Cutter and Bone (30 page)

Beyond the highway and the buildings lining it—the drive-ins, motels, and gas stations—he could see patches of the Colorado River running black in the night light, a vein of lifeblood trickling through the vast corpse of the desert. For some reason he thought it would be better to talk over there, under the scrawny trees scattered along the riverbank, and he headed in that direction. Cutter limped alongside, suddenly a wondering Celt.

“Aye now, Richard me boy, is it not a sight to behold up there? Stars so big and bright a body could almost reach out and touch them, he could, if a body’d a mind to, mind you.”

Bone did not respond. When they reached the bank, Cutter found a large rock at the base of a tree and sat down. Sighing, leaning back, he lit a cigarette.

“Okay,” Bone said.

“Okay, what?”

“Okay, give.”

“Give what?”

“The truth, Alex. Once again—what is going on?”

Cutter laughed and shook his head. “I got this weird sense of
déjà vu
, you know? Like I’ve already lived through this moment, like about a half hour ago.”

“Just tell me your destination. That would help.”

“We already told you, man. Nowhere. We’re just tripping, that’s all. Car tripping.”

“No particular destination, then?”

“None.”

“And direction? How about that?”

Cutter picked up a pebble and tossed it, waited until it plunked into the water. “Well, there is this one cat I know from Nam, he’s got some kind of lake resort near Tulsa. I figured we just might move in that general direction. See what develops.”

“And after that?”

“You tell me.”

Bone’s attention momentarily had strayed to the river, where an inflated raft was sliding past, unmanned, empty. And though he knew this was a phenomenon that merited comment, and even concern, he gave it nothing. He already had enough problems.

“Tulsa,” he said. “Pretty close to Missouri, isn’t it?”

“Pretty close.”

“And in Missouri, down near Arkansas, there is this little town of Rockhill.”

Cutter dragged on the last of his cigarette and dropped it on the ground, interred it with his foot. “Yeah, Rockhill,” he said finally. “Home of J. J. Wolfe, as I recall.”

“As you recall.”

“As I recall, yes sir.”

“But you wouldn’t be heading there?”

“Now why would I want to do that?”

“It was just yesterday morning, Alex—you forgotten already? You telling me that Wolfe had ‘sent you a message’?”

“I said that, huh?”

“You said that. And you believe it, too. It’s the only explanation for all this.”

“All what?”

“Leaving town. Taking George’s car and the money. And even more, your attitude. Yesterday morning you were a man in shock, and now—well, it’s like nothing had happened. You’re back at the same old stand, without a hair out of place. And Mo and the baby—it’s like they never were.”

“And somehow this all relates to Wolfe, huh?”

“In your head it does, yeah.”

“Then lay it on me. Explain.”

“You know the old phrase about beating swords into plowshares—well I think you’ve beaten your grief into a sword.”

Cutter pretended to lose his balance on the rock. Grinning, he struggled to right himself. “Such eloquence, Rich—I just wasn’t prepared.”

“Screw you.”

“All in good time.”

For a while neither of them said anything more. Cutter got up and limped a few steps closer to the river, a move that seemed without purpose, except that it put his face beyond the reach of Bone’s eyes. For a span of minutes he stood there staring out at the night and the river and then finally he turned and came back, and though he was grinning again, slightly, crookedly, all Bone really saw was his eye and the tears that filled it, made it seem incandescent in the starlight.

“Vengeance?” he said. “You think that’s what I’d have in mind, Rich, just because of what happened to Mo and the Kid? Hell, you know how I treated them—like so much dirt, wasn’t it? Just because she wasn’t ugly and had this thing about loyalty and didn’t get all choked up about stumps and scar tissue, you think I’d lay the ticker on the line? Or just because she pulled out all the stops and gave me old Brown Pants, myself all over again, only all in one piece, with the four limbs and the two eyes working so fine a man couldn’t even bear to look at the little bastard for fear some goddamn toy might go boom or the highchair topple over and crush a little footsie or maybe even the baby formula come up poison—who could know? Not his old man certainly. No, all he could do was run and hide, right? Drink too much and stay out of the house, try not to be there when it happened.”

