Hitler flexed. “I’ll be one of ’em — I like to fight.”
“No, you and me and Betty Boop will be at the back of the Rainbow — behind the stage, in fact.”
They were in the trees, where Hitler obviously felt safe.
“What’ll we be doin’ there?”
“Pretending we’re roadies,” said O’B.
Chapter Twenty-six
Maybelle finished cleaning the DKA offices before ten o’clock, almost an hour earlier than usual. Half the staff hadn’t been in. Oh, the skip-tracers, temp typists, and routine field men had, but they were shadowy presences to Maybelle; she seldom ran into them during her nocturnal cleaning chores.
Miss Giselle obviously hadn’t been at her desk, and Mist’ Kearny just as obviously had — his wastebasket had been overflowing — but not for the whole day. Bart was on vacation, O’B must still be up there in the rainy country, Larry Ballard had been in to write reports but hadn’t left much of a mess. Kenny was in Marin again for the night, and Morales had left his desk strewn with Taco Bell wrappers. Mmmmm, didn’t like that man, was after any of the underage after-school girls looked the least bit timid, but he sure knew how to work in the field.
They all did. God’s truth, they was a crew got things done; but right now everybody that counted to her seemed to be doing something besides their regular DKA work.
She turned out all but the night-lights, set the alarms the way that Giselle had shown her, and locked up. Since it was so early she took the bus — wasn’t much danger even for a fat old woman at nine-thirty at night — and was grunting her way up the stairs to her apartment by ten o’clock.
Had her a shower and a supper of leftovers, sat down in front of the TV... And didn’t even turn it on.
That had been fun last night at Mood Indigo. Hadn’t sung that way for years, not since the day she got the telegram ’bout her boy Jedediah dying in Vietnam. After that, all the joy had gone out of her, and she’d gone down, down, down...
Maybelle heaved herself off the couch, got into her red dress again, got back into her black cloth coat, tucked her black leather purse back under one massive arm, and made her careful way back down the stairs. Didn’t want to be sit-tin’ there thinking no thoughts like that. She was up in her mind these days, gonna stay up. Up, up, up.
A single lady could surely go to an establishment, have a beer, listen to all those wonderful old blues tunes on the jukebox, couldn’t she? Maybe that nice Mr. Sykes would be there. She’d had a lot of fun singing them old blues tunes alongside his piano last night. He had made it talk for sure.
Most fun in years.
The thing was, sex had never really been fun for Amalia the way it was with Ballard. Oh, arousing when a man tipped her over the edge into orgasm, but fun — uh-uh. Now it was. They were inventive, daring, they did everything together, explored everything together — things one or the other of them had seen in porn films over the years, their secret fantasies they’d never acted out before, not even alone... Quite often laughing together just at the sheer joy of whatever wonderful and unexpected thing was happening between them.
Now they were in the kitchen, sated and wolfing pasta, telling each other about their respective days.
“The Mark is going to cave in, tomorrow, over the weekend, Monday — I know they are!” she exclaimed fiercely. “We’re hurting them just too badly. Hardly any cabbies are crossing the lines, routine maintenance is breaking down...”
“God, you’re one tough broad!”
Ballard spoke around a huge forkful of penne and Parmesan. “You really love sticking it to them, don’t you?”
“They’ve been sticking it to the union for years, now it’s our turn.”
“I hope you never get mad at me.”
Her dark eyes impaled him. “Don’t make me mad, then.”
He wiped all the others right off her slate. She’d always been focused like a hawk on work anyway, so her liaisons had been casual, based more on physical need than deep emotion. She had to like the guy, but wedding bells never rang in Amalia Pelotti’s mind when she was involved with someone.
Nor did they now. But still, something was different...
“You remember Sally, the girl I gave our signs to on the picket line yesterday?”
“Sure. Short and squat.”
“But a lotta heart. And very’ bright. She told me on the line today that the last two days before he disappeared Danny spent going through files at some government offices.”
Ballard was all attention. “Which files? Which government offices? State or federal?”
“I should have asked, shouldn’t I?”
“No, it’s okay. But this is the first thing out of the ordinary we know Danny was doing before he went missing. How did she know about it?”
“He came into the union offices after hours, she was in the ladies’ getting ready to leave, so he stopped to use the phone at her desk. She came back out just when he was saying something about spending two days in the government files and finding what they’d been looking for. He seemed excited.”
“Tomorrow I talk with Sally,” said Ballard with some excitement of his own. At last, getting somewhere! But tonight... He leaned closer to Amalia. “Tonight...”
The doorbell rang.
“Ignore it,” said Larry grandly.
She did. “Tell me about what we’re going to do tonight that we haven’t already done.”
“Maybe we have already done it, but practice makes...” But the damned doorbell had kept on ringing. And now a heavy fist had started pounding on the panel. Ballard was on his feet, exclaiming, “Goddammit, anyway!”
He went into the living room to get into the pants he had shed when he’d gotten there — their first time this night had been on the living room wall-to-wall carpet two minutes after he’d arrived. Pulling on his shirt, he trotted barefoot down the interior stairwell to the street door, where two bulky shadows could be seen backlit against the glass from the streetlights. He flicked back the dead bolt and jerked open the door.
“What the fuck do you—”
“Well, well, well, if it ain’t Mr. Ballard. You sure do get around,” said Rosenkrantz. Or maybe it was Guildenstern.
Without really seeming to they rode him backward and on up the stairs between them.
Death, the performer formerly known as Timmy Adams, leaped high in the air with his legs spread, came down with a crash! on the wooden stage. Legs wide — get the sexual symbolism? Timmy had become Death because, shit, Sting got famous and got laid all the time with only one name, didn’t he?
Death furiously scrubbed the only three chords he knew from his $2,500 Paul Reed Smith guitar — Carlos fuckin’ Santana blows a PRS, man — and in his atonal voice shrieked out for the admiring throng the lyrics of “Euridice in Hell,” Blow Me Baby’s stirring signature magnum opus with which he started every gig:
Death wore the de rigueur heavy metal accoutrements: the big hair, the chains, the skulls, the spandex pants without any underwear, the Blow Me Baby logo lumpily hand-painted on the back of the leather jacket open over no shirt to show his sunken, hairless chest covered now with sweat.
“Go go go go!” shrieked an overweight pimple-faced girl in the front of the throng pressed up against the stage. “Give it to me big-time!”