I couldn’t adequately explain why I went up West Street to Second, turned the corner and went into Wildcat. Every time I was about to leave Rufus Booth’s in-home dojo he asked the same question: “What’s your number one defensive tactic?” And the answer was always the same: “Avoid trouble or run.”
Got that right.
So there I was inside Wildcat. Smart. As if I hadn’t learned anything in the fifteen months I’d been a gumshoe. Maybe it was because I was still in training, hadn’t picked up the finer points yet. But it was Sunday, two fifteen in the afternoon, not four people in the place, and the music was at a reasonable volume. “Graceland” by Paul Simon. Hard to imagine anything tamer than that. Well, “Garden Party” by Ricky Nelson, “Love Me Tender” by Elvis. So I sat at the bar, no one else nearby, and ordered a sarsaparilla.
“You kidding?” said the barkeep, a woman I put just shy of thirty. Pretty, no makeup, five-two, wearing a Wildcat T-shirt.
“I never kid about sarsaparilla.”
“That’s funny. We don’t carry it. You’re probably the first person to ask. Ever. Puts you in a class all your own.”
I smiled. “How about an ice-cold Mountain Dew?”
She planted her elbows on the bar. “You’re a riot, hon.”
“Milk?”
“That I can do. How about an Adam Bomb Two? Colorado Bulldog? Or I can do milk, neat.”
“Ugh, actually.”
“Thought so, Gramps. You look like the sarsaparilla type. Big, but sorta mild. Sorry I can’t accommodate.”
Gramps? I lifted my eyes to the underside of the ball cap’s bill, had second thoughts about that World’s Greatest Grampa thing. “Mild. That’s me. How about Pete’s Wicked Ale?”
“That I can do. Glass or bottle?”
“Bottle’s fine.”
She popped the cap, set it in front of me, looked toward the door, then wandered off toward the far end of the bar. She lifted a section of bar and went through, then disappeared into a back room.
As I took a sip of Pete’s, shadowy movement in the mirror behind the bar caught my eye. I turned, and Ramon—last night’s whippet—was coming up on my right side.
Well, shit.
But he didn’t know me, didn’t know I knew who he was, so I turned away and kept an eye on him in the mirror. Baggy cargo pants, black T-shirt, three heavy gold chains around his neck.
“Back again?” he said.
I turned slowly and faced him. “Huh? Are you talking to me?”
“See anyone else in here, dude?”
I looked around. The place had emptied out. Which wasn’t a big trick since there’d only been a few guys nursing beers near the front entrance at a table beneath a TV with the sound off. They’d gone, left their beers on the table.
This was Ramon’s turf. I was just some old guy sitting on a barstool. Rufus had impressed upon me several pieces of advice in the way of self-defense. Avoid trouble if you can, run if you can, never panic, don’t let the thought of pain paralyze you, but if confrontation is likely or inevitable try to show fear because that particular Sun Tzu puts assholes off their best game. Ramon was looking like an asshole at the moment, so I tried to pacify him.
“Buy you a beer?” I said in a friendly voice.
“Like you bought Mira dinner last night? Like that?”
“Mira?”
He pulled out a butterfly knife, gave it a smooth whip-whap that revealed a gleaming four-inch blade.
I got off the stool and backed away. “Hey, hey, hey. Whoa, friend. What’s with the knife?”
Okay, that bit about not panicking isn’t easy, Rufus, in case you didn’t know. I took a deep breath, which helped. Rufus said to breathe, smacked my head every time I didn’t breathe enough. So I remembered to breathe.
“Friend?” Ramon said with an eerie smile. “You want to be friends? Maybe buy me dinner too? Then maybe you and me, we go see a movie, eat some popcorn?”
“Look, I’ll just leave if that’s what you want.”
“You were in here last night.”
“Well, yeah. It was loud so I left. Look, no trouble, okay? All I want is to get out of here.”
He held the knife underhand, pointed at me, ready. “How ’bout we talk first?”
“C’mon, sir. Really, you don’t need that knife …”
He grinned. “Sir?”
