Slow Burn (28 page)

I must have
been slow on the uptake. Before I could come up with anything pithy to say,
Rebecca opened the door with a chorus of jingling chains and slapping bolts.
"Are you okay?" she asked.

She was wearing
black high-top Keds, a pair of soiled gray sweatpants and a purple U Dub T-shirt
that she'd stolen from me. She had dirt on her chin.

"I'm
throwing myself on your mercy."

"You
expect mercy from the woman who single-handedly moved both of us today?"

I held the
champagne bottle up. "I've brought an offering."

She squinted at
the label and then at me. Krystal. "At least you weren't cheap."
"You deserve it." "You're damned right."

My old oak coat
tree was standing behind the door. I took my leather jacket off, spun the coat
tree so the broken foot was facing the corner and hung my jacket on its regular
hook. I instantly felt more settled. "Can we find any glasses?" I
asked.

She took me by
the waist and pulled me toward the kitchen. The hall walls were lined with
boxes. The kitchen was ankle-deep in crinkled-up newspaper. "I started on
the kitchen," she said, "but I pooped out. I was just nodding off in
the living room when you knocked."

I traced a line
down her cheek. "You've got blankey marks."

"Okay, Mr.
Detective, maybe I was napping." From the cabinet on the far side of the
sink, she produced a pair of squat highball glasses. "That's it," she
said. I popped the cork and poured us both a handful. "How'd it go?"
I asked.

She told me.
When words alone failed, she took off. I followed her all over the house,
upstairs and down, as she recapped the difficulties of the day and related her
decorating plans for the future. By my reckoning, the latter would require one
of us to win the lottery.

It was forty
minutes before we were back in the kitchen, and I poured us the last of the
Krystal. "Thanks," I said.

She gave me the
fisheye. "Are you sure you're okay?"

"Why?"
I asked. "Don't I look okay?"

"You just
let me babble for an hour without interrupting me once, without once telling me
how hard your day was. Do you realize that, Leo? That's got to be a
first."

"I've been
listening to Dr. Lorna on the radio. She says women need to talk it out. That
what they really want you to do is listen to them. I'm becoming a more
sensitive, nineties kind of guy."

She seemed to
think this was funny, and it earned me a kiss, so I wasn't complaining. She let
me go and said, "Well, then, the least I can do is listen to you. So . . .
how was your day, Leo?"

I put the back
of my right hand on my forehead and said, "I can't bear to talk about
it."

I was only half
kidding. This was one of those stories I was hesitant to tell. As I'd run
through it in my head all afternoon, I realized the story had the sound of
folklore rather than fact.

Rebecca did
better than I expected. She listened to my story without comment, all the way
up to the point where I started telling her about going to Jack's new restaurant,
before she began shaking her head.

"Are you
sure you aren't exaggerating just a bit here, Leo? You know your penchant for
embroidering a story."

I almost wished
I were. The whole thing was completely over the top. After leaving Cecil, I'd
swung by Jack's new place. I don't know why. I certainly had better things to
do. I think maybe I was still in denial and needed to reassure myself one way
or the other about this mess I'd gotten myself into. One thing was for sure. If
it was reassurance I was looking for, I'd definitely gone to the wrong place.

The restaurant
was a storm of activity. The front door was jacked open by a chair, allowing
the parade of delivery people easy entry. Rickey Ray was sitting on a barstool
just inside the door. He was wearing the same cowboy weight-lifter suit as when
we'd first met.

"Leo, my
man," he said, "what brings you down here?"

I stepped aside
to let a guy with a dolly full of apple boxes go by, and then Rickey Ray and I
exchanged high fives.

"Just
wanted to see how things are going."

Dixie
's voice rose from the kitchen. "Ay
said over here, Ahnstein."

I pulled
another stool over from the bar and sat.

"This is
craziness, man."

"What's
that, podna?"

"You know
what I'm talking about." - He gave me a blank look.

