A Fistful of Collars (9 page)

The black SUV turned at the next corner and went down a block of small, low houses, their yards all dirt, or grass burned brown by the sun. At first only a few of the streetlights were working; and then none. The night sky went dark and sort of pink, the way it got in the Valley, not a star showing.

“This is getting interesting,” Bernie said.

I waited to find out how. Meanwhile, we tailed the black SUV down a long street where there’d been a fire sometime back—I could still smell the ashes, very faint—and most of the lots stood empty. Some guys sat on lawn chairs on one of those
empty lots, drinking beer from the real big cans. A block or two after that, the brake lights glowed brighter on the SUV. Bernie pulled over right away. That was him every time. He senses things.

The SUV stopped in front of an unlit house that looked a bit bigger than any of the others in the neighborhood; had two stories, for one thing. Jiggs got out. He didn’t glance around—that’s something Bernie always watches for at a time like this, can’t go into it now—but just walked right up to the house. The door opened without him knocking and he went inside. Was he carrying something? I thought so. A moment or two passed, and then a light shone at the back of the house.

“Curiosity killed the cat?” Bernie said. “Never bought into that, myself.”

Then we had something in common; a lot, in fact, and finding more all the time. Once we even howled at the moon together. What a night that was! Too bad about those bikers, of course. Back to the curiosity killing the cat thing. I’d never really understood it, curiosity being a bit of a puzzler. But it’s always nice to have a takeaway—that’s one of Bernie’s beliefs—and my takeaway was that curiosity must be a good thing.

We hopped out of the car—the only actual hopping done by me, although I’d seen Bernie try it once, back when he and Suzie were first getting to know each other and we’d gone to pick her up—and started down the street, side by side and real quiet. That was just one of our techniques. We had a bunch, including me grabbing the perp by the pant leg, which was how we knew the case was closed. Was it going to happen tonight? You never knew, not in our business.

Another technique we had was to get off the road and walk through vacant lots. We were doing it now. These lots were
vacant when it came to houses, but there was plenty of other stuff—broken bottles, broken furniture, rusted-out parts of this and that, plus the smell of drugs, all kinds of different drugs. Two of my guys had passed this way recently, laying their marks at exactly the places where I wanted to lay mine. What an annoying coincidence! No time now for me to do anything about it, what with us on the job. Well, except maybe for one quick squirt on the side of this slashed-up couch, taking no time at all. Who could resist?

We swung around a strange greenish puddle that smelled like metal when the welder gets his torch on it—Bernie always told me not to look, but I did anyway, then could never see right for the rest of the day—and squeezed through a hole in a chain-link fence; me first, although there was a little confusion about that. We stepped into the yard behind the house Jiggs had entered. The house had a small deck at the back. Bernie put his finger over his lips: our signal for quiet.

We crept onto the deck. Right away, one of the boards made a cracking sound under Bernie’s foot. It sounded like a gunshot to me, but you never knew how humans would hear something. We went still, waited. There were two windows on the back wall, one above, one below. The top one had an air conditioner in it, making a high-pitched rattle that bothered my ears. A light shone in the lower window. No one came to peer out, meaning we were good to go; not good to go is something I have trouble with, I admit it. We went closer, Bernie bending down to my level, right at the sill, and looked in.

We saw a small, bare room, with peeling paint and holes in the walls, plus a card table and two chairs. Jiggs sat on one, and a dude in a wifebeater with slicked-back hair and lots of tattoos sat on the other. They weren’t doing friendly things like playing
cards or drinking or smoking or eating; they were just talking in an unsmiling sort of way, but with the window closed and the AC so loud I caught hardly any of it. Jiggs said something about someone named Ramon. The tattooed dude said he wasn’t here to talk about Ramon. Jiggs said he didn’t want this goddamn messed-up situation to get anymore messed up. The tattooed dude told him to stop acting like a girl. Whoa! Imagine a girl who looked like Jiggs. I couldn’t. Meanwhile, Jiggs had a real pissed-off expression on his face. The tattooed dude said it was just an expression, take it easy. Then he held out his hand. Jiggs reached down, raised a brown paper bag, set it on the table. The tattooed dude glanced into the bag and nodded. Jiggs got up and left the room. The tattooed dude just sat there. A moment or two later, I heard the front door close. Then the SUV started up. Bernie heard that part: I could tell from the slight turning of his head.

