Joe Gores - Interface

Browne was already moving, quickly and silently, trotting at little short of a run toward the First Street entrance and the pay phone outside it. He dropped his dime, dialled. Alex Kolinski’s heavy voice came on the line.

“He’s here,” exclaimed Browne, “In the men’s room takin’ a shit!”

Before Browne was out the men’s room door, however, Docker’s stall had opened. The big, blond, hard-faced man had emerged fully clothed. Docker had the attaché case pinched between arm and body again to free both hands. He was drying, with a heavy wad of toilet paper, the fist he’d used to make the splash. He dropped the paper on the floor, went out of the restroom.

In the phone booth outside the far end of the block-long terminal, Browne was saying, “Trailways Terminal on First Street is where. He—”

“He’s getting a bus.” Kolinski’s voice made it a statement.

“Ain’t I tellin’ you? Los Angeles Silver Eagle, it leaves here at twelve-twenty. He—”

“He’s got an attaché case with him?”

“Uh. That like a briefcase only it square-like?”

Docker had stayed against the wall, had gone out the Fremont Street door closest to the men’s room and thus had not been visible from the body of the waiting room, let alone from Browne’s phone booth outside in First Street. He turned right, toward Natoma Street, then right again and went along Natoma toward First Street, where the Silver Eagle would load. The bus was waiting. Docker ignored it.

“Man, I tell you he try to leave I follow him. Be like pickin’ cherries off a tree—”

“ Listen , goddam you!” cut in Kolinski angrily. “ Don’t go up against him, hang back if he doesn’t get that bus. I and some men are on the way. He beat the living shit out of Rowlands over at the Greyhound station about an hour ago, acted like he might be dropping meth...”

Browne, whistling cheerily under his breath, headed back into the terminal. Thirteen minutes to bus departure.

Docker, who had been standing just out of sight on Natoma, went across First Street in long strides toward the open dark maw of the parking garage directly opposite. His topcoat tails flapped around his legs and the attaché case swung in asymmetrical rhythm to help with his balance.

He pulled up just inside the door with a little skip made necessary by his limp, then twisted to scan the front of the terminal building. Browne was nowhere in sight. Satisfied, he straightened his lapels, rubbed on the back of one calf the shoe-tip of the other foot which had gotten scuffed, then went away between the rows of parked cars.

This echoing passageway took him through the sprawling dim low-ceilinged garage to a series of open-air blacktop lots. These, leased to private operators by the state, followed the course of the Skyway which shook and rumbled with traffic above Docker’s head.

Eventually he emerged into Howard Street between two immense concrete abutments. He was nearly two blocks from the Trailways Bus Terminal. There was no one behind him. It was 12:18, two minutes before the Silver Eagle would leave for Los Angeles without him.

Back at the terminal, Browne was staring in disbelief as the last southbound passenger boarded the big double-decker bus. The door shut with a pneumatic sound very much like phooey. Browne sprinted back into the terminal and through it toward the men’s room. In his wake moved a very big man wearing a droopy mustache that made him look like an overweight Rock Hudson during the actor’s mustache phase.

Browne straightened up from looking under the locked door of Docker’s empty stall with shock in his face. As he did, Kolinski came in, preceded by the overweight Rock Hudson and followed by another man equally as large. All three of them had their hands in their overcoat pockets. No one else was in the restroom. The last man stopped and leaned against the door so anyone trying to open it would find it unyielding unless they got back and took a run at it.

Browne was backing up. Unfortunately for him, he was already at the last stall, almost against the back wall. Kolinski’s deep-set eyes were dangerous.

“So?” he said.

Browne said: “I swear he... I come in here after I seen he wasn’t on the bus. I swear—”

“Blaney?”

“He wasn’t on the bus,” said Rock Hudson.

“Any other bus out of here he could have caught?”

“No.”

“I swear,” said Browne. “I swear, Mr Kolinski...”

“Daggert. Amtrack?”

“The last train out was at nine o’clock,” said the man who was making sure there would continue to be no one else in the restroom.

“I swear, Mr Kolinski—”

“Upstairs? An East Bay bus?”

Blaney merely shook his head. “He must of smelled our friend here and just split. Unless...”

“Yes,” said Kolinski. “Unless.”

Browne had gone silent. Silence did not attract attention. But Kolinski’s attention was apparently already attracted. Since silence hadn’t worked, Browne began trying to make himself fit into the corner formed by the final stall and the back wall. He was too long and lean and suddenly dolorous to be successful.

Then Kolinski smiled. A lot of Jews wearing tattooed numbers would have recognized the quality of that smile. “How much did he pay you to lose him?” asked Kolinski softly.

Browne’s face glistened. His lips were dry. He said, “Mr Kolinski, I swear—”

“Blaney.”

The search was swift, thorough, professional, not at all gentle. Blaney shook his head. “Not enough to buy a piece of ass off his mother.”

“Pure stupidity, then.”

Kolinski swung a round-house right as he spoke. It was a sucker punch, but it drove Browne’s head sideways against the wall tiles because Browne had made no attempt to block it, counter it, or move his head out of its way. Like silence, it didn’t work either to deflect Kolinski’s anger.

“Make this stupid nigger hurt,” Kolinski said.

Browne’s mumbled, incoherent pleadings rose to a sharp scream of pain as the strongarm’s feet and hands got busy before Daggert even had time to let Kolinski out through the guarded door.

“Your cigarettes,” the jump-suited guard explained to the woman in the red coat.

“But I—”

“The foil on the pack.”

Neil Fargo followed her across the very slightly raised wooden ramp as his left hand gave topcoat, car keys, cigarettes, and pocket knife to the other, older guard. The buzzer sounded.

“What the hell, you packing your piece, man?” demanded the young black guard who had been hassling with the red-coated woman about her cigarettes.

Neil Fargo shook his head, stepped back, then through again. The machine buzzed again.

“Better do it,” said the black.

Neil Fargo held his empty hands away from his sides, arms wide to facilitate the white guard’s body search. It was sufficiently professional to seem perfunctory. The guard straightened up. Bending had made him red in the face. Small strips of his light blue shirt showed through the gaps between the buttons of his tan uniform jacket.

“My money clip,” said Neil Fargo abruptly. “I always forget the damned thing.”

The guard nodded and puffed out a breath laden with recent lunch. He slapped the heavy swell of gut under his jacket.

“Neil, how the hell you stay in the shape you do?”

“Night work, Ben.”

Neil Fargo crossed the marble lobby of the Hall of Justice, past the bronze plaque commemorating San Francisco’s police dead. The number of recent additions to the roster was one reason everyone entering the Hall was subject to a body search. He crossed to the banks of elevators at the rear of the lobby. Several professional freaks in their prescribed hippie uniforms were protesting something to a uniformed deputy who looked as if his patience was getting as thin as his hair.