'My cousin Louis had a friend named Booger,' Iggy said. 'The same thing happened to him, shot while walking a dog, except it wasn't a rifle and it wasn't a dog.'
'Booger?' Mitch wondered.
'Booker,' Iggy corrected. 'B-o-o-k-e-r. He had a cat he called Hairball. He was walking Hairball, and he got shot.'
'People walk cats?'
'The way it was — Hairball is cozy in a travel cage, and Booker is carrying him to a vet's office.'
Mitch repeatedly checked the rearview and side mirrors. A black Cadillac SUV had departed the freeway in their wake. Block after block, it remained behind them.
'So Booker wasn't actually walking the cat,' Mitch said.
'He was walking with the cat, and this like twelve-year-old brat, this faucet-nosed little dismo, shot Booker with a paint-ball gun.'
'So he wasn't killed.'
'He wasn't quashed, no, and it was a cat instead of a dog, but Booker was totally blue.'
'Blue?'
'Blue hair, blue face. He was fully pissed.'
The Cadillac SUV reliably remained two or three vehicles behind them. Perhaps the driver hoped Mitch wouldn't notice him.
'So Booker's all blue. What happened to the kid?' Mitch asked.
'Booker was gonna break the little dismo's hand off, but the kid shot him in the crotch and ran. Hey, Mitch, did you know there's a town in Pennsylvania named Blue Balls?'
'I didn't know.'
'It's in Amish country. There's another town nearby called Intercourse.'
'How about that.'
'Maybe those Amish aren't as square as Cheez-Its, after all.'
Mitch accelerated to cross an intersection before the traffic light phased to red. Behind him, the black SUV changed lanes, sped up, and made it through on the yellow.
'Did you ever eat an Amish shoofly pie?' Iggy asked.
'No. Never did.'
'It's full-on rich, sweeter than six Gidget movies. Like eating molasses. Treacherous, dude.'
The Cadillac dropped back, returned to Mitch's lane. Three vehicles separated them once more.
Iggy said, 'Earl Potter lost a leg eating shoofly pie.'
'Earl Potter?'
'Tim Potter's dad. He was diabetic, but he didn't know it, and he totally destroyed like a bucket of sweets every day. Did you ever eat a Quakertown pie?'
'What about Earl's leg?' Mitch asked.
'Unreal, bro. One day his foot's numb, he can't walk right. Turns out he's got almost no circulation down there 'cause of radical diabetes. They sawed his left leg off above the knee.'
'While he was eating shoofly pie.'
'No. He realized he had to give up sweets.'
'Good for him.'
'So the day before surgery, he had his last dessert, and he chose a whole shoofly pie with like a cow's worth of whipped cream. Did you ever see that stylin' Amish movie with Harrison Ford and the girl with the great knockers?'
By way of Hairball, Blue Balls, Intercourse, shoofly pie, and Harrison Ford, they arrived at Iggy's apartment building.
Mitch stopped at the curb, and the black SUV went past without slowing. The side windows were tinted, so he couldn't see the driver or any passengers.
Opening his door, before getting out of the truck, Iggy said, 'You okay, boss?'
'I'm okay.'
'You look stomped.'
'I saw a guy shot to death,' Mitch reminded him.
'Yeah. Wasn't that radical? I guess I know who's gonna rule the bar at Rolling Thunder tonight. Maybe you should stop in.'
'Don't save a stool for me.'
The Cadillac SUV dwindled westward. The afternoon sun wrapped the suspicious vehicle in glister and glare. It shimmered and seemed to vanish into the solar maw.
Iggy got out of the truck, looked back in at Mitch, and pulled a sad face. 'Ball and chain.'
'Wind beneath my wings.'
'Whoa. That's goob talk.'
'Go waste yourself.'
'I do intend to get mildly polluted,' Iggy assured him. 'Dr. Ig prescribes at least a six-pack of cerveza for you. Tell Mrs. Mitch I think she's an uber wahine.'
Iggy slammed the door and walked away, big and loyal and sweet and clueless.
With hands that were suddenly shaky on the wheel, Mitch piloted the truck into the street once more.
Coming north, he had been impatient to be rid of Iggy and to get home. Now his stomach turned when he considered what might wait for him there.
What he most feared was finding blood.
Chapter 6
Mitch drove with the truck windows open, wanting the sounds of the streets, proof of life.
The Cadillac SUV did not reappear. No other vehicle took up the pursuit. Evidently, he had imagined the tail.
His sense of being under surveillance passed. From time to time, his eyes were drawn to the rearview mirror, but no longer with the expectation of seeing anything suspicious.
He felt alone, and worse than alone. Isolated. He almost wished that the black SUV would reappear.
Their house was in an older neighborhood of Orange, one of the oldest cities in the county. When he turned onto their street, except for the vintage of the cars and trucks, a curtain in time might have parted, welcoming him to 1945.
The bungalow — pale-yellow clapboard, white trim, a cedar-shingle roof — stood behind a picket fence on which roses twined. Some larger and some nicer houses occupied the block, but none boasted better landscaping.
He parked in the driveway beside the house, under a massive old California pepper tree, and stepped out into a breathless afternoon.
Sidewalks and yards were deserted. In this neighborhood, most families relied on two incomes; everyone was at work. At 3:04, no latchkey kids were yet home from school.
No maids, no window washers, no gardening services busy with leaf blowers. These homeowners swept their own carpets, mowed their own yards.
The pepper tree braided the sunshine in its cascading tresses, and littered the shadowed pavement with elliptical slivers of light.
Mitch opened a side gate in the picket fence. He crossed the lawn to the front steps.
The porch was deep and cool. White wicker chairs with green cushions stood beside small wicker tables with glass tops.
On Sunday afternoons, he and Holly often sat here, talking, reading the newspaper, watching hummingbirds flit from one crimson bloom to another on the trumpet vines that flourished on the porch posts.
Sometimes they unfolded a card table between the wicker chairs. She crushed him at Scrabble. He
