Max immediately decided that he should have used the washroom and lumbered back toward the prison, leaving Owen staring at the gulls, the whitecaps and the enormous freighters in the bay. He had something important he had been waiting to tell Max. Something Max was not going to want to hear. He had thought the ferry ride and the sea air might provide a good occasion, but Alcatraz was having an unsettling effect on his guardian, and now did not seem an opportune moment. He was beginning to wonder why Max was taking so long when a voice called out behind him.
“Excuse me, I think I’ve found something of yours.”
Owen turned to see Max being led down the hill toward him by a chubby young man in a yellow pullover.
“They need more signs,” Max said. “All these bloody brambles look the same.”
“Seemed a little disoriented,” the young man said in a quieter voice.
“That happens sometimes,” Owen said. “Thanks for bringing him back.”
“Let’s have no more prisons,” Max said when the man was gone. “Sightseeing may be your department, but I’m putting in a formal request.”
“Max, how can we keep putting on shows if you forget where you are half the time?”
“Rubbish. Just got turned around, that’s all.”
“I don’t know. There were a couple of moments I thought you zoned out when you were dancing with Evelyn del Rio.”
“I was having fun. You remember fun, don’t you?”
“You’re worrying me these days, Max.”
Max did a King Kong imitation, drumming on his chest and hooting. “Fit as a fiddle,” he said, “and ready to roll. Las Vegas, Tucson, Dallas-not to mention Savannah, Georgia-the Max and Owen show is going to bring down the house!”
FOUR
Zig hated the smell of horseshit, and he could detect it from a long way away. At first he couldn’t understand why a self-storage outfit would smell like manure. But the moment he and Clem had stepped off the huge freight elevator, he’d figured it out; you could tell by the shape of the units.
“Jesus,” Clem said. “Why’s it smell like horseshit in here?”
“Used to be a riding academy,” Zig said. “Remember there was a sign coming north off the Strip?”
“Why you gonna put a riding academy in the middle of Las fucking Vegas?”
“I don’t know, Clem. Why do certain assholes have to smell like a fucking distillery all the time?”
“I had an Irish coffee. What’s the big deal?”
They walked along the corridors of units, each one numbered and padlocked, until eventually they found 704. A security camera halfway down the corridor stared at them with a baleful purple gaze.
“Stu better be taking care of the kid on the front desk,” Zig said.
“He will. He was gonna start a big argument about missing items and insurance and threaten lawsuits, the whole bit. Kid won’t be looking at no camera. Anyway, that’s why we got ball caps.”
“He better be good, this guy.”
“Stu’s good. Known him for years.”
“I haven’t.”
Zig took the bolt cutters out of the duffle bag and sent the lock crashing to the floor. When they stepped inside the locker, the smell of horseshit was a lot stronger.
“Fuck me,” Zig said. “Fucking Melvin.”
Except for some loose plastic bags and pellets of Styrofoam, the locker was empty.
“I knew we shoulda kept that guy alive for a while.”
Zig turned on Clem. “Oh, yeah? You knew it, huh? You’re so fucking clairvoyant? I suppose that’s why you said something at the time, right? That’s why you said, ’Hey, Zig, maybe we better keep him alive till we make sure he’s telling the truth.”
“Okay, okay, you’re right. You’re right. I shoulda said something.”
Zig kicked the locker wall with the heel of his boot, making a dent.
He cursed himself silently as they headed back to the elevator. It should have been obvious that no one would store the proceeds from a jewellery heist in a place like this. A smart thief would put them in a safe somewhere, just like a jeweller. He’d been half expecting to find a safe inside the locker, which would have posed a problem, for sure, but he could see in retrospect why that didn’t make sense.
“I am sick and fucking tired,” he said, “of learning from mistakes.”
“I know what you mean, boss.”
“Next time’ll be different.”
“Way different.” Clem punched the elevator button.
“Next time we detain the guy someplace safe, someplace where speed is not required. We’re gonna be way more thorough. And we’re gonna make sure we got our hands on the goods before we do anything else. Melvin just panicked and made shit up.”
“I think you’re right,” Clem said. “He wanted that bag off in a big way.”
As the elevator rattled them back toward street level, the barnyard smells began to diminish. Zig kicked the door. Fucking Melvin.
It was Max and Owen’s practice to take back roads wherever possible. They sought out the old U.S. highways that had been superseded by the interstates. Partly this was a security measure-the old highways were less frequently patrolled than the interstates-but mostly it was for pleasure. Max always scheduled their shows so that there was no hurry, and he liked to see the small towns and the countryside. Otherwise, he said, you might as well leave the Rocket at home and take a bloody plane.
Consequently, it took them fourteen hours to drive from San Francisco to Las Vegas, taking US 93 down through Nevada. Along the way they listened to dialect CDs, practising accents as they drove. Max was particularly insistent on Australian at the moment. When they weren’t doing that, he liked to find the smallest radio stations to hear the local news and ads. “When Walker’s Shoes are what you wear, it’s almost like you’re walking on air.” And he enjoyed hearing the “so-called Christians,” as he called them, foaming at the mouth over homosexuals, liberals and other degenerates.
Sitting beside him all day, Owen tried to think up a good way to tell him his news. After the next town, he would think, then maybe after the next gas station. So far he hadn’t managed to work up the courage.
Max was at the wheel as they approached Vegas, and even though he was exhausted and yearning for his bunk, Owen felt as if they were landing on a distant planet. As the sun set, the sky turned lilac, then mauve, and in the dry desert twilight the lights of the city became visible when they were still a hundred miles away.
“It looks like an idea,” Max said. “Not even an idea-a notion-soon to become an idea.”
“You should’ve been a poet, Max.”
“I am a poet. Every poet’s a thief. Poets break into your mind and heart, and their verses are so many shards of glass they leave scattered around.”
“Except people like poets. They don’t like thieves.”
“They don’t like poets either. Any poet who dies rich is either a charlatan or a songwriter.”
“Shakespeare got rich. He owned the biggest house in Stratford, you told me.”
“Will Shakespeare, aside from being my hero, my angel, was a one-man corporation: actor, manager and playwright. He was also a dab hand with real estate. In my heyday I knew everything there was to know about the great Will.”
“I still don’t understand how you could give up acting. You must have been great.”
“Sadly, the world thought otherwise. There was a time, though-oh, there was a time. I wish you could have seen my Hamlet. The Old Vic-the Old Wreck we used to call it. I got to play that slippery little Dane for three months running before the most discerning audience in the Western world.” Max swept a hand grandly across the
