Kiely got to his feet, began to prowl the room. Not could give you lots of bang, will.
“You think you can make this stick?”
“I’m givin’ it a shot, yeah.”
Kiely said, almost as if to himself, “Somebody once wrote there is nothing tougher than a tough Mexican.” He slanted a look over at Morales in the big leather chair. “Are you a tough Mexican, Morales?”
“Try and stiff me, Kiely, you’ll find out how tough.”
Kiely went to the door and opened it. “It’s been interesting. I’ll be in touch.”
He stood aside as Morales put his glass down deliberately on the polished hardwood of the desktop, then slouched past him to the outer office. Neither man offered to shake hands.
Kiely killed the alarm to let him out through the locked front door, reset it, went back into his private office and, almost absently, picked up the glass Morales had left behind, set it on the blotter so it would do no further harm to the finish.
“So he’s a dangerous man on the edge of stupidity,” he said aloud. “Which makes him just about twice as dangerous as someone really bright.”
The Petrock problem, for good or ill, was gone. The Danny Marenne problem remained. The Morales problem, mainly because of Marenne, was growing. He knew what had to be done. It paid to have cultivated ties with certain of the Local 3 officials.
Kiely tapped out a number on the phone. Through his window he could see sunset-stained clouds up over the city. While it was ringing, he brightened. An end run when they were expecting a plunge up the middle.
He said into the picked-up phone, “I maybe have a job of work for one of those nasty lads of yours. Piece work...” He listened. “Somebody... new. Without any... associations that could be traced should anything go awry. I can’t afford to appear in this in any way whatsoever...”
As he talked and listened, his troubled eyes had strayed once again to the light show still visible through his window.
Sunrises. Sunsets. Beginnings.
Endings.
Chapter Seventeen
Sunset was staining the bottoms of the clouds over the sentinel redwoods when O’B came around the rising turn in the narrow road. A small collection of houses was scattered around a clearing in the forest. Five of them. Fallen Tree Road just... stopped at the far edge of the clearing, so O’B knew that he was finally there.
In many ways the drive through the endless miles of silent evergreens stretching toward the unseen Pacific had been breathtaking. Breathtaking beauty of vista; breathtaking piney scents through his open window; breathtaking fear at some of the hairpin turns of the gravel road above awesome bottomless chasms.
In one of these five houses would dwell a certain John Little, who had quit paying for his longbed Dodge Dakota almost four months ago. Which made it a deadline deal for both O’B and for the bank: if Cal-Cit didn’t have it back to the dealership that had sold it before midnight of the last day of the fourth month of delinquency, the bank would have to eat the pickup. Which was a great deal worse than just eating crow, for both the bank and O’B. A man had his pride.
The houses were four-room clapboards with brick chimneys and somehow incongruous front porches. Electric ran in, and phone lines. Heat would be from the fireplace, cooking would be from the propane tanks set on sawhorses behind each house.
All five had phone poles set in the ground beside their front corners. Atop each pole was a TV aerial like a horizontal car grille, all tilted in exactly the same way, bowing to the distant Mecca of Eureka from which all programs flowed.
Smoke wisped from two of the chimneys. Lights were already on in the same two houses, and O’B could smell meat sizzling.
He turned in at the dirt driveway, still muddy and with standing water from last night’s rain, to stop behind an equally muddy longbed Dodge Dakota. Right license plate. O’B turned off his engine, got his repo order out of the folder on the seat beside him. The pickup windows were open. No thieves out here.
Except for O’B, but he wasn’t planning to steal this one; he would have waited until after dark if he had harbored such ideas. The man had stopped paying, and would know he had stopped paying.
There was one irreducible given about repos in distant areas like Fallen Tree Road: if you drove all the way out there and spotted the vehicle it bad to be yours. You could not go away empty-handed, come back tomorrow like you could in the city if the situation looked sticky.
The truck was here. He was here. When he left, the truck would leave with him. Maybe someday he would leave feet-first horizontal and the vehicle would remain behind, but O’B chose not to consider that an acceptable option. Not with the luck of the Irish he believed in so implicitly.
That’s when the guitar began to play. And the sad voice began to sing.
A good bass voice, full and mellow and sorrowful and loaded with whiskey. O’B went around the corner of the house.
On the porch a huge man was sitting in a battered old rocking chair, the ankle of one leg resting on the knee of the other, a guitar resting on the thigh of the crossed leg. The singer had long black shiny hair, a luxuriant black beard, a weather- and whiskey-lined face with full cheeks and heavy brows. His eyes were shut, his head was slightly back, his throat was thick and smooth and worked with his singing.
At the end of the verse, without opening his eyes or shifting his position, he reached a long arm down to grasp the neck of a half-full or half-empty quart whiskey bottle — optimist or pessimist — on the planking of the deck, raise it to his lips, tip back his head, and take a long swig. He said, “Ahh-h-h,” and shuddered slightly as he set it back down again.
At this point O’B, unseen on the bottom step, slipped his fine high tenor in above the huge man’s rumbling bass.
John Little sighed and opened his eyes and looked at O’B. They were the brightest, bluest, saddest eyes O’B had ever seen, deep-set beneath those heavy brows: the kind of eyes that look almost violet and always seem to gleam with unshed tears.
“My wife left me two weeks ago, can’t seem to rev up the damn engine no more.”
O’B sat down on the porch deck near the bottle. John Little grasped it by the neck, raised it slightly toward O’B. It was one of the hardest things he’d ever done, but O’B shook his head no. John Little nodded and took a heavy hit from it.
“Guess you didn’t come way out here to sing sad songs.”
“Wouldn’t mind doing another,” said O’B truthfully.
John Little’s idle strokes of the guitar strings made them moan in the dusk like a woman nearing climax. The light on the bottom of the clouds had faded from salmon to dull silver.
“Can’t blame her none. I ain’t worked in close to seven months. Remember ‘Hallelujah, I’m a Bum’?” He suddenly slapped the guitar strings and sang in an angry howl, “How the hell can I work when there’s no work to do?” He laid the guitar across his knees. “A lovely woman, too damn good for the likes of me.”