Ross Thomas: The Fourth Durango

“Won’t hardly take no time at all,” Dupree said, crossing to Adair in three swift steps and pressing the knife point against the throat where a vanished triple chin had once bobbled.

Adair whistled. It was no melodic pursed-lip whistle, but rather that piercing, cab-stopping blast often used by pretty young New York women at rush hour on rainy days-or by activist diehards in convention assembled who still believed it could resurrect lost causes long dead. From a block away, such whistles can summon a child, a fairly bright dog or, in Jack Adair’s case, a savior.

He seemed to flow into the shower room, although nothing but quicksilver flows quite that fast. He was the color of lightly creamed coffee and would have stood six-four, except he was bent forward as he feinted right, went left, used both hands to grab Bobby Dupree’s left wrist-the knife wrist-and break it over his raised right knee the way he would break a small stick.

The knife dropped to the floor. Bobby Dupree sobbed and sank down beside it, clutching his broken wrist. The man who was the color of lightly creamed coffee kicked the knife away and turned to Loco, the lightbulb eater, whose right hand seemed trapped inside his open fly where he had been fondling himself.

“Go jack off someplace else, sweet thing,” the man said.

Loco started backing toward the shower room’s far exit. He suddenly seemed to remember where his right hand was, jerked it from the open fly as if it were scalded, blew a wet kiss at Jack Adair and said in Spanish to the man who had broken Bobby Dupree’s left wrist: “Fuck your mother, crazy goat.” After that, Loco turned and skipped like a child from the shower room.

“Let’s go, Jack,” said the rescue man, whose name was Blessing Nelson and who weighed just under 215 pounds and had a Stanford-Binet-measured IQ of 142, which, Adair had assured him, was only eight points shy of perceived genius.

“By the use of some rather restrained mayhem,” said Adair with no hint of a smile, “you just broke up what could well’ve been my last romance-for which, needless to say, I’m goddamned grateful.”

Blessing Nelson shook his head in wonder. “Never shuts down for rest or repair, does it-that mouth of yours? Just goes on and on, night and day.”

“What about him?” Adair said, using a nod to indicate the still kneeling, still whimpering Bobby Dupree.

“Fuck him.”

“Speaking again of romance, they’ll both try and clean your plow but good,” the former chief justice said, wondering whether his grammar would ever return from its long AWOL.

“Loco might,” Nelson said, “on account of Loco’s stone crazy. But old Bobby here won’t try nothing else.” He kicked Dupree in the stomach. The hard kick knocked the breath out of Dupree and turned his whimperings into wheezing sobs.

“How much, Bobby?” Nelson said.

Dupree only shook his head and kept on wheezing and sobbing until Nelson threatened with his foot again. Dupree twisted his head around until he could look up at Nelson. “Twenty,” he said, gasping it out between the sobs and wheezes.

“Twenty thousand,” Adair said, as if almost pleased by the price tag that had been hung on his life.

Blessing Nelson’s long calculating look drove the price down. “Shit, Jack, somebody offer me half that in real money, you already be dead and gone.”

“Despite what we’ve meant to each other,” Adair said with a half-mocking smile.

Nelson nodded. “Despite that.”

Before being arrested, indicted and sentenced to a plea-bargained four years in Federal prison, the twenty-nine-year-old Blessing Nelson-by his own secret count-had robbed thirty-four banks and nineteen savings and loan institutions, eight of them twice, all of them located in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley and none of them more than 180 seconds by stolen getaway car from either the Ventura or San Diego Freeways, his two preferred escape routes.

It was on the advice of an aged journeyman thief whom he had twice represented as a young defense lawyer that Adair had retained Blessing Nelson’s services. The old thief, Harry Means, had spent twenty-three of his seventy-two years behind bars and was only seventeen months out of his last cell when Adair-less than ten days away from his own incarceration in Lompoc-had telephoned for advice on how to survive inside a prison.

“You want it without horseshit and feathers, Jack?” the old thief had asked.

“I really do, Harry.”

“Well, pick out the biggest, baddest nigger you can find, jump right in his arms and tell him, ‘Honey, I’m yours.’” And with that the old ex-con had cackled merrily and hung up.

Adair more or less had followed the advice, retaining Blessing Nelson’s services as protector and physical therapist for $500 a month in lieu of sexual favors. And since he was leaving the penitentiary alive, unraped, eighty-six pounds lighter and relatively sane, Adair regarded the money spent as an extremely prudent investment.

Inside the small mirrorless and doorless changing room in the discharge area, Blessing Nelson watched Adair dress. After stuffing the tails of a green J. C. Penney long-sleeved shirt into a pair of gray wash-and-wear pants with a thirty-six-inch waist, Adair held the pants’ waistband an inch or so away from his own thirty-four-inch waist and said, “Amazing what a sensible diet’ll do.”

“What a hundred sit-ups a day’ll do,” Blessing Nelson said.

“Well, yes; that too.”

Adair picked up a red and orange tie, grimaced at it briefly, slipped it beneath the shirt collar and, sawing it back and forth, said, “I’ll send word to your mother where I’ll be.”

“Mama’d like you to keep on sending that five hundred a month you been sending more’n she would a word.”

Adair slipped on a short tan rain jacket that reminded him of those once worn by filling station attendants and looked around for a mirror although he knew there wasn’t one.

“Can’t afford it anymore, Blessing,” he said with what sounded like genuine regret. “But I am grateful. Very. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d be leaving here with scrambled brains and a distribution franchise for AIDS. Instead, I leave unsullied and-in a certain sense of the word, virginal-save for that unpleasant experience with old Uncle Ralph when I was six and he was what-thirty? Thirty-two?”

Vexation bordering on anger spread across Blessing Nelson’s almost too regular features and made no effort to move on. Adair had managed to provoke that same expression at least twice a day, sometimes three, for the last fifteen months. Accustomed by now to Nelson’s fits of exasperation, Adair still couldn’t predict what would cause one.

“Can we just get the fuck outa here?” Nelson said.

“What about next month when you get out?”

“Next month you be saying, ‘Blessing? Blessing who?’”

Adair denied the charge with a solemn headshake. “I remember my friends, Blessing; as well as my enemies.”

“You got too many of one and not enough of the other and it ain’t hard to figure where you’re short. So maybe I’ll look you up and maybe I won’t. But right now, let’s go.” He grabbed Adair by the left arm and steered him out of the dressing room and almost into the arms of a senior guard who dyed his hair yellow and whose left blue eye looked frozen.

“You,” the hack said, glaring at Blessing Nelson with his one good eye. “Administrative detention.”

“Got me a pass.”

“Had you a pass. What you got now is the hole.” The guard turned on Adair with a kind of fond vindictiveness. “As for you, Mr. Chief Justice, well, you got a treat coming.”

Jack Adair stood patiently in front of the large gray metal desk and examined thewall-mounted head of the slain black bear, deciding once again it had been much too small when shot and, therefore, far too young. Both desk and bear belonged to Darwin Loom, an associate warden, who was using a twenty-six-year-old Waterman fountain pen to initial all nine pages of a requisition form.