King Maybe (5 page)

Don't dally. The bathrooms were just bathrooms, except for Stinky's, which looked like the pope's pissoir, with what I think was a holy-water font in white alabaster dead center in the room. More mirrors than I would have expected, although I immediately realized I should have known better: Stinky
liked
the way he looked, had in fact paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to have his face sculpted into an aerodynamic cutting edge, streamlined as a Modigliani, with high cheekbones and a tiny nose that plastic surgeons had been sanding down for decades. His hair had been plucked into a widow's peak that was probably inspired by Bela Lugosi. Stinky had apparently fallen in love with an alien who had landed at Roswell and had been remaking himself in its image ever since.

Okay, so the bathroom slowed me down. I was almost nine minutes in when I rounded the final corner of the house and found myself at the front door. I checked my watch, figured what the hell, and pulled on a plastic food-service glove. When I pressed the latch, the door swung open in front of me—always a bad sign—until it bumped against something. As dark as the hallway was, I could still make out the two little pictures I coveted hanging to my immediate right and, on the floor where it had served as a doorstop, a man-shaped consolidation of darkness that the penlight revealed to be Stinky's latest houseboy. He was on his back, but not restfully. His jaw had been shattered so that it yawned open on one side, and his right leg was bent, and not just at the knee. It was bent in three places, and the foot looked like it had been put on backward. It must have taken him many long minutes to die.

A sight like that demands a
lot
of attention, and my sense of time went a little elastic, because when I looked at the watch again, I'd been away from the car for ten minutes and forty-six seconds. I backed out of the hallway to the drumbeat of my heart, closed the door, removed the glove, and pulled the phone out of my pocket. The moment I turned it on, it buzzed. Jake Whelan. I answered and instantly disconnected as I trotted down the driveway, went a few steps farther, and then pushed the speed dial for Ronnie. And listened to it ring. And ring.

And ring.

5

Jejomar

The car was where I'd left it, and Ronnie was craning backward, still in the front seat but looking out the rear window, either for me or just toward me. I gave her a tentative little wave, but she didn't respond. Nor did the car seem to be running. I realized I was distracted by what I'd just seen in Stinky's hallway and slowed to give the night a belated look.

Quiet neighborhood, an architectural patchwork but nothing threatening except perhaps aesthetically. Nicely spaced streetlights, the lawns beneath them shining with dew, a thin, tardy sickle of moon just barely afloat above the trees. No one on the sidewalk but me, no moving cars and not many parked ones. Lights off in almost all the houses.

Ronnie continued to regard me neutrally as I got closer. I might have been a bowl of goldfish for all the interest she showed. I made a little shrug, meaning,
What?
but got nothing in response. My right hand began to itch, which usually means I wish I had a Glock with me. I did have the Slugger's razor, and I took it out and palmed it in my right hand so I could keep the left free to open the door or do whatever else might be called for.

Checking the surroundings again, I went to the passenger side, glanced into the car, and got in beside a wide-eyed Ronnie. The moment my butt hit the seat, I smelled perfume, and the moment I smelled perfume, I heard movement behind me and felt something cold prod the back of my neck, and Stinky Tetweiler said, “Say hello, Junior.”

I said, “If that thing touching my neck is your finger, you've got circulatory problems.”

“Where's my stamp?”

“Somewhere between here and there. Where's your houseboy?”

A long, long pause. I eased the blade of the razor open one-handed, and Ronnie's eyes went down to it and bounced back up again. When Stinky finally spoke, his voice was shaky. “Back at . . . at the house.”

“You get a lot of loyalty from your houseboys,” I said.

Stinky sniffled. “I get what? Oh, right, right. I'd forgotten. Ting Ting put you p-pretty well on the c-c-carpet, didn't he?” Stinky didn't usually stutter.

“He did.”

“That was the last time I smiled,” Stinky announced with another sniffle. He pushed the gun barrel into the back of my neck for emphasis.

I said, “I'm glad to have given you some amusement.”

“Yes,” he said. “One of the highlights of a b-bumpy relationship.”

It seemed like a good idea to keep him talking. “What was this one's name?”

“Jejomar.” He had physical difficulty getting the name out, as though it were fighting him.

“Sorry?”

“F-for . . . for Jesus, Joseph, Mary. Filipinos like to combine—” He began to weep.

“They got him pretty bad.”

“I heard it.” He cried for a moment, sounding like a dog in pain, then swallowed loudly. He pulled the gun away, presumably to wipe his face, then put it back. “I even saw a little of it, although they didn't see me. But what could I do?”

