“So you what? Set traps for them?”
“Please,” she said. “You can get in more trouble for killing a cat than a person.”
“Then where did they come from?”
“I bought them on the dark web. There’s nothing you can’t find there.”
“Enlighten me,” I said. “If you hate cats, why would you buy these?”
“To remind me that at least some of the world’s pussycats are dead. Anything else?”
“Your client,” I said. “Yes or no?”
She said, “His name is Allan Frame. I’ll get you his address. It’s a good address. I checked it before I hired Lumia.”
16
The Hard Hello
It was only a little after eleven, but I still had to ring Stinky’s doorbell half a dozen times before Crisanto opened it and placed every one of his hundred and twenty pounds in my way.
“I need Stinky,” I said.
“Mr. Stinky in toilet.”
“He’ll come out eventually,” I said. “He always has in the past.” I put both hands out and tilted them to my right, an invitation for Crisanto to get out of my way. “Please?” I said.
Crisanto licked his lips and spread his feet slightly, the image of someone who’s decided to tell a bully to suck it up and swallow it.
“Is he putting someone in that cute little room behind the pantry?” I said. “Shall I go and see who it is?”
“Let him in,” Stinky said from the living room. “No manners at all.”
The confrontation averted, Crisanto gave me a welcoming smile and stepped aside. I went down the hall, running my fingertips over the silverpoint drawing—just because I was angry enough to put my fingerprints on it—and into the living room. Stinky, wearing a kind of luau caftan with prints of tropical birds all over it, was sitting in front of his cylinder desk. It was closed. On the table in front of the couch was a cognac snifter half-full of something that was exactly the right color. I went over and sat in front of it as Stinky followed me with his eyes.
I picked up the glass and sniffed it. Well, well. “Company?” I said. “Brought out the good stuff and everything, didn’t you? Even the nice crystal. Doesn’t seem to me I’ve ever tasted—”
“Would you like some?” The words were polite but the tone was pure poison.
“That’s okay,” I said. “It’d be wasted on me. Just do me a favor for a second, and look at me.”
Stinky said, “With both eyes?”
“Please,” I said. “This will take less than a minute, and then you can get back to the person you actually invited.”
With an aggrieved sigh, Stinky swiveled his chair to me and waited, his eye on mine, expressing no curiosity at all.
I said, “Allan Frame.”
For all that happened on Stinky’s face I might have recited the first five letters of the alphabet. But then he reached out and scratched the side of his tiny nose.
“Okay,” I said, getting up, “now you can play with your real friends.” To Crisanto, I said, “I’ll let myself out,” but he still followed me all the way to the door, and after it closed behind me, I heard him throw the deadbolt.
“I should have known that the person who hired me through Stinky was also the one who went to Itsy to hire Lumia,” I said. “Here I was, fantasizing competing camps when, in fact, the Bride of Plastic Man is actually behind everything.”
“The Bride of—” Ronnie said from the bed. There was only one chair, and I was in it. “Oh. Right. Who called her that?”
“Colorful old Jake.” I was in the motel room at Minnie’s Mouse House, working on a cold but perfectly cooked ribeye from Taylor’s. Ronnie, who loved crisp fat, had thoughtfully trimmed every bit of it off and eaten it for me. “Jake seems to be getting the old age he’s earned.”
Ronnie said, “You sound like you feel sorry for him.”
“You know?” I said. “You see a lion that’s lost its teeth and claws, and its coat is all mangy and falling out, and you don’t think about all the lives it chewed up and swallowed. You kind of mourn the loss of power and beauty.”
“Bet an antelope doesn’t feel that way.”
“Antelopes are peaceful and beautiful and boring. Whatever else they are, lions aren’t boring.”
“Returning to the real world for a moment,” she said, “why should you have known you were both hired by the same person?”
“Because he showed up, furious, at Stinky’s after Lumia got killed. What that suggests to me is that he figured I’d gotten the McGuffin out of the doll but left the doll behind the previous night, when I was supposed to be there, and he figured Stinky hadn’t told him about it.”
“But then, why shoot her? She didn’t know what she was looking for, she didn’t—”
“I don’t think it was the fixer, it was the clients. Fixers don’t get their hands dirty. So it was one of his two clients, either the Bride or that fuzzball with the big nose who was with her at McDonald’s. Maybe they were furious, maybe panicked, maybe doing her in cold blood was part of the plan. Invertebrates, Itsy called them. Maybe he or she always meant to shoot Lumia and would have shot me if I’d been there when I was supposed to be. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Lumia told me where to hide if they came in, and for a moment I thought they might, but they took off. There they were with a dead woman in their car, and they obviously decided the best thing to do was get the hell out of there.
“Anyway, the guy in charge, whose name is Allan Frame, figured he could get to me through Stinky. But when he showed up to do a little strong-arm, Stinky surprised him—and me, I have to say—by hiding me in a sort of treasure cave and blowing him off. I should have known right then, the moment the guy started pushing Stinky around, that he had hired me through Stinky and then got Lumia through her own manager or whatever you want to call them. So it was his clients who were waiting for Lumia. I need him to tell me who they are.” I put down the fork and rubbed at my face, fighting a fast-moving tide of feelings at the thought of her, friendless and terrified, in that car with the gun pointed at her while I sat safely in the house, a clueless asshole.
