Timothy Hallinan - Everything but the Squeal

“Thanks, Jessica,” I said unsympathetically. “I should have worn a T-shirt that said Detective.”

“I saved your life,” she said, scrubbing her hands vigorously. “This nice man would have killed you.”

“What about the little girl?” I asked the Mountain.

“Gone too.”

“Well, heck,” I said, editing my language unnecessarily for Jessica's benefit. “So what do we do now?”

The Mountain rubbed the back of his neck with the awful-smelling rag and screwed up his eyes. Then he pursed his lips and blew out noisily. He seemed to be undergoing some kind of crisis of conscience. “I guess I break the rules,” he said at last. “I guess I take you to his squat.”

“What's a squat?” Jessica whispered as we walked single file, the Mountain in the lead, down a dark block of Vista. Vista of what? I wondered. The only thing I could see was a tract house and a chain-link fence. “Where a runaway lives,” I said.

“How romantic,” she said. “Isn't there anywhere to lie down?”

“Two houses down,” the Mountain said. “Across the street.”

The house two down and across the street had burned down, some time back, from the look of it. Blackened timbers poked up at irregular angles in the fine mist. The front porch was untouched, but behind it something that had once been a house sagged, black and fractional. The remaining walls of the house were no higher than my shoulder, and the roof would have been something to look at the stars through, if there had been any stars. A little kid's bright plastic pedal car sat forlornly in the middle of the rectangular brown patch that should have been the lawn. A tiny sneaker lay next to it, dead-center in a coiled dog-chain with the collar still attached, as though the dog, deprived of its child, had wasted away into nothing. The entire doleful panorama was surrounded by the ubiquitous chain link, and a sharp smell of charred wood filled the air.

“He lives there ?” Jessica said, disbelief coloring her voice.

“In the garage,” the Mountain said. “In the back. It didn't burn.”

The fence was eight feet high, topped by a long, lethal, lizardy spiral of razor-wire. “How do we get in?” I asked.

“Yow,” the Mountain said. “You get in. I won't fit.”

“You have an inferiority complex about your weight,” Jessica informed him. “You're a very attractive man, actually.”

“Honey,” the Mountain said, “you have a sweet mouth. At times,” he added after a moment's thought.

He parted some oleanders, poisonous and probably hallucinogenic if you could figure out how to use them; they're related to laurel, which was what the oracle at Delphi chewed before uttering her holy nonsense. From what I'd read of her advice, she was pretty stoned.

“Under there,” the Mountain said.

I squinted into the dark. Hidden from view by the oleanders was a little hole that led under the fence, like the holes dogs dig to escape. Maybe it had been the dog that belonged to the little kid. Jessica could get through it. The Guitar Player, with his twenty-inch waist, could get through it. The Mountain certainly couldn't. For that matter, I wasn't sure I could.

“You're joking,” I said.

“Oh, come on,” Jessica said in her steeliest tone. “You're not going to quit now.”

“You're not, are you?” said the Mountain. I might have imagined the menace in his voice, but it wasn't a theory I wanted to test.

“Of course not,” I said immediately. “An involuntary ejaculation, devoid of meaning.”

“I know about those ,” Jessica said.

“Well,” I said, getting down on my hands and knees, “that's nothing to brag about.”

Feeling fat and middle-aged, I started to wiggle under the fence. The smell of wet dirt was thick and heavy in my nostrils. Then the chain link grazed the back of my scalp, and I ducked. The taste of wet dirt made my nose superfluous. “Pfui,” I said, feeling like Nero Wolfe. Jessica laughed. I found myself on the other side of the fence, looking out at them. “Come on,” I said, looking at her. “If you're so smart, let's see you do it.”

Well, of course, she did. “Piece of cake,” she said, standing up and brushing herself off.

“Back there,” the Mountain said, pointing. “Give him money. He'll tell you anything for money.” He turned away and lumbered back up the street. Halfway up, he began to sing “Melancholy Baby.”

“He's such a cutie,” Jessica said as we skirted the remains of the blackened house. “I don't think all fat guys are unattractive.”

“Oh, shut up,” I whispered, recalling that one of the points of the exercise had been to scare her. She was less scared than I was.

Scraggly junipers lined the driveway on the left. To the right, ghost-ridden and black, was the skeleton of the house. The driveway was washing away from neglect, and I had turned my ankle twice by the time the garage rose in silhouette in front of us. Like the house, it was sagging. Unlike the house, it was intact. It was a two-car garage with a large single door. High in the door, two filthy panes of glass flickered in a jumpy fashion. Candles, I guessed, or maybe a kerosene lantern. Putting my finger to my lips to make sure that Jessica wasn't going to start a chat, I bent down, seized the handle in the center of the door, and yanked up.

The door shuddered, groaned metallically, and then jerked itself upward, almost carrying me with it. “Ouch,” I said, looking down at my scraped knuckle.

Inside the garage something scurried. It resolved itself into Donnie, traveling backward like a crab until his back hit a corner. “What the fuck ” he said.

“You,” I said, pointing at him. I spoiled some of the impact of the gesture by sucking on my knuckle. “Not a word until I say so. Where's the little girl?”

He sat crouched in the corner, rubbing his left forearm with his right hand. Closer up, his skin was sallow and no cleaner than it absolutely needed to be. There were half-moons of dirt beneath his fingernails. The nails on his right hand were longer than those on his left, and for the first time I realized that maybe he actually did play the guitar. After a moment he said, “Am I supposed to talk now?”

“I asked you a question, didn't I?”

He nodded.

“So talk.”

“She got a trick,” he said. “Some fat citizen in a Buick. He honked at us before we got off Santa Monica.” His left eye had a minuscule twitch that made him look nervous and furtive.

“What's she going to do to him?” Jessica asked in a fascinated tone.

“I don't know,” he said, noticing her for the first time. “Give him a blow-job, I suppose.”

“Is that what the citizens usually want?” I said, closing the door behind us. With the door closed, the candles calmed down, and Donnie's multiple shadows gradually overlapped into one. It was a very skinny shadow.

“The easy ones,” he said resentfully.

“Will he pay her?” Jessica asked.

“What are you, from Mars?” Donnie said. “Why do you think she does it, to keep her mouth in practice?”

“How much?” I said, for Jessica's benefit.

“Twenty, twenty-five. Maybe, if he's really stupid, fifty.” He shifted his eyes from her to me. “You're the cop,” he said accusingly.

“No, Donnie, I'm not a cop. I'm a private detective.”

“Big difference,” he said. But he sat up a little straighter. “How do you know my name?”

“ Twenty ?” Jessica said. Jessica spent twenty on gym shorts.

“It doesn't matter how I know your name,” I said. “As long as you're straight with me, you've got no problem.”

“Straight about what?”

“About her.” I crossed the garage and held out the picture of Aimee. He ducked back as though he thought I was going to hit him, and then he slowly took the picture from my hand. He looked at it and then back at me, and something very much like a cash register clanged in his brain. His eyes slotted. “Never seen her,” he said.