The Mentor (32 page)

She was a
very talented host.  Not just because my wine glass was never empty but
because she was, once again, totally naked.  And not blue anymore.

When she
finally left the room for a moment, I whispered to Doc: “Pink?  She’s
pink, man!”

“Nope,”
Manic rubbed his bald head.  “Salmon, she tells me.”

“Salmon?”

“Yeah.
 I thought it was pink, too, at first.”

“Isn’t
Salmon a type of pink,” Pavan said.  Admirably, he’d been keeping his eyes
on his plate or at Doc and me.  He was a nutty bastard but pretty
respectful.  One of the many things I like about him.

Doc
shrugged, “Type of fish, isn’t it?”

“Yep,” I
said.  “Pink fish.”

“Not
according to my lady.”

“Bummer,
man.”

It hadn’t
taken the Mad Surgeons, Pavan and Doc, long to find where the tracker was in my
body.  Doc seemed most excited about lining up a small mound of tablets,
pain-killers of every shape and size, a barbiturate buffet to prep me for a
little slice and dice just below my right butt cheek.

Call me
crazy, but with those two behind my naked ass
armed with a pen knife
, I
wanted to be as sober as possible. The wire came out, about as long as my hand
and once Doc had smashed, burned, boiled, sliced, crushed, melted and sunk it
into a paint bucket filled with concrete-- “
we have to be sure, Dex!
 Gotta stop the signals, man!
”-- there were no signals coming from the
room.

I’d have to
investigate later but, cobbling together the growing collection of memories of
my college years that were coming back to me, it seemed possible that the
tracker was getting its power from electromagnetic fields outside my body.

We let the
world tend to itself for an hour while Doc showed us some of his newest
paintings—he’s talented and it’s not hard to lose yourself entirely in the alternate
universe he’s peeled from the inside of his skull and slapped onto canvas.
 

A few hours
later, as I stared out the car window, my mind was trying to sift out any big
pieces in life’s sandbox to get an idea of what was happening to me.
 Pavan interrupted my thoughts:  “You okay?”

My Kato was
driving, the road very dark, and the hum of the engine was beginning to make me
sleepy.  I said, “My ass hurts a little.  I had this weird thing in
it, come to find out.”

“Was it
your head?”

I shot him
a look and he laughed so hard I thought he was going to wreck the car.
 But, maybe he was right.  

“Yeah,
okay,” I said and laughed along with him.

Tired and a
little wine buzzed from dinner and post-dinner bottles, I was slumped in the
crook between the door and edge of my seat.  Pulling my shoulder blades
together, getting a satisfying spinal crunch, I’d drifted in and out of sleep
over the next half hour.

Pavan
banged my shoulder when we’d pulled into the upscale Buckhead neighborhood.
 I’d only given him the cross streets, not much more.  The plan was
to get out of his car a couple blocks away from my destination, just in case
we’d been followed.  That may be paranoid, but I had all the reason in the
world to be paranoid.

Pavan
continued pressing me for where I was going.  Finally, I said: “I sorta
got a job.”

“What?
 No way.  You didn’t tell me this.”  He looked around the posh
neighborhood.  “You a gardener now?  I could help!”

“Well,
you’re Mexican,” I said.  “You’d know about that sort of thing.”

“El Sal-vah-dor,”
he said, enunciating each syllable, like he does every time I comment on his
heritage. “But, I can edge like a motherfucker, man.” he said.  “And I
know exactly where to get a lawnmower.  Uncle Rolo’s got one.”

“Isn’t that
the one he was pissed at your Dad about?  An innocent phone got slathered
with butt grease on it, right?”

“Yeah,” he
said, and I pointed to a gas station that had been crammed into a lot without
any regard for parking customers.  “I’m gonna have to stay away from the
phone for a long while.”

“Pull in
here.”  There was, at best, room for four cars—the only car there at the
moment, seemed to belong to whoever was behind the counter.  “I’m getting
out.”

“You’re
bunking
here
?”

“No,” I
said.  “A couple streets down.  Just don’t want to take any chances,
you know.”

Pavan
flicked his lights off and by the glow of the street lamps, stared at the homes
on the next street.  Easily, nothing in front of us was any cheaper than
seven figures.

“You got
some rich uncle I didn’t know about?  Or did you use that savings dough
you got to buy a new home here?”

“Nope.”

“You gonna
give me a number or something where I can get a hold of you?”

“Sure,
tomorrow,” I said, getting out of the car.  

