Crow's Landing (11 page)

“Look at the carpenter here,” Parson said. “They teach you that inside?”

“I learned a lot inside,” she told him. “Like who to trust. And who to run from like the fucking plague.”

“Now, now,” he said. “I'm afraid I'm going to get my feelings hurt.” He smiled. “So how you doing, girl? Looks like you're embracing the proletariat, getting it done, all that.”

“Right.”

“Although this truck doesn't suggest great financial success,” he said, looking at the rust above the wheel wells.

“I'm getting by.”

“Good,” he said. “So tell me what else is new. You got a man these days?”

“None of your business.” Dusty opened the door of the pickup.

Parson took a step forward and when he did he glanced inside the truck. The Iron Man action figure was on the seat. Seeing it, he paused. Dusty stepped in front of him and closed the door quickly, knowing it was too late.

“What the fuck do you want?” she demanded, upset he had seen the toy.

“They found the cylinder.”

Dusty took a moment. Whatever she was expecting from him after all this time, it sure as hell wasn't this. “Who found it?” she asked.

“I'm not sure yet.”

“What's it got to do with me?”

“It could have a lot to do with you, Dusty. It's a complicated situation. The people involved are acting cute.”

“What does that mean?” she snapped. “Why don't you ever just say what the fuck you mean?” She waited for an answer she knew wouldn't come. “Sounds to me like some-body
wants a lot of money for it. So pay it. And leave me out of it.”

“It's not that simple, Dusty. They say they want to deal but they're pretty vague on the details. Like where it is, where it came from. You know I'm a details kind of guy. Apparently it turned up around Kimball's Point. But I don't know who found it, and I don't know who's holding it. I need somebody to go out there and finesse the situation. Somebody who knows the territory.” He smiled. “Somebody with charm. And a winning way.”

“You are so full of shit,” she told him. “You think I'd help you after what you did to me? There's an old saying—burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice—go fuck yourself, Parson.”

“You sure that's how it goes?”

“Close enough.”

“I'm not looking for a favor, Dusty. I'll pay you to scope this out.”

“Do your own dirty work,” Dusty said. “For once in your life.” She opened the door and got in.

“Hold on,” he said, grabbing the door handle. “You're not getting what I'm saying here. It looks as if the cops might be involved. On a certain level. Like I say, the guy's being cute.”

“You're not getting what
I'm
saying here. I don't give a shit.”

“You should. The last time the cops saw that cylinder, it was being tossed off a boat that was registered in your name. All they need to do is make the claim that it's the same cylinder and suddenly it's your property. You already did a stretch for trafficking. This time it would be heavy duty. You could be looking at a dime. Unless you get the wrong judge and then you could be looking at more than a dime.”

He reached into his pocket and produced a business card,
which he placed on the dashboard in front of her. Dusty sat staring ahead, out the windshield, to the town houses across the road. She had been very content in the belief she would never see Parson again.

“Why don't you think about it and give me a call,” he said. “But maybe you're okay going back to prison. Maybe it's a better life than you have out here. Three squares a day and all that. Doesn't look to me like you're getting rich pounding nails.”

“Stay the fuck away from me,” Dusty said, pulling the door shut. She started the truck and gunned it out of the lot.

Driving to the day camp, she watched in her rearview, pulse pounding. Why would Parson show up now? Why would the goddamn cylinder surface? Dusty had trouble believing that it had. And maybe it hadn't, maybe it was just Parson, playing head games, trying to get back into her life. Nothing was ever a straight line with Parson, and what wasn't an angle was a curve. It wasn't so much that he lied, although he did that as easily as he breathed, it was more that he was an expert at surrounding the truth with a thousand little falsehoods, so that in the end it was impossible to know one from the other. Nobody knew that better than Dusty, and she doubted that anybody had ever paid as heavily for it as she had.

