Slow Burn

by G. M. Ford

  He took me at my word.

  “What about Dickie or Don?” I asked.

  “Donny’s doing the long limbo,” said Harold.

  “Trollin’ for topsoil trout,” George added.

  Ralph sensed my confusion. “He fell off the viaduct, Leo. Busted his neck. Dickie took it real hard. Ain’t nobody seen him since.”

  We finally settled on Hot Shot Scott.

  “What’s the job?” George asked.

  As I began to speak, George found a small spiral-bound notebook in the pocket of one of his coats and started to take notes. When I’d finished, he asked, “What about inside? What are we gonna do about that?”

  “I was thinking I’d fix up Frank and Judy.”

  “Gonna take a lot of fixin’.”

  “You let me worry about that. That way we’ve got Harold, Ralph, and Norman to run the crews and you to keep the whole thing working. Any questions?”

  “Who’s gonna look for the cow?”

  “It’s a bull, and I am.”

  “When do we start?”

  “Tomorrow morning. But I want to see everybody at four this afternoon.”

  “Where?”

  “Third Avenue. In front of the Rainier Club.”

  George wrote it down and looked up.

  I headed to the far end of the bar and had a few words with Bonnie. Bonnie wasn’t real enthused, but she said okay.

  He had the James Dean slouching-in-a-doorway thing down. He wore a tight pair of jeans, a belt with a rodeo buckle, and a white cowboy shirt with pearl buttons and the sleeves cut off. If I had arms like that, I’d cut my shirtsleeves off too. Hell, if I had arms like that, I’d cut the sleeves off my sport coats.

  “Why don’t ya just take a minute and have you a good look,” he said. “That way, we won’t be spendin’ our quality time together with you sneakin’ peaks at me, okay, podna?” I thought his finishing grimace might have been a smile. It was hard to tell.

  The face looked like it had been assembled from mismatched parts and, as such, gave conflicting impressions. A vertical scar ran the length, coming out from under his sandy pompadour and eventually disappearing beneath his chin. The scar had puckered an area of skin beneath his left eye, forming a pink teardrop of flesh that seemed to be forever rolling down his ruined cheek. A second, angrier scar ran from the corner of his mouth back under his ear, pulling his lips into an insincere grin. His right ear was fully an inch higher than his left. The patches of skin through which the scars did not pass seemed to have small pieces of gravel sewn beneath the surface.

  He gave me a lopsided grin. “Always wear your seat belt, podna.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I promised.

  It was as if, somewhere inside, a switch was flipped.

  “Show’s over,” he said suddenly. “Whacchu want?”

  “I want to see Mr. Del Fuego.”

  “Lots of folks wanna see ol’ Jackeroo.”

  “I’m Leo Waterman,” I said. “I’m here about security for the convention.” I handed him my handy new credentials. He took only the briefest glance before handing it back.

  He stuck out his hand. “Rickey Ray Tolliver,” he said. His hand was callused to something more akin to weathered bone than to flesh, but his grip was light. “They called about you sometime earlier, podna. Come on in, the Jackster wants to have a word with ya.”

  He swung the door aside and stepped back.

  I walked through an ornate vestibule into a large central room. Maybe thirty-five by forty-five. Furniture out away from the walls. Three separate seating areas, one with its own little library corner, a full bar, beige wool carpet up to my ankles that ran down the wide hall, off the back of the room that must lead to the five bedrooms.

  He was about sixty, wearing a fire engine–red suit over a ruffled tuxedo shirt that he wore unbuttoned nearly to his navel. I’d never seen a grown man in a red suit before, but somehow, on him, it seemed to work. Probably because it matched his eyes and his face. His thick head of white hair was welded in place, except for a single shock up near the front that he allowed to fall partially over one eye, lending, he probably imagined, a certain boyish charm to his otherwise dissolute appearance.

  He was on the phone.

  “I’ll tell you what, then, Myron. You just tell them to run what they been paid for. We’re paid up through Wednesday. They don’t wanna renew the ad, then fuck ’em. Be too damn late by that time anyway. Heh, heh, heh. By the time those damn fools get their shit together, we’ll have his big brisket broiled.” He pushed the off button and snapped the cell phone shut. He saw me and scowled.

