The Devil's Redhead (8 page)

Dominic resumed: “Don't mind Nina, okay? It's just, I mean, not to make you feel bad, but near the end, your mother lived like a squirrel. And what there was to get, your sister got. Feds took your share. Agents came to probate court, served their papers, it was all written down, boom boom boom. Not that there was much to get. Bloodsuckers came out of the woodwork, their hands out, bills you wouldn't believe. Poor woman. You coulda maybe thought about giving her a little of that money you made, know what I mean?”

“She wouldn't take it,” Abatangelo said. “And by the time she was sick, I'd been tagged. They seized everything.”

Dominic snorted. “Like you didn't have a secret stash somewhere.”

“Not secret enough.”

Dominic studied him. “Some criminal mastermind.”

They stopped in front of a grocery called the Smiling Child Market. Tea-smoked chickens hung in the window and Chinese matrons rummaged through sidewalk bins for dragon beans, lo bok, cloud ear mushrooms. Just beyond the door, the owner stood at the register, wearing a red cardigan and a wisdom cap. Behind him an ancient woman, dressed in black, sat on a dairy carton feeding glazed rice crackers to a cat.

“Jimmy,” Dominic called out, “Jimmy, dammit Jimmy, over here. This is the roomer I told you about. We're going up, that good?”

The grocer smiled an utterly impersonal smile. In the stairway, searching his pocket for the keys, Dominic told Abatangelo, “His name's Jimmy Shu. He don't know where you been, which is good. Never tell a Chinaman everything. He'll never trust you again.”

Upstairs, the hallway was dark and redolent of ginger and curry and chili oil. The clamor of North Beach filtered through the window at one end, Chinatown the other. Dominic fiddled with the keys in the dim light, holding them near his eyes, then opened the apartment door. They greeted a clutter of take-out cartons, ravaged napkins and tangled rags.

Dominic said, “Hey hey, this was all supposed to be, well, gone, you know?”

He kicked a welter of paper into a heap near the wall, wiping his head again and then his throat. “Christ. Fucking skinflint Jimmy Shu.” He let loose a burdened sigh. “Let me show you the back,” he said.

In the rear there was a foldaway bed, a table, a radio. Abatangelo found himself imagining Shel sitting there, on the bed, smiling up at him.

Dominic said, “Simple and small. Hope it don't remind you too much of prison. I'll get a broom, a pan, get the front cleaned up.”

“Dominic, slow down. Go back to the bar. I'm grateful.”

Dominic stood still for the first time. He nodded thoughtfully a moment, then looked up into Abatangelo's face.

“Your mother was a very dear woman,” he said. “Don't think she didn't miss you. Her only boy, in prison. For drugs, Christ. It broke her heart. You broke her goddamn heart.”

Abatangelo reached out for the old man's shoulder but Dominic recoiled. He wiped his mouth and looked at his feet. “I'm gonna say this,” he said. “Say it once and that's it. And I won't regret it.” He looked up. His chin bobbed angrily. “Nina's right in one respect, you know? If your father had been a better man, eh? Instead of a piece of shit. Maybe none of this woulda happened.” He let the words hang there a moment, nodding to himself as though, in hearing the echo in his mind, he felt certain the words were true. Finally, he turned to leave.

“Dominic? One last thing.”

Dominic stopped. “Yeah, sure, what?”

“Not to take advantage,” Abatangelo said. “But I need a car.”

From the hallway Frank stared at the door to the guest room. Shel had holed herself up in there again, right after fixing lunch. He listened for sounds from inside, thinking: She's gonna brood the rest of the day away. Gonna sit there and stare at the wall and run through her smokes. All she needs is a record player and a bunch of sad songs.

He shivered a little, wondering what it was that had come over her. Had she found someone else? Didn't she realize that whatever he did, everything he did, he did for her?

Well, all right then, he thought. It's up to me. Get our asses out of here and start up new. For all her moody sulking, for all her wandering off sometimes in the middle of something he was trying to tell her, she was still the one good thing in his life. She deserves to get out of here as much as I do, he told himself. She deserves better.

