“He would.”
“Thanks for lifting my spirits.”
“You know I love you, even with all your deficiencies.”
“How are things?”
“Well, pretty good for a small-blown crisis, but it’s the same crisis,” Brett said. “The one where my daughter is leading a screwed-up life, but pretends she wants to change and tells me all her woes, then goes right back to doing what she’s always done, being who she always was and is. A whore who drinks too much and buys her clothes at expensive stores in Houston, and her underwear at Wal-Mart.”
“And you’re thinking it’s your fault?”
“Some of it is my fault. Except for the Wal-Mart underwear… Oh, hell. Who am I talking to? You know I buy mine there too.”
“Your ex had a little to do with Tillie’s problems.”
“True, but I didn’t have to set his head on fire. I think it set a bad example.”
“Maybe a little,” I said.
“Are you doing okay in the private detective business?”
“Well, I’m in it. And there’s supposed to be a big check at the end of the rainbow, and me and Leonard got to hear some neat stuff about vampires, devil heads, a dog-eaten body, and a white trash winning the lottery and getting hit by a train. Oh, and a bunch of cats inherited the lottery money.”
“Say what?”
I told her all that I had learned.
When I finished, Brett said, “That’s some weird stuff.”
“You think? When are you coming home?”
“Tomorrow. I’ll be home by noon.”
“Really?”
“I just made up my mind. Tillie was the same before I got here, and she’ll be the same after I leave.”
“How is the prostitute business?”
“Booming. One of her johns asked me if I wanted to pull a mother and daughter.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah, I made three hundred dollars and there was a pony involved.”
“Is that all you made? The pony factor alone was worth three hundred.”
23
Leonard was about his business that night, which I thought might be trying to call John and talk him into coming back. I figured Leonard was close to the end of his rope on that. He was sticking with John better than anyone before, but I knew him well enough to know he had a destination in mind, and once he arrived there, if John came back to him bare-ass naked swinging his dick, Leonard wouldn’t be interested anymore. Once he cut you loose, he cut you loose.
Me, I pined over everything, worried about everything. I was worrying now. I was worrying that Bert wouldn’t call. I was thinking if he did, he wouldn’t know anything and that he would just try to work us for money. I was thinking me promising money was stupid. I was thinking I could dip into my savings and come up with a few thousand, if I had to, but I didn’t want to, and I didn’t want to spend the client’s money either.
I was also thinking Bert was just a dumb goober with a brain full of imaginary foes. A man shot down by disappointment, thinking about those cats with his dead wife’s lottery money, as if they actually held it in their little furry paws.
I went upstairs and crawled into bed with nothing on but my underwear and read from a good book until midnight. Then I put the book down with only one chapter to go.
I put it down because I was thinking about things that had come at me sideways, out of the past. I don’t know what sent them to the forefront, but this sort of thing had been happening for a while. All I could think about when things got quiet was the violence I had done in my life, or been around. Gunfire and fistfights, blood and gray matter splattered on the wall. The way it hit me right then, it was like I had looked in the wrong direction while crossing a road and had been hit by a truck.
I found that I was even breathing rapidly.
I twisted so I could sit on the bed and put my feet on the floor. I took some deep breaths. I tried to imagine encasing my thoughts in a dark balloon and letting it float away.
I had to float a lot of balloons.
After a little while, I felt better. I decided to take a hot shower and stand and soak the back of my neck for a while. I did that, and when I came out, toweling off, I checked the clock for the time. It was late.
I looked at my cell lying on the nightstand.
I had missed two calls.
I checked.
They were from Bert.
24
There was a message on the cell.
“Hey, this is Bert. Saw you and the colored guy with the silly hat at the auction barn, today, remember?” the message started, like maybe we wouldn’t remember him. “Give me a call, you got some money. I got something for you.”
I called his number.
Nothing.
I left a message.
I had missed his call by only a few minutes. Where the hell was he?
I finished drying off and crawled back into bed and picked up my book. I read only a page or two before I called him again.
Nothing.
I finally turned in and went to sleep, and in the middle of the night I woke up thinking about Bert’s call. There was no reason to suspect anything odd, anything foul. He had called and left a message, and I had called back and left one, and that was it, but I couldn’t get the paranoid feeling out of my head that something was wrong.
He hadn’t said anything particularly suspicious in his call, but I had detected a worried tone in his voice. Or had I? Maybe I was projecting.
I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep, but that didn’t work.
I turned on the light by the bed and tried to read some more, but my mind wouldn’t focus on the words. I got up and dressed and drove over to Camp Rapture and the address I had for Bert. It was about a forty-five-minute drive.
His place was off the main road and over a cattle guard, down a drive that was little more than a crease in a pasture. As I turned into the long drive, a car nearly sideswiped me, and was gone.
I couldn’t tell much about the car, but I thought it was some kind of SUV. All I had seen was lights, and the blur of a passing vehicle. It could have been any dark color.
I drove on cautiously, came to where he lived, which was a green-and-white trailer up on blocks in a little grown-up yard next to a creek on one side, an aluminum outbuilding with the door missing on the other side. I could see a lawn mower in there and what looked like an automobile engine up on sawhorses.
Bert’s trailer didn’t look as if it had been new when it was new. His pickup was in the yard. The closest house around, another mobile home up the road, wasn’t close at all. Maybe half a mile. It was a lonely kind of place.
I sat in my car for a moment, then reached over and opened the glove box and got my. 38 Super out of there,
