The Summer Soldier (12 page)

“I suppose you must be terribly at loose
ends,” he said, still smiling and still peering over the tips of
his fingers, “and you mustn’t allow yourself to worry about things
over here. I’ve always observed that in times of trial a university
acts rather like an enormous family; we take care of our own. So
please don’t be anxious—your colleagues will be happy to cover for
you during this period of personal crisis.”

Guinness suddenly found himself wondering how
his dean had heard about Louise’s death. He hadn’t told anybody—he
hadn’t even phoned her father yet. There hadn’t been time.

It had to have been Creon. Probably that
morning sometime. Probably while Guinness had been busy identifying
the body.

What the hell else had the damn man said?

Probably nothing, at least not right out. A
few hints would have been enough—college administrators had very
fine antennae when it came to scandal and if there was any chance
at all of Guinness taking the fall for his wife’s murder, then he
would have to be distanced as much as possible from the sacred
centers of academe. After all, it wouldn’t do for the police to
walk in and arrest him in the middle of class. Think of the
newspapers.

“An enormous family,” the man had said. What
bullshit.

“It’s all arranged. Jenkins and a few of the
junior men will take over your classes until the end of the term.
And I’m sure we can find someone if you decide you would rather
have the summer off—what with the current Ph.D. market, we have no
trouble finding people for short-term work. Even on such brief
notice as this.”

The dean smiled again, as if the thought of
all those poor hungry bastards coming out of the graduate schools
just made his day.

So there he was. Ray Guinness, the remittance
man of Belmont State’s big happy family. With nothing to do all day
except watch his laundry go round.

Of course that wasn’t all there was to watch.
There was, for instance, the guy in the pale green Chevy parked
outside.

Not that Guinness particularly minded being
tailed. He had grown accustomed to it over the past several days;
keeping track of the hotel detectives and the police legmen had
developed into a kind of game. When he had his lunch, there was
always another party of one crumbling saltines into his chili just
three or four tables away, and if he turned around on a city
sidewalk he could count on spotting some dude suddenly twisting
aside to look into a shop window or leaning against a building as
he read the sports pages. If he took a drive, there was always a
dark colored hardtop about half a block behind.

They were always the same five faces. Like
factory hands, they worked in shifts, and Guinness got so he always
stopped some place for a cup of coffee when it was time for the
Changing of the Guards. They weren’t very good, and he didn’t want
to make their lives needlessly difficult.

Five—probably close to half the manpower
Creon had in his whole department. It must have been making one
hell of a dent in his budget for the month.

But this guy wasn’t one of the regulars. For
one thing, he didn’t seem to keep a schedule; he didn’t come on at
nine in the morning and go off at dinnertime. He had simply
appeared the day before yesterday and had been around ever since.
He was just there—it was almost as if he wanted to be spotted.

The regular escort hadn’t become aware of him
yet, but then they probably wouldn’t have noticed him if he’d been
riding a camel. Somehow it never seemed to occur to police that
somebody might be watching right along with them. These guys never
even turned their heads.

But he was there all right. And while he
watched Guinness and Guinness watched his laundry, Guinness was
trying to make up his mind what to do about him.

He was not a cop, of that much Guinness was
sure. Murder not being a federal offense, Louise’s death was purely
a local matter. And there was no good reason why Creon should use
two sets of tails. Besides, he didn’t look like a cop.

And if he wasn’t a cop, it would be worth
something to discover his interest in this matter. Whoever he was,
he would have to know more than Guinness did about what was going
on.

So we bust him.

Guinness picked himself up out of the chair
from which he had been watching his underwear dry and went over to
the change booth. He really didn’t need any change, but the booth
was toward the front of the Laundromat and provided a better view
of the parking lot.

