“Why you tellin’ me this?”
“Same reason you aren’t killing me, I guess.”
Lana got out of the car and walked half a block before hailing a taxi. I sat there side by side with Lance Richards.
“She was something else,” he said in the central chamber of my mind.
“She slaughtered you.”
“And I killed my brother, walked away without a prayer or a backward look.”
“What would your brother have done if the tables were turned?”
“He’d have tried to save me and, failing that, he would have left me alive, taking the chance that I wouldn’t have turned him over.”
This was Lance Richards, only he was telling the truth for maybe the first time in his life. He’d always blamed others when he had to hurt them. They made him mad or were unconscious threats, they would have done the same thing or they were fools who deserved what they got.
No more.
The impression of Lance dissipated, and he blended into the chorus of my mind becoming one of the many murmuring voices that continually echoed in the background of my perceptions — like a host of monks singing Gregorian chants at a twenty-four-hour chapel on the border of Vatican City of the future.
When Rosetta finally woke up, I was sitting at her kitchen table, using one of my many personae to make Lana’s driver’s license into Rose’s, lifting Rose’s image from her own license.
“Have you been up all night?” she asked, the silk kimono falling off her left shoulder.
I had driven Lana’s car to the Kasbah Kasino’s outside parking lot, leaving the man named Pedro near consciousness but still stunned. Dr. George Forsythe, one of my more educated skull brothers, had decided that the would-be murderer would live and so I left him in the backseat.
From the Kasbah, I made my way to an alley behind Las Vegas High School where one of the city’s rare brick walls stood. I used one of these bricks as my private safe-deposit box for various properties that would not be secure on my body, with my friends, or in my house or car. I loosened the mortar around the only black brick in the wall and pulled out the two-quart, triple-strength baggie. Therein, I had secured various proofs of other peoples’ crimes committed either with me or in circumstances I had become aware of. And there was the safe-deposit box key that I put there only a few hours before being slain by my lovely partner. I had taken this precaution because I knew Siggy Petron had put a black spot next to my name.
Then I took a radio-cab to Rosetta’s house and spent the rest of the morning using the skills of Johnetta Reis, a very competent counterfeiter.
Johnetta’s expertise was foreign passports. She could whip up Japanese or Hungarian papers with paper clips and Polaroid stock. A simple Nevada license, especially since Lana had so generously donated hers, was no trouble at all.
So when Rosetta came in on me and asked if I had slept at all, I said, “A lot on my mind.”
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Giving you a document to get us into a certain bank in Phoenix.”
“That’s where the money is?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re not planning to rob that bank, are you?”
“No, ma’am. The money was already stolen by somebody else.”
“But the bank is holding it legal,” she said, making this statement a condition with her tone of voice.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, wondering what voice in my choir expressed itself with such humility.
“How much is it?”
“At least fifty thousand,” I said, “minus the five thousand I already gave you.”
“You don’t know me, Jack. How can you be sure I won’t turn you in?”
“I’ve already been turned into something that I don’t at all understand,” I said.
“Huh?”
At that moment, Rosetta’s phone sounded in my pocket.
When I pulled it out, she said, “Why do you have my phone?”
“Just to make a call about our money,” I said as I touched the green icon at the bottom of the tiny screen. “Hello?”
“Lance?”
“Rolly?”
“Roaches told me to call you and say when some chick called and asked about you. I gave her this number.”
“Thank you, Mr. Fournier. And tell Roaches that he doesn’t have to worry about me.”
There was another call coming in on the line.
“I gotta go, pal,” I said. “She’s already calling.”
The new number had a Cincinnati area code. I smiled while switching calls.
“Anna? Is that you?”
“Ron?”
“The next best thing.”
“What does that mean?”
“Listen, babe, I’m going to give you an address. Come by yourself.”
“What kind of trouble are you in?”
“You will have to look me in the eyes and hear my words to even have a chance to understand.”
Anna was always the brains of our partnership. I resented her when the chief paired us up. But over time, I came to realize that she had the gift of cold logic, which kept you alive in the field.
“What’s the address?” she asked.
“Who was that?” Rosetta asked when I handed her the phone.
“The woman who’s gonna watch our ass.”
“Your wife?”
“You are the only woman in my life,” I said honestly.
This declaration surprised Ms. Lawson. She was a little defeated by it.
“You need me to leave?”
“It would be best if your face wasn’t on Anna Wolf’s radar,” I said. “She’s a cop, of sorts, and more efficient than any shark in the sea.”
Rosetta smiled then. “I knew when you came in the restaurant that you were trouble, Jack Strong. And I could see in your eyes that you knew I was a woman who liked a man like you.”
“Go to your mother’s house. I’ll call your cell phone when it’s time for us to jump. I took your car last night but you can take my T-Bird, it’s parked out front. The key is probably in the visor.”
Sitting in the living room of the modest house with the blinds drawn and all the lights on, I cleaned the pistol that Tamashanter had lifted from a corpse. Now and again, I considered going out to the black van and asking them who the hell they were and why were they following me. But such a move was ill advised — I knew. The men in that car had known me as a dead man, as a whole barn piled high with dead men, women, and children — and maybe an animal or two. That was a terrible kind of knowledge that might repeat itself if I wasn’t careful.
The murmuring chorus that made up the background of my mind was very quiet while I sat and thought and cleaned. I suspected that I, and at times my needs, controlled the level of interference that the many I was comprised of could exert.
When the door chimes sounded, I had just spent a good hour in almost absolute internal silence.
While I approached the door, points of view began to pop up like unbidden ads on a computer screen when you’re surfing the net.
“It might be the gangsters,” someone painted in red letters on a brick wall.
“There’s a man out there,” came the paraphrased snippet from a paranoid blues song.
“Let me get that door,” Sergeant Mortman offered.
Ignoring my disparate sensibilities, I pulled the door open.
Anna had put on some weight in the last seven years, and the small lines around her eyes were just a bit more pronounced. She was still lovely however...
This last thought surprised me. The Ron Tremont in me never thought, or allowed myself to think, about this bronze-skinned woman romantically. We were partners. After a few years, we were even friends. She tried to give me CPR and mouth-to-mouth on that desolate highway in the early morning, when I was dying and she had tears running down her face...