We’re holding the Wanger’s story idea on Tom James you proposed. Wanger contacted Angland in jail, and Angland denied that James ever told him anything
about the money. So we have questions whether this Broker, who is just a temporary deputy up there, is pressing a legitimate investigation. I put the story back in your basket. Let’s talk-B
“…an event is coming.”
“Motherfucker!” he screamed. He shot to his feet, his chair and coffee cup flew in different directions.
Ruby went rigid, terrified, speechless. Coffee slicked her bare thighs and shorts. Her empty cup spun in hollow circles on the tile floor.
“Fucking no good bitch…” Danny seized the upturned chair and slammed it down. When it fell over again he hurled it through the screens, it smashed into a collection of brittle, empty terra-cotta planters on the deck.
Ruby was on her feet, backing away with her hands extended, palms out, but turned sideways, not defensive, more like pleading. “Pleeaase,” she whispered. And the nightmarish expression on her face bespoke a fault line all her own, a terror of men rammed deep within her. Seeing it brought Danny to his senses.
His smile came too suddenly, still quivering with anger, and that also terrified her, as if she’d seen it before.
“No, no,” he said in an embarrassed voice. “It’s…”
But she was going through the screen door. Her pretty face froze in profile. One flat wild eye splashed on features jagged as a piece of broken glass. Her bare feet made fast slapping sounds on the paving stones as she fled the property.
God. He touched his forehead, which felt like hot paper ready to combust. His eyes locked back on the monitor. But the screen saver had kicked on. Black panel. White dots zipping like blizzard snow pelting a windshield.
Like a bad night in Minnesota.
God. He felt like he was going to puke. Unsteady, he walked toward the bathroom. He even managed a sickly smile. His rubber knees duplicated the shock of a quake.
God. I could lose it all. That thought went down like a plunger, and he felt a wave of stomach acid froth in his throat.
He barely made the bathroom, knelt before the stool and projectile vomited. Immediately he felt relief. He rose to his feet, wiping away hot strings of spittle.
The shower curtain moved.
Someone in the shower.
A fast low shape shot past the cheap plastic curtain. Gray.
Sleek. Oriental black boots on the gray paws. Ruby’s cat.
Her missing fucking precursor cat.
Rage networked a million miles of nerves and assembled, red hot, in his hands. He ripped the toilet seat from the stool and in one powerful, flawless spin, turned and smashed the wooden oval down on the animal’s head.
He dropped the seat and kicked it and kicked it and…it died a kind of floppy miniature animal death somewhere between a small dog and an insect.
Squashed. Blood on its tiny white needle teeth.
Calmer now, with matted blood and fur on his bare feet, he walked back through the house to the kitchen, got a fresh cup and poured coffee.
Think. Clean up the bathroom. Hard to think. Fucking Broker again. Got to Ida somehow.
Splashes on the wall. Jesus Christ, he giggled. Looks like a goddamn slaughterhouse in here.
Then-holy shit!
Almost as an afterthought, he saw his whole new life crumble. The folly. So obvious.
whispered it in the dark for months. Those pages in her desk…
He stooped, picked up the dripping cat-thing and said to the smashed head, “We’ll have to do something about that!”
Then, practical: Wash the floor, Danny; get rid of the damn cat. With a pail, some Comet and a rag he sopped up the tracks and the mess in the bathroom. He placed the toilet seat tentatively back on the stool.
Stupid damn thing to do. Got to be careful now. This is when you make mistakes.
He wrapped the dead cat in the ragged cleaning towel and carried it to his truck. A light rain hissed from the warm tangerine sky, strange low clouds, air thick as jam.
He consulted his county map, drove through the flooded strawberry fields and orchards until he found the road to the nearest beach. Good. The parking lot was deserted. With the leaky cat wrapped under his arm, he went up the plank walkway through the dunes and crossed the beach toward the Pacific Ocean. Rain threaded down. He could barely make out the silhouette of the power plant to the south in Monterey.
Slow gray rollers flopped over and foamed lacy surf across the beach. Coils of fluted gray kelp protruded from hum-mocks of damp sand. Looked like dead worms from Mars.
Fucking Jeremiah Johnson running through the trees, tomahawk out.
He’d zeroed in on Ida.
She knew his name. But she didn’t know she knew it.
The fear washed through him faster than his eyes could process or conscious thought could catch. And there, like his fear manifest-thirty feet away, where the waves tumbled in the first breaker line-a long supple shadow broke the surface, glided. Fins.
Had to be twelve, thirteen feet, the distance between the dorsal and the tail. Just-right there. Then silently gone into the wide endless Pacific.
He lobbed the cat overhand, a lazy layup. It splashed just past the first breakers. He waited to see if the shark would strike. If it did, it happened below the surface where he couldn’t see.
Like he would. Silent.
Some fishermen in hip waders with very long poles were walking up the beach. Short men with black hair. The tonal mystery of an Asian language cartwheeled in the sound of the waves. He watched them take huge lures with ferocious curved hooks from their tackle box and string them to their leader. Calmer, composed, Danny walked back to his car.
These events disrupted his timetable. He’d have to take risks. It infuriated him that Ida Rain had repaid his compassion with betrayal. The bitch could have had it all.
Then he looked at his watch. Shit. He was supposed to meet the retired cop at that bar in Santa Cruz this afternoon.
59
The sky over Monterey Bay sagged in rainy streaks of aqua, orange and lime like a bleeding South American flag. He parked, got out and walked, nibbled the sweet California air. Passed a girl in cutoff jeans with beach bunny legs and safety pins in her face.
She looked at him funny. He glanced down, saw he had a wad of gooey cat-hair-stickum on his arm. Rubbed it off with spit.
The bar was wedged between an insurance office and a small strip mall. Across Ocean Street, the county building looked faintly colonial behind a screen of tall palms and pine trees. Sunday. Except for cop cars, the parking lot was almost empty.
In testimony to the new antismoking ordinance, four patrons stood outside the bar, furtively smoking like high school kids behind the field house. Inside, the Jury Box was black as a cave. A partition faced the door like a blast
