Someplace to Be Flying (8 page)

Which was what brought Moth to Jimmy’s Billiards, a prewar pool hall that was still situated above a pawn shop at the corner of Vine and Palm, right in the heart of the Zone. It was just going on noon, but the place was already half-full with the usual crowd, working the tables, nursing drafts on the benches that lined the walls, placing bets, making deals. Moth slid onto a stool at the bar and Jimmy came over with a glass of beer, the head foaming over the sides. He put it down in front of Moth.

Jimmy wasn’t the kind of person you brought home for Sunday dinner, not unless your father was a bookie, your mother a cocktail waitress, granny a stripper. He was deceptively overweight—what looked like fat was all muscle. Round-faced, double-chinned, and hairy. His forearms bristled with thick black hair, more of it pushing up through the V of his open shirt. By noon he already had a five-o’clock shadow.

Rumor had it he was a fence, a bookie, a gunrunner,
you
name it. Moth knew none of it was true. What Jimmy did was take a cut from those who were and used his place as an office.

“You want a cigar?” Jimmy asked around the fat Cuban he was chewing.

Jimmy’s cigar was always unlit, always the same length. For all Moth knew, it was always the same one, but he didn’t want to go to where that thought could take him. He shook a cigarette out of his pack and lit up.

“Nah,” he said. “I’ll stick with these.”

Jimmy leaned his large forearms on the bar. “So what’s up?”

“I want you to tell me again about that dog-headed man who came in here.”

Jimmy nodded. He looked past Moth’s shoulder, out across the tables, gaze fixing on something that lay on the other side of the beer poster on the far wall.

“That was something,” he said.

This was what he needed for Hank, Moth thought as Jimmy retold a story Moth had only half paid attention to before. Validation. It wasn’t only Jack who believed in these kinds of things. Ordinary joes had seen them, too.

Lily arrived early at the Cyberbean Cafe and took her café au lait and a cranberry muffin over to a small corner table by the window. Outside, the traffic had settled into a post-rush-hour trickle and there was little to hold her interest. She’d already read today’s papers, as well as this week’s edition of
In the City,
which someone had left behind on her table, so to kill time, she amused herself by taking mental snapshots of the café‘s patrons, her gaze moving from table to table.

Closest to hand, two Goths who reminded her of the raggedy girls who’d rescued her the other night were sitting with a long-haired flannel-and-jeans type who seemed almost asleep. At the table beyond theirs, three yuppie women chatting animatedly over their coffee with a younger punk woman with short-cropped hair and wearing more earrings and facial jewelry than some of the street vendors outside had on their carts. Near the door was a biker in his leathers and greasy jeans, sitting with a pretty, well-dressed young woman who looked as though she’d come directly from her office job to have a coffee with him. The rest were the usual hodgepodge of students, artist types, and hangers-on, each making their own fashion statements, or lack thereof.

Somehow she missed Joey’s entrance. She blinked with surprise when he seemed to materialize beside her table, a mug of plain black coffee in hand.

“Okay if I join you?” he asked.

She nodded. Now that he was here, she was at a bit of a loss as to why she’d agreed to see him. Why, if she’d had his number, she might well have called him if he hadn’t picked up the phone first.

“You seem surprised to see me,” he said.

“I guess I am. I was surprised you called. But then I was trying to find you, too, so I guess I understand.”

“Find me how?”

“My friend Rory—Rory Crowther.”

She could hear her voice go up on the last syllable, making a question of it. It was an affectation that always irritated her when she heard others do it and it irritated her more now that she was doing it herself, but Joey only nodded.

“You know him?” she asked.

“We’re not friends or anything, but I’ve run into him. Is he still writing?”

Lily nodded. Wasn’t that usually the way, she thought. People always remembered bylines before photo credits.

“Anyway,” she went on, “he was telling me about a mutual friend of ours who might know you, so I was thinking of giving him a call, see if he had your number. …”

Her voice trailed off.

“Look,” he said. “I’ve got to tell you something. My name’s not Joey. It’s Hank.”

That was going to take some adjusting to, she thought. But it did suit him better.

