Mask Market

“The Sonny James?”

“Yep.”

“But he’s country, not—”

“Not doo-wop? Roy Orbison had a doo-wop group himself once.”

“For real?”

“Sure. Roy Orbison and the Roses.”

“My goodness.”

She drifted into a sweet, connected silence. We were encapsulated, the Plymouth sliding smoothly through the night.

“I loved that girl singer,” she finally said. “You know the one?”

“Sounded like a young Patsy Cline?”

“Yes! Can we play hers again?”

I hit the “back” button until I found the cut. A driving, insistent bass line, the plaintive haze of a steel guitar hovering over the top. A nightingale’s voice cut through the steel like an acetylene torch:

You say that was your cousin

But I know what I saw

And if that girl was your cousin

You both was breaking the law

“Oh, I know I should just hate that,” Loyal said, chuckling, “but that Kasey Lansdale is just too good! That child’s going to be big someday.”

“Why should you hate it? The song, I mean.”

“Well, it’s another of those stupid stereotypes, isn’t it? You know, rednecks and incest. Tobacco Road stuff. We’re supposed to be all kinds of bad, Southerners. To hear some of the people around here talk, we’re all Bible- thumping, ignorant racists with no teeth, living in shacks. Well, you know what, sugar? That’s just another kind of prejudice.”

“It is.”

“You’re not going to argue with me?” she said, lightly scraping her fingernails over the top of my thigh. “Or are you just making sure I’m going to be nice to you later?”

“I can’t speak for the South. I haven’t spent enough time there to say. But anyone who thinks there’s no racism in New York hasn’t lived here long.”

“I know,” she said, vehemently.

“And anyone who thinks one part of the country—one part of the world—has got a patent on incest is in a coma.”

“There’s good and bad people everywhere,” Loyal said, a schoolgirl, reciting a hard-learned lesson.

I’m a lifelong gambler, but I never go all-in unless we’re playing with my deck. Hedging bets is more my style.

When I left Loyal’s apartment building, I drove downtown. I like the subway better, but this time of the year it’s a hermetically sealed disease-incubator, a particle accelerator for germs. Winter flu’s bad enough, but springtime flu can drop you quicker than a Jeff Sims overhand right.

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. New York is a city of streets. Five blocks away from where I stopped, ruptured-synapse zombies trembled in doorways, down to nothing but the prayer that the next rock they bought with blood-bank money would be a sweet crackling in their glass pipes, not a tiny chunk of drywall pretender. But I was standing in that sparkling piece of Manhattan where they shoot those perky and precious romantic comedies. The block was lined with wonderful little shops and reeked of ambiance. The princes who lived there kept their organically grown marijuana in rosewood humidors.

I used my cell phone instead of ringing the bell. Stayed on the line until I was buzzed in. Took the tiny little elevator cage to the top floor.

The man who let me in was built like a jockey, all muscle and bone. He had a shaved and waxed skull, a ruby in his ear so heavy it had elongated the lobe, and a red soul patch under his lower lip, the same color as his tank top. His eyelids sagged, dark half-moons stood out against the bleached whiteness of his cheeks. He looked as weary as a platitude in a mortician’s mouth.

“So?” he said, exhaustedly stepping aside to let me in.

I walked over and took a seat at one end of a long, narrow slab of butcher block. He followed me languidly, sat down at the other end.

I slid a copy of the CD Clarence had made over to him like I was dealing a card. It was an edited version of the one Daniel Parks had handed over.

“I’d like to find that woman,” I said.

“That’s nice,” he said. Like any good psychopath, he lived in the Now, and whatever ethics he had were long past their sell-by date. He knew that the only way the meek were going to inherit the earth was if the last predator to go left it to them in his will.

“I’d consider it a big favor,” I told him.

“Redeemable for…?”

“The last job I did for you…”

“You were paid for that, as I recall.”

“I was paid to do one thing,” I reminded him. “The job turned out to be more than you said it was going to be.”

“I never promised—”

“You told me someone had something that belonged to you, and you’d pay me to get it back.”

He raised what would have been his eyebrows, if he hadn’t shaven them off.

“It wasn’t yours,” I said, placidly.

“Well, that’s a matter of some dispute.”

“The dispute turned into a bullet wound.”

“So you’re here for more—”

“I told you what I’m here for,” I said. “Be a good listener; that’s how people stay friends.”

“I’m not alone here,” he said. “You don’t think I would have just let you come over if I was, do you?”

“You don’t think, if I wanted to do something to you, I’d call first, do you?”

He folded his arms across his chest, eyes involuntarily darting over my left shoulder. “Point-blank, I didn’t know Hector was going to go psycho on you, Burke. Polygraph that.”

“Oh, I believe you. I just figured you’d feel bad about how it turned out. And you’d want to make it up to me.”

“And if I don’t?”

I looked over at the wall of glass to my right. “You know how people talk about a ‘window of opportunity’?” I said. “You know why leaving it open a little’s always better than keeping it shut?”

“I’ll bite.”

“Because that way the glass never has to get broken.”

He touched his temples, tuning into whatever frequency guided his ship.

“I can’t promise anything,” he said.

When I got up the next morning, the whole right side of my head throbbed. A quick glance at the mirror showed me my right ear was inflamed. I get that from grinding it against the pillow all night. Only happens when I dream so deep and dark that it’s a blessing not to remember any of it.

I stepped out of the flophouse into the red-and-gold blaze of a chemical sunset. That’s this city for you, a toxic-waste garden, full of beautiful artificial flowers.

The pit bulls let me reclaim my Plymouth, even though all I had was a couple of gyros I bought from a vendor on the walk over.

It wasn’t about the quality of the bribe for them; they just wanted to be shown some respect.

The orca female sat and watched me for an extra minute. I tossed her a cube of steak I had saved from Mama’s. She snapped it out of the air without a sound. We both looked at the other two pits. Neither of them had seen a thing. Our secret.