Under the Skin

gone too.

Rose studied me over the flame of his lighter as he fired up a smoke. “This girl…she’s kind of special, huh?”

“I wouldn’t say that. We went out a coupla times.”

“How long you say you know her?”

“Not long. Didn’t really get to know her very well.”

“How long’s not long?”

“Well…a couple of days.” I grinned to show him how funny I thought it was.

He wasn’t buying it. “They say it don’t take long, sometimes—to get to know somebody pretty good, I mean.”

“Yeah, so I’ve heard.”

I stood up.

“So what you got in mind now?” he said.

“Do a little drinking with LQ and Brando, celebrate the bonus. Thanks a lot, by the way.”

“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Kid. Only reason you aint already on the way to the border is you needed cash.”

I had made up my mind to go after her the minute Rocha told me what happened—but I’d wanted to avoid any talk about it. There wasn’t anything to talk about.

“I gotta get going,” I said.

“Let me tell you something about women, Jimmy.”

“I have to go,” I said. I felt like I had a snake twisting around inside me.

“A woman’s never the reason. It’s always something else. Always. The important thing is to know what it really is.”

“All I know is, he’s not gonna decide how it goes.”

He stared at me without expression for a second—and then showed that smile that was nothing but teeth.

“Well hell, Kid…now you’re making sense.”

LQ and Brando fell in beside me as I made my way through the Studio crowd and headed for the elevator. LQ had his hands in his pockets and was twirling a toothpick between his teeth. Mr. Nonchalance. Some guy not watching where he was going bumped hard into Brando and said “Hey Jack —” and started to turn. And then he caught Ray’s look and shut up and moved on.

We rode down in a packed elevator. When we got out on the street I said I’d see them later and started around to the parking lot to get my valise out of the Terraplane. The train station was close enough to walk to.

They came along behind me, LQ whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again.” I asked where they thought they were going.

“Name it,” LQ said.

“I got something to tend to that’s nothing to do with business. See you guys later.”

“Sure enough will, because we’re coming,” LQ said. “Won’t take but a minute to get our bags.”

“I just told you it’s not a business thing. It doesn’t concern you guys.”

“Bullshit,” Brando said.

“Goddamn it, it’s personal, I’m telling you—”

“We’re partners,” Brando said.

“Business or personal,” LQ said around his toothpick. “In sunshine or in rain.”

As soon as we got on the move the snake inside me settled down, but it felt coiled and ready. We left Galveston well before dawn, then grabbed the first westbound connection out of Houston. The day broke red behind us as we pulled out of the station. I’d called Rose from the Galveston depot and said LQ and Brando were going with me. He said he’d figured they would be and that their visas would be ready too when we got to the border.

The train made stops at several small stations along the way and finally pulled into San Antonio a little before noon. It stopped there long enough for us to get out and have a cafe lunch rather than eat in the dining car. It was the first time I’d been to San Antone since the night two years before when Rose and I had gone speeding out of it in the Cadillac, leaving dead men in the street.

We hadn’t talked much on the train, every man pretty much keeping to his own thoughts, but once the waitress served us our steak sandwiches and slaw, Brando said, “So how long we got to wait before hearing about this girl?”

I said she was Mexican and her name was Daniela, she was damn pretty and spoke good English. I told about meeting her at the Avilas’ after the fight with Rocha but said I’d first seen her on New Year’s Eve when she went by in front of us in a beat-to-hell Model T.

“Hellfire, I remember that!” LQ said. “She was a finelooking chiquita. You young rascal—you track her down or what?”

“No. Just luck.”

Brando wanted to know what chiquita we were talking about, how come he didn’t know about her.

“If you’d pull your head out of your ass every once in a while,” LQ said, “you might catch some of what’s going on.”

“Catch this,” Brando said.

I told about having breakfast with her at the Steam Whistle and then about our swim in the gulf that night. The part about the hammerhead knocked them for a loop.

“I’ve heard tell about Black Tom since I was a kid,” LQ said, “but I never believed he was no damn twenty- foot long. I still don’t.”

“Well I didn’t put a measuring tape on it but it was like a train going by.”

“Goddamn, man!” Brando said. “She saved your ass.”

“I’m not ashamed to admit it.”

LQ said, “She took a kick at that thing, no lie?”

“No lie.”

“That’s some girl.”

“Yeah.”

“Then what?”

“I took her home.”

“Well now,” LQ said, cutting a look at Brando, “what I can’t help but wonder is, did you and this ladyfriend have the pleasure of, ah, doing the deed, shall we say?”

“Yeah,” Brando said. “That’s what I can’t help but wonder too.”

“None of your goddamn business, either of you.”

They grinned right back at me. “Thought so,” LQ said.

We got back aboard and the train rolled out of San Antone. For a while we just stared out the window at the changing landscape. The grass thinned out and the trees got scrubbier and there was more dust and rock. The sky enlarged as the country opened up.

Then LQ said, “So what’s the plan, Kid? I mean, we just gonna go knock on his door and ask him to hand her over, or what?”

“I’m not asking him a damn thing,” I said.

They both smiled.

“So? What’s the plan then?” LQ said.

“Don’t know yet. A guy’s meeting us at the border with the kind of information we need for a plan.”

“This rich guy,” Brando said, “he’s bound to have some muscle on the payroll, right? Maybe more guys like the two he sent to snatch her?”

I said I didn’t know, but Daniela had told Rocha the place had cattle, so the guy had plenty of ranch hands for sure.

“Cowboys, shit,” LQ said. “If all he’s got is cowboys, I don’t care if he got a hundred. I never met a cowboy