He’s thinking: subjects sit at a table facing a wall with their backs to the attendant. How is this happening? But I play it innocent, and it makes him nuts. It’s probably not nice, but I have so successfully channeled my bad Charlie energy into positive comps-taking energy45 that I can’t help myself.
I am so amped, in fact, that when I encounter Schermer and his asshole friends—in this case, Murgos, Iovine, and DeLesseps—it doesn’t really bother me. I apprehend them when I push out of the air-conditioning into the heat of the parking lot. My time slot was late in the day, and it’s already dark outside, but Schermer et al are discernible by their snickering. I consider flipping them the bird but I think of Herk’s Taoist pacifism and just smile at them with what I hope appears to be the indulgence of a patient adult indulging the antics of a bunch of squealers rioting at the kids’ table. Even when they do their defecatory pantomimes—Murgos putting his palm-heels to his mouth and blurting out a farty noise; DeLesseps making unmistakable propeller-like eructations; Iovine sticking out his tongue and flapping it against his lips, producing a raspberry-style flatulence while aiming at me the business end of his gastrointestinal tract—I keep composure.
Normally I crumble at moments like this, but tonight I am all rubber and they are so totally glue. I just grin and nod, as if to say: I can bear any puerility you generate, for I have just made the comps my bitch, and it will be I who works the Nakamura job, not you cretins.
Part of my unusual invulnerability is due to my performance, no doubt, but I am also buoyed by the sense of triumph I feel from my locker still being free from adult sanitary napkins or containers of Imodium or whatever Schermer usually thinks is funny.
I hazard a hope: maybe things are turning around for me.
Maybe I’ve paid my dues. Maybe I get this floater gig, give the commission to Deke, get the damned title, and sail away into my future with Charlie.
Maybe I get my clean getaway after all.
I am so pleased with the novelty of my coolness that it takes me a few moments to process the noise originating from over by the Reliant. Even at a distance, through the darkness of the parking lot, with the struggle and complaint of the BQE in my ears, I discern the sound of a brass-tipped umbrella crunching in the gravel. When I get to my car Detective Nunes looks the same as she did in her photo spread. Grim mouth, alert blue eyes, her shoulders hunched up as if struggling against a strong wind even in the breathless summertime air. She smells of stale menthol and rayon and gasoline and pencil shavings and body odor and fear: the precinct.
“Otto Starks?” she says.
I grunt.
“Cheryl Nunes. I’m taking over the Rat Burglar investigation.”
“Hunh,” I say as if it’s news to me. Totally dull, irrelevant, nonthreatening news.