Oscar cleared their salads as the entrees arrived, then returned with a bumbling flourish to shower their plates with Parmesan. Abatangelo found himself staring at his food.
“It won’t bite back,” Eddy said, watching him.
Abatangelo speared a serving of sausage with his fork. He felt an excruciating reluctance. When he finally managed to put the serving on his tongue, what he feared would happen, happened. He put his fork back down and covered his face with his hand.
“It’s all right,” Eddy said gently. “Same thing happened to me.”
Oscar popped up tableside. Eddy assured him all was fine and gently urged him to vanish. In time, Abatangelo looked up from his hand, wearing a vacant smile, eyes red.
“Stupid,” he said. “Sorry.”
“No more sorry,” Eddy replied. “You’re home.”
Abatangelo picked up his fork. Memories came at him again and again as he ate, memories of a childhood spent in this same neighborhood. A childhood consumed with defying his father’s shame, nursing his mother’s fear, tormenting his sister, playing pranks on the phonies.
“Can I ask you something,” Eddy said.
Abatangelo looked up.
“This Shel thing. Twenty-five words or less: How far you willing to go?”
Abatangelo stared across the table. He figured it was best not to tell Eddy what he didn’t want to know. “She said she could stand to see me,” he said. “I could stand to see her. I’ll be careful. After that, what happens, happens.”
Eddy shook his head. The effect of the wine was beginning to show. “That’s no good.”
“Ed, what—”
“I can assure you, man, Shel’s in a spot. Her eyes tell you that. But that doesn’t mean she’s suffering for you. Okay? Her being in a jam does not demand a response. Ten years is enough. Too much. Tell me we’re clear on this.”
Abatangelo put his fork down. “You’ve made your point.”
Eddy leaned close, eyes aglow. “Don’t … obsess …”
Abatangelo regarded the face before him with a sudden intense discomfort. He said, “What do you suggest, Ed. Sit and reflect? I’ve had ten years of rolling things around in my head. Time for a little exercise.”
“Look, Dan, I know how you feel.”
Abatangelo cackled. “Do you, now. What was it, forty-two months you did? Why was that, Ed?”
Eddy shrank back a little. “Look, I owe you. Big–time. I realize that.”
Abatangelo waved him off. “To obsess or not obsess is not my problem, Ed. My problem is making sure I don’t fall back into the bad habit that sneaks up on you inside the walls, the habit of thinking everything over ten different ways because that’s all you’ve got the chance to do. Lots of time on your hands. Remember? Well, that’s over. At least everybody keeps telling me it is. What’s your take on that, Ed? Is it over?”
“No, not yet,” Eddy said. “Not really.”
“Aha.”
“Which is why it’s important to stay smart.”
Abatangelo wiped his hands on his napkin, felt in his pocket to be sure he had the printout with Shel’s address, and rose from the table. “There’s someplace I’ve gotta be,” he said.
“No, Dan, come on. Don’t. It’s a chump move.”
Abatangelo stiffened. “Chump move. Stay smart. You got something you want to tell me, Ed?”
Eddy looked off, trying to puzzle out where things had gone so wrong. Abatangelo said, “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, fill you in on how it all turns out. Thanks for dinner.”
“Danny, please. Sit down.”
“And the cake,” He started moving away. “You outdid yourself. I mean that.”
CHAPTER
6
Frank surveyed the three vehicles deposited beneath a pole lamp in the Lucky Market parking lot in East Antioch.
“You said three trucks,” Frank said. “These ain’t trucks.”
Two of the vehicles were construction vans. One had the shocks gone in back. The other had bald tires and trails of scaly black rust rimming each wheel well. The third vehicle was a makeshift tool wagon, fashioned from a twenty-foot flatbed with a plywood after-shed bolted down in back. As though all this weren’t bad enough, every one of them was smaller than what Frank had had in mind.
“Lonesome George must’ve seen you fuckers coming,” he said.
Mooch hiked up his collar. “Like a little cheese with that whine, Frank?” A winter drizzle began to fall. “Not like we’re driving to Jupiter.”
“There’s plenty of room, Frank,” Chewy said. He sounded as though he was trying to convince himself. “I mean, how much stuff is there?”
