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When Joe got back he had a bottle of Dalmane and six Valiums. We put out the red beans and rice and cornbread, and ate. Ellen stared at her plate and said, “I’ve never eaten a ham hock before,” so I slit the skin and showed her how to get out the meat.
She ate quietly and completely, finishing what Pike put on her plate. Joe and I drank beer, Ellen had milk. I pointed out a few of the more uproarious ironies of life, but neither Ellen nor Joe showed much in the way of appreciation. I was used to it from Pike.
We finished the meal, did the dishes, then went into the living room. No one said more than five words at a time. I put on a Credence Clearwater album, then went into the entry closet and came back wearing my Groucho Marx nose.
“Appropriate, as always,” Pike said, then went out onto the deck. Ellen smiled once, then looked away. After a while I took off the nose and picked up Valdez Is Coming
I was almost through it when Ellen made a hoarse sighing sound from her end of the couch. When I looked up, her eyes were red and tears dripped down her cheeks. I reached across and touched her leg. She took my fingers and said, “What did they do to make him scream like that?”
Pike stepped in off the deck. I slid across the couch and held Ellen for a while, until she asked for two of the Dalmane and said she would go up to bed. I went up with her and stood at the foot until the Dalmane had done its work, then I shut the light and went down.
Pike said, “I like her.”
“You told her you were on the cops.”
“I like her a lot.”
I got two Falstaff from the box. We offed all the lights in the house, turned the stereo low, then went out onto the deck. A couple of cars moved through the canyon roads to the south and east, appearing then disappearing behind the houses that dotted the hillside. The coyotes were quiet.
Pike hung his feet off the deck. I joined him. Just like Tom and Huck.
I said, “Duran’s spotter had a good deer rifle, we’d be history.”
“Maybe.”
We sat. Heavy clouds blocked out the moon and most of the stars. You could smell the coming rain in the air. Springsteen sang about tough kids and broken hearts on KLSX.
I said, “Remember the other day, when I said Mort had given himself up?”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t. She did.”
“I know.”
“She’s over the edge right now. Mort, the kid, who she is. She doesn’t have as much self-esteem as a piece of bread.” Pike’s beer can raised, tilted, lowered. “I want her to make it back,” I said.
“Unh-huh.”
I took a pull on my Falstaff. “Does it strike you odd that Duran’s giving me so much time to turn over his dope?”
“It does.”
“Like maybe he knows I don’t have it, but he’s using me to find it for him.”
“Unh-huh.”
“Joe, how the hell can you see at night with the sunglasses?”
“I am one with the night.” Raise, tilt, lower. You never know whether he’s serious. “Duran wants you to find the dope because he doesn’t know how. If he tells his people to find something, all they know how to do is rack ass. That doesn’t get you very far, and maybe eliminates someone with some important information.”
“It would’ve been easier to hire me.”
“Maybe.”
“Only maybe I won’t hire, and I turn it over to the cops.”
“He probably shit himself, thinking about that one.”
I nodded and sipped the beer and listened to Springsteen’s courage flow into Mellencamp’s raucous honesty. “Joseph, what have you learned from me?”
“Good things.”
“Like what?”
He didn’t answer. I finished the Falstaff, then crimped the can square and crushed it. “A guy like Duran, worth a couple hundred million, a hundred K can’t be worth the hassle.”
“He’s not doing it for the money.”
“That’s what I don’t like. Maybe we’re all just running out of time. Maybe Duran says to hell with it and smokes the kid and the rest of us.”
Pike finished his beer, set the can on the deck. Pike never crushes cans. I guess he’s man enough without that. “Maybe you should find the dope before that happens.”
A big splat sounded behind me, then again to my left, then something wet hit my forehead. Joe stood up. “Good time for a walk.”
He went in through the living room and let himself out the kitchen door, locking it behind. I picked up our cans and went in out of the rain. My father, rest him, would’ve been proud.
The rain slapped at the deck and ran down along the glass. When I was little, I would sit in my window and watch the rain and feel easy and at peace. I didn’t feel that way often anymore, though I kept trying out windows and rainstorms and probably always would.
I turned the stereo off, put on the lamp at the head of the couch, stretched out, and finished Valdez. Much later, Pike let himself into the kitchen, moving like a dark shadow across the edges of the lamplight. He put muddy Nikes in the sink, peeled out of his wet shirt and wet pants and went into the little bathroom. “You up?” A voice in the dark.
“Yeah.”
He came out of the bathroom in jockey shorts with a towel over his shoulders. “I found the spotters. Two guys in the yellow house ten o’clock east, just up from Nichols Canyon. Asshole in a lawn chair on the back deck, squinting through a pair of field glasses.”
“What about the other guy?”
“Sacked out on a waterbed.”
There was more. “You took them?”
“Yes.”
Pike sat down on the floor beside the glass doors, his back to the wall. He sat sukhasen. Yoga. A sitting pose that allows relaxation. Did Pike do yoga before he met me? I couldn’t remember.
I said, “Your knife?”
“A house contains all sorts of useful appliances, Elvis. You know that.”
“Duran won’t like it, Joe. He’ll take it out on the kid.”
Joe’s eyes were pinpoints of light in the dark. They did not move. “He won’t know what happened, Elvis. No one will. Ever. They’re gone. It’s like they never were.”
I nodded, and felt cold.
The rain beat down, hammering noisily on the glass and the roof and Pike’s Jeep parked out past the front door. I thought about the cat, holed up under a car somewhere. After a while I slept and dreamed about the Eskimo and Perry Lang and my friend Joe Pike. But what I dreamed I did not remember.
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