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  He nodded to me as I approached, saying, “How they hangin’, Quarry?”

  “Turner,” I said, nodding back. We stood there a few minutes.

  “Lots of nice pussy,” he said, smirking. He did a lot of smirking. His voice was like sand­paper rubbing against itself.

  I didn’t say anything for a while.

  “You won’t see nicer pussy,” he said. “Young pussy. Nice young pussy. You won’t find pussy any tighter. You know what I’m talk­ing about, Quarry?”

  “It seems to have something to do with pussy.”

  “Bet your ass it does. You hungry?”

  “I could eat.”

  So we went over to one of the few food stands that had a counter and stools, and ordered knock­wurst sandwiches with grilled onions and pep­pers, and lemonade, and sat at the far end of the counter by ourselves and ate and talked.

  “What do you think, Quarry? How’s he look to you?”

  “Like a bigger asshole than you.”

  “How’m I supposed to take that?”

  “Any way you like.”

  “I don’t get you, Quarry. Why the fuck you got to be so goddamn hard to get along with? I been trying to get along with you, you know.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well I am, goddamnit.”

  “Drop it, okay?”

  This was only our second contact. Turner had been here a week, getting the mark’s pattern down, and I got in last night. Today I was to see if the setup looked kosher enough to go ahead with the hit. We’d had words last night, at Turner’s motel, about the way he was handling his end, his making like a Shriner as a cover. He thought it was a great idea. I thought it sucked. He could’ve picked up any number of menial jobs at the carni­val that would’ve given him plenty of opportunity to stake out the mark; his acting the Shriner role was in my opinion idiotic, as the Shriners were local and could spot him as phony.

  But the cover had held, apparently, probably because Turner had a good line of bullshit, so what the hell.

  “I got to agree with you,” Turner was saying, through a mouthful of knockwurst and onions and what have you, “the guy’s an asshole. You’d think he’d have fucking sense enough to try and blend in. You’d think he’d notice all the noise the other pitchmen are making, and that he’d have sense enough to join in. But no. He just lays back quiet and waits for customers to come see him and when they do, he don’t give a shit. He don’t know much about being inconspicuous.”

  “Maybe you could give him some tips.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Guess.”

  “Hey, yeah, well and blow it out your ass, Quarry, if you want my opinion. So you going to tell me how it looks to you, or just sit there?”

  “It looks okay.”

  “I think so, too. How’s tomorrow afternoon sound?”

  “Bad. They pull up stakes morning after next. Tomorrow being the last day might make it atypi­cal. Since you went to the trouble of getting his pattern down, we ought to use it.”

  “I suppose. Fuck it, anyway.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I had a date tonight. This evening, I mean.”

  “A date.”

  “Yeah, I was going to get it on between shows with Zamorita.”

  “Zamorita.”

  “I been humping her. Zamorita. Actually, her name is Hilda something. She’s the woman who turns into a gorilla.”

  “You have that effect on all the girls?”

  “Funny. I mean, she’s the one with the stage act. She gets in this cage and they dim the lights and do some electrical stuff and she turns into a gorilla. Anyway that’s what it looks like. Actual­ly it’s just a big hoax.”

  “Oh, Turner, do you have to spoil everything?”

  “You’re a funny guy, Quarry. Funnier than my old man when he takes out his teeth. Anyway, I guess I’ll just have to take a rain check on the bitch. Damn, is she going to be disappointed.”

  “I can imagine. Ten o’clock, then?”

  “Ten o’clock. I’ll be there.”

  “Where exactly?”

  He pointed over to a spot near the mark’s tent, between the exhibit with the giant rats and the House of Mirrors. The Winnebago camper was parked behind there, just fifty feet away, among many other such vehicles belonging to the carny people; in the background loomed the truck trail­ers, the rides, when disassembled, were trans­ported in.

  “Okay,” I said. “See you later.”

  “See you later.”

  I went on some rides, had my weight and age guessed and threw a few balls at a game tent, but not the mark’s. I ended up in Fun World, a king-size arcade in a long, narrow tent. The pinballs and shooting machines held my attention for sev­eral hours, and when I finally came out, at nine-thirty, night had replaced dusk; the rides, with their bright neons of every imaginable color, were tracing garish designs against the darkness, like ungodly jewelry or a hand-painted tie.

  And at nine-forty, after going to the rental Ford for my silenced nine-millimeter and a light jacket, I had wandered over by the mark’s stall, where he was closing down. The rest of the carnival stayed open till one, but not this clown. He always closed up early, sometimes as early as ten o’clock. To­night was a new record.

  Which was a little disturbing. It’s always dis­turbing when a mark varies his pattern, even just a little. But even more disturbing when I looked over where Turner was supposed to be and he wasn’t. Well, it was early. He’d be along soon.

  By nine fifty-five the mark’s tent was shut down.

  Still no Turner.

  And the guy was heading back toward his Winnebago.

  I hesitated.

  Shit.

  Turner would be here momentarily.

  I went ahead and followed the guy to the camper. It was dark back there, and deserted, except for the mark and me. I took the silenced gun from out of my belt, where the light jacket had covered it, and went in right behind the guy, shutting the camper door behind us, flicking on the light and showing him the nine-millimeter.

