the floating platform, whereon lay three large and completely still cottonmouth moccasins, when he felt it. There was movement there under the shade trees some thirty feet away. The sun was hot and bright overhead and he squinted.
“Hello,” he called out.
They weren’t family-or rather ex-family. He’d never seen the two men before in his life.
They were dressed as if they had just come from a highend real estate closing. His first errant thought was that they were potential clients who had gone to a lot of trouble to find him.
In a way, he was right.
The water came up to Carlos’s chest. It was a good thing they had waited until he was nearly done before happening along. Ten minutes before and they would have come upon him slogging through the muck on the opposite shore with his bare ass dripping mud and water.
“Hello,” one of the two men said, and waved. The man smiled.
Carlos almost waved back, but he was mindful of the snakes, just three feet away. Snakes couldn’t hear worth a damn, but they could sense movement, and cottonmouths are known for their aggressiveness.
“Give me a minute, will you? Go on in the house. There’s beer and Cokes in there. Also, I’m not exactly dressed for visitors at the moment.”
Carlos had a towel in his pickup, and he was thinking about how he’d look trying to move across the yard to get to it before the two glanced back out the front window. Chances were they’d get an eyeful no matter what he did. But that was all right. They were guys, after all. And something else was beginning to take hold inside of him. A far-off song, like a radio picking up a skip on a clear night: the opening chords of the world’s oldest song- opportunity. Anyone coming this far to see him must want something awfully bad.
And he was right about that as well.
The two men went inside without further word.
Carlos pulled the leading timber up into the mud of the bank and made a break for the truck. The towel was there behind the seat where he’d left it, but it wasn’t a beach towel. He kept it there for those moments when the old Datsun itself had had enough and decided it was time to overheat. You had to have a thick, dry towel to remove a hot radiator cap, and the towel-complete with the three Powerpuff Girls: Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup (the only thing he’d truly walked away with to call his own from his former marriage)-wrapped around him just enough for him to make a small knot. Even that, in the final analysis, would do him little good.
The towel would have to do.
Carlos stepped up to the front porch and slid the glass doorway back on its tracks. The track needed a good cleaning out and a bit of graphite to smooth the slide of the door, but like all things, there was never enough time.
The air inside was cool. Not cold, but just enough to make him shiver. He was still wet and water trickled down his legs. There were tiny green specks of duckweed all over him. He usually went from the lake right into the shower because if he dried off with the duckweed still on him it tended to stick like glue.
The two men came in from the kitchen. Each had a Coke in hand. One of the men was smiling, the other looked at him with dead-fish eyes.
Carlos shivered again.
“How can I help you fellas?” he asked. It came out sounding uncertain, and he knew it.
“Just a little information,” the smiling fellow said. His big teeth were as false as the rest of him, Carlos suddenly knew. That song-that radio-skip melody-was no closer now than the background hum leftover from the Big Bang.
“You guys cops?” Carlos asked.
The dead-fish-eyed fellow laughed. It was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
For Carlos the temperature in the room plummeted.
“No,” Smiley said, cutting his own light chuckle off short. “Not cops. Businessmen, Mr. McDaniel. Just like yourself. You had a client. A lady.”
“I’ve got a lot of lady clients. And you said ‘had.’ I don’t keep track of my old clients very well. Which is maybe why I’m not pulling down a hundred Gs a year.”
“We understand, Mr. McDaniel. We really do. This lady you’d not easily forget.”
“Who is she?”
“Your first name is Carlos, right?” Smiley asked. “But your last name is McDaniel. You got some greaser blood in you?”
“I don’t think I like you,” Carlos said.
“You don’t have to,” Smiley said. “Who’s the bean eater? With a last name like McDaniel, it’d have to be your mother, right?”
He felt it then, strong. The floodgates of adrenaline opening somewhere in his body. It was going to be either fight or run. Running, at the moment, looked best. Two on one with him naked in his ex’s uncle’s cabin, a mile to the nearest neighbor? Not good odds.
But Carlos fought the urge to run. Who can truly tell the future?
“I’ll tell you what you want to know,” he said. “Then you can leave.”
“Smart fellow, right, Sammy?”
“Yeah,” Sammy said. He was the broad-shouldered, deadeyed one. Or perhaps his eyes were more reptilian than merely dead. “Fart smellow,” Sammy said and laughed again. Carlos’s instant assessment of him was bleak at best. He was all gristle and fat with little brain. If Sammy ever graduated high school, Carlos was willing to bet he’d been in his mid-twenties at the time.
“Okay, kid,” Smiley said. “Her name is Linda Sneed. That’s two
“The penthouse deal. Haven’t talked with her in six months. Lost my ass on the deal too. What do you want to know?”
“See, Sammy? I told you today something was gonna break.” His eyes never wavered, but the tone of his voice dropped a whole scale. “Where is Ms. Sneed, pepper-belly?”
Carlos considered. The moment had arrived. The moment he’d known was coming the instant he’d seen Sammy’s dead-fish eyes.
Sammy’s hand went into his suit jacket, and what came out was exactly what Carlos McDaniel knew was going to come. It was a gun. A black 9mm.
“Tell him,” Sammy said.
Carlos’s control of his bladder slipped for just an instant. He knew without looking there would be a small spreading stain on the front of the towel. It felt like hot lava in the chilly room.
“She’s… gone. Long gone. I’m not lying. I tried to reach her. Everybody did.”
“Yeah?” Smiley said. “Who’s everybody?”
“Me. My broker. The title company. The lawyers. Last I heard she was somewhere in West Texas.”
“Yeah? That’s a pretty big area. You mind narrowing it down for me a bit?”
“Littletown. No. Littlefield. That’s northwest of Lubbock.”
“Thank you, Mr. McDaniel,” Smiley said. He turned toward Sammy and nodded.
Carlos stood frozen.
Sammy shot him three times: once in the leg-he had been aiming for Carlos’s groin and missed by half an inch-once in the stomach, and once in the chest.
The two men left him for dead.
Carlos McDaniel didn’t hear the sliding door close behind the two men. He was concentrating on the ocean of pain that had suddenly invaded his life. He hurt. The pain was deep-a fundamental thing that could not be ignored-and blackness was coming. He was already graying out.
His hand moved, touched the widening pool of blood soaking into the old carpet beside him. He brought it to his stomach and traced five letters.
He pulled his finger away and looked at it. There was a tiny speck of green in all the red.
Carlos McDaniel was either a fortunate or unfortunate man, depending upon one’s point of view.
