And Hawk started yelling at me to shut up. Then the cellblock lights went on, and a moonfaced cop with a crew cut came in from the office. “What the fuck is going on in here,” he said.
“I’m singing to the coon,” I said.
“The man’s goddamned crazy,” Hawk said at the same time.
I sang louder. The moon-faced cop walked toward me. He had a leather sap in a low pocket on the right side of his uniform pants and he pulled it out as he walked.
“You,” he said, “button it up, now.”
“‘Don’t want no bright lights, false teeth, doorbells, landlords, I make it clear/That, no matter how they coax me, I’ll stay right here.’ ” I beat a sloppy paradiddle on the cinder-block wall with my shoe. Actually half a paradiddle, because I had only one shoe.
The moon-faced cop turned and yelled out into the office.
“Hey, Maury, get in here.”
A second cop appeared, this one taller than Moon Face, with a puzzled country look to his face, and brown hair slicked back and parted in the middle. I kept singing. Hawk was silent. Moon Face made a gesture at me with his head and Maury pulled a switch inside the corridor door and my cell door slid back. Moon Face walked in tapping his thigh with the sap. Maury walked down the corridor and came in behind him. He was taking the handcuffs from the back of his belt.
I said, “What are you guys going to do?”
“We’re going to show you how to shut up,” Moon Face said.
I put my hand under my shirt and rubbed my bare stomach nervously. “I was just ragging the spade,” I said.
“Turn around,” Moon Face said, “and put your hands behind your neck.”
I took my gun out from under my shirt and pointed it at both of them. “If you make any noise,” I said, “I’ll kill you.”
Both of them stopped in freeze-frame.
I said, “Hands on top of your heads, walk over and stand facing the wall.”
They did what I said, neither one said a word. I took the service revolver from each of them. Moon Face had a standard issue .38, but Maury was packing a .44 magnum. Good for whale hunting.
I said, “Who’s on the dispatch board?”
Moon Face said, “Madilyn.”
I said, “Okay, to be sure she doesn’t get hurt, and you don’t get hurt, you be as quiet as two tombs in here. I’m going to open the other cell and I can see you all the time.”
Carrying both guns by the trigger guard, I backed out of the cell and down the corridor. On the wall inside the door to the office was a series of switches labeled Cell One, Two, Three, and Four. I hit Two and the door closed, I hit Four and Hawk’s cell opened. He came out and walked to me. I handed him the guns.
He handed me the .38 and held the .44 in his right hand. I stuck the .38 in my pants pocket.
“Bongo, bongo, bongo?” he said.
“Get the dispatcher,” I said.
Madilyn was about fifty-five and not slender. She went without a word and sat on the bunk in Hawk’s open cell, while we shut the door.
“We got until somebody on patrol calls in and can’t get an answer,” I said.
“Long enough,” Hawk said.
We walked quickly out of the police station and down the silent main street to the library. The Skylark was still parked behind it.
“There,” I said. I got the key from the ledge and gave it to Hawk. “You drive,” I said.
“Susan’s?” he said.
“Yes.”
“First place they’ll look,” Hawk said, “when they know we gone.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said.
We swung out from behind the library and turned right at the end of the square. A mile up the road, we pulled right again and then left into the parking lot of a six-story industrial building. Even in the moonlight you could see that a lot of work had gone into the place. The brick walls had been sandblasted and steam cleaned and all the windows were new. There was a lot of granite filigree around the rooftop and the door lintels were granite blocks.
Hawk parked right in front of the back door. “That her window,” Hawk said, “over there. You want to ring the bell or you want to go on in through the window?”
The window was ground-floor level.
“We’ll go in,” I said, and started across the parking lot.
The lot had numbered slots and cars were parked in most of them. One of them might be Susan’s. I used to know what her car was. Now I didn’t.
