It hadn’t been that long since I had healed up from a bullet wound, and in the process of getting that wound, I had ended up splitting some good money with Leonard, so I wasn’t sure why I was working. It wasn’t my style to do something when there was money already to be had. I preferred desperation and overdue bills as a work incentive.
I showered and got ready for work and thought about Brett and her whore of a daughter. Brett had gone off to see her before and had come back blue and not so friendly for a couple of days, and then she would see it all for what it was, come around, and be okay for months. Then some idea would strike her, or the daughter would e-mail her, or some such thing, and the blues would open up again like a deep hole in the sea, and down Brett would go. I couldn’t do a thing for her when she was that way. She had to deal with the depths and what was down there in her own manner and in her own time, same as me. She got like that, she was nothing like she was the rest of the time, and it was really best she did leave me for a while. That way they wouldn’t find my decapitated head on my pillow.
But she was never like me. She was always able to find some truth in herself. Me, I wasn’t sure I knew which way was up, let alone which way was true.
As I finished getting ready, I thought too about how I had come by the money I now had in reserve. Vanilla Ride, the beautiful assassin who had been hired to kill me, gave it to me and Leonard as a gift. It had worked out strangely, with me and her and Leonard in a cabin in Arkansas. Nothing as kinky as that sounds. The three of us bonded together for a moment to have a shootout with Clete Jimson’s Dixie Mafia goons. The goons didn’t do well. I came out with a wound that a good veterinarian took care of. But, most important, we had parted from Vanilla with a truce intact and a pile of dough that had belonged to some unsavory characters who I liked to believe would just spend it on unsavory things. It was still hard for me to grasp the insanity of it, or to understand how someone like Vanilla could be so deadly, and yet, in her own way, honorable.
It was also hard to believe that the very man who had wanted us killed, Clete Jimson, we had also formed a truce with, primarily because we had made it not worth his while, and there was in the background the threat of Vanilla Ride, and Jimson hadn’t wanted any part of that. No one in their right mind would.
I was ready just before noon and sat at the table drinking decaffeinated coffee, waiting for Leonard to pick me up. Our friend Marvin Hanson had started a private detective agency. His plan was to hire us as grunts from time to time, which was best, because as detectives we made very good grunts.
Today we were supposed to meet him at the office to talk about a real job, not getting some old lady’s money back. Then we were supposed to go to lunch and put a game plan together. What I wanted to do was go back to bed and read, or watch some TV, or just lie around on the couch. But if fish could fly they’d live in trees.
About eleven-twenty, Leonard showed up and drove us over to Marvin’s office. The car had a smattering of bird crap across the windshield, and Leonard tried to clean it by turning on the windshield wipers, which made a slick whitish smear across the glass. Leonard cursed at it and hit the wipers again and made it worse than before.
I made a note to self. Do not try and clean bird shit off a windshield by using the wipers. It doesn’t work. Cursing does not clean it either.