“Sounds good,” I agreed. “You’d blend in better with Check Point’s crowd anyway, at least at a rock gig. Watch how you handle it if you start asking Dunk questions, though. Try not to sound like you’re a cop or a reporter. Okay, that was the part of your night that ‘worked.’ How about the rest of it?” My tone didn’t change.
He told me what he had been doing at the Bear’s place, about Brock and the aborted dope deal. He mentioned nothing about the adventure I knew he’d had on the way here, with the three gutter punks. I wondered silently what he thought about that window shattering to save his skin. Oh well, if he wanted to believe in guardian angels, that was up to him.
On one hand, I felt relief. He hadn’t been trying to buy drugs for himself at the bar—or so he said, and I believed him. On the other hand, he’d been tackling a dangerous assignment from our “shopping list.” Too dangerous. I had figured on taking that one for myself, though obtaining an inventory of recent ex-cons in the Quarter was more of a priority. I had done that.
I told Bone about it.
“‘Juggernaut,’” he muttered, dragging on a fresh cigarette. “Jesus Christ, he sounds like fun, doesn’t he?”
“My contact said he’s strictly into guys.” I’d said nothing to Bone about the Bear being my contact or where I’d been tonight. If I told him we’d been at the same bar, he might think I was spying on him. “Juggernaut stays on the suspect list, of course, but we’ll probably eliminate him.”
“What motive could he have to kill Sunshine—that’s what you mean?”
“Right. Considering Sunshine’s tendency toward screwed-up relationships, I’d guess jealousy figured in it somewhere. But, who knows? We’ll keep an open mind.” I sipped a little more whiskey. “Did Sunshine date across racial lines? Did you personally ever know her to go around with blacks, Hispanics, or Orientals?”
He gave me an odd look, then he started chuckling.
“What’d I miss?” I asked.
Bone shook his head, still amused. “Sunshine and me were both living in San Francisco, Maestro, remember? Aw, maybe you wouldn’t understand. You don’t say ‘Hispanic’ out West. The word is ‘Latino.’ And it’s horribly politically incorrect to ask about dating across racial lines. You have to be very, very careful in SF whenever the issue of race comes up. People back there love to get offended about things.”
“None of which answers my questions,” I said flatly.
“Guess you had to be there,” he said with a shrug. “Sunshine dated two Latinos that I knew of and had a Japanese boyfriend for about three weeks, which was almost a record for her.”
“Nobody black?”
“Nope. Not for as long as I knew her.” Suddenly he was shaking his head again, all the amusement drained from his thin face. “Sunshine ... still hard really believing she’s dead.”
I nodded solemnly. I found myself studying Bone closely.
Clinical depression, which Alex told me Bone suffered as a teenager, was a serious condition. It went way beyond having the blues or the blahs, or feeling listless or gloomy. From what I gathered, it was like dragging around a battleship anchor. It put one in a permanent state of despair and dejection, where everything felt hopeless and pointless all the time.
Well ... I guess not permanent. Not in Bone’s case, anyway. Alex had said he’d been hospitalized for a year. If he were committed, presumably by his parents, then he must have had a bad case. It was also safe to assume he had recovered. After all, he’d been released. Even so, here I was sitting across from him in the booth, furtively studying him, maybe even looking askance. Was I searching for some telltale hint of his past condition? That made me a little uncomfortable. I had a past that was no doubt more unconventional than Bone’s, and he was still treating me as a friend, without reservation.
“So is that it?” he asked. “Business-wise, I mean.”
“I think we’ve both done enough for one night, don’t you?” I stifled a yawn, realizing this cocktail on top of everything else tonight was putting me to sleep. I was tired from the hunt, I thought with a little dismay. It had been quite a long time. Yet I still felt good about what Bone and I were doing. Hunting Sunshine’s killer was a positive deed.
“Can I ask you something?” Bone pushed aside his soda.
I gave him the standard Quarter answer: “Well, you can ask.”
