“Well, sir, I imagine a life in tire sales might be nice.”
“Tire sales?”
“Putting people back on good rubber, getting them rolling again, after life threw a blow-out at them. That would be satisfying.”
“I can see your point. But since we’re just imagining here, why don’t we imagine big?”
“Big. All right.”
“If you had a big dream in life, what would it be?”
“I guess maybe…having my own ice-cream store.”
“Is that as big as you can go, son?”
“My best girl at my side and an ice-cream shop we could work in together all our lives. Yes, sir. That would be terrific.”
I was serious. That would have been some life, me and Stormy and an ice-cream shop. I would have loved that life.
He regarded me pleasantly. Then: “Yes, I see, with a little one coming along, it would be nice to have a business you could rely on.”
“Little one?” I asked.
“The baby. Your girl is pregnant.”
Bewilderment is, for me, a natural expression. “Girlfriend? You know my girlfriend? Then you must know who I am. You mean…I’m going to be a father?”
“You were talking to her this afternoon. Utgard saw you. Before you jumped off the pier.”
I looked disappointed, shook my head. “That was crazy—jumping off the pier, talking tsunamis. But the girl, sir, I don’t know her.”
“Maybe you just don’t remember knowing her.”
“No, sir. When I came on the pier after being mugged, and I had amnesia, I saw her and thought, well, maybe I often went to the pier and she would know who I was.”
“But she didn’t know you.”
“Not a clue.”
“Her name’s Annamaria,” he said.
“That’s a pretty name.”
“Nobody knows her last name. Not even the people letting her live above their garage rent-free.”
“Rent-free? What lovely people they must be.”
“They’re do-gooder morons,” he said in the nicest way, with his warmest smile yet.
“The poor girl,” I sympathized. “She didn’t tell me that she had amnesia, too. What’re the odds of that, huh?”
“I wouldn’t take the bet. The thing of it is—the same day, here you are with no first name or last, and here she is with no last name.”
“Magic Beach isn’t a big city, sir. You’ll help us find out who we are. I’m confident of that.”
“I don’t believe either of you is from around here.”
“Oh, I hope you’re wrong. If I’m not from around here, how will I find out where I’m from? And if I can’t find out where I’m from, how will I find anyone who knows who I am?”
When the chief was in his charming-politician mode, his good humor was as unshakeable as the Rocky Mountains. He kept smiling, though he did close his eyes for a moment, as if counting to ten.
I glanced at Mr. Sinatra to see how I was doing.
He gave me two thumbs up.
Hoss Shackett opened his warm Irish eyes. Regarding me with delight, as if I were the leprechaun he had longed all his life to encounter, he said, “I want to go back to the big-dream question.”
“Still an ice-cream parlor for me,” I assured him.
“Would you like to hear my big dream, son?”
“You’ve accomplished so much, I’d guess your big dream already came true. But it’s good always to have new dreams.”
Chief Hoss Shackett the Nice remained with me, and there was no sign of Chief Hoss Shackett the Mean, though he resorted to the silence and the direct stare with which he had regarded me when he had first entered the room.
This stare had a different quality from the previous one, which had been crocodilian. Now the chief smiled warmly, and as Frankie Valli sings in that old song, his eyes adored me, as though he were looking at me through a pet-shop window, contemplating adopting me.
Finally he said, “I’m going to have to trust you, son. Trust isn’t an easy thing for me.”
I nodded sympathetically. “Being an officer of the law and having to deal every day with the scum of the earth…Well, sir, a little cynicism is understandable.”
“I’m going to trust you totally. See…my big dream is one hundred million dollars tax-free.”
“Whoa. That is big, sir. I didn’t know you meant big big. I feel a little silly now, saying an ice-cream parlor.”
“And my dream has come true. I have my money.”
“That’s wonderful. I’m so happy for you. Was it the lottery?”
“The full value of the deal,” he said, “was four hundred million dollars. My cut was one of the two largest, but several others here in Magic Beach have become very rich.”
