Watson signaled and hopped a lane. “Still there,” he said.
“Real stealth bombers, these guys,” she said. “They need a siren and a couple wide-load warning signs.”
“They’re closer,” said Watson.
“Libby? Hey there. Myrna Schweich. Can’t chat ’cause I got a small emergency here. Can ya run one for me? Yep. Missouri 5YW-77F. Metallic gray 1992 Taurus. Right. Johnny Laws? No? Registered to who?”
Watson crossed to the far right lane, dropped to fifty-five, and glanced in the sideview. The Taurus followed him to the right-hand lane and didn’t pass.
“WHAT!” yelled Myrna. “Wake me up and say it again. No way. That’s positive? Thanks, Libby. Gotta go.”
Another beep and click when she turned off the phone.
“Cops?” asked Watson, doing an admirable job of keeping his voice from shaking.
“Beat me naked with a bat,” said Myrna. “Those plates … That car is registered to James and Mary Whitlow, 4279 Fairmont, Dogtown, South St. Louis. New registration. Not more than three days old.”
“Not possible,” said Watson, a glimpse in the mirror. Eerie visual disturbances, his brain metabolism suddenly accelerating, burning some new fuel mix of fight-or-flight secretions. The windshield was becoming a huge, wraparound, high-resolution video monitor, the rearview mirror a mini-live-action video inset. Level 5 in a 3-D multimedia experience called Lawyer Warriors. The clues coming onto the screen and over the audio interrupts were impossibly contrived and gamelike. And behind him, his virtual guide, a dwarf with red hair, some yappy know-it-all on the order of Microsoft’s Bob, was telling him how to destroy their Level 5 enemies, so they could advance to Level 6.
“Can’t be Whitlow’s car,” he said, hoping sheer force of will might warp reality back into a narrative that made some sense. Then he recalled his interview with Whitlow and Myrna’s recitation of Dirt’s report: Lucy, the neighborhood watcher and mistress of towing—hadn’t she confirmed that Whitlow’s car was a Ford Taurus? And the tow lot lady?
“Title and a photo ID … and you will have to register it, pay any back taxes and licensing fees. Then, it’s yours.”
“Does your dispatcher ever make mistakes?” asked Watson.
“Not so far,” said Myrna. “You heard me ask her twice. And it ain’t reported stolen either.”
“Whitlow’s car is following us,” said Watson. He dropped all pretense and stared into the rearview mirror at two men in suits and shades, following him in his client’s car. Maybe they had stolen it. His delight at escaping arrest was so intoxicating, he almost assumed his Lawyer Warrior avatar stance, ready to defend his client’s property. What if he turned the car around, went back downtown, and filed an action for recaption and repossession? That would show them!
“Looks like somebody got the car out of the impound lot,” said Myrna, whipping out her compact for another look. “Musta been Mary Whitlow. But neither of them look like they’d take being called Mary too well.”
Her comment inspired two or three seconds of tense, prestorm silence followed by a burst of heat lightning in both their brains.
“Order of the Eagles!” they both cried.
“Shit,” she said. “Militia goons. Gotta be, right? The cops wouldn’t drive a suspect’s car around and fuck up evidence.”
“Gee,” said Watson. “Do you suppose whoever it is has opened the trunk?”
Another beep and click from her cellular phone.
“Where do I go?” asked Watson. “We drove past Big Bend and we’re coming up on Hanley.”
“Get off anywhere you want. I’m calling the office. I’ll tell you where to go in a … Tilly? What’s happening? No, hold the messages. Anybody been there to see me? Two guys in suits and sunglasses? You told them I was in court? No, Tilly. I wish it was the FBI. Be there in a sec.”
“Where to?” he asked, taking the Hanley exit, and checking the sideview as the Taurus followed them.
“They know where we live,” she said. “They’ve already been there.”
“And?” he asked.
“And what?” she said crossly, eyeballing her compact mirror again while pretending to tease an eyelash. “Go back to the office and we’ll talk to them. That’s what.”
Watson cruised down Hanley trying to think of a polite way to ask if he could just drop her off. Instead he drove to the parking lot behind the building, trying to convince himself that gallantry and chivalry were useless vestiges, especially out of place here, where Myrna represented the gender in charge. He parked his Honda in the usual spot. The Taurus slid into a metered space on the street and waited.
