Slipstream Page 19

  “You mean Georgette? The other bartender who works here?”

  Rudy waved his hand in the air. A dollop of custard landed with a blop on the bar. “Yeah, whatever her name is. You know who I mean.” He leaned closer and looked the bartender right in the eye to show him he knew what was what. “I saw her at the restaurant. I know she’s in on this thing.”

  Scarface stared a minute with his sneaky eyes.

  “She’s on at three. Excuse me,” he said, and beat it to the other side of the bar.

  Now Scarface was going to ignore him. Rudy knew that game. He finished the second turnover and used a cocktail napkin to wipe the custard that had dropped on the bar. It left a swirled chalky film, like polish on a car. A face like the bartender’s had to have a past. Watching the guy pretend to cut celery stalks, to wash glasses and busy himself with customers who already had full drinks, Rudy wondered what he had to hide. He wouldn’t trust a type like that around Vanessa, that was for sure.

  “Excuse me!” Rudy said, snapping his fingers when the bartender came back to his side of the bar.

  The guy didn’t smile, didn’t even talk. He just stood in front of him.

  “This cup was only half full when you gave it to me. The rest was foam. Better check your machine. There’s no excuse for this.”

  Something about the guy’s stillness as he stood on the other side of the bar caused Rudy’s heart to pick up and forced him to look down at the crumpled napkins and turnover wrappers. If Scarface reached out and grabbed him by the jacket, if he punched him in the face as Rudy had a feeling he was about to, then it was all over. No reason for Rudy to worry about any more jobs because the lawsuit he’d file against LAX would keep him in the green for the rest of his life.

  “You work here, right?” the bartender said in a low voice.

  Rudy nodded, still not raising his eyes.

  The guy took Rudy’s cup, topped it off, and set it down without a word. He picked up the crumpled papers and tossed them in the trash. He wiped the custardy film off the bar. “Anything else?” he said.

  Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.

  “Listen,” Rudy said in a low voice, leaning forward so no one else could hear. “Anything out of the ordinary going on around here? Anybody acting funny?” He pulled his ID tag halfway out of his pocket, tapped it with his index finger, and gave Scarface a knowing nod. “Just checking up.”

  The bartender raised his eyebrows. He studied Rudy a moment, then his face broke out in a smartass grin.

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “People act funny all the time.”

  Rudy put his ID tag around his neck as he headed toward the administrative offices. You can do this, he told himself. Stay calm, be reasonable. Move your arms, pick up your feet. He was almost there. The ceiling reeled for a minute; his scalp buzzed. He pinched one of his earlobes in an effort to get his balance back. It was all a misunderstanding. He pulled open the door to a long hallway with offices opening up on both sides. The floors and walls were white, with pools of light reflected in them like patches of ice. Everything white, white, white, but dirty white and scuffed—like the banged-up inside of an old refrigerator. He had a perfectly good case. Once he explained it, they’d all apologize and he’d go back to work. Rudy concentrated on his breathing. Office workers shuffled listlessly beneath fluorescent lights in the small, messy offices. None of them glanced up as he passed.

  Glenn Waller was there, in his messy office near the end of the hall. Not only that, but Waller’s boss, the head of the department, was there too. Srinivasa, Srinivasata, Srinivasan—something like that. An Indian from India: a compact man with a perfectly round bald head, thick glasses, and skin—if you really looked at it—as dark as a black man’s. He always dressed the same: gray slacks, white shirt, red tie. Rudy had never seen him smile. The two of them were leaning over Waller’s desk, looking down at a stack of papers.

  Something in Rudy’s chest lurched and swirled, propelling him forward. He gulped a lungful of air, threw back his shoulders, and plunged into the office. To his amazement, the two bosses jumped back! Rudy couldn’t believe the looks on their faces! Waller’s mouth dropped open, and the color drained from his saggy jowls. Sriniwhatever, on the other hand, tightened. He clenched his mouth so hard you could see the muscles in his jaw swell. They were afraid of him! Of him! It only lasted a moment, but long enough for Rudy to see. His first urge was to step forward and reassure them, to tell him he was just there to talk, to straighten everything out. But as Waller and the Indian recovered, their faces hardened into suspicion and disgust. Plain as day. That’s when Rudy changed his mind. Right then. About everything. That was it: from then on everything had to go forward.

