Doing Max Vinyl
(An Annie Ogden Mystery)
By Frederick Lee Brooke
Copyright
© 2011 by Frederick Lee Brooke
Smashwords Edition
www.frederickleebrooke.com
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual organizations, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be copied, re-transmitted or reproduced in any manner without express written consent of the author.
For
Maria Luisa
And
in memoriam
David Foster Wallace
Contents
2. Lost GPS
4. Mirages
5. Hunting
6. Betrayal
8. Collection
9. Pickup
10. Trigger
11. Your mother
12. Ginger
13. Used phones
14. Dante
15. Ten dozen roses
16. Indiana run
17. Night visions
18. Ten miles out
19. Ancient creature
20. Doing Max Vinyl
21. New job
22. Briefs
23. Totaled
24. Thinkpad
25. Used
26. TRS Without I
27. Olson
28. Car Collection
29. Furey
30. Home Invasion
31. Bonfire
32. Witness
33. Dork
34. Broken Heart
35. Natural Causes
36. Tent
37. Ancient Rhythms
38. Forest Ranger
39. Offer
40. War
41. Server Room
42. C
43. Lawyers
44. Handcuff
46. Seven Years
47. Sisters
48. Abacus
49. Bounced
50. Prairie Fire
51. Sexy
52. Timothy
53. Wet Drop
54. Barge Fight
55. Car Heaven
56. Shoreview
On that Monday in early June, when it all started, Max Vinyl cashed in three million dollars and then let the girl of his dreams slip away, in that order, all in the space of thirty minutes. Though it was now just past ten in the morning, the humid North Suburban air was already uncomfortably warm. They had forecast a heat wave for this week, and there wasn't a cloud in the sky as he came back in from the parking lot, his loafers crunching on the gravel. He had gone out to watch her drive away, not believing it was happening, not believing Tris Berrymore could be taking off, not believing she had just said the things that still rang in his ears.
Not that he was some kind of dreamer. Dreamers didn’t get far in business. Still, looking back, he would have forfeited the whole three million if only Tris had stayed. Like most troubles it wasn’t that simple. You couldn't just trade off one for the other. Plus the trouble didn’t end with her leaving. Her leaving was just the start of it. But he only realized that later, with the water up to his chest and the lights in his eyes and some giant creature from the deep bearing down on him, just under the surface of the water . . .
The problems had started in the late morning. The Koreans had left. Now Manny Rodriguez, his general manager, sat across from him. Rodriguez had cornered him in reception and demanded a meeting in Max’s office. Christ, they should be out on the packing room floor uncorking champagne with the staff, but Rodriguez had something on his chest, something that couldn’t wait.
“We’re sitting in there dicking around with the Koreans. You know what she was doing?” Rodriguez’s eyes flashed. He was always irritated about something. He had red streaks across his cheeks, as if he had been clawing at himself.
Max Vinyl would normally be unmoved by these signs of emotional upset in one of his managers, but Rodriguez was talking about Tris Berrymore. He felt the juices churning in his stomach. “What?”
“She made a file on her PC. And you know what it shows? She’s comparing the number of containers going to the Koreans with the number going to recycling.”
“Shit.”
“You can say that again.”
“But why?”
“Fucking tree-hugger, Max. I tried to tell you a hundred times. You never should’ve made me hire that one. Well, I caught her red-handed. I took the matter into my own hands.”
A minute ago, striding into his office, he had thrown open the door, still giddy from his three-million-dollar payday. Now the lightheaded feeling was draining out of him like the last water going out of a tub. “Wait a minute, Manny, hold on. What do you mean you took it into your own hands?”
“I canned her. What else would you do? Next thing you know she’ll be on the phone to the Tribune.”
Max stood up. His chair rolled back and banged into the wall. He felt the heat rising in his neck. His breathing was audible. But he locked his gaze on the general manager's eyes and stuck out a finger for emphasis. “I got news for you. You don’t fire Tris. Now go straight back and talk to her.”
Rodriguez bounced to his feet. “She’ll ruin us, Max. I can see it now. That’s what the bitch came here for. Well, I’m not letting it happen. She’s packing up her stuff. I’ve got security standing over her.”
“I don’t believe this. First we land the Koreans. They come here with their helicopter, their limos, their armed bodyguards. They walk in here like they own the place. They do own it, now, at least a part of it. They’re forking over for twenty percent of this company, Manny. Do you understand that? Three million bucks. We took it to the next level. And you fire Tris.”
“It’s precisely because of the deal that we have to do it. Do you want to risk having the Koreans see some environmental story in the newspaper? You think they wouldn't find out about something like that? You’re totally underestimating this threat.”
“Since when did Tris become an environmentalist, anyway?”
“She joined the World Wildlife Fund at age twelve, Max. I did some checking.”
He was so angry he couldn't see straight. He sank back into his chair, whipsawed between the highs and the lows. The problem was that Rodriguez was probably right. If the wrong information got out, maybe into the hands of some environmentalist journalist, it could be painted in a negative light, which would reflect badly on the company. Newspapers loved exposés like that; it was practically all they ever printed. Once something was printed it was out there, and then you couldn't do a damn thing about it.
Just when he had landed his glorious three-million-dollar payday, practically in the same minute. How strange was that? What good was a jackpot if you didn’t have Tris Berrymore to celebrate with? The deal was signed. Song Young Park was on his way back to Korea to give the green light to transfer the money. Time to celebrate. And yet here stood Manny Rodriguez, messing with his mind.
“There must be another way. What in Christ can I do without a receptionist?”
"Don’t be a jackass.”
“I won’t be called a jackass, Manny. Not by a Mexican, not by anyone else.”
“Then don’t be so damned desperate. Think of the deal. She’s rough around the edges. Stop mixing business and pleasure. It’s too risky. Look at me, Max, I stick my neck out like this, you know I’m doing you a favor. By the way, I’m from Costa Rica.”
