The Last Good Kiss

“Broke that damned cue right smack in two,” Oney quickly added.

  “Plain old bulldog, my ass,” Lester said. “That sumbitch’s meaner’n a snake. You tell him, Rosie.”

  “Listen, mister,” the barmaid said as she leaned across the bar, “I’ve seen that old bastard Fireball

  Roberts come outa dead drunks and blind hangovers and just pure-dee tear the britches off many a damn fool who thought he’d make trouble for a poor woman all alone in the world.” When she said alone, Rosie propped one finger under her chin and smiled coyly at me. I glanced over her shoulder into the ruined mirror to see if my hair had turned gray on the trip. An old ghost with black hair grinned back like a coyote. Rosie added, “He don’t just knock’em down, mister, he drags ‘em out by the seat of their britches, and they’re usually damn glad to go.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said, properly impressed, then I glanced at the bulldog, who was sleeping quietly curled on his stool. Traheame caught my eye with a glare, as if he thought I meant to impugn the courage of the dog, but his eyes lost their angry focus and seemed to drift independently apart.

  “‘Course now, ifn Fireball can’t handle all ‘em by his own damn self,” Lester continued in a high, excited voice, “ol’ Rosie there, she ain’t no slouch herself. You get her tail up, mister, she’s just as liable to shoot your eyes out as look at you.”

  I nodded and Rosie blushed sweetly.

  “Show him that there pistole,” Lester demanded.

  Rosie added a dash of bashful reluctance to her blush, and for an instant the face of a younger, prettier woman blurred her wrinkles. She patted her gray curls, then reached under the bar and came up with a nickel-plated .380 Spanish automatic pistol so ancient and ill-used that the plate had peeled away like cheap paint.

  “Don’t look like much,” Lester admitted gamely, “but she’s got the trigger sear filed down to a nubbin, and that sumbitch is just as liable to shoot nine times as once.” He turned to point across the bar to a cluster of unmended bulletholes between two windows above a ratty booth. “She ain’t had to touch it off but one damn time, mister, but I swear when she reaches under the bar, things do tend to get downright peaceful in here.” “Like a church,” I said.

  “More like a graveyard,” Lester amended. “Ain’t no singin’ at all, just a buncha silent prayers.” Then he laughed wildly, and I toasted his mirth.

  Rosie held the pistol in her rough hands for a moment more, then she sat it back under the bar with a thump.

  “‘Course I got me a real pistol at home,” Lester said smugly.

  “A German Luger,” I said without thinking.

  “How’d you know?” he asked suspiciously.

  The real answer was that I had spent my life in bars listening to war stories and assorted lies, but I lied and told Lester that my daddy had brought one back from the war.

  “Got mine off’n a Kraut captain at Omaha Beach,” he said, his nose tilted upward as if my daddy had won his in a crap game. “Normandy invasion,” he added.

  “You must have been pretty young,” I said, then wished I hadn’t. People like Lester might tell a windy tale now and again, but only a damn fool would bring it to their attention.

  Lester stared at me a long time to see if I meant to call him a liar, then with practiced nonchalance he said, “Lied about my age.” Then he asked, “You ever been in the service?”

  “No, sir,” I lied. “Flat feet.”

  “4-F, huh,” he said, trying not to sound too superior. “Oney here, he’s 4-F too, but it weren’t his feet, it was his head.”

  “Ain’t going off to no damn army,” Oney said seriously, then he glanced around as if the draft board might still be on his tail.

  “Ain’t even no draft no more,” Lester said, then snorted at Oney’s ignorance.

  “Yeah,” Oney said sadly. “By god they oughtta go over there to San Francisco and draft up about a hunnert thousand a them goddamned hairy hippies.”

  “Now, that’s the god’s truth,” Lester said, and turned to me. “Ain’t it?” His eyes narrowed at the three-day stubble on my chin as if it were an incipient beard.

