apartments, and had a “Rooms for Rent” sign in one of the front windows. As I stood facing the house I could see three windows on the second floor that were dim, as the kid went in, and then after he’d had time to climb a flight of stairs, a light went on in one of those windows, and then went out again moments later. I checked my watch: it was a few minutes before nine. Ash’s long-haired friend either went to bed very early, or was coming out of there again.
Ten minutes passed and no sign of him, through the front way, and I began wondering if he’d seen me, and sneaked out a back door. I was leaned against a tree, gun still tucked under my arm, so I wasn’t worried, and as I was studying from an angle the window of what I assumed to be his room, I saw something glint.
Something glass, catching light from a street lamp.
Across the way from the big yellow apartment house was another of those Gothic homes, a brown brick affair that was unique-looking even among these once-distinguished neighbors. It was somewhat smaller than the others, and had been designed to look like a modern castle, with turrets and everything, and seemed well-maintained, with no lawn full of cars to indicate apartment house conversion.
Somebody living in that place was going to die. Probably soon, judging by the length of the conversation between Ash and the kid, who was sitting in his room by the window right now, using binoculars or perhaps a sniper scope to study the mark.
That “kid” was the backup man, and Ash was the trigger. Somebody in that brown brick castle was the target.
Now, where did I fit in?
10
The water in the pool was warm. Too warm, really. I prefer a pool where the water’s on the chilly side. But of all the hotels and motels in Davenport, this place, the Concort Inn, was the only one with an indoor pool, so considering the time of year, if I wanted to swim, this was going to have to do.
And I wanted to swim. I swim every day, if I’m able. It keeps me in shape. Relaxes me. Helps me think, if I need to. Helps me not think, if I need that.
This morning I needed to think. Last night I’d been too tired to lose any sleep over the jumble of matters that needed sorting out, urgent matters though they were. I’d been up since this started, since night before yesterday when those two guys invaded my place in Wisconsin, so after my excursion last night into that neighborhood of crumbling mansions, I’d gone straight to the only place in town I knew of where I could find both bed and pool to dive into.
The Concort Inn was a modern-looking monolith of a building, made of glass and plastic and blue-tinged steel, sitting near the government bridge on the edge of Davenport, on a sort of concrete oasis, a full block’s worth of parking protecting the place from the seedy warehouse district at its back and the four busy lanes of traffic running in front. The rooms at the Concort were nice size, clean, pleasantly furnished and, since the building sat at an angle, usually had a decent view of the river. Downstairs was maybe the best restaurant in town, and a lounge with no cover and plenty of entertainment. All of which was pretty impressive, I suppose, if you hadn’t been there a thousand times before. I had.
The Concort was where the Broker and I would get together before jobs. Some kinds of business you just don’t handle by phone or through the mail, and every hit I ever made began with words rolling off Broker’s politician-smooth tongue, in a room at the Concort. Every assignment of my five and a half years in the business I had picked up here, or practically all of them; a few had been at other motels or hotels in the area, but most had been right here. At the Concort.
Maybe I was an idiot, coming back here, staying here again. Maybe I was risking my ass, just so I could go swimming, for Christsake. Broker had money in the Concort, no question, and he used the hotel as a tool in his operation; and it might be logical to assume Broker’s replacement would do the same.
Point of interest: Ash was operating not out of the Concort, but from the Holiday Inn near the Interstate.
Second point of interest: Ash and backup man were engaged in what looked to be a pretty much routine sort of hit.
And what that seemed to add up to was Ash was not the Broker’s replacement, but a hired hand, somebody else’s flunkey, only who was that somebody else? And why did that somebody else contract my death? Was there some sort of a power play going on here that I was caught in the middle of, several candidates going after Broker’s job, preparing to engage in a shooting war, what?
Questions. Questions.
I floated on the water’s warm surface, floated on my back, listening to the lapping sounds of the water, staring at the aqua-color ceiling, looking for answers.
“Oh… excuse me.”
The voice came from behind me: feminine, soft, so soft it didn’t even echo in a room that threw sound around so thoroughly the barest ripple of the pool caused a tremor.
I rolled off my back, snaked over to the edge of the pool before she was gone.
She’d come into the room, which was an aqua-blue cement box hardly big enough to hold the medium-size pool, and had apparently slipped off her robe before noticing me, and then when she did notice me was for some reason frightened, and said excuse me and was now getting back into her full-length white terry robe, heading toward the door.
“Hey!” I called.
My voice echoed like a yell off Lover’s Leap, and it stopped her.
“What’s to be excused?” I said, leaning against the edge of the pool.
She turned. Smiled a little. A good-looking woman of maybe twenty-eight, with white blond hair that hung to her shoulders and the sort of face you see on the covers of classy fashion magazines.
“I just didn’t know anyone was in here,” she said, hugging her white robe to herself protectively.
“Well, I’m in here,” I said, “and so what? This isn’t exactly my private property, this pool. And I’m not going to bother you. So swim if you want.”
She hesitated. Looked at me. Appraised me. “You don’t mind…?” she asked.
“No.”
She made a shy, shrugging gesture, let the terry robe fall in a puddle at her feet and dove in the pool. She swam easily, gracefully, though there was nothing fancy about it; she just swam, like she was born knowing how, neither gliding nor chopping: swimming.
I had my elbow on the edge of the pool, leaning there, watching her. After a while she swam over and sat up on the poolside, not particularly close to me, but close enough to talk without shouting. She sat there catching her breath, and I just kept looking at her. She had a nice body, and she made me wish I had the time to do something about it. She was slender, but not skinny, and she had the best-looking legs I’d seen in a long time. She wasn’t really busty, but she had enough, and I was enjoying the way her nipples were pushing out at the thin nylon fabric of her simple one-piece black swimsuit.
I stayed down in the water, because something was pushing at the nylon of my swimsuit, too.
“They keep this pool too warm,” she said, suddenly.
I said I agreed.
“I like to dive into cold water,” she said. “Wakes you up. Slaps you around, a little. Gets your nerve endings work- ing. Reminds you you’re alive.”
I said I couldn’t agree more.
“You, uh… must think I’m pretty silly,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
“The, you know… fuss I made, when I came in.”
“What fuss? You just didn’t see me, and then you did, and it startled you. That’s all.”
“That’s close, anyway,” she said, smiling less tentatively now. “You see, I come in here, every morning about this time, that is every weekday morning… what day is this?”
