“That’s not fair,” said Juana.
“What isn’t?”
“You been asking about me and you know some things, and I don’t know a damn thing about you.”
You been. He liked the way she said that.
“That accent of yours,” he said.
“What accent?”
“Your voice falls and rises, like music. What is that, Brooklyn?”
“The Bronx.” She shook an oyster off her fork and let it sit in the cocktail sauce. “What’s yours? The Carolinas, something like that?”
“Maryland, D.C.”
“You sound plenty Southern to me. With that drawl and everything.”
“This is the South. It’s south of the Mason—Dixon Line, anyway.”
He turned to face her. Her hair was black, curly, and very long, and it broke on thin shoulders and rose again at the upcurve of her smallish breasts. She had a nice ass on her, too; he had checked it out back at the restaurant when she’d bent over to serve her drinks. It was round and high, the way he liked it, and the sight of it had taken his breath short, which had not happened to him in a long while. Her eyes were near black, many shades deeper than her brown skin, and her lips were full and painted in a dark color with an even darker outline. There was a mole on her cheek, above and to the right of her upper lip.
He was staring at her now and she was staring at him, and then her lips turned up on one side, a kind of half smile that she attempted to hold down. It was the same thing she had done back at Rosita’s with her mouth, and Quinn chuckled under his breath.
“What?”
“Ah, nothin’. It’s just, that thing you got going on, your almost smile. I just like it, is all.”
Juana retrieved her oyster from the cocktail sauce, chewed and swallowed it, and had a swig of cold beer.
“How do you know Raphael?” she said.
“He came in the shop one day, looking for Stanley Clarke’s School Days on vinyl. Raphael likes that jazz—funk sound, the semi—orchestral stuff from the seventies. Dexter Wansel, George Duke, like that. Lonnie Liston Smith. I knew zilch about it, and he was happy to give me an education. I call him when we buy those old records from time to time.”
“You always worked in a bookstore?”
“No, not always. What you want to know is, am I educated, and if so, why haven’t I done anything with it. I went to the University of Maryland and got my criminology degree. Then I was a cop in D.C. for eight years or so. After I left the force, I thought I was ready for something quiet. I like books, a certain kind, anyway… .”
“Westerns.”
“Yeah, and there’s nothing quieter than a used book and record store. So here I am.”
She studied his face. “I know where I’ve seen you now.”
“Right. I’m the cop that killed the other cop last year.”
“It’s the hair that’s changed.”
“Uh—huh. I grew it out.”
Quinn waited, but the usual follow—up questions didn’t come. He watched Juana use her elbow to push the platter of oyster shells away from her. While he watched her, he drank off an inch of his beer.
“How about me?” asked Juana. “Anything else you want to know?”
“Not really. What I know so far I like.”
“Not a thing, huh?”
“Can’t think of anything off the top of my head right now.”
“Let me go ahead and get it out of the way, then, all right? My mother was Puerto Rican and my father was black. I’m comfortable in a few different worlds and sometimes I’m not comfortable in any of them.”
“I didn’t ask you that.”
“You didn’t ask me that yet.”
“What I mean is, I don’t care.”
“You don’t care tonight. Tonight there’s only attraction and do we connect. But this world we got out here and the people in it, right now, they’re not gonna let us not care. Like those two guys over there, been staring at us all night.”
“How about we deal with it as we go along?” Quinn signaled the barrel—chested man with the gray mustache behind the bar. “Sir? You wanna shuck us a dozen more?”
“Thanks, Tuh—ree,” said Juana.
Tuh—ree. He liked the way she said that, too.
On their way out the door, Juana noticed Quinn glance over his shoulder at the two men who had been staring at them all night and give them both a short but meaningful look.
OUT on the street Juana put her arm through his as they walked to her black Beetle, parked in the lot of a tire store. She was cold and it warmed her to be close to him, and it felt natural to touch him, like they had moved past something and were onto something else. He was easy to talk to and he listened, didn’t seem to be the type of man who was always thinking of what he’d say next. He didn’t boast, either, didn’t talk about his big plans, hadn’t tried too hard to impress her in any way, in fact, which had made an impression in itself.
