At his apartment over a liquor store he made her some soup, made up the couch for himself while she drank it, then got her into his bed when she started falling asleep spoon in hand.
Maybelle’s last thought before going down, down into sleep between those clean, cool sheets, was that she knew, deep inside her secret heart, that Kenny’d been sent by God because Jesus was giving her one more chance to repent.
Then she was snoring, out cold, not even any REM going on behind her eyelids. Ken Warren shut the bedroom door quietly, tiptoed out of the apartment, and drove back out to the Fillmore to repossess her Lincoln Continental for the bank.
No more of that streetwalking shit for Jedediah’s mother, even though his buddy was eighteen, no, nineteen long years dead in the jungles of Vietnam.
Chapter twenty-four
The aging rock musician bore the stylized stigmata of his tribe: a Gibson slung down his back on a worn leather strap; a bright felt-covered baseball-style cap loaded with glittery beads bill-backward on his shoulder-length hair; leather vest with more beads, big brass belt buckle of crossed miniature wheel lock pistols, faded jeans with the knees out, black scuffed combat boots. Obligatory shades.
“You see that there big ape?” he demanded of a little girl at the King Kong exhibit. “My daddy caught him for me.”
The little girl’s eyes got very big. She had blond hair and a gap in front where two teeth should have been. She lisped in wonder, “For you?”
He pulled the guitar around and strummed a simple chord progression and sang in a flat Bob Dylan sort of voice:
The mother, who thought he was part of the entertainment, laughed at his shouted last line as he lost his balance and steadied himself against her and lifted her wallet. The long drought was over. The Rock Musician, one of Poteet’s most potent personae, was scoring like the Golden State Warriors.
But when he was about to put the wallet back into her purse, some old grey-haired geek with a big jaw wanted to take their picture in front of the ape.
“Hey, sure, that’s great, man,” he mumbled, thinking, Get outta my face, geek, or I’ll knee-drop you for sure.
But, ever alert, he used the photo opportunity to slip the wallet back into the woman’s handbag — minus a couple of twenties, of course. The grey-haired guy ended up sitting next to him on the bus, real talkative and a real bug with that camera, click, click, click, all the damned time.
“My grandchildren are coming out from back east next week.” The old geek’s smile lit up a rather hard and heavy face. “So many things to do while they’re here, my wife sent me out on a little recon mission so we don’t miss anything.”
“Recon... that like a scoutin’ trip, Dad?”
“Very like,” agreed the grey-haired man solemnly.
He took so many pictures of everything and everybody that pretty soon Poteet sort of forgot he was there.
Click, click, click!
Up in the Bay Area, Eli Nicholas hauled the backseat out of the brand-new Fleetwood limo. Unlike Poteet, Nicholas absolutely would have known what a recon was, and actually did play the guitar professionally: on the weekends he strummed wild Gypsy tunes for a group of gadje amateur flamenco dancers in a neighborhood bar on El Cerrito’s San Pablo Avenue. He was a slight swarthy man with a lined joyful face and strong fingers callused by three decades on the strings.
During Vietnam those hands had learned another trade, one that led him to now have both back doors of the Fleetwood limo open and the backseat out on the concrete. Midday of a midweek workday, most of the parking slots under his Richmond apartment building were empty. The deserted area, backed by a high wooden fence, was well-hidden from the street. The afternoon was balmy, so both men, in work pants and shirt sleeves, were sweating lightly from pulling out the seat.
“Why under the backseat?” asked Rudolph Marino.
“It’s under where he would sit,” said Nicholas patiently.
Fact was, Marino was shook-up, nervous, a state of mind so foreign to him it was like a fever in his brain making it not work right. His biggest score, sure — but he only wanted to con some people, he didn’t want to blow them up.
From a cardboard box with a construction company’s logo on it, Nicholas was taking a foot-square sheet of whitish putty-like substance a quarter inch thick and backed with adhesive strips.
Marino asked almost shrilly, “What’s that?”
“Sheet C-4.” Nicholas said it casually as he was peeling away the protective layer from the adhesive.
“C-4? Plastique?”
“Yeah. Plastique. Ninety percent RDX, the most powerful chemical-composition explosive known, ten percent inert binders so it can be pressed into sheets like this here.”
He got into the back of the limo with the square of stolen explosive and, with the flat of one hand, began pounding the square casually down into place on the contoured metal floor where the seat would fit back in.
“Careful!” yelped Marino.
Nicholas ignored him to finish, then got back out of the car to squint at him through habitual cigarette smoke.
“Before we put the seat back in, I’ll push an electrical blasting cap down into the C-4. We’ll use a radio transmitter to detonate. When you want it to go off, you just attach a radio receiver preset to a certain band to the cap’s wires. You’ll have a pocket radio transmitter with you, so you just—”
“What if somebody else has a transmitter set to that band?”
“They won’t, but anyway, you connect the receiver to the blasting cap at the last second — in the garage. Then get behind a pillar and turn on your transmitter and...” He suddenly threw his arms wide with a joyful laugh, “POOF!”
PLOP!
The broken egg had slid down the curved side of the mixing bowl just a split second before something small and dark and gleaming and hunched dropped in after it.
“No,” said Ramon Ristick, “too slow. Way too slow.”
Yana fished the little dark gleaming pellet-like object out and palmed it. When she destroyed the next egg, the black object fell so smoothly that it landed in the bowl to glisten evilly up through the yolk as if it had preceded it.
“Perfect,” pronounced Ramon.
Yana broke another egg. “It has to be perfect every time.”
Ristik, watching her practice in glum silence, suddenly said, “I didn’t like what happened to Soma’s Allante.”
“That was Rudolph’s fault. I had to give Sonia to the gadjo after Rudolph threatened us...”
PLOP! Perfect yet again.
“He’ll know it was you told the gadjo where to look.”
“Maybe he’ll blame Ephrem again,” she said indifferently.
After two more, they scrambled and ate the eggs she had been practicing with, discussing when and with what trappings of the occult — and speculating for how much — they would work the poisoned-egg effect on Theodore Winston White. The Third.
Even from the outside, Theodore Winston White Ill’s house looked to Giselle like something out of Hammett’s “The Gutting of Couffignal.” Part stone, part wood, probably twenty-five to thirty rooms, three stories on grounds that were a wilderness of native California trees and shrubs able to thrive despite the now-broken drought.