The smile came again, rueful and crimped, a scar running under the open wound of his eye. “And I
wasn’t
there, was I?” he got out. “So why should I want revenge against Wolfe, huh? What did the man ever do to me except free me from anxiety, kill the old fear and trembling?” He held out his hand now, held it shaking in Bone’s face. “See, old buddy? So who needs revenge, huh? Who needs to get his own back?”

Bone said nothing for a while, unwilling to trust his voice. It was the first time he had seen Cutter cry, the first glimpse he had ever had beyond the man’s carapace of raillery and black humor. And it crossed his mind as vaguely as a feeling of guilt that he probably loved him, that if anyone’s pain was automatically his as well, it was Cutter’s. So he dealt from weakness.

“You
are
going to Missouri, then,” he said.

“I guess so.”

“To kill him.”

“I don’t know that yet. Maybe just the blackmail bit still, I won’t know till I get there. Till I see him, face to face.”

“Then you do believe it,” Bone said. “You actually believe the man had something to do with Mo and the baby.”

“Not possible, huh?”

“Not possible, Alex.”

“Oh, yeah it is.” It was a statement, a matter of fact.

“You’re out of your tree,” Bone told him.

“Maybe so. But I was there, man. I know what happened. I know how they reacted to what I laid on them. And I know they knew who I was, where I lived. Name, hotel, phone number—I gave it all to them, because I was feeling that reckless, Rich, that confident. I couldn’t see any reason not to tell the bastards.” He shook his head. “Now I know better.”

“But it doesn’t make sense,” Bone said. “Forgetting whether or not the man
would
do it, there’s still the problem of
how
, the time element. I don’t see how—”

“You don’t have to.”

“The hell I don’t!”

“Face it, Rich. What are the alternatives? Suicide or accident, right? And you know as well as I do how Mo loved that kid, how she took care of him. Oh, she was a pillhead, yeah. And maybe the world’s worst housekeeper too. But tell me—you ever see a time when she wasn’t able to take care of him? When she wasn’t there?”

Bone thought of the afternoon he had found the baby alone at home and had taken him to Mission Park, which in turn led him to the sound of Mo’s voice—How
touching, How too, too sweet—
and her face above him, the smiling mockery he had no idea he would ever miss, but did miss now. He said nothing, however. And Cutter pushed on:

“You ever see him when he wasn’t fed and clean and healthy? Like hell you did. And as for suicide—well, you said it yourself, she wasn’t depressed. And you were the last one to see her.”

Bone heard the words like a judge’s sentence, words he had known he would eventually have to listen to and deal with.

“That wasn’t exactly true,” he said.

“What wasn’t?”

“What I said before. She
was
depressed.”

Cutter had sat down on the rock again. His eye was dry now. “How depressed?” he said.

“I don’t know. Very, I guess. She had cried while I was there. She was asleep when I left her. And I’d promised to stay, to be there when she woke up. She’d made me promise.”

“But you cut out anyway?”

“That’s right.” Bone was not breathing now, was just standing there, waiting, his body tensed. For he did not plan to move, not if Cutter hit him, not even if he caned him. But, unbelievably, all Alex did was smile slightly.

“It figures,” he said. “With that leviathan ego of yours, you’d naturally assume a girl would run straight for the gas burner the second you walked out on her. I mean, after all, what other choice would she have, right?”

“She was
depressed
, Alex,” Somehow he thought the statement would be definitive, that it would put an end to the matter.

But Cutter only scoffed. “Who ain’t?”

Bone stared at him. “You take it real good, don’t you?”

“Which part? The dying? Or the screwing?”

“Take your pick.”

Cutter shrugged and reached down for another pebble. “I try, man,” he said. “I try to feel something. But it just isn’t there. The two of them, they could’ve been a couple of dogs for all I care. For all I feel.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t want to either.”

Bone’s fists shook at his sides. “You’re lying,” he said. “You’re posing. You’re a fucking poseur.”

“I don’t feel much of anything, no loss or grief or any of those nice normal feelings. Maybe I just scooped up too many guys and dumped them in body bags, I don’t know. Maybe there were just too many pieces.”

“And what about all that a minute ago?” Bone asked. “About Mo and the baby, and you not even wanting to look at him for fear—?”

Cutter held up his hand for silence. “Like you said, a pose. I thought I’d try it on. A noble, if phony, reason for going to Missouri.”

“Then what’s the real reason?”

