trim and narrow enough to go dancing in. He acted like it didn’t bother him at all… the damned WASP… Then he had to rub it in:
“Nestor!… you look great! If you knew how good you look in a suit, you’d never wear anything else!”
Nestor had never seen the WASP in such a cheery mood before. So he shot him a finger. But John was in such a good mood, he started laughing his head off over that.
The whole sky was the pale blue dome of a heat lamp. Nestor hadn’t walked a hundred feet before he could feel the sweat pouring out for real. The parking lot was so still, he could hear their footsteps on the asphalt. Yet practically all the parking places for the tenants were occupied. Just then a hoarse, grumbling, transmission-slipping, piston-done-for bus, the small boxy kind, painted white, came groaning in off the road. The fenders flared up in big curves like the wings of a pelican in flight. It pulled up not far from Nestor and John. On the roof a foot-high sign stuck up in the air from front to back: SHOP ’N’ BROWSE BUY BUS! It seemed to be a bus service that took groups of people from their Active Adult and Assisted Living homes to shopping centers and back. The driver hopped out. Look at that suntan!—a skinny young Anglo who looked as if his hide were just shipped from the tannery! He hustled around to the other side… to help a lot of old ladies get off, judging by the voices. They didn’t sound tired. They sounded excited.
“… but such… a… sale I’ve never seen…”
“… who on earth needs four? But look in this shopping beg—go ahead, take a look in!…”
“… didn’t even use all my coupons…”
“… thirty minutes from now? You better forget about the lemon meringue…”
“… yeah, only one kesh register open and such… a… line you…”
“… ‘Attention shoppers,’ every two minutes ‘Attention shoppers’—gives me a migraine you wouldn’t believe!…”
“… pushy pushy pushy, the nerve of some people the way they push…”
“… don’t keh! Walgreens has better buys!…”
“… meringue eleven-fifteen, maybe you can get on line! Me, eleven-fifteen I gotta go up and take my pills…”
… All this to the accompaniment of music—of a beat, anyway—an irregular metallic beat, actually… clink clink… clatter clatter clatter… clink… clatter… clink clink clatter…
As Nestor and John drew closer, they could see the old ladies heading into the building, quite a few supporting themselves on aluminum walkers that clinked and clattered clattered and clink clink clinked… Only two old men… At least half of the old ladies, even the ones on the walkers, were carrying shopping bags… Walgreens… Walmart… CVS… Winn-Dixie… Marshalls… JCPenney… Chico’s… the Gap… Macy’s… Target… ShopRite… Banana Republic… Naturalizer…
Home! Back home bearing the kill they came! The élan of a party of deadeye hunters returning from the field was what they had.
“What’s all this meringue?” said Nestor.
“Beats me,” said John Smith. “We let them all go inside and get settled before we go in.”
Okaaaaay… “the reporter”… All day John Smith had been directing this operation. He had assumed the role of captain. Maybe on this terrain “the reporter” knew best… Nestor doubted it, but he was heavily dependent upon John Smith. What other ally did he have? All right… let him run this his way.
So they stood outside the building. John Smith motioned for him to take out the dosimeter. Nestor, already soaked with sweat though he was, had to admit John Smith was right… the suits… the machine… nobody was likely to identify them as a pair of shady young punks loitering around an active adults apartment building and up to no good. Two properly attired young men was what they were, two young gentlemen willing to wear all these clothes while the heat lamp in the sky was heading for the max… they must have a serious mission or they wouldn’t be here.
Once the way had cleared to John Smith’s satisfaction, it was a minute or so after 11:30. The big front entrance was not an entrance in any formal architectural sense. It was nothing but a ten-foot-high, thirty-foot-long corridor where two sides of the building joined.
Thank God… no concierge desk or anything else to check who was going in or out. John Smith and Nestor walked right on in and found themselves standing on the edge of a courtyard framed by four sides of the building coming together to create a square. Like the exterior,