Butcher's Moon

Nineteen

Mike Abadandi drove slowly past the Princess Motel, looking at the pink-stucco walls and the blue-slate roof and the huge free-form sign out front. The sign’s neon was burning, but looked washed-out and anemic in the seven a.m. sunlight. None of the dozen cars parked along the front was the bronze Impala.

This was Motel Row, one sprawling low pastel building after another, the monotony broken here and there by a McDonald’s or a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. Abadandi pulled in at the next motel along, called the Quality Rest, parked in one of the vacant slots near the office, and strolled back toward the Princess. The sun, still low in the eastern sky away to his right, stood just above the neon signs across the road, pale yellow, very bright, in a pale blue cloudless sky; the sky’s color ranging from nearly white in the vicinity of the sun to a rich blue above the horizon to the west. The air was very clear, and not yet too warm; in the seventies, with neither wind nor humidity. A great day, a beautiful day. Walking along, Abadandi’s mind turned lazily and pleasurably around thoughts of the big above-ground swimming pool he’d put in the backyard two years ago. Swimming, drinking beer, lying in the sun. Invite Andy Marko over; Abadandi just loved to look at Peg Marko in a bikini.

Separating the blacktop of the Quality Rest parking lot from the blacktop of the Princess parking lot was a six-inch strip of cigarette wrappers and weeds. A knee-high railing stretched along the boundary here, made of a horizontal two-by-four laid on vertical two-by-fours driven into the ground, the whole thing painted white. Abadandi stepped over the railing, walked between two parked Chevrolets, paused while a Plymouth Fury drove slowly by toward the exit with an angry-looking couple inside, and headed around to the back of the motel, where most of the units were located in a large two-story horseshoe.

No bronze Impala. Frowning, Abadandi walked around the horseshoe a second time, studying every car in turn, and the Impala just wasn’t there.

So what was the story? Were they being cute, keeping their car someplace else? Or maybe they’d known last night that they were being tailed, and they’d come here just long enough to lose the tail, and then left. Or maybe the tail had loused things up and reported the wrong motel name.

Anyway, there was nothing to do now but find a phone and call for instructions. Abadandi headed for the front of the building again, and as he turned the corner out of the horseshoe the bronze Impala drove in.

He was so startled he almost ducked behind the nearest parked car. He did stop in his tracks for a second, but quickly recovered and walked on, giving the Impala no more than a glance as they passed one another.

Only one guy in it. Abadandi walked on around the corner, stopped, looked back, and saw the Impala pull in at an empty-slot across the way. It wasn’t Parker who got out—Abadandi remembered him from Fun Island two years ago—so it had to be the one called Green. He was yawning and stretching and scratching his waist at the sides as he walked along to the nearest exterior staircase and went up to the balcony-type walk that fronted all the units on the second floor. Abadandi watched him walk past seven doors and stop at the eighth. He fumbled for keys, found one, let himself in, and the closed door became anonymous again.

But where was the other one? Abadandi, suspicious by nature and by necessity, thought things over for a full minute before moving in any direction at all, and then he turned away and headed at a casual stroll for the front of the motel.

It took four minutes to walk through all the public areas of the motel, and to satisfy himself that the second man wasn’t outside anywhere. Then he went back to the horseshoe, took stairs up to the second floor across the way from the marks’ room, and walked around the three sides of the balcony to the door he wanted. In his right hand were four keys, one of which would definitely unlock it. His left hand hovered near his waist; his shirttail was out, hiding the snub-nosed .32-caliber Iver Johnson Trailsman tucked inside the band of his trousers.

He looked easygoing and unhurried as he walked along, a slightly stocky man of about forty, in gray Hush Puppies and pale blue slacks and a white-and-blue-striped shirt. He looked as though he wasn’t paying much attention to anything, but he was watching the blacktop down below and the doors along the balcony, and he was ready to move in any direction at the first sign of trouble.

In fast; he’d done this work before. Palming three of the keys, he poked the fourth one at the lock in the doorknob. When it failed to work, he dropped it after only one try, inserting a second key in the lock before the first one clinked against the concrete. Number two worked; letting the others also fall from his hand, he turned the knob and pushed, while at the same time slipping out the revolver with his left hand, moving quickly into the room.

