“Do you really want to know?” she’d said at last.
He’d told her he did.
“I’ll come down as low as they want, for as long as they want,” she’d said, her hesitation suddenly gone. “But their hands stay off me.”
Three rows from where Devon was deftly bending herself around a pole, Ricci took a deep breath and lowered his empty glass to the tabletop. He felt a kind of soft grayness settling over his thoughts and guessed he was a little drunk. Not too drunk to drive, but he could see how that might be a biased opinion. If he went for another refill, he might have to dispute it himself.
He stood up and pushed in his chair. Devon was almost through with her set and he’d decided to leave before she got off stage. He didn’t want to know if she’d spotted him. He didn’t want to know if A.J. was in the house. He didn’t want to see her go one-on-one with any of the customers who’d watched her dance, or make her feel as if she shouldn’t because he was here. He wanted nothing except to leave.
He turned and strode between the tables in the main room, and past the cashier’s counter, and then past the hulking bouncers in black pants and T-shirts at the door, giving them a nod as he walked outside.
The night was cool and breezy with mist that carried the salt smell of the bay across the parking lot. Ricci stood on the neon-splashed sidewalk before the entrance and took it in for a moment. He felt steady enough on his feet and told himself he’d be okay behind the wheel.
He stepped off the sidewalk into the parking lot and went around back toward his Jetta. The lot was illuminated by high overhead sodiums, but the club’s rear wall largely blocked his aisle from the glow of the lights. Though he had a decent recollection of where he’d left the car in the solid row of vehicles, he had to pause and search the darkness for a minute or two to locate it.
Ricci finally saw it about a dozen cars up ahead and moved on.
That was when he noticed a shadowy figure crossing the lot from its perimeter fence opposite the club. The man cut through several aisles of vehicles, momentarily slipped out of sight between two cars, and then emerged into Ricci’s aisle three or four yards in front of him. He wore a raincoat — a trench — belted at the waist and flowing well down below his knees.
Ricci’s guard raised itself a notch. You were alone in a dark place and saw somebody appear out of nowhere, you would be a fool in general not to be alert. He had met some dangerous people in his time at UpLink. And before that, and after — if his life as it was proved to be after.
And there was the coat. And the smooth, almost gliding way the man moved in it.
Ricci couldn’t dismiss the association they brought to mind.
He suddenly felt the absence of his weapon under his sport jacket. His suspension had not up until now cost him his carry permit, but the bouncers who wanded everybody who passed through the club’s door didn’t worry about permits, they worried about men with too much testosterone and alcohol in their bloodstreams acting like they were in some Dodge City saloon, and thinking they would get into it over the dance hall girls. Coming here tonight, he’d had to leave his apartment without his FiveSeven.
Ricci walked a little further through the aisle, stopped. The man approached to within a couple of feet of him and did the same, hands in the pockets of his coat.
They studied one another with quiet recognition in the darkness and fog.
“Lathrop,” Ricci said.
“Surprise, surprise.”
Ricci stood there watching him. Lathrop’s hands being out of sight in his coat pockets made him more acutely conscious of his own lack of a weapon.
“How’d you find me here?”
“Doesn’t matter.” A shrug. “I’ve managed to find you in all kinds of places.”
“Super,” Ricci said. “Now lose me.”
Lathrop was quiet, seeming to notice where Ricci’s gaze had fallen, his lips parting in a kind of smile.
“You think I came to take you out,” he said.
Ricci shrugged.
“I don’t know why you came,” he said. “Wouldn’t waste my time worrying about it.”
Lathrop slowly slid his hands out of his pockets and let them drop to his sides.
“This better?” he said.
Ricci just looked at him and shrugged again.
“Seems to me,” Lathrop said, “you could use a cup of strong coffee.”
Ricci remained silent. The breeze had picked up strength and he could feel the drifting mist on his cheeks.
“What the hell do you want?” he said after a while.
“My car’s back near the fence.” Lathrop nodded slightly in that direction. “Let’s go for a ride.”
“No, thanks.”
“We need to talk.”
“No,” Ricci said, edging past Lathrop and up the aisle.
“Ricci,” Lathrop said in a calm voice. “Not so fast.”
He kept walking.
“You owe me, remember?” Lathrop said from behind him. Again calmly, softly. “Big time.”
Ricci took another couple of steps forward, slowed, and finally halted. He stood there for almost a full minute, his back to Lathrop in the deserted parking lot. Then he turned around to look at him.
“Damn you,” he said. “God damn you.”
Lathrop smiled his enigmatic smile.
“I’ll buy the coffee,” he said, his long coat ruffling around him as he led the way off into the deeper shadows.
FOUR
The waterfront at Alviso was not much more than a drainage slough for the Guadalupe River, but then the Guadalupe itself amounted to little more than a glorified creek as it snailed through downtown SanJo, and then out of the city to deposit its sewage overflow between Alviso’s dirt levees and reeded banks before wearily petering off into San Francisco Bay.
From where Lathrop had parked at the end of Gold Street, Ricci could see nothing in the fog and distance besides some aircraft warning lights on the power transmission towers across the slough. Pale beacons under the best conditions, they gave the illusion of flickering on and off now as the high, slow mist dragging past them over the marshes began to gradually mix with light rain.
Behind the wheel of his Dodge coupe, Lathrop reached into the 7-Eleven bag he’d stuffed into a molded plastic storage compartment on his right side, produced a Styrofoam coffee cup, and handed it across the seat to Ricci. Then he got out a second cup for himself, peeled open the sip hole on the plastic lid, and raised it to his lips.
The two men sat quietly, as they had throughout the entire ride on the freeway to the extreme northern edge of San Jose, their silence uninterrupted even when Lathrop had pulled up to the gas station convenience store for their coffees.
“So here we are,” Lathrop said. “Like a couple of old friends.”
Ricci drank from his cup.
“No,” he said.
Lathrop shrugged.
“Here we are, anyway,” he said.
They sat looking out across the ugly mud flats. Lathrop had driven from the club with his wipers set on intermittent, and now that they’d been turned off, the windshield was smeary with an accumulation of moisture.
“Too bad about what happened to you,” Lathrop said. “Enforced leave… I might have figured.”
Ricci’s remote stare didn’t move from the windshield. “How do you know they’re calling it that?” he said.
Lathrop shrugged again.
“They can call it anything they want, doesn’t matter,” he said. “Somebody phones the switchboard operator at UpLink to ask for you these past few weeks, she connects him or her to your voice mail. Somebody asks the operator why you aren’t returning messages, her answer’s that you’re on leave of absence. Somebody asks how long you’ll be gone, she just says indefinitely.”