The Specialists (8 page)

“That was really one wonderful meal, Pat,” he told her. “I never would have picked that good a restaurant myself.”

“I didn’t know if you’d like Italian food,” she said.

“Oh, you can’t beat it.”

“That’s about the best place around, everybody says.”

Then everybody was crazy, Giordano thought. All pasta dishes should be
al dente
, not overcooked like a mouthful of mush. And the sauces—his mother would put a bottle of ketchup on the table before she trotted out a sauce like that. Well, everybody had always said Neapolitans couldn’t boil water. The restaurant called itself the Breath of Naples, and that was accurate enough. The breath of Naples, he thought, was seventy percent garlic.

He opened the car door for her, helped her inside, then walked around and got behind the wheel. He wondered how many people held car doors for her. Stop it, he told himself. You don’t just have to get through this evening. You have to string her for maybe a week, because she works in the place and knows the answers to questions you haven’t even thought up yet. And if you’re going to spend as much as a week fucking this side of beef, you have to sell yourself on her. Seducing her may not be a challenge, but you have to seduce yourself, and the first step is to stop taking mental potshots at the kid.

He started the engine but left the transmission in Park. “I’ll tell you, Pat. I was thinking about a movie.”

“Oh, that’s swell, Jordan.”

Jordan Lewis, that was the name he’d given her. Very obvious and amateur, but he had one particular mental block—whenever he used aliases, he forgot them. Jordan Lewis he had used frequently in the past; he would at least be apt to remember it.

“I checked a paper, the movies. There wasn’t too much of a selection.”

“Every town in Jersey, they’ll have three theaters, and all over the whole state they just have three different movies.”

“They call it block-booking,” he said. He decided it wasn’t unreasonable for him to know this. He had told her he was an advertising salesman for a chain of country-and-western radio stations. “But the point is, Pat, none of the movies appealed very much. There was one at a drive-in, but I’ll tell you the truth, I hate watching a movie at a drive-in.”

“Oh, you don’t have to tell me. I’m the same.”

“You’ve got the screen way out in front of you and the sound booming next to your ear and it doesn’t seem real. And then all the crazy kids you find at those places.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

He turned to her, a shy look on his face. “Any movie, though, I’ll tell you, Pat, a movie isn’t much of a treat for me. I must see three, four movies a week.”

“You’re kidding.”

“What else do you do when you’re in a strange town and you don’t know anybody? To me a movie is part of being alone.”

“I know what you mean. That television set, sometimes when I think of the time a person can sit in front of that box and just stare at it like a moron——”

“I know exactly what you mean,” he said.

He pulled away from the curb, drove slowly with both hands on the wheel. “What I like, what I really like, is just to talk to somebody. And that’s the rarest thing in the world.”

“You must meet plenty of people, Jordan.”

“But how many people do you meet that you can talk to? I mean really talk to. I mean relax and open up and talk.”

“Look at all the people come into the bank. I know what you mean, it’s the same.”

She wasn’t a bad kid, he told himself. Not a bad kid at all. The boxes people get into, the binds. She was okay.

At a traffic light he turned to her. He said, “What I’d like to do, well, I’m afraid to tell you.”

“What?”

“Well . . .”

“You can say anything to me.”

“I feel that,” he said. “I feel that you would understand. But it sounds like—well, what I’d like to do is if we could just go back to where I’m staying and really relax and get to know each other. Jesus, the way that sounds!”

“But I understand.”

“Do you?” The light turned. He pulled away, kept his eyes on the road but went on talking to her. “The loneliness, every day another city. I don’t drink, but maybe we could get some wine. My father always said there’s a difference between wine and real drinking.”

“Oh, there’s no question.”

“What was that wine we had in the restaurant? I had it before, I can never remember the name.”

“Chianti.”

“That’s it,” he said. “We could get some and go back to my place. I know how that sounds but I’ll tell you, I’m not much for parties and nightclubs, I don’t get on that good with strangers. Listen, if this doesn’t sound right to you, just say the word and I’ll never mention it again. So help me.”

He looked at her again, and suddenly the bovine look was gone, the stolid cast, all gone, and she had turned almost radiant. He wondered briefly if the change was in her face or in his eyes. It hardly mattered.

