“Put it on the table. Put your dollar bill in it.”
He picked up the dollar from the table and dropped it in the water. They sat on either side of the bowl, watching it. The water began to discolor. But not green from the dye in the money — which was supposed to be waterproof anyway. No. It was getting pink. Then red. Getting redder. Blood-red. His mother’s blood. His own blood. In his money.
“Cursed,” Yana said in a flat voice devoid of hope or pity; and Teddy knew he was going to be sick.
Chapter ten
But she wouldn’t allow him even that. Not right away.
“We have to be sure of the curse, we have to let the evil hatch,” she told him at the head of the stairs. “When you get home, wrap a fresh egg in a sock and put it in a shoe...”
“A... shoe? But... what kind...”
“Any kind. Just leave it there. Also collect all the cash money you can and put it in a paper bag with the shoe and the egg and leave it. When I call you, bring both with you to me.”
Only then was Teddy, shaking as if with fever, allowed to pay for the candles and go down to vomit out his horror at Madame Miseria’s revelations into the slanting Romolo Place gutter.
As he was so engaged, Larry Ballard was leaving his two-room studio apartment on Lincoln Way with his case files and repo tools. On impulse he drove a dozen blocks west along the southern edge of Golden Gate Park to Jacques Daniel’s.
Beverly had hung up on him five times since her car had gotten dinged up, which just wasn’t fair. Look what had happened to him — without any insurance to cover it like she had, either.
Oh, man, he sure hoped she had insurance to cover it.
Bev and her partner, Jacques, had renamed the little neighborhood bar “Jacques Daniel’s,” swept out the local rummies, put in an espresso machine, hung ferns and fake Tiffany lamps, and started serving trendy drinks like Sex on the Beach. It was not a meat market, Beverly saw to that; rather, a place where neighborhood singles could mix and mingle. In the grand old tradition, they were about to sponsor a soft-ball team.
Ballard stuck his bruised face and thatch of sun-whitened hair into the bar’s blast of light and heat and noise. Hammer was hammering eardrums on C/D. Beverly and Jacques were behind the stick serving them up with both hands, but when Ballard pushed the door wider and stepped through, Bev exploded.
“Out!” she yelled over the noise.
“Aw, Bev, can’t we talk about i—”
“Out, or I’ll throw you out. Jacques.”
Heads were turning, eyes were staring. Jacques sighed and took off his apron and dropped it on top of the beer cooler. Small, wiry, quick, balding, he once had been a diver with Cousteau. He and Ballard had SCUBA-dived together, they took karate from the same master — but he was Beverly’s partner.
Ballard said placatingly, “Bev, it was an accident.”
“My beautiful car.” Fire blazed in her eyes. Her lips were a thin enraged line. “Jacques. Do something.”
Ballard began, “The insurance—”
“Insurance? The car is totaled. Totaled! I don’t want insurance! I want my—”
Ballard lost it. “Why do you have to be such a sorehead? I mean, if the insurance’ll buy you a new car—”
The blazing eyes were on Jacques now. “If you won’t throw this bastard out of here...”
Jacques made little nodding, placating gestures toward her. He took Ballard’s arm and spoke in his elongated Gallic vowels.
“Larree, better you to go...”
Ballard let himself be herded out. If he wanted to patch it up with Beverly, he couldn’t fight her partner: he’d lose whichever of them ended up on his back in the gutter. Outside, with the doors swinging back and forth behind them, Jacques released his arm with a fatalistic French shrug.
“Larree, how can you reason with her maintenant? You should have telephoned first—”
“I did. Five times. She hung up each time.”
He said illogically, “Just as I said. So there is no reasoning with her now. Maybe never, hein?” He added, with bourgeois practicality, “Peut-être this is the end. Fin.”
“Yeah. Fin. Shit.” Ballard started rapidly away down the street, then turned back to add, “Pardon me, merde,” before going on again.
He drove right to the Montana, slid a tire iron up his jacket sleeve, and walked through the garage checking out the parked cars. No more Mr. Nice Guy for Larry Ballard.
No Mercedes for Larry Ballard, either. Twelfth floor, leaning on the doorbell for a timed two minutes. Nobody home. He printed CATCH YOU LATER in block letters on a business card that he stuck, bent, between doorknob and doorjamb.
Give the little toad something to think about.
For the rest of the night he sat in his car across the street from the garage entrance, dozing, listening to Live 105, The Rock of the Nineties, feeling blue about Beverly. She couldn’t seriously have dumped him tonight, just like that, could she? In public and everything, just because her car...
Rising sun woke him. People were leaving for work; no trick at all to get inside for another walk-through before admitting he wasn’t going to get the Mercedes. In two hours it would be assigned to someone else.
But as he drove away, he brightened: anybody who was going to get that car away from Pietro and his poopsie was going to have to be a better carhawk than Larry Ballard.
And Ballard had just enough ego to feel there weren’t too many of them fellers around.
A few hours earlier, while Ballard dreamed of hypersteroid Freddies going out twelfth-story windows in leather underwear without benefit of parachutes, Bart Heslip drove south through San Francisco on the post-midnight-deserted James Lick Freeway. His white teeth gleamed in anticipation as he took the Silver Avenue off-ramp into the outer Mission.
Just after lunch he’d gotten a new lead on Sarah Walinski from the skip-tracers. Until she’d waved her magic axe at the other guy’s head, Sarah had been a shift-worker at Bonnard Die-Cutting on Tennessee across from the site of the old Bethlehem Shipyards. Heslip had timed his arrival at Bonnard to chat in the noontime cafeteria with people who’d worked Sarah’s shift. A Polish woman as old as water had beckoned him to her table.
“Hey, you. Ya want get hold Sarah Walinski? Hey, talk Mel Larson. A driver.” She held up a hand with forefinger and index finger crossed. “Sarah and Mel like that...” She began moving her fingers in a shocking graphic rhythm and burst into raucous laughter. “Hey, that’s Sarah on top.”
After making sure Larson was out on his truck, Heslip used an insurance scam to learn from a bright-eyed personnel woman that Larson lived off Silver Ave, near the green postage stamp of Portola Playground. Tall skinny three-story wooden row-house that needed paint, ROOMS FOR RENT on the front door and a street-level one-car garage beneath. He checked through the dusty window. Empty. But fresh oil on the floor and junk shoved back against the walls showed a car was being parked in there.
The landlady had more chins than Chinatown, hawsers for ankles, and got more religion than a jackleg preacher when Heslip asked her about Sarah sleeping over.
“Oh my goodness, no! I keep a respectable house here...”
The Chicano who ran the little madre y padre down the street sang a different song. Si, Sarah live in the white house needs paint. Si, she lock up her car in that garage at night. Y caramba, she buy her liquor by the gallon.