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“I got a place down off Sligo Avenue. What about you?”
“I’m over on Tenth Street in Northeast. Near Catholic U?”
“You mind dropping me off before you head back?”
“What’re you, kiddin’?”
“’Cause I could walk.”
“Yeah, I heard you like to walk at night.”
“Raphael told you, huh?”
“And that you like westerns. He said you were reading one the first time he went into your shop and every time since.”
“So what was all that 'It’s not fair, I don’t know a damn thing about you’ stuff?” Quinn laughed. “You’re a liar!”
“All right, I lied,” said Juana. “But I promise you, I’ll never lie to you again.”
She stopped the Volkswagen out front of his place, a small brick apartment building, and let it idle. A convenience store and beer market sat closed and dark across the street, and boys in parkas were standing around outside its locked front door. The apartment units were dark as well.
“Here we are,” he said.
“Thanks for everything. It was nice.”
“My pleasure. I’ll see you around, okay?”
“Okay.”
He squeezed her hand and it felt like a kiss. Then he was out of the car and crossing the unlit street, his jacket black and flat against the night.
She drove home listening to a Cassandra Wilson tape, thinking of him all the way.
>QUINN washed and got under the covers of his bed. He tried to read a Max Evans that was sitting on his nightstand but found it hard to concentrate on the plot. He turned off the light, thinking of Juana, trying not to expect too much, hoping it could work.
Just before dawn he dreamed that he had gotten into a violent argument with a black man in a club. Punches were thrown and a gun was drawn. Then there were screams, blood, and death.
When he woke he was neither startled nor disturbed. He’d been having dreams like this for some time.
Chapter 5
RAY Boone’s jaw was tight from the thick line of crank he’d done. He unglued his tongue from the roof of his mouth and licked his dry lips. Ray went behind the long mahogany bar he and his daddy had built themselves, looking to fix himself a drink.
“Daddy, where’s that Jack at?” he hollered.
Ray couldn’t hear his own voice above the old Randy Travis number that was coming from the Wurlitzer jukebox he’d bought at an auction of the furnishings from a bankrupt restaurant. Edna had turned up the volume way high.
Earl Boone was sitting in front of a video screen playing electronic poker. He took a sip from a can of Busch beer and dragged on his cigarette. He tapped ash off the cigarette into a tray without taking his eyes off the screen. “Wherever the hell you left it, Critter, last time you took a drink.”
“I see it,” said Ray. The Jack was on a low shelf beside the steel sink, in front of a Colt automatic his daddy had hung on a couple of nails he’d driven into the wood behind the ba
r. Ray grabbed the black—labeled bottle and a tumbler, filled the glass with ice from a chest beside the sink, and free—poured sour mash whiskey halfway to the lip. He filled the rest of the glass with Coke and stirred the cocktail with a dirty finger.
“Ain’t you gonna fix me one, baby?” asked Edna Loomis, sitting at a card table covered in green felt. Edna was speed wired, her usual condition this time of the afternoon. She was stacking and restacking a pile of white chips with one hand and playing with her feather—cut shag with the other.
“Don’t want you gettin’ wasted too early, now,” said Ray, talking to her as he would a child.
“I won’t. Just want a little somethin’ to sip while I’m back at the house watching my shows.”
Ray mixed a weak one and walked it over to Edna, who stood to take it from his hand. She reached for the glass, running her long fingers over the backs of his, and clumsily licked her lips. He felt a stirring in his jeans.
“We got time?” she said, looking over his shoulder briefly at the old man.
“Uh—uh,” said Ray. “Me and Daddy are about to make a run into D.C.”
“When you get back, then,” she said, tossing a head of damaged orange—blond hair off her shoulder, winking as she took a sip of her drink. She moved her hips awkwardly to the Travis tune as she drank, keeping her eyes on him over the glass, and sang as the chorus returned to the song, “'Forever and ever, ay—men.’”
