A Fistful of Collars (8 page)

Meanwhile, Bernie and Jiggs were pulling Thad up into a sitting
position. For a moment, Thad’s eyes went all glazy. Then he shook his head and went, “Whew. Thought I was gonna puke there for a second.”

Jiggs and Bernie let go of him, stepped back.

“I hate puking,” Thad said.

Me, too, although it’s nice how you feel right after, so nice—and this is kind of crazy—that sometimes the next thing you knew you were licking up all the stuff that just got puked, putting it back inside you. What a life!

“Think about something else,” Bernie said.

“Like what?” said Thad.

“A cool breeze,” Bernie said.

Thad went very still. His face began to change in a way that was hard to explain. He became a different sort of Thad, one that wasn’t pukey. Then, mostly on his own, he rose to his feet.

“Jiggs?” Thad held out his hands. Jiggs unlaced the gloves and pulled them off. Thad stood there for a moment, then reached up and touched his nose, or rather, where his nose used to be.

W
hat would you call it this time?” Jiggs said. “Fainting? Blacking out? Passing out?”

Bernie took a look at Thad Perry. He was lying on the canvas again, but this time he’d gone down gently, sagging into Bernie’s and Jiggs’s arms a moment after he’d located his poor nose, angled over to one side of his face.

“Tough call,” Bernie said. Thad made a little moaning sound. His big chest rose and fell. “Looks like he’s in great physical shape.”

“He can bench three oh five,” Jiggs said.

“I’m impressed,” Bernie said. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, started fiddling with the buttons. “I know I’ve got Doctor Booker’s private number here somewhere.”

“Booker?” said Jiggs. “He black, by any chance?”

Bernie nodded. “Is that a problem?”

“Nope. Any relation to the DA?”

“Cedric? Yeah—the doc’s his brother.” Bernie gave Jiggs a quick glance. “I assumed you were from LA.”

“I am,” Jiggs said.

“But you know our DA out here in the Valley?”

“Know of him,” Jiggs said. “I do my homework.”

“So—no objection?”

“As long as he stays away from the goddamn media.”

Bernie nodded. “Here we go,” he said, hitting one more button. At that moment, there was a knock at the door. Jiggs whipped out some tiny device and clicked it. I heard bolts sliding in the walls.

“Thad?” Nan called. “The manicurist is here, if you’re ready.”

Bernie and Jiggs looked at each other.

“Thad?” Nan called through the door.

“Uh,” said Jiggs, “he’s, um . . .”

“In the whirlpool,” Bernie said. “His shoulder’s a little sore.” Jiggs nodded vigorously.

“Oh my God!” Nan said.

“Nothing to worry about,” Bernie said. “Jiggs is just checking to see if he’s ready.”

Jiggs did some more vigorous nodding. Then he bent down, picked up Thad like nothing, threw him over his shoulder. He stepped through the ropes, took Thad into a room on the other side of the gym. Before the door closed, I glimpsed a whirlpool bath and a pile of fluffy white towels. I made—what’s that expression of Bernie’s? A mental note? Yes. I made a mental note about those towels. A fluffy white towel can be fun to drag around, maybe something you already know.

“Jiggs?” Nan called. “Mr. Little?”

“Call me Bernie,” Bernie said.

“What’s going on?” Nan said. “The door seems to be locked.”

“It is?” Bernie said. “I’ll just step into the whirlpool room and . . .”

Bernie didn’t go anywhere, just stood in the ring. He gave me a smile. So nice. Now I knew that everything was going smoothly.
I liked to be in the picture. And hadn’t Bernie said something about that very recently? I tried to remember. But not my hardest, on account of what was the point, with everything going smoothly and all?

“Nan?” Bernie said after a while. “Thad says for the manicurist to come back tomorrow. He wants to sit in the whirlpool and, quote, that’s that, end quote.”

“Oh,” said Nan. “Sure. Of course.”

“And the door’s locked because Thad didn’t want any distraction during his workout,” Bernie said. “He seems to take it very seriously, maybe with filming coming up so soon.”

“Yes, he does,” Nan said. “For sure. Okay, then—I’ll take care of it.”

“Thanks,” said Bernie.

He cocked his head, as though listening for Nan’s departing footsteps. Did he hear them? No idea, but I did. There was a pause of a few moments before she actually started walking away.

I’d never met Doc Booker before, but his brother Cedric, the DA, was a pal of ours. Cedric had been a basketball star down at the college and could have gone pro, Bernie says, but he couldn’t play with his back to the basket. A puzzler, but basketball was full of puzzlers, starting with the ball, pretty much impossible for me, despite my best efforts.

