Royal Flush (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 6) (17 page)

I turned back toward Floyd. He finished his beer and hauled his belly over the bar, leaning far enough to get his glass under one of the spigots, drawing himself a fresh one. Steve didn’t object.

When he sat back down again, I smeared an earnest look on my face. “Listen, Floyd, you got me a little worried about Royal. Nobody really thinks he’s a traitor, do they?”

“Maybe. They think maybe you are too. Or that Royal shouldn’t have trusted you. Lots of people think lots of things.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you should watch your step.”

I laughed. “I always watch where I step.”

“Good. So— where’s that hot girlfriend of yours today?” For a second, I thought he was talking about Sally and wondered how he knew she existed. Then I realized. Rosie. “You think she’s hot?”

“Yeah, I do.”

He didn’t ask me what our status was and I didn’t volunteer. In some ways, Floyd had me more worried than Steve did. Floyd thought Rosie was hot, but he wasn’t pushing, not me, not her.

How did that fit in with his image of the tough guy who seemed to like waving his manhood around? I couldn’t help but think we were some kind of assignment. Keep an eye on Jase. Scope him out.

“Hey, Floyd?”

“Yeah, buddy?” Uh-oh. He’d never called me that before.

“I want you to know that I’m real grateful for your friendship. New to the group, got my dad to worry about— you’ve welcomed me. I thank you for that.”

He grinned at me. “But leave your girlfriend alone, is that what you’re saying? I ain’t no fool, Jase. I can see something’s not quite right between you. But don’t you worry about me. Never push a woman, that’s my motto. She’ll come to you when she’s ready.” He jabbed me in the arm with his elbow. “Or maybe she’ll come to me.”

Yeah. Neanderthal with a Valentine card. It didn’t scan.

Still, I decided to just go along with the gag, whatever it was, and convince this guy that he was my pal and I was everything he wanted in a best buddy— stupid, northern European, loyal, and fascist.

Gilly strolled in, said hello to Floyd, and nodded at me, taking a stool halfway down the bar.

Floyd stood up and clapped me on the back. “See ya later, Jase?”

“Yeah. See ya later.”

He swaggered out of the bar.

Gilly was watching me. “How are you, Jason?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“How’s Royal doing?”

“He’s just fine.”

“Glad to hear it.” How did she manage to make those words sound like an invitation to bed?

This would be a good time, I decided, for me to take a bathroom break. I headed for the back of the bar. But Gilly fell into step beside me.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” Why was everyone so interested in where Rosie was?

“Busy.”

“You look good together.” I shrugged modestly. “Seems to me, though, that there’s something going on between you and me.”

I shrugged again, totally noncommittal, smiled, and slipped inside the bathroom. I stayed in there for a full five minutes, trying to decide whether to get away from Gilly by going home, or stay for a while and try to pitch Royal’s innocence to Gilly and Steve.

Gilly was leaning against the wall, waiting, when I came out again. She took my arm and led me toward the door to the back room I’d never seen.

I didn’t know what to do. A perfect opportunity, a perfect excuse, to go somewhere where the Aryan Command probably thought I had no business going. To do some reconnoitering. But oh boy…

I let her guide me through the door, and we were in.

And alone. There were a lot of folding chairs stacked against the walls. At the other side of the room, about thirty feet away, there was a makeshift stage— a plywood box about eight feet long and two feet high. A podium stood beside it. Hanging on the back wall was one of those swastika-and-stripes Aryan Command flags. Courtesy of Hal and Helen. Next to the flag was a door. Another exit? A closet?

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Gilly said, looking at the flag.

“Very.” Big, anyway. As wide as the stage. Okay, I’d seen the room. It was for meetings. Speeches. And with that flag glaring down at us, there was nothing attractive about Gilly Johns. I reached for the doorknob.

But then I couldn’t see the flag anymore because Gilly was pressing me against the door, her hands on my shoulders, kissing my neck. From there, she navigated up to my ear. I couldn’t seem to move.

When she shifted her head to go for my lips, I got another look at that flag. What was I, a collaborator? What was this, a World War II movie? And the more important question, how easy was Jason, anyway?

I put my hands on her shoulders and moved her gently but firmly backward.

