Abatangelo stood on the porch of a safe house in western Oregon, watching with foreboding as an old Harley-Davidson shovelhead thundered up the winding timber road. The motorcycle turned into the long, steep drive to the house, spewing gravel and dust as it charged uphill beneath the pine shade.
Behind him, footsteps approached from inside. Glancing over his shoulder, he watched as Shel materialized through shadow at the porch door screen.
“Kinda early,” she said, nodding down the hill.
“Isn’t it?” he replied.
Abatangelo recognized the bike. It belonged to a man named Chaney, one of the local throwbacks he’d hired for the beach crew. Not the brightest bulb, but he wasn’t alone in that. This was probably the sorriest bunch Abatangelo had put together in years, comprised of Chaney and his wanna-be biker pals, plus an unruly and utterly toasted squad of pillheads from Beaverton and a few swacked Chinooks who at least knew the area. It underscored how right it was that this should be the last catch ever, a final nest egg against the looming unknown.
Chaney took the final crest of the hill at full throttle. The dogs, three spirited black Labs, barked from inside the fenced-in backyard as the bike left behind the thick shade of the drive and entered the hardpan firebreak surrounding the house. Chaney came garbed in denims and cowboy boots and aviator shades, with a black watch cap pulled down low on his head. Maybe all of twenty years old. Give him three years, Abatangelo thought, he’ll be punching a clock for the timber companies, or whining because he isn’t, same as everybody else up here.
Revving the throttle three times, legs sprawled for balance, Chaney walked the hog up to the porch. Abatangelo waited till he killed the engine, then waited a little longer for the dust to settle. Pines on all sides of the house swayed in the morning breeze. In the distance a lumber truck broke the valley-wide silence, groaning in low gear up a steep grade.
“What an unexpected pleasure,” Abatangelo said, making sure Chaney caught his tone. This location wasn’t common knowledge, not among the hirelings. Only the Company captains knew where to find each other.
“Yeah, well,” Chaney said, clearing his sinuses of dust. “Eddy gave me directions.”
Eddy was Eddy Igo, the Company’s transportation chief. He was also Abatangelo’s closest friend.
“He’s in trouble,” Abatangelo guessed.
Chaney lifted his shades, rubbing his eyes. “We were out last night,” he said, “put a serious package on. Eddy was driving. Got pulled over on the lumber road to Roseburg. Trooper made Eddy get out and do the stunts. You can pretty much imagine how that went.”
“Roseburg,” Abatangelo said. “Kinda far afield. You were over there why?”
“Truck hunt,” Chaney said.
It was Eddy’s job to assemble the fleet of trucks they’d need to move the load off the beach to the remote barn they’d be using for temporary storage.
“Eddy in Roseburg now?”
“Drunk tank,” Chaney confirmed. “He was getting cuffed, said, ‘Tell the family for me, will ya? Have ’em make bail.’ I figured he meant you, ’cuz I got no idea where his people are.”
“And he gave you directions here.”
“Kinda vague and cryptic, you know, hush-hush,” Chaney said. “Not so the trooper caught on. Don’t think so, any rate. If I didn’t live around here, I’d a been clueless, too.”
Abatangelo looked off, scanning the forest as he thought things through. The story could be horseshit. The locals may have turned the boy already, sent him out here to lure the next man in. Me, he thought. Worse, Shel. There was no way to tell without taking the next step, heading into Roseburg. If the kid was telling the truth, Abatangelo knew he had to get Eddy out soon, before the law caught on to who he was.
“I appreciate your bringing the news,” he said finally. A display of gratitude was called for, in the event Chaney was being straight with him. “You want to come on in? Stretch out, maybe have a bite?”
Shel recognized this as a cue. Opening the screen door, she stepped on out to the porch, dressed in a tartan lumberjack shirt and blue-jean cutoffs, barefoot, her red hair still tousled from sleep. Chaney, blinking, broke into a lovestruck smile.
“Come on in, roughrider,” she said, extending a hand.
Chaney froze, like she was asking him to dance. Shel wiggled her hand and Chaney came to, struggling to disengage himself from his machine and staggering a little as he got his legs beneath him, trundling forward, up the wood-plank stair and onto the porch.
As Abatangelo headed into the bath for a fast shower and shave, Shel led Chaney back through the house toward the kitchen. The kid ambled along, inspecting the place as though everything in it possessed a veiled meaning. He lingered at the framed photographs on the walls, taken by Abatangelo during his travels with Shel- Tulum, Barcelona, Pataya, Trinidad, Vanuatu. There were both landscapes and portraits, black and white mostly, but color, too, even a few hand-tinted prints. Chaney, eyes wide, probed the corners of his mouth with his tongue as he walked picture to picture.
In the kitchen, Shel pointed to a chair at the pine table near the window and asked, “Hungry?”
Chaney wiped dust from under his eyes and nodded. “Got any tuna fish?”
It stopped her cold. “We’re talking breakfast here.”
Chaney shrugged. “Well, yeah.”
The tone in his voice, it reminded her, This is a boy. “Sure,” Shel said.
“Tuna fish and Thousand Island dressing. Slice of Swiss if you got it. You know, a sandwich.”
He pressed his palms together, as though to demonstrate what a sandwich was. Good God, Shel thought, gagging.
He sat down and shortly noticed a stack of prints and proof sheets Abatangelo had left out on the table. “Jeez,” he said, waving in the vague direction of the hallway, as though to include both groups of photographs in his remark. “These are like, you know, good.”
“Danny has an eye.”
“I mean, like professional good,” Chaney said. “You know, Time. Newsweek. Penthouse.”
Shel dumped a splotch of Thousand Island dressing into a bowl of canned tuna and started working the stuff with a fork. “He’s sold a few to the wire services, AP, that kinda thing.” She slathered the stuff onto two slices of white bread.
Chaney sniggered and sat back. “Yeah right. And this load coming in, what’s that?” He crossed his arms, snorting as he nodded toward the pictures. “Probably bought all this shit at some kinda… I dunno, sale.”
Shel put down the fork, wiped her hands, strode across the room and leaned down till she was nose to nose with him.
“Look at me,” she said, tapping the bridge of her nose with her finger. “You got something you wanna say?”
Chaney leaned back a little, glance jittering from one eye to the other. “I said it already.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” Shel straightened. “If not, let’s hear it now. All of it.”
Chaney gnawed his lip. “What I meant,” he said quietly, “is, like, it’s a good idea, you know? Make the place look artsy. Like that’s what you guys do.”
“It is what we do,” Shel said. “Remember that.” She stormed back to the counter, threw his sandwich together and served it to him with a jar of pickles and a can of RC cola. “Chow down, Brown,” she said, then headed for the bath.
Abatangelo was finishing up, shaving himself, his lathered face reflected in a hand-wiped circle of steamless mirror. Shel sat down behind him on the edge of the tub. He was naked from his shower, dampness clinging to the hair along his legs, droplets dotting his back where he’d missed with the towel.
He glanced over his shoulder and nodded toward the kitchen. “You trust him?”
“He’s hell-bent on putting my self-control to work, I can tell you that.”
“That could be stuff.”
“It’s not stuff, believe me. It’s him. Anyway, yeah, sure, what’s not to trust? If the locals already rolled the kid, they’d have come up here themselves. You’re the head man. Why wait?”
“Always looks good in the papers,” he said, “you take down the whole crew.”
“You are the whole crew,” she said. “Be real. They get greedy, especially using that kid out there, they risk tipping you off. You close the whole thing down, poof, you’re gone. Then what’ve they got? Eddy on a drunk driving beef.”
Abatangelo rinsed his razor beneath the spigot. “You’re probably right.”
“Which leaves us where?”
With a washcloth he wiped away the last of the shaving cream. “If we’re lucky,” he said, “Eddy’s already been sprung and he’s wandering around downtown Roseburg.”
“You feeling lucky?”
Since the decision last spring to roll the dice, go ahead with this final run, fuckups had grown routine. The buzzards of bad luck were circling.
“Not particularly,” he admitted. He went into the next room, sat on the bed and pulled on a T-shirt, a pair of socks.
Shel followed him in. “Let me take care of Eddy,” she offered. “Go in, make his bail.”
Abatangelo got to his feet, stepped into his pants. “What makes you less of a risk than me?”
“Oh come on, Danny, don’t.”
Shel’s role in the Company was limited to playing the nice girl, the friendly new neighbor. She baby-sat the safe houses, took care of the dogs and gardens, finessed the locals. She was a brave, convincing actress, a sterling liar, but she handled no product. She never put up seed money, never optioned shares on a load. That was Danny’s bit.
“I’ve got a better idea,” he told her.
The man’s name was Blatt, a private investigator with no address but a Roseburg post office box. Most mornings he could be reached at a luncheonette named Brandy’s on the outskirts of town. They learned this from a local defense lawyer they contacted anonymously.
While Abatangelo waited in the car, Shel met Blatt in the restaurant. The place was paneled in knotty pine turned smeary and dark from years of grill grease and smoke. She sat with a cup of bitter coffee while, across the table, Blatt feasted on rheumy eggs, two rasps of charred bacon, and hash browns that looked like a fried disk of soap shavings. The man wore hiking boots and jeans, with a gabardine sport coat over a Western shirt, complete with bolo tie. He was medium height and wiry, with knobby hands and dirty nails. It was difficult to tell, from the way his long, thinning blond hair swirled around his head, whether he’d made a bad job of a comb-over or just been caught in the wind.
Shel explained what she wanted. Blatt nodded as he listened, then said, “Gonna cost you a thousand dollars. On top of his bail, which is two-fifty. That’s standard on a DWI up here.” He stabbed at an egg yolk with a wedge of toast.
“A grand,” she said. “A little steep, don’t you think? That your hourly fee?”
“Make it two thousand.” Blatt, still chewing, wiped his lips with his napkin, sat back, swallowed, licked his teeth. “Cash, of course.”
Shel declined to make further protest for fear of the stakes rising again. “Where’s this get done?”
“The money? Right here.” He unwrapped a mint-flavored toothpick. “Do business here all the time. Look weird if we went somewhere else.”
Weird to who, Shel wondered, glancing around the one-room luncheonette. The waitress was flirting with the cook. The other patrons, three lumpy middle-aged men, looked more like lonesome uncles than law enforcement.
“Excuse me a minute,” she said, getting up from the table. She walked to the counter, picked up a discarded newspaper, and headed to the can. Once inside she locked the door, stood at the sink and counted out $2,250 from her purse, wrapping it inside the paper. God help us all if this is a huge mistake, she thought. Tightening the fold of the paper around the money, she headed back out to the table where she sat back down and set the paper between her and Blatt.
“Humor me, if you don’t mind,” she said.
She accepted a refill on her coffee and took two lingering sips. Finally, she rose and collected her purse. “Please let Ed know I’ll meet him at the bus station.” She left the newspaper behind.
Down the block, Abatangelo watched from the car as Shel exited the luncheonette. Squinting in the sunlight, she walked to the curb, rested her hand on a lamppost and removed her shoe, as though to shake out a pebble. That was the sign.
He put the car in gear and headed for the interstate. An hour and a half later he was in the Medford bus station, buying himself three packs of gum and copies of Esquire and Photography and Sports Illustrated, then retreating to one of the long wood benches in the lobby for the four-hour wait till the bus from Roseburg rolled in, hopefully with Shel and Eddy on it.
From time to time he got up, stretched his legs, ambled about the shabby premises, scouting among the bedraggled Greyhounders for anybody who might be undercover, checking the parking lot for unmarked cars. Time crept past, giving him more than ample opportunity for reflection.
In Bangkok the preceding spring, Steve Cadaret had watched all his old contacts disappear. Rumor suggested the vanishings were the handiwork of certain officers in the Royal Thai Army, who were not-so-secretly taking over the trade, running off the minor players. It wasn’t till the wane of the dry season Cadaret finally tracked down a new source he felt he could trust. The price, though, to be transferred between Hong Kong accounts, was exorbitant, forty points on the tonne over anything he’d heard of before.
“Only the DEA will offer you better,” he was told. “Make your decision quickly. Soon the rains will start.”
Once a suitable ship was found and rendered seaworthy, the Company’s skipper, Jimmy Byrne, set sail with a crew of marginally sober Australians, heading up the South China Sea to pick up the load. He made one communication, just one, to Abatangelo- to explain that the engineer he’d hired to wire and tune the radio had burnt out the capacitors. To make matters worse, the backup could only reach high frequency ARRL bands, the ones monitored by the Coast Guard. Byrne signed off promising in code that he was coming in to the Oregon coast at the appointed time, but he’d be radio-silent the rest of the way.
And so we sit, Abatangelo thought, waiting for a shipment from a source we don’t know, en route aboard a ship we can’t contact. As if all that weren’t bad enough, there were the stateside foul-ups, Eddy’s little problem with drink only the most recent. Joey Bassinger, the Company’s paymaster, had left twenty grand in the trunk of a rental car. Mickey Bensusan, in charge of distribution, couldn’t whip his wholesalers out of their lethargy; rumors of a grand jury in Portland had people spooked. Add to all that the lamentable beach crew, and you had a damn good recipe for disaster.
The bad turn in luck underscored the intelligence of getting out. The winds had changed, and it wasn’t just Nancy Reagan and her berserk crusade to spare suburban teens the perils of pot. It wasn’t just the competition from the sensemilla farmers along California’s north coast, either, them and their mad botanist partners. The Mob had reclaimed the dope trade with a fury. No longer content to limit themselves to coke and skag, where the margins were better, they were perfectly content to blunder in where they had no place and glut the market with mediocre weed. On top of that there were blowback Cubans in the thick of it, too, not to mention the Marielitos, the Vietnamese, the Colombians, even the Mexican inheritors of the old candelilla contraband routes. Everybody was muscling for a piece of the prize. Greed ran wild, with a grisly streak of menace trailing behind. No more room for jokers like Danny Abatangelo. The era of the wildcat smuggler had played itself out.
Not that getting out was the snap the uninitiated made it out to be. First, it took time to work the money right so you weren’t a sitting duck. Instant millionaire? Do tell. Second, you couldn’t just strand your friends. Eddy, Joey, Mick, not to mention Cadaret and Byrne- he owed them, which was what this whole last run was all about: Put a little lucre in everybody’s pockets, take the bitter taste out of their mouths as they tried to figure out an answer to, So what am I supposed to do now?
And not just them. Walk away wrong, he knew, leave too suddenly, it smacks of betrayal, the rumors begin. Wholesalers, not the most enlightened breed of cat on the planet, they get edgy. If any of them got in a jam down the road, Abatangelo might well be the very first guy they handed up to save themselves. Especially if they were of a mind to stay in the trade. Can’t burn a bridge that’s no longer there. And just because he hadn’t been in the business for a while, that didn’t mean the feds wouldn’t be obliging. That was the beauty, so to speak, of conspiracy. Statute of limitations stretched to infinity, you were always good for a nailing. Hell, if anything, once you were out, you were the perfect fall guy. Fucking useless to everybody.
None of which, in the final analysis, was his chief concern. He’d done his best to keep Shel at a reasonable arm’s length from the business, but there was no way to keep her completely out, not and still be together as much as their need required. Regardless, the subtler nuances of her involvement would prove largely academic if the hammer came down.
Shel was on her fourth packet of Necco wafers when Eddy staggered into the Roseburg station a mere five minutes before the Medford bus was due to leave. Steady now, she told herself, getting up, strolling over, looking past him through the glass doors to see who might be following. Rising on tiptoes, she kissed his cheek and whispered, “You sad, sorry motherfucker, don’t you ever worry us like that again.”
“I am so sorry,” Eddy moaned, pressing the heels of his hands against his temples. He was a tall, hulking man, a mechanic’s son. Now he was stooped, raw from lack of sleep and wildly hung over. “Stupid. Stupid. Shoulda fucking known.”
She pulled on his arm. “Move now, repent later. We got a bus to catch.”
It was almost dark by the time the bus arrived in Medford. Abatangelo watched as Shel and Eddy stumbled out with sour, bleary expressions and stiff legs. Spotting them, he ran to fetch the car, and pulled up along the curb just as they came out through the station’s glass doors.
They hopped in, he made a few countersurveillance moves- a quick trip down a one-way alley; a sudden turn then a dead stop, waiting to see what followed- then headed for the interstate, checking the rearview constantly until, a half hour into the drive, he felt reasonably certain they were okay.
“Didn’t mean to create an adventure,” Eddy said from the back. He chafed his hands, his tone contrite. “By the way, just in case it makes you feel better- that guy you hired, he sprung me before John Law-di-da got around to my prints.”
“That’s what he got paid for,” Abatangelo said.
They decided to leave Eddy’s car where he’d been arrested, for fear of it being watched. They stopped in Grant’s Pass, bought a used car with cash, and Eddy went his separate way, promising to link up the following afternoon for final preparations on the incoming load. Once Shel and Abatangelo were alone in the car, she asked him, “You sure it wouldn’t be smarter just to call this whole thing off?”
Abatangelo shook his head. “Not with Byrne coming in. I don’t show up, he’s stuck out there at sea.”
“I know the radio’s a problem. But just one call, fill him in?”
“Not the way things’ve gone. Coast Guard snags the signal, may as well send up flares.”
Shel undid her seat belt and slid across the seat, nudging her hip against his. “This one’s got me spooked.”
Abatangelo turned to kiss her hair. “I can put you on a plane in the morning,” he said. “Head back to San Francisco, hang out till we wrap this up.”
Shel chuckled miserably. “Like that’d make me any less scared.” She reached inside her shirt, withdrew the amethyst hanging around her neck. Staring through the windshield, she rubbed the wine-colored stone with her thumb. “You gave me a chance to walk away two years ago, remember?”
“You’re being stubborn.”
“Get a grip, mister. I was born stubborn.”
They reached the safe house just before midnight. Remembering that Eddy had given Chaney directions in the presence of a state trooper, albeit “vague and cryptic,” they drove past the entrance twice, peering through the trees, looking for unknown cars, men hiding beneath the pines. They killed the motor, listening for the dogs. Nothing. Turning into the drive finally, they scaled the hill, pulled to a stop in front of the porch, and waited- for a rush of lights, voices screaming, Get out of the car, men wielding guns jumping out of the dark on every side. A wave of relief swept through them as the only sound that greeted them was a spate of barking from the dogs, their heads bobbing into view atop the tall wood fence.
The following night, Abatangelo heard out his lieutenants and made his decision. Maybe the boat’s sunk, they said. Maybe Byrne never even picked up the load, maybe the boat got boarded by pirates in the South China Sea.
“I’ve known Cap Byrne a long time,” Abatangelo responded. “He said he was sailing on home.”
He paid off half his crew, told them the catch was off, then in secret assembled the rest on the beach to wait. The wind was high and the sand as hard as asphalt. Eddy’s trucks waited along the access road, his drivers stationed at the edge of the pines. The beach crew readied their zodiacs near the surf, shifting foot to foot to stay warm, the bikers passing out Desoxyn, the Chinooks with their pints of whiskey. Everybody stared across the cold, dark waves.
Chaney was there, and a few of the Beaverton gang had started baiting him into ridiculous posturings. Abatangelo listened in, and envisioned one of the Beaverton boys pitching the boy off the zodiac into the sea, just to teach him a lesson on who not to lie to. Abatangelo ambled into the circle, made a round of bracing wisecracks, then drew Chaney aside.
“You look like you’re about to toss your lunch,” he said.
The boy’s skin was the color of bacon grease. He had waggling, bloodshot eyes.
“I get seasick easy,” he said.
“I’ll say. You’re on the goddamn beach. Want a smoke?”
The kid wiped his eyes free of sand and shrugged. “Won’t help.”
Abatangelo rendered a fatherly nudge toward the Chinooks. They at least would have the decency to ignore him. “You don’t have to impress anybody but me,” he said.
Just then a bullhorn voice blared from deep in the pines. It ordered every man to stand in place. DEA agents poured out of the trees aiming riot guns and AR-15s as flares arched over the moonless sand. A helicopter with a searchlight came roaring at low altitude around the point.
Men scattered. There was madness, shouting, another warning through the bullhorn. Gunfire.
Abatangelo scoured the beach, found an opening in the trees and ran. A hundred yards inside the pine forest, he found himself caught in the helicopter’s searchlight. In short order he was staring down the barrel of a Mossberg scattergun aimed by a fright-eyed agent.
He got marched back to the shoreline, lined up beside the others already collared, and pushed to his knees. Told to lie facedown, he locked both hands behind his head, inhaling sand. All around him, the rest of the men- Eddy, Joey, Mick, Chaney and the rest of the beach crew- all of them succumbed in like fashion while the lawmen, giddy from adrenaline and spite, went about their business, dispensing the epithets Asshole, Dirtbag, Dipshit.
Back at the safe house, Shel brought the dogs inside, not wanting them in the way in case she had to do a runner through the yard. She was loading boxes, packing up clothes and cameras and Abatangelo’s pictures, when one of the dogs pricked up her ears and whined.
She launched herself out the back, bolted through the yard. She had her hands on top of the redwood fence when from behind an agent threw the full force of his body into hers, pinning her against the fence to tackle her. Her face slammed hard against the wood, leaving behind a smear of blood. Her nose turned to red wet putty. She tried to kick free as they hit the ground, but the agent dropped his knee down hard into her solar plexus. All the air in her lungs vanished. Her brain locked in a spasm of pain and the night sky turned bright white.
Her vision returned with her breath, by which time the agent had her up and cuffed. “Reasonable force,” he said through his teeth. “Fleeing suspect. Just so we’re clear.” Her knees buckled as he prodded her back inside.
The place was swarming now. Animal control was marching off with the dogs, leaving behind a convention of straightlaced assholes in blue windbreakers interspersed with longhair narcs. The agent who caught her eye, though, was a woman. Shel knew what that meant. She got pulled into a bedroom and nobody bothered to close the door. On the contrary, a couple of agents stood in the doorway to watch, others peeking in from time to time, grinning, staring, popping their gum.
Rather than uncuff Shel and let her undress herself, the female agent did the job. Shel’s bloody shirt got pulled open and drawn down to her wrists. Her jeans came next, all the way off. The pockets were pulled inside out, her socks checked, her bra unhooked and the cups inspected. When nothing was found, the female agent turned to her crowd.
“Gentlemen?” she inquired.
No one bothered to leave. The female agent turned back to Shel. Pulling a latex glove from her pocket, she squeezed her hand into it and said, “Squat, dear.”
In the hours that followed, Abatangelo, still on the beach, learned in snatches overheard from passing agents what happened at the house.
“She was lovely,” one said. “Blushed like a newlywed.”
They were goading him, he realized. It’d suit them just fine if he got to his feet; they’d gladly hammer him back down into the sand. Not wanting to give them that sort of satisfaction, there was nothing to do but lie there. He vowed to make it right somehow, at the same time wondering, as he would for the next 593 days through trial and his 100 months in prison, what he might have done differently. Shel would blame herself, it was her nature. He wanted to tell her the blame was his, not hers, he’d had a bad feeling all along but didn’t act on it, he’d let his loyalty to Byrne cloud his judgment. He wanted to tell her a hundred things, anything, just for the chance to see her again, and knew he would spend the rest of his days, if need be, trying. It would define the rest of his life, that vow, that fear. To see her again. To make it right.
Two agents pulled him to his feet and prodded him across the sand to the transport wagon where they posed him for his in-custody Polaroid. The agent aiming the camera squinted through the viewfinder and said, “Flash us some teeth, lover.”
The guard who walked Abatangelo from sign-out to the forward gate cupped his hands to his mouth for warmth, cringing from the cold. An eastbound storm unleashed forefront winds across the high desert. Repeated flaws of cold air sang through the razor wire and hammered the prison’s concrete walls.
Reaching the gate, the guard murmured, “Watch yourself, now,” through clenched teeth. Abatangelo thanked him, lowered his head and stepped through the opening. The guard locked the gate behind him, spun around and hustled back up the walkway to the warmth of the prison.
Abatangelo headed down the long walkway for the parking lot, carrying a brown paper sack filled with the few belongings he’d decided to bring with him.
First and foremost was the old Bell & Howell 35 mm SLR the prison chaplain had given him, fitted with a Canon lens. Abatangelo had used the camera working on the prison newsletter, taking portraits of the men up for parole hearings, or the recent high school graduates he’d tutored for the GED. It had felt good, felt right, having a camera in his hands again.
As for books, he’d donated his to the prison library; only a handful were coming with him: Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, and five collections of photographs: one by Ben Shahn from the Depression; one by Henri Cartier-Bresson; two by Susan Meiselas, one titled Carnival Strippers, the other Nicaragua; and the last by James Nachtwey, Deeds of War. Six books, one philosopher, four photographers: his heroes, his hope.
There were letters in the sack, too, though not many, a sort of greatest hits collection. Only Eddy Igo had kept up the pace beginning to end. Shel had written at least once a week for the first five years, then it tapered off a little for the next two. Abatangelo had detected an encroaching depression in what she’d written. He’d urged her to see a doctor. Then, at year seven, the letters stopped.
After that, he had his own bouts of depression to deal with. The sickness unto death, Kierkegaard called it. Overall, he supposed he’d been lucky to have the newsletter to work on, the young mutts to tutor, the chaplain to argue with. Funny what passed for luck inside a prison.
Then, two weeks ago, a letter appeared. For the first time in three years she’d written. The sight of her handwriting, it felt like mercy. He’d read and reread the letter over and over- it was so worn from handling, he’d taped the creases so it wouldn’t come apart in his hands. This letter did not get carried in the sack. It remained in its original envelope, tucked inside the breast pocket of his jacket. He felt the pressure of it against his chest, just over his heart.
Reaching the edge of the parking lot, he spotted the man with whom he’d made arrangements for transport to Tucson. Leaning against a mud-caked Checker, the man had long black hair combed straight back, revealing a dark, pockmarked face and an oft-broken nose. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. Abatangelo stepped forward and said, “Man of the hour.”
The driver smiled through his cigarette smoke and opened the cab door. Abatangelo ducked inside. The interior reeked of tobacco and hair oil, the heater blasted foul hot air. A necklace fashioned of wolves’ teeth and hawk feathers hung from the rearview mirror.
The driver put the cab in gear and circled away from the prison. Reaching his hand across the front seat, he said, “Got your kickout?”
Abatangelo reached into his pant pocket, withdrew his federal release check and asked for a pen. He endorsed the check and slipped it into the waiting hand. “Thank you,” he said.
The driver pocketed the check then handed back a plain white envelope. Inside, Abatangelo found a budget fare one-way air ticket from Tucson to San Francisco, plus cash.
“You’re an honest man,” he said after counting the money.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Abatangelo met the man’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Nothing,” he said, pocketing the envelope. “It’s all here, I’ll need it. Thanks.”
The driver coughed and shook his head. “How far you think that mouth will get you?”
Not free ten minutes, Abatangelo thought. Already this. “Look,” he said, “it was a poor choice of words, I admit. If it’ll help, I apologize.”
The driver tapped his temple with his forefinger. “The prison’s up here, my man. You ain’t out till you’re out up here.”
They drove in silence to the federal highway junction, then south between Coronado Forest and the Peloncillos. The oncoming storm struck in time over Greasewood Mountain to the west, and with typical desert swiftness surged overhead within minutes, showering the highway with hail and rain before journeying east, accompanied by a ghostly wind. Abatangelo rolled down the window, put his face in the storm like a little kid. The worst of it passed as suddenly as it had come. In the ensuing calm he asked if they could pull over.
“Don’t tell me you gotta pee.”
“This won’t take long,” Abatangelo assured him.
The driver sighed and slowed the car onto the berm. Abatangelo opened the door, collected the 35 mm and got out. Hiking his collar about his neck, he crossed the wet slick highway at a trot. Twenty yards beyond the asphalt he stopped, lowered his collar and idly chafed his hands. He studied the desert plain, stubbled by frost-blackened cacti and easing into low chaparral. Mt. Rayburne stood in the distance, snowcapped and shrouded in a filmy haze. To the south, the Dos Cabezas Mountains lay misted in faraway rain. The desert floor wallowed in storm shadow, with tails of sand kicked up by crosswinds.
The mere fact the view spread wide before him, unbroken by walls, free of razor wire, it shuddered up a profound relief and he found himself taking slow, smiling breaths. Lifting the Bell & Howell to his eye, he set the focus on infinity and snapped three frames, to remind himself forever of this moment. Turning left and right, he shot the rest of the roll impulsively, focusing on anything and everything that loomed suddenly before him, letting it clarify in the hot spot, triggering the shutter. Lowering the camera finally, he took a long, deep breath of the rain-tinged air, then capped his lens and turned back toward the highway.
Once he was back inside the cab, the driver turned around. The man’s eyes were a vivid blue, deep set in a way that enhanced the pockmarks on his cheeks.
“Listen,” he said, “I came on a little rough back there. You know, it’s just… not every guy I pick up at that place has a brain in his head.”
“It’s not a problem,” Abatangelo said, putting the camera away. He turned to peer out across the desert again.
“I’m not a young man anymore,” the driver said.
“Me neither.”
The driver took a moment to study him. “You been in what? Time, I mean.”
“A hard ten.”
The man whistled. “Well, now.” He regarded Abatangelo a bit more mindfully. “That’s a heavy beef. What they tag you for?”
“Pot,” Abatangelo said. Sensing this explained too little, he added, “We brought it in from Thailand.”
The driver put the cab in gear. “Bring it in from the moon for all I care.” He checked his mirror and eased back onto the highway. “What happened, you take the fall so your crew could skate?”
Smart man, Abatangelo thought. “Nobody got to skate,” he advised.
Shel and the others had served three and a half in exchange for his ten. It was his choice. His plea. The feds jumped at the chance to claim they’d taken down the main man. Their case had developed evidence problems, they’d gotten arrogant and sloppy. Not so sloppy they’d lose, but bad enough Abatangelo’s offer sounded like a bargain. Their snitch- neither the odious private investigator Blatt nor the wanna-be biker Chaney, as it turned out, but one of the Beaverton pillheads- was working a second grand jury out of Portland. The agents tried to hide that fact, and got caught in the snare of their own lies. It was fun to watch them squirm on the stand. Pity it provided no more leverage than it had.
The driver rolled down his window and spat. “Ten fucking years. Out here no less. Over smokes.”
“Yeah, well, it was a lot of smokes,” Abatangelo offered. “I’d been at it awhile.”
“Which means what, you deserved it?”
They stared at each other in the mirror.
“No,” Abatangelo said. “That’s not what I said.”
The driver held his gaze a moment longer, then offered a comradely laugh. Lifting his head, he intoned, “ ‘While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.’ ”
Abatangelo smiled.
“That funny?”
“I wasn’t expecting to hear cabbies quote Lenin till I got to San Francisco.”
The driver eased down into the front seat a little, as though finally convinced he could relax. “We got a chunk of time to Tucson. Settle back. You want, I can turn on the radio.”
“No thanks,” Abatangelo said. “I’m enjoying the quiet, actually. Prison’s a noisy place.”
“I remember,” the driver said. He reached into his pocket, withdrew the kickout check, and read the name. “Abbot’n’Jell-O?” he said.
“Nice try.” Abatangelo recited the name, the driver read along, then he tucked the check back into his pocket. “That’s Italian,” the cabby said.
“So goes the rumor.”
“It mean anything? In English?”
Abatangelo regarded again the wolves’ teeth and hawk feathers hanging from the rearview mirror. “You mean like Crazy Horse, Little Wolf, something like that?”
“Whatever.”
Abatangelo wondered at the man’s curiosity. People had the strangest notions about Italians, especially out here, the middle of nowhere.
“The prefix ab,” he said, “it usually means ‘down.’ And angelo- ”
“Means ‘angel,’ ” the driver guessed.
“It never got spelled out to me in so many words, but- ”
“Fallen angel,” the man said, excited, like he was a game show contestant. He uttered a snarly little laugh. “That fucking perfect or what? A hard ten for Mr. Fallen Angel.”
At the airport they drove around to the departure gates and pulled to the curb. Abatangelo stared out at the gleaming modern structure of metal and glass. Skycaps manned their consoles. Travelers bustled in and out. He found himself strangely paralyzed. Shortly, he realized the cabby was staring at him.
“Scared?” he asked.
“So it would seem,” Abatangelo replied.
“Normal enough.” The man smiled. “Crowds here aren’t that bad. At the other end, it’ll be worse. Park yourself in the can if you have to. Wait it out. It passes.”
“Thank you.” Abatangelo gathered up his paper sack and got out and came around to the driver’s side window. “How do I look?”
He’d shorn his hair close in prison, a gesture to self-denial, and he looked like a large, savvy monk. Complicating the picture was his new suit, received only yesterday by mail. It still bore the creases from its packaging. Worse, he had on nothing but a white T-shirt underneath. The family friend who’d sent the suit had forgotten to send a shirt along.
After a cursory up and down, the driver said, “Screw how you look. How do you feel?”
Abatangelo uttered a small, nervous laugh. “First time thrown in the pool. Multiplied by a thousand.”
“A word to the wise?”
“Feel free.”
“You seem the brainy type.”
Abatangelo wondered where this was going. “Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. Listen. I’ve known guys like you, they come outta prison a little too ready to just keep on keeping on. Hole themselves away, read everything they get their hands on. Never quite get the flow of being on the outside. You follow?”
“Yes. I do.”
The driver tapped at his temple again. “Just because you can think deep thoughts, that don’t mean they ain’t got you right where they want you.”
“Point taken,” Abatangelo said.
“Lash out. Fuck parole, break the chain. It takes some practice, remind yourself you’re a free man again.” The driver’s eyes were intense, but his voice was calm. “Got yourself an old lady? In Frisco, I mean.”
The question caught Abatangelo off-guard. He felt the pressure of Shel’s letter against his chest. “As a matter-of-fact,” he began, but then found himself unable to finish.
Putting a fresh cigarette between his lips but not lighting it, the cabby reached up behind his visor and from beneath a rubber band removed a business card and a keno pencil. He scrawled a name and address on the back of the card.