What next? Go back to tailing Jiggs? Stay where we were? The what-nexts I pretty much left up to Bernie. He reached toward me, like he was about to tap my shoulder, meaning, Let’s go, big guy. But at that moment, the tattooed dude picked up the paper bag. Bernie’s hand went still. The SUV drove away, the engine sound fading. Was the tattooed dude, too, listening for that? He tipped the bag over and money spilled onto the table, lots of it. Then he started counting—when humans count money their lips move, like maybe there’s some connection between money and their mouths, about as far as I can take it, maybe farther—and then arranged the bills in stacks, snapping rubber bands around each one. After that, he dropped all the stacks back in the bag except for one, which he pocketed.

The tattooed dude grabbed the bag, rose, and left the room, shutting off the light on his way out. I heard his footsteps; then
running water; and the tiny squeak of mattress springs. After that, nothing but the AC.

Bernie spoke, his voice very soft. “Wonder what’s going on?”

What was going on? Did he mean besides the tattooed dude zonking out? If he did, I had no answers. I stood where I was, outside the back door. Soon the AC began dripping. I shifted out of range of the falling drops and sat down. Bernie went on gazing through the window at the dark room. Somewhere in the neighborhood a woman shouted, “Get out of my goddamn house!” A man laughed at her in a way that made my teeth feel like biting.

Bernie tapped me on the shoulder. We went back to the car and drove home. On the way, Bernie said, “I’d sure like to know what Jiggs and that guy were talking about.”

I wondered why. Nothing I’d heard had seemed particularly interesting, not even the parts I remembered.

Nixon Panero came over for breakfast. Had that ever happened before? Not that I could think of, but I sure hoped he’d do it again. For one thing, he brought the food: coffee and egg sandwiches for him and Bernie, a nice fat sausage for me. Did we mind that his fingers were grease-stained? Not us. Some days you just hit the ground running; I knew this was going to be one of them.

We sat out on the patio, water gurgling from the swan fountain, steam rising from the coffee cups, not a care in the world, at least not on my part.

“What’s with the ice pack on your shoulder?” Nixon said.

“You don’t want to know,” Bernie said.

“Hope it was one of those you-should-see-the-other-guy dustups.”

“Wasn’t any kind of dustup.”

“Whatever you say,” said Nixon. He took a big bite from his sandwich, talked with his mouth full, saying something like “I read the script.” He tossed it on the table. “Guy who wrote it, Arn Linsky? They paid him a cool million.”

“How do you know that?”

“
Hollywood Reporter
,” Nixon said. “He’s A-list. That’s what they get. Minimum.”

“So it’s good?”

Nixon shrugged. “Not claiming there aren’t good lines in it,” he said. He bit into his sandwich again, pawing—yes, just another nice thing about Nixon—pawing through the pages. “Like here, where Lolotea—she’s the shaman—says to Croomer—that’s Thad Perry’s character—‘I am unready to embrace the white man,’ and he says, ‘You could try closing your eyes.’”

“That’s good?”

“Guaranteed to get laughs. Plus it’s when he starts to appeal to her. And now you know there’ll be a hot scene with her and Thad Perry coming up. Heard who’s playing Lolotea?”

“Nope.”

“Kina Molenta,” Nixon said. “The brunette from
Hothouse Flowers
.”

“Didn’t catch that one,” Bernie said.

“It’s a TV show, not a movie,” Nixon said. “About strippers in a place called the Hothouse.”

“She’s playing an Apache shaman?”

“There are some—what’s the word?”

“Authenticity?” Bernie said.

“Yeah,” said Nixon, “authenticity issues you’re not going to like.”

“For instance?”

Nixon turned a page. “This part, where Croomer gets shot right through with an arrow, back to front, and then kills this other guy by falling on him so the same arrow goes—”

“For Christ sake.”

“It’s only a movie, like they say.”

Bernie gazed at the script. “Do the rivers flow?”

“Rivers?”

“The arroyos, the washes, the gulches—do they flow in the movie?”

“No,” Nixon said. “It’s dry as dust. They talk about that a lot. There’s even a scene where Lolotea takes one of those forked sticks and tries to—”

“Water flowed,” Bernie said. He put down his coffee—actually sort of banged it down, a tiny black wave slopping over the rim—and pointed to the canyon beyond our back gate. “Flowed right past where we’re sitting now.”

