Elmore Leonard - 52 pickup

Alan smiled at her. "Feel pretty good, huh? You been up and away almost three hours. Tomorrow you may be a little constipated, but you'll get over it."

She had nothing to cover herself with so she lay without moving, her hands flat on the bed at her sides. A patient watching her doctor.

"What did you to do me?"

"Guess."

Barbara stared at him but said nothing.

Alan grinned. "You squirmed around a lot. You don't remember? You moaned, said a few things. Nothing dirty."

"What did you do to me?"

"Give you a hint," Alan said. "You can't even knock anybody up doing it." He grinned at her and winked. "Now I got to shoot you up again. We're about ready to get out of here."

As Barbara started to push up, to lunge at him or get past him, Alan hit her with a fist, chopping it quick and hard into her upturned face. "Be nice," Alan said. He got her leg under his arm and squeezed the ankle to pop the vein.

The telephone rang.

Leo began that day with a vodka and 7-Up. It didn't help any. He had two more, not wasting much time. Usually the vodka picked him up and a couple of them would give him a nice glow; but he still couldn't feel anything. He ordered another one and said to the owner of the Kit Kat, who was behind the bar, "You haven't seen them today by any chance, have you?"

"Not since last night," the bar owner said.

"They were together though, last night?"

"I don't know if they came in together. What I told you before, they left together."

"What time was that?"

"I don't know what time. They're sitting at the bar, they got up and left."

"I'll have another one," Leo said.

The bar owner looked at him because Leo had only taken an inch off the top of his fourth drink; but when he came back with a fresh vodka and Seven-Up Leo was ready for it. The bar owner moved away and Leo sat there alone. One other guy was sitting up toward the front end of the bar with a Strohs.

Leo hadn't been able to locate either of them yesterday, to find out what the hell was going on. Alan hadn't been home or at work. Doreen said she hadn't seen Bobby or Alan all day. Bobby disappeared sometimes, but not Alan. He always knew where Alan was, or Alan knew where he was. Since getting into this deal they'd seen each other every day. Now, all of a sudden, Alan wasn't anywhere around.

Drinking the vodka Leo thought it over carefully, seeing Alan in his apartment the last time and remembering what he'd said. It was over. The guy couldn't pay. But the guy knew who they were. They couldn't take a chance on the guy not going to the police. Then sounding friendly toward the end, saying they had to stick together and maybe, after a while, look for another guy to hit. Why had he sounded so friendly? The whole deal blows up. They kill the girl for nothing. They have to kill the guy now. And Alan sounds friendly, not the least bothered about it or nervous. If they were supposed to stick together then where the hell was Alan? Like they were ditching him.

There were guys he hung around with a long time ago used to do that, ditch him. Sometimes they'd just take off running and leave him behind when he couldn't catch up. Or he was supposed to meet them somewhere and they wouldn't be there. Or he'd find out they'd all gone to a show and nobody had bothered to call him or come by his house. Once he was sixteen his mother let him use the car a lot, a blue six-cylinder Plymouth coupe, and for a while they let him drive them around and hardly ever ditched him. He hadn't seen any of them in a long time now. Not since he worked at his first motel as a night clerk, a six-buck place out on Telegraph. They found out he could fix them up with young fifteen-dollar broads out of high school and sometimes they'd come by two-thirty in the morning half-loaded on beer.

Something was going on.

He wondered if maybe Alan had seen Mitchell again. Or if Bobby had seen him and put the guy away. There was nothing in the morning Free Press or the early edition of the News. It could be too soon. They could have taken the guy somewhere and dumped him and his body hadn't been found yet. He said to himself, What's the matter with you?

Leo went to the pay phone near the entrance. He had to get the number of Ranco Manufacturing from the operator because it was out of the city, in Fraser. When he dialed the number and asked for Mr. Mitchell, the girl's voice asked who was calling please. He said, "Tell him Alan Raimy." He waited. When he heard Mitchell's voice, recognizing it immediately, he hung up the receiver and held it down hard in the cradle until he was sure Mitchell was off the line. He lifted it to his face again and dialed Alan's apartment. Still no answer. He dialed the movie theater. Alan wasn't in yet. Was he expected? Nobody seemed to know. He dialed Doreen's number again. No answer.

Leo had two more vodka and Seven-Ups at the bar. He was sure something was going on. He was beginning to be sure they didn't want to be seen with him. Because something was going to happen to him and if they were seen with him anytime before it happened they could be taken in and questioned. This way, if they were questioned for any reason, they'd say no, they hadn't seen him in a couple of days. And nobody could prove otherwise.

What the hell was he doing sitting here? Making it easy for them. The whole thing had looked easy. Foolproof, Alan had said. They'd have to be fucking idiots to blow this one. It was their chance to make it for life. Christ, his life was going by so fast all of a sudden. Christ, what had he done, accomplished? Worked at some motels. Handled some broads. Got them their business but had to pay when he wanted a little. Even the dumb-looking ones nobody wanted and didn't last, he had to pay. Three arrests for pandering. Two suspended, one conviction. Ninety days in DeHoco, fucking Detroit House of Correction. Famous milestones in the life of Leo Frank. When his mother died he was the beneficiary of a $25,000 life insurance policy and a year-old T-bird. Hot shit, his troubles were over. He'd invest it in some kind of business. He rented a storefront and set up the model studio; that took five. He met Alan, loaned him almost ten and pissed away the rest of it in less than a year. Alan had bought a sports car and fixed up his apartment with a lot of weird shit and hadn't paid him back as much as a dime of the ten he borrowed. All Alan ever did, pushed him around, ditched him, insulted him- Leo walked back to the phone and dialed Ranco Manufacturing again. This time, when Mitchell came on, Leo didn't hang up.

He said, "Mr. Mitchell, this is Leo Frank. From the model studio?… Yeah, how are you?… Listen, I'd like to talk to you sometime soon, I mean today, you get a chance…"

Mitchell could have walked-the Pine Top was across the road and only a block down-but it might have looked funny. Where was the boss going, walking off at two o'clock in the afternoon? It was an industrial area of small plants, warehouses and vacant lots for sale. There wasn't anyplace he could be walking to except the bar. So Mitchell drove over and parked the Grand Prix in the lot on the side of the green-painted cinder-block building, among the pickup trucks and sedans with hardhats on the rear window ledges.

Mitchell had been inside only a few times before. He remembered nothing in particular about the place: a bar that looked like hundreds of other bars, a country ballad on the jukebox and about a dozen workingmen sitting around drinking Strohs, most of them at the bar. The first person Mitchell recognized was Ed Jazik, the Local 199 Union business agent. He was alone at the bar. Mitchell walked past him and Jazik didn't turn around or seem to notice him. He saw Leo Frank at a table against the wall, fooling with a plastic swizzle stick. A drink and another stick were on the table.