Chapter V
M errick had promised us two days of peace, but I wasn’t prepared to gamble the safety of Rebecca and her daughter on the word of a man like that. I had seen his kind before: Merrick was a simmerer, his temper always on the verge of boiling over. I recalled the way he had reacted to my comment about the girl in the picture, and the warnings about his “personal” business. Despite his assurances, there was always the chance that he might go to a bar, down a couple of drinks, and decide now was the time to have another word with Daniel Clay’s daughter. On the other hand, I couldn’t spend all my time watching her. I needed to call in some help. I had few options. There was Jackie Garner, who was big and strong and well-meaning, but also had a couple of screws loose. In addition, where Jackie went two meat wagons on legs called the Fulci brothers usually followed, and the Fulcis were to subtlety what an egg beater was to an egg. I wasn’t sure how Rebecca Clay would take it if she found them standing on her doorstep. In fact, I wasn’t sure how the doorstep would take it either.
Louis and Angel would be preferable, but they were over on the West Coast for a couple of days, wine tasting in the Napa Valley. Clearly, I had sophisticated friends, but I couldn’t afford to leave Rebecca Clay unprotected until they returned. It seemed that I had no other choice. Reluctantly, I called Jackie Garner.
I met him at Sangillo’s Tavern, a little place on Hampshire that was always lit up like Christmas inside. He was drinking a Bud Light, but I tried not to hold that against him. I joined him at the bar and ordered a sugar-free Sprite. Nobody laughed, which was kind of them.
“You on a diet?” asked Jackie. He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt that bore the logo of a Portland bar that had closed down so long ago its patrons had probably paid for their drinks in wampum. His hair was shaved close to his skull, and there was a faded bruise beside his left eye. His belly pressed tightly against the shirt so that a casual glance might have dismissed him as another fat guy at a bar, but Jackie Garner wasn’t that at all. In all the time that I’d known him no one had ever knocked him down, and I didn’t like to think about what had happened to whoever had left that bruise on Jackie’s face.
“I’m not in the mood for beer,” I said.
He raised his bottle, squinted at me, and announced, in a deep baritone: “This isn’t beer. This is Bud.”
He looked pleased with himself.
“That’s very catchy,” I said.
He smiled widely. “I’ve been entering competitions. You know, the ones where you think up a slogan. Like, ‘This isn’t beer. This is Bud.’” He picked up my Sprite. “Or, ‘This isn’t soda. This is Sprite.’ ‘These aren’t nuts. These are—’ Well, these are nuts, but you get the point.”
“I see a pattern emerging.”
“I figure it’s adaptable to any product.”
“Except nuts in bowls.”
“Pretty much.”
“Don’t see how it can fail. You busy these days?”
Jackie shrugged. As far as I could tell, he was never busy. He lived with his mother, did a little bar work a couple of days a week, and spent the rest of the time manufacturing homemade munitions in a tumble-down shack in the woods behind his house. Occasionally, someone would report hearing an explosion to the local cops. Even less occasionally, the cops would send a car along in the faint hope that Jackie had blown himself up. So far, they had been sorely disappointed.
“You need something done?” he asked. His eyes gleamed with new light at the prospect of potential mayhem.
“Just for a couple of days. There’s a woman who’s being bothered by a guy.”
“You want us to hurt him?”
“Us? Who’s us?”
“You know.” He gestured with his thumb at some indefinable place beyond the confines of the bar. Despite the cold, I felt a prickle of sweat on my forehead and aged about one year in an instant.
“They’re here? What are you, joined at the hip?”
“I told them to wait outside. I know they make you nervous.”
“They don’t make me nervous. They scare the hell out of me.”
“Well, they’re not allowed in here no more anyway. They’re not allowed anywhere, I guess, not since the, uh, the thing.”
There was a “thing.” Where the Fulcis were concerned, there was always a “thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing over at the B-Line.”
The B-Line was just about the roughest joint in the city, a dive bar that offered a free drink to anyone who could produce a one-month AA badge. Getting banned from the B-Line for causing trouble was like getting thrown out of the Eagle Scouts for being too good with knots.
