“That’s right.”
I tugged out my handkerchief and wiped my forehead, laying it on thick for sure at this point, but sometimes this is how you gotta do it. You make yourself an open face of need, you send out need like smoke signals. You let need billow out and fill up the room.
“Because now the boss,” I said, “Sully’s boss, Mr. Coleman, who is now my boss, he’s saying this is on me. He’s saying I better find out what happened to that shipment or it’s coming out of my check.”
Angie guffawed, incredulous. “And you haven’t even been paid yet.”
“That’s right!” I slapped the counter again, both hands this time. “That’s right!”
Angie smiled. I smiled. We smiled at each other.
“So I been going crazy, this is four days now,” I said. “All Sully knows is the name of the supplier, and I called them, can’t get a straight answer. Sully does not know the name of the truck company. Between you and me, Angie, my man Sully, we’re not talking about Albert Einstein here, all right?”
“I’m getting that.”
“So I been going around to the different shippers, you know, because I gotta figure this out or I ain’t even getting my first paycheck. I’m supposed to be Sherlock Holmes or something. I’m the dang pea-gravel police all a sudden!”
Angie laughed. I laughed. We laughed with each other.
“You got a packing slip number?” she said, coming down off the laughter.
“No.”
“Client account number?”
“No. Like I told you.”
“You got nothing.”
“Zip.”
I leaned forward on the counter, let my golden eyes brim with need. I pushed the cap back so she could see my whole sad, handsome face. I was a weary and sorry soul, but nice to look at. I knew exactly how I looked.
“Well, let’s see,” said Angie, and then, bless her beautiful free heart, she turned to her computer. “So Sunday…” she said and started typing. “What’s the name of the place?”
“Okay, now, that’s another little problem.”
Angie reared her head back and clucked, gave me a look: Are you serious? I grinned, sheepish.
“It’s Garden something,” I said, “I know that. Garden Store? Gardens of—oh, I don’t know. Garden something.”
“And you know where it’s coming from? Of course you don’t.”
“Alabama, maybe?”
Angie gave me a different kind of look, sharp and serious. Angry, even.
“Not Alabama. Not with us. We do south-south, and we do north-north. We do a little bit of north to south, but we usually contract those out. We do zero south to north. You want south to north you need a specialty shipper to make sure you’re clearing all the regulations and whatnot. Most S-N places, they only do S-N, because the other customers, they do not want to be dealing with that shit.” Angie did not apologize for the word. “Best believe I would not be sitting here shipping south to north.”
“Oh, right. Right.”
“Best believe it.”
Angie clucked. The very idea. Meanwhile, I was processing this. I had assumed, and Bridge had assumed along with me, that Barton had chosen Winston Bibb to blackmail because Whole Wide World could arrange a truck to go all the way—to bring Jackdaw from GGSI up to Indy. But this company didn’t move shipments north out of the Four: Angie was leaving little doubt about that. She was back to the computer, still shaking her head, typing rapidly without breaking her masterpiece fingernails.
“So look,” she said. “I can just look for shipments starting with Garden, that’s all. Anything coming out of anywhere, Sunday afternoon, starting with Garden. I can do that.”
“You can do that?”
“Oh, baby, there’s a lot of things I can do.”
Totally deadpan, just the tiniest shadow of a smile, not even looking up from the screen. “Don’t tease me now, Angie,” I said. “Don’t you mess with me.”
Angie typed a while, then told me to give her just a second more, and I did. I drummed on her counter with my fingertips and flashed her sweet smiles, pulsing with anxiety and flirtatious energy, while inside I thought with a certain indistinct longing of the kids in the indoor trampoline park on the other side of the parking lot, white kids and black kids, hurling themselves up and down, up and down. I pictured them in slow motion, smiling from ear to ear, howling their glee.
“Here,” said Angie. “Here we go.”
She turned the screen so I could see, and I slapped the counter, one last time, loud and hard enough to make the dry-erase board shiver on the wall and the little bell above the door ring.
“Oh, Angie,” I said. “Oh, Angie!”
She leaned back in her chair.
“You just tell your man Sully I said not to be jerking you around again.”
“I surely will, Angie, I surely will.” She beamed. A nice girl like Angie, she’d tangled with a Sully or two in her day. “Hey—listen,” I said at last. “You think you could print this screen out for me?”
14.