Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

She laughed. “Right. Now tell me the one with the three bears in it.”

“You don’t give me a whole lot of credit, Liz,” the sheriff said. “Maybe — just like our werewolf — there’s a little more to me than meets the eye.” He winked at her. “But then again, maybe not.”

“That’s cute.” She flicked open her silver razor. “But let’s get one thing straight, Dwight Cole — if you come to my bed, you’d better be prepared to stay there.”

That was when Cole got up and left, arm in arm with the lady barber, and damned if Vin Miller didn’t end up thinking that it was just the opening the sheriff had been waiting for all along.

Vin didn’t even want to think about that.

So he just sat there, biding his time, flexing his muscles, hoping that the county public defender was going to be as good as that lawyer who’d gotten him off the hook in the army.

BLOOD MONEY

Her name is Jessie.

She’s about twenty-five. Dark, and thin.

Not delicate. Not that kind of thin.

Hungry thin. She can put it away. Wedged in a corner booth where no one’s likely to see her, she’s working on a lumberjack breakfast special and a side order of hashbrowns. Eggs scrambled dry and sausage and white Wonder Bread toast slathered with every pat of butter the cook put on her plate.

Damn good toast, too. Singed just past golden brown and painted slick purple with blackberry jam from little plastic containers.

Thick Jackson Pollock smears of jam. Jessie really should have gone to art school. Her mother always told her: “You’ve got an eye, dear. Other people don’t even know how to look at the things you see.”

“It’s just that they blink at the wrong times, Mom,” Jessie always answered. “They blink, and they miss the world that’s right there in front of them.”

Jessie stares at the jam. She doesn’t blink. She sees it, every gleaming smear. Darker than wine, dark as arterial blood. A color just short of black, the same color as a tattered human heart.

Just that fast her appetite is gone. She pushes the plate away and catches the attention of the restaurant’s lone waitress, a young woman about her age who is trying to brighten the day of a family whose fishing vacation has drowned in a September downpour.

Age is the only thing the two women have in common. The waitress is a granola eater. Rule of thumb for the California traveler — anywhere that redwoods grow, they grow girls just like this one. Retro-hippies with dull spacy smiles. Tie-dyed and brain-fried Jerry Garcia wetdreams.

Only Jerry has been dead a long time now.

Yeah. Jerry’s dead. But if you take a really good look at the waitress, and if you manage not to blink while you’re doing it, you can tell that he’s still alive, too.

Jessie’s stomach lurches, because Jerry’s not the only one.

The waitress tries really hard to turn on some rainy day sunshine for the vacationing family, but the suburbanites won’t give her so much as a smile. She breaks things off with a resigned shrug and slips Jessie the check on her way to the service window, then hurries off with a couple lumberjack breakfast specials for a pair of truckers on the other side of the restaurant.

At least they look like truckers. The men sit in a booth, their faces lost in shadows cast by worn ball caps, their big hands bathed in dull saffron light from a redwood and glass chandelier. Rain lashes the window on the far side of the booth, but neither man pays any attention to the storm outside. After all, this is Northern California, home of the banana slug. Up here, mildew is a way of life.

Jessie stares past the men, through the window. She doesn’t want to go outside. Putting it in artistic terms, it’s much too Emily Carr for her tastes. Which is to say that its extremely north woods impressionistic — sky the color of a dead man’s flesh, decaying horizon bleeding cold water, redwood forest on the other side of the highway dense, black, forbidding.

But Jessie doesn’t have far to go now, and at least with some breakfast in her belly she isn’t liable to faint on the way. How to get where she’s going is the question. She doesn’t have a car, and the parking lot doesn’t exactly present many possibilities. A couple motor homes, and the soggy tourists that match up to them don’t look like their Christian charity would extend as far as Jessie. Besides the condos-on-wheels, there are several trucks. Mostly chromed-to-the-tits Peterbilts. A couple of the tractors are empty. Those with loads are hauling dead redwood trees.

That’s a crime in itself to some, but not all. If the deadhead waitress is ecologically minded, she’s forgotten about it. Little Ms. Earth Mama is flirting with the truckers for all she’s worth — coy and carefree, like she just burned her Earth First! membership card.

Tips in this joint, they must come few and far between. The little waitress is giving it her best. Jessie can see that. She knows how hard a buck comes for most people these days.

Yeah. Money comes hard for most.

But not for all.

Jessie looks at her check. Lumberjack breakfast special and a side order of hashbrowns and coffee. Six bucks and change.

Jessie has money. Money that came the hard way. She’s got seventy-seven bucks in the left pocket of her black leather jacket. Lapel on the left side, there’s nine hundred jammed into a rip in the seam. Six thousand in big bills stuffed in a tear in the inside lining. Plus seven hundred split between her boots, and that’s a bitch. Her boots are too small to begin with.

One last sip of coffee before she goes. One of the truckers cracks a tree-hugger joke and the waitress laughs like she’s never even heard of Greenpeace. Hell, a couple thousand dead trees here and there, what does it matters The cafe walls are lined with dead redwood. Like anywhere else, up here life is all about money and how to get more of it. Everyone’s got to make a dollar — hard or easy — and everyone knows how it’s done in the Pacific Northwest.

You grow something, you cut it down, you sell it. Redwoods or dope. Take your pick. And that’s just what is happening now. Because the waitress is slipping money to one of the drivers, trading him cash for a Ziplock bag of California’s finest…

The big man slides the greenbacks into the pocket of his flannel shirt. “Darlin’, I’ll bet you had to carry a hell of a lot of bacon and eggs for that cash.”

“I’m in the wrong business.”

“You got that right. What you need is a growth opportunity.”

“What? Forty acres? Sensimilla?”

“Hell no. I’ll grow the dope. You grow the babies.”

Laughter splashes dry redwood walls. The waitress and the truck driver, both of them laughing hard while his hand strokes her flat young belly.

His fingers find a piercing there. That’s no surprise. After all, the waitress is one of Jerry’s kids. Garcia himself would have admired the silver belly button ring that twinkles in the saffron light, and the trucker is of the same mind. His thick finger flips the fragile hoop up and down and the waitress doesn’t do anything but laugh some more.

The man’s head tilts back as he eyes the waitress. Light spills from the redwood chandelier above, misses his face, bathes his neck…

Jessie shivers.

There’s a swastika tattooed over the man’s carotid artery.

Quickly, Jessie slides out of the booth. It’s time to go. No one’s looking at her. Everyone’s looking at the waitress, at the truck driver, at his hand on the young woman’s belly.

Everyone’s looking at that little silver ring.

Jessie wads the six-bucks-and-change check into a ball and stuffs it into the pocket of her leather jacket, the same pocket that holds seventy-six hundred and seventy-seven bucks. Twenties and fifties pinch her toes as she passes by the unattended cash register, jilting it cold.