RUSSELL TABER SOBER WAS a different man. Seated at Maynard Ance’s desk reading the Free Press sports section, he swiveled a quarter turn when Doc came in and raised himself an inch off the chair to offer his hand. Doc hesitated, then grasped it. It was wrapped in white gauze secured with adhesive tape. “I had a hundred bucks down on your first game with Texas,” Taber said. “You caught a line drive without stepping off the mound for the last out.”
“Glad I could help.”
“Help my ass. I bet on the Rangers. Who thought Detroit had anything in the bullpen?”
“I was on the d.l. with a sprained wrist for the next three games. How’s your hand?”
He looked at it. “Couple of cuts. No stitches. I don’t remember much about yesterday. Guess I slipped out of Park. You should’ve told me who you was.”
“Would it have made any difference?”
“Nah. Maynard should’ve warned you about me, about liquor and me. I’d quit, but what’d I do for an excuse then?” His truck driver’s face squinched up, as if he were staring into the sun. “How about you, still on dope?”
“I never was. Where’s Ance?”
“I took him over to the garage and dropped him off with the Coachmen. While they’re fixing the window he wants to go over a couple new features he wants them to put in. Gun portholes maybe. Said he’d catch a cab back here.” Taber was still squinting. “What’re you, six-four?”
“Six-five.”
“I’m six-two. Maynard likes to surround himself with telephone poles. Can you do anything besides pitch and steal motor homes?”
“I’m a fast learner.” Doc plucked a clean mug off a tree next to the complex coffee maker and filled it from the carafe. “Are we supposed to do anything while we’re waiting for him?”
“Waiting, that’s the job. I got plenty of experience. Twenty years sitting in a blue-and-white waiting for some puke to come along with a pinch bar and pry open some alley door. I got piles old enough to run for president.”
“I heard they let you go.”
Taber moved his shoulders. “This Willie took a run at me when I walked in on him during a stickup at a stop-and-rob on Chene. Shooting team never found a gun.”
“Willie?”
“Them people got no imagination when it comes to naming their kids.”
He went back to the sports section. Doc drank coffee and looked out at the dirt parking lot. The sun was well up now, and little curls of steam were coming off the patches of frost. A Volare hatchback with a wrinkled right fender pulled up next to the health spa canopy and a slim blonde got out, tugged down her short leather jacket, and went up the brief flight of steps carrying a gym bag. Her hair was in a ponytail and she had long legs in tight white jeans and knee-length suede boots with fringes. She unlocked the door with a key and went inside.
The coffee had a metallic taste. Doc set down the mug. “Okay if I step out for a half-hour?”
“Suit yourself. I’m just here to watch the phone.” Taber was doing arithmetic with a pencil in the margin by the box scores.
The sign on the door under the canopy read OPEN 10 a.m. TIL MIDNIGHT. It was a few minutes after eight. Doc pushed the button with his thumb. A bell jangled deep inside. After a moment a woman’s voice said, “Come back later.”
He rang again.
Footsteps scuffed carpeting. The opaque curtain over the pane of glass in the door parted an inch, then closed. The door opened against a chain. He saw part of a face.
“We don’t open for two more hours.”
“I may be busy then. I’ve got cash,” he added.
The door closed. He thought it was a rejection. Then the chain rattled and the door swung wide. He stepped inside around the blonde. She shut the door and replaced the chain. She was a foot and a half shorter than Doc, which surprised him; her proportions were those of a much taller girl. She had removed the leather jacket and was wearing one of those red printed handkerchief blouses tied under her breasts. She had an athletic build, but her face was pocked all over like a golf ball under heavy makeup. He couldn’t guess her age.
“Massage is thirty dollars.”
He produced his wallet and gave her a twenty and a ten. In the narrow, yellow-painted entryway she leaned through a square hole cut in the wall that reminded him of the registration desk at the Independence Motel. A buzzer sounded and she opened a door next to the hole and held it for him. “The sauna’s not ready yet,” she said. “Put your valuables in this and keep it with you.” She handed him a flat blue canvas bag the size of a pocketbook with a key attached to the zipper, then took a thick white folded towel off a shelf and gave him that. “The showers are in there. When you’re through, wrap yourself in the towel and come back here.”
