"I suppose that's one way to see it except Cain never went to rot on Death Row, but lived to a ripe, old age. Did you like it, ripping into the redneck?"
"Like it? That's sick. Of course I didn't like it." Esquire dragged his bear claw through his moussed hair, combing it up into a ruff of quills. "I felt only the coldest furor of my life." His gaze went out the window to penetrate the city's dark environs.
"Then what happened?" I asked.
"Like you always do, I covered my tracks as best I was able. I streaked home, showered off the blood, and Hermes, coming unraveled, burned my fouled clothes in the chimney. The bourbon came out, we drank, and I talked better sense into him to gain control of his overwrought emotions. Time went by, and he got better grounded, and we've never spoken of it since that night."
I pinched the cold butt between my fingers. The
Blue
Castle
had burned down, its ashy cone dribbled off, and spilled in my lap. I watched Esquire ditch his butt out the coupé window, and I did the same. I brushed off the ashes from my lap.
"Relax, sweetheart, because it's all under control. Since then I've put a governor on my bad temper. That terrible once was enough. It almost ruined our lives but only almost, and that's what counts in the end."
"It still has to torque you up," I said. "There's always that rap at your door. Always the keeping your head on a turret. Always your gut clenching at the sight of any uniform. Always your ears attuned to any keening siren."
"Indeed. How do you cope with it, sweetheart?"
My shrug came with exaggerated nonchalance. "I just say, screw it."
"You're telling a falsehood. I know it cuts you up inside because nobody can go that callous and unaffected through life."
"If thinking so makes you feel any better, so be it," I said.
"Do you deny it?"
I parroted Mr. Ogg's party line. "It's always just business, nothing personal. That's how I choose to view it."
"Tonight our business will be hunting down Gwen's killer."
"Exactly. Do we first try poking around in her townhouse?" I asked.
Esquire gave me an encouraging nod. "That's the logical starting point."
B
ack in my young turk days, Mr. Ogg used to farm me out like a minor leaguer playing the key shortstop position at different ballparks. I never got road-weary, and the frequent change of scenery seemed to agree with me. The outfit toasted me as one of the rising stars, and I basked in their adulation. Competitive and brash by nature, I ranged miles ahead of my nearest rival, McCoy, the boastful enforcer who was based in the
Baltimore
outfit. I wanted to kill him and let him rest in pieces.
I perfected a slick system. I breezed into the burg, scoped the layout, went
bang-bang
, and returned to
Old
Yvor
City
. I worked under a slate of aliases—Clarence Atkinson, Dice Snell, and Dimitri Zetts—so I never got to enjoy any perks from the frequent flyer miles I piled up. With so much of my time logged up in the clouds, I burned in my lust for the cannonball-assed stewardesses who I learned no longer went by that outmoded job title.
"The PC term is 'flight attendant,’ Dice."
I nodded. Whatever. For me, PC stood for pork chops or something as silly. "So flight attendant it is then."
"Don't go blowing this off. It's important to me and our profession."
"I know it is, baby. Sorry to be so flip. More vino?"
Lounging naked and desirable as a dewy orchid left on the zinc bed, Bunnie Ziplow smiled at me. "I'm a gold chalice. Fill me up, Dice Snell. Again. Please."
"Oh baby, that's all I've got on my mind."
I decanted from the screw-top wine liter into the cut-glass tumbler she lifted for a refill. Her centerfold-hot ass wrapped by her smart robin-egg blue flight attendant's uniform was what had melted out my eyes while at the air terminal. I'd been sprawled in a chair, the paperback dropped in my lap when they strode into my field of vision. She was gabbing with a fiftyish white dude in the navy blue livery. I tabbed him as the airline pilot and keyed on two key facts: she was just getting in, and I wasn't due to jet off until the morning. Therefore I resolved then and there to get my wick dipped.
Our hook up was made at the air terminal bar while the pilot wandered off to phone the wife and two-and-a-half kids with a dog or cat in a snug suburb back East.
Snooze, you lose, Captain
. The flight attendant was no older than forty. Two gins apiece later, she and I fled in her 5-speed, 1300 cc hoopty that burned motor oil—a black, greasy plume spewing from the dual tailpipes. Flight attendants didn't pull down hefty paychecks.
The ramshackle motel, a twelve-minute shot from the air terminal, she'd used before went by some dippy moniker like the Dew Drop Inn. We fell to it like wrestling gators. Later on that night I had my free-fall-through-the-bottomless-abyss dream and bolted upright in the strange bed. As my runaway heartbeats settled, I realized I was alone. Bunnie had slipped off while I slept, the breath of her floral fragrance lingering on the pillowcases. I checked for my wallet, and she headed my shit list for filching it and my latest fee.
The rain was pouring down. Mercy did it ever. It thrashed the motel's tin cymbal of a roof. Blue lightning bolts splintered the inky
Midwest
sky, and the banshee gusts roared by me. Trembling from the maelstrom, I was a can of sore nerves. The pelting rain drove me to lever shut the casement windows.
I groaned. How did a guy endure such a night? Again I groaned, but louder.
What the hell ailed me?
My life amounted to humping bitch thieves in ratholes like here. This one didn't even offer a Gideon bible kept in a warped bureau drawer or on the cracked toilet tank lid. I checked, and I didn't even understand why I bothered to search. Maybe the squall's fury was harrowing enough for me to want to believe in a higher power.