“You call this a favor?” He realized he was sputtering. He didn’t care if the man was from North Michigan Avenue. There came a time for asserting your damned authority. What would Song Young Park do in this situation? He would kick some ass, that's what he would do. Song had people running right and left everywhere he went. There was a man who could run a business. When they had finally first met, seven months ago, having increased their cooperation steadily over the last four years, Song had shown him a photo to demonstrate how nobody screwed with him.
The picture showed Song on a beach somewhere, shirtless, tracks of dirt-caked sweat running down his chest, his bare hands in a death grip around the neck of a wild pig. He held the pig up to the sky like a trophy, his biceps bulging while the pig’s bristly hairs brushed against his fingers, its body hanging limp, its white eyes blank in death. The sun was setting over palm trees in the background. One hour ago Song had stepped out of the chopper carrying nothing himself, people holding doors ahead of him, people watching his back behind him. He only had to make a slight movement of his finger and an aide would run up with a briefcase, a laptop, a phone. Song had his people in line. Sure as shit no one messed with his woman.
Max leaned on one elbow as the full impact hit him. Tris was packing her things while he sat here arguing with Rodriguez. In a few minutes she would be gone. When were they seeing each other -- tonight? No, tonight she was busy. It was tomorrow night. Was that off now, too?
His mind clouded. Caught red-handed, Tris was out on her ass. On the very day that the Koreans signed! Rodriguez sat in front of him, keeping him here, keeping him from talking to Tris before she left. Stalling him. Hell, Rodriguez was the one who should get the boot. But it would be foolish to make a snap decision on firing the general manager. The Koreans wouldn’t ask questions if a receptionist was canned. The general manager yes.
“I’m going to talk to her. I’ve got to see what in Christ is with this file.”
“Let it go, Max. We’ll find one that isn’t a goddamned tree-hugger.” Rodriguez stuck his chin out. His chin always jutted when he thought he deserved more respect. He wanted to get Tris out the door before Max had a chance to see her. Well, it wasn't going to happen like that.
“Move on that.”
Max sank back in his leather chair and waited. With this file business, you could forgive and forget. Turn the thing around. If they didn’t see each other at work, they could spend every night together, instead of every other night or every third night. Tris would be hard to replace. Christ, that was just it. She couldn’t be replaced.
How Ginger would laugh to see him like this, imagining everything worse than it probably was. Well, he wouldn’t give her the chance, would he? Ginger belonged to the past. Because the future was spelled T-r-i-s. The future had become so much clearer suddenly, with the signing. The way he had had to suck up to the Koreans during the ceremony – Song had even wanted to hold his hand – and what had that been that they were chanting, a prayer? All that Korean gibberish . . . chanting things in Korean that no one could understand . . . men in suits frigging holding hands in the conference room. Truly, the only way to forget those cheesy rituals was with a night of mind-blowing, high-octane carnal pleasure . . .
He sat up straighter in his chair, trying to focus on something lighter. Like that three-million-dollar bank transfer that was only three or four days away . . . what a man could do with that much wealth, Christ! Dinner at the Olympic Club any night of the week – although of course it wouldn’t be much fun alone. He could buy the cream-colored Bentley with the red leather interior in the framed photo hanging on his wall, something he’d been dreaming of. But then who could he go touring with? The brilliance of his entrepreneurial victory kept fading to the same unpleasant image in his mind – the image of himself sans Tris.
She had driven his cars. He adored nothing more than being chauffeured around in one of his own classic automobiles by Tris Berrymore. The 1963 silver e-type Jaguar. The 1967 yellow T-top Corvette. His white 1959 T-Bird with the portholes.
There was something so sexy about the way her strawberry blond hair curled around the cheap plastic stem of the telephone headset. The way she sat on the edge of her chair, shoulders back, smiling into the screen. Did this mean an end to those romps on his bedroom carpet late at night, in front of the cathedral windows with Lake Michigan in the background?
A knock on the door. In she came, white skirt hugging her hips, sandals cradling the feet that had sweetly massaged his neck. The turquoise peasant blouse highlighted her tiny waist. She practically disappeared in your arms when you hugged -- though she certainly didn't look to be in the mood for hugging now -- and he glanced at the neckline that dipped so interestingly and drew the eye so irresistibly to that point just in the center, where a tiny turquoise bow was sewn to the hem. On this hot, humid day she looked . . . well ventilated. Her eyes were an electric green, just like the color of the lake when there was a storm coming, and the sky would be filled with black clouds, but a shaft of sunlight would find a gap in the clouds and light up the water, almost so it looked backlit. That small, straight nose, those freckles sprinkled across the bridge of her nose . . . but now he couldn't help noticing how her chin pointed, her jaw set in a way he hadn’t seen before.
“Well, so tomorrow night still OK?”
Her eyes widened. “I got fired. Didn’t Manny tell you?”
He tried to make his face show pain. He took her pain and tried to make it his own, with his expression. Maybe a flash of manly desperation came from his eyes, but also sympathy. He waited for some acknowledgement, some softening, but nothing came. Something told him she wasn’t buying it.
He changed approaches, dismissed half a year’s employment with a wave of his hand. Speaking now as owner and president of TSR Inc., he said, “Sure, I got that. But about tomorrow night. What I’m asking. We said seven-thirty. Still on, aren’t we?” Seated across from beautiful women, his words sometimes glommed together. Amazing that it still happened with Tris after so long together.
“Max, I’m gone. It’s over. That means both my job and . . . well, whatever shit was going on between you and me.”
Her answer caught him by surprise. The finality of it. The decisiveness. And the nonchalance. It hadn't mattered to her. This he was not prepared for. In fact he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Yet there could be no misinterpreting her words.
I’m gone. It’s over.