“You’re due,” he said. “I get up your direction now and again. Why’s a long story. This girl here, Mandy’s her name. I’m not saying she’s a knockout, but you gotta make sure the pump still pumps. Don’t think it over, don’t contemplate the fallout, just call. Go. Fuck her till she cries. You’re a free man. You owe yourself. They stole ten years from you. Steal them back.”
Abatangelo accepted the card and read it. There was a Tenderloin address beneath the words MANDY PODOLAK, HOLSTEIN HOTEL. He pictured a woman large, plain, and nonjudgmental. A long story.
“I’ll tell her you send your best,” he said.
“Don’t bother.”
The driver put the cab in gear and drove off. His arm appeared from the window in a final salute as he merged with outbound traffic. Once he disappeared, Abatangelo dropped the card into the nearest rubbish bin.
He reached into his coat pocket, felt the envelope with Shel’s letter inside. No return address. That was coy. And she’d written about her new life, the man in that life, some guy named Frank, blah blah blah. The good news was, she didn’t sound like she was any too thrilled about the guy. And she’d thought enough to keep track of Abatangelo’s release date after three years of silence. That meant something.
It meant she wanted him to find her. Find her, or die trying.
Frank awoke with fragmentary images of the night’s final dream trailing away. The last thing he remembered was sitting in an empty room, alone at a wood plank table, eating tripe with his fingers.
Sitting up, he tested his balance at the edge of the bed. Why is it, he wondered, I do crank and up pop the weird little nightmares about food. His skin felt like it’d been stretched across a larger body then allowed to shrink. You’re a walking road map of your own sick impulses, he thought. Where was Shel? Where was his shiny white nurse?
He rose to his feet, tottering a moment, then felt his way toward the door. The morning was quiet, except for the intermittent howl of wind funneling between the house and the barn. He made his way to the guest room. Shel went in there sometimes to have a smoke or read when she couldn’t sleep.
He turned on the light, smelling a faint reminder of her shampoo. A pair of sweatpants and two mismatched wool socks lay scattered across the floor. The bed was unmade, the window open. She liked the window open at night. It had something to do with the stint she’d pulled at the FCI in Dublin.
Just then his head erupted in pain, like his eyes were exploding from the back. He put his hands to his face and dropped to the floor. On his knees, head to the floorboards, he waved his hand overhead trying to find something to grip. After a moment he gave up, struggled to his feet and charged blind down the hallway toward the kitchen.
He forced his head beneath the cold water spigot. Violent chills broke across his back, he bolted straight and roared. Forgoing a towel, he shook his hair and let the droplets fly. Stopping to catch his breath, he felt the water drip onto his naked shoulders. One hand gripping the edge of the sink, he slid to the floor.
Where was Shel?
He found himself revisiting his dream- the cavernous room, the bare plank table, the bowl of steaming tripe. The slithering gray meat in his hands, the spicy fecal odor, it came to him so vividly the skin of his fingers felt sticky and warm. He fought back a surge of nausea and wiped his face with the soft of his arm.
Where’s Shel, he thought. I need my long-stemmed nurse.
He returned to the bedroom and ransacked his things till he came across the small white pharmacist’s envelope in which he kept his secret daily ration of Thorazine. He hid the rest of his stash in the tool chest tucked behind the seat of his truck, where Shel was unlikely to happen upon it. Like any longtime meth enthusiast, he and Thorazine were pals. It tamed the shakes and spooks. Valium was good, too, for the shakes at least. That’s all they ever gave you at Emergency. It wasn’t so much the shakes, though, as the spooks that gave Frank a problem.
He regretted having to hide these things from Shel. She believed in: Good Things Happen To Those Who Stick With It. And it was not a bad philosophy, he supposed. She’d seen him through hell and more, stuck with it in ways he knew he didn’t deserve. And for that, he loved her. Loved her hard. If she didn’t quite love him back, well hey. No big thing. We’re all adults here.
With five hundred mills in his system he sank into a fitful sleep. Waking sometime after noon, he rose and made the same path to the guest room he’d made earlier. This time, Shel was there. And his heart skipped at the sight of her.
She sat on the bed cross-legged, her red hair hanging loose about her shoulders, a cigarette in her hand. She was dressed in a T-shirt three sizes too large, her arms sticking out of the billowing sleeves like a little girl’s. She wore sweatpants, too, a pair of heavy socks. The same pants and socks he’d seen on the floor earlier.
“How long you been home?” he asked.
She turned to look at him. Her eyes were beginning to betray her age. They were too serious for the tomboy face. She’d started putting henna in her hair, too, to ward off the gray. All in all, though, she remained a looker. Frank, who was ten years younger, returned her gaze and thought, I need you. Every minute, every day, I need you. You’re all I got.
“I woke up, you were gone,” he said.
“That’s not true. I’ve been here all morning.”
“Don’t do this,” Frank said.
Shel cocked her head. “Do what?”
“Make out like I’m nuts.”
“Frank, what’s going on?”
“You weren’t here.”
She turned to face him squarely. “I went out to stretch my legs for a while. Just to the road and back. That what you mean?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, misery in his voice. “That must be it.”
They stared at each other. Shel turned away first. Frank moved to where her gaze landed and pounded flat-hand at the wall.
“Quality Sheetrock, here. You bet. Lamefuck plaster job, though. Second-rate latex. A color they call ecru.”
“Frank, good God, what is it?”
He crossed the room, knelt down and wrapped his arms about her, settling his head into her lap. “I’m sorry,” he said, eyes shut tight. “It’s just…”
She put her cigarette to her lips and stroked his hair. “I know,” she said softly, exhaling smoke.
His grip weakened. He looked up at her. She rose from the bed and searched for her jeans. “I’ll make you some lunch,” she said. “How’s that sound?”
Good things happen to those who stick with it, he thought. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “Sounds first-rate.”
In the kitchen she fixed up sandwiches and soup. She regretted lying to him- of course she’d slipped out that morning, and not just for a little walk. She’d needed time with her thoughts. Danny was getting out today and, well, that was a lot to deal with. She did not mean to trick Frank. Things were just hard right now.
The last thing she wanted to do was make out like he was crazy.
It wasn’t that she thought he was unbalanced, just vulnerable. He had trouble piecing things together, he flew into easy rages. His hunger for human contact was only exceeded by his inability to make it count for much. Shel couldn’t say if all that added up to something a psychiatrist would put a name to, but after living with it at close quarters for a little over two years, she could testify that it signified at least a broken soul, if not exactly a sick mind.
She’d met him while working at a brunch and dinner spot in Port Costa overlooking the strait. She’d been out of prison four years, and it had taken that long to get half her confidence back. A convicted felon, she’d been turned down so often by casinos and even card rooms she’d returned to waitressing just to get by. It had taken some effort, untangling all that bitterness and loneliness, wandering town to town, just like she had before Danny. And him still being inside and all, her being too broke, too ashamed, to go down and visit him in Arizona. The letters, well, they were just letters.
Finally, she worked her way up to a nice place- starched formal shirt, red bow tie and cummerbund, a tony wine list. One day Frank wandered in, for Saturday brunch. He had a boy with him, a three-year-old named Jesse.
Frank was sweet like a pound mutt and reasonably good looking, rangy and dark with an easy smile, reminding Shel of Montgomery Clift in The Misfits. But it wasn’t his looks that charmed her. It was the way he interacted with his son.
She never meant for it to amount to much, just some company once in a while, till Danny got out again. Sex was tense, haunted by guilt. Mostly they just took walks with Jesse or did the playground bit as Frank talked through his problems. He was in his sixth month of rehab. His wife wouldn’t go. She binged on crank, disappeared for days, sometimes leaving Jesse alone in the house till Frank showed up to find him soiled and crying. What do I do? Frank wondered. Turn her in? Keep trying? She’s not evil, he’d say, just strung out.
Shel, once upon a time a collector of strays herself, said she saw his problem. Like her mother before her, she’d taken in a hard case or two over the years, knew how easy it was to draw the line, how hard it could be to honor it. Danny’d been the first whole human being she’d ever loved. And that was why she’d loved him madly.
Frank, at that point, was more distraction than attraction, to steal a line from her mother. Truth be told, Shel’s interest focused on the boy. Jesse had blond hair that erupted like crabgrass from his head, emphasizing ears so large he’d be ten before they matched the rest of him. He played like a puppy. He squinted when he smiled, and the smile would stop you dead.
The few occasions Frank stayed over, wanting moral support because his wife had been gone longer than usual this time, Shel secretly left the bed in the middle of the night and padded down the hall to the living room where she’d fussed up covers on the couch for Jesse. She plopped down on the rug and just sat there in the glow of the night-light, watching the boy sleep on his stomach, hands bunched beneath his chin, breathing in and out. Every now and then she’d reach over, brush a strand of hair from his face, or lay her palm upon his back, simply to feel the warmth of his body. Any person who can create a child so beautiful, she told herself, has light inside. Maybe, she thought, once Danny’s out again, him and me, we can try.
Frank’s old lady finally got wind there was another woman in the picture. She didn’t bother to flesh it out. She disappeared for good this time. Being the woman she was, she took Jesse with her.
Frank came a little unhinged then. Later, Shel would tell herself that if there’d been a time to walk away, that would have been it. But her favorite parable growing up had been the Good Samaritan. And the Good Samaritan didn’t interrogate the lost, beaten, dying man he found by the side of the road, didn’t ask who he was, where he came from, whether what happened wasn’t really his own damn fault. He just picked the man up and took him to the next safe place. Samaritans and victims are wedded together. They share a bond almost as fierce as love, or so she soon found out.
She joined in, searching up and down the county for Jesse. The thought of the boy out there alone, with only a wild woman on drugs to fend for him, it haunted her. And, privately, she felt pangs of guilt- if not for her, the boy’s mother wouldn’t have snatched the boy and run.
Together, she and Frank stapled handbills to telephone poles, pinned them up on community service message boards or tucked them under windshields at supermarket parking lots. They checked emergency rooms and SRO dives, questioned liquor store clerks and streetwalkers and chatty tweaks. This went on for nearly two months. Then one day a couple of detectives showed up, telling Frank to collect his coat and come along.
At the station the detectives had Frank identify some clothing found out on the rim of Honker Bay. “Kid’s corduroys, woman’s blouse and bra. Give it a sniff, chief. Tell us something.” Trembling, Frank inspected the stuff and said yes, he recognized it. That earned him free admission to an interview room. He spent the next four days in there, being grilled, the detectives convinced his wife and Jesse were dead. And Frank was the killer.
Frank was not the kind to bear up well under such scrutiny. Bad enough his boy was gone. Now death was all but certain, and though they couldn’t accuse Frank into confessing to a murder he didn’t commit, they did shame him into a craven mess.
Shel had her hands full keeping his head on straight once they finally were done with him. Talking him down from screaming jags. Wrapping him three-deep in blankets to fight cold spells she couldn’t convince him were just in his mind. Hiding the car keys, the money, the razors.
Finally the real murderer, some drug-addled freak Frank’s wife had fallen in with, succumbed to a lightning bolt from God. Showing up in the Antioch sheriff’s station, he announced he had something he wanted to show everybody. He led three deputies out to the spot where he’d buried the bodies. He’d crushed the boy’s skull with a hammer, making the mother watch. Then he’d killed the mother.
“She said she was gonna leave me,” he confessed.
Over the next year, Shel saw Frank in and out of the hospital after psychotic breaks. She found him hiding in the shower with a baseball bat. Curled up naked beneath the dash of his truck. Once he just stood in the doorway to his room, screaming, “Hey wait, I hate this movie.”
When asked by intake nurses, “Your relationship to the patient is…,” Shel usually resorted to “sister.” It gave her privileges “girlfriend” didn’t, she lacked the gold band that would’ve made “wife” credible, and besides, sister wasn’t such a reach. Frank was her damaged little stepbrother. They’d become family when Mother Mercy had hooked up with Father Fucked.
Outside the hospital, she did her best to steer him clear of the lowlife sorts he returned to when things broke down, the kind who played him like a fool. She reminded herself that this was the man who’d given life to Jesse, and using that for inspiration, she found ways to get Frank up and walking toward the better side of his character. The backslides could be brutal, though, requiring a special vigilance. Every year, at about this time, he went through the anniversary spooks of Jesse’s death, and that was not a sight for weak minds.
She heard Frank turn on the shower. Throughout the old house the water pipes banged and groaned behind the walls from the sudden flood of heat. It seemed heartbreaking, that sound.
Frank wasn’t the only one with a problem. She was lost. She’d taken a wrong turn, and now found herself engulfed in a haze, unable to retrace her steps. Worse, she felt robbed of the will to try.
It wasn’t like her. She’d been a feist, a firecracker, the Devil’s own redhead- at least she had been long ago. Now, she thought, chuckling sadly as she folded a piece of nameless lunch meat, now you’re the sadder but wiser girl.
First there’d been the arrest in Oregon, and all the tangled-up guilt, fury and humiliation it entailed. Next came prison, where the counselors harped and hammered on you about the notorious knack female offenders had, once free again, of inflicting more damage on themselves than anyone else. Then, after her release, the relentless, all-too-familiar life of dreary jobs and drifting town to town. It felt, at times, like her life with Danny and the happiness she’d known had all been a mirage. Nothing had really changed, except she’d grown older, life was harder. The loneliness had become more vicious and personal.
And so it was cheap to blame Frank for anything. She’d been heading toward Frank, toward Jesse’s death and the awful aftermath, all along. Besides which, what she saw that absolutely no one else did was that once, before his son’s murder, Frank had been capable of a great love. And great loves- like between her and Danny- they were rare indeed. Frank had possessed a true, selfless devotion for his boy. And that devotion had been savaged in a way all the naysayers dared not imagine. Shel herself recoiled from the images when they erupted, unbidden, in sleep, or an unguarded moment. Well, that nightmare belonged to Frank like the blood under his skin. And when its worst moments hit, there was no one- no one- in the world to talk him down but Shel.
Sure, he was a shadow now of who he’d been. A loser in a tailspin. Cut him loose, she imagined people telling her. She couldn’t do it. Because in her mind’s eye, she saw the hand with the knife was not her own, and the life plummeting into the abyss wasn’t Frank’s. It was hers.
Once, during one of her trips to ER with Frank, a doctor had taken her aside, grilled her a little. Saying she should stop worrying about Frank’s head and deal with her own, he prescribed intensive therapy and pills. Once he left her alone, she balled up the prescription slip and ash-canned it. She knew girls in their teens and twenties for Christ’s sake, hardly enough of a life to bitch about, already swearing by Prozac or Zoloft or some other pharmaceutical cousin, tossing them down like they were Rolaids. Like any emotion south of chipper was death itself. Not me, she told herself. I ain’t depressed, or at least no more than anybody would be on a good dose of what I’ve been through. I’m just stuck. Badly positioned in the swirl of things. Nothing to do but soldier on.
If I could just find the steam.
As if all that weren’t enough, now Danny was out. A tangle of wants she’d thought no longer existed had begun to surface, just in time for the third anniversary of Jesse’s murder. Frank would be going off like a bottle rocket sometime soon. You had to laugh, she thought. That or get “depressed.” And hell, what’s depression anyway but the thing that happens to you when you decide not to go totally fucking nuts.
“What’s the joke?” Frank asked from behind.
She turned around, startled. Fresh from his shower, he’d dressed and combed his wet hair away from his face. He looked like a boy.
Jesse.
“Nothing,” she said. “I was just thinking to myself.”
“Talking to yourself,” Frank corrected. “First sign of being crazy.”
Sleeves rolled up and shirttail out, he went to the fridge, collected a beer, twisted the top off and tossed it in the trash. Putting the bottle to his lips he slid into the breakfast nook and eyed her. She served him up a bowl of soup, cut his sandwich in half, placed it on a plate and came to the table.
As soon as she set down his lunch he curled his arm around her hip, pulled her to him and, lifting her T-shirt, ran his free hand across her belly. He kissed her navel, closed his eyes and placed his cheek against her skin.
“God I love the way you smell,” he said.
“I thought you were hungry.”
He flinched at her tone, withdrew his cheek and lowered her shirt.
“Frank- ”
“Can I tell you something?” he said, vexed. “You been drag-assing around this house the past I don’t know how long. Mumbling to yourself like Popeye.” He picked up his spoon, toyed with his soup. “Feel like I’m here all by myself.”
“Given who we owe for being here,” she said, “I’d say merely talking to myself requires a special courage.”
“Now, now, now. Like we had a choice. Got evicted last time, right? Lucky Roy had this place.”
Luck has nothing to do with it, Shel thought. Frank had met Roy Akers on a construction site, or that was the story at the time. It wasn’t till later, after considerable prodding, Shel learned that Roy and his Arkie transplant brothers weren’t nomad carpenters trailing after new construction up and down the valley. They were jackals. Crankers. Thieves. Shakedown artists. Worse, they owed their ability to operate to a ruthless, cagey old wolf named Felix Randall. No one in the Delta so much as felt an untoward impulse without paying Felix Randall for the privilege.
“Don’t kid yourself,” she said. “We’re just here to keep the lights on, ward off snoops and squatters.”
“Yeah, well, hey,” Frank said with a shrug. “Rent-free.”
“No such thing as rent-free, Frank. Sure as hell not with the likes of Roy Akers. We’ve had this discussion.”
Frank sighed. “While we’re on the subject of ‘we’ve had this discussion,’ remember that little talk we had a while back, about what we’d do if we came into a little money?”
He toyed with his sandwich, wearing an odd smile. His eyes zagged.
“What talk?” Shel said. “When?”
Frank shrugged. “Maybe I just thought about it. You know, like a little windfall.”
Shel sat down across from him. “What are you driving at?”
“Pull up stakes,” Frank said. “Haul ass outta here. Money in our pocket and gone gone gone.” He tasted his soup. “Any event, an opportunity’s come up. Nothing major. But it could give us just that kinda chance.” He glanced up, offering a wink and a smile. “You and me. You and me.”
Shel froze. “Roy know this?”
Frank pursed his lips and waved his spoon back and forth. “Our little secret.”
“You trying to get yourself killed?” She reached across the table and grabbed his wrist. “Promise me, Frank. Don’t get clever. Frank, look at me.”
Two months earlier, she’d almost fled in the night. Shaking Frank awake, she’d told him, “I’m going. Come with me.” Frank’d stared up at her, gripped her sleeve, and said, “Whoa, wait, stop. Please. Not that simple.” There was panic in his eyes when he said it, a look she didn’t want boring into her back. At which point she realized there’d be no walking out alone. Blame conscience, she thought, or habit, or that deadening haze inside your mind, whatever. The truth remains: You’re staying. You’re staying because, without you, Frank will crumble. And in that state he will undoubtedly do the very thing the Akers brothers will kill him for.
“Frank, I said look at me.”
Frank, smiling, prodded a wedge of meat with his spoon. “Chicken rice, mighty nice.”
Walking through the Tucson air terminal, Abatangelo fought intermittent bouts of vertigo adjusting to the speed of things, the freedom of movement, the colors. The presence of women. Erections surged and waned with an unsettling lack of discrimination. He ordered a cup of hot tea and sat by himself in the lounge, waiting for his flight.
He suffered a recurring premonition that something was about to go wrong. Any minute someone would press his face in close, a hand’s width away- You know me, right?- and then the rest of it going off like popping lights, the drawn weapons, the cries of Down on your face and Show us your hands- as though this day of all days could be involuted, drawn back upon itself and wrung inside out, like some topological oddity. He’d wind up right back where he’d started, forever.
He sipped his tea and listened for his flight number on the intercom.
Once on board his flight, he reached into his pocket and took out Shel’s letter. He already had it memorized, and so he didn’t so much read the words as just let his eyes trail across her loopy script. As he did, he listened for an echo- the memory of her voice, as though she herself were reciting the words. It was a pleasant illusion, despite what much of the letter said. The final paragraph, in particular. His eyes invariably settled there, as though it were some sort of mistake.
Got a new life now, out in B.F.E. with a man named Frank. It’s heaven on earth, except when it’s not. Like I said, it’s complicated. To tell the truth, I could stand to see you. I miss how sane things used to feel with you around. But hey, I wouldn’t know what to do with sanity if I owned it.
Love you, Shel
Sanity, he thought, gently folding the letter closed. I could stand to see you. As the plane descended into San Francisco, the stewardess cautioned against opening the overhead bins too quickly. He thought for all the world she added, “The continents may have shifted during flight.”
He took a cab to the corner of Union and Columbus, where Napolitano’s Bohemian Café sat in the shadow of the cathedral. Inside, crowd noise mingled with the shriek of the espresso machine. Berlioz’s Le Damnation de Faust provided background as bald men reading European newspapers shared tables with black-clad students. A woman in a business suit played pinball in her stocking feet.
Abatangelo approached the bar and sat beside two secretaries who smiled but did not engage. One of them reminded him vaguely of Shel and he suffered an immediate, embarrassing ardor for her. Behind the bar, his reflection in the mirror peeked through tiers of wine bottles. He made a halfhearted truce with what he saw and gestured for the bartender.
“Dominic here?”
The bartender paused for a moment. “You’re Danny A,” he said.
Abatangelo shot a sidelong glance at the secretaries.
“So?” The bartender shrugged, brought down a bottle of Bardolino and poured Abatangelo a glass. “Ben tornato.”
As Abatangelo tasted the wine, an unbidden smile appeared. He waited for something bad to happen.
“You want a sandwich,” the bartender said, recorking the bottle, “we got fresh-baked focaccia, put some salami on it, coppa, meatball, we got pizza, espresso, cannoli, you name it. Dominic said make you at home.”
“He’s not here,” Abatangelo guessed.
“Sit tight, he’ll be back soon. He knows you’re due.”
With that the bartender drifted away. Abatangelo squared the stool beneath him and settled in to wait. Beside him the two secretaries chattered feverishly, smelling of rain and perfume and chardonnay. Shortly, a commotion broke out from the rear of the bar, and Dominic Napolitano swam through the storeroom curtain, followed by a gray-haired, barrel-bodied woman. This was Nina, his wife. She brayed at his back: “How much? I got a right to know, you piss it away, I gotta right. How much, huh?”
Dominic shouted back, “Go ahead, bust my balls, the whole damn world can hear, what do I care?”
Dominic, looking up, spotted Abatangelo and blinked as their eyes met. He ambled forward and extended a meaty hand. He had small blue eyes and a nose bespotted with large pores. His short white hair accentuated the spread of his ears.
“Nina, look. It’s Gina’s boy, God rest her soul.”
Nina Napolitano stayed where she was. “That ain’t Gina’s boy. That’s Vince’s boy.”
“Nina, don’t- ”
“If this was Gina’s boy, he’d a been at her funeral. But I didn’t see him at Gina’s funeral. I didn’t see him nowhere, never. Not when she lived in that apartment all by herself. Not when she got sick, not at the hospital. Musta had plans.”
Dominic came around the bar and took Abatangelo by the arm. “Come on,” he whispered, “I’ll show you where you stay.”
Nina glared at the two of them as they made their way out through the crowd. She shouted from the bar: “You, the degenerate. Don’t come back to my place till you visit the lighthouse where we spread your mother’s ashes, you hear me?”
On the sidewalk Dominic took out a handkerchief and patted his bare head. He walked with a low center of gravity, gap-legged, with an arm-pumping swivel above the waist and his chin jutting out.
“Your P.O.’s been calling, driving Nina nuts. I swear to God- wants to know your address, ETA, where you’re working, yadda yadda. I tell him, Look, I’m just the home monitor, you wanna talk to Daniel, he’s smart, he knows he’s gotta connect within twenty-four hours. You wanna talk to his boss, now or whenever, call Lenny Mannion.”
Dominic turned toward Abatangelo.
“You should do that, too, incidentally. Call Lenny, I’ll give you the number. You can start whenever, he runs a little portrait shop. School pictures, families, babies, you know? It ain’t art, but it beats washing dishes and kicking back to some asshole for the privilege. And Lenny’s sticking his neck out. I mean, an ex-con, babies around, teenage girls. Know what I mean? No offense. But anybody finds out you been inside, he’s explaining till he’s dead.”
Dominic turned face-front again.
“Anyway, I tell this P.O. of yours, ‘Off my back.’ He still calls. Why? ’Cuz you’re not spending six weeks in some halfway house he’s probably got a piece of, if you know what I mean.”
“I appreciate what you’re doing,” Abatangelo said. “And I’ll call him. Today.”
Dominic shook his head. “I’m not doing this for you, you know. I’m doing it for your mother, God rest her soul.”
He led Abatangelo three blocks through North Beach. Traffic sat stalled on Columbus, horns blared, the sidewalks thronged with bobbing crowds. Abatangelo found himself clutching his paper sack, a yardbird reflex.
Dominic resumed: “Don’t mind Nina, okay? It’s just, I mean, not to make you feel bad, but near the end, your mother lived like a squirrel. And what there was to get, your sister got. Feds took your share. Agents came to probate court, served their papers, it was all written down, boom boom boom. Not that there was much to get. Bloodsuckers came out of the woodwork, their hands out, bills you wouldn’t believe. Poor woman. You coulda maybe thought about giving her a little of that money you made, know what I mean?”
“She wouldn’t take it,” Abatangelo said. “And by the time she was sick, I’d been tagged. They seized everything.”
Dominic snorted. “Like you didn’t have a secret stash somewhere.”
“Not secret enough.”
Dominic studied him. “Some criminal mastermind.”
They stopped in front of a grocery called the Smiling Child Market. Tea-smoked chickens hung in the window and Chinese matrons rummaged through sidewalk bins for dragon beans, lo bok, cloud ear mushrooms. Just beyond the door, the owner stood at the register, wearing a red cardigan and a wisdom cap. Behind him an ancient woman, dressed in black, sat on a dairy carton feeding glazed rice crackers to a cat.
“Jimmy,” Dominic called out, “Jimmy, dammit Jimmy, over here. This is the roomer I told you about. We’re going up, that good?”
The grocer smiled an utterly impersonal smile. In the stairway, searching his pocket for the keys, Dominic told Abatangelo, “His name’s Jimmy Shu. He don’t know where you been, which is good. Never tell a Chinaman everything. He’ll never trust you again.”
Upstairs, the hallway was dark and redolent of ginger and curry and chili oil. The clamor of North Beach filtered through the window at one end, Chinatown the other. Dominic fiddled with the keys in the dim light, holding them near his eyes, then opened the apartment door. They greeted a clutter of take-out cartons, ravaged napkins and tangled rags.
Dominic said, “Hey hey, this was all supposed to be, well, gone, you know?”
He kicked a welter of paper into a heap near the wall, wiping his head again and then his throat. “Christ. Fucking skinflint Jimmy Shu.” He let loose a burdened sigh. “Let me show you the back,” he said.
In the rear there was a foldaway bed, a table, a radio. Abatangelo found himself imagining Shel sitting there, on the bed, smiling up at him.
Dominic said, “Simple and small. Hope it don’t remind you too much of prison. I’ll get a broom, a pan, get the front cleaned up.”
“Dominic, slow down. Go back to the bar. I’m grateful.”
Dominic stood still for the first time. He nodded thoughtfully a moment, then looked up into Abatangelo’s face.
“Your mother was a very dear woman,” he said. “Don’t think she didn’t miss you. Her only boy, in prison. For drugs, Christ. It broke her heart. You broke her goddamn heart.”
Abatangelo reached out for the old man’s shoulder but Dominic recoiled. He wiped his mouth and looked at his feet. “I’m gonna say this,” he said. “Say it once and that’s it. And I won’t regret it.” He looked up. His chin bobbed angrily. “Nina’s right in one respect, you know? If your father had been a better man, eh? Instead of a piece of shit. Maybe none of this woulda happened.” He let the words hang there a moment, nodding to himself as though, in hearing the echo in his mind, he felt certain the words were true. Finally, he turned to leave.
“Dominic? One last thing.”
Dominic stopped. “Yeah, sure, what?”
“Not to take advantage,” Abatangelo said. “But I need a car.”
From the hallway Frank stared at the door to the guest room. Shel had holed herself up in there again, right after fixing lunch. He listened for sounds from inside, thinking: She’s gonna brood the rest of the day away. Gonna sit there and stare at the wall and run through her smokes. All she needs is a record player and a bunch of sad songs.
He shivered a little, wondering what it was that had come over her. Had she found someone else? Didn’t she realize that whatever he did, everything he did, he did for her?
Well, all right then, he thought. It’s up to me. Get our asses out of here and start up new. For all her moody sulking, for all her wandering off sometimes in the middle of something he was trying to tell her, she was still the one good thing in his life. She deserves to get out of here as much as I do, he told himself. She deserves better.
He left the house, started his truck and drove out to the highway, heading for West Pittsburg for his meet with the twins.
Secretly, he knew part of the reason behind his plan was to make amends. He hadn’t been entirely honest. Even with all the things she’d figured out, forced out of him, there were still a million left to tell. All the times he’d said he was going out to a construction site to pound nails or hoist Sheetrock, he was actually walking bogus picket lines in the valley, shaking down contractors. If he wasn’t shaking them down he was ripping them off, stealing equipment, tools, hardware, even trucks.
On occasion he manned a crank lab, sucking fumes, standing watch. Once the batch was cooked he’d help dump the dregs, trying not to get poisoned for the privilege.
He’d be gone for as long as a week sometimes, telling Shel they were in Fresno or Merced or Oroville. It was during those prolonged periods away that he binged. Sometimes it took a couple of days to get straight enough so he could walk back in without giving the whole charade away. Sometimes he wondered if she was even paying attention. That hurt. And when he hurt, he wanted to party. Roy Akers obliged; he was more than happy to keep Frank zoomed out of his skull.
Frank was so behind on his nut now the whole thing was way out of hand. Shel knew he owed money; she had no idea how bad it was. And he didn’t dare tell her. Regardless, on top of everything else, he was nabbing cars for Roy now, like he was in fucking high school. Which was one of the reasons he got talked down to by absolutely everybody, treated like a grunt. I’m sick of the Akers brothers strutting around like they’re the kickass of crime, he thought. Time to make a little score, blow on out of Dodge.
Me and my redhead nurse.
At West Pittsburg he got off the freeway and onto surface streets again, heading toward the water. On Black Diamond Street, a rotting whitewashed billboard displayed a spray-paint chaos of gang names and street handles: The Jiminos, Vicious Richie, Hype Rita, the Beacon Street Dutch. Broken bodies lined the street, grinders, rappies, honks, a line of vacant-eyed women eager to work twists. Party balloons, emptied of hop, lay scattered down the sidewalk.
Reverend Ben’s sat at the end of a cul-de-sac named Freedom Court. The sign above the doorway read:
REVEREND BEN’S APOLLO CLUB
UPLIFTING REVIVALS
GIANT TV
SHUFFLEBOARD
Frank pulled behind the building and parked. The tar paper roof bristled with cattle wire. Candy wrappers and a discarded tampon littered the gravel.
At the doorway Frank hit a stench of gummed-up liquor wells and rancid rubber. As his eyes grew accustomed to the change of light, the barroom came into focus. A large empty room with scattered metal chairs, cracked linoleum, bare bulbs screwed into wall sockets for light.
No giant TV. No uplifting revival.
The bartender, with the chest and arms of a man twice his height, watched Frank wander for a bit. He wore a tight knit shirt and had a shaved head. This, Frank guessed, was Reverend Ben.
Two old men sat with their drinks at the bar. Frank got a feeling of slick, good-natured harmlessness from both, which reassured him. The nearest one farted loudly, and the other looked around in mock astonishment.
“Low-flying duck,” said the first.
“You got mail,” said the other.
The rest of the room was empty. No twins, not yet. Frank ordered a beer and sauntered toward the jukebox, eyeing the hand-scrawled selections. Hop Wilson’s “Black Cat Bone.” Sonny Terry’s “Crow Jane.” John Lee Hooker’s “Crawling King Snake Blues.” Reading the handwritten titles, he couldn’t help feeling that, if he put a quarter in, he’d choose exactly the one song they’d hate him for.
One of the old men drifted up behind. He waved his hand at Frank as though to say: Go on.
“Don’t be pretending you know those tunes,” he said, entering the jukebox glow. He wore a bow tie and a white shirt. His cologne overwhelmed the stench of the bar. He leaned down, staring into the bright machinery. “Slip in your quade.”
Frank took out a quarter and did as he was told.
“Pick this,” the man said, pointing out a song. His hands were large and fluid, the fingers thick as rope. Albert King, “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven.”
Frank hesitated.
“Go on, won’t electrocute you.”
Frank punched in the code. The man said, “Then this,” pointing out another song. Elmore James, “Shake Your Moneymaker.” The man stood back and smiled.
“Feel better already, don’cha?”
The first song started out slow and raw. The old man recoiled softly, closing his eyes and working each arm as his hips rocked back and forth. Turning back around to his friend, he sang loud when the verse started, his voice a roar, like a preacher’s.
“Everybody wants to laugh
Nobody wants to cry
I said everybody wants to laugh
Ain’t nobody wants to cry
Everybody wants to get to heaven
But nobody wants to die.”
He turned back around to Frank for affirmation, but Frank just stood there. Shel usually handled these sorts of situations for him. Feeling a sudden visceral need for her there, Frank imagined her taking form by his side, like a ghost.
The old man shook his head and ran a thick finger under each eye. “Forget it,” he said, and humped back to the bar.
It took another ten minutes for the twins to appear. They came in one after the other, ducking into the bar with an uneasy familiarity. Their names were Bryan and Ryan Briscoe. They were identically towheaded, sloe-eyed, small and freebase thin. Frank called them Chewy and Mooch, to keep them separate in his mind.
One of the twins approached the center of the room with an expression of mock horror, his arms spread wide as though to embrace a missing thing. This was the wiseass, Mooch. He fell to his knees and cried out, “Reverend Ben! The snooker table! How could you?”
Reverend Ben traded glances with the two old men at the bar. Nobody looked happy.
