Drawing Dead (36 page)

Ben would be on his way up north. Dicky would be close behind him. Sam was there, waiting.

Crow climbed out of the car, slammed the door, leaned against the front fender, and considered his options. Only one possibility suggested itself. Crow sighed.

The
pool rushing up at him, the sensation of weightlessness, the pressure of giant hands wrapped around his ankles, the soundless screams vibrating his lips, the pool growing larger, looking up to see Freddy Wisnesky's muscled rictus bearing down on him, the realization that they were both falling, plummeting toward the blue and white tiles.

“Mr. Rich! Wake up, Mr. Rich!” The words penetrated the nightmare. Wicky's eyes snapped open. Freddy Wisnesky: The Nightmare Continues. “Wake up, Mr. Rich.” Giant hands gripping his shoulders, bouncing him up and down on the mattress.

“Okay, okay!” Wicky gasped.

Freddy stopped. “You was having a bad dream.”

“Okay, I'm awake now. Jesus Christ. I think you dislocated a shoulder.”

“It's nine o'clock, Mr. Rich. We got to get going pretty quick.”

Wicky swung his legs over the edge of the bed, sat up, leaned forward, rested his head in his hands, and waited for his brain to reposition itself.

“You okay, Mr. Rich?”

“Just leave me alone a few minutes, Fred.”

“I made you some breakfast. Eggs-in-a-frame.”

Wicky felt the matter in his bowel drop a few inches at the thought of Freddy's favorite breakfast. Since the balcony incident, Freddy had been puppyishly eager to please. He seemed genuinely sorry to have put his buddy Rich—or
Mister
Rich, as he had come to call him—through such an ordeal. Freddy seemed anxious for them to put the matter behind them and be buddies again. Wicky was having a little trouble with that.

He was not looking forward to this trip up north. He suspected that with Joey Cadillac involved, as represented by Freddy Wisnesky, there wouldn't be much left for little Rich Wicky. Freddy was evasive on the matter of the instructions he had received from Mister C. When Wicky asked, Freddy told him that he was just supposed to take care of the comic book guys.

“But I can still do my deal first?” Wicky had asked.

“I just got to take care of the comic guys for Mister C.,” had been Freddy's only reply.

This had the potential of being the worst day of his life, Wicky decided. Or, another voice in his head piped up, the best. He shook his head gingerly. You just never knew.

Freddy called from the kitchen. “Breakfast is ready, Mr. Rich!”

“Great,” Wicky muttered. “Eggs-in-a-frame.”

Wind
ripped the words to unintelligible shreds, sent them careening past his ear. Crow pushed his head forward.

“
What?
”

Debrowski turned her head. “
How . . . are . . . you . . . doing?
”

“
Fine!
” They were on Highway 10, a few miles north of Saint Cloud, moving at eighty miles per hour on Debrowski's Kawasaki dirt bike. Crow's ass had gone numb back at Elk River. His nylon windbreaker was flapping and cracking in the wind, his fingers were locked around the thin, frayed vinyl seat strap between his legs. He was trying not to think about it. He wouldn't mind riding on the back of a real motorcycle. Something big and solid, like a Harley, or even one of those big Japanese touring bikes. Something with some mass to it and something to hang on to. But two and a half hours on the back of a lime-green 250 cc dirt bike was not his thing. If he didn't have hemorrhoids before, this would almost certainly do it.

They were coming up on a small red sports car. Crow squinted into the wind. A Porsche. As Debrowski pulled out to pass, he recognized the license plate with a start and turned his face away.

What was
she
doing here?

When they were well in front of the Porsche, he shouted in Debrowski's ear. “
Did you see who that was?
”

Debrowski nodded.

“
Was she alone?
”

Debrowski shook her head and yelled back, “
Catfish…and…Tommy!
” She lifted her left hand and pointed. “
Is . . . that. . . him?
”

Crow squinted into the wind. She was pointing at another vehicle, half a mile ahead. Was it yellow? His entire body was vibrating. He couldn't focus well enough to identify the color.

They were gaining on the vehicle.

He could now see that it was yellow. A yellow Cadillac.