Frank started back for his truck. “Ever try to shove ten pounds of shit into a two-pound bag? That’s how much stuff there is.”
There was something else bothering him. He couldn’t quite figure out what it was. He stood there a moment studying the trucks in the rain, then it came to him. The tool wagon’s aftershed, it was painted a pale blue. Robin’s egg, he believed the color was called. The color was faded, chipped, stained, but even so, it brought to mind the shade of blue found on children’s blankets, painted on the walls of nurseries. He thought of Jesse, and all of sudden it was hard to swallow. The air felt colder than the weather justified.
Not now, he told himself. He reached inside the cabin of his truck, behind the seat, to remove the boltcutter. As he reached for it he spotted the neoprene case in which he kept a loaded Ruger 9 mm. With the seat obscuring him from view, he considered the matter. Like a little cheese with that whine? It was a pretty gun, a good gun. He opened the case, removed the clip from the Ruger, pocketed the clip and shoved the pistol in his waistband, pulling out his shirttail to hide the protruding grip. There was an eight ball of cocaine in the case as well; he stowed it in his pocket. Then he pulled the seat back into place, locked the door and headed for the lead van.
“Stay in a tight line behind me, don’t let anybody cut in,” Frank instructed. “If anything goes wrong with your truck, or whatever the hell you call these things, flash your brights.”
He led them out onto the Delta Highway and they followed it southeast in a chill, misting rain. Beyond Bethany they veered due south on Mountain House Road and shortly pulled up before a sprawling, shabby facility called Easy Access Storage. A hurricane fence surrounded the premises, sagging halfway to the ground in places. Inside, the storage sheds defiled like deserted barracks in the misty darkness, tin-roofed stucco sheds stained with oil and patched here and there with mismatched spackling. Hellhole Estates, Frank thought. But that was the genius of it. Hiding stolen goods worth $150,000 beneath a trash pile in the middle of nowhere.
The storage facility was but one more enterprise operated by Felix Randall. He’d bought it from a local family who’d packed up and moved to Idaho, part of the mass white flight increasingly common to the region, given the growing Mexican influx. Felix used the place intermittently to house his speed labs and store contraband. He left it unguarded on the principle he’d rather lose whatever he decided to leave there than risk handing some ill-paid henchling over to the law. He could always hunt down a thief. He couldn’t always compromise a snitch.
Frank got out of his van and walked back to the twins, telling them to stay put. Boltcutter in hand, he crossed the road.
Cocking an ear for oncoming traffic, he cut the gate chain, tossed it aside, and waved the twins on in, pointing down the nearest gravel lane. They pulled down to the last door, out of sight from the road. Frank ran back to his own van, drove it past the gate, got out, closed the gate behind him and circled the chain cosmetically around the forepost again.
He joined the twins at the roll-away door to Unit No. 209. Using the boltcutter again he snipped away the padlock and rolled up the door. The shed was sixteen feet high, thirty feet wide and fifty feet deep. It was stuffed floor to roof, front to back, with electronic equipment—one million feet of unshielded, twisted four-pair cable and assorted patch pa
nels, tyraps, Chatsworth racks. Wholesale price for the stuff was near $150 grand. Frank would get thirty for the job. He’d promised to pay the twins five between them.
The wire and panels were being handed off to a Mexican named Cesar Pazienza. Cesar referred to himself as a foreman, claiming to work for a rich hacendado named Rolando Moreira. Frank had met Cesar while scouting out lab sites for Roy Akers along the far shore of the Sacramento River. While driving around the farm roads, Frank had come across a new hotel he’d never seen or heard of before, out in the middle of nowhere. When he ventured inside, Cesar was the first man he met. After a little cat-and-mouse, they saw their way through to some business.
Chewy viewed the densely packed material with a shudder of astonishment. Frank slapped him on the back so hard he stumbled forward.
“Now you know,” he said, “why I wanted trucks.”
It took them an hour to load it all, stuffing it in as best they could. They repacked the tool wagon twice just to find a way to get it all, and all three vehicles sagged from their loads. Despite the cold, everybody stank from sweat. The odor had a chemical taint.
