Try as he might, Danny couldn’t see Anna Lia here. The place smelled like fireworks.
“He’p you?” said a man with half a beard. The right side of his face, purple, slick, and elastic, had been burned. A serious old wound. He wore jeans, a big gold watch, and a T-shirt that said RECON: FIRST IN, LAST OUT.
“Just looking,” Danny said. He didn’t know how to ask about Anna Lia without sounding like a cop. He needed a minute to pull himself together.
“Yell if you need anything.”
“I will, thanks.” He poked among books, army dog tags, S.S. caps. The door bell tinkled again. Soft voices, laughing, gossiping about buddies who still couldn’t get their vets’ benefits, years after the war; militia camps in the Thicket; surplus supplies; Nicaragua.
Then: “Yeah, I heard,” the sales clerk said. “Real damn shame.”
“Shaky,” a second man answered. “She had no fucking business.”
Danny stiffened. He ducked around a bookcase. In a corner by a Coke machine, he pulled his shoulders to his chest and tried to make himself small. Next to him, on the wall, scribbled notes fluttered on a corkboard: “Italian Stilettos: 13 Inches Overall. Call Duffy.” “Veterans Action Group, available for rescue, property recovery, or just plain getting even. U.S. only.” “Man for hire: Sugarland area. Short term. Confidential and discreet.”
The men were speaking rapidly now, in low tones, so Danny couldn’t hear them. He glanced around a crate of empty pop bottles. Sure enough. Smitts and his dumb-ass brother.
There’s a smarter way to handle this, Danny told himself (Average mind, he heard his father say), even as he stepped into the open. He approached the front counter where the men had gathered. “So,” he said. Too late now. Whatever’s going to happen — boom. “How often did you force Anna Lia to come here?”
Smitts didn’t move. He covered his surprise. He wore a faded Houston Oilers shirt. Behind him, his brother glowered, a stunned ox.
“Neighbor,” Smitts said. “Howdy.” He grinned.
“Answer me,” Danny said.
“She wanted to come. The place turned her on.”
“Fuck you.”
Smitts rubbed his leg through heavy, stone-washed jeans. “She liked guy stuff. But then, you didn’t know that about her, did you? She never saw any guy stuff from you, ain’t that right?” His brother and the sales clerk laughed.
Danny concentrated on the clerk’s purple patch, the smooth, ruined part of his face. It glistened in the grainy light through the window bars. Stay calm, Danny thought. Don’t let him bait you. Not here, not on his turf. “How’d you hurt your leg, Smitts? When the bomb went off? Where were you, on her patio?”
“You know something? You’re lucky I feel sorry for you, Clark. Anna Lia liked you, god knows why, so I’ve cut you a hell of a lot of slack so far, but don’t push it, man. I busted my leg last Sunday, hunting. That’s all you need to know.”
His brother and the man behind the counter looked hostile and amused, but for an instant, Smitts’s face seemed to soften and appeared to offer Danny a smidgen of sympathy. “Let it go, man. Stop being Sherlock Fucking Holmes — there’s nothing to find. She got a wild hair and she screwed herself up. That’s all.”
“Did you tell her what to buy?” Danny asked.
“I brought her here once, a long time ago, ‘cause she was into my shit, all right? I told the cops that — ask them yourself. I ain’t hiding nothing, man. Leave it alone.”
“She wouldn’t — ”
“Yes. She would. Listen to me. You’re gonna have to deal with the fact that you didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.”
“I was her husband, goddammit!”
“Yeah, and I was her lover, jack. But that don’t make me an expert on why she hopped in the sack with you, or Capriati, or what the hell she was doing at three o’clock in the morning — ”
Danny shoved past him, out to his car. Christ, he wanted to smash the fucker’s face, but with three of them there, he’d never get out. Best to swallow it now. Time’ll come, he thought. Sit tight. Get strong.
A pickup chuffed into the parking lot, flinging gravel, a Confederate flag in its cracked back window. Fiercely, Danny turned his key.
Down the block, in a pawn shop window, ballpoint letters were scrawled across an empty pizza box, forming a crude sign: FIREARMS, CHEAP, ALL OCCASIONS.
A fireman approached him at a stoplight, waving a rubber boot, asking for change. “Charity drive,” he said. Danny had heard on the news that this fundraiser was illegal.
Goddam cops. Never do their goddam job.
He made a pistol with his fingers and aimed it out the window. The fireman stumbled backwards, away from Danny’s door. Coins rained from the boot in his hand.
Danny swerved, pulled over at the pawn shop, and killed the car. Maybe … His daddy’s strained and distant voice. Maybe we can pick off some quail or something.
Crazy, he thought.
His door was open. His feet were on the pavement.
We never talk, I know.
Too late now.
Inside, waffle irons, Pez dispensers, nut crackers, golf clubs, pool cues, microwave ovens, ashtrays, bathrobes. A man showed him a second-hand Seecamp LWS. “Hundred bucks, even,” he said.
Danny picked up the pistol. Light as bread. “I need it right away,” he said.
“No problem. Extra twenty, we toss the paperwork.” This man, too, had a burned face.
Danny handed him six limp bills.
“There you go, my friend.” The man slapped a horsefly off his wrist. “Now you’re as armed and dangerous as the next man. Have yourself a ball.”
The light was on in Betty’s room. Libbie parked her van in the drive. The house, which Carla shared with her sister, was a simple, square two-story, with white wooden eaves and a shingled roof. “Quiet, hidden — perfect for a pair of old spinsters,” Carla liked to say.
A gnarled red oak bent above the roof: an old man waving his arms in despair.
“Okay, you grab Suzi, I’ll get Robi,” Libbie suggested. “We’ll see if we can make it into the house without being clawed to death.” “Fat chance,” Carla said.
But they made it fine. Carla patted the wall, trying to find the light switch. The cats vanished beneath the living room chairs.
“Poor things. They’re freaked,” Carla said.
“Sissy, is that you?” Betty called from her bedroom upstairs.
“It’s me, Bets. Libbie’s here. We brought you some company.”
Betty bounded down the stairs, wearing a thin yellow nightdress. Her hair was a wisp of fog, her face a pudgy block of chalk. At forty-three, she was only two years older than Carla, but the sisters could have passed for elderly aunt and niece. Carla was trim, youthful, mostly free of gray.
Betty hugged them both, then snatched Libbie’s hand. “Let me show you.” She approached the kitchen table. “Did you know that every flower matches a human emotion?” Her rapid, elliptical talk always startled Libbie. On the table lay dozens of blue construction paper flowers, snipped with a pair of sewing scissors.
“I should’ve warned you,” Carla whispered to Libbie. “Her latest get-rich scheme.”
“Well, then. What’ve you got here?” Libbie said.
Betty pressed her palms to her chest. “It’s so exciting. I’ve decided to design a series of greeting cards around the language of flowers. The tulip, for example, is a relative newcomer to the West. It didn’t arrive in Europe, all the way from the Orient, until the mid-1500s.”