Cooksin

by Rick Alan Rice

  "What do you mean?" she asked, leaning against the door jamb for support. "He left," Py said. "He took his things and left, and he isn't comin' back."

  Tory seemed to go pale. She took a deep breath, instinctively trying to recover sufficient energy to keep her upright. "Why?" she asked.

  Py shook his head. "He's in some kind of trouble, Tory," he said. "I don't know what it is.' I think he's runnin' from somethin'." And as he said it, his voice cracked and he began to cry.

  Tory rushed to his side, sitting down beside him on the bed and pulling him to her breast. Py clung to her as a young child would his mother, sobbing on her shoulder. "I can't believe he's gone," he cried. "I can't believe he'd just up and go."

  "When did he leave?" she asked, trying to remain calm herself, to avoid letting her own panic sound in her voice.

  "About an hour ago," Py sobbed. "Did he say where he was going?"

  "Not really," Py said. "He just took off walkin'. I think he was goin' to the bus depot."

  Tory held the boy tightly, stroking the back of his head, trying to comfort him. "Why, Py? Did he say?"

  "He's in trouble, Tory. He didn't want me to tell you, but he's in some kind've trouble. The other day, while you and Pete was gone to town, a man came. He had a gun and he was threatening Jake."

  "Threatening?" Tory asked, alarmed.

  "He even took a shot at him, tryin' to scare him. Jake tried to make like he didn't know what it was about, but he wasn't tellin' the truth. He scared Jake real bad. I heard him say Jake had to do somethin' or some people was gonna get hurt."

  "Do what?" Tory asked, pushing Py away so she could look into his eyes.

  "I don't know," Py said. "I just heard him say Jake had made a deal, and that he had no choice but to hold up his end. It was real scary, Tory. I thought he was gonna shoot him."

  Tory seemed to think for a moment, then she said to Py – "Are you alright?" Py nodded that he was, though the tears still flowed. "So you think Jake was headed for the bus depot in Longmont?"

  "I think so," Py said.

  Tory suddenly let go of Py and jumped up from the bed. "Tell dad I'm going to town," she said, hurrying for the door.

  "To get Jake?" Py asked, hopefully.

  "If I can," she said, charging out the front door.

  From the pasture west of the house, Pete heard the engine of his old Dodge start up and he turned to see Tory behind the wheel, cranking the car so that it fishtailed and threw up a cloud of dust as she turned a sharp U-turn in the yard and charged up onto the county road, heading south.

  * * * * *

  Tory drove as if a life depended on it. Maybe it did. Maybe a lot of lives did: hers, Pete's, Py's . . . maybe even Jake's. She didn't know what it was, the trouble Py had talked about. She knew that Jake was a mystery and that there were aspects to his nature she had never fully understood. As she barreled down the road to Longmont she tried to scan the inventory of their time together, tried to recall some conversation that held some truth that had gone unnoticed at the moment it was communicated – but it just wasn't there for her. She had known that Jake was haunted, not because of anything he had ever said, but because she could feel it about him. Something unseen hovered over him and kept him in a shadow of true despair, unwilling to open himself to the possibility of real happiness, unable to risk any significant expectation. The two of them had never once discussed a permanent relationship, though Tory couldn't imagine that any two people had ever been closer. Their souls had seemed to meet on some spiritual plain that was beyond the restrictions of time and space and conformed not to mortal expectations, like decrees of church and state, but to higher natural laws. There had seemed to be an unspoken understanding that the rest of time existed for them, that it sprung from their union and pulsated with life only because they had come together.

  Still, Tory had never been so naive as to believe that the spell couldn’t be broken. She had only hoped, and that was all. For her part, she knew that Jake could be the fulfillment of her needs and dreams, and she had thought that she, too, could be the same for him. But she had not ignored his darkness and had not under-estimated its strength. She had only hoped that over time they could face it down together, and hoped only that Jake would not give in to his fear and flee before the opportunity at last presented itself.

  But now it appeared that Jake had done just that, sneaking out on their chance for life while she attended to her father. Somehow the forces of darkness had waited until he was alone to confront him. Like a coward, he had fled.

