“I don’t believe you.”
“I tell you it’s in my baggage.”
“I don’t believe you, I don’t believe you’d let this off your person.”
“I don’t care what you believe, it’s in my baggage, I checked my baggage already and it’s already been taken out to the plane.”
“If you’re telling the truth…”
“I am!”
“If you’re telling the truth, get out your rosary.”
“You said…”
“I said I’m not into hurting people. I’m not. It won’t hurt, Father, it’ll just be black. All of a sudden. Real black.”
“But, please, please, listen to me, I checked the bags… the stuff’s in my bags and that’s the truth, I’m sorry, Christ knows I’d give it to you and be done but I’m sorry.”
I let the automatic peek out from under the draped raincoat. “Is that still the truth?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head no.
“Where?” I said.
He started to take off his coat.
I brought the gun up and said, “Watch it, Father!”
“No, no! Wait!” He eased out of the coat and handed it toward me. Offered it. “It’s the coat. The lining. In the lining.”
“Get it out of the lining.”
“You, you said you’d let me catch my plane. I’m gonna miss my plane.”
“Maybe. Get it out the lining.”
“It’s sown in, uh, under, I mean…”
“Rip it out.”
He did. He tugged free the lining and reached inside the gutted coat and pulled out two plastic bags, stapled at their tops, a lump of white powder in each.
Inside my head, I shit my pants.
Okay, Broker. Is this what you got me into? Okay. He gave me the bags and I slipped them in my suitcoat pocket.
“What now?” he said.
“Throw that lining away,” I said.
He balled it up and shoved it into the canister for used paper towels. I motioned to him to put the coat back on and he did.
“Well?” he said.
“You can go,” I said. “But not till I’m gone. I’m going to have to knock you out.”
“My, my plane! You said… but now I’ll miss my plane…”
“You’re under the gun and you worry about your plane. Christ. Just be thankful you’re getting out of this with your ass in one piece.”
“Please, I’ll wait in here, I can wait ten minutes and still make it.”
I rubbed my chin. “Suppose I could tie you up and by the time you got loose I’d be gone…”
“Sure, sure, you could do that! Here, I’ll untie my shoelaces, you can use that to tie me.”
“No, never mind,” I said. “I got some rope in my pocket.”
“Oh. Oh well, fine.”
“First you get in that stall there.”
“In there?”
“In there.’’
“It stinks in there.”
“That’s because you puked.” Christ, this guy.
He opened the stall.
“Put the seat down,” I said.
He did.
“Now sit.’’ He did.
“Put your hands together.”
As he was doing that, I shot him in the chest.
2
The water was all around me and cold. I bobbed back up to the surface, grabbed a breath, and breast-stroked over to the side of the pool, pulled myself up and out, and then went to the board and dove back in.
Five minutes later I stood in the shallow and the water lapped up against my thighs and I heard a voice say, “So here you are.”
I looked up and she was in a black bikini. She was very tan, brown-black tan, and she was slender, with hardly any breasts and a ribby rib cage but if she’d been facing the other way I would’ve been reminded what a fine round little ass she had.
“Didn’t think I’d be seeing you again,” she said, “didn’t think you’d still be around.”
“Come on in,” I said.
“No. You come out. I’m not getting my hair wet, I just want some air.”
I climbed out and went after my towel. When I was dry I looked around and saw she’d taken a lounge chair well back from the pool’s edge to keep her from getting wet if some clown like me dove in. She leaned back, her longish black hair hanging away from her face, and it was like she was sunbathing only she was just sitting there staring up at the clouds and the moon. I joined her, pulling up another lounge chair and sitting.
“I fell asleep,” she said.
“You were asleep when I left,” I said.
“Were you coming back?”
“Sure.”
“I didn’t figure on seeing you. I thought it was hit and run.”
“No. I slept there with you a little, then came out for a swim.”
“Where’d you change?”
“Went up to my room for my trunks. When’s your husband going to be back?”
“Not till late. He’ll be interviewing all evening.”
I didn’t say anything for a while. I was trying to remember her name. Helen, I think she said it was.
“How’s the water?” she said.
“Cold. Fine.”
“You refreshed?”
“Sure. You rested up?”
“Sure. Want to go in and fuck?”
“Why not?”
I followed her from the swimming area across some grass to the little cement patio to her room and then in the sliding glass doors. My room was up on the second floor and didn’t have such convenient pool access. She slid shut the window-door behind us and drew the curtain. She undid the bikini bra-top and let it drop; her breasts were small and her nipples large and dark, so with all that tan only a small circle of white separated dark texture from dark. It was a sexy effect. She lowered her bikini bottoms and she was dark and hairy down there against white skin. All this made up for her skinniness. I got my trunks off and we lay on the bed.
She was all technique and no passion, like she lost that part of it somewhere along the line and spent lots of time since looking for it. She told me her husband hired people for industry and went around interviewing applicants all the time and when he discovered she was cheating while he was off on business, he started taking her along. The husband always did his interviews at downtown hotels wherever they happened to be, but she insisted that they stay at motels so she could be near pool and sunshine. That was as far as her explanation went, but the rest was obvious enough: while her husband interviewed at the downtown hotel, she picked up traveling salesmen and the like at the motel, mostly by sitting around the pool in her black bikini.
I had got to the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge about an hour before I was supposed to meet the Broker in the restaurant part, so I checked in and managed to get picked up and laid by Helen or whatever-her-name-was before I was due to confab with Broker. Well, I did end up a little late but how was I to know the Broker had something last-minute urgent on his mind. I mean, he never pulled anything like that on me before.
And never again. I was glad I’d thought to arrange for a month rental on one of those lockers at the airport.
I figured Broker might be putting me onto something big and maybe I’d want to cache some or all of whatever it was for myself. So one of the lockers, which was good for only two days, had one of the little plastic bags of white powder in it; and another locker, good for a whole month, had the other. And I had both keys and Broker by the balls.
Of course this thing with Helen or whoever had worked out pretty nice, since the bitch provided me an alibi of sorts, not that I’d use it. As far as she knew, I’d screwed her, slept a while, then gone out for a swim. She didn’t know I stepped out to give last rites to a priest.
She sat up in bed, leaned back against the headboard and got a cigarette going. Her breasts were droopy and didn’t look so sexy anymore and I saw she had some tines in her face and all of a sudden she looked middle-aged housewife who slept around a lot, which is what she was. After a while it occurred to her she ought to offer me a cigarette too, and I told her I didn’t use them.
“Clean liver, huh?”
“That shit can kill you,” I said, fanning her smoke out of my face. “But it’s your life, do what you want.”
“You like to play at being hard, don’t you.”