Frank paused from time to time to study his accomplices. Mooch in particular. Ever since the kid had made that crack about wanting a stab at Shel, Frank had been afflicted with sadistic fantasies. It wasn’t wild conjecture to believe that Mooch might be the secret object of Shel’s inexplicable mood swings of late. He had to control an impulse to rush the boy from behind and deliver one good hard blow to the back of the head.
Shel walked out the kitchen door, following her shadow down the gravel walkway to the barn. A faint wail stopped her. She cocked an ear to the wind, then turned toward the sound. After a moment it clarified—a car engine, wound out at high revolutions in low gear, tires screaming on the backroad curves. Whoever was driving preferred to redline on the straightaways rather than downshift on the turns. Probably means it’s stolen, Shel surmised. Probably means it’s coming this way, too.
The car got waved in by the man posted as a watch at the gate. It swerved onto the ranch house side road, tailspinning into a culvert and digging itself out again, spewing mud and rock till it straightened out. It came toward the ranch house at a slightly slower speed, fixing Shel in its headlights.
Coming abreast of her, the car slowed to a stop. The driver, leaning across the front seat, rolled down the passenger window and said, “Roy sent me to fetch ya.”
His name was Eustace, but everyone called him Snuff. He was the youngest of the Akers brothers, named for an uncle in Arkansas. He opened the passenger door then pulled himself back up behind the wheel, waiting.
“I’ve got a chore or two to see to,” she said.
“Yeah, well”—Snuff scratched his cheek with his shoulder—“I mean, Roy says.”
Not now, she thought, and yet she knew Snuff was not conveying a casual invite. Roy couldn’t stand Shel, the feeling was mutual, and they only dealt with each other face-to-face when Roy’d had enough of trying to get through to Frank.
She climbed in beside Snuff, saying, “You’re bringing me back here in ten minutes.”
Snuff hit the gas. “Sure, sure, whatever. I got to relieve what’s-his-name out at the gate, anyway.” He faced front and smiled a prankish smile. “Had to bypass the kill switch to get this baby hoppin’,” he said. He pointed to the steering column from which the ignition cap had been pried away. His eyes glowed. “And check out these seats.” He patted the upholstery. “Is Lyle gonna shit or what?”
“Don’t tell me what I don’t want to know,” Shel said.
“Sure, sure, whatever.”
He drove with a quart of ale between his legs, fingers toodling the bottleneck. From the look of him, Shel guessed he was in the third or fourth day of a serious tweak. His eyes and skin looked twice as old as his years, except for a scab of acne arching high across each cheek. He wore jeans, Doc Martens, a soiled rugby shirt and a Raiders cap turned backward.
The car broke into the clearing in which the work sheds lay. A walnut orchard encircled the compound, the trees layered four rows deep. A trio of bluetick coonhounds greeted them at the gate, which was drawn aside by another of the Akers, this one named Hack, armed with a Remington shotgun.
Off to the side, a semitrailer container sat without wheels, planted on a low bank of cobble. It bore on its side the slogan of the company from which, Shel guessed, the Akers brothers had stolen it: LIFE IS A BANQUET—EAT OUT TONIGHT. A power line ran from one of the bunker silos to the container, and a mushroom vent poked up from its roof. Bags of cat litter and coffee filters, bedsheets and glassware and tubing and old batteries lay scattered about. This gave Shel a pretty good idea that this was the meth lab.
Snuff drove the Camaro between two bunker silos to a tin warehouse in the back of the compound. Machine parts and a cast-off drag chain littered the foreyard. A trash fire burned in an iron drum, sending rubbery shadows up and down the corrugated wall.
The warehouse’s double doors were drawn back, and Snuff pulled the Camaro in slowly, parking on a weighing platform for cattle trucks. The warehouse consisted of one large bay with work lights hung from the ironwork overhead, like tiny caged stars. Beams reaching floor-to-ceiling ran in parallel flanks, front to back. In combination with the high peaked roof they gave the interior the feeling of a big tin church.
Music thundered from a Blaupunkt stereo. Snuff opened his door and gestured for Shel to get out, too. Jumping down from the weighing platform, he shuffled toward his brother Lyle and the truck driver for the night’s run. The trucker was a longhair redneck, the preferred variety of life-form around the Akers property. He wore grease-stained jeans and a Redman cap. His hands trembled constantly.