Ray looked her over. Boy, she thought she was so sexy. He wondered what she saw when she looked in the mirror. She was getting up around thirty, and it was showing in the lines around her mouth. Dimples had begun to pucker below her ass, too, and she’d never had young eyes. She did have a nice set, though, the kind that stood at attention, with sharp pink button—nips. She ever let those bad boys go to seed like the rest of her was doin’, Ray’d have to think about trading her in for a new model.
“Huh?” she said. “I asked you a question, Critter. We gonna make like bunny rabbits and do the deed when you get back, or what?”
Her mouth, that was the other thing. Proud titties or no, she didn’t learn to shut her mouth some, he might trade her in sooner than she knew.
“Don’t call me Critter,” said Ray. “Only Daddy can call me that.”
“Well, are we?”
“Maybe,” he said. But she’d be sloppy as hell by the time he came back from the city, cooked on crank and drunk as a sailor on shore leave, too. He couldn’t stand to fuck her when she got like that.
“Ray?”
“Huh?”
“You’re gonna be gone a few hours, right?”
“Uh—huh.”
“Whyn’t you leave me some of that ice?”
“You know you’re likin’ that stuff too much.”
“Please, baby?”
“A little bit, then. All right.” He looked past her and said, “You about ready, Daddy?”
Earl Boone said, “Yep,” and flicked ash into the tray.
Ray went to a large door at the back of the barn. The door was steel fortified and it was set in a fortified, fireproofed wall. He took the set of keys he hung from a loop of his jeans and opened the door, which he kept locked at all times. He went in, closed the door behind him, and threw the slide bolt.
On one side of the room sat a weight bench and barbells and plates, with mirrors angled toward the weight bench and hung on the walls. A workbench ran along the opposite wall, with shelves above it and a Peg Board with hooks holding tools. A couple of safes sat beneath the workbench, and in the safes were money, heroin, and guns. Beside the workbench stood a footlocker next to a stand—up case made of varnished oak and glass in which four shotguns were racked.
On the third wall was a single—unit kitchenette with a two—burner electric stove, sink, and refrigerator stocked with bottled water and beer. Ray used the stove to make his private stash of methamphetamine, both the powder and the crystal, which he cooked on the stove in a small saucepan. On the steel countertop of the kitchenette were bottles of Sudafed and carburetor cleaner, and the other chemicals he used to make the crank.
Ray and his father had plumbed in some pipes and put a bathroom in the room, too. It was big and private, with a solid oak door. Ray could sit on the crapper and look at his stroke books back in there, and if he had a mind to, when he was done wiping himself clean, he could just turn around and pump a load off into the bowl and flush the whole dirty mess.
Beneath the carpet remnant that lay beside the weight bench was a trapdoor. Under that trapdoor was a tunnel that he and his father had dug out the summer before last. The tunnel was their means of escape, in the event that one was needed, and it went back about fifty, sixty yards or so, into the woods behind the barn and the house.
Ray Boone loved this room. Only he and his daddy were allowed back here, that was the rule. Nobody, none of Daddy’s friends or his own friends or Edna, would think of coming back here, even if they had access to the key. Edna knew that the drugs she loved so much were in this room. Dumb as she was, though, and she was dumber than a goddamn rock, she was plenty smart enough to know not to try.
Ray picked up a set of barbells and stood before one of the mirrors. He did a set of twenty alternating curls. He dropped the barbells and checked himself out. His prison tats showed just below the sleeves of his white T—shirt. A dagger with blood dripping from it on one arm, a cobra wrapped around the staff of a Confederate flag on the other: standard—issue stuff. The good tattoos, a swastika between two lightning bolts and a colored guy swinging from a tree, he kept covered up on his shoulder and back.
Ray made a couple of serious faces in the mirror, raised his eyebrows, first one, then the other. He wasn’t too good—looking so anyone would mistake him for a pretty boy, and he wasn’t all that ugly, either. He had acne scars on his face, but they’d never scared any girls off, not that he’d noticed, anyway. And some women liked the way his eyes were set real deep under his hard, protruding brow. A couple of times when he was growing up, some boys called him cross—eyed, and he just had to go ahead and pop those boys hard, square in the face. If he was cross—eyed, he didn’t see it himself. Edna said he looked like that guy on the Profiler TV series, always played a drug dealer in the movies. Ray liked that guy. There wasn’t nothin’ pretty about him.
