The Specialists

Twenty-three

It had been a rotten day for Pat Novak from the beginning. A bad night’s sleep for openers, with the little one up intermittently with nightmares. When the alarm went off at seven thirty, it dragged her unwillingly awake, shaky and headachy. She had coffee and put an English muffin in the toaster. When it popped, she took a long look at it, threw it in the garbage, and made herself a second cup of coffee.

And she just couldn’t take the bank that morning. The usual people with their usual nothing conversation (How do you want the hundred dollars, Mr. Frischauer? Oh, make it two thirties and a forty, Pat). Irma, on her left, was busy indicting another in a long line of patent medicines that did nothing for her sinuses. (Hodestly, they say id the commercial that id draids all eight sidus cavities. How do they get away, that is what I wadda dow. Hodestly!) And the other girl, Sheila, was driving her batty with her latest kick. She had gotten all buggy about astrology a couple of weeks back and ever since then Pat heard more about the stars than she really cared to. (You’re Aquarius, right? Let me find it here. Yes, here. Listen to this, will you? “A day of great contrasts, sharps and flats with few grace notes. Before you answer the door, determine whether it’s Opportunity or the Wolf.” That’s a wonderful one, Pat.)

If it was a wonderful one, Pat couldn’t figure out why. As far as she could tell, the best thing about it was that it meant whatever you wanted it to mean. Not that she didn’t sort of believe in it. With all the people who believed in it, and they included plenty of intelligent people as well as dummies like Sheila, well, you couldn’t help feeling there had to be something to it The only thing was, she decided, that she didn’t really want to find out what the stars held in store for her. She knew that life was going to be increasingly rotten. If you knew that you didn’t tend to ask for details.

At ten thirty she went over to the Greek’s for coffee. In the ladies’ room she checked her lipstick and found herself staring vacantly into the mirror. She couldn’t stand the way she looked, so washed out and stupid.

For a few days she had been quite beautiful. She stood looking at her reflection that morning and couldn’t understand it. It was the same face, wasn’t it? Why should a fellow make that much difference in a girl’s face? Why should liking a fellow, or even loving a fellow (if she did really love Jordan, and she guessed she did) make such a vast difference? Just going to bed with somebody didn’t do it. It might give you circles under your eyes and take the worry lines out of your forehead, but that was about all. It didn’t make you beautiful.

Jordan had made her beautiful.

He was such a shy little guy, she thought. But when they were alone together, the shyness went away and he was almost unbelievably strong. In bed he was resourceful and inventive. He had taught her to do things she had always resisted, even during marriage, and she had found herself not only doing what he wanted but actively enjoying it. Somehow Jordan had a way of making things seem all right.

She wondered if she would ever see him again. Probably not, she decided. She was reasonably certain that he wasn’t married, but she was equally certain that he had not told her the whole story. There was nothing she could pin down, just a hunch, an impression that something was being kept from her. He didn’t seem the type, but she guessed he was one of those who had a girl in every town he worked in. And why should he come back to her? She was nothing special. He had made her feel special, but now the glow was gone and she was alone again and not special at all.

So she looked in the mirror, and aloud she said, “You’ll never look pretty again, you poor bitch.” And wiped her eyes and went back to work.

The rest of the morning was more of the same, and by the time she had gone out for lunch, she was ready to disagree strongly with Sheila’s astrology book. All sharps and flats? She couldn’t remember a grayer, deader, duller day.

Then the phone call came.

Her first reaction was blind panic. An auto accident, her father in the hospital, condition very critical — she rushed out of the bank and started to hurry across town to the hospital. It was only a few blocks away, and it was easier to walk there than to wait for a bus.

Something stopped her halfway there. Something made her pause at an outdoor phone booth to call her house. She wanted to make sure the kids weren’t home alone, wanted to know if her mother was all right. So she dialed her number, and it rang five maddening times, and just as she was about to hang up her father answered.

He was obviously not at the hospital. Nor, he informed her, was her mother or the children or, indeed, anybody else.

She couldn’t understand it.

She started to go back to the bank, then considered. Perhaps the message was supposed to be for one of the other girls. She made another call, this one to the hospital. She asked for the emergency room. She talked to several nurses and left the booth with the certain knowledge that someone somewhere had played a pointless and rather horrid joke on her. A really rotten joke.

She walked back to the bank, her heels clicking furiously on the pavement, her mind spinning with combined rage and guilt. What have I done, she wondered, to be so bad that it would make someone hate me so much? She approached the bank, saw the brown truck race around the corner and pull to a stop, saw the door fly open, saw the guard, Nicholson, scamper around the corner from the Revere Avenue exit, and saw, suddenly in front of her, gun in hand, moustached and bright-eyed, the man she had never thought to see again, the man she needed, wanted, loved. Jordan Lewis.

He looked at her and froze. For a second or two they were figures in a painting, incapable of any movement, and then she saw Nicholson with his gun in his hand and she pointed at him and shouted, “Jordan, look out! Look out!”

Then the shots came.