He left the house, started his truck and drove out to the highway, heading for West Pittsburg for his meet with the twins.

Secretly, he knew part of the reason behind his plan was to make amends. He hadn't been entirely honest. Even with all the things she'd figured out, forced out of him, there were still a million left to tell. All the times he'd said he was going out to a construction site to pound nails or hoist Sheetrock, he was actually walking bogus picket lines in the valley, shaking down contractors. If he wasn't shaking them down he was ripping them off, stealing equipment, tools, hardware, even trucks.

On occasion he manned a crank lab, sucking fumes, standing watch. Once the batch was cooked he'd help dump the dregs, trying not to get poisoned for the privilege.

He'd be gone for as long as a week sometimes, telling Shel they were in Fresno or Merced or Oroville. It was during those prolonged periods away that he binged. Sometimes it took a couple of days to get straight enough so he could walk back in without giving the whole charade away. Sometimes he wondered if she was even paying attention. That hurt. And when he hurt, he wanted to party. Roy Akers obliged; he was more than happy to keep Frank zoomed out of his skull.

Frank was so behind on his nut now the whole thing was way out of hand. Shel knew he owed money; she had no idea how bad it was. And he didn't dare tell her. Regardless, on top of everything else, he was nabbing cars for Roy now, like he was in fucking high school. Which was one of the reasons he got talked down to by absolutely everybody, treated like a grunt. I'm sick of the Akers brothers strutting around like they're the kickass of crime, he thought. Time to make a little score, blow on out of Dodge.

Me and my redhead nurse.

At West Pittsburg he got off the freeway and onto surface streets again, heading toward the water. On Black Diamond Street, a rotting whitewashed billboard displayed a spray-paint chaos of gang names and street handles: The Jiminos, Vicious Richie, Hype Rita, the Beacon Street Dutch. Broken bodies lined the street, grinders, rappies, honks, a line of vacant-eyed women eager to work twists. Party balloons, emptied of hop, lay scattered down the sidewalk.

Reverend Ben's sat at the end of a cul-de-sac named Freedom Court. The sign above the doorway read:

REVEREND BEN
'
S APOLLO CLUB

UPLIFTING REVIVALS

GIANT TV

SHUFFLEBOARD

Frank pulled behind the building and parked. The tar paper roof bristled with cattle wire. Candy wrappers and a discarded tampon littered the gravel.

At the doorway Frank hit a stench of gummed-up liquor wells and rancid rubber. As his eyes grew accustomed to the change of light, the barroom came into focus. A large empty room with scattered metal chairs, cracked linoleum, bare bulbs screwed into wall sockets for light.

No giant TV. No uplifting revival.

The bartender, with the chest and arms of a man twice his height, watched Frank wander for a bit. He wore a tight knit shirt and had a shaved head. This, Frank guessed, was Reverend Ben.

Two old men sat with their drinks at the bar. Frank got a feeling of slick, good-natured harmlessness from both, which reassured him. The nearest one farted loudly, and the other looked around in mock astonishment.

“Low-flying duck,” said the first.

“You got mail,” said the other.

The rest of the room was empty. No twins, not yet. Frank ordered a beer and sauntered toward the jukebox, eyeing the hand-scrawled selections. Hop Wilson's “Black Cat Bone.” Sonny Terry's “Crow Jane.” John Lee Hooker's “Crawling King Snake Blues.” Reading the handwritten titles, he couldn't help feeling that, if he put a quarter in, he'd choose exactly the one song they'd hate him for.

One of the old men drifted up behind. He waved his hand at Frank as though to say:
Go on.

“Don't be pretending you know those tunes,” he said, entering the jukebox glow. He wore a bow tie and a white shirt. His cologne overwhelmed the stench of the bar. He leaned down, staring into the bright machinery. “Slip in your quade.”

Frank took out a quarter and did as he was told.

“Pick this,” the man said, pointing out a song. His hands were large and fluid, the fingers thick as rope. Albert King, “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven.”

