“They were gonna take you,” Theo said. “They had that van parked and waiting. It was you they wanted, not just any pretty woman happened to be out after dark. They set you up.”
“I saw them earlier today, then the one with the gun later, at the Lounge up on Second Street. I thought he was a policeman because I saw the gun.”
“He was no policeman,” Darley said.
“I guess not.”
“You live with that news guy. Maybe he was poking his nose in a story where it doesn’t belong,” Theo said.
“How do you know who I live with?”
“We rest here after dark,” Darley said, “but we have to be gone by sunrise or the lifeguards run us off. So we spend the days wandering the alleys, poking through the trash, checking out what people like you toss away. You’d be surprised what we find and what we know. Show us a face and we can put it together with an address. We’re not your average bums.”
“How do you live?”
“We got places to sell the stuff we find,” Theo said. “We get by.”
“I gotta get my shoes.” All of a sudden Maggie wanted to be home. These men could be every bit as dangerous and the men they’d scared off. She backed out of the dark.
“You get in trouble. You remember us. We don’t take to men chasing after a woman,” Theo said.
“Not at all,” Darley said.
“I’ll remember,” Maggie said. Then, “I gotta go.”
“I think we’ll walk you back to those shoes,” Darley said and they followed her out from under the pier.
They walked the distance in silence. Maggie’s impression had been that these men might be dangerous, but they didn’t seem so now, not exactly safe either, but she didn’t feel threatened by them.
“That them over there?” Darley pointed.
“That’s them.”
“You’ll be okay now,” Theo said. “They’re gone.” And without even a goodbye, they turned and started back toward the pier.
Chapter Six
Maggie walked into the Whale out of breath. She took a quick look around, spotted Gordon sitting in one of the booths by the pool tables, playing chess with one of the two men sitting across from him. It was obvious the two were a couple. Good. Gordon hadn’t found anyone yet.
“What happened to you?” Jonas, the Swedish bartender, was a big man, sometimes gruff and closing on sixty. But despite the appearance he tried to give off with his plaid shirts, work jeans and lumberjack boots, his heart was as big as he was and it kept his wallet as thin as a beggar’s.
“I fell down while I was running on the beach.”
“Bummer.” He pierced her with his water blue eyes. “Nick go home early again?” Sometimes on their walks home from the Lounge, Nick came in with Maggie and Gordon, sometimes not, as he had to get up early on Sundays for his magazine program, “Newsmakers with Nick.”
“I’d rather not talk about Nick. Just give me a rum and Coke and let me wallow in my misery.” She climbed up on a barstool, reached for a bowl of pretzels, pulled it to her, took one out and licked the salt off it as she stared into those blue eyes that saw everything and missed nothing.
He nodded, ran a hand through his thick hair. Like most Swedes, he was blond and old as he was, he had no grey. He pulled a bottle of Bacardi Select off the top shelf behind the bar. Reaching the bottle would have been a problem for Maggie, not Jonas. He was a tall man.
Maggie looked around the bar while he made the drink. Poster size black and white photos adorned the walls. John and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Mohammed Ali, others. Jonas owned the bar and it was clear where his politics lay.
Both pool tables were busy. Five or six people clustered around the two pinball machines. Real machines, mechanical, the kind you could get to know, not the computer kind. Gordon loved them. Maggie was starting to.
“On the house, because you look like you need it.” Jonas set the drink in front of her.
“Do I look that bad?”
“You look like you went ten rounds with him.” Jonas pointed to the picture of Mohammed Ali. “If that’s what running does for you, maybe you ought to seriously think about giving it up.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.” She looked over at Gordon. “He doing okay?” She wanted to change the subject.
“As good as can be expected, for Gordon anyway. A couple of good looking guys hit on him, but he blew them off.” Jonas picked up a glass, dried it, did another. He had several to go.
Gordon turned, as if he knew they were talking about him. He waved, then came over. “What happened to you?”
“You too? I must look pretty awful.”
“Go wash your face, then come back out here and tell me about it.”
“What about your game?”
“It’ll take ten or fifteen minutes for them to figure out what they want to do next. Go clean up. I’ll be here when you get back.”
She nodded, went to the woman’s restroom and gasped when she saw herself in the mirror. She looked like a street urchin from some third world country. Her hair was disheveled, her face blotchy with dirt and she had an egg-sized welt on her forehead. She ran water in the sink, grabbed some paper towels and washed the dirt off, gingerly dabbing the area around the bruise.
Her T-shirt was dirty and damp. She couldn’t do anything about that. It might even be ruined. She tried to straighten her hair, but gave up after a few tries and went back to join Gordon at the bar.
“I had no idea I looked like that.” She picked up her drink, took a sip.
“You don’t seem any worse for the wear, except for that bruise,” Gordon said. “What happened?”
She told them about Horace and Virgil and how Virgil grabbed onto her shopping cart in the Safeway. Then how she’d seen Horace with the ferret face dancing in the Lounge.
“And that didn’t bother you?” Gordon interrupted.
“Not really, I didn’t think about it. I see the same people all over in the Shore. It’s not like it was a great coincidence or anything.” Then Maggie told how Horace and Virgil had come after her and how the men under the pier had frightened them away.
“Big black man, the other crazy looking, dirty beard out to here?” Jonas held his open hands about half a foot from each side of his face. “Looks like Rasputin, starved and wild-eyed?”
“That’s them.”
“Darley and Theo.”
“Yeah, that’s their names.”
“You’re lucky you got away from that pair in one piece.”
“They were plenty scary, but they didn’t threaten me in the least, in fact they escorted me back to where I’d left my shoes.”
“Well, it sounds like an out of the frying pan and into the fire kind of story to me,” Gordon said.
“I don’t think they’re dangerous.”
“That’s why you came straight here instead of going home,” Jonas said. “Because you feel safe and secure?”
“I’ll bet there’s a story behind those guys, something Nick could use.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Gordon said.
“Why not? They could be a great story. Two men who roam the back alleys of Belmont Shore by day, living on what John Q. Public tosses in the trash, sleeping under the pier in the cold and damp by night. If he did it right, it’d be a great human interest piece. He could trace their lives, show how they got to be where they are. It could really tug at the heart strings.”
“It is the kind of stuff he likes to do,” Gordon admitted.
“What if one of them had been successful, then gone bankrupt?” Maggie sighed. “What if one of them was a vet? What if one was laid off after twenty years on the job? The homeless are everywhere now. Nobody notices them anymore. They’ve become part of the background, the same as a lamp post or a tree. If Nick did a story on them, it could help change all that. Really wake Southern California up.”
“I don’t think they want to wake up,” Jonas said.
“I think he’s right,” Gordon said. “Nobody wants to know about the homeless.”
“Your friends are calling,” Jonas said.
Gordon turned. One of the young men in front of the chess set was waving. “Gotta make my move.” Gordon started for the back of the bar and the chess game.