CHAPTER 7  

Glimmers

Honey Pobrinkis had been born Hunter Pobrinkis, in Chicago, in 1938. At that time, the boy’s father, Rudolph Pobrinkis, was the captain of the now-defunct Racine Ferry, a triple-decker pleasure boat that taxied tourists daily from Chicago to Milwaukee and back, stopping once each way in Racine, Wisconsin. Hunter loved his father and his father’s ferry job, which Rudolph held annually between May and October. In the winter months, Rudolph painted houses with a cunning, alcoholic thug named Willis Enright.

Hunter lived for the summer days when he could accompany Rudolph on the ferry. By the time he was six, Hunter considered it vital that he stand beside Rudolph on the captain’s deck—the small cabin on the ferry’s uppermost level, with room for only two men—where he could scout Lake Michigan for German U-boats while his father manned the helm. Hunter was smart and into books early, and he favored grim fantasy tales in which ogres and dragons were vanquished. If the lake looked clear of enemy subs, Hunter would curl at Rudolph’s feet with a book of such tales and read and doze in the sun and dream of his father kicking Hirohito in the balls.

When not on the ferry, Hunter was home with his younger sister, Christina, whose favorite possessions were her Raggedy Ann doll and her rosary beads. At noon on each summer weekday, Mrs. Meghan Pobrinkis made her children set a tray of two cheese sandwiches and two glasses of sherry outside her ground-floor bedroom door. The door remained shut while Meghan enjoyed her lunch inside, but Hunter noticed that Willis Enright’s painting van was always parked in the neighborhood between noon and one, and from behind the bedroom door came strange, frequent moans and occasional scratchings that sounded like a window opening and closing. Hunter was too young to comprehend these noises, but they troubled his peace and filled his head with a weird, unwelcome heat. He yearned to report this heat to his father, but he never did, because each time Rudolph took Hunter in his arms and hugged him, the boy’s mind cooled and gladdened and forgot all distress.

Then one summer afternoon when Hunter was eight his parents took him and Christina to Wrigley Field. It was blindingly hot out, with the sun tricking the eyes of ballplayers and fans alike. During the seventh-inning stretch, Hunter thought he saw Willis Enright about fifty yards off in the stands, staring at Rudolph, who had his arm around Meghan’s waist. The mood of Willis’s face was so malevolent that Hunter thought he was seeing a villain’s mug from a comic book. The strange, troubling heat rushed over the boy’s mind, and, feeling faint, he closed his eyes.

In that instant, Hunter Pobrinkis had a vision. For one sunspot second he saw his father being shoved by unseen hands over the captain’s-deck railing on the ferry and plummeting, headfirst, onto the dock at Racine Harbor. Hunter shouted with fright and opened his eyes, but when he scoured the Wrigley Field stands, Willis Enright was gone. A grand slam had just happened, and fans were roaring. So, given the glare and the home run and the way his mind always bloomed toward the fantastic, Hunter bit his hot dog and stamped the morbid vision from his brain.

Twenty-four hours later, Rudolph Pobrinkis was found dead on the Racine Harbor docks. He had a broken neck, apparently from a great fall, but there were no witnesses, because the fatality had happened (the coroner later deduced) during the ferry’s daily hour off, the time when Rudolph took his lunch break in Racine. Police found spilled motor oil on the captain’s deck, and slippery footprints there that matched Rudolph’s shoes, and it was determined that the poor boatman had lost his footing and gone over the railing by accident.

Hunter Pobrinkis did not cry, not once. He was shocked into an emotional freeze, but he didn’t cry. A boy of only eight, he knew all through the funeral and the days that followed what had been done to his father and by whom, but he didn’t tell anyone what he knew. And when his mother, Meghan, announced six months later that she was going to marry Willis Enright and take his name, Hunter didn’t cry then either. Instead, he shook Willis’s hand. Hunter was a well-built boy, but still a boy, so before the handshake, he went to the library and read. Gone forever was Hunter’s interest in fairy tales. Instead, he read now about precognition, ESP, second sight. He read about puberty, and the selective service, and learned at what age an adolescent American male could expect to possess adult physical strength if he pursued good nutrition and used barbells. Then, having soaked up these facts, Hunter approached Willis Enright coolly in the kitchen of what was now the Enright home and shook Willis’s hand and spoke.