“What is this,” Reverend Ben said finally. “National Skanky Hustler Day?”
Mooch rose to his feet and went to the bar, impervious to the contempt. He took out a tangled wad of cash, unraveled a bill and smoothed it out on the bar. “Drinks for everybody,” he said. “Gonna miss this place. Chump City. Made a lot of money here.”
The other twin approached Frank. This was the sad one. The nervous one. Chewy.
“We made it,” Chewy said.
The twins were a sight to behold, Frank thought. Youngest issue of the Lodi Briscoes, purveyors of quality feed. The twins were the family fuckups. Frank had made their acquaintance one night as they were hustling pool in a Manteca roadhouse. They had quite a little racket: Chewy suckered the marks in, knocked off to the can, then Mooch came out and finished them off. The brothers took their winnings in cash or blow. From the sounds of things, they’d played this room as well. Amazing, Frank thought, they made it out with their asses intact.
“How’d it go?” Frank asked.
Before Chewy could answer, Mooch came up from behind with three beers. He handed them around, grinning.
“Got three trucks,” Chewy said. He pulled up a metal folding chair and sat. Mooch remained standing. “All parked out in Antioch, where you said.”
“We did a follow-in out at the Red Roof in Tracy,” Mooch crowed. “Some salesman. Took his wallet and his sample bag and tied him up with duct tape. Sells ball bearings, you imagine? Went on out, used his plastic and rented us three big shiny white trucks.”
“Rented?” Frank said.
“Well, yeah,” Chewy said. He had yet to drink from his beer.
“It’s cool,” Mooch said. “They can’t trace it to us, I told you.”
“They can trace it to your follow-in,” Frank said. “Your salesman, he’ll hang a visual on you two. You kinda stand out, know what I mean?”
Chewy leaned closer and spoke softly. “It just seemed too much a risk to steal three trucks, Frank.” He licked his lips and swallowed. “You know, like three on a match?”
“Who’d you rent from?”
“That guy in Clayton you mentioned,” Chewy said. “Lonesome George.”
Frank froze. “Why him?”
“Why not?” Chewy answered. “No offense, but you’re making me very nervous here.”
Lonesome George DeSantis had operated at least a dozen rental agencies, one after the other, until the Insurance Commissioner got wise to his claims record. Lonesome George’s renters tended to have accidents. They tended to have their cars rifled, too, or stolen outright. Now he operated through a straw man. Since he had his shop in east Contra Costa County- CoCo County as the locals called it- Lonesome George kicked back to Felix Randall to keep his operation afloat.
“Why him?” Frank repeated. “Why Lonesome George?”
Mooch leaned down, close to Frank’s face. “Like my brother said, you gave us his name. You said he was a player.”
Frank turned to face him. The boy’s eyes jigged and the skin around the sockets was waxy. A user’s pallor. Frank said, “If I told you to come over to my house, fuck my old lady, it’s cool. Would you do it?”
“Hell, yes,” Mooch said. “You got a first-rate old lady.”
Chewy said, “Tell me what’s wrong, Frank.”
Frank kept his eye on Mooch. “You want a shot at my old lady?”
“He didn’t mean anything,” Chewy said. “Frank, what’s wrong?”
“No, I want to hear this,” Frank said. “Mooch, you want to splay old Lachelle Maureen? You’ve met her what, twice? Or am I wrong about that?”
“Frank- ”
“Answer my question, Mooch.”
Mooch took a step back. Eyes to the ceiling, he murmured, “Oh, man,” and drank from his beer.
“Look, Frank,” Chewy said, “I admit, you didn’t tell us outright, you know, ‘Check out Lonesome George.’ But we thought, hey, you brought him up, you told us who he was and all. Now, I mean, if he’s gonna make us…”
Frank closed his eyes and put his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, pinching hard. A riot of dots materialized on the backs of his eyelids.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Forget it.”
“Frank…”
“Forget it,” Frank said, louder this time. He stood up. To Chewy, he said, “Drink your beer.” He turned to Mooch then, and gestured for him to come close. Mooch took one step forward, no more. Frank reached across the space between them and put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. Whispering, he said, “What you just did? Don’t do it again. Understand?”
He met the boy’s eyes. They were wild with cocaine, vaguely insolent, uncomprehending. Frank removed his arm and headed for the door.
“Hit the hump, boys. Time to do the deed.”
Frank went to his truck, started it up, and left with the twins following behind. As he drove back out through West Pittsburg, he found himself not thinking about the fuckup brothers or even Lonesome George. He was thinking about Felix Randall.
One of the last of the old biker chiefs, Felix controlled the Delta underworld from his salvage yard out near Bethel Island. He’d suffered a little in stature when the Mexicans made inroads during his last stint in prison. To make matters worse, he’d been diagnosed with throat cancer while at Boron. They transferred him to Springfield for the tracheotomy, which the prison doctors botched. Despite his ruined larynx and his years off the game, now that he was out again he was hell-bent on proving one thing: He ruled the Delta. Not the Mexicans, not the Chinks or the Vietnamese, not the rival biker gangs. Him.
Frank’s connection to Felix was through Roy Akers and his brothers, who conceded to Felix’s control. They paid their tithe to a pair of enforcers named Lonnie Dayball and Rick Tully. Others had proved slower studies. They had to see their crank labs fireball, or their chop shops bombed, or their indoor pot farms raided by county narcs tipped by Felix’s people to realize: You Do Not Sideball Felix Randall. A few guys died, learning that.
Only the Mexicans stood up to him now. They had labs up and down the valley, Fresno to Redding, and the Delta was no exception. With what they paid the illegals who manned those labs, you could cop an ounce of chavo crank for almost half what Felix was asking. Moving up the wholesale chain, the prices got even more ridiculous. Frank, whose mother had been part Mexican and had driven into Mexico routinely to score cheap speed, saw a little humor in this development. He doubted anyone else in his circle shared this view.
Only a few weeks ago, one particularly unlucky mojado had been dragged from a lab out on Kirker Pass Road, stripped naked by Dayball and Tully and the Akers brothers and fastened to a eucalyptus tree with cattle wire and molly screws. Gaspar Arevalo, age seventeen, from the state of Sonora, so the reports went. He was dead by the time the paramedics figured out a way to get him down.
Abatangelo drove Dominic’s car south from San Francisco along the coast toward the Montara Lighthouse. Beyond Devil’s Slide the beach was windy, fogbound and desolate beneath shallow cliffs. Seagulls swept low across the hazy winter surf, struggling inland across low dunes scruffed with ice plant.
He turned into the parking lot and killed the motor. The lighthouse was open for tourists, and a half dozen of them stood in the glass-rimmed beacon, peering out into the fog. Several backpackers crouched at the door of the hostel, queued up to claim a cot for the night.
The lighthouse had always been one of his mother’s favorite landmarks. She’d come down here often to walk the beach and listen to the surf and smell the salt air. At times he’d wondered if he hadn’t inherited some of his fondness for the sea from her.
Out of the car, he stood for a moment at the edge of the gravel lot, surveying the beach. So where had the ceremony been held? The coast stretched cold and dark in both directions. The ocean seethed in a winter chop.
For the first three years of his imprisonment, Abatangelo had been badgered at least twice a month by agents trying to get him to roll on his old crowd. The younger agents had been especially full of themselves. They cracked bad Italian jokes and said he could help them. He knew the scene as well as anyone, where his partner Steve Cadaret might run in Asia, who’d he run with, who his suppliers in Bangkok were, which wholesalers stateside had not yet been tagged. If he confided these things- off the record, naturally- at most before the grand jury (a secret grand jury, mind you), they could move him back to the coast. Maybe work a cut in his time. Spring his old lady.
They offered him thirty grand and called it Good Faith Money. They told him if they supplied an attorney for him, he had to talk, they’d get a writ ad testificandum, it was “a sort-of-addendum to the Sixth Amendment.” They told him if he didn’t cooperate they’d get him holed away in Ad Seg forever. In the end, sensing a soft spot, they routinely circled back around to what he came to refer to as The Shel Beaudry Gambit: Play ball, your old lady walks.
“Come on,” they chimed, “you love her, right? Do anything for her, right? We don’t want to make you a hostile witness. We want to make you happy.”
It was a marvel to watch how much they hated you for not giving in to their insulting maneuvers. They knew you loathed them and they couldn’t stand that. They were the heroes, the high-minded brothers of your teenage sweetheart. They were only as vile as they had to be, dealing with the likes of you.
When Abatangelo’s mother fell ill, the agents gave up on The Shel Beaudry Gambit and turned to The Dying Mother Ploy. A trip to see her could be arranged, if, well, guess. Once, an agent delivered to him six months’ worth of letters he’d written to her, none of which had been posted. “You misplace these?” he asked, dropping them on Abatangelo’s bunk. “I got a better way to reach out and touch old Mom if you’re ready to act smart.”
It was insane how badly they misread him. The brinkmanship only deepened his resolve, and so his mother’s final days came and went without his being able to work so much as a call to the hospital or the funeral home. His sister never forgave him for that. Her letters stopped, and she returned his unopened; he no longer even knew where she was. But once Regina Abatangelo was dead, the badgering stopped. The government finally decided he was unworthy of further attention. The once-friendly agents advised the Bureau of Prisons to make sure Abatangelo served every last day of his ten-year term.
He headed down the sandy cliff on a pathway lined with bollards. Come sea level he marched north along the water. Seagulls gathered in swelling numbers, picking through litter. As he neared a group they fluttered up lazily, circled low across the surf, then came back down again. The last time he’d been on a beach was when he’d been arrested, and despite the unpleasant association, he felt a pleasant honing of spirit with the tang of salt and kelp in the air. As soon as parole conditions permitted and he had the money saved, he intended to buy a boat, live on it, sail it down the coast with Shel as his mate. They’d live on what they caught over the side with a drag, coming ashore only to snatch fresh water and barter for supplies.
But we’re not here to reflect on all that, he reminded himself. We’re here to remember Mother.
He tried to picture her, but the scenes that came to mind were hazy and unpleasant. His mother had been an unhappy woman married to a man born to perfect other people’s unhappiness. Vincenzo and Regina. The glib deadbeat and the suffering saint. They had two children, Daniel and Christina. There. Take a snapshot, carry it around in your wallet. Remember.
He tried to bring to bear the good things, the remarkable things. His mother at one time invested the whole of her heart in Dan and his younger sister, wanting them to regain the station in life she’d surrendered by marrying their father. At least once a week the three of them visited the Museum of Art, or the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Twice a year she treated them to the opera. She instructed them on the reasons why Verdi’s Otello surpassed Shakespeare’s. She explained to them in whispers the meaning of words like coloratura, bel canto, entr’acte.
Shortly these memories blended together until every recollection resembled the next. Then the one he always tried to avoid rose up.
It happened on a Sunday. They were just sitting down to afternoon supper when steps clattered in the hallway. Someone pounded hard on the door. His father went white and gestured for everyone at the table to be still. The pounding came again, harder, and a voice called out, “Vince, don’t fuck around, we can smell the food, you asshole.” Christina began to cry. Her father shot to her side and cupped his hand across her mouth, so hard the rest of her face flared red. She grabbed at her father’s arms, gasping, beginning to sob, and he jerked her head to remind her, Be still. Everyone stared at the door. “Have it your way, Vince,” the voice in the hallway called out. “Comin’ in.” Vince Abatangelo let go of his daughter, looked around helplessly, but only managed to edge backward, further into the room, as the first blows hit. The door cracked open on the fourth kick. A hand reached through the gash in the wood and unlatched the bolt, the door opened. There were three of them. The one who did the talking removed his hat, nodded to Gina Abatangelo, then said, “Didn’t have to be this way, Vince. Get your coat. Joey wants to talk to you.” Joey was Joey Twitch Costanza, the local shylock. The men he’d sent were collecting on a juice loan made to cover gambling debts. Once he realized he wasn’t going to be beaten in his own home, Vince Abatangelo’s mood transformed into one of groveling good cheer. He introduced his family, asking the men if they didn’t want to sit down. “Nick, we’re just about to eat. Sit.” He was told once again to get his coat. The one who did the talking nodded to Gina Abatangelo again- to say what? We’re sorry? Don’t wait? They led him out and closed the shattered door behind them. Soon their steps were on the stair, and the sound faded into the street noise. Christina sat simpering in her chair. Their mother stared at the door, hands to her face. Abatangelo could still remember the meal: ziti with summer sauce, pettile e fagioli, braised veal.
Abatangelo smiled drearily. And that is what there is to remember, Mother. Your son the felon, his memory’s got a certain bent. But I miss you. Miss whoever it was buried inside you I never quite came to know.
Forsaking the lighthouse trail, he made way instead up a snaking path through salty rock to one of the lower bluffs crowned with hemlock. He turned to look one last time at his mother’s resting place, the slate-gray ocean, the scavenging gulls, the relentless mass of fog. Turning to continue on, he discovered the path dead-ended halfway out. He had to forge his way through overgrowth to get back to the car.
Shel emerged from the guest room near twilight, wanting this day of all days to be over. She’d spent the whole afternoon sitting at the window, chasing one cigarette with the next and staring out at the south pasture. Danny, she thought. You never should have sent him that letter. Dumb. Pointless. You’ve got a world of unfinished business here.
She’d mulled over Frank’s latest pronouncement, the windfall he’d alluded to over lunch. I should check in on him right away, she told herself, should have done it hours ago. Return him to Planet Now. Instead she went into the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth. Glancing out the bathroom window she saw Frank’s truck was gone.
She bolted into the hallway, calling out for him, lunging room to room. Please, God, she thought. Just this once.
After a third fruitless search of the house she relented and made her way back toward the kitchen. Rowena, Roy Akers’s girlfriend of late, sat there, back from a day of God knew what and dressed for work as she knew it. Rowena was the most recent abomination foisted on Shel and Frank. She’d moved in during the last month on Roy’s orders. Since Roy owned the house, there was nothing to say.
The girl was short, thick-limbed and plain, a rowdy brunette with gray eyes and a nose too small for her face. Her skin was so densely freckled it resembled a burn. Shel sometimes imagined the girl’s lungs, her heart, her bones all measled with vague red spots. She was playing solitaire with the radio on, sitting in the breakfast nook, her stockings lying in a filmy tangle beside her shoes.
“I was looking for Frank,” Shel said.
“I gathered from the noise.”
“You seen him?”
“Nope.”
“How long you been here?”
Rowena groaned. “Oh, please.”
The radio blared old soul tunes, something Rowena didn’t dare listen to if Roy was around.
“Mind if I sit down?” Shel asked.
“You want the truth?”
Roy had met Rowena in a local bar, hustling truckers for drinks. He’d wooed her with drugs and a place to live, then put her up with Frank and Shel. Someone to watch the watchers. When he realized she had a child, a vaguely mulatto boy named Duval, he lost interest, except for the income she provided, which he called rent.
Roy put her back to work at a marginally better locale, a hotel lounge near the commuter airport in Concord. He drove her there three nights a week and sat there watching as she did her thing, asking the suits to dance, accepting their drinks, laughing at their jokes, touching them. Roy set the number of work nights at three, figuring any more than that meant she liked it too much; any less, she liked it too little.
Shel said, “Roy running late?”
“Don’t start with me.”
“I was just asking.”
“No one ever just asks. Least of all you.”
She was smoking menthols, and one jutted from the crook of her mouth as she shuffled her discards.
Shel tried again. “What I mean is, it’s getting late. I wondered if Roy had maybe called things off for tonight.” Snapping the cards, Rowena played the jack of clubs on the queen of diamonds. “If that’s so,” Shel went on, “I mean, if you’re staying in, well, I’ve got a favor.”
“Not a chance,” Rowena said.
“Just hear me out.”
“I just did.”
“Look, I can’t just wait here, I’ve got to track down Frank. If he comes back while I’m gone, I need him to stay put.”
Rowena looked up. Her eyes were dull with annoyance. “Please,” she said, “don’t tell me your problems.”
She returned her attention to the cards, scratching her freckled arm. Shel sighed and got up to go. A haze darkened the edges of the room. She felt tired. Depressed.
“Come on,” she said, trying one last time. “Be civilized.”
“I am civilized,” Rowena replied. She ran her thumbnail down the edge of the cards. The nail polish had been chewed away. “I’m the most civilized person you’ll ever meet.”
It was well after seven before Abatangelo made it back to North Beach and entered La Dolce di Venezia. Venturing through the dining room, he found Eddy alone in a booth at the rear, nursing a bottle of Barbaresco. His bread knife was slathered with butter, his place setting flecked with crumbs. A small, white-frosted cake rested on the table, bearing the inscription DANNY- WELCOME HOME written in red glaze and surrounded by sugar florets.
Looking up as Abatangelo approached, Eddy greeted him by licking his teeth and gesturing for him to sit. For all his impatience, a certain liveliness inhabited the eyes.
“I was out at the Montara Lighthouse,” Abatangelo explained, taking a seat. “Got caught in a mess coming back.”
Eddy raised a hand as though to say, No apologies. He poured them each a glass of wine, lifted his, and said, “Home.” Abatangelo responded in kind. They drank.
All things considered, Abatangelo thought, time had been kind to Eddy. He was bald on top, graying along the sides. It suited him, actually. He was still large, thick-legged and meaty, with the back of a wrestler and a shameless paunch.
“Got yourself some serious love handles there, Eddy.”
“Fuck love handles. I got love luggage.”
Eddy had taken over his father’s body shop out in the avenues, the elder Igo’s retirement coinciding with Eddy’s release from Lompoc. Promises of walking the straight and narrow attended the change of hands. Since his parole, Eddy had honored those promises. He married a local girl named Polly Neal. He bought a run-down Victorian in the Western Addition and was trying to return it to something resembling its original state.
In his letters to Abatangelo, Eddy had admitted that, with chosen friends, he did at times reminisce. He did so heartily, without remorse. “Let’s sing, me lads, about the days we was scurvy buccaneers,” he’d sally. He feared no backslides. He felt no temptation to recapture the wild and fugitive past. He was content, he said. He looked content.
Refilling his wineglass, Eddy asked, “How’d Montara feel?”
Abatangelo puffed his cheeks. “I’m all over the map,” he confided.
Eddy nodded. “First six months I was out, I went from scared shitless to ready for anything in the blink of an eye. Had more mindless impulses than a monkey.”
Abatangelo grinned. “Oh yeah, like what, for instance?”
“Like never mind, for instance. What you wanna eat?” Eddy brushed the crumbs off his menu and opened it, squinting to read in the soft light. “I hear they do a mean fish here.”
Abatangelo let his menu sit. “I’m gonna have spaghetti with sausage.”
Eddy, regarding him with incredulity, whispered, “You don’t have to worry about how much it costs.”
“Not the issue,” Abatangelo replied.
The waiter appeared. He was short and slight with exquisite good looks, carrying himself on the balls of his feet. A languor in the eyes suggested lukewarm morals. Abatangelo thought of his father.
“Gentlemen,” the waiter announced, enunciating the word as though to flaunt his accent. “I am Massimo. A fabulous evening, no?”
Abatangelo half-expected him to click his heels. “Massimo,” he said. “Paesano, come stai?”
Almost imperceptibly, the waiter stiffened. An ugly grin materialized. “M’arrangio,” he replied, bowing a little at the waist. “Paesano.”
Abatangelo couldn’t help but smile. M’arrangio meant, “I’m getting by,” but it had an additional connotation of “I’m watching the angles.” Pops to a T, he thought.
Eddy ordered grilled salmon and a side of linguini with clams. Abatangelo ordered spaghetti marinara with a side order of fennel sausage grilled with peppers. As the waiter jotted these things down, Abatangelo asked, “Play the ponies, Massimo?”
Massimo offered a mordant smile and made a gesture as though to say he did not understand.
“The ponies, Massimo. Used to be you’d go to Philly the Wag over at Portofino’s, but I hear he’s dead. Joey Twitch Costanza, he’s long gone. Who makes book in the neighborhood now? You’re the man who can tell me. I can feel it.”
“Danny,” Eddy murmured. “Throttle back.”
Abatangelo returned his glance to the menu. “As for wine,” he said, “we’ve just about killed this pup. Bring another Barbaresco for me and a nice Malvasia Bianca for my friend, given he favors fish. Molte grazie. Arrivederla.”
Massimo said nothing as he collected the menus. Once he was out of earshot, Eddy hissed, “Paesano… what the fuck…?”
Abatangelo tasted his wine. “I know his kind,” he said.
“They had waiters at Safford?”
“Our little man Massimo,” Abatangelo explained, “bears more than a passing resemblance to my old man.”
Eddy sat back and drummed his fingers on the table. “What’s going on, guy?”
Abatangelo stewed for a moment. “Sorry,” he said. “I got hit in the face at Dominic’s with ancient history. Nina Napolitano called me ‘Vince’s boy.’ ”
“Biologically speaking- ”
“Fuck biology. I just spent ten years in lofty self-examination, all expenses paid. I know what I know and what I know is, I ain’t Vince Abatangelo’s boy in any way that means anything.”
His delivery was over the top, he sensed it himself. Eddy leaned forward and put his hand on Abatangelo’s wrist. “Let it go.”
Abatangelo shrugged apologetically. “You’re right.” He leaned back into his seat and made a come-forth gesture with his hand. “So, regale me. The gang. How are they?”
Eddy obliged with a brief rundown. Steve Cadaret from all reports remained free in Southeast Asia, doing the bohemian fugitive bit. Mickey Bensusan had found God in Palm Desert courtesy of an Aryan beauty named Malika. Joey Bassinger died of a heart attack freebasing in a motel room near Yosemite, of all places. Jimmy Byrne, the Company’s skipper, who’d been apprehended at sea the same night the arrests on the beach went down, remained in prison, where, unless the political winds turned, he would grow old and die.
“Poor Cap,” Abatangelo offered.
“You did what you could do,” Eddy said.
“Maybe. Any event, you left out Shel.”
Eddy removed an envelope from his coat pocket and passed it across the table. “I’m not sure I approve of this, incidentally.”
The envelope contained a printout on coarse gray paper. The text bore the heading LACHELLE MAUREEN BEAUDRY, AKA SHEL BEAUDRY, and listed several recent addresses.
Abatangelo regarded it like a seven-year-old with a valentine. “Any trouble getting this?”
“Seventy-five bucks,” Eddy said. “If that’s trouble.”
“I’ll pay.”
“Whatever,” Eddy said. “Truth is, this wasn’t any trouble for me, but it was to the guy who got it for me. Seems he had to rely on vehicle registrations to get those addresses.”
“That’s a problem?”
“You’re not supposed to get vehicle registration information except for service of process. You lie, you surrender a fifty-thousand-dollar bond. But Shel, she’s got no property in her name. Doesn’t have any credit to speak of, and her last job ended over a year ago. So the last resort was DMV. Bingo. Turns out she has her name on a truck. To cover his butt, my guy filed a phony small claims action with a due diligence affidavit saying he tried to serve her but couldn’t. He’ll file a Request for Dismissal in a couple weeks. That should cover it.”
“If it doesn’t,” Abatangelo said, “I’m good for the hassle.”
Eddy laughed. “Oh yeah? You got fifty grand lying around? Forget about it. Let trouble come looking for you. Meanwhile, as long as we’re playing show-and-tell, hand over the letter you got. I want to read this thing for myself.”
Abatangelo thought it over, then obliged, feeling guilty for the trouble he may have caused. Eddy tore Shel’s letter out of the envelope and read it as though looking for his own name. After a moment, with a puzzled expression, he glanced up from the page and said, “Living out in B.F.E.? That’s-?”
“Bum Fuck Egypt,” Abatangelo replied.
“Oh, right, right.”
Their salads arrived with a fresh basket of bread and the two bottles of wine. Massimo did not bring them. In his stead he sent a stocky busman with a tooth missing. His bow tie was crooked and his shirt had elbow stains.
“From now, you want, you say Oscar, anything,” the man announced.
Oscar popped both corks and disappeared. Eddy said, “Next time, we eat Chinese, just to spare you these little flashbacks, okay?”
He returned to Shel’s letter, finishing it shortly and folding it back into its envelope. He passed it back across the table and attacked his salad. Abatangelo continued studying the addresses. With a little concentration, you could make out which one was most recent. He’d head out as soon as dinner was over, use Dominic’s car, get a map of the area once he was out there.
To Eddy, he said, “So what did you think? Of her letter, I mean.”
“Read between the lines,” Eddy said with a shrug. “Read deep. Then read a little deeper.”
“That bad?”
“Bad as that,” Eddy said through his food. “Worse, maybe. You know how she is.”
“I did once.”
“Now, now. Don’t pity yourself. It’s unlucky.”
“You saw her,” Abatangelo said.
“That I did,” Eddy confirmed.
Eddy had bumped into Shel by accident six months earlier in Antioch. His brother-in-law had a repair shop on the Delta Highway. Eddy went out to help him on weekends. While buying himself a hero in Safeway, he spotted Shel at the checkout. It’d been great for a minute or two, then increasingly edgy and odd. They talked at most ten minutes.
“She really seem that bad?” Abatangelo asked.
Eddy groaned. “You’re like a little kid, know that? We’ve been through this. She says it herself in the letter. She’s attached. To a loser.”
“Loser how?”
“Something about the way she was talking, I dunno, it just had crank written all over it. It’s very big among the white folk out that way.”
Eddy looked up to see what impression he’d just made. Abatangelo obliged him with, “Don’t get fooled. The guy’s being a loser could just mean he’ll be easier to cut loose.”
“He’s a cranker,” Eddy repeated.
“So?”
Eddy was outraged. “So? I seem to remember a little lecture I got once from a certain Daniel Abatangelo. The speech went: Steer clear of crankers. They’re loose on deck. They’ll fuck you over just to get it out of their system. They shit where they eat.”
“I said that?”
“Put money on it.”
“Well this is about Shel, not crank. And Shel is a girl who believes in Fate. Which is just another way of saying she doesn’t expect much. You End Up Where You Started. I began to see a lot of that in her letters before she stopped writing. It bothered me then and it bothers me now. But it doesn’t surprise me. This crankhead of hers, he’s nothing but a project, you watch.”
Eddy puffed his cheeks. His eyes suggested a certain mystification. Then he shrugged. “Yeah. Okay. Maybe so. What I know about women you could fit inside a pea.” He stared at his salad, licked his teeth and shook his head. “You ask me, though, she ain’t free to walk away the minute you show up.”
Abatangelo tried to form a picture of this in his mind. The task proved the better of him, for reasons he preferred not to address. He asked Eddy, “Any suggestions?”
Eddy chortled. “I suggest you get a little settled before you haul your ass out to Bum Fuck Egypt and get your dick stuck in the fan. She’s a convicted felon, check condition number nine of your release. You get permission to see her, I’ll kiss your bare ass at Geary and Powell.”
“I got permission to see you.”
“Because I sweat blood to make it that way. I’m the perfect parolee.” He finished his salad. Tearing off a chunk of bread, he sopped up the dressing off his plate. “Besides which, you’ve got a job,” he said. “Incidentally, I checked out this guy Dominic’s set you up with. He’s a goofy bird and the work’ll bore you stupid, but I don’t think he’s gonna mess with you. No kickbacks, no weird threats because you scare him. My guess is, it’s the best gig you could expect right now involving photography. Stick with it for a year, who knows? You could be doing your own stuff, showing it around town maybe. There are still a lot of little galleries here. That’s what you want, right?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
Eddy snorted. “It’s what you want, trust me. As for women, this is an easy town to get laid in. All the nice guys are boning all the other nice guys. Polly’s got friends who’ll jump you in a frenzy, I’m serious. You’re red meat compared to the preening yuppie fluff they’re used to. Don’t get me wrong, Shel’s a great old lady, or she was once. She chumped you off, though, remember? Don’t obsess. It’s not going to get you anywhere, except back in the tank.”
Oscar cleared their salads as the entrees arrived, then returned with a bumbling flourish to shower their plates with Parmesan. Abatangelo found himself staring at his food.
“It won’t bite back,” Eddy said, watching him.
Abatangelo speared a serving of sausage with his fork. He felt an excruciating reluctance. When he finally managed to put the serving on his tongue, what he feared would happen, happened. He put his fork back down and covered his face with his hand.
“It’s all right,” Eddy said gently. “Same thing happened to me.”
Oscar popped up tableside. Eddy assured him all was fine and gently urged him to vanish. In time, Abatangelo looked up from his hand, wearing a vacant smile, eyes red.
“Stupid,” he said. “Sorry.”
“No more sorry,” Eddy replied. “You’re home.”
Abatangelo picked up his fork. Memories came at him again and again as he ate, memories of a childhood spent in this same neighborhood. A childhood consumed with defying his father’s shame, nursing his mother’s fear, tormenting his sister, playing pranks on the phonies.
“Can I ask you something?” Eddy said.
Abatangelo looked up.
“This Shel thing. Twenty-five words or less: How far you willing to go?”
Abatangelo stared across the table. He figured it was best not to tell Eddy what he didn’t want to know. “She said she could stand to see me,” he said. “I could stand to see her. I’ll be careful. After that, what happens, happens.”
Eddy shook his head. The effect of the wine was beginning to show. “That’s no good.”
“Ed, what- ”
“I can assure you, man, Shel’s in a spot. Her eyes tell you that. But that doesn’t mean she’s suffering for you. Okay? Her being in a jam does not demand a response. Ten years is enough. Too much. Tell me we’re clear on this.”
Abatangelo put his fork down. “You’ve made your point.”
Eddy leaned close, eyes aglow. “Don’t… obsess…”
Abatangelo regarded the face before him with a sudden intense discomfort. He said, “What do you suggest, Ed? Sit and reflect? I’ve had ten years of rolling things around in my head. Time for a little exercise.”
“Look, Dan, I know how you feel.”
Abatangelo cackled. “Do you, now? What was it, forty-two months you did? Why was that, Ed?”
Eddy shrank back a little. “Look, I owe you. Big-time. I realize that.”
Abatangelo waved him off. “To obsess or not obsess is not my problem, Ed. My problem is making sure I don’t fall back into the bad habit that sneaks up on you inside the walls, the habit of thinking everything over ten different ways because that’s all you’ve got the chance to do. Lots of time on your hands. Remember? Well, that’s over. At least everybody keeps telling me it is. What’s your take on that, Ed? Is it over?”
“No, not yet,” Eddy said. “Not really.”
“Aha.”
“Which is why it’s important to stay smart.”
Abatangelo wiped his hands on his napkin, felt in his pocket to be sure he had the printout with Shel’s address, and rose from the table. “There’s someplace I’ve gotta be,” he said.
“No, Dan, come on. Don’t. It’s a chump move.”
Abatangelo stiffened. “Chump move. Stay smart. You got something you want to tell me, Ed?”
Eddy looked off, trying to puzzle out where things had gone so wrong. Abatangelo said, “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, fill you in on how it all turns out. Thanks for dinner.”
“Danny, please. Sit down.”
“And the cake,” He started moving away. “You outdid yourself. I mean that.”
Frank surveyed the three vehicles deposited beneath a pole lamp in the Lucky Market parking lot in East Antioch.
“You said three trucks,” Frank said. “These ain’t trucks.”
Two of the vehicles were construction vans. One had the shocks gone in back. The other had bald tires and trails of scaly black rust rimming each wheel well. The third vehicle was a makeshift tool wagon, fashioned from a twenty-foot flatbed with a plywood aftershed bolted down in back. As though all this weren’t bad enough, every one of them was smaller than what Frank had had in mind.
“Lonesome George must’ve seen you fuckers coming,” he said.
Mooch hiked up his collar. “Like a little cheese with that whine, Frank?” A winter drizzle began to fall. “Not like we’re driving to Jupiter.”
“There’s plenty of room, Frank,” Chewy said. He sounded as though he was trying to convince himself. “I mean, how much stuff is there?”
Frank started back for his truck. “Ever try to shove ten pounds of shit into a two-pound bag? That’s how much stuff there is.”
There was something else bothering him. He couldn’t quite figure out what it was. He stood there a moment studying the trucks in the rain, then it came to him. The tool wagon’s aftershed, it was painted a pale blue. Robin’s egg, he believed the color was called. The color was faded, chipped, stained, but even so, it brought to mind the shade of blue found on children’s blankets, painted on the walls of nurseries. He thought of Jesse, and all of sudden it was hard to swallow. The air felt colder than the weather justified.
Not now, he told himself. He reached inside the cabin of his truck, behind the seat, to remove the boltcutter. As he reached for it he spotted the neoprene case in which he kept a loaded Ruger 9 mm. With the seat obscuring him from view, he considered the matter. Like a little cheese with that whine? It was a pretty gun, a good gun. He opened the case, removed the clip from the Ruger, pocketed the clip and shoved the pistol in his waistband, pulling out his shirttail to hide the protruding grip. There was an eight ball of cocaine in the case as well; he stowed it in his pocket. Then he pulled the seat back into place, locked the door and headed for the lead van.
“Stay in a tight line behind me, don’t let anybody cut in,” Frank instructed. “If anything goes wrong with your truck, or whatever the hell you call these things, flash your brights.”
He led them out onto the Delta Highway and they followed it southeast in a chill, misting rain. Beyond Bethany they veered due south on Mountain House Road and shortly pulled up before a sprawling, shabby facility called Easy Access Storage. A hurricane fence surrounded the premises, sagging halfway to the ground in places. Inside, the storage sheds defiled like deserted barracks in the misty darkness, tin-roofed stucco sheds stained with oil and patched here and there with mismatched spackling. Hellhole Estates, Frank thought. But that was the genius of it. Hiding stolen goods worth $150,000 beneath a trash pile in the middle of nowhere.
The storage facility was but one more enterprise operated by Felix Randall. He’d bought it from a local family who’d packed up and moved to Idaho, part of the mass white flight increasingly common to the region, given the growing Mexican influx. Felix used the place intermittently to house his speed labs and store contraband. He left it unguarded on the principle he’d rather lose whatever he decided to leave there than risk handing some ill-paid henchling over to the law. He could always hunt down a thief. He couldn’t always compromise a snitch.