Lyle Akers wore coveralls and steel-tip boots. He and the trucker shared a joint, seated on a picnic bench behind a torn-down 351 Cleveland four barrel taken from a Grand Torino, stolen earlier that night. Snuff eyed the engine as he approached, jerked a thumb over his shoulder and assailed the two men with, “Got you guys some more beef to butcher.”
Lyle inhaled long and deep, snorted, then passed the reefer to his pal. Eyeing his younger brother with annoyance, he peered past him to the Camaro parked on the weighing platform. He rose to his feet and stepped toward Snuff, feigning a blow to his midriff then plucking the Raiders cap off his head.
“Hey, hey,” Snuff said, reaching.
Lyle held him at bay with a palm to his chest. “Now don’t get eara-tated, Snuffo.” Using the cap, he swatted Snuff three times hard across the face, then forced the cap back down on his head, jerking the brim sideways. “No point gettin’ earrrrr-a-tated.”
Snuff tore the hat off his head, put it back on the way he wanted, then huffed off, eyes scalding.
Shel asked: “Lyle, where’s Roy?”
Lyle cleared his throat and spat, then gestured toward a makeshift office at the back of the warehouse. Drawing an oil rag from his pocket, he wiped his hands and stepped toward the shiny red Camaro his baby brother had brought him to cannibalize.
Walking back to the office, Shel navigated piles of construction material stolen by the brothers from construction sites around the state: sandwich panels, cork tile, vermiculite, shiplap and burned clay flooring. A wood plank stair led up to the office door. Inside, Roy Akers sat at a sawbuck table, smoking a cigarette despite the fact that within arm’s reach lay two buckets of used degreaser, a five-gallon gas can and a spilljar of two-stroke oil. What is it, Shel wondered, about Arkies and this nonstop game with fire?
A lamp with a bare bulb, no shade, sat atop the table, and in its light Roy’s features seemed unusually haggard. He had salt-and-pepper hair worn long and brushed back. The collar of his leather jacket lay tangled around his neck and a rim of undershirt peeked through a gaping tear in his sweater. With a rag he wiped grease from the leads on a small electric motor. Seeing Shel, he put the motor aside, stubbed out his cigarette, and wiped his fingers. Without smiling he gestured her forward, into the one available c
hair. He pulled the cork from a bottle of Everclear, poured several ounces into a glass of ice and topped it with a splash of water and powdered lemonade. The concoction was referred to by the boys as a Peckerwood Highball. He stirred it with his finger. Producing a second glass he tinked the bottle of alcohol against its edge and looked up inquiringly.
“God forbid,” Shel said, sitting down.
Roy shrugged and put the bottle down, reinserting the cork. Given the stench of paint and chemicals in the air, it was impossible to tell from the smell of him how cranked he was.
He eyed her at length, then said, “You look well.”
“You don’t. Can I go?”
Roy emitted a raspy chuckle and took a sip from his glass. Lemonade powder clung to his finger and he licked at it.
“Sit tight,” he said. “Let me think on this for a spell.”
Shel sat there watching Roy think on it. It was not an attractive process, she decided.
To Shel, Roy had the predictable insecurities of an oldest son, particularly the oldest son of a conniving, ruthless father, a father who’d raised four sons principally for the cheap labor they provided and who played them, one against the other, every day of their lives. Roy had tried to make up for all his resulting deficiencies in manhood by cultivating a near-hysterical enthusiasm for menace. Respond to fear by inflicting fear, that was his guiding rule. Don’t get scared, get crazed. Even his brothers gave him a wide berth when he struck that certain mood.
Shel suspected the reason Roy pimped Rowena wasn’t for the money or the tawdry thrill, but for the effect it had on the men around him. It made them think: His women crawl for him. They take it. And in the lowborn milieu in which the Akers clan operated, this was serious medicine. Other men realized there’d be no appealing to Roy’s better side. He availed no such side, not even to his father, whom he feared.
Roy freshened his drink with a spurt from the bottle. He twirled his glass instead of stirring it this time. The ice made a tiny racket.
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