Lawrence Block - The Specialists

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.