The words echoed in his mind like cars crashing into each other. Those words simply did not belong in this discussion, in any discussion. The noise in his mind grew loud and drowned out everything else, the rattling of the air conditioner, the sound of Tris's breathing, the sound of a fan whirring somewhere deep inside his computer -- instead this crashing, roaring sound. Like his Mercedes Gullwing two weeks ago, that horrible sound of metal bending and breaking, only now many more cars, whole lines of cars smashing into opposing lines. A catastrophic image. Explosions . . . balls of fire . . . thunder and noise . . . but then it came again, steady and quiet, as if filtered through this noise.
I’m gone. It’s over.
His own voice came through the noise, as well. He heard himself saying that she couldn’t possibly be serious.
“Yes, Max.”
“But I don’t get it. Just like that?”
“It was going nowhere.”
“But it was. We were getting serious. I was thinking about . . . you know, I was sort of thinking of asking if you would want to . . . you know, stay together.”
For Chrissake, this wasn’t the moment to pop the question. He had once promised himself not to do that again without a lot of advance planning and thought, and here he had almost gone and done it now.
“No, Max.”
She wasn't budging. “Because of what happened? Hell, that doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it’ll be better like this.”
She laughed. “The answer is no.”
He searched her electric green eyes. That cold laugh. Christ, didn’t she have feelings? How could she sit there laughing? “You act like you’re happy about it. Like you couldn’t care less.”
“I just got screamed at within an inch of my sanity. I got accused of stuff I didn’t even do, all right? You know how that feels? I’m a little numb.”
“Yeah, what in Christ is with this . . . this file?”
She took a deep breath, then let it out. He noticed she had a paper in her hand, something she had idly picked up from his desktop. The paper was shaking in her hand. It looked pretty funny. In fact it would've been comical to see Tris so nervous if she hadn't been in the midst of driving a stake through his heart. “Well, things don’t really add up around here, do they?”
“What are you talking about?”
“All the old worthless gear. Some of it goes to Korea in containers.”
“All of it goes to Korea.”
“Bullshit. By my calculations no more than a third goes to Korea. Hardly any goes into recycling. I joined this company because you said you were recycling. What about the rest?”
“What calculations?” The idea made him feel hot and itchy. But he saw her trembling. She was nervous and scared. She wasn't sure of what she was talking about. But it was all too clear Rodriguez had been right. The whole thing made him furious. “What in Christ have you been calculating?”
“Too bad he deleted the file before I could show it to you.” The paper floated to the carpet and she stood up.
“You’d better be happy he deleted it. Whatever it was.”
There she went again, burning him with those eyes. Like somehow she was furious with him. When he thought back to all the evenings they had spent together, all the weekends, all the fine Sunday afternoon tours in his cars, there hadn’t been a single moment like this. Never a fight, scarcely even a disagreement. A little strange, thinking back, but there it was: they got along. Like they were made for each other.
Yet look at her now, green eyes like lasers that could burn through walls. If she had never been mad at him till this moment, how could he suddenly be such a monster? Until yesterday they had been in high gear together. In a car, you couldn’t shift straight from fourth gear into reverse. How could this even be happening?
Maybe if he bought her a ring . . . like a kind of engagement ring . . . or if he told her about his three million dollar payday . . . would that bring a change of heart? He had to tell her. He tried to think how he could work it into the conversation.
Remember that night at the Skinny Whip, all those Koreans?
Then again, this wasn’t the moment. The way she fixed him with those eyes, never letting go; Rodriguez must've slapped her around. Better just to wait and see, see if she could cool down and be her old self again. It certainly didn't look good. Rodriguez’s words came back: Goddamned tree-hugger.
“Then those other computers that come in, Max, like brand new ones,” Tris went on. “They disappear. They don’t get on the website. They’re not in inventory. I want to know what happens to those machines.”
“Christ, what is this garbage?”
“You’re not going to listen, are you?”
“I am listening.”
“No, Max, you don't listen. It's like it goes in one ear and out the other. You think I don’t know what happens when people don’t pay you? People who cause trouble?” She kept staring. When she looked at him like that he felt himself squirming, even though he sat rigid on the edge of his chair. “Everybody knows. It’s one reason I’m going. I’ve got my eye on you. Don’t try any shit on me, Max, I’m warning you.”
“You’ve lost me now.” She couldn’t possibly know what she was talking about. What in Christ had she gotten her nose into?
“Go to hell, Max.”
He made his face go innocent, puckered his lips, the little Cupid smile. It covered up a sinking, burning feeling of catastrophe. Had Tris just said what he thought she said? Was this the same girl who had made him so happy for the last six months? Who so athletically banged her pelvis against him eighty or ninety times only three nights ago, leaving him a sore but also a happy man? With her he became a legend between the sheets, a sex king, a stud. Tris made it happen. She brought that out in him. With Tris, sex could go on for hours. And then it stayed in your mind for days afterwards.
Was he truly losing this?
“What did you say?” It came out a whisper. His insides hurt so much at the thought of her voice saying: I’m gone, it’s over. The ache reached deep into his breast. His throat had gone tight. He could barely squeeze words out.
“You heard me. I’ve got my eye on you. Just don’t try anything.”
“Where does all this . . . poison come from? I was thinking how much I’m going to miss you. I still can’t believe this is happening.”
She laughed. “You’ll manage.” She jumped out of her chair like a track star coming out of the blocks. In her hurry to leave, one sandal caught on the carpet. Her foot was bare. In that moment when the sandal was off, and left behind, one step behind, he imagined the feeling of the threads of the carpet worming in luxuriously between her bare toes. He had nosed into those lovely spaces between her bare toes just recently himself, and he had tongued them quite thoroughly. She had laughed, he had laughed, they had been wet and silly and sexy together, they had wrestled and kissed and tossed around on the bed, and finally she had let him lick her into a state of pure, noisy ecstasy, right where she belonged. Where she still had been happy with him -- well, and happy wasn't even quite the word, was it?