  “Glenn,” he said with a smile, stepping into the office. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine, Rudy,” Waller said, moving forward with his arms extended, as if to push Rudy out the door. “Sanjay, this is Rudy Cullen—”

  “I know who he is,” the Indian interrupted. His eyes were fastened on Rudy. He didn’t say hello or crack a smile.

  Rudy said hello as normally as he could, but in his brain a string of realizations popped off like fireworks. The Indian! That was it! Everything fit together, fell into place. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Rudy made an effort to stay composed, to keep a poker face, but in Sanjay Srinivasa’s stony stare he could see that it was too late, that the Indian knew that Rudy knew.

  “What can I do for you, Rudy?” Waller said, glancing nervously at Srinivasa, back at Rudy, at the door, at the phone on his desk. Rudy wondered if Waller was in on it, too. The patsy. It wouldn’t surprise him.

  “Just checking in like you told me, Glenn. I came by to see if something’s opened up for me.”

  Waller kept glancing at Rudy’s chest. Probably trying to see if he was wearing a wire or maybe a weapon. The big, inept walrus. “It’s only been a couple of weeks, Rudy,” he said. “Nothing’s changed.”

  “Listen, Glenn,” Rudy said firmly. “You need to understand about this whole thing. I’ve—”

  “Glenn, why is Mr. Cullen still wearing his ID tag?” Srinivasa interrupted. He had a clipped way of talking, his words curling up at the ends.

  Rudy turned and looked at him. Hatred bubbled in his throat like a thick, hot liquid. Oh boy. This whole thing was deep, so deep. There was definitely something military about the stiff way Srinivasa stood, the abrupt way he moved. He didn’t even try to hide it. He was obviously high level, very high.

  “I’m authorized to wear this,” Rudy sneered, covering the tag with his hand.

  “Glenn, please take the tag and escort Mr. Cullen out of the terminal,” Srinivasa said, like Rudy wasn’t even there.

  Waller fumbled. Either he was good at playing dumb or he was out of the loop. “You’ll have to give me the tag, Rudy,” he said, holding his hand out timidly. “Come on, now. Don’t make a big deal out of this.”

  “Listen, this is a security issue!” Rudy shrilled. He clenched the tag in his hand in case they tried to snatch it from him. It was only fair to give them one more chance. “That’s what this is all about! That’s why I’m here!”

  The Indian picked up the phone, dialed calmly, and spoke a few quiet sentences. He crossed his arms over his chest, leaned against the desk, and waited. Cool as a cucumber. Waller, on the other hand, was sweating like a pig.

  “You’re making a mistake! A big mistake!” Rudy shouted, looking wildly from one of them to the other.

  One of their goons burst into the office. Waller nodded toward Rudy. The Judas! The lowlife patsy! The goon took one of Rudy’s elbows, Waller the other. “Come on, Rudy,” Waller said. “Let’s go.”

  Rudy didn’t fight it. What was the point? Now was not the time. He walked between Waller and the goon back out through the terminal. Before he knew it, they were out front, where a river of cars jockeyed for position near the curb. People hugged and kissed, taxi drivers unloaded luggage, skycaps eased through the crowd with loaded carts.


  “Listen, Rudy,” Waller said. “I’m talking to you as a friend here. Do yourself a favor, okay? Just let this whole thing drop. I know it’s hard, and you’ve had a tough break. Nobody’s disputing that. But these are hard times. The sooner you accept it and move on, the better it’s going to be for everybody.”

  In the bright outdoor light, Rudy noticed that a tiny drop of oil stood in each craterlike pore on Waller’s face. Worse, a flake of crumbly yellow wax was speared on a hair in his ear.

  “You get me? You could get in trouble, Rudy. A lot of trouble.”

  Rudy watched Waller shamble back to the terminal, his khaki slacks riding up his ass. Well, he’d tried to tell them. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. The clouds were moving quickly, rolling across the sky like time-lapse photography. Cars pulled up to the curb, then pulled away. The glass doors slid opened and closed. Rudy stood there. He had the sensation of being the only thing in the world that was still, the center around which everything else moved, coming and going.

