The man didn't even seem to have paid any attention. He rolled on his damaged arm, bringing his face closer. Under the bruises and the dark hair matted with blood, he had sharp-angled features, eyes deep set; maybe in his late twenties. It was hard to tell, with him being so fucked up.
"What's your name?"
He felt a flush of embarrassment creep up his throat. "Everybody around here calls me Doot." There was no point in trying to hide it. The guy would find out sooner or later. He pointed with his thumb toward the lobby's door. " 'Cause of that little bike I got. You know-doot, doot, doot?" Now he really felt like a jerk.
An impatient nod from the man, his eyes wincing in sudden pain. "Listen, Doot." He locked his unbalanced gaze onto him, speaking slowly. "I need you to do me a big favor. I've got to get to a telephone. Right away. And without anybody seeing me. Think you can handle that?"
This was too weird. He'd never even
seen
this guy until, what, a quarter of an hour ago? If that. And Christ knew what kind of deep shit he was in. To get worked over like that, and tossed out on the road in the middle of nowhere, the way Doot's father had described it to him that meant the guy had been keeping some unpleasant company. Heavy-type people. So this guy was probably something along those lines, too. Plus all that business about not wanting to go to a hospital-you didn't have to be a genius to figure that one out. The guy was looking to avoid the police.
The way he figured it, he'd already done his good deed by coming out here and checking up on the guy, bringing up all this food and stuff. His dad had felt sorry for him, because he'd found him out there where he'd been dumped. Well, fine; they didn't owe him anything more. Not to the point of wading hip deep into whatever shit it was that had gotten the guy into this predicament.
What was the smart thing to do, he knew, was to leave the guy here, with the rest of the sandwiches, and the chili and the Pepsi, and the flashlight and can opener he'd brought along. And go home and think about what to do next. Do not, he told himself, get involved in this dude's spooky business.
The man's voice poked at him. "Well? Can you?"
He hesitated a minute, then tried to keep his eyes from going too wide and making him look like a fool. He nodded yes.
SEVEN
Aitch had gone down to L.A. with an empty briefcase and came back with it full. Charlie waited for him at the airport gate, actually across the walkway at another gate where nobody was sitting. He could see from there when people started getting off the plane. Somebody in the crowd filling the rows of seats over there was smoking a cigar that smelled as though he'd taken a shit, then set it on fire for some personal reason; that was why Charlie had moved.
What a bunch of horseshit, to have smoking and no smoking sections right together, separated by some diddly sign hanging from the ceiling. Like that fart smell was going to percolate along in the air, right up to there, and then stop. All the way on the other side of the building, he slouched down in his seat-they were leathery plastic slings, suspended together from a long chrome frame-and looked at the neck of the business suit with the cigar. Put 'em all in their own little room, that was the way, and close the door. Jesus-now the smell was coming over here.
He picked up a folded newspaper that somebody had left on the seat next to him. The headlines were all yesterday's; he dropped it back onto the empty seat and wished that Aitch would hurry up. The first passengers had already come up the narrow slanting tunnel that went out to the plane. That fuckin' cigar smoke was going to make him puke.
Aitch finally appeared, swinging along with the briefcase dangling from his hand. It was full, Charlie knew, not from the apparent weight of it or anything like that-what Aitch had gone down to L.A. for didn't weigh that much-but just because Aitch wouldn't have been smiling like that if he'd come back empty-handed.
Charlie got up and walked over, just in time to see Aitch curl his lip, nose wrinkling, and hear him say to the schmuck with the cigar, "Hey, mac-there's kids around. You know?"
He grabbed Aitch by the arm, right above the elbow, and pushed him out toward the walkway. "Come on, let's get out of here."
They walked past the metal detectors. "How'd it go?" asked Charlie.
"Oh, fine. Fine. No problem. We're dealing with reasonable people." Aitch looked back over his shoulder as he walked. "Christ, did you
smell
that thing? What the-"
It was dark outside the terminal. Aitch had been gone all day. Charlie unlocked the car's trunk and Aitch tossed the briefcase in.
