The Adjustment - By Scott Phillips Page 0,52

report the theft; some operations are off limits even by the standards of the Quartermaster Corps, and selling army rubber is definitely such an operation.

For a second I wondered if he was my poison pen correspondent, but it didn’t seem likely. Lou’d known me in London, not Rome. Approaching him here was a non-starter, so I decided to take a position across the street and wait for him to come out. I didn’t think it would take long, since the supply of nickels in his hand didn’t amount to half a dollar, and his luck certainly wasn’t going to get much better tonight.

I waved at the manager on my way out. “You win some and you lose some, huh?” I said.

“Better luck next time,” he said, delighted to think that I’d dropped some of my own money at his tables.

THERE WAS A newsstand across the street. I browsed until I sensed the attendant getting antsy, then I bought the new Esquire and moved a few feet down the block. It was around eleven o’clock when Lou slinked out of the casino, dejected and friendless. He walked up that side of the street and turned a corner. I crossed and peered around it to make sure he wasn’t looking back or waiting for me to catch up. He wasn’t.

He continued up the street to a place called the Stuckey Palace Hotel and Apartments, a rundown brick building advertising weekly rates on the painted tin sign drilled into its facade. I waited until he’d had time to do whatever there was to do in the lobby, which would have differed depending on whether he was a hotel guest or a proper tenant. After five minutes had passed I stepped into a foyer and found no one on duty at the desk. Rows of mailboxes lined either side of the entry, beneath a panel affixed with the names and corresponding apartments of its inhabitants. ARNESDALE, L.P. lived in apartment 5H.

Retribution, whatever it turned out to be, could wait a few days. I’d waited years to find Lou and hadn’t really expected ever to run across him. Now the gods had dumped him wriggling into my jaws, and I wouldn’t waste the opportunity.

WHEN I GOT back to the hotel I called the number Herb had scrawled on the matchbook and had a girl sent up to my room. The service was cheap, as he’d promised, and mentioning his name had gotten me a further reduction in fee. When the girl showed up I let her into the room and she entered it with the élan and self-confidence of a movie star. She had jet-black hair pinned up at the crown of her skull and big black eyes that set off a slightly-too-large nose. Her walk had a nice sashay to it, and the first thing I asked after handing her the fee was for her to walk around the room a few times. When she asked me what I wanted next I told her to just get undressed and we’d think of something. She engaged me in some small talk as she performed her strip-tease, artfully tossing one garment after another over her shoulder or bending over to place it on a chair. I had a pretty good sense of her body before she’d finished and was glad I’d listened to Herb.

“What brings you to the Springs? Business or pleasure?” Her accent was northern Midwest, maybe the Dakotas, maybe Minnesota, maybe even Ontario, and I had to wonder what sad circumstance had brought her down to this hillbilly Sodom.

“Combination,” I said. “Started with business, now there turns out to be some pleasure involved.”

I was thinking of the pleasure I was going to get from killing Lou, but she took it for a compliment. “I’ll try and keep you satisfied.”

Fifteen minutes later a howling started coming from the supposedly soundproof suite next door. I didn’t think the old man had been without his medicine for long enough to produce that kind of pain; possibly he was howling at the injustice of the whole business. He had become unaccustomed over the last thirty or thirty-five years to having his demands unmet or his orders disobeyed. Then again Dr. Hargis had mentioned that his particular methods involved the application of countermedications, and that the side effects of these were sometimes unpleasant.

“Do you hear that?” the girl asked, tensing beneath me.

“Yep,” I said.

She pressed her hands to my chest to get me to stop pushing. “Shouldn’t we do