“Okay,” Abel said, taking a twenty-dollar bill from a small roll in the side pocket of his jeans.
“I’ll pay you back tomorrow.”
“Okay, Buey,” Abel said. “Tomorrow you be reech. I be reech too!”
The ox grinned at his partner, saying, “For one night we’ll be rich. We’ll prob’ly give it all to some Mexican whores after we drink about a quart a cactus juice.”
Abel gave the ox a playful punch on the shoulder just as a voice behind them said, “They’s a cantina right down the street, amigo. You can drink down there.”
He wasn’t quite as big as a cement truck and he sported the beard of a werewolf. He wore a cutoff gray sweatshirt and black jeans as grease-caked and filthy as Shelby’s. His boots were savagely studded with metal discs, and you could shoot pool on his belt buckle. He was about Shelby’s age and size, but his body mass looked concrete-hard.
“A little slack, dude,” Shelby said, looking into the mirror at the leering widebody. “We ain’t wantin grief.”
“Then go on down the street with your little amigo. Them Messicans down there’ll drink with you. Won’t they, amigo?”
“Le’s go, Buey,” Abel said, standing up.
“We ain’t goin nowheres,” Shelby said, watching the bearded giant in the fractured mirror.
“Then I go home,” Abel said. “I see you tomorrow, Buey.”
The last time this happened, Shelby had let Abel go home, and settled for petty revenge by slashing the bike seat of the guy that ran them off. Shelby hadn’t wanted to get it on with that other dude, but he felt differently this time. He felt that nothing would ever be right for him again.
The ox grinned at the mirror, and his missing tooth made him think again: Shelby the wolf. The fact was, Shelby Pate didn’t care what happened to him. Not anymore. He’d become … transformed.
He turned on his stool and faced the monster looming over him. He said, “Kin we jist have our shooters, dude? Kin we do that without you goin turbo?”
“Sure you kin,” the bearded biker said. “Down the avenue with the other Messicans.”
The ox looked around for a moment. He was a nodding acquaintance of most of the bikers and rednecks in the bar, but this guy was the new gunslinger in town. Everyone watched with rapt anticipation, especially a pair of biker mommas in dirty T-shirts sitting at a corner booth. There’d be no taking sides. Nobody cared one way or the other who went to the E.R., just as long as somebody did.
Shelby said, “Tell me, Big Kahuna, how do your friends over there feel about it?” Shelby pointed to a group of neutral pool shooters who were watching and waiting.
The bearded biker turned his face toward the pool table and said, “Everybody here feels just like …”
He didn’t get it out. The ox rose up with Abel’s full bottle of Carta Blanca and smashed it across the eyes of the bearded biker. Shards of glass and beer pelted the pool players. The bearded biker grabbed his face and toppled back in one piece, crashing down like a boulder.
“You’re mine,” Shelby said calmly.
He kicked the bearded biker three, four, five times in the upper body. Abel heard ribs break with the second kick. The next one was in the kidney and the bearded biker screamed in agony, jerking his hands away from his bloody face, trying to protect his body. The next kick only made him whimper.
Then the bartender said to Shelby, “That’s enough, dude. You learned him about life ’n times. That’s enough.”
“You kin pay the bill, Flaco,” Shelby said, stopping the attack. “I need what I got fer some brews. I’m all overheated.”
When Shelby and Abel were walking out of the bar, they heard the bartender say to the supine biker, “You want me to call nine-one-one or can you get your own self to the hospital, dude?”
After they were outside, Abel said, “Le’s go, ’mano! Le’s get away!”
“Go on home, man,” the ox said to him. “Take my pickup. I gotta git cranked.”
“Get sleep tonight,” Abel said. “We got bees-ness in T.J.”
“Yeah, yeah, don’t worry about me,” Shelby said, turning to go back inside.
“Buey!” Abel cried. “Joo crazy? Don’ go back een there!”
