he’d had the sense to follow my advice and survive.
Julie parked the Geo in the lot behind the building and entered through the kitchen to meet us at the apartment’s front door. I carried the plastered Janet in my arms like a bride over the threshold into the apartment. Julie, with a display of intense concentration, worked at getting the door night-latched, and made her way to the couch-this time I didn’t have to throw her over there.
I carried Janet into the bedroom, left the lights off, and settled her on top of the covers, taking off her shoes but otherwise letting her sleep there, fully clothed. Already she was snoring gently.
Then I returned to the living room and checked the door, finding it locked and successfully night-latched. I turned off the lights and only a little neon from the street pulsed in-I glanced at the double windows past Janet’s comfy chair and footrest; across the way, the windows of my surveillance post were dark and anonymous.
Janet’s sister was curled up on the couch, in a fetal position. The heat was on but cool air leeched in those double windows, so I went off and found a blanket and came back and covered Julie with it.
She stirred a little and looked up at me, blinking. “You…you really do love her, don’t you, you big jerk?”
I said nothing.
“I thought so,” she said, and smiled a little, and then it faded dramatically and she said, “Daddy… Daddy’s got something bad planned for Jan, doesn’t he?”
“You’re on a roll,” I said.
I sat on the edge of the couch. I felt fond of this kid, suddenly, and I didn’t even want to fuck her. I was getting so goddamn soft.
“Were you supposed to do it?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“The bad thing to Janet for Daddy.”
I nodded.
“And now…instead…you’re going to stop it?”
I touched her lips with a finger. “Get some sleep. You know where the bathroom is? ‘Cause you’re gonna have to piss like a racehorse.”
“I know where the bathroom is…Some night?”
I frowned at her. “What about ‘some night?’ ”
She got herself more comfortable. “Some night, when you’re sittin’ all bored and shit…with only my mousy little sis to keep you company…?”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe it’ll occur to you.”
“What will?”
“That you wound up with the wrong sister.”
I stared at her. She did her drunken best to stare back.
“Well,” I said, “you are more like what I deserve.”
In a goofily good-natured way, she said, “Fuck you,” stuck her tongue out and smiled and I tucked her in some more and she was asleep.
My nine millimeter and I went out and prowled the back alley, including checking the parked cars in the lot beyond, where the Geo was. Then I came back in and locked up and returned to the bedroom.
Janet was still on top of the covers, fully dressed, really sawing logs now, looking not at all glamorous, and incredibly beautiful.
I placed my nine millimeter on the bedstand beside me and stretched out next to the slumbering woman, and lay there in the dark, elbows winged, staring at the ceiling.
Fourteen
The explosion jolted me from deep asleep to fully awake-or the sound of it did, anyway, coming from outside the apartment, to the rear.
Still fully dressed from the night before, I sat up straight, as if from a nightmare; but I was waking to a nightmare, and knew it, as I noted the absence of Janet on the rumpled bed next to me.
I grabbed the nine millimeter off the nightstand and bolted toward the noise, which had shifted from full-scale world-rattling boom to lion’s roar of fire punctuated by snapping of flames.
The kitchen opened onto a small unenclosed porch and a half-flight of stairs down to the alley, across which lay half a block of metered parking lot, from which the smoke and flames curled a question mark into an overcast morning sky.
Something had exploded in that lot, and it didn’t have to be Janet’s car, could have been someone else’s or something else entirely, gas main maybe, only I knew in my tightened gut that it did have to be Janet’s car…
I took the steps three at a time and sprinted across to where I could see the Geo, transformed into a twisted mass of steel abstraction decorated with lashing tongues of flame and billowing smoky hands that turned to black fists opening to gray fingers.
Gun ready but with nothing and no one to shoot at, I dropped to my knees as if to pray. But I was not in a prayerful mood-my eyes were ignoring the smoke and taking in various sad, sick sights, from burnt-edged scraps of Janet’s brown suede coat to jagged sections of smoldering human flesh.
Not far from where I knelt, half a female arm lay, fingers twitching, just a little, not burnt at all, not even the stump, as if cut off rudely at the elbow and discarded, flung to the asphalt, which was dotted with the red rain of blood. A little ways away, a shoeless foot had landed on its sole, like the person it belonged to had stepped away, leaving it behind.
Mostly, however, the lot was littered with charred chunks of meat, as if the explosion had been in a butcher’s shop, not rigged here in this lot to blow sky-high when the key of the little Geo had been turned.
A sane man might have gone mad.
I went coldly sane, getting to my feet, ignoring the civilians starting to approach the fiery scene, a chorus of Oh my Gods and Oh my Lords making a frantic premature funeral out of the ungainly pyre. But I was in no mood for ceremony and just turned away and headed for my rental Ford, which wasn’t in the lot, parked instead over on the next side street.
In a weird way, the carnage of it made it easier for me to snap into the necessary gear-this was no clean kill, out of my more recent life, but a flashback to Vietnam, where I’d seen any number of friends blown to kibble thanks to land mines and mortar shells. Where you learned to react by retreating inside yourself, but not inviting the emotions in.
So I was in combat mode when I went looking for him.
Homewood had only seven motels, three of them major chains (Holiday Inn, Comfort Inn, Econo Lodge) which was where normally I would have started; but I had a hunch he would be staying close to my digs, since he was obviously keeping an eye on me.
That’s why I began where I was staying, at the Homewood Motor Court. I even parked in my own space by my own door, and on foot prowled the line of cabins, looking over the parked vehicles, studying license plates, peering in windows to take in anything showing in front and back seats.
Not many cars were in the spaces, as the motel catered to salesman and other mid-range business people, who were off with their cars pursuing their livelihoods. And when I made his ride, I was relieved to see it parked in the last space belonging to the last cabin at the far end, with no vehicles parked in the nearest four spaces.
That was good.
And the car hadn’t been hard to make-on the passenger seat of a Jeep rental were fanned-out magazines, Soldier of Fortune, Black Belt and several body building rags.
Seeing those had made me smile. Not much of a smile I grant you, a bitter little slash; but a smile. The magazines not only said who this car belonged to, it indicated a guy reading on the job, bored by surveillance work. Usually reading indicates intelligence.
Not this time.
Through the crack of the window, between the wood frame and the drawn blinds, I could see him, hurriedly
