Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [70]
“Who?”
“That’s just it. If I knew who, I could do something about it. It would take a month to tell you everything that’s happened around here. I will tell you this. I went back to Southeast Travelers one night to look around. They’ve kept the building pretty much the way it was, all taped off and everything. There was a man in there in the dark doing something. I couldn’t quite tell what. I could tell he didn’t work there. The bastard threatened to kill me.”
“What’d you do?”
“I got out of there, man.”
“Call the police?”
“What I did was, I started packing a gun.”
“You find out who he was?”
“No, man, we didn’t become friends or nothin’. Scared the hell out of me. I really thought for a minute he was going to kill me.”
I had some more questions for Drago, but I could hear the tremor in his voice. Charlie was coming close to losing his mind right there on the phone. I decided to change the subject and asked about the companies involved.
After much shuffling of papers and confusion on his end of the line, Drago told me he couldn’t locate the list of companies with products in the fire room at Southeast Travelers. Instead he told me all the company names he could remember off the top of his head and everything he knew about them. I wanted to compare the list from Holly’s truck with Drago’s list. It seemed to me that if we found products on both lists, we should concentrate on them.
“How about a company called Jane’s California Propulsion? Did they have anything at Southeast?”
“Jane’s? Maybe. I dunno. It’s a pretty long list. I can’t remember all the companies. Listen, I’ll get back to you when I find my complete list. And you get in touch anytime, day or night,” Drago said. “I mean that. You want something, it’s yours. I’ll fly out there and sit with you, man. I mean that. I’m there for you. Anything.”
“Thanks, Charlie.”
When I hung up, Stephanie looked at me and said, “Did they?”
“Did they what?”
“Recover?”
“No.”
We were still waiting for the meal when Mary Kay LeMonde approached our table with a look on her face that was half curiosity and half challenge. Through part of the winter and early spring, Mary and I had kept company, our time together overlapping Holly’s entrance and exit in my life, as well as the second Suzanne’s, the Suzanne whose existence had spurred my breakup with Holly. You can see how complicated things were.
I liked women, liked to be friends with them, liked to be lovers with them, and I especially liked to be friends with them after I had been lovers with them. I can’t tell you why it meant so much to me, because I didn’t know many other single men who were friendly with any of their exes, much less all of their exes. To me, it had always been pivotal that my lovers liked me after the heat of passion waned, which was ironic because Lorie barely spoke to me and certainly had not been back to visit since the night she left three years ago.
Joel McCain claimed it was almost as if I were forming a club of ladies I’d fucked.
Fucked. That was the word Joel had used. Could any term be more degrading, more gauche, more unpolished, or, in this case, more apt? Until the past few days, I’d never used the word. Not even back in the army. Oddly, Joel, with religion oozing out his ears, had used it all the time.
“Hello, Jimmy.”
“Mary Kay. How nice to see you.”
As with the others, after we stopped sleeping together Mary Kay and I remained on speaking terms—the last phone call about two weeks ago.
Grasping the table for support, I stood up, realizing as I looked into her dark-brown eyes that even though we still spoke on the telephone from time to time, I had been doing my level best to avoid her. Two weeks ago at the QFC I’d raced out of the store after spotting her. Childish, yes. Vintage Swope? You bet.
Mary Kay was unquestionably the best-looking woman on the staff at Mount Si High School and had often gone on about how handsome I was and what a nice couple we made and so forth. We had been a matched pair, neither of us ever appearing in public with