“Why not?” Shelby said. “Did you see them Harley honeys back in the corner? Them two with dirty hooters from hangin on the backs a bikers? They’re gonna be all wet from seein that blood on the floor. I bet they both gimme a blow-job before the night’s over. That is, if I kin score some cringe fer them.”
When Shelby swaggered back into the bar, the bloody bearded biker was in a fetal position, and a customer was phoning for paramedics.
The ox showed the bartender his gap-tooth grin and said, “I fergot to ask. Do you validate parking?”
CHAPTER 19
After he made a U-turn in front of the main gate, Fin watched in the rearview mirror as she sprinted across the street in her little red-leather pumps. Of course he revved the Vette, figuring that a kid like Bobbie would appreciate a muscle car. He leaned across to open the door, but she swung it open and lowered herself into the seat in a move as smooth as ice cream. Her cheeks were showing color from the offshore breeze.
“Cool ride, sir!” she said, with a smile that broke his heart.
What happened to it? His youth? What the hell happened? “It’s a mean machine, all right,” Fin said. “Whadda you drive?”
“I got a little Hyundai,” she said. “Gets me around, is all.”
“Wanna go down to that Irish pub in Coronado?” he asked. “Whatever it’s called?”
She shook her head and her blond bob swung saucily, revealing flat tiny ears pierced with gold studs. “Too many sailors,” she said. “I know a nice neighborhood restaurant up near Hillcrest. It’s not a saloon though, if a saloon’s what you wanted.”
That surprised him. He thought she’d want to go to the nearest bar, humor the old geezer, and get the hell back to the barracks or wherever she lived.
“I got it up to here with saloons,” he said. “Let’s go uptown.”
She directed him to a restaurant at Fifth and Hawthorne, where downtown bleeds northward into an older residential neighborhood, then farther uptown into the artsy and gay district of Hillcrest. It was too early for the dinner crowd, so Fin was able to park at the curb next to the canopy awning. Other than two couples drinking at a little entry bar, Fin and Bobbie were the only customers.
She’d surprised him by choosing an up-market, cozy restaurant, and she surprised him again when after they were seated in the dining room, she said to the waiter, “Bombay on the rocks with a twist.”
“The same,” Fin said. Then to Bobbie, “Detective Doggett, you do astonish me. I thought a sailor’s cocktail’d be a bottle of Mexican beer with a lime sticking outta the neck.”
“I drink my share a beer,” she said. “But I had this boyfriend recently, he lived pretty good and taught me a lot about drinks and good restaurants. It’s kinda neat to order a cocktail where there’s a tablecloth and a flower and a candle on the table, right?”
“What happened to him?”
“Went back to his wife.”
“I’m not married,” Fin said, but Bobbie didn’t respond.
“Whadda you do for fun?” he asked. “When you’re on liberty?”
“I like water sports,” she said. “Surfing, scuba, jet-ski, any kinda water sports.”
“I haven’t surfed lately,” Fin said, failing to say that the last time he’d surfed, you could still get your windows washed at a gas station.
“How come?”
He loved that. How come? It never occurred to her that at his age the icy ocean could even shrivel earlobes. “I got tired of it. And I hated the surfers at Windansea.”
“I just surf in Coronado,” she said.
“Yeah, well, in Coronado it’s civilized. Up there in La Jolla you get a different breed of surf rat. Besides, I saw a great white shark out there and it really changed my mind about the sport.�
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“Wow! A great white?”
“I like animals and all, but I can’t make a case for sharks. Only good thing about them is they draw no distinction between a harbor seal, an old truck tire, or a Windansea surf rat.”
“I saw a few blue sharks,” Bobbie said, “but never big daddy. You sure it was a great white?”
“It was big and aggressive and had two rows of big scary teeth,” Fin said. “It was either a great white shark or Arnold Schwarzenegger.’’
Bobbie showed him a high-wattage smile he rarely saw on people his own age, and Fin felt a little shiver in his tummy.
“How long you been a police officer, sir?”
“Twenty-odd years,” he said. “And I mean odd.”
“You don’t look that old,” she said. And he could see she meant it!