Frank got out of his van and walked back to the twins, telling them to stay put. Boltcutter in hand, he crossed the road.
Cocking an ear for oncoming traffic, he cut the gate chain, tossed it aside, and waved the twins on in, pointing down the nearest gravel lane. They pulled down to the last door, out of sight from the road. Frank ran back to his own van, drove it past the gate, got out, closed the gate behind him and circled the chain cosmetically around the forepost again.
He joined the twins at the roll-away door to Unit No. 209. Using the boltcutter again he snipped away the padlock and rolled up the door. The shed was sixteen feet high, thirty feet wide and fifty feet deep. It was stuffed floor to roof, front to back, with electronic equipment- one million feet of unshielded, twisted four-pair cable and assorted patch panels, tyraps, Chatsworth racks. Wholesale price for the stuff was near $150 grand. Frank would get thirty for the job. He’d promised to pay the twins five between them.
The wire and panels were being handed off to a Mexican named Cesar Pazienza. Cesar referred to himself as a foreman, claiming to work for a rich hacendado named Rolando Moreira. Frank had met Cesar while scouting out lab sites for Roy Akers along the far shore of the Sacramento River. While driving around the farm roads, Frank had come across a new hotel he’d never seen or heard of before, out in the middle of nowhere. When he ventured inside, Cesar was the first man he met. After a little cat-and-mouse, they saw their way through to some business.
Chewy viewed the densely packed material with a shudder of astonishment. Frank slapped him on the back so hard he stumbled forward.
“Now you know,” he said, “why I wanted trucks.”
It took them an hour to load it all, stuffing it in as best they could. They repacked the tool wagon twice just to find a way to get it all, and all three vehicles sagged from their loads. Despite the cold, everybody stank from sweat. The odor had a chemical taint.
Frank paused from time to time to study his accomplices. Mooch in particular. Ever since the kid had made that crack about wanting a stab at Shel, Frank had been afflicted with sadistic fantasies. It wasn’t wild conjecture to believe that Mooch might be the secret object of Shel’s inexplicable mood swings of late. He had to control an impulse to rush the boy from behind and deliver one good hard blow to the back of the head.
Shel walked out the kitchen door, following her shadow down the gravel walkway to the barn. A faint wail stopped her. She cocked an ear to the wind, then turned toward the sound. After a moment it clarified- a car engine, wound out at high revolutions in low gear, tires screaming on the backroad curves. Whoever was driving preferred to redline on the straightaways rather than downshift on the turns. Probably means it’s stolen, Shel surmised. Probably means it’s coming this way, too.
The car got waved in by the man posted as a watch at the gate. It swerved onto the ranch house side road, tailspinning into a culvert and digging itself out again, spewing mud and rock till it straightened out. It came toward the ranch house at a slightly slower speed, fixing Shel in its headlights.
Coming abreast of her, the car slowed to a stop. The driver, leaning across the front seat, rolled down the passenger window and said, “Roy sent me to fetch ya.”
His name was Eustace, but everyone called him Snuff. He was the youngest of the Akers brothers, named for an uncle in Arkansas. He opened the passenger door then pulled himself back up behind the wheel, waiting.
“I’ve got a chore or two to see to,” she said.
“Yeah, well”- Snuff scratched his cheek with his shoulder- “I mean, Roy says.”
Not now, she thought, and yet she knew Snuff was not conveying a casual invite. Roy couldn’t stand Shel, the feeling was mutual, and they only dealt with each other face-to-face when Roy’d had enough of trying to get through to Frank.
She climbed in beside Snuff, saying, “You’re bringing me back here in ten minutes.”
Snuff hit the gas. “Sure, sure, whatever. I got to relieve what’s-his-name out at the gate, anyway.” He faced front and smiled a prankish smile. “Had to bypass the kill switch to get this baby hoppin’,” he said. He pointed to the steering column from which the ignition cap had been pried away. His eyes glowed. “And check out these seats.” He patted the upholstery. “Is Lyle gonna shit or what?”
“Don’t tell me what I don’t want to know,” Shel said.
“Sure, sure, whatever.”
He drove with a quart of ale between his legs, fingers toodling the bottleneck. From the look of him, Shel guessed he was in the third or fourth day of a serious tweak. His eyes and skin looked twice as old as his years, except for a scab of acne arching high across each cheek. He wore jeans, Doc Martens, a soiled rugby shirt and a Raiders cap turned backward.
The car broke into the clearing in which the work sheds lay. A walnut orchard encircled the compound, the trees layered four rows deep. A trio of bluetick coonhounds greeted them at the gate, which was drawn aside by another of the Akers, this one named Hack, armed with a Remington shotgun.
Off to the side, a semitrailer container sat without wheels, planted on a low bank of cobble. It bore on its side the slogan of the company from which, Shel guessed, the Akers brothers had stolen it: LIFE IS A BANQUET- EAT OUT TONIGHT. A power line ran from one of the bunker silos to the container, and a mushroom vent poked up from its roof. Bags of cat litter and coffee filters, bedsheets and glassware and tubing and old batteries lay scattered about. This gave Shel a pretty good idea that this was the meth lab.
Snuff drove the Camaro between two bunker silos to a tin warehouse in the back of the compound. Machine parts and a cast-off drag chain littered the foreyard. A trash fire burned in an iron drum, sending rubbery shadows up and down the corrugated wall.
The warehouse’s double doors were drawn back, and Snuff pulled the Camaro in slowly, parking on a weighing platform for cattle trucks. The warehouse consisted of one large bay with work lights hung from the ironwork overhead, like tiny caged stars. Beams reaching floor-to-ceiling ran in parallel flanks, front to back. In combination with the high peaked roof they gave the interior the feeling of a big tin church.
Music thundered from a Blaupunkt stereo. Snuff opened his door and gestured for Shel to get out, too. Jumping down from the weighing platform, he shuffled toward his brother Lyle and the truck driver for the night’s run. The trucker was a longhair redneck, the preferred variety of life-form around the Akers property. He wore grease-stained jeans and a Redman cap. His hands trembled constantly.
Lyle Akers wore coveralls and steel-tip boots. He and the trucker shared a joint, seated on a picnic bench behind a torn-down 351 Cleveland four barrel taken from a Grand Torino, stolen earlier that night. Snuff eyed the engine as he approached, jerked a thumb over his shoulder and assailed the two men with, “Got you guys some more beef to butcher.”
Lyle inhaled long and deep, snorted, then passed the reefer to his pal. Eyeing his younger brother with annoyance, he peered past him to the Camaro parked on the weighing platform. He rose to his feet and stepped toward Snuff, feigning a blow to his midriff then plucking the Raiders cap off his head.
“Hey, hey,” Snuff said, reaching.
Lyle held him at bay with a palm to his chest. “Now don’t get ear-a-tated, Snuffo.” Using the cap, he swatted Snuff three times hard across the face, then forced the cap back down on his head, jerking the brim sideways. “No point gettin’ earrrrr-a-tated.”
Snuff tore the hat off his head, put it back on the way he wanted, then huffed off, eyes scalding.
Shel asked: “Lyle, where’s Roy?”
Lyle cleared his throat and spat, then gestured toward a makeshift office at the back of the warehouse. Drawing an oil rag from his pocket, he wiped his hands and stepped toward the shiny red Camaro his baby brother had brought him to cannibalize.
Walking back to the office, Shel navigated piles of construction material stolen by the brothers from construction sites around the state: sandwich panels, cork tile, vermiculite, shiplap and burned clay flooring. A wood plank stair led up to the office door. Inside, Roy Akers sat at a sawbuck table, smoking a cigarette despite the fact that within arm’s reach lay two buckets of used degreaser, a five-gallon gas can and a spilljar of two-stroke oil. What is it, Shel wondered, about Arkies and this nonstop game with fire?
A lamp with a bare bulb, no shade, sat atop the table, and in its light Roy’s features seemed unusually haggard. He had salt-and-pepper hair worn long and brushed back. The collar of his leather jacket lay tangled around his neck and a rim of undershirt peeked through a gaping tear in his sweater. With a rag he wiped grease from the leads on a small electric motor. Seeing Shel, he put the motor aside, stubbed out his cigarette, and wiped his fingers. Without smiling he gestured her forward, into the one available chair. He pulled the cork from a bottle of Everclear, poured several ounces into a glass of ice and topped it with a splash of water and powdered lemonade. The concoction was referred to by the boys as a Peckerwood Highball. He stirred it with his finger. Producing a second glass he tinked the bottle of alcohol against its edge and looked up inquiringly.
“God forbid,” Shel said, sitting down.
Roy shrugged and put the bottle down, reinserting the cork. Given the stench of paint and chemicals in the air, it was impossible to tell from the smell of him how cranked he was.
He eyed her at length, then said, “You look well.”
“You don’t. Can I go?”
Roy emitted a raspy chuckle and took a sip from his glass. Lemonade powder clung to his finger and he licked at it.
“Sit tight,” he said. “Let me think on this for a spell.”
Shel sat there watching Roy think on it. It was not an attractive process, she decided.
To Shel, Roy had the predictable insecurities of an oldest son, particularly the oldest son of a conniving, ruthless father, a father who’d raised four sons principally for the cheap labor they provided and who played them, one against the other, every day of their lives. Roy had tried to make up for all his resulting deficiencies in manhood by cultivating a near-hysterical enthusiasm for menace. Respond to fear by inflicting fear, that was his guiding rule. Don’t get scared, get crazed. Even his brothers gave him a wide berth when he struck that certain mood.
Shel suspected the reason Roy pimped Rowena wasn’t for the money or the tawdry thrill, but for the effect it had on the men around him. It made them think: His women crawl for him. They take it. And in the lowborn milieu in which the Akers clan operated, this was serious medicine. Other men realized there’d be no appealing to Roy’s better side. He availed no such side, not even to his father, whom he feared.
Roy freshened his drink with a spurt from the bottle. He twirled his glass instead of stirring it this time. The ice made a tiny racket.
“So,” he said finally. “How are things up at Happy House?”
“Delirious. That all?”
“Rowena tells me different.” Roy looked across the table as though expecting her to argue. “Rowena tells me Frank’s done a sudden vamoose. And you’re all shook up about it.”
“Weener needs to get her facts straight.”
“You’re calling her a liar.”
“Don’t start with me, Roy.”
Roy chuckled and looked off. He tugged his nose and snorted. “You know,” he said, “if I tried to count the number of times you’ve acted nice to me.” He held up one hand, bending his fingers one by one to count.
Shel said, “Careful, Roy. You’ll get a nosebleed.”
Roy said, “Your mouth…”
“And if Weener- ”
“Her name’s Rowena,” Roy said. “She wants to be called by her name.”
Shel howled. “That why you call her The Swallow?”
“If you were as smart as your mouth, you’d be nice to me.”
“Being nice to you,” Shel said, “would be too painful to bear.”
Roy wiped his face with his hand. “You want too painful to bear? I’ll tell you a little story about too painful to bear.” Roy emptied his glass and did himself up another drink. “Know that storage center Felix runs out near Bethany? The one we’ve let Frank tend to now and again, give him something to do.”
“Frank doesn’t tell me everything he does for you,” Shel said. “I’ve got a good idea why.”
Roy smiled. “Well, given that you’re out of the loop, then, I guess you’re gonna have to trust me, huh? Trust I’ve got… my facts straight.”
“Where’s Frank?”
“Keep your pants on.” Roy leaned back and smiled. “Felix has some equipment stored out there, has to do with a little operation he’s running with this electrical contractor does work for the insurance companies, setting up their claims centers. This contractor, he’s ordered a lot of extra equipment on the sly, sidetracked it over to Felix.”
Roy looked up to gauge her attention.
“I’m waiting for the part that deals with me,” she said.
“You mean Frank, right?”
“Whatever.”
“You’re not gonna bail on little Frankie, are you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, you didn’t,” Roy agreed. “You certainly did not.” He sipped from his drink. “Where was I? Ah. Seems Frank has been paying Felix’s equipment an awful lot of attention of late. That, and the fact he’s a looney shitbird to begin with, has folks concerned. Then this afternoon the Idiot Twins, you know the ones I mean, Screwy and Gooey, the ones Frank cottons to, they showed up at Lonesome George’s wanting three trucks.”
Despite herself, Shel flinched. Noticing this, Roy smiled. He said, “I wonder- Felix got anything to worry about? From Frank, I mean.”
“You tell me.”
“You really don’t know?”
“I haven’t the faintest goddamn idea what you’re talking about.”
Roy lowered his chin and laughed low in his throat, like a nodding drunk. “That just won’t do,” he said. “Will it?”
“Works for me,” Shel said, getting up to leave.
“Sit the fuck back down,” Roy barked. “Frank and the Idiot Twins knocked off Felix’s locker not twenty minutes ago. Felix sent Tully out there to sit on the place, see if anything went down. Plenty did. You following me here?”
Shel felt a sudden sick feeling. Then she was laughing.
“You fuckwad,” she said.
“You think I’m making this up?”
Feeling for the chair behind her she sat back down. Roy studied her, leaning forward on his arms. Shortly he was cackling. A small, drug-driven fury animated the sound. Shel leaned back from it.
“Let’s cover this ground again,” he said. “What’s Frank got going?”
It took an hour of driving through misting rain along the Eastshore Freeway for Abatangelo to reach the Delta Highway. He followed it east for twenty miles, enough to get beyond the storm. In time he came upon a patchwork community of old farms, recent strip malls, scrap yards and housing projects. The place was called Oakley.
He pulled into a roadside market that bore no other name than CHEAPER. Inside, the light was dim except for the beer coolers, which glowed like TV screens. The snack rack was full but other merchandise sat in boxes along the aisles. He purchased a local map, checked the index to be sure it included the road where Shel lived, and returned to the car.
He crouched before the headlights, searching out his way on the map. The latticework of streets grew sparer out where Shel lived. Once his bearings were clear, he got back in the car and wound his way for several miles through low, green hills dotted with laurel trees and scrub oaks. Florid pastures sank away into deep ravines and lakes of rainwater. Moonlight shone through low scudding clouds. An easterly wind was bringing the storm in from the coast, and the smell of coming rain tinged the air.
He drove slowly, navigating awkward turns in the road as it followed ancient property lines. He checked the names and numbers on roadside mailboxes. Many bore RFD numbers that didn’t jive with the address he had for Shel, and he ventured back and forth along the same five miles of narrow, curving asphalt, unable to make sense of where he was, how close he might be, how far. In the end he just returned the way he’d come to the same roadside market in Oakley.
He went to a bank of pay phones along the outside wall. Beside them, a fresh urine stain streaked the plaster where someone had unzipped and let go. The stain had a yeasty stench, and in a nearby station wagon three teenage boys downed beers and chortled madly. When a young woman emerged from the market, the teenagers emitted in unison a cheerless mating howl.
Abatangelo checked the phone directory, but Shel wasn’t listed, even under misspellings. He called Information but the operator had no new listings, either. He tried to think of aliases she might use, recalled a few from the old days, checked these as well but only came up empty.
He walked toward the station wagon with the three sniggering drunks. Leaning down into the driver’s side window, he said, “I’m hoping you guys can help me with a problem.”
The boys were white, neither poor nor well-to-do. The kind whose fathers worked construction or wore a badge or drove a rig, maybe two generations removed from Dust Bowl camp trash. They wore decent clothes, their teeth were straight, and their hair looked like it was cut by a woman. They regarded Abatangelo with expressions of dread. He crouched down, so as to look a little less imposing.
“I’ve got an address I’m trying to find out here, and I can’t seem to get the thing right.”
The three teenagers exchanged glances with vague relief. One of them said, “Lotta people get lost out here.”
“Well,” Abatangelo said, “I guess I’m one of them.”
“What address you got?”
It was the driver who spoke. He seemed the oldest, with sandy-colored stubble on his cheeks and chin. Beside him, the guy riding shotgun, if that was still the term, was blond and good-looking and seemed the most frightened of the three. The last one had the Okiest features of the bunch and seemed bent out of shape about something. Skinny and big-eared, he sat in back alone. Riding President, Abatangelo thought. At least that’s what they called it when he was their age.
From memory, Abatangelo recited the address he had for Shel, deciding against showing them the computer printout. They looked at one another as though to determine if anyone had a clue. It was the one in back who spoke finally.
“You ain’t talking about the Akers place, are you?”
Abatangelo turned toward the voice. “What Akers place?”
“You’d know,” the driver said, “if that’s where you were headed.”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” Abatangelo replied. “I’m just looking for an old friend.”
The one in the back leaned forward, touched the driver’s shoulder, and said quietly, “Gary, let’s beat it.”
“Look,” Abatangelo said, “I’m not out here looking for trouble. There something I ought to know about this Akers place?”
The three kids looked at one another and then replied variously, “I never said that”; “Sorry”; and “School night.” The driver reached for the keys, but Abatangelo reached through the window and caught his hand.
“I don’t know,” he said calmly, “what you three are so scared of, but it shouldn’t be me. I’m not a cop, or I would’ve busted you for the beer already. I don’t even know who this guy Akers is, so I’m not out for a fight, I’m not trying to score, I’m just looking up an old girlfriend. If there’s something going on out near where I’m headed, I’d appreciate your telling me.”
His face was less than three inches from the driver’s. He could smell the beer and the chewing gum on his breath. He let go of the boy’s wrist.
“Gary, you tell me,” he said. “Give me directions to this Akers place, and we’re square.”
The boy licked his lips, glanced at his friend beside him and then murmured his directions to Abatangelo. From his hours of to-and-fro on the road, Abatangelo had a fair idea of the property the boy was referring to. He recited the directions back to the boy and got a nod to affirm they were right.
“Now tell me what was so hard about that,” he said. None of the three youths looked at him. “Go on home, before you run into somebody not so understanding.”
He turned back to the phones and heard the station wagon’s motor turn over and the transmission engage. The tires screeched on the smooth blacktop as the three youngsters fled. Probably his mother’s car, Abatangelo thought, thumbing through the phone book again.
He discovered a listing for a Euell Akers, no address. He dialed the number but ten rings passed without an answer. He hung up and went inside. In accordance with a plan made up on the spot, he bought a six-pack for camouflage. Gotta go out and deal with some people named Akers, he thought, who clearly wield a serious fear factor with the locals. Just the kind of people to know this cranker pal of Shel’s, this Frank. Tell them I’m out here to look up a friend. I brought the brew, figured we’d sit around and shoot the goose. Story needs improvement, he realized, but there was time during the drive for that. He got back in the car, put it in gear and headed back out toward the same country road.
Frank and the twins proceeded in darkness along Pacheco Creek, driving the tool wagon and the two vans toward the scrap yards on Suisun Bay. Refineries lined the westerly hills above the road. Rail yards cluttered the lowlands to the east.
The vehicles turned into a landfill road parallel to a line of abandoned dry docks. The asphalt turned to gravel as the road curved along a small, unkempt marina. Beyond the marina, a cinder-block wall ran parallel to the road on the landward side. A half mile further inland, refineries towered along the hillsides, twisting dark masses with plumes of flame, ghostly exhaust and a webwork of light.
Frank and the twins slowed their vehicles, took up position along the wall and prepared to wait. A wind came up, carrying with it a stench of tap-line leaks and rancid water. From the nearby marina, ship tackle and boat lines clamored dully. Now and then moonlight filtered through the clouds drifting low overhead.
Frank studied the Martinez hillside beyond the refinery. A few of the houses had kitchen lights burning, left on for workers due home in a few hours from graveyard. There were fewer such lights than in the past. The refineries were closing here, moving to Mexico. Everything with an income to it was moving to Mexico, or Malaysia, or some other Third World backwater, and what wasn’t moving was staying put with foreigners running the show.
Face it, Frank thought, same thing here. Doing business with Mexicans.
After twenty minutes the vehicle he was waiting for appeared. It was a four-by-four, black with an enclosed shell. The small truck parked on the strait side of the gravel lane, its motor still running, from which Frank inferred they’d popped the ignition switch to steal it. He signaled with his headlights in a prearranged code and the Mexicans signaled back.
The moon, suddenly exposed, cast a stark, cold light as the Mexican driver stepped out of the four-by-four. He was joined by two companions who lowered the truck’s tailgate and unfolded themselves from the back. The three men greeted one another in whispered Spanish, eyed the moon, then ambled toward Frank and the twins.
The two groups passed each other at the center of the gravel lane, doing so wordlessly and without gestures of greeting or even acknowledgment. Soon the vans and the tool wagon, commanded now by the Mexicans, started up again and began to move. They followed the gravel lane west toward a pick-up road that would lead them south again, through a ravine lined with alders toward the highway. From there they would head off to Rolando Moreira’s worksites east of Suisun City.
Frank climbed inside the four-by-four the Mexicans had brought and discovered a newish smell. Stolen from a lot, he figured, checking under the dash for things that weren’t supposed to be there. Explosive things. Listening things. Satisfied, he turned on the headlights and put the truck in gear.
He took the same path out as the Mexicans before him, and a half mile down the way he spied beyond the marsh grass a dark sedan. It was Cesar’s car. Frank wasn’t surprised to see it but he wasn’t pleased, either.
He signaled by headlight to the car, received the same signal back, and pulled to a stop. Setting the parking brake, he rapped on the glass partition to the back, and told the twins through the glass, “Get out.” He didn’t wait for their objections. Instead, he just stepped out of the cab and went back to meet them as they scrambled off the tailgate onto the gravel.
“We’re just here to do a little meet ‘n’ greet,” Frank said. “Won’t be long.”
“Frank-o,” Chewy replied. His eyes glowed. “Shitload of money back here.”
“Later,” Frank said.
The driver of the dark sedan rolled down his window to speak as Frank and the twins approached. An intense aroma of mota wafted through the window crack.
“Francisco,” Cesar said, smiling. He was a small and wiry man with a disfiguring birthmark above one eyebrow. He eyed the twins, then extended his hand to Frank.
“Francisco, amigo. Quihubo?”
The man beside him in the passenger seat giggled. In contrast to Cesar, this man was huge. The third man in the back was huge as well. Frank had met them once before. Humberto and Pepe.
“Whatch’all doin’ out here?” Frank asked. All down home.
Cesar said, “Abrazos from Señor Zopilote. He’s happy. So am I.”
Cesar’s command of English rated somewhere between competence and mimicry. Frank, who’d grown up in San Diego, knew the accent well. The border was swimming with guys who spoke just like him.
“That name again?” Frank said.
“Zopilote,” Cesar replied, the goodwill draining from his eyes.
“I grew up along the border,” Frank said. “My mother was half-Mexican, she drove me in and out of TJ twice a month to score diet pills. So I know a little Spanish. In particular, I know what zopilote means.” It meant ‘vulture.’ ”I don’t recall it coming up before.”
“He’s the boss,” Cesar said.
“I thought you worked for some guy named Moreira.”
“Don Rolando?”
“Rolando Moreira, yeah.”
“He owns the hotel where we met,” Cesar admitted. “A hacendado, land owner, developer, you know. But I work for El Zopilote. He’d like to meet you, by the way.”
“Abrazo,” Humberto shouted suddenly from the backseat. “Quihubo, amigo.” He and Pepe started giggling again. Cesar reached over and slapped at Humberto’s head. Humberto yipped in mock pain and he and Pepe fell into dopey laughter. Cesar turned back to Frank. “Idiots,” he said apologetically.
“Tell Señor Zopilote or whatever you really call him I’d be glad to make his acquaintance,” Frank lied. Buy time, he thought.
“Bravo,” Cesar said. “Tonight?”
Overhead, the moon vanished again beyond the clouds.
“Tonight’s a little soon,” Frank said. “When things settle down. There’s gonna be quite a stir once Felix finds his stuff is gone.”
“Perfect,” Cesar said. “Because I was told to pass along a little something. An offer. If you want to make some real money, we are very interested in learning how to get a message to Mr. Felix.”
Frank, to conceal his shaking, toed the gravel at his feet. “No fooling? What sort of message?”
“A friendly message.”
From behind, Frank heard Mooch whisper, “Fan mail? From some flounder?”
Frank spun around and glared. Mooch coughed in his hand and stared off toward the refineries. Turning back to Cesar, Frank leaned down closer to the car window and asked, “This wouldn’t have anything to do with that chavo got strung up to a tree out on Kirker Pass Road, would it?”
With his forefinger Cesar scoured a cigarette pack tucked inside his shirt pocket. Shortly he withdrew a mangled cigarette and put it to his lips. “A friendly message,” he repeated.
“I thought your boss Moreira had no truck with crank,” Frank said. “Just a builder.”
“Absolutely,” Cesar responded.
“But El Zopilote, he’s more broad-minded.”
“Francisco…”
Frank leaned down closer and whispered, “That’s what this was all about, right? You didn’t need any cable, you didn’t need any of that shit, or not so much you were willing to pay me thirty grand. You wanted a crack at Felix Randall. A little venganza, am I right? What was the boy’s name? Gaspar Arevalo. From the county of Sonora, if I remember right.”
“We would be very interested,” Cesar responded. He extended his hand in the Latin fashion, palm down, for Frank to take. “We’ll make it worth your while. We already have. We’ll talk?”
Frank took Cesar’s hand, gripped it perfunctorily, and stepped backed from the car.
“Till then,” Cesar said. He put the sedan in gear and eased it from the gravel shoulder. As they went, Humberto sang, “Vaya con Dios… Quihubo culero Francisco…”
Frank stared at the receding car with newfound dread. Collecting himself after a moment, he signaled for the brothers to get back in the truck.
“That little guy,” one of the twins remarked. “He’s one butt-ugly little cooze.”
Frank turned about in a sudden fury. It was Mooch, of course. “Come again?”
Mooch took a step back. “Hold the phone, Frank.”
“You know what ‘cooze’ means in the joint, right?”
The boy kept retreating.
“I asked you a question.”
“ ‘Cooze.’ ‘Cooze,’ it’s a fucking word.”
“Hey, Frank,” the other brother said, stepping between them. He was chafing his arms. “Frank-o buddy, he didn’t mean anything, okay? Let’s hit it.”
Frank stood his ground. “That’s just what you need, Mooch,” he shouted. He felt strangely infuriated at the boy’s helpless stupidity. “Some joint time. Let some buck nigger put some flavor in his behavior. You can chalk his stick.”
“Frank,” Chewy said again, reaching out for Frank’s arm. “Let it go. All right? He didn’t mean anything.”
Frank tore his cap off, flung it to the ground then kicked it for good measure. Standing there stock-still for a moment, he realized it had all been decided. It was out of his hands. He picked up his hat, swatted it against his leg and fit it back on top of his head.
“Get in the truck,” he said.
With the twins in back he put the four-by-four in gear again and headed up Pacheco Creek, south to the highway. There he turned east, toward Willow Pass where they’d cross the Diablo foothills. As he drove, Frank checked in back, to make sure the twins were occupied, then he withdrew the Ruger from his waistband and the clip from his pocket, stowing both in the glove compartment. After thinking it over he removed the eight ball of cocaine from his shirt pocket and threw it in with the gun.
They followed Marsh Creek through the arroyos into pasture lowlands, heading toward the Delta tule marshes. The brothers rented a split-level house near Sand Mound Slough. The house sat alone on a dirt road rimmed with cattails. Grime hazed the windows. An antenna clamped to the chimney hung loose, shorn free by the wind.
Frank pulled into the garage. After securing the door behind the truck, the twins came front. Frank opened the glove compartment, removed the eight ball, and waggled it at eye level. “I’d say we deserve ourselves a little victory ball.”
Mooch eyed the bundle with fond surprise. “Well, hey,” he said.
“Check out what the wets left behind.” Frank pulled out the 9 mm and its clip and held them out in his palm.
Chewy eyed the weapon with instant dread. “I knew it, I fucking knew it,” he said. “You’re a damn fool, Frank, walking unpacked into a trade with those fuckers.”
“I walk in packed,” Frank said, “something goes haywire, they toss me and find a gun? Here, take this.”
He handed the Ruger to Chewy. Chewy accepted it in both palms and held it there, like it was sleeping. Like it might wake up. Frank took the clip away from him, emptied it of rounds, then handed it back. He pocketed the bullets, which were hollow-points. “Feel better now?” he asked.
“Some,” Chewy admitted.
Frank brandished the eight ball again. “We gonna hoot the toot or think deep thoughts here?”
“What about the count?”
Frank shrugged. “Money going somewhere?”
The brothers looked at one another. Trick question.
“Thought not,” Frank said. “Let’s get hammered. I hate counting. Thankless goddamn chore.”
Inside the house, every surface wore a glaze of dust. Discarded socks and magazines lay scattered under chairs, behind curtains.
“Bring the party,” Mooch called back over his shoulder as he climbed the stairs.
Abatangelo drove back and forth outside the Akers property twice before deciding he had the right place. It wasn’t till he turned off the road that he spotted a pickup truck with a man at the wheel, parked beyond a stone wall about twenty yards in.
The pickup’s headlights came on and the truck lurched out, blocking the way amid a cloud of dust and exhaust. The driver yammered into a wireless phone over the throb of the truck engine, squinting out into the glare from Abatangelo’s headlights. He was little more than a kid, not much older than the boys who’d provided directions out here, and whoever he was talking to was giving him a hard time. The conversation went from heated to pitched and ended in a shout before the kid slammed down the phone, killed the truck motor, threw open the door and marched forward, rocks crunching beneath his boots. He carried a Maglite with him, flicking the beam on as he came to the driver’s side window of the car. He pointed it inside, scouring the front seat first. Then he raised the beam into Abatangelo’s face.
“Whoa, bub, the eyes, how about it?”
The kid stepped back and lowered the light. He was thin, edgy. Acne rippled across his cheeks. He wore a Raiders cap, brim pointed backwards. It was pulled down low on his head like he was defying someone to pull it off.
“You’re the one kept driving back and forth out here ’bout an hour ago,” the kid said. A nasal twang. “Figured you’d be back.”
“I’m not from out here,” Abatangelo said. “Easy to get lost.”
“What the hell you doing on my property?”
The statement had a defensive ring. This is no more your property, Abatangelo thought, than it is mine. But, given the bit with the phone, he presumed the owner would be out momentarily. Abatangelo patted the six-pack beside him. He’d passed a roadhouse on the Delta Highway just outside Oakley, the name came to him as he traded stares with the boy.
“I’m looking for a buddy of mine. Met him at The Wagon Wheel a few nights back. Told me if I had the inclination I ought to come on out, lift a few brews.”
“This friend, he got a name?”
Abatangelo nodded. “Know somebody who doesn’t?”
In the distance another truck approached, turning a bend and spewing gravel as it lurched up the side road toward them. The kid stepped back from the car, pointed the Maglite toward the oncoming truck and flashed it on and off three times. Abatangelo chuckled. All we need now, he thought, is a tree house and a secret sign. His palms were damp. A confrontation was on the way, an ugly one perhaps, and though he’d readied himself mentally his body rebelled. Sensing the need for a little stage business, he reached to the six-pack beside him and uncapped one of the beers. He’d taken three sips by the time his welcoming committee disembarked from the truck.
There were two of them, they carried shotguns and lumbered toward the car. Something in the way they ignored the pimply kid suggested they were brothers.
You’re a pleasant guy, he told himself. You’re the mildest man on the planet.
The two newcomers split up as they reached the car. One took the passenger side, lifting the barrel of his shotgun so it pointed directly at Abatangelo and pumping a round into the chamber as he took aim. The other one came around to the driver’s side. He had longish graying hair combed straight back, a sweater with holes in it. He seemed to be the oldest.
“You’re on private property,” he said.
“Hey,” Abatangelo said. “I was invited.”
“No one here invited you.”
“Wrong. Sorry, I don’t mean to differ, but wrong. I got explicit directions.” He gestured toward the one pointing his rifle. Middle child, he thought. No surprise he’d be the one most attached to his weapon. “Could you tell Sergeant York over there to chill? I’m not here to hassle anybody.”
“Too late for that,” the oldest said, and spat. “We’re already hassled.”
“Not by me.”
“He says he’s got a friend,” the kid interjected from behind. He’d been chewing his thumbnail. “Says they met at The Wagon Wheel.”
“You haven’t got any friends here,” the oldest one said, checking the inside of the car.
“That’s not my understanding,” Abatangelo said. He gestured to the one training his shotgun on him. “Come on, lighten up. What’s with you guys?”
“We’ve had poachers out here, if it’s any of your business. Squatters. Thieves.”
“Aha,” Abatangelo said. That’d be the story if the cops found his body out here. “Even so. All this- ”
“You don’t like it, turn around.”
Abatangelo took a sip from his beer. In the distance ahead, about a half mile away, he could see the glow of houselights crowning the first hill. He wondered if Shel was there.
“Like the young one said, I’m here to meet a friend.”
“Give me his name.”
Abatangelo considered the matter. He was getting nowhere. Time to risk a little. Calling to mind the name Shel had mentioned in her letter, he said, “Hank,” and took another sip of beer.
“You mean Frank,” the kid said.
Bingo.
“Do I?” Abatangelo offered an addled smile. “It was a wild night. Good thing I jotted the directions down or I would’ve fucked them up, too.”
The oldest one reached for the door handle, opened the door and said, “That’s it. Out.”
“Hey- ”
“Get your ass out of the car,” he shouted. He raised his own gun now, a reckless fury in his eyes.
Abatangelo lifted his hands away from his body. “Careful, friend.” He eased out from behind the wheel, set his feet onto the gravel, still showing his hands. “Let’s not overreact.”
The oldest, using the gun for a prod, forced Abatangelo to his knees, hands spread out to each side against the car. The shotgun barrel pressed against his neck. The middle child came around, muttering, “Sergeant York, huh? Fucking Sergeant York?” In the background, the youngest protested, saying, “Goddamn, Roy, no need to make a federal case. Let him get back in the car, get the fuck outta here.”
“Shut up,” the one called Roy said. Reaching inside the car, he removed the keys from the ignition, tossed them to the middle brother and said, “Check the car, Lyle.” Turning back to Abatangelo, he pressed the shotgun barrel harder into his neck. “Came out to pick up your stuff, right?”