“I can’t wait to see how you’re going to spread the good fortune around, sir. ‘Everyone a neighbor, every neighbor a friend.’”
“I’m adding four words to the motto—‘Every man for himself.’”
“That doesn’t sound like you, sir. That sounds like the other Chief Shackett.”
Sitting forward on his chair, folding his arms on the table, virtually sparkling with bonhomie, he said, “Happy as I am to be stinking rich, I’m not without problems, son.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Such a wounded look of disappointment came over his face that you would have wanted to hug him if you had been there.
“You are my biggest problem,” he said. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you are. That dream, the vision, whatever it was that you passed to me and Utgard.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry. It’s a very disturbing little dream.”
“And so spot-on accurate. Clearly you know too much. I could kill you right now, bury you somewhere like Hecate’s Canyon, and nobody would find you for years.”
In his Chief Hoss Shackett the Nice persona, he had brought to the moment such a spirit of camaraderie and such fine intentions that the low concrete ceiling had seemed to expand into a high vault. Now it so suddenly crashed down again that I ducked my head a little.
Once again I could detect the smell of vomit under the pine disinfectant.
“If I have a vote, sir, I’m opposed to the kill-and-bury-in-Hecate’s-Canyon solution.”
“I don’t like it, either. Because maybe that fake-pregnant girlfriend of yours is expecting you to report in.”
“Fake-pregnant?”
“That’s what I suspect. Good cover. The two of you come into town like vagrants, the kind nobody looks at twice. You’re like some surf bum, she’s like a runaway. But you work for somebody.”
“Sounds like you have someone in mind.”
“Maybe Homeland Security. Some intelligence agency. They have a slew of them these days.”
“Sir, how old do I look to you?”
“Twenty. You might look younger than you are, might be twenty-three, twenty-four.”
“A little young to be an undercover spy, don’t you think?”
“Not at all. Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, the best of the best—some of them are twenty, twenty-one.”
“Not me. I have a gun phobia.”
“Yeah. R
ight.”
I had leaned on the table, as well. He reached out and patted my arm affectionately.
“Suppose you don’t check in with your partner, this Annamaria, at the appointed hour, and she gets on the horn to your controllers back in Washington or wherever.”
Amnesia no longer served me well. I would do better being a cool and deadly government agent. I said only, “Suppose.”
“In a spirit of trust, which I sincerely hope you genuinely do appreciate, I’ll tell you—the job that made me rich, my part of that is done tonight. In two weeks, I’ll be living in another country, under a new identity so tightly guarded I’ll never be found. But leaving the right way, the careful way, is going to take two weeks.”
“During which you’re vulnerable.”
“So I have only three options I can see. One—I have to find your Annamaria real quick, before she squawks, and kill you both.”
I consulted my watch, as if in fact I had a pending report time with my undercover co-agent. “You won’t be able to pull that off.”
“That’s what I figured. Option two—I kill you here, now. When you don’t report to Annamaria, she sends the alarm, your agency comes storming into town. I play dumb, tough it out. Never saw you, don’t know what happened to you.”
I said, “I’m sorry to hear…this must mean Reverend Moran is in this with you.”
“He’s not. He found you in his church, you said your life had taken a wrong turn. Then you started talking Armageddon, the end of the world, you made him nervous. You told him the retriever’s name was Raphael, but he knew who owned the dog, and its name is Murphy.”
I said, “Gee, a troubled young man worried about the end of the world, maybe on drugs, has a dog isn’t his…I’d think a preacher would try some counseling and prayer before turning me in.”
“He feels comfortable calling me about small stuff, and don’t pretend you don’t know why.”
“Are you a member of his parish?” I guessed.
“You know I am.”
I hesitated, then nodded. “We know.” I made the we sound like eight thousand bureaucrats in a block-square building near the CIA. “And don’t forget—the reverend knows you arrested me.”
He smiled and dismissed my concern with a wave of his hand. “That doesn’t matter if before morning the reverend kills his wife and commits suicide.”