“Poor baby,” Ronnie said, watching me. “You must be exhausted.”
“It’s just, you know.”
“I know,” she said. “She meant something to you.”
“Just someone I liked,” I said. “If you, um, if you saved this whole steak for me, what did you eat? Except for the fat, I mean. You ate almost all of the—”
“I ordered the kale mash,” Ronnie said, “which I set in the center of the table because the room needed some green, and then I had a couple of almost raw lamb chops. I asked the chef just to put them in a plastic bag and then slip them into his pants until they were body temperature.”
“Hope they weren’t frozen.”
“I think I would have heard him scream.” She smiled at me, essentially an interrogative smile to see whether I’d smile back.
I forced one but couldn’t hold it, so I looked around the room, something I’d been avoiding. I said, “Sorry about this place.”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Ronnie said. “It’s got to be a personal growth opportunity. The carpet alone hits a new lifetime high on the creep scale.”
It did indeed. It had once, in a distant millennium, been white, but now it was the gray they point at in TV commercials to convince you to change your detergent. The gray was enlivened by hundreds of thin, twisty black figures that might have been little snakes or individual sperm cells swimming valiantly for glory, but that, on closer inspection, turned out to be mouse tails in various degrees of curliness. Worst of all, they were heaviest where the carpet met the wall, where they formed a sort of black fringe that suggested enormous platoons of mice sitting cheek by jowl with their butts to us, just on the other side of the thin plaster. To make the experience even more vivid, the bo
ttom of the wall had mouse-holes painted on it at irregular intervals. I had been told that one hole in each room was real, not painted, and inside it was a coupon for a free two-night stay. I didn’t have to fight an inclination to search for it.
“I have to admit,” Ronnie said, “that I made it from the door to the bed in a single leap. That was before I looked at the bedspread.” The bedspread, on which she was reclining—one of Ronnie’s guides to the good life is never to miss an opportunity to get horizontal—was patterned in little mouse footprints. “If this place had a chandelier you would have found me hanging from it.”
I said, “Did you sample the cheese?” Sharing the room’s one table with my steak was a dusty Plexiglas dome that covered a plate with three desiccated, melancholy looking pieces of cheese on it. The plate said nibble nibble nibble all the way around its edge. The table was in front of the room’s sole window, and the window was covered with a red, white, and blue drape that featured about sixty images of Mickey Mouse giving the onlooker a cheery four-fingered salute. About twenty yards away from the window the motel’s magenta sign glared away, with just enough of its light bleeding through the drape to turn Mickey’s friendly world a wee bit demonic.
“You have to arm wrestle a rat before you’re allowed to open it, so I passed,” she said, rearranging herself among the lumps in the mattress.
I picked up the bone to gnaw on it. It’s my favorite part of a steak, except maybe the crisp fat.
“That’s so carnivorous,” she said, watching me. “‘Thousands of years of civilization, erased like chalk.’”
“A new stage in our relationship,” I said. “You haven’t criticized my eating before.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said. She rolled over on her stomach and propped her chin on her hand to watch me work on the steak. “My mother always said you can learn a lot about a man from the way he eats a bone.”
“She always said it? Not the easiest phrase to work into a conversation.”
“I’ve been staring at that curtain,” she said with a nod at the window, “and given that you’re a font of useless information—”
“Useless?” I said. “Forsooth. Obscure, perhaps, but never useless.”
“—I just know that you can explain to me why Mickey Mouse only has four fingers.”
“Actually,” I said with my mouth full, “he has four digits. Three fingers and a thumb.”
“Mice don’t have thumbs.”
“Yeah, well, they don’t wear gloves, either.” I put down the bone, swiped at the cold fat on the plate with the pad of my right index finger, and then put the finger into my mouth. Around my finger, I said, “Mmmm.”
“So, no answer. Life is just one disappointment after another.”
“I didn’t say I had no answer. I was just busy eating. In fact—and this is the solemn truth—Walt, as the whole world called him, was asked that very question.”
Ronnie said, “I’ll just bet he was.”
“And this is what he said, word for word: ‘Artistically five digits are too many for a mouse.’”
She looked at me long enough that, in a film, there probably would have been a dissolve. “That’s it?”
“I don’t make this stuff up,” I said. “I’m stuck with the truth.”
“So,” she said, “why would that person have hired two burglars, you and Lumia?”
“Being double-careful is my guess. The only reason I even learned Lumia was there was that I went the night after I was actually supposed to go. Way it looks to me, if I came out empty-handed on my scheduled night, she was supposed to give the place another shaking.”
Ronnie said, “Do you think they were waiting for you outside on the night you were supposed to be there?”
“That’s exactly what I think.”
“Brrrr,” she said. “So that woman with the orange hair, she wanted—”
“Looks like it. Dessert?”
