Bones must have known it had been a long shot, but all the same he looked panicky. “Hey, Priest, you want to know the truth of it.… I’m in bad shape. Could you loan me a thousand bucks? That’d get me straight.”
“We don’t have any money,” Priest told him. “We don’t use it here, don’t you remember that?”
Bones looked crafty. “You gotta have a stash somewhere, come on!”
“Sorry, pal, can’t help.”
Bones nodded. “That’s a bummer, man. I mean, I’m in serious trouble.”
Priest said: “And don’t try to go behind my back and ask Star, because you’ll get the same answer.” He put a harsh note into his voice. “Are you listening to me?”
“Sure, sure,” Bones said, looking scared. “Be cool, Priest, man, be cool.”
“I’m cool,” Priest said.
Priest worried about Melanie all afternoon. She might have changed her mind and decided to go back to her husband or simply got scared and taken off in her car. Then he would be finished. There was no way he or anyone else here could interpret the data on Michael Quercus’s disk and figure out where to place the seismic vibrator tomorrow.
But she showed up at the end of the afternoon, to his great relief. He told her about Flower being arrested and warned her that one or two people wanted to put the blame on Melanie and her cute clothes. She said she would get some work clothes from the free shop.
After supper Priest went to Song’s cabin and picked up her guitar. “Are you using this?” he said politely. He would never say, “May I borrow your guitar?” because in theory all property was communal, so the guitar was his as much as hers, even though she had made it. However, in practice everyone always asked.
He sat outside his cabin with Flower and tuned the guitar. Spirit, the dog, watched alertly, as if he, too, were going to learn to play. “Most songs have three chords,” Priest began. “If you know three chords, you can play nine out of ten of the songs in the whole world.”
He showed her the chord of C. As she struggled to press the strings with her soft fingertips, he studied her face in the evening light: her perfect skin, the dark hair, green eyes like Star’s, the little frown as she concentrated.
He thought of himself at that age, already a criminal, experienced, skilled, hardened to violence, with a hatred of cops and a contempt for ordinary citizens who were dumb enough to let themselves get robbed.
She played the chord, and Priest realized that a particular song had been running in his head ever since Bones arrived. It was a folkie number from the early sixties that Star had always liked.
“I’ll teach you a song your mommy used to sing to you when you were a baby,” he said. He took the guitar from her. “Do you remember this?” He sang:
In his head he heard Star’s unmistakable voice, low and sexy then as now.
Priest was about the same age as Bones, and Bones was dying. Priest had no doubt about that. Soon the girl and the baby would leave him. He would starve his body and feed his habit. He might overdose or poison himself with bad drugs, or he might just abuse his system until it gave up and he got pneumonia. One way or another, he was a dead man.
As Flower struggled to play the chord of A minor, Priest toyed with the idea of returning to normal society. He fantasized going every day to a job, buying socks and wingtip shoes, owning a TV set and a toaster. The thought made him queasy. He had never lived straight. He had been brought up in a whorehouse, educated on the streets, briefly the owner of a semilegitimate business, and for most of his life the leader of a hippie commune cut off from the world.
He recalled the one regular job he had ever had. At eighteen he had gone to work for the Jenkinsons, the couple who ran the liquor store down the street. He had thought of them as old, at the time, but now he guessed they had been in their fifties. His intention had been to work just long enough to figure out where they kept their money, then steal it. But then he learned something about himself.
He discovered he had a queer talent for arithmetic. Each morning Mr. Jenkinson put ten dollars’ worth of change into the cash register. As customers bought liquor and paid and got change, Priest either served them himself or heard one of the Jenkinsons sing out the total, “Dollar twenty-nine, please, Mrs. Roberto,” or “Three bucks even, sir.” And the figures seemed to add themselves up in his head. All day long Priest always knew exactly how much money was in the till, and at the end of the day he could tell Mr. Jenkinson the total before he counted it.
He would hear Mr. Jenkinson talking to the salesmen who called, and he soon knew the wholesale and retail prices of every item in the store. From then on the automatic register in his brain calculated the profit on every transaction, and he was awestruck by how much the Jenkinsons were making
He arranged for them to be robbed four times in a month, then made them an offer for the store. When they turned him down, he arranged a fifth robbery and made sure Mrs. Jenkinson got roughed up this time. After that Mr. Jenkinson accepted his offer.
Priest borrowed the deposit from the neighborhood loan shark and paid Mr. Jenkinson the installments out of the store’s takings. Although he could not read or write, he always knew his financial position exactly. Nobody could cheat him. One time he employed a respectable-looking middle-aged woman who stole a dollar out of the register every day. At the end of the week he deducted five dollars from her pay, beat her up, and told her not to come back.
Within a year he had four stores; two years later he had a wholesale liquor warehouse; after three years he was a millionaire; and at the end of his fourth year he was on the run.
He sometimes wondered what might have happened if he had paid off the loan shark in full, given his accountant honest figures to report to the IRS, and made a plea-bargain deal with the LAPD on the fraud charges. Maybe today he would have a company as big as Coca-Cola and be living in one of those mansions in Beverly Hills
