Watch Your Back

by Donald Westlake

  Stan turned in at the narrow lane leading past this anthology of automotive misadventure to the pink stucco office building, where there was already a car parked, of a very different kidney. First, it had been manufactured in this millenium. Second, it had no dents or scratches in it at all, but was a clean and gleaming black Olds Finali. And third, it wore license plates — New Jersey, but still.

  Stan parked the Buick behind this aristocrat, noticed that there were no personal items visible inside the Olds, nor a key in the ignition, and went on into the office.

  The interior was simple to the point of anonymity. The walls were gray panels, the two desks utilitarian gray metal. At the larger of the two sat Maximilian’s entire office staff, a skinny, severe, hatchet–faced woman named Harriet, who at the moment was doing a lot of rapid–fire typing on state motor vehicle department forms, using an old Underwood office machine so big and black and ancient it looked as though it should come with a foreign correspondent attached.

  Harriet did not stop typing. She looked over at Stan as he entered, nodded, and finished a staccato of jabs at the form in the machine, then flipped it out and onto a pile of such forms in a mesh metal in–basket, and said, “Hi, Stan.”

  “Max in his office?”

  “Where else would he be?” She glanced at the pile of untyped forms by her left hand, but did not reach for them. “He’s in there,” she said, “with a lawyer.”

  “From Jersey? Is that a good thing?”

  “Nobody’s done any shouting in there,” she said, “which I count a plus, but let me buzz him.”

  Which she did. “Stan’s out here. The one we like.”

  “That’s nice,” Stan said.

  Hanging up, Harriet said, “There are Stans and Stans. He’s coming right out.” She reached for the next form.

  “With the lawyer?”

  Yes. The inner office door opened, and out first came Max himself, a bulky older man with heavy jowls and thin white hair, his white shirt smudged across the front from leaning against too many used cars. Behind him came another person of jowls and heft and thinning white hair, but here the resemblance ended. This one was decked out in a pearl gray summerweight suit (of which there is no such thing), pearl gray loafers, pale blue shirt with white collar, rose–and–ivory–striped necktie, and a neckpin, yellowish, shaped like a dollar sign. The man wearing all this finery, plus a number of rings with stones in them, could have been any age from a hundred to a hundred and nine.

  “Stanley,” Max said, “listen to this.”

  “Sure,” said Stan.

  Max looked at the lawyer and gestured at Stan: “Tell it to him,” he said. “I want to hear how it sounds when I kibitz.”

  “Certainly.”

  The lawyer gave Stan the smile that had charmed a thousand juries, and said, “Our friend Maximilian, as you know, provides a truly worthwhile public service.”

  Stan had not known that. He wondered what this public service was, but didn’t interrupt.

  “By providing affordable transportation to those of modest means,” the lawyer explained, gesturing at the heaps outside with the graceful wave of the arm that had enchanted a thousand juries when he had employed it to indicate the evidence, the defendant, or occasionally the jury itself, “Maximilian enables those unfortunates to seek — and at times obtain and possibly even hold onto — employment.”

  Stan gazed at the array of crates out there. “Thinka that.”

  “However,” the lawyer continued, raising the stern finger that had alerted a thousand juries, “we must be realists here.”

  “Sure.”

  “Those at the bottom of the economic ladder, who would be most likely to take advantage of the service Maximilian supplies, tend to come equipped with minimal education and marginal skills. Also the automobiles, those out there, have for the most part already provided many years of faithful service. Given those vehicles, and given the caliber of most of their operators, there will be accidents.”

  “This,” Max said, “is where I don’t track it no more.”

  “No,” Stan said, “I’m with him. Go ahead,” he told the lawyer.

  “Thank you. Now, we can assume, I believe, that when one of these accidents does occur, it will certainly not be the fault of the automobile, nor of its operator.”

  “Natch,” Stan said.

  “But some entity will be at fault,” the lawyer went on, “and justice requires that responsibility be fixed, and that damage, both physical and emotional, be compensated.”

  “Sue them,” Stan suggested.

  “That is the way our system works,” the lawyer agreed. “But sue whom?” With the two–hands–outspread gesture that had calmed a thousand juries, he said, “There are some, either misguided or led astray by false counselors, who might consider suing their benefactor.”

  “Max here, you mean.”

  “Oh, they consider it,” Max grumbled. “Believe me, they consider it.”

  “It is my suggestion to Maximilian,” the lawyer explained, “that in furthering his good works, and in protecting himself from the onslaughts of the ungrateful, that at the conclusion of every sale of one of his vehicles to one of his customers, he place in the hand of the customer, in addition to the bank contract and the ignition key, a copy of my card, which looks, in fact, like this.”

