“Come on in, roughrider,” she said, extending a hand.
Chaney froze, like she was asking him to dance. Shel wiggled her hand and Chaney came to, struggling to disengage himself from his machine and staggering a little as he got his legs beneath him, trundling forward, up the wood-plank stair and onto the porch.
As Abatangelo headed into the bath for a fast shower and shave, Shel led Chaney back through the house toward the kitchen. The kid ambled along, inspecting the place as though everything in it possessed a veiled meaning. He lingered at the framed photographs on the walls, taken by Abatangelo during his travels with Shel- Tulum, Barcelona, Pataya, Trinidad, Vanuatu. There were both landscapes and portraits, black and white mostly, but color, too, even a few hand-tinted prints. Chaney, eyes wide, probed the corners of his mouth with his tongue as he walked picture to picture.
In the kitchen, Shel pointed to a chair at the pine table near the window and asked, “Hungry?”
Chaney wiped dust from under his eyes and nodded. “Got any tuna fish?”
It stopped her cold. “We’re talking breakfast here.”
Chaney shrugged. “Well, yeah.”
The tone in his voice, it reminded her, This is a boy. “Sure,” Shel said.
“Tuna fish and Thousand Island dressing. Slice of Swiss if you got it. You know, a sandwich.”
He pressed his palms together, as though to demonstrate what a sandwich was. Good God, Shel thought, gagging.
He sat down and shortly noticed a stack of prints and proof sheets Abatangelo had left out on the table. “Jeez,” he said, waving in the vague direction of the hallway, as though to include both groups of photographs in his remark. “These are like, you know, good.”
“Danny has an eye.”
“I mean, like professional good,” Chaney said. “You know,
Shel dumped a splotch of Thousand Island dressing into a bowl of canned tuna and started working the stuff with a fork. “He’s sold a few to the wire services, AP, that kinda thing.” She slathered the stuff onto two slices of white bread.
Chaney sniggered and sat back. “Yeah right. And this load coming in, what’s that?” He crossed his arms, snorting as he nodded toward the pictures. “Probably bought all this shit at some kinda… I dunno, sale.”
Shel put down the fork, wiped her hands, strode across the room and leaned down till she was nose to nose with him.
“Look at me,” she said, tapping the bridge of her nose with her finger. “You got something you wanna say?”
Chaney leaned back a little, glance jittering from one eye to the other. “I said it already.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” Shel straightened. “If not, let’s hear it now. All of it.”
Chaney gnawed his lip. “What I meant,” he said quietly, “is, like, it’s a good idea, you know? Make the place look artsy. Like that’s what you guys do.”
“It is what we do,” Shel said. “Remember that.” She stormed back to the counter, threw his sandwich together and served it to him with a jar of pickles and a can of RC cola. “Chow down, Brown,” she said, then headed for the bath.
Abatangelo was finishing up, shaving himself, his lathered face reflected in a hand-wiped circle of steamless mirror. Shel sat down behind him on the edge of the tub. He was naked from his shower, dampness clinging to the hair along his legs, droplets dotting his back where he’d missed with the towel.
He glanced over his shoulder and nodded toward the kitchen. “You trust him?”
“He’s hell-bent on putting my self-control to work, I can tell you that.”
“That could be stuff.”
“It’s not stuff, believe me. It’s him. Anyway, yeah, sure, what’s not to trust? If the locals already rolled the kid, they’d have come up here themselves. You’re the head man. Why wait?”
“Always looks good in the papers,” he said, “you take down the whole crew.”
“You are the whole crew,” she said. “Be real. They get greedy, especially using that kid out there, they risk tipping you off. You close the whole thing down, poof, you’re gone. Then what’ve they got? Eddy on a drunk driving beef.”
Abatangelo rinsed his razor beneath the spigot. “You’re probably right.”
“Which leaves us where?”
With a washcloth he wiped away the last of the shaving cream. “If we’re lucky,” he said, “Eddy’s already been sprung and he’s wandering around downtown Roseburg.”
“You feeling lucky?”
Since the decision last spring to roll the dice, go ahead with this final run, fuckups had grown routine. The buzzards of bad luck were circling.
“Not particularly,” he admitted. He went into the next room, sat on the bed and pulled on a T-shirt, a pair of socks.
Shel followed him in. “Let me take care of Eddy,” she offered. “Go in, make his bail.”
Abatangelo got to his feet, stepped into his pants. “What makes you less of a risk than me?”
“Oh come on, Danny, don’t.”
Shel’s role in the Company was limited to playing the nice girl, the friendly new neighbor. She baby-sat the safe houses, took care of the dogs and gardens, finessed the locals. She was a brave, convincing actress, a sterling liar, but she handled no product. She never put up seed money, never optioned shares on a load. That was Danny’s bit.
“I’ve got a better idea,” he told her.
The man’s name was Blatt, a private investigator with no address but a Roseburg post office box. Most mornings he could be reached at a luncheonette named Brandy’s on the outskirts of town. They learned this from a local defense lawyer they contacted anonymously.
While Abatangelo waited in the car, Shel met Blatt in the restaurant. The place was paneled in knotty pine turned smeary and dark from years of grill grease and smoke. She sat with a cup of bitter coffee while, across the table, Blatt feasted on rheumy eggs, two rasps of charred bacon, and hash browns that looked like a fried disk of soap shavings. The man wore hiking boots and jeans, with a gabardine sport coat over a Western shirt, complete with bolo tie. He was medium height and wiry, with knobby hands and dirty nails. It was difficult to tell, from the way his long, thinning blond hair swirled around his head, whether he’d made a bad job of a comb-over or just been caught in the wind.
Shel explained what she wanted. Blatt nodded as he listened, then said, “Gonna cost you a thousand dollars. On top of his bail, which is two-fifty. That’s standard on a DWI up here.” He stabbed at an egg yolk with a wedge of toast.
“A grand,” she said. “A little steep, don’t you think? That your hourly fee?”
“Make it two thousand.” Blatt, still chewing, wiped his lips with his napkin, sat back, swallowed, licked his teeth. “Cash, of course.”
Shel declined to make further protest for fear of the stakes rising again. “Where’s this get done?”
“The money? Right here.” He unwrapped a mint-flavored toothpick. “Do business here all the time. Look weird if we went somewhere else.”
Weird to who, Shel wondered, glancing around the one-room luncheonette. The waitress was flirting with the cook. The other patrons, three lumpy middle-aged men, looked more like lonesome uncles than law enforcement.
“Excuse me a minute,” she said, getting up from the table. She walked to the counter, picked up a discarded newspaper, and headed to the can. Once inside she locked the door, stood at the sink and counted out $2,250 from her purse, wrapping it inside the paper. God help us all if this is a huge mistake, she thought. Tightening the fold of the paper around the money, she headed back out to the table where she sat back down and set the paper between her and Blatt.
“Humor me, if you don’t mind,” she said.
