You could have been a little more diplomatic, at least, Morris thinks. A little diplomacy could have saved all those wasted years. But you couldn’t spare me any, could you? Not so much as an attaboy, that must have taken guts. All I got was don’t try to lay this off on me.
His old pal walks his expensive shoes into Jamais Toujours, where he will no doubt have his expanding ass kissed by the maitre d’. Morris looks at his bagel and thinks he should finish it – or at least use his teeth to scrape the cream cheese into his mouth – but his stomach is too knotted up to accept it. He will go to the MAC instead, and spend the afternoon trying to impose some order on their tits-up, bass-ackwards digital filing system. He knows he shouldn’t come back here to Lacemaker Lane – no longer even a street but a kind of pricey, open-air mall from which vehicles are banned – and knows he’ll probably be on the same bench next Tuesday. And the Tuesday after that. Unless he’s got the notebooks. That would break the spell. No need to bother with his old pal then.
He gets up and tosses the bagel into a nearby trash barrel. He looks down toward Jamais Toujours and whispers, ‘You suck, old pal. You really suck. And for two cents—’
But no.
No.
Only the notebooks matter, and if Chuck Roberson will help him out, he’s going after them tomorrow night. And Chuck will help him. He owes Morris a large favor, and Morris means to call it in. He knows he should wait longer, until Ellis McFarland is absolutely sure Morris is one of the good ones and turns his attention elsewhere, but the pull of the trunk and what’s inside it is just too strong. He’d love to get some payback from the fat son of a bitch now feeding his face with fancy food, but revenge isn’t as important as that fourth Jimmy Gold novel. There might even be a fifth! Morris knows that isn’t likely, but it’s possible. There was a lot of writing in those books, a mighty lot. He walks toward the bus stop, sparing one baleful glance back at Jamais Toujours and thinking, You’ll never know how lucky you were.
Old pal.
5
Around the time Morris Bellamy is chucking his bagel and heading for the bus stop, Hodges is finishing his salad and thinking he could eat two more just like it. He puts the Styrofoam box and plastic spork back in the carryout bag and tosses it in the passenger footwell, reminding himself to dispose of his litter later. He likes his new car, a Prius that has yet to turn ten thousand miles, and does his best to keep it clean and neat. The car was Holly’s pick. ‘You’ll burn less gas and be kind to the environment,’ she told him. The woman who once hardly dared to step out of her house now runs many aspects of his life. She might let up on him a little if she had a boyfriend, but Hodges knows that’s not likely. He’s as close to a boyfriend as she’s apt to get.
It’s a good thing I love you, Holly, he thinks, or I’d have to kill you.
He hears the buzz of an approaching plane, checks his watch, and sees it’s eleven thirty-four. It appears that Oliver Madden is going to be johnny-on-the-spot, and that’s lovely. Hodges is an on-time man himself. He grabs his sportcoat from the backseat and gets out. It doesn’t hang just right because there’s heavy stuff in the front pockets.
A triangular overhang juts out above the entrance doors, and it’s at least ten degrees cooler in its shade. Hodges takes his new glasses from the jacket’s inner pocket and scans the sky to the west. The plane, now on its final approach, swells from a speck to a blotch to an identifiable shape that matches the pictures Holly has printed out: a 2008 Beechcraft KingAir 350, red with black piping. Only twelve hundred hours on the clock, and exactly eight hundred and five landings. The one he’s about to observe will be number eight-oh-six. Rated selling price, four million and change.
A man in a coverall comes out through the main door. He looks at Hodges’s car, then at Hodges. ‘You can’t park there,’ he says.
‘You don’t look all that busy today,’ Hodges says mildly.
‘Rules are rules, mister.’
‘I’ll be gone very shortly.’
‘Shortly is not the same as now. The front is for pickups and deliveries. You need to use the parking lot.’
The KingAir floats over the end of the runway, now only feet from Mother Earth. Hodges jerks a thumb at it. ‘Do you see that plane, sir? The man flying it is an extremely dirty dog. A number of people have been looking for him for a number of years, and now here he is.’
The guy in the coverall considers this as the extremely dirty dog lands the plane with nothing more than a small blue-gray puff of rubber. They watch as it disappears behind the Zane Aviation building. Then the man – probably a mechanic – turns back to Hodges. ‘Are you a cop?’
‘No,’ Hodges says, ‘but I’m in that neighborhood. Also, I know presidents.’ He holds out his loosely curled hand, palm down. A fifty-dollar bill peeps from between the knuckles.
The mechanic reaches for it, then reconsiders. ‘Is there going to be trouble?’