Doc Booker, not as tall as his brother, was still the tallest human in the whirlpool room. Then came Jiggs, after him Thad, now on his feet and wearing a robe, and Bernie last, the very shortest! Had that ever happened before?

“Love your movies,” said Doc Booker.

“Thanks,” said Thad, only it came out more like “Danks,” what with his nose the way it was.

“My wife would be thrilled to have your autograph,” Doc Booker said. “How about signing my prescription pad?”

“Always the wife,” Thad said, taking the pad and pen Doc Booker handed him and writing on it. “Maybe I’ll prescribe myself a whole mess of Oxycontin.”

Doc Booker laughed. “That’s a good one.” Bernie didn’t laugh, although the corners of his mouth turned up a bit. As for Jiggs, the corners of his mouth—not a very nicely shaped mouth, especially compared to Bernie’s—were way down.

Doc Booker tucked the prescription pad away. “Thanks a bunch,” he said. “Let’s take a look at this situation.” He peered at Thad’s nose, extended his finger as though to touch it, but didn’t, Thad wincing anyway, said, “Totally fixable. You can either come to the hospital where I’ll get you into the OR and reset you under anesthetic—”

“Hospital?” said Thad. “What about the goddamn media?”

“Or,” Doc Booker continued, “if you’re up for it, I can do it right here, quick and dirty.”

“Quick and dirty?” Thad said.

“Sting a little,” said Doc Booker. “But it’ll be over in two seconds.”

“And I’ll be back to normal?”

Doc Booker nodded. “Or even more rugged than before.”

“What the hell?” said Thad. “I don’t want to be more rugged than before. I need to be the exact same amount of rugged, for Christ sake.”

“Got it,” said Doc Booker.

“And no one ever hears about it,” Thad said.

“Bernie has already filled me in,” Doc Booker said. He shook his head. “You’re a brave man, mixing it up with ol’ Bernie.”

Bernie shot Doc Booker a quick look.

“Or not,” said Doc Booker. “Bernie’s bark is worse than his bite.”

Whoa. What a stunner. Bernie’s bark? Bernie’s bite? Neither one had ever happened, not in all the time we’d been together. Maybe Doc Booker was getting the two of us confused. Did that mean that my own bark was worse than . . . ? I lost the thread, and none too soon.

Thad took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “Do what you gotta do. Should I sit down?”

“Nah,” said Doc Booker, and he reached out and in one smooth motion took hold of Thad’s nose and gave it a hard twist.

“In hindsight,” Doc Booker said, “sitting down would have been preferable.”

“Not your fault,” said Bernie.

“I didn’t take him for a fainter,” Doc Booker said.

“I was trying to figure out how to put it,” Bernie said.

“Good luck with that,” said Jiggs.

They gazed at Thad, now lying on a training table, eyes closed and a peaceful look on his face.

“You did a great job, Doc,” Jiggs said.

“Thanks.”

“Just send in a bill.”

“No bill,” said Doc Booker. “Bernie and I go way back. How’s the leg, by the way?”

“No problems,” Bernie said.

Even though there were. But that was Bernie.

Jiggs glanced at Bernie’s leg, maybe about to say something, but before he could, Doc Booker turned to me and said, “Chet’s looking great. Happen to have a biscuit on me.”

Old news: I’d known the instant he stepped into the room,
had almost stopped wondering if the biscuit was going to make an appearance. Now I was wondering again, wondering my hardest.

“Down, Chet,” Bernie said.

“Should I make him sit?”

“Way past that,” said Bernie. “Just give him the damn thing.”

Doc Booker reached into his pocket and gave me a biscuit. Maybe I took it, would be more accurate.

“My God, he’s quick,” Doc Booker said. Then came a discussion of how much I weighed—I’m a hundred-plus-pounder—but I wasn’t paying attention, on account of the quality of the biscuit, very high.

We drove past the gate—a different guy on duty now—along the ridge, and started down the mountain. After not too long, we came to a construction site with a partly built house and a Dumpster out front. All of a sudden, Bernie pulled off the road and parked behind the Dumpster. He shut off the engine.

“If you know someone does his homework,” he said, “then you’ve got to do your homework, too.”

At that moment, he noticed the fluffy white towel—just washcloth size, really—in my mouth, and took it away. No problem. My mind was on other things, namely homework. Once Charlie had to do some homework. This was on one of his every-second weekend visits, and did we look forward to them or what? Every-second weekends couldn’t come fast enough! But the point was, I knew about homework. You opened a book or two, did some writing, yawned, gazed around, got up and had a snack, turned on the TV. So I waited for Bernie to take out a book. The sooner the book part, the sooner we’d get to the snack.

