Spider’s Cage (10 page)

Sister Opium Jade's husky tones got huskier.

“Harry?” she pleaded. “Harry, I'm sick Harry.”

The speaker circuit clicked back to send and they could hear the claustrophobic ambiance of Lobe's ten by ten office. His desk chair squeaked.

“What: you a comic?” The speaker clicked.

“Harry,” she pleaded, moving with her body and voice at the speaker as if it were a sailor in a dance hall. “Harry, I need work.”

“Who is this?”

Sister Opium Jade rolled her eyes at Windrow and cooed, “Mary Simms, Harry. Cooka sent me. She said you could get me some work. I need work, Harry. I'm good but I'm sick, Harry.”

Another pause. They could hear that the speaker was still in its microphonic mode, listening to the street. Opium Jade leaned until her ruby lacquered lips were not an inch from the filthy grill, a perishable delicacy perilously close to imminent corrosion.

“The first one's free, Harry.” She caressed the words so that they oozed through the little punctures in the dented metal.

The lock on the iron gate buzzed, and Windrow pushed it open.

Lobe's office was in the top of the building in the back. It should have been a closet, but Lobe had the rest of the building rented out to the faded list of faceless enterprises listed on a piece of plywood wired behind the grate above the doorbells. The peep show would appear to be the only legitimate business on the premises, so long as you didn't look too hard into the system of mirrors that owned it.

But Windrow didn't give a damn about that. He took the steps three at a time, to spite his soreness. When he got to the top he stood there, shaking. The anticipation worked the valves and circuits in him, uncoiling the wounded animal. For the first time in a week adrenaline laced him with its unique favor, united all the quirks and bruises of his system for him. He pushed Lobe's office door until it banged flat against the wall, to the left behind it.

Lobe's desk faced the hall, with room for the door to clear and then some. He was sitting behind it. Eight by ten glossy photographs, nude, obscene and otherwise, some personalized, mostly yellowed and curled, covered the peeling green walls above a battered wainscot. There were a couple of file cabinets to the left, another chair beneath a grimy window to the right.

Lobe was a fat hairless man with a round greenish-yellow
face that looked like the bottom of a gallon jug of cheap chablis held up to a street light. His cranial features concealed a small handful of hydrated dolomite that passed for brains but could have passed for the same yellowish gluten that passed for his flesh that for all the world looked like it would present the same unvarying consistency to the thoughtful bullet passing through its center from any direction. Like, for example, in one ear and out the other.

Lobe, for his part, had a pretty low opinion of Windrow. Had he known who had come buzzing his buzzer this a.m. Lobe wouldn't have granted admittance if only to provide Windrow some minor irritation. Lobe saw Windrow as a cipher equal to zero in his nickel abacus: no more, no less. Windrow's permanent absence from Lobe's sordid scene seemed like an okay idea to Lobe, his presence a nuisance.

Under normal circumstances, in either case, there was no way Lobe thought Windrow worth the sweat of gunplay. But today circumstances must have been waxing abnormal. Lobe was expecting trouble. To cope, he was keeping, a revolver handy in the partially opened desk drawer over his lap. Whereas, Sister Opium Jade's voice coming over the speaker box on his desk had been an unexpected relief to him, the appearance of Windrow's gangly and distinctly unfeminine frame in the doorway surprised Lobe badly. But, as Windrow deduced from the information-giving and-receiving tics of Lobe's eyes—the
saccadic
eye movements, the ones directly related to thinking or, as in Lobe's case, to the manipulation of small potatoes that passed for thinking—his appearance was not the surprise Lobe was expecting to be surprised by.

All this Windrow took in at a glance, it used up only a second. Then he got his own surprise.

It was a pleasant one.

Lobe went for the blaster anyway.

Lobe hadn't intended to pull a gun on Windrow; he had it handy for somebody else. Windrow suspected the discrepancy. Having gone for the piece in his initial moment of surprise, Lobe hesitated when he saw it was Windrow, the wrong party. But then, he saw that Windrow was going to act adversely, a counter move, and his mind restarted the reflexes it had just called off: he thought to pull the gun out just to cover himself. And, while he was at it, maybe he would shoot this jerk Windrow anyway. Self-defense against a trespasser. All this decision-making took time. It took, maybe, a quarter of a second.