Actually, I thought that was a great touch. If Ramon didn’t kill me, I would tell Rufus about it—seeing that killer’s look in Ramon’s eyes dim slightly. But this business with the knife also made me mad, to put it lightly. I hadn’t expected that. I was tired of people trying to kill me. The world is filling up with vermin, psychotic trash, and I was getting damn sick of it.
I edged sideways. “I’ll just go, okay?”
He lifted the knife another inch. “Stay where you are, dude. I ain’t done with you yet.”
“What? What do you mean?” Weak. Afraid. This guy was a scary little weasel, but he was beginning to really piss me off.
“What’re you doin’ here? You a cop? Narc?”
And if I was, then what? If he thought he’d just pulled a knife on a cop, where did he think this was going to end up?
“Nothing like that. I came in for a drink, thought I’d check the place out when it was a lot quieter.”
“Sure you did.”
I took a step back. “Don’t … don’t do this. Please.”
He smiled.
Truth is in the eyes. This guy’s eyes were rabid wolverine, nothing human inside, glowing with anticipation. Even if it has never happened to you before, you know when someone has crossed a mental boundary and made the irrevocable decision to hurt you. Ramon was seconds away from cutting.
“Look, if it’s the hat you want, I’ll just leave it on the bar.” I took off the ball cap with my left hand and tossed it three feet to the bar, used the quarter-second distraction to grab his right wrist in my right hand, palm up like Rufus had made me do a few thousand times in the past six months. This time I did it faster. “Anything you do for real, do it with speed and power,” he told me over and over. “If someone threatens your life, don’t hold back. It’s not a game. Give it a hundred and ten percent.”
So I didn’t hold back. I twisted his wrist counterclockwise, which he would see as clockwise. He was wiry, not strong. I cranked his arm in a half-turn that locked his elbow out and took all the leverage out of his arm. The knife was suddenly useless in his hand. I pulled his arm toward me then down and across my body as I spun hard to my left and slammed my right hip into his elbow. I felt the joint go. Felt it. He screamed. Probably hurt when tendons tore loose. Or ligaments. The knife clattered to the floor as I grabbed his wrist in both hands, lifted his arm, ducked under it as I twisted it further and cranked his arm above his head, kept turning to my left, felt the shoulder joint go the way Rufus said it would, then I slammed him back against the bar. The entire sequence was one continuous movement that didn’t take three seconds.
He bounced off the bar and dropped like a rag doll, giving off a high-pitched squeal that was mostly an airless scream, as if he couldn’t breathe. I made sure he had no more fight left, then I picked up his knife, kept an eye on him.
“Thanks,” I said, putting it in a pocket. “I always wanted one of these.” Which was of course a lie. I’d never given knives as weapons a moment of thought.
He stared at me with eyes so full of pain he might not be seeing or hearing much of anything. He was on the floor with his head on a brass foot rail, right arm twisted unnaturally. It would take surgery to put it back together and physical therapy before he would be tying his shoes again.
I crouched in front of him and looked into his eyes. “Arm hurts a little, don’t it?”
He stared at me through a glaze of pain, but balefully. An animal disguised as human.
I poked his forehead with a stiff finger. “Next time, I won’t stop until you’re dead.” Pretty fuckin’ macho since I was so full of adrenaline I
was about to puke. The words rolled out of me without thought. My voice was shaky, a quarter octave high. A knife? In a Second Street Reno bar on a lazy Sunday afternoon? What kind of a world was this, anyway? This subhuman had made the decision to slash me, watch me bleed, maybe kill me? What did he think gave him that right? What kind of a person could stick a knife into another person?
I grabbed him by the ears and bounced his head off the brass rail. Hard. It made a short hollow ringing sound. His eyes rolled up in his head. Out. Then I gave him another bounce for good measure and because I didn’t like him.
The bar was empty. Miss Barkeep still gone, no one else in the place. Guess everyone there had known Ramon, had a good idea of what was up, didn’t want to get mixed up in anything. He might have said something to the guys at the table near the front door as he came in. They might be out on the sidewalk right now, keeping anyone from coming in until Ramon took care of business and strolled out, grinning. It might be taking longer than expected. One of them might have a peek inside soon to see how it was going. Or someone might’ve already called 911.
