The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (7 page)

“Don’t know,” said Wooly.
“I couldn’t see.”

“Same driver? Ski
mask?”

“I was too busy ducking
for my life. I couldn’t
see
.”

“So you have nothing new
to add? Even less than last time? You see my
frustration.”

“Your
frustration? I’m getting shot at in front of my own domicile.
I’m soiling my butt on my own front fucking lawn. How much of this
fucking
guff
do I
have to put up with?”

“Wooly,” said Genevieve,
refilling Alex’s glass from her pitcher, “do you have any idea how
loud you’re screaming?”

“Fine,” he said. “Fine. No
more outta me. Pattern of patience, right here. I won’t say another
fucking thing.”

“Have you looked for the
car?” said Genevieve. “The Fusion?”

“Twenty-four hours,” said
Alex, “we’ve had our eyes out for it. I hope you understand, this
isn’t necessarily a big town, but there are plenty of places to
hide.”

“So you have no idea who
owns it?”

“To be honest, we don’t
have much to go on.”

“Cause you’re
fucking
useless
!”
said Wooly. “You and those two dancing dingleberries out there, you
couldn’t find the car if it ran you the fuck over!”

While Wooly’s lament went
on, I turned to Nickie. “By the way, I appreciate the take-down
before.”

“Did I hurt
you?”

“Considering you saved my
life, I’m willing to let it go.” I clinked her glass. “Thank
you.”

“Not a problem. I guess
you’re worth having around.”

“Compliment?”

“Possibly.”

Now Wooly was working up a
new line of thought. “I know what it is. I
know
. It goes back years ago,
doesn’t it? What I told you about the Pope. You’ve never taken me
seriously since.”

Alex went into his deepest
squint of the day. “What can I tell you, Wooly. There’s no statute
of limitations on insanity.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

CHAPTER 3

BRAIN SPLATTER

>>FRIDAY JUNE 15 (6
days to go)

>>SATURDAY JUNE 16 (5
days to go)

FRIDAY JUNE 15, 4:45
p.m.

MONEY IN THE
BANK

Wooly kept downplaying my
interest in Monte Slater, but he hadn’t managed to squelch it. Not
with the lawsuit, with Georgiana Copely’s visit, hanging in the
air. Georgiana goes to the Trident office, an hour later somebody’s
slinging bullets at Wooly’s big head? I thought talking to Monte
was worth a shot.

And my curiosity only
trended upward when I got to the fifth floor of the Hidden Lake
Executive Center. I saw two guys walking out of Trident
Manufacturing, and I saw them quickly slam the door shut behind
them when they saw me approach.

I said I was looking for
Monte Slater, who turned out to be the wreck on my right. A doughy,
roundish, disconnected man, flabby and winded. He looked like a
defeated dumpling.

The other guy was Gary
Bogash, one of the Trident partners—a Chamber of Commerce-type
huckster with bronzed cheeks and spiked blond hair, wearing a suit
of tiny yet exquisitely loud black and white checks. Something
about him reminded me of photos in those creepy old nudist
magazines, where the genitals were always airbrushed into smooth,
sexless flesh.

What did I want with
Monte?

I was doing a story on
Wooly Cornell.

They both stiffened right
up.

“Crack pipe,” said Monte,
“here I come.”

“We’re in litigation with
Wooly Cornell,” said Bogash. “We can’t talk about the swiney
bastard.”

“It’s off the
record.”

“Doesn’t
matter.”

“Wait,” said Monte, “what
the fuck. Off the record? I’ll tell you something about Wooly. He
doesn’t understand. HE DOES NOT
UNDERSTAND
.” He slapped his palm
with the back of his other hand as he said this. Slapped it hard.
“Him, everybody else—
nobody
understands!”

“Understands
what?”

“The
pressure
. They can’t
pressure
me like this,
the sons of bitches. They shouldn’t be pressuring
anything
on
me.”

Monte was rattled, coming
part—torn up something bad.

“Getting what you want?”
said Bogash.

“I’m only asking for one
reason,” I said. “Looks like somebody’s trying to shoot
him.”

“Are you serious?” said
Monte.

“I am.”

“Then why’re you talking
to me?”

“Wooly’s got lots of
enemies,” said Bogash. “He’s going for like the world’s enemy
record. Money in the bank, it’s one of them.”

“I had nothing to do with
it,” said Monte. “
Nothing…at…all.”

That took three slaps on
his palm. What did Wooly say about him? He takes his anger out on
himself.

“What about Georgiana
Copely?” I said. “What was she doing here?”

Bogash looked at Monte,
lot of curiosity in his face.

“Look,” said Monte, “there
are
always
obligations. That’s what we’re talking about. There
are
always
obligations that have to get paid.”

I had no idea what he was
talking about.

“Anything I can do?” I
said.

“What can you do?” said
Monte. “What can
anybody
do in a situation like this?”

“What
situation?”

Bogash grabbed Monte’s arm
and pulled him past me. “We’re done.” He pressed for an
elevator.

“I’m in no shape to talk
today,” Monte admitted. “Try me tomorrow.”

“Saturday? You’ll be
here?”

“Maybe we can talk
then.”

Bogash jammed on the
elevator button.

“All I got to say,” said
Monte, “I didn’t come all the way over here just to get all the way
over there. I didn’t.
I…just…didn’t.”

Slap, slap,
slap.

Ding. They stepped inside
the elevator.

“You know Wooly’s
problem?” said Bogash. “LSD is not a good breakfast.”

And down they
went.