When he could see the license number clearly, he shouted in Debrowski's ear, “
It's him. Pass him.
”

He turned his head toward the left, resting his cheek against Debrowski's back. He felt the little 250 cc engine winding up as Debrowski increased their speed to blow by the Cadillac as quickly as possible.

“
Who?
” he shouted after they had left the Cadillac behind.

“
Ben!
”

“
Anybody else?
”

“
No!
”

If he had not been traveling at ninety miles per hour on the back of a dirt bike, Crow might have relaxed slightly. They would get there ahead of the pack. He wondered whether Ben knew he was being followed by Catfish and Tommy. Either way, things were getting complicated.

So what do you think? Can you see yourself sitting out on the dock, nice comfortable chair, pulling in a twenty-pound northern?

—Jimbo Bobick,
instructing a potential customer in creative visualization

Sam O'Gara liked
Ozzie's cabin. He liked being by the water. He liked the quiet. He liked the squirrels. He thought it would be nice if his son would buy a cabin, someplace he could bring his dogs to, let them run around in the woods. He hadn't seen Chester or Festus since being licked awake shortly after dawn. He heard a distant howl. Dogs will run. Wasn't nothing you could do—they got that call of the wild.

Crook Lake, an eight-mile-long, bean-shaped body of water, had a reputation for good bass fishing and high mercury levels. Ozzie's cabin was on the tip of a long wing-shaped point, almost a peninsula, that jutted half a mile out into the western end of the lake. A weed- choked bay fdled the back of the wing; the leading edge was rocky, wind-beaten shoreline. Ozzie LaRose owned the tip of the wing, twenty-nine acres of boggy, rocky, heavily wooded bottomland.

At the entrance to Ozzie's property, a sign, crudely carved into a weathered board, hung from a shaky-looking open gate made from saplings. larose's acres. A few yards past the gate, at the point's elbow, the narrow dirt road made a sudden right turn, almost at the water's edge, and followed the narrowing point another quarter mile to the cabin.

Last night Sam had pulled the sign down and hidden it in the brush. Then he had driven the half mile out to the shore road and used a can of fluorescent orange paint to spray his own name on Ozzie's mailbox.

Sam lit a Pall Mall and put his feet up on the plank table. He was sitting on the screened-in porch, drinking a can of beer and waiting for his son to show up. These kids came up with the damnedest ways to make a buck.

The back of his red truck was loaded with neatly packed and sealed cardboard boxes. They didn't quite fill it up, but damn near. He had used every one of the three dozen cardboard boxes he had brought up and had spent most of last night packing, taping, and loading. He could've done it faster if the magazines hadn't been so distracting, but who could pass up a chance to look at
Clit Cavalcade
. Even more enticing, from Sam's point of view, was
Mopar Mamas
, twelve generously endowed babes posed with their tits hanging over the greatest Mopar engines ever made. His favorite was the redhead on the slant six. Something about the way she was holding the distributor cap. After a while, the acres of unclothed images had lost their power, and he had been able to finish the packing job. Only one of the thirty-six boxes contained actual comic books, the ones they had borrowed from Natch, Crow's hippie friend.

“If you have to open a box for him, make sure you open the right one,” Joe had told him. The scheme seemed a bit chancy to Sam, but Joe had assured him they could pull it off with no problem.

“You just be yourself, Sam,” Crow had said. “Don't let them push you around. When Ben gets here, he's going to want to cut a deal quick. Just jerk him around for a while, get him good and nervous. He'll want to cut a deal before Dickie shows up—just don't let him start opening boxes, okay? Get him to give you the money, load him up, and get him the hell out of here. Better yet, just give him the keys to the truck. Tell him you'll drive his car back for him. And don't worry—I'll be watching. Anything goes wrong, we kill the deal, okay?”

“What happens when the other fellow shows up?”

“You'll just tell Dickie you sold the collection to Ben. They can work it out between themselves.”

Where the hell was Joe? Sam looked at his watch. Damn near ten o'clock. He didn't like this waiting.

