“That girl, that Florence. You don't know she didn't tell Tiffle everything.”
“She doesn't know much except that the sky is going to fall on good old Claude tomorrow morning.”
“Tran, then,” he said, finally getting down to it.
“Tran's fine.” I was becoming very bored with this particular argument. Horace held a grudge by wrapping both arms and legs around it and clinging for dear life.
“He could sell us—”
“Blood is thicker than money.” I stuck the tip of my tongue into the coffee and pulled it out fast. “Anyway, they'd kill him on sight, and he knows it.”
Horace ran the nails of his free hand over his jeans with a sound that made the hair on my arms stand on end. “I don't know.”
I found I was furious. “And I don't know about you.”
He looked astonished. “Me?”
“What the hell did you think you were doing?”
His face slammed shut, and for the first time since I'd met him Horace turned into the inscrutable Oriental. He squeezed his cup, making it bulge perilously. “I don't want to talk about it.”
“Too bad. I do. You know, I do this shit, or something like it, for a living, remember? I'm sure some mathematician could express my death as a probability factor. Well, okay, so I can die. I'm nobody's father, and as much as I love Eleanor, I'm nobody's husband. You're both.”
“Barely,” Horace said between his teeth.
“Tell it to the kids,” I said, not caring whether it sounded brutal.
“I don't talk to the kids,” Horace said tightly. “Pansy talks to the kids, Pansy's their window on the world. She explains to them about why Daddy's never home, because he's out selling real estate in the daytime and pumping gas at night, like they can understand. And then, when I get home and they're asleep, she talks to me about how they miss me and how she should get a job like she had before when she was taking pictures and how my mother tells them one thing when she's told them another, and they don't know what to do. Well, í don't know what to do, either. My home life feels like a ... a maze that's all blind alleys.” He took a gulp of coffee and gasped steam. “Holy Jesus.”
I watched him unsympathetically as he fanned his mouth with his free hand. “So let Pansy get a job.”
“Right,” he said, sowing scorn right and left. “Eight hours a day out of the house. She leaves the room for thirty seconds, the kids cry. My mother moves to Vegas, the kids ask where's Grandma. I'm sure they think God is a Chinese woman of forty-seven, midway between Pansy and my mother. And I'm busting my butt to pay the electric bill.”
“God, that's terrible,” I said. “You're jealous of your own wife and mother. And you're a Chinese male chauvinist, to boot.”
“Jealous!” He did the thing with the fingernails on his jeans again and then put his hand on my wrist. “You don't know what you're talking about.”
Well, I didn't. I'd never had kids. I blinked, lost for a moment, and he withdrew his hand.
“So maybe a little,” he said in a muffled voice.
“Not much,” I said soothingly.
“Aaahhh,” he said, shaking his head in small swings, like if he turned it too far it would yank his body after it.
“And your mother—”
“Pansy can deal with her, now,” he said. “She sent her home.” His eyes came up to me, and he looked like the old Horace again. “That was a big deal for Pansy,” he said proudly.
“That makes it your turn, doesn't it?”
“My turn.” His tone was noncommittal, but he'd shifted his eyes to his lap.
“Um, that Thai girl,” I said, not sure whether he'd hit me.
For a moment I thought he was going to laugh, but he forced the corners of his mouth down and then together, looking like a prince forced to kiss a frog with no princess potential. “I knew I shouldn't have taken you and Lo to that bar,” he said.
“Scene of the crime,” I ventured.
“Oh, some crime. I flirted with her, I tipped her. I figured it was all just business to her.”
I thought it probably had been—jealousy and all—but I didn't want to say so. She'd obviously stoked his ego, and men are such dopes.
“Still,” I said, shrugging.
He nodded. “Yeah, yeah. Okay, no more girls.”
Mentally I asked the next question and retracted it, then asked it out loud. “She the only one?”
“Are you kidding? How much energy do you think I've got with two jobs?”
“So ease off. You can pay the electric bill on one job.”
He thought about it. “Kids are expensive.”
