Slow Burn (7 page)

The face looked
like it had been assembled from mismatched parts and, as such, gave conflicting
impressions. A vertical scar ran the length, coming out from under his sandy
pompadour and eventually disappearing beneath his chin. The scar had puckered
an area of skin beneath his left eye, forming a pink teardrop of flesh that
seemed to be forever rolling down his ruined cheek. A second, angrier scar ran
from the corner of his mouth back under his ear, pulling his lips into an
insincere grin. His right ear was fully an inch higher than his left. The
patches of skin through which the scars did not pass seemed to have small
pieces of gravel sewn beneath the surface.

He gave me a
lopsided grin. "Always wear your seat belt, podna."

"I'll
remember that," I promised.

It was as if,
somewhere inside, a switch was flipped.

"Show's
over," he said suddenly. "Whacchu want?"

"I want to
see Mr. Del Fuego."

"Lots of
folks wanna see of Jackeroo."

"I'm Leo
Waterman," I said. "I'm here about security for the convention."
I handed him my handy new credentials. He took only the briefest glance before
handing it back.

He stuck out
his hand. "Rickey Ray Tolliver," he said. His hand was callused to
something more akin to weathered bone than to flesh, but his grip was light.
"They called about you sometime earlier, podna. Come on in, the Jackster
wants to have a word with ya."

He swung the
door aside and stepped back.

I walked
through an ornate vestibule into a large central room. Maybe thirty-five by
forty-five. Furniture out away from the walls. Three separate seating areas,
one with its own little library corner, a full bar, beige wool carpet up to my
ankles that ran down the wide hall, off the back of the room that must lead to
the five bedrooms.

He was about
sixty, wearing a fire-engine-red suit over a ruffled tuxedo shirt that he wore
unbuttoned nearly to his navel. I'd never seen a grown man in a red suit
before, but somehow, on him, it seemed to work. Probably because it matched his
eyes and his face. His thick head of white hair was welded in place, except for
a single shock up near the front that he allowed to fall partially over one
eye, lending, he probably imagined, a certain boyish charm to his otherwise
dissolute appearance.

He was on the
phone.

"I'll tell
you what, then, Myron. You just tell them to run what they been paid for. We're
paid up through Wednesday. They don't wanna renew the ad, then fuck 'em. Be too
damn late by that time anyway. Heh, heh, heh. By the time those damn fools get
their shit together, we'll have his big brisket broiled." He pushed the
off button and snapped the cell phone shut. He saw me and scowled. "Rickey
Ray . . ." he began.

Tolliver
stepped out from behind me. "Name's Leo Waterman, Jack. He's the guy from
convention security."

A grin split
his face. "Well, hell's bells, why didn't you say so, Rickey Ray." He
started across the room toward me. "Get Mr. Waterman here a drink,
boy," he said.

Tolliver headed
for the bar. I caught his eye. "Mineral water," I said.
"Something like that." He winked his injured eye.

Jack Del Fuego
threw an arm around my shoulder and began hustling me toward the center of the
room. "Yer not a teetotaler, now, are ya, Waterman?" .

"Nope,"
I said. "Just getting older and got a long day in front of me, is all. I
start drinking this time of day, I'll have to grab a nap."

He clapped me
on the back. "Glad to hear it," he said. "Can't trust a
teetotaler. They're damn near as bad as them vegetarians and animal rights
assholes. Enough to puke a buzzard, if ya ask me."

When I seemed
to agree, he gave me the canned spiel, in the third person, referring to
himself as "ol' Jack." How ol' Jack started out with a little joint
in Allstin, Texas, and built it into a thirty-three-store chain. How ol'
Jackeroo had been betrayed from within. How the world would soon tire of what
he called Abby's "Styrofoam steaks." How his betrayers had grossly
underestimated the ol' Jackalope's legendary resiliency and would now face the
wrath of the Jackster.