Then her hand touched his, a comforting pat, a squeeze. “Most fellows, if a girl agreed, they would take it the wrong way. No, you don’t have to say, I know you’re not like that. I think . . . yes. I don’t care about movies either, Jordan. And I’m like you, and lonely, you don’t have to tell me about lonely. Yes, let’s go to your place, yes, I’d like that.”

When Murdock pulled into the motel lot Simmons was waiting for him. He opened the door and got inside, and Murdock spun the truck in a neat circle and drove back onto the highway.

“How’d you do?”

“Two pieces. Fifty dollars for the two, if you can believe that. Soul brothers stick together. He didn’t make a dime on me.”

“I got two and paid three times that. More. Ninety for the Ruger and seventy-five for the Smith and Wesson.”

“Caliber?”

“The Ruger’s a forty-five. Mean old thing. The S and W’s a thirty-eight, takes the same load as killed that guard.”

“I got both thirty-eights, but one is chambered for magnum loads, which I believe is what they took out of the teller that was shot.”

“Lucky it didn’t take her arm off, a magnum shell coming off a thirty-eight frame.”

“Or take the arm off whoever fired it.”

“You know it.” They lit cigarettes, and Murdock inhaled deeply and blew out a cloud of smoke. “They’ll know it wasn’t the same guns, won’t they?”

“Uh-huh. Ballistics. They can tell. But they’ll also figure that a pro always gets rid of a gun if he uses it but that he sticks to the same general type of gun. What the colonel calls verisimilitude.”

“Now what the fuck does that mean, boy?”

“Means you should wear falsies if you want people to think you’re a girl.”

“I’ll just bet it says that in the dictionary. Right like that.”

“Just in the unabridged dictionary.”

“What I say, you teach a nigger to read and he just don’t know when to quit.”

“That’s the truth. Rednecks, now, you don’t have that trouble. Never yet heard of one they could teach to read.”

“Well, now, you just know it’s tough enough getting used to wearing shoes. You should have heard some of the things I said about niggers. And I got three, no, four new jokes I’ll have to tell you.”

“We’re even. I spent a couple hours agreeing that honkies are the worst thing in the universe.”

“What the hell’s a honkie?”

“A redneck.”

“I’ll be damned, I’m a word I never heard of. What’s it come from?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know where
redneck
comes from, for that matter. My neck ain’t red unless I stand in the sun, which I don’t.”

“As far as that goes, I haven’t nigged in years.”

“Huh?”

“I say I haven’t nigged in years, so why do they call me a nigger?”

“If that don’t beat all.” Murdock laughed, slapped the steering wheel. “Now, that’s funny.”

“Old joke.”

“Never heard it. ‘I haven’t nigged in years.’ There’s a drugstore. You want to call Old Rugged or should I?”

“I might as well. I have to call my wife, anyway.”

“What for?”

“I call her every night. You know, just to see how she is and let her know I’m all right.”

“Yeah,” Murdock said.

He parked the truck and waited while Simmons went inside. He looked at his cigarette for a moment, then pitched it out the window. Aloud he said, “Ain’t nobody in this world I’d call.”

Nobody at all, he thought. Just to call up and talk to, well, there wasn’t anybody. Not that he felt the lack. But still.

But, he wondered, why did Simmons make a point of saying it? If he was going to call, well, fine, and go ahead and do it, but why say? Or was he just trying to make me feel bad?

Oh shit, he thought. Think on things too hard and you just went and made yourself crazy. And he looked down on the floor at the two paper bags, each with two guns in it, and thought where they all came from, and the too-hard thoughts went away and he just put his head back and started laughing.

It was like gambling in one respect. The important quality, the absolute essential, was patience. Hurry up and wait—that was how the Army put it. You had to be able to move fast. You also had to be able to go without moving at all.

Manso was stretched flat on his back underneath Albert Platt’s black Lincoln. He had remained in that position for well over an hour. First he had crouched beside the fence until the lot attendant delivered the car. Then, with the kid in the car and the engine going and the kid down at the far end of the lot and facing out toward the street, Manso took three running steps and slapped his hands onto the bunched-up tee shirt and vaulted the fence. He landed soft, landed on the balls of his feet, and in seconds he was out of sight behind a car, the tee shirt tucked under his belt.

