charge stride toward the Corvair with the confidence of a Lafayette Escadrille pilot about to go up after the Red Baron. I figured his odds of getting home were about the same.
That left the prof alone in his cottage, and me wondering if I should spend a couple of more days updating the obviously flawed surveillance info I’d been given, before laying my ass on the line. Maybe Annette hadn’t moved out-maybe she’d skedaddled to the shopping mall over on the southeast side, to kill time while Professor Loverboy dealt with a student who was presumably stopping by to deliver breathless prose and not a blowjob.
By that reasoning, the brunette might wander in right when I was fulfilling the contract. If all I had to do was pop this fucker, that might be worth the risk-I could be in and out in minutes. But I had that extra assignment of rounding up certain manuscript pages and disposing of them-that “challenge” Broker had given me, as his new boy.
An hour went by and no Annette. The radio station had cycled through its playlist for the fourth or fifth time, and “American Woman” was back on when I decided to do something more than sit on my ass. I had Annette’s address, which was in Coralville, a small suburb to the west of Iowa City. I drove there.
She was on the second floor of a little modern redbrick apartment complex, six apartments up, five down, all with exterior entrances, the walkway above providing the first floor with an overhang. A laundry room on the lower level seemed to be the only shared living experience here.
The apartment facility was just a block off Coralville’s busy retail and restaurant strip, an artery pumping monetary life’s blood into the little suburb. And I was able to park in the lot of a Sambo’s restaurant on the corner, the Maverick nosed in against the cement-block six-foot wall that separated the restaurant from its residential next-door neighbor, but with a clear view of Annette’s digs. She was on the second floor, apartment 204, with her white Corvette parked in a specified spot in the complex’s tiny parking lot.
The curtained windows of her apartment glowed yellow. She was in there, maybe writing. She had to produce material for her advisor to advise her over, right? For maybe an hour, I sat watching those windows, figuring if she stayed in her nest until, say, midnight, she wasn’t likely to go back out and rejoin the prof.
This wasn’t scientific. I was learning on the job, which is to say making it up as I went along. But I was giving serious thought to making tonight the night- drive back to my split-level and go over to the cobblestone cottage and get this the fuck over with. The longer I hung around, it seemed, the more wild cards were getting played. In a game like that, you either play what’s dealt you and hope for the best, or you get the hell away from the table.
And what would the Broker say if I bailed on my very first contract? Not only would I be a disappointment to my new employer, I’d be an instant loose end. This wasn’t the kind of job, wasn’t the kind of business, where you can apply, get a position, discover you’re not right for it, shake hands with the boss and say thanks anyway and go along your merry way, until the next position came along. No. I knew the Broker was a middleman in the murder business, and that was dangerous information to possess, in and of itself. On top of that, I knew about the Concort Inn and could extrapolate that the Quad Cities was Broker’s base of operations.
If I didn’t want to go through with this, I would have to disappear and leave behind my A-frame on the lake and money in the bank and still risk getting shot to shit by some asshole sent by the Broker.
Amway and the Jehovah’s Witnesses were looking better all the time.
I’d been watching maybe another half hour when she came out of her apartment and trotted down the central staircase, a big white purse on a strap over her shoulder. Again she was in the white leather coat with the white fur collar; her bell bottoms were dark blue with black polka dots that didn’t show till she’d crossed the street and walked right past where I was parked.
I watched her go into the Sambo’s.
What the hell. I went in after her. I hadn’t eaten since the pizza at the Airliner.
The restaurant had a motif based on the old children’s book about little black Sambo chasing tigers around a tree until they turned into butter, which must have seemed like a fun concept for a chain of pancake houses until Black Power came along. The Sambo kid on the menus and in decorative art in this aggressively bright orange- and-white restaurant was not black, rather some vague turbaned Oriental type, like that wouldn’t offend somebody in a college town like Iowa City.
The place was damn near empty, Sunday night during break, a few families in booths and a couple of truck drivers at the endless counter, with the young waiters and waitresses in their orange outfits and caps stricken with that hollow expression that says, How did my life bottom out so soon?
I took a counter seat and ordered some eggs and pancakes and sausage and iced tea. I was able from here to see Annette, seated by herself in a corner booth, reading a book whose title was Armies of the Night; I wasn’t actually seated close enough to see that, but I’d picked up on it when I walked past her.
Her coat was off-the heat was going at a pretty good clip here in the tropical world of Sambo’s-and she had on a black sweater that made the polka dots on the purple slacks stand out more; her smallish breasts under the sweater were doing a swell job, considering. She wasn’t eating anything, at least not yet, just working on a cup of black coffee.
She seemed fairly engrossed in the book. I had my eggs, sausage and pancakes, “tiger butter” and all, and decided to take a risk. Maybe it was the sugar rush.
On my way to the counter to pay my bill, I stopped at her booth and asked, “How is that?”
She glanced up from her paperback, not at all irritated by the interruption, and said in a nice throaty alto, “Do you like Norman Mailer?”
“I’ve only read Naked and the Dead,” I said, which was true. I read it in high school back when I thought war sounded like a heroic thing for a kid to get involved in. Mailer’s opinion had been different, and now so was mine, although he hadn’t had anything to do with it.
“Well, he’s a completely out of control egotist,” she said. “Or perhaps I should say ego- ist.”
Was there a difference? Not if you hadn’t been to college there wasn’t.
She was saying, “But he may be onto something here-referring to himself in the third person and all.”
I nodded toward the book in her scarlet-nailed hands. “Isn’t that non-fiction? Something about the march on the Pentagon?”
“Yes. But it’s a non-fiction novel, or at least it’s trying to be. I don’t know if he’s really successful here, but it’s interesting to see him try. I really think this is the future.”
“Yeah. Of what?”
She beamed at me in a winning combination of embarrassment and confidence. “Of the novel. Of journalism. I don’t know really, but something new.”
“Does sound interesting.”
I smiled and nodded, and she smiled and nodded back and returned to her book, and I went on outside and climbed into the Maverick and got the heat going.
No way to know how long Mailer’s book and Sambo’s coffee would hold her interest; no way to know if she’d be heading back to her place or the prof’s cottage, after. I could sit here and wait and watch to see when she emerged, five minutes or two hours from now, but if she noticed me, that would be bad. That was the downside of getting friendly with my target’s best girl. I couldn’t think of an upside, incidentally. I just kind of liked her looks.
Less than half an hour later I was back at the old stand. The space heater was doing fine and in fact was making me a little sleepy; well, the space heater and those pancakes-blame the tiger butter. A car belonging to another of those male Writers’ Workshop students was parked in front of the cobblestone pad, meaning a legit advisory session was again under way.
This meant Annette might be staying away just until these meetings were over. Another half an hour dragged by and I was sipping some cocoa from the thermos lid-cup when I heard a crinkling sound. Now this new house had plastic down on the floors, but I had rolled the living room sheet back to give me a nice space by and around the window where I could sit on carpet and not on cold crinkly plastic. I mention this because the plastic could also serve as an early warning system, alerting me to somebody else moving through this house.
Of course, I would have to have been fully awake and not trying to maintain surveillance with my head up my ass, and when I removed my head from that orifice and turned, I was facing a guy with a gun. Which is to say, I wasn’t facing him with my gun, he was facing me with his, a little. 38 Police Special with a snub nose, a dinky nothing that could kill you deader than Jimi and Janis.
He was short and dark and pudgy with Nixon jowls and tiny dark eyes and an awful bulb of a nose. He had no