  He almost cried out when he looked down at the front of his shirt. The ID tag was gone. Instead, just over his left breast—right where you put your hand when you pledge allegiance—was a bullet hole. Perfectly round, glistening with ruby gore. He frantically backed away from himself while he tried to signal to the people who came and went heedlessly around him. But there was no pain. No weakness, no symptoms at all. Was he dreaming? He didn’t remember anything. Rudy put his finger to the wound, probed it gently. Still wet, but—

  He brought it to his nose, sniffed. Shook his head and laughed. Looked around to see if anyone had noticed. What the heck, he thought, and sucked his finger.

  The sweet berry taste, the two tiny seeds.

  18

  The fetus curled in Wylie’s brain like a cutworm. As he cleaned celery stalks for Bloody Marys, he pictured it salamander-like, breathing through gills that opened and closed as it floated in his cerebral fluid, bouncing softly against the walls of his skull. Its transparent fingers flexed and grasped. Its tiny, segmented spine coiled like a lasso. It nudged the edges of his cranium like a minnow nibbling, floating up to him with enormous, blind eyes. An alien, straight out of Roswell. But there was something familiar about it too, something he recognized. The moment his mind was unoccupied, the larval curl bobbed to the surface of his consciousness.

  “It’s a little limp, don’t you think?” the guy who’d ordered the Bloody Mary said. He looked like he’d shaved with a lawnmower. There was a spot of blood in front of his ear, one in the cleft in his chin, another on his neck that bled down onto the crisp collar of his white shirt. “The celery,” he said, flicking it with the back of his hand. “Looks like it’s made of rubber.”

  Wylie retrieved the entire bunch from its compartment and held it up. It was curved like a crippled hand. “This is how it came this morning,” he said in a flat voice. “Somebody must have shoved it in a plastic bag or something.” Since his fist was itching to connect with the guy’s jaw, he laid the celery down and fastened his hands behind his back. “I can remove it if you prefer,” he said, drilling the guy with his eyes.

  The guy backed down and took a big slug of his drink. “No, no. It’s okay,” he said. He smacked his lips in an unappetizing way. “You’ll never guess what happened to me last night.”

  Like Wylie really wanted to know. The things he’d listened to. People who were left, battered in love. Stepped on and walked over, cheated, lied to, abandoned because their lovers needed space or a nicer house or a younger lover. Or no reason at all. Just left. You come home and they’re gone, out of the clear blue sky. Bam. He’d listened to stories of people deserted as children, of pets lost but never forgotten, of fortunes made and squandered, of mean grandmothers and schemes gone awry, of bowling games and slights suffered in childhood. You name it. He’d listened to hundreds and hundreds of jokes, conspiracy theories, elaborate plans for making money. Every pickup line in the book. Every excuse for having another drink or not paying for the ones you’d already had. He’d seen the panics at last call, when men and women scrambled for each other like musical chairs. And fights: over spilled drinks, songs played on the jukebox, money left on the bar. The whole gamut. And now here was another one, a guy with a story.

  The guy leaned forward, his shoulders hunched up around his ears. One of the cuts was still bleeding. “Last night,” he said, looking first over one shoulder and then the other, as if someone might be listening in, “I went out to pick up a woman, you know. It was my last night in town and all. I’d had a few drinks, so I went out to Sunset and had a look around.”

  Wylie wondered why people thought bartenders were different from anybody else. Why they could tell them anything and it didn’t matter. What if the tables were turned? What if he went up to a customer and said, “You know what, buddy? I’m fifty-one years old. I’ve got this kid in my head like an idea that just won’t go away. Like when you wake up in the middle of the night and keep thinking the same thing over and over.”

  The guy tapped Wylie’s wrist to keep his attention, to prevent him from looking around the bar and seeing who needed service.

