Box Nine

Chapter Twelve

So’d ya bring it?” Little Max says, making a halfhearted, unambitious grab for Lenore’s breast. She swats his hand away, tired, but tied into the ritual that Max loves.

“I brought it,” Lenore says.

They’re sitting in the Barracuda in the parking lot of the old Quinsigamond airport. The airport is deserted and abandoned, a mini ghost town of aviation. Weeds have grown up in the middle of both runways. Windows are smashed in and doors missing from the old wooden, Colonial-style terminal.

There’s a new, modern airport a few towns outside of the city. Lenore hates the new airport, though she’s never been there. She made a small vow to herself never to fly out of that “abomination in the name of progress.” The old airport sits on the very top of one of the city’s seven hills, and though this made it ridiculously susceptible to dense fog, it also gave it a strong quaintness and a view that extends for miles and, on some autumn days, all the way to Boston.

Woo has relinquished the front seat to Max and sits silent in the back, his hands folded and resting in his lap like a monk at prayer.

“So c’mon, c’mon,” Max says, “let’s see.”

Lenore reaches under her seat and pulls out an oversized black leather portfolio. She unzips the top, reaches in, and pulls halfway out what looks like a stiff piece of drawing paper or posterboard. It’s filled with colorful cartoons framed in square panels with inked-in dialogue balloons. Woo leans forward to take a look. Max mumbles, “Jesus,” with a real and humble reverence.

“What strips?” he asks quietly, his voice suddenly sounding much younger, even prepubescent.

Lenore suppresses a need to grin, a feeling of triumph. She acts bored and says slowly, as if attempting to remember bothersome facts, “Two Ripped-Up Man and a Prince Natema, I think.”

“Oh, Christ,” Max says, and he sinks back into his seat, then snaps forward and says, “Lemme see,” and tries to grab the drawings.

Lenore stuffs them back into the valet and holds it at her side.

“You’re forgetting your manners, Maxie.”

Max breathes out a lungful of air and his head bobs fast and loose.

“How’d you get ’em?” he asks. He can’t help himself.

“C’mon, you dink,” Lenore says to him. “You know better than that. I ask the questions. That’s how it works. My game from here on in.”

Max starts to drum on his legs with the palms of his hands and Lenore says, “Look, Max, I own these now, okay? You want, you can get out of the car, and I can go home and burn them in my fireplace. They’re mine. I possess them. I can do what I want. So don’t waste my time and don’t piss me off. You want some original Menlos, great. Tremendous. Start talking to Lenore.”

“Just one thing,” Max says. “I really need this, okay? Do you know Menlo?”

Lenore says, “I know people who know Menlo.”

She waits a beat while he digests this, then says, “Now, your turn.”

Max nods, trying to be adult about the situation he’s put himself in. He takes a breath and begins.

“Some shit is definitely up. Cortez is acting like a freakin’ loon, okay? He can’t sleep for shit. We hear him all night, me and Mingo and Wyatt. We hear him above us, in the library, I guess, pacing all night, walking around in big circles all freakin’ night long. It’d drive you nuts.”

“He’s expecting some merchandise?”

“That’s what we figure. He’s always uptight before a big delivery, but never like this. He’s got us all running these dipshit errands, anytime at all. Three A.M. and he’s buzzing on the intercom in this high-pitched voice, telling Mingo to go get ten cloves of fresh garlic. Yeah, you tell me, you know. Where do you get ten cloves of garlic at three A.M.? Mingo busted in the back door of this bodega down on Billings and cleaned them out. This isn’t good shit for the neighborhood, you know?”

“Any visitors? Any phone calls?”

“Nobody new’s come around. Phone calls, who knows? Cortez has got a dozen private lines up there. It’s like the freakin’ White House or something …”

“What kind of shipment are we talking? We seem to be saying this isn’t any normal smack deal.”

“I’m just telling you the guy’s on the edge, okay? I mean, you want me to guess, then okay, yeah, I’d say you’re right. This is something new. This is something different.”

“But no sign of the Aliens …”

“Look, lady, I don’t know the Aliens from shit. You think there’s somebody over Cortez, but I’m telling you, no one else thinks so. He’s gone big for a while now. He’s got his own pipe to the Southland and the Triangle. Maybe there’s some generals in Colombia or some big-time slants in Burma or somewhere that he’s got to rely on. But here in the U.S., I mean, I’m telling you again, Cortez is no one’s errand boy. He’s independent. You give the guy ten more years and he’ll own the whole East Coast. That’s what Mingo says anyway.”

“Any weird shit at Club 62?”

Max lets out a wild, child’s laugh.

“Stupid question,” Lenore admits. “I mean anything weirder than normal?”