She was smiling at me. Rejected, perhaps, but still not convinced. “Who are you, Jason?”

“Just a man looking for his life.” I thought she might like that, but she wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Be careful where you look.”

I opened the door and escaped back to my stool. She followed in a few seconds, but didn’t sit down. She said she’d see me later and left the bar.

No one else came in. I stuck around for half an hour longer, nursing a beer, trying to make small talk with Steve. He wouldn’t talk.

As I walked past him on my way out, I saw that the magazine he was reading was a gun catalog.

I had more time to kill before I could go home. It was one of those bright blue, hot-sun days we get in September, with a light so strong and deep it gets inside you and paints pictures on your soul. A Mediterranean light, I’m told, although never having been to the Mediterranean, I can only take it on faith.

The open house had a while to go; I was dressed, still, in my Thor’s clothes, and while the jeans, Docs, and T-shirt were normal enough for West Marin— no reason to change— Sally might wonder a bit about the boots she’d never seen me in. So all in all, it seemed right to keep the brown wig in the dash compartment and pass right through Fairfax, staying on Sir Francis Drake, heading west to the farm country and the coast. Past the stables and the dairy cows and the ranch, hidden among the hills, where George Lucas makes his magic movies.

I kept going to Olema, a town with one store and one great restaurant, and turned right and left again, heading toward the Point Reyes National Seashore. Still sunny, still clear. No fog. Some Sunday traffic. The side road to Limantour Nature Area wasn’t as deserted as I like, either. Weekdays are better. And the parking lot was pretty full. I pulled in next to a minivan that was spitting out children, and started walking toward the beach, trying to look at the birds in the marsh and clear my mind. It stayed pretty clear until I actually slogged up onto the dunes, pulled off my boots, and looked out at the Pacific, smelling the rotting seaweed, squinting toward China. Some days, the waves are big and act like they want to knock you down. Today, they were smooth and easy, and people were playing carelessly in the cold water.

I walked ten minutes along the sand until I got to a place where no one had laid a blanket or planted an umbrella for a hundred yards around. I sat down on a big chunk of driftwood, and the people I’d been spending my time with started wandering around my mind.

The weird thing was, none of them seemed real. Floyd acted like he wanted to be my pal, flirted with my “girlfriend,” and watched me like a high-school hall monitor. Karl had tried, in a not-so-subtle way, to warn me about Floyd, but I couldn’t tell what the warning was about, and even though it was clear Karl and Floyd didn’t like each other, I sure didn’t have any idea why Karl would want to be on my side.

Steve? Well, I’d thought he was this totally in-control guy, but suddenly, after the Switcher leak, he was edgy enough to get paranoid about a couple of teenagers and toss them out of the bar. He seemed like he was under pressure to keep out subversives and recruit at the same time. Tough job.

And Gilly! I wanted to ask some questions about her. Sure, I’m irresistible, but that scene in the back room felt a little cold. And she’d warned me about something too. What? The fury of a woman scorned?

Helen and Hal. She was just a garden-variety lunatic, I was pretty sure. And Hal was a blank. Nothing too puzzling about them. Or Ebner, for that matter. He was consistent. A consistent son of a bitch. And Red just seemed to be Red.

Ebner, I thought, was in it for the power. Leslie, I figured, was in it for the boys. And the boys were in it for the motorcycles.

I got home half an hour after the open house was supposed to end and found a note from Sally scribbled on the back of one of her flyers.

“Just a couple bites,” the note said. “But I think we’ve got some interest. Rosie called— she’ll meet us here at 7:00 to go over to Scenic Avenue to negotiate. See you then.”

Not exactly a love note but it would do until something better came along. I felt a quick flashback: Gilly’s lips on my earlobe. I thought I’d worked that one out of my system, but maybe not. See, my problem is, I’m too vulnerable. Just a peeled nerve when it comes to beautiful women.

I didn’t see the cats anywhere, so I gave a yell. “Tigris? Euphrates?” They crawled out from under the bed, looking dusty and pissed off. Too many strangers passing through their house that day. I fed them a can of Super Supper, fed myself a can of chili, and stretched out on the couch with the Sunday paper.

