Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 by Trust Me on This (v1.1)

tried to picture it in her mind,
see whether or not there had been anything on the left lower comer of the
glass; but she just wasn’t sure. That hadn’t been part of her attention at the
time, and now she could visualize the Buick’s windshield just as readily with
the sticker as without.
                 The
guard was pleased when she appeared and handed him the wrinkled sticker. “Mr.
Harsch sent a memo down,” he told her, “said you probably wouldn’t be around
with this till tomorrow.”
                “I work fast.”
                 “Usually,”
the guard said, “you wouldn’t get your permanent sticker till next week, but
there’s no point giving you the temporary for just one more day, so . . .
Excuse me.”
                 Once
again, as the white guard had done on Monday, this one took a sticker from his
clipboard, put the clipboard atop her car, peeled off the sticker’s backing,
and leaned in through her open window to fasten it to the lower left comer of
her windshield.
                 The
permanent sticker.
     
                 Massa had liked a magnificent eleven of Jack’s
ideas this morning. If it weren’t for the new one and her goddamn sticker,
Jack’s world would be a reasonably all right place today, considerably less
Hieronymus Bosch than usual. And the ice cream diet, which continued to elude all
search parties; those were the two clouds on Jack’s horizon.
                 And
here came one of those clouds now, a lot closer than the horizon. “Well, looka
that,” Mary Kate said in mild amazement, and Jack looked up, and here came Sara
Joslyn herself, quartering her way through the squaricles. “Well, well,” Jack
said. “In fact, well, well, well.”
                 “I’d
say so,” said Mary Kate.
                 Sara
Joslyn. She went left, she went right, she advanced, she went off at an oblique
angle, she turned sharply, she came straight to Jack’s squaricle and entered
through the door space. “I got it,” she said. “Everything’s fixed.”
                Jack smiled upon her, he couldn’t
help himself. “And you came back today, rather than tomorrow.”
                 “Well,
I felt bad about making trouble.”
                 “And
quite rightly, too,” Jack said, as Ida Gavin entered the squaricle and said,
“Keely Jones.”
                “Ah, yes,” Jack said, swiveling
around to face her. “We are playing the tape of the swimming pool salesman’s
story from a loudspeaker truck in front of Miss Jones’s house.”
                “Not anymore,” Ida said. “She came
out and fired a shotgun at our truck.”
                 “Oh, nice!” Jack said, and Mary Kate
looked up with a sunny smile.
                 “Our
attorneys,” Ida said, “are right now negotiating with her attorneys.”
                 “Be
prepared, Ida,” Jack said, “to sky LAward soonest.”
                 “My
fuck-you suit is already packed,” Ida said. “I’ll keep you informed.” And she
marched from the squaricle.
                 Jack
turned again to the new one. Was it possible things would be going well now for a little while? Was it
possible this Sara Joslyn would eventually become part of the solution, instead
of part of the problem? “Your attitude is commendable, Sara,” he told her. “And
I shall reward it by overworking you.” He selected two sets of papers from his
desk and handed them to her. “I like to think of these as self-explanatory.”
                 “I
hope I think of them that way,” she
said, accepting the papers.
                But first, there was the unresolved
Case of the Murdered Man. What had happened there, finally? The Galaxy's extensive research library did
not include back issues of the local paper, so it wouldn’t be easy to go