Everything but the Squeal

aquarium, okay?”

He nodded, and I opened the door.

I was out and he was past me so fast that I barely saw him. He sprinted up a series of stone steps that put a permanent part in the sagebrush, and I followed as best I could. By the time I got to the top of the steps I was winded, and Wyatt was pounding at the door of a surprisingly nice house that commanded a panoramic view of hills and sky.

I grabbed his hand in mid-pound, and it was a good thing I did, because it opened at precisely that moment and Wyatt would have begun the negotiations by hitting his daughter in the face. He tried to jerk his hand away from me, then focused and let it drop to his side.

“Daddy,” Jessica said coolly. “Is dinner ready?”

I hadn't seen her in a few months, and I wasn't prepared. Sure, she was still a baby to anyone who'd known her as long as I had, but she was a woman too. Most of the baby fat that makes children look so tentative had dropped away, revealing a face that had made up its mind to be beautiful. She wore a raggedly slashed T-shirt, shrunk bleached jeans, and a cloud of light brown hair with golden highlights. She sighted behind her father to look at me, and her hazel eyes narrowed slightly.

“Yes, it is,” Wyatt said tightly. “In fact, it's getting cold.”

“Mommy's ropavieja never gets cold,” she said. “Even when it's a week old, it'll blow your pants off.”

“And I'm glad to see that yours are on,” he said.

“Oh, please,” she said. It was the wrong thing to say.

Wyatt grabbed her arm and gave her a shake that almost lifted her off her feet. “We're going,” he said.

“So go,” said a male voice from behind her, and a lanky young man pulled the door the rest of the way open. “Take her with you. She was going home anyway.”

“I don't need your fucking permission to take my daughter home,” Wyatt said.

Blister passed a hand through limp hair that dangled over a narrow forehead. He was wearing white drawstring pants and slippers, and his stomach muscles looked like something you wouldn't want to hit your head on. His eyebrows collided above his nose. The air from the room inside was overripe with cigarette smoke.

“This is boring,” Blister said. “Oh, and happy birthday, Dad.”

My hand was on Wyatt's shoulder, and I felt him tense to lunge at Blister, but Jessica defused the moment. Without turning around, she said, “Don't call him Dad.” It was not a tone that invited discussion.

“So what am I supposed to call him?” Blister asked indolently.

“Call me Wyatt,” Wyatt said after a massive effort.

“Yo, Blister,” I said softly. Blister's eyes went to me for the first time. “Hi,” I said. I made a small confidential pointing gesture at Wyatt. “Call him Mr. Wilmington.”

“Who's this?” Blister asked the world in general.

“Nobody much,” I said, smiling. “You can call me The Man with No Name.”

Jessica looked from Wyatt to me and misjudged the degree to which the conversation had become civilized. “How about you give me half an hour, Daddy?” she asked. “Blister will drive me home.”

Wyatt looked at me and exhaled slowly. Then he arranged his features into what might have passed for an open smile at a nuclear-disarmament conference, turned back to Jessica, and said, “In a pig's ass.”

“Huh?” Jessica said, except that she didn't even have time to finish saying that. Wyatt crouched down, grabbed her knees, and straightened up without so much as a grunt of effort. Jessica dangled over his shoulder in a fireman's carry, her blue-clad bottom pointing at the sky. I stepped aside to let them go. Jessica was squealing and hitting at her father's back with her fists.

“Hey,” Blister said, stepping all the way into the doorway. “Put her down, you jerk.”

“Blister,” I said, putting a hand gently on his chest. “Remember me?”

“Get out of my way, shithead,” he said. “He can't do that.” Jessica's squeals echoed up through the sagebrush. He pushed against my arm.

“Wrong on two counts,” I said. “He can, and I'm not a shithead.” I looked past him. “And how come there's another woman in your house?”

He looked confused. “There isn't. .“he said, and then he turned his head to check. I hoisted a steel-toed cowboy boot and cracked him right below the kneecap. Blister made a gurgling sound and involuntarily grabbed his right knee and lifted it. As the gurgle turned into a moan I kicked his left knee, and it buckled beneath him, hitting the floor with a reassuring crack. He rolled on the floor, holding a knee in each hand and emitting high puppylike yelps.

He'd forgotten I was there, so I stretched out a foot and tapped his groin with the toe of my right boot.

“Have I got your attention?” I asked. He screwed his eyes up and nodded.

“For a couple of days you're going to walk like you're on stilts,” I told him. “After that, you'll be fine. And remember, the next time you're screwing around with Jessica, or anybody less than sixteen years old, that The Man with No Name might be just outside the window.” I wiggled my eyebrows for emphasis. “Got that?”

“You asshole,” he said in a choked voice.

I lifted my right foot. He winced, and I looked down and examined the boot. “You've made me scuff it,” I said. “Now say, ‘Yes, sir.’ ”

He let his head slump to the floor. “Yes, sir,” he said, squeezing back tears.

“Much better,” I said. “Also, you might think about where else the boot might have landed. I don't think a scrotum with the word Frye permanently printed on it backward is much of a selling point. Anyway,” I added, “for the future-and this is free advice, okay? — don’t call anybody shithead unless you know where both his feet and both his hands are. And never, never look behind you.” I bent down and chucked him under the chin with my index finger. ” ‘Bye, now.”

I went down to the car, where Wyatt had dumped a sullen Jessica into the back seat. When we got to the Wilmingtons’ house, I said good-bye. Neither of them had much to say to me.

Leaving Alice parked at the side of the road, I scaled the driveway to my house. It was cold and dark and empty. The light on the answering machine blinked a red semaphore while I uncapped a bottle of Singha beer from Thailand, a brew so sublimely lethal that it regularly loses its import privileges. With the first two gulps dizzily chasing each other down my esophagus, I pushed the Play button on the machine.

“One,” the machine announced. It says that on the twelfth message too. I ignored it for the moment and looked around the living room. Eleanor's curtains, left over from the time when we'd lived together, still hung over the windows. Patches of damp glowered at me from the rug. Then the machine whirred and I finally got to the message.

“Out and about as usual, are you?” Hammond's voice said. “Well, we've got one, and she may be yours. Problem is, she's in the morgue.”

4

Underground

Morgues are even colder than you'd think they'd be. It was the next morning. I had a headache, and I was blowing on my hands as Hammond led me down a long linoleum stairway, our feet scuffing against steps that somehow managed to look as though they'd been washed every fifteen minutes since the tile was laid but were still gray. It was a gray that didn't have anything to do with dirt. If grief were a color, that was the gray it would be.

Hammond had his hands stuffed into his pockets. He heard me huffing and puffing away behind him, and said, “Brisk, isn't it?”

“Brisk?” I said. “An oyster could get chilblains.”

“No oyster with any sense would be caught dead in here,” he said with a flash of the wit that makes cops welcome additions to cocktail parties the world around. “Jesus, it's ten a.m. I usually try not to visit the morgue