I was nervous. I don’t apologize for that. I’d been through rough stuff in the jungle, but a kind of adrenaline high plus the camaraderie of your fellow soldiers got you into it and then through it, and sniper duty was a whole other deal, more a Zen kind of state where nerves didn’t come into play, not if you wanted to survive.
I liked surviving. It was about all I valued. I’d seen plenty of evidence supporting the notion that life and death were meaningless, and God was either nonexistent or uninterested, but what was wrong with breathing? Didn’t a decent meal and getting laid and watching something funny or exciting on television or reading a good western and did I mention getting laid, didn’t that all beat nothingness inside a box six feet under all to shit? So I tend to come down strong on the survival side.
And these two guys were big. They were also black, and fuck you, I’m no racist, I fought alongside black guys and I bet you didn’t; so you go up against a couple of streetwise soldiers for the Black Mafia, taller than you, fifty pounds each on you, probably packing all kinds of shiny steel. Either one of those guys could fuck me up in a fair fight, and together they could throw me down and kick me till a busted rib punctured something and I drowned in my own goddamn blood.
So, hell yes, I was nervous.
But not scared, really. My nine millimeter was on the seat next to me, the radio tuned to an FM station where the Beaker Street program was going, DJ Clyde Clifford doing zonked-out intros to album cuts against electronic space music right out of Forbidden Planet, and while I hadn’t done weed since Nam, Clyde and his offbeat music choices chilled me out nicely, though “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” (coming up on the drum solo) probably meant we again had a disc jockey who needed a bathroom break.
The landscape was an ivory-washed blue once more, the snow frozen in odd clumps and clusters on the terraced earth along I-80, the temperature having gone up and down today, thawing, freezing, thawing, freezing, making modern art out of precipitation. The trucks were blowing past me again, and the traffic in general was heavier. This didn’t bother me, and even encouraged me, because it meant I could stay several car lengths away from the Fleetwood and not be spotted. An interstate in general was proving a great place to tail somebody; so what if you and somebody else were going in the same direction?
Several exits for gas and restaurants slipped by, including the green dinosaur and the Cove. We drove such a distance that even “Vida” ended, and the Vanilla Fudge doing “Season of the Witch” took over, filled with screams and whimpering, and though normally I dug that cut, I ditched Clyde for an easy listening station. Frank, Dino and Sammy were more like it, anyway. I was doing a job for Frank’s pal, Lou, right? Even if Lou didn’t know it.
As Frank sang “My Kind of Town,” we blew past the Quad Cities where the Broker and his Concort Hotel were. Then, with Bobby Darin doing “Once in a Lifetime,” just west of the Mississippi River and north of Walcott, Iowa, they pulled off at a dinky oasis economically called the I-80 Truck Stop-two diesel pumps, four gas pumps, a small white enamel gas station attached to a slightly bigger restaurant.
Shit.
I’d been hoping for one of the state-run rest stops. With a little luck, at one of those-which were just toilets and vending machines-I might have what I needed to deal with Annette’s captors, which was no audience.
I pulled off anyway. Were they going to eat again? Wasn’t that Sambo’s feast enough for them? Maybe they worked up an appetite overpowering a twenty-two year-old college girl.
The Fleetwood pulled into one of the slots along the row of restaurant windows. If these guys had a brain between them, they would take the nearest window onto that stall. I stopped at the gas pumps, cut the engine, got out and instructed the kid to fill me up with regular, which was pushing forty cents a gallon, highway fucking robbery. Then I went into the gas station portion of the interconnected buildings. They sold some trucker gear, and I bought a rabbit-lined brown nylon zipper jacket.
I’d left my corduroy jacket in the car. While I had no reason to think those two had noticed me at Sambo’s, I also had no reason not to. The gas station had all kinds of toiletries, so I was able to buy a tube of Brylcreem and a comb. I went into the Truckers Only restroom, which had showers and an array of sinks, at one of which I dumped water into my hands and dumped it on my head. Then I used the Brylcreem, and a little dab didn’t do me, no, I squeezed that shit out of the tube and combed my hair into a style that must have been at least as effective a birth control method as the Pill.
After paying for the gas, and getting an odd look from the young attendant, since I seemed to be a different customer now, I drove the Maverick over into another of the stalls. I was still flying by the seat of my pants, and when I got out and then walked past the parked red Fleetwood, knowing that the girl was in that trunk, I wondered if I could somehow get her out of there and toss her in the Maverick and just book it the hell away.
Problem was, her black escorts were seated at the window adjacent, as I’d figured they would (apparently they did have at least one brain between them). What was I supposed to do, shoot the lock off the trunk? I’d never tried that, and I doubt you have. I would have probably killed the girl and then those assholes would have come tumbling out the restaurant and jumped my ass, if they didn’t just fire through the window at me.
Or I could shoot out the window of the Fleetwood, reach in and open the car and hope this vehicle had a trunk release button; that should be standard on a Caddy, right? But where? Under the dash, or in the glove compartment, and oh by the way, those black bastards have killed me by now.
So I did what any other hero hoping to rescue a fair maiden would do: I went in and had a piece of coconut cream pie. I could use the sugar rush. The waitress was young and cute but not at all interested in a guy with greasy kid’s stuff on his hair. I ate my pie and drank my iced tea and did my best to listen to the two black guys in the booth right behind me.
Green hat: “Man, why not have some fun? Enos is gonna kill her ass, ain’t he?”
Red hat: “He might. He might not. Do you sit at the table with Enos and the others, planning shit? No. Do I? No fuckin’ way. We muscle. We goddamn good at it, but we muscle.”
“We could go someplace with her. Some motel or some shit. We tell her we let her go, she’s nice to us. We can fuck her one at a time or each take a hole.”
They were whispering, by the way. But I was right behind them, and even if I’m filling in a word here or there, trust me-I’m giving you more than the gist.
Red Hat: “You think she go for that?”
Green Hat: “Why not? These white girls, these college girl cunts, they sluts, they whores. And they curious about whether black men is all hung like fuckin’ horses, which I am and if you ain’t, that’s your problem.”
The previous had been mixed with laughter and was clearly kidding, but the guy in the red hat said, “Fuck you and the horse cock you rode in on.”
“Aw, come on, don’t be a dick. You think she won’t bargain?”
“Then what?”
“Then what, we tape her up again and take her to the boss.”
“And she tells the boss his boys diddled her up and down? How’s Enos gonna like that shit? What if Enos wants to trade the little twat? He might want her not fucked up and shit.”
“Well…I just sayin’.”
“You say too much, Leon.”
“Kiss my ass, Charlie.”
Not another Charlie!
They didn’t talk much after that. They had big platters of chicken and fries show up soon after. Yes, they ate chicken-fucking sue me. They ate chicken like all the white truckers around them were eating chicken. Jesus.
And speaking of truckers, the I-80 restaurant was packed. The I-80 Truck Stop was popular and the possibility of me getting these two alone was somewhere between slim and none.