Timothy Hallinan - Everything but the Squeal

“I don't want anything,” I said. “I just don't like Blister.”

“I don't like him all that much myself,” she said unexpectedly. “But the pickings in Topanga aren't exactly world-class.” Not knowing what to say, I shut up.

It was drizzling as we went down the hill toward the ocean. Alice was built in the fifties, the age of convenience, and both the passenger and the driver were thoughtfully equipped with shiny chrome buttons that operate all the windows in the car. After a snicker to let me know how corny I was, Jessica reached up and opened the windows on my side.

I endured the cold and the sting of the drizzle against my face until we made the turn. Then I used my own buttons to raise both windows on the driver's side and open the ones on hers. Jessica promptly slid mine down again. I waited eight or ten minutes, until the Pacific, slate-gray and flatter than a razor's edge, slipped into sight between the hills and then raised the windows on my side, leaving hers open.

Jessica made a show of fanning her face with one hand, then closed her windows and opened mine. I closed all of them and pushed the button that locked all of them, the only button she didn't have. As I turned left onto the Pacific Coast Highway she fiddled unsuccessfully with the buttons and gave me a glance that must have cost her several grams of self-control. Then she turned her angelic face sweetly up to me, shifted delicately onto one haunch, and emitted a ladylike fart.

“Where’d all the fun go?” I said to no one in particular.

She gave me both barrels, a full-bore, hazel-eyed gaze. “Mommy says you're having an elastic adolescence,” she said at last. “You've stretched it and stretched it, but one day it's going to snap back and leave you nowhere.”

It sounded like something Annie might say. “I prefer to think of it as an escalator,” I said, not very convincingly. “I'm enjoying the ride. When it's taken me high enough, I'll get off.”

“And who will you be then?”

“Me. But older.”

“ Older ?” she said nastily. “You must be joking.” It was her second shot at the same target, and I figured she might be running out of bullets.

“People do get older,” I said. “They even get older than I am. Someday you'll be older than I am now. Maybe you'll look back at this moment and say, ‘Why wasn't I nicer to that poor kid?’ ”

“Fat chance.” She took a satisfied sniff at the rotten-egg air and settled back, gazing through the windshield and daring me to do anything about it.

“Listen,” I said, largely to prevent myself from giving in and opening the window, “the best thing that can happen to you is to get older. As someone once said, consider the alternative.”

“Huh?”

I negotiated a curve in silence, waiting for her to get it. The Pacific slapped in disinterestedly to our right. When she didn't get it, I said, “Being dead.”

“Oh,” she said dismissively. “That.”

“The dead can't fart,” I said, losing points.

“They don't have to. They already smell bad.”

We let a mile or so pass in malodorous silence. When I felt reasonably safe from scorn, I lowered my window.

“Chicken,” she said, sounding pleased for the first time. She twirled a lock of hair around her finger and checked it for split ends. “I knew you were chicken. Blister should have farted at you. You would have fallen down the stairs headfirst.” She gave up on her hair.

“What are you doing with a coke dealer?”

She emitted an exasperated little poof of air. “He's not just a dealer. He's a person too. Anyway, don't go figuring I hang around with him just so he can keep me high.”

“Then what is it? His stomach muscles?”

“Oh, give me credit. I tried it. Why wouldn't I? But then I quit. Who wants to feel fast and stupid at the same time? It's like the Super Bowl, you know? There's always two guys talking: the big slow dumb guy and the little fast dumb guy. Who wants to be the little fast dumb guy?”

“Jessica,” I said, turning to her. “How did you get this way? I knew you when you were one year old.”

“You have the advantage of me,” she said loftily. “And how about you keep your eyes on the road?”

I eyed the road, reflecting on the exchange between Wyatt, Annie, and me on the previous evening, when I'd asked them if I could have Jessica. First I'd reexplained the case I was working on.

“Are you kidding?” Annie had said. “She could get killed .”

“She could get scared,” I'd said. “Right now, she feels like she'll live forever, no matter what she does. Screw around with Blister? No problem. Run away? So what? All she has to do is come home and flash that old Jessica smile and you'll both be falling all over each other to make her bed and buy her school clothes.”

“So what are you saying?” Wyatt had asked. He wasn't crazy about the fact that I'd been up at Blister's with him that night; he was, after all, Wyatt Wilmington the Third, even if he had decided to be a carpenter rather than a real-estate mogul like his father, and his family had always kept its problems to itself. It was the sacred WASP tradition: what matters is what people can see. Keep it secret, and maybe it can be fixed before it makes the papers.

“Wyatt,” I said. He was my oldest friend, and Annie had been my girlfriend when I introduced her to Wyatt all those years ago when we were innocent students at UCLA. “Wyatt, I'm in the family. She's my goddaughter. I drove Annie to the hospital when she was going to be born, with the two of you in the back seat. You remember how smoothly I took the curves?”

Wyatt gave a grudging nod. He'd been too nervous to drive.

“Well, I'm going to do the same now. She's going to see that kids can't always go home again. She's going to realize for the first time that there are lines that we cross, or don't cross, that can't always be crossed in the other direction. She's going to see kids who can't hope to live more than another couple of years.”

“And you're going to protect her?” That was Annie.

“You're protecting her now?” I said, without really thinking.

There was a long silence, and the two of them exchanged a glance from which I was profoundly excluded. I looked down at my coffee cup. It had coffee in it.

“Why do you want her?” Annie finally said. “What's she supposed to be?”

“She's my I.D. card,” I said. “She'll make me fit in.” Annie shuffled off one of her slippers and looked down at it as though it contained an answer. “Just my I.D. card,” I repeated.

In the car, my I.D. card said, “I'm hungry. This is sure a weird way to spend Easter. Normally I'd be stealing pieces off the ham by now.” It was two o'clock.

“Well, luckily for you, we're going to a restaurant.”

“Will they have ham?”

“If they do, you probably won't recognize it.”

“What restaurant?”

“It's called Tommy's Oki-Burger.”

“Blister's been there,” she said. “He told me something about it.”

“It's Blister's kind of place. What'd he tell you?”

“That it was full of kids who'd split from home. And don't knock Blister. It's boring.”

“Did he tell you what they were doing there?”

“Peddling their butts, he said.”

“That's about it.”

She thought about it for a while. “Why are we going?”

“You're going to help me find a little girl.”

“Is she peddling her butt?”

“Where do you hear expressions like that?”

“Around,” she said, sounding like a teenager for the first time. “Is she?”

“I don't know. For all I know, she's dead.”

“Zowie,” she said, half under her breath. “Is it going to be dangerous?”