  And it should have been over just that fast. I should have squeezed the trigger, sent him on his way and me on mine.

  But I was still pretty new at the game. I hadn’t learned the desirability of doing it fast, not yet. In fact I was just in the process of learning.

  Because in the split second I wasted, the fat little Jew or Italian or whatever the fuck he was reached over to the little built-in stove and got hold of a frying pan and laid it across the side of my face, and I fired but the silenced gun thudded a shot into the cushion of a chair, and there was grease in the pan, not hot thank God, but grease, and some of it got in my eyes and the little fucker had pushed me aside and was scrambling past me, out the door, before I could get my eyes working and my gun hand around to make up for my mistake.

  I put the gun back in my belt. I had to: from the doorway of the camper I could see the mark head­ing into the carnival, that Hawaiian shirt flashing into the crowd, and I had to pursue him. And that could hardly be done with the nine-millimeter hanging out. I zipped the jacket up a third of the way and went after him.

  One good thing, though: he’d angled toward the space of open ground between the giant rat exhibit and the House of Mirrors. Right into Tur­ner’s arms.

  Only as I reached that point myself I saw the guy going into the House of Mirrors, nodding at the ticket-taker who knew him as a fellow carny and waved him by without a ticket.

  And Turner was nowhere to be seen.

  So I bought a ticket to the House of Mirrors.

  It wasn’t very busy right now, but I wouldn’t be alone in there with him. I didn’t know what com­pelled him to enter that place, but chances were he didn’t know, either. It’s easy to be critical of the behavior of people in tense situations: not every­body functions well under stress.

  Or maybe he’d seen some movies with arty funhouse shootout scenes, and figured I’d be dis­tracted by all those r
eflections of myself and he could maybe somehow lose me in there. Which was a possibility. Maybe it would have been smarter to just wait for him to come out.

  But he might also know his way around in there; maybe he was a pretty good friend of the guy who ran the house, and knew where an office was or a back exit or something. Or maybe he figured he knew the place well enough to hide somewhere and jump me as I came by.

  Who could tell what he thought.

  At any rate, I found him, in an enclosed area of perhaps sixteen mirrors, none of them distorting, and nobody else was around at the moment, and if he thought hiding in the House of Mirrors would be to his advantage, he was wrong—unless he enjoyed watching all those images of himself get­ting shot through the sternum.

  I found my way out with little trouble. Behind me I heard somebody finding him, and making a fuss, going into a screaming panic. That was too bad. Had everything gone as it should, the mark would have been found no sooner than morning, in all probability.

  I found Turner in the trailer behind the Gorilla Girl’s tent.

  I knocked and, finally, was answered by a pretty brunette of about twenty, though her face was an easy ten years harder.

  “Tell Cheetah Tarzan’s here to see him,” I said.

  “Go away,” she said, starting to push shut the door.

  I pushed it open and found Turner naked in bed and pulled him out by the arm and threw him on the floor.

  “What the hell . . . ?” he said.

  I kicked his balls up in him.

  That kept him busy for a few minutes, during which time I told Zamorita to get him his clothes.

  “I’ll fix you, fucker,” he said, after a while, still holding himself. “I’ll fix you.”

  “Never mind that,” I said. “You better just get your pants on so we can both get the hell out of here.”

  Now, five years later, going through Turner’s room at Wilma’s Welcome Inn, I wondered why I bothered going back for him at all.

  4

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  FROM THE WINDOW above the old-fashioned radiator in Turner’s room I could see my A-frame cottage clearly, despite the partial sheltering of trees. The radiator was hot and making hissing noises, complaining about its unexpected April workload; but at least it helped keep the frost off the window, which was a plus for Turner, as he was apparently using this window to watch me, to study my pattern. He no doubt used the same binoculars I was now using: I’d found them in his bottom dresser drawer, between a box of .380 shells and the Browning they were used in.

  A gunsmith had done some improvising on the automatic, because the original barrel was gone and replaced with a new one that had a built-in silencer. I didn’t see the point, as the length of the new barrel was practically the same as the old one would’ve been with silencer attached. So nothing in particular had been gained, and something had been lost: the ability to detach the silencer, which is nice to be able to do at times, as they aren’t always necessary and do make the weapon more bulky. But to each his own.

  The room was orderly, though Wilma did not provide maid service. That is, unless the sixteen-year-old niece Turner was humping was playing housekeeper, too. There was just the one big room, with a double bed with maple headboard against the left side wall, and a living room area opposite, with sagging couch and a chair or two and a beat-up coffee table with a scuffed metal­lic portable TV on it. The wallpaper was flowered and purple-faded-to-gray. Varnished light wood floors showed around the worn edges of the large round braided rug. There was no john (other than the floor’s communal one, down the hall) and a single, shallow closet he hadn’t hung anything in was behind the couch, in the corner. The dresser was over left of the window, near the bed; its drawers contained clothing and what I mentioned before. His shaving kit was on top of the dresser, which had a mirror. On the floor under the bed was a stack of skin magazines, of which Hustler was the most genteel.

