The Undertaker

by William Brown

  “Sorry, Miss,” he said, looking down, gawking. “Uh, it's a two-day minimum.” He tapped the sign under the window. “That's thirty bucks.”

  “Thirty bucks! That's a rip, man,” she said as she fumbled in her purse and reluctantly handed over the money.

  “Sure is, but better you get ripped than me. If I give a ticket out, I gotta turn one in or they take the thirty bucks out of my pay. But you have a nice day now, you hear.”

  We drove out on the street and turned right. “It ain't what you got, Talbott, it's knowing how to use it.”

  “I suppose you learned that at “Infant Jesus of Prague too?”

  “No, tenth grade at Pius the 12th, Sister Mary Boniface, English Lit.”

  I turned and looked at her. “All you did was flash the guy.”

  “Some people just don't understand art.” She shook her head with a wistful smile. “The guard would remember you, but when I stopped, he never looked at my face, the car, you, or anything else. You may not appreciate them, but he sure did.”

  I smiled and looked at my watch. It was almost 2:00. “Let's find the signs for I-80,” I told her as I opened the glove compartment. I pawed through the trash inside. At the bottom, I found a couple of battered road maps and pulled them out.

  We had reached an empty stretch of road and she pulled over to the curb. “Turn around,” she told me. I started to turn toward her only to get a slap on the shoulder. “The other way, you moron! I want to put my bra back on.” I turned away as she pulled the lime green top up over her head. “And don't you dare watch me in the window glass, or I'll slap you silly.” She stopped to untangle the bra before she put it back on and I smiled as I watched her in the window glass, then turned my eyes to the Michigan road map. She slapped me on the back. “You turkey! You were watching. I saw that!”

  “I was controlling myself just fine until you told me not to look.”

  “Talbott, you have more self control in your little finger than all the other guys I've ever met put together,” she said as she pulled the top back over her head. “So suffer!”

  The Michigan road map showed the northern tier of Ohio, too. On the back, I found a table with mileage between US cities. “It's nine hundred miles to Boston.”

  “There's always Washington DC. We need to call Timmy Hardin tomorrow. We could go there.”

  “Maybe, but Boston first.”

  Up ahead we saw the first sign for I-80. Sandy pointed. “Isn't the toll road the first place they'll look if they think we're heading east?”

  I looked fondly at the sign, but she was right.

  “It's going to take us all night to get that far anyway,” she said. “And that's too many hours in a stolen car.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I reached in my pocket and pulled out the Amtrak brochures. “There's a train from Chicago to Boston.” I looked at the schedule. “We can catch it in Toledo. No one would be looking for us there.”

  “Toledo? You got that right. And the train? Sneaky.”

  “It doesn't leave there until 1:30 in the morning and it doesn't get to Boston until 6:30 tomorrow evening.”

  “Not exactly like flying, is it?”

  “No, but slow and meandering might keep us under Tinkerton's radar.”

  “It won't take us six hours to get to Toledo, so we have a lot of time to kill.”

  “We'll take the back roads,” I said as I looked down at the map. “You drive for a while and I'll navigate.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” she said as she reached for the radio. “Just one little problem, I can't go six hours without a big dose of Merle Haggard.”

  I wanted to gag, but I didn't want another bruise so I let it go.

  Route 12 ran up along the Lake Michigan shore for twenty miles and then cut across the rolling farmland of southern Michigan through the small towns of Niles, Sturgis, Summerset, and Coldwater, until we dropped south to Toledo. For the first hour, we drove in silence, enjoying the calm and the quiet. The road was flat, boring, and empty.

  “Look, Peter, I know you think I'm some kind of air head, a silly ditz, like Parini called me, and most of the time I am.”

  “No, I don't.” I sat up and turned toward her.

  “Yes you do. But you're going to pretend you don't, and I'm going to pretend I believe you, because it's been a long time since I've had a nice guy around, and I like to pretend too. You pretend and I'll pretend, and sooner or later we're going to pretend ourselves right into the sack. That'll be a lot of fun and something we could both can use, But when the clock strikes midnight, I'm going to be like Cinderella at the end of the ball, alone, with nothing but a couple of mice, a big pumpkin, and some lovely memories to keep me company.”

