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  Ken checked out and was on the road twenty minutes later in Pearso Stokes’s new silver Eldorado. What a great road car for eating up the miles!

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Late that night, as Ken sped west through moonlit darkness toward Nebraska, O’B was getting himself arrested on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi just south of Stupidville.

  It came about this way.

  He arrived from Florida that afternoon to find that Giselle had reserved rooms for everyone at the Bide-A-Wee Motel.

  But Dan Kearny had not checked in yet.

  Bart Heslip had not checked in yet.

  Ken Warren had not checked in yet.

  Larry Ballard had checked in the day before, but then had left again, saying he would be back “in a day or two.”

  Giselle Marc had checked in but was nowhere around. No message. So O’B, at loose ends, did what he did best.

  He played liar’s dice in the Pirate’s Landing (“Choice Steaks, Cocktails”)—“I’ll drink to that”—played horse in the Blue Moon Cafe (“DW—Dipped Walleye—Our Specialty”)—“I’ll drink to that”—shot pool at Kreuzer’s Sportsman’s Hall (“You Catch It—We Cook It”)—“I’ll drink to that”—played shuffleboard at the Gallery (“Where the Elite Meet to Eat”)—“I’ll drink to that”—and at nearly midnight had a hamburger at the Marina Mooring (“Deck Dining May to September”)—“I’ll even drink to that.”

  Alas, with all those drinks in him, it seemed to O’B like a good idea to scout out the huge conclave of Gypsies camped in Dieter Braun’s field a mile south of town. Local kids liked to go up to the bluffs overlooking the field and park, he had learned, but the cops had been chasing them away because of reported “scandalous doings” in the encampment below.

  O’B, knowing that the Gypsy society is among the most rigorously modest on earth, felt the tales of scantily clad dusky women parading around campfires was more adolescent wishful thinking than anything else. The Town Meeting scheduled for tomorrow night at the Elks Lodge would examine, he was sure, the Gypsies’ endless thieving rather than any scandalous doings.

  Anyway, O’B staggered back to the motel and got his car, by trial and error found the narrow dirt road winding through the hardwoods up to the big open-view area overlooking the moon-silvered Mississippi. There were no other cars.

  Knee-high in sweet-smelling grass, he scoped the encampment below the edge of the bluff with a pair of binoculars he’d found in the glove box. There actually was enough light from campfires and the moon to let him pick out several new Cadillacs beside the tents and trailers. Easy pickings for DKA tomorrow…

  Headlights transfixed him, a harsh voice snapped, “Hold it right there, mister!”

  O’B turned, squinted into the lights, holding the hand with the binoculars up to shield his eyes. Two burly uniformed policemen moved in on him from either side of the headlights.

  “Tryna get a look at them Gypsy women?” demanded one cop.

  O’B started to reply with something zesty—like, What are those binoculars in your hands for, Officers?—then remembered how much he’d had to drink. Whoa! Easy, hoss!

  “Think we oughtta roust the bastard, Lloyd?”

  “Let’s let him go this time, Frank…”

  They waited as he walked back to his car—thank God for the uneven ground, it would account for any slight unsteadiness of gait—got in, and drove away. To find a track into a nearby cow pasture where he hid his car under the hardwoods, killed the lights and motor, and waited.

  Roust him, indeed! Let the bastard go, indeed! They had started to believe the tales of the kids they’d sent home, that was it, and wanted him out of there so they could spy on the Gypsy women. But he was here on a professional mission! It all got his Irish up, begorra! He’d carry out that mission!

  Of course a little basic caution was called for. Some camouflage, that was the ticket. And he knew just where to find it. Kalia Uwanowich, that Gypsy scamp, must have had a sideline for times when the bogus roofing trade was slow: O’B had found a trunkful of “novelty items” and “marital aids” while itemizing the personal property for his condition report on the Allante.

  Ten minutes later the police cruiser went by, heading back to town. A little sober voice deep inside whispered that O’B should just return to the motel and go to bed—tomorrow was another day. But the booze was positively shouting in his ear, Action! Action!

