Timothy Hallinan - Everything but the Squeal

I'd written the line of print under Ella Moss’ face. I couldn't see the screen, but I knew what it said: FOUR OUT OF FOUR. WE'RE COMING. Morris had done it right.

“Your turn,” I said, pushing the contracts toward her.

“I can't,” she said wildly to me. “I can't do it now. You'll have to wait. I've got an appointment. I've got. . I've got. .” She looked at the screen as the normal menu reasserted itself. ”. . an appointment.” She forced herself to look at me. Her eyes were all whites. “Come back tomorrow,” she said.

“Trouble?” I asked.

“No.” She cranked her mouth into a smile. “Nothing. Just … just a little glitch.” Her eyes dropped to the contracts. She looked a thousand years old, a perfectly preserved Queen of Egypt crumbling at the rush of new oxygen as the bandages were cut. “Leave the papers,” she said, struggling for control. “Come back tomorrow.”

“Sure,” I said, getting up. I shoved the contracts into the back pocket of my jeans, but she didn't notice. She was staring with a kind of superstitious dread at the computer screen. The phone was still burring away.

“Tomorrow,” she said mechanically.

“Your phone's ringing,” I said, leaving. She didn't look up.

The parking lot was pitch dark. “We're on,” I said to the Mountain as I got back into Alice. “We're rolling.” Ten minutes later Mrs. Brussels' Mercedes fishtailed out of the lot and left onto Sunset. We were three cars behind.

She went home.

That was a surprise.

Home was a house north of Sunset in Beverly Hills. Only downtown Tokyo was more expensive. I'd had to fall back a block or so after she turned her tidy little fifty-thousand-dollar Mercedes left off Sunset. There wasn't enough traffic to cover us. As extra insurance I doused Alice's headlights, hoping the Beverly Hills cops weren't anywhere around. No question whose side they'd be on.

As the neighborhood got better, the Mountain got worse. We were out of his element. “Maybe we should have bought a map to the stars' homes,” he grumbled. We'd passed half a dozen kids flagging the night air with folded pieces of paper directing the credulous to the homes of people who'd been dead for years. “Long as we're up here, we could drop in on Jane Fonda. She could tell me how to get down to half a ton.”

We were parked across the street and half a block up, still hoping for no cops. The Mountain was listing movie stars in no particular order, clearly disgruntled. He'd gotten to Leslie Nielsen, so it had been quite a while.

“Leslie Nielsen ?” I asked in spite of myself. “Is he the one with the aqualung?”

“That's Lloyd Bridges,” he said with infinite scorn. “His kids probably live up here too. There's all sorts of people live up here. What I want to know is, why the fuck are we here?”

“She's the one,” I said. “Just shut up and sit back. Work on your cellulite or something.” The air was ripe with Mountain's pong. “And roll down the window, if you don't mind.”

“Can I smoke?”

“You can light fire to your feet if you want to.” I hadn't known that the Mountain smoked. Now that I thought about it, it made sense. You didn't get to be his size without a lot of bad habits.

He pulled a crumpled pack of some unidentifiable off-brand cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit up. Wreathed in smoke, he gave out a relatively comfortable sigh. “Why don't we just kick the door in?” he asked.

“They're not here,” I said, my nose twitching toward the smoke. Ancient yearnings arose within me. “It doesn't make any sense for them to be here. She gave them to Birdie.”

“Birdie?”

“Never mind,” I said. “Give me one of those.”

“You?” he said. “I didn't know-”

“Just give me the fucking thing.” He tossed me a cigarette and I let it dangle uselessly from my mouth. “What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “Rub my legs together to make a spark?”

“Jesus, you're touchy,” he said, handing me a book of matches. “Want me to kick you in the chest to get it going?” He coughed up a blubbery woof of laughter.

I lit the cigarette, my first in two years, and sucked in the smoke, feeling my uvula knocking in protest against the top of my tongue. The nicotine navigated my defenses without apparent effort and filled my lungs, and I got light-headed immediately. All the problems of the world fell away; it was a crossword puzzle and I was a dictionary. I was as definite as Noah Webster. “She'll come out,” I said, blowing smoke, “and we'll follow her, and then we're home.”

“So what's she doing in there?” the Mountain asked. “Lining up her shoes?”

“She's making calls,” I said with absolute certainty. Until that moment I hadn't known what she was doing. “She's freaking out, and she's getting the kids together so she can move them.”

“Move them where?”

“Out of L.A. She has no idea what's going on.”

“Me neither,” said the Mountain, lighting another one. He had apparently eaten the first. “Maybe you'd like to explain.”

I explained, finishing my cigarette and bumming a second in the process. I could quit later. In the meantime, nicotine seemed promising.

“Holy shit,” the Mountain said after five minutes of concentrated explanation. “Let's french-fry her.”

“What's the first thing you do when you make french fries?”

“Chop,” he said. “First you have to chop up the potato.”

“Dibs on that,” I said. “I get to chop. You get to drop the pieces into the fat.”

He exhaled enough smoke to guarantee chemotherapy to most of the Midwest. “So you're saying we wait.” He tried to cross his legs under Alice's dashboard and failed. “The world is too small for me,” he said. It was a statement of fact, not a complaint.

By the time she backed her car out of the driveway, it was almost nine. The sun was long gone, the moon was taking a nap behind the clouds, and the straight nine-tenths of the world was heading for bed. The little Mercedes scooted out backward and turned downhill toward Sunset.

I started Alice. “Told you,” I said. “She's got to go somewhere. And where she's going is where they are.”

“Hey,” he said, “if I didn't believe you, why would I be here? Shit, I could be having a great old time mopping tables at the Oki-Burger.”

“Thanks for Apple,” I said, thumping his knee. “Let's turn it around, okay? If I didn't believe you , why would you be here?”

“So okay,” he said. “We're both champs. Just keep her in sight.”

In fact, I nearly lost her as she swung east onto Sunset. The light went yellow and I accelerated through it anyway, hoping she didn't have one eye on the rearview mirror. Some cowboy getting a jump on the red tooted a little Fiat's horn at us with a pipsqueak flatulent sound and swerved around us, making operatic Italian hand gestures out the window. I passed him on the left, hoping Mrs. Brussels hadn't heard the horn, and the Mountain leaned out of the passenger window, made clawing motions toward the guy's throat, and roared at him. The guy driving the Fiat took one look at the Mountain and braked abruptly, then made an immediate right to get out of his vicinity.

“Focus,” I said as Mrs. B. made a right down Doheny. “The enemy is up ahead.” I followed her, gunning Alice's engine to decrease the distance between us as the Mountain subsided into mutinous mutters in the passenger seat.

“Little wop cars,” he grumbled. ”Rinky-dinky little Tinkertoys. How come people don't buy American?”

Since the trade deficit was not the issue at hand, I concentrated on Mrs. Brussels. She drove fast and well, with an aristocratic disregard for lane lines and yellow lights. I'd had to run two more reds by the time she turned left onto Pico, heading east.