it’s hard to get it stopped. So the next one will be partly on you.”
“I hate your guts,” Dina said.
People told Bernie that from time to time. I knew they didn’t mean it.
“Comes with the job,” Bernie said.
“And what’s that?” said Dina. “What’s your goddamn job?”
“Retribution.”
Whatever that meant, it made her stop hating him at once: I could see it on her face. She looked at Bernie in a whole new way. Not liking him, it wasn’t that. More… respecting. We have that, too, in the nation within. Dina took a big breath and let it out real slow.
“This was long before he was famous, of course,” she said. “Thad Perry was a kid, just like us. He came here that summer to visit a cousin and met April at a car wash where the cousin worked. It all happened real fast, maybe two weeks from when they met till she died. He left town right away.”
“Did he kill her?” Bernie said.
“I don’t know,” Dina said. “He was gentler than most of the boys, and more polite. And much better looking. I saw them together just the one time, at the car wash. They were so beautiful together.”
“Did they argue?” Bernie said. “Fight with each other?”
“Not that I know of,” Dina said.
Bernie gazed at her. “How come you didn’t want to talk about this?”
Dina rose and went to the window, pushed the leaf of a big plant aside, looked out.
“What are you afraid of?” Bernie said.
“All the usual things,” Dina said.
“Including the cousin?”
Dina turned to him, her mouth opening.
“Was his name Jiggs?” Bernie said.
“If you know all this, why ask?” Dina said. “Nolan Jiggs, this king-size shithead. He blew town with Thad Perry, something I didn’t realize at the time. Then, years later, just before Thad’s first movie came out, he came back and found me.” Dina turned from the window, the plant leaf flopping back into place. “He paid me five grand to keep things to myself.”
“That was the carrot,” Bernie said.
“You’re not as dumb as you look,” Dina said. “The stick was a promise to kill me if I breathed a word to anyone.” She gazed at Bernie through the leaves. “Are you and your dog going to keep that from happening?”
Bet the ranch.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Very late at night-but a time we’re used to being up at in this business-the Valley gets as quiet as it gets. That near-quiet was what I was hearing now, like everyone was having restless sleeps. Bernie, at the wheel, face harder than ever in the green light from the dials, turned to me and said, “Take us at least twenty minutes to get there, big guy, even at this hour. Why don’t you grab a quick catnap?”
Say what? I sat up my straightest for the whole ride, which turned out to be all the way across town to West Side Heights, one of the fanciest neighborhoods in the Valley.
“Not sleepy, huh?” Bernie said, as we wound up a hilly street lined with big houses spaced far apart. Not if cats were sleepy, I sure wasn’t. Bernie pulled into a circular driveway, outside lights coming on right away, and stopped in front of a house that looked a bit like the old mission downtown. “Time to blow up this whole damn thing and start over,” Bernie said, as we got out of the car and went to the front door, one of those massive dark-wood double doors with lots of metalwork. We had no dynamite on us-one of the easiest smells going-so the explosions weren’t coming anytime soon. Fine with me. We’d blown up a shed once-the wrong one, it turned out-a really exciting day, at first, but Bernie had-not miscalculated, no way that could ever happen, more like he’d gotten a little too enthusiastic when it came to the number of dynamite sticks, and in the end we’d taken out a sort of bridge as well as the shed and all the tires on the Porsche, and had to walk a long way to the nearest gas station.
Bernie rang the bell. I heard it sound deep inside the house, a big house, the size of many sheds. That worried me.
Footsteps approached on the other side of the door: a man, barefoot, powerful. Bolts slid, locks clicked, the door swung open, and there was Bernie’s pal Gronk, the insurance dude from downtown. Had he hooked us up with the mayor’s office in the first place, or something like that? Hard to keep all this straight; good thing that wasn’t my territory. Gronk’s hair was all over the place and he wore a polka-dot silk robe. Polka dots do nothing for me, but silk has a very nice feel, something that had led to a problem or two in the past. Not now, of course: we were on the job.
“Bernie?” Gronk said. His sleepy eyes were waking up fast; Bernie was like that, too, when he had to be. “What’s up?”
“Need to talk,” Bernie said.
Gronk paused for a moment, then nodded. “Come on in.”
We went in, and at that moment a woman called from upstairs.
“Stevie? Who is it?”
“Nobody,” Gronk called over his shoulder. “Go back to sleep.”
“But I heard you talking,” the woman said.
“It’s just an old friend.”
“Friend?”
“Buddy.”
“Oh.”
“Go to bed.”
“Okay, Stevie. Don’t be too long. You’ve got that breakfast meeting.”
Gronk cocked his head, listening for more. There was no more. “My wife,” he said. He lowered his voice. “The new one.” He led us down the hall and into a room that looked like a sports bar, except smaller, and not even that much smaller. “The old one was a much better sleeper.” Gronk gestured at the rows of bottles behind the bar. “Something to drink?” He sat on a stool.
Bernie shook his head. He leaned against the bar. When he gets tired his leg bothers him. Sit down, big guy, I thought, sit down and have that drink. But he didn’t.
“There’s a problem?” Gronk said.
“Lots of them,” Bernie said. His voice wasn’t pally. Weren’t they old pals? “The one that concerns you is that story about getting me hired by the mayor’s office.”
Gronk stared at Bernie for a bit, and then sighed. “You never change.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’ve always been and will always be a stubborn son of a bitch,” Gronk said. “A stubborn son of a bitch who doesn’t ever know what’s good for him.”
“Spill it,” Bernie said.
“You can’t just leave this simply as me getting a chance to do you a small favor and seizing the opportunity?”
“Not if it didn’t go down that way.”
“But what’s the goddamn difference?”
“Life and death,” Bernie said.
“I don’t get it,” said Gronk.
Whoa! You can smell the difference right away, poor Carla in the Dumpster, for example. But Gronk wasn’t in the business, so maybe I was expecting too much.
“I’ll explain when this is all over,” Bernie said. “Right now, there’s no time.”
“Christ,” said Gronk. “Anybody else, I’d…” He went silent before I found out what he’d do; with a big strong dude like Gronk, probably plenty. “All right,” he went on. “Attaching you to the mayor’s office wasn’t my idea.”