She stopped now, aimed her foot into the left-behind sandal, arched her back, wriggled it back onto those delectable bare toes. The door clicked shut behind her.
He felt a huge, echoing loss, a hollowness inside him, a quickly expanding black hole of sadness. All those happy, carefree moments they had spent together . . . like how she would watch TV on the couch with a glass of wine, but just one glass. Like him, she hated ruining her evening with booze. Some girls got too loose once a bottle was open. Passed-out girls revolted him; it was as if you had a dead body on your couch. The situation got worse when they woke up.
Tris Berrymore was the opposite of that. Earthy and natural and sexy all at once, her lack of inhibition had opened his eyes. With her your fantasies became reality. On summer nights she would pad around the house in pyjama shorts and a button-down pyjama top that she didn’t bother to button. Some men might find her breasts a trifle on the small side; to his eye they were sublime. She hadn’t worked as a stripper for nothing. She went around barefoot. She ate no meat. When she slept she hardly made noise at all, like a hibernating animal.
The day had started off so damned terrific. A three-million-dollar payday didn’t land on your desk every day. In fact, he had never before experienced anything quite like it. But that huge rush had been cruelly replaced by the feeling of being adrift, out of control. Alone. Single. And the whole thing had happened so suddenly. Amazing to think a day that started off so beautifully could turn so incredibly rotten.
At that same moment on Monday morning, Ike Mullin sat behind the wheel of his 1984 Lincoln heading north at seventy miles an hour on I-94, the Edens Expressway. It wasn’t the two margaritas in his gut that were making him sweat; the problem was the A/C in the Lincoln was on the fritz. He realized now, with the first heat wave of the year, he’d never gotten around to it last summer. He kept one eye on traffic while fiddling with the electric window control, a little up, a little down, trying to find a balance between a refreshing breeze and getting blown right out of the car.
He blinkered his way into the right lane. Anything to get out of the chaos of the middle lanes. At least in the far right lane people only barged in from the left. A sudden double honk blared out of his blind spot.
What the . . .?
The big brown Lincoln rocked left and right as he swerved back into his lane, its suspension system trying to recover from his jerk of the wheel at high speed. For an instant he thought he had lost it. He had a vision of flying off the road and landing nose-down in the cattails by the side of the road. But the Lincoln righted itself, saved by forward momentum and a new set of radial tires.
“Damnation!”
A burgundy Corvette blew by on the right, high beams flashing. Tinted windows hid the bastard’s face. Sweat beaded up on Ike’s forehead. Too shaken by the near miss to think of any other choice words, he grunted, “Oughta run their ass off the road!”
“Drive much?” said Tranny, once he'd quit laughing. Tranny was Vietnamese by birth. They had met in jail.
“Idiot shouldn’t be passin' on the right.”
“Anything goes on the ‘spressway, man.”
“You woulda laid off that fourth margarita, you’d be driving,” Ike said. He’d stopped at two himself, pacing himself through the morning. Alcohol turned Tranny’s skin a frightening shade of red, even if it never seemed to make him drunk. Just one sip, and he looked like a bomb set to explode. Ike normally wouldn’t let him drive then, but not so much because he worried about accidents. He simply felt a duty to keep his partner out of the way of law enforcement. Which meant Ike wound up driving most of the time.
“You got the GPS, right?” Tranny asked now, changing the subject, patting his pockets. For a second Ike thought his partner might be playing one of his usual tricks. He glanced away from the traffic ahead. Tranny was checking his shirt pockets, then the pants, front and back.
“Please tell me you’re shittin’ me.”
“No, man. I ain’t got it. I checked under the seat and all. You think maybe you left it somewhere?”
“You saying I left it somewhere?”
“All I know is I ain’t got it.”
Ike kept calm. Eyes on the road.
“I thought you had it, man.”
“Don’t give me that pussy excuse. You’re in charge of the GPS. If you wouldn’t have had to show it to that waitress, you’d have kept it in your pocket where it belongs. Why’d you have to show to her, anyway?”
“That’s it,” Tranny shouted. “We left it in that scummy restaurant!”
“Not we, asshole,” Ike corrected.
If they had to go back to Max Vinyl minus the GPS, he definitely wasn’t standing for this we bullshit. Without further discussion he angled off the highway, up an exit ramp. A minute later they were speeding back in the other direction again, heading for Chicago.
Tranny groaned. “I never even got to show it to her. She was always runnin’ off. Place wasn’t even busy. You think she was avoiding me, man?”
“We’re going straight back and get it.”
“What if it ain’t there anymore?”
“It’ll be there.”
“Yeah, but I mean, what if it ain’t?”
Ike’s foot touched the accelerator, partly out of irritation, partly because some feeling inside told him Tranny might be right. There was no time to waste. The boss would go postal if they lost his GPS. There was no telling what he would do. Ike preferred not to think about it. Plus there was all that information Lance had put on the GPS a couple weeks ago.
“Tranny boy, lemme tell you something. In life there ain't no point in asking, ‘what if?’ It just gets everybody uptight about shit that might not even be worth worrying over. Half the time things turn out ok, and then you worried for no reason at all. Either it’s gonna be there or it ain’t, and we’re gonna find out real soon.”
The GPS was an expensive model that calculated positions even out in the middle of Lake Michigan, not just on roads like most GPSs. They used it for their trip out on the lake every other night. Otherwise how would you ever find the right spot?
The boss didn’t have to know about the work Lance had given them. He wasn't going and checking what they put on the GPS.
