The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [83]
“Well,” she told him, “you sure won’t have the same problem in that getup.”
He swung back to face her. “What? I look normal.”
She poked him. “Normal for a bum.”
With a flash of anger, he reached for the door handle and yanked it open. “Let’s get going.”
She caught hold of his arm. “Whoa, hang on. I don’t want to lose sight of you.”
“Fat chance of that. You’ll be in the middle of an admiring crowd.”
She didn’t let go. “Willy.”
He caught her change of tone and was quieter in his response. “What?”
“I’ve stuck by you this long, haven’t I?”
Willy wasn’t overequipped with moments of grace, but he did have them, as both Sam and Joe knew. They came fast and vanished faster for the most part, but when timed right, they could linger.
As an example, in a gesture scented with faint but reliable virtue, he quickly ducked his head, kissed her fingers, and said, “Come on, babe, we ain’t got all night.”
They headed off in slightly different directions after leaving the car separately, blending into a section of town at once bruised and polished. Bennington was full of such contrasting overlays, with haves and have-nots virtually sharing the same fences. This area featured low-income housing down one street, a fancy restaurant and a state-of-the-art fire station up two others, and one of the town’s busiest commercial strips one block over.
Piccolo’s appealed to customers of all stripes, being a place where the younger, slightly rough-edged gentility might go for a nightcap after the evening had officially concluded—to where the hard-core drinkers had been hanging out all night. It wasn’t a classic biker bar—those tended to be short-lived in towns like this—but it was definitely working class.
It was also a place where Sam and Willy each could reach a combat-ready comfort level. As with those few soldiers who discovered that the adrenaline of battle afforded a certain simplified clarity, so these two had found that slipping disguised into the twilight between the good guys and the bad freed them to act more spontaneously, without fear that their bosses were one citizen’s complaint away.
Cops, especially those in uniform, were more conscious of maintaining the badge’s reputation than they were of the gun most civilians stared at. It was the claim of misconduct, whether real or imagined, that dogged them most, not the misuse of a weapon they rarely fired. For these two, therefore, there was a paradoxical sense of liberation in their identities being hidden.
So Sam and Willy, several minutes apart and via two different entrances, came into Piccolo’s looking cheerful and glum respectively, supposedly in search of either company or respite, but in fact as keen as dogs on the hunt, ready for anything and on the scent for Mel Martin.
Mel Martin, not surprisingly in a town this size, was a couple of streets from Piccolo’s at that very moment, sitting in the cab of the truck he’d bought from Newell Morgan. He was watching the front of the oddly named Green Mountain Vista Lodge Motel—a fleabag with no vista of anything except the traffic on Route 9.
The Vista, as it was colloquially known, was C-shaped in the traditional manner, surrounding its own parking lot on three sides. All the rooms led onto two stacked walkways, the upper one belted in by a balcony, a row of cars hemming in the lower one like sucklings lined up against one gigantic, sleeping pig.
Mel’s point of interest was the door to number 32, on the second floor, slightly closer to the right-hand staircase. It was indistinguishable from its neighbors—brown, battered, and accompanied by a tiny, occluded window to one side—but Mel stared at it as if seeking enlightenment.
Which, in one sense, he was. He’d witnessed a blade-thin young man, street-named Banger, enter the room twenty minutes earlier, intending to conduct a minor piece of business in the illegal drug trade, and he was awaiting his reappearance.
Mel knew what was happening behind that door.