“Maybe you gotta pay two mil for that kind of detail,” Nixon said.

The phone rang while Bernie was shaving. Bernie hated shaving, didn’t do it every day, not even close—causing some problems, back in the Leda days—and he looked great shaved or not, in my opinion, except for that one camping trip where he’d ended up with an actual beard. Too much for me, and we’d had to drive into the nearest town, hardly even a day’s ride, for a disposable razor.

He hit the speaker button.

“How’s it goin’ so far?” said Rick Torres.

“Don’t like the script,” Bernie said.

“Yeah?” said Rick. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s not accurate.”

Silence. Then Rick said, “Don’t forget it’s a director’s medium. The script doesn’t mean squat. It’s what happens on the set and in the editing room.”

“They pay a million bucks for something that doesn’t mean squat?” Bernie said.

“That’s Hollywood.”

“How do you know all this?”

“It’s common knowledge,” said Rick. “Met Thad Perry yet?”

“Yup.”

“What’s he like?”

“You know,” Bernie said. “Just a guy.”

“Puts on his pants one leg at a time?” said Rick. “C’mon, Bernie. Help my marriage.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I told you—Marcie’s a big fan. She needs details. And don’t forget about that autograph.”

“Always the wife,” Bernie said. And then: “Ow.” Uh-oh. A fat drop of blood welled up on Bernie’s chin, trickled down. I wanted to lick it up, but sort of remembered Bernie not liking that when I’d tried it before, and all the other befores. Bernie cut himself shaving just about every time.

“Shaving?” said Rick.

“No,” Bernie said. “Can you check out twenty-four hundred sixty-three North Coursin Street, Vista City? Ownership, residents, the usual.”

“Bad neighborhood—I can tell you that right off the top of my head,” Rick said. “What’s the story?”

“Just following up on something,” Bernie said.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Rick said. “But nothing’s free in this world.”

“You’ll get the goddamn autograph,” Bernie said. He clicked off. “Chet! Down!”

Oops.

Soon after that, we were on the open road, headed up, up, and out of the Valley, passing the last development, then one more golf course, and into the desert.
Rumble rumble
went the engine, sending shudders through the whole car. Bernie slowed down a bit.

“Is that a new sound?” he said.

He tapped the gas pedal a couple of times.
Va-vroom! Va-vroom!

“Wonder if it’s something to worry about.”

Of course not, Bernie. Couldn’t be better, our new ride. But on his face I could see that a bout of worrying was on the way, those tiny forehead lines growing deeper. The phone rang just in time.

“Bernie? Cal Luxton here, mayor’s office. How you doing?”

“Headed out to the set,” Bernie said.

“Seen it yet?”

“No.”

“You’re gonna be impressed,” Luxton said. “How’re things going with Thad Perry?”

“Good.”

“That’s what I hear,” Luxton said.

“From who?”

Luxton laughed. “Word gets around.”

There was a silence. The sky went from the dusty blue of the Valley to lovely pure blue. Hey! The moon! I’d forgotten all about that, seeing the moon in the daytime. What a treat! Nothing like a treat you eat, but pretty nice.

“Anything I can help you with,” Luxton was saying, “don’t hesitate.”

“Thanks.”

Another silence. “Any questions so far?” There was something . . . probing, yes, probing about his voice; kind of like his eyes, if that made any sense.

“When are you going to ask me for his autograph?” Bernie said.

Luxton laughed again. “Already got it,” he said.

I
’d been in a lot of bars—comes with the territory in our business—but never one quite like this. Yes, it was Old West–style, our favorite, mine and Bernie’s: rough wooden floor, long bar with a few tough-looking dudes hunched over their shot glasses, rows of dusty bottles, a wagon wheel leaning in a corner. But this bar had no ceiling; the shot glasses were filled with tea—no putting a switcheroo like that past me; and there were bright lights all over the place, plus microphones dangling down here and there, and a big camera in the middle of things. A dandruffy guy—a real easy smell to pick up—dressed in torn jeans and smoking a big cigar was peering into the camera eyepiece. Everything about him said perp to me, but I was sitting quietly, on my best behavior or even better: Bernie had been very clear about that.