  “Rickey Ray…” he began.

  Tolliver stepped out from behind me. “Name’s Leo Waterman, Jack. He’s the guy from convention security.”

  A grin split his face. “Well, hell’s bells, why didn’t you say so, Rickey Ray.” He started across the room toward me. “Get Mr. Waterman here a drink, boy,” he said.

  Tolliver headed for the bar. I caught his eye. “Mineral water,” I said. “Something like that.” He winked his injured eye.

  Jack Del Fuego threw an arm around my shoulder and began hustling me toward the center of the room. “Yer not a teetotaler, now, are ya, Waterman?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Just getting older and got a long day in front of me, is all. I start drinking this time of day, I’ll have to grab a nap.”

  He clapped me on the back. “Glad to hear it,” he said. “Can’t trust a teetotaler. They’re damn near as bad as them vegetarians and animal rights assholes. Enough to puke a buzzard, if ya ask me.”

  When I seemed to agree, he gave me the canned spiel, in the third person, referring to himself as “ol’ Jack.” How ol’ Jack started out with a little joint in Austin, Texas, and built it into a thirty-three-store chain. How ol’ Jackeroo had been betrayed from within. How the world would soon tire of what he called Abby’s “Styrofoam steaks.” How his betrayers had grossly underestimated the ol’ Jackalope’s legendary resiliency and would now face the wrath of the Jackster.

  Rickey Ray produced a lemon-lime water over ice and handed it to me. Jack waited until I had swallowed half of it and then leaned close.

  “You been over to see the Meyerson midget yet?” he asked.

  “No, sir, I haven’t,” I said.

  “Don’t be listenin’ to her bullshit, now, boy. That little shit got more stories than the naked city. She starts runnin’ me down, tellin’ stories, all that, you just ask her about the bone.”

  “The bone?”

  “The pork chop bone her husband, Lutz, choked to death on.”

  “What about it?”

  “She had it gold plated. Used it for a key chain.”

  I held his gaze. “Come on. Really?”

  “Used to give out little bronze replicas to her employees, you know, like for promotions and employee of the month and that stuff.”

  “Sounds like one of those stories to me,” I said.

  He took the arm that wasn’t around my shoulder and held it up.

  “As God is my witness,” he said, “I will, of course, allow you to draw your own conclusions as to how that big old bone got stuck that far down that man’s skinny little throat.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “She starts runnin’ me down on my parentin’ skills, snivelin’ about how I didn’t do right by my stepkids and all that other crap of hers, you just ask her about that daughter of hers that she don’t talk to no more. Nice girl, name of Penny. Married some kind of tradesman. The Meyerson hag dropped her like a hot potato. Couldn’t stand to have no blue-collar trash in the family. No, sir. You ask her about that.”

  I swore to wedge it in at the first conversational break.

  “Now, I don’t know what you know about my present situation…” he said. “I got me some real security problems.” He shot a quick glance at Rickey Ray. “Not the personal kind, ya know. Ol’ Rickey Ray here’s more’n capable of watchin’ out for my big ass. Three-t
ime Ultimate Fighting Challenge champeen. Nobody else ever won it twice. Got him every kinda belt in every goddamn gook martial arts discipline known to man. The problem I got is—”

  Before he could continue, the lock in the hall door snapped and a tall blonde woman bustled through the door, followed by a moving pile of bags and packages. Nordstrom, The Bon Marché, Barneys, Helen’s, of course. Downtown Retail grazing at its finest.

  “Rickey Ray,” she wailed. “Help Bart here for a sec, will ya, honey?” Tolliver didn’t move a muscle.

  Even without the platform shoes and the hair, she must have been the better part of six one or two. Long in the leg and narrow in the hip, she wore a blue spandex jumpsuit so tight that when she turned back toward her packages, I could tell that her brassiere was a two-snap model and that she was wearing a pair of those user-friendly thong underpants. She had a feathered-back pile of bleached hair and a set of those butterfly eyelashes so favored by the wives of TV preachers. Farrah Fawcett meets Tammy Faye Bakker.