A darkened room: drapes closed over the windows front and back. Two light sources: the expanding and contracting trapezoid of sunlight from the doorway, lying across an unslept-in double bed strewn with hurriedly removed clothing, and a ribbon of indirect electric lighting from the slightly open bathroom door midway in the right wall. Abadandi closed the door behind himself, swiftly and silently, while registering the sound of a shower running in the bathroom and a tuneless voice raised in song: “‘If I did-int caaaaaare, more than words can saaaaaaay—’“

Abadandi stood with his back to the door, looking around the room. He was right-handed, but he’d trained himself a long time ago to be left-handed with the gun, partly so he’d be able to use it with either hand and partly because most people expected a gun to come from the other side, and any edge at all was a help.

The room was empty, mostly dark, with only the bathroom light-spill, and obviously only tenanted by one man. Was that the idea? One of them here, one of them somewhere else.

Maybe he should pull back out again, wait for the guy to move, trail him till he made his next meet with his partner.

No. Separate was better. The partner could be found, that wouldn’t be any trouble. A bird in the hand.

Abadandi moved forward, his silent shoes doubly silent on the room’s wall-to-wall carpeting. He went around the foot of the bed, looking at the sliding doors of the closet to the left, one side open to show empty hangers on the rod and one small suitcase closed on the floor. The mark didn’t intend to stay here long.

The air near the bathroom door was increasingly moist and steamy. Abadandi did some rapid blinking, to moisten his contact lenses, and reached his right hand forward till the palm was resting gently against the beaded wet surface of the door. The door opened inward to the right, and the sounds of shower and singing came from the right, behind the door. Abadandi held the gun out in front of himself with his left hand, took a small step closer to the door to brace himself for the rush, and sensed a sudden breeze of movement behind his back.

He turned, looking over his left shoulder, and the guy coming from the closet was already halfway across the room, moving low and fast. Abadandi had a split second to think, He’s looking at my eyes, not at the gun, and that means he’s as professional as I am.

The singing went on in the shower. Abadandi brought the gun around fast, but he’d started too late and there was no way to catch up. The guy dove, flat and low, his right hand going for Abadandi’s left wrist, his head and left shoulder thumping into Abadandi’s midsection, bouncing him at an angle into the door and the wall.

Abadandi wasn’t a fool; he didn’t pull the trigger unless the gun was aiming at something useful, and the hand on his wrist was keeping him from bringing the Trailsman around into play. So he forgot the gun, and concentrated on the weapons he still had available: his right hand, his legs, his head. He was trying to knee the guy even before his back hit the door, and though that first impact knocked the breath out of him, he still managed one good rabbit punch on the back of the guy’s neck before the guy dropped down and sideways, pressing his side and back against Abadandi to pin him to the wall while turning under his gun arm, trying to come up with that arm bent around backward, trying to lever Abadandi down into a powerless position on the floor.

And the singing had stopped. Abadandi, with everything else going on, took note of that; the singing had stopped the instant his back hit the door, meaning the one in the shower knew something was going on, meaning there would very soon be two of them in the play.

He hit the guy twice on the back of the head with his fist, but it made no difference. The guy was moving under his left arm, twisting the arm forward and down, pressuring Abadandi’s shoulder to follow, his body to follow the shoulder. Then the guy was through his turn, was rising again, was next to Abadandi now instead of in front of him, the two of them both facing out from the wall but turned slightly toward one another, and the guy had both hands on Abadandi’s wrist, one above the other, pressing forward and down. Abadandi couldn’t turn into that pressure, couldn’t get at the guy with anything at all, and he felt himself slowly but steadily bending forward.

There wasn’t time for this, not with the other one ready to join at any second. Abadandi had been a wrestler and a tumbler in high school, he still did some of the old tumbling routines out by the pool for the enjoyment of his kids, so now he suddenly dropped to the left knee, dipped the left shoulder, the one getting all the pressure, and rolled, somersaulted in a compact ball out toward the middle of the room, at the same time kicking up and back with his left leg, hoping to hit anything at all.

Nothing. But he did break the hold on his wrist, he did free himself. Spinning around on the middle of his back, still in the tight ball, still rolling away from the doorway, he came up on his knees facing the doorway again, his head coming up out of the ball-shape, his eyes staring up and out, seeing the second man naked and astonished in the doorway, and then seeing a dark shape angling toward him, zooming in at him like a jet plane, and he realized it was the other guy’s foot, coming up on a trajectory to meet the flow of his own movement. He hadn’t pulled himself free, after all; the guy had let him go, had stayed close to him, had followed the arc of his motion, and was right now aiming a kick at a spot in the air where Abadandi’s head was about to be.

He tried to stop, stall, alter, drop, lunge, shift, somehow change the movement, but the momentum was on him and the orders to his muscles were too slow, and he thought. My contact lenses! and pain struck the right side of his head like a bucket of fire and blotted him out.