  * * * * *

  Tory wanted, more than anything she had ever wanted in her life, to stop him and make him face himself before it was too late. In her lover's heart-of-hearts, she knew that, whatever this evil was that could make him walk away from the love of his life, the two of them could face it down. They could look it in the eyes and banish it back to whatever hell it was that it had traveled forth from. Tory knew that together they had that strength, if only somehow she could make Jake know it too.

  * * * * *

  Jake had waited nervously in the bus depot, working his ticket between his fingers, eyeing the clock and trying to will the Greyhound in from the north, where it was coming from Fort Collins on its way toward Denver. The clock on the wall seemed to have frozen, and with it Jake's jaw and neck, as his muscles tightened to painful knots, sending trails of agony shooting across his face. An old lady seated on a bench across from him seemed to notice his condition – seemed to think that he was a nice looking man who was nervous and upset. Something about him seemed to make her want to mother him, to offer encouragement. "It's a nice day for a bus ride," she said ever so gently, offering a sweet smile, which Jake tried to return, but found that his clenched jaws made the courtesy impossible. He tried instead to return a polite nod, but he felt his eyes begin to twitch under the weight of the obligation. His mouth went dry. He looked back up at the clock to find that it hadn't moved. Suddenly a young boy, not more than four or five years of age, wearing a cowboy hat and a holster, jumped before him and fired a toy pistol a couple times into his face. "Bang! Bang! You're a bad man!" he said, before his mother came out of nowhere to pull him away. "Leave the nice man alone," she admonished, as she pulled the struggling youngster away with an urgency that made it seem she wasn't really at all that sure that Jake was the nice man she said he was. He looked to his right, where an attractive, thirtyish-looking woman stopped applying her makeup long enough to give him a dirty look, as if his kind was beneath her. Jake quickly looked down at his valise, on the floor between his feet, and he took a deep breath. Too dry to spit. His heart pounded in his chest, and the tic that had been working at his eyes now moved to his cheek. "I'm on my way to Colorado Springs to see my grandchildren," the elderly lady said, still trying to engage him in some sort of conversation, as if all he needed to relax was to get his mind off whatever it was that was bothering him. "Have you ever been? To Colorado Springs, I mean?" she asked, but Jake couldn't seem to part his lips to answer. He tried another pleasant nod, indicating that he hadn't been to Colorado Springs, though it was a lie. He offered it graciously, fearing that the truth may necessitate elucidation.

  Jake just wanted to be gone – to get on the bus and have it over with. He knew the longer he had to wait, the greater were his chances that Tory, Pete, or someone would show up and make him face-up to why it was that all he could think to do was run. And he knew he wouldn’t be able to handle that – that it would require a look at him that would be harder than anything he had the guts to do. He could almost feel the confrontation approaching, riding in out of the dust like a vengeful tormentor, unwilling to accept his defeatist thinking and his convoluted rationale. He was at stand time, and he knew it. He had reached that point in his life where it was going to hurt no matter what he did, and so all he could think to do was fall back on that which he had always done take the easy way out, but this time be so slick that somehow none of the usual scars would stick. His plan was to leap
into the void, to lose himself. It had always been the last resort, the one sure-fire solution once he'd reached the point where all hope had finally been exhausted, and when expectations were too expensive to keep. He would become a nowhere man – a "real cowboy," in a sense, which was the closest he ever figured to get to owning that title in this life anyway. He'd ride the range of vanquished emotion, and settle for less. He'd swear off love and hope and a regular life and stay out there far from human interaction, riding the ridge beyond the fray. He'd just be alone, and learn to live with it. There would be no more feelings to hurt and there'd be no need for happiness, only days in the saddle and starry nights; only private recollections without lost or lonely dreams.

  Through the front window of the depot, Jake saw the Greyhound pulling to a stop, and he quickly jumped up, grabbed his things and headed for the door. The man at the ticket counter announced its arrival, but Jake was out the front door before his announcement was even finished. As the door to the bus swung open, Jake started up the steps, but the driver stopped him before he could get on. "Hold on, cowboy," he said, putting a hand on his chest, pushing him back out the door. "We got to get some people off before boarding anyone new," he said. The driver seemed disdainful of Jake, and pleased with his authority to make him wait.

