His head bobbed curtly, pipe in his teeth. “Not at all.”
I directed Becky to sit, which she did. She was as nervous as on a trip to the principal’s office.
“My friend will kill both Sam and Dave,” I said, “and dump them, on a dusty road...” Another gag lost on him. “...if I’m not back safe and sound in about ninety minutes.”
“Understood,” he said.
Her eyes white all around, Becky leaned forward and said, “I’m so sorry, sir. Dave and Sam did their best, but he... he had a gun.”
“So I see,” our host said with a nod to my nine-millimeter-in-hand.
Pleasantly, I asked, “What was it you wanted to see me about?”
“I would like to know your intentions.”
“Well, Rebecca and I’ve only been out on one date, but I think it’s going really well, so you can rest assured my intentions are honorable.”
Becky winced at that. My host didn’t react at all. Humor was either something he did not understand or at most something had learned to tolerate.
“Earlier today,” he said, “Rebecca saw you enter an apartment below hers.”
She turned to me and said, “I was coming down the stairs. You didn’t see me.”
“And this was after,” the man with the corncob pipe said, “you had gone out of your way to make her acquaintance the night before. More than that, to impress her with your manhood.”
Was he referring to me pistol-whipping those creeps, or to my impressive Rebecca-banging manhood? I didn’t seek clarification.
Instead I asked, “What are you looking for me to say?”
He removed the pipe and looked at it, confirmed it had gone out and re-lit it with a kitchen match.
Puffing it, getting it going, he said, “I have stayed alive, Mr. Blake... that is your name, isn’t it, or at least the name you’re using? I have stayed alive lo these many years — where others with a similar courage of their beliefs have gone down in a hail of bullets — by exerting what may seem to some an excess of caution. Are you an interloper, sir? Or did you innocently stumble into something of which you knew nothing?”
I thought about killing him, but that meant killing Becky and Sam and Dave, too, for chump change.
“You know my name,” I said. “Who are you?”
That surprised him. “You don’t recognize me?”
“I don’t get out that much.”
“Or perhaps you have survived through caution, as well. The name is Starkweather — Commander Zachary Taylor Starkweather. You’ve heard of the White Christian Freedom Party? I’m its proud founder, as well as the Grand Dragon of the Missouri Ku Klux Klan.”
I hadn’t heard of him, but I knew about these screwball American Nazis. And I was fairly sure I had this thing figured out. Since I was the one with a gun, why not take a flier?
“I didn’t stumble into anything,” I said. “And neither did you.”
His mouth smiled around the pipe. “Is that right?”
“I was hired to do a job,” I said. “And when I work, there’s insulation. No direct contact with my employer. That’s designed not so much for my protection as for the one who hired me. Anyone on the hiring end, trying to lend support, is... misguided. Anyone on that end checking up on me is a damn nuisance. The wrong parties could get killed. Do I make myself clear?”
He drew in some of that foul smoke, then shared it with us. “You do, sir.”
“Delightful as her company is, I would like Becky here to vacate the apartment above where my partner and I are working. She can keep her job — jobs are tough to find — but she should stay with friends till she has somewhere else to live. And if I see either Sam or Dave, I will kill them and leave town. With the job unfinished.”
He nodded sagely. “Understood, sir. There was severe misjudgment on our end. Do forgive us.”
“Leave the forgiveness to Jesus. And the job to me.”
He nodded again, so low, it was almost a bow. Then he stood behind the desk — he was about my size — and extended a thick paw for me to shake. He was surrounded by the red of the Nazi flag.
I switched the nine mil to my left hand and stood and shook with him. His grip was cold and clammy but firm.
I said, “Come on, Becky. Let’s go get your friends out of hock.”
She and I were at the door when Starkweather said, “May I ask you one thing, Mr. Blake?”
“Okay.”
“In taking on this assignment, are you strictly, as they say, in it for the money? Or are you too a good Christian, who hates the niggers and kikes as much as we do?”
I gave him half a smile. “You left out the fags, Commander.”
“So I did! So I did.”
He was chuckling as I left.
I stuffed my nine millimeter in my waistband and slipped an arm around Becky’s shoulder and walked her out of the church and into the parking lot. Then I wiped off my hand where the madman had shook it and shuddered.
“Jesus Fucking Christ,” I said to myself.
“Please, not here,” she scolded.
“Amen,” I said.
And we got the hell out.
Seven
The next morning Boyd and I again got breakfast together, this time at a funky restaurant called Duff’s in an old house with mismatched furniture, bizarre paintings, a purple ceiling, and waitresses in headbands. We found a quiet corner and had scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, coffee and further discussion about whether to bail.
“If this racist goon is our employer,” I said, “he’s about as stable as a two-legged table, and a prime candidate for a straitjacket.”
“Ours not to reason why,” Boyd said, but the frown lines under that curly dark fright wig of his said he was troubled, too.
“Complete that thought and get back to me,” I said, chewing bacon. “If these morons figured that watching us, for whatever reason, was a good idea, it’s at the very least a breach of protocol.”
“But such good money,” he whined.
He didn’t know the half of it. Literally, since his ten grand was less than half of my twenty-five.
I said, “I’m calling the Broker.”
He shrugged, bit off a corner of toast slathered with organic marmalade, and admitted, “Probably a good idea.”
A couple of old-fashioned wooden phone booths were off the restaurant’s bar area, which was hours away from being open. I closed myself inside one, sent a dime down the slot and told the operator the number and that it was a collect call. I expected I’d have to camp out since surely I’d get a flunky, with the return call from the man himself taking up to half an hour to happen.
But the Broker actually answered.
I told him I was in a hippie joint, so unless the feds were tapping the phones to find dissidents or drug dealers, it should be cool to talk. Of course an avalanche of euphemisms followed anyway.
“The guy who hired the job had people watching us,” I said. “Whether to back us up should we need help or to double-cross us at the end, or just make sure we were earning our pay... I got no fucking idea.”
“A shameful breach. My apologies. I’ll talk to the party in question.”
“I already have.”
“What? You know this breaks the cardinal rule! Contact with the client is strictly out of bounds.”
“Not when two of his people jump me it’s not. They were gonna take me to the guy, under duress. I took care of them.”
Alarm colored his voice. “You took care of them...?”
“Just temporarily. Then I called on who sent them myself. Told him to call off his dogs.”