Shackles (22 page)

“Elmer Rix, for starters,” I said. “Would that be you?”

“Sure would. You got business with me?”

“With someone you know.”

“Who would that be?”

“Frank Tucker.”

A change came over him, the subtle kind that you might miss unless you were looking for it. Outwardly, nothing at all happened; the smile stayed fixed, the expression otherwise blank and the eyes half-lidded. But beneath the surface he got hard, rock hard: Fat turned to stone so suddenly that he might have gazed upon the face of Medusa. Those amphibian eyes measured me, dissected me with the same emotionless precision a biology teacher uses to dissect a real toad.

He said with false geniality, “Hey, do I look like the missing persons bureau? I sell junk, not information.”

“Are you telling me you don’t know Frank Tucker?”

He didn’t say anything, just looked at me. I looked back, not giving him any more or any less than he was giving me. I had my hand in my jacket pocket, touching the butt of the .22, but it would have been a mistake to put him under the gun. Elmer Rix was no O. Barnwell; intimidation and threats wouldn’t work with him. The hardness was strength as well as stubbornness and probable veniality. A tub of guts with guts.

I said, playing it a different way, “Look, I need to talk to Tucker. As soon as possible. He won’t mind when he hears what I’ve got to say.”

“What would that be?”

“I’ve got a job for him.”

“That so? What kind of job?”

“Do I need to spell it out?”

“I’m a good listener, friend. Try me.”

“Muscle work.”

“Bodybuilding, that what you mean?”

“Come on, Rix, let’s cut the bullshit, okay? We both know what Tucker hires out to do.”

“Man in my business gets to know a lot of things,” he said. “Point is, how do
you
know?”

“Somebody I know knows Dino.”

“Dino who?”

“Friend of Tucker’s,” I said, and I didn’t have to feign the impatience in my voice. “The word I got was that if I wanted to talk to Tucker, I should come over here and see Elmer Rix at the Catchall Shop. So here I am. Now do you point me to Tucker or do I find somebody else to give my dough to?”

He watched me a while longer before he said, “What kind of job and how much you paying?”

So far, so good. “I own a trucking outfit in Winters. For a while I didn’t have much competition; now I got heavy competition and I don’t like it. I want the competition to close up shop, go somewheres else. I want Tucker to fix it so that happens.”

“Tsk, tsk,” Rix said through his smile. “You didn’t say how much.”

“Top dollar. Plus a bonus if my competition is gone within three months. I’ll work out the exact numbers with Tucker.”

“Uh-huh. You know my name—what’s yours?”

I said, “Canino. Art Canino.” And I thought: If he asks for ID, I’ll have to put him under the gun after all.

But he didn’t ask for ID. He said, still smiling, “Well, you sure do tell a wild story, Mr. Canino. If I did know somebody named Frank Tucker, and I ain’t saying I do, I don’t know as I could recommend he take on a job like the one you’re offering.”

“Suppose we let him decide that.”

“Sure.
If
I knew him and how to get hold of him.”

Now I saw what he was after. Still a little slow on the uptake; still a little rusty. But the important thing was that it meant I had him hooked.

I asked, “How much do you want?”

“Some of the stuff you see in here, I’m selling it for somebody else. On consignment, like they say. I get ten percent.”

“From Tucker? Or from me, extra?”

“From the customer,” he said. “Always.”

I put up a mild protest to make it look good. “What the hell? That means I got to pay a hundred and ten percent.”

“Everything costs these days, Mr. Canino. You want a job done right, you go to the best people. You go to the best people, you pay high prices right down the line.”

“Okay, okay. But I’m not putting up any cash until I see Tucker and we settle on a price.”

“Hey, nobody’s asking you to.”

“So where do I find him?”

“Tell you what,” Rix said. “You go away someplace, come back here in an hour. No, make that an hour and a half.”

“How come so long?”

“I ain’t had my lunch yet.”

“Listen, this deal is important—”

“So’s my lunch,” he said, and he was dead serious.

“Will Tucker be here when I come back?”

“Ninety minutes and then you find out, right?”

