‘Right.’ Kifka poked Janey and motioned at the pad and pencil over on the dresser. ‘Rite Loomis,’ he said, ‘Carder Avenue.’ Janey went over reluctantly and wrote it down.
Janey stayed at the dresser the rest of the conversation and had two more names to write down before she was done, one with an address and one with a phone number. Then Kifka hung up and she said, ‘How much more of this, Dan? Can’t you put that silly phone down for a while?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’ He felt time crowding in, too much time. It was yesterday afternoon that Parker had been ambushed outside Ellie’s place, and since then there hadn’t been a sign of the bird they were after. Last night they’d all moved out here and Kifka had started his phone calls while the others had gone snooping around after the people Kifka turned up. The nine on the cop’s list they weren’t bothering with yet, hoping they wouldn’t have to. Around midnight last night they’d packed it in, and started again this morning. Now it was almost noon and nothing was happening. Kifka was getting irritated and impatient, and Janey was getting worse.
She said, ‘You could take five minutes away from the phone, Dan.’
‘Parker’s right,’ he said. ‘I’ll never get over this virus with you around.’
‘Body heat,’ she said. ‘It’s got to be good for you.’
‘Sure.’ He made his voice sound aggravated, but he was pleased by Janey. She was an odd thing to happen to Dan Kifka and he was having trouble getting used to it. Kifka was a big blond-haired heavy with two assets: strong arms and an ability to drive. He pushed a hack sometimes for bread and butter, and took what other jobs came his way, punching heads if he was paid to, driving for operations like the stadium heist. He was thirty-four and used to the idea of who he was, and not expecting anything like Janey to come waltzing into his life.
The way it happened, he was driving the cab at the time, and a fuzzy-faced youth with a nasal condition and Janey had flagged him and given him an address out in the suburbs. All the way out they argued back there, the two of them, sniping at each other, the youth injured in a haughty way and Janey coldly furious. While the cab was stopped at a light, she’ finally threw him out, pushing the door open, pushing him on out onto the cobble stones, chewing him out the whole time. The youth ended in a paroxysm of snippishness, slammed the cab door, and stalked off into the night. The light changed and Kifka turned his head and said, ‘You want to wait for him, lady?’
‘Lady’ was inaccurate. She was a girl, not a lady, young and tender as garden vegetables. She was wearing a pink dress with a lot of crinolines and petticoats and doodads and gewgaws, and she was enough to make strong men chew carpets. She said, ‘I wouldn’t wait for that twerp if he was my Siamese twin. Drive on!’
He drove on, and three blocks later she said, ‘Stop at a nice bar, I want a drink.’
The customer is always right. He stopped at a neighborhood-type tavern and she said, ‘I don’t go in these places unescorted. Come with me.’
He said, ‘You see how I’m dressed?’ He meant wrinkled trousers and a brown leather jacket and a Humphrey Pennyworth cap.
She said, ‘So what?’ and that was the end of it.
In the bar, over a glass of sauterne, she became a compulsive talker, telling him her own life story and everything she knew about the kid who’d just walked out on her. There was nothing special about either; both of them college kids from one family houses, on their own in a city bigger than their home towns.
What he was, after just a little bit of it, Kifka was bored. She paid for her own sauterne, glass after glass, but meanwhile he wasn’t picking up any fares, so it was still costing him money. Eventually he figured the one sure way to get rid of her was make a pass, so he did, and forty-five minutes later they were in bed together at his place.
It had been going on for eight months now, with time out for her summer vacation from college when she’d gone home for three months. Kifka had figured that was the end of it right there, but come September and there was Janey again, twitching her rump with pink impatience.
At first he’d kept his own life story to himself pretty completely, but gradually he got so he trusted her more, and by now she knew everything there was to know about him.
Except how to cure him of a virus.
‘Body heat,’ she said, getting it all wrong.
He pushed her away and said, ‘One more phone call, all right? One more guy on the list and I’m done.’
‘If you promise.’
‘I promise.’
But just as he was reaching for the phone it rang. He picked it up and it was Abe Clinger checking in, saying, ‘Scratch two more off the list. Bill Powell and Joe Fox, both covered for the time.’
Kifka repeated the names for Janey to cross off on the main list, and then he said, ‘Abe, we’re running out. We got to go to the cop’s list now.’
‘I anticipated,’ Clinger said. ‘Believe me.’
Kifka gave him two names and addresses, and Clinger gloomily repeated them to make sure he had them right, and then they broke the connection.
‘One phone call, you said,’ Janey reminded him.
‘That wasn’t it.’ He shoved her back and dialed another number.
The voice that answered was fuzzy with sleep, wanting to know what time it was. Kifka told him it was practically twelve o’clock noon, and the voice said, ‘Man, I was up till all hours last night. This crazy cat just back from Mexico, he dropped around, we talked the night away; I don’t think you know him.’
‘Never mind do I know him, did he know Ellie Canaday?’
‘Sure! Hell, they used to go together, you know what I mean?’
Kifka held a hand up in the air for Janey to start paying attention. Carefully he said, ‘What’s this guy’s
