Mad Dogs (31 page)

46

We sat on metal folding chairs beside the porno store's upstairs window and put binoculars on whoever walked out of the afternoon and into Mail 4 U!

“What time is it?” said Zane, his eyes on our stakeout.

I glanced at my watch: “Four forty-two.”

“Rush hour.” Cari looked out and down at the stream of cars passing by. “Lucky people, going home.”

“We'll get there,” I told her.

“What if nobody picks up your tube?” she said.

“Hell,” said Zane. “What if somebody
does
pick it up? Taxis don't cruise around here. Our chase car is at a motel 20 minutes away. We spot the pick up, most we'll get is a visual of the guy, maybe a license plate. Unless he takes a bus or hikes to the subway, we won't be able to follow him or snatch him.”

“We got what we got,” I said.

Cari swung out of her black cloth blazer, draped it across the back of her folding chair. She wore Hailey's cashmere pullover. That too-tight red sweater stretched over Cari's no bra breasts and I didn't think about Nurse Death's five eyes or inflated flesh featured in the TV playing under our shoes. Cari had Nurse Death's unloaded Walther PPK tucked into her belt, cosmetic armament for her fake role as a federal agent.

She combed her fingers through short blonde hair, stretched—could have used the stretch as prelude to an attack, but didn't. The stench of ammonia drifted from the bathroom. She looked at me: I gave her a comforting smile.

Zane swung the binoculars up to watch the mail drop store.

Four minutes later said: “Customer. Went to his mail box, found nothing, left.”

“I never know whether to be glad or sad when my mail box is empty,” said Cari.

I said: “He could have been a scout.”

Zane joked a Marlon Brando boxing movie line:
“I could-a been a contender.”

Cari watched Zane and I share a smile. Said: “What's it like to be crazy?”

“Same as it is for you,” said Zane. “Everybody's different. Yet also the same.”

“It takes guts to be nuts.” I shrugged.

“Being crazy is living in a dream,” I said. “But maybe
out here
is the dream and crazy is what's real. What matters is what you can make work.”

“Plus what makes you happy,” said Zane.

“Happy?” said Cari. “Babbling on street corners? Locked up in a padded cell?”

I told Zane: “She knows about Condor.”

“You call that happy?” said Cari, neither confirming nor denying what I'd said.

“One man's happy is another man's Hell,” I said. “And you'd be surprised what people get used to. But where we were… I call that trying.”

“Trying is where everybody starts.” Zane shrugged. “Since we busted out, since I made it through the subway meltdown—”

“What subway meltdown?” interrupted Cari.

“Never mind, he got by with a little help from his friends.”

“Sure, obvious things made me crazy.” Zane's eyes probed beyond the glass. “My parents' car wreck. Jumping out of an airplane to get hung up in war tree and watch a man I treasured die because of my great idea. Baking like I was in the Hell the nuns promised me. The dig-my-own-grave mindfuck. Tons of bombs blasting my nerves. Getting so fried with fear and pain that my hair turned white. Being smeared with heroin, packed out of the jungle like a monkey. All that whacked me, but hey: everybody gets a load.”

A truck honked outside on Georgia Avenue.

“What
kept me
crazy was believing in my bones that I had to carry that load forever. I fought with everything I had to hold onto the weight that was crushing me. Carry that weight, no matter what, and never, never cry. Or else.”

Cari said: “Or else what?”

“If you let go of your weight, you got nothing.” Zane stared out porno's window. “Some people need to get down to nothing. “Me, I melted down in the subway where Vic and Russell and strangers changed the moment and kept me from going batshit. Going batshit is another way of holding on to your weight. But them being there stopped me from going batshit. So I had to let go, and when I could breathe again, I was still hanging on to a moving train. My crying and letting go didn't destroy the universe. So while I was in the same place… it wasn't the same me.

“Dr. F getting whacked led me to zero,” said Zane. The window reflected his sad smile. “Kind of rough on him, but Dr. F was my best ever penny.”

Zane took a quick look at Mail 4 U! through the binoculars. Put them down on the window ledge and asked Cari: “What about you?”

“I'm not crazy.”

“Are you glad or sad your crazy mail box is empty?”

“Irrelevant,” said Cari. “Instead of me nailing my mission, my mission has nailed me. Doesn't matter if I'm crazy or not, I screwed up and so I am screwed.”

“I don't know about screwed,” said Zane, “but you didn't screw up. You've been dealing with what's real, not what was expected. I'd say that makes you a star.”

She stared at him.

“But do you know what's important right now?” asked Zane.

Cari shook her head.

“Crazy or not, we need to eat.”

And I saw my chance
: “There's that Vietnamese restaurant a few doors down.”

“Saigon's everywhere out here. Makes sense for me to get dinner.” Zane passed me the binoculars. Asked Cari: “Can I bring you anything in particular?”

“Make it hot, make it a lot.”

As the door downstairs buzzed Zane's exit, Cari said: “Was he always like this?”

“Yes. No.”

She took his chair. We stared out the smudged glass window. Alone.

“So…” My gesture took in the cluttered second floor of our pornography palace, the traffic rushing in the street below, sunset's bleeding sky. “How you doing?”