That
morning, while sitting at the counter at Becky's Sunshine Cafe, enjoying the Steak and Eggs Breakfast Special, Jimbo Bobick decided not to wait for Joe Crow. There was no percentage in waiting for the customer to come to you. You smell the sale, you go after it. Without further thought, Jimbo left four dollars and thirty-five cents on the counter, got straight into his big Oldsmobile, and headed north out of town on 371. Ozzie's cabin on Crook Lake was only twenty minutes away, which was nothing considering the commission he stood to make if he could get Crow locked into the Whiting Lake property. He would just drop in and say Hi. It was the neighborly thing to do.

“Look,
we've got ten miles to go, just up to Brainerd. We'll buy a helmet as soon as we get there.”

The highway patrol officer, standing beside his maroon vehicle, gave no sign of having heard her. He was writing carefully in his citation book, occasionally lifting his powerful chin to look through his mirrored sunglasses at Debrowski, at her license, at the bike, or at Crow, who could see that he had decided to write the ticket, and that was that. Eighty-four miles per hour in a fifty-five zone, no helmet on passenger. Crow watched Ben's Fleetwood come into view. He bent over, as if tying his shoe, and turned as the Cadillac flashed by, keeping his face from view. Fifteen seconds later, he repeated the performance for Catfish and Tommy. If the cop noticed, he didn't comment.

Debrowski was shifting her weight from one boot to the other. Crow crossed his arms and leaned a hip on the bike. The more anxious she became, the slower the cop would write. Crow had seen it plenty of times before. He had done it himself. One of the unwritten laws of traffic control was that if you go to the trouble to stop some citizen for speeding, you have to keep him sitting on the shoulder long enough so that he would have arrived at his destination sooner by not speeding.

If they were lucky, if they didn't push it, if Debrowski could keep her feelings about authority figures under wraps, they would be back on the road in five minutes.

Sam would have to fly solo for a while. Crow forced himself to remain calm. He briefly considered telling the cop that he, too, was a cop. Or, rather, an ex-cop. That might help, but more likely it would backfire, especially if this one remembered his name from the papers. It was only two years ago that he'd been busted. Too many cops might have followed that story, and too many might remember.

Debrowski was a few yards away, kicking the ground, sending up sprays of dirt and gravel, puffing furiously on a Camel. The cigarette looked good. Crow reached for one of his own. Hand to pack, cigarette to mouth, lighter to cigarette—the sequence was hard-wired into his brain. Soon he would be back up to two packs a day. He started moving toward Debrowski, thinking to calm her down, when she slammed a fist on her leather-clad thigh and walked stiffly over to the cop.

Crow thought,
Uh-oh.

“Listen,” he heard her say. “Do you think you could hurry it up a bit? We're supposed to meet some people, and we're late already.”

The cop lifted his chin and turned his head slowly to look at her. Crow thought, That's good for another ten minutes, minimum.

Joey
Cadillac stared down at the scrambled landscape—rectangular fields of yellow and green and brown splattered with twisting rivers, creeks, and lakes. Lakes everywhere. At least a dozen lakes visible in any direction. Joey commented on this to the pilot, a handsome, happy kid named Karl.

“Land of ten thousand lakes,” Karl replied, shouting to be heard over the twin Pratt & Whitney engines. They were in an old Grumman Goose seaplane, practically an antique, but the only thing Joey could find on short notice that would land on water. For eight hundred bucks, Karl had guaranteed to get him to Crook Lake by noon.

Joey nodded. Ten thousand lakes in Minnesota: he'd heard that somewhere before. Chrissy had probably told him. He wondered how they had got the number to come out so even.

Joey had completed the drive up from Chicago by alternating hits from the bottle of Martell with cups of coffee, and with the aid of a Dexedrine spansule from his glove compartment stash. He had kept himself entertained on the drive through Wisconsin by mentally tearing apart and reassembling the conspirators in various creative and unusual ways. Sometimes he had the help of Freddy Wisnesky, and sometimes he made them do it to each other, but most often, and most satisfying, was when he did it himself. Revenge was the tastiest bite of all; Joey savored it in his mind.

He had arrived in the Twin Cities before ten o'clock that morning in a conscious and reasonably coherent state. At least, he was coherent enough to forget about trying to drive the final hundred and fifty miles up to Crook Lake. Instead, he had followed the signs directing him to Crystal Airport, and after flashing some cash around—Joey usually kept a few thousand in his pockets—he had found Karl.