even looking. The guy was hunched over trying to get the glove compartment open.
“This thing locked?”
“Push the button,” Armand said, his hand finding the grip of the Browning automatic, right there with the seat pushed back. He brought the pistol up between his legs and was reaching down again when the guy looked at him.
“The hell you doing?”
“You want my wallet?” Armand came up with it. “Here.”
But Richie was holding the car registration in one hand and his revolver in the other. The glove compartment was open now, a light showing inside. He said, “Shit, this isn’t even your car. What’s L and M Distributing, Limited?”
“They sell pepperoni,” Armand said, “to places they make pizza.”
“Yeah? You work for them?”
“Sometimes, when I feel like it.”
“And they let you use this car?”
“They gave it to me. It’s mine.”
“Gave you a Cadillac, huh?”
Armand watched the guy take the wallet and try to open it with one hand. He watched the guy lay the revolver on his lap and hold the wallet with one hand and take the currency out with the other and then hunch over, holding the money close to the glove-compartment light, to look at it.
“What’s this, all Cannuck?”
“Most of it.”
“It’s pretty but, shit, what’s it worth?”
Armand laid both hands on his lap as he watched the guy riffle through the currency, counting numbers, getting an idea of how much was in the wad.
“Man, you got about a thousand here.”
“Same as that lucky Mexican, ’ey?”
The guy, still hunched over, said, “The hell you do they pay you this kind of dough?”
Armand felt himself changing back, no longer Armand Degas, dumb guy taken for a ride. He was the old pro again as he came up with the Browning auto and touched the muzzle to the side of the punk’s head.
“I shoot people,” the Blackbird said. “Sometimes for money, sometimes for nothing.”
Without moving his head or even his eyes, star
ing at that wad of cash, Richie Nix said, “Can I tell
you something?”
“What?”
“You’re just the guy I’m looking for.”
3
THE DAY THE REAL ESTATE SALESMAN showed the Col-sons the house, five years ago, he told them it was built in 1907 but was like new. It had vinyl siding you never had to paint covering the original tulip-wood. You had your own well, you had a Cyclone fence dog-run there, if the Colsons happened to have a dog.
Carmen Colson said, “No, but we have a car and a pickup truck and I don’t see a garage anywhere.”
They were standing on the side porch off the kitchen, toward the rear of the two-story Dutch Colonial. The real estate man said, well, it didn’t have a garage, but there was a marvelous old chickenhouse out there. See it? Carmen’s husband, Wayne, said, “Jesus, look at that!” Not meaning the chickenhouse. There was a whitetail doe standing way back against the tree line, off beyond a field growing wild. As soon as he said it Carmen knew they were going to buy the place. It didn’t matter the front hall was bigger than the sitting room, the closets were tiny and wasps were living upstairs in the bedrooms. There were deer on the property. Twenty acres counting the field that ran nearly a quarter of a mile from the house to the tree line and all the rest woods connecting to other woods the real estate man said, you bet, were full of deer.
Carmen said to her husband, after, “Hon, I was
Wayne said sure, it was old, but look at its possibilities. Knock out a wall here and there, do a little remodeling, the kind of work he could handle, no problem. Wayne said, “You sit in that back bedroom window upstairs. It’s like looking out a deer blind.”
Their only child, Matthew Colson, transferred to Algonac High, where he starred three years as a wide receiver, power forward and third baseman for the Muskrats, won nine varsity letters, graduated, joined the U.S. Navy and was now serving aboard a nuclear carrier, the U.S.S.
Carmen’s dad, now retired and living in Florida, had been an ironworker. Her parents were divorced when she was seventeen, the same year she graduated from high school a straight-A student and her dad took her to the Ironworkers Local 25 picnic. This was where she met Wayne Colson, a young apprentice they called Cowboy, blond-haired and tan wearing just athletic shorts and work shoes, and she couldn’t keep her eyes off him. She watched him look over his bare shoulder at her as he put on his gloves, getting ready for the column-climbing contest. It was where they used just their hands and feet to go straight up a ten-inch flanged beam staked to the ground and held in place by a crane. Carmen watched Wayne Colson climb that thirty-five-foot beam like it was a stepladder and fell in love as he came sliding down the flange in seven seconds flat, muscles tensed in his arms and back, and looked over at her again.
That summer Carmen would borrow the car, drop her mom off at Michigan Bell, where she worked as a telephone operator, then drive forty miles to happen by the building site where Wayne was working. She could pick him out—standing up there on that skeleton of red iron, shirt off, hard hat on backward, God, maybe nine or ten stories in the air—because once he spotted the car he’d wave. Then he’d stand on one foot on that narrow beam, the other foot out behind him, his hand flat above his eyes in kind of an Indian pose and she’d just about have a heart attack. Sundays they’d go for a ride and he’d show her office buildings in Southfield he’d bolted up, Carmen imagining him climbing columns, walking beams, fooling around way up there in the air. Wasn’t he ever scared? Wayne told her there was no difference between being up forty feet or four hundred; go off from either height it would kill you. If you had to fall, he told her, try to do it inside the structure, because they decked in every other floor as they bolted up. But either way, falling inside or out, it was called “going in the hole.” Wayne let seventeen- year-old Carmen heft his tools, his spud wrench, his sleever bar, his bull pin, the sledge he called a beater they used for driving the bull pin to line up bolt holes that weren’t centered. He buckled his tool belt around her slim hips and she could barely move with the weight of it. He handed her a yo-yo, the thirty-five-pound impact wrench they used for bolting up, and Carmen had to tense her muscles to hold it. He told her, hey, she was pretty strong, and said, “Don’t ever get hit on the head with one of these, some Joe happens to drop it.” He told her a Joe was an ironworker who couldn’t hack it. If you were in the trade and your name was Joe you’d better change it. He told her an apprentice was referred to as a punk. If a journeyman called you that, it wasn’t anything to get uptight about. He told her she was the best-looking girl he’d ever met in his entire life. She smelled so good, he loved to stick his nose in her dark-brown hair. He’d tell her he wanted to marry her, the sooner the better, and Carmen would get goose bumps.
Her mom, Lenore, said, “You’re crazy to even think about marrying an ironworker.” Carmen said, well, you did. Her mom said, “And I got rid of him, too, soon as you were of age. Ironworkers drink. They don’t come home from work, they stop off. Don’t you remember anything growing up? Us two eating alone? Doesn’t Wayne drink? If he doesn’t, they’ll throw him out of the local.”
Wayne said to Carmen, “Well, sure ironworkers drink. So do painters, glaziers, electricians, any trade I know of the guys drink. What’s wrong with that?”
Lenore said, “You are a lovely young girl with your whole life ahead of you. You’re smart as a whip, you got
