'Are you sure?' I asked.
'Put it this way. I can't tell you with certainty the toxic element that was in your system. But I can tell what it's not. So that creates an area of speculation. The best I can come up with is this historical stuff.' Then he smiled and asked, 'You haven't been to Africa lately, have you?'
'Why?'
'According to my nifty book here on political intrigue and assassination, Unit 731's gift to biological warfare has been used to murder several democratic leaders in Africa, primarily because its symptoms are like a number of fatal viruses carried by diseased animals.'
'How about Central Africa, the old Belgian Congo?'
His eyes dropped to an open page in his book, then looked at me again.
His humorous cynicism was gone. 'How'd you know?' he said.
Tuesday Wesley Rhodes was in my office, wired, shaking, and wrapped so tight his eyes were bulging out of his head. In spite of the temperature outside, he wore two long-sleeve shirts to give his body dimension, and motorcycle boots with two inches of platform glued on the bottoms.
'You're speeding, Wes,' I said.
'Coke won't hammer out the kinks no more,' he said, grabbing one wrist, then the other, raking his cupped palm over the back of the opposite hand as though he were trying to wipe rainwater off it. 'Everything's coming apart. I boosted a few places. I peddled my ass. I creeped a funeral home. I never done no real harm.'
'You always took your own fall, too. That's stand-up, bud. How about kicking it into neutral?'
So he told me about his weekend with the East Enders.
Hammie Wocheck, Jeff Deitrich's buddy from the University of Texas, cruised by Wesley's paint-peeling, termite-eaten house and sat in his pickup truck with the engine idling until Wesley got up off the porch and walked out to the swale. Hammie's blond hair was wet with gel, his face sunburned, the side of his thick neck still scabbed with the purple and burnt-orange tattoo of a butterfly. His huge upper body seemed to fill up the window of the truck, the way an elephant might look inside a phone booth.
'Wes, my man, we need you to go with us to Big Dee, call up a couple of mop-heads on their beeper. I'm talking about the Jamaicans who took down Jeff Deitrich. This your house, huh?' Hammie said.
'I ain't lost nothing in Dallas.'
'Point of honor, Wes. We got spear chuckers tracking monkey shit into our town, selling bad dope to people, messing up little kids. Problem two is you dropped Jeff's name into the bowl. Believe me, that did not float. You need to square it, little buddy. Give your old man this six-pack. Tell him you're doing a righteous deed for the town. He'll relate to it.'
They drove to Val's and met Jeff Deitrich and Warren Costen and two others, one of whom was a fat guy named Chug Rollins, who must have gotten his signals wrong because he was dressed up like queer bait. Then they convoyed in three cars to a little town south of Fort Worth. Wesley had never liked Chug; he was like most big, fat guys-he had a mean dude hiding inside all that blubber, one that liked to push around little guys. But Warren was another matter. Except for his long torso, he looked like a surfer or a movie star, with his big arms and flat-plated chest and sandy hair. Warren kept cracking open Budweisers from the cooler and passing them to Wes, offering him a smoke, even telling him they should shitcan this mop-head gig. But what are you going to tell a guy like Jeff when he's got a telephone pole up his ass?
'I thought we was going to Dallas,' Wesley said.
'Jeff's got a special place he wants to 'front these dudes. When you get them on the line, read them the directions on this piece of paper,' Warren said.
'To a rock quarry? They ain't gonna come,' Wesley said.
'Hope they do, Wes. Jeff is in a bad mood. I hate to get in his way when he's like that,' Warren said. He shook his head profoundly.
Wesley took two hits of speed and washed them down with his beer.
He used the pay phone on the side of a shut-down filling station while the others watched him from the heated darkness. Insects thudded against the interior light overhead. His skin felt as though it were wrapped with damp wool.
The mop-head answered the beeper page but acted like somebody threw easy money in his face every day.
'Where you get four grand, mon?'
'It belongs to a fudge packer, the guy I been buying blues for.'
'We give it some thought. We meet you on the highway. You better change your life, mon. Stop hanging with dem AIDS people.'
The mop-head gave Wesley directions to a Dairy Queen and hung up before Wesley could argue. Wesley was terrified when he stared out of the lighted phone booth into Jeff face.
'I told y'all they wouldn't go to the quarry. It ain't my fault,' he said.
'You did great. They're gonna take you down, little buddy,' Hammie said.
It didn't make sense. What were they talking about? Wesley's head throbbed.
All of them were grinning at him now, but in a tolerant, avuncular way, as though they had accepted him as one of their own.
'You got another beer?' he said.
A half hour later Wesley sat behind the wheel of Chug's car, with Chug eating a banana split in the passenger seat, ice cream and strawberry juice and chocolate smeared on his mouth. Wesley started to ask him why he was dressed up like a fruit, but he remembered the damage Chug used to do to his opponents when he was a high school varsity lineman.
So instead he said, 'Jeff just wants his stash back? Ain't nothing real bad going down, huh, Chug?'
Chug adjusted the tweed hat on his head and winked. 'You know Jerry Lee Lewis got kicked out of divinity school here?' he said.
The two mop-heads pulled into the Dairy Queen in a black Mercedes and got out and leaned down on the windowsills on both sides of Chug's car. They smelled of funk and onions and fish and unwashed hair that had been plaited with aloe.
'We don't go nowhere till we see some money, mon,' the one at Chug's window said.
Chug lifted up a napkin from his lap and exposed a roll of one-hundred-dollar bills crimped together with a rubber band. He smiled, his tongue lolling on his teeth. A tiny green stone gleamed in his earlobe.
'There it is, hard as a cucumber. You want to touch it?' he said.
'You can follow us. We got a place to do business. But don't be talking that way to me, mon. We don't got dose kinds of problems in the Islands,' the man at Chug's window said, his dreadlocks swinging like dusty snakes on his cheeks.
'How we know y'all won't beat us up?' Chug said, his face suddenly soft and vulnerable.
'You too sweet and de little man there too rough,' the man at the window said.
So the mop-heads were smart-asses as well as takedown artists, Wesley thought as he followed the Mercedes down the highway. Just like everybody else, making fun of him because he was short and didn't think fast and his meal ticket was with a fudge packer or two. Well, maybe they needed to get their paint scratched up a little bit. Like Hammie said, point of honor. It made Wesley feel good to know he was on the same wavelength as guys like Hammie and Warren.
The Mercedes turned off on a dead-end gravel road and drove between rolling pasture, then stopped by the desiccated and paintless shell of a farmhouse that was squeezed to breaking inside a stand of blackjack.
The mop-heads cut their lights and walked back toward Chug's car. One of them opened Chug's door.
'Step out here in de road, mon. We need to count your money,' he said.
'Really?' Chug said, standing erect now, the mop-head finally realizing how big Chug actually was.
'Yeah, 'cause dat's too much money for you. We think maybe you just give it to us,' the mop-head said, his hand reaching for the. 25-caliber automatic pushed down in the back of his beltless slacks.
That's when Chug hit him in the stomach, harder than Wesley had ever seen anyone hit. That was also when Wesley pulled the remote latch on the trunk and heard Hammie climb out on the gravel and saw Warren and Jeff each coming fast down the road in separate vehicles, their headlights so bright they made his eyes water.
He turned away from what happened next. The blows from fists and knees and feet finally stopped and the
