Out the door they went, but what Norman had heard convinced him: it was the picnic the woman was talking about, the picnic and the concert that was going to round off the day, some group called the Indian Girls, probably lezzies. So there was a chance that this woman knew Rosie. Not a good chance — lots of people who weren’t tight with Daughters and Sisters would be at Ettinger’s Pier tomorrow — but a chance, just the same. And Norman was a man who believed emphatically in the fickle finger of fate. The hell of it was, he did not yet know which of the three had been talking.
Let it be Blondie, he prayed as he got quickly to his feet and went out through the swinging door. Let it be Blondie with the big eyes and the cute ass. Let it be her, what do you say?
It was dangerous to follow, of course — you could never tell when one of them might glance idly around and win the super bonus round of Place the Face — but at this point he could do nothing else. He sauntered along behind them, his head casually turned to one side, as if the junkola in the shop windows he was passing was of vital interest to him.
‘How are you making out on pillowcases today?’ the tub of guts walking on the inside asked the other two.
‘For once, they’re all there,’ the older woman walking on the outside said. ‘How about you, Pam?’
‘I haven’t counted yet, it’s too depressing,’ Blondie replied, and they all laughed — those high, giggly sounds that always made Norman feel as if his fillings were cracking in his mouth. He stopped at once, looking in a window at a bunch of sporting goods, letting the maids pull ahead. It was her, all right — no question about it. Blondie was the one who had
said the magic words Ettinger’s Pier. Maybe it changed everything, maybe it changed nothing. Right now he was too excited to figure it out. It was certainly an amazing stroke of luck, though — the kind of miraculous, coincidental break you always hoped for when you were working a longshot case, the break that happened more often than anyone would ever believe.
For now he would file this in the back of his mind and proceed with Plan A. He wouldn’t even ask about Blondie back at the hotel, at least not yet. He knew her name was Pam, and that was plenty to start with.
Norman walked to the bus stop, waited fifteen minutes for the airport shuttle, and then hopped on board. It was a long ride; the terminal was on the edge of the city. When he finally disembarked in front of Terminal A, he slipped on his dark glasses, crossed the street, and made his way to the longterm parking area. The first car he tried jumping had been there so long the battery was dead. The second one, a nondescript Ford Tempo, started all right. He told the man in the collection booth that he’d been in Dallas for three weeks and had lost the ticket. He was always losing them, he said. He lost laundry tickets, too, and he was always having to show his driver’s license at Photomat when he stopped in to pick up his snapshots.
The man in the collection booth nodded and nodded, the way you do at a boring story you’ve already heard about ten thousand times. When Norman humbly offered him an extra ten dollars in lieu of the ticket, the man in the collection booth perked up a little. The money disappeared.
Norman Daniels drove out of longterm parking at almost exactly the same moment that Robbie Lefferts was offering his fugitive wife what he termed ‘a more solid business arrangement.’
Two miles down the road, Norman parked behind a beat-to-shit Le Sabre and swapped license plates. Another two miles on, he stopped at a Robo-Wash. He had a bet with himself that the Tempo would turn out to be dark blue, but he lost. It was green. He didn’t think it mattered — the man in the collection booth had only taken his eyes off his little black-and-white TV when the tenspot had appeared under his nose — but it was best to play safe. It increased the comfort level.
Norman turned on the radio and found an oldies station. Shirley Ellis was on, and he sang along as Shirley instructed, ‘If the first two letters are ever the same / Drop them both and say the name / Like Barry-Barry, drop the B, oh-Arry / That’s the only rule that is contrary.’
Norman realized he knew every word of that stupid old song. What kind of world was it where you couldn’t remember the fucking quadratic equation or the various forms of the French verb avoir two years after you got out of high school, but when you were getting on for forty years old you could still remember Nick-Nick-bo-bick, banana-fanna-fo-fick, fee-fi-mo-mick, Nick? What kind of world was that?
One that’s slipping behind me now, Norman thought serenely, and yes, that seemed to be the truth. It was like in those science fiction movies where the spacemen saw Earth dwindling in the viewscreens, first a ball, then a coin, then a tiny glowing dot, then all gone. That was what the inside of his head was like now — a spacecraft headed out on a five-year mission to explore new worlds and go where no man had gone before. The Starship Norman, approaching warp-speed.
Shirley Ellis finished up and something by the Beatles came on. Norman twisted the radio’s volume knob off so hard he broke it. He didn’t want to listen to any of that hippy-dippy ‘Hey Jude’ crap today.
He was still a couple of miles from where the real city began when he saw a place called The Base Camp ARMY SURPLUS LIKE YOU NEVER FIND! the sign out front read, and for some reason that made him burst out laughing. He thought it was in some ways the single most peculiar motto he’d seen in his whole life; it seemed to mean something, but it was impossible
to say just what. Anyway, the sign didn’t matter. The store probably had one of the things he was looking for, and that did.
There was a big banner reading ALWAYS BE SAFE, NEVER BE SORRY over the middle aisle.
Norman inspected three different kinds of ‘stun-gas,’ pepper-gas pellets, a rack of Ninja throwing-stars (the perfect weapon for home defense if you should happen to be attacked by a blind quadriplegic), gas guns that fired rubber bullets, slingshots, brass knuckles both plain and studded, blackjacks and bolas, whips and whistles.
Halfway down this aisle was a glass case containing what Norman considered to be the only really useful item in The Base Camp. For sixty-three-fifty he purchased a taser which produced a large (although probably not the 90,000 volts promised on the label) wallop of juice between its two steel poles when the triggers were pushed. Norman considered this weapon every bit as dangerous as a small-caliber pistol, and the best part was that one did not have to sign one’s name anywhere in order to purchase one.
‘You wah niy-vole baddery widdat?’ the clerk asked. He was a bullet-headed young man with a harelip. He wore a teeshirt which said BETTER TO HAVE A GUN AND NOT NEED ONE THAN
NEED ONE AND NOT HAVE ONE. To Norman he looked like the sort of fellow whose parents might have been blood relatives. ‘Dass waddit runs on — a niy-vole.’
Norman realized what the young man with the harelip was trying to say and nodded. ‘Give me two,’ he said. ‘Let’s live a little.’
The young man laughed as if this was the funniest line he’d ever heard, even funnier than Army Surplus Like You Never Find!, and then he bent down, got two nine-volt batteries from under the counter, and slapped them down beside Norman’s Omega taser.
‘Dull-feetcha!’ the young man cried, and laughed some more. Norman figured this one out, too, after a moment, and laughed right along with Young Mister Harelip and later he thought that was the exact moment when he hit warp-speed and all the stars turned into lines. All ahead, Mr Sulu — this time we’re going way past the Klingon Empire.
He drove the stolen Tempo back into the city and in a part of town where the smiling models on the cigarette billboards started being black rather than white, he found a barber shop by the charming name of Cut Me Some Slack. He went in and found a young black man with a cool moustache sitting in an old-fashioned barber chair. There were Walkman earphones on his head and a copy of Jet in his lap.
‘Whatchoo want?’ the black barber asked. He spoke perhaps more brusquely than he would have to a black man, but not discourteously, either. You weren’t discourteous to a man like this without a damned good reason, especially when you were alone in your shop. He was six-two at least, with broad shoulders and big, thick legs. Also, he smelled like a cop.