“Don’t give them the hairy eyeball search,” said Myrna, gathering up her clothes and purse and walking toward the back door of their building. “Just get inside.”
Watson locked the Honda with his remote and lingered momentarily, thinking that if his car were a computer file or a desktop object, he could set an extended attribute or an archive bit, and then he would be able to tell if anyone tampered with it in his absence. Or if the parking lot were the desktop of an operating system, he could just lock up the whole thing with a screensaver, so that no one could get into it without typing in the password. He was suddenly alarmed at the uselessness of his own thoughts, staring blankly at a car, wishing it was not a real car but an object on the colorful, orderly, well-maintained desktop of his operating system.… Clutch thinking. A real-world crisis manager.
“Joe,”
said Myrna sharply, the look on her face expressing concern for his mental health.
“You don’t think they’ll, uh, do anything to the car, do you?”
“Not unless I hire them to do the job,” she muttered. “Get inside.”
The door into the building faced west. As they approached it, he kept waiting for a bullet to enter the back of his skull. Probably, he would not even feel it—a flash of light inside his brain—and plush curtains of blood would fall slowly over his eyesight, his matinee video screens would go blank for good.
When he opened the glass door and walked inside, the afternoon sun cast a shadow of his outstretched arm holding the door for Myrna, of his suited torso; the clean lines of his silhouette fell spread-eagle on the floor of the entryway like the outline of a fallen victim at a crime scene.
“Some serious motherfucking professionals did this,”
the homicide detective would say.
“Probably Order of the Eagles, like their client. Birds of a feather. These two lawyer fucks probably never knew what happened. When those hollowpoint bullets hit the brain stem, they open your head like a fucking cantaloupe.”
A split-second ejection to the afterlife. No time to make a confession or think about the meaning of life. It just stops, and then coarse people stand around talking about your remains, how you got what you deserved because you took too many risks, served the wrong clients, picked the wrong side, ate the wrong foods, smoked, and drank too much. Death—the ultimate defeat in the evolutionary fitness contest.
Myrna jangled her keys and popped the locks on her office door, tossed her clothes and purse on a chair, then walked around her desk and pulled open the big lower drawer. She plucked out a black shoulder holster, so delicate it looked like a one-cup leather bra. She slipped into it and yanked open the top drawer, pulled out a Smith & Wesson .357, snapped a clip into it, and popped off the safety.
Watson watched, unsure whether the resolute calm she displayed in arming herself inspired confidence or terror. It appeared that there was at least some chance that real bullets could soon be discharged with the attendant ambient audio of actual explosions.
“Jacket,” she said, pointing at the wall behind the door, where a black blazer hung on her coatrack. He threw it to her. It matched her baggy black pants and covered the weapon. She faced him and patted under her arm.
“Ready?” she asked him. He nodded. She put her arms down, comically
splayed and wiggled her itchy fingers, then drew the weapon, her right hand instantly retrieving it from under her jacket. She crouched into a standard two-handed shooting stance, the gun pointed at the peephole of the door.
“The clip holds eighteen Equal Rights Amendments,” she said, tucking the weapon back into her holster.
Her phone emitted a single trill.
“Hi, Tilly. Two gentlemen? To see Joe? Do they have an appointment?” She held the phone away and smoothed her jacket over the bump of the holstered weapon. “Tell them we are preparing for a trial. They should make an appointment and leave their names.”
Myrna paused, fished out a cigarette, and lit it with the skull lighter.
She exhaled. “An emergency? Tell them my whole life is one big emergency, and five minutes is all they get. Send them to my place.”
She hung up, tugged down her sleeves, and patted the jacket again. She stood behind her desk, lifted a piece of paper, and pretended to be reading it.
Two knocks.
“Yeah,” she said. “Come hither.”
The door opened. Watson recognized the top halves of them from his rearview mirror. Two large men, still in shades, leaned in.
“Joseph Watson?” said the first one, aiming black lenses in his direction.
“Yeah,” said Joe. “Why?” He tried to sound tough and annoyed, a hard-bitten criminal lawyer who would never have worked at Stern, Pale, where visitors in suits and ties were greeted with “How can we help you?”
