I watched Joey’s eyelids flicker open. “Motherfucker,” he said. He reached up and felt the back of his head, and his paw came back wet with more than rain.
I took the gun out of my pocket. “Get in the elevator.”
We went upstairs. The kangaroo looked pretty funny sprawled across my couch, his awkward legs crossed and his useless tail pushing up a corner of his raincoat like some kind of tumor or erection. I kept the gun trained on him, switching hands as I shook out of my jacket and locked the door. The dirty white cloth had somehow made it upstairs, and the kangaroo rewrapped it around his head, a bandage now instead of a turban. I wiped my face clean with a paper towel from the kitchen and sat down across from the kangaroo, the coffee table between us.
I emptied my jacket, putting Testafer’s electric gun on the shelf behind me and the envelope full of Pansy Greenleaf’s make into my shirt pocket. Then I set the gun down on the table and slid my mirror onto my lap.
The make in the packet on the mirror was my last. I shook it out and pushed it into sloppy lines with a matchbook cover, and the kangaroo watched dazedly while I snorted them up. The familiar blend took over, and reality became standardized and comfortable again. I wiped at my nose with the back of my hand, picked up the gun, and leaned back in my chair.
“I want you to take me to Phoneblum,” I said.
“You’re making a mistake.”
“It’s my mistake to make.” I pushed the telephone across the table. “Call him.”
He took the telephone and punched in a local number, and his red eyes worked nervously around the room as he waited for an answer. It came after what must have been the third or fourth ring.
“Yeah,” he said. “This is Castle. I need to talk to Danny. It’s important. Tell him I’m with the pee-eye. No, just tell him.”
He moved the receiver away from his mouth and said: “You’re in luck, if you want to call it luck.” I smiled, and he handed me the phone. I kept the gun pointed at his heart—assuming I had the location right.
“Hello,” came a voice on the line.
“Hello,” I said. “My name is Metcalf. You wanted to talk to me, I guess.”
There was a moment of silence. “I sent someone to have a word with you, if that’s what you mean. I would have thought my message was clear.”
“You sent a kangaroo to do a man’s work,” I said. “I don’t scare as easily as Dr. Testafer.”
The voice laughed. “Dr. Testafer has a stronger stomach than he’s letting on, Mr. Metcalf. You surprise me. I would have thought a man in your line of work would know when he should abandon his investigations. We had another private inquisitor on this case who had to be helped to understand—”
“You would have thought a lot of things, apparently. When and where can we meet to set you straight?”
There was another silence. “I’m not sure I understand what the purpose of such a meeting would be.”
“It’s like this. I’ve got a client who’s headed for the freezer, and if I can’t stop it, I at least propose to find out why it’s him who has to take the fall and who it is he’s taking it for. You can’t buy me off, and if Joey here is your arm, you can’t bully me off either. Meet me or he goes over to Morgenlander. I don’t think your kangaroo is ready to stand up to the Office screws, Phoneblum. If you think different, call my bluff.”
“Morgenlander is a problem,” said the voice thoughtfully, as though confiding in a friend. “You’ve got pretty much everything else dead wrong, but Morgenlander is a problem. Come and see me. We’ll find out who sets who straight.” He chuckled, then gave me an address in Piedmont. I set the gun down on my side of the table and wrote the address on the empty make envelope. He said seven o’clock and I said okay. Then I put the kangaroo back on the phone and started emptying the shells out of the gun.
The kangaroo said yes a few times and then hung up. “I have to go now,” he said. “Give me the gun.”
I pocketed the shells and tossed it to him, and he caught it against his chest. “You’re a good boy,” I said. “Phoneblum must be very pleased with your work. Just don’t come around here anymore, okay?”
“Fuck you,” he said, his eyes glaring from under the dirty white cloth. I pointed at the door.
He was on his way out when I said: “Phoneblum didn’t seem overly concerned about you, Joey. Don’t be surprised to find the rug pulled out from under you, if what’s swept underneath it doesn’t stay that way.” I didn’t really know anything; I was just flexing my muscles while I had the chance.
Joey screwed up his mouth, flared his nostrils, and slammed the door. I went to the window and watched him splash through the puddles back to wherever he’d hidden his scooter. When he turned the corner, I let out my breath and tried to relax, but my chest was all tight and there was a ringing sound in my ears. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe evenly for a couple of minutes, before giving it up and going into the kitchen for a drink.
I stood by the window and sipped on a glass of scotch and watched the sky darken as the sun fell behind its veil of clouds at the edge of the bay. The rain had stopped, but the sun was beaten, and it was crawling away. It had my blessings; I wanted to go with it, to some other part of the earth. I looked at the clock on the wall. It was five-thirty, an hour and a half before my meeting with Phoneblum. Then I looked at the refrigerator. I didn’t have to open it to know there was nothing inside.
I had the pizzeria on the line when there was a knock at the door. “Come in,” I said, figuring that anyone who wanted in would achieve it one way or another.
It was Angwine, only he looked more like a projection of Angwine than the real thing. His face was white and his voice came out a whisper. I had to calm him down to get a straight answer out of him.
“I took a cab up to see Testafer. There wasn’t anybody there that I could see, but the door to the little house was standing open. I went over to it, and there was blood on the doorknob. I may have gotten my fingerprints in it, I don’t know.”
I told the pizzeria I’d call them back. “What did you see?” I asked him.
“Just blood, everywhere,” he said. “I didn’t want to get caught there.”
“What did you want from Testafer?”
Angwine looked at the floor. “I couldn’t sit still. I wanted to find out what he knew about Stanhunt and my sister. I wasn’t followed up there, I’m sure. They were tailing me, but I shook them.”
“You’re stupid,” I said. I put my drink on the shelf next to Testafer’s electric gun.
Angwine went and sat on my couch where just minutes ago the kangaroo had been sitting. I opened the drawer in my desk, put the pocketful of bullets, and Testafer’s gun inside, then locked it. “You stay here,” I said. “I’ll go and have a look.”
“I had to do something. It was driving me crazy.”
“Shut up, okay? I understand.”
He looked up at me as I went out the door, and I thought he might be about to start crying. I couldn’t think of anything nice to say, so I left without saying anything.
CHAPTER 13
WHEN I GOT TO THE TOP OF THE HILL, I STOPPED THE CAR for a minute and watched the last traces of sunset dissipate into the night. It wasn’t the best I’d ever seen, but it looked better than I felt. I got back into the car and drove into the lacing of streets that led to Daymont Court, where Testafer’s home was waiting, mysteriously bloodied, for someone to blunder into. I figured it might as well be me. I parked a block away this time and walked through the puddles, down to the padlocked chain at the driveway. There weren’t any other cars visible, no signs of the inquisitors. I was alone, if only for the moment.