  Chuckling to himself, O’B opened the trunk on its spate of thoroughly ingenious—if often grotesque—devices from Japan to plug into auto cigarette lighters, insert into various body cavities, and the like. There were two cartons of explicit photo magazines from Australia (“XXX Nonviolent Erotica, All Models Over 18”). And, perfect for O’B’s purposes, two boxed Anatomically Correct Life-size Inflatable Latex Sex Dolls (“You Need Never Do It Alone Again”) made right here in the good old U.S. of A. One blonde, one brunette.

  O’B chose the blonde.

  By the time he managed to get her blown up, he was red-faced and panting, about ready to forget the whole thing. But from a dozen feet away, sitting on the front seat with the door open and the overhead light on, she looked extemely lifelike, from the tippy-tips of her red rubber toes to the Dynel champagne-blond crown of her inflated latex head.

  But also extremely nude. Extremely naked.

  Well, he was, after all, going to a lover’s lane. But he would drape his sports coat decorously around her shoulders. And by parking broadside and very close to the edge of the bluff, he could lean across his anatomically correct companion, put his elbows on the edge of the open window, and glass the encampment below. All anyone would be able to see of her was her hair. To the casual glance, just a guy snuggling up to his gal.

  But he found that the booze was dying in him, his head was starting to ache, there was a distinctly chilly breeze blowing up from off the river, and nearly all of the Gypsy campfires were out. He couldn’t see a bloody thing. To hell with it.

  He started to draw back into the car, barked his knuckles on the window frame, and dropped the binoculars on the floor. In leaning down to grope for them, he unwittingly pulled his coat off the inflated nude figure.

  Damn! The glasses had gone under the seat. He leaned down farther still, his face pressed firmly into the dummy’s Dynel-ornamented anatomically correct lap, his other hand groping for the doorframe. By bitter mischance, it closed around one of the latex doll’s extremely lifelike triple-D breasts.

  That’s when the policemen sneaking up on his car shone their flashlights in the windows.

  “He’s got her buckass nekkid and his goddam face in her lap, Lloyd!”

  “An’ grabbin’ her tit, Frank!”

  O’B tried to sit up, cracked his head painfully on the underside of the dash.

  “That ain’t no woman, Lloyd! It’s one of them sex dolls!”

  “We got us a damn pervert, Frank! Spyin’ on the women down there to the campground, then up here with his face in—”

  Guns were suddenly pointed at him.

  “OKAY, YOU, OUTTA THE CAR! HANDS ON TOP OF YOUR HEAD!”

  “YOU GOT THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT…”

  Busted.

  * * *

  Dawn in Nebraska. Grunts of effort, grate of trenching tools against stone as three kneeling figures dug a hole in the rocky soil big enough to bury a midget or a large dog.

  “Good enough,” panted one. “They’ll be coming soon.”

  The three men in black jumpsuits donned black ski masks, picked up their weapons, and separated to their assigned posts.

  * * *

  The twenty-two-vehicle Lovelli caravan rolled east through the plains along a two-lane highway. The rising sun dazzled their eyes while showing that the early May buffalo grass, nevermore to be cropped by its namesakes, was still green and lush. In a month it would be sere and silver. A low hill rose from the prairie ahead; the road cut straight through it, flanked on both sides by rock faces of shale deposited by the shall
ow inland seas that had once covered the region. The Lovellis drove toward it.

  * * *

  The black-clad figure prone on the rounded apex of the hill took his binoculars down from his eyes. He said into his walkie-talkie, “Here they come, guys! ETA three minutes.”

  * * *

  As it reached the far side of the narrow cut through the hill, some three city blocks in length, the lead car of the caravan squealed to a stop: crosswise on the highway in front of it was a car-trailer used to haul new cars to dealers. It completely blocked the road. As the caravan skidded to a stop, a second big car-trailer came bouncing out of a sandy-floored wash to block the highway just behind the last Gypsy vehicle.

  Trapped.

  Yojo Lovelli, the clan patriarch at 55, got stiffly out of the lead car—a new Cadillac Coupe de Ville from Cal-Cit Bank, as it chanced—tested his knees, and looked around. There was a moment of relative silence except for the grumbling of the engines and the soughing of the prairie wind.

