“Shadow,” I cooed. “It’s me, baby. Harry.”
The low growl from hell started up again. Lonnie rubbed her ears. My hand got within about two inches of her great black, shiny wet nose. I moved it closer, just a hair, then held it there.
She seemed to pause for a second, then sniffed the air expectantly. Behind Lonnie, I saw her tail wag. My heart backfired in my chest as she lunged, and I had this fragmented thought that this was what the jaws of death were going to look like.
Then her paws were on my shoulders, and her huge tongue was slapping across my face, wet and hot and sloppy. I relaxed and wrapped my arms around her in a bear hug. I lowered her to the ground, and she barked twice, loud and cheery. No big deal to her. All forgiven, all forgotten.
“No, baby, no chicken. I don’t have any chicken today.”
She barked a couple more times, like I could still eat you, bud.
“What’d you do today, anyway?” Lonnie asked as he turned and headed back to the trailer. “Crawl out of bed and eat a big bowl of stupid?”
“Sorry,” I answered, following him.
“I’ve seen you do some sorry shit before, but I’d have to rate that one about a nine-point-nine.”
“That low?” I asked, closing the door behind me as we stepped into the living room. I looked around. Every time I came here, he had some new piece of junk or equipment, exotic weapon, or electronic device. The place looked more like Frankenstein’s laboratory than a dwelling-especially if Frankenstein drove a pickup truck and drank a lot of beer.
Speaking of beers, one came flying through the air toward me as Lonnie emerged from the kitchen. Two tops popped simultaneously as Lonnie pitched himself down on an overstuffed chair. I settled onto the couch, avoiding a large patch of thirty-weight for the sake of my good clothes.
“What’s this?” I asked, eyeing a large carton on the coffee table.
“UPS man left it,” he said.
“Bet he didn’t try to come through the gate.”
Lonnie laughed. “He’s got better sense.”
Curiosity got the better of me. “What is it?”
“Let’s see.” He whipped out a long pocketknife and thumbed a release on the side. The blade flicked open and glinted in the lamplight.
“What in the ever-loving hell are you doing with a switchblade?”
“This old thing?” he said offhandedly as he slit the packing tape across the top of the carton. “Hell, this’s just a toy.”
I shook my head, then took a long pull off the can. My throat sparkled as the beer went down. I only had to wait a couple of seconds for the burn in my gut.
Lonnie ripped the top of the package open and dug through a pile of Styrofoam peanuts. He pulled out some packing slips and an invoice. “Oh, yeah, I remember. Jeez, I ordered this stuff almost two months ago.”
“What is it?”
He dug deeper into the white, crunchy peanuts, then pulled out a small, green can. He handed it to me and I studied it. It weighed maybe a pound, maybe a little more, and except for the fact that it had a grenade pin and handle on the top, it looked fairly innocuous.
“I’m afraid to ask,” I admitted.
He sat back down in his chair. He held the sweating beer can in his left hand, and in his right, he casually tossed one of the canisters up and down.
“M-18 smoke grenade,” he said. “Military issue. Pull the pin, wait a couple of seconds, and then over the next minute and a half, you’ve got a quarter-million cubic feet of dense colored smoke. I sent for the variety pack. What color’d you get?”
I looked down at the writing on the can. “Red.”
“Great, I got violet.”
“Well, whoop-de-doo. Let’s go outside and play.”
Lonnie scooted over and dropped his canister back into the pile of packing peanuts. “What in the hell’s going on with you, Harry? Lately, you been about as much fun as a bad rash.”
I put my head back on the couch and stared straight up toward the ceiling. The dirty-white and brown-stained acoustic tiles looked like someone had been spitting tobacco juice at them.
He stared at me until I became uncomfortable. “What?” I finally asked, just to break the silence.
“I’ve known you for a long time, Harry, and you ain’t never been this weird before. What the fuck’s going on with you?”
“I wish I knew.”
I got up and walked into the kitchen. The sink was permanently discolored with grease stains and dirt. A huge, four-barreled Holley carburetor sat on the counter, the tops of its brass jets polished to a shine. I opened the refrigerator and grabbed another can of beer. It was the first time I’d ever done that without thinking.
Just make yourself at home, dude, I thought. “Want another one?” I yelled.
“No,” he called. “I like to savor mine. The delicate bouquet and the lingering aftertaste.”
“Yeah,” I said, walking back into the living room and pacing around with the can in my hand. “It’s the aftertaste I keep trying to wash away.”
“Who are you kidding, Harry? Don’t pull that Sam Spade shit on me. You don’t even drink that much.”
“Well, I may start.”
“Has it occurred to you that with all you’re dealing with, you’ve got every right to be a little stressed-out?”
“Yes,” I said, “I have the right to be a little stressed-out. I don’t have the right to quit functioning, which is what I feel like I’m doing.”
Lonnie’s heavy workboots hit the top of the coffee table with a bang as he stretched out. “Look, guy, your girlfriend’s a hostage, another friend’s in jail for murder, and you’re so fucking broke you can’t afford to pay a lawyer to bankrupt your ass. And to top it off, my dog just missed chewing your nuts off by the thickness of a chain-link fence. You think there might be some situational triggers here?”
“Yeah, and as soon as I get this laundry list of situations taken care of, I’ll be okay.”
“That’s it,” he yelled, slapping the armrest of the worn red-velour chair he sat in. “That’s the problem. See? You keep saying taken care of and fixed and all that shit. You keep acting like you’re going to solve some crime and be the big hero. And there ain’t nothing for you to solve. It’s not your business. You aren’t a hostage negotiator and you aren’t a homicide investigator and you’re not, not a …”
He paused. “Not a detective?” I asked. “Or at least not much of one.”
“That’s not what I meant. You still don’t get it. What I’m trying to tell you is that you’re going about it the wrong way. You can’t be a detective here. So stop trying.”
“So what do I do?” I yelled. “Sit here while the whole damn world swirls down the toilet?”
“If it does, you can’t stop it, can you? But that’s not even the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
He shifted up in the chair and dropped his boots on the floor with a thud that shook the floor of the trailer. “Forget all this Mike Hammer shit. Go back to what you know best.”
I felt my forehead tighten involuntarily. “What do you mean?”
“What did you do before you became a private investigator?”
“A reporter,” I said. “You know that.”
“Right. And you were a much better reporter than you are a detective.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said.
“What the hell would you expect me to say? You were a reporter for, what, fifteen years? And you’ve been a detective maybe two years. Do the math.”
I set the beer can down on the coffee table, still unopened. Then I settled into the corner of the couch and found that I had unconsciously chewed a sore place on my lower lip.
“So stop thinking like a detective,” he said. “And go back to thinking like a reporter.”
“You know,” I said, after a moment, “I’d gotten out of that mind-set.”
“So get back into it. Forget about catching the bad guys. Go back to looking for the truth, just for its own sake. You do that, everything else will fall into place on its own.”
Then, for a moment, this incredible sense of calm came over me. Lonnie was right. I’d been trying to chase down and hog-tie something I couldn’t even see. I began to see Marsha’s situation in a different light, and Slim’s as well. But there was one situation-the financial one-that had only one perspective, and that perspective was inescapable. In order to change that, I was going to have to do something I’d never done before, and I was real uncomfortable at the thought.