He’d heard it before, and chuckled again. “How did you come to retire from ... your previous line of work?”
I went immediately into hyper-wary mode, but it was just reflex. I was already trusting Bone with a lot of crucial info about me. Glancing around, I saw that the drunk tourist couples had gone, and there were just two regulars left, down at the far end of the bar. They stumbled out as I watched, both looking loaded enough that I hoped they were heading home in cabs.
Padre came around from behind the bar. “I’m going to lock it up, guys. If you want to stay that’s fine, but I’ve had enough of everybody else.” He went to pull the shutters over the door and turn the key. He switched off the juke and it was suddenly very quiet in the Calf.
Bone waited, not impatiently. I gazed back at him an extra moment, then turned to Padre who was starting in on the cleaning and restocking that usually takes him half an hour at the end of his shifts.
“Padre, Bone here wants to know how I came to be retired. From the Outfit.”
Padre straightened slowly from wiping down the bartop. He measured both me and Bone from behind his eyeglasses.
“And how, pray tell, Maestro, does Bone know what you used to do for a living?”
“I told him. I told him because Bone and I are on a hunt. For whoever killed Sunshine.”
My words hung there, and Padre continued to stare. Padre was my oldest friend in the Quarter. Hell, my oldest friend anywhere, since I’d necessarily severed all ties when I’d bugged out of Detroit.
I went on. “He might even enjoy hearing the story of how I came to relocate down here. What do you think?”
Bone wasn’t saying a word throughout this, still just waiting and watching.
“A hunt ...” Padre murmured, like he couldn’t quite grasp that. “Wow. Never thought I’d hear you saying this.”
He reached into the cooler and twisted the cap off a beer. He came over to the booth and sat next to me so we were both facing Bone.
“Go ahead,” Padre said. He took a big swallow of beer. “Tell him.”
I leaned slightly forward, toward Bone. “Remember when I told you I wasn’t into the rough-off work when I was in the business? True, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t handle myself. It comes in handy if you slip up and someone you’re hunting turns on you. I learned some fighting techniques formally, when I first was getting into fencing. Some, like down and dirty bar fighting, my buddies taught me. I mean, most self-defense classes don’t get into how to handle someone coming at you with a straight razor or a broken bottle.”
Bone nodded, following. I’ d decided not to tell him about my time in the military before I’d joined the Outfit.
“One night,” I continued, “I was asking what I thought were some low-key questions in a bar. Bars are gold mines for info everywhere, not just down here. Anyway, some guy I didn’t know suddenly started to draw down on me. I’m not good enough to play around with disarms when the other guy is waving heat. So I killed him.”
I paused to pull on my Irish, to let Bone absorb that. Actually, to be honest, I just wanted the drink at that point.
“I didn’t like doing it, but I figured I didn’t have a choice and that my connections would cover for me.”
Nobody in the booth mistook my humorless grunt for a laugh.
“As it turned out, the joke was on me. It seems the guy I dropped was the vacationing nephew of some out-of-town higher-up in the business. When I found that out, I knew the ne
xt step would be for my bosses to offer me up as a sacrificial apology to keep the peace. Didn’t matter one whit that the nephew was a notorious cowboy and borderline psycho who’d probably drawn on me just for giggles. Didn’t matter the years I’d put in. I was a foot soldier, totally expendable.”
I drained my tumbler to the ice and pushed it aside.
“Needless to say, I didn’t care much for the idea. I decided to implement my own Witness Protection Program and got the hell out of Dodge. Problem was, of course, my people were going to be sending out some other hunter/tracker to find me. Probably more than one. It would be important for my bosses to make that gesture, to appease the other gang.” I fished out my smokes. “Granted, I had the advantage of a head start, plus the knowledge of what sorts of trails my hunters would be likely to try to follow. I discovered I was very good at covering my own tracks. This may be the information age and the time of Big Brother, but a man can still slip through the cracks with enough determination.”
