Т Паркер - Where Serpents Lie

He named her Loretta. It was the kind of name he liked — kind of country/traditional — not like the sadly ambitious names that girls have now. She sat on the bucket seat next to his, not really scared, lifting her small buttish face to the air conditioner breeze that parted the long strands of her eyebrows to reveal her BB-sized eyes. Her face was kind of smashed in — from what you could see of it — but her white-and-tan-splotched hair was gay. The grim crone of an animal control officer had offered to tie a bow around the dog’s neck, and Hypok had chosen white with black paw prints. “What’s your daughter’s name?” the officer demanded.

“Nan,” he’d said with a proud smile.

Now he was heading back out the 22 toward the 55, giving serious thought to where he should start. He took a generous gulp of tequila and held up the clear plastic bottle: one-third left. It was 5:45 P.M. Friday, with all sorts of good possibilities at the malls because working moms like to pick up their daughters at day care after work and go spend money on Fridays. The amusement parks were always good. The supermarkets would be good, too. The beach would be okay but not great because it wasn’t quite warm enough yet. Same for the public swimming facilities, though the one down in Mission Viejo had showers and was active last spring. The parks were always good, especially if you liked Latins, which Hypok neither liked nor disliked more than any other ethnic brand. Obviously, it was too late in the day for schools or bus stops. The trick was to be where the kids were numerous and the parents lax. A lot of it was just luck, too, though. The tequila consolidated him in a wonderful way, compressing him into a single, purposeful unit of acquisition. He was back in the hunt. The first order of business was to stop at a pet store and get a leash and a little collar, and maybe some of those little poopie tissues that come in the round plastic eggs like the rubber snakes in the vending machines used to. He had once purchased a realistic rubber coral snake for a quarter.

“You girls can get expensive,” he remarked to the dog.

Loretta yawned, then looked at him and wagged her tail.

Hypok looked out at the traffic-swelled County of Orange as he crept down the 55. It wasn’t his idea of a good place to live, really, because it was expensive, fast paced and filled with successful, hardworking, narrow-minded people. They wanted it all, and believed they deserved it. Real consumers, reeking of entitlement. One of the upsides was that there was plenty of work if you needed it. The other upside was that these “master-planned communities” were dandy breeding pens for middle-class human beings, who tended to produce attractive, healthy offspring. So, it was a trade-off. But compared to Missouri or Arkansas or Georgia or Florida or Texas, Orange County was pretty good. The parents here were a lot more careless than you might think, which he attributed to a general arrogance in baby boom adults who were themselves just older, privileged children. They thought they owned the whole fucking world. He thought about his next place, wondering if a more rural but growing metropolitan area — like Portland, Oregon, or Denver, Colorado — might give him the sense of nature that he really liked, along with a suitable population base for successful work. He briefly entertained an old fantasy: sell house and most belongings, buy big pickup with camper on it, buy small trailer to tow behind the pickup and go around the states taking choice Items into the camper bed, allowing them to enjoy his company, then letting them have free run of the trailer for as long as they could until they met up with Moloch — the full-time tenant of the trailer. He loved the idea — it was the RV lifestyle they were always talking about on the radio, with a wrinkle. But he knew he’d miss the comforts of a true home. That’s why he’d retracted Collette’s listing, because of the comforts of Wytton Street. But the current fact of the matter was that the heat was on here in OC, and he’d either have to move, quit or get caught. His days of carefree anonymity were over. Another Item or two collected, and that would be about it. There was no reason to press something when the odds were growing against you. But that was easy to say and harder to do, when every cell, nerve and corpuscle in your body was screaming out for the same thing: love, touch, release.

Hypok continued down the 55 to the 405, heading for Fashion Island, an outdoor mall in Newport Beach that had a pet store. He could kill two birds with one stone: get Loretta outfitted properly, and troll for Items right there in the mall until security threw him out for having a dog. If he explained he just bought the dog at the store, it might buy him a little leeway. Fashion Island was a ritzy place, not as crowded with kids and moms as a run-of-the-mill suburban mall, but it had some things going for it: (1) parking places very close to some of the store entrances, (2) dozens of entrances/exits as opposed to the limited number — usually four to six — found in an indoor mall, (3) the pet store, (4) an outdoor, relaxed, adult-oriented atmosphere that distracted parents with products and made them lax, (5) healthy, nutritionally advantaged Items, and (6) plenty of single guys around for cover. This time of day wasn’t a good one for Fashion Island, Hypok conceded, but if he didn’t have any luck by six-thirty, the movie theaters, amusement parks, stadiums and entertainment arenas would be heating up by then, as well as all those wonderful fast-food restaurants that featured playgrounds for the kiddies.

