33

Jimmy Plumm looked at the cash piled on his desk. He slid a hundred-dollar bill from under a rubber band and held it to the light. Then he smelled it as one might sniff a cigar. ‘I have to be careful these days, Lee. So many good counterfeiters around. So much sham money.’

‘We’re clear now,’ Boyle said.

‘Even steven.’

‘Pleasure doing business with you,’ Boyle said. ‘Except for a little random violence and the daylight robbery of my Porsche.’

‘Business is very cruel,’ Plumm said. ‘A moment, before you go rushing away, Lee. I’m curious. How did you raise this much money?’

Boyle tapped the side of his nose. ‘No can say.’

‘Daddy come good?’

‘Daddy isn’t involved.’

‘Ah. You have other sources.’ Plumm fingered a strand of long hair away from his shoulder.

Boyle was restless here. He didn’t like Plumm, didn’t like Plumm’s office, the heavy brocade drapes drawn against the sunlight and the sense of being imprisoned in some eternal night. The desk lamp threw out a sickly light the color of a withered lime.

‘Have a drop of port before you go, Lee.’

‘Hate port, sport.’

‘A little vino then? This is a red-letter day, after all. And to think I was worrying about you, imagining Raseci ruining that pleasant face of yours.’

Plumm was already pouring wine from a decanter into two glasses. He pushed one across his desk toward Boyle, who shrugged and picked it up.

Boyle sipped and said, ‘Nice, very nice. I’d be happy to sit here all day, Plumm, but I have places to go. Do I get a receipt?’

‘Very funny, Lee,’ Plumm said. ‘You won’t let me in on the secret of this money?’

‘I’ll carry it to my grave.’

‘Then we’ll let it go like that, shall we?’ Plumm extended his hand and Boyle took it. The handshake was too firm to be friendly. But you couldn’t expect amiable gestures from Plumm. Even a handshake had to establish some kind of supremacy.

Fingers tingling, Boyle walked to the door.

Plumm said, ‘Terrible thing about your girl, by the way.’

‘Terrible is right,’ Boyle said.

‘You aren’t in trouble with the police, are you?’

Boyle shook his head. ‘No sweat.’

‘Let’s hope they catch the culprit.’ Plumm had his glass raised in the air. ‘And let’s hope you’re back in business before too long, shall we?’

‘Let’s hope.’ And Boyle stepped out, took the stairs quickly. He was hyper. He had $15,000 in his pocket and he was free of Jimmy Plumm. $15,000. Great score. And so easy. Samsa had been backed up, manacled, stripped of options and going round in circles like a blind guy without his stick.

Boyle was flush. Money gave him a feeling of invincibility. What to do with all that bread. Out on the sunny street he remembered something Vass kept harping on – ’It’s not too late to change your life, Lee.’ With the bucks bulging in his pocket he could begin a reconstruction of himself, split from this city, do something with his future. Such as? Go back to college, get a degree? In what? Pharmacology, so you could design your own drugs?

The idea of buckling down and getting the brain refocused was a drag. Why work if you don’t have to? When you can get other people to do it for you? Like sad little Almond. Nancy, that cunt, before her. And before Nancy, the French exchange student called Paulette, whose only true exchange had been one of body fluids.

Let’s hope you’re back in business before too long, shall we?

Yeah, let’s.

Let’s put our mind to work on that one.

He reached the Taurus, parked in the same alley where his Porsche had been vandalized. He got in, spread a little speed on the back of his hand, snorted – up up and away. His stash was practically gone. But he wasn’t fazed. Nosiree.

He drove out of the alley, air-conditioner blasting. He headed for the freeway. He turned on the radio, found a Bach cello suite on a classical channel, sweet and deep and melancholic. This fondness for classical music was the solitary debt he owed Hugh, who had thousands of albums he played endlessly, and Boyle in his childhood had developed a liking for it. Which was about the only aspect of his youth Hugh had approved of, albeit grudgingly. Monique, of course, she went off to learn the violin at Hugh’s insistence, despite having a tin ear and an aphid’s brain.

His mind was fizzing. He came off the freeway, approached a stop sign, slowed. This was familiar territory. This was where he wanted to be.

He hung a right, parked under a tree, left the engine running. He was hot. He adjusted the flow of cooled air directly into his face.

There she is.

He saw her step out of a VW convertible a hundred yards away. He watched the guy behind the wheel skip lightly over to the passenger door and follow her up the drive. She turned to say something to him, and the guy reached for her hand and simultaneously thrust his head forward, obviously expecting a kiss, but it didn’t come.