“Okay,” he
said, as if making a mental note.  “You gonna tell me what you’re doing
out here?”

“Not yet,”
I said and smiled, closed the door.  “As soon as I can, you’ll be the
first to know.”

Walking
away, I thought:
I
hope
you’ll be the first to know.

I LEARNED A
COUPLE years back, the hard way, that you probably don’t know a guy well enough
to bash him unless you’ve walked a mile in his shoes.  Like a friend used
to say about that notion: then, if you decided you were going to tear into the
guy, at the very least, you’d be a mile away and have his shoes.  

With that
in mind, I tried to get into The Mentor’s head.  

Did
he
rent that plane to Hawaii?  Did he rent another that got me dropped into
Guinea?  Why would he even have underworld connections in Africa?
 Did he work for the company on the flight manifest I’d seen at the
Honolulu airport, Solomon-Bluth?

And, top of
the list,
why
was he doing this to me?

The first
thing I’d done after landing at Hartsfield-Jackson airport was to check my
email and secure a part-time gig, off the grid a bit.  After a few clicks, I
scribbled an address onto a napkin from the airport bar.  The first hit
didn’t work out but the second was perfect timing.  I needed a place to
stay today, and the client of my new venture needed someone right away.

Finally
arriving at the house, I gingerly slipped on a pair of thin, black gloves that
Pavan had scrounged up for me.  My hands and wrists had been treated back
in Morocco, but they were still a bit gruesome from my run in with the Sterno. 
And the volcano.  

The bell
rang beneath my finger and a moment later a striking woman in her fifties stood
before me, looking a little perplexed by the young man at her door.

“I’m Dexter
Daisy,” I said.  “I spoke with you on the phone a few hours ago.”

She smiled.
 “Yes, I remember,” she said and called out behind her.  “David!
 The pet sitter is here.”

Chapter
Nineteen

The web ad
I’d placed explained my top-notch pet and house sitting skills: schooled in
taking top care of flora and fauna, whatever was required of me.

Among
others, the Dvoraks had likely called Laura as a reference—I’d given her the
heads up to say wonderful things about me and she said she would only after I
promised these people weren’t about to be robbed blind. That kinda hurt.
 But, still, she thought I was some gambling junkie, so it’s hard to blame
her.

“We can’t
leave the babies at a kennel; certainly, you never know what they’ll bring home
from those dreadful places.  And the woman who usually sits when we’re out
died unexpectedly last week.”

“Unexpectedly?”

“Old age.
 She was eighty-four, I’m told.”

“I’m sorry
to hear that.”

“Well,
luckily, we found you,” she said and smiled flatly.

My new
employer walked through the enormous house as a museum tour guide might ten
minutes before closing.  The home was beautiful, expensive and spotless.
 Just like the woman of the house.

“Ruggles
and Muggles get one cup of the hair-ball formula dry food in the morning and
then one before bed,” Mrs. Dvorak said.  Because I didn’t want to make any
mistakes that would hamper any future chances of getting lodging in this way, I
listened closely.  Because I’m male and, thus, simple and juvenile, I
couldn’t help trying to imagine what she might look like naked.
  “Toby isn’t allowed in the house…”

“You don’t
let your dog in the house?”

“No,
never,” she said, her eyes fixed on me.  “There’s a bag of dog food in the
garage—on the far side—and he eats from there.  Just fill his water bowl
every morning.”

I looked
around the home (trying very hard not to look like I was looking around), and
was only mildly impressed.  Some of the most expensive stuff in the world
is pretty ugly, it seems.  Although, the television that took up a third
of one of the walls in the “home theater” was kinda nice.  

“And don’t
look Toby directly in the eye.”

“What
happens if I look Toby the dog in the eye?”

“That would
be a… challenge, as I understand it.  It very likely could lead to some
sort of territorial affirmation.”

“That means
it could bite me, right?”

“Yes, for
starters,” she said and looked down at a sheet of paper that held my
instructions.  “The cats are indoor cats, but I scoop the box every
night.”

“Box?”

She stared
at me, eyes probing my face.

“Yes,” she
said, studying me.  “Litter box, you know?”

“Oh, yes,”
I said, nodding vigorously, “It’s, um, my previous clients, they were… you
know, European, and they, um, had the animals trained to go in the flower bed.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, dual
purpose, it seems.”

“I see,”
the lady of the house said, measuring me up.  “We don’t have them trained
that way.  Stick with the box.”