“Must be greed, huh? Our little blackmail bit? Especially now, with you and Valerie pulling out, and no one to share the proceeds with. Why, shee-it, man, I be able to retire on Ibiza.”

“And vengeance—‘getting your own back’—that doesn’t figure in?”

Cutter tried to grin, he tried to meet Bone’s gaze, but neither worked. Finally he just looked down and shook his head in bewilderment. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m going. For some reason I’ve got to. I’ve got no choice.”

Bone nodded slowly, understanding nothing, except that he would be going along, that this time at least he would not be walking out on someone who needed him, even if that someone suddenly made his flesh crawl.

When they went back to the motel, Bone told Cutter that he was not ready to go to bed yet, that he wanted to walk for a while by himself and do some thinking. And Cutter said he thought it was a capital idea, he often recommended thinking to those who were jaded and wanted to do something unusual, but he advised Bone not to overdo, and of course not to accept any candy from strangers.

Bone had to walk almost to the other end of the small town before he found an outdoor booth with a workable telephone. There, first, he placed a collect call to Mrs. Little, who was understandably waspish at the outset. She hadn’t liked it one bit, the way his gimpy friend had stormed in and cleaned out Bone’s apartment. She herself had not been there at the time, but Teresa had, and when the poor soul tried to find out what was going on, “your friend told her he was FBI and that you’d been arrested for impersonating an officer and indecent exposure and God knows what all, and that if Teresa didn’t get her ass out of his way he was going to deport her to Mexico. That’s what he told her. Why, the poor thing was scared half to death.”

Bone commiserated with her, said yes he knew all about that offensive character and he too wanted nothing more to do with him. It was another friend of his he was concerned with now, a nice guy who had just kicked his teenage son out of the house for stashing drugs there and now the father was worried sick, was looking all over for the kid, and Bone was helping. It was too complicated to explain it all now, but one of the things he’d had to do was abandon her truck, had left it in the Leadbetter beach parking lot—a fact Mrs. Little was very happy to hear, she said, because tomorrow she’d planned on reporting the thing stolen and she would have regretted getting him into trouble with the police. Bone thanked her, said he appreciated all she had done for him, and that he thought she was one hell of a lady. In return, she told him that the job and apartment would always be open to him. “We’ve got some unfinished business,” she said. Bone slipped hurriedly around that, thanking her again, then saying goodbye.

Next he called George Swanson, and once again he found the man more than a little tainted by sainthood. Yes, George had read the note Alex had left for him, so of course he knew about the car and the other “items” that had been taken. But he had no intention of calling in the police and reporting anything stolen, Bone could put his mind at rest on that. Bone thanked him and explained about his binge and his not having known what was going on, in fact that he still was not sure what their destination was. But he said that if he was able to stay with Cutter now he thought he’d be able to see him through “this problem of his, this obsession,” and with luck he’d even be able to get the car and the other items back to George within a week or so, hopefully with Cutter still in one piece and out of jail. George asked if Bone could tell him any more about Cutter’s “problem” and Bone said it had to do with the deaths of Mo and the baby, maybe someone Cutter held responsible and wanted to get even with, or possibly he was simply running from the tragedy—Bone was not sure, was still pretty much in the dark about everything, except that the man was close to the edge, that he needed time. And of course George gave him all that and more. He told Bone that if he needed anything else, any help or money, just to call him and he would send it. And for a few moments Bone found himself speechless in the face of the man’s effortless generosity and loyalty. Finally though he managed a few words of thanks. He told him that it would work out and they would all be back in the sun in no time. And George said he hoped so. “Take care of my boy,” he added. “I wouldn’t want to lose him too.”

Only then did Bone realize the man was crying.

Cutter’s “early start in the morning” did not take place until eleven o’clock and Bone was glad of the delay, for the long night’s sleep and the leisurely breakfast of pancakes and bacon and eggs had left him feeling almost normal again. But if the start was unhurried, the going turned out to be something else entirely, in fact was close to a steady eighty miles an hour under Cutter’s heavy prosthetic foot. And even though he had to drive one-handed, he still managed to smoke and drum the wheel and fiddle with the radio, all the while serving up an almost unbroken commentary on a wide variety of subjects, which Bone would not have minded if only the man had not also found it necessary to keep looking away from the road to read his audience, bright little Monk sitting next to him in the front seat thirstily imbibing his every word.