Free The Specialists by Lawrence Block Page A

told himself. Not a bad kid at all. The boxes people get into, the binds. She was okay.
    At a traffic light he turned to her. He said, “What I’d like to do, well, I’m afraid to tell you.”
    “What?”
    “Well . . .”
    “You can say anything to me.”
    “I feel that,” he said. “I feel that you would understand. But it sounds like—well, what I’d like to do is if we could just go back to where I’m staying and really relax and get to know each other. Jesus, the way that sounds!”
    “But I understand.”
    “Do you?” The light turned. He pulled away, kept his eyes on the road but went on talking to her. “The loneliness, every day another city. I don’t drink, but maybe we could get some wine. My father always said there’s a difference between wine and real drinking.”
    “Oh, there’s no question.”
    “What was that wine we had in the restaurant? I had it before, I can never remember the name.”
    “Chianti.”
    “That’s it,” he said. “We could get some and go back to my place. I know how that sounds but I’ll tell you, I’m not much for parties and nightclubs, I don’t get on that good with strangers. Listen, if this doesn’t sound right to you, just say the word and I’ll never mention it again. So help me.”
    He looked at her again, and suddenly the bovine look was gone, the stolid cast, all gone, and she had turned almost radiant. He wondered briefly if the change was in her face or in his eyes. It hardly mattered.
    Then her hand touched his, a comforting pat, a squeeze. “Most fellows, if a girl agreed, they would take it the wrong way. No, you don’t have to say, I know you’re not like that. I think . . . yes. I don’t care about movies either, Jordan. And I’m like you, and lonely, you don’t have to tell me about lonely. Yes, let’s go to your place, yes, I’d like that.”
    When Murdock pulled into the motel lot Simmons was waiting for him. He opened the door and got inside, and Murdock spun the truck in a neat circle and drove back onto the highway.
    “How’d you do?”
    “Two pieces. Fifty dollars for the two, if you can believe that. Soul brothers stick together. He didn’t make a dime on me.”
    “I got two and paid three times that. More. Ninety for the Ruger and seventy-five for the Smith and Wesson.”
    “Caliber?”
    “The Ruger’s a forty-five. Mean old thing. The S and W’s a thirty-eight, takes the same load as killed that guard.”
    “I got both thirty-eights, but one is chambered for magnum loads, which I believe is what they took out of the teller that was shot.”
    “Lucky it didn’t take her arm off, a magnum shell coming off a thirty-eight frame.”
    “Or take the arm off whoever fired it.”
    “You know it.” They lit cigarettes, and Murdock inhaled deeply and blew out a cloud of smoke. “They’ll know it wasn’t the same guns, won’t they?”
    “Uh-huh. Ballistics. They can tell. But they’ll also figure that a pro always gets rid of a gun if he uses it but that he sticks to the same general type of gun. What the colonel calls verisimilitude.”
    “Now what the fuck does that mean, boy?”
    “Means you should wear falsies if you want people to think you’re a girl.”
    “I’ll just bet it says that in the dictionary. Right like that.”
    “Just in the unabridged dictionary.”
    “What I say, you teach a nigger to read and he just don’t know when to quit.”
    “That’s the truth. Rednecks, now, you don’t have that trouble. Never yet heard of one they could teach to read.”
    “Well, now, you just know it’s tough enough getting used to wearing shoes. You should have heard some of the things I said about niggers. And I got three, no, four new jokes I’ll have to tell you.”
    “We’re even. I spent a couple hours agreeing that honkies are the worst thing in the universe.”
    “What the hell’s a honkie?”
    “A redneck.”
    “I’ll be damned, I’m a word I never heard of. What’s it come from?”
    “I