“Yeah, well, you cling to that in the middle of the night. Especially considering that you've got a goddamn gun in your hand.”

“Junior!”
Ronnie said.

I said, “You should see what they did to him while Stinky was getting his over-upholstered ass down the driveway.”

“Onto the golf course,” Stinky said. He could never resist an opportunity to correct.

“Not hard to figure out what the weapon was,” I said. “And I didn't even see it happen.”

He shoved the gun into the base of my skull, hard. “This is what I should have done the
first
time I wanted you dead. Not hire a bunch of palmy hitters who—”

“Don't mess up my car,” Ronnie said.

“
Your
car?” I said, and immediately tried to erase it with, “Yeah, don't mess up the lady's car.” I turned the razor so the blade was facing away from me.

“Whose car is it, then?” Stinky said.

“Hers,” I said as Ronnie said, “Mine.”

Stinky said, “Looks a
lot
like the one you drive, Junior.”

I said, “I borrowed it from her,” as Ronnie said, “I bought it from him.”

There was a pause. My fingers were cramping around the razor. Stinky said to Ronnie, “You're fast.”

I said, “I was just telling her that a few minutes ago.”

“Maybe we shouldn't be sitting here,” Ronnie said. “What with Jujube or whatever his—”

“Jejomar,”
Stinky said, his voice rising.

“Tell me why you want to kill me,” I said.

Ronnie said, “You mean
this
time.”

“Well,
yeah
,” I said.

“Just looking for clarification,” Ronnie said, sounding aggrieved.

“Don't act even dimmer than you are,” Stinky said to me. “You told those beasts with bats that I sent you for the stamp, and they came to kill me.”

“Really.” I let go of the razor and said, “I'm moving slowly here, Stinky,” and reached into my pocket. “Explain this.” I had the stamp pinched between my fingertips.

“It's the fake?” Stinky said, but the question mark deprived the sentence of most of its authority.

We all sat there for a minute. Then he said, “Gimme.”

“In your fucking hat,” I said, pulling it away. “You do anything I don't like, and I mean
anything
, and I swear I'll use the last bit of life I have left to chew it into a spitball.”

“You guys are both lunkheads,” Ronnie said. “
He
thought—Junior here did—that you found the stamp, sent him after it, and tipped off that bat fetishist, all as a fancy way to kill him.”

“Preposterous,” Stinky said. He settled his weight farther back in the seat, which made the car dip. “As you should know from recent experience, Junior, when I want to kill you, I'll hire someone to shoot you.”

“Like that other man just did,” Ronnie said.

Stinky said, “What other man?”

I said, “Never mind.”

“And
you
thought,” Ronnie said serenely to Stinky, “that they caught Junior in the act, as people say, and he told them you sent him, and they said, ‘Well, all right, then, thanks, here you go,' and gave him the stamp as a reward and came after you.”

“Well,” Stinky said, “when you put it
that
way—”

“I said the exact same thing,” I told him. “When she reacted to
my
theory, I mean. Word for word.”

The pressure on the gun eased off. “You going to give me the stamp?”

“You going to give me the thirty-five K?”

“I haven't got that kind of money in my pocket.”

“Well,” I said, “this will give you motivation to get it.”

“You don't trust me,” Stinky said, and Ronnie burst out laughing.

I said, “What's so funny?”

“Both of you,” she said. “You're hopeless.”

Stinky said, “Who
are
you anyway?” He was looking at her like someone who's just seen something new and is trying to count its legs.

“A mere girl,” Ronnie said.

Stinky nodded, stopped nodding, and nodded again. Then he shook his head once as though to clear it and said to me, “So you didn't rat me to them?”

“Would I be alive if I had? Would I have
this
?” I waved it around a little. “So you didn't set
me
up?”

“Of course not.” He thought for a moment. “Were you ever a Boy Scout?”

“No.”

“Really?” Stinky sounded surprised.

“But you were a Cub—” Ronnie began.

“Skip that,” I said.

Stinky leaned forward to look at me over the gun, which was now beneath his chin. “You were a Cub Scout but you never became a Boy Scout?”

“One of my early failures.”

“Out of many,” he said.

“I'd like
not
to point out that
you're
the one who ran away over the eighteenth hole, leaving his valiant houseboy with his legs on backward.”

Ronnie said, “Eeewwww.”

“So do you remember the oath?” Stinky said. He seemed to have gotten past Jejomar, with the dependable resilience of the sociopath.

“What oath?”

