Side by Side

7

Ferny Ernest Smoot, who was supposed to keep tabs on the old judge’s comings and goings, hated his name, so he answered only to “Click.” Click had followed Judge Fondren from his big house in Meyers Park to the Westin Hotel in downtown Charlotte. There the judge met a light-skin black woman and the pair sat down at a table in the hotel restaurant. Click took a seat at a table across the room.

Click’s father, Peanut Smoot, would want to know if the lady was a cop, but since she wasn’t in uniform, that wouldn’t be easy to figure out unless Click was to ask her, which of course he couldn’t. She could have been a businesswoman, a lawyer, another judge, the judge’s secretary, or even a mistress. She was old, but not half as old as the judge was. She was pretty good looking, but she didn’t have breasts that amounted to much, and she was more short than tall.

Click knew the woman was staying at the hotel because she signed the bill that the waitress put on the table. What was odd was, after she signed the ticket, she leaned over close and said something to the judge, who turned to glance at a bearded man seated by himself across the restaurant. The woman leaned back and also looked over at the man. The bearded man they looked at didn’t notice them looking at him. So Click studied them all without acting like he was doing anything but eating-somebody who didn’t have any reason not to be minding his own business.

The bearded man was narrow-shouldered, pudgy, and looked to Click like a college professor whose mother still dressed him. He seemed to be reading a newspaper, but his eyes didn’t shift around on the page. He was either the world’s slowest reader, or he wasn’t reading at all. Then Click saw that the man was actually looking at the window beside him, using its reflection like a mirror to keep an eye on the woman and the judge.

Click wondered if the man had noticed him, too.

The judge got up all the sudden, said his good-bye to the pretty woman, and walked out of the restaurant. Click was only half done eating his nine-dollar hamburger-for which he didn’t even have a bill yet-couldn’t very well get up and take off after the old man without attracting attention. What he did was sit tight, eat the rest of his meal, and watch the woman, who waited a few minutes before she too walked out. That happened just as Click was forking up the last of his french fries.

As soon as she left, the bearded man set his newspaper aside and left the dining room. Click noticed that the man had signed a ticket too before he got up. So that meant they were both staying at the hotel.

Click set fifteen dollars on the table by the bill and walked out chewing. He would rather have used a stolen credit card, but that would take too long. As it was, by the time Click made the turns that put him in a position to see the end of the lobby, the woman and the bearded man were getting into separate elevators even though the man clearly had time to get in hers with her. They didn’t look at each other, but the woman did glance at Click. Click was sure they were together when the cabs both stopped at the fourth floor.

Even though his daddy would be pissed that Click lost track of the judge, the news about the meeting with the stranger should make up for it. His daddy couldn’t get too mad seeing how Click had warned him earlier that very morning that they needed more people to follow the judge right. Peanut had said, “No need to leash a bitch when you have her puppies in a box.”

Click went outside in the courtyard to use his cell phone. He was right about both things-Peanut was mad that the judge got away, but real interested in the woman and the bearded man.

“I shoulda known better than to send a child to do a man’s job,” Peanut told Click several times to let him know he meant it. And don’t think Click didn’t know better than to mention the fact that he had told his daddy following somebody wasn’t a one-man job.

Peanut agreed that, since the bearded man and the pretty woman were both staying at the same hotel on the same floor, but acting like they didn’t know each other, they were up to something. He said they needed watching more than the judge.

“It’s the damned FBI,” Peanut said.

“You sure?” Click said. “The man with the beard was goofy looking. He looked like he was supposed to be a college prof in some low-budget porn video.”

“Feds,” his father told him. “Sure as caged chimps sling balls of monkey dung. All the agents aren’t in slick suits. I need to think on it some.”

Click knew that the judge had screwed up by defying his father’s orders not to bring in the cops. Watching the judge was pointless now because the jurist was going to be punished exactly as he had been warned. Blood would have to flow or Peanut’s threats would be seen as less than certain.

Click was ready to leave the hotel. What more could he do? He wanted to go by Best Buy and pick out a few CDs, get some more memory for his Dell laptop because it hung up on his favorite interactive game, Urban Plague, and that lag had gotten him killed the night before. His heart sank when he found out that wasn’t going to happen today.

“Stick around there and keep your eyes open,” Peanut told him. “Call me if anything happens.”

“What kind of anything?” Click asked.

“You’ll know when you see it. Like more cop-looking people coming from and going to her floor.”

“Daddy, I can’t very well park out on College Street and watch.”

“Stay inside then. Blend in and keep a sharp eye out.”

“What the hell do I do to blend in-get a job here?”

Click snapped the phone shut before his daddy could ream him out and frowned. He looked at the tree growing in a giant pot and at the plants that took up a whole corner of the hotel lobby and imagined himself squatting in the prissy foliage wearing camouflage overalls. Of all the members of the Smoot clan, only Click didn’t hunt. He didn’t like being in the woods, especially after he’d gotten chiggers so bad he’d gone to the emergency room about it. He’d known the nurse was trying hard not to laugh because his privates were swollen up and itched so bad he was crying. He also didn’t like sitting still all day with frozen toes, and once he killed a deer, he had to get really nasty field-dressing it. And his siblings always smeared his face with deer blood even though it was only done when you killed the first buck of your whole life. Peanut, Click’s brothers Buck, Curt, and Burt, and his sister Dixie could have the damned woods all to themselves, as far as Click was concerned.

Looking around at the ocean of open space punctuated with modern furniture, the polished marble and glass, he tried to figure out just how the hell he was going to manage an act of camouflage.