When Ray was done admiring himself he grabbed a vial holding a couple of meth crystals and slipped it into a pocket of his jeans. He took off his sneakers and put on a pair of Dingo boots with four—inch custom heels, opened the safe, and removed a day pack holding plastic packets of heroin the size of bricks that he had scaled out earlier in the day. He found his nine—millimeter Beretta, checked the load, and holstered the automatic in the waistband of his jeans. From the footlocker he withdrew a heavy flannel shirt and jacket, and put them both on, the tail of the shirt worn out to cover the gun. He slung the day pack over his shoulder, left the room, and locked the door behind him.
Edna was waiting for him out in the bar. She gave him a wet kiss as he palmed the vial over to her, then left the barn with her drink in her hand.
“Ready, Daddy?”
“Sure thing.”
EARL hated the city. There was only one thing good about it, far as he was concerned. It was down in the warehouse they called the Junkyard. For him, it was worth the trip.
Earl Boone stabbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. He killed his beer and crushed the can in his hand, dropping the empty in a wastebasket beside the electronic poker game. He slipped a deck of Marlboro reds into his shirt pocket and watched his son take his own pack of ’Boros off the bar and do the same.
Earl stood as his son crossed the room. Earl was a weathered version of the boy, the plow lines on his cheeks somewhat masking the acne scars, and deep—set, flat eyes. He was taller than Ray by six inches and wider across the shoulders and back. Unlike the boy, he’d never lifted a weight when he wasn’t paid to do so, and he didn’t understand those who did. A hitch in the Marine Corps and hard work
had given him his build.
“Let’s do it,” said Ray.
Earl smiled a little, looking at those high—heeled boots on his boy’s feet. Ray sure did have a thing about his lack of height.
“Somethin’ funny?” said Ray.
“Nothin’,” said Earl.
Earl picked up a cooler that held a six—pack and looked around the bar and gaming area before he shut down the lights. He was real proud of what they’d done here, him and his boy. The way they had it fixed up, it looked like one of those old—time saloons. The kind they used to have in those towns out west.
EDNA Loomis filled the bowl of a bong with pot and dropped a crystal of methamphetamine on top of the load. She stood at the window of the bedroom where she and Ray slept in the house and watched Ray and Earl leave the barn and head for their car, a hopped—up Ford parked between an F—150 pickup and Ray’s Shovelhead Harley.
Edna flicked the wheel of a Bic lighter and got fire. She held the flame over the bowl and drew in a hit of ice over grass. Holding in the high, she watched Ray dismantle the top of the car’s bumper, then take the heroin out of the day pack and stuff the packets into the space between the bumper and the trunk of the car.
She coughed out the hit, a mushroom of smoke exploding against the glass of the bedroom window.
Ray put a strip of rubber or something over the heroin and replaced the top of the bumper, pounding it into place with the heel of his hand. Earl was facing the wide gravel path that led in from the state road, keeping an eye out for any visitors. The both of them, thought Edna, they were just paranoid as all hell. No one ever came down that road. There was a locked wooden gate at the head of it, anyhow.
Edna was still coughing, thinking of Ray and Earl and their business, and her head started to pound, and for a moment she got a little bit scared. But she knew the pounding was just the rush of the ice hitting her brain, and then she stopped coughing and felt good. Then she felt better than good, suddenly straightened out right. She lit a Virginia Slim from a pack she kept in a leather case, picked up her drink, and sipped at it, trying to make it last.
She went to the TV set on the bureau and turned up the volume. Some white chick with orange hair was up on a stage, sitting next to a big black dude. The white chick was fat and asshole ugly, not surprising, and now some bubble—assed black chick was walking out on the stage and, boy, did she look meaner than a motherfucker, too. Looked like she was about to put a hurtin’ on the white chick for sleeping with her old man. And damn if she wasn’t throwing a punch at the white chick now… . Edna had seen this one, or it could have been that she was just imagining that she had.