“So you got this picture, Cath?”
He risked using the diminutive, which sounded like a pet name. They were sitting on the couch and he had his arm around her. Her blouse unbuttoned low, which he realized was a habit with her, the better to see the boobs, my dear.
“Here’s this guy with a big gun in his right hand and his left hand is holding a leash at the end of which is this porcupine looks like an attack dog with quills.”
He laughed.
Cathy laughed, too.
He sort of hugged her when she laughed. Arm around her shoulders. Pulled her a little closer.
“It turns out he wants me to shoot the porcupine,” Parker said. “He’s nuttier than a Hershey bar, you understand…”
…keeps waving the gun in Parker’s face, it’s a thirty-eight, and telling him that the porcupine here is his wife’s pet who shit all over the house, and he wants Parker to shoot it for him. That’s why he brought the gun up here, he’s got a carry license for it, he works in the diamond center, it’s the only humane thing to do, shoot the fuckin porcupine. Meanwhile, the guy’s eyes are getting crazier and crazier and the gun is making bigger and bigger circles on the air and Parker’s afraid he’s going to get shot just talking to this maniac. This is the police department’s obligation, the guy insists, mercifully putting a wild animal to sleep who has no right running around the apartment relieving himself at will while the guy is trying to sort diamonds. Meanwhile, the porcupine at the end of the leash is relieving himself all over the squadroom while Parker is trying to sort out this little dilemma he has here, whether he should put the thing to sleep with a legal handgun or risk getting shot himself as they debate the entire matter.
At this point in his recitation, Parker slid his hand down off Cathy’s shoulder and into her blouse. She didn’t seem to mind. Or maybe she was too fascinated by his delightful porcupine story to notice.
“I didn’t want to kill that poor animal,” he said, hoping his eyes were brimming with tears, “but neither did I wish to get shot myself,” undoing the buttons lower on her blouse, exposing the cones of a white bra, Cathy took a deep breath. “Besides, how did I know this was a legal pistol? There are many ramifications to police work, you know. So what I finally did,” he said, and reached behind her to undo the bra clasp, releasing her breasts into his hands, she took another deep breath, “what I did was I said to him ‘How about I take the little fella for a walk?’ and I got up and held out my hand for the leash, and he put the leash in my hand, and I said, ‘The gun, too, so I can do what has to be done outside,’” lowering his face to her breasts, nuzzling them with his cheeks, one against each cheek, it was a good thing he’d shaved before coming over here. His hands up under her skirt now, he said, “So I took the gun and the porcupine downstairs, and I called the ASPCA to take the thing away, and I gave the gun to the desk sergeant for him to run a make on, and it turned out the guy really did work in the diamond center and he did have a carry permit for the piece, so nobody got hurt, do you think you’d like to go in the bedroom now?” he asked as he lowered her panties.
Sometime during the next hour, while it was still April Fools’ Day and after Parker had brought Cathy to orgasm several times, she told him that her dream was to become a writer. He thought she meant a graffiti writer at first, like her dumb fuckin son. But she meant a movie writer. She told him she typed movie scripts all the time and it seemed like a very easy thing to do. She also told him that her other dream was to marry a decent hardworking man one day, perhaps a man like Parker, move out of the city into a little house with a low fence around it, cook barbecue in the backyard at the end of the day when she finished writing for the day, maybe in a suburb of Los Angeles, that’s where all the movie writers were. That was her dream. To marry a decent hardworking man…
“Like you,” she whispered.
…and write screenplays in the L.A. area and cook barbecue in the backyard.
His hand buried between her legs again, Parker thought Dream on, fool.
10.
AT TWO O’CLOCK on the morning of April second, the concert site was deserted except for a lone security guard. The people working in the production trailer had turned off the lights and locked up behind themselves some twenty minutes ago. Got into the two private cars parked outside, drove off on the access road that went out of the Cow Pasture and past the big lake they called The Swan, Carter wondered why. The guard—a big fat man wearing a blue uniform with a yellow stripe on the trouser legs—had waved off the two cars and then had got into his own black-and-white car with the gold shield of the company on the side. Carter figured he would radio the home office, tell them everybody’d just left, twoA .M. and all’s well. Then he’d take a little nap. Carter hoped .
The Cow Pasture was this huge lawn, some ten-plus acres of newly cropped grass that this weekend would be covered with God alone knew how many people, all of them screaming at the stage. The stage hadn’t been put up yet, nothing had been put up yet, there was only the empty lawn with the trailer sitting there all alone under the stars and the guard’s car parked across the entrance drive that led in from the access road. Since there was nothing to steal out here in the open except what was inside the trailer, the car was parked with its nose facing the trailer. But Carter figured the guard knew there was nothing much of value in that trailer; this wasn’t like sitting outside Fort Knox waiting for a big caper to happen. This was a single guard sitting here in the middle of the night and never for a minute suspecting that anyone would want to get in that trailer. But the guard was armed and Carter didn’t want to get spotted fiddling with the Mickey Mouse lock on the door to the trailer; they had parked the trailer so that its back was to the lake, its entrance door clearly visible from where the guard sat behind the wheel of the car.
Carter’s instructions were to get in and get out without anyone knowing he’d been there. Steal one—and only one—of theALL ACCESS laminates. Didn’t want anyone to know anything was missing. Just take one of the laminates and get out fast. There’d be laminates in there for specific areas, and different performing groups, but Florry had told him to look for the ones that saidALL ACCESS , that was the kind he needed. When Sanson introduced them, he said Florry knew about such things, he’d worked on the sound at Woodstock. Carter didn’t know what Grover Park had to do with what they’d be doing come Saturday, but Sanson said not to worry about it, just get the laminate, without the laminate we might not be doing anything come Saturday.
The uniforms had been the easiest part so far.
For all I know you can walk in some store and buy them right off the rack, he’d told Sanson. Which turned out to be exactly the case. Well, not just any store. What he’d done, he’d called the Department of Sanitation and told them these guys on his bowling team were sanitation employees and they’d just won a tournament…
“I’m captain of the team,” he said.
“Hey.”
…and he wanted to buy them some uniform stuff as a victory gift.
“What’d you have in mind?” the guy on the other end of the line asked. Heavy Calm’s Point accent. Carter visualized a fire hydrant with a cigar in its mouth.
“You know,” he said, “the uniforms they wear on the garbage trucks.”
“You mean the spruce-green uniforms?” the guy said.
“Yeah,” Carter said, “what they wear on the truck.”