On the northern end of North Street, Reznick pulled off the road into a small parking lot, and pulled up beside a tollbooth-like house with a sign on the front that read Java-Hut. It was painted pastel violet with pastel yellow trimming, like an Easter egg. He stopped with his car window just below the window in the side of the little house. The young woman who worked in there was a fresh-faced blonde with dreamy eyes and a bedroom smile that was an especially pleasant way to start the day.
“Hello, Marc,” she said.
“Good morning, Janine,” he said with a big smile. “I’ll have the usual, please.”
“Comin’ up.”
It was the only time he ever wished he drove a big pickup or an SUV – so he could be level with the window and look in there while Janine moved around making his frozen coffee drink. He imagined she wore faded denim shorts above long tan legs that looked as smooth as the coffee drinks she served. Probably a very tight, round ass. Nice, smallish breasts – those he’d glimpsed from his car as she bent forward. She looked like she had the whole world in front of her – and she was trapped in that little shack selling coffee drinks. He wondered what her dreams were, and how that job figured into them. She was twenty-two, twenty-three – where did she hope to be at thirty-three, at forty-three? Or did she think that far ahead? That was what worried Reznick about the young people he met – they seemed to go along with the flow of things, no ambitions, no particular hopes or dreams, seeking not knowledge but the next entertainment, the next diversion. He wondered if Janine was that way. And he wondered with whom she discussed those things – what lucky guy got to hear about Janine’s dreams? Or was she with a guy who didn’t care?
“Here ya go, Marc,” she said with a big smile.
She took his money with one hand and gave him the drink with the other. Their fingers briefly touched. As she made change, she said, “Any interesting cases?”
“I’m afraid not, Janine. Business has been very slow. I may just dump the whole thing and go raise alpacas, or something.”
Her laughter was a pleasant, youthful sound. She handed Reznick his change.
“Have a good one, Janine.”
“You, too.”
He drove away and headed for his office.
His frozen drink was already beginning to melt.
Sherry awakened suddenly and bit the inside of her cheek.
“Ow,” she said as she slowly raised a hand to the side of her face.
“What’s wrong?” Philpott said.
“I bit mythelf,” she said.
“Andy’s here.”
“What?” she said, her eyes suddenly open wide. She looked down at herself. She was lying on the bed, all the covers in a heap at the foot, in shorts and a yellow tube top – When did I put that on? she thought – and she sat up straight. She closed her eyes tightly when the bed whirled around. She flopped back down on the pillows.
Philpott said, “You wanna try that again a little slower?”
Sherry laughed humorlessly. She slowly sat up and moved her legs off the bed. She sat there for awhile, her elbows locked at her sides.
“What time is it?” she said.
“About quarter to ten.”
“When did he get here?”
“They been here a few minutes.”
“They?”
“David’s with him.”
She set her jaw and stood. “That son of a bitch had better – “ She stalked down the hall and shouted, “You son of a bitch, you’d better have a good story ready!” She stepped into the kitchen and saw him seated at the bar, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer.
“I brought a buncha beer,” he said. “The fridge’s full of it. Now we gotta get some food in there.”
“Where the hell have you been?” she said. “You fuckin’ jerk, you know how worried I was?”
“Yeah, I noticed how worried you was when I got here. You was so worried, Philpott had to wake you up.”
Sherry turned around and reached out blindly. Her hand landed on a coffee mug on the counter. As she lifted it and pulled it back over her shoulder, Andy disappeared behind the bar. She threw it anyway, and it broke into two pieces when it hit the living room floor.
“Hey,” David said. He was seated in Andy’s recliner watching television. The mug fell at his feet.
“You fuckin’ asshole,” Sherry said. “I was worried all night. I called your cell phone, but it was turned off. Turned off! Since when do you turn off your phone?”
Andy cautiously raised his eyes above the edge of the bar. When he saw she was unarmed, he rose up and sat on the stool again. There were two stools at the bar, one on the living room side and one on the kitchen side, and they did not match.
“My battery’s dead,” he said. He reached into his pocket, took the small silver phone out and put it on the bar. “Look at it yourself.”
She crossed the kitchen and opened the phone. She tried to turn it on.
“No signal,” Andy said. “Nothing. Needs batteries.”
“Where the hell were you all night?” she said, putting the phone back down, not very carefully.
“David and I went over to Eddie’s to score some pot,” he said.
Sherry pulled back and put a fist on her hip, her elbow jutting out at her side. Her face seethed. “Was Karen there?” she said.
“Well, a course Karen was there, she’s married to him, isn’t she?”
Karen was a sore spot. Andy had slept with her once while Eddie was out of town. The only reason Eddie had anything to do with Andy was that Eddie didn’t know anything about it.
“You were there all night?” Sherry said.
“Well, Eddie had some weed that was… oh, man, it was some special shit, I tell ya, some stuff he’d grown himself.” Andy shook his head. “Ain’t nothin’ ever made me that stoned since the first time I got stoned.” He turned to David. “Wasn’t that some good shit?”
“Incredible shit,” David said. “It was amazing. At one point, I imagined I had a bunch of little holes in my forehead and a cold breeze was blowing in over my brain.”
Andy and David laughed.
“You were stoned all night?” Sherry said.
Andy said, “Too stoned to drive home.”
“And Eddie and Karen don’t have a fuckin’ phone?”
“Like I toldja, I was stoned, I didn’t think to call you. I wasn’t thinking, period.”
Sherry sighed. What made her just as angry as the fact that he hadn’t called all night was the fact that she was so glad to see him, she wanted to go to him and touch his face and put her fingers in his beautiful long hair. She stood there and looked at him for a while, and then she did. She went to the bar, bent over it, and kissed him with her hand on the side of his head.
“God, how I wish you’d been here last night,” she said. “It was so scary.” She pulled back and turned to David in the living room. “Who the hell was that guy you brought here?”
“Arnie?” David said. “Where is Arnie, anyway?”
“He’s dead,” Sherry said angrily. “He OD’d here last night.”
“Whuh… what?” David said, slowly sitting forward in the recliner. He gradually rose to his feet. “Did you say… Arnie is… dead?”
“Yes.”
“Then… where is he? What happened to him?”
She looked at Andy. “You’re not gonna believe it. These men – they claimed to be Secret Service. They came and took your friend away, David. They wrapped him up in blankets and just took him away. Two men dressed in black. As they left, one said this had never happened, and we’d never seen them, or somethin’ like that.”