Rickey Ray
produced a lemon-lime water over ice and handed it to me. Jack waited until I
had swallowed half of it and then leaned close.

"You been
over to see the Meyerson midget yet?" he asked.

"No, sir,
I haven't," I said.

"Don't be
listenin' to her bullshit, now, boy. That little shit got more stories than the
naked city. She starts runnin' me down, tellin' stories, all that, you just ask
her about the bone."

"The
bone?"

"The pork
chop bone her husband, Lutz, choked to death on." "What about
it?"

"She had
it gold-plated. Used it for a key chain."

I held his gaze.
"Come on. Really?"

"Used to
give out little bronze replicas to her employees, you know, like for promotions
and employee of the month and that stuff."

"Sounds
like one of those stories to me," I said.

He took the arm
that wasn't around my shoulder and held it up.

"As God is
my witness," he said. "I will, of course, allow you to draw your own
conclusions as to how that big old bone got stuck that far down that man's
skinny little throat."

"Of
course," I said.

"She
starts runnin' me down on my parentin' skills, sniv-elin' about how I didn't do
right by my stepkids and all that other crap of hers, you just ask her about
that daughter of hers that she don't talk to no more. Nice girl, name of Penny.
Married some kind of tradesman. The Meyerson hag dropped her like a hot potato.
Couldn't stand to have no blue-collar trash in the family. No, sir. You ask her
about that."

I swore to
wedge it in at the first conversational break.

"Now, I
don't know what you know about my present situation . . ." he said.
"I got me some real security problems." He shot a quick glance at
Rickey Ray. "Not the personal kind, ya know. Ol' Rickey Ray here's more'n
capable of watchin' out for my big ass. Three-time Ultimate Fighting Challenge
champeen. Nobody else ever won it twice. Got him every kinda belt in every
goddamn gook martial arts discipline known to man. The problem I got is—"

Before he could
continue, the lock in the hall door snapped and a tall blond woman bustled
through the-door, followed by a moving pile of bags and packages. Nordstrom,
The Bon Marche, Barney's, Helen's, of course. Downtown Retail grazing at its
finest.

"Rickey
Ray," she wailed. "Help Bart here for a sec, will ya, honey?"
Tolliver didn't move a muscle.

Even without
the platform shoes and the hair, she must have been the better part of six-one
or -two. Long in the leg and narrow in the hip, she wore a blue spandex
jumpsuit so tight that when she turned back toward her packages, I could tell
that her brassiere was a two-snap model and that she was wearing a pair of
those user-friendly thong underpants. She had a feathered-back pile of bleached
hair and a set of those butterfly eyelashes so favored by the wives of TV
preachers. Farrah Fawcett meets Tammy Faye Bakker.

She swiveled
forward. "Rickey Ray," she insisted.

"I tole
you before, darlin'," Jack said. "Rickey Ray is my driver and my
bodyguard, not your cock of the month. Ol' Bart here needs help, get him a
boyfriend of his own."

She turned in
an instant, dipping into the tote bag that swung from her elbow and coining out
with a single sheet of paper. She waved the paper in front of her as she
crossed the room.

"Need I
remind you?" she said. "Need I remind you? You forget what the judge
told you the last time? You that dim or what?" She didn't wait for an
answer. " 'Course you are. Why in hell am I asking myself that? You'd
think I'd know by now. You wasn't that damn dumb, you wouldn't have run the
business into the ground, now, would you?"

Jack and Rickey
Ray exchanged tired glances. She kept at it. "Rickey Ray is paid by the
company. I am one half of that company. He works as much for me as he does for
you, and right now I want him to . . ."

It appeared to
be some sort of court document she was waving. It was laminated and made a
wooga-wooga sound as she flapped it around.

She noticed me
for the first time. "And who in hell is this?"

"He's with
convention security," Jack said. "Security, you say? Well, hell, you
could sure use all the help you can get there, Sparky." She stepped my
way. "Dixie Dormer," she said. "Leo Waterman." We shook
hands.

