Donald Westlake - Smoke

She hung around down there maybe five minutes, and then turned and started the long trudge back up the slope, and Barney retreated all the way to the far corner, past the parking area, waiting there until she made the turn, then moving back again, holding at the head of the station driveway until her head would appear again, over there beyond the parked cars, and it didn't.

He waited. He frowned. He looked down into the blacktop area in front of the station, where the van was parked, and here she came, out of the building. She just hadn't known ahead of time about that back entrance, that's all.

Okay. Time out for everybody. Barney walked back to his car, got behind the wheel, reached for Playboy, and the van drove by.

What? The damn buzzer wasn't working! What a hell of a time to break down! Knowing he'd have to do a visual tail, hating the idea of it, Barney quickly started the engine, shifted into drive, and the car went klomp forward klomp forward klomp forward. A mile an hour. Less. And shaking all over the place.

Barney hit the brakes. The bastards. He already knew, but he got out of the Impala anyway, as the van disappeared around a curve far ahead.

All four tires. Flat. Slashed. And a little later, when he lifted his maps and newspapers and magazines from the front seat, there under them lay the bug, almost as good as new.

25

"I don't like that guy on our necks like that," Freddie said.

He was still dressing in the back of the van, so Peg kept her eyes firmly on Rhinebeck's only traffic light, now red, two cars in front of her.

She said, "He isn't on our necks anymore, Freddie. You took care of that."

"Damn good thing those guys told you about him."

"Yes, it was."

Those guys were the guys in the firehouse, who had told her, when she went to pick up the van this morning, about the cop who'd come in with a cockamamie story that nobody believed for a second, so everybody watched the cop when he was supposedly looking over a blue Toyota, and he was obviously taking too much of an interest in Freddie and Peg's van, and maybe she ought to know about it. The guy, from their description, was the tough cop who'd come to the place yesterday with the lawyer, Leethe.

Because the fire guys had given her that warning, she'd been extremely alert, looking in every direction at once on her way back to the apartment to pick up the stuff they were taking upstate, so that was why she spotted him, lurking in that big old Chevy, a faded green like an old shower curtain or something, parked half a block from her place. I'll have to lose him somehow, she thought, and went on to load up the van.

But then she didn't see him again. Had he been that easy to lose? She drove all the way upstate on the Taconic, and over the local road to Rhinebeck, and never saw him at all. Until all at once, as she was stopped at this very light, there he was, just a few cars behind her.

That was when she realized what he must have done at the firehouse yesterday: put some kind of bug on this car. Every new piece of police technology is immediately described to the citizenry via cop shows on TV, so Peg knew all about long-distance tailing of other cars with these radio bugs. What she didn't know, now that she found the cop in his washed-out green Chevy behind her, was what to do about it. I'll let Freddie decide, she decided, and ignored the cop and his car from that point on.

It was a long wait, all in all — three trains — before at last she heard that whisper in her ear: "Hi, Peg." Then the van sagged beside her, so he was aboard.

Relieved, glad to be reunited, grinning like an idiot, Peg shut the van door, got around to the other side, slid in behind the wheel, got serious, and said, "Freddie, he followed me, he put something on the van."

"The cops from yesterday?"

"Just one of them's a cop. He's up there in an old Chevy the color of a lima bean."

"And he put a bug on the car?"

"He must've."

"Go take a walk somewhere for maybe five minutes," the voice behind her said. "Get him to follow you. I'll take care of it."

So she did, and the cop followed her, and Freddie took care of it, and now, as she waited for the Rhinebeck traffic light to turn green, Bart Simpson came up and sat next to her, saying, "Only one of them was a cop?"

The light changed; traffic moved. As she drove on through town and out to the countryside, Peg told him her story, and then said, "How've things been with you, since yesterday?"

"Weird," he said. "I took the subway to Manhattan — it's really dirty down there, Peg, after a while you could see my feet, I think a couple little kids did see my feet—"

"That must have been kinda scary."

"Good thing it wasn't rush hour. I got off at Times Square and went to a movie and washed my feet in the men's room—"

Slyly, she said, "Not the ladies' room?"

"I don't know why I didn't thinka that," he said. The Bart Simpson face was deadpan. "Anyway, then I sat there and watched a Disney movie five times. You can't believe, Peg, you just can't believe, how not funny after a while it is to see a wet Labrador retriever in a station wagon with six little kids and an actress on coke. And every time you see a can of housepaint you say, "Oh, boy, here comes that one again.'"

"Sounds like no fun."

"They oughta change the rating system," Bart said. "They oughta have a 2D rating, for movies that are Too Dumb to put up with."

"It might bring more people in," Peg suggested. "Especially out-of-towners."

"Good for them," Freddie said. "Finally, after the fifth time, the movie stopped and everybody went home, and I got a good night's sleep."

"On a movie chair?"

"No no, the manager had a nice sofa in his office. Smelled like Dr Pepper, that's all. They have these dust cloths they put over the popcorn stand at night, so I used a couple of them for sheets and blankets, and it was pretty good."

"Be glad nobody walked in."

"The first movie's at noon," he said. "I was up long before then, had breakfast at the food stand, and took off when they unlocked the doors, before Disney could get at me again."

"And went to the railroad station?"

"I was on my way," he assured her, "but those city streets are crowded, you know, and this time of year most of them seem like they're Europeans, talking all these other languages, and they got no radar at all, they bang into each other all the time and they can see one another. So I had like fifteen blocks to go to get to Penn Station, and I just wasn't gonna make it, so I ducked into Macy's and went up to furniture and fell asleep again on a sofa in there and woke up when a fat lady sat on me."

"No!"

"Yes. She let out a holler and so did I, but with her holler nobody heard mine, so I got outta there, and she was saying that was the lumpiest sofa she ever felt in her life."

"I bet. Then what'd you do?"

"I made it over to Penn Station — another dirty place, believe me — and saw when the next train was, which was like over an hour—"

"They don't go very often," Peg agreed. "I think we'll travel mostly by car."

"Me especially," Freddie said. "Anyway, I tried to keep out of the way, but what you got in railroad stations is people running, and wherever I went that's where somebody wanted to run, so finally I hid behind a homeless guy against a side wall, and when he accidentally leaned back and found me there I told him just to mind his own business."

"You talked to him?"

"I was tired of gettin out of people's way, Peg. So I said, "You just do what you're doin, don't mind me back here, I'm not gonna bother you, just do what you're doin,' which was nothin much except to hold up a message on a piece of cardboard and stick out a used plastic coffee cup for people to put quarters in, which mostly they don't."