“Well…
Way back when
, I never pictured being in a place like this.”

“Who did?” I said. “Americans usually mean high school when they talk about
back when
. For the rest of the world,
back when
is usually either when they had food or when they didn't. What was way
back when
for you?”

“Yesterday. Forget about high school.” She shook her head. “High school is America's cradle. We always believe we can re-birth ourselves into a new person—smarter, prettier, richer, more powerful. In the rest of the world, people struggle to be better and safer in who they already are. That's why
way back when
for us springs from our adolescent daze. We keep thinking we still got time to grow up and be somebody else.”

“Who do you want to grow up to be?” I said.

“Alive.” She lowered the binoculars. Kept her gaze out the window. “All there.”

“And
here
isn't how you pictured
there
.”

“Got that right,” she said. “Back then, all I wanted was out. To go somewhere special. Do something more than ordinary life. Do what nobody thought I could.”

She laughed. “So guess what? Now I risk my ass to protect ‘ordinary life.' And what do I get for ‘special'? Trapped above a porno store with a couple of maniacs.”

Cari put the binoculars on the window ledge.

“The real joke is that ordinary life finally makes sense.” She gave me a wry smile. “But hey, I'm just a girl with no bullets in her gun.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“Next do you want my horoscope sign? Wasn't the stars that got me here.”

“Suburbia? The city? Small town? A farm?”

“
Ah
: persistence. Dull the resistant edge of your captive by bonding with her over details of her life.”

Risk everything
: “If you want to walk away… go.”

Her green eyes didn't blink. Neither did I.

“Nah,” she said. “I'd miss dinner.”

Our eyes went across the street to the glowing lights of Mail 4 U!

“Iowa,” she said.

My heart slammed against my ribs. “Are you married?”

“You know better than that.”

“Is there… Do you have somebody?”

“You can always have somebody.” Her blonde head shook. “There's nobody.”

“Me, either.”

“That's no news flash.”

“That's what we miss in this spy life,” I said. “The chance to find anybody who's more than somebody.”

“You always figure there's time,” she said. “Even knowing what you and I know about
time
. In 11 seconds, I can kill a man—and that's hand-to-hand. Give me bullets for my gun, and forget about point blank: if I see him, I own him.”

“We're all a blink away from the last bullet,” I said. “Look where I am.”

“Don't think I don't think about that. We all do. But when we hear about… crashes like you, we say it was just your time.”

“Time changes.”

“And grinds up people in the gears.”

“I'm still here.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But I tried to nail you. I tried real hard.”

“Better luck next time.”

She blinked.

“Do you like poetry?”

“I never think about it.”

“Then you're lucky. You've got a lot to learn, and… and…”

What, what happened?

“Victor! Vic!” Cari's leaning right in front of me and I'm still sitting in the hard chair, the window's turning dark now but she's leaning close to me, off her chair…

“Vic! You… zoned out.”

“But I'm back. I always come back.”

“So far. How long have you guys been off your meds?”

“Russell would say not long enough. Don't worry. We'll make it.”

“Even Eric and Hailey?”

“Together they add up to a whole.”

“How are you spelling that?” said Cari.

“See? You do know poetry!”

She glanced out the window: “An unmarked cop car just parked out front.”

We crouched below the window ledge and stared out to the parking lot below.

A balding man in a cheap gray suit closed the driver's door of a Crown Victoria with two radio antennae on its trunk. He looked from side to side as if to be sure that he was alone. The cop in the cheap gray suit marched towards COYOTES door and out of our angle of vision.

The angry electronic buzz told us the door had opened.

“I'm not getting trapped up here!” I said, filling my right hand with the Glock .45.

“What about Zane?” said Cari.

My left hand shot up:
Quiet!

We scurried across the bare floor like mice in a cat's house, eased down narrow wooden stairs that somehow granted our wishes and didn't creak. Just past the bottom of the stairs, all that separated us from the sales room of the porno video store was the doorway filled by a moldy green curtain.

Smells like wet wool
, I thought as I crouched beside that green curtain to peer through the gap between its edge and the door jam. Cari crouched behind me—I'd never let her be there if I hadn't trusted her. She could see over my head, shared my curtain's-gap narrow vertical view of the world.

We saw the cop shove a video cassette across the counter to the cadaverous clerk, say: “Might be more stuff I can find here that you need to let me check. But don't worry, I'll keep it all off the books.”

The clerk said: “You cops are always too good to me.”

Zane opened the door and activated the buzzer.

The cop turned to face the sound of a
man walking through the front door
—and as he did, his suit jacket rebelliously flipped open to flash the badge on his belt, busting who he was for any self-righteous, letter-writing, phone-call-making citizen. As he registered the sight of
white-haired stranger/hard eyes
, the cop's right hand instinctively brushed to his side and he growled: “What the hell you got in those bags?”

Zane blinked. Said: “Food. Vietnamese.”

“You bring food… in here?”

Can't tip who we really are to either the cop or the clerk! Zane told himself, said: “Don't you get hungry?”

“Yeah, but I know when and where I'm supposed to eat.”

Zane winked at the cop: “Guys like us eat where we want?”