A half hour later they stood on the outdoor terrace of the Falling Domino restaurant. Ike scanned the faces of the early lunch crowd. He headed straight for the table where they had drunk their margaritas. The man at the table, seeing them coming, put his enchilada down and sat up straighter in his chair. Ike noted with respect the heavy muscle in the guy’s arms and chest.
“We had this table before. You find anything?”
The man held his eye for a long moment, as if waiting to see if Ike was done speaking. “Nada,” he said.
Ike led Tranny inside, toward the hostess stand. “The guy ain’t lying, ” he said. “In this joint they don’t seat you till the table's cleaned up and set. So he couldn’t have taken it. ” His eye was drawn elsewhere. Two hostesses, long, spindly legs like frigging flamingos, stood chatting at the entrance.
He slapped one hand down, hard, on the wooden hostess stand. The sound echoed as if the stand was hollow. The whole dining room went quiet. The two girls stared with their bambi eyes. “Listen up,” he said. “We left something on our table when we was here.”
The one hostess had big round brown eyes and long, thick eyelashes. Her blond eyebrows were so delicate they seemed to blend right into her skin. Her lip gloss glittered when she talked.
“Do you want to tell me what it was?” She had a high, squeaky voice.
“Yeah, a GPS,” Tranny said.
“’Bout yay big,” Ike said. He saw her eyes flick upward. She would be checking out his eyebrow. At her age she probably hadn’t seen too many men with a number 14 steel lag bolt perforating the skin of their eyebrow.
“We've got our lost and found right here.” The hostess picked up the lamp on the stand to illuminate the contents of the drawer. He stuck his hand in and rummaged among the phones, glasses cases, wallets, paperback books, slips of paper with phone numbers. But in all this mess no GPS. “Are you sure you left it here?” she asked in that squeaky voice. “Not someplace else?”
“Someplace else for sure,” Tranny said.
“He means we left it here for sure,” Ike said.
“That’s what I said,” Tranny said.
The hostess looked from Tranny to him, then she stared again for a long time at his pierced eyebrow. “Doesn’t that . . . kind of weigh you down?”
Ike started working the outer wing nut. It always caught a little on the lock washer, though he sprayed it weekly with WD-40. When you turned the nuts on their threads, the skin around his eyebrow stretched and twisted. To an innocent girl like this it looked as though if you weren’t careful, you might just peel off a chunk of your face.
She couldn’t take her eyes off it. “Gag me.”
“Marry me, I’d put my ring up here,” he said.
She took a step back. The other hostess had already retreated to the wall.
“You keep staring, you gonna get cross eyes,” Tranny said.
Ike scanned the dining room, his gaze following waitresses going through the kitchen door at the back. “Come on, man. Waitress bitch musta swiped it. Let's go find her.”
“Anything left behind would be here in our lost and found,” said the hostess. Ike pulled Tranny away. They weren't getting anywhere here. The hostess turned to some other people. “How many in your party?”
Waitresses stepped out of the way, giving him room. A good eyebrow-piercing got people’s attention, all right. Some people jingled change in their pocket. He had his bolt loaded with nuts and washers. When he walked in a certain jaunty way, they made a pleasing sound: chink-a-chink.
The heat of the kitchen slammed into your face like an invisible wall of heat. It had to be twenty degrees hotter in here. Waitresses picked up plates that waited under heat lamps. The food on the plates looked like it was held together with glue. Waitresses, busboys and cooks shouted at each other while dashing in different directions.
“You gonna know her when you see her?”
“Ain’t seen her yet,” Tranny said.
“Who’re you looking for?” A girl that looked like a skeleton in white shirt and black trousers stood off to one side, wiping trays with a rag. She had shiny black hair in a short haircut. Her thin arms, neck and bony face didn’t look normal. Probably one of those girls that starved themselves on purpose. He personally liked a little more meat on the bones.
“This waitress,” Ike said. “We left something on the table about an hour ago.”
“On the terrace?” asked the waitress. “What’d she look like?”
“Really hot, you know?” Tranny said.
Ike elbowed him. “Little taller than you, maybe. Sort of a ponytail, but not long, like. Tall and skinny. Real pretty smile.”
“Alison Paine,” the waitress said. “Breakfast shift today. She got off at eleven.”
“Can I be of assistance?” A round-faced black man carrying a tray heaped with dirty dishes joined them.
“Yeah. Where do we find Alison Paine?” Ike said. The busboy flashed a dirty look at the black-haired waitress. He was steamed about them knowing Alison Paine’s name. So they were on the right track. Ike spoke louder. “She took something that belongs to us.”
The busboy shifted his tray. “You must be the guys with the phone. She showed it to me when I bussed the table. Garmin, something like that.”
“Yeah, that’s us,” Ike said. He moved a step closer so that his chest was even with the tray balanced on the busboy’s fingers.
“Went straight into the lost and found. Watched her put it there myself. Less than an hour ago.”
The busboy couldn’t even look him in the eye. Bad liars put Ike in a rage. He had beat up a ton of liars in prison.
With his open hand he heaved upward suddenly at one edge of the tray. He put all his strength into it. The weight of it surprised him as everything went flying. Forks, spoons, steak knives, wine glasses, beer steins, food-caked plates and a giant iced-tea pitcher launched into the air in all directions. Some of those glasses were still half full. Two or three stacks of dirty plates had been piled on that tray. Those plates, now headed for the floor, would never make another trip through the dishwasher.
The busboy yelped like a kicked dog.
“What the hell you do that for?”
Glass and china started to hit the red quarry tile, shattering with an ear-splitting noise, one plate after another. It was enough to rupture your eardrums. He remembered once, back in prison, a machine gun spraying bullets in a steel-walled room. That had sounded a lot like this.
Then waitresses screaming, covering their eyes, tripping and falling down as they ran away . . . glass shards, splintering china, ice cubes and drops of iced tea ricocheting off the walls, stainless steel tables, and their clothes . . . and the busboy twisting and turning in an effort to save something, anything, but the load a total loss . . .