"The whole
thing with the helicopter. Flying a goddamn bull carcass into the middle of
downtown Seattle just to prove you can do it."

If he was
surprised, he didn't show it.

"The
Jackster don't think so."

"The
Jackster is out of his goddamned mind."

"You got
it, my man."

"This is
going to be the end of him."

Rickey Ray
checked the area around us. "He's done either way, Leo. Too many fuck-ups,
too much booze, the Meyer-sons doggin' his trail, Dixie cuttin' his fences. You
right, - podna. The old Jackeroo is headin' for the last roundup."

"You don't
seem real concerned," I noted.

"It's just
a job, Leo. Jack's responsible for himself." His nonchalance evaporated,
and he was suddenly serious. "It all comes around, my man. Comes a time
when all of us have to atone. When, whether we like it or not, we gotta take
responsibility for our actions. Been a long time comin', but the Jackster's
'bout to get his." He caught himself raving. "Old Jack should never
have started in with that Meyerson woman," he said quickly. "She's
gonna be the death of him yet."

"The
Meyerson woman swears she's not the one eating old Jack's lunch. She claims
there's somebody else out there sabotaging his business."

He ignored me. "I
tol' him not to do that shit with that sign of hers. That bird got no sense of
humor. That sign shit just woke her up."

"So if
this all comes apart, you're out of here?"

He reached over
and patted me on the back, once more the good old boy. "I be updatin' my
resume as we speak," he joked.

I wondered
whether maybe I couldn't flip his switch, too, so I said, "What about
Candace? She gonna do the rats-from-a-sinking-ship thing, too?" I could.

His mismatched
face clouded. "You know, podna, you always a little too damn interested in
Miss Atherton."

"Funny,
but you know, I was thinking the same thing about you. Isn't that weird?"
He looked up at me through his hair. I kept talking. "Really. On the way
over here, I was thinking how if a guy didn't know better, he'd almost have to
figure it was you and Candace instead of Jack and Candace. You know, because
she spends a whole lot more time with you than she does with Jack."

He slipped off
the stool. "Know what I'd do if I was you?" He punctuated the last
word with a stiff tap on my chest with his finger.

"You're
not me, Rickey Ray," I said calmly. "That's why they gave us
different names."

He tapped me
again, harder this time. "They can give you "whatever goddamn name
they want. Don't change a goddamn thing. You still who you are. Long as you
never lose track of who you are, they can't hurt ya. Miss Atherton and what she
is or ain't doin' is none of—"

We never got a
chance to finish our little discussion. At that moment Jack came blustering
around the corner. Today he was doing his man-of-the-people thing. Blue jeans
and a crisp blue work shirt. The plebeian attire merely served to highlight the
three pounds of jewelry. He looked like the king of convicts.

"Well,
well," he said. "Looky heeya." He palmed my shoulder with a big
red hand. "Nice to see you, boy." He sounded like Foghorn Leghorn. I
half expected him to turn away at any moment and announce to some invisible audience
that I was not the brightest boy in the world.

"You seen
the place yet?"

"No, I
haven't."

He threw the
rest of the arm around my shoulder. "Well, there, Lee—"

"Leo,"
I corrected.

"Well,
there, Leo. Lemme show you 'round."

I was all right
as long as we were indoors. I'd expected Texas longhorns and mounted buffalo
heads, but the place was slick. It had kind of a Hunt Club motif, with
thoroughbred racing thrown in as the kicker. As we walked, Jack kept up a
running commentary.

"When I
started in the business, Leon, they said you couldn't put pictures of horses on
the walls of a steak house. Said it was crazy. Said it made folks nervous. The
Jackster, he said . . ."

