“Little soon, isn’t it?” the blond said, frowning.
“Sooner the better. This is too wide-open here.”
“The road?”
“No, the town. You can’t predict jack shit in a place like this.”
True, I thought, gaining respect for him. Smart.
“And too small,” the older man went on. “Where do you fuckin’ lay low? I don’t know how in hell you ain’t been spotted.”
I wondered if Monahan was one of these guys who reverted to tough-guy talk on the job. Surely he didn’t talk like that pretending to be an insurance salesman. I lost respect for him.
“No problems,” the kid was saying, grinning, waving it off. “I got a good set-up-farmhouse right across the way.”
I’m guessing about “the way,” because a waitress in a white-trimmed brown uniform got between us, taking their order.
So I watched the bikini girls for a while. Shit, there were eight or nine of the little dolls frolicking around. Must not have been much to do in Haydee’s Port before nightfall.
The waitress left, and the kid asked: “So, first thing, then? Where, do you think?”
Monahan’s response seemed a non-sequitur: “Only three minutes from that joint to the Interstate ramp.”
“That’s good.” The kid was grinning again. “Perfect from where I’m sittin’.”
They stopped talking about the job. Monahan asked the kid about how Heather was doing, and she was doing fine, and this line of lip flap seemed to be about the kid’s girl or maybe wife. That meant these two worked together all the time. Not uncommon.
Then their food came, and I let them eat it. I was done with my Famous Bacon Cheeseburger and lesser known fries, and paid at the counter and got the fuck out. I had an idea I knew what they’d been talking about, but I wanted to check it out.
Without even speeding, it was almost exactly three minutes from the Paddlewheel parking lot to the Interstate bridge ramp. I pulled into the restaurant/casino’s lot-it was blacktop and half the size of a football field, rows and rows of white-outlined parking spaces. The entrance was near the building, the exit all the way down-only that one way in and one way out. Just seeing the geography told me how Monahan would do it.
Across from the Paddlewheel was a field of corn that wasn’t as high as an elephant’s eye, but this was only June. A metal gate was across a gravel driveway that angled up to a rundown farmhouse in a small oasis of overgrown grass in the middle of all that corn.
I drove half a mile south and pulled my Sunbird into an access inlet, which enabled tractors and other big farm rigs to get in and out of the cornfield, with the added benefit of slowing down traffic. This time of year nobody was planting or harvesting and I could leave the car there.
The sun hadn’t gone down, the temp about eighty-five, so my dark-blue windbreaker wasn’t really necessary, and yet it was, because I had my nine millimeter Browning in my waistband and the windbreaker covered it. I was otherwise in black jeans, a light blue Ralph Lauren t-shirt and black running shoes.
Weather aside, the windbreaker also proved invaluable in moving through that cornfield. The blades of those fucking stalks were like nature’s razors, and I was glad my head was above them, albeit just above. I was headed for that ramshackle two-story farmhouse.
Which, when I got there, showed no signs of life. I could see from some oil on the gravel where the drive came around back that the blond kid (or somebody, but likely the blond kid) had been parking here. He would still be over at the motel for now, though he’d long since finished his own Famous Bacon Cheeseburger and there was no telling at what point he’d return.
That was assuming, of course, that I’d figured right, and that this was where he’d been keeping watch on the target, who was clearly somebody who worked at (or more likely ran) the Paddlewheel.
Anyway, I needed to get inside but not in a way the kid would notice. He’d have been going in the back way, but that door, which was up a few paint-peeling wooden steps to the kitchen, was locked. I’d have been surprised to find otherwise.
What did surprise me was how sloppy the kid was-though the same could be true for whatever real estate agency represented the property-as I discovered the slanted cellar doors unlocked. I went down in and found sunlight sneaking in stubby windows onto a mostly empty cement area with a broken-down washer and dryer and not much else but exposed beams. There were pools of moisture here and there, but I could skirt them. I heard some mice or rats scurry, but they stayed out of my way and I did them the same favor.
The chance of anybody being upstairs was minimal. But I got the nine millimeter out anyway, and took the creaky wooden stairs as quietly as I could manage-shit, probably took me two or three minutes to get to the top. All the way up I was wondering what I’d do if that door was locked. Forcing it would be no problem, but it might leave a visual record of my entry, plus if anybody was up there, I’d be announcing myself more obnoxiously than I cared to…
But it wasn’t locked.
I eased the thing open, and it didn’t make any more noise than the Crypt Keeper’s vault, though it didn’t matter a damn. Nobody was in the kitchen, which was where I came out. Nothing was in the kitchen, except a dead refrigerator that dated back to Betty Furness days, no kitchen table, nothing except a counter and sink and empty cupboards.
We’ll skip the suspense stuff-nobody was in the house. I searched it slow and careful, because that’s what you do in such a case; but the place had not a stick of furniture in it, much less a person. Even the flotsam and jetsam of the lives lived here by good solid immigrant stock for maybe a hundred years had gone to Dumpster heaven.
I should have said “no stick of furniture” original to the house, because in the living room, by the front bay- type window, was some recently-brought-in stuff that indicated the presence of a human being, not a rodent (except maybe figuratively).
The blond kid’s set-up included a folding chair, the beach variety (Mike Love again), like he’d been sitting by a pool or maybe on the deck of cruise ship, and not in the front room of an old farmhouse where he could maintain surveillance on the target of a contract killing. He had a portable radio with cassette player that ran off batteries (yes, Poison tapes), and a Styrofoam chest with ice keeping cans of Pepsi cold as well as a few wrapped Casey’s General Store sandwiches. Some small packets of potato chips leaned against the Styrofoam chest, and a pair of binoculars rested on the window ledge. Having searched the house, I’d already determined that the toilets still worked, so he had a decent stakeout post here, though my own back couldn’t have stood that flimsy chair for days on end.
If the fact that he was a Pepsi drinker wasn’t disgusting enough, I noted to one side of the beach chair a pile of Hustler magazines, a box of Kleenex, some baby oil, and a metal wastebasket filled with crumpled, wadded tissues, which told me more about how the blond kid dealt with boredom than I wanted to know.
For two hours and maybe fifteen minutes, I sat in his beach chair, long enough to get so thirsty I almost drank one of his damn Pepsis. I used the binoculars and could see the Paddlewheel okay, but without any meaningful view into a window. The late afternoon turned blue and then black. The house was warm and stuffy at first and then, without the sun, got cool and stuffy. At one point, I thumbed through a Hustler, but did not partake of the baby oil and Kleenex. I was raised on Playboy and still preferred Hefner’s fantasy to Flynt’s gynecology.
The kid drove a Mustang (I’d seen it parked next to Monahan’s Buick at the Wheelhouse Motel) whose headlights announced him when he pulled into the mouth of the drive. What followed was a graceless dance: he got out and unlocked and moved the metal gate, returned to the car, pulled in deeper, got out and locked up again, then back in his car to come crunching up the gravel drive.
When he unlocked the kitchen door and came in, I was to one side and put the nose of the nine millimeter in his neck. By now it was dark in the house, but some moonlight filtered in the dirty cracked windows over the filthy old sink and I could see his blue eyes pop. They were light blue and looked spooky in the dimness. I mean the room’s dimness, not his.
“Hands on your head,” I said.
He put them there. The eyes stayed wide. He was even skinnier, close up-still in the black Poison t-shirt, but a light tan jacket open over it. He had a snubby. 38 in a jacket pocket. I took it, slipped it in my left-hand