We traded another long look, him with that amphibian smile pulling up the corners of his fat mouth. Only now it was genuine. Big toad king sitting on the throne in his cave full of decaying junk, holding court and enjoying every minute of it because in this place, this little kingdom, he made the rules and levied high tariffs for the privilege of his favors. I wondered if the local cops knew what kind of business His Bloated Highness was really in. I thought that maybe, when I was done with all this, I would find out.

There was nothing more to say to him, not just now. So I let him win this round of the staring match, nodded once, and left him sitting there looking royally pleased with himself.

It was a quarter of one when I got into the Toyota. I drove downtown, found a Denny’s, and picked my way through a taco salad. Not much appetite since I’d come out of the mountains above Deer Run; it would probably be a while before I had one again. But that was all right. I liked the shape I was in now, leaned down and hard-bellied. Once I was home, back into a daily routine, I would have to take steps to ensure that I didn’t put weight on again.

When I finished eating I paid the check right away and returned to the car. I had been spending too much time in restaurants lately, drinking too much coffee, brooding too much, and listening to too many trite conversations among strangers. Better to kill the half hour I had left by driving around instead. I took the bridge over to Marysville, toured around there, went up Highway 70 a ways and then turned around and came back. My watch said 2:10 when I recrossed the bridge into Yuba City, and 2:15 when I pulled up in front of the Catchall Shop.

Rix was right where I’d left him—fat toad king on his throne. But there was nobody else in the office, nobody else in the kingdom except for a long-haired kid struggling to load a cast-iron sink onto a dolly: slave or serf, and nobody I was interested in.

“Where’s Tucker?”

“Nobody here named Tucker,” Rix said through one of his smiles.

“I can see that. What’s the idea?”

“Tell you what you might do. You might drive over to Highway 99 and on down there, south, about eight miles. A road’ll come up on your left, next to a closed-up fruit stand—Herman’s, it’s called. Road runs through some orchards toward the river. After a mile or so it hooks to the left, and right there where it hooks you’ll see another road, dirt one, that runs straight ahead to the river bank. Plenty of parking space back where the dirt one ends.”

“Tucker’ll meet me there, is that it?”

The smile, and a delicate shrug to go with it.

I said, “Why not here or at his place?”

“Real private out there by the river. Fishermen and kids and farm workers in the summer, gets pretty crowded. Nobody goes there this time of year.”

So Tucker was being cautious. Cautious enough to bring somebody with him as a backup, just in case? Somebody like Lawrence Jacobs? Be just fine if it worked out that way. If it didn’t, if he brought somebody else or came alone, that was okay too. I was taking my own company along, my own little backup in case of trouble: the .22 Sentinel.

“All right,” I said. “If that’s the way it has to be.”

The smile, the shrug.

“You’ll be hearing from me, Rix.”

“Real soon, I hope,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Real soon.”

The side road and Herman’s Fruit Stand were easy enough to find. I turned onto the narrow blacktop, past the boarded-up shanty, and drove in among the orchards—peach trees on my left, walnut trees on my right, both kinds just starting to show their spring buds. There had been plenty of winter rain up here; the ground under the trees was soggy in places. I passed one group of farm buildings tucked back among the peach trees, saw no one there or in the orchards or on the road.

The Toyota’s odometer had clicked off nine-tenths of a mile when the hard left bend appeared ahead, just beyond where the orchards ended on both sides. The unpaved track that extended off the paved one was narrow, rutted, and muddy; it ran in a series of little dips across a brushy expanse of sand and broken rock and then vanished among scattered scrub oak. Beyond and through those trees I had glimpses of the Feather River: brownish sparkles where the afternoon sun struck the water.

I eased off onto the track. Its condition wasn’t as bad as it had looked from a distance; I had no problem getting across the open ground and in among the scrub oak. The track dipped sharply and at an angle then, into another cleared area of sand and gravel some ten feet above the level of the river. You could tell that it was used for a lover’s lane as well as a parking lot; there were used condoms and a pair of girl’s underpants among the beer cans and other litter. You could also tell that in the summer, when the Feather shrank in size, it would be half again as large as it was now. At the moment it was deserted. And I saw no sign of a person or a car anywhere else in the vicinity.

