about the money, wanting only hundred-dollar bills and fifties. He started over with a clean napkin opened up and put down what he wanted to say. Perfect.
But by the time he paid his check, walked several blocks to his car, and drove up Collins Avenue to the bank, it was closed.
Last week he might have given up. Not today; he was making his move. Looking stupid to the guy in the liquor store didn’t even set him back. It told him to, goddamn it, do it right. Liquor stores, he
Louis used the tire iron to pry the lock off Max’s gun cabinet in the meeting room with the office refrigerator and the coffee maker. Inside were four handguns and the nickel-plated Mossberg 500, the pistol-grip shotgun with the battery-operated laser scope. Louis felt his image changing as he got serious and chose the chromed Colt Python he knew was Winston’s, a 357 Mag with an eight-inch barrel, big and showy. That should do it, and a couple of boxes of hollow points. But then thought, if he was going for show he might as well go all the way and took the Mossberg 500 too. Even with the laser scope the shotgun would fit under the coat he was wearing as a sporty jacket. Buttoned, the coat was snug on him and had the widest lapels Louis had ever seen. All J.J.’s clothes were like new but out of style, hanging twenty years in closets or packed in trunks while J.J. was in and out of the system. Ordell would never see this coat. Tomorrow he’d go to Burdine’s or Macy’s and get some new outfits. Nothing too bright, like Ordell’s yellow sport coat, he wasn’t feeling that showy. Something in light blue might be nice.
When Louis walked in the liquor store the second time, the guy with GOD BLESS AMERICA on his T-shirt rubbed his hand over his jaw and said, “Jesus Christ, don’t tell me you’re back.”
Louis said, “Let me have two fifths of that Absolut,” this time bringing the Mossberg out of the coat from under his left arm, the nickel plate gleaming in the overhead light, the red dot of the laser scope showing the bottles he wanted as he squeezed the grip.
The liquor store guy said, “You swipe that toy gun offa some kid?”
Louis said, “See the red dot?” He moved it off the Absolut, squeezed the trigger, and blew out three rows of the cheap stuff. Louis said, “It’s real,” Christ, with his ears ringing. “That’s two fifths of Absolut, whatever you have in the till, and that wad in your hip pocket.”
He felt good and had some vodka out of the bottle driving up Dixie, on his way to finding a motel, through living at J.J.’s, through hanging around the bail-bond office. . . . And realized, Christ, he had to go back there right now. Put the key in Max’s desk and make it look like a break-in, or Max would know he did it. He should’ve taken all the guns. Max still might figure it out. Four years locked up, he was rusty, that’s all. At least he knew what he had to do. Then keep going, ride it out. No stopping or getting off once you start. Wasn’t that how Ordell said it?
Something like that.
Ordell had tried showing his jackboys how to use a tension tool with a feeler pick or what was called a rake —none of these gadgets more than five inches long, they fit right in your pocket— to open most any locked door to a house. See? It was easy once you practiced and got the feel. No, jackboys liked to bust into places. They liked to smash windows or blow the lock out with a shotgun. Their trip was driving a big pickup truck through the front door of a pawnshop or a hardware store: drive in, load up, and drive out again in the stolen truck with some company name on the side. Gun shops put iron posts in the concrete outside the door so you couldn’t drive in. What they would do juiced up was walk in when the gun shop was open, pull their pieces, and go for the assault weapons they loved. It did-n’t matter they could get shot doing it, they were crazy motherfuckers. Ordell gave up on teaching them subtle ways to gain entry.
He brought out his tools only when he needed to use them himself.
Like this evening, getting into Jackie Burke’s apartment.
Max drove home seeing her across the table in barroom light, Jackie looking at him the way she did with those sparkly green eyes, looking off at the piano and saying he shouldn’t be allowed to play “Light My Fire.” Saying “Great,” in that same dry tone of voice when he told her she might do a year and a day. Saying “You’re as much fun as the cops,” when he didn’t believe her at first. But pretty soon she was confiding in him and he could feel them getting closer, like they were in this together and she needed him. It was a good feeling. He had watched her eyes to sense her mood. Watched the way she smoked cigarettes and wanted one for the first time in a couple of years. Before they’d left the cocktail lounge he knew something could happen between them if he wanted it to.