Ike uncoiled and drove his fist into the liar's solar plexus. The busboy sank to his knees, doubled over, gasping and wheezing for breath.
“Ain’t acceptable to lie to myself and Tranny, see?” he said.
People had to know, shit like that had consequences. Ike lined up a kick, setting his sights on the man’s balls. But the tray was all tangled up in the busboy’s legs. His kick would just get deflected by the tray. The angles played out in his head, and he decided to let it go.
Time slowed down. He had time to see something flying through the shimmering air coming straight his way. Something brown, something with steam. Boiling hot coffee. He saw the steam wafting off the flying coffee.
His eyes followed the twisting cloud of coffee back to the pot. The outstretched hand of the Puerto Rican cook that held the pot, the contorted expression on the cook’s face – he had time to see all these things, yet still not enough time to move his feet and get out of the way.
Boiling coffee splashed across his chest, neck and arms. It burned on his skin like hell itself. He heard a roaring and a bellowing and realized it was his own voice. He sank to his knees, feeling broken glass digging into his kneecaps, but alive only to the fiery pain in his chest and arms. The boiling coffee soaked his shirt. Now it was the shirt burning him, blistering his arms and his chest and his collarbone. He stripped off the scalding t-shirt. It hurt so much he knew layers of skin were peeling off with the shirt.
The cook had snuck around from behind somewhere. He crouched in front of them now, like some sort of street-fighter, coffeepot in his left hand, steam pouring off the dry glass, his right hand waving a ten-inch butcher knife.
“You gonna be sorry,” Ike shouted, standing up again now. His arms had gone strangely cold. He feinted left, all instinct now, shirtless, big white belly swinging with him. He saw Tranny off to his right, dodging and feinting as well.
With a sudden manic movement the cook smashed the coffeepot on the side of a metal table. Glass crunched underfoot. The cook now brandished a plastic coffeepot handle with jagged glass edges sticking out. That thing would fillet you. It looked more lethal than the butcher knife in his other hand.
“Take him on that side,” Ike yelled. But Tranny couldn’t sneak around behind the cook any better than he could.
“Fat fuckers outta my restaurant! Royal, call de cops!” The cook pointed at the wall phone with his coffeepot weapon, backing up another step. He had room to maneuver. The busboy crab-walked out of the fight zone. The cook brandished that knife like he wanted to use it. Little scraps of meat still clung to the blade, raw pork or chicken. With that glass-studded handle in one hand and the big knife in the other, the cook held both of them back singlehandedly. Macho bastard had no fear. He didn’t even break a sweat under that runty moustache.
The busboy had the phone at his ear.
“We got two men in the kitchen threatening the staff with a knife,” he said. He named the restaurant and gave the street address. This was Rush Street. It wouldn’t take long for the cops to show up.
Ike backed toward the door. “We don’t find our GPS, we’ll be back for your asses.”
“You ever come back, we gonna cut off your dicks an throw you sons a bitches inna freezer,” yelled the Puerto Rican.
Ike kicked an unbroken wine glass against the wall, where it exploded and added to the mess. Waitresses and busboys cowered against the far wall, covering their eyes with their hands. Looking at them, you'd think it was a bank robbery, with guns and shooting. Ike straight-armed the door and emerged in the coolness of the dining room.
“You ever hear anything that crazy?”
“How’s he gonna fit a grown man in a freezer?” Tranny asked.
“That’s what I want to know.”
“’Specially one the size a you.”
“Shut up, Tranny boy. You hadn’t left the GPS here, we wouldn’t have had this problem in the first place.”
“Wait a minute, I know,” Tranny said. They were passing through the bar area, headed for the hostess stand and the exit. All eyes were on Ike’s bare belly. “Chop him in pieces. Shove ‘em in there one at a time.”
“He wanted to cut us up with that knife a his, that’s sure.”
“Like to see him try.”
Ike caught the eye of the hostess on the way out.
Chink-a-chink.
She stared back. This babe wanted him. She didn’t mind a tiny beer belly. He flexed his biceps going by.
Max Vinyl wondered how his Uncle Gordon could possibly go on working.
The old man sank into the chair slowly. His yellowed white hair hung across his brow at an odd angle, as if he had chopped it himself, which he probably had. He clipped coupons and paid in pennies, counting them out one by one with maddening slowness, driving store clerks crazy. The lines around his eyes, and then around his mouth, formed a series of deep triangles. The lines deepened with any expression of his face, but most of the time he seemed to be grimacing in pain. His shoulders hung at a strange slope, beset by arthritis. His hands were spotted and his fingers didn’t straighten.
He wore a trench coat in this heat, and an old cotton sweater underneath. Max’s eye fixed on an unidentifiable stain on the collar of the sweater. Gordon’s circulation was weak. Even the lousy air conditioning here at TSR made him feel cold.
“Sure are getting bigger all the time, Max.”
“Not really. Hauling more stuff, but prices dropping. Too much damn competition. Four years ago I got 50 cents a pound. Now it's down to 30 cents. Driving the price down all the time. I’ve got to keep an eye on costs, otherwise I’m toast.”
“You’ll do all right.”
“Hell of a way to make a living. If I didn’t have you, I don’t know what I’d do.”
“You’re good to your old uncle. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.”
“How is Aunt Greta? Any news?”
Max handed across his desk first, as always, the unmarked manila envelope. It contained two thousand dollars in twenties. Two thousand every Monday. One hundred thousand a year. They had been doing it for three years, now. Uncle Gordon had no use for hundreds and fifties; they would just draw unwanted attention. His uncle had a look inside, then closed it up again.
“Personally, I think it’s hopeless. But she keeps coming back from wherever it is she goes to, you know. They wait on her hand and foot over there. Medicare doesn’t cover it all. Costs me an arm and a leg. That’s where this comes in.”
