“It’s hard to know about Tonto, isn’t it?”
“So far,” I said.
“He’ll always be hard to know. I can promise you that. You all have screws missing, all of you, but he’s like an empty parts house. It’s not just the screws that are gone, but all manner of stuff.”
“I think you’re right,” I said.
“Marvin, he’ll be all right at home, won’t he?”
“Sure. Wherever he ends up, he’ll be okay.”
I wasn’t sure of that, and she knew I wasn’t sure, but it was a little game we were playing. I saw a tear in her eye and I took hold of her and we held each other, and finally we kissed, and she took up her bag and gave me a smile and started to get on the bus. I patted her butt. She said, “Why, thank you.”
I laughed and she got on the bus.
I stood there until I saw her take her seat, and then I still couldn’t go, so I stood there until she turned to smile at me. She looked as if she was about to bust out crying, which was exactly how I felt. I watched until the bus started to move and she lifted a hand, and I waved back. Then with a turn of the corner and a fart of exhaust, the bus and Brett were gone, on their way out to Arizona.
It was solid daylight when I drove over to the cop shop and went inside and asked for Drake. I was lucky. He was in. The dispatcher picked up a line and Drake appeared and gave me a not-so-friendly drag of the hand, indicating I should follow him.
We went along the hall and passed the booger-lined room with the greasy mirror, turned into another room with a long table and some chairs and a counter with a pot of coffee brewing and a couple boxes of doughnuts holding court next to them.
Drake went over and picked up the pot of coffee and poured some into a Styrofoam cup, asked if I wanted any. I looked at the coffee. It was thick and very dark, like sewer sludge.
“No thanks,” I said.
Drake got a couple of doughnuts out of one of the boxes and put them on a napkin. He didn’t ask me if I wanted a doughnut. He went over to the table and set the doughnut-laden napkin on the table and set the coffee beside it, then put his ass in a chair and crossed his legs. I sat across from him.
“You know,” he said, “I’m the unluckiest man in the world. I wasn’t supposed to be working this shift. I wasn’t working it, I wouldn’t have you.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought you and me, there was a kind of spark, you know.”
“No spark,” he said. “What do you want?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “These FBI guys, this all on the up-and-up?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, they gonna keep their part of the bargain if we help them out?”
“I assume the ‘we’ you refer to is you and Leonard, ’cause it sure isn’t me and it definitely isn’t the department. We got nothing to do with this.”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”
“I have no idea what they’ll do,” he said, sipping coffee, pausing to bite into a doughnut. “The FBI, they do their thing and we do ours. Unfortunately, sometimes the things clash.”
“Just like sex.”
“No. There’s no fun in it. Not even a little bit. All I can say is Hirem knows all manner of stuff the FBI would love to know, and it’s stuff worth them knowing, but I got no love for them FBI boys. They come in here like we’re dog mess on the bottom of their shoes, like they’re the goddamn ghosts of J. Edgar Hoover hisself.”
“If they were the ghosts of Hoover,” I said, “they’d be wearing dresses.”
“What?”
“He was supposed to be a transvestite. You know, transvestites put on dresses. I think he was gay too.”
“I hadn’t heard that.”
“Oh yeah. Big-time.”
“Huh? I’ll be damned.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“You’re sure about that dresses thing?”
“That’s the story. I’m not sure about anything.”
“I’ll be damned. Hadn’t heard that.”
I let him contemplate. He said, “You know, considering how Hoover was, the way these guys act, that’s kind of funny.”
“Yep. But about the FBI guys …”
Drake shrugged. “What I can tell you is, if they’re wanting you to do something like this, it’s more than an ask. It’s a kind of push, and it might be a lot nastier than you think. It might be worse than a trial and a jury. But if you’ve come to me to know more about them, more about what they want, you’re in the wrong place. I understand you defended yourself, you and Leonard and Brett. But I can’t feel good about citizens doing what you done and all you get is a slap on the wrist. I don’t buy you were just driving around armed to the teeth and they came out of nowhere and decided to kill you.”
