“Me?” I say. “You like me for this?”
Nunes stabs a cigarette in her mouth, lights up, exhales on me. Schermer and those idiots can’t hear the dialogue at this range, but they see me cough and that makes them yuck it up.
“Like you? Right now I love you for this, Starks. Right now you’re my leading man. You’re my favorite. You’re my goddamn prom date.”
“If I’m a mang46 on jobs that have totaled twenty million dollars, why aren’t I living the life? Do multimillionaires drive K-Cars? Do we beg our bosses for our jobs? If I’m the inside man, then what am I doing with my haul?”
It is then that I realize that Nunes’s roving glance is not merely a personal foible. She has been checking me out, and, I now see, I am not the only one with visual acuity. She reaches out and extracts from my chest pocket the Najad brochure I salvaged yesterday from my locker. It is in vivid full color with the comprehensive digital workup of my boat, complete with the name stenciled across the transom and everything.
“Good-looking boat. These things go for, what, a couple mil? That’s a lot of boat for a pulse who’s been downgraded to backup, don’t you think?”
It occurs to me that if Nunes compares my bank records to the money I’ve put down on the boat, there will be certain discrepancies. Part of me wants to come clean to her about Deke right now, but my relationship with him isn’t exactly legal, and I’m already close enough to getting the axe.
“Clean Getaway? Interesting name. There’s a term for that.”
“Irony?”
“Appearance of guilt.”
Again I say nothing, hoping that silence conveys not guilt but disdain for the ludicrousness of this line of questioning.
“Know what they do to pulses in the joint, Starks?”
“Do people honestly still call it the ‘joint’?”
“I could arrange to have you in the same ward as Frankie Nickels. I know he’d love to see you. How do you feel about that?”
With one hand Nunes plays with the butt of her handgun. She pulls it half out of the holster, then reinserts it. It’s only a gesture. Not really a nervous tic—I cannot imagine Nunes being nervous—but maybe a habit of security, making sure it’s still there. Or available for immediate withdrawal. But I am so terrified of guns—even theoretical guns—that the sight of real gunmetal from a real gun, in someone’s hand and half out of its holster and glinting in the weak light of the overheads, makes me quail. A car backfires and I try not to flinch but the chorus of howling from Schermer’s corner of the parking lot tells me I fail.
Then I make a mistake. I’m terrified, naturally, the way anybody would be while facing a gun and considering jail time with Frankie Nickels, but I don’t want to look it, so I resort to using a line I heard Herkimer utter once when he was getting chewed out by Po-Mo, but when I say it—“Doesn’t make me want to write a letter home to mama”—I garble it unintelligibly. Plus it seems, after I utter it, that it does not exactly make any kind of sense.