“I know.”
“When are you coming to see her? You could get lucky. For you she’d open her eyes. If she knew about your support, she’d be mighty grateful.”
“Christ, Gordon. If that’s what it takes to give her some quality of life, not to mention . . . you know, a shot at some kind of recovery. Hell, it’s what money’s for, isn’t it?”
They’d had the same conversation a hundred times. He knew the money was a gift from Heaven for Gordon. It meant Greta not having to live in some Medicaid home that smelled of urine, where even the buttons off your shirt got stolen by the shift workers, and where the doctors were glad to get the hell out as quick as possible. The place where Greta had lived these last years was full of people whose face would light up just at the sight of you, people who honestly cared for her, people who had gotten to know her before she finally sank into this sleep. Even before the three-million-dollar payday, long before, he had never held back with the money for her care.
But the passing thought of his windfall brought back in a rush the painful memory of Tris's voice: I’m gone. It’s over. The memory of her cold eyes jolted him like a convulsion.
“You okay, Max?” Uncle Gordon’s eyes were alert now. They were horribly red-rimmed and shiny. Max wished he could get his uncle to drink less, but on the other hand how could you get any man to change? Aunt Greta’s illness didn't make it any easier. “You look like you saw a demon,” his uncle said.
“We're on the outs.” Max couldn’t look him in the eye.
“Tris? Don’t tell me.”
He nodded. “Looks like it might be over.”
“What? Such a nice girl. Where is she, anyway? When I walked in, no one was there. Finally Manny came and let me in.”
“Manny caught her nosing around in something. Canned her without even asking me.”
“That bad? So now she’s mad at you?”
“I've never seen her so mad, tell you the truth.” He swallowed the rest of what he was going to say. It hurt to talk about it. Then again, it felt good to have someone listening. For a long while Tris had been his listener. Now he was spilling the beans to old Uncle Gordon. He heard himself groan.
“Listen, Max,” Gordon went on. “When a girl is mad, you got to back off. I’m just telling you. You probably know it better than me. Things like this don’t change from one generation to the next. Give her some time. Could be it was some kind of misunderstanding.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Give it some time, believe me. That girl loves you just as much as you love her. Something’s wrong here.”
“I thought so too, but the more I think about it . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. He was thinking back to that calamitous event of two weeks ago. Something he hadn’t attached any special significance to until just this moment.
They’d been heading south on the tollway, Tris at the wheel of his 1957 Mercedes 280 SL Gullwing coupe. The doors opened upward, like the wings of a seagull. Tris had become distracted by a spider as it dropped down in front of her face. His antique cars stayed parked in the barn for months at a time without being dusted. It was natural that a few bugs and spiders got in there. The silver Gullwing, current insured value more than three hundred thousand dollars, had been one of the highlights in his seventeen-car collection. Suddenly the spider, dropping down from the visor, had disappeared down her shirt.
This had happened just as they downshifted into the toll plaza. Reducing speed. On the final approach to the tollbooth, the spider had scuttled ticklishly right into her cleavage. Screaming, she had jerked the wheel and gone out of her lane. Before Max could react, she had plowed the front end of the Gullwing into a concrete barrier. They couldn’t have been going more than ten miles an hour, but that solid concrete had pushed back. The Gullwing front end had crumpled with a horrible accordioning of metal. Why hadn’t he reached over and grabbed the wheel? How could he have just sat and watched it happen?
Then, as if that weren’t disaster enough, impact from behind. A tailgaiting Ford pickup had mashed the rear end. The driver had apologized. Said he had taken his eyes off them to count the coins in his hand.
It had all happened as if in slow motion, yet so fast there had been no chance of avoiding it. He and Tris had walked away from the wreckage. The Gullwing had gone to the junk heap. All because of a spider.
She had made up for it with her kisses that night.
Could she have planned an accident like that?
The idea had never occurred to him. But after this morning, it suddenly seemed thinkable.
When he had described the accident in detail, Gordon shook his head. “Impossible, Max. No one could orchestrate something like that on the tollway, even if they were crazy enough to try.”
After all the things Tris had said, he wasn’t so sure.
Max next got out a thick gray envelope made from 100% recycled paper with the company logo on it. This envelope was filled with the forms that Gordon would file at the Greater Lake County Environmental Agency. The forms contained proof that computer gear had been broken up into its component pieces, sorted by material and class of hazard, and disposed of in ways that were environmentally acceptable.
It was what people expected. It was good for business. It was also completely phony, the papers prepared by Rodriguez every week at some point between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. The software generated reports on all the equipment that came in. He would then fill out the forms manually, using the numbers from incomings – 30 screens here, 50 PCs there. This way there was at least a halfway legitimate paper trail on what was being recycled. But the truth was that in more than seven years of doing business no one had ever come to inspect the premises or ask questions or follow the paper trail. No one had even called. They relied on self-regulation. Which meant all this was a waste of everybody’s time. And in any event there existed no laws regulating the disposal of computer waste in the State of Illinois. Just a set of vague recommendations from the EPA that were never enforced, and would carry no penalties even if they were.
The environmental certificate hung in the reception area, blown up to poster size. It certified under the seal of Lake County that TSR Inc. continually re-evaluated to make sure that they were using best practices in the disposal of computer waste.
“Question, Uncle Gordon. Would a change of ownership alter the way we work together?”
The old man’s eyes clouded over again. It wasn’t clear if he was thinking about some old memory, considering the question, or just reacting to some new pain in his shoulder. After a minute Gordon said, “Could do so. Between us there’s a certain trust. If I’ve got to sit down with some fellow I don’t even know, and meanwhile you’re long gone . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. He sat perfectly still, Max knew, because his neck was so stiff that even turning his head was painful.