“Pansy could save money if you brought home a dollar a day.”
He smiled, not at me but at Pansy. “She could, you know. Pansy's Chinese to her toes.”
“If you're home more, she could even get a job of her own.” I scalded my tongue and gave up on the coffee. Maybe I'd have it with lunch. Or dinner. “Male chauvinism notwithstanding.”
I put my hand on his shoulder, and he reached up and patted it awkwardly. “I don't want to turn into one of the guys on National Public Radio,” he said.
“You've got miles to go,” I said. “Light-years.”
He sat back. “Assuming I live through tonight.”
That brought me to the problem at hand. I got up and went to the window, looking out as though I expected to see a solution in the street. The window was open, and since the motel had economized on screens, I poured my coffee out through it. It splattered on the asphalt of the parking lot, steaming like the entry way to hell. “Tonight will be okay.”
“Listen to you,” Horace said. “Talk about male chauvinists. I just don't think it's nailed down. God is in the details, you know.”
I turned back to him, feeling my own tension build again. “So find me a nail, Horace. Hell, I'd settle for a thumbtack. The key to something like this is improvisation.”
The upside-down-V eyebrows went sardonic. We were buddies again. He sipped, blinked twice, spat it back into the cup. “A little sententious, don't you think?”
“Horace,” I said, “you're Eleanor's brother. Even if you think I'm willing to get myself killed, you have to know that your life is sacred to me.” I batted my eyelashes at him.
He inflated his cheeks and let the air out with a cynical little pop. “I just hope you know what you're doing. What we're doing.”
That was easy. “I thought we'd settled that, Horace,” I said. I went to him and took the coffee out of his hand and poured it out the window, on top of mine. “I haven't got the faintest idea.”
21 - A Question of Color
We were in San Pedro by two-thirty. Except for the fact that my mouth tasted like I'd been sucking on a roll of nickels for a week, I was fine. It also helped if I ignored the rate of my heartbeat and the chill that emanated from the sopping patches on the sides of my shirt, courtesy of the two faucets that had been implanted under my arms while I slept.
Horace, Tran, and I were stewing in my latest rented car—a big one with a copious trunk this time—parked around the corner from the first of the safe houses. Unless Charlie's boys ignored the Harbor Freeway, always a strong possibility at rush hour, they had to pass us. Dexter and Horton were halfway up the next street, about fifty yards past the house. The five Doody Brothers, who were all bigger, or at least wider, than Horton, were two blocks away.
Horace, sitting at the wheel, was revealing himself as a nervous chatterer, reviewing, with the expertise of hindsight, all the reasons he should have known something was wrong the moment Uncle Lo showed up. Tran was emanating a prickly force field from the backseat, where he'd curled himself into a concentrated ball of silence, knees against his chin and arms around his ankles. He hadn't said a word since we'd left the motel. Once in a while he'd nod, as though some mental calculation had just come out right. I made monosyllabic responses to Horace's monologue by way of polite punctuation, but I was actually paying more attention to Tran's nods. Eac
h nod, I figured, represented one less way to get killed.
We sat there for hours.
It began to get dark: twenty past six. People were coming home from work, and every car that passed us brought our heads around as though they were drawn by a single wire. Horace had developed an anxious sigh and practiced it so often that the windows were misting up.
“Can you concentrate on inhaling for a few minutes?” I asked. He rolled down the driver's window.
Soon, I think," Tran said, breaking his vow of silence.
“I thought you were dead,” Horace said.
“Later,” Tran said.
Lights swept the road. “Heads down,” I said. “Here's another one.”
Horace and I ducked, leaving only Tran to peer through the smaller window in the rear. “Three lady,” Tran said.
Horace sighed.
“Who would have thought,” I asked the world at large, “that so many people would live in this stucco nightmare? And who'd have thought they'd want to come home at night?”
“Van,” Tran said from the backseat. We ducked again. The van, a big one, a minibus really, went past us at a nice, legal twenty-five miles an hour and turned the corner onto the street with the safe house on it. “One more,” Tran said. A second mobile Enormo, twin to the first, followed. “CIAs,” Tran said flatly. “Not long now.”