So, time to leave. I got my hat off the bar, took the bottle of Wicked Ale and its fingerprints with me, went out a back exit and found myself in an alley with garbage cans and plastic bins full of empty bottles. I made it to the end of the alley and around the south side of Wildcat before an out-of-body feeling hit me with so much force I felt like a helium balloon, as if I’d become untethered from the world. A bar fight? A knife fight? Me? Had that actually happened? I floated along in a haze, no thought about where I was going, no memory of reaching the West Street sidewalk and walking south, no idea how I got to Virginia Street or having crossed the bridge over the Truckee River, or when or where I got rid of the bottle of Wicked Ale.
CHAPTER SIX
THREE TWENTY P.M., I rang the bell outside Booth’s dojo.
He opened the door and stared at me, gave me a quick up and down look. His eyes narrowed. “What up, brother?”
“Need to talk.”
Having walked over a mile to his place from Wildcat, I was partly back inside myself. And disturbed by what I’d done, that I had put myself in that situation. I was not my favorite person at that moment.
“You okay?”
“I’ve been better, Ruf.”
Rufus took me into the dojo and sat me in a wooden chair. He looked into my eyes. “You didn’t run.”
“How’d you know?”
“You still got that spiky adrenaline thing going. Your eyes aren’t right. How you feel?”
“Not good.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“You need water.” He went through a door, came back with a plastic bottle, uncapped it, gave it to me. “Drink it slow.”
I took a sip, then leaned forward, put my head between my knees. Held that position for half a minute, then looked up at him. “I’m an idiot.”
“We all are, to one degree or another, but you mighta had a special moment. How ’bout you take ten or fifteen minutes and come down a little more? Get some air in you. Shut your eyes. Breathe. I’ll be back.”
He went out, left me there. I closed my eyes and got air. It helped. I downed more water. That helped too.
When I opened my eyes, he was crouched in front of me. I hadn’t heard him come in, not a whisper.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
I got the knife out of my pocket, handed it to him. He took it, flicked it open, flicked it shut. “Benchmade Morpho,” he said. “A fifty-one BK. Worth about three hundred bucks.” He handed it back.
“Good to know.”
He smiled. “That knife takedown worked, huh?”
“Just like you showed me.”
His smile went out like a blown light. “You got any idea how lucky you are? You mighta practiced it a thousand times in here the past half year. Maybe two. Sounds like a lot, don’t it? I wouldn’t want to try anything out there I hadn’t run through at least fifty thousand times. If it isn’t pure muscle memory, hard and fast, no thought involved, then it ain’t worth spit, ace. You had no backup move. What I oughta do, I oughta cut you loose. There’s a world out there where dangerous people crawl around in the gutters. If you think this judo shit makes you invincible, you’re not gonna last long.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Says you. It’s almost always like that. Now tell me about it from the beginning, and I’ll tell you where you fucked up.”
So I told him, as much of it as I could remember. Already it was getting fuzzy in my mind.
He slapped me upside the head, just hard enough to make it hurt some. Not many people could do that, but Rufus could do it anytime he wanted and I couldn’t stop him if I tried. A ninth-dan judo master isn’t like other humans.
“You fucked up the moment you took your first step in the direction of that Wildcat place.”
“I know.”
“Don’t go back.” He popped my head again. “Ever.”
I nodded. I deserved this. I’d brought it on myself. After I’d seen Mira’s face, I had been on a kind of automatic pilot, which is the exact opposite of thinking rationally.
“I don’t fit in my own skin, Ruf.”
“You won’t. It’ll take about three days to get it out of your head. It’ll go a little faster if you do familiar easy things. Best is if you take a long slow run, take the edge off that adrenaline.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
He stared at me for a while. “Guy pulls a knife on you, you took it away and tore him up pretty good.”
“That’s the short version.”
“Good for you. Better than gettin’ cut.” He thumped my head one last time. “Next time, ace, run. I’m gonna rethink that orange belt of yours.”