  “I found this gal. She was beautiful, man. Tall, hair down to here. Just gorgeous. When we got back to her place—”

  The guy lowered his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes as if trying to wake himself from a bad dream. Wylie had an idea of what was coming. What if, instead of listening, he told the guy, I keep thinking of when I was a kid myself. I don’t know why, but all of a sudden things are coming back to me. The pencil-shaving-and-bologna smell of the cloakroom at my elementary school, the night my father loaded us all in the car and drove us out of town because we owed months and months of back rent. Left everything, including my cat. Woke us up and took us, right in the middle of the night.

  “She was a man. A man.”

  The guy looked bug-eyed at Wylie, as if begging him to argue, to tell him he was wrong. But Wylie just stood there.

  “I mean this guy was gorgeous. Long hair. Tits out to here. You would have never known. I mean it. It wouldn’t have crossed your mind.”

  Wylie shrugged. “I guess things aren’t always what they seem—” he began to say. That’s when he became aware of some commotion on the other side of the bar.

  “Holy shit, something’s happening!” the guy who’d picked up a man said.

  People were crowded around a spot at the other end of the bar. The ones standing up strained to see past the ones sitting down.

  “I’ve got it on my hands, all over my hands!” a woman with pale skin and hair the color and texture of an orangutan’s fur cried when Wylie came over. She held her hands up as if he’d pulled a gun on her. The crowd fell back. There was a general murmur, a few startled exclamations.

  For the life of him, Wylie couldn’t figure what was happening.

  “Call security!” someone shouted. “Get somebody over here!”

  “Oh my God!” another woman cried. “It’s here, too. It’s all over!”

  “Stand back!” a beefy guy in a Dodgers cap shouted. “Get away from the bar! Don’t touch anything!”

  A couple of stools went over with a metallic clang. The woman with the orangutan hair stumbled against the bar while a thin, mousy man with sleepy eyes tripped over one of the downed stools and fell on the floor. People from the other side of the bar rushed over to see what was happening. A few people walking through the terminal slowed down and looked over with curiosity.

  “It’s you!” the beefy guy shouted, pointing to the mousy man who still lay meekly on the floor. “You were the one! You were sitting here when I came!”

  “Hold on!” Wylie yelled over the noise. Someone had to take control. “Everybody settle down.”

  Wylie’s breath caught when he saw the white powder scattered across the black Formica of the bar. His first thought was that someone had been doing drugs right there. It wouldn’t be the first time. Some of the places he’d worked, peo
ple didn’t bother going to the bathroom to cut their lines on the back of the toilet. He’d even sniffed a little off the bar himself, courtesy of his customers, back in his day.

  “What is it?” he said to the ring of faces whose eyes were fixed on him, waiting for some kind of response.

  “It’s white powder, man,” the beefy guy with the baseball cap said angrily, like Wylie was an idiot. He seemed to have appointed himself leader. He was massive, with a beer gut and fleshy hands. Funny how the biggest male tended to seize power that way, Wylie reflected. So animal kingdom.

  “It could be anything!” a woman behind the beefy guy shouted. “It could be anthrax!”

  “Anthrax!”

  “Anthrax!”

  “Anthrax!”

  The word echoed in expanding rings out into the terminal.

  “It’s anthrax!” Wylie heard someone yell over by the stand with the umbrella where they sold espresso drinks. “Someone put it on the bar!”

  “Let’s all stay calm,” Wylie said.

  “My glass was sitting right in it!” a woman with very short bangs and a necklace that spelled NANCY shouted at him. “It’s all over the floor! It’s on my suitcase and shoes!”

  As if it was Wylie’s fault.

  “He did it!” the beefy guy said, hoisting up the man who was still on the floor. “This guy right here! I saw him! This is the dude!”

  The mousy guy’s legs were tangled in the barstool. When he was on his feet he blinked his sleepy eyes like he’d just woken up and didn’t have a clue what was going on.

  “Hey, man. What are you?” the big guy shouted, shaking him by his collar. “Are you an Arab? Do you speak English?” He held him up by his jacket for everyone to see. “Look at him! He’s an Arab! He was sitting right there!”

  “I ain’t no Arab,” the mousy guy said, knocking the beefy hands off his collar. “I’m Chicano, man.”

  “I saw you! You were right here.”