  She swiveled forward. “Rickey Ray,” she insisted.

  “I tole you before, darlin’,” Jack said. “Rickey Ray is my driver and my bodyguard, not your cock of the month. Ol’ Bart here needs help, get him a boyfriend of his own.”

  She turned in an instant, dipping into the tote bag that swung from her elbow and coming out with a single sheet of paper. She waved the paper in front of her as she crossed the room.

  “Need I remind you?” she said. “Need I remind you? You forget what the judge told you the last time? You that dim or what?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “’Course you are. Why in hell am I asking myself that? You’d think I’d know by now. You wasn’t that damn dumb, you wouldn’t have run the business into the ground, now, would you?”

  Jack and Rickey Ray exchanged tired glances. She kept at it. “Rickey Ray is paid by the company. I am one half of that company. He works as much for me as he does for you, and right now I want him to…”

  It appeared to be some sort of court document she was waving. It was laminated and made a wooga-wooga sound as she flapped it around.

  She noticed me for the first time. “And who in hell is this?”

  “He’s with convention security,” Jack said.

  “Security, you say? Well, hell, you could sure use all the help you can get there, Sparky.”

  She stepped my way. “Dixie Dormer,” she said.

  “Leo Waterman.”

  We shook hands.

  “I had the great misfortune to be married to this idiot a while back. Quite a while,” she added. “Old Jack here likes his honeys just barely growed up and haired over. The fresher outta high school, the better the old boy likes ’em. Ain’t that right, Jackeroo?”

  The lack of a reaction did not slow her down.

  “Technically speaking, half the restaurants are mine. Community property, ya know? ’Ceptin’ if I leave birdbrain here alone, there won’t be no damn restaurants to be half of. Be like his poor first wife, poor soul. He may have snookered her, but he sure as hell ain’t gonna snooker me. I figured if I didn’t take the bull by the horns, so to speak, and make damn sure he don’t screw up the rest of it, I’d be out on the street.”

  “Where, as I recall, you’d feel right at home,” Jack sneered.

  “Got a court order.” She waved it again. “No company business can be conducted unless I’m there.”

  “Laminated?” I asked.

  “Shit for brains kept tearing it up,” she explained. “Like that’d make it go away or somethin’. Had it done in clear Kevlar. Not even Jo Jo the Dogfaced Boy over there can tear it up now.”

  I made it a point not to look over at Rickey Ray.

  She hollered over my shoulder. “Bart! Don’t just stand there like a bump on a log; take that stuff down to the room.”

  The pile of bags and packages began to move across the carpet. From what I could see, Bart was an attractive young fellow of about twenty-five, six feet or so, with a slicked-back head of black hair and a pair of thin, hairless forearms.

  Dixie Dormer focused on me again. “He tell you how we can’t take a crap over here without the Meyerson camp knowing whether it was one lump or two? He tell you that? He tell you those people are kicking our asses in damn near every market because they always know ahead of time what we’re gonna do? He tell you he’s got us in hock up to our asses and if this Seattle store ain’t a great big hit, we may all end up wearin’ paper hats? Security, my ass.”

  Without another word, she brushed past me and started after Bart, who had bumped his way around the corner and moved down the hall.

  “You so much as break wind without me being there, Jack, and I’m going to haul your big ass back to jail,” she said over her shoulder.

  Jack opened his mouth, remembered I was there, and, instead, went trotting down the hall in her wake. I could hear his plea.

  “I can’t operate this way, Dixie. It’s all gonna go sour. You’re just gonna have to take a smaller part here.”

  “Trust me, Jack,” she said. “You got a small enough part for the both of us.”

  I missed whatever was said next. As I stood still and tried to catch the receding voices, a head popped up over on my left. Visible above the carved wood border on the Victorian sofa was a lustrous mane of sandy-brown hair, connected to a rather lustrous young woman. She must have been lying down. “Poor Jack,” she said, rising.

  I thought I heard Rickey Ray chuckle as she came around the edge of the sofa. “Sorry if I startled you,” she said.

  “No problem,” I said.