“Sixteen,” he said.

Willis, a man of reactionary politics and constant suspicions, frowned at his soon-to-be stepson. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he grunted.

“Sixteen,” repeated Hunter, and he ended the handshake.

For the next eight years, Hunter studied Willis Enright voraciously. He shadowed his stepfather, watched him slink in and out of bars, listened to the cruel snarls or spiffy apologies that Willis lobbed at Meghan, depending on his blood alcohol content. Hunter held his tongue, but tallied grievances every time Willis spoke sharply to Christina or mocked her rosary beads, which Christina prayed over each night. And on weekends and in summers, when he wasn’t making crap wages on his paper route, Hunter found the city’s underbelly. He skulked in South Side hovels and pool halls, being admitted both for his bulk (which by fourteen was considerable) and for his cold, peremptory gaze. He made the careful acquaintance of gamblers, debtors, prostitutes, bodyguards. He listened to drug fiends whining in back alleys, and absorbed the movements of club owners, restaurant owners, pimps, loan sharks. In this manner, Hunter came to know the weak, wheedling behaviors of men, their patterns and needs, their perennial vices. He saw the hangdog passion that men had for women, a passion Hunter vowed would never master him.

Hunter also endured the nickname that Willis Enright saddled him with the summer he was fifteen. Willis, whose hands and arms were always flecked with paint, was sitting by a corner of the kitchen table after dinner one night, listening to a ball game on the radio. Willis liked to slouch there at the table all evening long, drinking cheap red wine from a jug and eating blueberries, his favorite snack. Sometimes he poured the wine over the berries in a bowl and spooned up the treat until his lips were stained blue with juice. He was doing this one night, drinking himself blue, telling Meghan that her ass was sagging like the porch roof, when Hunter strolled in, back from a weight workout at the Y. Willis glared at his stepson while Hunter opened the fridge, pulled out a milk bottle, and chugged.

“How’s little Hunter?” Willis wore a wine-enriched grin. “Little Hunter pumping iron? Getting tough?”

Hunter finished his milk and put the bottle away. “Yes, sir.”

“Aw, sugar shit.” Willis popped a berry in his mouth. “Tough’s got nothing to do with Nautilus.”

“It doesn’t, sir?” Hunter stood with his hands behind his back, facing Willis like a pupil.

“Hunter,” warned Meghan, who sat at the far end of the table from her husband. “Don’t provoke your father.”

“He’s not my father.”

Meghan looked up from her crossword and glanced anxiously at Willis. “Well, don’t provoke him.”

“He ain’t provoking me,” cackled Willis. “You ain’t provoking me, little Hunter. You know why?”

“No, sir.”

“Because you’re a little cream puff.” Willis was on his third bowl of Chianti.

Hunter peeked into the living room, to make sure Christina was safely watching television, which she was. If Willis and Meghan were arguing badly, Hunter sometimes escorted Christina down to the all-night corner grocery, where the owner, a kind Polish man named Levski, always made her laugh.

“You’re a little cream puff,” declared Willis, “and I’m going to call you Honey. Honey Enright.” Willis slapped the table with his palm, hooting laughter.

“Willis,” said Meghan, “don’t tease him.”

“Shut up, Meghan. I’m talking to little Honey Enright. That’s his new name.”

Hunter stood his ground. He was nearly six feet tall already. Willis cracked his knuckles, took in his stepson.

“Nautilus is bullshit,” said Willis. “You know what tough is, little Honey?”

“Tell me,” said Hunter.

Willis stared at him. “Tough is a nugget in your gut, boy. You’re born with it, or you aren’t. And you weren’t.”

“Oh,” said Hunter.

Willis sighed. “Get the fuck out of my face.”

