thousand.”
“How?”
Grove shook his head while looking me in the eye.
“So now what?” I asked.
“I know how to make the money. You bring me the bond.”
“Maybe I should go to the cops,” I speculated.
Grove decided on that moment to stand up.
“Messenger of the Divine is where you could get in touch with me. I might be a little bit scarce the next week or so, but Vincent knows how to get to me,” he said. “Going to the cops might get me in trouble, but it’ll get you boys killed.”
Fearless blew Grove a kiss in reply. I wasn’t feeling so cocky.
The self-proclaimed minister walked away from the table and to the woman who was waiting for him at the bar. Together they went out the front door. I sat there wondering, was there a dollar amount worth my life?
FEARLESS AND I FINISHED our drinks in silence. Then we went toward the door. He was the first one through, and I was just about to follow when someone grabbed me, roughly, by the shoulder. It was the waitress with the scarred lip.
“Excuse me,” she said.
“Uh-huh?”
“Why cain’t you look at me? I’m so ugly that you got to be rude?”
I looked at her then. I saw a lovely female face, except for that scar, on a woman not over twenty. Her expression was petulant but sweet; that face had seen some life.
“It ain’t that, sugar,” I said.
“Then what?”
I brought a finger to her face, tracing the scar up to her lip. She didn’t move away.
“I wanna kiss that streak. I wanna bite it. But you know I don’t even have a roof or rent for a room. That scar meant that somebody hurt you, so I looked away. I wanted to say somethin’ nice, but what use is a man smooth talkin’ when he ain’t got two nickels to rub together?”
The woman didn’t believe me, but she wanted to. One brow was knitted in anger, but the other one was wide with hope.
“I’m Charlotte,” she said.
“Paris. Paris Minton. You be workin’ here in two nights, Charlotte?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll drop by.”
“Sure. I bet.”
“You got a pencil?” I asked her.
She took out her yellow number two and her bill pad. I gave her Milo Sweet’s phone number and said, “You can call there if I don’t show, but don’t worry, I’m comin’ back around.”
“HEY, PARIS,” Fearless said in a shy tone. We were in the car driving toward Milo’s office.
“What?”
“I just remembered somethin’.”
“Yeah?”
“I know Leon Douglas.”
“Say what?”
“I know ’im, Paris. He went in for armed robbery. But he was in the city jail ’cause he got a fancy new lawyer and a retrial. His cell was just down the hall from me.”
I pulled the car to the curb and turned off the ignition. I put my head on the steering wheel and closed my eyes. The darkness called me toward sleep, but I sat up again and asked, “Why the hell you wait till now to tell me this?”
“I just didn’t think of it. In the can they called him Big Bama ’cause he was from Alabama an’ he was big. I hardly even knew him.”
“So? What do you know about him?”
“Nuthin’. He was smug about bein’ down at the jail. He did a payroll robbery and shot two men. They had him for thirty at San Quentin, but the evidence wasn’t hard. The gun they found on him when he was arrested was the wrong
