This Wicked World (13 page)

The way it games out is, if he kills Anderson, she inherits everything. If he merely fucks him up, there’s the abuse allegation, which she’ll deny and make disappear in exchange for a divorce and enough cash. Either way, Boone is played for a fool and ends up behind bars. He chuckled bitterly as it all fell into place and thought,
Well, someday she’ll get hers,
but that was bullshit, and he knew it, just something people comforted themselves with when they’d been had.

He kept his head down in prison, did his time. It was rough in the beginning. He had to go toe to toe with a couple of bone crushers to establish that he wasn’t to be fucked with, and sustained a minor stab wound fending off a lunatic with a shiv who had some kind of beef with him. Word eventually got around that he was a righteous con, though, and the challenges stopped.

After that, his main problem was boredom, filling his days. He worked in the laundry, read paperbacks from the library, played cards, and exercised on the yard. In some ways it was a lot like the Marines. The easiest way to get by in Corcoran, just as it had been in the corps, was to stick to the program, follow orders, and not indulge in useless bitching and moaning. The few friends he made were older cons, go-with-the-flow characters who knew the secrets to living a quiet life in the midst of the chaos of prison.

Carl came up to see him a couple of times, Berkson too, but Boone was content to have little contact with the outside. His strategy was to ignore everything that didn’t pertain to the day-to-day grind. Concrete, steel, shit, and sweat. He pulled back his horizons until they reached only as far as the razor-wire-topped perimeter fences and got very good at convincing himself that there was nothing he wanted, needed, or missed. But then a jet would pass overhead, bound for L.A. or San Francisco, or the yard would be swept by a breeze sweet with the smell of new-mown hay, and he’d crumble into dust.

Berkson picked him up when he was cut loose and drove him back to L.A. He’d come to believe that Boone had indeed been set up by Jeannie Anderson and felt awful about the way things had gone. Boone had sold everything he owned to pay his legal fees and fines and had only two grand left to his name. Carl had talked about him maybe returning to Ironman, but as a convicted felon — not even allowed to carry a gun — Boone wouldn’t be much use, so Berkson set him up with the job at the Tick Tock and the gig managing the bungalows.

It’s six months later now, and he hasn’t yet figured out his next move. The only thing he’s ever been good at is protecting other people, putting himself in harm’s way for pay. Tending bar is nice and safe, but it sometimes feels like killing time. Lately he rouses from dreams of waiting and lies awake in the dark with the minutes flying past so swiftly, it takes his breath away. Then, suddenly, it’s dawn, another day, and he’s still a man becalmed, adrift a million miles from shore.

B
Y THE TIME
Boone finishes up, his and Amy’s glasses are empty, and so is the bottle. He’s never laid the whole story out like this, told it from the beginning, and he’s surprised at how drained he feels. He is also a bit embarrassed, thinking about Amy having to sit through all of it.

“Damn,” he says. “Sorry about going on like that.”

Amy sets her glass on the coffee table. “Don’t be,” she says. “You obviously needed to get it out.”

“Yeah, okay, but that’s what shrinks are for.”

“Ahh, shrinks are expensive.”

“Well, still, I’m sorry.”

Amy pushes her hair back behind her ears. She reaches for her cigarettes, starts to pull one out, then pushes it back inside and closes the box.

“Look, I’m gonna go,” she says. She stands suddenly, as if now that she’s decided to leave, she can’t wait to get away. “This is an awful lot to absorb, and I kind of feel like I need to be alone to do it.”

“Sure,” Boone says. “I understand.”

Joto wakes up and lifts his head to watch as Boone walks Amy to the door.

“Do you have a blanket for him?” Amy asks. “Dogs like that, something of their own.”

“I’ll find one,” Boone assures her.

She steps out onto the porch.

“The kids at school, what do they call you?” Boone asks.

“
Bitch
behind my back, I’m sure, but Miss Vitello to my face.”

“Well, then, good night, Miss Vitello.”

“Good night.”

Boone watches her walk across the courtyard and actually feels pretty good, all things considered. He’s done the right thing for once, putting everything out there. And Amy reacted just the way she should have. What woman wouldn’t be turned around by a story like that? Maybe over time he’ll learn a better way to tell it.

“Hey.”

It’s Amy, calling to him from her porch.