One of the walkie-talkies Dexter had procured made a throat-clearing sound on the seat between Horace and me, and I picked it up. “They comin home,” he said. “In the driveway now.” He sounded unreasonably calm. “Here's number two.”
“You guys set?” I had to say something.
“Horton done pulled four-fifty out of my ear.” Horton said, “Whuff.”
“You finished getting the labels out of the dresses?”
“Idle hands is the devil's playground. Not a label in the bunch.”
“How do you look?”
“The governor of Jamaica ain't gone invite us home to dinner.”
“And the Doody Squad?” I asked.
“Tryin to keep awake,” said Howard Doody, the eldest of the brothers, from their car. The others were named Harold, Henry, Hector, and Hayward.
“We can all hear each other?”
“No,” Howard Doody said. “This your imagination speakin.”
“Right. Well, keep the line open,” I said.
Tran started to hum. After a few bars I recognized it as “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” Horace joined in on an off-key counterpoint line lifted from the Modern Jazz Quartet, and I did my best to turn it into a fugue.
“You guys got a future,” Dexter said over the walkie-talkie. “Course, you'll only work once a year.”
“You know a harmony?” I asked. “We've got an opening in the group.”
“We doin Bob Marley. Horton the bass drum.” Horton went “Bum, bum, bum,” obligingly. It sounded like depth charges.
“Tell Horton,” I said, “that he can always get a job in sonar.”
“Man say you sound like a bullfrog,” Dexter said to Horton. Assorted Doodys laughed.
“Bullest frog he ever see,” Horton rumbled.
“Coming, them,” Tran said. Horace and I did our little dive.
“We think this is it,” I said into the phone as the car glided past.
“Ying,” Tran said. “One other.” We all held our breath, waiting for the second car. After thirty seconds, it hadn't come. “Okay,” Tran said.
“They parkin. Here he come, man goin up the walk,” Dexter advised us. “Little squirt.”
“We'll wait a minute to be sure they're alone. He'll be inside four or five minutes. He has to get the cash, count it, check the CIAs against his list, and make sure that everything adds up.”
“Six minutes, maybe seven,” Tran corrected me. “First time, him.”
“You hear that?” I asked Dexter.
“My ears okay. It's my heart done turned to stone. That's why I such a merciless dude.”
Count to fifty. No second car. I tapped Horace on the arm. “We're rolling,” I said to the phone.
“Listen to the man,” Dexter scoffed. “Rollin.”
“Let Horton emerge into the world.” The engine caught, and Horace eased the car into the street, lights out. Now that it was actually coming down, I felt light-headed but clear: The game passed seamlessly through my imagination, without a bump or a missed stitch. Tran touched my shoulder lightly and whispered, “Good.”
Horace pulled to the curb about thirty feet behind the car that had had Ying in it. There were two parked cars ahead of us, and we were between streetlamps.
“Jesus Christ,” Horace said, leaning against the steering wheel for a better view.
Horton Doody, dressed in a flowing robe, was ambling down the sidewalk, looking wider than a king-sized bed. A streetlamp pulled him from the darkness and glinted off the shawl thrown over his shoulders and the colored beads in his braided hair. Since I'd never before seen him with his watch cap off, I didn't know whether the hair was his own or one of Dexter's inspirations.
“He's just going to meander along like that?” Horace asked. “What about a little stealth?”
“It's a question of color,” I said. “If they're expecting anything, it's not someone who looks like Horton.”
“Nobody expect that,” Tran murmured.
“Come on, Horton,” I urged. As he approached Ying's car he gave it an incurious glance and slipped the shawl from his shoulders.
“What if the car's locked?” Horace said. He knew, but he couldn't stop babbling.
Horton was wrapping the shawl around his right hand, looking up at the cloudy sky like someone who's just had her hair done. He was still looking at the sky when he reached the passenger door, and he didn't glance down even when he drew back his wrapped fist and punched out the window.