* * *
According to Lewis Thomas, everyone has a desire to be useful, which is nonsense, patently untrue. Ramon had no desire to be useful to anyone, including himself. At best, he had a little shit’s desire to be admired by other little shits.
Enough.
* * *
One of the better things about my buying Jeri’s house from Ron DiFrazzia after Jeri was murdered is that it’s on Washington Street between First and Second, only four hundred feet from the Truckee River and the bike path that stretches from East Sparks all the way to Verdi, a distance of some twenty miles. I could pop out the door and go. I went west to Mayberry Park and back, total distance of about ten miles, at ten minutes a mile, an easy lope, trying to get Ramon out of my head.
Which worked, sort of. Then I showered, dressed, and my phone rang. It was Lucy.
“How’s Albuquerque, kiddo?” I said.
“Hot. How’s Reno?”
“Got in a knife fight and took a ten-mile run.”
“Wow, that’s so not funny.”
“You find Megan yet?”
“We’re maybe tracking her down. She was at one place and it looks like she probably changed her name. I’m learning a lot of cool stuff with Ma.”
“She’s like that.”
“You figure out that embezzlement thing yet?”
“Workin’ on it.”
“Miss me?”
“Like crazy, Luce.”
“Well, good. Maybe we should get hitched.”
“It’s on my radar.”
“Okay, good. But no pressure, Mort. Gotta go. We’re about to go into a restaurant here. I’m starving.”
We ended the call. So knife fights weren’t funny. I thought that myself. Lucy would give me hell for it later, especially the way I’d said it but hadn’t said it. She would probably slap me upside the head too, harder than Rufus had.
I walked over to the Golden Goose in yet another disguise. Disguises were getting to be routine. This time it was a golfer’s hat, long white hair, white moustache, sunglasses, a cane, fake limp, and a foam and polyester pad under my shirt that rounded me out at about three hundred pounds. Television had turned me into something of a celebrity, made me mor
e recognizable than the vice president, not a difficult trick. I kept off Second Street and stayed well away from Wildcat—not that Ramon would be there. Odds were, he would be in surgery another hour or two. I could still hear that chicken-bone sound of his elbow joint going.
You proud of that, Mort?
Nope.
Well, sort of, to be honest. The son of a bitch pulled a knife on me. Far out there on my mental horizon was the smoky haze of a long-ago gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
I got to the Green Room at 5:57. O’Roarke was just coming on duty and Rosa was at the bar in a sunflower-yellow cleavage-rich dress that revealed lovely legs up to mid-thigh. It felt good to be among friends in a familiar place. Rosa was twenty-four, slender, pretty, and, last I’d heard, she was charging fifteen hundred a night. I’d told her how to avoid a big tax liability. Tax forms have a long list of codes for occupation, but none for hooker or call girl, so we had her down as an artist, claiming an income of about $48,000 a year, which covered the usual living expenses. All the rest, something north of $120,000, was getting packed into a safe deposit box. It was earning zero percent interest, but out of Uncle’s sight.
I sat beside her, leaned my cane against the bar, put my hat, wig, and moustache on the seat to my left, glasses on the bar.
“A cane?” she said. “Since when?”
“Think of it as insurance. You never know when you’ll pull up lame.”
She laughed, showing a pink tongue, even white teeth. Her eyes had a healthy sparkle to them.
“What’ll it be, Spitfire?” O’Roarke asked. “It used to be Pete’s, but you’ve been all over the place the last few months. Got a new shipment of sarsaparilla in, just for you.”
“Wild Turkey, barkeep. A double, straight up.”
“Whoa,” Rosa said. “Been one of those days, huh?”
“One of those, yeah.”
She patted my arm. “Well, if you need comforting, just let me know.”
“Will do. Have to ask Lucy first.”
“I’m sure that’ll go well.” Rosa looked around. “Where is that gorgeous little minx of yours, anyway?”
“Albuquerque.” The double whisky landed in front of me. I knocked back a third of it to get it started. One more reason to dislike Ramon. Now the bastard had me drinking hard stuff.
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