lg. soft drink, I sat and watched the traffic go in and out of the Cap'n's lot. There was a system, of sorts. After the rooster on the curb waved them in, cars went either into a parking slot or into the drive-through lane. Once in a while a kid would get out of a car in the drive-through lane and go into the bathroom, but he or she always came back in due time, so I figured the cars to watch were the fancy ones whose occupants went into the restaurant.
I was there an hour, which was as long as I dared to stay. I saw only four expensive cars the whole time I was there. A Cadillac convertible with a male in it who arrived solo, ate solo, and left solo; a big Jeep Cherokee with a family of six who left without ordering because the place was too busy and they didn't want to wait in line; a Maserati driven by a man who had a little boy in tow and who left twenty minutes later with him still in tow; and a Buick Reatta containing a man and a little girl of twelve. When the man came out alone, I sat up so jerkily that I spilled part of the drink into my lap, adding to the already plentiful scars and stains of the day, but a moment later the little girl came running out of the rest room and climbed into the Buick and the two of them drove away. With a lump in my stomach that was compounded equally of disappointment and indigestible chicken, I headed into the rush-hour traffic and pointed Alice toward Topanga. The sun, as I drove west, glared through the clouds like a luminescent bottle of milk.
I wanted to call the Sorrells when I got home, but I couldn't. Daddy would be there. I wanted to call Hammond and ask whether they'd found Marco, but I couldn't. It might have endangered Aimee. I wanted to find out where Mrs. Brussels lived and break into her house, but I couldn't, for the same reason. In all, there wasn't a hell of a lot I
So I called Roxanne. She was chilly and distant, nursing the grit of her grudge from Easter into a fine pearl of resentment. I called my parents to apologize, and my mother hung up on me, telling me they were watching something on television. I knew they never watched television.
For want of anything better to do, I put Elvis Costello on the stereo and built a fire in the woodburner, congratulating myself on having had the foresight to buy beer on the way home, and thought about dinner. Then the lump in my stomach reasserted itself and I stopped thinking about dinner and thought about beer instead.
Elvis Costello was singing about watching the detectives, and I was on my fourth Singha and wishing I still smoked, when someone knocked on the door. By the time I got up, Roxanne had opened it with her key and was standing there, all soft and milky and looking, as always, like she'd just sent herself out to be dry-cleaned. Her fine auburn hair hung down her back, fastened at the top by what seemed to be a red plastic clothespin. She'd ruined yet another pair of pants by pouring bleach directly into the washing machine instead of into the bleach dispenser. Roxanne is a fool for bleach.
“I'm a creep,” she said without a prelude, “but you are too.”
“I've never denied that I was a creep,” I said, delighted to see her. “But I have a certain
“Oh, God,” she said, mimicking a swoon, “I go all buttery when you speak French. Is there any more beer?”
“Does the pope wear suspenders?” I asked.
She uncapped one for me and one for her, and I finished mine while she did it, and rolled the empty under the old mahogany sideboard. Roxanne curled up on the couch with her head on my lap and breathed into the front of my jeans. It felt warm and damp and healthy. Two beers later, she said, “Let's do something awful.”
We went to bed and did something awful. When we'd caught our breath, we fell asleep.
I was once again in the watching place above the stairs, the place Aurora had told me about, looking down through the slats in the banister. Without knowing why, I knew that everyone else in the house was asleep. The front door opened, and Aimee-the-pig came in. She climbed the stairs just a little more slowly than was natural, sobbing inside the pink plastic costume.
When she passed me, making soft snuffling noises, I got up and followed. I seemed to be enormously heavy, and it took all I had to lift my legs, like I was trying to run through water. Aimee went into her room, her back to me, and stood at the foot of a little white bed decorated with frolicking pigs. Without turning around, she shed the obscene little skirt, with the hole in the back for the curlicue tail, and then the polka-dot blouse. The air in the room began to hum and I felt the hair on my arms bristle. I tried to say something, but all that came out was a croak. She didn't hear it. As I stood there, wanting to run away but unable to make my legs work, she reached up and popped off the snaps that fastened the pig head to the pig body and then she pulled the head off and shook her yellow hair free and turned slowly around to face me, and the air hummed more frantically, like a thousand imprisoned hummingbirds, and I saw her tear-streaked face, and it wasn't Aimee at all.
I sat up in the darkness, grabbing a fistful of blanket in each hand. Roxanne moaned and threw an arm across her face. Moonlight poured in through the window. I knew what was happening in Cap'n Cluckbucket's.
III
22
It's like every other fast-food restaurant in the world,” I said into the phone. “They come in with kids and they go out with kids. But at Cap'n Cluckbucket's they're not always the same kids.”
I could hear traffic wheezing and hooting on the other end of the line while the Mountain thought. A motorbike snarled by with a long, tearing fart. Then he grunted. “How?”
It was after ten on Friday morning. Roxanne was long gone, off to an aerobics class where she was purchasing a perfect stomach on the installment plan. She'd left a pot full of perfect coffee.
I took a grateful hit off my third cup. “Who notices the kids with an adult in a restaurant?” I asked. “And if they're worried that someone might, there are those chicken masks. I saw two males go in and out, and when one of them left, the kid with him was masked. How do I know that she was the kid he arrived with? They were the same size, but that's all I could testify to. Hell, the one family I talked to, I could barely tell the difference between a boy and a girl.”
“I know the place,” the Mountain said. He didn't sound very surprised, but then, I'd never seen him act surprised. “Good chicken,” he added.
I put a hand to my throat to block the upward progress of the lump I'd ingested on the previous day. The Mountain could have digested Disney World without so much as a burp around Mickey's ears. “Mountain,” I said, “there are
“Hold it,” the Mountain said. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and barked something at someone, and I suddenly felt a surge of paranoia wash over me. Suppose I was wrong? Suppose the cops were okay and the Mountain wasn't? Suppose I was talking to someone with a line to Aimee's kidnapper? After all, he was perfectly placed to nab little kids off the streets and stick their parents up for ransom. Worst of all, the kids trusted him. And why wouldn't they?
“And?” he said, coming back on the line. Now it sounded as though his mouth were full.
“And nothing,” I said, backtracking. “Just steer your kids away from Cap'n Cluckbucket's.” I drew a series of interconnected boxes on my pad-a symbol, Eleanor always said, of spiritual imprisonment-and wished I hadn't made the call.
“Hey,” he said, “I can't even get them to leave the Oki-Burger. And I can't keep the ones I want to stay. Little girl yesterday, I had her parents all set up to come by, and when they showed up, she was long gone.”
“Yeah,” I said, “well, that's the breaks.”
“You okay?” he asked. “You sound kind of funny.”
