The Last Coin (38 page)

Pickett sagged like a stuffed doll, steadying himself against the sink. He opened his mouth to speak, but Andrew shook his head, gesturing, looking again up the stairs, and then nodded him out of the restroom, shutting the door and throwing the bolt. He pointed toward the rear of the basement and winked, then set out with Pickett at his heels. He helped his friend through first, and then Pickett half-dragged him out onto the asphalt of the parking lot. Andrew reached back in and pulled the window shut just as the basement light clicked on. Both of them sprang for the dumpster.

The seconds ticked by. They could just see someone moving around within, shifting crates, juggling vegetables. There was an airy little snatch of song, and then the light shut out again and all was silent. Andrew nudged Pickett in the ribs and grinned at him. His friend looked awful—rumpled and baggy-eyed—but he clearly hadn’t been beaten. They were saving him for Pennyman, no doubt. There’d be time to discuss it in the car.

Andrew felt very satisfied with himself, and nearly laughed out loud. Quickly, he formulated a new plan, whispering it to Pickett, warning him about the thugs on the street, about the manifold dangers. Andrew would slouch out, bum-wise, toward the sidewalk, and if the doughnut eaters were gone, he’d give Pickett the high sign and Pickett would follow, the two of them beating it up to the Metropolitan and away. It was easy as that. He’d get Pickett out of there yet, and Pennyman could go hang.

Steeling himself, Andrew started out, peering past the edge of the dumpster and shoving his foot forward just as a yellow cab whipped around the corner onto Cherry and bumped to a stop at the curb. The rear door swung open and Pennyman himself hunched out, shoving his arm back in through the window to pay the driver.

Andrew ducked back, whispering “Pennyman!” and hauling Pickett down onto the asphalt, the two of them huddled and listening. A car door slammed and the taxi motored away. They’d wait for Pennyman to go in, and then they’d run for it. To hell with anyone at the curb. Once Pennyman unbolted the bathroom door and found that the prey had disappeared, there’d be half a dozen men at the curb.

But Pennyman didn’t go inside. He walked straight in their direction, whistling “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” as if he were in tip-top shape and the morning was a good one.

Andrew and Pickett crouched amid the rubble of broken crates and cardboard boxes, watching beneath the dumpster as Pennyman’s white bucks strode along toward them, the tip of his walking stick tapping along beside. There was no time to pull a carton over their heads; no time for elaborate plans. Andrew gave Pickett a look that he hoped suggested toughing it out. Between the two of them they could throttle Pennyman despite his canes and blowfish. If he carried a gun though …

Pennyman stopped when he got to the dumpster, close enough to it that he must have been gripping the edge, with his face nearly in the garbage. There was no way on earth that he could see Pickett and Andrew unless he walked around to the other side. What was he looking for? Some sort of vile fish guts to grind into poison? He stood just so. Andrew and Pickett held their breath. The morning was deadly silent.

No, not quite silent. There was a deep, almost hoarse irregular breathing and sniffing. Garbage shifted in the dumpster, as if Pennyman were stirring it with a stick, and the reek issuing from the rotted fish and vegetables and table leavings redoubled. Andrew nearly gagged, covering his mouth with his hand, still watching Pennyman’s feet. The old man groaned, sliding the toe of one shoe up along the back of his calf, as if caressing it. He stood suddenly on tiptoe, bending farther over into the dumpster, and uttered a low, moaning wail, breathing like an engine, quicker and quicker, the toes of his shoes twitching on the asphalt.

Andrew was dumbstruck, and Pickett, given the look on his face, was nearly blind with disgust—not at the ghastly odor of decay and rot that had settled around them, but at Pennyman’s insane passion, which, from the look of his twitching feet and the sound of his dwindling, throat-rasping wheeze, was almost spent.