Frank hesitated.

“Go on, won't electrocute you.”

Frank punched in the code. The man said, “Then this,” pointing out another song. Elmore James, “Shake Your Moneymaker.” The man stood back and smiled.

“Feel better already, don'cha.”

The first song started out slow and raw. The old man recoiled softly, closing his eyes and working each arm as his hips rocked back and forth. Turning back around to his friend, he sang loud when the verse started, his voice a roar, like a preacher's.

“Everybody wants to laugh

Nobody wants to cry

I said everybody wants to laugh

Ain't nobody wants to cry

Everybody wants to get to heaven

But nobody wants to die.
”

He turned back around to Frank for affirmation, but Frank just stood there. Shel usually handled these sorts of situations for him. Feeling a sudden visceral need for her there, Frank imagined her taking form by his side, like a ghost.

The old man shook his head and ran a thick finger under each eye. “Forget it,” he said, and humped back to the bar.

It took another ten minutes for the twins to appear. They came in one after the other, ducking into the bar with an uneasy familiarity. Their names were Bryan and Ryan Briscoe. They were identically towheaded, sloe-eyed, small and freebase thin. Frank called them Chewy and Mooch, to keep them separate in his mind.

One of the twins approached the center of the room with an expression of mock horror, his arms spread wide as though to embrace a missing thing. This was the wiseass, Mooch. He fell to his knees and cried out, “Reverend Ben! The snooker table! How could you?”

Reverend Ben traded glances with the two old men at the bar. Nobody looked happy.

“What is this,” Reverend Ben said finally. “National Skanky Hustler Day?”

Mooch rose to his feet and went to the bar, impervious to the contempt. He took out a tangled wad of cash, unraveled a bill and smoothed it out on the bar. “Drinks for everybody,” he said. “Gonna miss this place. Chump City. Made a lot of money here.”

The other twin approached Frank. This was the sad one. The nervous one. Chewy.

“We made it,” Chewy said.

The twins were a sight to behold, Frank thought. Youngest issue of the Lodi Briscoes, purveyors of quality feed. The twins were the family fuckups. Frank had made their acquaintance one night as they were hustling pool in a Manteca roadhouse. They had quite a little racket: Chewy suckered the marks in, knocked off to the can, then Mooch came out and finished them off. The brothers took their winnings in cash or blow. From the sounds of things, they'd played this room as well. Amazing, Frank thought, they made it out with their asses intact.

“How'd it go?” Frank asked.

Before Chewy could answer, Mooch came up from behind with three beers. He handed them around, grinning.

“Got three trucks,” Chewy said. He pulled up a metal folding chair and sat. Mooch remained standing. “All parked out in Antioch, where you said.”

“We did a follow-in out at the Red Roof in Tracy,” Mooch crowed. “Some salesman. Took his wallet and his sample bag and tied him up with duct tape. Sells ball bearings, you imagine? Went on out, used his plastic and rented us three big shiny white trucks.”

“Rented?” Frank said.

“Well, yeah,” Chewy said. He had yet to drink from his beer.

“It's cool,” Mooch said. “They can't trace it to us, I told you.”

“They can trace it to your follow-in,” Frank said. “Your salesman, he'll hang a visual on you two. You kinda stand out, know what I mean?”

Chewy leaned closer and spoke softly. “It just seemed too much a risk to steal three trucks, Frank.” He licked his lips and swallowed. “You know, like three on a match?”

“Who'd you rent from?”

“That guy in Clayton you mentioned,” Chewy said. “Lonesome George.”

Frank froze. “Why him?”

“Why not?” Chewy answered. “No offense, but you're making me very nervous here.”

Lonesome George DeSantis had operated at least a dozen rental agencies, one after the other, until the Insurance Commissioner got wise to his claims record. Lonesome George's renters tended to have accidents. They tended to have their cars rifled, too, or stolen outright. Now he operated through a straw man. Since he had his shop in east Contra Costa County—CoCo County as the locals called it—Lonesome George kicked back to Felix Randall to keep his operation afloat.