"That's the last time I fly in and out of LAX, though." Aitch lounged back as Charlie paid the girl in the parking garage booth. The barrier went up, and he headed for the freeway. "Fuckin' nightmare," said Aitch. "And I don't mean because it's crowded. I can deal with that. It's those goddamn wimpy takeoffs you gotta endure. You know LAX is a black star airport?"
"What's that?" He swung the car up the on-ramp.
"I read it somewhere." Aitch was hopped up and talkative from too much caffeine; Charlie recognized the symptoms. "The airline pilots get together and give a black star to airports they think are dangerous. L.A. rates because of the noise restrictions. They gotta creep out of it on low throttle until they're out over the water, then they can give it the gas. Meanwhile you're hanging up there, wondering if this bastard's going to make it. No, man, next time I have to go down there, I'm going to use Ontario. You ever fly out of Ontario? Not Ontario, Canada; I mean the one down in Southern California."
He moved the car into the center lane and picked up speed. "No. Never have."
"It's a trip." Aitch stretched his legs out, arching his spine away from the seat, head rolled back. "Full power takeoff. People who live around there don't like it, they can move. Boom, you're up in the air like a slingshot. Real E ticket ride."
Charlie grunted, noncommittal. Everything was a trip for Aitch.
Now he was leaning forward, prowling through the glove compartment for a tape he wanted to hear. He gave up, falling back in the seat and leaving the radio tuned to the murmur of the classical station. "Hey, you know Hollis, don't you? You've met him."
Hollis was the source in L.A. that Aitch had flown down there to talk to. "Yeah, I know him." Hollis was Mister Smooth-he
looked
like a doctor-which made it easy for him to turn the ones that got in over their heads. It was like dealing with a fellow professional. Or maybe a priest: they got to confess their sins and do their penance. Which was where the margin of profit for Hollis, and for Aitch and him, came from. Things like the stuff the briefcase in the trunk was filled with. Stuff like that, on the loose instead of being locked up in a hospital cupboard, meant that somebody was fucking up.
"Hollis told me something interesting." Aitch watched the cars over in the next lane. "About skeletons.
You know how hard it is, getting hold of a good skeleton these days? He hears about these things 'cause of his line of work, you know, hanging around with all these doctors. Some of 'em teach and do university stuff, and they're telling him about the problems they got. And it seems-" Aitch spread his hands out. "Seems there's a real drought in the market right now, for really good Grade A human skeletons. Everybody's gotta make do with these plastic ones, or fiberglass. They used to get 'em, the real ones, out of India and places like that, he told me-a real Third World export product, you know-but a lot of those places have clamped down. Politics and stuff. Plus now-catch this-a lot of the ones that do come up for sale, they get snagged by these interior decorating places. Some yuppie, he's into like a
bone
motif, he's already got a water buffalo skull or something up on his wall, then he wants like real human bits and pieces. Plus, you figure, he's only ever going to buy
one,
so he can pay whatever they want. Drives the prices right up."
He knew Aitch was watching him out of the corner of his eye, checking his reaction to this kind of talk. Seeing if he was squeamish about it. He kept his face composed, just watching the traffic. The talk was more cold-hearted than actually grisly.
Aitch stroked his lower lip, musing. "You know, what else Hollis told me was that you got your different quality skeletons. Especially in the skulls. Like A, B, and C grades. Depending on how much of their teeth they got left in their heads. They got all their teeth, maybe a few fillings, that's a Grade A. I wonder…" He pinched the lip between his thumb and forefinger, then let go of it. "Hey, you remember our buddy Mike?"
He was talking about it as though they'd dumped Mike off months ago, instead of just the other day. As though he had to really work to dredge him up out of memory.
Charlie nodded. "What about him?"
"He had pretty good teeth, didn't he? I mean, with him being a young guy, and a doctor and all…, he took pretty good care of himself. Maybe a couple teeth got busted, when you hit him with that bar."
