Tillis mustered a weary grin. “Well, you want to watch me get dressed?”
“I don’t want to, but I’m going to.”
Before he left, dressed in his brown suit and black shoulder holster, the Luger in it unloaded at present, Tillis kissed Phyllis goodbye and said, “Later,” to Nolan, adding, “Take care of this girl while I’m gone, Nolan, I like her,” and Nolan knew what he meant, felt better about trusting Tillis.
Nolan and Phyllis retired to the living room. Nolan took Tillis’ place on the couch and Phyllis took the easychair. She stared sullenly at him, unaware that her spread legs were giving Nolan a view worthy of the most raunchy porno mag.
“What do you do?” Nolan said.
“What Tillis tells me to,” she said, still sullen.
“For a living, I mean.”
“I’m a grad student.”
“You go to college, you mean? What do you study?”
“I’m in the Afro-American Studies program.”
Nolan looked at her thighs and got ready to ask her what the hell she meant, but the scream broke in.
He jumped up, and so did the girl.
The noise, the scream had come from outside. He pressed up against the clear glass and looked down and saw Tillis sprawled across the tan Ford, his unloaded Luger in his hand, a ribbon of blood across his chest. Even from the second floor, Nolan could see the wide white rolled-back eyes, the bulging tongue.
Didn’t take a college education to tell Tillis was dead.
The modern buildings of Northern Illinois University rose to the left like the set of a science fiction film with a big budget. The rich Illinois farmland dissolved into a blur of plastic college-town shopping center, apartment building and franchise restaurant living; the highway became a shaded street along which kids of both sexes wearing tee-shirts and cut-off jeans walked and pedaled bikes. Then, after blocks of pizza places and boutiques and McDonald’s hamburgers and dormitories, a wide, off-center intersection appeared from nowhere, as if to separate one half of Dekalb from the other. That seemed only right, as this other part of town was so different it was like passing through to another dimension; the business district beyond the intersection had no doubt been much the same for many years, the narrow main street lined with one- and two-story buildings, drug stores, dress shops, five and dime, hardware stores and only rare indications (“Adult Books in Rear” — “Water Bed Sale”) that this was a college town and not just a congregating point for area farmers and sedately middle class townspeople. Dekalb was a schizophrenic town. Even Nolan noticed it.
“Hey, look at the jugs on that one,” Angelo said, pointing to a tall blonde girl with a short haircut, cut-off jeans and green tee shirt. “Bouncy bouncy.”
“Just drive,” Nolan said.
“Sour ass,” Angelo said.
Nolan still wasn’t happy about being with Angelo, though he supposed he should’ve been grateful to his chubby-faced companion. It was just an hour and half ago that Nolan had been looking out the window and watching the crowd form, a crowd of briefcase-carrying men ready to leave for work and curlered women in housewifely robes and gleeful little kids in bright summer shirts, all looking on in fascinated horror at the big black dead man sprawled across the tan Ford. Nolan’s tan Ford, and at that moment of no damn use at all, as far as transportation went. Nolan hadn’t bothered trying to calm the hysterical Phyllis Watson, who had started to scream, pummeling him with hard little fists. Instead, he had knocked her cold with a solid right cross, sincerely hoping he hadn’t broken the girl’s jaw, and went down the stairs and out of the house, cutting through the backyards of houses behind, moving away from the scene of Tillis’ death as quickly as possible. He’d gone to a filling station, called the number Angelo had left, and after fifteen minutes and two cups of coffee in the station’s adjacent cafe, Nolan had gladly hopped in a car beside Angelo and got the hell out of Milwaukee. Somebody would have to go back for the tan Ford, which belonged to the Tropical Motel and could conceivably cause some problems, but that was one of those details that would have to be ironed out later. Some asshole like Felix could sweat over that.
Now Nolan was with Angelo in a black Chevy (naturally) in Dekalb, Illinois. Nolan wasn’t happy about being in Dekalb, for several reasons. For one thing, Dekalb was only fifteen miles from the Tropical, his starting point on this largely fruitless trip, which already had lasted some nine or ten hours. Being so close to home served to remind him of how far he hadn’t gotten; he sensed he was going around in a big circle that included all of Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin. He felt like a traveling salesman with nothing to sell.
Another reason for his discontent was that he was in Dekalb to do something he would rather not do. Something he had told Tillis he wouldn’t do.
He was going to bother Charlie’s daughter.
He was, in fact, probably going to kidnap her.
