forefinger into my chest.
“You lied to me,” he said. “What was that shit about auto parts?”
“Come again?”
“You’re in the security game. Working for Freed. I know all about it.”
I had hoped Angela would be more discreet.
“Maybe I was checking up on you,” I said.
He thumped my chest again. “Well I don’t fuckin’ appreciate it! And stay away from Angela. I don’t want you havin’ anything to do with her.”
“Don’t touch me again.”
He shoved me hard. “I’ll touch you. I’ll fuckin’ kill you.”
I opened my coat and reached under my arm and took out the nine-millimeter.
His eyes got very large, considering how small they were, and he backed up. “Jesus-what’s the idea…”
I slapped him alongside his head with the barrel and he went down like a kid’s tower of blocks.
I sat on top of him and put the gun’s nose against his. His ear was bloody from where the gun slapped him. His eyes looked back and up at me, frantic and afraid. “Jesus, Jesus… I didn’t mean…”
“Don’t threaten to kill people,” I said. “It isn’t nice, unless you mean it. It isn’t nice if you mean it, either, but in that case, what’s the difference?”
He was sweating. “What… what do you want?”
“Like you said, I’m in the security game. And I’m working for Preston Freed.”
“What… what’s that to me?”
“That Buick that was stolen off your lot.”
His eyes tensed. That told me something.
“The men who took it,” I said, “did not have Preston Freed’s best interests at heart. Only I don’t think they ‘took’ it. I think you gave it to them.”
“You’re… you’re fuckin’ nuts.”
I twisted the bleeding ear and he howled.
“You used to be a Freed supporter,” I said. “What turned you against him? Why do you want him dead?”
“I don’t want anybody dead!”
“You can be dead yourself, if you don’t come clean.” I twisted the ear again. “Talk to me Lonny,” I said, above his howl.
A knocking at the office door interrupted us. “What’s going on in there?” Angela’s voice cried. “Lonny? Is Jack in there? Lonny, are you all right?”
I climbed off him, helped him up. He was shaking and shaken.
“Not a word about this,” I said, putting the gun away. “Find something to wipe off your ear.”
“You’re crazy,” he said, breathlessly; it was not an accusation, or an insult-more a surprised statement of assumed fact. He stumbled into a small washroom off his office and used a damp cloth on his ear.
I cleaned his blood off my hand with a handkerchief and opened the door and a wide-eyed, worried Angela was standing there, poised to knock again. I slid past her and pulled her along.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get something to eat.”
“What was going on in there?”
“Your car or mine?”
“Let’s take both this time, I’ll follow you; but what…”
“I’ll tell you when we get there.”
The Sundance Restaurant in the Blackhawk Hotel was a yuppie’s notion of the old west-pottery and Indian- blanket carpeting, sepia photos of Wild Bill Hickok and Sitting Bull, mingling with the usual hanging plants. Rather large, the open-beamed place was sectioned off and made to seem cozy, its unfinished pine walls cluttered with wagon wheels and mounted buffalo heads and lamps made from antlers. We sat by ourselves in a nook below a blue-and-orange stained-glass skylight.
“What was going on in Lonny’s office?” she asked, leaning forward. The ride over had not dimmed her interest or her concern. She was nervously toying with the gold chain around her neck; she was wearing a white blouse and blue jeans.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. I would have liked to take off my coat and tie and unbutton my top button; but I still wore my nine-millimeter in its shoulder holster. So I remained less than casual.
“You’d said you’d tell me,” she said with brittle, barely controlled anger. “It sounded like you were fighting in there.”
“It was just a scuffle.”
“A scuffle! What about?”
“You. He told me to stay away from you, and took a swing at me. I decked him, then sat on him a while till he was cooled down. That’s all.”
Exasperated, she shook her head, eyes large, said, “Does this sort of thing happen to you often?”
“It used to. I been leading a pretty quiet life lately.”
“Well, you’re certainly getting back into the swing of things, aren’t you?”
“Yes. But I wish I wasn’t.”
“What do you mean, Jack?” Her anger was fading already.
“Nothing. Let’s forget about this and just have a nice meal, okay?”
“Oh-kay,” she sighed, smirking with frustration, and we ordered drinks-her a martini (again) and me a Diet Coke (again), and I got her talking about her kids for awhile. The older one was a cheerleader, but not such a great student; the younger girl was shy, though her marks were excellent. Angela’s eyes lit up when she talked about them. The sadness that I’d noticed in her last night was absent this evening, at least when her kids were the topic of discussion.
I hadn’t eaten anything today, so I had a full dinner, the main course wiener schnitzel (the Sundance menu wasn’t particularly frontier-oriented); Angela, who probably weighed one hundred twenty, had the diet plate.
She was having a second martini, an after dinner one, when I got back into it.
“I need to ask you something about your husband,” I said.
“Bob? What about him?”
“You said he’s working for George Ridge now.”
“Yes. He’s an… executive assistant, I think is the title.”
“But Ridge and Preston Freed had a bitter falling out. Are you aware of that?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding.
“Yet you indicated your husband is still under Freed’s ‘spell.’”
“Yes, Bob’s still a member of the Democratic Action party. I don’t think he’s as active as he used to be, but… I don’t get your point.”
“Well, the point is, how can he work for Ridge, and still be involved with Freed?”
“I don’t know. Lots of people who work together, who’re in business together, disagree politically. Is that so unusual?”
I let some air out. Shrugged. “I just figured the rift between Ridge and Freed was so acrimonious, it’d spill over into other things …”
“Maybe so. I really don’t know anything about it. Why don’t you ask George Ridge about it? Or Freed? Or Bob, for that matter?”
She didn’t know it, of course, but nobody was going to be talking to Bob again, not unless it was with a Ouija board. And the same would be true of George Ridge, before long, once I’d met him and his plane Monday night. Freed I could, and would, ask.
“Something else we need to talk about,” I said.
“Yes?” Her smile was eager; she was assuming, wrongly, this would be pleasant.
“Don’t ask me how I know this. Don’t ask me how I did this exactly.”
“Know what? Did what?”
“That rumor about Preston Freed’s video-tape library.”
She smiled, laughed softly. “His triple-X home movies, you mean. What about it?”
“It’s no rumor.”