Andrew suddenly stood up, slamming his open hand into the steel side of the dumpster, which thrummed like a bass drum. His vision had narrowed down into a tight little focus, as if he were looking down a tube. He couldn’t speak. But playing through his head like a looped tape was the loathsome knowledge that this monster, ecstatic now with rot and filth and decay, had kissed Rose’s hand, had been gallant, had been …

He lashed out with his right fist, pulling himself up and across the rim of the dumpster, taking Pennyman utterly by surprise. The old man reeled back, safe by inches, his mouth working. He raised his stick and swung it at nothing, as if he were half-blind. Andrew leaped around toward him, picking up an empty bottle and hurling it wildly, past Pennyman’s shoulder. It smashed straight through the basement window where he’d torn off the screen. Glass shattered, crates toppled. Pennyman shouted, and there was the sound of running feet punctuated by a weird raucous chattering, coming, it seemed, from the sky.

Pickett slammed into Andrew’s side, deflecting him away from Pennyman, who stood with his stick upraised, watching him rush in. “C’mon!” Pickett screamed, pulling at Andrew. “Leave him! Let’s go!”

Andrew reeled after him, but turned back after half a step. Give up! Not now he wouldn’t give up. He would finish Pennyman off and damn the consequences he’d beat Pennyman with his own cane, by God! He’d …

The two doughnut eaters rounded the corner of the building just then, one of them carrying a little wooden baseball bat, and both of them springing straight toward Andrew. Pickett waded in behind them, smashing one of them with a packing crate, the spindly wood cracking to splinters against the man’s head. He stumbled, mostly out of surprise, but he was up again in an instant.

The air was a tumult of sounds: Pennyman’s cursing, Andrew’s shouted threats, feet running on pavement, the airborne shriek of suddenly-appearing parrots. Andrew turned to meet the two new attackers just as Pickett threw himself onto the back of the one who had stumbled. But two more men—two of the white-aproned waiters from the restaurant—burst out through the back door just then, and although Andrew landed one good punch on his man’s shoulder, half-spinning him around, the two reinforcements slammed Andrew against the stucco wall, pinioning his arms. Pickett lay on the parking lot, the man with the ball bat having shaken him off and standing over him now, the club poised in the air.

“Stop!” commanded Pennyman, and the man with the bat lowered it, snatching Pickett to his feet. Pennyman smiled, raising his left hand to his mouth and nibbling on his finger.
“I’ll
attend to that,” he said. “Hold them.”

Andrew was aware that he was breathing hard, but he felt calm, considering what he faced. He vowed not to lose control over himself the way he had that afternoon with Ken-or-Ed. Pennyman fed off that sort of chaos. “Your hair is mussed,” Andrew said matter-of-factly and squinting with disapproval. “I’d let you borrow my comb, but I don’t …”

The tip of the cane whistled through the air, stopping a half inch from Andrew’s nose. Pennyman grinned when Andrew flinched and gasped. He paused to take out a pocket comb, which he pulled through his hair with a trembling hand. Andrew wouldn’t be put off. He was fired up and thinking. The morning was wearing on. Traffic had picked up. There was every reason in the world to waste time, to spend a few more minutes in the parking lot in order to attract the attention of neighbors or passing cars.

“Why those five books?” Andrew asked.

Pennyman looked sharp at him. “What?”

“The five books you stole. Why those five? They aren’t worth anything, not really. I don’t get it. Those are the five
I
might have stolen.”

Pennyman made no effort to act surprised, to pretend. He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

Pennyman liked to talk. He fancied himself a philosopher.

Andrew knew that—all the wombing and tombing business had taught him as much. “I can’t figure it out, especially the Pogo.”

Pennyman widened his eyes, as if to tell him to go on, that he would hear him out.

“A month ago,” said Andrew, “I’d have said that any friend of Pogo was a friend of mine. Anyone who reads Walt Kelly
has
to have the right inclinations. Nitwits and pretenders wouldn’t understand it. I’d have taken you for the sort who nods over—who?—Sartre? Maybe Mann. Someone polished and full of … shit, I guess. But not Pogo. What does that mean, I ask myself. And it seems to mean that, well, you’re something in the way of a lost soul. There’s something in you yearning to be … might I say, good? Something that isn’t at all fond of … of … collecting cat waste, let’s say, or drooling over rotted garbage in a dumpster.” Andrew beamed at him curiously, but with the moony-eyed, meaningful smile of a self-help psychologist, a benevolent, compassionate look, guaranteed to drive Pennyman insane. He tensed, readying himself to duck the inevitable blow of the walking stick. But there was none. Pennyman stared at him, breathing shallowly. A heavy pall of embarrassment had descended.