“What happened?”
“They hit a guy with a door.”
By comparison with some of the stories I had heard about the Fulcis, and the B-Line, that seemed comparatively minor.
“You know, that doesn’t sound so bad. For them.”
“Well, it was really a couple of guys. And two doors. And they took the doors off their hinges so they could hit the guys with them. Now they can’t go out so much no more. They’re kind of sore about it. But they don’t mind sitting in the lot here. They think the lights are pretty, and I bought them a couple of family-style takeouts from Norm’s.”
I took a deep, calming breath.
“I don’t want anybody hurt, which means I’m not sure that I want the Fulcis near this.”
Jackie scowled. “They’ll be disappointed. I told them I was meeting you, and they asked to come along. They like you.”
“How can you tell? Because they haven’t hit me with a door yet?”
“They don’t mean no harm. It’s just that the doctors keep changing their medication, and sometimes it don’t take like it should.”
Jackie spun his bottle sorrowfully. He didn’t have a lot of friends, and it was clear that he felt society had misjudged the Fulcis on a great many levels. Society, by contrast, was certain that it had the Fulcis down pat, and had taken all appropriate steps to ensure that contact with them was kept to a minimum.
I patted Jackie on the arm.
“We’ll find something for them to do, okay?”
He brightened. “They’re good guys to have around when things get messy,” he said, conveniently ignoring the fact that things tended to get messy precisely because they were around.
“Look, Jackie, this guy’s name is Merrick, and he’s been following my client for a week now. He’s been asking about her father, but her father has been missing for a long time, so long that he’s been declared legally dead. I cornered Merrick yesterday, and he said that he’d ease off for a couple of days, but I’m not inclined to trust him. He’s got a temper.”
“Was he carrying?”
“I didn’t see one, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
Jackie sipped his beer.
“How come he’s only showing up now?” he asked.
“What?”
“If this guy’s been missing so long, how come this other guy is only asking about him now?”
I looked at Jackie. That was the thing about him. Something definitely rattled in his head when he walked, but he wasn’t dumb. I’d considered the question of why Merrick was now asking about Daniel Clay, but not what might have prevented him from doing so before. I thought again of that tattoo on his knuckle. Could Merrick have been doing time since Daniel Clay disappeared?
“Maybe I can find that out while you’re watching the woman. Her name is Rebecca Clay. I’ll introduce you to her tonight. And look: keep the Fulcis away from face-to-faces with her, but if you want to have them close by, then that’s okay with me. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to let them be seen keeping an eye on the house.”
Even a man like Merrick was likely to be discouraged from approaching Rebecca by the sight of three big men, two of whom made the third look underfed.
I gave Jackie a description of Merrick and his car, including the tag number. “Don’t bank on the car, though. He may ditch it now that it’s been connected with him.”
“Century and a half a day,” said Jackie. “I’ll look after Tony and Paulie out of it.” He finished his beer. “Now, you gotta come out and say hello. They’ll be offended if you don’t.”
“And we wouldn’t want that,” I said, and I meant it, too.
“Damn straight.”
Tony and Paulie hadn’t arrived in their monster truck, which was why I hadn’t spotted them when I’d parked. Instead, they were sitting in the front of a dirty white van that Jackie sometimes used for what he euphemistically termed his “business.” As I approached, the Fulcis opened the van doors and climbed out. I wasn’t even sure how Jackie had managed to get them in there to begin with. It looked like the van had been assembled around them. The Fulcis weren’t tall, but they were wide, even double-wide. The kind of places that they shopped for clothes opted for practical over fashionable, so they were twin visions in polyester and leather blousons. Tony clasped my hand in one of his paws, smearing it with barbecue sauce, and I felt something pop. Paulie patted me softly on the back, and I almost coughed up a lung.
“We’re back in business, fellas,” announced Jackie proudly.
And for a brief moment, before common sense prevailed, I felt strangely happy.