to go. It’s gonna happen tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“That’s right.”
“Good. We need you back here as soon as possible. We got a little something for you to take care of up north.”
“North?” Cruz said.
“Yeah, like New England.”
“Great. You gonna fly me straight up there?”
“No. We need you back here first.”
“All right. It’s your dime.”
“So everything will be done by tonight?”
“Tonight,” Cruz agreed.
“Good enough.” There was a pause. “Listen, how’s the girl?”
Across the restaurant, Cruz could see her, still at the table. She was examining something along the hem of her skirt. It gave him a flash of panty.
“She’s great. Very smart.”
“Smart?”
“Smart.”
“Uh, okay. How’s the suite?”
“Couldn’t be better. Richly appointed furnishings. Views of the French Quarter. 24-hour concierge.”
“All right, then. We got a new service and I just wanted to make sure everything worked out.”
“It’s great,” Cruz said.
“Then get it done, will ya? We’ll see you soon.”
Cruz returned to the table. It was shaping up to be a hot and sticky day. The girl was finishing her fruit cocktail. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember her name. Did it matter?
“What do you say?” he said. “Let’s go to the room, eh? I got a busy day today and I want to fuck you some more before I send you home.”
She slurped a cherry down, then licked the glass cup with her tongue.
“Good,” she said. “More money for me.”
They went upstairs.
“That bitch,” Darren Pelletier said.
His voice had taken on a nasal pitch because of the cotton wadding stuffed up his nose. A white plaster splint made an A-shape across its bridge. Both his eyes were black, and the whole package together made him look somewhat like a raccoon.
“You know I’m gonna make her pay, right?”
Hal Morgan didn’t say a word. He just sat in the living room of his ramshackle three-bedroom house in Auburn, Maine, thirty miles north of Portland. He let his friend ramble on. Hal’s hair hung loose and he pushed it out of his eyes. Mr. Shaggy, he often called himself when the young ladies asked. He held his first beer of the morning, a can of Budweiser. It was ice cold and felt good in his hand. He sipped it quietly while reviewing his menu of options.
They didn’t look good.
He gazed out the front picture window. He lived just down the road from the Lost Valley ski resort. In fact, he could see the small mountain – little more than a hill really – from right here on the sofa. He watched that mountain now, the bald ski runs bathed in morning sunlight, reds and oranges of fall mixed in with the evergreens along the edges of the trails.
Soon, another six weeks at most, the hill would be covered in snow. From his living room, he could watch the skiers glide down. Then, before he knew it, the scene would change yet again. The seasons passed faster and faster as he grew older. He was almost forty years old now, and it seemed like on Monday he would glance up that hill in green and sunny summertime, and on Tuesday a howling wind would blow powdery snow from the top of it.
Closer to home, his neighborhood sprawled out in what he liked to think of as the mountain’s shadow. It was a quiet neighborhood of small saltbox and ranch-style houses, not quite suburban, not quite rural. The neighborhood itself looked like it was leaning toward suburban – what with the houses just ten or twenty yards apart. But the pickup trucks with the gun racks and the sagging condition of some of the homes said the people were leaning toward rural.
He sipped his beer and watched Darren.
Darren sat sprawled in an easy chair. His shirt was off, revealing his well-muscled upper body. His sandy blonde hair was slicked back. He was drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette, sulking, touching the plaster the emergency room doctor had put across his nose, cursing to himself, and looking over his various bruises all at the same time.
Mr. Blue Eyes.
The moniker fit him perfectly. Nobody had eyes that were bluer than Mr. Blue Eyes. He had eyes of pale blue – like the sky, like a Caribbean lagoon. You could fall into his eyes, they were so blue. In fact, Hal knew that Darren wore contact lenses to give his eyes that color. There was nothing wrong with his eyes that needed correction – except their color: they were actually brown.
Darren had slept in the spare bedroom because he didn’t want to go home to his wife after the beating he took. Darren often slept in the spare bedroom. Sometimes he slept in there with the girls from photo shoots they did – a lot of the girls weren’t nearly as resistant as Lola to modeling with Darren. Sometimes he slept in there alone. Beating or no, Darren rarely wanted to go home to his wife.
“Gonna eat that bitch alive next time,” he said, almost to himself. He took a deep drag from his cigarette. “Yes sir, next time I surely am gonna do it to her.”
Hal smiled. “We’ll have to put a paper bag over your head, but okay.”
Darren’s handsome face winced as he gingerly rubbed a large purplish blot on the side of his thick neck. He smiled around the cigarette. “Man, she got me good right here.” The bruise looked like an octopus imbedded in his neck, trying to push its way out through the skin. It looked like somebody had hit him there with a baseball bat.
“Oh yeah, that’s the worst of it,” Hal said. “What’d she do there?”
“Kicked me as I was falling.” Darren took a big slurp of his beer. “Or maybe it was after I was down.” The two men glanced at each other for a moment, and burst out laughing. It was funny, if you looked at it the right way. Last night had been the worst screw-up they had experienced in their new careers. A couple of girls had almost escaped, at times, and one had even pulled a gun, which they talked her into dropping. But none so far had busted out with this Bruce Lee shit. That was the one thing they hadn’t expected.
Hal took a sip of his Budweiser as the laughter subsided. “Kid, we got our asses kicked by a little girl.”
“We sure did, partner.”
They lapsed into silence, and Hal looked around the room.
He had inherited this house from his mother years before, and there was no doubt he had let the place go to hell. It was in need of a woman’s touch, maybe. The furniture was old, the window blinds were moving toward ratty, the rugs were threadbare, and bordered scuffed wooden floors that had long since needed resurfacing. The kitchen cabinets were old – they had probably been put in during the 1940’s. Ditto the stove, although it still worked well. The refrigerator was only two years old, but that was because the last one had broken. Outside, the lawn did whatever the hell if wanted. Right now, in mid-October, it was long and going toward brown, slowly dying. Bits of paper and other assorted flying garbage had embedded itself here and there on the grass. Beneath the grass, especially near the rickety front porch, were empty beer cans that Hal and Darren had chucked while sitting on the porch and bullshitting.
If the house looked bad, Hal could take comfort in the fact that it looked no worse than any of the other houses in the area. A lot of people in that neighborhood were struggling. Hal could also take some comfort in the