For the next
half hour or so, as we strolled around the restaurant, things seemed to fold
themselves back into a recognizable pattern. In the kitchen, Jack and I found
Candace polishing glasses and carried her along on our tour. She patted Jack's
arm as we walked. The bustle and hum of preparing for Friday night's opening
lent me a much-needed feeling of stability, as if the sight of real people performing
real tasks somehow increased my distance from the Looney Tunes universe into
which I seemed to have fallen. I was feeling better. There really was a restaurant
called The Feed-Lot. It was nice. The staff seemed nice. This spasm of sanity
lasted until we stepped out the side door.

The half block
to the south of The FeedLot used to be a twelve-story office building, named,
if I remember correctly, after some insurance company. A few years back, a new
owner had leveled the property and completely cleaned off the lot in
preparation for another shiny new business-retail complex that never came to
be, leaving an entire half block of downtown Seattle sitting paved and empty.

In a town
where, depending upon the section of the city, it can cost over twenty dollars
a day to park a car, a half acre of bare concrete ranks right up there with
bread from heaven on the covet meter.

In
a nanosecond
the slab had become Seattle's only genuine free-parking area. I'd used
it
myself a couple of times. The city was not amused. As the City of
Seattle sees it, no act performed by any member of the citizenry, while
in the confines of
the city limits, shall be without charge from the city. It's Rule One
D:
Everything costs. No exceptions.

They made the
owner fence the thing, and for the past few years it's been a downtown eyesore.
It was an eyesore no more. Jack had turned it into the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. My heart hit my shoes.

It wasn't the
green-and-white-striped tents set up around the edges. As a matter of fact, the
tents and the jaunty pennants flying from their peaks merely worked to imprint
the Apres the Derby motif and to intensify my sense of well-being. That's not
what set my teeth on edge.

It wasn't the
big cattle trailer parked in the alley, either. The white eighteen-wheeler
filled the alley on the far side of the fence like a cork in a bottle,
effectively both blocking the alley completely and lending, I'm sure Jack
imagined anyway, a certain rural charm to the proceedings. A charm he sought to
accentuate by the strategic placement of a number of bales of hay, piled on the
ground along the perimeter of the rig as well as on the tops of both the cab
and the trailer, all of which pretty much cleared up the mystery about the
stuff he'd had delivered from Wagner's. It was window dressing.

It wasn't the
forest of trees, shrubs and flowers that Jack had imported in order to
transform the slab into a formal garden, nor was it the bandstand being set up
over on the left. All of this seemed part of the regular, rational, everyday
world. No. They weren't the problem.

The problem was
on my left as we came out the door. It was the world's only combination stage
and barbecue pit. A full four feet above ground level, the raised platform ran
nearly the width of the yard. A giant blowup of Jack and Bunky had been affixed
to the brick wall behind the stage. It said only: HUNGRY?

Everything was
right there. An open-pit barbecue you could have driven a truck into. Back in
the north corner, a dump-truck load of charcoal briquettes formed a pitch-black
cone on the ground next to the forklift.

I pointed to
the steel apparatus at the center of the stage.

"What's
that?" I asked.

Jack squeezed
my shoulder again.

"That,
Leo, is the finest, most modern barbecue pit ever known to man." Using my
neck as a lever, he guided me over in that direction. "Barbecue is an
art," he announced. "Ya probably didn't know that, did ya, but it
is."

When I seemed
to agree, he went on.

"What
we're gonna do tomorrow will make barbecue history." Jack's eyes took
on a
distant light. He pointed to the huge metal pan sunk in the center of
the
stage. "When we set that ol' boy on the spit tomorrow, Leon, they'll be
a full ton of coals blazin' away down here. Two thousand pounds of
flamin'
flavor." He eyed me closely. "You know anything about cookin'?"

"Not a hell
of a lot."

He gave me a
conspiratorial wink. "Well, you see, the reason nobody ever tried to cook
anything this big is the problem that you got to cook it so long to get the
inside cooked that the outside is burned to a cinder. The only way it could be
done would be with a real intense dry heat, like you got in an oven. The
charcoal's too hot in one place and not hot enough in another. Can't be done
with charcoal."