  Then there was the unmistakable harsh metallic sound of a shotgun shell being jacked into a chamber. A man in a black jumpsuit and wearing a black ski mask over his head came around the front of the car-trailer with a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun.

  Yojo, not yet intimidated, began, “Hey, whatta hell you—”

  To be drowned out by a bullhorned voice from above them. “NOW HEAR THIS! NOW HEAR THIS! YOU ARE SURROUNDED!”

  Another shotgun shell was jacked into another chamber; a second man, dressed and armed like the first, appeared above them on the lip of the embankment with the bullhorn. Behind them, yet a third shotgun was worked to bring a shell into its chamber.

  “REMAIN IN YOUR VEHICLES!” ordered the bullhorn. There was a scrambling back of unarmed Gypsies who had started to get out of their cars and pickups. “EXCEPT FOR THE NEW CADILLACS…”

  Yojo was poised on a knife-edge of resistance: he didn’t want to lose his Coupe de Ville. He didn’t want to lose face with his clan. But he didn’t want to lose any of his people to these madmen, either. His moment passed.

  “Goddammit!” he said as he stepped away from his Caddy.

  Within twenty minutes, the seven Cal-Cit cars were lined up on the shoulder of the road, empty of people and possessions, engines whispering. The man on the hilltop stayed there, watching for any approaching highway patrol vehicle. None showed. Where they had real luck was that no other travelers appeared on the road from either direction; of course it was early and the Gypsies themselves had chosen this route for its relative lack of use.

  The driver of the truck blocking their passage east climbed up into his cab and ran the truck forward so one lane of the highway was open. The man on the top of the hill just couldn’t resist his bullhorn one last time.

  “EASTWARD… HO!”

  The caravan moved. Yojo’s wife, Vera, cursed the car thieves through her open window in passing.

  “May your testicles wither! May your members be soft! May your wives cuckold you! May your children be born dead!”

  As the last car began to move, the other truck pulled around on the shoulder behind it. The driver jumped out to pull down the truck’s clanking metal ramp and fix it in place.

  Because occasional cars were passing in each direction now, the three men quickly stripped off their jumpsuits and ski masks to become Bart Heslip (front truck), Larry Ballard (hilltop), and Ken Warren (rear truck). They tossed their attack clothing and sawed-off shotguns into the sage along the shoulder of the road. Within fifteen minutes, all the cars were loaded, along with Bart’s and Ken’s two other Cadillacs they had kept hidden in the arroyo.

  “Think the Gyps’ll flag down the highway patrol?” asked Ballard a little nervously.

  Ken Warren shook his head. “Gno.”

  “Guess not, at that. ‘Hey, Officer—somebody stole our stolen cars!’”

  “And the closest town is two hours away,” said Bart Heslip. He was feeling mighty good about this coup he had engineered. A lot could have gone wrong, from the highway patrol showing up to a Gyppo buck trying to jump one of their shotguns. None had. He added, “Ken and I’ll be on the interstate inside of one hour.”

  Larry shook hands with them before they started off, yelling after them, “GO GETTEM, BEARS!” That had been Kathy Onoda’s invariable order as she sent them out into the field, and since her death it had become a DKA rallying cry.

  When the rented truck-trailer rigs had disappeared to the west and no traffic was in sight, Ballard dumped the discarded jumpsuits, ski masks, and shotguns into the predawn hole they had dug. In the unlikely event the Gyppos did blow the whistle, no incriminating evidence would be found on them.

  As he filled in the hole, artistically replanting over it an uprooted clump of rabbitbrush, the only observer was a ferruginous hawk kweee-e-eing down at him as it passed in its rocking, side-to-side flight half a hundred feet above his head.

  Finally, he recovered his rental car from beneath a pile of brush in the dry gulch, and turned its nose east toward the Mississippi, and Stupidville—and, hopefully, Yana.

  The recovery count in the Great Gypsy Hunt had just risen from fourteen to twenty-one.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  In those same predawn hours that the DKA boys dug the grave for the contraband black jumpsuits and artistically sawed-off shotguns Bart had bought in Chicago, Lulu Zlachi was practicing some artistry of her own on Staley in his room at Stupidville General Hospital. The rom would be descending on the place at first light, and the King had to be ready to receive them.