“I took a shower this morning.”
“It’s required.”
He went through the open door she’d indicated into a room with a low Formica-topped bench and metal lockers against one wall. One of the lockers had a combination lock; the others were just latched. When he unzipped the bag to put his wallet and watch inside he found a small padlock. After determining that the key fit the lock, he stripped and put his clothes in the locker and secured the door with the padlock and stepped into the cavernous shower room to the left. As he lathered himself with liquid soap from the dispenser he had an idea the blonde was watching him somehow. The thought of it gave him an erection. He hoped he’d be able to get through the massage.
He rinsed himself, toweled off, wrapped the towel around his waist kilt-fashion, and found her waiting for him when he went back out. He was sure then that she’d been watching him. She led him to a curtained opening, held the curtain aside for him, and followed him through. They were in a small square room with a padded table and a bench with plastic bottles on it. Pink recessed lighting illuminated the mirrors on the walls and ceiling. “Hand me the towel.”
When he complied, standing before her naked, she gave him a quick appraising glance that told him nothing. “This is how it works,” she said. “I make my living entirely off tips. A plain massage will cost you another thirty dollars.”
“I only have twenty.”
“Visa and MasterCard are okay.”
“I don’t have a credit card. I guess you’ll have to give me back my money.”
“I can’t. I already rang it up.”
“Well, I didn’t pay thirty bucks just to take a shower.”
She chewed the inside of a cheek. “Okay, twenty. But don’t tell anyone, okay?”
“Who’d I tell?”
He unzipped the bag and gave her a bill. She directed him to lie facedown on the table and went out through the curtain. When she returned a few minutes later, he saw in the mirrors that she had changed out of the blouse, jeans, and boots into a black teddy and high-heeled slippers. She had high pointed breasts and muscles in her buttocks like a dancer’s.
She spread a light scented oil over his back, buttocks, and legs and worked it into his skin starting with the shoulders. Her hands were strong and she knew something about massage; his muscles responded as they had in the hands of experts when he was with the Tigers. She cracked his fingers and toes and smacked the soles of his feet and braced a hand between his shoulder blades while she bent back each of his legs in turn with the other, stretching him like a bow. Finally she applied powder, spread his legs, and grazed her palms over him with light, feathery strokes, paying special attention to the area between his thighs. He thought his erection would push him off the table.
“Turn over.”
When it was finished—three minutes was as long as he could hold out—she handed him a clean towel and he showered again and dressed. Outside the locker room she met him in a yellow kimono, took the towel and the zipper bag, now empty, and escorted him to the door with her hand in the small of his back. “Full price next time,” she said. “And come back during business hours.”
“What’s your name?”
“Lynda, with a y. What’s yours?”
“Keith.”
“Come back enough times and we’ll call each other by our real names.” Just before she closed the outer door between them she smiled. He decided the makeup was misleading; she was younger than she looked.
At the bottom of the steps he almost ran into Maynard Ance getting out of a yellow cab. The bail bondsman had traded his overcoat for something lighter, but the industrial-strength suit beneath it was the same one he always wore, unless he had a closet full of them.
“Get a good workout?” he asked Doc.
Doc felt too good to be defensive. “Did I break a rule?”
“Not if you washed up afterwards.”
“How’s the Coachmen?”
“Third in line at the garage. Taber in the office?”
“He was when I left.”
“Get in the cab. I’ll bring him out.”
“Where we going?”
“Hertz. I just called the Wizotskys. That little scroat Roy skipped last night with their car. He didn’t even stay the night”
Doc sat in the backseat and contemplated an angry boil behind the driver’s right ear. He felt mellow after the massage, as if he had had two beers on top of an hour in the whirlpool. When Ance and Taber came out of the building they were carrying cased shotguns. The driver got out and opened the trunk for them. Taber climbed in the passenger’s seat in front and Ance got in beside Doc.
