Fear of the Dark

Chapter 43

The only entrance to Bubba’s Yard was an eight-foot-high wrought-iron gate. He had four snapping and slavering feral dogs that came out to greet us with their canine threats and promises.

Fearless pressed the buzzer while Useless and I stood a few feet away. The dogs were wolflike, maybe they were wolves, with dense pelts and yellow fangs. They wanted to look us in the eye, like bullies on a street corner. They wanted to kill us.

The dogs prowled the inside of the gate, lunging at it now and then. A man approached from the house that sat at the back end of the lot.

Bubba Lateman was a huge man. Six six or more and weighing three fifty at least. His head was bald and his hands too big even for a body his size. He had a smile on his face, but I knew how mean Bubba could be.

He was wearing overalls and railroad gloves. His skin was black and that day streaked with sweat.

“Fearless Jones,” he said amid the yowling and barking of his dogs.

It was both a greeting and a threat. Powerful men who had never tested him always felt a little disdainful of Fearless’s reputation.

“Mornin’, Bubba,” my friend hailed. “We come with Ulysses here to pick up Hector LaTiara’s car... for his widow.”

Fearless could lie if he had to. Usually it was to save some poor soul from an ass-whupping. I think that day he was also worried about having to kill those dogs.

“Hector didn’t say nuthin’ ’bout no wife,” Bubba said.

“White girl,” Fearless assured him. “Jessa is what they call her.”

Bubba’s eyes were tiny for his big, bald black head. When he blinked it was almost as if he were being coquettish, flirting with the object of his confusion.

“What you say about that, Useless?” Bubba asked.

There was a moment in which Useless faltered. I believed that he was wondering if maybe he could enlist the aid of this giant standing before him. Maybe Bubba could block us from getting Hector’s Cadillac.

“They just drove me down, Bubba,” he said. “Paris my cousin, an’ Fearless his friend.”

The dogs sensed something and began snarling in a different key.

“Get on back there!” Bubba commanded his curs. They whimpered and obeyed, skulking to some kennel on the far side of the property.

Bubba brought a big ring of keys out of the inside of his work overalls. He used a jagged-looking piece of brass to unlock the gate.

After we entered, and he locked up again, Bubba led us to the right, where the yard part of his business was. The largest of the wolf-dogs came to walk with him. She was a big gray creature, between seventy-five and eighty-five pounds. For all her weight, she looked starved and hungry for fresh flesh and revenge.

I had never been inside Bubba’s Yard before. The automobiles parked in neat rows upon the hard desert soil were impressive. Cadillac cars and Italian sports jobs, there was even a Bentley and a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud.

And Hector’s Caddy, pink and chrome, as Useless had promised. It actually sparkled under the hot L.A. sun.

“They say you’re bad, Fearless Jones,” Bubba said.

“Some say I’m good,” Fearless replied easily.

Bubba didn’t like the joke. “What would you do if I told Bree here to jump up an’ tear out yo’ throat?”

Fearless glanced at Bree, who started growling on cue. He, Fearless, contemplated a moment and then looked back at Bubba.

“She’s a beautiful animal,” Fearless said. “Too skinny and knocked around more than she deserves. If she was to jump I’d have to grab her by the jaw an’ snap her neck like a chicken. An’ then, Bubba Lateman, I would have to teach you a lesson that you’d carry down into the coffin wit’ you.”

Bulfinch’s Mythology came to me then. It seemed to me that this tableau belonged in those pages. Fearless was the hero, I was the hero’s companion, Useless was the mischievous trickster, and Bubba was the ogre or giant. We were playing out roles in a history that went back before anyone could remember. The river Styx might have lain to our left, and this was just a step in our journey.

I couldn’t help it: I laughed.

Bubba grinned then too. Bree turned her head toward him with a look of canine surprise on her vicious face.

“Take the car, man,” Bubba said. “And lemme tell ya, if Bree here jumped at ya, you’d never have a chance.”

I drove my car while Fearless manned the Caddy with Useless at his side. We took Useless back to Nadine’s house. Out front he was unwilling to see us go.

“Why you want Hector’s car?” he asked us.

“I like pink,” Fearless said. “It’s my favorite color.”

“Come on,” he said. “What you want it for?”

“Useless,” I said.

“Why you have to call me that?” he asked. He almost sounded insulted.

“What? Useless?”

“That’s hurtful. I don’t call you Dog Shit, now, do I?”

“You bettah not.”

“Well, I might.”

“And I might go to the cops an’ say about Martin Friar and Brian Motley, not to mention Mad Anthony. I might tell ’em that you was in business with Lionel Sterling and Hector LaTiara. That’s all I got to say, Useless. Because you know I never call you. I never drop by your house askin’ for ice water. I don’t need you, not at all. To me you truly are Useless. So get your ass back up in the house with your cockeyed mama and wait for us to call you again.”

If I didn’t know better I would have thought that Useless’s feelings were actually hurt. He pouted and stared at the ground.

“Go on, Useless,” I insisted.

He turned and walked away slowly.

For my part, I stood there refusing to feel guilty.

“What you think, Paris?” Fearless asked me when we were in my kitchen smoking cigarettes and drinking schnapps.

“I don’t know.”

There was a duffel bag on the floor between us. Above that was a table piled high with twenties, fifties, and hundred-dollar bills. I had stopped counting at sixty thousand dollars. Adding that to the money we had found at Sterling’s, we had over one hundred thousand dollars. One hundred thousand. In 1956 that was enough to retire on.

“We got to give it back, Paris,” Fearless said. “We got to.”

“Why, man? They already stole it. We might get caught tryin’ to put it back.”

Fearless shook his head and started shoving the money in its bag.

“I got the addresses,” I said. “Why don’t you just let me send it?”

“First we need to make sure the cutthroat ain’t a problem,” Fearless said.

“What you gonna do with the money and Hector’s car?”

“I’ll just leave Hector’s car on the street to get towed and then I’ll borrah Mickey Dean’s white Caddy, put the money in the trunk, an’ bring it ovah to Bubba.”

“You sure you wanna mess wit’ that man again?” I asked seriously. “I think he wanna test you.”

“Naw,” Fearless assured me. “I mean yeah, he wonders, but Bubba’s business. The minute I’m a payin’ client, thatta put fightin’ right out his mind.”

Fearless hefted the bag of money over his shoulder and carried it out to the Caddy.

I accompanied him out to the street and watched as he drove away.

A hundred thousand dollars in free money, and my potential partner in crime was the most honest man in L.A.