“Where are they?” Kipp asks.
“Ms. Wyndham, she’s the general manager, she has them in her office. She says the FBI might want them.”
Angelina feels Kipp’s alarm. A sudden electricity in the air.
He says, “What’s the FBI got to do with anything?”
“The lady who was with the roller-skater, she flashed an FBI badge or something at Ms. Wyndham. Ms. Wyndham thinks now it was phony ID, she needs to tell the FBI.”
The situation is instantly clear to Angelina. The Ethan Hunt bitch is gone. Her dyke friend is gone. Time to forget them. Let them go. Get out of here.
To Kipp, she says only, “Better melt Vinyl faster than fast.”
Kipp blinks at her. He nods. He’s always like two seconds behind her.
He gives two C-notes to the bell captain.
The garage is quiet. Lonely.
“A little muscle, too,” Angelina advises.
“Yeah,” Kipp says, and he takes the bell captain by the throat. Rams him back against the wall. Gets in his face. “You never saw either of us. You never talked to either of us. You understand?”
The bell captain’s voice is choked off. He can only nod.
“You say a word about us, I’ll find you one night and cut your nose off and feed it to you. Same for the doorman. You tell him.”
The red-faced bell captain nods. His eyes bulge. His mouth is an O as he sucks for breath. He doesn’t look like a doctor now. He looks like a red-faced fish. He’s nothing in his fancy uniform. He’s a big zero. A feeb.
Kipp lets go of the feeb’s throat. Throws a punch hard into his gut. The feeb goes to his knees.
Kipp lets the big zero keep the two hundred. It’s a way of humbling him. Like saying he took the two hundred to allow Kipp to beat him.
Angelina and Kipp walk away.
Behind them, the feeb vomits on the garage floor.
Angelina will miss this when she kills Kipp. She will miss watching him show people how little they are, how nothing. And watching him hurt them.
32
* * *
AT TWO O’CLOCK, as arranged, Barney was waiting for Jane on Oceanfront Walk, sitting on the platformed steps that led up to the indoor amusement center associated with the Santa Monica Pier. This was where she had first seen him earlier in the day. He was hunched under the weight of his backpack, the trash bag of his worldly goods at his side, staring at the pavement between his feet as though the meaning of life must be written in the concrete shaded by his body.
That morning, by way of introducing herself, she had brought him a breakfast plate from a nearby café, which understandably would have been unwilling to serve him if he had entered in all his ragged splendor, for most of the other customers would have bailed upon his arrival.
He had wondered at her motives, but he’d eaten what she brought him. After fifteen minutes of conversation, she had made her motives clear when she counted five twenty-dollar bills into his hand and told him about a man who would, at noon, walk through Palisades Park with briefcases and with a metallic balloon tied to one wrist.
Barney was not as dirty as he appeared. His hands were careworn but reasonably clean, and in her company he had a few times lathered them with antibacterial gel. His hair and beard bristled as if with a dangerous electrical charge, but they were not matted with filth. She thought that he must shower at a shelter somewhere or else bathe in the sea at night.
His clothes were every bit as dirty as they appeared to be, however, and it was necessary to talk to him at a three-foot remove to avoid being withered and prematurely aged by his horrific breath.
Now she sat on the step he occupied, at the distance needed to avoid his halitosis. “You did a good job in the park.”
He raised his bushy head and stared at her from under a tangled hedge of eyebrows, and for a moment it seemed that he did not know who she was. His watery eyes were a pale faded-denim blue, a shade she’d never seen before, and she wondered if too much alcohol and misfortune could have faded them from a darker hue.
Although his eyes didn’t clear, awareness rose in them. “Most wouldn’t come like they said, but I knew you would.”
“Well, I owe you another hundred dollars.”
“You don’t owe me nothin’ but what you want to owe.”
“Nona said you scared the hell out of Jimmy.”
“The baby-face balloon guy? He’s an asshole. Pardon my French. He won’t give even just a dollar to a Vietnam vet.”
“Are you a Vietnam vet, Barney?”
“How old you think I look?”
She said, “How old do you think you look?”
“You’re a regular damn diplomat. I think I look seventy-eight.”
“I wouldn’t argue with you about that.”
“What I really am is fifty. Or maybe forty-nine. No older than fifty-one. I was a snot-nosed kid when Vietnam was hot.”
From a coat pocket he fished out a bottle of Purell and began to sanitize his hands.
“You use a lot of that stuff,” she said.
“I’d drink it by the quart if it did the job on my insides like it does my hands.”
“Have you had lunch yet?”
“I don’t eat three squares. Don’t need ’em.”
“Well, I can bring you some lunch from the café. You liked their food at breakfast.”
When he squinched his hairy face, he seemed to be looking out at her from shrubbery.
“It won’t come out of your hundred,” she said, and she gave him five more twenties.
As he tucked the money away, he looked around suspiciously, as if countless thieves were gathered on the stairs behind him, waiting for the chance to turn him upside down and his pockets inside out.
“On the other hand,” he said, “I can’t abide offendin’ a lady.”
“What would you like?”
“They have a nice cheeseburger in there?”
“I believe they do. You want fries or something?”
“Just a nice cheeseburger and Seven Up.”
She brought the cheeseburger in a take-out bag and a medium 7 Up in a paper cup. “I told them just a little ice.”
He surreptitiously mixed part of a pint of whiskey with the soda. “You’re a scary woman, the way you know a man’s mind.”
He didn’t talk while he ate. She found it best not to watch.
High above, seagulls performed ballets blancs. They cried down the day, and though their voices would have been annoying if issued close at hand, they were otherworldly and haunting from a height.
When Barney finished eating, he said, “You don’t have no damn reason to care, but you know what I like most about you?”
“What’s that?”
“You give me money without naggin’ about spendin’ it on drink.”
“It’s your money now, not mine.”
“Not many left who don’t lecture about every damn thing.”
After he threw away the burger bag and the paper cup, he picked up his trash bag of belongings. “You walk with me just up there past the pier? Till I’m sure no greedy pirate’s followin’ me?”
“Sure.”
They had gone a little way when he said, “I made a whole lot of bad choices in my life, but you know what?”
“What?”
He chuckled. “Give me a chance, I’d make ’em all over again.”
He was quiet for a few steps. Then: “It’s a beautiful, terrible world, isn’t it?”
She smiled and nodded.
“You know what I once was before I was this way? I once was a waiter in a fancy restaurant. Tips were big. Made good money. I once was like a youth counselor and lay minister in my church. I coached a Little League team. I knew baseball like nobody else.” He had come to a stop. He regarded the gulls adance in the sun-shot air. “Funny, but most of the time, I can’t remember how all that went away.”
“It never went away,” Jane said. “It’s still part of who you are. It always will be.”