She spotted the police cars from a block away, parked in front of the day camp. Pulling up, she saw there was yellow tape stretched across the entrance to the alley beside the building. Dusty got out and went inside. Travis was in the first of the little classrooms, just him and one of the assistants who worked there, a girl of high school age. She was slumped in a chair, her legs stretched out, so fully engaged in entering a text into her cell phone that she never noticed Dusty's
arrival. Travis was flipping through a picture book, looking bored. At some point in the past nine hours, he had managed to remove his T-shirt and put it back on inside out.

“Hey, buddy,” Dusty said when she walked in.

“Hi, Mom.”

Dusty turned to the girl. “What's going on?”

“What do you mean?” The girl had looked up briefly when she heard Dusty's voice but now she was reading something, an incoming text probably, on her cell.

“There's a dozen cops outside and they've got the alley taped off,” Dusty said. “Are you fucking stupid?”

The girl straightened up and put her phone in her jeans pocket. “They found a body in the alley.”

“I found him!” Travis said.

The girl hastened to explain. “The kids found him at lunch. They were outside—”

“In the alley?” Dusty asked. “Who was it?”

“A drug addict, I guess. Overdose. They found a syringe.” The girl shrugged, somewhat apologetically, although it was doubtful she knew why she might feel that way. A faint beep emitted from her pocket.

“You got a text,” Dusty told her.

On the way home she stopped at the pizza place down the block and grabbed a medium for her and Travis. She didn't feel like cooking tonight. Travis was all in favor of the pizza idea.

“That's the first dead guy I ever saw,” he told her when they got back to the apartment.

“Did it bother you?” she asked.

“Nope. Not a bit.”

Which bothered Dusty. Quite a bit.

After putting Travis to bed, she took a shower and went
out onto the fire escape with a can of Sam Adams. Inside the apartment the television was tuned to PBS; Travis had been watching
Mister Rogers
reruns earlier and Dusty hadn't bothered to turn it off. She looked out over the city and drank the beer.

It wasn't all that far from where she sat to where she had grown up. Knock down a couple of the bigger buildings and she could practically see Jefferson Park from here. She could almost smell the park—the pot and the pachouli and the urine and the vomit. The place never changed. She heard a gunshot off in the distance, or maybe it was a vehicle backfiring. One seemed more likely than the other. Inside, on the television, a man was discussing art and artists.

… Gauguin then struck up a friendship with Vincent van Gogh, with whom he shared more than just a talent for painting. Both men suffered at times from debilitating bouts of depression …

Dusty turned to look through the window into Travis' bedroom. He was sound asleep, his face angelic beneath his curly hair. He was not all that angelic when he was awake, but he was a good kid. Dusty had managed to keep him on a straight path. So far anyway. It would get harder as he got older.

She looked again at the city. She'd come a long way from her days in the park, but she knew she hadn't come far enough. Today had shown her that. It was bad enough that her six-year-old son was stepping over dead bodies outside his day camp. It was worse that Parson had shown up, dragging her past with him. Dusty didn't need to hear about the goddamn cylinder after all this time. And she certainly didn't need to hear that the thing could still be connected to her. She didn't know if that was true, or just more of Parson's intrigue. But
she did know, if it was true, that she would stand to lose her freedom. When that happened, she would lose her son.

And that was the one thing that couldn't happen.

 * * *

Parson had dinner on the street level patio of a seafood place on Broadway and afterward he sat there watching pedestrians walk by as he drank cognac and smoked a cigar. He had left Cherry a voice message after his conversation with Dusty and he was waiting for him to call back.

His thoughts drifted to the Ford cabriolet in Argentina and when he was on his second brandy he called the dealer in Buenos Aires and offered him eight grand for the car. The dealer's English was not great, but it was good enough for him to convey to Parson how deeply insulted he was at the lowball offer.

“You show to me disrespect,” the man said over the phone.