“Listen,” Abatangelo began.
“The stuff old Frankie went and stole for you tonight.”
Abatangelo closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the side of the car. Good God, he thought. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The middle brother, the one called Lyle, was rifling the car. Scouring the glove compartment, he found only road maps, a tire pressure gauge, an old magnetized statue of St. Christopher and the registration. He removed the registration from its envelope, puzzled over it briefly, and called out, “Car belongs to a guy named…” He stared at the small piece of paper as though it were written in code.
“Dominic Napolitano,” Abatangelo said.
“That you?” Roy asked.
“No. A friend. Car’s borrowed.”
Roy gestured for Lyle to go on searching. Lyle tucked the registration in his pocket then went around back to check the trunk, lifting the spare to peer beneath it and rummaging through a box of rags.
“Nothing,” he shouted, slamming the trunk closed.
He came around front again. As Roy eased back with the gun, Lyle rifled Abatangelo’s pockets and came up with nothing but what was left of his kickout money. He counted it, showed it to Roy, then stuffed it in his pocket with the registration.
“Chump change,” Abatangelo said over his shoulder, grateful to have the gun barrel off his neck. “If I’m here to pick up something worth making this kind of noise over, how come all I’m carrying is chump change?”
“I can name a dozen reasons,” Roy said. “How come no ID? How come no wallet, even?”
Abatangelo made a point to meet Roy’s eye. It was clear now he’d be the one to decide things. “I tell you the truth,” Abatangelo said, “you’ll just jump to conclusions.”
“Will I now?”
“Look, I don’t know what Frank may have been up to, that’s the truth. I met him once, that’s it, at the Wagon Wheel. We shot the breeze.”
“Horseshit,” Lyle said.
Roy said, “About what?”
“About being in the joint.” Abatangelo turned a little further. “I’m fresh out. That’s why I don’t have ID.”
Roy thought it over a moment. “Frank offer you a job?”
“Not in so many words.”
“He’s lying,” Lyle said.
Addressing Roy, Abatangelo said, “You’re so bent about thievery, tell your brother to give me back my money.”
“Fat chance, liar,” Lyle said.
“How come you know he’s my brother?” Roy said.
“Oh, come on.”
“You’re just some stranger, met Frank at the goddamn Wagon Wheel, how come you know shit about me or anybody else standing here?”
“A mentally retarded rock could peg you three for brothers,” Abatangelo said. “I’m tired of being on my knees. I’m standing up.”
“You stay put.” It was Lyle, shouting. “Come on, Roy, snap to. Fuck this fool. Him and his goddamn mouth.”
Abatangelo turned his head around to where he could meet Roy’s eye. “I’m standing up,” he said again, and began to rise.
“Fuck you will,” Lyle said, and he charged forward.
Roy cut him off. “We got a problem here, Lyle?”
“What the fuck’s gone wrong with you?”
Lyle shoved Roy, Roy shoved back, neither blow enough to do anything but get the other brother’s attention. Maybe that was why the younger one didn’t step in. He just stood there, blank-eyed, no stake in the winner. Lyle, sensing he was being stared at, looked away from Roy just long enough to say, “You see something funny, Snuff?”
Abatangelo reached his feet and brushed the knees to his suit pants. Roy, Lyle, and, of all things, Snuff. Brothers, oh yeah.
“This is Frank’s handoff,” Lyle shouted at Roy. “Hell’s bells, you’re the one who brought it up.”
“If I was a handoff,” Abatangelo interjected, sitting down behind the wheel, facing out, “I’d make Frank bring his stuff to me, wouldn’t I? If he made me come out here looking for it, I’d come with a gun. Think about it, thief.”
Lyle took a lunge toward Abatangelo. “I’ve about had it with you.”
“Knock it off,” Roy shouted, collaring Lyle and throwing him back. They glared at each other, weapons ready. The young one, Snuff, remained frozen to the spot, looking utterly lost.
“You want a beer?” Abatangelo asked.
Snuff didn’t answer, but he did shoot back a look that said, Don’t joke. Shortly, whatever was meant to pass between the older brothers ended. Roy made a gimme gesture, Lyle handed him Abatangelo’s car keys, then Roy turned back to Abatangelo and said, “Get the fuck off my property. I see you again out here, there won’t be time to talk me out of it.”
“I want my money back,” Abatangelo said. He nodded toward Lyle. “And the registration. Admit it, I haven’t done anything to you.”
“You want your money,” Lyle said, “get up off your ass and claim it.”
“Put the gun down,” Abatangelo said, “make it a fair fight, I’ll claim a lot more than my money. Right here. Your brothers can watch.”
This brought a smile to Roy’s face, as though he could just picture it. Even so, he turned to Abatangelo and said, “I told you, leave. Don’t push your luck.”
Abatangelo looked at each of the brothers in turn and realized it was his last chance. He glanced up the gravel road again, at the glowing crest of the first hill, and briefly considered some ploy to get back there, use the phone, the can, anything, just to see if she was really there. Lyle brought him around by banging on the car hood with the stock of his shotgun.
Abatangelo closed the car door and turned the ignition over. As he did he felt his hand trembling. He put the car in gear and the two older ones started in on the young one, Snuff, like it was all his fault. Abatangelo backed out toward the road feeling sorry for the kid.
Ten minutes later he was back at the market named CHEAPER, sitting in his car, staring at nothing. He asked himself, as the Baltimore Catechism of his Catholic boyhood had asked him at the end of each chapter: What have we learned from this lesson?
Shel might as well be on the moon, he thought, that’s what we’ve learned. What were the words in her letter, Got a whole new life. Things are complicated.
Got that right.
Her old man- Frankie, as they called him- he’d fucked up major from the sounds of it. And if there was any spine to Roy Akers’s ranting, old Frankie was in for an ordeal the likes of which Abatangelo wouldn’t mind knowing about, truth be told. He doubted it’d stop at Frank, though. The Akers clan didn’t seem the type to discriminate too subtly when it came to revenge. Frank’s friends were their enemies. He had to assume that meant Shel, too.
You should have stayed, he thought. Gotten her out. Yeah, sure- how, exactly? Figure it out on the fly, just go, do it. Turn around. Now. No. Go back, you just get yourself killed. Get her killed, too. For what? You’ve been gone ten years. Admit it, you haven’t got the faintest idea what’s going on.
He put the car in gear and drove, not sure where he was headed and doubtful he much cared. He reached the Delta Highway but did not get on, continuing instead toward the seedier neighborhoods rimming downtown.
The storm that had been approaching from the west finally arrived, dropping a thick and steady mist over everything. Ghosts of steam rose through sewer gratings. Inside an all-night Laundromat, an old man folded his clothing. Beyond the lobby window of a cheap hotel, an old woman sat alone, illumined by the jittery light of an ancient TV. That’s you and Shel, he thought. Years from now. Old, forgotten. Apart.
He turned blindly onto a cross-street and found the sidewalk dotted with working girls. The sight made him wish he’d brought his camera along. The women manned the doorways of dark buildings, standing out of the rain, peering out from the shadows like the undead. Gotta make sure the pump still pumps, he thought drearily, remembering the cabby’s words from that morning outside the Tucson airport. Fuck her till she cries. The women here looked like they were well beyond crying. One Latina in a raincoat leaned against the wall of an SRO hotel, standing there barefoot, singing, pulling at her hair, staring into her empty pumps as they filled with rain. Beside her, a sign posted on the hotel’s door read:
IT IS UNLAWFUL
for Anyone to Sell, Use, or Possess
any Controlled Substances
NARCOTICS
Except as Otherwise Provided by Law
Abatangelo drove on. Just beyond the streetwalkers lay a strip of seedy bars: The Spirit Club, Earth Angel, Cinnabar, The New Déjà Vu. Above an empty lot, a spotlit billboard read: CALIFORNIA LOTTO: YOU’RE ONLY SIX NUMBERS AWAY.
As the twins sat side by side on a sagging couch, passing the pipe back and forth, Frank kept reminding himself: You’re almost there. He pictured Shel in the guest room by herself, moody, smoking, staring out the window at the sodden pasture. No more of that, he thought. She’s gonna be standing on a beach in Baja, walking along the surf, wind in that long red hair. The money’s downstairs, stay calm, do it right- you and your shiny white nurse can put a world of distance between you and Felix Randall’s redneck mafia. Get gone, vanish, start over. Be happy. He liked the sound of that. Happy.
“Yo, Frank,” Mooch said. “Bring the fire.”
Snapping to, Frank held a flaming rum-soaked cotton ball in a set of tongs beneath the bowl as first Mooch then Chewy drew deep and long from the pipe. Chewy had set the Ruger on the floor. From time to time he stared at it, puzzled, rubbing his knees. Frank picked it up and ran his finger down the slide chamfer. “What’s to be scared of, Chew?”
From his pocket he withdrew the hollow-points and fitted them one by one into the magazine’s viewing port. He pulled back the breech to load a round into the firing chamber, put the safety on, then removed the magazine and added an extra round. He shoved the clip home, released the safety and held the gun out for Chewy to take.
“It’s not alive,” Frank said. “It only does what you want it to do.”
“I don’t want it to do anything,” Chewy said.
Frank tucked it in his waistband and pulled his shirttail over it. “Then we’ll keep it out of sight. Feel better?”
“Yeah,” Chewy said. “Sure.”
Mooch eyed the bottle of petroleum ether on the bedstand, then turned his stare toward his arm, running his fingers over the skin. Chewy elbowed him.
“Stop it.”
“What?”
Chewy sighed. His face darkened into a frown, only to soften a moment later. His eyes warmed. Frank inferred from this that the kid had lost track of what he was thinking.
“Can we get more of this?” Chewy asked eventually.
Frank shrugged. “Sure. Maybe. I can find out,” he said, improvising. He felt angry, for reasons he couldn’t quite place. Looking around the room, he took comfort in the fact it wasn’t pale blue. Robin’s egg blue, he remembered, thinking of the tool wagon, the suggestion of children’s things the color called to mind. Then despite himself, the other memory- deeper, sadder, more horrible- it started moving. Sliding along the floor of his mind, it dragged after it a slag of cold blood. The monster was coming out now. The monster with a boy’s face, it was here. Again.
Mooch looked up wearily from his arm, looking ready to cry. He put his hands to his temples and squeezed.
“Goddamn,” he said quietly.
“This is dangerous,” Chewy agreed.
“What’s dangerous?” Frank asked, snapping to.
“Too much candy in the house,” Chewy said, staring at what remained of the eight ball on the bedstand.
“You gotta know how to handle your drugs,” Mooch agreed. He’d begun fingering his arm again.
Frank nodded toward the pipe. “Another go?” He wanted something to do with his hands, something else to think about. His heart was pumping like mad but his skin felt clammy. He dampened another cotton ball in rum and gripped it with the tongs, lit it with his cigarette lighter and held it out. Chewy put his lips to the pipe stem and inhaled heavily, closing his eyes.
“How’s Shel doin’?” Mooch asked.
Frank froze. Kill him, a voice said. No, hey, don’t. He waved the tongs until the cotton ball went out.
“She’s hit middle age,” he said finally. “She’s depressed.”
In unison the twins nodded their comprehension.
“Hope I look that good,” Mooch said. He looked up from his arm. “I don’t mean, you know, look good, like… I’m not out to bone her or nothing. Not that I wouldn’t, I mean, she’s a fox, Frank, an ace old lady, no fooling, but…” He sighed from the effort of getting his thoughts in order.
“State your business, Mooch,” Frank said.
“He didn’t mean anything, Frank,” Chewy said. “Don’t get mad, all right?” Trying to move things along, he added, “Can we get more of this?”
Frank turned his attention from the one to the other. He was sweating. “Keep the rest,” he said. “You can do me back.”
Chewy looked at Frank as though trying to discern him across a distance. “Sure,” he said. “Thank you.”
“I remember,” Mooch murmured, scrunching his face, “the first time I met Shel. Up at the house. She’s got a killer smile. I mean, a nice smile.” He waved his hands, to dispel a confusion. “Kinda smile that makes you feel wanted. Wanted as in ‘liked,’ I mean. Not wanted as in ‘by the FBI.’ ” He squeezed his temples again, to unscramble his thought pattern, then sighed. “You got a first-rate old lady, Frank.”
Chewy elbowed his brother again and whispered, “Shut… up.”
Frank said, “Yeah. Almost perfect.”
“Perfect,” Mooch repeated. “Dead on.”
Chewy licked his lips and said for the third time, “We’ll probably want to buy some more of this.” It came out very loud.
Mooch stood up, wavering on his feet. “I gotta pee.”
He shuffled from the room like a ghost. It’s no longer in your hands, Frank thought, remembering his flash of insight at the marina. What happens, happens. Do it right. Frank turned to Chewy. Something must have shown in his eyes. As soon as Chewy looked up, he said, “Don’t be mad. Okay?”
“Who says I’m mad?”
Chewy chuckled miserably and gestured as though to say, Get real.
Frank nodded toward the stereo. “How about some tunes?”
“Don’t be mad.”
“Stop saying that.”
Frank got up and went to the cassette rack, checking for anything loud. Finding a tape by a group called Stick, he slipped it in and jacked the volume on a tune called “No Groovy.” A spoon in a water glass rattled clear across the room.
Chewy shouted, “Hey…”
Frank drew the Ruger from his waistband, bracing his right hand with his left. He shot three quick rounds. Chewy lunged back into the couch, legs twisting up. He got fish-mouthed, sucking for air. His chest convulsed. The gun turned warm in Frank’s hands, which were shaking. He expected more blood.
Mooch hit the doorway yelling, “What the…”
Frank pivoted, charging at him. The next four rounds in the clip caught the boy point-blank. Mooch spun back trying to grip the door frame, hit the wall, then slid down. Frank noticed there was more blood this time.
He turned down the stereo. The gun was hot, he set it on the floor to cool. Don’t be mad, he thought. I didn’t mean anything.
Chewy’s body stopped twitching. To force back his vomit, Frank held his breath, held it till his head ached. It’s not like I had a choice, he thought. Out of my hands.
The next thing he knew he lay curled in a ball on the living room floor. His skin was cold with sweat. How much time had passed? It was still dark outside. He looked up at the furniture with something like envy. It sat there in the room so peacefully.
A nameless pressure lifted him to his feet and guided him back upstairs where, in a state of abstracted terror, he looked at what he’d done. This is not the beach at Baja, he thought.
Move, a voice said. Finish it.
Inspired by an impulse he’d not foreseen, he dug a pair of socks out of a drawer and put one on each hand. He went around wiping everything, even the door downstairs, the banister, then went back to the bedroom and trashed it. Make it look like a burn, he told himself, an inner voice he barely recognized as his own. Do it right.
Look for money.
The twins weren’t all that clever. They kept their stash in a wad, stuffed inside a throw pillow. Thirteen hundred and change. Finish it. He went through the rest of the house, throwing down every picture, dumping out baskets, checking the flour tins, cereal boxes, the bread hamper. He was light-headed and crying. In a pickle jar he found another grand wrapped inside a condom. He broke the jar on the floor, pocketed the money and left the fridge door open. He found scattered bills in their wallets, a few more in a magazine, an envelope, a hatband. It has to be thorough, he realized, to be convincing. He found two quarter-gram bundles stashed in an empty cassette case; he dusted the bodies with the powder. Make it look like honest-to-God revenge, he thought.
Too much candy in the house.
He picked up the gun, put it away, and collected all seven spent shell casings, reaching far beneath the couch to claim the last. Chewy’s body lay there, face to the ceiling, one leg tucked under. Blood caked most of his T-shirt now, the sofa cushion had soaked up the rest. The dusting of cocaine resembled sugar. Frank pulled the socks off his hands and crossed the room, reaching out to touch Chewy’s eye with his fingertip.
He thought of a boy. Not a monster, a boy not yet three years old, a precious boy, murdered by a drug-crazed half-wit.
Frank withdrew his finger. He’d already been planning to cut the twins’ share down, whittle it to zip, and though he expected them to whine, he doubted they’d have made enough noise to squirrel the plan. He could have strung them along, told them another deal was on the way, bigger, fatter, they were his favorite boys. Then poof, gone, with Shel beside him, the twins wondering where their money went. It could’ve worked. There was no need to do this. But it just took on a life of its own, not some wild improvisation but more the work of some invisible hand: the gun in the trunk, the eight ball, the constant niggling horseshit about Shel.
I’m only human, he thought.
He wiped his face with his sleeve and turned away, thinking: Fitting and fair. Everything, absolutely everything, is fitting and fair. Even this.
He went out to the garage, got behind the wheel of the four-by-four then found himself unable to move. He had no idea what to do. The plan he’d devised, it didn’t include a pair of dead twins. Think, he told himself. Think.
As his terror mounted, it occurred to him that maybe he should just pretend that nothing had happened. Stick to the plan, a voice said. Instantly he felt better. That’s it, he thought, backing the truck out of the garage. When in doubt, stick to the plan.
He returned to Oakley, heading for a remote entrance to the Akers property, about a mile from the house. This entrance led to an abandoned tract of pasture, separated from the rest of the Akers property by a walnut grove and a series of low hills. No one ever came back here anymore, not since half the Akers herd died in the drought.
He pulled in beyond the gate then sat for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness so he could drive without headlights. Beyond the first hill, out of sight of the road, he parked the four-by-four near a deserted milking shed. He’d readied the place for use the previous week and checked on it every day since then, to be sure no one came nosing around. Outside the truck, he peered in every direction, through the walnut trees, across the hills. He cocked an ear, listening. Confident no one was coming, he went to the back of the truck, opened the tailgate and unloaded the money.
Inside the milking shed, he kicked aside the hay he’d spread across the floor as camouflage. Two days earlier, he’d torn a hole in the concrete floor with a pickax. He emptied the money into a Halburton case he’d stowed there, then buried it beneath a small sheet of plywood. Using equipment he’d lifted from a construction site in East Antioch, he mixed a fresh batch of Quickrete in a slurry boat. After wetting down the wood and the jagged edges of the hole, he worked in the Quickrete, sealing the plywood and smoothing the top with a planing trowel. He shoveled dirt across the entire floor, kicking it helter-skelter to suggest a natural state. He ripped more hay from a wormy bale still sitting in the corner from years ago and scattered it around. He tossed his tools and leftover materials out the door then locked it shut from inside.
From equipment he’d stashed the same night he’d dug the hole, he fashioned a trap from filament wire, a blasting cap and a jar of ether, triggering it to the door. If anybody thought to come out here, peer in the windows, he’d see nothing worth his trouble. If that didn’t satisfy him, if he got curious enough to barge on in, he’d get ripped to shreds or burn to death. Frank had seen Lyle rig a meth lab this way, when they had to leave it unattended for a few days. That’s the beauty of it, Frank thought. Booby trap’s got Lyle’s signature on it, not mine.
Stick to the plan.
He went to the downhill wall and crawled out through a hole near the floor. The hole had been put there when the shed was built, a way to pass wastewater whenever the inside of the shed got hosed down. Once outside, he lodged a cinder block into the hole, sealed it in place with the last of the Quickrete and piled rocks around it.
He gathered up his tools and the slurry boat and threw them in the back of the truck. Turning the truck around, he headed back out to the road and drove toward a strip mall in Antioch where he tossed his tools and all the rest in a Dumpster. Next he drove to a multiplex, wiped down the inside of the four-by-four, and left it in the lot, walking the half mile to where he’d left his own truck the night before.
During the walk, he kept telling himself, over and over, It never happened. You were never there. He repeated these words like a mantra, till flickerings of conviction calmed his mood. Drive it from the mind, he told himself. Where the mind leads, the body follows, and the body tells all.
As he sat inside his own truck again, he took in its smell and feel as though it were God’s own hideaway. You’re almost home, he thought, inserting the key into the ignition.
Looking up, he saw the twins’ car parked in the next aisle over. Grabbing the wheel with both hands he settled forward a little, then hurriedly opened the door to vomit onto the pavement.
Stick to the plan, he thought. Are you nuts?
He’d devised the plan when all he thought he’d have to worry about was Felix discovering his stuff was gone. Everybody’d swagger around, trying to ID who did it, but Frank figured nobody’d think he had the spine. That was the plan’s perfection. Not even Shel thought he could pull it off. If he ran too quick it’d only blow his cover. That’s why he’d buried the money. He’d need time to play it cool. Wait it out. He’d sat through four days of questioning from homicide dicks, he was a veteran of the hostile face-off, he could do it. Sooner or later the thing would blow over, at which point he and Shel could just say, “Hey, later.” Vanish.
That was before he’d lost his head and greased the twins. Now playing it cool seemed crazy. No, he thought, this is all wrong, it won’t work, what the fuck were you thinking?
He put a cigarette to his lips and let it hang there unlit. He was shaking. The body tells all. He had to drive back now, before anybody knew the stuff was gone, grab Shel. They’d head right back out to the shed, dig up the money and be gone by daylight.
There, he thought. See? You can do this.
He started the truck, put it in gear and roared from the parking lot toward home. Don’t think, he told himself, just go. Get Shel. Tell her you’ll explain everything later.
Shortly a flickering darkness swirled in the corner of his eye. He batted at it, jerking the wheel. The truck fishtailed, skidding onto the shoulder as he slammed on the brake and counter-steered. The truck righted finally, lurching to a stop in the middle of the road.
The engine stalled. He sat there a moment in the ensuing quiet, breathing hard.
It wasn’t real, he realized. Nothing was there.
Frank turned off the county road down the access lane toward home. Maybe Shel’s awake already, he thought. His clothes were sticky with sweat. If I’m lucky, she’ll hear me out, stay calm. The more he pictured it, the more the scenario acquired the tang of possibility. Two steps away from home free, he reminded himself. Everything I do, baby, I do for you.
He parked the truck beyond the gateyard and hurried up the back steps through the door and into the kitchen. Hitting the light, he instantly felt the cold hard steel of a double-barreled shotgun, pressed against his face.
“Hey, buddy,” Lyle Akers said, pushing him against the wall with the gun. Roy, Snuff and Hack all sat in the kitchen nook, waiting, armed. “What took ya?”
Shortly Frank was on his knees, bound hand and foot, a lanyard made of white plastic clothesline circling his neck. Then the brothers brought in Shel, tied her to a chair so she faced him, and circled her head with duct tape, gagging her.
Frank sobbed, “I’m sorry please Christ believe me I’m so fucking sorry please…” He said it, or things much like it, over and over, his voice acquiring a manic pitch, a sound not wholly his own. Shel found herself wanting to get away from it. All she could do, however, was close her eyes.
It made her think of Jesse, of course, the way Jesse died. She couldn’t look at Frank, not here, not like this, and not bring all that to mind. Like everything was happening all over again, just a slightly different way, to slightly different people. But the same twisted story, the same awful end. She almost felt grateful when, after less than a half hour, Felix’s enforcers, Lonnie Dayball and Rick Tully, arrived.
Tully came in first, ducking to get through the door. He was a lumbering, bearded man with wild black hair. His face made little impression, except for the small dark eyes. Basically, the thing you noticed about Tully was how big he was.
Dayball made his entrance next, sauntering in like a midnight movie host. He was wearing a silk sport jacket and black pegged pants with two-tone loafers. He’d combed his blond hair back and trimmed his beard close, his face aglow with a gum-chewing smile. He formed his hand into a gun and fired at Frank, winking as the thumb came down.
“Mercy, mercy,” Dayball said. “A friendless man.”
He positioned himself behind Shel’s chair.
Frank stammered, “Let her go, Lonnie, she didn’t do nothing, she don’t know nothing, it’s me, it was always just me…”
Dayball put a finger in the air as though to call for quiet, then removed a notepad from his pocket and flipped through the pages. “This the fifteenth or sixteenth?” he asked no one in particular. Frank knelt there, wondering if the question was meant for him. Wondering if there was a wrong answer.
Tully said to Frank, “Answer him, Short.”
Frank looked back to Dayball, who stood waiting.
“Fifteenth?” Frank murmured.
Lonnie Dayball nodded and wrote this down. “Where do the days go,” he remarked. He checked his watch and wrote down the time as well, then closed the notepad and returned it to his pocket. He looked at Frank and smiled.
“A tight ship is a happy ship.”
“Lonnie, you’re gonna let her go, right?”
Dayball stepped closer behind Shel. Resting the heels of his hands on her shoulders, he began gently to coil her hair about his fingers.
“I don’t know if I can do that,” he said. “I’m being straight with you. I just don’t know.”
He turned toward Tully. Lifting his hands, the fingers still entwined in Shel’s hair, he said, “Red red red, Tully. Who’s that remind you of?”
Tully stood at the edge of Shel’s field of vision. Lyle and Hack and Snuff sat beyond him, in the breakfast nook.
“Got my eyes on Short here,” Tully said, nodding toward Frank. “Don’t look good, neither. White as a goddamn sheep.”
Dayball chuckled, still fingering Shel’s hair. “Sheet, Tully. The phrase is, ‘White as a sheet.’ ”
Tully shrugged. “I said what I said.”
“So you did.”
“He don’t come clean, gonna look a lot worse. Find his tongue in his pocket and his eyes in his socks.”
Dayball grinned. “It’s the little things that keep people together.”
“I’ll give you the money,” Frank said.
Dayball began to knead Shel’s shoulders. “Money?”
“All of it.”
Dayball set his chin on top of Shel’s head. He worked his chin in a tiny circle on her scalp.
“And how much would that be, Frank?”
“Don’t hurt her.”
“How much money?”
Frank’s breathing came so fast it looked like he might faint. “Fifteen thousand,” he said.
Dayball lifted his head and put his thumbs to Shel’s temples, massaging them. The pressure was just short of painful. He said, “Again?”
“Thirty,” Frank cried. “Thirty thousand. Don’t.”
Dayball lowered his hands to her throat. With his thumb and forefinger, he found the edges of her trachea. He ran his fingers gently up and down, as though performing a measurement. Shel readied herself.
“I’ll show you,” Frank shouted, straining at the lanyard, “I’ll dig it up, take it all, don’t hurt her…”
He dropped his chin to his chest and sobbed. Tully walked behind him, delivered one hard kick to his kidneys and said, “Stop it.”
Dayball let go of Shel’s throat but remained behind her. He settled his weight on the back of her chair. “How much the twins gonna kick in, Frank?”
Frank lifted his head and blinked hard to get the tears out of his eyes. “Lonnie?”
“Tell him, Tull.”
Tully cleared his sinuses again and spat. He said, “Twins got beat.”
Dayball leaned down so his lips were next to Shel’s ear. “Bet you didn’t peg your little Frankie here for a stone-cold killer.” To Frank, he added, “You were a busy boy tonight, Frankie. Kept poor Tull here shakin’ n’ bakin’ just to keep up.”
No, Shel thought. It’s not true. They’re lying, the motherfuckers. Tully killed the twins. Then her eyes met Frank’s. She felt a surge of nausea and feared she was going to retch into her gag. She closed her eyes and fought the impulse, knowing she could suffocate that way.
Dayball said, “So tell us, Frank. Inquiring minds want to know. How’d it feel?”
Unable to face Shel again, Frank looked at the floor instead.
“Need an invite?” Tully said. “Answer him, Short.”
Frank turned back to Dayball and tried to conjure up the right answer. “It feels done.”
Tully and Dayball laughed. Dayball said, “Done like how, Short? Like it’s a fucking cake?”
“Stick a fork in it,” Tully said.
Frank pictured the remote house, the upstairs room, the identical dead boys. He recalled how quiet it was after.
“I mean it’s over,” he said. “It’s finished.”
Dayball said, “Not by a long shot, Short.” He took out a cigarette and lit it. Tully coughed into his fist.
“So you squirreled away your money,” Dayball said. “Usually, Short, you know, just to catch you up on the drill, we sort of look for a doofus like you to choke on his dough when he’s pulled a little side action like you done. But in this instance, I’ve got instructions- from Felix, Frankie, Felix- instructions to let you tell your story. You follow?”
“She didn’t- ”
“I said, ‘You follow?’ ”
“Yes.”
“Good, Frank. Splendid. Now, for beginners. This stuff you stole, Frank. Who’d you pass it off to?”
“A contractor,” Frank said. “Some guy on the north shore of the river.”
“His name, Frank.”
“Lonnie, promise me. I’ll tell you everything. Just untie her. Let her walk on out of here. I got no grounds to ask, but I’m asking.”
“What was the contractor’s name, Frank?”
Frank lowered his head and began to sob quietly again. Dayball looked toward Tully and Tully walked over, clutched the rope binding Frank’s wrists and pulled straight up, lifting Frank from the ground. Frank screamed so terribly even Roy Akers looked away. Tully dropped Frank to the floor and kicked him till he lay face flat, at which point he put his boot to the back of his neck and applied weight.
Frank began to talk. The words came out in a choked and halting stream, he was confessing, confessing to God, to the Devil, to all the living and the dead. By the time he was finished, Shel was weeping softly along with him.
Dayball waited till Frank ran out of words. Studying him on the ground, pinned beneath Tully’s foot like a snared cat, he grunted pensively twice, blinking, then let loose with a long soft whistle of awed disbelief as the import of Frank’s confession hit home. Addressing the Akers brothers, he nodded to Shel and said, “Get her out of here.”
Leaving her wrists and ankles tied and grabbing her beneath the arms, Lyle and Roy lifted Shel from her chair and dragged her down the hallway to the guest room, where they dropped her onto the bed.
Lyle, eyeing her in a sudden heat, sat down close beside her. She kicked at him, caught him in the chest, his eyes flared but then Roy dragged him off from behind and pushed him toward the door.
“Now now,” Roy cracked. “You’ll make the cows jealous.”
Lyle spun around, flushed red. “Touch me again, fucker- ”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” Roy muttered. “Moo.”
Lyle, seething, flexed his hands then turned on his heel and vanished. Roy followed him for a step, reaching the doorway, then pivoted around. Leaning on the door frame he said to Shel, “Don’t get your hopes up. You’re still gonna wish you’d been nice to me.”
He closed the door, leaving her in the dark. She lay on the bed, craning to hear, listening in particular for screams, but none came. Something like an hour passed, then quietly the door opened. A silhouette appeared in the doorway. It was Lonnie Dayball. She felt a certain relief, albeit small, that he came alone. He turned on the overhead light and closed the door behind him.
Pulling up a chair beside the bed, he studied her for a moment. His eyes were a deeply flecked blue that this particular light rendered a hazy violet. The distortion in color gave his eyes a gentle cast. It was that utterly fraudulent gentleness, more than anything, that scared her.
He reached into his pocket, withdrew a small knife, and cut the tape around her mouth. He loosened the adhesive from her skin and hair, whispering, “Sorry,” several times. Once it was free he tossed the snarled mass onto the floor and helped her sit upright.
Settling back into his chair, he said, “I’ll tell you how this is gonna happen.” He closed his knife, pocketed it, and folded his hands behind his head. “Your old man, Looney Two Shoes, in there? He’s in the bizarre position of being in luck precisely because he screwed up worse than anybody coulda thought.”
He said this with what sounded like genuine awe. He also seemed to be waiting for a reply.
“I don’t know anything about that,” she said. It came out sounding weak.
Dayball smiled. “I know,” he said. “Now.”
“Untie me,” she said.
“In a minute.”
Dayball looked at the ceiling and clucked his tongue, thinking. “Frank’s offered us a rare opportunity, believe it or not. People he dealt with, fucking Mexicans, and not just any Mexicans, oh no. The ones we had to chase on out of here not so long ago. They want revenge, the simple shits. For that little asshole we nailed to a tree out on Kirker Pass Road. They asked Frank to put them next to Felix. Can you believe it? They want Frank… to put them… next to Felix.” He chuckled at the lunacy of it. “Well guess what? We’re gonna let him do that.”
“Why not just kill him now?”
“It is,” Dayball said, “a real opportunity.” He closed his eyes, as though to contemplate the full merit of the opportunity. When he opened his eyes again, he said, “I gotta know, he gonna hold up?”
“Till when? Till you kill him?”
“Nobody’s gonna kill him, not while he’s useful. And that’s what I’m asking, how long’s he gonna be in a condition to make himself useful?”
“You tell me,” Shel said. “You saw him in there.”
“Yeah, well, we can buck him up, pharmaceutically speaking. My question’s a little more general than that.”
“I’m not a doctor.”
“You live with him,” Dayball said. “It’s a simple question. He done for the night or can he stand up for just one more show?”
She didn’t dare tell him about Frank’s past. The part about Jesse. The part about this being the third anniversary of the boy’s pitiless death.
“He’s weathered worse,” she said.
“That doesn’t help me much.”
“Not a lot I can do about that.”
“He cares about you, know that?”
Shel closed her eyes. She said, “Yeah. I know that.”
“Matter-of-fact,” Dayball continued, “he told me, just now in the kitchen, I swear to God, he told me the real, down-deep reason he dusted one of the twins out there in Knightsen was because the kid was boning you.”
Shel opened her eyes again. Dayball was grinning at her, waggling his eyebrows.
She said, “So why’d he kill the other one?”
Dayball shrugged. “Never break a set.”
“I never touched either one of the twins. Never. Never even thought about it.”
“You’re saying Frank’s nuts, then.”
“I’m saying he’s mistaken.”
“Pretty fucking drastic mistake, you ask me.” Dayball shook his head. “Too bad. I mean, if he’s unstable, he’s useless. And if he’s useless…”
“Don’t, please.”
“Too much risk here. You see that.”
“He’s harmless.”
Dayball chuckled. “Talk to the twins about it.” He rose to leave, shaking out each pant leg to nurse the crease. “No, you told me what I gotta know. Too bad, really. I’m not gonna take any pleasure from this.”
