Marcy Browne had been sitting there in her cute little hooker costume for maybe thirty, thirty-five minutes when the blue Volvo showed up.
She had been listening to a country and western stationthe title of the last song being 'I Cheated With My Body But Not My Soul'because she planned on taking up line dancing very soon. Line dancing was becoming very big in the United States among people who fancied themselves real cowboys and cowgirls, though it was highly unlikely that a real cowboy would ever have done a dance called the Tush Push.
She was thinking about Tush Pushes, her mind drifting the way it always did when she pulled surveillance, when the blue Volvo eased past her on the opposite side of the street.
She spotted the guy driving immediately.
Same white-haired James Coburn kind of guy as in the photo Jill had given her. Same deep blue Volvo Jill had described.
She sat up good and straight, still feeling a little self-conscious in her hooker get-up, turned on the lights and prepared to make a U-turn.
The blue Volvo wasn't stopping at Jill's but it was slowing so the guy could look at the second floor and see that Jill was home.
She started into her U-turn.
This was great.
Real excitement.
The kind of thing that happened to TV private eyes all the time but that almost never happened to them in real life.
An honest-to-goodness tail job!
She was going to get his license number and then she was going to follow him and then
And then, because she'd been so excited she hadn't seen it coming, the gray Plymouth drove straight into her. Marcy had been halfway through her U-turn and
There was a great and calamitous ripping and rending of metal, a loud and ugly shattering of glass, and an angry blast of horn that could probably be heard half a mile away.
Only now did March realize what had happened. She'd swerved out into the traffic lane without seeing him coming.
He was big, truck-driver big, and mean, thug-mean, and he fairly tore off his door getting out of the car. He stalked up to her with ape-drooping arms and said, 'You little bitch, I should slap the shit out of you.'
It was enough to make her want to go back to community college and find herself a new line of work.