“Any ideas how to play it?” she said. Then, “Stop looking at my legs, you pervert. You’re practically a married man now.”
I shrugged, leaned back myself, looked up at the bright marble sky. “Not sure. Know what bothers me?”
“Besides Muzac, infomercials, and New Jersey accents?”
“About this case.”
“Pray tell.”
“Why the name Moira Kenzie? I mean, if it’s a fake, which we can probably assume, why my last name?”
“There’s something known as coincidence. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s when the—”
“Okay. Something else.”
“Yes?”
“Kevin Hurlihy seem like the type of guy who’d have a girlfriend to you?”
“Well, no. But it’s been years, really, since we’ve known him.”
“Still…”
“Who knows?” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of weird, ugly guys with beautiful women and vice versa.”
“Kevin’s not just weird, though. He’s a sadist.”
“So are a lot of professional boxers. You always see them with women.”
I shrugged. “I guess. Okay. So how do we deal with Kevin?”
“And Jack Rouse,” she said.
“Dangerous guys,” I said.
“Very,” she said.
“And who deals with dangerous people on a daily basis?”
“Certainly not us,” she said.
“No,” I said, “we’re wusses.”
“And proud of it,” she said. “Which leaves…” She turned her head, squinted into the sun to look at me. “You don’t mean—” she said.
“I do.”
“Oh, Patrick.”
“We must visit Bubba,” I said.
“Really?”
I sighed, not real happy about it myself. “Really.”
“Damn,” Angie said.
3
“Left,” Bubba said. Then, “About eight inches to your right. Good. Almost there.”
He was walking backward a few feet ahead of us, his hands held up near his chest, his fingers wiggling like he was backing in a truck. “Okay,” he said. “Left foot about nine inches to your left. That’s it.”
Visiting Bubba in the old warehouse where he lives is a lot like playing Twister on the edge of a cliff. Bubba’s got the first forty feet of the second floor wired with enough explosives to vaporize the eastern seaboard, so you have to follow his directions to the letter if you want to breathe without artificial assistance for the rest of your life. Both Angie and I have been through the process countless times before, but we’ve never trusted our memories enough to cross those forty feet without Bubba’s help. Call us overly cautious.
“Patrick,” he said, looking at me gravely as my right foot hovered a quarter inch off the ground, “I said six inches to the right. Not five.”
I took a deep breath and moved my foot another inch.
He smiled and nodded.
I set my foot down. I didn’t blow up. I was glad.
Behind me, Angie said, “Bubba, why don’t you just invest in a security system?”
Bubba frowned. “This is my security system.”
“This is a minefield, Bubba.”
“You say tomato,” Bubba said. “Four inches left, Patrick.”
Angie exhaled loudly behind me.
“You’re clear, Patrick,” he said as I stepped onto a patch of floor about ten feet away from him. He narrowed his eyes at Angie. “Don’t be such a sissy, Ange.”
Angie was standing with one knee raised looking a lot like a stork. A very put-out stork, actually. She said, “When I get there, I’m shooting you, Bubba Rogowski.”
“Oooh,” Bubba said. “She used my full name. Just like my mom used to.”
“You never knew your mother,” I reminded him.
“Psychically, Patrick,” he said and touched his protruding frontal lobe. “Psychically.”
Booby traps aside, sometimes I worry about him.
Angie stepped onto the patch of floor I’d just vacated.
“You’re clear,” Bubba said and she punched his shoulder.
“Anything else we should worry about?” I said. “Spears falling from the ceiling, razor blades in the chairs?”
“Not unless I activate them.” He walked back toward an old fridge which sat beside two worn brown sofas, an orange office chair, and a stereo system so old it had an eight-track deck. In front of the office chair was a wooden crate, and its several cousins were stacked on the other side of a mattress thrown down just beyond the couches. A couple of the crates were open and I could see the ugly butts of oiled black firearms sticking up through yellow straw. Bubba’s daily bread.
He opened the fridge, pulled a bottle of vodka from the freezer. He produced three shot glasses from the trench coat I’ve never seen him without. Dead of summer or heart of winter, it doesn’t matter. Bubba and his trench coat do not part. Like Harpo Marx with a really bad attitude and homicidal tendencies. He poured the vodka and handed us each a glass. “I hear it steadies the nerves.” He tossed his back.
It steadied mine. By the way Angie closed her eyes for a moment, I think it steadied hers. Bubba showed no reaction, but then Bubba doesn’t have nerves or, as far as I know, most other things humans need to function.
He plopped his two hundred and thirty-plus pounds down into one of the sofas. “So, why you need a meet with Jack Rouse?”
We told him.
“Doesn’t sound like him. That picture shit, I mean, maybe it’s effective, but it’s far too subtle for Jack.”
“What about Kevin Hurlihy?” Angie said.
“If it’s too subtle for Jack,” he said, “then it’s completely beyond Kevin.” He drank from the bottle. “Come to think of it, most things are beyond Kev. Addition and subtraction, the alphabet, shit like that. Hell, you guys must remember that from the old days.”
“We’d wondered if he’d changed.”
Bubba laughed. “Nope. Gotten worse.”
“So he’s dangerous,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” Bubba said. “Like a junkyard dog. Knows how to rape and fight and scare hell out of people and that’s about it, but he does those things well.” He handed me the bottle and I poured another shot.
I said, “So two people who knowingly took a case that pitted them against him and his boss…”