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After the third time I had dialed Kevin’s number and gotten his goddamned annoying voice mail message I decided to call Carol: no dice, left her a message also.
I had never bothered to pay a lot of attention to his personal life, such as it was, since he arrived from Florida other than to marvel at his shiftlessness – there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to notice, really.
That Kevin might have had a girlfriend I didn’t know about didn’t surprise me, but something wasn’t adding up.
It was so obvious that I was angry it didn’t hit me straight away but, given the last 48 hours, it was little wonder I wasn’t thinking straight.
“What’s that email say again, Stan?”
Stan was staring at the ass of some coed passerby wearing black tights or leggings or something as outerwear that were about as thick as a coat of paint. Did they dress like this in front of their fathers? Did their fathers know that guys like me and Stan and God knows who else were out there in the world taking it all in?
Maybe it was an Iowa thing or an Iowa City thing. Dressed like this, these girls wouldn’t make it down any three blocks in Chicago without becoming the lead story on the 10 o’clock news when they either went missing or were found unconscious and raped in some garage someplace. Maybe it was just a college thing, I don’t know. The only thing that bothered me was that the college boys I had seen walking among them didn’t even really seem to notice. The world wasn’t always like this and they were too dumb to even realize it, to know what sort of a 24/7 sexcapade they had inherited. Dumb punks.
“Stan . .”
“Huh, what, what?”
“The email, in the email, blah blah this that and the next this broad said she came out here with Carol, Carol called her up to come along for the ride . . .?”
“Yeah,” he said, listening but now transfixed on the rack of some redhead with a D-cup flouncing by in the other direction.
“Stan, goddamnit.”
“What? Sorry, yeah, I was, where are we? Is this college? Shit, I should have gone.”
“This Nikki girl, in the email, said she came along, you seen her?”
“No, I just dropped Kevin off, went into pee and when I came out he was gone.”
“He say anything to you he knew she was coming?”
“He didn’t say much of nothing about nothing, actually. He was still pretty grogified from whatever the Doc had given him.”
“Point being,” I said, this “ain’t right.”
“Which part?”
“Look: she says she’s coming out here with Carol from Chicago, why the fuck are we looking for her here in Iowa City? And why the fuck Kevin didn’t mention anything to me he’s got a piece of ass out here in the very town we’re coming out to.”
That I overlooked these glaring inconsistencies in the story I chalked up to my condition. That Stan would troubled me. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer most days but he was no dummy either, you can’t be and do what we did for long without screwing up, badly.
“Wait,” he said, “no . . . I . .she said that . . .”
I could see the gears slowly starting to turn inside his scarred and stubbly head.
“Len, you’re right. What’s the situation. This some goosechase?”
“I don’t know what it is but I think the Doc is sending us out to whack some girl who ain’t who she is, if she even exists. How the fuck did you miss that?”
“I dunno, Len, I thought that, I mean . . .”
He was stalling now, as it became clear to him that as things were becoming clear to me that I could sniff out the fact that he hadn’t been feeding me anything more than big piles of bullshit.
“Don’t fuck with me here, Stan. Do not fuck with me on this.”
“Len, look, see I was gonna, I mean I meant to tell you but there’s more to this . . . you see this isn’t exactly . . .”
The empty beer bottle on the table in front of him exploded and half a second later I heard what I knew to be the soft thump sound of a high-caliber rifle with a silencer.
The handful of other folks sitting around us looked in our direction when they heard the glass break, not recognizing the sound of the bullet that had caused it.
Stan was still too distracted by the bottle’s explosion to realize what it was either, but I was already lunging across the table to pull him to the ground when I heard a quick “thwap thwap” and Stan was knocked back from his chair by the two rounds that caught him square in the chest.
I rolled over him and looked up in the direction where the shots may have come from and saw a figure dressed in black holding a rifle on the third floor of a concrete parking ramp that was across the street from the bar. Whoever it was saw me seeing them and spun on their heels and disappeared from view.
The other folks who were sitting outside finally figured out what had just happened and had taken off screaming down some alley that ran between the patio we were sitting on and what looked to be a bank.
