“DStar’s real name is Jimmy Bonifant and Skip was talking to somebody named Bonnie when we were at Blue Hill.”
“Who made the deal?” Dodson said, not giving up. “Noelle went out to the desert in her Jimmy Choos, sat down at the picnic table Skip don’t have, and worked out the details with all them dogs barking? I ain’t seeing it.”
Isaiah hesitated. Dodson thought Oh shit.
“She had a go-between,” Isaiah said.
“Go-between like who—Charles?” Dodson said. “Skip sat down with Grandyose at Starbucks and them two unstable muthafuckas worked out a deal? You know that didn’t happen.”
“So it was somebody else,” Isaiah said, softer than before.
Dodson thought, I landed one. He’s hurt. “Maybe it was Bug got together with Skip,” he said. “Skip talked about being in the Olympics and Bug told him how he might be something in Fergus but he wasn’t shit up in here. Be serious, Isaiah. Noelle wouldn’t trust either of them fools to go to the store and buy a soda, now would she?”
Isaiah looked at his gumbo.
“Well?” Dodson said. He’s down for the count.
Isaiah put his spoon down and wiped his lips with a napkin and in those few moments Dodson knew he’d been sandbagged. “No, Noelle wouldn’t trust them,” Isaiah said, “but she might trust her bodyguard.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, honey,” Blasé said, “but I’ve got a little problem. A stalker’s been following me around, popping up everywhere I go. You know the kind, looks at you like he wants to see you in his basement chained to the water heater?”
“I’ve been in that situation myself,” Noelle said. “Had some silverback on my trail. I think Cal sent him to scare me and it worked too. Did you get a restraining order?”
“Not yet. We don’t even know his name.”
“Anything I can do?”
“I don’t know how to say this but—I’d like to borrow your bodyguard.”
“Rodion?”
“Is that his name? Rodion?”
“That’s what we call him.”
“Does he have a last name?”
“If he does he hasn’t told anybody. Why him?”
“You know that club on Melrose, Nirvana? It’s always so crowded you can’t even raise your arms? Byron said he saw Rodion at the bar and it was like he’d just come back from Liberia with a runny nose. Nobody was within ten feet of him.”
“Yes, he is a frightening individual. Consuelo calls him el monstruo feo, which I believe means tell me when he’s gone so I can clean the damn house.”
“Can you spare him, honey?”
“I would if I could but he’s on vacation.”
“Where does somebody like that go on vacation?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he went to Comic-Con. He’d fit right in and wouldn’t have to wear a costume.”
After the gumbo, Dodson went home and Isaiah mulled over his Noelle-Charles-Rodion theory. It sounded good in an argument but he had the feeling that’s all it was, a way to win an argument.
Once, Marcus and Isaiah spent the afternoon at Mount Baldy having snowball fights and sliding down the icy slopes on a cardboard sled. They were having so much fun they lost track of time and got a late start heading home. The two-lane road was pitch dark and windy, clumps of snow on the roadside. Isaiah was eleven years old and a city boy. It made him nervous being out here, driving an old clunker with a broken muffler and a knocking engine. When they got off the mountain and into the high desert, the road straightened out but Isaiah didn’t feel any better about it. Billboards for strip clubs and bail bondsmen going by. The houses isolated, junk in the yards. Marcus said he could hear the domestic abuse. They were coming down a long grade when something in the drive train thumped.
“What was that?” Isaiah said.
“Damn, the car’s stuck in second,” Marcus said. He pulled the car over to the shoulder and messed with the clutch and gearshift. “I’ve got to get underneath.”
“Underneath the car?” Isaiah said.
“There’s no room to work down there,” Marcus said. He thought a moment, then drove the car over a drainage ditch and stopped, the wheels straddling the ditch. “Okay, let’s take a look,” he said. He got his toolbox out of the trunk, put a flashlight in his mouth, and slid into the drainage ditch and under the car.
Isaiah waited in the cold, stamping his feet, and wondering what was taking so long. He could hear Marcus squirming around, grunting, the tools clanking. “Everything okay?” he said.
Marcus crawled out from under the car, filthy with grease and mud. “It’s the pin that holds the shifter to the fork in the transaxle,” he said. “It’s broken.”
“Can we get another pin?” Isaiah said, looking around at the dark.
Marcus rummaged around in the trunk and found a road flare. He cut off the wire stand with a wire cutter and slid under the car again. More tool noises and grunting.
“What are you doing?” Isaiah said.
“Replacing the pin,” Marcus said, “but I’ve got to bend the wire to fit.”
Isaiah waited another year.
“Got it,” Marcus said.