Another subject of keen interest to Hunter was diamonds. He’d noticed that after his father’s death, his mother had removed her diamond wedding ring and either hidden or sold it. Also, when Willis married Meghan at City Hall, he gave her a ring with no gem on it. It was just a cheap, plain gold band that matched one he wore.

The absence of a diamond on his mother’s wedding finger spoke volumes to Hunter. While his father had been alive, Hunter had adored touching the brilliant stone on Meghan’s hand, turning her palm this way and that to see how the diamond flashed at him differently each time, as if, like Lake Michigan, it held deep, shining, adult secrets. Now his mother had no secrets from him. She drank sherry each night, while Willis consumed wine and berries. She did crosswords, withstood her husband’s carping, and pursued screechy, wall-thumping sex with him in their bedroom, to the point that Hunter often sent Christina to Levski’s for some Dots and some peace and quiet.

All of this came to a head on Hunter’s sixteenth birthday. He skipped school that day, and walked to the house Willis was painting. He asked his stepfather for one birthday favor: that Willis remain sober for the day, and arrive home sober for dinner. He said he had something important to tell Willis that night. Willis scowled, but he remembered his own sixteenth birthday, the first day he’d driven a car, so he nodded curtly and agreed.

That night, after dinner, Hunter gave Christina some money for Levski’s.

“I don’t like her going down there alone,” said Meghan. The entire family was in the kitchen.

“Neither do I,” Hunter told his mother. “Please go with her. I have to talk to Dad in private, if that’s all right.”

A small hush happened, as Hunter had hoped it would. He’d never before referred to Willis as Dad.

“Well, I’ll be.” Meghan tousled her son’s hair. “Someone’s a gentleman after all.”

Meghan and Christina left.

“So.” Willis leaned back. He had a stomachful of rare roast beef, Hunter’s favorite food, and he was rooting between his molars with a toothpick. “Little Honey Enright is sixteen. He’s a birthday boy.”

“Please stand up.”

“Excuse me?”

“Please stop picking your teeth and stand up.”

Willis set down his toothpick. He creased his eyes warily, then stood.

“You’re not drunk, right? You promised you wouldn’t be.”

“No, I’m not drunk, you little snot. Now, what’s so private and important?”

Hunter wore blue jeans, work boots, and a white T-shirt. He stood six foot one, an even two hundred pounds. His hands were loose at his sides.

“I’ve been patient,” said Hunter, “but now I have things to tell you.”

“Is that right?” Willis weighed slightly less than his stepson. “Well, get to it, I’m not patient.”

Hunter exhaled. “My name is Pobrinkis. Not Enright. Pobrinkis.”

Willis scratched his head. His hair shone with thinner, which he used every night to lube paint splotches from his scalp. He grinned. “That ain’t exactly a revelation.”

“I know you killed him,” said Hunter. “I saw it.”

“What?”

“I saw it before it happened, in a dream. At the ball game.” Hunter shook his head, dissatisfied. “Not a dream. I don’t know. A glimmer.”

The refrigerator hummed. It was August, and muggy in the kitchen.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You killed my father. You drove to Racine and pushed him off the ferry and made it look like an accident.” Hunter’s eyes were the gray of granite. “You killed my father, Rudolph Pobrinkis, so you could keep screwing my mother, like you already had been all those years anyway.”

Blood drained from Willis’s face. “Honey. Take back every goddamn word you just said.”

“You can have the first punch,” offered Hunter. He spoke almost elegantly, for the words had been inside him for years, trimming themselves, getting leaner. “But by the end of tonight, if you aren’t dead, you’re leaving this house forever.”

“That’s it.” Willis strode forward and shoved Hunter against the refrigerator. It was the only shove he got in.

Hunter’s uppercut started down around his toes. It split Willis’s chin, drove north into his nose. A crunching happened, blood shot from Willis’s face, and the painter pronounced the name of God. He tried to cover his head, but Hunter’s blows came quick and righteous, buffeting the older man’s neck and skull and jaws. Willis sank to his knees, a dizzy white pain in his sinuses. He flailed with his hands.

“Hunter,” he implored. “Jesus.”

Hunter kicked his stepfather’s ribs, cracked a couple. Willis wailed. He’d scrapped in bar fights, but he’d never faced a meanness stronger than his own.