Rosie got there first, and I ran down some of my thoughts on the inhabitants of our little nightmare world. She listened, and she nodded, and she sat there quiet for a minute.

“Losers and misfits,” she said finally. “Why do you think they should make sense?”

“I can’t think of Gilly as a loser or a misfit. She’s gorgeous.”

Rosie gave me her “idiot man” look. “Listen, Jake, one of the craziest, most vicious, most sadistic women I ever knew was gorgeous. At least she was for a while.”

“Was she a loser?”

“Eventually. Tell you which one of those guys scares me the most— Pete Ebner. I watched him in the bar, I watched him at that tailgate party. Evil. There’s a piece of him missing.”

Right about then Sally knocked on the door, and we drove off in the Falcon to the other side of Fairfax. Which took all of three minutes.

The people who were selling the cottage-and-cottage lived in the first house and let their teenage son live in the other one. They reminded me of Dharma’s parents on that TV show, “Dharma and Greg,” old, unreconstructed hippies. He had a long ponytail dripping down from the bald spot at the top of his head; she had a lot of hair and floppy flowered pants. Their realtor, a guy in chinos and white polo shirt, was with them.

They offered us wine, which we accepted. They looked like pushovers but they were not.

“Hey,” the homeowner said, after we’d been dipping into the wine and the real estate conversation for five minutes. “I can see where you’re coming from. You want to sell your house and buy this one.”

I admitted that was where I was coming from.

“But hey, we can’t go along with a contingency deal, man. Sorry, but we just can’t. Whoever comes up with the money first, that’s the guy we have to sell to.”

They were moving up to Oregon and they wanted to go now. They did admit that they had no other offers, but said if they got one, they’d take it, that they couldn’t wait around on the off chance that I would sell my house. No contingency deal, no way, no chance.

But hey, you have a nice day.

Back in the car, Sally reassured us that my house, being somewhat more conventional, might sell faster than the cottage-and-cottage. She put a little icing on that cake by asking me to join her for chow mein at her house later in the week— right there in front of Rosie, who jabbed me in the ribs. I set it up for Thursday, just in case Switcher’s Wednesday hit wasn’t really off. So all in all, even though Thursday was four days away, I wasn’t as depressed as I might have been.

Except for a couple of locals I’d seen before, sitting around stupefied as usual, no one but Steve was in the bar when Rosie and I got there later that night. Not one other ranking member of the Aryan Command. But Steve had a message for me from one of the missing: Floyd.

“Wanted to talk to you about something but won’t have a chance tonight. Leave your phone number with Steve so I can call you. Thanks. Floyd.”

As I stood there trying to focus on the note, thinking fast about my phone number and the answering machine that identified me as Jake Samson, Gilly came rushing through on her way to the now-no-longer-mysterious back room. She glanced at me and jerked her head in a kind of nod, but didn’t stop or say a word. Red came in, ignored me entirely, and strutted toward the back too.

I ordered beers. Steve just looked at us for a minute, then he decided to serve us.

I pushed my luck. “What’s going on back there tonight?”

“Go on home, Jase. Members only.”

“Some kind of Inner Circle meeting or something?”

He gave me that blank stare again and shook his head. “All the members. Which you are not.” Charming guy. But I consoled myself: he didn’t seem any more suspicious of me than he’d been before The Leak, and he wasn’t really any ruder now than he’d ever been. Which made me wonder if he had a better suspect than Royal, better than me. It wasn’t like I’d seen him being pals with anyone else. He didn’t seem to socialize much with the group, hadn’t showed up at the ball game or the warriors’ party.

That afternoon, though, he had allowed Floyd to come between him and the skin kid. That meant he either liked him, respected him, or feared him.

I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to stick around and wait to see who else came in. I gave Steve a blank look of my own, stuck Floyd’s note in my pocket and asked Rosie if her beer was cold enough. Just to say something. She didn’t have a chance to answer.

“Don’t matter if it’s cold enough, it’s the only one she’s getting. You got five minutes to drink and go.”

I drank slowly. Halfway through the beer, he reached out with both hands and yanked our glasses off the bar.

“Bar’s closed. I’m gonna lock up now.” Then, louder, for the benefit of the neighborhood guys in the corner, “Finish up! Bar’s closing.” They lurched to their feet.