“Hank,” she found herself repeating, testing the name on her tongue.

He nodded. “Hank Walker. I’ve got this bad habit of not handing out my name the way—” He smiled. “You know. Some people do a business card.”

“For safety’s sake?” she asked. It made sense, seeing how he was involved in an illegal activity.

“For privacy.”

“Oh.” She took a sip of her café au lait. “So why are you telling me now?”

“Just to keep things straight between us.” He gave her a disarming smile. “In case we decide we want to get to know each other better.”

Lily knew a momentary discomfort, not entirely sure what he was leading up to. She took another sip of her coffee and looked around the café.

“It’s funny,” she said, trying to keep the conversation light, “but people look more interesting today than I remember them being when I was growing up.”

Hank raised an eyebrow.

“You know,” she said. “There isn’t one look anymore, one tribe. Instead the tribes are smaller, more diverse, and the lines blur between them. I’m sure there are still cliques, but they don’t seem so obvious anymore and I like that.”

“We live in different worlds,” Hank said. “Where I come from it’s the same as it’s always been: There’s us and there’s them and that’s about as complicated as it gets. We look after ourselves, same as everybody else. We just have a smaller resource base. But that’s okay. Means there’s less to screw up.”

“Isn’t that kind of insular? There are so many things going on in the world, so many problems. …”

“I’ve given up trying to save
the
world,” Hank said. “All I do now is try to save my small part of it—make sure my family’s taken care of.”

“Do you have a big family?”

Hank smiled. “Yeah, but it’s not the kind you think. It’s more like a crew, people looking out for each other, caring for each other—not because nobody else will, but because we want to.” He smiled. “Us and them.”

“I guess I’d be a ‘them.’ “

He shrugged.

“But you stopped to help me.”

“That’s one of my failings. Sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong.”

It was an obvious contradiction to what he’d said a moment ago, but Lily didn’t call him on it. She’d learned a long time ago that there was nothing cut-and-dried about the way people did what they did, or how they justified it.

“I didn’t see anything in the paper about the man who died,” she said.

“I don’t read the papers, but it doesn’t surprise me. Lots of stuff doesn’t make the papers, but it still has a huge impact on people’s lives.”

Lily nodded in agreement. A grandparent dying in their sleep. A new child born into a family. A daughter coming out to her parents. They weren’t big news stories, but they still changed the lives of the people who experienced them. Like what had happened to them the other night.

She  regarded him for a long moment,  trying to understand what had brought him here to see her, what kind of a person he really was. Usually a good judge of character, she couldn’t get a take on him at all. The only thing she was relatively sure of was that he didn’t mean her any harm.

“Why did you want to see me?” she asked.

“A woman like you has to ask that?”

He said it easily, not like a come-on.

“No, really,” she said.

“Really?”

She nodded.

“I have no idea.” He looked past her, out the window for a moment, then met her gaze. “This thing we experienced … on the one hand, it seems like a dream, like it never really happened. On the other, I can’t get it out of my mind. I’ve listened to Jack’s stories for years, but they were always just stories, something to fill up the empty space between nightfall and dawn. Something to take our minds off of the hard times, you know, if only for awhile. But now, knowing those animal people are real …”

His voice trailed off.

“It changes everything,” Lily said.

“Yeah. And what I can’t figure out is, is it good or bad or …”

“Just different.”

“You’ve got it.”

Only Lily could tell there was more to it, because whatever was haunting the back of his eyes made a trail of uneasy paw prints up her own spine.

“Or more than different,” she added.

“You feel it, too?” Hank asked. “It’s like we’ve, I don’t know, stumbled onto a secret and there’s no backing out of it now. It’s just going to keep pulling us deeper and deeper into foreign territory.”

Lily nodded. That was exactly how it felt to her.

“So what can we dor” she asked.

“That’s the thing, isn’t it? We’re on unfamiliar ground. I was thinking w
e
could just let it slide, but I feel like a junkie, needing a fix. Not to get high, just not to feel sick, you know? To be well. I keep scaring up strange stories wherever I turn, like I’ve stepped around a corner and I’m someplace else. Everything looks the same, but it’s different now. Changed. And instead of backing off, I want to go deeper—I
need
to know more.”

