“My dirty laundry, I guess. So you’ve been in my apartment. So what?”
“So now I’m in your car and I got a gun on you.”
“Yeah, well, congratulations. Now what the fuck’s this all about?”
“It’s about a guy who drives an LTD and makes a hell of a lot of money, who leaves his car unlocked and lives in an apartment you can open with a credit card, in an apartment building whose security is a joke.”
“There are two armed guards on duty twenty-four hours a day at Town Crest.”
That was the name of the high-rent apartment building I could see from Lucille’s window. Frank Tree was a tenant.
“Those guys aren’t guards,” I said. “They’re parking lot attendants. Anybody in a jacket and tie can walk in the lobby and go up the elevator and nobody says a word.”
“Is there a point to this?”
“The point is if I’d been hired to kill you, you’d be dead by now.”
“Hired to…”
“The only problem I can see in killing you is trying to pick from the dozens of ways to do it. I heard of sitting ducks, but this is ridiculous.”
Tree brought a hand up, and I touched the back of his neck with the silenced gun. But he was only scratching his head. A few flakes of dandruff floated onto his shoulders.
“I can offer you double,” Tree said. “Double whatever you’re being paid.”
“You don’t understand. No one’s paying me. Yet. I only said if I’d been hired to kill you.”
“What is this, some kind of extortion racket? Maybe you don’t know the kind of people I count as friends.”
“Mafia guys, you mean? They probably helped get you into this.”
“Into what?”
“You’re being watched. You’re being set up.”
“Watched? Set up for what?”
“What do you think?”
“Hey, I don’t have an enemy in the world.”
“Sure. Hitler probably felt the same way. Anyway, I’ve already established you’re going to be killed.”
“Established…?”
“You got two weeks, at the outside.”
“Two weeks…”
“I’ll be going now. Don’t turn around as I go.”
“But…”
“I’ll call you tomorrow, Frank. Sleep well.”
13
The stairwell was dark. An hour ago I’d been in the back seat of Tree’s car in the Barn parking lot. I was preoccupied, wondering how tomorrow would go. This crucial first meeting with Tree had gone well enough, but that was the easy part: scaring him. Tomorrow I had to reason with him, which was where it could get hard.
I was alone. She’d given me the key to her apartment and told me to go on ahead. She had her own car tonight, so why didn’t I take off a little early and get the frozen pizza in the oven and put the hot water on for Sanka, and go ahead and get started on the late show, if my eyes were up to the postage stamp screen of her portable. She’d be along soon.
The stairs creaked; the walls of the stairwell were peeling paint; the smell of disinfectant hung heavy. Light seeping out around the doors on either side of the little platform of a second-floor landing made me feel less alone, but the third-floor landing was long, more a hallway, though there were only two apartments up here, one of which was empty. Or anyway she’d told me it was empty. I noticed light along the bottom crack of the door and wondered if somebody had just moved in today or what.
And I had this prickly feeling, on the back of my neck, that made me wish I still had the silenced nine-millimeter on me, and I swung my arm back and gave the guy coming up behind me, from out of the shadows of the landing over to my right, an elbow in the face. Felt like I caught a cheek, flesh and then sharp bone, but it was dark and an elbow isn’t the most sensitive part of the body to be making such distinctions with, so who knows.
The important thing was I’d sensed the guy in time, and I was drawing back my right foot to kick his balls up inside him when that apartment door opened, flooding the landing with light, and somebody hit me with something.
14
I felt my face moving. Back and forth. Then I heard a clapping sound. Face moving, clapping sound, like I was clapping with my face, and I came out of it chuckling, laughing at how silly it was, clapping with your face, and opened my eyes and looked into bright light, and the guy stopped slapping me.
I never saw his face. I saw nothing but the light. A lamp I guess it was, with a hundred watt bulb or maybe something stronger. Anyway all I saw was light, and the guy, who was somewhere behind the light, right behind it, said, “What’s your name?”
“Jack Wilson.”
That was the name I was registered under at the Holiday Inn. The phony driver’s license in my wallet had it, too.
“What are you doing here?”
“Going blind.”
“You know, I can jam this. 38 up your ass and see how you like it.”
The light was blinding me, all right, but I didn’t have to see to know I didn’t want a. 38 jammed up my ass.
“I’ll ask again,” he said. “What are you doing in Des Moines?”
“Looking for work.”
“What kind?”
“Any kind. Salesman.”
“What are you doing hanging around the Barn?”
“Playing some cards. Banging the lady bartender.”
“It’s time you moved on.”
“Anything you say.”
And he put out the light.
He hit me with it.
15
My eyes peeled slowly open and she was right in on top of me, leaning over me, fingers plucking at my face, her oriental eyes narrowed like I was something interesting to look at.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Picking glass out of your face,” she said.
“Oh.”
“You’re not too badly cut. Lot of little nicks is about all, really. But we better get this glass out.”
“Be my guest.”
“Ouch!”
“What?”
“Little fucker nicked me.” She held a half-inch sliver of glass up by a thumb and forefinger for me to see. When I had, she dropped the sliver, sucked the forefinger a second.
I sat up on the couch. “How’d you get me back in your apartment?”
“I walked you over here.”
“You mean dragged me? I was unconscious, wasn’t I?”
“Not entirely. More like drunk.”
“I think somebody hit me with a lamp.”
“I think so, too. Anyway there’s a busted bulb all over the floor next door. All but the pieces of it I been picking out of your face, that is.”
“That’s where you found me?”
“The door was open, you were on the floor, against the wall, glass all over your face. I thought you were dead for a minute.”
“No such luck. Who’s your new neighbor? The guy that wrote Psycho?”
“Nobody lives next door. Not that I know of.”
“Help me off this couch. I want to go see for myself.”
She did.
The door was still ajar. I went in carefully, reaching a hand around to switch on the light before going in all the way.
And saw an apartment exactly like Lucille’s, with one exception: it was unfurnished.
Some shattered, bloody glass lay near one wall; so did the screw-in socket of the bulb with its claw of red-flecked glass shards sticking out.
“Let’s go back,” she said, a hand on my shoulder.
“Let’s.”
She locked the door and nightlatched it. A lot of doors in the Midwest don’t have nightlatches. I was glad hers did, though I had no reason to feel safer locked in here with her than I’d been next door with the guy who’d used my face to switch off the lights.
Did I say “guy”? No. There were two of them: the one who came up behind me; and the one who opened the door. Of course the one who opened the door could’ve been a woman.
“Listen, I think there’s some mercurochrome in the bathroom cabinet. You better let me dab some on.”
“Go ahead.”
She went and got the stuff, and I had a sip of the Sanka she’d found time to make.