on mine.
But I was still pretty new at the game. I hadn’t learned the desirability of doing it fast, not yet. In fact I was just in the process of learning.
Because in the split second I wasted, the fat little Jew or Italian or whatever the fuck he was reached over to the little built-in stove and got hold of a frying pan and laid it across the side of my face, and I fired but the silenced gun thudded a shot into the cushion of a chair, and there was grease in the pan, not hot thank God, but grease, and some of it got in my eyes and the little fucker had pushed me aside and was scrambling past me, out the door, before I could get my eyes working and my gun hand around to make up for my mistake.
I put the gun back in my belt. I had to: from the doorway of the camper I could see the mark heading into the carnival, that Hawaiian shirt flashing into the crowd, and I had to pursue him. And that could hardly be done with the nine-millimeter hanging out. I zipped the jacket up a third of the way and went after him.
One good thing, though: he’d angled toward the space of open ground between the giant rat exhibit and the House of Mirrors. Right into Turner’s arms.
Only as I reached that point myself I saw the guy going into the House of Mirrors, nodding at the ticket-taker who knew him as a fellow carny and waved him by without a ticket.
And Turner was nowhere to be seen.
So I bought a ticket to the House of Mirrors.
It wasn’t very busy right now, but I wouldn’t be alone in there with him. I didn’t know what compelled him to enter that place, but chances were he didn’t know, either. It’s easy to be critical of the behavior of people in tense situations: not everybody functions well under stress.
Or maybe he’d seen some movies with arty funhouse shootout scenes, and figured I’d be distracted by all those reflections of myself and he could maybe somehow lose me in there. Which was a possibility. Maybe it would have been smarter to just wait for him to come out.
But he might also know his way around in there; maybe he was a pretty good friend of the guy who ran the house, and knew where an office was or a back exit or something. Or maybe he figured he knew the place well enough to hide somewhere and jump me as I came by.
Who could tell what he thought.
At any rate, I found him, in an enclosed area of perhaps sixteen mirrors, none of them distorting, and nobody else was around at the moment, and if he thought hiding in the House of Mirrors would be to his advantage, he was wrong-unless he enjoyed watching all those images of himself getting shot through the sternum.
I found my way out with little trouble. Behind me I heard somebody finding him, and making a fuss, going into a screaming panic. That was too bad. Had everything gone as it should, the mark would have been found no sooner than morning, in all probability.
I found Turner in the trailer behind the Gorilla Girl’s tent.
I knocked and, finally, was answered by a pretty brunette of about twenty, though her face was an easy ten years harder.
“Tell Cheetah Tarzan’s here to see him,” I said.
“Go away,” she said, starting to push shut the door.
I pushed it open and found Turner naked in bed and pulled him out by the arm and threw him on the floor.
“What the hell…?” he said.
I kicked his balls up in him.
That kept him busy for a few minutes, during which time I told Zamorita to get him his clothes.
“I’ll fix you, fucker,” he said, after a while, still holding himself. “I’ll fix you.”
“Never mind that,” I said. “You better just get your pants on so we can both get the hell out of here.”
Now, five years later, going through Turner’s room at Wilma’s Welcome Inn, I wondered why I bothered going back for him at all.
4
From the window above the old-fashioned radiator in Turner’s room I could see my A-frame cottage clearly, despite the partial sheltering of trees. The radiator was hot and making hissing noises, complaining about its unexpected April workload; but at least it helped keep the frost off the window, which was a plus for Turner, as he was apparently using this window to watch me, to study my pattern. He no doubt used the same binoculars I was now using: I’d found them in his bottom dresser drawer, between a box of. 380 shells and the Browning they were used in.
A gunsmith had done some improvising on the automatic, because the original barrel was gone and replaced with a new one that had a built-in silencer. I didn’t see the point, as the length of the new barrel was practically the same as the old one would’ve been with silencer attached. So nothing in particular had been gained, and something had been lost: the ability to detach the silencer, which is nice to be able to do at times, as they aren’t always necessary and do make the weapon more bulky. But to each his own.
The room was orderly, though Wilma did not provide maid service. That is, unless the sixteen-year-old niece Turner was humping was playing housekeeper, too. There was just the one big room, with a double bed with maple headboard against the left side wall, and a living room area opposite, with sagging couch and a chair or two and a beat-up coffee table with a scuffed metallic portable TV on it. The wallpaper was flowered and purple-faded-to- gray. Varnished light wood floors showed around the worn edges of the large round braided rug. There was no john (other than the floor’s communal one, down the hall) and a single, shallow closet he hadn’t hung anything in was behind the couch, in the corner. The dresser was over left of the window, near the bed; its drawers contained clothing and what I mentioned before. His shaving kit was on top of the dresser, which had a mirror. On the floor under the bed was a stack of skin magazines, of which Hustler was the most genteel.
I was surprised I could find nothing in writing, no record of my activities as noted by Turner. He might possibly be keeping that on his person, in a little notebook or something, but I didn’t think it likely: the kind of record a person working stakeout would keep isn’t easily kept in anything smaller than a secretarial-size pad, and Turner’s habit during the time he’d worked back-up for me had been to use a spiral notebook larger than that. Of course that was five years ago.
Which in itself had me thinking. It was a little late in the day for Turner to come looking for revenge. Five years ago I’d kicked him in the balls, and reported him fucking up to the Broker, but it hadn’t cost Turner anything: Broker had simply put him with another partner. I didn’t doubt Turner carried a grudge against me, but I did doubt it was big enough a one for him to come looking for me with a gun.
Besides, he was obviously on stakeout duty. Which meant he was part of a team, and not the trigger part, either. He was hired help and nothing more. My first instinct was to tie his presence here in with the bad blood between us: but I no longer felt that way. Turner was not working on his own initiative.
So I’d just have to talk to him and find out who hired him. Or at least find out who his new Broker was, so I could put a gun to that guy’s head and get the name of whoever it was took the contract out.
I put the binoculars in the dresser, but stuck the Browning in my belt. I turned out the lights and went over to the couch to wait for Turner to come.
I didn’t let myself think. There was a lot to think about, a lot in my life that was threatened by all of this, not the least of which was my life itself, but I didn’t think. I didn’t let myself. There are times when it’s smart to sort through the things that have been happening to you, and figure out what it is they all mean, and there are times to clear all the shit out of your head, empty your head of everything but now, so you are ready, not edgy, but on edge, perched like an animal waiting for its prey to make a move. So I sat on the uncomfortable, spring-bulging couch, waiting for Turner to come.
In two hours and some odd minutes, I heard his voice. It was still grating, had that same sandpaper quality. He was standing outside his door, talking to somebody. And that could be a problem.
The other person spoke, and it was a girl, a young woman’s voice. Possibly the sixteen-year-old niece Wilma was worried about.
A key was working in the door, in the lock, and I ducked into the closet, to the rear of the couch.