  I was surprised I could find nothing in writing, no record of my activities as noted by Turner. He might possibly be keeping that on his person, in a little notebook or something, but I didn’t think it likely: the kind of record a person working stake­out would keep isn’t easily kept in anything smal­ler than a secretarial-size pad, and Turner’s habit during the time he’d worked back-up for me had been to use a spiral notebook larger than that. Of course that was five years ago.

  Which in itself had me thinking. It was a little late in the day for Turner to come looking for revenge. Five years ago I’d kicked him in the balls, and reported him fucking up to the Broker, but it hadn’t cost Turner anything: Broker had simply put him with another partner. I didn’t doubt Turner carried a grudge against me, but I did doubt it was big enough a one for him to come looking for me with a gun.

  Besides, he was obviously on stakeout duty. Which meant he was part of a team, and not the trigger part, either. He was hired help and nothing more. My first instinct was to tie his presence here in with the bad blood between us: but I no longer felt that way. Turner was not working on his own initiative.

  So I’d just have to talk to him and find out who hired him. Or at least find out who his new Broker was, so I could put a gun to that guy’s head and get the name of whoever it was took the contract out.

  I put the binoculars in the dresser, but stuck the Browning in my belt. I turned out the lights and went over to the couch to wait for Turner to come.

  I didn’t let myself think. There was a lot to think about, a lot in my life that was threatened by all of this, not the least of which was my life itself, but I didn’t think. I didn’t let myself. There are times when it’s smart to sort through the things that have been happening to you, and figure out what it is they all mean, and there are times to clear all the shit out of your head, empty your head of everything but now, so you are ready, not edgy, but on edge, perched like an animal waiting for its prey to make a move. So I sat on the uncomfortable, spring-bulging couch, waiting for Turner to come.

  In two hours and some odd minutes, I heard his voice. It was still grating, had that same sand­paper quality. He was standing outside his door, talking to somebody. And that could be a problem.

  The other person spoke, and it was a girl, a young woman’s voice. Possibly the sixteen-year-old niece Wilma was worried about.

  A key was working in the door, in the lock, and I ducked into the closet, to the rear of the couch.

  “Don’t worry, baby,” he was saying. I heard the door close. I heard a thud, which I guessed to be the sound of his hunting jacket being tossed on the couch. “She works till two in the morning It ain’t even midnight. We got plenty of time.”

  “If she finds us together,” the girl said, her voice sounding very young, “she’ll kill us.”

  “Aw the hell with her. You going to let some fat old windbag run your fife?”

  “She’s my aunt.”

  “She can’t give you this.”

  There followed considerable, moaning and groaning, most of it from the girl. In the back­ground the radiator hissed.

  “Here. Let me help you out of that stuff.”

  “No . . . I’ll . . . I’ll do it.”

  I was sitting on the floor. It was cramped in there. I decided I might as well enjoy myself, so I looked through the keyhole while the girl undres­sed. My view was partially blocked by the couch, but I saw everything, as the girl moved around a little, placing her clothing piece by piece over on the dresser.

  She was small, tan and big-breasted, with a simple, pretty face that had those same blue eyes as fat Wilma. She had shoulder-length dark brown hair and an equally dark brown pubic tang­le that started as a trail at her navel and turned into a dense undergrowth soon after; it was a place you could get lost in for weeks. I hoped her overage boy friend wouldn’t be quite that long.

  Turner took his clothes off, then. That I didn’t bother watching. I felt stupid, like a hus
band who didn’t have it right: the idiot didn’t realize it was the lover who hid in the closet, not the cuckold.

  Then the bed was making noise and so were they. The radiator got its two cents in, too.

  Me, I was slouched quietly down in the closet, back to the wall, gun in my lap.

  Still waiting for Turner to come.

  5

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  HE AND THE girl stayed in the sack nearly two hours. I didn’t watch much of it, though the keyhole provided an unexpur- gated if small-screen view of the proceedings. Between rounds he would teach the girl things to do to him, and watching her crawl around on the bed and him doing them certainly beat watching reruns of “Celebrity Bowling.” But eventually, inevit­ably, he’d get on top of her and stay on top, which meant the view I had was largely of him, and I wasn’t particularly interested in looking up that asshole’s asshole.

  So I sat there, patiently, my state of mind remarkably serene for a guy hiding in a closet, and why not. Turner was in a tighter box than I was, and I don’t mean that in the sense of a pun. He was in a very bad situation and didn’t know it, which was part of what made it so bad.

  I admit he was having a better time than I was, but that was largely because he was a man who thought he had a gun in a nearby dresser drawer and didn’t know that gun was still nearby but now in the possession of somebody in a closet a few feet away, waiting to possibly put that gun to use. Ignorance is bliss, all right, but it’s also a good way to get blown away. And that’s no pun, either.

  The only reason I was sitting this out, of course, was the girl. Turner alone I could handle, no problem—or anyway not much of one. Turner in the company of an innocent third party was something else again. Particularly when that in­nocent third party was Wilma’s niece, whose hon­or I was here on the pretense of defending, even though from my occasional glimpses through the keyhole I could see there wasn’t much left to defend.