Hush Money (18 page)

“Where is it, Robin? Where's Nancy's letter?”

She started to wail, she started to moan, she started to hiccup all at once. She started to die right there and then just to show me she knew how, with the hair flying across her face like tumbleweed blowing down the highway.

“I'll tell you, Cage. Jesus God, I hid it. Only it's long gone. It's so lo-o-ong gone, Jesus God, I'll never go back there again, nobody ever will. Andy, my God, when're you comin' home Andy …”

I let her have a little more, and her legs pretzeled tight around my back, fighting for it with her thighs, and I fought the bubble back inside, the great big snow bubble oozing out my brain and sliding down the spine column, saying:

“Where's Nancy's letter, Robin? Let's have it!”

She screamed, she wailed, she bit, she tore, she belted my back with her fists. Oh she died all right, a thousand times or so in a second. And she told me. She told me, the lying bitch, she told me, and I believed her, believed her enough to let the bubble go south down the pike, and her legs went wide, wider than wide and rocking, and she opened up like a clam when the water starts to boil, and she came in a blast of blasts, farting all the way, and she shouted:

“Look out, Cage! Jesus God Almighty!”

I ducked, but not far enough. Another stronger blast belted me into the wall. The bed went over, the altar somersaulted, the whole room rocked and tilted. It was the Brethren, about a dozen of them or fifty, busting all at once, busting the door clean off its hinges, busting me, busting Robin, and then I was on my hands and knees fighting for my life in the dark, slipping and sliding like the whole earth had turned to mud, and I heard Robin screaming and laughing in the corner, that bad wild unearthly sound.

If they'd come in three or four they'd have had me, but as it was I left them fighting themselves. I tunneled through, and under. A foot kicked me in the head. Somebody had a hammer lock on my neck for a while. I let fly and felt the soft crunch of nards, heard the shriek, and the grip fell apart. A tearing sound behind me where somebody's sleeve had torn loose. It was my own. I came up and through them like a drowning man flailing for the light. I hit the corridor on one wheel, slipped, skidded and cornered. On my feet and running, while behind me all hell broke loose. It was the Zoo on Saturday night all right, and Bedlam when they unloosed the bats, and all the stoned of California screaming on an overdose.

The church was dark, empty. The light show had gone out, and the multicolored sky was just a crummy warehouse ceiling. The only light was the spot on the Fairest Lord. If it hadn't been for him and the lying bitch behind me, I could have gone right out the front door like any old night watchman on a coffee break.

Sorry ole buddy, I told him in my mind.

I didn't stop running. I hit him like a pulling guard leading the sweep, and his head flew off in one direction, his body skittered on the sand in the other. Papier-mâché Jesus. The altar top came loose in my hands, lock and all. I reached inside for the goodie and came up with the collection box and a stack of handbills. I reached again. Nothing. I stuck my head in and poked around.

It was empty.

Sister Robin had pulled another fast one. Even stoned and scared and shivering and wild and coming like a runaway train, Robin had pulled a fast one. Jesus Christ, Doris, what kind of monsters have they let loose on this earth?

I didn't have time to worry about it then. I didn't have time to worry about anything. The lights went on and the Avenging Angel stormed into the desecrated temple, leading his monks. They came out from every rock, pore and crevice, St. Francis' gang, except that these days the Avenging Angel wears glasses and he packs a gun instead of a sword.

They stopped a second when they saw me.

I threw the cash box at Brother Pablo, just for nothing.

The gun went off in my ear. The bullet went in that ear and out the other and splintered the colored glass behind me. Lucky thing. Not that my head was empty, but that it showed me the way.

I went out behind it. The gun splattered behind me and the colored glass smashed and showered just like it does in all your dreams and all your trips, only this time it was real.