No book appeared. Bernie rubbed his shoulder. “How does
he know he’s the exact right state of rugged?” he said, losing me completely. I didn’t sense a snack coming anytime soon. Kind of frustrating because there was a ham sandwich, or at least part of one, somewhere in that Dumpster: pretty much impossible to miss the smell of ham.

Bernie glanced over at me.

“You’re slobbering,” he said.

Uh-oh. I wasn’t sure how to stop that. I tried panting. It worked a bit.

Bernie smiled at me and gave me pat. “Let’s just keep in mind the three grand a day,” he said, rubbing his shoulder again.

Bernie’s always been a great thinker, one of our strengths at the Little Detective Agency. I bring my own things to the table. We’re a real good team. Ask some of the dudes sporting orange jumpsuits up at Northern State Correctional.

“Thad Perry,” Bernie said. “I’ve already changed my mind about him three times. Maybe that’s why he’s an actor. What’s that word? Sort of means changeable.”

I waited to hear.

“It’s on the tip of my tongue,” Bernie said.

I gazed at him closely. At first his mouth was closed, then it opened slightly, and I saw the tip of his tongue. A beautifully shaped tongue tip, nice and pink, but there was absolutely nothing on it.

“Suzie’ll know,” he said.

Whoa. Suzie would know what was on the tip of Bernie’s tongue when she wasn’t even here?

Bernie took out his phone, raised a thumb to start pushing buttons, then paused. “But maybe this isn’t the kind of thing I should be doing, now that . . .” He put the phone away. Why? I’ll leave that to you. All I knew was that he’d been happy when we
started down the mountain—you can always tell by his eyes, the clearer the happier, the murkier the sadder—and now he wasn’t.

We sat. “Starts with P,” he said after a while. My eyelids began to get heavy—what a strange thing, how eyelids could put on weight like that—and were just about to close when I heard a car coming down the road, and a few moments later a black SUV with tinted windows rounded a bend and whizzed past us. Tinted windows, but rolled down on the driver’s-side door, and I could see him: Jiggs. He now wore a T-shirt and his huge bare arm rested on the door frame. Bernie turned the key, let Jiggs get by the next turn, and pulled onto the road.

We’ve tailed a lot of dudes, me and Bernie, and once I did some tailing with Suzie at the wheel. She did a fine job for a rookie, but Bernie was an expert. He could follow from far behind, from closer in, from different lanes, even from in front! Two tricks, when it comes to tailing, Bernie always says. Don’t let them lose you. That’s one. The other may come to me later.

The road curved back and forth all the way down the mountain. We followed Jiggs from two curves behind, so he was always below us, making it hard for him to—yes! That was it. The other trick: Don’t let them spot you. I’d known it would come to me, just didn’t expect it so soon.

Jiggs got on a freeway, headed back across the Valley, traffic pretty heavy. We followed from two lanes over, only a few cars behind, but on the passenger side of Jiggs’s car. Shadows got longer and longer, and soon Jiggs and lots of other drivers were switching on their headlights, but not Bernie. After a while, we reached Spaghetti Junction, this huge tangle of freeways that had once made Leda so mad she’d done something too upsetting to go into—in the end, Bernie persuading the tow truck guy not to sue—and Jiggs took one ramp, then another, with all these changes of direction
and us now following real close. When we came out on the far side we were crossing the bridge over the Vista City arroyo and it was night.

We hadn’t done much work in Vista City—just one case I could think of, and I never wanted to think of it—but I’d been down in that arroyo. It was dry, like all the arroyos in the Valley, although Bernie said that back in Indian times water had flowed in them all year long, and I had smelled water that one time, under the pebbly ground. That was just before I’d found the kid’s backpack, but too late. We’ve solved every missing kid case we ever took, except that one. I’ll never forget when we opened the broom closet. And later that night, we’d taken care of justice on our own, me and Bernie. That was part of what I never wanted to think about.

W
e have some tough neighborhoods in the Valley, South Pedroia being one, and Vista City another. They’re both in flat parts of town, where the heat gets hottest and the air dustiest. Also they’ve both got lots of boarded-up buildings, dive bars, and too many people just sitting around, watching. That’s never good when it comes to humans. We had the headlights on now, and they shone on the eyes of one of those watchers, an old guy sitting on a wooden box by the pumps of a closed-down gas station. His eyes followed us down the street.