He cruised the parking lot near the Robinson’s/May store, a prime place to be if he got lucky. Circling the two best rows for the third time, Hypok suddenly felt a jolt of anger passing through him: a tensing of his muscles, a dimming of his vision, a huge desire to strike or throttle something living — the dog next to him, for instance — then it was gone as quick as it came on and he calmed himself with another swig of warm tequila as he waited for a fat-assed Japanese luxury sedan to vacate a space so he could pull in.

He ran a tender hand over Loretta’s tiny hairy head. She shivered. He licked his finger and offered it to her. Lick, lick. Ohhh ...

Out of the van, lock the door, Loretta held to his side like a football. Just a few steps and he was into the sensual cloister of the mall, all perfume and product and groomed human beings, corporate America pandering to the bored and prosperous, Hypok’s natural instincts isolating the blonde with the stroller; the frizzy-haired brunette with a daughter on each hand checking the curios in the From Russia with Love booth; the portly third-world nanny guiding a young son and daughter behind a speeding mother who was already through the doors of the Express store offering 33 percent off swimwear and a buy-two-get-one-at-half-price deal on “summer casuals.” Hypok noted the five-year-old Item (red dress, ribbon in hair) nearly a hundred yards ahead of him; the seven-year-old (pink shorts, pink blouse) trailing its father into a department store; the four-year-old (denim pants and matching oversize jacket) standing alone by the leather sandal booth and looking very enticing indeed. He approached. He stopped about ten feet behind it. He set down Loretta and started cooing at her. She wiggled, jumped up to lick him, then began to wander away with a precarious sideways puppy canter that brought a smile to Hypok’s face.

“Lo rett a!” he ordered calmly. “Come back here, little girl!”

The four-year-old turned as if on command — they often responded to a masculine voice at that age, especially if their parents were already divorced — and it looked quickly at Hypok, then at Loretta. Its face broke into a smile bright and warm as a Death Valley sunrise. It slapped over to Loretta in its little sandaled feet and bent down, oversized jacket covering most of its pale, chubby legs. Dinosaur Band-Aid, lower right calf, freshly applied, no peripheral dirt buildup yet. Loretta was jumping up to lick the Item. Her tail wagged over her back. Hypok sighed and walked over to them, taking a knee a few feet away to watch the precious Item/canine encounter. He looked directly at them from behind his sunglasses, showing no interest at all in who — if anyone — might be the Item’s keeper. Loretta sprang up and down like a ball attached to a rubber band attached to a paddle. She scooted away. The Item lunged after her and fell to its knees: white thighs, a flash of something whiter between them. Loretta wiggled toward it. Hypok knelt on one knee with his left elbow resting on his kneecap and a hard, ferocious heat annealing his guts. Something of Valeen and Collette in this one, he thought, in the way its eyes shine. He doubted if this Item had the unabashed carnal curiosities of his older sisters at age, say, ten, but that was hardly the point. There were ways around that little problem. Then, the almost inevitable happened. Hypok sensed it before he saw or heard it, and he knew exactly what it was. Suddenly, a large intrusive figure barged into his field of vision and squatted down next to the Item and Loretta. It was like a dark cloud passing over the sun. Human male: forty-something, polo shirt, shorts and deck shoes, no socks, one of those come-late-to-familihood dads who were a whole lot more vigilant about their brood than the twenty-something kids who started early. He was actually gray haired. He looked at Hypok with a neutral expression, nodded, then reached out to the puppy. Loretta dropped her flag of a tail and cowed, then approached him reverently. He pet her. She peed. Hypok moved up and forward and swept the still dribbling Loretta up into his arms. He smiled down at father and Item.