Everything but the Squeal

realized for the first time that I didn't even know his name.

“Sick, schmick,” I said. “You can still die. You took Aimee to her ‘agent.’ ”

“No way,” he said weakly. He was on the verge of tears.

“I want names.”

For the first time in several minutes he looked directly at me. “No,” he said. “I don't know any names.”

“Let's change tack,” I said. I went right up to him, and his eyes followed the flame in my hand. The gasoline fumes poured off him in waves. He didn't even see his knife in my other hand.

I stuck it through the fabric of his denim jacket and sliced down. The knife went through it like margarine. His skinny chest, slick with gasoline, gleamed at me. “We can start with skin instead,” I said. Behind me, I heard Jessica step back.

“Don't matter,” he said, looking at me again. “I'd rather die this way.”

“Well,” I said, “I don't think you know what's involved.”

“Fuck off,” he said. He closed his eyes again. “Just kill me.”

“We'll open with a nipple,” I said.

He shook his head, his eyes closed now. “So do it,” he said.

I turned around and saw Jessica looking at me with eyes bigger than Bambi's. I looked down at the torch in my hand, and then turned and walked away and tossed it into the reservoir. It hit the water with a hissing sound and disappeared.

“Untie the cables,” I said to Jessica, turning back from the water. When she did, he fell forward onto his face. His hands were still tied behind him. Then he turned his head and retched.

He retched for longer than I would have believed possible, until his stomach was empty, and then he retched air.

I put my fingers into his hair, lifted his head, and rubbed his face into the vomit. “This is for Junko's tongue,” I said. When I pulled him upright, he was covered in dirt and vomit.

“Don't move,” I said. I went behind him and cut the tape binding his wrists. I left intact the tape over his fingers and thumbs. Then I took the money and cigarettes out of my pocket and shoved them into the front of his trousers.

“For Christ's sake,” I said, “don't try to light up.” I threw the knife into the reservoir and then undid my belt from the tree and dropped the gas can to the ground. “Come on, Jessica,” I said, walking toward the car.

“Wait,” he half-sobbed. “What about me?”

“Oh, I haven't forgotten about you,” I said, still walking. “You'll be on my mind for quite some time.”

“How am I supposed to get home?”

I reached back and pulled Jessica along behind me. He yelled after us as we walked, but I tuned it out. At the car, all the violence and ugliness came up into my throat, and I had to turn and spit it out. When I got into Alice, my throat hurt and my mouth was sour and foul. I started the car. Jessica sat against her door, small and self- contained and silent.

As I hit the lights and shifted into drive, I said, “I'm afraid you're not seeing me at my best.”

“You're fine,” she said. She was quiet until we'd bumped all the way down the road and made the turn that would lead us onto the Ventura Freeway.

Then she shifted in her seat and faced me. “Do you really think he gave them that little girl?”

“Maybe. He got Junko at just about the right time.”

She turned and cracked her window and breathed the fresh air, getting the gasoline out of her lungs. After a moment she turned back to me. “If he hadn't told you anything,” she said, “not anything at all, would you have let him catch fire?”

“No,” I said. A mile or so passed in silence.

“Softy,” she said.

18

Mountain

Upon returning home, as Annie told me later, Jessica received the first spanking she'd had since the age of four. When she was four, Jessica cried. At thirteen, she responded by running away.

“She's not going to come here,” I'd said the first and second time Wyatt and Annie called me. “After last night, I'm the last person she'd want to see. Try Blister's. Maybe she's gone up there to punish you.”

They had tried Blister's. There was no one there. Wyatt had broken in through a window on the assumption that they were both inside, hiding. They weren't.

“I'm afraid they've run away together,” he said on phone call number four.

“She'll be back,” I said. “She knows that Blister is a walking abscess. And she's not going anywhere alone. After what she's seen, the street doesn't look any better than the Seventh Level of Hell.”

I wasn't in the best of shape. I'd awakened twice in the night, escaping the dream vision of Junko's pimp on fire. My mouth tasted as though I'd been gargling with gasoline. After the second time I'd cajoled myself back into sleep, I had a nightmare about someone in a pig costume. It was one of those peculiar dreams where nothing frightening happens but the air is charged with the kind of low-voltage electrical hum that makes the hair on your arms stand on end before an electrical storm. The person in the pig costume slowly walked up a flight of stairs and into a room. I followed, and the pig stood with his-her-back to me, and that was when the hum started. Then the pig mask came off. When the big pink pig started to turn around, I woke up. I was wringing wet, and cold to the center of my bones.

By then the sky was beginning to pale, and some L.A. birds were coughing in the trees. I got up, thankful to have awakened alive, and made a quart of coffee. Half an hour later, Wyatt called for the first time.

In addition to the fact that I felt sleepy and lousy, I was pretty much out of things to do. It was only Wednesday, the second day of the four-day ransom period, and I'd done just about everything I could think of that wouldn't directly endanger Aimee, on the remote chance that her kidnapper actually intended to release her after he picked up the ransom that had been mailed-mailed? — to him. I didn't believe for a second that he would. I had to wait, but I felt like I was waiting for the second coming of a deity whose first coming I had never accepted.

So I sort of cleaned the house again and hoped that Morris would call to announce that he'd broken the code on Birdie's disks. He didn't, and I couldn't call him: I didn't have his number, and there were no Gursteins listed in Topanga. Since I was sitting by the phone, I called once more the three numbers that had been answered by some guy saying “Cap’n’s.” On the first two, I got the same response. I hung up. The third, the one in my area code, just kept ringing. Well, that meant that the various Cap'ns kept something like business hours, so I hadn't entirely wasted my time.

But I still didn't know what the Cap’ns’ business was. What do Cap'ns do, anyway? The one in California might possibly have been a nautical man, but it seemed unlikely that the Cap'ns in Arizona and Idaho discharged their duties on the breast of the briny deep.

I staved off my identity crisis for a few hours by pulling on my shorts and a pair of battered shoes and running about six miles on the softest Pacific sand I could find. The clouds were back and there was a chill in the air that was the meteorological equivalent of a horse laugh at the idea of spring. My calves were on the verge of cramping permanently when I headed Alice into the main entrance of UCLA, still clean and empty because of Easter break, and headed for the saunas. When I got back to Alice, whom I'd parked in one of the dim underground lots that the state built for the convenience of rapists, it was ten-thirty, and I was showered, gleaming, and as pink as the pig in my nightmare.

Well, I thought, since I'm in town anyway, let's drive the streets and soak up the atmosphere. Maybe it would provoke an idea. What it provoked was an almost suicidal sense of futility. Even at that hour, even in the cold, the kids were out on Sunset and Santa Monica, both boys and girls, their thumbs extended to snag twenty dollars, a beating, or a nice case of AIDS. Without thinking about what I was doing, I pulled into the Oki-Burger. Since I was no longer under cover, I parked in the lot.