“Are you through?”

Andrew shrugged, glancing sideways across the parking lot. The street was empty. Talking was useless.

“Take them in.” Pennyman’s mouth was set, frozen in an expressionless line. “Into the kitchen,” he said, with such a ghastly intonation as to make it sound as if the kitchen weren’t a kitchen at all, but were a medieval chamber of horrors.

Andrew screamed, simultaneously ducking away, carrying his captor with him. Taking Andrew’s lead, Pickett screamed, too, and Pennyman, caught by surprise, stepped backward, thinking that Andrew was lunging at him, and swung the stick wildly, thudding it off the back of the man that held Andrew’s arm. Andrew stamped his foot behind him, still shouting and screaming, trying to smash the man’s toe and swinging around so as to keep the man between himself and the cane.

It was worthless. The man sprinted forward, driving Andrew into the wall of the restaurant. It was over, and all Andrew had managed was to drive Pennyman into a fury. He could hear the parrots circling above, and he stumbled as he was pushed toward the door.

Then, without warning, the parking lot was chaotic with parrots, flapping and reeling and shrieking. There was a cloud of them, a green, clamoring, raucous cloud of heavy parrots, dropping in like dog-fighters and slamming around and around them, tearing at faces with pronged beaks and claws, screeching and gouging. Pennyman threw his hands over his head after taking a wild cut at them with his cane. One of the waiters ran for the street, pursued by three or four parrots that tore at his ears like demons.

Pennyman hunkered lower, trying to keep the birds away from his neck, trying to curl up into a ball but terrified lest his white trousers touch the dirty asphalt of the parking lot. One of the parrots, a great, red-headed Amazon with an almost three-foot wingspan, clung to Pennyman’s back and burrowed into the collar of his coat as the old man let go of his head with one hand and flailed away at the bird uselessly, trying first to bat it away, then to get a grip on it.

The parrots took no interest at all in Andrew and Pickett. It was as if the cavalry had arrived in the nick of time. For the long space of half a minute Andrew watched amazed, wafering himself against the wall of the restaurant, as he was jerked back and forth by the doughnut thug, who still gripped his left arm but was weaving and dancing and waving his free arm to keep off the parrots. Seeing his chance, Andrew hit his man in the stomach with his elbow, twisting away at the same time and kicking him in the knee.

Two parrots sailed in as if to help him, one of them clutching at the man’s cheek with its talons and biting his nose, wrenching it back and forth as if to tear it off. Howling, he grabbed the bird but couldn’t pull the parrot off without losing the end of his nose into the bargain, and so reeled away shrieking for help, blood spattering his shirtfront. Andrew ran for it, up Cherry, toward the Metropolitan, thanking heaven that the parrots were on his side, and that one hadn’t latched onto
his
nose by mistake. Pickett pounded along after him as the men back in the parking lot were slowly backed up against the wall, fighting just to keep the birds away from their eyes.

None of the parrots followed Andrew and Pickett, and as they topped the hill and sprinted across a lawn, angling toward where the car was parked, they looked back to see Pennyman lurching through the door into the rear of the restaurant, his pants tattered, his hair wild. He tore at his coat, which still sagged under the weight of the determined parrot.

Andrew fired the engine and sped away, Pickett pulling himself into the weaving car and slamming the door on the run, the Metropolitan barreling through two stop signs and sliding around the corner onto Wisconsin Street, bound for home. It was when they’d got to Ximeno that the flock of parrots passed squacking overhead again, heading out over the ocean. Mystified, Andrew and Pickett watched them through the windshield until they disappeared beyond the rooftops.

It was early yet, too early to go home. Heaven knows there was enough to do at home, but there was no way on earth that Andrew could claim to have done any serious fishing yet, and, at least for the moment, there was no way they could simply walk in and confess. Not yet anyway. They talked about it as they sat in a booth at the Potholder, eating breakfast.

What profit would there be in generally revealing things? Rose would become involved; that was bad. It would be expected that they’d call the police, now that kidnapping had entered the list of villainies. But what, the authorities would want to know, had Pickett been doing breaking into a house on The Toledo?