“Come on,” Shel said. “He can’t hurt you.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Dayball replied. “Sooner or later, somebody besides Tully’s gonna find those twins. Say Frank gets hauled in. They do the usual on him, sit him alone for twelve hours at a stretch, no sleep, no smokes. Scare the piss right into his shoes. Then, once he’s good and shook, they’ll father right on up to him the way they do. ‘You don’t need a lawyer, Frank. What you need a lawyer for, you feel guilty about something?’ And then Old Frank sees the future. And me and Felix and Tully, we’re in a world of hurt.”
“You can’t snitch off on a murder one. You know that.”
Dayball smiled abstractly. “So they say. I’m not so sure. Say they lower it to murder two once they see he’s willing to jabber. Don’t tell me it can’t happen.”
“Frank’s not a talker.”
“Can’t risk it, dear.”
“What if- ”
“Plan’s too touchy, darlin’. Frank’s gonna be under the lights. I can’t have him dreaming up shit isn’t even there.”
“That’s not what I’m telling you,” Shel said.
“No?”
“No.”
Dayball frowned. “What’s that mean, then? You really did bone this kid? He came on, you said yes.”
“No.”
“You acted like you wanted to. You gave the impression.”
“Frank sees what he wants to see sometimes, it doesn’t- ”
“You’re telling me he’s useless.”
“All right,” Shel said. “Yes. The kid came on to me. I didn’t say no. I made eyes. I flashed some leg. All right? You got it? It’s not Frank. It’s me.”
Dayball crossed his arms, studying her with a smile that wavered between satisfaction and contempt.
“You’re lying,” he said.
“I was bored. I’m not young anymore, got it? It felt good, being looked at that way. Okay? It wasn’t just in Frank’s head. It’s my fault. I’m the one who caused all this.”
Dayball looked off, sighed, then sat back down. He rested his chin in his hand and said, “Well then.”
“I had no idea Frank would whack the kid. My God- ”
Dayball held up a hand to stop her. “So this twin did come on to you.”
“Yes.”
“And you responded?”
Shel said, “Yes. Yes. Yes.”
“That takes care of that, then.” Dayball leaned back in the chair, folding his hands across his midriff. “Just one last question. Which twin was it?”
Shel felt her mouth go dry. In time she managed to say, “The stupid one,” but by then Dayball was already convulsed. He laughed so hard his feet tapped against the floor. Collecting himself, he ran his finger beneath each eye.
“Goddamn, that was luscious,” he said.
“Look- ”
“I’m a man who loves his work, know that? Know how few people in America genuinely love their work?”
“It’s me, not him, I meant that.”
He reached over and rubbed a strand of her hair between his finger and thumb, testing it for dye. “Let’s go over this again, shall we?”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“We’ve learned how far you’ll go for your boy, am I right? And we’ve learned you’re a lousy liar.”
“Look- ”
“You’re not going to cause me any problems, are you?” He ran his finger across her cheek and smiled. “ ’Cuz you said it yourself, one way or another, you’re the one responsible. Your words exactly.”
“Yes,” Shel said.
“You’re gonna do what you’re told. Stay put. Make sure he stays in the saddle.”
“Don’t hurt him.”
Dayball smiled and put his fingertip to the bridge of her nose. He tapped gently. “As long as you keep him bright-eyed, as long as he can walk his talk…”
“And after that?” Shel asked.
Dayball removed his hand. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. He rose, returning his chair to where he’d found it. “And the reason I can’t tell you that, is because I don’t know. I’m being straight with you.”
Abatangelo was three weeks into his new daily schedule. He rose at six, showered and ate, then walked across Russian Hill to Lenny Mannion’s photo portrait shop on Union Street. Mornings, he made cold calls to expectant mothers and did the newborn darling layout hustle. Come noon he switched his focus from infants to aspiring talent: homely comedians, models blanching dead smiles, belly dancers hawking cleavage. He stood in the darkroom, inhaling the warm chemical stench as he shepherded black-and-white glossies from developer to stop bath to fixer tray. Come five o’clock he walked back over Telegraph Hill to North Beach, arriving home just as twilight gave way to darkness. Electric buses jostled past, brightly lit and crammed with vacant-eyed office workers. The sidewalks teemed with men and women trudging home. Some of them walked arm in arm, smiling, heads touching.
His apartment remained sparsely furnished in front, but he’d managed to pick up a few items at sidewalk sales. He’d also obtained a metal storage cabinet for the camera equipment he was buying from Mannion, paying it off little by little each week. The camera equipment was part of the plan. He’d gone back out to Oakley two weeks running, sitting atop the hill overlooking Shel’s house and snapping picture after picture of anything and everything that moved in the night. He hadn’t actually seen Shel yet, though he thought he’d caught her silhouette once or twice in a lamplit window, a doorway. He hadn’t mustered the nerve to go down to the door and knock. His reluctance had nothing to do with what the Akers brothers might do to him. It was what they might do to her.
Hanging his coat on the back of a chair, he shuffled to the back room and lay down on the bed, waiting for rush hour to end. He turned on the radio and found himself in the middle of an argument between two female psychologists. The topic, he learned shortly, was impotence. One of the psychologists had a breathy voice, as though letting him in on a withering secret. The other, in contrast, sounded defiantly upbeat. And so it went, like a round of Good Cop/Bad Cop, with the male member under the lights. Withering. Upbeat. Withering. Upbeat.
He turned off the radio.
Books lined the baseboard: Slocum’s Sailing Around the World Alone, Ernest Gann’s Fate Is the Hunter, Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Each volume contained a small white flag where drowsiness or boredom had mastered his curiosity. He picked one up at random and began to read, but soon the words devolved into a blur.
He dozed till seven-thirty, then rose from the bed, put on his shoes and collected his coat. In the front room he gathered together his equipment then went back out into the street, fumbling with his car keys as he hit the pavement.
The car was a twenty-year-old Dodge Dart, an old slant six that Eddie’d bought in near mint condition from an aging customer; all it’d needed were new plugs and seals, a tune-up and a lube. Eddy intended it as a token of gratitude, a way to say thanks for Abatangelo’s hard ten. Under any other circumstances, Abatangelo would have insisted on paying for the car, but his money was tied up in Mannion’s camera equipment. Besides which, without transportation, there’d be no getting out to the Delta.
He traveled the same route he had that first night and for the last two weeks running, across the Bay Bridge, up the Eastshore Freeway, out the Delta Highway then down through the winding county road. He pulled off in a turnout he’d discovered. Putting the car in neutral, he let it glide an additional fifty feet. It came to rest in a cluster of pampas grass beneath a windbreak of eucalyptus trees, invisible unless you already knew it was there.
From the trunk he gathered his tripod and canvas camera bag, filled with the equipment from Mannion: three telephoto lenses, an infrared kit, a Passive Light Intensifier. He donned a pair of rubber boots, scaled a barbed-wire fence, and worked his way uphill in the dark through lowing cattle and wet brush. A filmy scud of cloud obscured the moon, and making way in the windy dark he stumbled into gopher holes, slipped in manure and lost his footing in mudslicks where the cows had tread repeatedly day after day. At the crest of the hill, among a stand of oak and laurel trees, he dropped his equipment and eyed the valley below.
To the right was the gate where the Akers brothers had cut him off. Moving to the left, a gravel lane scaled a low hill, connecting the county road with a house surrounded by elm trees and a white fence. It was Craftsman in design, with gabled dormers, jutting rafter tails and stone cladding along the sides. Furniture veiled with drop cloths cluttered the porch, lending a funereal air. Big, weird and ugly, Abatangelo thought. And better than I could give her.
There were lights on in the house, the kitchen windows were open, and faint music carried on the wind uphill. A porch lamp brightened the dooryard, which was littered with junk.
Beyond the house lay a barn with four silos connected by a catwalk. Three outbuildings stood behind the barn, defiled along a dirt track that continued into pasture and ended beside a rainwater sump rimmed with cattails. A small herd of cows grazed on the salient above the sump amid a clamor of bullfrogs.
Abatangelo’s eye returned to the house and the access road on which it sat. The road continued east for several hundred yards, then gave way to a rutted path sparsed with gravel that followed a shallow ravine. At the far end of that path another group of buildings lay nestled in an orchard. Bunker silos sat in a scrap yard compound, protected by a high wire fence. It was an almost perfect hideaway, the lights only visible from above. Taking out the telephoto lens, Abatangelo checked those distant buildings more closely.
This was where what activity he’d seen the past two weeks had taken place. The vehicles that came and went seldom stopped at the house; most continued on to the compound. Some of the cars whirling in off the road traveled all the way back and never came out again. He assumed they got stripped down and placed into one of the trucks that showed up from time to time.
A truck sat down there now, a ten-speed sixteen-wheeler with a Freuhauf trailer that abutted a loading dock at the warehouse at the back of the compound. Four cars, all top of the line, had sped in during the past hour and not one had been seen since. He was getting an idea of what the Akers family business was.
From behind, Abatangelo heard a pair of cars approaching along the same road he’d taken in. Stepping deeper into the cover of the laurel trees, he turned the camera about on its tripod, squinted into the viewfinder, and watched two large sedans rounding the last turn before the Akers property turnoff. They passed the spot where Abatangelo had hidden his car, not slowing, got to the gate of the Akers property, exchanged signals with the man posted there, and turned in. Like every other vehicle that came to the property, it sped past the ranch house and continued on, back to the fenced-in compound.
Rocking from the motion of the car, Frank stared trance-like through the windshield as the headlights sprayed the gravel road. The car was a Lincoln Mark IV the Akers brothers had stolen earlier that night. A second stolen car drove behind, an old two-tone Le Mans- ironically, exactly the kind of low-slung bucket-seat American coupe with soft shocks and a throbbing V-8 that Mexicans loved. The cars passed through the compound gate and pulled to a stop. At the back of the main warehouse a sixteen-wheeler sat backed up to the bay, receiving the last of this night’s load. Tully, who was driving the Lincoln, honked twice and shortly Snuff appeared, planting his Raiders cap on his head and hurrying to join them.
Snuff sat in back with his brothers Lyle and Roy. Frank sat in front, nestled between Dayball and Tully. Dayball removed his spiral notepad from his jacket as Tully put the Lincoln in gear again. “At long last,” Dayball said, addressing no one in particular. He checked his watch, wrote something down, returned the notepad to his pocket then turned sideways and squeezed Frank’s shoulder.
Dayball grinned at the side of Frank’s head, leaned close, and whispered something in his ear. To Frank, it sounded at first like, “The Menace in Man.” Or: “Good medicine, my man.” He said nothing in response. Dayball, still grinning, turned around to regard the Akers brothers.
“Where’s Hack?” Snuff asked him.
“Hack rides with the second detail,” Dayball said. “Car right behind us.”
Snuff looked over his shoulder. Hack was getting out of the Le Mans, waving at the truck crew as they rolled down the warehouse door and got ready to head on out. Hack would wait till the truck was gone, then lock the gates of the compound.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Snuff said. “Who else is in on this?”
Roy groaned. “You think we’d do this with just three men? Shut the fuck up.”
Dayball seemed to enjoy this brotherly spat. “Hack’s gathered a couple of buddies, Snuff, a little extra manpower. Got yourself a regular posse, kid. Strength in numbers.”
Frank heard the voices rise and fall around him but paid them little mind. The sound of his pulse seemed louder than the voices. He struggled to keep his eyes open, lifting his hand to the ear Dayball had whispered into. It was still damp from his breath. Frank chafed his finger and thumb together and returned his gaze to the empty road reeling toward him from the darkness.
The day after he’d killed the twins and buried the money, he’d accompanied Dayball and Tully out to the deserted milking shed. He chiseled away the Quickrete that sealed the cinder block in place at the hose-out hole, then crawled inside as Dayball and Tully watched from a window. He brushed aside the hay and dirt, revealing the new layer of Quickrete. Using tools they passed in to him, he opened up the floor, dug through to the money and hauled it out. He put the plywood back, kicked hay over it, then handed the Halburton case through the hose-out hole and crawled out behind it. They sealed up the hole again and Dayball elected to leave the jar of ether, the blasting cap and trip wire in place. It appealed to his sense of theater. Besides, there were Mexican squatters out this way at times. It’d serve as a message.
“Gotta give you credit, Frankie,” Dayball had said. “You got flair when it comes to squirreling loot.”
Frank snapped back to the present as they pulled up to the ranch house. Everyone in the car got out and milled toward the yard. Frank walked unsteadily between Lyle and Roy, trying to work his knees. As he did, he heard the sound of the sixteen-wheeler approaching from the direction of the compound, and shortly it took the final turn beyond the barn and thundered past, heading for the county road and vanishing in a roar of dust. Shortly, the Le Mans carrying Hack and his friends appeared and pulled up beside the Lincoln.
Everybody went inside and found a place to wait. From his seat in the kitchen Frank heard the sound of a third car arrive. Two doors opened and closed and Bud Lally, Felix Randall’s bodyguard, poked his head in, surveyed the room, then held the door open.
Felix Randall entered with a bent, painful weariness, walking with the help of a stick. With a nod of gratitude he accepted the chair offered him by Lonnie Dayball. His face was deeply cragged and he wore a two-day stubble that shone gray on his chin and cheeks. He wore his hair cut short in a military burr. At one time, in his biker heyday, the locks had flowed, but after his stint in Boron he’d decided on a more Spartan deportment.
His hair was not the only thing prison had changed. After they’d discovered the tumor in his throat and transferred him to Springfield, they’d hacked out the better part of his larynx and esophagus to snag the growth, then bombarded him with chemotherapy and radiation. It was only in the past six months he’d managed to eat anything resembling solid food, and he still spoke in a growling whisper.
Even with his haggard face and his weary eyes and his thin, bent body, he commanded the full attention of every man in the room. Sitting with both hands resting atop his walking stick, he gestured with his fingers for Dayball to lean toward him. When Dayball obeyed, Felix whispered to him, “Bring her in now.”
Shel sat waiting in the guest room by the window in the dark, with only the glow from her cigarette lighting her face. She did not turn when the door opened. From behind, someone snapped his fingers.
“Visitor,” Dayball said.
She stubbed out her cigarette and rose. The first two weeks she’d done as she’d been ordered to do, nurse Frank along, keep him functional. Every night, she’d told herself: You kept him alive one more day. It felt, more times than not, like fattening a calf for slaughter.
The past week they’d kept him from her, and given the sudden theatricality she’d sensed in everyone’s mood tonight, she expected to learn that he was dead, or due to die. She had little idea what had happened or even if it had already, but regardless it had taken three weeks to get right. Frank had kept it from her for her own good, which, given the circumstances, seemed a caring gesture.
This last week they’d been plying him with speedballs, a home brew made of crank mellowed with fentanyl. This was meant to flatten out his impulses, self-destructive and otherwise. The few encounters she’d shared with him since had revealed a caricature of the man she’d known. He meandered around in a state of thoughtful obsession, focused on what it was they wanted him to do and nothing else, like it was all he could hold in his mind at one time.
The most haunting thing about it was, he seemed happy. Once, when they’d passed in the hallway, he’d offered her a sunny, mindless smile, and she sensed it was as close to good-bye as they would come with each other.
She entered the kitchen with Dayball behind her. Felix Randall studied her for a moment, then gestured for Buddy, his bodyguard, to lean close. Felix whispered something to him. Buddy stood straight again and said, “Everybody but her and Frank, out to the cars.”
Dayball, Tully, the Akers brothers, and the other men filed out silently. When there was only the four of them- Felix, Buddy, Frank, and Shel- in the room, Felix gestured for her to come closer so he could talk to her directly instead of through Buddy.
He pointed to a chair and Buddy pulled it up for her. She sat down, leaning forward, her arms folded and at rest on her knees. Frank sat in the breakfast nook, staring at her.
“You two married?” Felix asked Shel in his throatish whisper.
The question took her utterly off-guard. “No,” she answered.
“Why not?”
His eyes were deeply set in his face, the result of having lost so much weight. Shel had never seen him well, but she had seen pictures, and he had been tall and fearsome. His eyes retained much of that power.
“It’s never come up,” she said.
“You been together how long?”
“Three years.”
“Three years,” Felix repeated, “and it never came up? What, there somebody else?”
“No,” Shel said instantly. She wondered what they knew about her past, what they knew about Danny.
“I been married twenty-one years,” Felix said matter-of-factly. “I believe in marriage, the right two people. Cheryl, twenty-one years, she’s been solid as a rock. You remind me of her a little.”
“Thank you,” Shel said.
He gestured with his chin across his shoulder toward the breakfast nook. “What do I do with him?”
Shel found herself searching for a reply. She doubted this sat well with a man who believed in marriage. “I was not aware,” she managed finally, “that it was in my hands.”
“I’m asking,” Felix said.
“He’s suffered enough,” Shel said.
“For what?”
Shel closed her eyes. She felt afraid. “For his mistakes.”
“Is that what they were? Mistakes?”
“Yes,” Shel said.
“I’m not so sure,” Felix said. “I mean, I don’t know that I believe in such a thing as a mistake. I think a person’s pointed in one direction from the day he’s born. He may get sidetracked, because life can fuck you good, but basically everybody finds a way back into the saddle. And I gotta ask you, is what’s happened, what he did, a case of life knocking him off his horse, or was he headed that way the whole time?”
“I believe,” Shel said, “people make mistakes.”
Felix looked at the floor, clenched his jaw and shook his head. “I don’t like that answer,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she replied. “I wish I had another one.”
“I believe that.” Felix thought for a moment then turned to his bodyguard. Nodding toward Frank, Felix said, “Take him out to the cars with the others, all right?”
Buddy nodded, moved toward the breakfast nook and inserted his hand in Frank’s armpit. He lifted Frank to his feet and led him toward the door. Frank’s eyes met Shel’s, but the only words he managed before leaving were, “Hasta luego.”
Shel cringed and closed her eyes. Felix shook his head. Once they were alone, Felix said, “So what am I supposed to believe, that he’s gonna go on making mistakes?”
“I think,” Shel said, “he’s learned a lesson.”
“Hasta luego? He’s learned a fucking lesson?”
Shel couldn’t think of what to say. Felix grimaced. “What sort of guarantee I got he doesn’t make a million more mistakes, each one worse than the last?”
“I’m the guarantee,” Shel said. “I’ll watch him.”
Felix shook his head. “That what you are? A baby-sitter? A wife, there’s a bond, there’s an oath. A wife can’t be made to testify. What’s a goddamn baby-sitter?”
“I’ll stay right here,” Shel said. “And I won’t testify.”
“Why?”
Shel looked at her hands. “What’s the alternative?” she asked.
“For who?”
“Frank.”
Felix thought this over for a moment. He said, “You’re being honest.”
“Yes.”
“I appreciate that.”
She looked up. “I’m glad.”
Felix studied her again, a bit longer this time. “I don’t have a problem with you, do I?”
“I don’t know anything,” she said. “I don’t know where, what or why. I barely know who. I tried to drop a dime on anybody, what could I say? I’d get laughed at by the cops, or used and then fucked over. And I’d still have you to contend with, wouldn’t I?”
Felix didn’t say anything.
“Besides which,” Shel continued, “I don’t like the law, I don’t run to the law. I don’t believe much in the law, to be honest.”
“Like the sound of that,” Felix replied. He reached out for her hand. She gave it to him, and he held it in a surprisingly strong and bony grip. “Because, you know, if you were to cause any problems, I can find you. Not one man, not one woman, in all my years, been able to hide.”
“I’ve heard that,” Shel said. “And I believe it.”
“If I have to track you down, I’m not gonna worry about my manners. People’ll get hurt. Not just you.”
She looked up into his gaze and thought: Danny. If they didn’t know about him now, they’d find out when the time came.
“I understand,” she said.
“So when the boys get back, they’ll find you here.”
She nodded. “Where would I run? What would it get me?”
Felix let go of her hand. “Funny how much you remind me of Cheryl,” he said. “Help me to the door.”
Frank waited in the backseat of the car with Lyle beside him. The crank-and-fentanyl hum was wearing off, he’d need a booster in short order and he knew he wouldn’t have to ask. Everyone seemed quite content to keep him loaded.
He saw Felix appear in silhouette in the kitchen doorway, Shel to the side, guiding him down the steps. They looked like father and daughter. Shel let go of Felix’s arm as Buddy took over and she took a step backward up the steps. Felix walked slowly through the porch-lit dooryard toward the cars, leaning heavily on his stick. As he passed the first vehicle he said in a loud and raspy whisper, “Good luck,” then he walked down toward the side of the car in which Frank sat. Felix stopped at the window and peered in at Frank, then gestured for Dayball to approach. When Dayball was beside him, Felix said, nodding toward Frank, “Make sure the brothers understand. Comes a time, no more good graces. Job gets done.”
From the porch Shel watched as the cars backed up in the gravel and drove off. Their headlights sprayed the house and the sagging fence and then the rain-wet hill as they made their way from the property in a slow parade.
She turned and went back into the house and wandered. Rowena and Duval were gone, sent to a movie by Roy. She was, in a sense, free.
As though pulled by gravity she returned to the window where Dayball had found her earlier and she sat back down in the same chair. She picked up the package of cigarettes she’d left on the sill, probed the package for a smoke, then put it back down again and put her head in her hand.
Felix was right. What Frank had done went far beyond the orbit of “mistake.” He’d been keening down one disastrous path since the very beginning. Nothing she’d done had changed a thing. Except she’d learned something. She’d learned why she felt for him the way she did, learned what fueled the little machine of pity in her heart. What thou doest for the least of my brethren. There but for fortune. It could be you.
She’d always believed that she and Frank weren’t all that different. Poor, white, luckless, children of busted homes, bruised bodies and cheap promises. American deadlegs. Had she been born male, she might well have wandered a path like his. A fuckup careening toward a tragedy. And though she hadn’t meant for it to happen, she’d cherished the intensity, the drama, the sense of purpose Frank had brought to her life. It had filled the vacuum Danny’s absence had created. She hadn’t foreseen the trap it would become.
In particular, she hadn’t seen that Frank’s psychic vulnerabilities had a killing edge. She woke up often, thinking of the twins. She felt guilty, felt used and foolish and betrayed, and at the same time realized why he’d done it.
The secret lay in that mournful little phrase he was always muttering: Everything I do, I do for you. Like a pup that brings you a mangled bird in his teeth, blood all over, tail wagging like mad. So proud. He did it for me, to get my attention, to make me understand- there but for fortune, it could be you- to make me suffer the way he does. To make me guilty, like him.
She reached for her cigarettes again.
Abatangelo remained hidden in his hilltop shelter of oak and laurel, poised behind his tripod and camera. Overhead, the cloud front had broken. The sagging meadow, the ribbon of asphalt, it all came alive beneath the winter moon, charged with unearthly detail.
For the first three rolls of film he’d shot, he’d used the Passive Light Intensifier, and until he had the chance to fiddle and prod in the darkroom he’d have little idea how the prints would appear. Now, with the moonlight, he used 3200 Tri-X with the telephoto, closing down as far as he could and exposing each frame for as long as ten seconds. For the longer shots, the ones of the compound at the back of the property, he’d used an even slower telephoto, a 300 mm. He shot three frames for each composition, to yield a continuum of detail and compensate for botched exposures. The shots would take some pushing in the bath, just to produce a semblance of detail.
To what end, he wondered.
He’d managed to shoot the cars coming and going, but due to the timed exposures they’d most likely reduce to nothing more than a blaze of headlight and blurred masses of shadow. Still, he’d caught a few shots of the men coming in and out, milling around the cars, and that might lead to something. The truck that had left just a while ago would resemble a long, milky smear flanked by moth-like wings of haze. One spot would be clear, the truck’s grill and cabin, maybe even the driver in silhouette, caught as the aperture closed. Abatangelo would bathe the prints in Acufine to sharpen the grain, then blow them up fivefold to see if he could make out the license numbers.
For all the preceding activity, the place seemed strangely quiet now. He presumed the truck had taken off the last incriminating whatever; the compound was locked up, any contraband removed, he supposed, and if they had a meth lab back there they’d hauled off the chemicals and dregs and dumped them, probably in a neighboring rancher’s well water. The man who had been posted at the county road had driven off with the others and hadn’t come back. The ranch house was lit up here and there, squares of light curtained dully, just another lonely house in the shadow of Mt. Diablo in eastern CoCo County. A scented wind rustled the trees. From within the drowsy herd milling below, a bull let out a moaning roar and shook its head, rattling the clapperless bell strung around its neck.
Bending down to peer through the viewfinder again, he spotted a distant, solitary figure. A woman. Dry-mouthed, he watched each step. Even after all this time, the years of having nothing but memories of her in his mind’s eye, he knew.
She hurried down the gravel lane away from the ranch house, walking with her shoulders hunched, arms tight to her body, battling the cold. As she passed the barn he dug the lens cap from his pocket, fit it into place and bagged his equipment, shouldering the tripod for the run downhill. Shel reached the first outbuilding, lifted the rolling aluminum door and disappeared inside. Shortly a truck engine shrieked then purred and headlights sprayed the gravel outside.
He scrambled down the moonlit hillside scattering cows. Reaching the Dart in its blind of pampas grass, he threw his tripod and camera bag into the trunk and climbed behind the wheel. He put the keys in the ignition but did not engage the starter. Instead, he sat low in the seat, waiting.
Minutes passed. It was possible she’d taken the road west instead, he thought. He should hurry then, follow. He didn’t move. His mind raced, his body sat. Then headlights broke the hill and a Pathfinder streamed past in low gear. Abatangelo caught a glimpse of her profile.
Shel drove with one hand on the wheel; the other hand held her head. She had to get out of the house, needed to drive, be out in the open air. For just a short while. She felt reasonably certain they wouldn’t begrudge her that. They hadn’t even bothered to post a man at the gate, which was normal for uneventful nights when the compound sat dark and empty, nights when it was left to Frank and Shel and Rowena to make the place look like any other out here, nothing more than occupied. Just another off night, she thought, that’s what this was. That said something. It said she’d held up her end of the bargain. Frank had stayed in the saddle, he’d gone out to do his bit. And what she’d told Felix was true: She knew nothing. She could not connect anyone directly to anything, no matter what happened; she posed a threat to no one. That said, she told herself, not too far. They’ll sense it somehow, track you down just to brag about how they did it, if you stray too far.
In her rearview mirror she spotted the pair of headlights. They were two curves behind her, gaining. It was Felix, she thought. It had all been a test, see if she’d stay put. Her throat clenched. This wasn’t the sort of thing he’d want to handle personally. Maybe it was Bud Lally. Maybe it was the Mexicans everyone was bitching about. Maybe they were coming for Frank. And when they found her instead, what then?
She slowed, and the lights kept coming. Whoever they were, they weren’t just following, they meant to catch her. She tapped the accelerator once to gain some distance, floored it suddenly, but no more than a thousand yards later she eased her foot off the pedal entirely. The truck slowed to a stop. No more running, she thought. Too far to any crossroad, no turnoff, no escape. Make your peace. If they mean to get you, they will.
The car in pursuit rounded the turn and drifted to a stop behind her, headlights remaining on. Please don’t drag this out, she thought, so I won’t be tempted to beg. Only one man left the car. She could not see if others remained behind. But of course, she thought, he’s huge. She swallowed hard, fighting an impulse to retch, and leaned her head against the window glass, peering into the mirror. Something in the walk, the docking hips, the loping gait and the cock of the head, it seemed familiar.
The figure came up alongside and rapped lightly on the window glass. She found herself taking deep breaths through her mouth, eyes closed. Get it done with, she thought. Opening her eyes, turning, she bolted at the sight of the face, screaming, “Oh good God!”
“It’s me,” Abatangelo shouted through the glass. He pressed his hands to the window. “Hey, hey, don’t be scared. Just me.”
The music from the barroom jukebox blared so loud the ladies’ room mirror shivered above the white row of sinks. Shel had been standing there several minutes, unable to muster the will to step out into the bar where Danny sat waiting.
At the sight of him, the moment she recognized his face and realized she wasn’t daydreaming, a knot unraveled in her chest. It had gotten worse as they’d driven to town, him following behind in his own car. She’d started sobbing so hard she’d thought of pulling over. But then he would’ve pulled over, too, and she couldn’t let him see her like that. It was ridiculous, really. The complications boggled her.
In better times, younger times, such dim prospects would have inspired in her a steadying defiance. Now, with Danny at the bar, she wondered if she was equal to the task of simply sitting next to him and holding up her end of the conversation. She couldn’t tell him what was going on. He’d want to take charge, pull her out of the pit she was in, and that would get him killed.
Several sinks down, two youngsters fussed at themselves, yammering at their own reflections. The nearest was a sinewy blonde in a spangled shift that clung to her shape like a body stocking. She was pretty in the local manner, everything in place, nothing too stark or ethnic. Straight teeth. Boyish of hip and wow of boob.
The other girl was on the chubby side, wrapped tight in a pink dress that pinched up her cleavage. Her hair erupted above her head in coils of syrupy henna. She brought to mind something Shel had read years before on a bathroom wall: CUTE- LAST STOP BEFORE UGLY.
The blonde gripped her clutch and snapped it shut. Using her hip, she nudged the door open. Music blared through the opening like a train horn. The blonde and her homely sidekick left without so much as a glance back at Shel. The door swung quietly behind them.
Shel stared at her hands, clutching the sink edge, avoiding her reflection. When she did look up finally, she confronted the middle-aged woman she had become. How long will it take him, she wondered, to decide this was all a wild mistake?
She tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear, and bit her lip to make it flush. Overall, she thought, addressing her own image, you look used.
Abatangelo positioned himself at the bar in such a way as to put the greatest distance between himself and the jukebox. It was the size of a tanning stall and the music it bellowed consisted of throbbing mush punctuated by schoolboy grunts. He disliked it less from a distance.
The bartender was a tall and rangy man with large, strong hands. He stood alone with his arms crossed by the ice bin, nursing a tonic water. A twelve-stepper, Abatangelo guessed. Ordering a dark rum neat with a soda back, he paid with a twenty and let his change sit. This is exactly the kind of joint, he thought, we used to avoid. Shel was sending him a message, no doubt. Don’t expect much. Or, more to the point: Go home.
From long habit he began to view the room one-eyed, appraising shadows, framing possible angles and assessing depth of field. The decor called to mind a dozen interchangeable cities- Des Moines, Ft. Wayne, Columbus, Tulsa- cities in which he’d once grabbed a quick drink in an off-ramp motel bar. No one looked at home. The women were mouthy and overdressed. The men were scrubbed blue-collar types, recent entrants to the service sector, he supposed. Here and there a few souses loomed, hunched over beers, eyeing one and all with horny menace. Ready to fuck or fight. They lent the place its only character, them and the ax handle the bartender had tucked beside the ice bin to keep them in line.
Abatangelo sipped his rum. So what’s the plan, Dan? First, he surmised, don’t let on that you know her situation. She’ll read that as charity and spit everything else you say right back at you. Don’t try too hard to charm her, either. She’s got built-in equipment for sniffing through charm, and besides, your mechanism there is rusty.
Judging from her eyes, Shel hadn’t enjoyed much in the way of charm lately. It was odd, seeing in the flesh what he’d detected in her letters. He didn’t want to pin a word like “depression” on it- words were particularly cheap at that end of the psychological spectrum- but she looked like it was all she could do just to function.
He checked his watch, sipped his soda, felt his pulse skip around. Two made-up vamps strutted from the ladies’ room, braying at the boys. Shel didn’t follow. What was taking her?
He pictured her scrambling out through a propped-open transom, jogging to her car and fleeing. That would be exotic, he thought. Then he pictured the two of them lying side by side, an impulsive stroke of tenderness, a motel room, naked. She would hike the sheet up around her chest, head propped on one hand. The lamp behind would cast a warming glow along her body. How many centuries had passed since he’d touched her? She would pluck gray hairs from his chest. She would crack unseemly jokes about his prison muscle.
Shel emerged from the ladies’ room with a tentative stride. Abatangelo, watching her, felt every step break his heart. You’re here for the same reason I’m here, he thought. Admit it.
Shunning eye contact, she crossed the room and slid a bill across the bar, nodding with her head toward the jukebox. The bartender palmed the bill, leaned down, reached for the throw switch, then turned around and flipped on the radio as the jukebox grew dark and the music faded into dissonance then silence. A roar of disapproval erupted from the crowd, to which the bartender turned his back. He adjusted the radio volume to a level compatible with talk.
“What was the fee?” Abatangelo asked.
Shel hiked herself onto the stool next to his. “Enough, apparently,” she said.
“Doubt it made you any friends.”
“Pete’s my friend here,” she replied, nodding toward the bartender. As an afterthought, she added: “We used to work together. Long ago.”
She said this without sentiment. Down the bar, Pete the bartender set about mixing a double Stoli Bloody Mary. A dab of Worcestershire, several shakes of celery salt.
“I fear,” Abatangelo said, “Pete finds me unworthy.”
“Pete thinks everybody’s unworthy,” Shel responded. “It’s his curse.”
Pete concluded his preparations and carried Shel’s drink toward her like a chalice. He spun a napkin down and pinned it with the glass stem. Abatangelo nudged a five from his change but Pete lifted a nay-saying hand.
“Thank you,” Shel said to both of them.
Pete smiled toward her, eyed Abatangelo, then retreated. Shortly he resumed his position at the ice bin, far enough away to imply discretion, close enough to overhear if voices were raised.
Shel regarded with relief the cocktail before her- fuss of celery, lime squeeze, peppery ice. The first taste went down with a delicious greedy snap and she promptly considered draining the glass, ordering a second. Instead, she took the celery stalk in her fingers and used it to stir.
A long silence followed. Sensing Abatangelo about to break it, she launched in first, saying, “Who are you?” Listening to her own voice, she decided the words did not sound coy or malicious. She meant to sound curious, as though they were strangers. A bit of make-believe, to lighten things up, give them a little emotional leeway. “If you don’t mind my asking,” she added.
Abatangelo stared back at her with a look of bafflement. He picked up his glass and rolled the rum around, sniffing it, sipping.
“I am,” he said at length, “a photographer. I work in the city.”
“You’re a long way from home.”
“I came out to see an old friend. Lost touch over the years. I’m hoping she’ll turn up soon.”