“You killed Rudolph Pobrinkis.” Hunter’s fists were shaking, blood-covered. They pounded his stepfather’s cheekbones. “You killed him.”

Willis writhed on the floor, his head a softening pulp. He screamed, but Honey didn’t relent. He felt as if he were striking out not with his fists but with his stomach, with the nugget of hate there that was harder than any knuckle. At some point, using his long, sharp thumbnail, Honey sliced off a third of Willis’s ear. Willis shrieked, spat bubbled cries for mercy. Blood gushed from his ear onto Hunter’s shoes, and then onto the foyer floor, as Hunter dragged his stepfather to the front door and kicked him out.

“Crawl away now.” Hunter leaned close. He still felt composed, but he was surprised to see one tear drip from his face onto Willis’s. “Crawl away down the street, and never come back. Ever.”

Willis grunted, his mouth open against the ground. Three of his teeth were back in the kitchen, on the linoleum.

Hunter stood, stretched his shoulders, felt the twinge of a strained muscle. He looked down at the heap before him. “I’m going inside to clean up, Willis. If you’re still here when my mom and sister get back, I’ll put a chef’s knife through your heart. Good-bye.”

Ten minutes later, when Hunter finished mopping blood and teeth and earlobe off the kitchen floor, he looked out the front window. Willis Enright was gone.

*  *  *

The next morning, sixteen-year-old Hunter stared into his bathroom mirror. Overnight, as he’d slept, a bold streak of white had appeared in his otherwise black hair. It was the length of a knife blade and it slashed upward and back from his left temple. Hunter had heard of men who, after having faced down some mortal terror (the teeth of a lion, the barrel of a cocked Luger), found their hair turned entirely shock white. Peering at his own preternatural scar, Hunter guessed that the execution of terror could have a similar effect. He knew one thing for sure: Willis Enright would never return. But Hunter also knew that his own proclivities—his acquired ease with low people, his hatred of cowards like Enright, his anger at men who, like his own father, died foolishly and too easily—would not dissolve just because Willis was gone. He’d lived so long now with cloaked, acrid yearnings in his guts that the yearnings had become not means but ends in themselves, or at least their own excuses for being.

Thus, as the young man gazed, unafraid, at the new white emblem on his head, he got his second glimmer, this time a picture of his future. It was a future that involved him abandoning high school and rising to power on the streets of Chicago. It was a vision of muscle and cruel luxury, a glimpse of a life where he would eat meat and have women and kill men that crossed him, and he would effect such pursuits with sly, judicious nerve, learning, before any act, how certain funds could be vouchsafed, how each ingénue took her whiskey, where every corpse could be stowed.

Over fifty years, this vision came to be. The young Pobrinkis apprenticed himself to garden-variety hoods, then took over their rackets. He dealt always in cash, and introduced himself as Honey rather than Hunter, sensing that a casual, breezy moniker stuck better in people’s heads. He also took the name Honey as a reminder of his triumph over Willis Enright, and, in perverse tribute to the man who’d murdered his youth, Honey started, in his thirties, to snack on red wine and blueberries each night. He did so, he felt, with greater panache and brio than Enright ever had. Whereas Willis had been a bitter, uncultured lush, Honey chose only the finest merlots, the choicest fruits. He sweetened the dish with sugar, and ate it proudly, in full view of patrons, in the foyer of the restaurant that he built and named in honor of his father. Over time, Honey’s fondness for merlot and berries became a signature detail that, like his blue incisors and his infamous strength, etched his name ever deeper in Chicagoans’ minds.

Honey’s glimmers remained part of his nature too. They came irregularly, but sharply and intensely, like migraines. One such vision led Honey to have Ryan Vicario (his original copartner in founding Ferryman’s) crushed to death in a trash truck’s compactor. Another prompted him to catch his first wife, Babs, in bed with his lawyer, Terrence “Bifocals” Trilling. Honey had Babs and Bifocals frozen to death in a subzero meat locker. He then had his men stand these human ice sculptures in the lobby of the Trilling, Smith, and Cabou law offices at six-thirty on a Monday morning, so that when Mr. Washington Cabou (the new manager of Pobrinkis’s accounts) got to work at seven, he would see the wisdom of keeping his dick in his pants.