  For a change, I kept my mouth shut and nodded. But not emphatically enough to suit Lester. He started to say something, but I interrupted him as I excused myself and walked over toward Trahearne. Behind me, Lester muttered something about goddamned gold-brickin’ 4-F hippies, but I acted as if I hadn’t heard. I reached over and tapped Trahearne on the shoulder, and his great bald head swiveled slowly, as if it were as heavy as lead. He raised an eyebrow, wriggled a pleasant little smile onto his face, shrugged, then toppled backward off the bar stool. I caught a handful of his shirt, but it didn’t even slow him down. He landed flat on his back, hard, like a two-hundred-fifty-pound sack of cement. Rafters and window lights rattled, spurts of ancient dust billowed from between the floorboards, and the balls on the pool table danced merrily across the battered felt.

  As I stood there stupidly with a handful of dirty khaki in my right hand, Lester leaped off his stool and shouted, “What the hell did you do that for?”

  “Do what?”

  “Hit that old man like that,” Lester said, his Adam’s apple rippling up and down his skinny throat like a crazed mouse. “I ain’t never seen nothin’ as chickenshit as that.”

  “I didn’t hit him,” I said.

  “Hell, man, I seen you.”

  “I’m sorry but you must have been mistaken,” I said, trying to be calm and rational, which is almost always a mistake in situations like this.

  “You callin’ me a liar?” Lester asked as he doubled his fists.

  “Not at all,” I said, then I made another mistake as I stepped back to the bar for my beer: I tried to explain things. “Listen, I’m a private investigator, and this gentleman’s ex-wife hired me to …”

  “What’s the matter,” Lester sneered, “he behind in his goddamned al-i-mony, huh? I know your kind, buddy. A rotten, sneaky sumbitch just like you tracked me all the way down to my mama’s place in Barstow just ‘cause I’s a few months behind paying that whore I married, and let me tell you I kicked his ass then, and I got half a mind to kick yours right here and now.”

  “Let’s just calm down, huh,” I said. “Let me buy you boys a beer and I’ll tell you all about it. Okay?”

  “You ain’t gonna tell me shit, buddy,” Lester said, and as if that weren’t enough, he added, “and I don’t drink with no trash.”

  “I don’t want no trouble in here,” Rosie interjected quietly.

  “No trouble,” I said. Lester and Oney might have comic faces, funny accents, and bad teeth, but they also had wrists as thick as cedar fence-posts, knuckled, work-hardened hands as lumpy as socks full of rocks, and a lifetime of rage and resentment. I grew up with folks like this and I knew better than to have any serious disagreements with them. “No trouble at all,” I said. “I’ll just leave.”

  “That ain’t near good enough,” Lester grunted as he took two steps toward me and a wild swing at my face.

  I ducked, then backhanded him upside the head with the half-full beer bottle. His right ear disappeared in a shower of bloody foam, and he fell sideways, scrabbled across the floor, cupping his ear and cursing. Oney stood up, then sat back down when he saw the bru&en bottle in my hand.

  “Is that good enough?” I asked.

  Oney agreed with a nervous nod, but Lester had just peeked into his palm and found bits and pieces of his ear.

  In a high, thin voice, he shouted, “Goddammit, Oney, get the gun!”

  Behind me, I heard Trahearne stand up and dreamily wonder what the hell had happened. But nobody answered him. Oney and Rosie and I were locked into long silent stares. Then we all moved at once. Rosie dashed down the bar toward the automatic as Oney scrambled over it. I glanced at the bulldog, who still slept like a rock, then I lit out for open country. I would have made it, too, but good ol’ Lester rolled over and hooked a shoulder into my right knee. We went down in a heap. Rig
ht on his ruined ear. He whimpered but held on. Even after I stood up and jerked out a handful of his dirty hair.

  Behind the bar, Rosie and Oney still struggled for the pistol. Trahearne had sobered up enough to see it, but as he tried to run, he crashed into the pool table, then tried to scramble under it just as Oney jerked the pistol out of Rosie’s hands and shoved her away. As she fell, she screamed, “Fireball!” I gave up and raised my hands, resigned myself to an afternoon of fun and games in payment for Lester’s ear. But as Oney lifted the pistol and thumbed the safety, Fireball came out of a dead sleep and cleared the bar in a single bound like a flash of fat gray light. Still in midair, he locked his stubby yellow teeth into Oney’s back at that tender spot just below the short ribs and above the kidney. Oney grunted like a man hit with a baseball bat, dropped his arms, and blanched so deeply that ancient acne scars glowed like live coals across his face. He grunted again, sobbed briefly, then jerked the trigger.