“Don’t worry. That’s a long way off, if it ever comes. Thing is, I’ve managed to sell twenty percent of the company. Just signed the papers this morning. Means I’m holding on to eighty percent. Not leaving anytime soon.”
“Oh. Well, I guess it’s ok, then.”
Uncle Gordon looked relieved. His lips were bluish, as if they weren’t getting enough blood circulating to them.
Annie Ogden let her body sway with the light side-to-side rocking of the boat. Five miles out, with the sun already below the horizon, the Chicago skyline looked like something she'd seen in a postcard on the other side of the world. The Sears Tower off to the left and the John Hancock Building up north framed a random jumble of building-block skyscrapers. Triangles, rectangles, some higher, some squatter, each building pointed to the sky in its own signature way, the only sort of mountains this monumentally flat city had to offer.
The vaguely fishy smell of the water and the sound of the light swells lapping against the side of the boat lulled her into a state of welcome calm. At the end of a sweaty Monday, cool breezes on her face felt good.
“Earth to Annie,” her sister said.
Could it be that only three months ago she had still been strapping on body armor just to go outside? Or was she dreaming now? Were this watery view and this brimming lake just cruel mirages after her years in a desert country? Her mind played back the tape of her long trip home, first to Rhine-Main Air Base in Germany, from there to Atlanta Hartsfield, and finally back to O’Hare, the endless flights, the sleep loss, the bureaucracy. No, it was all so real. She was home.
“Right here. I’m here.”
“The hell you are,” Todd said. “Look, I know we didn’t catch a salmon. Hell, it isn’t even a fish. But I didn’t expect you to start crying over it.”
Todd was always going for laughs. Why he tried so hard she would never understand. True, the tears were flowing more often these days. They came with no warning, like a real storm in the desert. Happened to a lot of returning vets, she’d been told, crying and depression and panic attacks. She knew it was okay.
“They don’t put you in a padded cell for this. For a few minor leakages,” she said. Still, just knowing she was clinically okay didn’t make her feel any better. Who could say? They might have misdiagnosed her.
Her brain was running ahead of her, and Todd and Alison were looking at her funny. She decided to stop trying to explain things that couldn't be explained, and produced a meaningless little giggle, in deference to his efforts.
“Oh, I get it,” Todd said. “You’re crying because you’re, like, happy?” He looked out across the water toward the city. “Personally I find it pathetic. You’re trolling for salmon, right? And you think you’ve finally got one on the line, like you’ve hooked the last living sockeye salmon in the southern end of Lake Michigan, and what’ve you got? Somebody’s lousy printer cable covered with algae. Disgusting!”
“Do they ever catch any fish?” asked Alison.
“I hear they’ve started melting down the fish for their metal content,” Todd said.
“This view alone is worth the price.” Annie tried to make him feel better. He didn’t have to take responsibility for her mood. She hugged her shoulders, suddenly shivering in the evening lake breeze. Most passengers stood along the rail gazing at the skyline, a glass of wine in one hand, pointing out buildings. She led her sister and Todd inside, where only a few people sat. They drank coffee and looked out the window.
“So you’re really going to stay out in those woods?” Todd asked, obviously making conversation. Alison was content to study the skyline, maybe listening, maybe off in her own world. “Aren’t there a lot of kooks running around in there?”
“Like to see someone provoke me.”
Todd looked anxious. “Be serious. You and your jogging. Rapists go out to that forest just to pick off joggers. It’s like a sport for them.”
She lived in a narrow strip of forest of white oak, birch and sugar maple, through which a slow-moving section of the Des Plaines River ran, all this just two miles from O'Hare Airport. When she had come out for her run this morning she had gone straight down to the riverbank, wondering what all the splashing was about. Just off the opposite bank, maybe fifty feet away, in a little cove where a tree trunk lay half-submerged, a pair of mallard ducks batted the water with their wings, dodging in and out, half running, half flying, all for the amusement of the brown-feathered female floating at a safe distance a few feet away. Just then a jumbo jet thundered in over the treetops, flaps fully extended, on point for runway 28 and drowning out all other sounds. The plane was so low you could read markings like no step on the side of the engines. If the ducks could ignore it, she could too.
She considered telling her sister's husband about the ducks. But then they would probably look at her strangely again. In a quiet voice she said, “If that's the case, we should take it back from the rapists.”
“You’re home now, Annie. End of insurgency.”
“And we sure are happy you got home in one piece, kid.” There was something warm in Alison’s eyes. If Todd hadn’t sat there slouching between them, they might have hugged.
“Don’t you think there might be a few running around the city, too?” she asked. “As if that’s any safer.”
“At least in the city someone might hear the screaming.”
She fixed her gaze on the skyline again, unconvinced. What did he know about ambushes? Down in the alleys between Chicago’s skyscrapers, someone somewhere was probably getting mugged at this moment. Well, with his work for the newspaper he probably knew more about city crime than most people. But he didn’t know what he was talking about when it came to the forest preserve. She doubted he had ever even set foot there before three months ago.
More importantly, there were quite a few things he didn’t know about her.
She loved Alison and Todd, her husband, but small doses were best. They argued so much it was almost like they fed on arguments. As girls growing up they had fought their share. Sibling rivalry. Arguing and fighting and belittling each other – those were things all kids did. You didn't expect to see so much of it in married people.
She had visited with them every week or two since coming home, sometimes just with them, sometimes in restaurants, twice at her cabin in the woods. When Alison had invited her on the salmon fishing tour on Lake Michigan, it had sounded like the perfect alternative to sitting around in some air-conditioned dining room.
“I like the forest,” Annie said, answering his question with a sugar-coated version of the truth. “Guess I’ll stay for a while if nobody throws me out.”
“Or till the first airplane falls out of the sky and obliterates you. We’re waiting for another invitation, you know. Just so we can have the pleasure of declining.”