As for diamonds, Honey collected them like baseball cards. He bought diamond necklaces and brooches and navel rings for his wives: first Babs, then Tasha, then Margarita. He wore a grape-size diamond pin in the lapel of his suit each day, and in 1985 he paid a dentist ten thousand in cash to pull his purple, infected molar and cement a five-carat gem into the socket. Meanwhile, in Ferryman’s basement vault, he kept certain small but famous diamond collections that Charles Chalk had procured, including the three Norwegian stones known as the Fjords, and the original wedding ring and matching ankle bracelet of the famous 1920s Mexican film actress Villa Vente.

In the spring of Honey’s sixty-fifth year, his fits of clairvoyance and his yen for diamonds dovetailed in two successive glimmers. In the case of the first, Honey was sitting at his table in Ferryman’s foyer when into his mind crashed a picture of Charles Chalk and Helena Pressman on a flying red magic carpet. They were laughing and hell-bent for the Mexican border, and between them on the carpet was a silver suitcase that Honey knew contained the Planets, the diamond collection he’d sought his whole adult life. He dispatched Henry, Roger, and Floyd to the Chalk farm. When Roger and Floyd came back battered and empty-handed, Honey was stunned. He’d never once had a bringback or hit go awry, and it floored him that Henry Dante, his strongest and previously most reliable man, had run off with the Planets.

What floored Honey even more was his next glimmer. It came just days after the first, at four in the morning, while Honey was in bed with the twenty-nine-year-old Margarita. She had just finished performing on Honey her trademark sexual move, a technique she called the Old Salt, when Honey sat bolt upright in bed.

“No,” he whispered. His eyes stared, vacant and terrified.

Margarita frowned. Men privileged enough to receive the Old Salt didn’t complain afterward.

“Honey?” she said.

“He wouldn’t.” Thick, naked, and pale, Honey bunched the bedspread in his hands. “Henry’s a gentleman. He wouldn’t do that with them. . . .”

“Do what?”

Honey blinked, tried to erase the vision. His mind had been hazy with sex, filled with the blur and scent of Margarita. Then he’d seen outer space, the Milky Way. Floating in this cosmos had been the sun and seven planets and two enormous naked people. One was Henry Dante and one was a woman with a red celestial aura swirling around her head like hair. Henry and the woman had been making love, kicking stars around in their passion, but then they’d reached their hands toward the planets as if to scoop them up and—

“No.” Honey slapped the mattress. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s not sporting. Why would he give them away? Unless . . .”

“Honey, you’re scaring me.” Margarita was dark-haired and tan and she knew what lay in Ferryman’s basement. But she’d never witnessed a glimmer firsthand.

The mobster closed his eyes and concentrated. For a moment, he saw Henry again, Henry and the universe-size woman. Honey tried to focus on her. It was just a dream, a quick flicker, but there was something in this woman’s aspect that reminded him of Christina, his rosary-obsessed sister. For decades, Honey had sent money to Christina, but, disapproving of his life, she’d always returned it. Not only that, she’d barred him from paying for their mother’s golden years, nursing home, and funeral.

Honey opened his eyes. He glared at Margarita.

“What?” she said nervously. “What’d I do?”

“A woman.” Honey stood up, paced. “A woman is making him do it.”

Margarita put on her robe. She felt exposed, in peril. “Making who do what?”

“Just give me the goddamn phone.”

“Give it to yourself.” Margarita hurried from the bedroom, afraid.

Honey found his phone among the sheets. He dialed the cell number of his only nephew, the son Christina had disowned once he’d started working for her brother. Honey stood flexing his muscles, waiting. Then Roger Pobrinkis, lost in South Dakota, answered, and Honey related with fury the sin he knew to be taking place.