  Jake stood off to the side while several passengers disembarked and the driver opened up the side baggage compartment and pulled out their suitcases and other things. Then he climbed back onto the bus and said to those inside, "We're gonna be here about five minutes, in case any of you need to get off and use the restroom. But we leave for Denver at exactly 3:30 p.m., so don't be late getting back." Then he stepped off the bus once again and hollered – "Okay, Denver-bound passengers can board!" Jake quickly handed him his ticket and scrambled up the steps into the bus. "You get that luggage under the seat and out of the way," the driver said sternly, and Jake nodded that he would.

  The guy seemed to hate him on sight, but Jake didn't care. He figured bus drivers were as low a breed as cowboys, maybe worse, and he moved on up the aisle and found a window seat at the back and didn't give the guy any more thought. Jake had seen a lot of lonely, tough men where he'd been, and now he figured to see a lot more.

  The bus sat idling for what seemed to Jake to be an eternity. It was fairly crowded, though the seat next to Jake went unoccupied. Most of the passengers either napped or quietly read newspapers or magazines, while a few other Longmont boarders stepped aboard and searched up and down the aisle for an open seat.

  Jake tapped his foot nervously, eager for the bully driver to pull the door shut and get back behind the wheel, where he belonged. The young woman who had given Jake a condescending look in the depot boarded and walked to the rear of the bus, taking a seat across the aisle from him. She once again gave him a look that seemed to tell him she recognized his kind and hated him on principle.

  Jake looked to the front of the bus and saw the driver climb the steps and stand like Moses at the head of his flock. Using both hands, like a preacher, he counted heads, and Jake noticed that he cast a long look at the girl across the aisle, who seemed happy to make eye contact, but shot Jake another resentful glance for having noticed. The driver took his seat behind the wheel and quickly scribbled something on his travel log, then glanced once in his rear-view mirror before pulling the lever that closed the door.

  The bus shuddered as the driver ground the transmission into first gear, and just as the bus finally began to move Jake saw Pete's old Dodge come to a stop out front of the depot, and he saw Tory jump out and walk quickly toward the bus. As it picked up speed, she walked right along beside it, checking each window, until finally she saw Jake, and their eyes met. The driver shifted into second gear, as the Greyhound headed up Main Street, still not so fast that Tory couldn’t walk right alongside it, staring at Jake. She wanted him to know that she could see what he was doing – riding out of her life like a coward on coach fare. Jake looked down at her, barely able to breath, watching her pace the bus, bumping once into the back of a parked car as she walked without concern for obstacles, moving around it undeterred, continuing to walk alongside the departing bus, staring Jake in the face. She wanted to make clear how she felt, for him to see the desertion in her eyes, to know that he couldn't just ride out of the lives of people who loved him without feeling responsibility for the pain that he left behind. The driver shifted the bus into third and Tory fell back a little, though she continued to walk in a deliberate manner, as fast as she could without running. Jake shifted in his seat so he could look back at her, then as she was left behind he got out of his seat and moved to the rear of the bus, leaning across passengers seated there to look at her out the back window.

  "Hey! Sit down back there!" barked the driver, viewing the scene in his rear view mirror. Jake held his ground, staring out the back window as Tory finally stopped following and stood there on Longmont's main street, watching the man she loved ride out of her life.

  CHAPTER 35 – French Quarter

  New Orleans' French Quarter was bustling with activity: visitors from every corner of the globe, come to hear the music and take in the night life; draymen making their deliveries, stocking the bars and shelves of the merchants who made their living on the foot traffic; poor blacks from Plaquemines County, across the river, wandered into the city in search of slave labor; prostitutes, settling in for the night; beat cops, making small talk with street vendors, transferring wages to bookies; children dancing on the sidewalks for tips; musicians, shuttling their instruments from bar to bar, working the regular circuit.

