He did sound like an Arab.
She didn’t know if she talked fast or slow. She forgot to cross her fingers. She didn’t glance once at Hank, not once, that much she knew. That was the important thing.
Afterward, outside the courthouse, Hank gave her back the key to the house. Just walked up and handed it to her like a flower. “Babylove. Come on over. You’ve got a couple things at the place.”
“A couple? My whole life is in that house.”
“We don’t have to break off contact.”
“The fuck we don’t. Last Friday in the Packard Room you didn’t have anything more for me than Cajun chicken.”
“Last Friday the last nail wasn’t in.”
“In my coffin?”
“Poor choice of words.”
He wore a tailored charcoal suit. His shirt looked like cream.
“How much did you pay for that tie?”
“Money’s no object. Not lately, Babylove.”
“Do you have some formula you’re working here? You call me Babylove X times and poof you’re not a piece of shit?”
“I
am
a piece of shit.” He put his hands in his pockets and smiled. He wasn’t that good-looking. He simply had this way about him that suggested it was his party, and the human race was lucky to be his guest.
“You never let me in. You ripped off two-point-three million dollars and never mentioned it. And then you framed me for it.”
He said, “Somebody has to be the designated bad guy.”
“Why can’t the real bad guy be the bad guy?”
“In this kind of situation, that honor goes to the cutest. You’re the cutest.”
“What an honor.”
“The one they’ll punish least. I’m not as cute as you. I know it’s cold-blooded, and I’m horrible and mean, but lift your head up and take in the scenery here. Does it look like prison? It’s over, and we’re both standing on the street.”
“Meanwhile, I pay eight hundred a month, and no job.”
“Babylove. Wake up. It’s over.”
“Eight hundred a month for
life
How over is that?”
“Are you staying around?”
“What do you think?”
“I’m not staying around either. Why don’t we not stay around together?”
“Do I look that desperate? All I need in this world is half a tank of gas to get to the next man. And he’s a better man than you.”
“Don’t kill me. Don’t you know you can kill me, talking that way? I’m the one who’s desperate.”
“You lie and you lie and you lie.”
“What do you want? Just tell me.”
“I want to see you grovel.”
“I’m groveling now. How do you like it?”
“I love it. That tie must’ve cost two hundred dollars.”
“There’s more where that came from. Why don’t we share the wealth?”
She turned around and left. She didn’t look back.
Later she drove by the house. He probably wasn’t home. No reason he’d be home at two in the afternoon. But his gray Lexus sat in the driveway. The Lexus didn’t mean he was home. He might be driving a second car. He could afford one. He could own eight cars by now. He could be heading a parade of newly purchased automobiles down Main Street. In her shaking hand the key chain jingled. She put the key in the lock. She swung open the door. He was home. “Babylove,” he said. “I’m pouring you a drink.”
Seven minutes later he went down on the floor by the bed. She said, “I like you on your knees, Daddyman.”
She saw tears in his eyes.
She was weeping too. “Now beg.”
Ernest Gambol proceeded into the traffic and across the street looking neither right nor left, setting his aluminum cane down hard with each step forward. The pain was good pain. Different than before.
He entered the parking lot of the Circle K. As he passed behind the Wonder Bread truck idling out front, its reverse lights flared. He struck the nearest one with his cane and shattered it. He made his way to the pay phone, where he rested his weight on both feet equally and allowed four minutes to pass. He punched the buttons and called the pay phone out front of O’Doul’s.
Juarez answered. “Alhambra here.”
“It’s me.”
“Are you ready to laugh?”
“I’m ready.”
“You got your pants on?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Are you ready?”
“I said I was.”
“Do you remember Sally Fuck?”
PART THREE
MARY
poured some bourbon over ice and asked Gambol, “Do you want a drink?” He’d already told her twice to shut up, but she couldn’t help herself.
Gambol, sitting on the couch in his boxers and Mary’s blue nylon robe, said nothing. He stared at his wounded right leg, outstretched before him on the ottoman. His brow looked even heavier than usual. He kept his lips clamped together. It didn’t seem possible, but maybe he was thinking.
Mary took her drink to the coffee table and sat beside him on the couch. Together they watched the final minutes of
Law & Order
No conversation but the fraught dialogue of cops and crooks, no other sound but the ice in her glass when she sipped from it.
When the show was over, Gambol looked at his wristwatch.
Mary knelt on the floor beside the ottoman and parted the hem of his robe and examined the wound. He couldn’t appreciate the work. When it came to suturing, she was
better than most doctors she’d assisted. “You’re healing fast, but I’m leaving those stitches in awhile. Seven days minimum for a wound to the proximal lower extremity. Ten days would be better.”
He placed his hand gently on her head. She laid her cheek on his thigh and stared at his crotch. “Did I say you had one leg still working? Make that two out of three.” She reached for the remote and killed the power, and he relaxed on the couch while she knelt between his splayed knees with her head going up and down.
In only a matter of seconds she sat beside him again, wiping her lips with her thumb, and said, “What’s got you so excited?”
Gambol stared straight forward, stroking her hair.
She handed him his aluminum cane. “Let’s see how the bad leg’s doing.”
He gripped the cane’s head with both hands, stood up straight, and let the cane fall to the carpet. Taking uneven, quite deliberate steps, he got himself to the bedroom and turned on the light. Mary rose to join him, but he shut the door.
When he opened it again in a few minutes, Mary was still standing beside the television, and Gambol was dressed for the street, all but the footwear. A pair of black socks jutted from his shirt pocket.
He went into the bathroom, and she heard him piss a long time and flush and turn the faucet on and off. She heard him messing in the medicine cabinet, went to see—
he was emptying a tin of Band-Aids into his hand and shoving his pants pockets full of them.
She got out of his way and observed him while he behaved like a one-legged contestant in a game of Treasure Hunt, stumping around the place and collecting unrelated items. Six feet of toilet paper — bunching it into a ball in his large hand as he hobbled into the kitchen — her car keys from the magnetic hook on the door of the fridge, a Magic Marker from a kitchen drawer, and from the drawer next to the sink, his.357 Magnum and its clip-on holster and a box of rounds. Clamping the Magic Marker in his teeth like a cigar, he began loading the weapon.
Mary said, “Ernest, are you going someplace? Or maybe we?”
He took two packs of MagSafe rounds from the drawer and put one in each front pocket of his trousers and closed the drawer. He clipped the holster to his belt and slipped the gun into the holster and snapped the strap across the hammer.