*  *  *

On a roadside in Greybull, Wyoming, Grace McGlone was having, if not glimmers, at least some portentous, ranging thoughts of her own. It was two in the morning, and Phil Weal was stretched across the truck’s front seat, asleep, while Henry and Grace lay in their air-mattress nook, a curtain drawn between them and the cab. Henry was as deeply asleep as Phil, but Grace lay awake, listening for coyotes and other Big Horn sounds. At Phil’s urging, Henry had steered the truck off the 90 onto 14 West, which would bear them straight through Yellowstone into Idaho. It was Wednesday morning, just twelve hours after they’d met Phil, so Grace had no problem with the route. She and Henry had time to get Phil home, then backtrack northeast and reach Great Falls, Montana, by Friday night. All Grace knew was, she was a married woman, and she was going to face Bertram Block.

She glanced at her husband’s back, at the stallions emblazoned there. The horses bore black armor, and their Jolly Roger jockeys, with swords raised in bony fists, wore purple shrouds and wicked grins. As Grace beheld this dark prophecy, two mythical creatures loomed in her mind. One was Gehenna, the devil bird that had ruled Hell in her girlhood imagination. The other was a man made of stones, a hero Grace had once looked upon in a tree house. This man had seemed forged from earth itself, not from a woman’s rib or womb but from the bulging stuff of mountains.

Grace shook her head to clear it. She looked down at the slight guttering in her stomach skin that came with each breath out. She was a woman now, a wife, not some one-night screw for an arrogant cleric. She hadn’t yet told Henry that she’d lost her innocence to the preacher they were driving to meet, because she wasn’t sure how to play the meeting. She wanted to give Bertram Block a bullet where his mystical third eye should have been, because he’d pressed into her something no man had any right to press into a fifteen-year-old girl. On the other hand, Grace thought, the reverend—or the P&V that preceded him—had wakened in her some profound carnality, some desire to clutch and drink down all the truths under heaven.

This carnality, Grace knew, had led her to Henry, but she didn’t know what it would prod her to do once she saw Bertram Block again. She figured facing the preacher would be dangerous, but somehow correct, or gallant, or, as her husband said, stupendous. She sensed Henry felt the same way about having commandeered the Planets, about having married her. She’d chosen in a flash to wed this stranger because she believed he was no stranger, but the answer to an ache in her heart. Everything in life that had first felt dire to Grace—her father’s death, her faith—had whispered to her that peaceful, calm living couldn’t make her happy, that bright, irrational lurches of the body and soul were the worthwhile paths. Grace couldn’t decide now whether this was true.

I should want peace, she thought. I should. I should.

As she listened for wolf song, though, Grace felt tugged toward something besides peace. She guessed that whatever this tug was, it was what told Henry not to cower from pursuers. It was some call for reckoning, and it hounded her and her man, and, like a hunted animal, Grace feared and hoped and knew that soon she would have to whirl, bare her teeth, and fight.

*  *  *

Roger clicked his phone shut, thinking about the news his uncle had just roared at him. It was past two in the morning, and Roger was tired. He was behind the wheel of the Nova, which was parked outside an all-night bowling alley named the Snapdragon. The bowling alley was in Rapid City, South Dakota, and Floyd was using the place’s men’s room. The car windows were open, and a cool, tart breeze flowed in from the east.

Roger blinked wearily, removed his porkpie, scratched his head. He needed a shave, and the muffler had started coughing a few towns back and Roger didn’t want to be chasing Henry anymore. He wanted what most men want when they’re lonely and tired at night. He wanted a woman’s warm thigh under his hand. He wanted a shower and a pint of ale and a hamburger cooked hot but rare, with bacon and three melting slices of cheese.

Floyd came out of the Snapdragon, stuck his head through the shotgun window. “Hey, Roger. They’ve got a nice two-holer in there, in case you need to dump.”

Roger winced.

“Plus, we should bowl a few frames. The lanes look smooth.”