  So saying, the lawyer whipped out the advertised card with the sudden snapping motion that had startled a thousand juries. Stan accepted it and looked at it, while Max said, “Mostly what they do, they come around with baseball bats. I’m a great contributor to all the charities at the precinct.”

  Stan looked from the lawyer’s name and phone number to the lawyer. “So the deal is,” he said, “they get your card when they get the car, and that way, when they get the accident they’ll probably call you, and you’ll find somebody they can sue instead of Max.”

  “Precisely,” the lawyer said, with a beatific smile, and folded his hands at his waist in the comfortable pose that had put a thousand juries to sleep.

  Stan, staying awake, looked at Max. “What’s the downside?”

  “It sounded better this time,” Max admitted, “but I don’t know. You got somebody wants to buy one a them heaps out there, I don’t like to use the word ‘accident.’ ”

  “So don’t use it,” Stan said. “Look. You give them the card,” and he gave the card to Max. “You say, ‘You ever got a legal problem with the car, this is a guy that knows laws about cars. Keep it in the glove compartment.’ ”

  Max beamed all over his face — a sight so rare that Harriet actually stopped typing for three seconds. “Fantastic!” he said. “Stanley, I knew you were the one to ask. Okay,” he told the lawyer, “I’ll be your tout. Cuts out the ambulance chase.”

  “We’ll both be happy,” the lawyer assured him, and from within his suit he brought a little stack of his cards, wrapped in a rubber band. “A starter set,” he said, handing them to Max. “I’ll mail you more.” Then, with his own broad, beaming smile, he shook Stan’s hand, saying, “An honor to meet you, sir, you have an agile mind. If ever the occasion arises, I will be happy to assist you in any way possible.”

  “Sounds good,” Stan said, and waited until the lawyer, with more effusions hither and yon, took his leave.

  “Thank you, Stanley,” Max said, “I just couldn’t get my head around the proposition.”

  “And if any of them ever does sue you,” Stan said, “you can make that bird take the case, on the arm, or you’ll have Harriet write an innocent inquiry letter to the Bar Association.”

  “That much I know,” Max assured him. “What’s this you got out here?” He stood at the window to frown out at the Buick as the snazzy Olds took itself off. “You usually pick with a little more discrimination, Stanley,” he commented.

  “It has one great advantage,” Stan told him. “No Global Positioning System. But that out there, that’s just a little taste, something you can give me cabfare for. What I mainly w
ant to do is bring you, tomorrow, a beautiful BMW, which I will give you straight up, in trade for one midsize truck for which the only requirement is, it can’t be hot.”

  “A new complication?” Max squinted, as though a fog had formed between Stan and himself. “You wanna give me a BMW, no charge —”

  “A free gift.”

  “— and I should give you a truck?”

  “You got it.”

  “No, I don’t.” Max waved at his lot. “You see what I got here, I got cars. No trucks.”

  “You’re in the business, Max,” Stan pointed out. “You can find a truck.”

  “It’s a little work you’re asking.”

  “With a beautiful BMW at the end of it,” Stan said, “that the owner’s out of the country for years, it won’t even be reported stolen for who knows how long. And it’s a gift, for you.”

  “Well, the BMW is or it isn’t,” Max said, “and I’m not saying I’ll kick it outa bed, but I’ll tell you the truth, Stanley, if I’m gonna put myself out to find you a truck it’s mostly because you made me see the legal issue a little better. You know, when a lawyer talks to you, the natural thing to do is not listen.”

  “I know.”

  “Certainly, not believe. But you listened, Stanley, and you heard the kernel of good in there, and so for that reason, plus the BMW, I’ll see what I can do, get a truck. Call me day after tomorrow.”

  Stan said, “Not today?”

  “Today is when you asked the question. Give me a little break here, Stanley, call me day after tomorrow.”

  In his mind, Stan could hear the low rumble of Tiny saying, “Another delay.” But what could be done? “It’s a deal, Max,” he said. “I’ll call you day after tomorrow. And now, if it’s okay with you, we’ll exchange a little cash and I’ll call for myself a cab.”

  Max said, “You wouldn’t want to buy a little runabout for yourself?”

  Stan and Harriet both laughed politely, and then Stan called himself a cab.

  Chapter 34

  * * *

  Preston said, “Who is he calling?”

  “Who? Oh, Tonio,” Pam said, because the pilot of this small sailboat, the bronzed Tonio, was murmuring into a cell phone as he sat hunched over the tiller at the rear of the boat, steering them out of the cove, toward the open sea. “Oh, he always does that,” she said. “He has to phone the marina whenever we set sail, it’s a safety thing.”

  “Oh,” Preston said, and faced forward again, as the open sea grew increasingly open. The little sailboat did bob around an awful lot, did it more and more the faster they went and the farther from the protection of the cove. Preston tried to think of the movements as sensual, but it was difficult.

