Lane stayed at the house, getting ready for the funeral, doing a little telecommuting and some restless reading. She also spent some time poking through the Jaz disks, but neither of us found much.
Three days after the fire, the blisters on her arms were drying to unsightly splotches of itchy dead skin, while the redness under her neck had begun to fade to brown. I brought in meals during the day, and in the cool evenings we walked out to dinner at a dimly lit Italian place, where the burns wouldn't be visible.
The funeral took place on a beautiful California morning, fifty people gathered in an old-fashioned Spanish-style stucco chapel, where an Episcopalian priest said all the right words with the right dignity The women cried, the men shook hands and Harry Connick Jr's "Sunny Side of the Street" played through the sound system as Jack's childhood friends carried his casket out the side door
LuEllen walked in the door a few seconds after the service started. I almost didn't recognize her in the New York black dress, hat, and wraparound sunglasses. She lifted a hand to me and slipped into a pew across the way. Lane didn't noticeshe was out of it, struggling through the worst week of her life, struggling to get her older brother into the ground
At the end of the service, Lane went to the front door to shake hands. LuEllen drifted over to me and said, "Bummer."
I said, "Yeah," and then, "You're looking nice. The black dress."
"I was working in New York," she said LuEllen was something of a chameleon. In black, without lipstick, with her close-cropped frosted-blond hair, she could have been a London model, except that she was too short, and her shoulders a tad too wide. When she put on Western shirts, the kind with the arrows at the corners, and cowboy boots, you'd swear she'd come straight back from hauling hay out to a horse barn in Wyoming, a rosy-cheeked good-time country girl. In Miami, she could have been a drug dealer's bimbo, in San Diego, a slightly used Navy wife on the lookout for a Coronado Island admiral
But she was a lot more than all of that.
"Anything good?" I asked
"Coin dealer. Let it go. Way too much protection." She looked around with the kind of eye-drooping, stand-back attitude she tended to develop after a couple of weeks of pushing her way around Manhattan
"Not like you need the money," I said
"Not yet, anyway," she said. She nodded at Lane. "Who's the chick? Jack wasn't married, was he?"
"His sister. Lane Ward "
"Oh, yeah, when you look at her close, you can see it." She looked at Lane and then back up at me. "Too much makeup for my style," she said
"There's a story behind it." I told her about the house and the fire. "So she's flash burned on her neck and arms and the cops want to talk to her. We're trying to bullshit our way through the funeral, then get her out of sight until she's healed."
"Gotta hurt," she said. LuEllen was unimpressed by pain, her own or anybody else's.
"It does. The doc said it'd take eight or ten days to heal, so we've got a while to go."
"Can we talk with her around?"
"I think so, but I haven't given her anything on you at all, except your first name, and I'll keep it that way."
"All right," she said. Then "You getting laid?"
"Not by Lane, if that's what you're asking "
"By who?"
"Software lady back in the Cities. We're building a computer together." I couldn't see her eyes, but I could tell they were rolling.
"Nerd love," she said
"Nerd love," I agreed. "How about you?"
"Nothing right now. I've been working pretty hard. I did a hundred and seventy thousand in Miami a couple of months ago, scared myself brainless."
"Come close?"
"Not to getting caught, but the people. bunch of pecker wood meth manufacturers. If they'd figured me out, they would've cut me up with a chainsaw, and I shit you not."
Sometimes LuEllen and I were in bed, sometimes not. She had a taste for slender, dark-haired Latin men with big white teeth. I'm not any of that. We hadn't been in the sack for a while, but I expected that she'd be back. Or I would, or something. We'd probably be buried next to each other, sooner or later: funeral thoughts.
On the way out of the church, I introduced her to Lane, who smiled and nodded, and we went outside. I'd driven Lane to the church in her car, but she'd ride to the cemetery with friends. I decided to go with LuEllen, and pick up Lane's car on the way back.
"You know what wouldn't be a bad way to go?" LuEllen asked, on the way out to the cemetery. "You know your time has come, it's all over. Go up in the North Woods in the wintertime, where there are wolves around. You sit down, take your coat off, and chill out. Wouldn't hurt. You'd just go to sleep, and instead of rotting, you'd be a dinner for the wolves. Something usefuland you'd wind up as a wolf yourself, sort of."
"Wouldn't hurt as long as the wolves didn't get there early," I said.
"That's really romantic," she said.
"Or you'd probably wind up getting eaten by field mice. Voles."
"Shut up, Kidd."
Half the people at the church followed to the cemetery. Jack was buried in a smoothly curving piece of the earth framed by a dozen small redwoods; nice spot. The funeral was one of those where, after the coffin is let down into the ground, the bystanders walk by and toss a handful of dirt into the grave. We filed past, LuEllen a step ahead of me, and when I turned past the top of the grave, saw a thick-necked man in a suit and sunglasses standing a hundred yards away, half concealed behind a granite gravestone.
I'd seen him once before, I thought: outside the house in Dallas, his face silhouetted by a streetlight.
"Got a problem," I muttered to LuEllen. "You got your cameras?"
"In the car," she said. She looked right at me, too smart to look for trouble.
"I'm gonna turn, and if you look past my shoulder, you'll see a guy in a gray suit and black sunglasses, about a hundred yards off. What are the chances of getting a shot?"
I turned and she turned with me, smiling, saying, "Yadda yadda yadda," and then, "All right, I got him. He's not a cop, unless he's some kind of federal spook that I don't want to know about."
"He's not a cop," I said. "He could be private security. He could be a major asshole."
The people at the funeral were starting to look around, ready to start moving as soon as the last handful of dirt was dropped in the grave. LuEllen said, "Let me give you a peck, say good-bye," and I leaned over and she gave me a peck on the cheek and started for her car, lifting a hand to wave good-bye as she went.
She was the first to go; her car was only fifty feet down the cemetery lane. She popped the trunk with a remote key, pulled out a shoulder bag, tossed it across the front seat, started the car and drove away. I turned, casually, saw the man in the gray suit still standing there, but faced in a different direction, looking ninety degrees away from us. The last handful of dirt went in the grave, and Lane shook hands with a couple of people, and took the arm of a guy who, with his wife, had driven her to the cemetery: their oldest friends, Jack's and Lane's, and from what I'd seen, nice people.
As Lane started moving toward the car, the man in gray started to move, down away from the stone where he was standing. I couldn't see a carit was apparently behind an evergreen-covered knoll, out of sight. LuEllen had only had a couple of minutes to set up, and I wasn't sure if she was ready yet. Nothing to do about it, and since I'd come with her, I had nothing to do but wait. The man in the gray suit came to watch? Couldn't be that simple.
Everybody was moving now, but Lane, about to get in the backseat of her friends' car, saw me standing, watching, and called, "Kidd? Where's your friend?"
I strolled over and said, "Give me a hug?"
With a question on her face, she stepped over to give me a hug and I said, quietly as I could, "One of the people who burned Jack's house is here."
"Oh, no." She took my arm and led me a few steps away from the car, looking up at me earnestly, as if giving comfort. What she said was, "What's he doing? Do you see him?"