He drove, following directions to the letter. The once bustling Youngstown downtown district loomed briefly to his left, a dreary, unlighted mile of skeletal buildings, sad sentinels awaiting a better day. It’d come, John Sebulsky had told him—fully one-third of the fifteen thousand jobs lost had been regained over the years following the crash, small industries were slipping unheralded into the green Mahoning Valley, tool-and-die shops, small plastics concerns, food distribution outfits, an automotive corporation, taking up the slack a little at a time, fifty jobs here, one hundred fifty there. Lockington was glad for this. Youngstown was a good city with good people, and it had trees. Lockington had a thing for trees.
He thought again of relocating—he’d thought of it often, so often that his mind turned to the subject unbidden, like an old horse that knows its way home. The Chicago he’d known and loved was gone and it’d never come back. There wasn’t much in Youngstown, but there was hope, a light at the end of the tunnel. In Chicago, the fucking tunnel had collapsed.
Clancy’s was a small white stucco building approximately four times the size of Lockington’s room at the New Delhi Motel, shabby on the outside, dim and smoky on the inside, a silent jukebox on its south wall, a dusty cigarette machine on its east wall, a sleek-black-haired Valentino-type behind its circular bar. There were a dozen barstools, four occupied by women, hard-faced, middle-aging things. Professionals look pretty much the same in Youngstown, Chicago, or Saigon—they have dollar signs stamped all over them. And the Valentino-type working the bar probably had a tongue like a whitewash brush, Lockington thought—Valentino-types usually do. There were half a dozen booths clustered along the west wall of Clancy’s and Lockington carried his double Martell’s in that direction. The young couple in the left-hand corner booth might have abided by the dictates of propriety when they’d first come in, but that was no longer the case. Their conduct failed to disturb Lacey Lockington to any great degree, but the likelihood of getting splashed did, causing him to veer sharply into the booth in the righthand corner.
It was 9:55 according to Lockington’s Japanese wrist-watch which hadn’t been set since Central Daylight Time had arrived in Chicago better than a month earlier. It was a twenty-dollar Yamahachi and it’d always been a free soul, ticking to the beat of a different drummer, so it could have been 10:55 Youngstown time, or 10:45, or 11:05. Rarely had time been of the essence in Lockington’s life—if he was late he apologized, if he was early he waited, and he let it go at that, Greenwich be damned.
He had time to kill and he spent the vigil drinking Martell’s cognac and considering the matter of the now late Billy Mac Davis. Davis had been a fanatic, his own doctrine had branded him as such, but, Jesus H. Christ in the morning, how fanatic can one man get? He’d blazed away at Lockington in the early evening on Interstate 80, and he’d been set to stage an encore at an Ohio Turnpike rest stop scant hours later. He’d had a following—more than fifteen thousand people had poured into Chicago Stadium to hear him rant and rave, and he’d had money—religious and political lunatics can raise millions with the twitch of an eyebrow. So why hadn’t one of his disciples handled the dirty work? Among Davis’s followers there must have been dozens of crackpots who’d have taken the assignment out of sheer dedication to the white supremacy cause. Or why hadn’t the job been handed to the Copperhead, an expert with skills readily available to LAON, according to Natasha Gorky. Yes, Virginia, there was a LAON, and Billy Mac Davis had been connected with it—his views had paralleled those attributed to LAON too closely for coincidence. They’d been essentially of the same fabric, the red-baiting and the blackhating, beliefs short of reason and devoid of intelligence. LAON as a body harped on the Communist threat and the individual Billy Mac Davis had gone after the blacks—it’d been six of one, half a dozen of the other. Lockington was a staunch conservative, but conservatism without brakes proves every bit as dangerous as unbridled liberalism—give either its head and you wind up with guys in long black overcoats hammering on your door at two-thirty in the morning.
Lockington sat in the booth at Clancy’s, shaking his head. There was a troublesome point here—Billy Mac Davis had been tagging him around the city of Chicago for days, he’d had innumerable opportunities to take a whack at Lockington, and he’d never made a move. But when Lockington had set sail for Youngstown, Ohio, Davis had jerked out all the stops. The Mafia—it could have killed Davis at its leisure, but it hadn’t. Yet, when Davis had lit out in pursuit of Lockington, the manure had hit the windmill. Lockington’s eyes narrowed—Davis had tried to keep him out of Youngstown, and the Mafia had thwarted Davis, obviously wanting Lockington to get there. Why? What the hell was in Youngstown?
He sensed movement to his left and he shook himself free of his thoughts, glancing up to see Pecos Peggy coming his way. She stopped at his booth, peering down at him, her blue eyes dark with intensity. She said, “Lacey Lockington, what took you so goddamned long?”