  The first round blew off a significant portion of his right foot, the second wreaked a foamy havoc in the cooler, and the third slammed through the flimsy beaverboard face of the bar and slapped Mr. Abraham Trahearne right in his famous ass. The fourth powdered the fourteen ball, the fifth knocked out a window light, and the rest ventilated the roof.

  When the clip finally emptied, Oney sank slowly behind the bar, the automatic still clutched in his upraised hand, and Fireball still locked to his back like a fat gray leech. During the rash of gunfire, the tomcat had come out of nowhere and shot out the front door like a streak of black lightning, while Lester had hugged my knees like a frightened child. Or a man whose war stories had finally come true.

  “Goddammit, Lester,” I said when the echoes had stopped rattling the old beams, “you’re bleeding all over my britches.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly as if he meant it, then turned me loose.

  As I handed him my handkerchief for his ear, Fireball came trotting around the end of the bar, his drooping jowls rimmed with blood. He scrambled onto the platform bar rail, a stool, then up on the bar. He worked his way along, tilting bottles, catching them in his muzzle, and drinking them dry. Then he lapped his ashtray empty, belched, then hopped down to the floor the same way he had gotten up. With a weary waddle that seemed to sigh with every step, he wandered over to the doorway and stretched out in a patch of sunlight, asleep before his belly hit the floor, small delicate snores rippling the dust motes around him.

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything quite like that,” I told Lester.

  “Goddamned sumbitchin’ dog,” Lester growled as he walked over to a booth to sit down.

  I went behind the bar to check on Oney and Rosie. He had fainted and she lay on the duckboards like a corpse. Except that her hands were clasped to her ears instead of crossed on her chest.

  “Anybody dead?” she asked without opening her eyes.

  “Some walking wounded,” I said, “but no dead ones.”

  “If you’d wait till I get my wits about me before you call the law,” she said, “I’d surely appreciate it. We got to figure some way to explain all this crap.”

  “Right,” I agreed. “You got any whiskey?”

  She nodded toward a cabinet, where I found a half-empty quart of Old Crow. I did what I could for Oney’s foot, took off his work shoe and cotton sock and poured some whiskey on the nubbins of flesh where his two middle toes had been, then wrapped the foot in a clean bar towel. After I washed out the dog bite with bar soap, I went over to help Lester clean slivers of glass out of the side of his head and tattered ear.

  “Ain’t no ladies gonna slip their tongues in that ear no more,” I joked.

  “Never much cared for that anyway,” he said primly: “How’s ol’ Oney?” ‘

  “Blew off a couple of toes,” I said.

  “Big’uns or little’uns?”

  “Medium sized,” I answered.

  “Hell, that ain’t nothin’,” Lester said as he gently touched his ear. “How ‘bout Rosie?”

  “I think she’s taking a little nap.”

  “Looks like the big fella is, too,” Lester said with a nod.

  I thought it unkind to point out that “the old man” had somehow become “the big fella,” so I went over to see why Traheame still huddled under the pool table.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Traheame?” I asked as I knelt to peer under the table.

  “Actually, I think I’ve caught a round,” he answered calmly.

  I didn’t see any blood, so I asked where.

  “Right in the ass, my friend,” he said, “right in the ass.” Then he opened his eyes, saw the bottle, and took it away from me.

  “You drink this pig swill?”

  I didn’t, or least hadn’t, but he didn’t have any trouble getting his mouth around the neck of the bottle. Not as much as I had trying to get his pants and a pair of sail-sized boxer shorts down so I could see the wound. The jacketed round had left a neat blue hole, marked with a watery trickle of blood, just below his left buttock. I had no way of knowing if the bullet had struck a bone or artery, but Trahearne’s color and pulse were good, and I could see the lead nestled like a little blue turd just beneath the skin below the hump of fatty tissue hanging over his right hip.

  “What’s it look like?” he asked between sips.

  “Looks like your ass, old man.”

  “I always knew I’d die a comic death,” he said gravely.

  “Not today, old man. Just a minor flesh wound.”

  “That’s easy for you to say, son, it’s not your flesh.”