“Like where did they come from?” Lily said. “Those girls from the other night. Where are they now?”

“And what else is out there?”

All around them, the patrons of the café went about their business, but the murmur of their conversations, silverware tinkling against cutlery, the music from the overhead sound system, seemed separate from the two of them sitting here at their table, as though they were cocooned and unmoored—drifting farther and farther from familiar territory.

Suddenly Lily wanted to get out of the place. But she didn’t want to be alone.

“Do you want to go someplace and have some dinner?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think I’m in the mood for restaurants or crowds right now. Even this place is way too busy.”

Again, he was on the same wavelength.

“We could go back to my place,” she said, surprising herself. “Have some soup or something.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Look,” she said. “It’s just something to eat in a quiet place.”

He gave a slow nod. “Soup and some quiet would be good.”

It was closing in on midnight and Rory was about to go online when his phone rang. Turning the volume of the radio down, he picked up on the second ring and said hello.

“You weren’t sleeping?” Lily asked.

“You know me, Kit. I’m the original night owl. I was just about to go online.”

“Oh. Well, I’ll let you get to it, then.”

Rory sighed. “But what I’m doing now, and it’s way more interesting, is talking to you.”

“Oh.”

“So what’s up?”

Lily hesitated. “I just wanted to talk to you about the other night… .”

When her voice trailed off, Rory gave her a couple of moments before jumping in.

“I told you,” he said. “I’m okay with it. You can talk about it when you’re ready, or not at all. We don’t have a problem with it.”

“But I do want to talk about it. I mean, that’s why I’m calling.”

Rory couldn’t remember Lily ever sounding this unsure of herself. He wished they were talking face-to-face so he could better gauge how she was doing, then realized that was probably why she was doing this over the phone.

“I’m listening,” he said.

She laughed, a nervous sound. “I don’t know where to begin.”

Rory didn’t press, thinking it was better if  she did this at her own pace.

“Remember the cabbie I told you about?” she said after a moment of dead air.

“Sure.”

“He called me today and we got together at the Cyberbean. And then later he came back to my place for soup.”

“So … do you like him?” Rory asked.

“It’s not like that—or at least it’s not like that yet. Who knows? His name’s not Joey, by the way. It’s Hank Walker.”

The name rang a bell, but it took Rory a moment to place it.

“I know him,” he said. “He’s what? Medium height, short brown hair, brown eyes. Sort of tough-looking, but not mean.”

“That’s him. Where do you know him from?”

“He does some work for Marty Caine.”

“Who?”

“You know, the lawyer I was doing all that research for last winter, the original ‘Mr. No Comment.’ Walker’s done investigative work for him from time to time—background checks, legwork stuff. Sort of what I did, except he did it on the streets while I used the libraries.”

“So what do you think of him?”

Rory had to smile. No, she wasn’t interested in him. Right.

“He wasn’t exactly the sort of person you got to know,” he said. “He didn’t really mix with the other people in the office, but he was good at what he did, so it wasn’t like Marty was going to complain.”

He looked across the room, remembering. He’d made some comment to Marty about Walker’s standoffishness one day and Marty had said, “I’ll tell you what’s important, Rory. Hank doesn’t play the middle ground. If you’re his friend, he’ll stand by you no matter what comes up; if you’re not, if you threaten somebody he cares about, he’ll take you down and he won’t care what happens to himself in the process. And that’s why he’s so good at this kind of work. I can only get him to take a job on if he believes in the defendant, but when he does, he gives it a hundred and ten percent. Now tell me, whose side would you rather he was on?”

“So he’s driving a cab now,” Rory found himself saying.

“I get the sense he does a lot of things,” Lily said.

“Only you didn’t call me to talk about him.”

“No. But he’s involved. I guess it started with those stories Jack was telling me.”

Rory smiled. “Now we’re talking real characters. I keep telling Christy he should get together with him. I mean, you have to wonder. Where does he get that stuff?”