  Lorenz Pico took a seat in a booth in Little Larry's, a seedy restaurant-bar that entered from an alley off Bourbon Street. Larry's was an old establishment in the Quarter, a known hangout for racketeers and crooked cops. There was no "Little Larry" anymore – he had been killed in a knife fight back in the thirties, caught up in a feud over a whore called "Little Louise." He had laid claimed to her, based on his firm belief that their similar sobriquets indicated that theirs was a relationship written in the stars, but a regular of hers, a less colorfully named Maurice Gueydan, had taken exception to Larry's advances and slashed him outside of his bar late one night. Larry bled to death there in the dark alley, even as patrons stepped past him as he sprawled there in the gutter. It wasn't that unusual to see him there, drunk as he usually was, and apparently no one noticed the deep black arterial blood emptying into the storm sewer under where he lay, so he died, drained of the only thing he ever had to offer in this life, other than the bistro that bore his name. That was taken over by his chief bar maid, a lady named Chantal Robeline, who retained the establishment's name, figuring that to change would jeopardize jinxing the long-running success the place had enjoyed. So, Little Larry's continued its illustrious tradition of providing a home base for the gangsters and thugs of the Big Easy.

  Pico ordered a Wild Turkey straight up and melted into the shadows, waiting for the man he was here to meet, another gangster named Ray Pierot. Pierot was well-known to Louisiana police, a mob hit man who had done time in Federal Prison at Terre Haute, Indiana. He had plea bargained his way out of a murder conviction, accepting ten years on lesser felony charges in return for "information" used to convict an Indianapolis businessman of having a competitor killed. It was well-known to insiders that Pierot's sentence had been light: he had done the deed – offed a rival wholesaler – and taken the loot, but somehow the hardware man got the shelf time. Pierot got out of prison several years ago, and had been lurking in the dark corners of New Orleans ever since, accept when he made brief visits to New York or Chicago on "business." Usually someone, somewhere, died. Then Pierot was back in the Bayou practicing his one known occupation, which was gator poaching. Somehow the local authorities turned a blind eye to that, too.

  Pico didn't have to wait long before Ray Pierot arrived. He walked into Larry's and was greeted warmly by the barkeep and a couple swarthy patrons, seated near the entrance. Larry’s was customer friendly a
nd always had a couple lookouts posted near the door to signal noted regulars should someone enter who appeared "untrustworthy," in the vernacular of the place. Pierot was recognized as a friend of the establishment and its clientele. He had a few words with the guys at the door, who told him where, in the darkened booths near the back, he could find Lorenz Pico.

  "Lorenzo," Pierot said, approaching Pico's booth, offering a handshake. "Hello, Ray," Pico said, greeting him with a firm grip.

  "You waitin' long?" Pierot asked in his Louisiana drawl. "I shaw hope I didn' inconvenience ya none."

  Pico shook his head. "Don't worry about it. Have a seat," he said, and Pierot sat down in the booth across the table from him.

  Ray Pierot was a big man, well over six feet and nearly two hundred fifty pounds.

  He had the sun-leathered skin of a Bayou fisherman, and the thick, stubby fingers of a shrimper, a testimony to his delta ancestry. His family emigrated from Europe in the eighteenth century and, originally, had made their living as fur trappers. Only in the last few generations had they become fisherman, which the family viewed as certain evidence of decline. When young Ray got involved with local gangsters it was warmly endorsed by his father and uncles. It meant that the Pierot's once again got the respect that had alluded previous generations, an atavistic right that was long overdue. These, after all, were the descendants of men who had fought alongside Jean Lafitte to make this country livable.

  "I got a problem with someone who's working for me," Pico said, getting right to the business. "It's making me real nervous."

  "Employees do test managemen', don' they?" Pierot said, offering a stain-toothed grin.

  "It's a guy named Jake Jobbs," Pico said. "I got him on a job in Colorado – Longmont."

  "Never heard of it."

  "It's a pissant farm community, north of Denver about fifty, sixty miles," Pico said. "I got an operation going there – livestock, trucks, tractors, farm implements. It's a big thing. There's a ranch owned by a guy named Walker – rich guy, safe on property, cash, jewelry. He's the big pigeon in all of this. We're going to hit dumb-fuck farmers all around the area, starting tomorrow night – that's all set and ready to go – but this guy Walker's the main bite."