He hadn’t had this feeling in a long time. Never with a defendant.
Once, during the past two years living alone, he had almost told a woman he loved her. A waitress named Cricket with a Georgia accent. Got that tender feeling one night lying in bed with her, stirred by the way the light from the window softened her hollow cheeks and lay across her small pale breasts. Except the shine was from a streetlight outside, not the moonlight of “Moonlight Becomes You” or “That Old Devil Moon,” and realizing this might have stopped him if good sense didn’t. Cricket sang Reba McEntire numbers with gestures. She sang that old Tammy Wynette song “D.I.V.O.R.C.E.,” would give him a look and say, “Hint, hint.” Cricket made him feel good. The trouble was finding something to talk about. It was the same way with Renee. All those years of not talking. He had tried reading poetry to her when they were first married. If she said anything at all after it was, “What’s that suppose to mean?”
He hadn’t told Renee he loved her in about ten years. He told her a few times when he knew he didn’t love her and then quit. What was the point? She never told him. Not even that much in the beginning when he told her all the time, because he did. She was tiny, she was cute as a bug, and he wanted to eat her up. She never said a word making love. She was afraid of getting pregnant; she said a doctor had told her she was too small and it would kill her, or her uterus was tipped or she was afraid of hydrogen bombs; take your pick. It was okay if she didn’t appreciate his reading to her. It wasn’t romantic poetry anyway, it was mostly Ginsberg and Corso, those guys. He liked them even though he had to face demonstrators in those days with a riot baton, out in the streets being called a pig, and he’d wonder, Wait a minute. What am I doing here? This was before he made detective and liked Homicide so much he was willing to die there. One time he finished reading a poem and Renee said, “You should see yourself.” Meaning a uniformed deputy in dark green reciting poetry, but missing the point entirely that it was one of the Beats.
He remembered a poem more recently by a guy named Gifford called “To Terry Moore” that ended with the lines,
Tell me, Terry when you were young were your lovers ever gentle?
He remembered it because he had been in love with Terry Moore in the fifties, right after being in love with Jane Greer and just before he fell in love with Diane Baker. This year he had passed on Jodie Foster, only because he was old enough to be her dad, and fallen in love with Annette Bening. He didn’t care how old Annette was.
Jackie Burke had made him think of the poem to Terry Moore. The last part, “were your lovers ever gentle?” On the way to dropping her off to get her car. Jackie telling him she had been flying nearly twenty years and married twice. Once to an airline pilot “who went to prison with a two hundred-dollar-a-day habit.” And once to a Brit in Freeport, floorman at a hotel casino, “who decided one evening it was time to die.” And that was all she said about them. He thought of the poem because he could imagine guys coming on to her as a matter of course, before those marriages and in between and maybe during, thirty thousand feet in the air.
She asked in the car as they were coming to the airport if he was married. He told her yes and how long and she said, “Twenty-seven
Almost raising her voice. He remembered that. Making it an unimaginable period of time.
He said, “It seems longer,” and in the dark, staring at his headlight beams, tried to explain his situation.
“We started out, I was already with the Sheriff’s Office, but Renee didn’t like being married to a cop. She said she was worried sick all the time something would happen to me. Also, she said, I put the job first.”
“Did you?”
“You have to. So I quit. She didn’t like being married to a cop—she
Jackie said, “You don’t look like a bail bondsman.”
Meaning it, he assumed, as a compliment. She didn’t say what a bail bondsman was supposed to look like. He imagined she meant a sleazy type, fat little guy in a rumpled suit who chewed his cigar. A lot of people had that picture.
“Renee moved out of the house. She opened an art gallery and has these guys, they look like gay heroin addicts, hanging around her. Twice before, we separated. This time it’s been almost
