to see a solution in the street. The window was open, and since the motel had economized on screens, I poured my coffee out through it. It splattered on the asphalt of the parking lot, steaming like the entry way to hell. “Tonight will be okay.”
“Listen to you,” Horace said. “Talk about male chauvinists. I just don't think it's nailed down. God is in the details, you know.”
I turned back to him, feeling my own tension build again. “So find me a nail, Horace. Hell, I'd settle for a thumbtack. The key to something like this is improvisation.”
The upside-down-V eyebrows went sardonic. We were buddies again. He sipped, blinked twice, spat it back into the cup. “A little sententious, don't you think?”
“Horace,” I said, “you're Eleanor's brother. Even if you think I'm willing to get myself killed, you have to know that your life is sacred to me.” I batted my eyelashes at him.
He inflated his cheeks and let the air out with a cynical little pop. “I just hope you know what you're doing. What
That was easy. “I thought we'd settled that, Horace,” I said. I went to him and took the coffee out of his hand and poured it out the window, on top of mine. “I haven't got the faintest idea.”
21
We were in San Pedro by two-thirty. Except for the fact that my mouth tasted like I'd been sucking on a roll of nickels for a week, I was fine. It also helped if I ignored the rate of my heartbeat and the chill that emanated from the sopping patches on the sides of my shirt, courtesy of the two faucets that had been implanted under my arms while I slept.
Horace, Tran, and I were stewing in my latest rented car-a big one with a copious trunk this time-parked around the corner from the first of the safe houses. Unless Charlie's boys ignored the Harbor Freeway, always a strong possibility at rush hour, they had to pass us. Dexter and Horton were halfway up the next street, about fifty yards past the house. The five Doody Brothers, who were all bigger, or at least wider, than Horton, were two blocks away.
Horace, sitting at the wheel, was revealing himself as a nervous chatterer, reviewing, with the expertise of hindsight, all the reasons he should have known something was wrong the moment Uncle Lo showed up. Tran was emanating a prickly force field from the backseat, where he'd curled himself into a concentrated ball of silence, knees against his chin and arms around his ankles. He hadn't said a word since we'd left the motel. Once in a while he'd nod, as though some mental calculation had just come out right. I made monosyllabic responses to Horace's monologue by way of polite punctuation, but I was actually paying more attention to Tran's nods. Each nod, I figured, represented one less way to get killed.
We sat there for hours.
It began to get dark: twenty past six. People were coming home from work, and every car that passed us brought our heads around as though they were drawn by a single wire. Horace had developed an anxious sigh and practiced it so often that the windows were misting up.
“Can you concentrate on inhaling for a few minutes?” I asked. He rolled down the driver's window.
Soon, I think,' Tran said, breaking his vow of silence.
“I thought you were dead,” Horace said.
“Later,” Tran said.
Lights swept the road. “Heads down,” I said. “Here's another one.”
Horace and I ducked, leaving only Tran to peer through the smaller window in the rear. “Three lady,” Tran said.
Horace sighed.
“Who would have thought,” I asked the world at large, “that so many people would live in this stucco nightmare? And who'd have thought they'd want to come home at night?”
“Van,” Tran said from the backseat. We ducked again. The van, a big one, a minibus really, went past us at a nice, legal twenty-five miles an hour and turned the corner onto the street with the safe house on it. “One more,” Tran said. A second mobile Enormo, twin to the first, followed. “CIAs,” Tran said flatly. “Not long now.”
One of the walkie-talkies Dexter had procured made a throat-clearing sound on the seat between Horace and me, and I picked it up. “They comin home,” he said. “In the driveway now.” He sounded unreasonably calm. “Here's number two.”
“You guys set?” I had to say something.
“Horton done pulled four-fifty out of my ear.” Horton said, “Whuff.”
“You finished getting the labels out of the dresses?”
“Idle hands is the devil's playground. Not a label in the bunch.”
“How do you look?”
“The governor of Jamaica ain't gone invite us home to dinner.”
“And the Doody Squad?” I asked.
“Tryin to keep awake,” said Howard Doody, the eldest of the brothers, from their car. The others were named Harold, Henry, Hector, and Hayward.
“We can all hear each other?”
“No,” Howard Doody said. “This your imagination speakin.”
“Right. Well, keep the line open,” I said.
Tran started to hum. After a few bars I recognized it as “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” Horace joined in on an off-key counterpoint line lifted from the Modern Jazz Quartet, and I did my best to turn it into a fugue.
“You guys got a future,” Dexter said over the walkie-talkie. “Course, you'll only work once a year.”
“You know a harmony?” I asked. “We've got an opening in the group.”
“We doin Bob Marley. Horton the bass drum.” Horton went “Bum, bum, bum,” obligingly. It sounded like depth charges.
“Tell Horton,” I said, “that he can always get a job in sonar.”
“Man say you sound like a bullfrog,” Dexter said to Horton. Assorted Doodys laughed.
“Bullest frog
“Coming, them,” Tran said. Horace and I did our little dive.
“We think this is it,” I said into the phone as the car glided past.
“Ying,” Tran said. “One other.” We all held our breath, waiting for the second car. After thirty seconds, it hadn't come. “Okay,” Tran said.
“They parkin. Here he come, man goin up the walk,” Dexter advised us. “Little squirt.”
“We'll wait a minute to be sure they're alone. He'll be inside four or five minutes. He has to get the cash, count it, check the CIAs against his list, and make sure that everything adds up.”
“Six minutes, maybe seven,” Tran corrected me. “First time, him.”
“You hear that?” I asked Dexter.
“My ears okay. It's my heart done turned to stone. That's why I such a merciless dude.”
Count to fifty. No second car. I tapped Horace on the arm. “We're rolling,” I said to the phone.
“Listen to the man,” Dexter scoffed. “Rollin.”
“Let Horton emerge into the world.” The engine caught, and Horace eased the car into the street, lights out. Now that it was actually coming down, I felt light-headed but clear: The game passed seamlessly through my imagination, without a bump or a missed stitch. Tran touched my shoulder lightly and whispered, “Good.”
Horace pulled to the curb about thirty feet behind the car that had had Ying in it. There were two parked cars ahead of us, and we were between streetlamps.
“Jesus Christ,” Horace said, leaning against the steering wheel for a better view.
Horton Doody, dressed in a flowing robe, was ambling down the sidewalk, looking wider than a king-sized bed. A streetlamp pulled him from the darkness and glinted off the shawl thrown over his shoulders and the colored
