She smiled back, showing irregular, stained teeth, and lit the Marlboro for him with a Bic. She had to lean over the counter a little to do it, making sure he noticed her breasts, which were average size but pushed up by one of those special wired bras. He could see the boning through her uniform.
“You look like you’ve had a tough night,” she said.
“Got the job done,” he said because he couldn’t think of anything else.
“What kind of job?”
“Uh, you know.” He shrugged, hoping she would go away.
“Ummm.” A broad smile, not showing any teeth. “Sounds like the kind of work I might like.”
He grunted and she left. While she went for the coffee he twisted off the filter and dropped it on the floor. He hated those things. With relish he drew in a big chestfull, not caring about getting the tobacco fibers in his mouth. The waitress gave him another too-broad smile when she brought the coffee. She had dirty-brown hair and a lot of lines around the eyes, lines that makeup just crinkled around without concealing. Plenty of glossy purple lipstick, with chipped fingernail polish to match. Late thirties, he guessed. Showing the wear. Or maybe for a woman like her, the right term was use. Any woman who was interested in him now, the ragged way he looked, had to be desperate.
She licked her purple lips. “You new around here?”
George tried to think of a way to get rid of her while he watched the street. “Just passing through, sort of.”
“You’ll find there’s a lot to do at night”—a significant look—“if you know the right places.”
“Maybe I’ll work nights.”
“Yeah.” The stained smile again. “You said.”
He had made the cigarette last through the bitter cup of coffee. Just as he took the last drag, he saw two black-and-whites going down Chestnut headed toward the Bank of America. They were moving pretty fast but with no blinkers or sirens on.
The counter waitress started talking to him about the weather or the Angels or something as he watched the patrol cars turn toward the bank. He guessed they wouldn’t figure he was on foot. But somebody could have seen him, and on top of that there weren’t many places a guy on foot could go this time of morning. A prickly pressure built up in him, pulsing in his ears, thumping loud and strong so that he couldn’t make sense of what the waitress was saying. His chest started to heave, tight and fast.
He threw the three quarters onto the counter, jerked to his feet, and started out. The waitress stopped talking, her mouth half-open to frame the next word of mindless patter, surprise turning to irritation. “Hey.” She glared. “Hey.”
He went out the back exit and trotted down an alley behind a Vons Market. It felt good to move. Muscles working, eyes dancing. He went half a block in the clean morning air and slipped into a doorway to think.
He knew this was probably not the smartest thing to do. He could have sat out the next hour in the Denny’s listening to the waitress tell her life story, could have cadged some free coffee while she steered the discussion around to what movies he’d seen lately, using her eyes to suggest a whole lot more, and then she would have started hinting about doing something together tonight. But he liked to move when his body told him to. His instincts had kept him out of a lot of bad stuff and this time they told him to get some distance, fast. He never questioned his instincts—they were the work of God, and the Lord knew what was best for him. Maybe cops used the Denny’s for a hangout, and after they answered the stop-and-question call at B of A they’d go there, notice him. His subconscious had a reason, his instincts, God’s plan—it didn’t matter what he called it, he had to follow it.
Down the alley a kid was unloading a truck onto the Vons dock. Boxes, dumpsters, trash. The kid looked like he was nearly through. George sized up the timing. He kicked at some packing material in impatience, slamming some two-by-fours against the wall. The alley danced in the pale blades of morning sunlight, colors popping in the air.
“Hey, you cleared out pretty fast, bud,” the waitress said at his elbow.
He was startled, alarmed. She had approached on rubber soles while he was trying to plan, all caught up in his head, not on guard. He blinked and his mouth moved, but nothing came out.
“Guy like you, a girl notices, you know?” A sluttish smile, weakening at the corners with wobbling uncertainty. “Best thing I seen in a long time. Don’t want to let a guy like you get away.”
He looked at her nervous twitching lips, and his breath came in gasps. A girl notices. Would remember him if anybody asked.
“Well, you duck out like that, I take it kind of personal.”
The trash-lined alley whirled around him, planes and angles sheeting up to the gray sky.
“And I liked you right off. Thought we might get together later?”
Bloodred patches flashed in the air around the woman’s uncertain smile.
“Hey, look, I guessed you were keepin’ outa the way of the cops.”
Tight. His chest tight. “How?” He had trouble getting the word out.
“You got the look, y’know?” She seemed encouraged by his finally saying something. “Needing a place to maybe hole up?”
Colors arced like veins, burnt orange coronal streamers bursting out of her and dissolving into crimson stars. He opened his mouth, closed it. Watching the colors.
“You could come over to my place, rest up. Man like you needs his rest.” The slanting morning sunlight showed the crinkled cosmetics in the lines of her face. Her bright red lips slid into a hesitant leer. “Not that you have to rest all the time. Y’know, you can have what you like.”
Gaudy light, colors sluicing down from an oyster-gray sky and running in rivulets around her mock-coy, painted face. Don’t want a guy like you to get away.
He sucked in a deep, fulfilling breath. Everything was clear now. The Lord had drawn His coat of many colors around her, and that made things simple.