“The
Boy Scout
oath.” Stinky sounded like he'd had a long day of talking to stupid people.

“I told you, I was only a Cub Scout.”

“Why?”

“He couldn't climb a rope,” Ronnie said.

“What're you, Jiminy Cricket? If I want my conscience singing out all the time, I'll take some sodium pentothal.”

Ronnie turned back to Stinky, pushing the gun barrel aside. “Careful with that thing,” she said. “He's touchy about the Cub Scout episode. He
still
can't climb a—”

“Fine, fine, fine,” Stinky said. He put the gun beside him on the seat. “Is there some oath you
do
believe in?”

“Sure,” I said. “The oath of the Tarzana Ham Sandwich and Skateboard Club. I belonged to it when I was a kid.”

“Then by the oath of the whatever you just said, do you swear you didn't have anything to do with those sadists showing up?”

“I do.”

“Okay.” Stinky looked down at the automatic as though he'd forgotten he put it there. “Perhaps we need to reconsider the situation.”

“There's a situation?” I said. “One that we're both in?”

Lights swept the lawn to our left and then flared in the rearview mirror. “Everybody down,” I said, and we all dove for the floor. My hand rolled on something, and I picked up one of Ronnie's fugitive lipsticks.

The car came down the block slowly and slowed even more as it passed us. The beam of a flashlight nosed its way through the passenger window and zipped snoopily around over our heads. From the backseat I heard Stinky whisper,
“Ama namin, sumasalangit Ka Sambahin ang ngalan Mo—”

I said, “Shut
up
.”

Stinky left off, but I could still hear his lips moving. He sounded short on spit.

The car accelerated, and the noise of it gradually fell away.

“Okay,” I said. “There
is
a situation.”

“I
told
you we should move,” Ronnie said, her voice pitched a little closer to the soprano range than usual. “Why didn't they get out of the car?”

“There are two possibilities. The good one is that they didn't see anything and decided to keep searching. The bad one is that they
did
see something and decided it would be too noisy to take care of us here.” I handed her the lipstick. “Found this.”

“I looked
everywhere
for that.” She pocketed it. “What a relief.”

“What a
relief
?” Stinky said, clawing his way back to eye level. “This team of sadists is after us and getting your
lipstick
back is a relief?”

“It's a hard color to find,” she said. To me she said, “How long should we give them?”

“Three minutes.”

“Why three minutes?”

“
I
don't know. Same reason I asked for ten minutes before. It sounds kind of cool, suggests that I know what I'm doing.”

Stinky said, “You don't know what you're doing?”

“If I knew what I was doing, Stinky, would I be here?”

“I'm not good at this,” he said. “I should be home, with my things.”

“Wouldn't recommend it, not for quite a while. What were you saying back there?”

“Saying? When?”

“During the flashlight.”

“Oh,” Stinky said. “Then.”

“Should I go out the way we're facing,” Ronnie said, “or turn the car around?”

I said, “Why does everyone ask
me
everything?”

“Okay,” Ronnie said. “Turn around.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” she said. “If you want to decide, just decide.”

“Just looking for . . . you know, the logic of it. I mean, since our lives might depend on it and all.”

“I figured they saw something,” Ronnie said, “and decided to wait for us up ahead.”

“And why do you figure they saw something?”

“I knew you were going to ask that. When I got down, I hit the brake pedal with my hand.”

Stinky said, very fast,
“Ama namin, sumasalangit Ka Sambahin—”

“That,”
I said to Stinky. “What the hell is that?”

“The Lord's Prayer. In Tagalog.” There was a pause that felt like someone waiting for a slap, and he sniffled again and said, “Ting Ting taught it to me.”

I said, “Great guy, Ting Ting.”

He said, “Have you seen him?” in the tone of someone who has come to think that “hope” is nothing more than a girl's name.

“We don't move in the same circles,” I said. “They're a younger, more energetic couple, go out a lot. And then there's her. She kills people.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Ronnie said. “Go straight or turn around?”

“Turn around.”

“I feel so vindicated,” she said. “The three minutes up?”

“Who's counting? Just get us out of here.” To Stinky I said, “Give me the gun.”

He said, “It's not loaded.”

“It's not—”

“If it was loaded, do you think I would have let them do that to Jejomar?”

“Right, right, right. I'm sorry, I really am. So why'd you bring it?”

“I felt safer. It fooled
you
, didn't it?”

“Here we go,” Ronnie said, and there we went, into a very tidy three-point turn. We crept slowly, lights still out, to the corner of Stinky's street, and she started to make a left.