  “That's not going to happen, Sandy.”

  “Yes it is. But I'm a big girl, so don't go getting the guilts about me. I'm going to pretend right along with you until that clock strikes twelve, and I'm going to enjoy the hell out of it while it lasts.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Toledo, where make-overs start, but never end…

  Sandy was driving and humming in time with the radio as it played a song about a guy who painted his name and Bobbie Jean's on the water tower in John Deere green. I'll have to remember that the next time I want a date in Iowa, I thought.

  “What do you think of Parini?” she looked over and asked.

  “Parini?” I shrugged. “That's like asking me what I think of an avalanche.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am serious. He's big, he's powerful, and you don't want to get in his way.”

  “Then, you think he's a bad guy?”

  “Good? Bad? He does what he's told to do. That could be planting flowers, picking them, or stomping the Bejeezuz out of them, but he does what he's told.”

  “Well, I like him. I see something in his eyes.”

  “Is that the photographer talking? All I see is the chrome-plated .45 in his hand.”

  “Maybe. I just don't think he's all bad.”

  “Speaking of bad…” I looked over at the gas gauge and at the clock. “Let's get off at the next exit and get some gas. I need to make a phone call.”

  “Your friend in Boston?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But if he doesn't know anything, why would Tinkerton bother him?”

  “Because Tinkerton doesn't think that way. He'll keep his goons stomping around in the dark until they step on something. Then look down and see what it is.”

  We found a Shell station in a small town east of Niles. Sandy started filling the tank while I headed for the pay phone. As I dropped in some change and dialed Doug's office number, I watched her check out the car. She looked at the oil and the air pressure in the tires. She even took off the cover the air cleaner and held the filter up to the light, shaking her head disapprovingly. If my car ever was stolen, I hoped it was by a thief with a mechanic fetish like this one. Then I remembered. My car was stolen. By a County Sheriff back in Ohio, about a hundred years ago.

  On the third ring, I heard a friendly receptionist's voice say, “Symbiotic Software, how may I help you?”

  “Doug's office, please. If he's not in, put me through to Sharon. Tell them it's Pete Talbott and I need to talk to one of them.”

  I heard a couple of minutes of what I guessed was a Mozart piano concerto. I didn't call in very often, and it was nice to see Doug had risen from his Grateful Dead phase to a higher intellectual plain. Finally, someone came on the line, but it wasn't Sharon.

  “Pete? Hi, this is Jeanie Simpson in HR.” She sounded hesitant, almost unsure. “Doug isn't here. He didn't come in this morning and we're getting worried.”

  “What about Sharon? Isn't she there?”

  “She didn't come in either,” Jeanie paused, still not sure. “Look, I know you two are old friends or I wouldn't say this, but when Doug and Sharon's desks were both empty this morning… well, the common assumption was they had gone off somewhere together.”

  “Doug and
Sharon? That didn't happen.”

  “I didn't think so either, but it wasn't my place to question. However, he missed two appointments this morning and a conference call with the bankers.”

  “Doug missed a call with his bankers? Have you called the police?”

  “I called Ted McDermott, our attorney. He said the police won't touch it for forty-eight hours, so we had to sit tight.”

  “Ted's right, Doug will probably come wandering in tomorrow morning with some lame excuse, so sit tight,” I told her, not believing a word I was saying, but I didn't want to get the office staff involved. “Jeanie, when you came on the line just now, you sounded surprised to hear from me.”

  “You had several phone calls this morning. A man was asking if we knew where you were. He was polite enough, but my radar went up. First he tried the receptionist, then Programming, and then he tried working me.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he was calling from California, from your old office, and that he had to talk to you about some project the two of you had been working on. He was very, very persistent and he wanted to know if I knew how to reach you. But it just wasn't right.”

