Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

Back in Jersey, there was a message from Bart Heslip. Meet him and Larry Ballard in Grand Island, Nebraska, as quick as he could get there. Drive all day, all night if he had to.

Ken checked out and was on the road twenty minutes later in Pearso Stokes’s new silver Eldorado. What a great road car for eating up the miles!

Late that night, as Ken sped west through moonlit darkness toward Nebraska, O’B was getting himself arrested on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi just south of Stupidville.

It came about this way.

He arrived from Florida that afternoon to find that Giselle had reserved rooms for everyone at the Bide-A-Wee Motel.

But Dan Kearny had not checked in yet.

Bart Heslip had not checked in yet.

Ken Warren had not checked in yet.

Larry Ballard had checked in the day before, but then had left again, saying he would be back “in a day or two.”

Giselle Marc had checked in but was nowhere around. No message. So O’B, at loose ends, did what he did best.

He played liar’s dice in the Pirate’s Landing (“Choice Steaks, Cocktails”) — “I’ll drink to that” — played horse in the Blue Moon Cafe (“DW — Dipped Walleye — Our Specialty”) — “I’ll drink to that” — shot pool at Kreuzer’s Sportsman’s Hall (“You Catch It — We Cook It”) — “I’ll drink to that” — played shuffleboard at the Gallery (“Where the Elite Meet to Eat”) — “I’ll drink to that” — and at nearly midnight had a hamburger at the Marina Mooring (“Deck Dining May to September”) — “I’ll even drink to that.”

Alas, with all those drinks in him, it seemed to O’B like a good idea to scout out the huge conclave of Gypsies camped in Dieter Braun’s field a mile south of town. Local kids liked to go up to the bluffs overlooking the field and park, he had learned, but the cops had been chasing them away because of reported “scandalous doings” in the encampment below.

O’B, knowing that the Gypsy society is among the most rigorously modest on earth, felt the tales of scantily clad dusky women parading around campfires was more adolescent wishful thinking than anything else. The Town Meeting scheduled for tomorrow night at the Elks Lodge would examine, he was sure, the Gypsies’ endless thieving rather than any scandalous doings.

Anyway, O’B staggered back to the motel and got his car, by trial and error found the narrow dirt road winding through the hardwoods up to the big open-view area overlooking the moon-silvered Mississippi. There were no other cars.

Knee-high in sweet-smelling grass, he scoped the encampment below the edge of the bluff with a pair of binoculars he’d found in the glove box. There actually was enough light from campfires and the moon to let him pick out several new Cadillacs beside the tents and trailers. Easy pickings for DKA tomorrow...

Headlights transfixed him, a harsh voice snapped, “Hold it right there, mister!”

O’B turned, squinted into the lights, holding the hand with the binoculars up to shield his eyes. Two burly uniformed policemen moved in on him from either side of the headlights.

“Tryna get a look at them Gypsy women?” demanded one cop.

O’B started to reply with something zesty — like, What are those binoculars in your hands for, Officers? — then remembered how much he’d had to drink. Whoa! Easy, hoss!

“Think we oughtta roust the bastard, Lloyd?”

“Let’s let him go this time, Frank...”

They waited as he walked back to his car — thank God for the uneven ground, it would account for any slight unsteadiness of gait — got in, and drove away. To find a track into a nearby cow pasture where he hid his car under the hardwoods, killed the lights and motor, and waited.

Roust him, indeed! Let the bastard go, indeed! They had started to believe the tales of the kids they’d sent home, that was it, and wanted him out of there so they could spy on the Gypsy women. But he was here on a professional mission! It all got his Irish up, begorra! He’d carry out that mission!

Of course a little basic caution was called for. Some camouflage, that was the ticket. And he knew just where to find it. Kalia Uwanowich, that Gypsy scamp, must have had a sideline for times when the bogus roofing trade was slow: O’B had found a trunkful of “novelty items” and “marital aids” while itemizing the personal property for his condition report on the Allante.

Ten minutes later the police cruiser went by, heading back to town. A little sober voice deep inside whispered that O’B should just return to the motel and go to bed — tomorrow was another day. But the booze was positively shouting in his ear, Action! Action!

Chuckling to himself, O’B opened the trunk on its spate of thoroughly ingenious — if often grotesque — devices from Japan to plug into auto cigarette lighters, insert into various body cavities, and the like. There were two cartons of explicit photo magazines from Australia (“XXX Nonviolent Erotica, All Models Over 18”). And, perfect for O’b’s purposes, two boxed Anatomically Correct Life-size Inflatable Latex Sex Dolls (“You Need Never Do It Alone Again”) made right here in the good old U.S. of A. One blonde, one brunette.

O’B chose the blonde.

By the time he managed to get her blown up, he was red-faced and panting, about ready to forget the whole thing. But from a dozen feet away, sitting on the front seat with the door open and the overhead light on, she looked extemely lifelike, from the tippy-tips of her red rubber toes to the Dynel champagne-blond crown of her inflated latex head.

But also extremely nude . Extremely naked.

Well, he was, after all, going to a lover’s lane. But he would drape his sports coat decorously around her shoulders. And by parking broadside and very close to the edge of the bluff, he could lean across his anatomically correct companion, put his elbows on the edge of the open window, and glass the encampment below. All anyone would be able to see of her was her hair. To the casual glance, just a guy snuggling up to his gal.

But he found that the booze was dying in him, his head was starting to ache, there was a distinctly chilly breeze blowing up from off the river, and nearly all of the Gypsy campfires were out. He couldn’t see a bloody thing. To hell with it.

He started to draw back into the car, barked his knuckles on the window frame, and dropped the binoculars on the floor. In leaning down to grope for them, he unwittingly pulled his coat off the inflated nude figure.

Damn! The glasses had gone under the seat. He leaned down farther still, his face pressed firmly into the dummy’s Dynel-ornamented anatomically correct lap, his other hand groping for the doorframe. By bitter mischance, it closed around one of the latex doll’s extremely lifelike triple-D breasts.

That’s when the policemen sneaking up on his car shone their flashlights in the windows.

“He’s got her buckass nekkid and his goddam face in her lap, Lloyd!”

“An’ grabbin’ her tit, Frank!”

O’B tried to sit up, cracked his head painfully on the underside of the dash.

“That ain’t no woman, Lloyd! It’s one of them sex dolls!”

“We got us a damn pervert, Frank! Spyin’ on the women down there to the campground, then up here with his face in—”

Guns were suddenly pointed at him.

“OKAY, YOU, OUTTA THE CAR! HANDS ON TOP OF YOUR HEAD!”

“YOU GOT THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT...”

Busted.

Dawn in Nebraska. Grunts of effort, grate of trenching tools against stone as three kneeling figures dug a hole in the rocky soil big enough to bury a midget or a large dog.