That little bit of time allowed Windrow to savor a foretaste of the immense pleasure he was about to get out of legitimately preventing himself from being shot. He grinned hugely, and saw the slow dawn of terror in Lobe's previously business-like eyes. He raise his right leg, placed the ball of his shoe against the edge of Lobe's desk, and kicked, hard.

Though plenty big, the desk was cheap and light; it slid easily. Lobe's swivel chair rolled backwards a few inches to the wall, the drawer pushed against his huge stomach and closed on his hand. The gun discharged in the drawer, blowing a large hole in the side of the desk. The slug struck the wastebasket to Windrow's right. It clanked dully. Further pressure to the desk meanwhile pushed the air out of Lobe and into the room with a great whoosh. As a byproduct of its motion the gasp made a sort of yell as its air passed Lobe's vocal chords, but the sound of it was lost in Windrow's apelike roar.

Windrow turned loose of the doorframe and leaned over the desk. He grabbed Lobe by the roll of fat that bulged over the leading edge of the desk with his right hand and the knot of his tie with his left. Turning as he pulled, he lifted the
big man out of his chair over the desk and launched him over his hip, back toward the hallway. The desk turned over against Windrow's leg as he made this move, and the motion caught Lobe's wrist between the drawerface and the edge of the desk. The hand came out of the drawer all right, but not before the wrist snapped and a wide stripe of skin peeled back from the wristbone to the second knuckle on the thumb and forefinger. Lobe gulped the stale air of the office and howled.

But, as he turned and released the fat agent, Windrow saw too late that, having banged against its hinge wall when opened, the door had drifted back on its return arc, nearly closing again. So that Lobe, flying out of Windrow's grasp, crashed through the cheap panels of the door and into the hall beyond.

Windrow couldn't help but laugh at Lobe's misfortune, a short bark of a laugh, and with the laugh about half of his animosity toward the big man went out of him. So he paused the mayhem. Now maybe Lobe would talk to him. He was about to pull open the shattered rectangle of splinters that had been the door and drag the poor sap back inside, let bygones be bygones, when, with an animal roar, Lobe exploded through the calendar that still somehow hung over the splinters. He was wielding a short piece of wood, like a club.

So this is how you make it in show business, Windrow thought: Perseverance. He stood his ground and unloaded his right fist from the back wall into Lobe's face at arm's length—you never give up, he thought. Lobe's head stopped dead in the air and the rest of him folded around it and went past and he dropped to the floor, flat on his back, with a crash. The piece of board hit Windrow lightly in the shin.

Sister Opium Jade struck a pose in the door and inhaled a low whistle through her pursed lips.

“He'd a crushed me to death,” she observed. She looked
at Windrow admiringly. “Mah hero. You has done saved me from a grisly squash-job.”

“We're even, babe,” said Windrow, shaking out his fingers. “I can't tell you how good that felt.”

“I knows sumpin what feels mo better…”

“Can the Uncle Remus and see if you can find some water.”

He uprighted the desk, leaving the spilled trash on the floor. He leaned Lobe against the front of it. He got the gun out of the drawer and unloaded it. Then he took the time to quickly shake down the office. He pulled open file drawers until he found a folder marked Ryan, J. He opened it and stopped. The first item in the folder was an 8 × 10 of Jodie Ryan's face, which he'd seen before. He had a copy in his own office. He liked it. He dropped the slugs from the pistol into the file drawer and closed it.

Opium Jade returned with a little paper cup full of water and looked over Windrow's shoulder.

“Country,” she said. “Bread and butter and milk and eggs and dewsilky moo-cows in the misty upper forty—at $10,000 an acre, of course.”

Windrow grunted.

“And if you believe that,” she added, “you're a sap and I'll give you a license that says so.”

“I already have a license.”

“Not to drive that rig.” She posed cutely with the dixie cup. “What do you want me to do with this?”

“Throw it in his face.”

She poured it. Two ounces of water barely wet the vast surface that contained Lobe's salient features, but the big man moaned at the change.

Windrow laid the file on the desk and bent over the agent.

“Lobe. Can you hear me, Lobe?”