"I had the
great misfortune to be married to this idiot a while back. Quite a while,"
she added. "Old Jack here likes his honeys just barely growed up and
haired over. The fresher outta high school, the better the old boy likes 'em.
Ain't that right, Jackeroo?"

The lack of a
reaction did not slow her down.

'Technically
speaking, half the restaurants are rnine. Community property, ya know? 'Ceptin'
if I leave birdbrain here alone, there won't be no damn restaurants to be half
of. Be like his poor first wife, poor soul. He may have snookered her, but he
sure as hell ain't gonna snooker me. I figured if I didn't take the bull by the
horns, so to speak, and make damn sure he don't screw up the rest of it, I'd be
out on the street."

"Where, as
I recall, you'd feel right at home," Jack sneered.

"Got a
court order." She waved it again. "No company business can be
conducted unless I'm there." "Laminated?" I asked.

"Shit for
brains kept tearing it up," she explained. "Like thafd make it go
away or somethin'. Had it done in clear Kevlar. Not even Jo Jo the Dogfaced Boy
over there can tear it up now."

I made it a
point not to look over at Rickey Ray.

She hollered
over my shoulder. "Bart! Don't just stand there like a bump on a log; take
that stuff down to the room."

The pile of
bags and packages began to move across the carpet. From what I could see, Bart
was an attractive young fellow of about twenty-five, six feet or so, with a
slicked-back head of black hair and a pair of thin, hairless forearms.

Dixie Dormer
focused on me again. "He tell you how we can't take a crap over here
without the Meyerson camp knowing whether it was one lump or two? He tell you
that? He tell you those people are kicking our asses in damn near every market because
they always know ahead of time what we're gonna do? He tell you he's got us in
hock up to our asses and if this Seattle store ain't a great big hit, we may
all end up wearin' paper hats? Security, my ass."

Without another
word, she brushed past me and started after Bart, who had bumped his way around
the corner and "moved down the hall.

"You so
much as break wind without me being there, Jack, and I'm going to haul your big
ass back to jail," she said over her shoulder.

Jack opened his
mouth, remembered I was there and, instead, went tiotting down the hall in her
wake. I could hear his plea.

"I can't
operate this way, Dixie. If s all gonna go sour. You're just gonna have to take
a smaller part here."

"Trust me,
Jack," she said. "You got a small enough part for the both of
us."

I missed
whatever was said next. As I stood still and tried to catch the receding
voices, a head popped up over on my left. Visible above the carved wood border
on the Victorian sofa was a lustrous mane of sandy-brown hair, connected to a
rather lustrous young woman. She must have been lying down. "Poor
Jack," she said, rising.

I thought I
heard Rickey Ray chuckle as she came around the edge of the sofa. "Sorry
if I startled you," she said.

"No
problem," I said.

"I'm
Candace Atherton."

She was maybe
thirty and a beautiful girl. A lithe five-ten, in a white silk blouse, a blue
cashmere cardigan and a pair of loose-fitting chinos. She eased herself across
the room in my direction, her movements far too graceful to be considered
common locomotion.

"I'm
afraid I'm what Miss Dormer so prosaically referred to as Jack's latest high
school honey."

"It's been
a while," I said, "but I don't remember anything even vaguely like
you in my high school."

"I suppose
I'll take that as a compliment, Mr. . . ."

"Waterman,"
I said. "Leo Waterman, and please do."

From the far
end of the hall, a garbled mix of raised voices filtered our way. "How
long has this been going on?" I asked.

"She got
the court order six weeks ago in Dallas," Rickey Ray said. "Been dogging
us ever since."

"Poor
Jack," the woman-said again.

"You ought
to be around when she follows him into the toilet," said Rickey Ray.

"Noooo
..."

"There's a
phone in the toilet," Candace Atherton said.

" 'Cause
she knows ol' Jackeroo does most of his business on the can. Says he thinks
best in there."