17

I landed on my knees, fell forward, rolled and took off. I ran like Roger Bannister going for the four-minute mile, and when I'd run the four-minute mile I did another, and when I stopped long enough to feel myself hurting all over I ran again. It's easy enough now to say I was running for my life, but on the spot it was something a lot worse. It was the monster risen up behind me some twenty stories tall, and laughing that bad wild shrieking laugh. It was the whole town gone amok, freeways torn loose by the roots, buildings powdering like houses of clay, the pavement of the goddam streets going zizzle-zazzle under my feet. Call it the wedding of King Kong and Godzilla, with the Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms carrying the flowers, and when the laughing started it twisted my mind like a cruller to realize it wasn't the Beast laughing at all, or even Robin Fletcher, but the sirens of the law carousing through the night.

And longer still to understand who it was who'd called the law down. On the spot it was only Twink Twike Tweek Twuck, who'd gotten tired of waiting out at George Curie's joint and had blown the bugle, which meant every cop and deputy and California Highway Patrol and National Guard from here to Seattle, all of them hunting for something as inconspicuous as a white man running around spadesville in a one-armed monk's robe and nothing else, and bleeding like a stuck pig.

It was only the next day that I finally tumbled. Because if not Twink, then who?

The papers told me. The papers made a barbecue out of it with all the trimmings. Like: “We all know and deplore the depraved activities some of our children have become involved in, even to the point of travestying our most revered institutions, but what does it mean when older, respectable citizens start to join them?” Back on Page 3 were the names, chapter and verse, including some of the respectable citizens and a picture of a Paul Meier, the “ringleader,” who was none other than Brother Pablo, and all the others I knew about. All, that is, except one. The last time I'd seen her, or heard her, she'd been screaming her head off and stoned out of her crazy mind, but stoned or sober, I guess it made no difference to Robin Fletcher when the crunch was on. Maybe the brothers had doublecrossed her, maybe not, but she'd had enough cool to slip out and call down the law, and then …?

Well then, I guess you could say, Robin Fletcher had busted out.

And as for me?

I was beat, done in, run to ground. I mean, you figure it out. A stoned and one-armed monk in spadesville in the middle of the night, without so much as a dime to make a phone call. What was I supposed to do, start ringing doorbells?

I ended up in a drycleaning store in some godforsaken shopping center. I must have busted in the door. No alarm went off that I remember. I guess they can't afford them down there. At that, who'd have come even if an alarm went off, the law? I mean, it's not exactly Fashion Square down there. Spadesville, friend.

I hunkered down in some clothes in a bin under the racks, and that's where I crashed. Up until then the adrenalin must have neutralized the acid working my system, enough at least to keep me moving when I had to move, but now the acid, or whatever it was they'd sugared the wafers with, got even with a vengeance. My face was cut in a hundred places, and each one started to hurt like all the mortifications the monks ever invented. Every sound, every creak, got decibeled up to rats galloping across the roof, and horses galloping across the rats. I did the hot and cold bit, and to top it off my chest started itching like a son of a bitch, and I scratched it till the hairs caught fire and I tore the goddam sackcloth off, and then the bell rang and my teeth broke out of the starting gate, doing sixty by the time they hit the backstretch.

I also started seeing things. I remember there was a heap sitting out in the parking lot, the only one I could see from where I was. I was staring at the heap, and the more I stared, the more I was pretty sure the heap was staring back. Then it started toward me, crawling like a dismembered bug or a tank with one of its treads missing, but crawling, and it crawled right up to the drycleaner's window till its nose was pressed up against it, making a mist. I jammed myself down into the bin, my heart going off like the gong at the end of Dragnet, and the next time I looked the heap was back where it'd been and a gang of bloodshot moonriders were stripping it of everything that wasn't welded down, like hubcaps, tires, wheels, headlights and the roof rack up on top. Maybe I dreamt the part, and when they started carrying TV sets out of the emporium next door, and I didn't have to pray to whoever was listening that they didn't decide to help themselves to some clean clothes while they were at it. But when I saw the heap again it looked so godawful mutilated that it was the last thing I saw for a while.

How long?