Lobe groaned and moved his head. Rivulets of water thinned the blood beaded along the seams of a dozen scratches on his face. It looked like glacial melt running off Half Dome in a red sunset.

“Why the heavy play, Lobe? You forget how to talk with your hands full?”

Lobe moved his lips. Sounds came out, none of them English.

Windrow furrowed his brow. “What's he saying?”

“Fuck you, I think,” Opium Jade surmised.

“Off.” Lobe managed to open his mouth long enough to form the O. “Fuck… off.”

“I'm surprised at you, Lobe. You don't want to fry for shooting lil ol us. Who were you staying ready for?”

Lobe moved his head from side to side with his eyes squeezed shut. The fat bunching around his stubby black lashes, the only hair on his head, made them look like two nasty stitched-up wounds.

“Does it have anything to do with the Ryan girl?”

Lobe said nothing.

Windrow crouched close to the agent's swollen face and scowled. “Look, Lobe. We've gone this far, I don't mind taking the rest of the route. Do I have to maybe pull your tongue out a couple inches with a pair of pliers and hold matches under it?”

Opium Jade laughed, a high lilting chuckle that was spontaneous, but it had something decidedly anticipatory about it.

“Or maybe…”

Lobe's head began to sag to one side.

“He's fainted,” Opium Jade said. “You scared him unconscious.”

Windrow patted Lobe's vast jowls. They hung from both
sides of his face like dead meat in shallow water. “Lobe. Wake up!”

Lobe's head came back upright and the eyes became slits. Windrow could see the glint of the moisture in them. And he could see something else. Half conscious and his defenses down, Lobe's eyes showed one thing.

Lobe was scared.

Windrow frowned. “I didn't come here to kill you, Lobe. I came here to ask a couple of stupid questions. Some yes-no stuff. Maybe an address or two. Real simple.”

Lobe's breath, shallow and slow when he was out, was gradually coming in short gasps. “I ain't scared of trash like you Windrow,” he muttered. He arranged him back more or less vertically agains the desk and seemed to regain a bit of his oily composure. He pushed Windrow away. “I ain't scared of no washed-up Sears-Roebuck floorwalker.”

“That's the spirit, kid. All I can do is strain you through the cracks in your floorboards. So why the piece?”

Lobe touched the corners of his mouth with the back of his ruined hand. He winced at the gesture, looked at his hand and the blood that came away with it. His eyes focused and he snarled. “None of your goddam business.” He flailed his hands in front of him in an effort to overcome the elemental forces that held him to the floor. He teetered to the right and put out his hand to stop himself from falling over. The fingers barely touched the floor before he let out a yell and jerked his hand back so that he fell over. He clutched the mangled appendage to his chest and curled around it, cursing and grimacing.

“Yeah,” said Windrow, standing up. “It's all my fault.”

Lobe got to his feet, still clutching the bad hand to his chest, his face red with abrasions and rage. Windrow found a spark of admiration in himself for this fat chiseler. The guy had some guts in him.

Lobe began feebly to move his desk by pushing against it with his thigh, edging a corner of it out from the wall to get to his chair. Ignoring the scattered papers he bent to put the telephone back on the desk and replaced the receiver in its cradle.

Windrow stood up. “The Ryan girl,” he said.

Having cleared enough space, Lobe uprighted the swivel chair and collapsed into it. He gripped the bad hand and sighed. Then the eyes opened and looked with undisguised hatred at Windrow.

“You should feel what that fluff does for the Lobe,” he sneered.

Opium Jade let a small gasp escape her lips. She looked at Windrow. Windrow looked at Lobe. Three seconds ticked past. Then Windrow suddenly reached over the desk. He closed his big hand over Lobe's broken hand and squeezed. The blood started from the split skin over Windrow's knuckles.

Lobe screamed.

Windrow twisted.

Lobe pounded and chopped at Windrow's arm with his good hand but that made it hurt worse, and he howled.

“Awright, awright,” he yelled.

Windrow twisted the other way. He hissed like a snake.

Lobe begged. Involuntary tears coursed his cheeks.

Windrow turned loose.

Lobe cuddled his ruined paw against his chest. The features of his face compressed into the smallest area possible, a focus of torment.