Aitch had been the one that had hit Mike with the bar, a roundhouse swing that had laid Mike out on the floor. Charlie looked over at Aitch. "What do you want to do? You want to go back out there and get him, scrape the meat off his bones or something?"
"No, come on… shit." Aitch shook his head. "I mean, he's out there in the middle of nowhere, he's gonna
be
bones after a while. You don't have to pick meat off him. The sun just, you know… dries him out. Bleaches him."
"Um, I don't think so. There's coyotes out there. They'd pull him to pieces. Crack the bones to get at the whatta-ya-call-it, the marrow inside. You'd go back out there and you wouldn't find any pieces bigger than your thumbnail." He didn't know if that was true or not, but it sounded right.
"That's a pisser." Aitch stared out the windshield. "Coyotes, huh?" He mulled it over. "That's really too bad. Because you can get a pretty good price for a nice human skeleton, with all its teeth in good shape. I don't mean tons of money, but still…"
Charlie knew that Aitch wasn't interested in the money at all. Some bent yuppie has a human skeleton in his bone collection, then Aitch had to have one. That fucker Hollis had put the idea in his head. Plus to have it be somebody you had known… a former business associate, instead of just some dumb Indian peasant… that would appeal to Aitch. He could hang it in the corner of his bedroom, maybe with some artistic lighting on it, and make little sly comments about it to the girls.
Oh, that?-just somebody who had a, uh, little accident
. Mysterioso gangster vibes. They went for that sort of thing.
Aitch lifted the sleeve of his jacket to his nose and sniffed it. His face curdled. "Christ! All I did was walk past that guy, and I can still smell his fucking cigar!"
"Yeah, it really gets in there." Charlie let the traffic pull the car along, on toward the city. "Hey, did you know I used to smoke?"
"You did, huh." Aitch still looked disgusted.
"Gave it up-'cause of the smell, and all the other stuff. The first time I woke up in the morning, went to the bathroom, and coughed up a big yellow wad in the sink-looked like some kinda prop from a horror movie-I said that's it. No more for me. The way I quit, this old guy I used to know told me how to do it. It was the same way he'd gotten himself off pills."
"Yeah? What's that?"
Charlie lifted a forefinger off the wheel. "What you gotta do is, you take all the stuff you don't want to do any more, like the pills or the cigarettes, and you throw 'em in the toilet, and you watch it all go down. Then you go out and get some more of it-you go out and
buy
more-and you take it home and flush
that.
And you keep doing that until you don't want the stuff any more." He took his hand from the wheel and used the finger to tap the side of his head. "See, what it does, it makes a connection in your brain between that stuff and shit. Shit goes in the toilet. That's what it's for. And who wants shit? You know?"
Aitch turned his head and looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded. "That's very good. That's smart. Lucky for us, the people we deal with aren't that smart." He slumped back in the seat, gazing back out the side window.
It'd been the longest spiel he'd ever had, talking with Aitch. Usually he didn't say that much, at least not all in one go. But he'd wanted to change the subject, get Aitch off all that b.s. about skeletons-Mike's bleached bones-and stuff.
That
was sick.
He glanced over at Aitch. The man was thinking, whatever it was he thought about when he shut up and his eyelids came halfway down.
"Maybe…" Aitch's voice came from far away. "Maybe we could go out there and put like chicken wire over him. So the coyotes wouldn't get to him." Shit, thought Charlie. The guy never let up.
EIGHT
Mike lay on the building's verandah, his back against the boards over the door. It had been so hot and airless inside, the sun making the place into an oven, that he'd had the kid drag him out there. Along with the water that was left in the thermos, and the big bottle of Pepsi. He'd nearly finished them both. He'd lost a lot of fluid, both from the beating and then from the hours he'd been lying unconscious at the roadside.
The sloping roof over the verandah-it ran all the way across the long front of the building and turned the corner to the side-had shaded him. What breeze there had been brought a faint sulfur smell from, he supposed, the pond he could just see out at the side of the lane. It probably had some kind of mineral content, fed from underground. That was why it hadn't evaporated away in this heat.