“We'll take a little medicine at the same time,” I said, lapsing once again into Nursese. I sat on the table in front of the couch and measured out two more Ampicillin and a couple of Excedrin. “Open,” I said.
“Nuh-uh,” the kid said, staring at the pills as though they were hemlock. He was more afraid of them than he was of Bravo.
“Look,” I said, putting one of each into my mouth and washing it down with what turned out to be a very nice red wine. This was getting to be a lot of Excedrin. “Medicine. For your arm.” I gestured toward his arm and he shrank from me, making me feel like Klaus Barbie. “Make you strong,” I said hurriedly. “Fix your arm.” I rubbed my own shoulder with the hand holding the pills and then flexed it. The kid's eyes went to my mouth.
“Swallow,” he said, with a hollow note of command.
I poured some more wine into my mouth, swallowed extravagantly, and opened wide to show him that the pills were gone. The second gulp of wine hit my stomach like a hot, wet towel and spread out, radiating upward toward my chest. “Now you,” I said. I dropped the two pills into his mouth; he gave me a dark, sour look as he tasted the aspirin.
“Drink this,” I said, holding out the glass, which was empty. “Whoops,” I said, “sit tight.”
“What?” he asked, a little furrily, as I poured.
“Just stay there,” I said, resolving on the abolition of idioms forevermore. “Here.” I held the wineglass to his lips and he took a suspicious sip and stopped. He washed it around inside his mouth and then drank the rest.
“Good boy,” I said. “Listen, I can't keep saying 'good boy' to you. It confuses the dog. What's your name?”
He looked down at my chest and pursed his lips, and I growled at Bravo, who responded with something that sounded like the overture to the Lisbon Earthquake. It even cut through
“Tran,” the boy said quickly.
“Okay, Tran.” I pulled the glass back and refilled it. “I've got the dog and I've got the gun and you've got a bad cut on your shoulder. And you tried to kill some people I love not so long ago-”
“Not kill,” he said. “Only frighten.”
“Spare me the embarrassment. And then you tried to kill me. Twice.” I drank half the wine.
“Only beat up,” he said. He squirmed to find a more comfortable position and failed. “You tickled me.”
“And you set a house on fire,” I said, letting him finish the glass.
“Not yours,” he said, the soul of reason. “We came to beat you up but the house was burned down. I got mad, burned it the rest of the way.”
“If you had come to this one, you'd have tried to kill me.”
“No. Beat up only.”
“I'll take that on faith,” I said, “but only because nothing depends on it.” I poured again and decided to skip a turn. “Drink up.” He took the wine easily this time, and why not? It was better than he deserved.
Bravo sat happily on my foot, watching the wineglass again, and I prodded him up onto all threatening fours. “This is the deal-sorry, forget that. Here's what's going to happen. Do you understand me?”
“Understand,” he said, sounding insulted.
“I need to know that you do. Understand, I mean.” I watched him closely as I poured another glass, remembering, a little late, that I'd brought two into the room. I drank and said, “I'm going to take care of your cut, okay? I'm going to keep you here for a few days and the nice lady you wanted to kill, frighten, whatever, is going to come around once in a while and give you medicine until you're better, and you and I are going to talk.” I poured again.
“Talk what?” he asked suspiciously.
“Talk everything.” It was catching. “You're going to tell me why you wanted Uncle Lo, and who those Chinese are, and what they're doing, and all sorts of stuff.”
“Stuff,” he said shortly, and I wasn't sure whether it was a request for clarification or a command, but I passed on aggressiveness and put the glass to his lips and let him drink again.
“Stuff,” I said equably, “like, first, who's Lo and why were you sent to get him?”
“Don't know,” he said. Then he looked at the wineglass and said, 'Good.'
“Glad you like it. More?” He nodded, more enthusiastically than before, but this time I drank a full one myself before I gave him another couple of ounces. The Grand Inquisitor at work, pitiless and perhaps slightly drunk.
“Where were we?” I said. “Uncle Lo, and don't tell me you don't know.”
His mouth went wide and negative. “Don't. They said get him. They said if he came out from apartment, get him.”
“Why did they send you to get him? Why not send Chinese?”
The mouth curled scornfully. “Two Chinese they sent. Only one got out.”
“Lo killed the other one?”
He shrugged. “Must be. Only one got out.”
“So you were supposed to be backup?”
He nodded.
“And they didn't tell you who he was or why they wanted him?” Some epicurean judge inside was telling me that this was a
“Why?” he asked, eyeing the glass in a fair imitation of Bravo, who had managed to sit on my foot again. His weight felt good, so I let the bum sprawl.
“Why what?” I asked, getting confused.
“Why tell us? If they don't tell us, we don't know.”
There was a certain unassailable logic in that. It was what he'd said before, under the Torture of a Thousand Fingers. “You didn't know who he was, but you were going to kill him.”
He shrugged, as well as someone can who's sheathed in Saran Wrap. “Only get him. If he come out. Kill him if we have to, sure. If he try to kill us.”
“Or if he was getting away,” I suggested. He hesitated and licked his lips, and I poured a little wine down his throat.
“Sure,” he said, after he'd swallowed, “kill him. No problem.”
There was something elaborately casual about the words. They sounded like make-believe.
“Have you killed a lot of people?” I asked. I was thinking about how he'd laughed when I tickled him.
“Very many,” he said gruffly.
I let it pass. “You were supposed to get him if he came out. Why'd you go in?”
He blinked. “Uh,” he said.
“Could you be more specific?”
He tried a smile. “Mistake.”
“It sure was.”
“We run out of gas,” the hitman said, dropping the smile and looking embarrassed. “Gas thing on my car broken. So, late, almost half hour. We don't know who's in, who's out. Think maybe Lo's there.”
It was too stupid to be a lie. At seventeen, I'd
“One more time,” I said, “who was Lo?”
He looked into the middle distance, and oak popped in the fireplace. The boy started at the sound and then tried to hide the movement by turning it into a shiver. Something furtive and intelligent came into his eyes, and I involuntarily caught my breath as words formed themselves on his tongue. Here it came, the big news flash. He looked at the wine again, and then at me. He licked his lips.
“Water chaser?” he asked.
I heard myself laugh, and I heard Bravo's tail thump against the floor, and I said again to Bravo, “Kill him if he moves,” and then I laughed again and went to the kitchen for a glass of water.
Two hours later I was sitting next to him on the couch, and he was leaning against me in a friendly fashion. I'd undone the cuffs around his feet and slightly loosened the Saran Wrap connecting his wrists, and we were well into the third bottle. I'd learned that he was, in fact, seventeen, that the name of his gang was the Flying Fists, and that his parents were long divorced, his father gone God knew where. I'd learned that he lived-whenever he was home-with his mother, who worked as a cashier in a Vietnamese restaurant in Westminster, about forty miles south of L.A. He'd learned all about the relationship between Eleanor and me, and he'd agreed that nothing was harder than being a bad man who has somehow come into possession of a good woman. A grand and malicious joke. He'd