My adopted parents, the Zanes, had just broken up from a nasty divorce instigated by his drunken nights out tomcatting for some strange. They'd reached an irreparable split in their lives, and the man-child inside me cried over it. The white folk had raised me—a black kid—as one of their own. They were caring folk. Amanda baked a mean blueberry buckle, and Phil sneaked into my bedroom to shut off my alarm on school snow days. On the face of it, everything appeared just fine.
Or that's what I told myself every time the emotional issue bit its fangs deep into me. Growing up different was main force that'd shaped me. Nobody else came stamped from the same die as Tommy Mack Zane. An original, he knew his own mind, and he followed it. That’s how I came to be huddled in this motel crib. I got a bout of the jimjams, so I turned on the nightstand radio, and Joni Mitchell warbled her jazz cuts to soothe me. I paced the U-shaped path the previous lodgers had worn in the carpet around the zinc bed.
Then somebody’s knuckles tattooed the door. I froze.
Cops
charged like a lightning flash through my brain. I hadn't yet ditched my piece used on this last job. I planned to hurl the piece into one of the concrete mixer trucks I'd seen lined up at the air terminal's new wing under construction.
The linchpin evidence, my prints smothering it, guaranteed me a hot date with Old Sparky, or whatever method Joe Law used in this state to execute its Death Rowers. A second flurry of door knocks erupted. The command—"Police! Open up!—hadn't barked out yet. I still packed a few slugs, including the silver one I ate before they ever took me alive.
"Dice? Are you in there, darling?"
The distant, muffled voice asking for "Dice" threw me until it cleared in me that was my current alias. "Who's with you?" I asked her from my dry side of the door.
"What? Nobody is here but me. Check the damn peep."
"I can't. It's gummed up. Where did you go?"
"Out."
"Shit, I know that. Why?"
"I scored us some bud."
"Prove it."
"This is childish, Dice. Just open the door."
"To you, sure, but not to me. Prove it, I said."
"Hurry up. I'm drenched to the bone."
"Where's my damn wallet?"
"Don't fling a fit. It's all right here."
"Except what you spent."
"I couldn't put the bud on my plastic, too."
Now I knew where all her money was going instead of upgrading her transportation. "Who's your dealer then?"
"My roommate Leah sells it. Look, I charged our room on my MasterCard. Why are you being such a shit like this?"
"Because I thought you'd ripped me off."
"That's insulting. I tell you what. I'll dump your god damn wallet out here, and you can walk back to the airport in the morning."
"Wait, I need a minute to think."
"I'm gone unless you let me in. Now."
Hiking on foot back to the air terminal was risky. So I rattled off the brass security chain, and clinked free the deadbolt. The door curved in, swatting me. The driven rain sprayed us until she sloshed into the crib, and I shouldered the door closed. She was a sight, all right. The fabric to her clothes lay plastered against her skin like Jacqueline's wet t-shirt movie scene. That revelation titillated me, except Bunnie was in no playful mood. After she brightened the other lamp, her wide, caramel eyes smoked in anger.
"You better peel out of those wet duds," I said, trying to be helpful.
"What's eating you, Dice?" she asked. "I cowered out there like a drowning rat in the rain and wind."
"You can't be on your toes too much."
"On your toes for what? Are the cops after you? Is that it? Have I taken up with a felon on the run?"
"Ain't nothing like that, baby. I'm the new kid in town, and I don't know anybody to trust. Put yourself in my shoes, and you'd feel the same way as I do."
"A handgun lies at the bottom of your duffel bag. Why is that?"
Off the bat, I stewed to let her have it but good for snooping in my stuff, but she had me at more than a slight disadvantage here. "Ain't no big thing, baby. Like I just said, I wanted the self-protection, and a local pawnbroker sold it to me for a song." I shut up. The barest lies went over the smoothest. Dress them up too garish, and they stood out like pink lipstick on a pig. "Now where's that good bud?"
Bunnie, left hand planted on contoured hip, didn't shift out of her defiant stance. I sensed she'd in mind to call me a liar, and she'd be right as the rain slashing at our door. Instead, she pointed at me.
"Do you keep it real, Dice?"
"Cross my heart and hope to die, baby. Let's fire up that bud you were so nice to fetch us on a soupy night like this."
"Don't sell me short on the truth, Dice. Ever. Lie to me, and I'll go Lorena on you. Liars are pond scum, and I hate 'em."
I did a placatory hands down motion. "Okay, Bunnie, I hear you. Peace, okay? Jeez. Now where's my wallet?"
She picked it up and thrust it at me. "I burned two Benjamins. That's a righteous price, too, because it's primo weed. Leah is stoned for days while high on it."
"I like that sound. So, let's get down to it."
"Yes, so let's."
Bunnie doffed the white blouse, the top to her flight attendant's uniform. Her pear-shaped breasts and maraschino cherry nipples trumpeted in rising glory. I already bristled at full a-ten-hut. She'd gone out barefoot, and the best was yet to come unwrapped, when she halted her striptease, pirouetted, and dished me a coy half-smile.
"I'll be back in a jiff. Don't go anywhere or get started without me."
Now of all the times?
"Will you be awful long, baby?"
"That's for me to know, and you to find out."
After she sidled into the bathroom, I heard the balky ceiling fan clank on to run. My eyes swerved from the bathroom door to my duffel bag left on the chair.
Ditch the piece
, I thought
.
But where
? I wasn't tramping out into this tumult and getting zapped by a lightning bolt. A motel crib offers precious few hiding spots, and ours was barer than most. I always toted a roll of black electrician's tape, a handy aid in hushing the squawkers and subduing the squirmers.