“What was that dentist’s name?” he muttered to himself. “Paulson? Paulsen?” He picked up the phone book and tried to find the listing and couldn’t. Finally he looked in the yellow pages under “Dentists-Orthodontists” and found it: Povlsen. Odd damn spelling. He dialed the number and asked the girl who answered if Karen was there and was told just a moment.
“Yes?” the voice said.
“Hi, Kare.”
“Hi, Jon.” Her voice was neutral; she couldn’t make up her mind whether she was mad or not.
“Listen. I want to tell you something.”
“I’m listening.”
“I mean, you can talk, can’t you? Has Larry had his teeth worked on yet?”
“Yes. That is, the doctor’s working on him right now.”
“Well, why aren’t you...?”
“The doctor said I... I shouldn’t be in there... said Larry was too old for that sort of thing.”
Good man, Jon thought.
“Kare?”
“Yes, Jon?”
“Thanks for breakfast. Thanks for asking me over.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice.
He got out of the chair and sat up on the counter. “And listen, something else...”
“What?”
“I want your bod.”
“Jon...”
“So when are you going to be done at the dentist’s. I want to fill
She laughed and said, “That’s medicine I’ll gladly take. I’ll be home in half an hour.”
“Good,” he said, and suddenly noticed the trail of red across the floor down at the end of the counter. “Hey, Kare, hold on, will you?”
“Sure, Jonny.”
The thin red streak led from the side door across the floor and around into the first back room. What the hell was it, anyway? It wasn’t... blood?
He followed the red trail into the second back room and found the slumped shell of his uncle.
Jon started to shake.
He approached his uncle tentatively, bent down saying, “Unc? Uh... Planner?”
He shook his uncle’s shoulder and could feel how slack the body was, and turned him off his side and saw Planner’s face, saw the queer smile, saw how white the face was, saw the blood his uncle was soaking in, and ran back to the phone.
“Je... Jesus,” he sputtered into the receiver.
“Jonny?”
“Listen... something... something terrible’s happened.”
“What should I do, Jonny?”
“Nothing. Go... go home when... Larry’s through and... I’ll call you in an hour. O... okay?”
“Are you all right?”
“I... will be.”
He hung up.
Shaking, he felt the cramp buckle him over, overpower him, and he heaved his breakfast onto the old wooden floor of his uncle’s antique shop.
The housing addition had a vaguely English look to it, rough wood, watered-down Tudor architecture, occasional stone. It was more plush than your run-of-the-mill housing addition, carefully laid out on gently rolling hills, each lawn spacious and immaculately tended, though the spread-out nature of the addition and the lack of trees made it look barren and lonely and cold against the clear sky. It was on the edge of Iowa City, on one of the less-traveled routes out of town, just beyond a modest commercial area dominated by a Giant grocery store, Colonel Sanders Chicken, and filling stations. On the other side it was surrounded by sprawling farmland, and at that very moment a farmer was on a tractor working slow and hard along the horizon, making the cluster of houses seem out of place and somehow irrelevant, to the farmer’s life at least. Though the houses were not crackerbox identical, there was still a housing addition sameness to them, which was only emphasized by the contrived effort to avoid repetition that amounted mainly to alternating one-story homes with split-levels. Walter slowed as he approached one of the one-story homes, focusing his vision on the number on the door, making sure this was the one he was after.
This particular house was dark wood with light stone and sat on a corner next door to a house that was light wood with dark stone. It was just another house in another (if elite) housing addition, with the only noticeable difference being that this had a red Mercedes Benz in the driveway instead of a Ford LTD or a Cadillac. The house was a surprise to Walter, as the whole addition had been. It was not the sort of neighborhood where he’d expected to find the home of a dope peddler.
Of course Sturms was more than a dope peddler, Walter supposed, though he didn’t know what else you’d call him, really. Supplier, maybe. From the looks of the housing addition Sturms evidently thought of himself as a district sales manager or something.
Walter had a low regard for people who dealt in drugs, and knew his father, Charlie, shared that low regard. Once they had discussed the subject and his father had told him that the Chicago Family was only into drugs because they had to be, and they were in it mainly as financiers, not fucking around with diddlyshit pushers and such.