  “What wasn't”

  “Excuse me for being blunt, but I'm HR. I knew you had been out of work for quite some time in Los Angeles, so what could you possibly have been working on with this man? And he said he was calling from California.”

  “California?”

  “Yes, but we have Caller ID on all the incoming lines and the display showed the call was from a local Boston number. That's why it didn't seem right. And then the Boston Police started calling this afternoon, asking if we knew where you were.”

  “You did the right thing,” I reassured her. “Tell the office staff, if they get any more calls from that guy, they should play dumb. You haven't heard from me, you haven't talked to me, and you don't have a clue where I am. But if you can, get them on tape.”

  “Are you coming back? Can you help?”

  “I'm going to try. I'm in Amarillo, Texas. If I can, I'll call you again tomorrow.”

  After I hung up, I stayed in the phone booth for a long minute, playing the “what-ifs” back to myself. As usual, I came up with more questions, but not very many answers. What I did know was that we had to get to Boston and we had to be careful.

  The rest of the drive across southern Michigan was uneventful. I took the wheel for the second half of the trip. We took it slow and stopped for coffee and a late lunch before we hit Toledo at 6:30 PM. There wasn't much traffic by that time. What there was, was all leaving town, not going in. That made it easy to find the train station. It was a big, neo-classic building named Union Station, like most other downtown train stations in the Midwest. It was south of the tall buildings, down on the river. We circled it twice, staying a full block away. All we saw was a cop car parked near a donut shop, no SWAT Teams or ugly sedans with black-walled tires were lurking nearby.

  “Drop me at the front door,” Sandy said. “I'll look around the waiting room.” She could tell I didn't look very happy at that thought. “You're something else, Talbott.” She pulled the blond wig from her shoulder bag. In seconds the transformation was complete. “We need to know, and it's better to find out now than later. If I come running back out, you'll know it was a really bad idea.”

  It did not take more than three minutes before she came strolling back out and hopped in the car, holding a newspaper in her hand. “Unless they're disguised as bored ticket agents, a very old black porter, or a couple of really gross homeless guys laying a bench in the back corner, nobody's home. Let's go.”

  As I drove away, she opened the newspaper. It was the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She flipped through the pages in the first section. “Oops!” she said. “We made the AP wire.”

  I pulled over to the side of the street and read the story over her shoulder. It was inside, on Page 4, but they had the photo from my California driver's license next to the story. Nothing makes you look more like a perp than one of those. I made a mental note to cross Arnold Schwarzenegger off my Christmas card list.

  TWO WANTED IN MIDWEST CRIME SPREE

  Chicago. Chicago Police joined a three-state manhunt for a modern-day, Bonnie and Clyde. Following a high-speed chase through the south side this morning, two police officers were seriously injured when the pair shot their way through a roadblock at 35th Street creating havoc on the Dan Ryan Expressway. They escaped north on an El train and disappeared in the Chicago Loop. A large manhunt is continuing downtown and police sources consider both suspects armed and dangerous.

  The pair are believed to have escaped with the help of the Disciples, a notorious south side street gang. CPD Gang Intelligence says the two white fugitives may be major players in an interstate drug trafficking syndicate from the west coast believed to be muscling its way into the Chicago rackets with the help of a Columbian cocaine cartel.

  The man is identified by Chicago Police as Peter E. Talbott, a drifter from Los Angeles who faked his own death in Mexico last year. He is wanted for questioning regarding the death of a private security guard on the north side earlier this morning, and in Ohio for the murders of a county sheriff and two ambulance attendants.

  His unnamed female accomplice has not yet been identified. She is described as a short, punk rocker with black hair and heavy make-up...

  That got a rise out of my unnamed female accomplice. “A punk rocker with heavy make-up!” she exploded.

  “And short.”

  Her eyes became thin dark slits. “Don't let your mouth get your butt in trouble, Talbott, but what's this stuff about us shooting our way through a roadblock?”

  “And “the death of a private security guard… major players in an interstate drug trafficking ring… a drifter who faked his own death in Mexico last year”? Tinkerton is losing it. Odd, though, there's no mention of the Feds. No “FBI sources”, only the Chicago cops.”