He smiled gamely. She felt herself grow sad. She wanted a kiss from him.
“How did you lose touch,” she said, “you and this old friend of yours?”
“I’ve been away,” he said. “The desert.”
“Studying with a guru?”
This provoked a helpless cackle. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Me and all my hermit pals. We were studying with our guru. We were paving the road to enlightenment.”
“You sound bitter.”
“Well, it got a little dull.”
“Maybe your guru was messing with your head.”
“That’s all part of the process.”
“Then who needs it?”
“Me,” Abatangelo said. “Wicked me. The wise ones decided: Send the sorry motherfucker to the desert, that’ll straighten him out. Let him learn the ancient secrets of boredom and humiliation.”
“Listen…”
“That’s enlightenment in the desert, my dear. That and an inkling, that, back in civilization, the people you used to know quite easily abide your absence. They, how does one put it, move on.”
He looked at her inquiringly. She felt her throat tighten.
She said, “But hey, now you’re back.”
“Waiting,” he said.
She reached for her drink. “What did you do before this bit in the desert?”
“I was in import/export. Exotic greenery. My turn now: Who are you?”
She felt stung by his tone and yet oddly relieved. He was getting pissed. “I used to work in property management,” she said. “Beachfront homes. But the partnership dissolved.”
“How sad,” Abatangelo said. “I mean, I suppose. Was it?”
“Yeah,” she said. “It was sad.”
He stared at a spot two inches inside her skull. “Tough luck,” he said. “Hard to find good partners. And now?”
Shel puffed her cheeks and winced. “I run a day-care center,” she said, “for hard-to-discipline children.”
She offered him a knowing smile. Once upon a time, she thought, we did this in Vegas. We were young and crazy with hope and brand-new to each other. Every word crackled. It seemed a thousand years ago.
He turned toward her and said, “Let’s drop this, all right?”
“I’m sorry, it was stupid, I just thought- ”
“Forget it.”
They lifted their glasses in unison and drank. Shel tried hard not to think of Frank, or Felix, or the twins.
After a moment, staring straight ahead, he told her, “I got your letter.”
Shel let loose with a long and windy sigh. “Then there’s not much point talking about it,” she said, “is there?”
He studied her. “You look fabulous, incidentally.”
She felt her lips break into a weak and childlike smile. She wanted, again, a kiss from him. “It’s the light,” she said. “It’s kind.”
“No. I’m aware of the light. I know what light can and can’t do. That’s one thing I do know.”
The corners of his mouth softened into a forgiving smile. She found herself gratified to see he was still a handsome man. Overall, despite the desert, he looked trim and sturdy and free of serious defect. The hair was shorter, with bristlings of gray. He looked stronger, bigger in the neck and chest and arms. She longed to hear his stories about the Safford weight room. He could be such an achingly funny man.
“Do you believe in echo?” he asked her suddenly.
The question roused her. “Come again?”
“Echo,” he said.
She stared.
“ ‘Who can believe in echo, when day and night he lives in urban confusion?’ It’s a question posed by Kierkegaard.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“Danish philosopher.” After a moment, he added: “You get a lot of time to read in the desert.”
“No fooling.”
“This particular line, the one about echo, it stuck with me,” he said. He offered a mischievous smile. “The point, as I understood it, is that it’s hard, believing in echo, given how confused life is. Modern life.”
“Echo,” Shel said.
“In context, it has Christian implications. God’s grace bestowed on virtuous men. The good guys.”
“Oh man,” she murmured, shaking her head.
“Bear with me. Now I, like you, have serious doubts about the grace of God. Let alone the good guys.”
“Well, hey.”
“So I read this particular line a bit differently. Echo is simply a voice like my voice, in a sense. Someone like me, out in the world somewhere. She exists. Not a wish. A fact. She’s there. And her existence, it creates a sort of echo.”
He gazed at her, his face full of: Pick it up. She expected him to grab her wrists, shake them. And, in no small way, she wanted him to.
“Sounds a little to me like long-lost love,” she said.
“Not lost,” he said. “Come on. A soul like your soul. Calling out somewhere. What do you think? You believe in that or not?”
She tried to work up the nerve to respond. Yes, she’d tell him. She believed, somewhat, sure. So? Sensing his impatience, she resorted merely to, “I’m having fun.”
“That’s good.”
“No. It’s not. Not at all.”
He started leaning toward her. His kiss found the corner of her mouth, gentle and dry. He touched her arm and she found herself closing her eyes. Their lips parted with the next kiss and she felt a dizziness with their mingling saliva. She clutched the bar for balance and pulled away gently.
“People know me here.”
“No they don’t. Just Pete, remember? And he’s cursed.”
“Don’t be flip.” She clutched the lapels of his jacket and shook him with an intensity half-comic, half-heartbroken. “Why don’t you hate me?” she said. “I walked. When it was easy, you were helpless, in the middle of nowhere, what could you do to stop me? It was chickenshit. So why are you being so nice?”
Abatangelo reached for her hands and gently removed them from his jacket. He enclosed them in his. “I got over it,” he said.
“That’s not fair.”
Abatangelo laughed. “I beg your pardon?”
“I didn’t do anything to earn this,” Shel said. “Forgive somebody who’s earned it, all right? Forgive Eddy. Don’t go easy on me. It’ll just come back to haunt me.”
She withdrew her hands from Abatangelo’s hold and drank long from her Bloody Mary. It had acquired a watery flatness. Pepper grains fastened to her teeth, she had to work them loose with her tongue.
“How perfectly quaint of you,” he said.
“Don’t get snide, Danny, please. Okay?”
“I’m sorry if I sound snide. That wasn’t my intent.”
“It’s okay.”
“But forgiveness is seldom earned, you realize. Trust me, this is an area I’ve considered with some interest. You can reach a point where you tell yourself, ‘I’ve done enough, if that isn’t good enough for the bastards, fuck ’em. But that doesn’t mean you’ve earned their forgiveness. Even if they turn around and give it to you.”
Shel flagged her hands in the air, as though in mock surrender.
“Forgiveness comes or it doesn’t come,” Abatangelo went on. “Right? It’s a gift. In this particular case, a gift from me.”
Averting her eyes, she toyed with her glass. Abatangelo, discovering he’d drained his own, thrummed his fingers on the bar, trying to get Pete’s attention. Pete was not there. A plume of smoke was all that was visible through a storeroom door.
“How can you forgive me,” Shel said finally, “when you don’t even know all the facts?”
“I know enough.”
“Hardly.”
“Your letter- ”
“Doesn’t tell half.”
“Don’t tell me you’re happy. Like he’s good to you.”
This one hit. Shel drifted back a little on her stool.
“He’s the beating you deserve, right? Let me guess, your being with him, it’s all the work of Fate. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Shel waved him off. “I can’t make sense out of what you’re saying.”
“My apologies. Been alone with my thoughts for a while.”
“Danny, I’m sorry.”
“I’m tired of you being sorry, frankly. Why are you shacked up with some cranker lowlife? You hear a lot about speed sex in the joint, that what we’re talking here? How bad does he knock you around?”
“I’m not getting into this.”
“And on the other hand, why, just for conversation’s sake, why-oh-why are you here with me?”
“Auld lang syne.”
“You’re a liar.”
“You came looking for me, not the other way around.”
“And you’re going to make me work, right? You’re going to make sure I bust my hump to prove I really mean it, I’m not bitter, I miss you, always have. Always will. You’re the one thing I was looking forward to. All those years, ten of them, remember that part, ten goddamn years, the last few in particular, all I thought about at night, and you know what goes on in a cell block at night. I closed my eyes and wished hard. You were all I wanted. It was my antidote to bitter. I’m a sentimentalist, I’ve got a long memory and I’m loyal as a dog at dinner. There. That enough? What’s it going to take? Want me to spill some blood?”
Shel said, “Please don’t.”
Pete the bartender reappeared. After a quick survey of the room he pulled a flyer from a cabinet behind the bar and hurried toward Shel. He set the flyer down so she could read it and said, “You seen these around?”
The flyer bore the picture of the Briscoe twins. Across the heading, it read: “Murdered: Ryan and Bryan Briscoe.” Shel felt the bottom drop out of her stomach.
“The woman who’s been passing them out,” Pete said, removing the flyer from sight, “she just pulled up in the lot outside.”
Shel flinched. Why did Pete suspect she’d have any concerns about the twins? Working up a tone of nonchalance, she said, “Time to settle up, I guess.”
“Forget it,” Pete said. “Go on.”
Shel started searching for her keys, slipping off her stool and watching the door. As she did, a plain-featured woman in her mid-thirties entered the bar. She wore slacks and flats, a sport jacket with a white blouse underneath, carrying herself with an air of studied tact. A crook in her nose suggested a break, and she wore squarish gold-rimmed glasses. Beyond a wristwatch she wore no jewelry. Freckles clouded each cheek and her short-cut hair was the color of wet straw.
Overall, Abatangelo thought, she looked cordial and educated and easy to fool. Shel pegged her for a lesbian. The woman glanced about the room.
“Let’s not be in a rush,” Shel murmured, turning back to Abatangelo so her face would be discernible only to him.
“What’s this about?”
“A mistake.” She took his hand in hers, set it in her lap, and smiled up at him cheerlessly.
The woman approached the younger crowd and consulted with them briefly. She gestured with a thumb toward the parking lot, and one of the men shrugged. Then the busty cute girl in the gathered pink dress poked her head up and pointed across the bar. Shel flashed on a girl from grade school. Always scrubbed and packed in petticoats, the good girl, the unhappy girl, the innocent little snitch. They follow you through life, she thought, the good girls, the unhappy girls. The woman with the straw-colored hair turned toward Abatangelo and Shel, broke into a grateful smile, then nodded her thanks to her informant.
“Heads up,” Abatangelo said quietly.
“There are women in this world that torture’s too good for,” Shel replied.
Abatangelo gestured toward Pete for another round then turned back to Shel and whispered, “One more time, quick, what’s this about?”
Shel replied merely, “Let me talk.”
“Lachelle Beaudry?” the woman said in greeting. Up close her appearance conveyed an even greater effect of blandness. Her skin looked wan from lack of sun, her glasses sat crooked on her face, she had matronly hands. Shel thought: my name. How did she get my name?
The woman drew a business card from her shoulder bag and offered it to Shel, who declined to accept it. The woman then extended it to Abatangelo, who took it in his fingers, smiled, and put it in his pocket without so much as a glance.
“My name is Jill Rosemond,” the woman said. She regarded Abatangelo quizzically. “You must be…”
“Somebody else,” he replied.
The woman smiled. To Shel, she said, “There’s a red Pathfinder parked outside. The girl over there said she saw you drive up in it. It’s registered to a Lachelle Beaudry. Her and a man named Frank Maas.”
She again regarded Abatangelo inquiringly.
“Not me,” he assured her.
Shel lifted her head back, eyes closed, looking pained.
“Perhaps this is a bad time,” the woman said.
Shel laughed. “Now there, you’re on the right track.”
“Yes, well. I’m working for a family up in Lodi, the Briscoes. They had a pair of twin sons.”
“I always heard twins came in pairs,” Shel said.
Jill Rosemond’s smile withered. “These twin brothers,” she responded, “are dead.”
“As in identically dead, or fraternally dead?”
Abatangelo reached out and placed a cautionary hand on Shel’s knee.
“I’m not accustomed to humor on this subject,” Jill Rosemond said.
“Then I’d guess you’re not from around here,” Shel replied.
Jill Rosemond adjusted her glasses and worked up another smile, hoping to start over. “I was hired by the family. The twins had not been heard from in some time.”
“Kinda comes with being dead, don’t you think, Jill?”
“I located the twins, found them finally in a house they rented along Sand Mound Slough. They’d been murdered.”
Shel said, “Sounds like you got there late.”
“People tell me the twins had been seen recently with a man named Frank Maas.”
“Here it comes,” Shel groaned, feigning enough-is-enough. “And know what I hear? Those two Briscoe kids were slumming it. Pair of coked-up little freaks. They were due.”
“Where did you hear that?”
Shel waved her off. “I’ll tell you something else. Kids don’t run away from home ‘cause everything’s great. I’d say the people paying you want to calm a bad conscience.”
Jill Rosemond’s expression conveyed she had heard this before. “What else,” she asked, “would you like to tell me?”
Shel shook her head. “You’ll listen to damn near anything, I’ll bet. Earn your fee. Family’s got as much use for you now as they do their kids, right? You were supposed to make contact with these prodigal twins of yours. Get them in touch with the family again, work up that backslapping get-together everybody was pretending they wanted. But you took too long. You blew it.”
“It appears we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot.”
“Stop the heartfelt sincere bit, will you? It is very annoying.”
“I do not- ”
“Have you been paid?”
Abatangelo pressed Shel’s knee harder with his hand. She jerked her leg away.
“I beg your pardon?” Jill Rosemond said.
“This family, they’re into you what, a few grand now? Maybe more. So you tell them, I’ll go the extra yard. I’ll keep on pushing, pass on everything I find out to the boys in Homicide. ‘Cause if a perp crops up, or somebody who’ll pass for one, you want it to look like you helped out. And then you mail the Briscoes the bill, Jill. You’ve made it worth their while to pay up finally. They’ll get some vengeance, which’ll keep up appearances. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“I merely want to talk to Frank Mass,” Jill Rosemond said. “I think he can help me. Maybe. How can I know till I talk to him?”
“Oh Lord,” Shel groaned. “The scent. Go get ’em.” She leaned forward. “Horseshit.”
“I’m sorry, but this attitude of yours strikes me as just a bit hysterical.”
“Then, like I said, you’re not from around here, honey. We’re skeptical out this way. We’re white trash. Your kind never brings good luck.”
Shel gathered her things and dropped off her bar stool. “I’ve got nothing else to say to you.” She headed for the door. Abatangelo left his change and scrambled to catch up with her in the doorway.
“Let’s take my car,” he said under his breath.
“Danny, that’s not a good idea. Go home.”
Outside, the parking lot glowed from overhead lamplight. Up the hill traffic rushed past on the Delta Highway, cruising west into Pittsburg or east toward Antioch.
Abatangelo took Shel’s arm. “She’s going to follow you.”
Shel shook off his hand. “She’ll be in for a rude shock.”
Jill Rosemond stormed up from behind. Her face was flushed. Reaching them, she came to, adjusted her glasses and struck a pose of righteous fury. “I want to paint you a picture,” she said. “It’s a picture the family’s going to live with for a long time.”
Abatangelo tried to turn Shel away but she fought off his hold. She held out her finger as though intending to ram it through the other woman’s chin.
“You listen…,” Shel hissed.
“No, I’ve listened enough,” Jill Rosemond replied, holding her ground. “It’s your turn. I found the Briscoe twins in an upstairs room with their chests torn up by close-range gunfire. I had to wave through a cloud of flies to make sure it was them. Blood spread into the carpet like a paste, I still smell it sometimes. The twins, they were all of eighteen years old. Eighteen. Left there like meat, bloated, swimming with maggots. But that’s just another day in the life of white trash, I suppose.”
Shel crossed her arms, made a low caustic laugh and said, “That it?”
“I want to talk to Frank Maas.”
“No no no,” Shel said. “My turn now. My turn to paint the scene.” She cocked her head. “You ready? This Frank Maas you want so bad, he had a baby boy once, know that? Name was Jesse. He was all of three years old when he died. Killed with a hammer through his skull. Killer made his mother watch all this till he beat her to death with the same fucking hammer. There’s more, God yes, but I’ll spare you the details. Here’s a promise, though: I got you beat on the gore scale, sugar. His own damn kid. Frank’s kid. And who do you think got dragged in for questioning. Right. Sorry-ass Frank. He didn’t have money to hire an item like you, he just had to sit there and take it. Four damn days they grilled him. When they had to let him go they put him on surveillance, followed him up and down the county. He was the one, they were positive, no doubt. Go get ’em. Frank loved that boy. Loved him with every ounce of strength he had. But if the real killer through some thunderbolt from above hadn’t heard his conscience calling, walked in and given himself up, they’d still be out to nail Frank for his own boy’s murder. Just like you want to do with these twins. Don’t tell me otherwise. Christ. Listen to you. Wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you. Wouldn’t care. The hell with you. I’ve seen your kind. Frank and me, we’ve been through this. And that, my dear, is another day in the life of white trash, if you so much as give a shit.”
She spun away toward her truck. Abatangelo stood there, not moving. No wonder, he thought. A boy. He shook himself from his stupor, offered Jill Rosemond a shrug and hurried toward Shel.
“You have my card,” Jill Rosemond called after him. Her voice seemed brittle and false now. Abatangelo started to run as Shel sorted through her keys. He reached the truck as she was getting in and lodged his arm inside the door.
“Tell me what’s going on,” he said. “This is nuts.”
“I gotta run now,” Shel said, voice cracking. “It was nice to see you. I mean that.”
She turned the ignition key and released the parking brake. She did not put the car in gear, though. She leaned forward in the seat and rested her forehead against the steering wheel, inhaling through her mouth.
Abatangelo said, “I didn’t know. I never heard about- ”
“Danny, don’t,” Shel moaned.
He pulled a pen from his pocket, scrawled his number and address on the back of Jill Rosemond’s card. “In case,” he said, handing it to her.
Shel took the card, dropped it in her lap and put the truck in gear. “Thank you,” she whispered.
She pulled away in a shrieking jolt and fishtailed onto the road. He stared after her, watching the taillights flicker beyond a row of aspens. For the first time he felt the wind on his skin, cold and damp off the river. He turned back toward his own car and discovered Jill Rosemond standing there. She waited in the middle of the parking lot, casting a small round shadow in the lamplight. One hand clutching her purse strap, she called out to him in a tone of newfound resolve: “I still didn’t catch your name.”
The two cars bearing Frank, the Akers brothers and the other gunmen sped north through the Delta. Frank and the Akers brothers rode with Dayball and Tully in the Lincoln, Hack and the others trailing behind in the old Le Mans. At a rest stop just beyond the Antioch Bridge, Dayball and Tully told Lyle to stop and let them out. They were due to return to Bethel Island, join the birthday celebration for Felix Randall’s niece which would serve as their alibi. Before getting out, Dayball helped Frank roll up his sleeve, and with a fresh spike submit to a booster of his medicine. With his usual flair for theater, Dayball booted the liquor in the cylinder, drawing back blood and watching the thin dark threads waving in the fluid. Finally with his thumb he drove the plunger home, withdrew the needle tip from the skin and told Frank to roll his sleeve back down. As Frank buttoned his cuff, Dayball pocketed the spike and removed his spiral notebook, as always checking the time, then recording his secret notation.
Frank, feeling the first wave of humming warmth and a not wholly unpleasant nausea, pointed to the notebook and asked, “Lonnie, I gotta know, why you carry that around?”
Dayball gestured for Frank to wait a moment, completed his jottings, then capped his pen and put the notepad away.
“You gotta know?”
“I’m curious,” Frank admitted. He’d spent more time with Dayball the past three days than anyone else. He was beginning to feel a genuine bond. A bond that, at least, promoted curiosity.
“Doesn’t mean I gotta tell you,” Dayball said.
“I understand.”
Dayball withdrew the notebook and let Frank take it. Frank glanced up at Dayball to make sure it was okay, then cracked open the cover. He discovered page after page of small, spidery notations, written in cipher.
“I been in the joint just once,” Dayball explained. “When I got out, my probation officer, he was a very decent guy. He had a lot of good advice. One piece of advice was this: Keep a diary. ‘Cause there are certain cops, they get an eerie, almost telepathic feel for you. They’ll work it out like astrologers. They’ll chart you, put you somewhere you don’t belong in that one stretch of time you can’t account for. Just for the fun of watching you get dragged back in.” He reached for his notebook and gently removed it from Frank’s hold. “Makes ’em feel all streetwise and pitiless. Real crime fighters.”
He opened his door and gestured for Tully to do likewise. They strolled beneath lamplight to a car parked at the far end of the rest area. Frank watched them get in as Snuff said, “I’ll tell you who we ought to be shooting tonight.”
“Cork it,” Roy said. “Nobody needs you piping off.”
“Listen to you,” Snuff said. “You speak for everybody now?”
Roy turned around in the seat and stared. “That’s right,” he said. “Open the door, you don’t like it. Open the door, get your runt ass out on the road back south and figure out who your next family’s gonna be.”
“Like that’d be punishment,” Snuff said.
“Come again?”
“A pox on your box, pal, hear me?”
Roy did a double take worthy of a cartoon. “A pox on my box? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“Figure it out,” Snuff said.
“No. You tell me.”
“I’m done talking.”
Roy turned to Lyle. Nudging his arm, he said, “Hey, Lyle, you catch that? A pox on your box.”
“Don’t touch me,” Lyle said.
They continued in silence, driving north with the Le Mans two car lengths behind. The road was narrow and winding, running along the river atop a levee, the roadside dotted with darkened saltbox shacks advertising lugger rentals or live bait: anchovies, shad, mudsuckers. Comforted by the gentle rocking of the car, Frank stared out at the sword grass and cattails and eucalyptus trees lining the riverbank. Framed by the windshield and lit by headlights, it seemed like a sort of movie.
That afternoon at the El Parador Hotel, Frank had met for the final time with Cesar, the Mexican he’d dealt with over Felix’s materiel. The hotel was intended one day to be a real showplace, but for the time being it sat out in the middle of nowhere in a mosquito-infested area above the Sacramento River known as Montezuma Hills. Frank sat alone with Cesar in the hotel’s empty bar, explaining how the thing would go down. He’d connect with the shooters in a scrap yard on Andrus Island, then together they’d drive out into the Delta to a restaurant where Felix was throwing a birthday party for his niece. The story had been devised by Dayball. He’d made Frank recite it word for word, like a poem, until he got it down pat.
“The beauty of it,” Dayball had told him, “is that it’s half-true. Only gotta remember the other half.”
No one would be expecting anything and no one would be armed, Frank had told Cesar. As for the exact location of the restaurant, Frank added, that gets divulged when we connect tonight and I get paid. That was when Cesar dropped his own little bombshell- the men who would be coming to kill Felix were the brothers and cousins of Gaspar Arevalo, the seventeen-year-old that Dayball, Tully and the Akers brothers had murdered out on Kirker Pass Road.
“Frank,” Roy said from the front. He’d turned around and was facing the backseat. “You’re good with everything we went over with Lonnie this afternoon, right?”
“I remember,” Frank said.
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“Tell it to me, then.”
Frank closed his eyes. A picture emerged. He described the picture.
“You wave them inside the killfire,” Roy said.
“Get them in close.”
“You gotta get them inside the killfire,” Roy repeated, “or it could get ugly.”
“I understand,” Frank said.
When they reached Andrus Island, Lyle stopped the car. Roy got out to remove a gate chain, and once he got back in they drove along a dirt road for a little less than a half mile where they came upon the scrap yard, barricaded in accordion wire. Roy got out again, this time to negotiate the gate to the yard, then they drove past towering aisles of wreckage. Moonlight reflected in pockmarked chrome and oily pools of water; it glowed through shattered windshields hazed by dewy filth. Cats flitted in and out of shadowy recesses. Everywhere, the smell of gas and rust filled the air.
They rounded a bend and came upon a clearing, banked by tire mounds twenty feet high. “Hats on,” Roy said from the front seat. He put out his cigarette in the dashboard ashtray. “Film at eleven.”
A sawbuck table sat at the far end of the clearing, silhouetted by the headlights. Roy got out and opened Frank’s door and led him to the table, sat him down. He handed Frank the flashlight needed to return the coded signal that had been arranged.
Removing a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, Roy tamped out two and offered Frank a smoke. Frank accepted the cigarette, then bent to the match Roy struck for them both, cupping it with his palm. Roy shook out the flame, smiled through smoke and looked at his watch.
“Not long now, bro. One more time, run it down for me.”
Frank recited the procedure again, this time being sure to use the term “killfire,” since Roy enjoyed it so much. The words came from a part of him he couldn’t quite locate. After a moment, he was not even sure he’d said anything, so he repeated himself. Roy nodded as he listened to both renditions, then put his hand on Frank’s shoulder.
“I’m proud of you,” Roy said. The tone lacked warmth. He was probing. “I mean that.”
“Thank you, Roy,” Frank said. “We’ve been through a lot together, you and me, that right?”
“Time’s nigh,” Roy said. Looking up, he saw the others removing their shotguns from the trunk of the Le Mans. He pointed to where he wanted them.
Frank said, “Roy, remember that construction site we picketed in Turlock? The one where the contractor came out with an old M-1 and said he was counting to ten?”
Roy turned around and looked down at Frank with a troubled expression. “Not the time to shoot the breeze, Frank.”
“I was just remembering, Roy.”
“You want to remember something, remember what you gotta do.”
“I will, Roy.”
“Don’t let me down.”
Roy fled beyond a wall of wreckage with the others. They were situated so as to be able to hit the Mexicans from every side at once, spraying the area so heavily with buckshot there’d be no risk of return fire. Shortly Frank found himself humming a pleasant tune: “Don’t Let Me Down.”
Above him, the clouds fled past, brightened by the moon. They were exquisite tonight, finely shaped, complex, like puffy, cavernous seashells. He found himself wanting to ascend, enter them, travel their interiors.
A car approached slowly from the edge of the compound. It was a Mercedes sedan, one of the older diesels. The engine pinged and chugged as the car edged forward. There were seven men inside, packed so tight they created one large multiheaded silhouette.
As the headlights went on and off, relaying the coded signal Cesar had chosen, Frank reached for the flashlight on the table beside his hand. Three, he thought. He was supposed to flash back three times. Three was the age Jesse had been when he’d died. And that was three years ago. If Jesse had been born the day he died, Frank thought, tonight might be the very night he got murdered all over again.
By the time his thoughts circled back to the signal he was supposed to provide, it was too late. The Mercedes slammed into reverse. Lyle Akers, sensing the setup had failed, cut off the car’s retreat and opened fire from behind. The Mercedes’s rear window shattered to the sound of screams and bloodcurdling Spanish as the brothers and cousins of Gaspar Arevalo threw open their doors and clawed across one another in the tight-packed car. One by one, amid raining gunfire, they dove or fell or got pushed to the dirt and found cover in the scrap heaps nearby.
Frank dove beneath the table, curling into a ball. The ground was cold and wet; he burrowed into it, thinking: Mudsuckers. Live bait. Looking up through his hands he watched as one of the Mexicans fled to the back of the Mercedes and struggled with the trunk, as though that was where they’d stored the serious weapons. He was gunned down fumbling with his keys. The others resorted to pistols, returning fire by moonlight and by the sound and muzzle flashes of their attackers’ guns.
The smoke-filled air crackled with the reports of pump guns and pistols and shortly Lyle lay on the ground, clutching his midriff and screaming. One of the Mexicans ran to claim Lyle’s shotgun from the ground beside him and finished him off. Ducking, the Mexican then ran to the side of the clearing and fired into a muddy swale barricaded with tires. A second Mexican came up behind, reached into the spot where the bullets had gone and retrieved a second shotgun glistening with blood. One of Roy’s men came up behind and opened fire at the Mexicans’ backs. The two men fell but not without landing one shot in their killer’s leg. The man toppled, struggled back to his feet, limped to the front of the Mercedes and poured four shotgun rounds into the body of another Mexican writhing there.
Frank closed his eyes and wrapped his arms about his head until finally, as suddenly as it had started, the gunfire died. The stench of cordite hung in the air. Opening his eyes, he watched a vast shapeless cloud of smoke settle slowly, brightened by moonlight and drifting down in patches toward the dirt. Screams came from various places. Frank could make out Hack’s voice and another wailing in Spanish.
The Lincoln roared into the clearing, Roy behind the wheel. He slammed the car into park, engine running, and ran toward the spot where Hack had fallen. He picked his brother up beneath the arms and tried to move him but Hack kicked, clutching his midriff and screaming. Roy, searching right and left through the acrid haze, called out for Snuff, cursing him, telling him to come help. Snuff staggered from his hiding place, tottered in the open air for a moment then hustled toward Roy. Grabbing Hack’s ankles, he helped carry him to the Lincoln where they laid him out, crazed, howling, in the backseat.
Roy turned back around, lurched to the front of the Mercedes where one of the Mexicans lay dead, tugged the man’s gun from his fingers, returned to Snuff and forced the weapon into his hands. Snuff did not respond. He just stood there watching Hack, thrashing in the backseat of the Lincoln, clutching his exposed viscera, trying to shove them back inside, his hands slopped in blood.
“You shoot the motherfucker,” Roy shouted, pointing at the sawbuck table. “You shoot him dead.”
Hack screamed, “God… Please, you can’t… Roy, hey, Jesus, ah please, God, no…”
Roy shoved Snuff toward the table then ran to where Lyle had fallen, leaving Snuff standing there alone, the gun in his hands. He looked down at it as though it might fly up of its own accord. Lifting his head, he gazed all around him through the stinging haze at the fallen men, some still writhing in the mud. He scuttled toward the table beneath which Frank still lay hiding but got no closer than ten yards before he raised the gun and opened fire, spraying the area in a berserk side-to-side motion. He was weeping. Frank felt the bullets connect with the table, the muddy grass nearby. Snuff dropped the gun where he stood and gripped his head, making a sound Frank had never heard before. Then Snuff staggered back sobbing to the Lincoln. He helped Roy lay Lyle’s body out in the trunk. They got into the car and Roy jammed it in gear, the wheels spun in the mud and the car swerved right and left as it dodged the Mercedes and vanished through the scrap yard gate.
Shortly one of Felix’s other gunmen appeared, the one with the wounded leg. He dragged himself out from his hiding place among the smoke-obscured tire mounds and, propped on one knee, called out and waved for his lone surviving friend. The Le Mans appeared. The driver got out, gathered up his wounded companion then dragged the dead one to the car and toppled the body into the backseat. A moment later they were gone, too.
Frank lay beneath the table, waiting, arms wrapped tight around his head. When it had been absolutely still for quite some time, he rose from the mud, inspecting himself. He was filthy, but unharmed.
His eyes watering from the cordite and smoke, he got to his feet, sneezed, and stumbled toward the Mercedes. Shattered glass covered the backseat, the car was riddled with holes, but from the looks of it all the shotgun fire had aimed high. The point, he guessed, was to kill the Mexicans, not the car. The upholstery and dash were shredded but the tires were good. The keys still hung from the ignition cylinder. He tried the door, struggled to get it open, swept the shattered glass off the upholstery, and sat. Gripping the steering wheel, his hands came away with blood. He rubbed his hands on his pant legs, wiped the wheel with his shirttail. He tried the ignition and gasped with joy when the engine turned over. He struggled with the gearshift, lodged the transmission into reverse, then backed out of the clearing and down the aisles of wreckage.
Abatangelo sat at a small, kidney-shaped table of yellow Formica in a place called Zippy Donuts. A fluorescent tube buzzed overhead, flashing dim shocks of light that caused the reflections in the window glass to jitter, like images in an old home movie. Across the table sat Jill Rosemond.
“I’ve been to a number of bars where the twins did their little act,” she said, “hustling pool. Three weeks, I’ve done this, from Modesto to Galt. You would not believe some of these places, or the creatures who inhabit them. That’s what I was trying to get through to your friend, Ms. Beaudry. I don’t have Frank Maas at the top of any list. From what I’ve seen, just about anybody could have killed those boys, given what they were up to.”
In the background the insomniac sweet-tooth crowd milled in and out. The donut shop was run by a Korean family, and the counter girl, her smile encaged in braces, rang the register brightly, thanking one and all with ferocious gratitude.
“No one ever forgot those two. None too many wanted to see them back. As for Frank Maas, I didn’t even know he existed till this afternoon. I got an address- ”
“How?” Abatangelo asked, interrupting.
Jill Rosemond cocked her head. She looked a little older in this light. Sleep deprivation, maybe. Money worries. Abatangelo wondered if she had children. Or dogs. She seemed the sort to have dogs.
“Addresses aren’t hard to come by,” she said.
“Let me see the printout,” Abatangelo said, extending his hand. When she affected puzzlement, he added, “You got an address for somebody you say you didn’t even know existed till this afternoon. That’s quick. Either a cop gave it to you or you bought it from an information mill.”
She thought it over a moment, then reached into her shoulder bag and removed a sheet of coarse gray paper almost identical to the one Eddy had given Abatangelo his first night out. He took it from her, read the addresses, and noticed the combination matched Shel’s up to the three-year mark, then things were different. The most recent address, cross-referenced to the registration of Shel’s truck, was the one Abatangelo knew. The Akers’ place.
“I thought you couldn’t access DMV information unless you intended to serve process,” he said, handing the paper back.
Jill Rosemond froze. “Who told you that?”
He liked her response. “You’ve got some paper to hang on Frank. A subpoena? Summons?”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself.”
“Why didn’t you go out to the house, instead of the bar?”
“I did go out. No one was there.”
“When was this?”
“Not long before I met up with you and Ms. Beaudry.”
Abatangelo considered this. It made sense, he supposed.
She added, “It’s not an easy place to find.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
She cocked her head again. “You said- ”
“I have an address. I never said I’d been out there.”
“Don’t insult me. I’ve got eyes. I’m not stupid. You and Lachelle- ”
“We just met.”
Jill Rosemond sat back and laughed. “Not possible,” she said. “Not from what I saw.”
“Appearances deceive. I’m sure, given your line of work, you’ve discovered that to be true.”
“You seemed very protective.”
“It’s my way.” He reached out his hand. “What other printouts did you get on this Frank character?”
Jill Rosemond laughed again, a little less naturally this time. “Excuse me?”
“A rap sheet,” Abatangelo said. “Or does that take longer than just a few hours?”
She studied him. “You still refuse to give me your name?”
We’ve been through this, Abatangelo thought. You didn’t like my answer. I’m new here. A stranger, just passing through.
“Who I am isn’t important. Not yet.”
“What’s your stake in this?”
“This?”
“The Briscoe murders.”
“Not a thing.”
“In Frank Maas, then.”