You tell me. It was still dark when I finally climbed out of the bin and called her. Even that took some doing. I figured there had to be a phone somewhere, like next to the cash register, but I couldn't find the cash register. When I did, the holes in the dial got as big as the Hollywood Bowl, and when I dialed and she answered I got the giggles for no reason I remember, that kind of hysteria that doesn't have much to do with comedy. She all but hung up on me. Then when I'd explained and she wanted to know where I was, I spent a couple of days or so on my hands and knees till I found the drycleaner's order pad.

I'll leave her name out of it, also her phone number. I called her because she was the only person I could think of who wouldn't ask a million and one embarrassing questions. It was the old flame bit, very old. Since then she'd turned pro and was doing fine for herself, and a couple of times back during Cage's personal recession she'd thrown some business my way. Who she had to kick out of bed or what kind of a crimp I put in her schedule I've no idea, but a while later when the headlights swung into the shopping center, they were real, and they were hers, and I crawled out and into her back seat and that was the last thing I knew until we started picking bits of glass out of my face with a tweezers the next day.

I still hadn't come out of it all the way. I drank enough bouillon to keep the meat extract people in business till Lent, but I couldn't handle the orange juice. It was the waves again, only finally the crests got further and further apart and in the end the sea went flat like a bathtub, and it stayed flat. We watched the Society of the Fairest Lord Show on TV, including all the reruns. In the afternoon she went out and bought the papers, also some clothes for me, which she put on the bill. She was itchy for me to leave, I could see, but when I told her I couldn't go home because some friends of mine were using my apartment, she bought it without too much squawk, and she was making some phone calls when I fell asleep again.

I woke up a little after midnight.

I was brainstorming like Albert Einstein thinking up relativity. The windmills were spinning, all the windmills, and Robin Fletcher was telling me again how she'd hid the letter and how long gone it was, lo-o-o-o-ong gone, where she could never go again etcetera etcetera, not ever, while the title of a book I'd read once bumped into it like a car going against the traffic.

I ran it through my head a couple of more times and listened to it, the parts that weren't smudged out. Then I let the book title in where I could see it. And then … I had it! Where I'd find the letter, and Robin Fletcher too! Of course! Elementary, Dr. Watson!

Dumbass.

Before I could think it through the rest of the way, I tripped over my own congratulations. In other words I made a mistake—the more so because no sooner done that I compounded it—but the way it worked out, my last one.

I got long distance information on the phone. There were only two Fletchers in the book, and I hit mine the first try. It was Robin's old man who answered, and I probably woke him up because his voice had that suspicious who-the-hell's-calling-at-this-hour fuzz to it. But it didn't matter. Nosirreebob, Arthur Fletcher, it didn't matter. It was like one of those puzzles where you slide the little balls around under the glass, trying to slip them into the holes, and I had them all in but one, and after I got through talking to Arthur Fletcher, I was all set to take off right there and then.

Only I let my hostess talk me out of it.

I'd've sworn I'd sworn off sex for the duration, along with God, but what the hell, just for Auld Lang Syne …

I told her to put that on the bill too, along with the cash she lent me. Which she did, as it turned out. Which made it a little bit like love.

In the morning she drove me back downtown to Jesusland. Man's Best Friend was still there on the street, looking pissed off but none the worse for wear. Amazing, but not a thing was missing, not even my keys in the ashtray, and the only addition was a day-old parking ticket under the lefthand wiper.

18

Normally it's a three, three and a half hour drive. We made it in a little under two and a half, the Mustang and me, even allowing for a pileup coming over the pass where a truck had run into another truck and the CHPs were still scraping the pieces off the freeway. I hadn't been up that way in years. On the run north I usually take the coast road because it's prettier, and it's a hell of a long way to go just to buy a bushel of grapes. But it was still there, the San Joaquin, as flat as the palm of your hand and a lot richer, also hotter, the towns looking about what they'd always looked like and no sign of that weird morning fog they get up there.

The night before, I'd told Mr. Fletcher I was Robin's doctor. I told him she'd disappeared and that I was worried about her condition and that under no circumstances was he to let her leave till I got there. I told him I was on my way.