  “Well, he's got you labeled as a cop-killer now. He wants you dead.”

  Not just me, I thought but didn't say, and that is what I'm afraid of. “We have almost six hours before the train leaves,” I told her.

  “A girl can always shop. Let's go back to the Interstate and find a mall. I need some things and you could use a new look, too. Besides.” She gave me that look again. “The balcony of a dark movie theater is a good place to hide and kill some time.”

  “They don't have balconies anymore.”

  “Darn!”

  We found a mall at an interchange in the suburbs and wandered through a large department store. I picked out a pair of dress jeans, a plum-patterned Polo shirt, and a dark blue casual blazer. Sandy bought a light blue top, a dark-blue skirt-shorts combination, and a jacket. We had the clerk cut off the tags, and we went to the fitting rooms to change. When she came back out, she took me by the arm and pulled me down the concourse. “There's something else I still need to do with you.”

  “You've been trying hard enough,” I mumbled.

  “Not that!” She smacked my arm and pulled me into a makeup shop. “Your face. Your hair. It would be great if you grew a beard, but there's no time. Besides, they get scratchy in all the wrong places while they're growing in.” I looked at her, but it did no good. “What if you go blond? The hair and the eyebrows?” She started rummaging through the tubes and bottles on the shelf. “Nothing phony or bleachy, just a nice soft natural look.”

  “I suppose you know how to use that stuff?”

  “Six months in beautician's school, that's like graduate school for us bimbos and ditzes.” She looked at me with a twinkle in her eyes. “I have the blonde wig, but I think I'm going to get a light brown color and maybe something coppery-red. I've done them all.”

  “I'll miss the black, is that your natural color?” I asked, not thinking.

  “That's for you to find that out, Talbott.” She stuck out her tongue and turned away.

  Out in the mall we found a 12-plex theater. There was no balcony, but she
was right. It was a great place to hide. The movie was a singles dating comedy staring a bunch of twenty-somethings I had never heard of, but it was her pick and I didn't care. The theater had those big recliner stadium seats and it was mostly empty.

  “Can I pretend we're a couple again?” she asked as she snuggled close. It didn't matter, because five minutes later I fell sound asleep.

  It was probably an hour later when I woke up with my head buried in her shoulder. “God, I'm sorry, Sandy, that must have killed your arm.”

  “Don't be,” she whispered. “I haven't had a guy fall asleep on me for a long, long time, not one I cared about anyway.” I looked at her, but she shook her head. “Don't! It was only a nap, nothing you need to feel guilty about.”

  “I don't feel guilty.”

  “Oh, yes you do.” She leaned closer and kissed me gently on the cheek. “You feel guilty about a lot of things you have no reason to feel guilty about. That's one of the many subjects you and I need to talk about. Now shut up and watch the end of the movie.”

  After the movie, I had her drive back to the train station. That gave me a chance to look over the Amtrak schedule and routes. “Some of the trains have private compartments,” I said. “It would be great if we could get one all the way to Boston.”

  “Like Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe in “Some Like It Hot?” But that's in black-and-white, so I doubt you ever saw it.”

  “I did so. But the Amtrak compartments are a lot bigger now, like a small room. Maybe we could get one of those.”

  “Yeah? You and me, alone in a small room. I can't wait.”

  “Would you stop that! This is hard enough for me as it is.”

  “Yeah, I'll bet it is.”

  I looked over at her and glared.

  “All right, I'll behave. I promise.”

  “Seems to me, you said that before,” I reminded her. “But if we get stuck sitting in an open coach, we'll have to bail out in the morning, maybe a couple of times, and try something else. So we really want a compartment.” I looked at the schedule and ran my finger down the chart. “Wow. It'll run us almost $1,200.” I dug in my pockets and counted out what was left of the Sheriff's Coffee Fund and Louie Panozzo's envelope. “We have enough, but it will take us down to maybe $500 in cash. That's okay, if I can get some help in Boston.”