He slid a dollar bill across the counter and
the attendant, a skinny craggy faced old gal with hair dyed to a
violent henna that made her look like nothing so much as Abe
Lincoln in drag, took a handful of dimes from the cash register and
carefully counted out ten, arranging them in pairs on the counter
until they made an orderly little two-by-five rectangle. Just to be
on the safe side, she counted the ten dimes over once more before
pouring what was left back into the till. Guinness pushed them off
into the palm of his right hand, smiled a “thank you,” and turned
casually around to face the big picture window that took up most of
the Laundromat’s front wall. What the hell, if you’re going to
watch someone who’s watching you, there is no point in being cute
about it. None of that over the shoulder shit; he’ll spot that
faster than anything. But a man who simply looks out of a window,
without making an enormous production of it, could just be checking
the weather.

The pale green Chevy was still there.

Yes, this was a gentleman who deserved a few
minutes of our undivided attention, provided he could be gotten off
somewhere by himself. It would be necessary to shake the police,
but that shouldn’t present too much of a problem. Not for Raymond
M. Guinness, social pariah and local master criminal.

Guinness experienced a decided thrill at the
prospect.

It would be good to be doing something
positive, to be on the offensive for once.

He packed his laundry back into the small
blue and white canvas suitcase he had owned since college, and he
left. The Laundromat was only about ten blocks from his hotel, so
he hadn’t bothered with the car. It being a warm day, he slung his
coat over his shoulder and set the suitcase down on the sidewalk in
order to roll his shirt sleeves up to the elbows.

Two blocks down from the Laundromat was El
Camino Real, until within living memory the main roadway north and
south upon which the suburban towns of the San Francisco Peninsula
were strung like beads. Now all the really serious traffic was on
the Bayshore Freeway, but you still went to the El Camino if you
wanted to catch a bus, and Guinness wanted to catch a bus.

He sat down on a bench on the west side of
the highway and checked his watch. It was twelve minutes after one,
and at that time of the afternoon the local buses ran only about
once every half hour. He couldn’t see his police tail, although it
was likely that if he turned his head fast enough he would spot a
familiar face. The new man, whoever he was, wasn’t being even that
coy—across the street, parked in plain view at the head of the next
side road up, was a pale green Chevy.

The arrogant bastard. The son of a bitch was
just begging to be taken down.

Finally a southbound bus came along—Guinness
didn’t really care about the direction; he just happened to be on
that side of the highway—and, after fishing around in his coat
pocket for five of his recently acquired dimes, he got on and found
himself a seat over the left rear wheel. Out of the back window, in
the right lane so as to keep track of who got off at each stop, the
green Chevy was clearly visible, and, about three quarters of a
block further back, there was a very familiar looking dark blue
Ford. Guinness sighed and shifted his attention to the Blue Cross
ads posted over the side windows. Just once in his life he would
have liked to be tailed by a hot-pink Cadillac convertible.

The bus made its painful way past the Pup ’n
Hound diner, past a billboard announcing the current feature
playing at the Carlos Theater, past a tiny bookstore with a Tudor
bay window that Guinness had always had it in mind to investigate
someday, and pulled in at the Redwood City Depot.

It wasn’t much of a place—just a square
building with a ticket booth and a concession stand against one
wall and some coin operated lockers against the other, with three
long rows of slat benches in the middle. Guinness got off his bus
and checked his suitcase full of underwear in one of the lockers.
He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so he bought a hot dog and a small
paper cup full of tepid Dr. Pepper at the concession stand and sat
down on one of the benches to wait for the next bus going
north.

The hot dog wasn’t bad, but the Dr. Pepper
made him faintly ill, and it occurred to him, as it did from time
to time these days, that since Louise had died he had begun to live
an awfully seedy life. Here it was just a week and he was
subsisting almost entirely off of junk food. Louise would never
have let him sink to a meal like this one. Hot dogs and Dr. Pepper,
indeed.

Lately, he had taken to having his dinner at
the McDonald’s a block away from his hotel. Hell, it was fast and
you weren’t likely to pick up a social disease in the men’s
room.