“Well, I’m not down the Club much, you know, except in the mornings when I help out with the cleanup. But Wyatt was telling me, I mean, you know, signing to me, how there was some crap last week.”

“Shooting?”

Max nods. “Bad news, according to Wyatt. Two guys went apeshit. Started as this regular men’s room brawl, two dorks all twitchy on speed. But they went at it like they couldn’t die. Knuckles, then knives, finally they pull pieces. Now, this is from Wyatt, and usually he’s okay, he’s on the money, not like Mingo, you know. Wyatt says they each had like four or five bullets. In the arms, legs, in the freakin’ neck, okay? And they kept goin’. Wyatt says like this was beyond like a coked-out numb or something. He says it was like you could see fire coming off their backs, whatever that means. He says they were fucked up in a way he’s never seen and he says he’s seen them all. You gotta remember, this is a guy who lived in Korea for a while …”

Max pauses, turns toward the backseat, and says in a lowered voice, “No offense to your friend here.”

“I’m not Korean,” Woo whispers.

Max turns back toward Lenore. “Wyatt says you couldn’t even understand these guys. That this weird fuckin’ clickin’ and buzzin’ sound was like comin’ from their throats.”

Lenore and Woo catch each other in the rearview mirror.

“Are they dead?”

Max scrunches up his face and says, “You kiddin’?”

“What did Cortez do with the bodies?”

“Wyatt and Mingo took the truck. Hauled them up to Galloway and dumped them in the Passaconaway River. Listen, the fish are gonna be buzzing from those guys …”

“Any of the girls been acting strange lately?”

“The secretaries?” Max asks, delighted, like it was a new and filthy word. “They’re all strange to me. You should hear the crap they say to me.”

“Nothing out of the ordinary?”

“We had a runaway last Thursday, but that’s not like out of the ordinary. You know, one of them bolts every couple of months. Wyatt brings them back most of the time …”

“She have a name?”

“Called herself Vicky. She was probably like a couple years older than me. Redhead. She was really into those Harlequin books, those paperbacks, you know, at the supermarket. I talked to her a couple times, just joking around.”

“Vicky have any relatives in the city?”

“No, I don’t think so. Not in Quinsigamond, I mean. She had a sister back home, she said. Darleen, I think. She was southern, from some small town in Mississippi.”

Lenore stares at Max for a long minute, then looks away, out over Quinsigamond. She studies the landscape, tries to pick out monuments, buildings, and streets she knows. Max fidgets, twists his neck around like it was stiff, scratches at his nose.

“That wasn’t bad, Maxie,” Lenore says finally. “That was okay. We’ll call it okay. Not great, not quite what I needed, but it’ll do for now. There’s always tomorrow, right?”

“I guess,” Max says, unsure and nervous.

Lenore pulls the portfolio into her lap and takes out one of the drawings. “What do we have here?” she says, seemingly to herself. “We got a Ripped-Up Man. Oh, dammit, you like the Natema strips, don’t you? Doesn’t it figure?” She sighs and nods to herself. “I’ll tell you what, Max, you take the Ripped-Up Man print here, you take this one and I’ll hold on to the other two. Then when you find out something more, something pretty specific about Cortez’s shipment and plans and all, we’ll get together again and you can pick up the other two prints …”

Max’s jaw goes rigid. He bites in on his lips and stares at Lenore. He says, “That wasn’t our deal. You said three Menlos. Three originals …”

Lenore matches his heat. “Things change, you little brat. You just calm down this second. You’ll get the other two. I just need a little more information …”

“But this isn’t what you …”

“Forget what I said, Max. This is how it is. You get the one print now. You get the rest later. That’s it. End of discussion. Just do what I want and you’ll have them all. And you know a smart little bastard like you might have thought for just a second that if I can get my hands on these, I can get my hands on others. Smart little bastard like you might have thought about the future a little.”

Max shuts up, slumps in the seat, and sulks for a second, then says, “Just drop me behind Gomper’s station, I’ll walk home from there …”

“You got a stash there? You’ll want to keep that clean …”

“Hey, don’t worry so much,” Max says. “I know how to take care of things. I’ll need at least twenty-four hours. Look for me about this time tomorrow. I’ll see what I can get.”

“I’ll bring the prints.”

Max spits the words out like seeds from a piece of overripe fruit: “I bet.”

Lenore kicks over the Barracuda and drives down Symon’s Hill. Max hops out at the burned-out remains of the old train station and Woo climbs back in front. They idle for a second, watching the boy disappear inside the Gothic rubble of cracked marble and broken hunks of granite, into the rail pits where the trains used to roll in, away to some labyrinth of hiding places with his new joy protected inside his coat.

Lenore wonders as she watches: could he really be Cortez’s son?