“What time are we going to breakfast tomorrow?” she says.

“Excuse me?” Boone replies, wondering if he missed something.

“I’ll have all this sorted out by morning and be dying to talk about it.”

“Is nine okay?” Boone asks.

“Nine’s fine,” Amy says. She walks into her bungalow and closes the door. A few minutes later the light in her living room goes off.

Boone stands on his porch for a long time, listening to the freeway traffic in the distance and watching the spotlights slide across the purple sky above Hollywood. It might be the wine, but he’s moved — by the night, by the city, by the gently swaying silhouettes of the palm trees overhead. By Amy’s kindness and by Berkson’s faith in him. Beautiful, he thinks. All of it. Tomorrow, things will go to hell again, but tonight he’s not going to question his contentment; he’s going to accept it for the fleeting gift that it is.

W
ILLIAM
T
AGGERT SLIPS OUT OF BED AT DAWN AS HE DOES
every morning. Part of it is that he can’t stand to waste daylight, but the other part is that his dreams have turned weird lately. Lots of running, lots of hiding. Half the time he wakes up more tired than when he sacked out.

Olivia mumbles something angry in her sleep and curls into a tighter ball, and Taggert takes a moment to admire her long legs, her smooth skin, thanking his lucky stars for the thousandth time before covering her with the sheet. A quick piss, and he steps out into the front yard in his boxers and a T-shirt, raises his arms over his head, and groans as he stretches.

The surrounding desert blooms pink and purple, the sun just now climbing above the horizon. Taggert watches a baby cottontail nibble at a clump of weeds until a barking dog over at the barn spooks it, sending it bounding for cover. A couple of little brown birds perched on the old horse trough in Olivia’s cactus garden dip their beaks and fluff their feathers. These truly are the finest five minutes of every day.

Miguel, the kid who looks after the animals, steps out of his trailer over by the barn and waves. T.K.’s Explorer is parked next to the bunkhouse, a battered seventies singlewide set up on a flat a hundred yards down the hill. Taggert heard him and Spiller get in around eleven last night but didn’t feel like dealing with it. He and Olivia had already killed a pitcher of margaritas and were in the middle of
The Godfather
. She’d never seen it before, but that didn’t surprise him. She’s twenty-five; he’s fifty-five. He’s seen a lot of things she hasn’t.

He puts on khaki shorts with lots of pockets and a pair of flip-flops, then pours himself a cup of coffee and sips it on his way down to the bunkhouse. The mobile home shakes when he pounds on the door. Something falls off a shelf and clatters to the floor.

“Rise and shine, bitches,” he yells.

Spiller opens up, that stringy red hair of his, what’s left of it, hanging in his face, a bandage on his neck.

“Morning, boss,” he mumbles.

“Another job well done, huh?” Taggert says.

“What were we supposed to do, the fucker pulls a gun?”

“Reason with him? Talk him down?”

“No time. The guy was half a second from opening up on us.”

T.K. appears in the hallway behind Spiller, nods, and says, “Hey, boss,” before shutting himself up in the bathroom.

“What’d you do with the garbage?” Taggert asks Spiller. “I didn’t see anything in your vehicle.”

“We dropped everything off at the shack on the way in. T.K. was worried about it leaking on his upholstery.”

“And the kid?”

Spiller jerks his head toward the couch, and Taggert leans in to see a pair of scared eyes peering at him over the armrest. The punk does look a little like Olivia.

“Hey there,” Taggert says. “Welcome to the ranch.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“It’s Virgil, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, Virgil, I bet your sister’s gonna get a big kick out of seeing you. Spiller and I have some chores to do, but what say we meet at the house at ten for breakfast?”

“Cool,” Virgil says.

Cool, huh? Taggert kicks himself in the ass. He should have had Spiller and T.K. put the kid down with that other piece of shit. Olivia would never have been the wiser; bad boys like Virgil drop off the face of the earth every day of the week. But he blinked because of her. Because she calls him Big Poppa and Sweet Tea. Because sometimes she smiles right when he needs her to. Because she gets him hard just by walking into a room.

“Put some fucking pants on,” he says to Spiller, the guy standing there in his Jockeys like it ain’t no thing.

