‘Bread?’ I said. ‘You’re a little out of touch with popular culture, aren’t you?’
‘All that shit sounds the same,’ said Louis. ‘I’m down with the kids.’
‘Yeah, the kids from the nineteenth century.’
‘I could kick your ass,’ said Rod, feeling the urge to contribute something to the conversation. He might have been dumb enough to believe it, but the two guys behind him were smarter, which wasn’t exactly something worth putting on their business cards. Already they were trying to move Rod along.
‘Yes, you could,’ said Louis. ‘Feel better now?’
‘By the way,’ said Angel, ‘I lied. I’m not really heterosexual, although he still really isn’t black.’
I looked at Angel in surprise. ‘Hey, you never told me you were gay. I knew that, I’d never have let you adopt those children.’
‘Too late now,’ said Angel. ‘The girls are all wearing comfortable shoes, and the boys are singing show tunes.’
‘Oh, you gays and your cunning ways. You could run the world if you weren’t so busy just making things prettier.’
Rod seemed about to say something else when Louis moved. He didn’t get up from his chair, and there was nothing obviously threatening about what he did, but it was the equivalent of a dozing rattlesnake adjusting its coils in preparation for a strike, or a spider tensing in the corner of its web as it watches the fly alight. Even through his fog of alcohol and stupidity, Rod glimpsed the possibility of serious suffering at some point in the near future: not here, perhaps, on a busy street with cop cars cruising by, but later, maybe in a bar, or a restroom, or a parking lot, and it would mark him for the rest of his life.
Without another word, the three young men slipped away, and they did not look back.
‘Nicely done,’ I said to Louis. ‘What are you going to do for an encore: scowl at a puppy?’
‘Might steal a toy from a kitten,’ said Louis. ‘Put it on a high shelf.’
‘Well, you struck a blow for something there. I’m just not sure what it was.’
‘Quality of life,’ said Louis.
‘I guess.’ Beside us, the two men abandoned their burgers, left a twenty and ten on the table, and hurried away without saying a word. ‘You even frighten your own people. You probably convinced that guy to vote yes on Prop One just in case you decide to move here.’
‘With that in mind, remind us why we’re here again,’ said Angel. They had arrived barely an hour before, and their bags were still in the trunk of their car. Louis and Angel only took planes when it was absolutely necessary to do so, as airlines tended to frown on the tools of their trade. I told them everything, from my first meeting with Bennett Patchett, through the discovery of the tracking device on my car, and finished with my conversation with Ronald Straydeer and the sending of the photographs from Damien Patchett’s funeral.
‘So they know that you haven’t dropped the case?’ said Angel.
‘If the GPS tracker was working, yes. They also know that I visited Karen Emory, which may not be good for her.’
‘You warn her?’
‘I left a message on her cell phone. Another call in person might just have compounded the problem.’
‘You think they’ll come at you again?’ asked Louis.
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘I’d have killed you the first time,’ said Louis. ‘If they figured you for the kind of guy who walks away after some amateur waterboarding, they got you all wrong.’
‘Straydeer said that they’d started out with the intention of helping wounded soldiers. It may be that killing is a last resort. The one who interrogated me said that nobody was going to be hurt by what they were doing.’
‘But he made an exception for you. Funny how folk do that where you’re concerned.’
‘Which brings us back to why you’re here.’
‘And why we’re meeting in public, on a bright summer evening. If they’re watching, you want them to know that you’re not alone.’
‘I need a couple of days. If I can get them to keep their distance, it will make life that much easier.’
‘And if they don’t keep their distance?’
‘Then you can hurt them,’ I said.
Louis raised his glass, and drank.
‘Well, here’s to not keeping one’s distance,’ he said.
We paid our check, and headed to the Grill Room on Exchange for steak, for the prospect of hurting someone always made Louis hungry.
16
Jimmy Jewel sat in his usual seat as Earle finished closing up. It was close to midnight, and the bar had been quiet all evening: a few rummies looking for a straightener after the previous night’s excesses, yet without the stamina or the funds to embark on another bender; and a pair of Masshole tourists who had taken a wrong turn and then decided to order a couple of beers while congratulating themselves on the authentic squalor of their surroundings. Unfortunately, Earle didn’t take kindly to people making unkind remarks about his working environment, especially not urban preppies who, in the good old days, would have been kissing the lid of a trash can in a back alley as atonement for their bad manners. The Massholes’ attempt to order a second round was met by a blank stare and the suggestion that they should take their business elsewhere, preferably somewhere over the state line, or even over multiple state lines.
‘You got a way with people,’ Jimmy told Earle. ‘You ought to be with the UN, helping in trouble spots.’
‘You wanted them to stay, you should have said,’ Earle replied. His face was guileless. There were times when even Jimmy didn’t know if Earle was being sincere or not. Still waters, and all that, thought Jimmy. Occasionally, Earle would pass a remark, or make an observation, and Jimmy would stop whatever he was doing as his brain struggled to process what he had just heard, forcing him to reassess Earle just when he believed that he had him figured out. Lately, it was Earle’s choice of reading material that was throwing him: he seemed to be playing catch-up with classic literature, and not just Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn either. Earlier that evening, Earle had been reading a collection by Tolstoy, Master and Man and Other Stories. When Jimmy had questioned him about it, Earle had described the plot of the title story, something about a wealthy guy who shields his serf after they both become lost in a winter storm, so that the serf lives and the wealthy guy dies. The wealthy guy made it to heaven as a consequence, though, so that was all right.
‘Is there supposed to be a message in that?’ Jimmy had asked.
‘For whom?’
‘For whom,’ like Earle was John Houseman now.
‘I don’t know,’ said Jimmy. ‘For wealthy guys with bad consciences.’
‘I’m not a wealthy guy,’ said Earle.
‘So you’re like the other guy?’
‘I guess. I mean, I didn’t take it that way. You don’t have to be one or the other. It’s just a story.’
‘If we get caught in a blizzard, and one of us is going to die, you think I’m not going to use you like a blanket to keep warm? You think I’d take a hit for you?’
Earle had considered the question. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I think you would take a hit for me. Wouldn’t be the first time, either.’
And Jimmy knew that Earle was referring to Sally Cleaver, because he had sensed it playing on Earle’s conscience ever since the detective’s first visit. Jimmy knew Earle well enough by now to recognize when that particular ghost had chosen to whisper in Earle’s ear.