“I do know a safe place,” I said. “I can take you straight to it and get you inside.”
“... What place?”
“You’ll see. It’s safe, believe me. Nobody goes there. Nobody has any reason to anymore.”
“Get there by boat?”
“Right to it. You won’t need to try hot-wiring the ignition, either. I know where Ms. Sixkiller keeps the key.” On a hook next to the fridge in her kitchen; I’d seen it and some others hanging there on my way out with the blankets and other stuff. “It’ll only take me a couple of minutes to get it.”
“You know how to drive a boat like this?”
“Sure. It’s not hard. From a distance, with my scarf over my head, I’ll pass for Ms. Sixkiller and you’ll be hidden back here under the tarp. After you’re safe, I’ll bring the boat back and she’ll never even know it was out.”
“Unless she comes home meanwhile.”
“It won’t take more than an hour and a half, round trip. That’s more than enough time.”
“She could still come back early. What if she’s here when you bring the boat in?”
“I’d tell her I went for a ride. She wouldn’t turn me in to the cops or anything. Just yell at me a little. She’s cool.”
“The things you took from her house — she’s bound to miss them.”
“No, she won’t.” She would, once she saw the broken bathroom window, but I didn’t care about that right now and I didn’t want John to worry about it. I was so torqued up over helping him escape that nothing else seemed to matter, including the fetus growing inside me. It was dangerous, yeah, but it was also, like, major exciting. And I was doing it for all the right reasons, wasn’t I? Besides, my life was so totally screwed up now, what difference did it make if it got even more screwed up later on?
John said, “I don’t like it.”
“But you know it’s the only way. Neither of us wants you to go to prison or the gas chamber for something you didn’t do.”
“Yeah.” He said it hard and angry, but it wasn’t me he was pissed at. I knew that. “But you be careful. And you promise me something before we go. Promise me if we get caught together, you tell the law I forced you to help me. Threatened you, and you were too scared not to do what I told you.”
“If you say so.”
“I say so. Promise me, Trisha.”
“I promise. So let’s stop talking and just do it, okay?”
“Okay,” he said in that same angry voice. “We’ll do it.”
Anthony Munoz
The first thing Mateo says when I walked into his pad was, “Where were you last night, little brother? You know what went down? You hear what a wild-ass scene it was?”
“I heard. The old man was yapping about it when I got up.”
“Cracked her skull, man. Cracked it wide open.”
“Yeah. Leaves a bad taste, man. That Mrs. Carey was a fox.”
“Lagarta’s more like it. Jode y una mamada, that’s all she was good for. Well, she picked the wrong dude this time.”
“Yeah. But she didn’t deserve no cracked skull.”
“You don’t think so? I think so.”
“Why? Because she dissed you that time you tried to hit on her?”
“She was a bitch, man.”
“I don’t know, man. Dyin’ like that...”
“Ain’t no good way to die, is there?”
“Got that right. Old man says Faith drowned in the lake.”
“Maybe the dude did, maybe he didn’t.”
“Or he iced out there. The old man says—”
“The old man don’t know his dick from a paint scraper.” Mateo laughed. “I’d love it if the dude’s still alive, gets away with it. I’d love it, man.”
“Why?”
“Told you, bro. She was a bitch and she had it comin’.”
“I don’t know, man.”
“What do you know, man? Sometimes I wonder about you.”
“Wonder what?”
“Just wonder. So where were you, Anthony? Man, we had a bigger street party than ten freakin’ Fourth of Julys. Dudes cruisin’, dudes doin’ crank and blow and weed right in front of the heat, TV trucks, even a freakin’ TV helicopter. A freakin’ circus, man. And you missed the whole show.”
“Yeah.”
“Out balling Trisha, huh? Don’t you ever get enough pussy?”
“Too much pussy, that’s what I been getting.”
“No such thing, man.”
“She’s knocked up.”
“No shit? Trisha?”
“Who else.”
“You go divin’ without a wet suit?”
“One time. One freakin’ time.”
“That’s all it takes, bro. Sure it’s yours?”
“Yeah, it’s mine. She don’t lie, man.”
“So what, then? She wants you to marry her?”
“What the hell else.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“I told her no way, man.”
“That’s my man. Marriage sucks.”
“Big time. Yeah.”
“It’s for jerks and squares, man.”
“Yeah.”
“Look at the old man and old lady. Him so wore out from paintin’ houses all day, he can’t do nothing at night except yell and swill down cheap wine. She ain’t no better. Don’t give a shit about me and you, each other, nothing but TV and Carlo Rossi.”
“Yeah.”
“Dudes like us, we got to be free. Free and easy, man. Go places, do things, see the fuckin’ world, get ourselves a piece of the good life. No wives, no babies, no tied-down bullshit for Anthony and Mateo. Right?”
“Right.”
“So how’d she take it? Trisha.”
“Went ballistic, man. Jumped out of the car, ran off and hid in the freakin’ trees. I couldn’t find her.”
“Where was this, man?”
“The Bluffs.”
“So what’d you do?”
“Drove off and left her.”
“Yeah, man.” He put his hand out and I slapped it. “So then what’d you do?”
“I was pissed, you know? Wild. Drove around lookin’ for you, Petey, somebody to hang with. Nobody around.”
“We was partyin’, man. Leon’s homestead.”
“Never thought to check Leon’s. Shit.”
“So then what’d you do?”
“Drove down to Southlake.”
“Lookin’ to score?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d you get? Crank? Blow?”
“No man. Ecstasy.”
“Cool. How was it?”
“Lame, man. I still don’t feel right.”
“How about some grass, pick you right up.”
“Nah. I don’t wanna get high.”
“Half quarts of Green Death in the fridge.”
“Not that neither. Too early, man.”
“Never too early. Come on, let’s pop one.”
“Yeah, okay. What the hell.”
Mateo went out to the kitchen to get the brews. I didn’t want one, but I felt wrong for sure and I needed a lift. Wrong about leaving Trisha up there on the Bluffs even if she did go hag-crazy on me, all that cagueta about the baby and then running off and wouldn’t come out of the freakin’ trees. Wrong about that Mrs. Carey, too. Murder, man... it ain’t right to kill somebody unless he’s tryin’ to ice you. It ain’t right to hurt a chick that way, no matter who she is.
Mateo’s pad is cool, man. Real dank. Old building down by the boatyard, second-floor pad with a little balcony so you can sit and check out the lake when the weather’s right... suck down a brew or smoke a joint, whatever. Nobody lives here gives a Frenchman’s fuck. He’s got it fixed up with NASCAR posters, blowup color pix from Laguna Seca and Sears Point and Indy races. Not much furniture, none of the crap most people have. He’s got the front seat out of a ’52 Olds for a couch and buckets from a ’Vette and a TransAm for chairs. Can’t get much more dank than that.