  This was the first time he’d been off the island since he’d flown down from New York, almost three years ago. He’d never felt the need to frisk about on the briny, and in fact he still didn’t, but Pam was so difficult to pin down, a phrase he meant quite literally. She was always either off sailing with some lout or too tired from her outer–sea exertions to be of much use.

  Well, if you can’t fight them, join them. Last night, when once again Pam had been too tired to drop by his place for a little kidding around, he’d brought up the sailboat idea himself: “Tomorrow, what do you say, if you want to go sailing again, I’ll came along with you.”

  She was delighted: “Oh, would you, Pres? You’ll love it, I know you will.”

  So here they were, and so far he wasn’t loving it. Not that he was going to be seasick — that sort of thing had never been a problem — but maintaining one’s balance was definitely a problem, perched here on this padded seat at the prow of the sailboat. Also noise; he would have expected sailpower to be silent, but the rush of the little boat through the sea created two kinds of white noise that made conversation difficult, they being wind and wave. The wind of their passage rushed past his ears, and the surface of the ocean hissed as the boat sliced through it.

  So Preston merely sat silently, clasped his knees, frowned mightily at all that empty water, and waited for the good part. Are we having fun yet?

  Once he looked back, and Tonio was off the phone now, and the island was really surprisingly far away. The sailboat traveled faster than one would have supposed. Preston looked at Tonio, and the man just sat there, one hand on the tiller, no expression at all on his face. Preston faced forward again.

  He let another minute whish by, then leaned very close to Pam’s lovely left ear and murmured, “When does Tonio take his little swim?”

  “Oh, Preston, not till we’re out of sight of land.”

  “Out of sight?”

  Twisting again to look back past the stolid Tonio, Preston said, “By God, we almost are!” Facing Pam, he called, into the roar of wind and wave, “Should we be out this far?”

  “Oh, these boats are completely safe,” Pam assured him. “They wouldn’t let us go out if they weren’t.”

  “Presumably.” Preston gazed out at the illimitable ocean, and on it there moved a speck. “What’s that?”

  “What?”

  “That,” Preston repeated, and pointed at the black–looking speck with the tiny white line of wake behind it.

  “Why, it’s another boat,” Pam said, sounding pleased.

  “Why don’t they find their own ocean?”

  Pam caressed his near knee. “They’ll be gone in a minute, darling.”

  Preston frowned toward that other boat, which, instead of going, was definitely coming nearer. “It doesn’t have a sail.”

  “No, it’s a motorboat.” She shielded her eyes with a hand, gazing at the interloper. “I think it’s one of those they call the cigarette boats.”

  “Noisy and fast,” Preston said, disgusted with the idea. “Drug dealers and the like.”

  “Oh, some very decent people, too,” Pam assured him.

  “Is that boat going to crash into us?”

  “Of course not, darling.”

  “They’re coming right at us.”

  “Maybe they want to say hello.”

  Preston looked back past Tonio, and there was no island back there at all any more, no land anywhere in sight, nothing and no one except themselves and that other boat. “I don’t like this,” he said.

  Scoffing, Pam said, “Oh, there’s no bad people in this part of the ocean.”

  Preston shielded his own eyes with his hand. That other boat was surging powerfully through the sea, thundering on like a seagoing locomotive, nose up. It could now be seen to be mostly white, with blue trim, and with names and numbers in blue on its side. Sunlight glinted from its windscreen, so that whoever was driving the boat couldn’t be seen.

  Preston made a sudden decision. Twisting around again, he called, “Tonio, take us back! Now!”

  Tonio didn’t even bother to look at him. They continued to sail as before. Wide–eyed, Preston stared at Pam, but she was smiling at the approaching boat, apparently mightily amused by something or other.

  And now Tonio did do something with the sail, so that they definitely slowed. Instead of rushing, all at once they were wallowing. And the cigarette boat was just there, also slowing, turning in a large, carnivorous circle as it approached.

  Pam turned her beautiful head to meet Preston’s stare, and her smile now was savage with triumph. “It’s been fun, darling,” she said.

  “You’re taking me off the island!”

  “You are off the island, darling.”

  The cigarette boat eased in close, and Preston made a belated and bitter discovery. “You look like my wives.”

  She laughed, lightly. At him. “Of course,” she said, and Tonio held out a hand to catch the cigarette boat’s rope.

  Chapter 35

  * * *

  Of the several guarded telephone conversations that took place on that Wednesday, Kelp was involved in most if not all of them. The first was midmorning, when Kelp’s cell vibrated against his leg, and the caller turned out to be Stan Murch, who, based on th
e balalaika music in the background, was calling from a cab: “I seen our friend.”

  “Uh huh.”