  “In a few days, you won’t have nothing but a bad memory and a sore ass,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said, “but I seem to have both those already,” He paused for a sip of whiskey. “How is it that you know my name, young man?”

  “Why, hell, you’re a famous man, Mr. Trahearne.”

  “Not that famous, unfortunately.”

  “Yeah, well, your ex-wife was worried about your health,” I said.

  “And she hired you to shoot me in the ass,” he said, “so I couldn’t sit a bar stool.”

  “I didn’t shoot you,” I said.

  “Maybe not,” he said, “but you’re going to get the blame anyway.” Then he sucked on the bourbon until he curled around the empty bottle, adding his gravelly snore to Fireball’s quiet drone.

  2••••

  AS THE OFFICIAL CARAVAN, TWO AMBULANCES AND A deputy sheriff’s unit, swept out of Rosie’s parking lot in a cloud of dust, they all hit their sirens at once and wailed into the distance. From where Rosie and I sat on the front steps, it sounded like the beginning of the end of the world.

  “Them boys sure do favor them sirens,” she said quietly.

  “It’s just about the only fun they get out of life,” I said.

  “You speakin’ from experience?” she asked with narrow eyes.

  “I’ve ridden in the back seats of a few police cars,” I said, and she nodded as if she had too.

  As she and I had cleaned up the mess inside the bar, moved the wounded outside, and concocted a wildly improbable but accidental version of the shooting, Rosie and I had become friends. Now we were also bound by our mutual lies to the authorities. Lester and Oney would have lied for free, just to be contrary, but I doled out a generous portion of cash to help with medical expenses. Lester pocketed the money, then told me that he and Oney, by virtue of several trips to the drunk farm, were medical wards of the state of California. The middle-aged deputy who questioned us seemed to know we were shucking him but he didn’t seem to care. He was more interested in ragging Oney about shooting himself in the foot. As he left, though, he mentioned that I should drop by the courthouse the next morning to sign a statement, and he and I both knew what that meant.

  As soon as the sirens had faded away, Rosie said, “Reckon we should have us a beer?”

  “Whiskey,” I said, then went over to my pickup for the road pint in the glove box. When I got back t
o the steps, Rosie had found two whole bottles of beer for chasers. After we drank silently for a bit, I said, “Sorry for the trouble.”

  “Wasn’t your fault,” she answered waving with a tired hand. “It was that damned worthless Lester. Truth is, when that there private detective caught him down in Barstow, Lester smartmouthed him, and that boy proceeded to whip the living daylights outa Lester right there in his momma’s front yard, whipped him till Lester just begged to pay some back childsupport.”

  “Thought it might be something like that,” I said.

  “How come you were after that big fella, anyway?” she asked. Then she quickly added, ‘“Course you don’t have to tell me if it ain’t none of my business.”

  “I was supposed to find him before he drank himself into the hospital,” I said. “Or into the grave.”

  “That’s a fool’s errand,” Rosie said with authority.

  “I was just supposed to find him,” I said, “not take the bottle out of his hands.”

  “Is that what you do for a living?” she asked. “Find

  folks?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “Other times I just look.”

  “You do okay?”

  “Fair to middling,” I admitted, “but it ain’t steady. I end up tending bar about half the time.”

  “How come?”

  “Beats the hell out of standing around Monkey Wards watching out for sixteen-year-old shoplifters.”

  “I reckon so,” she said, then laughed and hit the pint. “How long you been trackin’ the big fella?” “Right at three weeks,” I answered. “Get paid by the day, huh?” “Usually.”

  “This job oughtta do you nicely,” she said.

  “Hope so,” I said. “They might feel unkindly, since the old man got shot, and decide that I’m overpriced, unworthy of my hire.”

  “Sue ‘em.”

  “Ever try to sue rieh folks?” I asked.

  “Hell, boy, I don’t even know any rich folks,” she said, then paused to stare at the ground. “What you reckon that old boy was runnin’ from?”

  “Maybe he just needed a high lonesome,” I said, “or a running binge. I don’t really know.” And I didn’t. Usually, after I had been after somebody for a few days, I had some idea of what they had in mind. But not with Trahearne. During some of my less lucid moments, I had the odd feeling that the old man was running from me, running so I would chase him. “Maybe he just wanted to see what was over the next hill,” I added.