  “Hey, that stuff feels good,” exclaimed Staley.

  “It is good,” she said complacently. “A mix of St. Ives Swiss Formula Firming Mask and Johnson’s Baby Oil. Mineral clay—make you look good and beautiful.”

  “Make me look good and dead,” grinned Staley.

  Lulu smoothed more of the mixture onto his hands and face. “Good and almost dead,” she amended.

  “Close enough so they’ll believe I’m gonna go any minute?”

  “But not so close you can’t have a miraculous recovery.”

  Yes, it was a thin artistic line indeed that Lulu walked. Or rather, smeared.

  * * *

  At 9:00 A.M. a terrifically hung-over O’B, with only hazy recollection of the previous night’s events, was brought over from the four-cell town jail to the county courthouse and arraigned before Judge Konrad Spitz on charges of lewd and lascivious conduct and possession of pornographic materials.

  Thank God, there was Dan Kearny himself, wearing a suit and a tie and a sour expression. What did he have to be so sore about? O’B was the one with the headache, wasn’t he? And sundry itches that suggested the jail needed a good fumigating.

  Judge Spitz was a white-haired man with muttonchop whiskers and wire-frame glasses. He peered over them first at O’B and then at the two complaining officers.

  “All right, what do we have here?” he asked.

  Lloyd and Frank testified as to what had happened the night before. The whole courtroom was laughing—mostly drunks up from the tank, and their lawyers—when they had finished.

  Dan Kearny cleared his throat and said, “Your Honor, may I address the court?”

  “And you are, sir?”

  “Daniel Kearny from San Francisco, Your Honor. This man is in my employ. We are in town to try and recover a number of illegally obtained automobiles from the Gypsies in the encampment south of Steubenville. In his capacity as a private detective, Mr. O’Bannon recovered a car from a Gypsy in Florida…”

  Kearny explained away the pornographic material found in O’B’s trunk. O’B had been on the bluff, not to ogle Gypsy women, but to ogle Cadillac cars. It was unfortunate that…

  Et cetera.

  O’B then explained that he had inflated the doll so he would look like a harmless necker rather than a tough private eye, but he had dropped his flashlight and…

  Judge Spitz began, “From the look of your eyes, sir—”

  “You ou
ght to see them from in here, Your Honor.”

  Kearny looked stormy, but Judge Spitz allowed himself a small grin. Then he turned to Frank and Lloyd.

  “Gentlemen,” he said in a deceptively soft voice, “I know of no law against parking with an inflatable latex doll. Especially since you arrested Mr. O’Bannon outside the city limits.” He leaned forward and roared, “Outside your jurisdiction!” He SLAMMED down his gavel. “Dismissed.”

  Kearny and O’B crossed the street in silence to the Dew Drop In Coffee Shop (“Wake Up with Our Bottomless Cup”), where the waitress found them a booth in the corner so bright light couldn’t pierce O’B’s sunglasses. He tried a little levity.

  “What I really need, Reverend, is a Bloody Mary.”

  “Buy it on your own goddam time!” snapped Kearny.

  “Listen, Reverend, I saw a lot of Cadillacs out there last night. When the rest of the crew gets here—”

  “You won’t see them there this morning. It’s all over town—redheaded Irishman claiming he was repoman from San Francisco getting busted on the cliffs overlooking the Gyppo encampment! All the Cal-Cit cars are gone.”

  “Gone where?” asked O’B stupidly. His head was even worse.

  “Why the hell didn’t you just keep your mouth shut last night? You knew I’d be here to bail you out.”

  “I… don’t remember what I said,” admitted O’B sheepishly.

  “Well, you’ll have a lot of time to figure it out on the plane back to San Francisco,” said Kearny.

  “What do you mean?”

  “G’wan. Get out of here. Screw up somewhere else.” He suddenly stood, throwing some money on the table to cover their coffees. “I mean it, O’B. I’m sick of your goddam boozing.”

  Alone in the booth, O’B sipped his coffee and tried a little toast. One bite was all he could stomach.

  Hell, his drinking wasn’t that bad. Just social. He could take or leave it alone… couldn’t he?