The guy in the car jumped high enough to bump his head on the roof, but Horton had an arm through the window by then and his left hand had come out of the pocket of his robe with a gun that looked big and deadly even from thirty feet away. He yanked the door open and let the driver see the gun pointed at his head, and the man froze. Up the street the light came on in Dexter's car, and he got out and headed for the house.
We were about two minutes in.
Tran and I pulled ski masks over our faces and climbed out of the car, Tran moving quickly toward Horton while I angled toward Dexter and the safe house. Horace remained in the car, watching the play and waiting for us to come out.
Tran had a wide roll of fiber tape and Charlie Wah's trusty handcuffs, and I had my automatic, another roll of tape around my left wrist, a can of spray paint in a holster, and a quiver full of persistent misgivings. As I joined Dexter I saw Horton pull the driver from the car one-handed.
Dexter was wearing something free-flowing and tie-dyed, and he'd teased his hair up into angular spikes that made him look a little like the Statue of Liberty if the Statue of Liberty had been Jamaican. “Hey, mon,” he said softly, giving the words a passable island lilt. Behind him, Horton was holding the driver parallel to the ground like a piece of driftwood while Tran wound the tape around his head, sealing both his eyes and his mouth. Then Tran went around to the driver's side and got the keys to open the trunk.
“Waitin the hard part,” Dexter said, glancing at his watch.
“About a minute,” I whispered. “Hurry up, Horton.”
Right on cue, Horton tossed the driver into the trunk and floated toward us, his feet hidden by the hem of his robe. Tran shut the trunk, got into the car behind the wheel, and closed the door.
“This my granny's shawl,” Horton said. “She going to be plenty pissed.”
“Buy her a new one,” I said.
“Hell,” Dexter said, “tonight's money, you gone be able to buy a new granny.”
“Against the house,” I said, and the three of us split up, Dexter and me to one side of the door and Horton to the other, six or eight feet away from it. As though he'd been waiting fo
r us, Ying opened the door and came out.
He was walking stiffly, and even in profile his face was scraped and raw. He looked like someone who'd taken a header into a Cuisinart. Dexter and Horton closed on him soundlessly, and Horton's arm had circled his throat before he even made the sidewalk. He made a sound that sounded like cikkk-cikkk as Horton lifted him from the ground and shut off his air. In a single fluid motion, Dexter extended a hand, gave Ying a casual little slap on the face, and took his briefcase. Horton toted Ying out of sight around the side of the house, and Dexter and I retired behind an overgrown bird of paradise and took a look at the haul.
“Mama,” Dexter said reverently. The briefcase was stuffed with cash, rubber-banded stacks of fifty- and hundred-dollar bills mostly, plus a few thick wads of brightly colored toy money that I took to be Taiwanese. Folded to one side was a sheet of legal paper. I grabbed it and opened it and then let out a sigh of sheer exasperation.
“It's in Chinese,” I said.
“What you expectin? Cyrillic limericks?”
“Well, it means you've got another question for him. He has to read these names out loud. All of them. Anyone who's got a Christian name, I want the Christian name.”
He fidgeted, a sign of nerves at last. “Gone slow us up.”
“One of them is a woman who knows the lady who's got the church. She can help Horace keep them in line.”
“Anything else I don't know about?” He snapped the case shut and took off for the side of the house. I hung back a few steps, not wanting to get too close to Ying, even with the mask in place. I needn't have worried: Ying was totally focused on Horton, who had inserted the tip of his gun barrel into Ying's left nostril. Ying's hands were jammed down inside his pants, elbows straight, and he looked like a man who is trying very hard not to let his bladder go.
“Fuck with us and you're dead,” Dexter said softly, flicking Ying's cut cheek with a forefinger to get his attention. “How many passengers inside?”
Ying's hard little eyes rolled toward him. “Thirty-eight.”
Dexter had been appointed Grand Inquisitor. “How many of your assholes?”
“Two.” It figured: the vans' drivers.
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