lights stopped, and the driver of the cop car approached from the back, shining a flashlight on the badge case. Sherrill pushed the door open, dropped her feet to the street, looked at the cop and said, 'What the fuck are you doing?'
'What are you doing?'
'I'm on a goddamn stakeout. I was on a goddamn stakeout,' Sherrill said. 'Now
I'm in a goddamn comedy routine.' People had stopped up and down the street, to watch.
'Well, jeez, we're sorry.' The cop looked around at the audience and flapped his arms helplessly. 'You shoulda told somebody, instead of just lurking around here. The doorman called. He said you'd been here for hours.'
Sherrill could see the doorman in Carmel's building peering at them through the lobby window. 'Yeah, well: now I'm gonna drive around the block and park again,' she said. 'And I'm telling you. Stay away from me or I swear to Christ, I'll shoot you.'
The cop peered in the back window and said, 'Hi, Tom.'
'Hi. Want some nachos?'
'Nah. Give me heartburn… so you're gonna go around the block?'
'Yeah.'
'Well. Be cool.'
Sherrill started the car, and they rolled away, Black laughing in the back. Then
Sherrill started: 'God, I love police work.'
Two minutes later, they were back on watch, Black still relaxed in the back and even deeper into the nachos. 'How you been?' he asked through a mouthful of chips and cheese. 'Since you and Davenport?'
'I miss him. A lot,' she said.
'He's an asshole. Sorta.'
'I miss him anyway,' she said. 'Besides, while I agree he's an asshole, he's not an asshole like you think he is.'
'Oh, I think I know.'
'Just 'cause you're queer doesn't mean you know. You're still a guy.'
Black contemplated the statement, formulated a reply, ate the chips as he worked at it: carefully formulated replies were necessary in the stakeout business. You could sit for hours, and you didn't want to run out of stuff to talk about – or piss off your partner – too soon.
'Let me tell you my theory of queerness as relates to the straight male,' Black said. And he did, and after a while – ten minutes – Sherrill said, 'I never would have thought of any of that.'
'You're not gay.'
'It's not that. It's just that I couldn't have come up with such an utter crock of shit.'
Black put a final three nachos in his mouth and settled back to formulate another reply. Before he got a good paragraph together, Sherrill said, 'Here they come – and Jesus Christ. Look at that dress.'
Black peered over the sill of the back window. Allen and Carmel stepped out through the glass doors, Allen wore a dark jacket that Black suspected was lightweight cashmere; tan, expensive-looking slacks; and loafers. Carmel was in a shocking, low-cut red party dress and red shoes.
'Nice dress,' Black said.
'Nice? A little gaudy, don't you think? And her tits are about coming out.'
'I don't know,' he said. 'Color is always good in clothing. And skin display is nice, in the summer.'
'Don't give me the fag act. Look at her. She's like a billboard.'
'All right. She's obviously a tart,' Black said.
'Thank you. Not nearly fine enough to aspire after the lovely Hale.'
'And she certainly doesn't have your tits.'
'You don't think?'
'Marcy, you've probably got the third-best tits in
Minneapolis. Davenport says sixth best, and of course, he would know from first hand observation, while Sloan says second best – I don't know about Sloan's qualifications…'
'He has none, and shut up, we're going.'
'Let me get my Big Gulp off the floor… Ah, shit.'
Rinker missed the foul-up with the squad car; she'd already turned the corner, and was headed back to her hotel to pick up her car. She felt heavy as she went.
She might have to kill the two of them, the mother and daughter. Might have to.
And that felt wrong. These were people who'd never had a chance; they weren't people who'd screwed up somehow, had gotten too stubbornly close to something that was bad for them… It was like all that gang-banger talk years ago, of mushrooms popping up in the line-of-fire. This mother and daughter were essentially mushrooms, and Rinker had always thought of herself more as a surgeon than as a gang-banger… She'd have to do this right.
Carmel and Hale Allen went to a club called The Swan, which had a twelve-piece orchestra and a blonde chick singer with a voice like buttermilk, and danced.
Old-style dances, cheek to cheek, hand in the middle of the back. Carmel could reach Hale's earlobe with her tongue, which she did every few minutes, and which had a profound effect on him. After the third dance, he growled, 'Let's get out of here.'
'No,' she said, in her best cat voice. 'You've got to be patient.'
Sherrill and Black watched from a balcony seat as Allen and Carmel moved around the dance floor, stopping now and then to talk with friends; all of the friends,
Sherrill decided, had a certain slickness that she disliked. She mentioned it to
Black.
'I think they teach you that in law school,' Black said.
'Hey, I know some pretty nice lawyers.'
'So now we're gonna be sincere?'
'No, I was just wondering. There's this subset of people who look slick. See?
Look at the guy in the white coat, and the woman he's with. Slick.'
'They spend too much time looking at themselves, without being professionals,'
Black said. 'Professionals – actors – can look perfect, and look right at the same time. These guys try to look perfect, and they just look slick.'
'Much more of this surveillance chit-chat and I'll throw up.'
Rinker scouted the Davis' neighborhood, saw nothing at all. Of course, if it were a trap of some kind, the cops might be in an apartment across the street or up the stairs and she'd never know until they were kicking down the doors.
But it didn't feel that way; it didn't have the creepy close feeling of movies, when a guy was in hiding. And somehow, she thought, it would feel that way.
There'd be that peculiar stillness of the moment when you hide in somebody else's house, and they walk in… and they know. She didn't feel that here.
Rinker had taken two FedEx boxes from a FedEx stand, and taped them together.
She left the car a block from the Davis apartment – she noted the lights under the window shades, so somebody was home -and walked back, carrying the box. A guy was following his dog down the other side of the street, paying no attention to her.
Rinker turned in at the house, jogged up the stoop, and stepped inside the entry and stopped. She could hear a stereo from up the stairs, nothing from the back, from the Davis apartment. She moved closer to the Davis door, listened. The rhythm of voices – or one voice, a woman's voice. She glanced around, took the pistol out of her belt and stuck it under her left arm, pinned to her side. She knocked once.
The rhythm of the voices stopped, and she heard footsteps. The door opened on a chain, and a woman peeked out. 'Yes?'
'We got a FedEx upstairs for you, the guys did. They forgot to bring it down, so
I did.' Rinker said cheerfully. She bounced the box in her hand. The woman didn't hesitate, said, 'Oh, thanks. Just the minute,' and pushed the door shut and began to work the chain. Rinker quickly stooped and put the box on the floor, then reached up and pulled the nylon down over her face, pulling it down like a condom.
