The first one up the next morning was Bobbie Ann Doggett. The second was Fin Finnegan, only because Bobbie phoned him at 8:00 A.M. sharp.
Fin stared at the ringing telephone like he was Alexander Graham Bell’s cleaning lady wondering what the hell that strange contraption was.
“Uuuhhhh!” he mumbled, after he worked it all out and picked it up.
“It’s Bobbie!” she said. “I’m real sorry, Fin, but I could hardly wait to call!”
“Uuuuuhhh!” he said, afraid to raise his head from the pillow. “Bobbie, I’m near death! Please!”
“Don’t you want a second opinion? Listen to me, Fin. The shoe? Whaddaya say we call and talk to the officer that found the dead guy’s foot? Or maybe we could call the morgue?”
“It’s Saturday, Bobbie! I’m on a day off. You’re on a day off.”
“But Fin,” she said, “if the dead guy’s foot was inside a black steel-toe high-top U.S. Navy flight-deck shoe, I’m gonna arrest those two truckers for grand theft!”
“Wait, Bobby!” he said, sitting up. Then, “Owwwwww!”
“What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong? You drank as much, no, more than I did and you ask what’s wrong?”
“I felt a little sick last night, but I went for a jog this morning and I’m fine,” she said.
Youth. Communication was hopeless. “Don’t go running off and arresting anybody,” he said. “Lemme get up and find my head and make some coffee and call a priest for last rites. Then I’ll phone the CHP and see if I can get in touch with the young officer who added to my present torment by going on a treasure hunt for a goddamn foot!”
“Okay, I’m at home and I’m ready to go to work,” she said. “This’ll be the biggest arrest I ever made. It’s rad!”
“Rad,” Fin said, hanging up the phone. Then, “Rad. Cool. Awesome. Ow, my freaking head!”
While Fin was trying to accomplish the most difficult task of the week, namely, locating the bathroom door, another urgent call was being made by an equally anxious caller.
“Here, pus brain,” she said, “it’s for you.”
Shelby Pate didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know who she was for a moment, even though he’d been living with the woman for eighteen months.
He lay in bed and tried to focus, but couldn’t. He heard the telephone voice saying, “Hello? Hello?”
He tried to put the receiver back on the cradle, but only managed to knock everything on the floor.
“Hello?” the voice said, more faintly.
Then Shelby felt himself being shaken by his hair. “Ooooooo!” he moaned. “You bitch!”
“Get up, puke face, and talk to him!” she said. “It’s your fucking boss! I gotta leave for work now or I won’t have a job and you’ll have to support me for a change, you speed-freak asshole!”
And with that good morning, Shelby Pate’s long-suffering girlfriend went off to her job as a manager of a pizza joint, leaving him to listen to that fucking telephone voice yammering at him.
“Hello? Hello? Hello? Goddamnit!” the voice said.
Disoriented, he picked up the phone and said, “Flaco, is that you? It’s too early, man!”
“This is Jules Temple!” the voice said.
“What?”
“It’s Jules Temple! Wake up. We gotta talk.”
That brought him around a bit. He raised up on one elbow and said, “Kin I call you back, Mister Temple?”
“I just need a few minutes. It’s important.”
He couldn’t find a pencil anyway, so he said, “Okay, I’ll try to talk, but I was up late.”
“It’s about the cops that visited you yesterday,” Jules said. “I got back to the office and found a note from Mary.”
“Yeah?”
“What’d they want?”
“Kin this wait?”
“No, goddamnit! What’d they want? I gotta know! It’s my business! You’re my employee!”
There was nothing like a little jolt of anger to cut through the fog. “I know you’re my boss,” Shelby said.
“There seems to be a lotta interest in you two and that truck. What happened? Mary said a kid was contaminated from the Guthion.”
His head was clearing more quickly and he said, “That’s right, Mister Temple. From the Guthion.”
“That’s a shame,” Jules said. “But what else did they say? Did they find the drums? Did they find … anything?”
“No, Mister Temple,” Shelby said. “They didn’t say nothing about the waste drums. Whaddaya mean by find anything?”
“Well …” Jules hesitated. “Like the license plates, or registration, or any documents from the truck.”
“They didn’t say nothing about no license plates or registration.”
“Anything else? Did they ask about anything else or mention finding anything else?”
“Like what?”
“Goddamnit, like the fucking manifests! Did they mention finding the manifests?”
“Which one?” Shelby asked innocently. “The one from North Island or the one from Southbay Agricultural Supply?”
Jules could have shot him dead. He could have plunged a knife into his throat. He could have pushed him into a vat of acid in the storage yard. But he took a long pause and said, “All right, did they mention the manifest from North Island? Like maybe they found it?”
“No, they didn’t,” Shelby said, and even through the hellacious methamphetamine and tequila hangover, he was starting to enjoy this.
“Did they mention the other manifest?” Jules asked very carefully, the way you’d talk to a lunatic chained to a wall. “Did they maybe find the manifest from Southbay Agricultural Supply?”
“No, they didn’t say they found it,” Shelby said.
“They didn’t? Okay, I was just wondering, and …”
Shelby interrupted him: “But they mentioned it.”
“What … did they say, Shelby?” Jules asked, with no emotion whatsoever in his voice.
“Just that we was carryin this real bad Guthion and it would have to be manifested for outta state. Texas, I think. That’s what they said.”
“And what did you say?”
“That we never pay no attention to what manifests say. Our job was to bring the stuff back to the yard and then you tend to it after that.”
“Okay,” Jules said. “Okay, was there anything else they said?”
“Just asked us again about how the truck got stolen. Like, whether we saw anybody we knew around Angel’s when we went in for lunch. That kinda stuff. Cop stuff.”
Jules was enormously relieved. Now he wanted to smooth things over with this halfwit, to keep Shelby Pate from thinking that there was any more to this than a routine call from a concerned employer.
“I’m sorry to be so abrupt and to call you so early,” Jules said, “but you can imagine how I feel. A child died because our waste got dumped by some truck thief. It’s not your fault. It’s not my fault. Still, I feel very bad about it. You can understand, can’t you?”
“Sure, Mister Temple.”
“So that was it?” Jules Temple said. “They haven’t found any paperwork whatsoever?”
The ox managed a little smile, even with a blinding headache. It was fun being clever, particularly since Shelby hated this cheesy son of a bitch with his manicured fingernails and thirty-dollar haircuts. A guy who never so much as got a palm blister in his whole life. Shelby said, “They asked again about your five hundred bucks.”
Jules knew that this larcenous son of a bitch was rubbing it in about his money, but he forced himself to say, “And you told them the same as before? That the truck thief got it?”
“Right. That it was in an envelope wrapped up by the manifests inside the glove box. Where we put everything for safekeeping.”