I lit my smoke. Bone’s eyes had gotten a bit wide.
“At this point,” I exhaled smoke, “Padre comes into the picture. You want to tell the rest of it?” I eyed my friend sidelong, giving him another chance to put the kibosh on the whole thing.
He swallowed more beer. “Naw, you finish it, Maestro. You’ve got such a lovely speaking voice.”
I couldn’t quite join in the wise-ass jocularity.
“I knew Padre by professional reputation,” I continued. “Before he retired, he was making a hell of a name for himself in the business.”
Bone’s palm suddenly slapped the tabletop. “Hold on! Is everybody I know an ex-mobster? You’ve got to be shitting me!”
Padre was snickering. “Didn’t Maestro tell you, Bone? ‘Mob’ is such an ugly word. He prefers ‘the Outfit.’”
I ignored him, wanting to get this finished.
“No, Bone,” I said. “Padre wasn’t in my business. He was a free-lance identity specialist. He had a lot of status among my circle of hunter/trackers. He did identity theft—that’s stealing another person’s official records, IDs, credit card numbers. It’s all done by computer—”
“I know what it is,” Bone retorted.
Right. Bone might not have had my background, but I wasn’t talking to a preschooler.
“This was ten, fifteen years ago, though,” Padre put in with a kind of casual pride. “I was very avant-garde.”
I nodded agreement, “Padre’s other gig was setting people up with false identities, ones that had never existed before. He would build fake pasts, from birth certificates to credit histories. He was indeed an artiste.”
Next to me, Padre bowed his head, grinning.
“I contacted him. It cost a pretty penny, but he set me up. All he had to know was where I wanted to be so he could doctor up the appropriate state ID and whatnot. I told him New Orleans.”
“Any particular reason?”
“I’d visited once or twice. Liked the place.” I shrugged. “Besides, people down here keep the same vampire hours I was used to. Reinventing myself in Bumblefuck, Missouri, might have been lower profile, but I’d go nuts inside of a week. Why bother to stay alive if you’re only going to bore yourself to death? Besides, you know the Quarter. Once you’re established here, nobody will give the time of day to an outsider if they come asking around about you.”
That was certainly proving true in the case of my inquisitive friend with the silver crucifix.
“As it happened,” Padre said with a grin, “New Orleans was where I based. I started out in Texas, but that’s another story.”
“So you met Maestro when you supplied him with his new identity?” Bone leaned toward Padre, taking in every word.
“Yep,” I answered. “We got to be friends after that. Kindred spirits.”
“Maestro said you were retired,” Bone continued, still talking to Padre. “Why’s that?”
I lifted a hand. “Now, Bone, too many questions can—”
“I believe the young gentleman was addressing me,” Padre cut me off. “It happened like this, Bone. Some people showed up at my house one day, tied me up with duct tape, beat me to a bloody pulp, and trashed the place top to bottom. I thought they were going to set fire to it as well, but they didn’t. While I was in the hospital, I decided to retire. I had no idea who had assaulted me. They never said a word to me. That’s the scariest thing, actually—that kind of out-of-the-blue, could-happen-any-minute type violence—particularly when it’s directed at you. After that, I went back to tending bar, like in my college days. It’s a slightly less hazardous profession.”
He snickered again, and I had to admire somebody who could laugh at something like that. I certainly didn’t get a lot of chuckles out of my own past.
“I see what you mean by ‘kindred spirits.’” Bone looked back and forth between us. Then he shook his head sharply. “This has been fascinating, Maestro, really, but I’m going home. I called Alex to tell her I’m on the way. I’d better make good on that. Padre, think you can ring me a cab?”
For a second there I thought I saw Bone eyeing Padre in that odd, leery manner. He was getting the idea that, in the end, it may be that no one in the Quarter is who he first appears to be.
Maybe he was right. I rubbed my eyes. I was tired.