“So hope you don’t mind me comin’ on to you like this, but long time back I learned the hard way that you see somethin’, you go—”
He bent over and kissed her. It felt good to let the tightness steam out. Woman like this, that’s what she wants. A shot of the hot ‘n’ heavy, they’d called it in high school.
She blinked with surprise and then returned his pressure. Her tongue slithered into his mouth, muscular and slick and wriggling. All the spit and goop with it.
Warm and quick and alive.
A moist, thick snake.
Then she was limp in his arms, and he was staring down at her loose face. Something had happened to her and he did not know what, or how, but as he shook her the neck and spine wobbled, no resistance. Face empty, pale. Arms dangling. No sound.
Long ago there had been the girl in the field, the one he met at night out there on one of his walks, and she had taken him into the hot ‘n’ heavy, too, and the next thing he had known then was her shrieks ripping open the thick night air. She had raked him with her fiery fingernails and staggered away in the Arizona dark, and he had not known then what had happened before between them. Just like now. Only this woman with the crows’-feet spreading away from her eyes, the brown eyes staring up at him, this woman did not scream.
Enough of this. He looked up and down the alley.
Nobody there. The kid working the Vons dock was out of sight.
No sirens in the distance. Just trash blowing in the breeze.
Big industrial-size dumpster beside the cinderblock wall.
Puffing, he crouched and picked her up. Surprising weight to her, but he rocked her up easily into a hug. He carried her to the dumpster. Had to move fast now. Yeah, heavier than she looked. Hoisting the body up onto his shoulder and then standing up was work. Grunting, he pulled the sheet-metal lid up. Setting his feet, getting the angle. He threw her in with one movement. Backward over the top, her head snapping back as if to look at him as she went over. Hair frayed with the momentum, face open, then gone.
Flattened cardboard
boxes under his feet. He scooped up two, threw them in to cover her. The lid banged down as he sprinted away.
His thinking had been interrupted there, but now his head was clear. The strands and snaking threads of color were fading, crisping and fizzing in the slanting sunlight. He had trouble walking for a moment, his jimmy-john stiff against his leg, but he was proud of getting away, free.
He thought of a broad valley strewn with bones baked white beneath the rich sun. Faces flickered before him, faces forever stilled in expressions of surprise, fear, confusion. And colors sizzling around the wrecked heads, fiery plumes frying the faces, crisp, hot, vibrant.
The Vons Market was getting ready for the day. He slowed to a walk as he passed the piles of cardboard boxes and pine loading flats and more dumpsters. The kid had finished unloading. He was backing the Mack delivery truck out from the loading dock, grinding its gears. It had a steel tailgate, and George grabbed for that as the kid gunned his motor and started up. George pulled himself up easily and stood on the rear chrome bumper, holding on to the tailgate. The back doors were locked. The truck accelerated, the driver shifting through the gears as if this were a sports car.
He rode the truck for a fast few miles. The kid was hot to get somewhere and the smell of carrots filled George’s nose as he hung on, the truck jouncing lightly on the turns.
He thought about the woman a little and knew he had been right. She had said she was going to try to hang on to him—Don’t want a guy like you to get away—and she had guessed the cops were after him.
Well, she couldn’t hang on to him. He had proved that. In mathematics, once a proof is done, you drop it and go on to the next problem. That was the way he wanted to run his life, and lately he had been getting better and better at that. George firmly put the woman from his mind and concentrated on the ride, on his plans, on this day. This day he had to dedicate to himself. And through him, to the Lord.
George jumped off at a traffic light because he saw a Security Pacific building down the block. He had a principle that God had given him when he was a boy, when he had learned to fight back against the bullies at school: The one sure way to get danger on your tail was to turn your back on it. People against you, you had to go right back at them, show them some spirit. If you got thrown, then right away you got back on the horse. He was going to ride Security Pacific.
He sat at a plastic table outside a Dunkin’ Donuts, holding a Styrofoam cup he had fished out of the trash, so he would look as though he belonged there. Not long to wait for Security Pacific to open. That gave him time to strip all the Gary Pinkerton cards from his plastic accordion carrier. He said a fond good-bye to all twenty-three cards as he sliced them in half with a pocket knife and dumped them in the trash. Leave intact cards, and somebody would for sure try to pass them. He took out his backup, a small folder that had cost him several thousand dollars to set up and that had lain fallow for over a year.
The Security Pacific card of one Bruce Prior was virgin, just like the other dozen in the folder. He slipped them into his first-line plastic windows, enjoying the crisp feel of them. George felt the familiar tingling in his hands as he tuned himself up. Bruce Prior now had to take on an identity.
He rearranged his face so that the anger and irritation went out of it. When he was pretty sure he looked worried, he went into the men’s room of Dunkin’ Donuts and checked. Not bad, but he started to scowl as soon as he thought of anything else.
