Now, as he stood at the men’s room door, he took in the assorted faces as though seeing them afresh. The first thing that struck him was that he knew a lot of people with criminal pasts. There was Groucho, the hot-wire expert, who might have made a good mechanic if he could have been trusted not to boost and then sell the cars on which he was supposed to be working. Beside him was Tommy Q, who was the most indiscreet man Willie had ever met, an individual apparently born without a filter between his mouth and his brain. Tommy Q, a purveyor of illegally copied movies, music, and computer software, was such a pirate that he should have sported an eye patch and carried a parrot on his shoulder. Willie had once, in a fit of madness, bought a bootleg copy of a movie from Tommy, the soundtrack to which had consisted almost entirely of the sounds of someone munching popcorn, and a couple having sex nearby, or as close to it as they could get in a crowded movie theater. In fact, thought Willie, it had been pretty similar to the actual experience of seeing a movie in New York on a Friday night, which was precisely why Willie didn’t go to the movies in the first place. Tommy Q’s inexpertly wrapped birthday tribute to Willie sat on top of the pile of gifts in one corner. It looked, thought Willie, suspiciously like a collection of pirated DVDs.
Then there were those who should have been there but, for vastly different reasons, were not. Coffin Ed was doing two-to-five in Snake River over in Oregon for desecrating a corpse. Willie wasn’t sure what the precise wording of the charge had been and, to be honest, he didn’t want to know. Willie wasn’t the kind of man to judge another’s sexual proclivities, and one naked person being found in a position of intimacy with another naked person didn’t bother him in the slightest, but when one of the naked people was in something less than the fullest bloom of health, then that was slightly more problematic. Willie had always thought there was something kind of creepy about Coffin Ed. It was hard to feel entirely comfortable around a man who had attempted to make a living from stealing corpses and holding them for ransom. Willie had just assumed that Coffin Ed kept the corpses in a freezer somewhere until the ransom was paid, not in his bed.
Meanwhile, Jay, who used to do some part-time work for Willie, and who was the best transmission guy Willie had ever met, had died five years earlier. A heart attack had taken him in his sleep, and Willie supposed that it wasn’t such a bad way to go. Still, he missed Jay. The old man had been a rock of decency and common sense, qualities that were sadly lacking in some of the other individuals gathered in Nate’s bar that night. Old man? Willie shook his head sadly. Funny how Jay had always seemed old to him, but now Willie was only five years younger than Jay was when he died.
His gaze moved on, lingering briefly on the women (some of whom, he had to say, were looking pretty attractive now that his beer intake had softened their lines); passing over Nate at the bar, who was reluctantly making up some complicated cocktail for a pair of suits; glancing at the faces of strangers, men and women cocooned in the comforting dusk, their features glowing in the candlelight. Standing where he was, half hidden by shadows, Willie felt momentarily cut off from all that was happening, a ghost at his own banquet, and he realized that he liked the sensation.
A small side table had been set up for the buffet, but now only the scattered remains of fried chicken and beef tips and firehouse chili lay upon it, along with a half-demolished birthday cake. In a corner to the right of the table, seated apart from the rest, were three men. One of them was Louis, grayer now than he had been on the first day that they had met and a little less intimidating, but that was simply a consequence of the years that Willie had known him. Under other circumstances, Louis could still be very intimidating indeed.
To Louis’s right sat Angel, nearly a foot shorter than his partner. He had dressed up for the night, which meant only that he looked marginally less untidy than usual. Hell, he had even shaved. It made him look younger. Willie Brew knew a little of Angel’s past, and suspected more. He was a good judge of people, better than he was given credit for. Willie had met a guy once who had known Angel’s old man, and a bigger sonofabitch had rarely walked this earth, the guy said. He had hinted darkly at abuse, at the farming out of the boy for money, for booze, and sometimes just for the fun of it. Willie had kept these things to himself, but it partly explained why there was such a fierce bond between Angel and Louis. Even though he knew nothing of Louis’s upbringing, he sensed that they were both men who had endured too much in childhood, and each had found an echo of himself in the other.
But it was the third man who really troubled Willie. Angel and Louis, silent partners in his business, were, in their way, less of an enigma than their companion. They did not make Willie feel that, in their presence, the world was in danger of shifting out of kilter, that here was a thing unknowable, even alien. By contrast, that was the effect this other had upon him. He respected the third man, even liked him, but there was something about him…What was that word Arno had used? “Ethereal.” Willie had been forced to look it up later. It wasn’t quite right, but it was close. “Otherworldly,” maybe. Whenever Willie spent time with him, he was reminded of churches and incense, of sermons filled with the threat of hellfire and damnation, memories from his childhood as an altar boy. It made no sense, but there it was. He carried with him a hint of night. In some ways, he reminded Willie of men whom he had known in Vietnam, the ones who had come through the experience fundamentally altered by what they had seen and done, so that even in ordinary conversation there was a sense that a part of themselves was detached from what was going on around them, that it resided in another place where it was always dark and half-glimpsed figures chittered in the shadows.
He was also dangerous, this man, as lethal as the two men beside him, although their lethality was part of their nature, and they had accommodated themselves to it, whereas he struggled against his. He had been a cop once, but then his wife and little girl got killed, and killed bad. He found the one who had done it, though, found him and put an end to him. He’d put an end to others since then, foul, vicious men and women, judging from what Willie had learned, and Angel and Louis had helped him. In doing so, they had all suffered. There had been pain, injuries, torments. Louis had a damaged left hand, the bones smashed by a bullet. Angel had spent months in a hospital enduring grafts on his back, and the experience had drained some of the life from him. He would die sooner because of it, of that Willie was certain. The third man had lost his PI’s license not so long ago, and things still weren’t right with his girlfriend, and probably never would be, so that he didn’t see his new daughter as often as he might have liked. Last Willie heard, he was working behind a bar in Portland. That wouldn’t continue for long, not with a man like that. He was a magnet for trouble, and the ones who came to him for help brought dragons in their wake.