“Big-time.”
“Because you got shot a while back?”
“Well, duh, that has something to do with it,” I said.
“Would some sympathy pussy help?”
“Well,” I said. “I don’t know I’ll feel any more right about what I did, and I won’t miss you any less when you’re gone, but it certainly would improve my spirits.”
“I thought it might,” Brett said, shifting to slip off her panties.
5
I slept a short while after we made love, and then I woke up and got out of bed gently and went to the bathroom. I came back and sat in the chair by the window. I looked out at the yard where a fence rose up and another house swelled on that side slightly covered by a large tree and its shadows. The darkness from the tree made the house look like a natural formation. There was moonlight in the next-door neighbor’s backyard, which was clear of trees, and there was a kid’s swing set back there; it looked like some kind of Martian insect lurking.
I turned and watched Brett while she slept. The window was framed in such a way that it had four panes and the panes were filled with moonlight and the light lay across the bed and the thin slats that held the panes in place divided her like dark straight cuts. Her face was at peace and her mouth was open and she was snoring slightly. I could see her white teeth and the way her long red hair, which looked dark as the shadows, curled around her chin and spread out on the pillow like an oil spill.
I loved the way she looked and the way she made love and the way she made me feel. But there was nothing she did or could do that would make me feel good about what I had done. Not tonight, anyway.
I thought about going downstairs and reading, maybe listening to music with the earphones, but I didn’t feel strongly enough about it to do it. I went back to the bathroom and closed the door and turned on the light and found a magazine on the back of the toilet, picked up the pair of Wal-Mart glasses I kept in there-I kept several pairs around the house-and put them on and sighed because I needed the damn things to read close-up print. I was too tired and too old to be beating people up. A man who was old enough for reading glasses should have a job in some place air-conditioned and his most violent activity should be sliding his zipper down.
I read from the magazine, but nothing I read stayed with me. I finally gave it up and took a couple of light sleeping pills and went back to bed, and when I woke up it was late morning and Brett was gone.
6
It hadn’t been that long since I had healed up from a bullet wound, and in the process of getting that wound, I had ended up splitting some good money with Leonard, so I wasn’t sure why I was working. It wasn’t my style to do something when there was money already to be had. I preferred desperation and overdue bills as a work incentive.
I showered and got ready for work and thought about Brett and her whore of a daughter. Brett had gone off to see her before and had come back blue and not so friendly for a couple of days, and then she would see it all for what it was, come around, and be okay for months. Then some idea would strike her, or the daughter would e-mail her, or some such thing, and the blues would open up again like a deep hole in the sea, and down Brett would go. I couldn’t do a thing for her when she was that way. She had to deal with the depths and what was down there in her own manner and in her own time, same as me. She got like that, she was nothing like she was the rest of the time, and it was really best she did leave me for a while. That way they wouldn’t find my decapitated head on my pillow.
But she was never like me. She was always able to find some truth in herself. Me, I wasn’t sure I knew which way was up, let alone which way was true.
As I finished getting ready, I thought too about how I had come by the money I now had in reserve. Vanilla Ride, the beautiful assassin who had been hired to kill me, gave it to me and Leonard as a gift. It had worked out strangely, with me and her and Leonard in a cabin in Arkansas. Nothing as kinky as that sounds. The three of us bonded together for a moment to have a shootout with Clete Jimson’s Dixie Mafia goons. The goons didn’t do well. I came out with a wound that a good veterinarian took care of. But, most important, we had parted from Vanilla with a truce intact and a pile of dough that had belonged to some unsavory characters who I liked to believe would just spend it on unsavory things. It was still hard for me to grasp the insanity of it, or to understand how someone like Vanilla could be so deadly, and yet, in her own way, honorable.
It was also hard to believe that the very man who had wanted us killed, Clete Jimson, we had also formed a truce with, primarily because we had made it not worth his while, and there was in the background the threat of Vanilla Ride, and Jimson hadn’t wanted any part of that. No one in their right mind would.
I was ready just before noon and sat at the table drinking decaffeinated coffee, waiting for Leonard to pick me up. Our friend Marvin Hanson had started a private detective agency. His plan was to hire us as grunts from time to time, which was best, because as detectives we made very good grunts.
Today we were supposed to meet him at the office to talk about a real job, not getting some old lady’s money back. Then we were supposed to go to lunch and put a game plan together. What I wanted to do was go back to bed and read, or watch some TV, or just lie around on the couch. But if fish could fly they’d live in trees.
About eleven-twenty, Leonard showed up and drove us over to Marvin’s office. The car had a smattering of bird crap across the windshield, and Leonard tried to clean it by turning on the windshield wipers, which made a slick whitish smear across the glass. Leonard cursed at it and hit the wipers again and made it worse than before.
I made a note to self. Do not try and clean bird shit off a windshield by using the wipers. It doesn’t work. Cursing does not clean it either.
7
Marvin’s office was in a nice area off the main drag, down a house-lined street. We parked in front of a huge, broad oak and got out. A space of dirt had been left in a rare example of city planning. Someone, perhaps leaving it as a kind of sacrifice to the forest gods, had placed a used rubber and a potato chip bag by the tree trunk, and it smelled like someone had taken a piss, but otherwise it looked natural and lovely and gave off a bony kind of shade.
As we sniffed the urine on the fall air, brown oak leaves were dropping and tumbling across the lot with a crackling noise, like someone stepping on paper sacks, or like someone breaking a big guy’s knee with a baseball bat.
Across the way, a sweet gum tree had shed messy gum balls onto the concrete in a way that made me fear for its future with the city council.
Marvin’s office was in a two-story building next to a one-story comic shop with a big blue blow-up gorilla on the roof. Some days it was a giant red ant, and on other days it was a big silver alien. One day there was a great brown bear wearing Bermuda shorts with a fish in its air-filled teeth and a fishing rod in its paw.
The bottom part of the building Marvin was in was a bike shop. The building had been painted a bright yellow. A young blonde woman, who from the shape of her legs looked like she rode a lot of bikes herself, was out front, defying the cool, wearing shorts and a T-shirt and flip-flops. She was unlocking the bike shop door when we came up. She turned and flicked her long blonde hair and smiled. She had a smile that would make a family-values Republican stab a hole in the Holy Bible with a buck knife.
The stairs were metal and a little slick from the rain that had come and gone. We went up. On the door was