Padre unlocked the door for Bone when his cab rolled up and honked. He hopped in and was gone. I made to go too. Padre tapped my shoulder.
“Needless to say, Maestro, if there’s anything I can do to help out in this hunt, just let me know.”
It was virtually what Alex had said to me last evening. Did the whole world want in on this?
“Thanks, Padre. I may be missing some pool games for a little while.”
“That’s what co-captains are for.”
We shook hands and I went home.
It all came out, the night’s events, full disclosure, and Alex made herself very clear. I had told her about the hunt the day before. Now she was telling me.
“In on it?”
She nodded slowly, her eyes pinned to mine.
We were sitting on the couch. I’d come out of the cab, up the stairs, and found her waiting in my apartment—she’d had a key since Sunshine and I had taken her in. Booboo was waiting, too, looking at me intently with green eyes. She wanted mostly to sniff at the boots I’d pulled off my sore feet.
Booboo hadn’t liked Alex’s sharp tone. Neither had I, since I wasn’t giving her an argument; saw no basis for one. Hell, I agreed with her.
“You want in on it?” I repeated. “Good. I’d like that.”
“Not going to get all boys’ club on me?”
My eyebrows went up. “Where the hell are you getting that from?” Sexist is one of the last adjectives that could be applied to me.
“Nowhere,” she muttered, eyes going someplace else.
“Are you thinking Maestro might object?”
“Might he? I mean, to working with another nonprofessional.”
I sagged back on the couch. The air-conditioner, a window unit, was going, though I can’t afford to run it constantly like some people do in summer, those people who also get themselves outrageous electric bills. Above, the ceiling fan—there’s one in every room of my apartment—whirled. Like other features of life in the Big Easy, these are exotic at first, right out of Casablanca; then, later, they’re practical. I remembered Sunshine stepping through the door when we first rented the place, into this very room with me, both of us filled with hopes for some sort of better life. I remember her eyes, long, natural lashes fluttering as they rose, seeing that same fan that wasn’t turning then, and even so her lips forming to make a delighted, childlike ooooohhh.
I shook myself.
“Maestro?” I said, looking for the thread of what I was saying. “Maestro ... well,
he’s been retired ten years, hasn’t he? I’d say he’s lost his pro status as well. And ...” My turn now to trail off uncertainly.
Alex cupped my knee, squeezed.
I sighed. “Well, you heard what I was saying, what he told me tonight at the Calf. I believe him, by the way. Same as I believe the rest of it. If he’s delusional, he’s got people—not just me—going along with him, and he’s portraying himself without a hitch. No.” I laid my hand over hers. “What I said—ten years. Killing this mafioso nephew ... hey, at least he didn’t say the guy’s name was Vinnie. Then I would say delusional, no doubt. But think about it. Maestro retired—deserted the Outfit, came down here from up North, got himself an entirely different identity to live under ... ten years ago.”
Alex nodded, but it was a “go on” nod.
“Does he still seriously think he’s being hunted?” I asked softly.
That got her looking suddenly thoughtful.
“Ten years is a long time for anybody to be looking for anybody,” I continued. “Even if the object of the search is revenge. Even if it’s the Mob that’s looking for that revenge. From what Maestro says they couldn’t even have any leads to his whereabouts. The only lead is Padre.” Alex had shown something of my same shocked incredulity when I’d told her about Padre’s past. “If Maestro’s old cronies tracked him to Padre—bammo. Hunt’s over. So he’s still completely in the clear. And has been for a decade.”
“Sounds like you’re thinking delusional after all.” Alex rocked back into the cushions.
“No. No, not quite. But ... I’ve spent a fair amount of time with him, especially these last couple of days. I’ve watched. Just about everything Maestro does is colored by the assumption that he’s in constant mortal jeopardy.”
She shrugged. She was wearing a formfitting white T-shirt that had a wolf baying at a full moon printed on it. She looked good in it. “In a larger sense,” she said, “we all are.”
NO Quarter Page 19
