tonight?'
'You're my only lead.'
'Then you're shit out of luck, man,' she said, but she was smiling.
When she finished with her toilet, I locked the shackle around her ankle, snapped off the lights, and we shared a few drinks of Scotch in the light of the milk-house heater almost without conversation, then slipped into our beds.
Later that night I had a version of the dream, the one where I stood beside her cot. This time, though, she reached her hands down from the cot, took my hands, and pulled me into the cot with her, saying, 'Get in here, you old fart. It's cold down there.' But this time it was no dream. I just had to act as if it was one to live with myself. Then I blamed the Scotch for making me open the cocaine and the shackle, then the cocaine for Molly, then I blamed myself for everything. But for a few hours the dead kept their eyes closed and the living shut their flapping mouths. And the dream lived. For the moment.
Although the storm still loomed cold and ashen outside, it was nearly bright noon when the nightmare began. When the scrambled cell phone began to ring, I untangled myself from Molly, then stumbled around the corn crib until I found the phone in my war bag.
'What the hell,' I muttered.
'Milodragovitch,' an oddly familiar voice shouted, 'I've got your fuckin' nigger, I want my whore back.'
'Shit,' I said. Molly looked up at me from the cot. 'What? Who is this? What are you talking about?'
'Listen to this, you asshole,' the voice said, then I heard a grunt of pain, as if somebody had been hit with a truck. 'We're standing here in North Las Vegas, asshole,' the voice came again, 'and your nigger's head is in a vise. If she ain't back here in forty-eight hours, I'm going to take a hammer to his face until he looks like crawdad shit. Not even his Momma will recognize his body. Of course it won't matter because she'll be fishbait floating in Lake Mead. Forty-eight hours, dickwad.' Then the connection was broken.
'What's up?' Molly asked.
'Your buddy, Jimmy Fish, has got a friend of mine and his mother,' I said, 'and he's going to butcher them if I don't bring you back. He claims you're his whore.'
'Oh God,' she said, 'that little fuck will kill them,' then buried her face in her hands. 'What are you going to do?'
'Put your clothes on,' I said, then found my pants, dug out Fresno's card, and dialed the number. It took a few minutes to argue my way past secretaries and into the august presence of himself.
'Mr. Milodragovitch,' he crooned, 'what can I do for you now?'
'You can earn your money for a change,' I said, then explained before he could interrupt.
The next four hours clicked by like the passage of death beetles. Molly and I drank coffee, chewed on oranges, and smoked like wood stoves. But neither of us said an extraneous word, just waited quietly. When the cell phone rang, it sounded as if we were trapped in a bell tower, as the ringing crashed off the metal walls.
'Milodragovitch,' Fresno said.
'I'm here.'
'Well, I don't know exactly what happened, but it went okay.'
'What the hell's that mean?'
'The McCraveys are okay. Not fine, but okay. Red has a bunch of scrapes and bruises. And his mother had some kind of heart spell, but the paramedics said it's nothing serious. But Mr. Jimmy Fish, he'd been watching too many of his own movies.'
'Yeah.'
'I don't know why, but he decided to shoot it out with me and my boys. Tossed his crutch aside and grabbed for his piece,' Fresno said. 'I took a chance and put one in his shoulder. Little fucker dropped the piece, but before he hit the floor, one of the goons with him – some slick Frenchman, Red says – put one in Jimmy's head, then threw his piece down and slipped out the back door. I don't fucking know how he got away, but he did.'
'Are we covered?' I asked.
'As far as I can tell, the two other guys don't speak English. So we're covered. I stuck one of our alarm shields on the outside of the building,' he said. 'Jimmy Fish had a gunshot crease in his thigh, but everybody around here knows that he did that himself. So as long as your friends keep their mouths shut, you're covered.'
'Can you get the cell phone to Red?'
'I'll run it by the hospital. He rode along with his Mom.'
'Thanks,' I said, then asked him how much I owed him. He said he'd send a bill. I said I'd send a check.
'I guess I should thank you for more than the money,' he said.
'Why?'
'I don't know. After the way we met, I guess I should thank you for even thinking that I might help.'
'You didn't seem all that happy about your situation,' I said. 'I had to hope I read you right.' Once again, asking for help seemed to have worked out.
'Maybe someday you'll tell me what's going on,' he said, 'but thanks anyway.' And we left it like that.
'Jimmy Fish is dead,' I said as I turned to Molly.
'I guess I can go home then,' she said.
'What?'
'I don't know anything, man. Jimmy Fish set up the job on you,' she said. 'Hell, he's been getting me jobs since he turned me out running cons. One of his so-called buddies – Vegas, Hollywood, or Richboy Land – would want to fuck a guy up, and I'd be the instrument of revenge.'
'Isn't that just fucking lovely.'
Then Molly explained just how lovely it had been.
Jimmy Fish and Rollie Molineaux had been childhood buddies, had grown up together, and gone to work roughnecking offshore out of Morgan City to support their garage band habit. They had been working on the rig floor together the day the backup cable on the cathead tongs broke and snapped Rollie's arm off clean as a police whistle. They had gone into the bar business with the insurance settlement. Rollie became the world's best one- armed bartender. Jimmy discovered that nobody wanted to listen to him sing, but he had a real talent for handling hecklers, running whores, and setting up cons. Even during his run as a semi-famous comic and character actor, Jimmy Fish couldn't stop the gangster life.
'He never recovered from the fact that he wasn't going to be the Cajun Frank Sinatra,' Molly said. 'He always thought the audiences hated his act and him, that they were just laughing at him, so the gangster life gave him a way to be in charge. Running drugs and whores and cons.'
'Sounds like a sweetheart.'
'Except for the fact that he sort of raped me when I was thirteen, he had his moments,' she said softly. 'Sort of.'
'Sort of?'
'Oh, hell,' she sighed. 'I was a goofy, gawky teenager, and he was Rollie's best friend, almost a member of the family, and sort of a celebrity, and we'd been drinking wine, so maybe I flirted with him a little bit. He'd bought Rollie a fishing boat, and I think maybe they were running a little coke or something for somebody, so one night when Rollie hadn't made it back yet… I don't know. You know what they say, shit's what happens while you're waitin' for life to start.'
'That's what they say, I guess.'
'But I don't think they really know,' she said, then released a bark of laughter, short and sharp as if she was biting off a sob. 'But what the hell, man, he paid for college all the way through my first year of law school, and he didn't bother me too much, then…'
'Then?'
'Oh, hell, the usual story. Some rich guy I was datin', he OD'd one night and suddenly I was in the middle of a cocaine bust I couldn't skate,' she said slowly, 'without help from Jimmy and his connections, then suddenly there didn't seem any sense in finishing law school, right, and I wasn't skinny anymore, so I started taking my clothes off for a living, and believe me I made a good living… until Jimmy showed me how to make a better one.'
'When did you start running cons?' I asked.