>>>>>>

FRIDAY JUNE 15, 7:00
p.m.

PLUM CHERRY

Genevieve invited me to
stay for dinner. Her chicken tetrazzini was fantastic. The mood
around the table, however, wasn’t quite as satisfying. Wooly was
pissed to high hell by the day’s shooting, by Alex Tarkashian’s
rude words. Genevieve, Nickie and I listened while he ranted about
the sheer amount of nutjobbery he’d been subjected to. And when
Genevieve pointed out that, even though someone had tried to kill
him, it didn’t take, he flew off the roof. It would’ve been nice,
he said, if she’d shed at least one tear after the ordeal. She said
she
had
shed a
tear—several of them, in fact. He said he hadn’t noticed a one.
Then you weren’t looking, she said, because they were
big
,
big
tears. Didn’t matter, he said,
his days were numbered. Time was only moving in one
direction.

And speaking of time, he
thought I was wasting mine on Monte Slater. All I was doing was
jig-jagging around, in his humble opinion. The whole question of
Monte, as he put it, was as interesting as porn after you’ve shot
your wad.

More cheese
sauce?

No, the true bane of his
existence, he said, was Georgiana Copely.
She’s like a horrible human being—I think I might’ve
mentioned this.

Monte, on the other hand,
his only sin was being deadly broke. And having no regard for
testing. Speaking of which, he was going to take me on a tour of
Material Witness tomorrow.
It’ll be fun.
I’m fun to be with.

But not tonight. He
couldn’t maintain his manic flow. Conversation ebbed, trickled to a
chit-chat stream and lapped into silence. Toward the end of the
meal, all that was left was the clinking of knives and forks on the
plates.

Wooly said he was tired,
drained by the day’s travails. He was even going to skip dessert, a
startling announcement in itself. He was going to turn in early—he
really needed to pack some zzzs away.

>>>>>>

Nickie and I helped
Genevieve clean up. She said she knew her husband’s sanity could
wear dangerously thin at times—just the way he is. The first time
someone shot at him, she said, he came home and fixated on eggs.
Decided they had too many eggs in the house. He took them all out,
boiled them up and made a gigantic bowl of egg salad. Then he
forced everyone who walked in the door to eat egg salad sandwiches.
That included Genevieve, people from the factory who came to see if
he was all right, Alex Tarkashian when he came to interview him
again. Of course that wasn’t enough so he took the bowl to work and
insisted all his employees have an egg salad sandwich.

“I think every person is
like a drug,” said Genevieve. “We all come with side effects. You
always have to ask yourself, if I’m going to be with this person,
if I’m going to take this drug, can I handle the side
effects?”

>>>>>>

When Genevieve went to
bed, Nickie and I stayed at the kitchen table. We did a lot of
talking—how to survive Wooly World, how to get by working in
agencies, how you’re always asking can I find a place here for
myself? We talked about cases we’d worked, people we might’ve
known.

Something seemed to happen
to her face as the night went on. It seemed to slowly unfold to me,
like a flower coming to bloom. I paid more and more attention to
the dark honey color of her skin, her chocolate eyes, her white
teeth. Even the scars came to seem natural, as if any woman
wouldn’t
want
them there.

Of course, I tend to think
highly of any woman who saves my life.

At one point she was in
the mood for something sweet. She missed having dessert. A jar of
homemade plum cherry jam was sitting on a shelf in the
refrigerator. She brought it to the table with a spoon, began
eating it out of the jar. It’s delicious, she said. Try
some.

I took a big heaping
spoonful and managed to get half of it in my mouth. The other half
fell plop on the table.

“Such a mess you’re
making,” she said.

“I’ll get a
sponge.”

“Hold on.”

She scooped the jam up
with her fingers and smeared it on my face. On my right cheek, the
same place her scars were. I just sat there, totally what-the-hell
surprised. She went hysterical with laughter.

Now what? I wiped the plum
cherry off me and drew a line with it around her lips. She didn’t
resist. Then I leaned in my chair, looked into her eyes and licked
the jam off her mouth.

She took a fresh fingerful
from the jar and rubbed it on my throat. I lifted her out of her
chair and onto my lap, felt her tongue flicking along my neck and
sliding up to my lips. I touched her tongue with mine, pushed it
deep back in her mouth. I could taste her, smell her.

She rolled her T-shirt up.
I undid her bra, circled her breasts with jam and licked it off.
She closed her eyes. I rubbed another circle of jam across her
stomach. She took my hand and brought it lower, showing me where
she wanted more.

>>>>>>

I woke up in silver heaven.
The whole bedroom was filled with lustrous argent light. The blinds
were still open. Moonlight was streaming into the room where she
stayed in the house.

She was moving next to me.
Me waking up was nudging her out of sleep. She opened her eyes and
smiled. I touched her face, stroked her cheek. The moonlight threw
small shadows off her scars, off the blade traces in her
flesh.

“Can I ask a question?” I
said.

“I guess.”

“What happened to your
cheek?”

She pulled away from me,
pressed to the edge of the bed.

“Don’t ask,” she said. She
wasn’t angry. She wasn’t hurt. She was just final. “Don’t ever
ask.”

>>>>>>

SATURDAY JUNE 16, 9:30
A.M.

EATING LIGHT

Wooly didn’t seem to mind
finding me with Nickie in his house. “You two seem to be getting
along. Good for you. The most action we have in bed is fighting
over the covers.” Genevieve also seemed pleased, though she was
more concerned with the herbs she had growing out back. They were
swarming with caterpillars this morning and she didn’t know
why.