With the
straightest face possible, I said: “Ma’am, those are words I live by.”

Slowly, she
looked at me and then a small smile crept to her lips.

SO, THE
FIRST ANSWER is, no, “the Pet Whisperer,” I ain’t.   

As a kid,
we never had a dog because my parents were too busy to take care of it.  A
dog couldn’t have been my responsibility because, when it’s something that
doesn’t interest me, I have a tendency to put it out of mind. That mentality
seems to clash with a dependent, living creature’s mortality.

Cats, we
had two.  Not in succession, but two together.  The first was pawned
off on us because a neighbor was moving to Germany for a couple years.  I
guess they don’t allow cats.

But,
Abigail, as the cat was named (horrible name for a cat), hid under the sofa for
a week and anytime we tried to give it food it would swipe at us with
diamond-tipped claws, so by the third day we got pretty good at bouncing its
food off the linoleum floor, hopefully landing near Abigail in her dark,
furniture cave.

My
tender-hearted mother thought her newest, furriest child was in need of a play
pal, so she popped over to the animal shelter to find the most lovable,
friendly cat she could find.  The papers said that Mr. Timshun (second
dumbest name for a cat, after Abigail) was “fixed.”  But, from behind, it
looked as though someone had jammed “double-stuffed” cotton swabs into the gap of
its legs, so we had a sneaking suspicion Mr. Timshun was looking for a Mrs. T.

Playing
hard to get (or totally terrified), Abigail stayed under the couch for nearly
three months, attempting to cope with two very different fears of the outside
world: big scary people who ricocheted food off the floor at it, and, if the
poor thing tried to make it to the litter box, that she’d endure a frenetic
feline mounting before she completely cleared the couch.

So, in the
end, we were left with a smelly couch and a horny, white tabby that would tear
from one end of the house to the other at full speeds, usually when we were
trying to sleep.

And, not to
delve too personally into it, but as a kid trying to get a, uh, grip on puberty
I caught Mr. Timshun watching me.  More than once.  Not cool.

The first
time I snuck a girl into the house, and began to cast my teenage spell of love
upon her in my bed (with Superman sheets and curtains, still, sadly)… when it
was all over, a few minutes later, there was Mr. Timshun curled up at the end
of the bed.

So, while I
like cats, I do get the impression they’re sorta like some creepy neighbor or
uncle the family doesn’t like to talk about.  

Ruggles and
Muggles were Burmese.  I learned a little about cats when plugged into the
Cobb County audiotape library, but those were mostly lions, tigers and pumas…
that sort of thing.  I didn’t see the necessity to learn about, well,
kitties.

After the
Dvoraks, Cindy and David, left that night, I perused the list of instructions.
 They’d be gone ten days and, for the time being, that gave me a chance to
catch my breath.  Thankfully, the couple never commented on my gloves,
possibly dismissing it as some parcel of an eccentric nature on my part—the
professional pet sitter.  

Snooping a
little around the house, I did discover they’d not only called Laura but had
run me through a background check, both criminal and financial.  As I
looked around the home, I wondered which of those two mattered most to them and
settled on the latter.

One of the
neighbors would come by, each day, the first couple days to make sure things
were all right (read: make sure I didn’t steal all their crap), so I had to at
least keep the place up a little.

I put
Pavan’s knapsack in the guest room, which was a sort of loft tucked into a
third floor that was half the size of the other floors.  From the window,
there was a beautiful view of city skyline: various styles of buildings with
spires climbing higher to the sky than the previously built structure, as if
some bizarre, multi-million dollar phallic brandishing contest had taken place
above the city of Atlanta.

The Dvoraks
were
cultured
, it seemed, which means they didn’t have beer.  They
had a liquor cabinet and said I was free to imbibe after the pets had gotten
settled (although “not carelessly,” which to me, seemed at cross-purpose), but
both brown and clear liquor makes Evil Dex come out.  Not for me.

I walked
the four blocks back to the gas station to pick up some beer.  And by the
time I arrived back at Casa de Dvorak with my six-pack, I was already three
short.  And breathing a little heavy.

“I really
gotta get into shape,” I said to Ruggles or Muggles and locked the door behind
me.  Both grabbed a leg and wound in and out like serpents, wooing me into
some sort of hypnotic compliance for some task they weren’t prepared to reveal
to me just yet.

Settling
into a room just off the foyer, the “parlor” according to the lady of the
house, I drank in the quiet, the darkness and a fourth beer.