Roger said nothing. The fifth mark he’d killed for his uncle Honey had been a guy named Tobias Ploughman. Tobias had owned a video arcade called Ploughman’s Playhouse, a building whose cruddy façade was similar to the Snapdragon’s. One night, after hours, Roger had come to collect the twenty thousand that Tobias owed Honey, and when Tobias drew a gun, Roger was obliged to shoot him three times in the face. He then hid the corpse in the vat of sponge balls that normally contained frolicking children and Ploughman Pogo, the arcade’s bouncy mascot, who was played by a college kid wearing, for reasons unclear to Roger, a Dalmatian suit.

“How about it, Roger? Want to take some R & R? Bowl a few frames?” Floyd was still peeking his head in the window, eyebrows raised.

“Honey just called. He’s had a glimmer.”

“Oh, man.”

“Henry’s with some redhead, Honey thinks. The two of them, Henry and this chick, they’re unloading the Planets.”

Floyd’s ponytail hung over his shoulder. He swept the tuft of it along the door. “No problem. Your uncle knows every diamond man and pawn hocker in the States. As soon as the stones turn up—”

“They’re not selling them.” Roger rubbed his neck. “They’re giving them away. Honey saw it.”

“Giving them away?” Floyd frowned like a scientist. “Why would Henry do that? I mean, who’s he giving them to?”

Roger wanted sustenance, a barmaid, a good book. “I don’t know. People. Civilians.”

Floyd looked at the sky, exhaled long and loud. “Oh, man. This chaps my ass. Here we are, at the Snapdragon bowling alley, and Henry’s making time with babes, giving away Planets, living the life of Smiley.”

Roger kneaded his temples. “Riley.”

“Riley?”

“The life of Riley. Henry’s living the life of Riley. That’s what you mean.”

“I’m saying Henry’s probably giving the diamonds to, like, random soccer moms, in exchange for boning them. He’s probably all smiles right now. You know, the life of Smiley. It’s a phrase.”

“There’s no such person as Smiley, Floyd. You’re saying it wrong.”

“Yeah? Who the fuck is Riley, then?”

Roger closed his eyes, felt the breeze on his cheek. He tried to think, then laughed. He had no idea who Riley was.

“I am so goddamn sick,” he said, “of being in this piece-of-shit car.”

Floyd nodded sadly. He felt bad when Roger got down.

“I hear you, buddy,” said Floyd.

Roger smacked the steering wheel. “We’re driving blind here. Henry could be in Oklahoma. Honey says, keep heading west, don’t worry, we’ll pick up their trail, but how the fuck . . .”

Floyd watched Roger with motherly concern. “If Honey says we’ll pick up their trail, we will. How often is Honey wrong?”

Roger shrugged.

“So we’ll keep heading west. In the meantime, we’re both beat. We should take it easy, you know? Get some R & R.”

“What do you mean?”

Floyd rubbed his hands together. “Oh, man. I wasn’t going to say anything till Wyoming, but my sister Gretl works at this spa out here. In a town called Cody.”

Roger looked at his partner. Floyd had never before spoken of his sister’s whereabouts. Roger smiled a secret, wicked smile, remembering the blond, downy hairs above Gretl’s knees, the pleading gasp of her voice.

“A spa, huh?”

Floyd nodded vigorously. “I haven’t been there, but it’s always in magazines. They swaddle you in mud or somesuch goo and you become supremely at ease. And Gretl will hook us up for free, I bet.”

Roger sat up straight. He was a Pobrinkis and a killer, so he would not get swaddled in goo. But an encore of sexual roughhouse with Gretl Webber—whether she wanted it or not—sounded first-rate.

“We could pop inside here,” said Floyd. “Have a few beers, bowl a few frames. Then, you know, head to Cody.”

As far as Roger could tell, the darkness and the breeze weren’t whispering any secrets about where to find Henry Dante.

“All right, Floyd.”

“Honestly?” Floyd’s grin quivered like a puppy’s ears.

Roger redonned his porkpie. Recalling Gretl’s patchouli scent, he got out of the Nova. “Sure.”

“All right!” Floyd pumped the air with his fist. “Fucking A, baby!”

Roger stretched. Then, before heading to Cody, he and his partner entered the Snapdragon and had a few beers and bowled a few frames, because, manhunters or not, they sometimes had fun together.