Instead she moved toward the porch. The kid, filled with youth’s mighty persistence, went after her, caught her by the arm and swung her round to face him and she pulled away. She said something – he saw her lips move but couldn’t read her words – and then she entered the house, running fingers through her brown hair as the door closed. Boyle thought he detected a certain weariness in her movements, the way her shoulders slumped.

A boyfriend? Or maybe this kid with the shiny black hair and model looks was just making a play for her, only he wasn’t getting very far. The relationship, whatever it might be, had obviously hit some snags, and the young guy was applying pressure. The kid lingered on the shadowy porch a few seconds. Boyle could hear him call out quite distinctly, ‘I love you, Darcy.’

She didn’t open the door.

The kid charged down the steps and jumped back in his car. I love you Darcy. So that was the kid’s pitch. I love you and my hidden agenda is I want inside your pants. And Darcy – was she holding out?

Well well. Young virgins might have visions of delight.

Boyle watched the VW swing in a loop and stream past him. He slipped the Ford in behind the little convertible and followed it, seeing the cocky way the young guy drove, one hand loosely on the wheel, the other dangling over the side and tapping the panel. Look at me, I’m young and horny and driving this neat little auto, and the breeze is doing these real nifty things to my hair.

Boyle’s mood was darkening swiftly. I don’t like you. Not even a little. I don’t want you getting in Darcy’s pants, buckaroo.

He followed the VW several miles. The young guy turned the car into an alley behind a row of houses. He parked, ran a comb through his hair, checked his face in the mirror and then got out, hitching up his jeans with a swiveling little motion of his hips.

Mr Cool. God’s gift. You think.

He pushed open an iron gate in a fence and entered a backyard.

Boyle parked the Taurus close to the mouth of the alley, exited the car, strolled to the gate. The yard led directly to the rear of a two-storey house. Boyle saw the kid stand outside a pair of sliding glass doors. He was waiting for something, tapping one foot, whistling, cheeks puffed. He just exudes confidence, Boyle thought. He’s young, the world at his feet. Fucking fool. Milk behind his ears.

The glass doors opened, a girl appeared. She had yellow hair piled high on her head and wore a gray sleeveless T-shirt, cut-off Levis and red and blue starred boots that went halfway up her calves. She had big tits and her mouth was a slash of violet lipstick. Boyle, concealed by shrubbery, saw the girl draw the kid inside and slide the doors shut with a deft movement of her foot.

This is interesting.

First he drops off the lovely Nightingale, then he comes here to visit this chick who looks like she’s just failed an audition for lead vocalist in a country band.

Boyle pushed the gate, entered the yard and made his way through the foliage to the back of the house. He edged along against the wall until he was within a few inches of the glass doors. A quick peek was all he wanted. A look inside.

So let’s do it.

What’s this?

The kid, his jeans rolled down to his ankles, ass bare, was ferociously humping the girl on the floor. She had her legs upraised on either side of him, and her cut-offs had been discarded and her sleeveless T-shirt pushed up around her neck. She was still wearing the tacky boots. They were going at each other like rutting skunks, the kid pumping away, the girl clutching him, her mouth wide open.

This young asswipe was playing goddam games with Darcy. He had his flash blonde cutey he was banging on the side. He dropped Darcy off after school and came straight here to get laid, which could mean he wasn’t scoring with Darcy, who was the kind of girl you’d gladly introduce to your parents.

The bimbo was a dark secret stashed on the side, a girl you’d never take home to Mom and Dad in a hundred years.

Boyle didn’t like this at all. It offended him deeply. He sometimes convinced himself into thinking he had a tiny pocket of decency left, and it was this fictive moral sense, exaggerated by chemicals, that was outraged by the kid’s duplicity. Fizz fizz.

The greaseball cheapened Darcy. It was a goddam insult. And Boyle was filled with a hot flood tide of anger as he stood outside the doors and watched this savage coupling on the floor and listened to the first orgasmic sounds emerge.

He clenched and unclenched his hands time and again. Sweat poured down his face.

Darcy betrayed, he thought. By this creep. This cretin.

He’d open the glass doors and go inside and just do something about this whole goddam situation. But not now, he had an appointment to keep, one he didn’t want to be late for.

With reluctance he had trouble overcoming, he turned and went back to his car, thinking of the treachery done to Darcy, and picturing her with her hair colored black and her mouth lipsticked and maybe some shadow under her eyes. Yeah.