I turned the Toyota around to face the track, braked in the shadow of a scrub oak, and shut off the engine. From this spot you couldn’t see either the country road or the orchards. I looked at my watch: five past three. When the hands showed ten past I yielded to impulse and got out of the car; I was edgy and sitting there was causing crimps in my neck and shoulders.

A brisk wind blew here, almost cold and strong enough to make sighing, rattling sounds among the oak branches. Clouds had begun to pile up in the west; some of them moved across the face of the sun, so that the daylight was successively bright and a dull metallic gray. I walked over to where the ground sloped muddily to the water. The river was maybe seventy-five yards wide at this point, a hundred yards wide where it bellied inland farther south. Willows grew down that way, past a fan of driftwood that spread upward against a hump in the bank. Somebody—kids, probably—had fashioned a water swing out of two pieces of rope and a truck tire and hung it from one of the willow branches: swimming hole in the summer. Now the water was heavy with silt, swollen and swift-moving from the winter rains. More driftwood and other flotsam bobbed along on the surface, running down toward where the Feather joined the wider and deeper Sacramento River.

For a time I stood alternately watching the water and the place where the track bled into the parking ground. Stillness, except for the movement of the river and the tree branches. Silence, except for the soughing of the wind. It wasn’t long before the cold prodded me away, back to the car—the cold and the mounting tension.

3:20.

Come on, Tucker, I thought.

I got back into the Toyota, sat with my hand kneading the butt of the .22 in my jacket pocket. The track stayed empty, this side of the river stayed deserted. On the other side, half a dozen crows came from somewhere and began wheeling above another walnut orchard over there, creating a shrill racket that penetrated the closed car and scratched at my nerves.

3:25.

3:30.

Maybe he’s not coming, I thought—and that was when he finally showed up.

I saw his car before I heard it, because of the wind and the crows. Newish Chrysler, its brown and chrome surfaces dulled by a layering of dirt and mud. The windshield glass was streaked, too, but I could see through well enough to tell that the driver was the only apparent occupant. Somebody hunkered down in back? Not likely. Unless he was the paranoid type, Tucker wouldn’t have any cause for that much caution.

He parked twenty yards from the Toyota and a little to one side. But he didn’t get out right away: waiting for me to show myself first. I obliged him, straightening up behind the open door. When he followed suit I stepped around and shut the door and walked toward him, slowly. He edged forward to meet me. There was a kind of ritualism to it all, like a couple of street dogs working each other in an alley.

We stopped with a few feet separating us, about halfway between the two cars. He was four or five inches above six feet and big all over. “Arms like cement blocks,” Barnwell had said. Yeah. Popeye forearms, and biceps that bulged and rippled and stretched taut the sleeves of his blue T-shirt. The T-shirt and a pair of Levi’s and heavy workman’s boots were all he wore: Mr. Macho, Mr. Bad Ass. Maybe so, but his head under its covering of black slicked-back hair was undersized and his eyes, like chips of brown glass, betrayed its relative emptiness. Thinking would never be a hobby with him. Whenever he did have a thought, if he ever had one, it would soon curl up and die a solitary death, like a babe lost in a wasteland.

I said, “Frank Tucker?”

“Yeah. You Canino?”

“That’s right.”

“I hear you got a job for me.”

“Right. An easy one.”

“Kind I like best. What you want me to do?”

“Answer a question.”

“Huh?”

“Tell me where I can find Lawrence Jacobs.”

“Huh?”

I took the .22 out and pointed it at his sternum. “Pal of yours, the one who calls himself Lawrence Jacobs. Where can I find him?”

He stared at the gun for five seconds, not moving. It took him that long to shift gears, to come to terms with the sudden twist in the situation. Then he got mad. His muscles rippled, his hands closed into fists, his eyes got mean and his mouth got ugly, and he said, predictably, “What the fuck’s the idea?”

“Lawrence Jacobs. He’s the idea.”

“You’re talkin shit.”

“Lawrence Jacobs,” I said again. “He lived with you on K Street in Sacramento last November. Slender, brown hair, in his thirties. Called himself Lawrence Jacobs.”

“Brit? What you want with him?”

Brit. Another name I didn’t recognize. “Is that his first or his last name?”