The conversation ended there, but Parson called back a half hour later and made an only slightly more respectful offer of eight-five hundred. One more phone call and they settled at nine thousand, a figure that still had the dealer whining as if he'd been held up at gunpoint, even though Parson suspected that the man had probably found the car in some backwater halfway up in the Andes, and paid whatever dumb goat farmer who owned it a hundred pesos to take it off his hands.

Parson was still thinking about routing the car through Colombia and using it as a mule, but it was a tricky proposition. Security was tighter than ever these days, and even an antique car from South America was bound to get a pretty thorough going-over. The days were gone when a man could stuff one of the tires with product and mount it back on the rim and run it through. Not only that, but if Parson loaded the car with dope, he'd be obliged to send it to someone else
here at home. For a time he'd registered everything coming through customs in Jenny's name but Jenny had been gone now for over a year, having left at Parson's suggestion after he'd discovered her birth control pills hidden among her dozens of pairs of shoes in the walk-in closet. The discovery had convinced Parson that their differences were insurmountable—he had wanted a kid while she had been content to lie around the pool all day as high as a kite. She had gone to a lawyer who had made a lot of noise about Parson paying Jenny an exorbitant amount of money for their three years together. Parson had sent Cherry to discuss the matter with Jenny one night and he never heard another word from her or the lawyer.

His cell rang and he saw it was Cherry.

“Hey,” Parson said. “Where are you?”

“McMahon's.”

“I'll come there.”

McMahon's was an upscale place up on Western Avenue, known for its steaks and its wine cellar. Cherry was sitting at the bar with a brunette wearing a tight blue dress. The woman was no more than twenty-five, Parson guessed, but then that was right in Cherry's wheelhouse. He was forty-six or forty-seven now, but Parson had never seen him with a woman over the age of thirty. He wasn't sure if women of that vintage were too old for Cherry or if they were too smart for him. Of course, women in their twenties could be just as smart, but then Parson had never seen any of those women on Cherry's arm. He would be surprised if the brunette in the blue dress proved to be the exception.

Cherry had a pathological obsession with his looks. He colored his hair an unnatural black and he was constantly checking it in any available mirror when he thought nobody was
watching, as if a single gray strand might reveal to the world what the world already knew. He'd already had a couple of cosmetic surgeries, although he would never admit to them. But Parson knew that he'd had his eyes done and his chin tightened. Cherry spent time in his own gym every day, working out with the ball players and the pretty-boy cops and firemen, and he liked to brag that his regimen kept him looking young. At times Parson was tempted to ask him which workout it was that had removed the lines from around his eyes.

Cherry was drinking bourbon on the rocks and the twinkie in the tight dress was sipping some frothy concoction with what appeared to be chunks of fruit floating in it. Parson sat and ordered a brandy. Cherry introduced the woman as Zelda. While Parson waited for his drink he asked Zelda what she did and she said she was going back to secretarial school that fall, her tone suggesting she'd taken time off from her studies to find herself. A few moments after that she excused herself to go to the ladies' room. Parson suspected that Cherry had arranged for her to leave when he showed up.

“You talk to her?” Cherry asked, watching Zelda walk away, something Zelda did very well.

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“She told me to fuck off.”

“Sounds like her.”

Parson's drink arrived and Cherry told the bartender to put it on his tab. “I'll bet she was surprised when you told her they found it,” Cherry said.

“About the same as me,” Parson said. He took a drink. “She's kind of bitter.”

“Don't tell me that part surprised you.”

“No,” Parson said. “But she needs to learn how to move
on. We did have some fun together. She still looks good too. Her body is tight as a dancer's, must be all that construction. Got me thinking about the good old days.” He laughed. “I'm pretty sure Dusty wasn't thinking about the good old days.”

“Well, she did go to prison,” Cherry said.

“Am I supposed to feel guilty about it? What was I supposed to do?”

“Nothing,” Cherry said. “Bad luck all around.” He finished his drink and signaled to the bartender for another. “So what happens now? You want me to try to find the thing?”

“No. We'll let her do it.”