Every night a Big Mac and a large order of
French fries, every god damned night.

Louise had always been very careful about
that sort of thing. “Fried foods will kill you,” she used to say.
“I don’t intend to have you dropping dead on me so I can spend my
middle years back clerking for some damned insurance company.” She
made sure he had a lot of chicken and fish, and she kept the
starches down. If he felt like he just couldn’t live another minute
without a nice big greasy cheeseburger, he had to buy it on the QT
and eat it in his office at school.

Now his weight was up a good six or seven
pounds and he went around all the time with an oily feeling on the
roof of his mouth. All that garbage and he couldn’t even enjoy it;
not like when he could believe he was pulling off the crime of the
century and knew Louise would put it right with a dinner of
skinless chicken and green salad. Hell, he used to go to the Burger
King across the street from the campus and feel like he was walking
through the doors of a bordello.

A northbound local pulled in with an
exhausted sigh from the air brakes, and Guinness fed another fifty
cents into its coin catcher just as the bus closed its doors and
started to pull back out onto the El Camino. With any luck at all,
that would give him a tiny head start while Creon’s man tried to
pry open his rented locker to find out what exactly Belmont’s
Othello could be hiding in a bus station beside nine fresh pairs of
his BVDs. It was a temptation no cop in the world would be able to
resist, and Guinness hoped this one wouldn’t even try.

Within two blocks of the terminal he pulled
the cord over the window, signaling that he wanted off, and was
dropped at the next stop, where he turned off on foot into a side
street. After about four blocks, he was satisfied he’d shaken his
official escort.

Not so for Green Car, however. He would be
back there somewhere, and anyway we didn’t want to lose him. No, we
wanted to take him alive, alive and talkative.

Of course, there was always the chance that
he might not feel chatty just that day. If he was the man who had
killed Louise, there was even the chance that he would start
shooting or something, although Guinness couldn’t really bring
himself to worry too much about that. No, the man who had stabbed
Louise and had booby trapped his car was a man with a message. He
would want to deliver it before he declared war.

Still, he would be armed. He would be
carrying a gun—they all did. It occurred to Guinness that he was
going to have to break down and get one for himself sometime soon.
It looked like the nice quiet days were over for a while. Maybe
forever.

The green Chevy was nowhere in sight, but
that didn’t mean anything. Its driver would have left it somewhere,
there being difficulties involved in tailing anyone on foot from a
car.

After a few more blocks, Guinness caught
sight of a familiar face reflected in a shop window. His new escort
was across the street, leaning up against a building. Very cool he
was, not looking like he was tailing anyone and not looking like he
wasn’t. He had “pro” written all over him; and not cop pro, but the
only pro that mattered. This guy was in The Life, a ghost. Guinness
knew the type.

He was wearing a dark brown summer sport coat
and what looked like khaki trousers and no hat, which was a relief.
Hell, nobody wore a hat these days; it only passed for a disguise
in police circles.

Dark hair, perhaps even black, with a little
silver at the temples—that might or might not be real—but a
youngish face. Not tall and with the build of someone who had
wrestled in college. Put his age at around thirty-five.

In that instant, Guinness saw him reach up
with his left hand to pull at where his belt was apparently
pinching him in the side. The movement brought his elbow out
akimbo, revealing that the armholes of his jacket were unusually
loose and deep. Well, that was instructive—he was strapped into a
shoulder holster.

It was nearly three before Guinness found
what he had been looking for. A nice old fashioned gas station with
a nice old fashioned men’s room, the kind that has a latched window
high up on one wall rather than a fan that operates off the light
switch. He made sure to approach it from the proper angle, keeping
his shadow across the street and where he would be able to see the
door but not the window.

Once inside, Guinness turned over the open
trash can into which you were supposed to drop your used paper
towels and shinnied out through the window, skinning his rib cage
and nearly breaking his neck in the process.