“I ate it. Are you doing anything to sidestep all this? I’d hate to have to move out of the edgwood. Not that this isn’t nice, of course.”
“I think Jake’s going to find her for me, through the kids.”
Ronnie rolled over on her back, staring up at a bit of the ceiling that looked to me just like all the other bits of the ceiling. She let the silence stretch out and said, “It’s tomorrow at ten, isn’t it? The meeting with Francie.”
Francie DuBois was the disappearance specialist—she called herself a travel agent—who was going to help me get Ronnie’s two-year-old son, Eric, out of New Jersey without a trace, once I figured out how to get my hands on the kid. Francie had opened the exit door for a great many people who had been just one wrong turn away from the hard hello, and now they were all living in some off-brand country, eating sheep’ testicles or something else prized by the locals, but free of mortal terror. I wasn’t personally certain it was a trade I’d make.
“Ten it is,” I said. “We can just lounge around here and soak up the atmosphere until it’s time to go. Memorize Hickory Dickory Dock and Three Blind Mice. Not much character development, but they’re classics of their kind.”
She said nothing. I figured I knew what she was thinking about, and I was right.
“Are you sure you want to take on that woman with the orange hair?”
“I don’t think I’ve got any choice. I think I can either take her on or sit around until she comes after me.”
“So if you just returned the money, she wouldn’t—” She broke off, rolled onto her back and put her arm over her eyes to shut out the room. She said, “I don’t know.”
“About what.”
“Any of it. I don’t know whether you shouldn’t just try to find a way not to come up against that woman, and I don’t know whether Francie, even if she seems pretty smart, can really erase your tracks out of New Jersey. I don’t even know whether you can get in and out of that house in one piece.”
I pushed back from the table and got up, just to move a little. “To take the points one at a time, I think if I try to give the Bride of Plastic Man her money back she’s going to figure I have the doohickey and come after me with guns. As far as Francie is concerned, all we’re doing is looking at potential plans. And getting in and out of houses is what I do.”
She put the heels of her hands to her eyes and kept them there for a moment. Then she rolled back onto her left side and said, “In case I’m not making myself completely clear, I’m worried about you. I’m worried about how I would handle it if anything—anything bad—were to happen to you. I’m not sure I could survive losing you.”
I said, “Oh.”
“You think you’re immortal.”
“Not to start an argument, and not to downplay the way I feel about what you just said, but if I thought I were immortal I would have been dead a long time ago.”
“Well,” she said, “I’m glad you’re not.”
“Me, too,” I said. “I would have missed this room.”
She said, “Oh, fuck you.”
“But you mean that in a good way.”
“Of course I do, you idiot. Well, if you’re going to take her on, we might as well talk it over. I do have some survival experience, stuff you don’t even know yet. What’s your plan?”
“It hasn’t actually evolved to plan status yet.”
“That’s not exactly what I wanted to—”
She broke off because I’d gotten up, and she must have read my expression because she said, “Don’t touch me until you’ve washed the grease off your hands.”
“I was going to give you a chance to lick it off. I mean, considering the way you went after all that fat.”
She pushed herself to a sitting position. “If I do lick it off, will you bother me?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, trot that grease over here. Something about this pl
ace just gets the old hormones pumping. But there’s a condition.”
Almost close enough to touch her, I wagged my index finger at her and said, “A mere stumble on the path to paradise, a faded stop sign I can blow through, a ripple on the surface of—”
“As much as I usually love to hear you talk, shut up. There’s a time and a place for everything.”
She put the greasy finger in her mouth, and I shut up.
17
Gateway to Stardom
Despite my recent lack of sleep, I snapped bolt upright at the sound of the mouse’s xylophone, which was what my dream had turned it into, a sort of all-rodent version of the Modern Jazz Quartet with a xylophone made of tiny bones played by a mouse wearing white gloves and sunglasses. But the sound continued after I opened my eyes, and once I had pushed through a moment of yawning incomprehension the mice turned into John Prine and I saw my phone blinking on the table where the remains of the steak still sat, silhouetted against what, given the fuchsia tint of the light outside, looked like a hundred Mickey Mouses waving for rescue from the ninth circle of Hell, the Mouse Inferno.
Ronnie said something to someone in whatever dimension she was in. It sounded like cantaloupe or, I suppose, can’t elope. I cast a mental vote in favor of melon and got out of bed.
Unknown number and a text: Losing my patience.
I said out loud, “We do have something in common.” I read the text again, for no reason except that I still had one foot in the Land of Nod. Nope, I hadn’t missed anything; she was losing her patience. Just for the hell of it, I brought up Anime’s app and found myself looking down the entry hall toward the door of our apartment. The light all came from the left side of the screen, which was as it should have been; I’d left two table lamps burning in the living room.
I pulled the chair to the table, pushed the cold meat a little farther away, and watched my own front door on the bright little screen. The experience was unusual without being interesting, and after a minute or two I went to Facebook and read the latest creative slagging of the president, and a bunch of people making irate complaints about spoilers in some TV show with dragons in it, and then, with a yawn that was loud enough to make Ronnie say, “What?” in her sleep, I went to my email.
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