Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“There she is,” Walter said when they had circled around Fifteenth Street and Broadway. Two blocks down the street, Valletta Moore was opening the passenger door of an old, tired muscle car, looked like a Toronado, mottled gray and beige, streaked with green, like a slice of Oscar Mayer bologna after two months in the refrigerator. Titus and the other one fell into the backseat, then Cleopatra Clark or whoever got in and eased the door shut.

“Go,” Walter said, watching them pull away from the curb.

“You see I still got a red,” Bankwell said. “You want me to get a ticket? Police pull me over, how we going to follow them then?”

Bankwell was not afraid of Prince Walter.

When the light turned green, the Toronado was far enough ahead to be tailed with ease and discretion. Bank had himself ready, to tell the truth was hoping, to see the Oldsmobile put some evasive maneuvers into play, a Jim Rockford fishtail, something, but the driver of the Toronado, likely the very man they were supposed to be locating, made no efforts in that line. Right turn on Telegraph, up to MacArthur, then into the parking lot of a motel, the Selwyn, one of a number of fine establishments along the boulevard, looked like it catered to a select clientele of crankheads, day-raters, and the insects who loved them. The office was an A-frame, the motel a two-decker box, with a covered drive-through between them that the Toronado just managed to thread.

“Parking lot must be in the back,” Walter said. He settled between his cousins as if they were a couple of pillows and it was nap time for the little baby prince. “Go on, then.”

“What about you?” Bank said. “You coming, too, right?”

“Huh? I’m supposed to stay here.”

“What?”

“Monitor the situation.”

Bank stood there with the door open, patient. A man with time to burn. Presently, shaking his head at the low state to which he had fallen, Prince Walter got out of the car. “You strapped?” he said as they crossed the boulevard. Bank did not bother to dignify the question with a response.

In the front parking lot, there were three cars, a Band-Aid-tan VW square-back, a Jeep, an ancient B210. A housekeeping cart had the upper walkway all to itself. There was nobody in the office A-frame they could see. Two security cameras on light poles, but whatever. They were here only to pay a visit.

As Prince Walter had guessed, the covered area led to a smaller parking area behind the motel, gravel, subservient to a row of Dumpsters. The Toronado was tucked into a spot between the trash bins and the high stucco wall that kept the motel quarantined from the house behind it. The backside of the motel was blank stucco and frosted windows, a face that was minding its own business. On the ground floor beside the gas meters, a fire door warned that it must be kept unlocked at all times.

“I’m a wait here,” Walter said. “Case they see you coming, try to run out the back.”

It sounded cowardly, but it made sense, and some allowance needed to be made for Prince Walter’s likely uselessness in the event of trouble. Bank hiked up the left leg of his suit pants to take his little Beretta Bobcat out of the holster that was Velcroed to his ankle.

“Here you go,” he said, handing it over to Walter, who took it without bothering to hide his reluctance. “Remember to shoot at the horses’ legs.”

Prince Walter nodded solemnly before he caught what Bank had said. Scowled. As they went through the fire door, Bankwell was obliged to tell Feyd to shut up, man, quit laughing. They found themselves in a harsh-lit room, lollipop smell of laundry, a couple of coin-op washers and dryers. Something like a pair of sneakers was turning one of the dryers into a tom-tom. Purple tumbleweeds of lint rolled scattering as they passed through another door into a dim hallway, past an ice machine, and outside, under the second-floor walkway, right next to room 112. Aimless little flies hovered in the cool of the stairwell like the dots on a lacy funeral veil.

“You check out down here, I’ll go up,” Bank said. He had a feeling they would be on two.

It was not that he looked forward to trouble or violence. But he felt that it was better to rush up on it than to let it rush up on you. He rang his way up the steel stairs and was about to step onto the landing when somebody stuck out a leg. He fell hard. A lightbulb broke on his head. The stairway was a gong, resounding. While Bank was falling, though, he reached out to take instinctive hold of someone who turned out to be Titus. Shortie fell down beside him.

There was blood in Bankwell’s mouth, possibly a loose tooth.

“Motherfucker!” he said. Scrape against the concrete of the soles of his loafers as he reared up on his legs, flapping his necktie, flapping the tails of his jacket. Without intending to, he stepped on Titus’s stomach, and ho, shit, here came the bear claw, acrid brown slush in a jet. Bank jumped back, lost his footing, and then was attacked by a swordsman.

“Ya!” said the boy with the bunnies in his wallet. “Hi ya !”

The first blow glanced off Bank’s right arm, just above the elbow, but the second caught him square on the back of the head. It was a practice katana, see them racked in a dojo, solid wood. Coming after Bank’s interaction with the concrete landing, the blow to his head did no favors to the clarity of his thought process. Luckily, he was armed with a fully licensed Sig Sauer .38 that he was more than qualified to use. Thinking was not required.

He stuck the gun in the face of little, what was it, Julie. Julie Jaffe. Five feet five inches of redhead Mr. Peabody samurai fury. Bank could not help smiling. “Check this out,” he said to Feyd when his cousin came running up the steps. “Check out little white-boy Zatoichi.”

Mr. Peabody lowered the sword, possibly because he now had two guns pointing at him and a sword made out of wood. But it looked more to Bank like amazement than surrender. More like Bank had guessed his secret identity. Bank twisted the sword free of the boy’s grip.

“Zatoichi!” Feyd said. “That’s good, I could use me a massage.”

Feyd looked down at Titus, saw what had become of the bear claw, wrinkled up his face.

“Look at you, bitch,” he said to Titus, who rose dripping to his feet, boy full of hateful thoughts he sent out his eyeballs toward Bankwell Flowers III. “What the fuck you do to yourself?”

“It’s okay. Okay, come on. Leave them alone.”

Bankwell turned to see Walter bringing up the rear of a short procession, the apex of a loose triangle whose remaining points were Valletta Moore and Luther Stallings with their hands up. Walter held the Beretta high and crooked, one-handed, in that movie style Uncle Chan abhorred.

“You found me,” Luther Stallings said, the old-school kung fu movie star, wiry and fit in a kimono, parachute shorts, pair of black cloth Bruce Lee slippers. Gray in his hair and chest fur, more lines on his face than Uncle Chan. “Put up the thumpers. Let me get my clothes on. Go on home, boys. I’ll be fine.”

Bank had seen, not recently, a movie or two with Luther Stallings in the lead. This was pretty much what he remembered: to the point, monosyllables, the lazy smile. So either this was acting, too, or there was no acting involved.

“Go ahead, Julie, Titus,” said Valletta Moore. “Boys, go on. You can go.”

“Fuck they can,” Bank said.

“It’s all right,” Walter said. “We got no room for them, anyway.”

While Bank was distracted by how stupid Prince Walter could be sometimes, Titus woke up. He grabbed hold of Julie’s shirt and dragged him down the stairs, four feet in sneakers chiming on down to the parking lot, sneakers against the blacktop.