“We see his credit cards. Okay?” Walter said. “Don’t ask who, don’t ask where. I’ll tell you two things, then you forget them. One, we got people watching his credit cards. Two, if something like an airline ticket came through, Abraham Lincoln would have told us. Told us when, told us where. That’s why I don’t think so.”
“But Abraham Lincoln ain’t answering his phone.”
“Today he ain’t,” said Walter gloomily. “I’ll concede that.”
The woman on the phone held out a hand and backhanded the air five, six times. Like she were reenacting the slapping of a child.
“Shit, I can’t stand it,” said East, and he swung the door open and jumped out. Colder here, now. And quiet.
The woman bared her teeth at him before he was ten feet away.
“You get away from me!” she raged. “You get back! I got here first!”
“Ma’am,” East said. “Ma’am.”
“You git back!” she hissed. “This is my call!” A yellow rubber bracelet on her wrist holding one key. Gripping the receiver jealously, ready to give up everything for it, her one treasure on Earth. “There’s this boy here,” she shouted into the phone. “He wants the phone! Yes! And I told him, it’s my call. I paid! I came first! And now he won’t go away.”
East pushed the air down with his empty palms down, trying to settle. “Ma’am,” he cajoled. “Not hurrying you. Not hurrying you.”
“Yes, you are. Yes, you are!”
He had Ty’s little squirt gun in his pocket. It gave him an odd, lopsided feeling.
“How long you gonna be on, though? Ma’am!”
“How do I know?” the woman protested. “A minute, maybe? A few minutes? Damn!”
Blankly, East stared at the woman. Well, this sawed it. Ride for days, then crash up on this creature. Beggar-woman, they would have called her in The Boxes: steel-wool hair. Shoulder blades quivering under the housedress. His mother in white.
“A few minutes,” he conceded bitterly. He turned and walked to the van, where they’d be teasing him, he knew. Yes. Pealing laughter as soon as he opened the door.
“God damn,” wept Walter. “You should have seen her eyes flash.”
East slid in with what he could salvage of his dignity. “A minute, she said.”
“All night. I was right,” Ty said. “Do what you wanna do. That was funny.”
East tried to consider it funny.
“So, what did this robber look like, anyway?” Walter said. “The one who was gonna take us?”
East shrugged. Stuff you don’t know about. “Big and white. Moustache. Red hair. Teenaged. Wore a green coat like the army.”
“Probably was the army,” Ty said. “Oh! Look!”
The woman was scurrying off in her slippers. Wasn’t taking a chance.
—
The operator was a new one. It took her forever to dial through. “Are you still on?” Walter asked twice. “Did we get disconnected?”
“I’m still here.”
Then the silence of a new connection on the line. “Yeah,” a male voice said.
East put his head in so close to Walter’s that they were breathing each other’s breath.
“Man,” Walter said, “we’re there. We reached it. You guys been offline. And the man isn’t at the house. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“You got any news for me? Anything I can use?”
“We got a different setup,” reported the voice. “Police came down this morning. Arrested a few people.”
The curve of Walter’s ear just past the dark receiver, pinkish-brown.
“A few people? Who?”
“You know,” the man said. “I don’t really want to say.”
“The big man?”
“Definitely got the big man.”
“Fuck,” said East. His body recoiled beneath him, wanted to smash something, to go running off. He bit down hard and listened.
Walter asked, “The two dudes who sent us?”
“Definitely arrested them. Definitely cleaned out that whole area.”
“How many?”
“Maybe fifteen, twenty. Put it this way. Yesterday there was an organization. Tonight there ain’t. We’ll see what we can do tomorrow.”
Walter put the phone to his chest. “You hear this?”
“Yeah,” East whispered.
“Things are changed,” the voice on the other end said. “I mean, it might be cool, you making that stop. More important now. There’s more people he can talk about now, you dig?”
Walter said, “I dig.”
“But I got no instructions. You do what you got to do,” said the voice.
“You still got him flying out Sunday?”
“Flying Sunday,” confirmed the voice. “Nonstop to LAX.”
“Remind me,” said Walter. “What day is it now?”
“Thursday night,” the voice said tersely. “You boys strong? In your pocket?”
“Yeah, we’re strong,” said Walter.
“Okay,” said the voice. “The next conversation should be like this conversation. Smart.”
“So you’re telling me to make up my own mind,” Walter said.
“Yeah,” returned the voice. “I guess you can do that.”
Walter cupped the phone. “It’s up to us,” he whispered. “What you want to do?”
East looked long and hard at Walter’s brown eyes. “We go,” he said. “We do what Fin told us.”
“All right,” said Walter, and drew a long breath, the van full of guns idling behind them, blind.
12
Once at the house in The Boxes a boy named Hosea was going to fight a boy they called Cancer. Everyone knew it would happen, and no one wanted it to, because Hosea was well liked while Cancer was not, and Cancer was going to whup Hosea’s ass. None of that was a question. The boys knew, too, that it would happen, because Hosea had asked for it. He told Cancer that nobody liked him, then went on and explained it. He insulted Cancer and then insulted him again. Everyone knew Hosea was telling the truth. Hosea was a good kid.
But stronger than their feelings for Hosea or telling the truth was a principle: Know when you’re fucking with someone. Know who you’re fucking with. Know that things have their cost. The boys knew the fight was on, because Hosea could not say what he’d said and not pay.
And then the fight didn’t happen. It was a windy, blast-furnace day. First Cancer was there, waiting for Hosea. When he left, Hosea showed up. Then they were both there, and ready, but Sidney called out from inside with some work: a U had stopped breathing on the kitchen floor. He had to be taken out. He was all quaky and blue. You did not have people dying in the house. It was best to save their lives, or have them die somewhere else. Either way, you took them out. Cancer and Hosea were both called into that, and they helped carry the U out and put him in a car. In the car, the U went ahead and died, so the event became less a drop-off and more a dropping-the-body. You could not just drop a body anywhere or at any time. Bodies were complicated. And the dead body dissipated the charge between Cancer and Hosea.
But not the other boys. That tension had not been released. And the rest of the day, East had to settle them, to separate them, to keep the electricity that had stabbed the air like a knife from cutting into them, from sending them honed at each other. No matter that Hosea and Cancer stood together and let it drop; no matter that a dead man lay in temporary storage, waiting to be cast aside when darkness came. A knife had been thrown up into the air, and the boys would not settle to their work until they saw it land.