“Can we get on a first-name basis? My name’s Fin.”
“Bobbie,” she said. “Bobbie Ann. Sometimes they call me Bad Dog.”
“I get it. Your initials. Bad.”
“And Doggett. Bad Dog.”
“I like it,” he said. “On a young girl like you it’s great. Bad Dog.”
“I’m not that young,” she said. “I’m almost twenty-eight.”
Not that young. God! He was suddenly aware of his herringbone sport coat. Why didn’t he wear his blue blazer? And his tie, a rep tie. Jesus, only guys older than gunpowder wore rep ties these days, and his was narrow. He was aware of his feet. He looked down in horror at… wingtips!
Her eyes followed his under the tablecloth, as though she was still looking for her black steel-toe high-tops. “Anything wrong?”
“Wingtips,” he said with a weak grin. “Do you know anybody that wears them?”
“Never noticed,” she said.
“I’m wearing them for a reason,” he said. “I don’t really like them, or anything.”
“Could we talk about the case now, sir? I mean, Fin?”
He signaled for another pair of martinis even though hers wasn’t half finished.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” he said. “This case has more wrinkles than Robert Redford.”
“Who?”
“The Way We Were.”
“What?”
“Butch and Sundance?”
“Huh?”
“The movie. You musta seen it on TV?”
“Oh, sure,” she said.
“Robert Redford was Sundance.”
“Oh yeah, I like old movie stars.”
“You’ll notice a lotta movie allusions in my speech,” he warned. “I’m a professional actor as well as a cop.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh huh,” he said, “I’ve been in two feature films. Not speaking roles, but I was in them.”
“Would I know them?”
“I don’t think so. You didn’t know Robert Redford.”
“After you said, sure, I know who he is.”
The waiter put the drinks down while Fin was deciding that the generation gap was insurmountable. So maybe he should talk about something boring like police work. He said, “The two truck drivers might very well be involved in the theft at your warehouse. We learned that the hazardous waste from North Island as well as some worse stuff from an agriculture supply house were dumped in T.J. And two little kids got poisoned. One’s dead.”
“Oh, no!” she said. Her brow knitted and two little creases formed between her eyebrows, the only two lines on her sweet young face. He hated making her sad.
“The other one’s gonna be okay, we hope. Do you know anything about Pepe Palmera?”
“Who’s that?”
“I better start from the beginning,” he said, “or you’re gonna be more confused than General Motors.”
He never got headaches, at least not stress headaches, but he suspected that stress was causing the pounding over his left eye. Jules lay across his bed with the TV tuned to local news, but with the sound turned so low he couldn’t hear the news readers.
Now there was a death-not the death of a truck thief whose demise on the bumper of a Greyhound bus might be considered good ecology-but the death of a kid. Mexican or not, jurisdictional problem or not, Jules realized that Willis Ross was right. At this time in history, during the debates over the NAFTA agreement, it could be disastrous for Green Earth Hauling and Disposal, and more important, for himself.
Jules thought he’d given Willis Ross a worst-case scenario: that two cretinous truck drivers had dumped hazardous waste for reasons unknown. Now he found himself being forced to consider every possibility, such as the notion that his drivers had certain plans that went all the way back to the North Island warehouse.
This made him begin thinking about the navy detective and the stolen shoes. Could those morons have stolen the shoes and delivered them to Tijuana? But if they had, why would they dump the waste? Why not just abandon the van and come back with their bullshit story about the truck being stolen? Or, if they felt they had to dump the waste, why didn’t they dump it on the U.S. side? Why in a residential zone in Tijuana?
They must’ve had a hard time getting it over the border into Mexico, so why smuggle it down there just to dump it? The American authorities would presume that a Mexican truck thief would dump the load on the U.S. side and then drive the empty van to T.J. So if Abel Durazo and Shelby Pate truly dumped that load of waste in Mexico, they picked the goddamndest most baffling way to do it that Jules could imagine!