T
AGGERT WALKS BACK
up to the house, which started as a simple vacation cabin in the fifties but has since mutated into a sprawling three-bedroom jumble of dubious structural soundness thanks to various owners’ additions and improvements. Taggert bought the place a couple of years ago for the land — two hundred acres of sand, chaparral, and rocks — and when the new house he’s building on the butte is finished, this rattrap will be torn down and hauled away.

He climbs into his old Dodge truck and drives down to pick up Spiller at the bunkhouse. They bump along a washboard road until they reach the abandoned homesteader’s shack where T.K. and Spiller stashed Eton’s body and the bags containing the pieces of chair and the bloody linen. There’s a funky smell in the air when they step inside the shack. Flies are already gathering, their frenzied buzzing enough to make your head spin, and a long line of fat black ants marches across the shower curtain to squeeze through a hole in the plastic and get at the corpse.

“They sure don’t waste any time,” Spiller says as he bends over to grab Eton’s feet.

“When’d you last turn down a free meal?” Taggert replies, lifting his end.

They carry the body out to the truck, lay it in the bed, then load the bags. Taggert slides behind the wheel again and turns onto a side road that climbs into a narrow box canyon. The canyon dead-ends at the entrance to an old mine, a five-foot-square vertical shaft that extends down who knows how far, but enough that the beam of a powerful flashlight doesn’t reach the bottom.

Spiller hops out of the truck and walks over to the mine. He cranes his neck to peer into the hole and says, “I bet there’s a way to figure out how deep this goes by counting, like you do with thunder.”

Taggert has dropped the tailgate of the truck and is dragging out the body. He says, “Maybe one day you’ll wind up down there yourself, and all your questions will be answered.”

“I’m not that curious,” Spiller replies as he walks to the truck to help.

They carry the body to the shaft and toss it in. Spiller stands at the edge with his hand cupped over his ear, listening for it to hit.

“I got to four,” he says. “What’s that mean in feet?”

“Hey,” Taggert growls, already back at the truck. “How about getting over here and grabbing some of these bags.”

When everything has been disposed of, Taggert drives Spiller up to the site of the new house, the highest point on the property. From here they can see the little town of Twentynine Palms, the Marine base that keeps the town from drying up and blowing away, and part of Joshua Tree National Park. He and Spiller stand on the concrete foundation, which was poured six months ago. It’s taken two years to get this far on the place, with Taggert putting every bit of extra cash he can into it. All the sacrifices will be worth it when the house is done though. Taggert takes a deep breath, filling his lungs with the cleanest air he’s ever tasted.

The sun is fully up now, and the only thing marring the pale blue sky is a pair of jet contrails arching over their heads and already beginning to feather and fade. Taggert walks to the truck and retrieves the blueprint for the house from behind the seat. He unrolls it on the slab, weighting the corners with rocks. He dreamed last night that the south wall was off by six feet and wants to put his mind at ease.

He bends to examine the plan. Thirty-one feet, it should be. Taking a tape measure from the pocket of his shorts, he hands the end of it to Spiller.

“Hook this over there,” he says. “I need to check something.”

Spiller moves to the end of the slab while Taggert walks backward, extending the tape. Thirty-one feet exactly. So everything’s copacetic. Taggert scratches his goatee and shakes his head. Fucking dreams, man. And the fucking fools who dream them. He rolls up the blueprint and sits on the foundation to admire again the view he’ll have from the front window of the house. Spiller plops down beside him, lights a cigarette.

“If I was smart, I’d have moved here years ago,” Taggert says.

“It’s nice,” Spiller says. “Quiet. Makes you feel close to God.”

“God?” Taggert says, then spits in the dirt. “There’s no God out here, man. No God, no devil, just the wind. And shit lasts forever in this dry air. Leave a junk car sitting outside, it’ll take years to rust. People too. They’ve proven that you actually live longer in a climate like this.”

“I believe that,” Spiller says. “You seen those mummies cruising around Palm Springs, so shrunk up they can barely see over the dashboard? All you can make out from behind is big-ass knuckles clutching the steering wheel.”

The guy thinks he’s cute, making fun of old folks. He doesn’t realize yet that someday he’s going to be old too and have young assholes cracking wise about him. Taggert doesn’t say what he was about to say next, that he’s thinking about throttling back soon, taking it easy. He doesn’t want to hear any more jokes.