CHAPTER SIXTEEN

He opened the door to go inside and she was right there behind him. A hard shove sent him stumbling into the darkened room, arms flailing. The bag of Chinese food he'd been carrying flew from his hand and hit the floor. White cardboard containers burst open and spilled fried rice and pork chow mein over the ratty carpet.

"Whoa! Fuck! Hey!" he blurted as his feet knocked into each other and he went solidly to his knees. He landed on a packet of soy sauce and popped it. "What's the fuckin' deal, dude?"

"I'm not a dude," Jade said in her coldest voice. She kicked the door shut, cutting off the daylight and plunging them into even murkier lighting.

The kid with the masses of rusty-wire hair on his head and all over his body, the hulking loser she'd nicknamed Bigfoot, started to rise.

Jade ratcheted the shotgun, and he froze. There was no mistaking that sound. Anybody who'd ever been to an action movie knew that sound.

She didn't care for the shotgun. It was messy and imprecise, hard to conceal, hard to handle. But the important thing was that it made big nasty holes in people, and Bigfoot knew it.

"Don't get up," she said. "Stay right like that."

Still on his knees, he was dumb enough – or stoned into sufficient bravado – to twist his head around and look at her. His eyes were glazed and bloodshot. They squinted at her, then lit up with a low animal cunning. He recognized her. It wasn't hard; she wore a green track suit and a hooded jacket, but had made no effort to hide the color and style of her hair.

"Look, bitch –"

"Call me a bitch again, and I'll shoot your foot off."

Holding the shotgun on him, she scanned the rest of the room to make sure they were alone.

Bigfoot lived in a scuzzy motel at the bad end of Prewett. It rented units by the week or month, for cash with no I.D. necessary and no questions asked. He had blankets tacked up over the windows, casting the room into a gloomy dimness that hid the worst of the squalor. There was no kitchen, not even a kitchenette. Instead, there was a microwave so old it probably sent out sterilizing beams of radiation whenever it was used. Given Bigfoot's suitability to breed, Jade figured that in his case, a little sterility was a good thing.

The bed folded down from the wall and was a rumpled expanse of sleeping bag, dirty clothes, and dirtier magazines. Pizza boxes, beer cans, empty two-liter soda bottles, and take-out wrappers littered the floor. The closet was a bare bar above a mound of clothes and towels that looked like they might come alive if someone shot a bolt of lightning through them. Posters of bands – grunge and heavy metal – vied for wall space with centerfolds and pictures of pro wrestlers.

The bathroom door stood ajar and the fly-specked low-wattage bulb over the sink shed their only source of light. She didn't really want a close look at his bathroom, but could see enough of it to determine that no one was hiding in the shower, the floor was so grimy that she couldn't guess what color it had started as, and the toilet seat was up. She'd have bet her car that it wasn't flushed, either. And the shower drain would be clogged with a wad of rust-colored hair the size of a dead hamster.

He had himself a fairly nice entertainment setup, a stack of porn videos, a black Rubbermaid container full of video game cases, and not one but two game-system consoles.

Opposite the bed, the disassembled pieces of a bike hung on metal hooks that had been mounted on the wall. He had left his other bike outside, locking it to a metal rack, the modern equivalent of the ol' hitching post. A skateboard, airbrushed with an image of a flaming skull with snakes coming out of the eye sockets, rested against a speaker. At the foot of the bed was a pair of in-line skates with black wheels. He even had one of those shiny silver scooters. Bigfoot covered all the bases.

The smell in here was enough to make her eyes water. Jade tried not to breathe too deeply, wanting get as little of it into her lungs as possible. She didn't let herself think about what might be causing such a stench, just as she didn't let herself think about the stains on the carpet.

When she had seen him the previous afternoon, Bigfoot had been wearing a rock group tee shirt and black leather pants looped with chrome chains. Today he was in urban commando mode, with an olive-green tee shirt, army-style boot and camouflage pants.

One of his hands twitched toward his belt, where a box cutter hung in a leather loop, and Jade prodded the side of his head with the shotgun barrel.

"Unless you want to make this room even more of a revolting pigsty by decorating the walls with your brains," she said, "you'll forget about trying."

"Jeez, lady! I didn't do nothing!" He had not called her a bitch, so perhaps he could be taught after all, wonder of wonders and hallelujah.

"What's your name?"

"Jon." He said it sullenly, the way he would have – and had, she was sure – said it to a teacher or playground monitor.

"All right, Jon. Listen to me. I want to know who that other kid is, and where I can find him."