I rifled through Stan’s pockets until I found his keys and felt around in the small of his back until I found his piece, a Smith and Wesson 686 .38 caliber revolver.
I jammed both in my coat pocket and when I was turning to leave when I stooped back down and grabbed his wallet as well.
“Sorry, Stan, but I know you’d do the same, you prick.”
I started across the street towards the parking ramp and almost got greased by some coed on a scooter when I ran into traffic without looking. She swerved to avoid me and nearly lost control of her ride but recovered enough that she was able to regain control before laying it out.
Any other day that alone might have given me a heart attack but after being shot at little things like that seem pretty tame by comparison.
There was a stairwell and an elevator at the corner of the ramp and I ruled out the elevator because that would announce my arrival if I decided to take it up.
The stairs I ruled out just because I didn’t think I had it in me to do three or for flights.
Whoever it was who had just taken out Stan wasn’t likely to have walked there with the long gun and if they came in by car odds were they were going to leave by one.
Several floors above me I heard an engine start and tires squeal as somebody was looking to get the hall out of the ramp as quickly as possible.
I didn’t see an exit on my side of the building so I hustled as fast as I could towards the side I figured cars must exit from arriving just in time to see a beat-to-shit old Honda Accord come tearing around the last turn that lead to the exit of the ramp.
I pulled Stan’s gun from my pocket and leveled it at the Accord which saw me and slammed on it’s breaks and veered right taking out the taillights of a minivan that was parked half way up the ramp before slamming into the wall.
Keeping the gun leveled on the driver I came around side of it and saw a pudgy 20 something Mexican gal in the driver’s seat, unmoving, no seatbelt, probably knocked out from the crash. In the backseat was a car seat with a wailing baby inside of it. Who the hell drives like that with a kid in the car? And no seatbelt on top of it?
“Jesus, lady, what the fuck were you thinking?”
Behind me, a white van that had “Bebo’s Florist” on the side revved to live and squealed its tires when it slammed into reverse and flew out of it’s parking spot.
Now in drive, it squealed its tires again and blew out of the ramp’s exit clipping the rear quarter panel of some green and yellow taxi cab that was driving by when it shot out of the ramp.
The taxi slammed on it’s breaks after the collision but the van kept going.
Whoever it was that had taken out Stan was behind the wheel and there was no way I could catch up with them, the Bug Stan had been driving was parked three blocks down in a public lot across the street from an auto repair joint.
Somewhere in the distance I heard wailing sirens approaching, too late to save Stan but close enough to catch me if I didn’t get moving fast so I headed back towards the corner where the stairs were and headed up one flight.
Walking as fast as I could without looking like I was trying to walk fast I made my way towards the other side of the building – where the exit was – and walked down the flight of stairs at that end and out onto the street.
The taxi driver was standing outside his car talking on a cell phone, probably calling the cops over the hit and run.
I looked left and right and nobody had gathered on the street watching him, maybe accidents like this didn’t seem out of place in a college town.
He never saw me as I approached from behind and swung the butt of Stan’s gun down on the crown of his head. He dropped next to his car and I slid into the driver’s seat of the still running car.
I pulled a u-turn and then a left to get back onto the street where the Bug was parked.
Just as I made a right to head towards the lot two police cars pulled up in front of the bar we had been sitting at.
I dumped the taxi in a spot next to the Bug, changed cars and was about to start it when my cell phone started chirping.
It was a 319 area code, a number I didn’t recognize but I answered it anyway.
“Hello?”
“Hello Leonard,” the dentist oozed. “Sorry about your partner but it seems you’ve failed your first test. This is a pity because there was ever so much riding on it. Wouldn’t you agree, Carol?
I heard what I knew from experience was the sound of a fist landing true in somebody’s gut followed by a scream I knew was Carol’s.
“Listen to me you sonuvabitch –“
“No, Leonard, it is you who needs to listen. And listen closely: there is a payphone inside of a laundry mat on Bloomington street not quite 5 blocks from you. Find it. I will be calling you on that number in exactly seven minutes. If you do not answer I can assure you that as bad as things seem know they will get quite a lot worse. For a lot of people.”
For some reason, I believed him.