That this should be happening to him was an outrage, now when everything was going so right. Even this afternoon’s stroke of luck boded well, getting close to a user-friendly old rich babe. All of it could be jeopardized by those truckers. It was more than a man should bear.
Jules sat up in bed. He had to stop this anguish. This was not like Jules Temple. This was what ordinary people did. He ordered events, and controlled them. What Jules’s father had deplored in his son-his ability to live for the present and not stew over future consequences-was, in Jules’s opinion, the key to successful living. If people truly were slaves to conscience they were handicapped and doomed to fail, that’s what Jules believed. He’d seize the moment. He’d deal with those two if and when he had to.
Now he had other tasks, such as giving a recital tonight, an important one. Before showering, Jules laid out his deodorant, his after-shave, his cologne and hair gel. He decided to wear blue silk briefs for Lou Ross, but he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
After she got home that afternoon, Nell had a glass of vegetable juice and a bath. While she was watching the evening news she fell asleep on the sofa, and the short nap revived her. She looked at her watch and thought about Fin and that dinner invitation.
Nell had to admit she kind of liked the guy. Despite his horrendous marital history he was the sort she’d always liked: cute and not one to launch a sexual panzer attack. He’d opened doors for her and probably would’ve lit her cigarette if she was dumb enough to smoke. And he was semi-amusing, that was the thing she liked most.
And even if he was an emotional mess she thought he’d be pretty good in bed because he didn’t take himself too seriously, except for the acting which nobody else could take seriously. All in all, he was the most promising guy to come her way in quite a while, if she disregarded any possibility of a long-term relationship.
He’d written his home number on the back of his business card, so Nell got her purse, retrieved the card, and picked up the phone. Then she decided it was humiliating. After all, she’d already turned him down, and anyway, he might not even be home.
A moment later, Nell picked up the phone, punched three numbers, then hung up. She poured herself a glass of wine, took a sip, and picked up the phone again.
She could say, “I was wondering if you might need some salad to go with the pasta?”
No, that was lame. She could say, “There is another angle about the stolen truck that’s bothering me.”
But what angle? Hadn’t they explored every possibility?
She could say …
oh, the hell with it! She dialed his number and got his answering machine.
Fin’s theatrical voice said, “Hello, this is Fin Finnegan. If your call has to do with police or personal business, please leave a message after the beep. If it has to do with the performing arts, you may wish to call Orson Ellis Talent Unlimited, or leave me a message and I shall get back to you.”
She hung up. Performing arts! Such a neurotic!
Nell opened a can of split-pea soup and read the latest issue of Vogue, cover to cover. The soup was more nourishing.
The valet-parking attendant took his Miata the instant he parked in the porte cochere of the twenty-seven-floor Meridian building on Front Street. A doorman directed him inside and a concierge met him at a counter in the lobby.
“Jules Temple,” he said to the concierge. “Mrs. Ross is expecting me.”
It wasn’t until Jules was on the elevator that he thought how extraordinary it was that she lived on the thirteenth floor. He wasn’t a superstitious person, but this was a residential high rise. He was still thinking about it when he rang her door chime.
He forgot about it momentarily when she opened the door. Her hair looked like an Eva Gabor wig with highlights that weren’t there in the afternoon. She was wearing a short red velvet dress with spaghetti straps and a deep neckline. It looked ridiculous on a woman her age.
“You look wonderful!” Jules said, pecking her on the cheek.
“I hope you like Szechwan,” she said. “It’s being delivered from my favorite Chinese restaurant in Horton Plaza.”
“If it’s hot enough,” he said. “I like it hot.”
“I never doubted that for a moment,” she said, and Jules could see that she had an insurmountable cocktail lead.
The condo was tasteless enough to’ve been decorated by a Mafia wife. All it needed was a couple of candelabras, and a harp next to the pink marble fireplace.
While she was mixing him a vodka on the rocks, it came to him again, that worrisome moment on the elevator.
When she gave him the drink she pressed close and kissed him on the mouth.
“Mmmmm,” he said. “You taste like gin. Sweet.”
Finnegan's week Page 18