Would they reach for their weapons now? His only real-world referents for the physical specimens standing in the doorway came from Scorsese movies and video games—Greek SlaughterHouse and CarnageMaster. Multimedia violence and movie bloodshed were the closest he had ever come to physical danger. Every other threat he’d encountered in real, adult life had to do with purely psychological or intellectual threats, marital turbulence, academic performance, career-path obstructions.
The man’s nostrils flared slightly. Watson instinctively moved his hand in search of a trackball or a joystick, something to click on so he could fire his turbocharged lasers and blow big, jagged holes in their virtual flesh.
“Eat flaming death, Droids! I am CarnageMaster!”
Galoot number one walked in, folded his hands in front of him, and waited for his partner to shut the door and come alongside with a black leather briefcase in tow. Even close up, they looked alike—not quite twins, but probably brothers in more than crime. It was hard to tell with no eyes to look at. Stocky two-hundred-pounders, both straining at the seams to move up a size into new dark-blue and black suits. Above the shades, their hair was slicked straight back with scented styling gel, and below them, mugs with double chins. Tastefully subdued ties were done up just so on cotton oxfords with clean and neatly buttoned cuffs and collars. They had the look of former college athletes who, after fifteen years of selling insurance and buying a thousand or so twelve-packs, had gone into law enforcement or found a suitable militia and were now ready to remind the world about patriotism and decency and fighting for what is right.
Their sunglasses were busy with reflections of the office, including occasional tiny postage-stamp images of Watson and Myrna, swelling and shrinking in the convexity of the black lenses, swirling like those thumbnail animated Java applets you see in Web sites.
“We need to talk about James Whitlow’s case,” said the same bruiser, the one on Watson’s right, who so far was the talking half and seemed to be carrying less fat and more muscle than the retiring mesomorph on the left, who, upon closer inspection, was also distinguished by a complexion that looked like a flesh-tone satellite photo of a lunar landscape. Introductions seemed unlikely, so Watson provisionally named the lead, talking male Alpha and the clone beast in tow Beta.
“If you gentlemen made an appointment, it’s not on our calendar,” said Myrna. “You are …?”
“Ma’am, we work for some friends of Jimmy Whitlow,” said Alpha, sounding almost polite, turning his head in Joe’s direction. “The friends he told you might be in a position to help pay his lawyer fees.”
His accent was somewhere between Midwestern and Southern, maybe Cape Girardeau, Rush Limbaugh’s hometown, or at most, the boot heel, damn near Arkansas.
Joe opened his mouth even though he had no intention of saying anything. Myrna’s face morphed into a great big “Say what?”
“Don’t talk to these guys, Joe,” said Myrna. “Friends of Jimmy Whitlow? Lawyer fees? You guys come in here asking about alleged clients? To me that means you are either from outer space or else you are cops.”
Beta flinched and spoke for the first time. “We ain’t cops,” he said
suddenly, as if this were too much slander for any man to bear. He twitched again, seeming to show conscientious restraint in not reaching for his weapon; then his vocal cords rumbled somewhere deep in his thick neck. Alpha turned his head slowly around, an apparent reminder to his associate about who was going to do the talking.
Myrna’s back talk made Watson nervous. He was wondering if she shouldn’t be polite and let old Beta vent a little, if it was a choice between that and him discharging bullets. The man’s acne may have occasioned an unhappy adolescence and chronic low self-esteem. Watson wanted to help Beta feel better about himself, manage his anger, talk about his feelings.
“You guys got wires on?” asked Myrna. “Christ, you might as well pull out those gold badges and use ’em for tiepins. Undercover from Hell to breakfast, Joe.”
“Lady,” said Alpha, “we ain’t cops. We work for some friends of Jimmy Whitlow. We can’t get to him anymore, because the feds took him to Minnesota.”
“Cops, robbers, meter readers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, good fathers, war veterans,” said Myrna. “I got no idea. I take it you ain’t showing IDs. You want to tell us something? We’ll listen and see does it make sense, but we don’t know anything about any friends of Jimmy Whitlow. And we don’t know sheep shit from Tootsie Rolls about anybody paying anybody’s lawyer fees.”
Alpha’s shoes creaked when he shifted his weight and rolled his shoulders like a gorilla, except that he was too swollen around the middle to be a primate; he and his brother were more like dark polar bears, but their thickness and ursine stolidity seemed to be animated by intelligences a rung above gorilloid.