Another few minutes and he had found Platt’s car. He knew the model and license number—the colonel’s sister was aces in the research department. The doors were unlocked, the key in the ignition. He considered and quickly rejected the idea of hiding in the back seat. Instead he picked another good moment and let himself into the car long enough to pop the hood latch. He slipped out of sight then, waiting, and when the kid took a moment to duck out of sight around the front of the restaurant, Manso raised the hood and loosened a wire coming out of the distributor.

Then he crawled under the car.

He was still there now, forcing himself to remain alert and prepared without getting jumpy in the process. He played the exercise through his mind and couldn’t find anything wildly wrong with the plan. The only drawback was his relative immobility. It was not particularly easy to get out from under a car in a hurry. Still, he didn’t think that would matter too much.

He tensed himself at the sound of approaching footsteps. It was the attendant, he knew the kid’s walk by now. And this time the footsteps did not turn away. The kid opened the door on the driver’s side of the big Lincoln, and Manso watched the frame of the car settle as the kid got behind the wheel. The kid turned the key and the starter ground. Where Manso lay, the noise of the starter was particularly loud. He thought, for the first time, what an utter snafu it would be if he’d yanked an unimportant wire and the fucking car started after all. The car would probably run right over him, and he would damn well deserve it.

But the engine did not catch. The starter motor whirred and whirred and the car shook with the repeated vibration, but there was no spark, no ignition. Give up, Manso thought. Get out of the car before you kill the battery. Go on, you schmuck.

The door opened, the kid got out and trotted off. Manso gave him a few seconds lead time, then began inching his way out from under the car on the passenger side. He crouched at the side of the car, his feet hidden behind a tire. He saw the kid returning with Buddy Rice walking impatiently on ahead of him. The kid was trying to explain and Rice was saying that he was a stupid little prick and he must have flooded it and why the hell couldn’t he learn how to start a car without flooding the goddamned carburetor, and it better start now or he’ll just be wishing that all Mr. Platt does is get him fired, for Christ’s sake.

Rice dropped behind the wheel and ground the starter.

“See, Mr. Rice? It just goes like that, pocketa-pocketa, but it don’t catch. I thought——”

“Not flooded,” Rice said. He hit the hood latch and was around the front of the car almost at once. “Get your ass over here,” he told the kid. “Did you have this hood up? Don’t give me any shit, now, I’ll find out if you did. It’s a big car, a great car, kids like to fool around with cars. You have this hood up?”

“Mr. Rice, I swear by my mother——”

“You got a match? Here, I got one, take this. Light it and hold it steady, for Christ’s sake. I said steady, I can’t see a thing.”

Manso had the knife in his left hand. It was a throwing knife, a hiltless wedge of fine German steel. Knives with hilts were supposed to be better for combat use, but Manso liked this one because it was so easy to conceal. You could tape it to your arm or put it in your shoe, anything, and there was no bulge and nobody knew it was there. He had the knife in his right hand and his left hand was up a few inches in front of his face, the elbow bent sharply in front of him. He moved quickly, silently, away from the car and around in an arc that took him behind the two of them.

“Why, you little shit, look at that! You see that wire? You were playing around and you knocked it loose.”

“I swear, I swear by my mother——”

“Fuck your mother,” Rice said.

That was all he said. Manso chopped once at the back of the kid’s neck, pulling the blow back at the moment of impact and slapping the hand at once over Rice’s mouth. The other hand, the one with the knife, was already in motion. Manso remembered a sentry in Laos, remembered other men who had died noiselessly, and even as the memory flashed in his mind the little wedge of steel slipped neatly between Buddy Rice’s neck and collarbone, slipped neatly in, through the artery, through nerve bundles, neat, easy, like dropping a penny in a slot.

In and out and then the blade wiped back and forth on Rice’s jacket while he lowered Rice gently to the ground. No time wasted checking the kid. He knew he was alive, and he also knew he’d be out cold for ten minutes at the least. He spun, ran, the knife again taped to his arm, the undershirt bunched in his hands. In seconds he was over the fence and running through the yard and down the driveway. He trotted to the Plymouth, started it up, and drove off slowly, resisting the urge to put the gas pedal on the floor.