It was a
relief to think that upon waking there wouldn’t be someone sitting on my
dresser in the middle of the night.  Even so, I couldn’t just leave the
matter behind.  

My plan was
that in the next day or two, I’d check out the charity that had foot the bill
for the rent-a-jet flight down to Honolulu: Solomon-Bluth.  There would be
a regional office for a company that big and a visit was in my near future.

After my
fifth beer, the home theater seemed like a good place to fall asleep for the
night.  Delightfully, the very large television offered up an old episode
of Wonder Woman, which I love, because of a long running fantasy about Linda
Carter tying me up with that golden lasso, and the truth she learned was
basically all the things I wanted to do aboard the invisible jet because, and
how, that high up in the jet stream, our lovemaking would not be restrained by
petty and shortsighted state indecency laws.

Which made
me think of Laura.  Not because she has a lasso or bullet reflecting
bracelets but because I hadn’t talked with her since the night she clubbed me
on the noggin.  

I’d lied to
her, for sure.  If forced to explain it, I would likely play it off as
keeping her in the dark for her own safety.  To be honest, she and I
weren’t very good for each other.  She’d made it clear on a number of
occasions that she continued to see other guys and that should have probably
bothered me far more than it did.  

Laura saw
me as a lazy, drunken (and now out of work) movie theater usher.  She’d
had very low expectations of me, and met each with abandon.  

But, I was
leaving that person behind.  And that was the person who had liked Laura
and Laura, in some small way, had liked.

The kitties
had taken to me like ants to an apple core and where I walked, they were always
there swirling around my feet.  Well, “taken to me” is probably a polite
way of saying the odor wafting from my three day-old socks was probably like
feline single malt whiskey.

After twenty
minutes, my T.V. Amazon super lady was replaced by a man armed with a juicer, a
studio audience and an obvious cocaine addiction, I began to drift toward
sleep.  Yet, my eyes would pop open every few moments, scanning the room.
 I was certain there wouldn’t be a midnight gargoyle to awaken me but,
still, my mind was on Defcon 4 in fear of imminent attack.

One of the
cats jumped up onto the couch where I was sleeping, did a little soft shoe
number searching out the spongiest material available, and then fell asleep in
a matter of seconds on my stomach.  

Watching
the kitty cast a sail for sleepy town so fast, I took this as a cue—albeit
completely without merit—that all was safe.

When the
next morning came, the idea of leaving the house to do
anything
faded
completely.  I’d been on edge for a couple weeks now—and put through a
physical exertion I’d never imagined was possible for me.  The next
twenty-four, then, were merely sleeping, feeding animals and watching
television.  

On the
second morning at the house, I’d been awoken by the phone and given Cindy
Dvorak, the missus of the manor, the rundown on her pets and plants.

Ah.
 The plants.  

Missed that
the first time.  

Immediately,
after hanging up, I went around the house with the largest cooking pot
available filled to the rim with water. The last time plants
anywhere
had
been doused so thoroughly, an old guy stealing glances at the sky had been
running around collecting pairs of animals, two by two, for his big, wooden
boat.

The old
woman from across the street, who asked me to call her “Miss Wanda,” had come
over twice already, each time in the early afternoon after walking her dog
Bear, a pug that had been stricken with, she explained, terrible allergies and,
only moments following this revelation, I witnessed the dog’s sneezing fit,
which looked like the final, terrifying moments of some brutal, third-world
exorcism.

She only
stepped into the foyer during these visits because Bear “didn’t like going in
and out of the air-conditioning,” which was fine with me because I hadn’t found
the
lesser
towels yet and didn’t need dog boogers to clean up after.

As for the
“dog of the house”, Toby split its lurking time between the garage and the
backyard.  I only heard it bark one time and that was to tell me the water
dish was empty.  Filling a pitcher, I went to the far end of a three car
garage with no cars and replenished its water dish (which was so large, if
turned toward the southern sky, I was convinced you could pick up Korean pay
satellite television with it).  Remembering one of the few instructions
imparted to me about the huge animal, I didn’t look into the big, brownish
beast’s eyes or possibly face the same fate my childhood cat Abigail was leery
of from the amorous Mr. Timshun.

Twice, I’d
called Pavan and both times he’d begged to come out, but if the Mentor was out
looking for me, he might be watching my friend.  Whereas that didn’t make
me feel great, at least the crazy fuck wouldn’t do anything to Pavan because,
now the tracker was out of my butt cheek, that could jeopardize one of the few
chances to find to me.