  “I’m Candace Atherton.”

  She was maybe thirty and a beautiful girl. A lithe five-ten, in a white silk blouse, a blue cashmere cardigan, and a pair of loose-fitting chinos. She eased herself across the room in my direction, her movements far too graceful to be considered common locomotion.

  “I’m afraid I’m what Miss Donner so prosaically referred to as Jack’s latest high school honey.”

  “It’s been a while,” I said, “but I don’t remember anything even vaguely like you in my high school.”

  “I suppose I’ll take that as a compliment, Mr….”

  “Waterman,” I said. “Leo Waterman, and please do.”

  From the far end of the hall, a garbled mix of raised voices filtered our way. “How long has this been going on?” I asked.

  “She got the court order six weeks ago in Dallas,” Rickey Ray said. “Been dogging us ever since.”

  “Poor Jack,” the woman said again.

  “You ought to be around when she follows him into the toilet,” said Rickey Ray.

  “Noooo…”

  “There’s a phone in the toilet,” Candace Atherton said.

  “’Cause she knows ol’ Jackeroo does most of his business on the can. Says he thinks best in there.”

  “Oh, now, Rickey Ray,” she chided.

  “He had me throw ’em out of the suite in Dallas. Two hours later, they come and hauled his ass to the pokey on contempt charges. Took us two days to get him out. The ol’ boy was not a happy camper.”

  She looked at me. “I hope you won’t judge Jack by this, Mr. Waterman. He’s really a warm, loving human being. Kind and generous to a fault and very self-actualized.”

  “I’m not in the judging business, Miss Atherton, I’m in the security business. I’m just trying to make his visit to Seattle as pleasant as I can. My employers were concerned that, you know, with Mr. Del Fuego and Ms. Meyerson and Mr. Reese all here under the same roof—”

  Candace interrupted, her eyes wide. “Mason Reese is here?”

  “Room eight-fourteen,” I said.

  “We ain’t even goin’ to the show till Tuesday,” Rickey Ray said quickly. “I don’t figure we’re gonna have no problems at the show.”

  I pulled my notebook from my pocket. “What’s your schedule for tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Oh, Jack’ll be clearin’ his sinuses till noon, then we’ll head down to the new restaurant,
and he’ll gum up the works down there till dinnertime, and then we’ll head back here. After that, it’s anybody’s guess. Just depends on what comes into his head.”

  “Anything I can do for you?” I asked.

  Rickey Ray moved out from behind the bar, standing between Candace Atherton and me, wiping a glass with a small towel. The knuckles of his hands were buried beneath a half-inch ridge of brown calluses.

  “Things ain’t gonna get dicey till Friday. That’s the night of the barbecue. You know…the…”

  “Hasn’t anybody tried to talk him out of it?”

  Rickey Ray shook his head. “Hell, everybody’s tried.”

  “Jack’s a very determined man,” Candace added.

  “Got a head like a rock.”

  Candace Atherton leaned in close. “He was originally going to stage the barbecue in Cleveland, but there were some problems.”

  “The stampede?” I ventured.

  “No, that was Atlanta,” Candace said.

  “Yeah, in Cleveland it was every goddamn animal rights activist in the world,” Rickey Ray reported. “All out in the streets with signs and shit. Hell, we had to get outta Dodge, three days before the opening. City charged Jack thirty-five grand for the mess.”

  “You think he can pull it off this time?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “You can pretty much count on it. This time he’s the man with the plan. And the closer we get to that, the more downright interesting things’re gonna get.”

  The distant voices rose an entire octave, dueling tenors.

  “I better go,” Candace said, hurrying off toward the din.

  I watched her go. Candace in motion was balm to the eye.

  “Jack’s a lucky man,” I said.

  “Luck got nothin’ to do with it,” Rickey Ray said. “Bought her a new Mercedes convertible for her last birthday and a little cabin on Lake of the Ozarks the year before that.”

  “How long has she been with Jack?”

  “We both been ’round a couple of years. Me, a little longer.”

  “How’d you—” I started.

  Rickey Ray looked over my shoulder, “Hey, Bartster.”