He kept working on his expressions while he did the job he had to get through first. Down with the pants, out with the jimmy-john. He wasn’t sure what he had done with the woman back there in the alley, there were gaps in his memory of it. But it never hurt to get clean right after, that was for sure. He remembered the minister telling him that, many years ago, when he got caught in the church rec room, doing the hand-love with his jimmy-john after the Andrews girl felt him there and ran away. How good it had felt to clean it after, in the church men’s room, all the foul smells gone. Same as now. He caught the musky reek coiling up from himself and figured that was from the woman exciting him down there. They carried filthy diseases, too. He used eight paper hand towels to be sure and felt better right away.
Back to business, all fresh. Time for repairs.
He washed his face and hands without soap because there wasn’t any, just cold water and a wall-mounted blow dryer that was so low he couldn’t stoop enough to get his face under it. He wet his hair and combed it with his fingers until it looked pretty good, like a guy who had just been in a hurry this morning. His black tie was still in his coat pocket but he had managed to mess it up by sleeping on that side. He wetted it a little and stretched it and put it on. The wrinkles still showed.
People always thought better of you if you dressed conservatively, plenty of serious blacks and grays. He stuck the tip of his tie under his belt and fiddled with his zipper until the tie got caught there, holding it tight so the wrinkles went out. With his jacket buttoned you couldn’t see that or the dirty smudges on his shirt. He wet his fingers and stroked his pants legs until most of the creases came out. Lucky he hadn’t been wearing one of his pleated outfits when he had gone out to a church dinner three days ago. They’d look like hell by now.
He had nearly walked straight into the cop screen around his apartment. A neighbor was having a loud party across the boulevard from his stucco apartment building, and there had been no street parking left at all. He’d seen that a block away and so had parked under an oak tree and started walking home, frowning at the loud rap music booming out of the party. Rap music!—gutter talk, no kind of music at all, and years out of date. It had irritated him to hear that trash cutting through the dry, cool Tucson evening. Especially after the sweet, flowing hymns he had been singing, songs that meant something and lifted you up on choruses of beauty.
But the party had saved him, because he saw the plainclothes guy walking away from it, maybe having just asked them to quiet things down a little. Mr. Plainclothes had cop all over him, plenty of stiff swagger and a third-rate suit.
George had slipped down an alley, fading into the shrubbery, and doubled around. There were two unmarked cars at the rear of his building and guys sitting in them, with one more standing in the shadows of the back stairs. They looked like serious trouble. Not local law, who were so dumb they’d park in front, probably under a streetlight so they could read the newspaper.
He had gone away and stayed overnight with a fellow parishioner family, good folks, giving them a story about a sudden need to fumigate the whole apartment house. They’d been kind of edgy about things, the way most people were around him, but they let him sleep over. The next morning he’d approached his place from three different directions. He did it on foot, in case they had an all-points out on the plates of his car.
Sure enough, from each direction there was a guy trying to look casual within a half block of the apartment. He had tried again that night, and they were still there.
Which meant the Feds, for sure. They could field special teams, take their time. Probably the interstate banking morons with their big computers. Which meant he was finished there.
But not finished for good, he thought, as he studied himself now in the men’s room mirror and worked on his expression some more. Two days of hitching from Tucson had given him reddening sunburn and a mean squint. He got his mouth and eyes set so that he looked like a guy who had done plenty of manual labor and had the muscles to show but was basically just your average Joe. Worried, maybe a little confused.
He went into the Security Pacific with the opening door crowd. There were five desks to his left, two marked off with a little wood and brass fence, which meant the president and VP worked there. He looked over the three account managers at their desks. The best would probably be a young guy at the end, but he was already talking to a weathered Chicana woman in a sweater who was having trouble with her English.
George picked the next youngest account manager, a woman who looked to be mid
twenties. The older they were, the more sharp and suspicious they’d gotten. As he sat down she gave him the neutral business smile they taught everybody these days and said, “How may I help you?” like a recording.
“Well, it’s kinda funny,” George said sheepishly. “I got one of your cards, but I don’t have a local account yet.”
“Oh, that’s no problem.”
“Kind of backward, I guess.”
“Well, we probably sent you the card as an invitation, Mr.—”
“Prior. Bruce.” He handed over the card, fishing it from his vest pocket so she could not see the plastic windows full of other cards.
She gave the card three seconds and said, “Let me just enter you and see.”
He sat for five minutes while she clumsily went through her memorized routine, typing his card number in and looking for specs on the account, going through their national net. He casually moved his chair around so that he could see some of her screen. She had an obsolete monitor and made two mistakes with access codes.
He’d done nothing but charge a hundred bucks or so every month to keep Bruce Prior active and had paid off right away. It was a long five minutes, though, because there was a chance the cops at his apartment had somehow traced this identity. They’d had time to alert the networks. He had paid off the Prior with checks on Gary Pinkerton accounts, part of his perpetual cycling of money that kept him going. But unless the Feds did a thorough retrieval on every account he had, there would be no alert on Prior.
Unless they were on to him for more than that. There was always the chance that some stuff he’d covered up years back wasn’t really buried. He put that thought out of his mind and watched the woman, ready to get out of there fast.
She smiled approvingly. “You’ve moved, Mr. Prior?”
“Right. New to the neighborhood.”
“I see your previous address was in Tucson. A post office box.”
“Got a better job out here.”
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