“No, when it’s two men and one lady.” He snapped his fingers. “Tag team!”
“Ever done that?”
Pete shook his head.
“Me neither. Jim?”
It was, for a change, a question Keller could answer honestly. “Never,” he said.
Pete: “When you think about, you know, the possibilities...”
Roy, who seemed to be thinking about the possibilities, drew a deep breath and got to his feet, cell phone in hand. “Y’all give me a minute,” he said.
Roy came back with another round of beers, and news that the phone call had been a success. “Quarter past three tomorrow afternoon,” he announced. “We’ll meet up and take my van, ’cause there’s only room for one vehicle in her garage.”
Was that double entendre? Keller decided it wasn’t.
“What we don’t want to be is late,” Roy went on, “on account of we want to take our time. Husband’s got a long drive home after a full day at the office, but he could walk in anytime after six.”
“And what was it Jim here said? ‘Four’s a crowd.’”
“I’d say the two of us could handle him, but I’d just as soon not have to.”
“Rather spend my time handling her,” Pete said. “Damn, man, you went and talked her into it!”
Roy beamed, but Keller sensed that it hadn’t been that hard a sell. More like persuading a bee to sip nectar, or coaxing a moth toward a flame.
Pete said, “You’re the man, man. Old Harold, you figure he would have shared?”
“I’d say no. Harold, he was a hell of a guy, but I can’t say he was much of a one for sharing. Let me borrow his van one time, and first I had to sit through a whole lecture on how to keep from grinding the gears.”
“You want to grind her gears tomorrow, buddy, I’d say go right ahead.”
“Hey, no worry there, Pete. This particular model’s self-lubricating.”
Oh, spare me, Keller thought. He said, “Two hours and change should be plenty of time. I mean, you won’t have to invest a lot of time in small talk.”
“No,” Roy said, “have to say she’s good to go.”
He nodded. “Of course,” he said, “it’d be good to be prepared just in case. Suppose he comes home early and he’s got something in his hand.”
“A hammer,” Pete said.
They looked at him.
“Guy like that,” he explained, “guy that owns his own home, you know he’s got a work bench with a few hundred tools on it.”
“Right,” Roy said. “Son of a bitch could walk into the bedroom carrying a spirit level.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Or a measuring tape,” Roy said, “in case there’s anything Melania doesn’t get around to measuring.”
“I said a hammer because I was thinking about Harold is all.”
Right, Keller thought. “What I was thinking,” he said, “is if I was coming to that party tomorrow, I’d think about bringing a gun.”
“Harold had one,” Roy said.
He did?
“And a whole lot of good it did him,” Pete said. “Guy sneaks up behind you, your head’s caved in before you can even think about getting that old gun off your hip.”
“And it’s no use unless you’ve got it in your hand,” Roy said. “But you’re right, pardner.” He patted his hip. “I won’t have to remember. Never leave home without it, you know?”
A few minutes later Keller had a genuine reason to visit the restroom, and decided he didn’t need to return to the table. He slipped outside, went to his car.
So the Marlboro Man had had a gun on his hip? He hadn’t known that, and it struck him as the sort of thing one would want to know in advance. Then again, he hadn’t suspected Cowboy Roy was walking around strapped, and that could have posed a real problem, especially if the scenario had called for him to deal with Roy and Pete at the same time. There were far too many ways that could have gone wrong, and just thinking about them was sobering.
Speaking of which, he wondered if he was okay to drive. He’d had what, three beers? And a sip of a fourth? He thought about it and decided he felt clearheaded enough. And once he got underway he certainly seemed to be fine, listening to the gentle but firm voice of the GPS lady, and following her instructions all the way back to the Super 8.
“I got rid of the hammer,” he told Dot. “Brand new hammer and I tossed it in a trash can.”
“You could have taken it back for a refund,” she said, “but what would you do, tell them it didn’t work? ‘Sir, you’re supposed to hold it by the handle, not the head.’ How far away was the trash can?”
“I was standing right next to it. It wasn’t a toss, really. I just dropped it in.”
“Well, nobody’s gonna give you a medal for that. So now should I send the money back?”
“Maybe wait a day,” he said.
He put the Pablo phone away, took out his iPhone, decided he didn’t care if it pinged off towers in Baker’s Bluff. What difference did it make now? He called Amtrak and booked a roomette on the City of New Orleans for the following night, then called Julia and told her he’d be home the day after that.
“I’ll pick you up at the station,” she said. “It, uh, went okay?”
“I sort of called it off.”
“I’m glad, if it means you’re getting on a train tomorrow night. Still, it’s a shame. Not that you called it off, but that you made the trip for nothing.”
“Well,” he said. “That remains to be seen.”
He slept until he woke up, then checked out of his motel and drove across the street to Denny’s. Something made him follow the GPS prompts to Robin’s Nest Drive, and all that accomplished was confirmation that the Overmont house was still standing. It had not burned to the foundation, or been swept away in a flash flood, or imploded from emotional intensity. The garage door was closed, the drapes were drawn, and not a single vehicle was parked at the curb for the full length of the block.
Was there any reason to look more closely? Any reason to do anything at all in the pleasant town of Baker’s Bluff?
None that he could think of. He touched the GPS screen, selected Previous Destinations, and headed for O’Hare to give the car back to Hertz.
And from there to Chicago, where James J. Miller of Waco went back to being Nicholas Edwards of New Orleans. It wasn’t noon yet, and his train wasn’t scheduled to leave until 8:05, so after he’d picked up the ticket he’d reserved and used it to check his bag through to New Orleans, he had a whole day to kill.
Well, he thought, maybe that wasn’t the best choice of words.
He’d put his three phones in three different pockets before he checked his bag, and now he found a quiet corner in Amtrak’s Metropolitan Lounge. He examined all three phones in turn, and decided there was really only one call he had to make, and only one phone on which to make it.
It rang three times before it was answered, and the fellow on the other end managed to put a world of uncertainty into the single word hello.
“You don’t know me,” Keller said. “But there’s something you really need to know, and something you really ought to do about it.”
When he lived in New York, a stone’s throw from the United Nations, Keller had done a minimal amount of decorating. The bedroom held a couple of inoffensive Japanese prints. He’d never paid much attention to them, and at this point he couldn’t begin to remember what they’d looked like.
But in the living room he’d hung a framed poster he’d picked up at the Whitney. There’d been an Edward Hopper retrospective, and one painting after another had caught him and held him, although it would have been hard for him to say why. The hold was sufficient to prompt him to buy the poster, and it still worked when he brought it home and hung it on the wall.