When Clyde was on duty, he usually did his dining at places like the drive-through window at Wendy’s. No shift was complete without running a Dustbuster over the driver’s seat of his unit to pick up all the spilled salt, french-fry ends, and straggly bits of lettuce he had left behind.
But this was his last shift, possibly the last time he would ever wear a law-enforcement uniform, and it was Christmas Day, and nothing was going on. There weren’t enough cars on the road to make the necessary quorum for a road accident. And he had spent the last two days chasing Iraqis on numerous different modes of transport, at all hours of the night and day. So he decided to take his breakfast in sit-down luxury at Metzger’s Family Style Buffet in downtown Nishnabotna, which could be relied upon to have a fine spread laid out along its mighty banks of steam tables.
As he came down the street, he saw a red Corvette with vanity license plates reading BUCK in front of the restaurant. His first impulse was to gun the motor and get out of there; he’d almost rather park in a frozen barnyard and eat french fries behind the wheel than share Christmas dinner with Buck Chandler. But he mastered this urge to flee and parked next to the Corvette. Buck had parked it badly, angling across two parking spaces, and one corner of the bumper was actually rammed up against the high curb.
Metzger’s, Where Iowa Meets and Eats, had a big neon sign to that effect on its facade. After Clyde clambered up the high and precipitous stone curb, he involuntarily turned and looked up into the west, which is what most people around there did several times a day in lieu of tuning in a weather forecast. The sky in that direction consisted of a mass of dense and featureless gray extending hundreds of miles from south to north. A gauzy veil of high ice crystals had already drawn itself across the face of the sun, smudging it into a bright soft-focus splotch in the southern sky, within which the disk of the sun could be crisply resolved. The empty streets of Nishnabotna were illuminated by bright but bluish light that cast no shadows.
The big picture windows of Metzger’s Buffet were framed in synthetic green garlands and plastic holly, and thickly fogged by the vapor escaping from the steam tables. Clyde hauled the massive door open, jangling innumerable sleigh bells and detonating a cacophony of synthesized electronic carols from various motion-sensitive gewgaws that had been hung from the doorknob. The “Please Seat Yourself” sign was up; Metzger’s was running on a skeleton crew.
Clyde was pleased to find himself there. He had eaten so many meals and attended so many banquets and rehearsal dinners in this place that it made him feel more at home than he would have felt in his own house without Desiree.
It had been an active couple of days. Fazoul had told him, during their late-Saturday-night conference in Knightly’s hidey-hole, that the Iraqis had rented a truck, so Clyde had done a routine records search and discovered that one of the newly arrived “Jordanian” Ph.D. candidates had, in the last few months, somehow found the time to obtain a truck driver’s license. This person was none other than Abdul al-Turki, the wrestler with the cauliflower ears.
On Sunday, Clyde had taken it upon himself to follow al-Turki around town—not very difficult, given the size of his rig. He had to admit that the Iraqi handled it as if his postgraduate studies had been not in the field of chemical engineering but rather in advanced theoretical truck driving. Clearly the years since his ejection from international wrestling had been put to good use learning an honest trade.
But the chase had been short-lived. Al-Turki had driven the rig down to the Matheson Works on Sunday afternoon and swung it expertly through a narrow gate in the high brick wall that surrounded that vast property. The gate was promptly closed and locked behind him.
There were three possible exits from the Matheson Works. Clyde had slept in the station wagon near one of them, Fazoul in the Knightlys’ Mazda near another, and Knightly himself, in his capacious four-wheel-drive Suburban, near the third.