It’s out in your lot right now. So is he, probably. I didn’t see him upstairs or down, but that’s no surprise. I broke his nose the other night and he probably doesn’t want to show what’s left of his face around here, where he might see me.”
“Then why’s he here at all?”
“I can think of a reason.”
That stopped him for a moment.
“This is it, then,” he said.
“Tonight’s the night, you mean? Shit, I don’t know. There’s too many things that just don’t track here. I’m starting to think this is something else entirely.”
“Like what?”
“I’m working on it. I think we better have an under- standing. If I get involved in something that is apart from our other business together, but something that turns out to be of benefit to you, can I expect to be rewarded accordingly?”
“You bet your ass.”
“Okay, then.”
And I got up and went to the door.
Went out to gamble.
30
John Smith was sitting in the blue Chevelle, on the rider’s side. Slouched against the door, smoking a cigarette, two fingers resting gingerly on his bandaged nose. Where surveillance was concerned, he’d been an incompetent agent, but you could hardly ask for a better subject. It was like sneaking up on a corpse.
The parking lot, dimly lit except directly under the small neon over the door, was empty of anything but cars at the moment. Ten o’clock was too late for many people to be arriving and too early for many people to be leaving. And a perfect time to go out to my GT on one side of the lot, unlock the glove compartment and get out the silenced nine-millimeter, and walk over to the other side of the lot and the Chevelle.
The door he was leaning against was unlocked, I noticed, and when I opened it he fell out like an ironing board from its closet.
He had a gun, a Smith and Wesson snubnose. 38, but it, like his cigarette, tumbled out of his fingers while he was tumbling out himself. I scooped up the. 38, dropped it into a jacket pocket and pointed the nine-millimeter at the middle of his face.
He was sprawled on his right side and looked like he was trying to swim in the gravel. He looked comical. More so, when his eyes crossed to look at the barrel of the nine-millimeter.
“You motherfucker,” he said, lamely, like he’d never used the word before in his life.
“Shhh,” I said.
“What’s going…”
I poked his nose with the gun’s.
“Shhh, I said.”
He put a hand over his nose. He started to weep.
“Please,” I said. “This is embarrassing enough as it is.”
I patted him down with my free hand. He had no other weapon.
“Keys,” I said.
He pointed at the car.
I looked over and the keys were in the dash.
“Get them,” I said.
He pushed himself up, hesitantly, and leaned into the car. I leaned in with him, pressing the flat snout of the silenced gun against his back, his ribs, and he got the keys. We leaned back out and he turned slowly and held out the keys to me. They dangled like a vulgar earring.
I didn’t take them. I shut the car door and said, “Open the trunk.”
He cocked his head, like he couldn’t quite make out what I was saying. With those ears of his, you’d think he wouldn’t have any trouble hearing.
“The trunk,” I said.
He shrugged, but the casualness of that gesture didn’t work for him. This was one scared shitless character.
Which didn’t keep him from opening the trunk, fumblingly of course, but he opened it.
I had, by this time, stuck the nine-millimeter in my waistband. For a guy like this I didn’t need the gun. In fact I could’ve given it to him to hold for me.
I glanced around, looking for the beams of light that would indicate someone coming up the drive into the lot, looking to see if anyone was coming out a Barn door, or if anyone might be able to see us from a window. The latter was barely possible, but between the lack of windows downstairs and the shuttered ones upstairs, and our being way over to the far side of the lot, I felt it unlikely there were any eyes on us.
So we were standing in front of the trunk of the Chevelle like a couple of guys in front of an altar, or urinal. And my bland-looking college kid companion, with his busted nose and big, apparently nonfunctional ears, looked at me wondering what to do next. I told him.
“Get in,” I said.
He cocked his head again.
“In,” I said, and pointed at the trunk.
He cocked his head and pointed at the trunk with me.
“Oh Jesus,” I said, and pushed him in there and shut the lid.
31
After closing I sat at the bar and nursed a gimlet while Lu was cleaning glasses and generally tidying up. The dealers were filing into Tree’s office to turn in their money, and witness the ritual of seeing the money go in his fat relic of a safe. There was a second ritual, nightly, of the money being shifted to the real safe, the one in the floor under the carpet, but the dealers didn’t get to see that.
The guy with glasses was one of the first to go, but the sound of the outer door opening and closing didn’t follow him. I hadn’t expected it to.
I waited till the line of dealers had thinned down to two, and went to the coat room to get my jacket. The. 38 I’d lifted from the party currently residing in the trunk of a Chevelle was still in the pocket I’d dropped it in. I’d returned the bulky nine-millimeter to the GT’s glove compartment. If Lu happened to see me with a gun, I’d prefer it was the. 38 and not the silenced automatic, professional tool that the latter one was.
I went up the short flight of stairs to the landing that separated the club room of the Barn from the restaurant. Stairs rose from the landing a full flight, wide and without a rail, softly carpeted, to the wide doorless entry area of the dining room. I slipped the. 38 out of the jacket pocket and started up.
The restaurant closed down at eleven, and all the help involved with that part of the Barn operation were long gone. The large rustic dining room, with its many booths, was dark. I didn’t like that. Not at all. All those fucking booths, so many places to hide, Christ.
I stalked the room like a parody of a western gunfighter in this parody of a western setting. Winding through the rows of picket-fence booths, the thick carpet cushioning my steps, soaking up what little noise I made. Clint Eastwood would’ve been proud of me.
Then I saw the hairline of light beneath the door of the men’s room.
Both of the johns were just off the top of the flight of stairs. An easy, logical place to duck into.
But the lack of imagination these guys showed was staggering. Not only was this asshole hiding in the john,