“How many guns do you own?” Doc asked.
“Not that many. We took these out before we dropped off the bus. Those mechanics are all thieves.”
At the Hertz office downtown they waited thirty minutes while a Cadillac was being gassed and prepped. Taber stayed outside with the shotguns to avoid panicking a clerk. Sitting in the office, Ance said, “I always ask for Fleetwoods after the time Budget stuck me with a Toyota. Fucking Japmobiles are too small even for a sawed-off. Besides, I buy American.”
It was a midnight blue V-8, not as big as they used to make them but bigger than anything else on the road. There was room enough in the trunk for everything in Ance’s arsenal and a Honda Civic, and the bail bondsman could have stretched out on the fabric-covered backseat if he wanted to. Doc drove, with Taber beside him. The suspension was slushy and there was too much play in the steering wheel, but Doc liked the instant response he got from the big engine when he pressed the pedal. “Where to?”
“Ypsilanti. Wizotsky says Roy has friends there he hangs out with sometimes.”
“Okay if I play the radio?”
“You can piss out the fucking window as long as you keep your eyes on the road.”
He went past reggae and country and about eighty rap stations before stopping at a call-in talk show, a phenomenon he had gotten hooked on in prison; most of the people he heard there made him feel better about his own situation.
“… twelve-seventy, all-talk. You’re on the air.”
“Hello?”
“Hello, you’re on the air.”
“Am I on?”
“Sure, go ahead.” The announcer sounded patient.
“Okay, well, um, I think the City of Detroit should erect a statue of Wilson McCoy in Hart Plaza. That’s one brother who stuck to his guns, you know?”
“The ones he didn’t sell to support his habit,” Ance said.
The announcer said, “I get where you’re coming from, and a lot of people would agree with you. But probably a lot more would say that McCoy represents a negative image of African-Americans.”
“Just the white mother—” The radio crackled and he was off the air.
“WXYT Twelve-seventy talk radio, what’s on your mind?” the announcer asked the next caller.
“Hey, that guy was full of it. The only thing McCoy done right his whole life was kill himself. Them Mountains of Mohammed—”
“I think you mean the Marshals of Mahomet.”
“Huh?”
“Go on.”
“The FBI should of burned them M-and-M’s out a long time ago just like they done the Panthers. I had it with all this sixties crap. To hear some of these coloreds you’d think you was in some kind of time warp. They overcame, already. What do they want now?”
“For one thing, they don’t want to be called coloreds.” Crackle. “WXYT One Two Seven Oh, talk to me.”
Taber reached over and turned off the radio. “Gab, gab, gab. Some people got nothing better to do than listen to their gums flap.”
“Sounds like the M-and-M’s are lining up another god,” Doc said. “In case something goes wrong with Mahomet.”
“Nothing to us, till they have to make bail.” In the rearview mirror Ance ran a cigarette under his nose and sniffed both ends. That was starting to get on Doc’s nerves.
Ypsilanti looked like pictures Doc had seen of Detroit in the fifties: elegant old Victorian and Queen Anne houses advertising rooms for rent and blocks of horizontal storefronts and neighborhoods showing signs of early decay. A phallic water tower built of brick dominated the skyline. At the bail bondsman’s direction Doc took a succession of side streets and boated into a curb in front of a blue frame house with gables and turrets and shingles shaped like fish scales. Two of the windows had VACANCY signs in them.
They got out. Ance opened the trunk, unzipped the shotgun cases, and laid them side by side on the backseat with the butts sticking out. “No sense stirring something up if we don’t need them,” he told Doc. “You see one or both of us come running out of the house, have ’em ready to hand out when we get to the car.” He and Taber went up the flagstone walk to the porch. They wiped their feet, opened the screen door against the complaint of a spring, and let it clap shut behind them.
Doc was starting to think about lunch when he heard the first shot. A windowpane in one of the turrets tipped out in two big pieces and fell a long way to the grass.