“Damn you to hell, Custis Long.”
Longarm sighed again and finished his rye—it really was prime stuff—and said, “I may well be headed in that direction, Gregory. But lucky for me, that ain’t for you to say.” He shook his head no when Gregory offered to pour another. “Thanks, but one is enough for right now. Just tell me where I can find her.” He looked suggestively toward the wall behind the bar where a doorway had been cut through.
Gregory frowned, but after a moment nodded. “She’s there, Long. She’s most always there lately.”
Longarm raised an eyebrow.
“She hasn’t been feeling good, Long. She’s been real sick.”
“Sick, Gregory? Or …”
“What do you want me to say, Long? She’s been sick. Never mind that the sickness comes in a little brown bottle.”
“Damn,” Longarm said.
“Seeing you will make it worse again, Long.”
“I won’t say anything that …”
“You won’t have to. Don’t you understand that? It isn’t anything you might say. Hell, I know better than to think you’d hurt her. Not that you’d ever mean to. I give you more credit than that, Long. It’s just … she sees you and she thinks about … you know. She’ll think about you and she’ll think about Harry Bolt and tomorrow she’ll drink two, three bottles of that tincture of opium shit, and for the next week or more she’ll be floating on some Chink cloud. You know? She’ll be fuzzy as a peach in August and constipated as a turkey buzzard. It’ll be another month before she’ll be worth a damn again, and even then she’ll bust out in tears every so often for just no reason at all. And if you’re wondering why I hate to see your ass in here, Long, well, screw you and the horse you rode in on. I reckon now you know.”
“I’m sorry, Gregory.”
“The worst thing about you, you son of a bitch, is that I know you mean that.”
Longarm didn’t say anything.
“Go on inside, damn you,” Gregory said. “I won’t do anything to stop you.”
Longarm started toward the end of the bar, then stopped again. “You love her, don’t you, Gregory?”
“Get the hell away from me, Long.”
Longarm went behind the bar and made his way through the doorway that led to the private living quarters in one of the many ramshackle add-on room sections. It had been a long time, but he remembered the way very, very well.
Chapter 5
Jesus God! Longarm thought, barely able to stop himself from blurting it aloud. Emmaline Constance Bertolucci looked … awful. Simply awful. Her flesh was bloated and puffy, and her complexion—oh, that complexion that had been as clear and perfect as the finest porcelain—her complexion was blotchy red and orange and yellow.
She looked fat, except she wasn’t fat. It was more like a thin person had been inflated or maybe pumped full of water so that she bulged and protruded in unlikely places. Her hair—which had been her crowning glory and a source of considerable vanity—was lank and greasy and looked like she’d neither washed nor combed it for weeks or months on end. Instead of a subtly artful application of fine cosmetics, she had caked her face and neck with layer upon layer of powders, and as they dried the layers had cracked and flaked away, or in some places allowed grime and sweat to accumulate in the crevasses. Even her eyes, those china blue orbs, were ruined by being surrounded with heavy daubs of black goo that might have been makeup or might have been nothing more exotic than axle grease. Putting crap like that around eyes like Emmaline’s was like setting a fine diamond in a bed of drying cat shit.
Longarm felt sickened just from looking at her. At this woman who once—and not so terribly long ago as all that, really—had meant so very much to him. He tried his best to keep his feelings from being reflected on his face, forcing a smile and a cheery voice. “Hello, Emmy. How’ve you been?”
“Custis!” she shrieked. “You’ve come back, Custis!”
“I … I’ve come to visit, Emmy. That’s all. Just a visit.”
“Oho, Custis dear.” She giggled. “Whatever you say, hee-hee.” She grinned and simpered and twisted about on the chaise where she was reclining. She batted her eyelashes quite furiously and flopped her hands about. It took him a moment for Longarm to realize that this … this creature who had once been his beloved Emmaline was being girlishly coquettish with him.
She leered and giggled and in her contortions managed to make her gown spread apart to display the heavy, blue-veined jugs that Longarm had long ago suckled and teased. And beneath a roll of fat as white as a fish’s belly there was a hint of the copper coils of pubic hair that he remembered tickling his nose and the point of his freshly shaved chin. Emmaline then had been as fresh and fragrant as a blossom in springtime. Now he could smell the sour stink of her from across the room.
“It’s nice to see you, Emmy.”
“I knew you’d come back to me, Custis.”
“We don’t want to go through all that again, Emmy. We all made our choices a long while back. They seemed the right choices at the time, and it’s too late now for regrets or recriminations.”
“But not too late to change our minds, is it, Custis?” she said with another flutter of her eyelashes.
Longarm felt vaguely ill. “I didn’t … I didn’t come to talk about that, Emmy.”
“No? What did you come to see me about then, Custis?”
It was true that he’d had, buried somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind, some thought that since Harry was no longer in the way … but shit, he didn’t want to remember those half-formed suppositions. Not now. Not seeing her like this, he didn’t. “I came on business, Emmy.”
“Business, Custis? That’s all?”
“Yes. Really.” It wasn’t much of a lie. “You are the only person I can turn to, Emmy. I came to see you because we are old and dear friends and because I knew I could count on you.”
“It’s Harry then, isn’t it, Custis?”
“Yes, but …”
“You know I won’t do anything to hurt Harry, Custis. Not even after what he did to me.”
“Did to you, Emmy? What did Harry do to you?”
The horrid creature who once had been so beautiful drew herself rigid, summoning the remnants of a faded dignity, and said, “We’ll not discuss that, if you please.”
“No, Emmy. Whatever you say.”
“Exactly, Custis. And what I say is that I shall not be untrue. I will tell you nothing that would bring harm to my Harry.”
“Nor would I ever ask you to, Emmy. I came here so you could help me keep Harry safe. There is a man who wants to kill him. I have to find Harry so I can warn him.”
“Are you being honest with me, Custis?”
“I’m hurt that you would even ask me that, Emmy. You know I’ve never been anything but honest with you.”
“That’s true, old dear.” She looked a little weepy now. She produced a handkerchief from inside the sleeve of her gown, and used it to mop at her eyes, smearing the cloth with black ooze from her eye makeup and with pink rice powder from her cheeks. She didn’t seem to notice, and fortunately could not see the effect the mopping had on her makeup. “Tell me about this threat to my Harry, Custis.”
So he told her, briefly sketching the mission Billy Vail had given him.
“And you say Harry is the next target of this young person?”
“That’s what the man from the Justice Department believes.”