She sat down and turned on the typewriter. The phone kept on ringing. She kept on ignoring it.
The fat woman’s lower jaw moved up and down like a puppet’s in its motionless bib of fat.
“There is a gas leak. I can smell a gas leak.”
“Lady, there isn’t any gas leak. I checked.”
“I tell you, my gas bills have never been this high.”
Jamie almost told her where to put her gas bills, but instead just walked away, leaving her flapping and squawking like a hen with its head cut off. Let her complain. They couldn’t fire him — he was on disability and PG&E was a public utility.
Hell, he’d forgotten to read her meter. Well, it was all that goddamn Runyan’s fault anyway, showing up yesterday and threatening his kid. He pull that shit again, Cardwell thought, swinging up into his brown and tan PG&E truck, he’d shoot the fucker again, and do it right this time.
Runyan was sitting against the far door, his hands empty but great bodily harm in his eyes. All thoughts of killing him skittered desperately from Cardwell’s mind. Runyan made it worse by saying, “Somebody tried to blow me away last night, Jamie. Was it you?”
“I... I got loaded last night, Runyan. You can ask Betty if you don’t—”
Runyan sighed and looked out the windshield. “One of the others, then.”
“I didn’t tell them you were around.” He grabbed at Runyan’s arm. “You’ve got to believe—”
His head was rammed right down inside the ring of the steering wheel, so suddenly he didn’t even know it had happened. Runyan’s voice came from somewhere above and behind him.
“You tried to kill me once, Cardwell. Don’t ever lay your fucking hands on me again.”
He was abruptly released. The strength in those hands had been terrifying. He pulled himself erect. His jaw ached where it had been slammed against the steering post. He risked a look over. Runyan was different from yesterday. Harder. Colder. Cold as the grave.
“Are they morons, or what?” he asked. “Is one of them stupid enough to think I’m carrying the diamonds around with me?”
“Look, Runyan, leave me out of it, okay?” Cardwell whined. “I got a wife and kid to support—”
“Your wife works and your little girl goes to public school,” said Runyan coldly. “You draw disability from the V.A. and you have a steady job at union scale and seniority. Give me the names of the others, then you’re out of it. Unless they’re expecting me when I drop around — then you’re back in.”
Watching him walk away with the names he had wanted, Cardwell felt a great weariness. It wasn’t ever going to end. It was just going to keep on, until he was dead. He’d never got any breaks. They were all bastards, every one of them, and he’d never gotten even one little break at all, never in his lifetime.
Moyers put a ten-dollar bill into the rat-faced clerk’s paw, and the rat scuttled back into its hole. The shooting last night had to have been an attempt on Runyan, but nobody had seen anything, nobody was hurt or dead, and the cops weren’t going to waste much time on it. Runyan’s stuff was still in his room. Moyers would have to hold the stakeout to see if Runyan would chance coming back for it.
He went to the phone, picked up the receiver, was about to drop his two dimes when he thought: the drug pusher. The big bearded guy in work clothes. His suitcase had carried a broken-down shotgun, not drugs: instant, not progressive death. In and out, blip, blip, blip — very professional.
Except that he’d missed. Which said that Runyan was very damned good indeed. Well, Moyers had seen him work out on the rings. He moved like quicksilver in the palm of your hand.
A professional hit. But by whom? Louise’s Vegas connection? That seemed most likely.
None of that got him any closer to Runyan. But this might. He put in his dimes and tapped out his number. When a secretary answered, Moyers said, “Mr. Benjamin Sharples, please.”
Runyan was nursing a cup of coffee in a cafe next door to a sex devices store which also rented gay video porn movies. His two hundred from the parole board was almost gone; there was enough to pay a week on the room he’d rented by phone, sight unseen, on Bush just beyond Franklin, but not much more. He had to get his stuff out of the Westward Hotel, and he had to do it without Moyers catching on. He couldn’t have Moyers looking over his shoulder any more, because somebody else might be looking over Moyers’s. After last night, staying loose meant survival.
Three young white male whores in chains and black leather came in and took a table near his. They looked him over, mistaking the nature of his interest. The blond one came to Runyan’s table and sat down.
“Hello, darling,” he said.
Behind the eyeshadow and rouge he was not over 16, wearing a cup to make his scrotum look sexually engorged. Runyan had seen dozens of them at Q; most of them, handed around the cellblock like a box of candy, were reduced to rubble in a week. Those who survived came out vicious and usually deranged. This one hadn’t started the downward spiral yet.
Runyan tore a twenty-dollar bill in two and dropped half of it on the table along with his room key.
“Westward Hotel, around the corner and up the street. Second floor rear by the fire escape. Clean it out, clothes, a chess set — everything except the yellow gym bag. Leave that.”
“What is this, a joke?” demanded the kid in a half-scared, half-angry voice. This wasn’t as simple as opening some John’s zipper in the men’s room.
“Easy money,” said Runyan. “Somebody’s waiting outside the building — knows me, but doesn’t know you.”
“If this is a setup, my friends will hurt you. Bad.”
Runyan didn’t speak, so after a moment the kid took the maimed twenty and the key and stood up. As he started to turn away, Runyan said softly, “Your friends?” The kid paused. Runyan said, “They’re the hostages.”
The boy stared at him through mascaraed lashes, then walked out with a single scared backward glance. While waiting for his return, Runyan looked up the South of Market Loan Company in the phone book.
Chapter 14
When Runyan entered the storefront office on Mission off Fifth, around the corner from the old Mint, a little bell screwed to the top of the door tinkled. A secretary with greystreaked hair and a long nose was pounding an antique electric typewriter as if it were the chest of an unfaithful lover. Runyan’s clothes and chess set were under his arm in the supermarket bag the hooker had brought back to him.
The secretary stopped typing, her mouth slightly open so he could see an inverted V of rabbit teeth behind her upper lip.
“He’s expecting me,” said Runyan.
She pointed over her shoulder with a pencil she jerked from her hair, jammed it back, and assaulted her paramour again as Runyan crossed to the door.
The inner room was a windowless box with an old-fashioned bottled-water stand against the back wall next to an equally old-fashioned coat rack. Nothing old-fashioned about the steel-set-in-concrete under-the-floor safe; not even oxyacetylene would touch that baby.
A fleshy red-headed man with his shirt sleeves rolled up almost to his shoulders was sitting behind a desk with a brass plaque on it: PATRICK DELARTY. He had freckled muscular arms with fine red-gold hairs glinting on them. A cigar jutted from the center of his mouth as if he’d seen too many old newsreels of Franklin Roosevelt. Red brows which he pulled down over hard blue eyes in a frown made him look like a clown with only half his makeup on.