He didn't bother with pretending not to know what she was talking about. Having a shotgun pressed to his skull, just above his right ear, must have removed any desire to be a wiseass or play games. "The guy who lifted your purse, I don't know who the fuck he is. Seen him around, and I heard some kids call him Scoot. But I don't know him, lady, I don't fuckin' know him."

"Not good enough."

"Fuck! For Chrissake, lady!"

"Seen him around, you said. Seen him around where?"

"Places," Jon said. "The Plaz, the skate park, the library quad at Atherton."

"You go to Atherton?" she asked, not trying to keep the skepticism from her tone.

"To skate," he said defensively. "To ride my bike. I'm not some pussy college student, but they've got good pavement there."

"What skate park?"

"On Pine," he said. "Pine and 3rd, 4th maybe. I don't go there anymore. Used to, when I was a kid. It's for pussies. They won't let you ride your board there unless you wear a fuckin' helmet."

"But you've seen this Scoot there?"

"Sometimes, yeah." He turned his head a little, the shotgun barrel digging into his matted hair, and looked at her out of the corner of his eye. "You're not the first one whose fuckin' purse he's stolen. I seen him do it a few times, and so's everybody else."

"Lucky me," Jade said. "Have you seen him since yesterday?"

"No, dude."

"You're not lying to me, Jon?"

"I swear! I fuckin' swear!"

"You certainly do."

"Huh?"

"Tell me about Scoot."

"I told you, I don't fuckin' know him, already. I heard some of the chicks think he's a fag. A pretty boy; all the chicks are crazy for him, but he looks like a fag to me."

"What does he look like?"

"Told you. A pretty boy. I never seen him up close."

"Do you know where he lives?"

Jon shook his head.

Sighing frustration through her teeth, Jade said, "Do you know who would?"

"He doesn't fuckin' hang with us, okay? He's just … around. Doesn't say much."

"Does he smoke? Drink? Do dope?"

"Dope," chuckled Jon. "Dude, that's a good one."

She nudged harder with the shotgun, which the shaggy lunkhead seemed to have temporarily forgotten. "You know what I mean."

"I never seen him do anything but soda."

"Who else can I talk to? I need to find Scoot."

"Hey, I'd fuckin' help you if I could, lady. It's people like him who give the rest of us a bad name, all right? Going around fuckin' robbing people, and so the cops start thinking we're all fuckin' criminals."

Jade had, without consciously electing to do so, begun keeping score of his ludicrous profanity. She couldn't help it.

"They're always fuckin' looking for an excuse to bust one of us, dude," he went on. "Like it's against the law to smoke a little pot."

"It is."

"Fuckin' stupid law. It doesn't hurt nobody."

She wasn't about to get into a debate on law and order with him. This was absurd enough already.

"Tell me who might know where to find Scoot," she said, jabbing harder with the shotgun this time.

"Ow! That fuckin' hurts, okay?"

"It'll fuckin' hurt worse if I pull the trigger. Dude."

God, how she hated whiners! Here he was, six-foot-something and twice her weight, more covered with hair than a werewolf, and he was whining. If ever she'd needed another reason why she preferred to shoot people without having to talk to them, this was it. They would all whine, or blubber, once they had the gun to their head. And then she wouldn't be killing them for the right reasons.

"Sorry," he said, chastened.

Now, why had that gotten through to him all of a sudden? Was it because she was finally speaking his language? Or had the pressure of the shotgun barrel finally made a coherent impression on that thick head of his?

"I'd rather not blow your brains … pardon me, your fuckin' brains out, dude," she said. "It'd be noisy and gross. So, if you want to be alive to eat those egg rolls for lunch, I suggest you listen closely to what I have to say."

"Sure, anything, lady."

One hand on the shotgun, she fished into her pocket and drew out a pre-paid disposable cellular phone. She bought them by the half-dozen and never kept them more than a couple of weeks. "My number's already programmed on here. I let you go, and next time you see Scoot, you call and tell me where he is."

His muddy, bloodshot eyes brightened with hope.

"But there's a catch," she said. "If I don't hear from you by Wednesday – that's in four days – I come back and we have another talk. Got it, dude?"

"Yeah."

"I found you this time, so I can find you again if I need to. Don't make me hunt you down. If you do, you'll regret it."

He bobbed his head again. Droplets of sweat stood out in his scruffy red stubble like beads of dew. Maybe the fact that she had bald-faced walked into his room with a shotgun at high noon convinced him she was in earnest.

"Good." She tossed the phone down beside him and backed toward the door. "And it goes without saying that if I find out you've warned Scoot off …"

"I'm not a fuckin' moron!" he said.

"Prove it."

With that, she was out the door like an eddy of wind.

**