The beaming counter girl appeared, bearing a coffeepot. Her braces gleamed, her eyes quivered, strands of hair erupted from under her hair net. Abatangelo accepted a warm-up for fear of making her cry.
“Given what you’ve told me,” he said once the girl moved on, “given what I learned from Shel tonight, I’d say everyone involved has known happier times. I’m a firm believer in happier times. That’s my stake.”
“What did she tell you?”
“Later.”
“Why not now?”
“I need a better sense of what’s relevant, what’s not, before I say something that might drag her into your orbit.”
“What orbit is that?”
“Punishment.”
Jill Rosemond smirked and waved her hand. “You sound like her now.”
“You’ve got to account for two dead twins. You’re trying to tell me, if you find out who killed them, that’s it?”
“It’s the end of the matter for me, yes. I don’t have any power to go beyond that.”
“You hand it off to the law.”
“That’s my client’s decision, not mine.”
Abatangelo laughed.
She said, “I asked what your stake is in all this.”
“Like you won’t listen to what I have to say, regardless.”
“I’ll listen to anybody. Your friend was right in that regard. It doesn’t mean I’ll believe them. Or say yes if they ask for money.”
“I haven’t asked for money.”
“I’m impressed. It’s saintly of you.”
“That’s me. A true believer.”
“In happier times.”
“There you go.”
“Even if you have to remove Frank Maas from the picture.”
Abatangelo looked down, sipped his coffee. “I have no particular interest in seeing him suffer.”
“Then nothing you’ve said here makes sense.”
“I don’t recall saying much of anything.”
“You’ve said enough. Believe me. Look, I need to speak with him. Frank Maas.”
“I understand. I doubt you improved your chances given your performance tonight. You won’t have much luck getting any further following the same tack.”
“Which means you might come in handy.”
“Could be.”
“Do you think he’ll run?”
Abatangelo’s sense of Frank was that he resembled any number of goofs he’d come across over the years, in prison and out. The kind that never mean any harm but always end up making somebody suffer. The kind that always forget and never learn. Run? Hell yes. And take Shel with him.
“I’d say that’s a distinct possibility.”
“He won’t be doing himself any favors if he does.”
“It’s been my experience,” Abatangelo said, “that the people who crow loudest about standing tall are the ones who’ve never had to do it.”
“I’m not saying he’s a suspect.”
“But he’ll do. Especially if he runs.”
“What will it take,” she said, “to get you to tell me the rest of what you know?”
“A little more time.”
“How long?”
“I wish I knew.”
She sat there a moment, then gathered her keys and bag and rose from the table. Extending her hand, she said, “Next time, if there is a next time, please don’t go to so much trouble to lie to me. It only makes you sound like a loser.”
He took her hand, gripping it cordially, but said nothing. She turned, then, and exited Zippy Donuts, crossing the parking lot to her car. It was a station wagon, several years old, the sort a mother would drive.
It brought to mind the issue of children again. Not hers. Not the Briscoe brothers. He recalled what Shel had said, about her and Frank and a baby boy. A boy that got murdered. He pictured Shel holding the child, cradling him, and then discovering that the boy was dead, the body sprawled bloody and lifeless in her arms. Beaten with a hammer, he thought. Good God.
He gathered his things. It was time to go; he had some pictures to develop.
Frank figured Roy would drive straight for Rio Vista to a veterinarian the brothers always talked about in the context of gunshot wounds. Frank chose a different route, taking back roads empty this time of night, and down which a bullet-riddled Mercedes diesel with shot-out windows, no taillights and only one good headlight would draw scant notice. Just under an hour later he arrived at the gate leading to the ranch house. No one was stationed there. All was still. Even so he parked the car in the culvert and slinked in, thinking he could dive into the grass and hide if he heard a car coming in or out. No one came. He reached the ranch house without incident and studied it from a distance for a while. It was dark, but that could mean anything. No one there. Everyone there, waiting. Waiting for me.
But they think you’re dead, he told himself. They think Snuff killed you.
He checked the yard for other cars, but none were there. The barn they used for a garage stood open, and only his truck was parked inside. Where was Shel? Getting closer to the house, he circled it twice, crouching beneath the windows, listening. No sound from inside. Finally, he went up the back steps and tried the door. It was locked. You don’t set up an ambush, he thought, then lock the door. He felt above the door frame where the extra key was hidden, found it and opened the door. The kitchen was dark. He was still fishing for the light switch when the phone rang.
Run, he thought. Now.
Instead, he turned on the light. No one came forward to kill him all over again, and on the tenth ring the phone went quiet. He staggered to the breakfast nook and collapsed.
A newspaper cluttered the table, someone had tried the crossword, and beside it sat an ashtray filled with menthol butts. Rowena, he thought. Her and her boy, Duval, they must still be at their movie. Waiting for Roy to show up.
A checkerboard and a cigar box full of chess pieces that belonged to Duval sat next to the newspaper. The boy was always going around asking everybody if they played chess. Frank had told him once, “I know how the pieces move.” The kid had said, “That’s jailbird chess.”
The phone rang again. It occurred to Frank it might be Shel. She should be here, she was here when I left. Maybe it’s somebody who knows where she is. He crossed the kitchen, let the phone ring one more time, then reached out cautiously for the receiver, thinking: If it isn’t her, hang up.
A car was coming. He stood there, one hand in the air, his head turned to the sound of the car as headlights broke the hill. Lurching to the window, he pushed the curtains aside and saw at once it wasn’t Shel. A gun, he thought. You survived fucking World War III and never once thought to bring back a gun. He stood there, pounding the sides of his head with the heels of his hands as the car came to a stop outside and a single man stepped out.
Frank looked for a place to hide. It was too late to turn out the light. He’d probably already been spotted through the curtain. To come this far, he thought, survive Roy’s killfire and Snuff’s manic blazing away and the sneaky drive home in the chewed-up Mercedes, only to be caught like a dog.
The driver of the car eased the back door open, calling out, “Lonnie?”
The voice was a stranger’s. Not Roy. Not Snuff or Tully. A stranger who seemed nervous. It was a setup. It was cops. Frank sat there, unable to get a word out.
“Who’s… come on, hey,” the voice said.
Frank cleared his throat. “Yeah?”
The door closed. Hesitant steps sounded in the hallway to the kitchen, and then the man appeared. Young man. Frank had no idea who he was.
“I was looking for Lonnie,” the guy said. He eyed Frank’s muddy clothing, his eyes darting around like hummingbirds. “Lonnie Dayball. He here?”
Dayball’s supposed to be here, Frank thought. That’s what this means. Get out.
“Lonnie ain’t here,” he said. “And you?”
The guy said his name, still standing in the doorway. The name meant nothing to Frank, he forgot it instantly. He wondered if the guy was armed. The guy pointed across the room. “I know you?”
This is it, Frank thought. He makes me, he runs out of here, finds Dayball.
“No,” he said. “Don’t think so.”
“I’ve hung Sheetrock with the brothers. You?”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “Must be. Gotcha.”
“You’re not…”
“Not what?”
The guy wiggled the finger he was pointing, like that helped him think. “There’s a guy lives here, name’s Frank Maas. You’re…”
Frank grimaced and shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “My name’s Mick. Mick Spielman.” It was the name of a kid Frank had gone to grade school with. He’d died in a car accident in fifth grade. Frank had used the name on and off over the years, when the need arose.
“Glad to meetcha,” the guy said.
“Same.”
“You know Frank? Frank Maas.”
“Know him, no,” Frank said. “Saw him tonight, though.” Taking a risk, he added, “Don’t think he’ll be coming back here.”
The guy laughed a nasty little laugh and relaxed a little. He leaned back against the doorjamb and nodded at Frank’s clothes. “So that’s it.”
Frank looked down at himself, as though surprised at the state he found himself in. He said, “What?”
“That thing with the nacho niggers.” There was a conspiratorial little wink in his voice. Like he wasn’t supposed to know. His eyes were eager.
“Yeah,” Frank said.
“And that fucked-up Mercedes out there.”
Frank shrugged, thinking. “Couldn’t leave it behind,” he managed.
“Damn,” the guy said with juvenile awe. “So tell me. How’d it go?”
“Go?”
“The Mexicans. Jesus.”
Careful, Frank thought. He considered a dozen different ways to say it, then settled on, “Caught ’em in the killfire.”
The guy nodded, grimacing with envy. “We come out okay? I mean, except for Frank, the lame fuck.”
Frank stared. The guy stared back.
“We good?”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “Better than good.”
The guy pumped his arm. Rooting for the home team. “That’s great,” he said. “That’s fabulous. Christ, no wonder you look wasted.”
Frank leaned back, let his body sag. “Yeah.”
“Listen,” the guy went on, “like I said, I’m supposed to connect with Lonnie Dayball. I’ve got his mobile number but the motherfucker’s outside range. Tells me to stay tuned, then this. I mean, really.”
“It’s fucked,” Frank ventured.
“Tell me about it. But that’s Dayball. Do what I tell you, and while you’re at it do what I didn’t tell you. Unless I shoulda told you not to. Round and around…”
“Why look for him here?” Frank asked.
The guy threw up his hands. “What else am I gonna do? Like I said, he’s outta range, the homo.”
“He due here?”
“I’m desperate,” the guy said. “He had me playing shads on Frankie Maas’s old lady. Never seen her before, either, but Dayball, you know how he is, says, She’s the only one out there. Anybody leaves, it’s her. Felix wanted her thinking she was cool but then told Dayball: Put a tail on her. So that’s my deal, I sat on the house tonight. And I got news. Oh yeah.”
Frank sat there, head tilted like he hadn’t quite gotten the last part right. His throat clenched. The guy kept talking, but the blood pulsing in Frank’s ears drowned out the sound. All he caught was, “… any ideas?”
Snapping to. “About?”
“Jesus, what’s wrong with you? Where I can find Dayball.”
“I can pass word on,” Frank said. The words came out without thought. “I see him, I’ll pass the word on.”
The guy shuffled from one foot to the other, murmuring to himself. “Fine. Yeah. Hell. Whoever gets there first. Here goes. I sat out on the road, hidden in that bunch of trees down the road from the gate, like Lonnie said. Sure enough, not fifteen minutes go by, red Pathfinder pulls out and turns toward town. Woman driving, bingo. I give her a few minutes, I mean, there’s nowhere to turn off, right? I pull out finally, put the tail on. I find her about a half mile away, pulled to the side. There’s some guy pulled up behind her. Where he came from, I don’t know. Big guy, tall, well built, short hair. Mean anything?”
Frank felt as though the top of his head was lifting off. “Big?” he said.
“He’s standing there at her car, they’re talking. I slow down, I’ll get made. So I blow on by, keep going till the Oakley turnoff, pull in, can the lights, wait. Maybe ten minutes later, they go by, one then the other. Guy’s driving a fucking Dart. Again, I figure, don’t follow too close. I wait a couple minutes. But this time they reach the highway. I lose ’em.”
Tall, Frank thought. Well built. A cop. In a Dart?
“I must’ve driven up and down the highway two, three hours. I’m thinking Lonnie’s gonna have my head. Then I pull in to Rafferty’s, you know it? Friend of mine hangs out there. Turns out he saw Frank’s old lady and this big guy there just a little while back. They got pretty oily with each other.”
Frank closed his eyes. “Tell me where again?”
“Rafferty’s, by the water. They had a drink at the bar and then started in on the touchy-feely. What’s wrong, guy?”
Frank shook his head, as though to snap it free from some invisible thread. His heart was beating fast. “Sorry.”
“Then this woman who’s been around. This woman, she’s passing out handbills on the dead twins. You hear about that?”
“No,” Frank said. Then: “Yeah, sorta, I heard.”
“This woman, she says she wants to talk to Frankie, she gets pointed over to his old lady and they talk some, then everybody tippy-toes on out. Together. This was maybe two hours ago.”
Frank only half-heard the last part. His mind was elsewhere. He saw a woman cocooned in duct tape, a drug-crazed man leaning over her, a clot of her hair in one fist, a hammer in the other.
“Hey. You with me?”
“Can do,” Frank said. “We’re good.”
“Listen,” the guy pleaded. “You pass this on, please, the part about me bitching about Lonnie, that’s strictly you and me here talking, right?”
“Got it,” Frank said.
“And the part about me losing them for two hours.”
“No problem.”
It took another five minutes to get rid of the guy. Once he was gone, Frank stumbled back inside the house and to his room. A dime bag of crank was stashed in the wall behind a dummy light socket. He did five fast whiffs, rearing back his head with each snort. Shortly his spine crackled, his eyes cleared. His heart pounded like a fist inside his chest. The real me, he thought, banging to get out.
He went hunting. Something told him to check the trunk of the Mercedes. When he did he found pay dirt: five rifles, plenty of shells. He grabbed a Remington pumploader, armed it with nine shot, pumped a round into the chamber and filled his pockets with extra shot shells. Then he got in the Mercedes, started her up, hid it out beyond the barn and went back to the kitchen.
Right when I needed you the most, he thought. Ain’t that the way. Sorry little cheat. Liar and cheat. He wondered how much of it had been her plan all along. The setup with the Mexicans, it was just a ruse to get him killed with the chavos. Shel had decided to hand him over to Felix and the law and the Briscoe family all on the same night, pass him around to the highest bidder. Play them all against each other and slip away in the chaos. He’d never seen it all this clear. It’s not me, he thought. It’s them. Every goddamn one of them.
But especially her.
He sat with the gun across his legs, stroking the barrel like a cat and drinking from a bottle of Old Fitzgerald he held by the neck. I survive Roy’s killfire and come home to this. What can you say? One thing after another, then a kicker at the end. All of it fitting and fair.
The sound of an engine drifted up the hill, approaching from the county road. Frank went to the window. In time he heard rubber on gravel, then watched as the headlights sprayed the grass beyond the bluff. This time it was Shel. He could tell that from the motor.
She entered the kitchen and glanced at the clock. After leaving Danny she’d hurried back from the bar only to find Frank still gone, so she’d turned around, headed back out, driving around in a fury, hoping against hope to find him somehow. That was hours ago. After that she’d just given in, kept driving just to move, because staying in one place felt too much like waiting to die. Who knew where Roy and his brothers had taken Frank after their little episode, if they’d taken him anywhere. He might very well have been left there to die. It might already be over. She thought of Felix Randall telling her she ought to be married. In sickness and in health, till death. She thought of Jill Rosemond pressing her on where to find Frank, like some middle-aged Nancy Drew out to solve The Mystery of the Two Dead Twins. Everywhere, everybody, everything: death.
And then she thought about Danny. After all these years. Danny.
Every plan she devised ran smack into a wall, every backtrack, too. There was no right way to go, no best way out or even any way out- which was why, in the end, she’d just come back here. The place where all wrong turns converge. Home.
She tossed her purse onto the breakfast nook table before spotting what else lay there: a cigar box filled with nine shot shells and a checkerboard.
“You play chess?” Frank asked from behind.
She turned to face him. He was juggling a chessman one-handed. The other hand held a shotgun. His eyes were bleary from drink and yet there was something else about them, too.
“My God,” she said. “You’re here.”
“True enough,” Frank replied. He gathered up the chessman in a knuckleball hold and hurled it across the kitchen at her. She ducked the missile and called out from behind her arm, “What’s wrong with you?”
“A wee bit surprised to see me?”
He crossed the distance in two long steps and gripped her throat with his free hand. With the shotgun he forced her head down onto the table.
“Thought I’d be gone for good, right? Dead maybe? Not enough to tell Felix: Do it, kill him. Had to make sure. Just in case the Akers boys fucked up. Play both ends. ’Cuz you had a whole new set of plans tonight.”
She squirmed in his hold but could not break free. Her arms flailed without connecting.
“They found you, right? The twins’ family, they made you an offer and you grabbed it. Was that before or after you fixed it with Felix?”
With his tongue protruding through his teeth he drove the gun butt hard into her kidneys. Her knees gave way and she slid to the floor. Her bladder broke. The gun butt came down hard again, this time on her neck.
“Frank,” she shouted, “you gotta listen, this woman- ”
“I know all about the woman,” he said.
He kneed her in the back, a vertebrae cracked. Grabbing a shank of hair, he dragged her kicking across the floor.
“What I ever do to you?” he said.
He pulled something from under his shirt. It had been hidden there, tucked in his belt. She saw what it was when he raised it over his head. A hammer. Shel screamed his name.
Abatangelo stood pinning up prints in the back room of his North Beach flat, drinking a beer and listening to a cassette of Maria Callas performing excerpts from Tosca.
He turned around to recue the tape each time his favorite aria ended: “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore.” Now in my hour of sorrow, Maria Callas sang, I stand alone. Callas’s was not normally a voice he preferred, but in this particular rendition, this aria, she gave him the chills. He’d read somewhere that the aria was often called “Tosca’s Prayer.” A misnomer, he thought. She isn’t praying. She’s braving her fate. Which brought Shel to mind and returned him to the matter at hand.
Despite the repartee, a hint of the old spark, even a kiss, Shel had left him standing there. A perfectly good reason existed for that, of course. Frank could be the biggest skank on earth, it wouldn’t change a thing. There was a child in the picture. And the boy got waxed. God only knew what the whole story was. Regardless, he knew Shel well enough to know she’d never in a thousand lifetimes turn her back on a thing like that.
And what about you, he thought. All you ever want to do is help, right? Like some heartsick freelance Boy Scout. All you want to do is say, Tell me how far to go. I’ll lie, cheat and steal for you, baby. Better yet, just like Tosca- I’ll kill for you, if you suffer for me.
He dropped into a chair near the wall and wiped his hands on a dish towel. The damp prints dripped on the floor, dangling from a plastic clothesline hung wall-to-wall by eyehooks. This was the darkroom. With sheets of black plastic he’d sealed off the kitchen in his flat. Upon a card table he’d stationed rubber bins filled with developer, stop bath, fixer. He worked by infrared lamp and an egg timer.
The photographs were those he’d shot from the hilltop overlooking Shel’s house. They seemed very much beside the point now. Even if he passed them along to Jill Rosemond the PI, what would it net him? Frank and Shel were most likely already on the run somewhere, far away and for good, leaving behind lonesome Danny and his pointless schemes.
He did not hear the rapping at his door until his next recue of the tape player. He remained still a moment, ear cocked, wondering if he hadn’t imagined the sound. It came again, more like a scratching than a knock. He tread toward the sound in his socks across the tile floor.
It was not quite dawn. The Bible peddlers wouldn’t be making their rounds as yet. Drunks might sleep in the stairwell, but they wouldn’t come up knocking. Jimmy Shu, his landlord, avoided most encounters requiring English, and his probation officer called first now, they were pals.
At the door he called out, “Who is it?” pressing his head to the doorjamb to listen. A snuffling, fleshy murmur answered back. He couldn’t tell if it said, “It’s me,” or, “Come see.” He cracked the door.
Her eyes stared out from deep in their sockets, small and unreal. One eye flared red, beyond bloodshot. Swelling puffed her jaw. A long scab flecked her lower lip.
“I had that long, hard talk with Frank,” she murmured.
Taking her hand he led her inside and locked the door. Shel deferred to his touch without remark. He studied her briefly, surmising what had happened and what, to his mind, should be done about it.
He told her to wait and disappeared to the back of the flat. When he returned he was carrying his camera and arming the flash. He positioned her against the white wall and told her to lift her hair. She obeyed, revealing bloody scratches and a bruised knot on her neck.
It’s time, she thought, time to listen to him. It may well have been time all along.
Abatangelo shot five frames, told her to turn front, shot a close-up of her scabbed mouth, her ballooning cheek, her crimped eye. He used Plus-X in addition to a filter, to give the reds a disturbing saturation. She displayed her arms, bruised black where Frank had held her or come down with the gun butt. At Abatangelo’s urging she turned to face the wall again, naked from the waist up, exhibiting the purple-yellow welts across her back. She explained in time that, right before he’d tried to crush her skull with a hammer, she’d managed to groin him, coldcock him with his own gun and scramble to her truck.
“I don’t want to get even,” she said as he disarmed the flash. “There’s no point.”
“This isn’t getting even,” he told her, removing the roll of film and pocketing it. “This is insurance.” He took a blanket from the couch, shook it free of cracker crumbs and wrapped it around her. Setting her down in his only armchair, he tucked the blanket about her knees and told her to stay put.
In the bathroom, he turned the space heater on high and threw open the hot water spigot, filling the tub, tossing in every towel he found except a few he’d need for drying. Moving to the kitchen, he opened the freezer and dug from behind bagged peas and carrots a fifth of Stolichnaya embedded in hoarfrost.
Carrying two glasses and the icy vodka bottle, he returned to Shel. Guiding her up from her chair, he led her down the hall and set her on the edge of the tub. Steam purled about the room, coating the mirror. Moisture frothed Abatangelo’s skin, he opened his shirt and wiped his face with his wrist. He drew Shel’s blanket away, undid her coat, and as he continued to undress her she stared at him with weary bafflement.
“Now that there’s a record on film of what he did to you,” he explained, “we can concentrate on getting the bruises down.”
He poured her a full glass of vodka and told her to drink it. She did. He poured her another. Her body sagged dreamily and she regarded him with sweet, tired eyes. He took her in his arms and knelt beside the steaming water, saying, “This is going to hurt.”
Submerged, her body convulsed. She struggled, whimpering. He refused to let her out, even as the water scalded them both. He gathered the steaming towels from around her, wrapped them tight across her back, her throat, her face. He wrung or pressed them against her skin until she screamed from pain, the sound echoing against the tile. He reassured her with jokes, constantly moving. He sang the few funny songs he knew, gleaned from opera buffa and cartoons. “You’re looking better,” he said, over and over.
In time he slowed his rhythm, letting the towels sit on her body longer. Where it wasn’t puffed or discolored, her skin had the same smoothness he remembered from years before. The hair of her muff rose up softly in the water. Her nipples flared red in the heat.
“I realize,” he began, “that this is a sensitive issue, and you don’t have to answer, but I was wondering if he- ”
“No,” she said, anticipating the question. She sat hunched in the bathwater, shrouded in dripping towels. “I nailed him before it got that far. Besides which, he was cranked out of his skull. What he wanted, was me dead.”
She looked at him with an expression that said, And that is that.
“And now you’re here,” he offered.
“A little the worse for wear.”
The water cooled, Shel settled herself back, eyes closed. So this is where the future starts, she thought. With a beating. A scalding dunk in the healing tub. She watched as Abatangelo wiped flecks of blood from the porcelain. Regarding her body, she detected swelling here and there, but he’d rid her scratches of infection; they were neat white seams. Her skin flushed. My Little Miracle Worker, she thought. Unaware that she was watching, he searched inside her purse until he came across a perfume bottle. He added several drops to the tub water.
“I’m assuming you’ll tell me,” she said finally, flicking tepid water at him, “where it was you picked up your medicine.”
He sat down on the floor and peeled off his shirt and trousers. In only his shorts, T-shirt and scapular he answered her finally with, “You grow up Italian, you learn how to take a beating.”
She shook her head and laughed. “That’s an answer?”
Abatangelo shrugged and poured himself three fingers of vodka.
Shel said, “And after your daily lesson- your mother, she did this for you?”
“No,” he said.
Her eyes softened. “Who?”
“Aunt Nina. My father’s sister. She was the designated guilt bearer of the family.”
She watched him turn away, busy himself. Until you took over, she thought, thinking better of saying it out loud. There simply was no limit to the burden he’d shoulder, as long it was for someone he loved. And if there was one thing to be said for Daniel Sebastian Abatangelo, she thought, it was this: The man loved.
“You look good,” she told him.
He shrugged and drank.
“No, don’t be like that. You look good.”
Her words slurred from the swelling. She eased back, closing her eyes again. The ridiculous songs he’d sung for her echoed in her head, making her smile. And yet a suspicion came over her quickly- tomorrow would never redeem today, not even with Danny there. The future did not start here after all, just more of the same. I am, she thought, depressed. Her heart sank in an utterly familiar way and she looked at Abatangelo as though to ask him to stop it, stop this feeling.
“Hey,” she whispered. He did not hear her.
She pictured Frank reeling room to room, clutching his head, rehearsing his sotted apologies, waiting for her to reappear so he could shower them on her. God help me, she thought. Is there a word in the language, she wondered, in any language, for someone as hell-bent as I’ve been to do the right thing, someone committed to real charity, not lip service, the Good Samaritan and all that, someone who put her own life aside to care for someone else, some lowly forgotten other, the least of my brethren- is there a word for someone who does all that, does it for years, only to see it crushed in three weeks’ time, carried away by a bitter wind of insanity, cruelty, and death? Yeah, she thought, there’s a word. And it’s nothing grand or tragic. The word is “depressed.”
A thread of bile slithered up into her throat. Abatangelo eyed her curiously as she spat toward the toilet.
“Freshen that up?” he asked, nodding to her glass.
She worked her tongue to rid her mouth of the taste of her sputum. “Keep it cold, keep it coming,” she said, holding out her glass.
Abatangelo obliged, the liquor poured happily. “Thank you,” she said.
She studied his face, his shoulders, his long heavy arms. She wanted to tell him, We have to find a safe place now. We can’t self-destruct anymore. Fate doesn’t have to be all gloom and sorrow. Fate can be happy, too. You and me, Danny, happy again, my God, what a concept. Maybe fate is love, and love requires nothing more than the courage to be seen for who you are. Maybe they could teach each other that. Maybe they could handle that, show each other, it isn’t so terrible or hard, letting someone see you.
Without thinking, she stood up in the tub. As though to be seen. Looking down self-consciously at the soaked wrinkling of her flesh, her bruises, she said, using a Betty Boop voice, “Such a dainty little rose.”
Abatangelo toweled her dry, produced a sweatshirt and boxer shorts for her to wear and wrapped a dry towel around her head, fussing it into a turban. Missing her, wanting her from afar had become so ingrained a habit that her reflection in the mirror seemed strangely more real than she did. To dispel this illusion, he gave her his arm, led her back to his bedroom and set her gently onto the narrow bed.
She looked up at his face with a plastered smile, sniffing the cologne in his chest hair. Fingering his scapular, she said, “I had hoped, sir, you wouldn’t go churchy on me.”
He removed the cloth medallion, hanging from his neck by a satin thong, and let her hold it. She took it as though it were a shrunken head.
“Oh Danny, you worry me with this stuff.”
“Chaplain at Safford handed them out like suckers.”
“That explains how you got it. Not why you wear it.”
On one side, assuming the foreground, was the picture of an arch-backed man, bound to a cross. Christ Crucified predominated the background, wreathed in purplish storm clouds and attended by disciples. On the reverse side, the inscription read: “Jesus, remember me when you enter upon your reign. Luke 23:42.”
“St. Dismas,” Abatangelo explained.
“There’s a saint named Dismal?”
“Dismas,” he corrected. “The Good Thief.”
Shel fingered it a moment longer then handed it back. “The guilty are so sentimental.”
Morning had come. The curtains flared with light. Abatangelo retrieved another bottle of vodka from the kitchen, this one warm, so he brought ice back with him, too. He filled both their glasses. Shel set her cheek on her knee, watching him.
“In all the time you were gone, all those years,” she said, “a day didn’t go by that something didn’t come up. Some little thing, you know? A smell. A voice somewhere. Reminding me of you. I began to think I’d never forget you. And I needed to. Sometimes. You understand?”
A hint of relief, even joy, flickered beyond the heartbreak, like a promise. It showed in her eyes, her smile. Abatangelo waved a fly from his glass. “I came as fast as I could,” he said.
She laughed softly. “Not fast enough. Sorry.”
They stared themselves into self-consciousness. Then, gently, she leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth.
“I am so looking forward to it,” she said.
“What?”
She gave him a little shove. “Sex, you asshole.” She ran her hand across his hair, his face, his throat. “Soon as I’m in better shape.”
The same fly scudded angrily across the ceiling join. The sound of morning traffic escalated outside. Shel eased back onto the bed and closed her eyes.
Abatangelo stroked her hair and watched as she drifted off. Her palm closed and opened, as though in a dream she was reaching for something. He studied her eyebrows, the chewed nails, the wrinkled flesh middle age had engraved around each eye, around her mouth. With his fingertips he traced the line of her shoulder, her arm.
A sense of well-being settled in. Images segued through his mind, scatterings of film in which she laid her head on his stomach, knees drawn up, as though she intended to nap there. He imagined her rising, straddling his hips and placing him inside her, eyes closed, quivering slightly as he rose to her. She would lift her chin, no sound, rocking with him gently. Something long-lost and forbidden. Strangers on a bridge, someone saving someone else. In his fantasy she came without cries or moans the way she often had, simply lowering her head and shivering as he slowed his rhythm. Bringing her down to him. Kissing her hair.
Every hour through the morning, he shook her awake, told her this was a precaution against concussion and checked her eyes, her pulse, her breathing. At first, Shel accepted this attention compliantly. He was a man who knew his beatings. After the fourth roust she grew irritable. By noon she was fending him off.
In the kitchen Abatangelo fixed himself coffee, his third pot of the day. Cup in hand, he dialed Lenny Mannion and begged off coming in that afternoon, resorting to the same excuse he’d concocted that morning: He said his eye was swollen shut from a spider bite. Mannion, from his tone, found this too weird to disbelieve. Abatangelo hung up, went into the front room and sank into the sofa, thinking things through.
His hourly calls on Shel had not been inspired solely by a desire to monitor the healing process. Every time he nudged her awake, Abatangelo grilled her a little further about what her life had been like the past few years. He kept it simple and innocent, blamed it on lost time, they had a lot of catching up to do. Little by little he gained a much clearer view into who this Frank character was. He learned in particular that though the dead boy had not been Shel’s, she’d felt a special devotion for him. The guilty are so sentimental, he thought. No joke.
He’d also learned a lot more about Frank’s friends, who they were and what they were up to, how Frank fit into all of it. Now that Shel seemed well enough to leave alone for a few hours, he intended to step out, make some calls. He had the beginnings of a plan.
There was something to this story about dead twins, he decided. Shel had been noncommittal when he brought it up. That was as good as a yes. Regardless, an inquiry or two seemed in order. Train a little light on the action, put Frank in the oldest bind of all: the law on one side, revenge from his pals on the other. Turn up the discomfort level. Help Frank find out what scared really feels like.
The alternative to this plan, of course, was to sit still. Wait and see. Do as Shel asked: nothing. Abatangelo considered this alternative, such as it was, unacceptable. He’d found himself pacing, and soon a feeling of being trapped arose. He’d thought it through all morning, weighing the various strategies, unable to choose the best, fussing over pointless distinctions, until it dawned on him he was doing exactly what he’d been warned against his first day out. How had the cab driver put it: Just because you can think deep thoughts, that don’t mean they ain’t got you right where they want you. Shel lay asleep in the next room, lucky to be alive, and he traveled the confines of a small room, pacing. Thinking. It’s a trap, he realized- the mind, it’s the perfect trap, a brilliant, beguiling, captivating trap. It was prison.
Get out, a voice said. Do something. Remind yourself what freedom feels like. Because if freedom doesn’t feel like the power to protect the person you love, what good is it? She wouldn’t have come to me for shelter if she didn’t, on some level, want me to make sure shelter meant something real. Frank wasn’t just some hapless loser- maybe once upon a time, but not now. Something had snapped. He was a killer.
He went back to the bedroom and knocked lightly, pushing open the door. Hearing him enter, Shel drew her covers tight around her head, peering out whale-eyed as he approached the bed.
“Don’t touch me, Danny.”
Abatangelo sat on the edge of the bed and settled his hand on her haunch. She squirmed away. “You poke at me one more time, I swear to God.” A frantic plaint pitched her voice, half mocking, half not. “I don’t want to be pissed at you, Danny. I love you, you’re driving me crazy, leave me alone.”
“Just let me see your eyes,” he said.
“No way. I mean it, I’m goddamn fine. Just let me sleep.”
He felt the sheets; they were warm but not too warm. “You don’t have a fever,” he told her. “And you’re pissy. I suppose that’s a good sign.”
“Damn right.”
“What if I’m wrong?” he said. “What if I end up having to cart you down to ER?”
“No hospitals,” she moaned, digging a vent through the blankets.
“Oh for God’s sake…”
“People die in hospitals. My aunt went in for an ulcer, got peritonitis. She never came out again.”
“Every family in the world has a story like that,” he said. “Come on, sit up. It’ll be over in a minute.”
She shot up. “Danny, so help me God. Please. If you really care, be a doll, run some errands, go to work. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.” She reached for an alarm clock beside the bed, set it for an hour ahead, said, “There, I’ll do it myself,” then dove back under the covers.
After another minute of silent watching, Abatangelo withdrew from the room. He made two rounds of the flat, secured the transom from within, dead-bolted the rear door, saw that the windows were locked. In the kitchen he checked his answering machine to see if there’d been any curious calls. Nothing. He went up front to check the street.
Noon light hazed among gray clouds, with hints of sun and burn-off coming. It had already rained. Chinese groceries, Italian cafés and local bars defiled along the arching pavement, bustling, loud. The bohemian ghetto. He stood there awhile, watching for a lone man waiting in a car, a suspicious loiterer, a window across the way with a man at the curtains.
When he came back to the bedroom Shel was asleep, facedown in her nest of pillows and snoring in a faint, adenoidal drone. He leaned down, studying her welts and bruises one last time. Gently, he kissed her shoulder, then the hand nearest to him. Her fingers smelled the same as her hair. He still suffered a nagging sense of unreality at her being there, no longer a mere fixation, no longer locked away in dreams. At the same time, an excruciating longing for her seethed through him, nesting in his hands, his groin, but the longing only reminded him that after ten years in prison, his capacity as a lover, as a knower of anyone’s body other than his own, was hideously malformed. And so the longing turned to shame. He couldn’t claim to be her lover, not yet. For now he was just the grim relentless figure who’d emerged from the desert. With business to attend.
So go take care of it, he told himself, turning away from the bed. Make sure there never comes another day you see her standing there in your doorway, battered, an inch away from dead.