Those to be Forgiven

Published: 11 Jan 2018

There’s a lot to unpack here…

(…)

I find it interesting that brought up your dreams again.

In what way?

You said that the painkillers that you were prescribed gave you strange dreams…and this is the third or fourth time that you mentioned that you had been having disturbed sleep. Is that common for you Mr Quaid? Do you have recurring nightmares? Or where the facts of the case (such as they were at this point in your story) playing on your subconscious?

What do you think? I was working the kind of case that I’d always wanted to but it was unpleasant. Every fresh piece of information seemed like it was dragged from some new hellish landscape.

Would you like to tell me about your dreams?

You a Freudian are you?

Not really. But you know of the importance that was placed on dreams by some of the people you met in the course of your case.

And some of the people outwith the case…

Sorry?

Christian and the The Dutchman were pretty hung up on that stuff too. As far as I see it dreams aren’t anything special. Just your brain working through what it needs to work through. Despite what some have told me. If you dream your flying: you’re either feeling free in your real life – or you’re feeling trapped so your dreams give you that escape. You dream your teeth are feeling out: you’re worrying about money… People’s dreams are only interesting to themselves.

Do you want to tell me what you were dreaming about?

Not especially.

How about what Christian Christiansands said to you?

What was that?

Past failures and the possibility of redemption?

I don’t want to talk about that.

I think that you should Mr Quaid. You didn’t hide from me how upset that made you when he brought that up when you went to see him.

I’m trying real hard not to hide anything from you… despite my inclination to do so.

Then you should let it out. If something in your past has any bearing on the case that you were working then it is in your best interests to tell me now.

What purpose does it serve?

It shades your character. Perhaps gives reasons for your actions. Relating to…

Johnny Ives?

Yes. But not only him.

I lied to you… Before… When I said that there were no bad memories attached to Shaolin… I don’t know why… Well I do… but…

I was seven years-old, in nineteen eighty-seven. Do you remember the eighties much? Of course you do. There was a freedom that kids were given that they don’t have now… I guess maybe all adults think that about their childhood though. Maybe it was the time… Maybe it was the lack of home consoles, personal computers and twenty-four hour rolling news that forced them outside.

The news is the main thing though, right? The constant stream of death and terror and fear is what makes parents wrap their kids in bubble wrap and hide them indoors. It forces parents to keep them sheltered from any perceived threats and imagined dangers. Not that there aren’t actual threats out there and not all dangers are imagined. I know that better than most. But in reality it’s certainly no worse than it was. There are just more people on the planet, there’s just more scope for creeps and weirdos than there used to be. More news coverage to relay and replay every shitty act one human being visits on another. But in nineteen eighty-seven the news was nightly and it barely registered in the mind of a seven year-old.

In fact: the only two news items that I can remember from that year are the Jim Bakker scandal (primarily because it obsessed my father who thought all preachers were wolves in sheeps clothing) and the SN 1987A Supernova.

The Supernova? They had talked about it at school and with my birthday in May I had pestered my parents for a good telescope. It was the first that year, hence the name 1987A. Watching that thing for an hour or so every night was thrilling for me. That final cataclysmic explosion at the end of a star’s life. It was when I realised and accepted how small… how insignificant we are. How big the universe really is… Where an exploding star the size of our sun was just a pinprick in the sky. Heavy thoughts for a seven year-old right? But that thing glowed for months. And for some reason I found that comforting. You try to explain to a kid about the death of stars and the end of solar-systems and nine times out of ten they don’t really understand. I understood. It fascinated me.

My best friend when I was seven years-old was a kid called Tommy Barton. He was a few years older than me but he was beyond socially awkward, tipping to the point that most kids his own age weren’t too fond of him. Our Moms worked at the grocery store together so our friendship was kind of forced on us. I know today they’d diagnose him; Aspergers or Autism, he’d get the proper help he deserved and he’d be looked after – but back then Tommy Barton was just slow witted. While sitting in the backyard one night with my telescope pointed toward the sky I overheard my Dad say to my mom, in the kitchen, that Tommy Barton was ‘retarded’ and although I didn’t know precisely what he meant I knew that I didn’t like the word. My Mom liked him though; said he was always polite and clean. To me Tommy was just Tommy. He played well and said funny things and he was crazy smart about the stuff that interested him; reeling off facts about fish and whales and tides that would be impressive for most adults… like I said… He was my best friend. Still the way that my Dad had said ‘retarded’… Not like it was something pitiable… Like it was something to fear… like it was something that I could catch… that played on my young mind.

Tommy and I had the best fun playing with our GI Joes. Well, I did. We’d build forts for them out of mud and sticks in our backyards and launch them over the walls in all out war. For a ‘slow’ kid Tommy could certainly build a meticulous looking stick fort. He was obsessed with getting the dimensions and scale right so the GI Joes had to be able to fit through the doors and have enough space in their small forts to move around like a real person would in his home.

I remember that summer being one of the hottest… Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. Summers always seem hotter and longer when you’re a kid. Tommy and I biked down to Wolfe’s Pond Beach. He loved swimming and being in the water more than anything; so much so that he had said that when he grew up he wanted to live on a beach so he could swim in the ocean everyday and study the water and the creatures that lived in it. There weren’t that many people around; a couple of families further up and no sign of a lifeguard… That distance from everybody else made it seem like we had the whole beach to ourselves. So we went in the water in our little trunks and goofed off… Well, I goofed off while Tommy swam laps around me. After about half an hour or so I got cramp in my left leg and panicked. Tommy was a few feet away from me in the water and heard me call for help as I bobbed in the water – I remember feeling like I was getting pulled down beneath the surface and was so damned sure that I was going to drown.

He was a strong swimmer. Something that his Mother had given him, she’d taken him swimming at the local pool twice a week since he was a baby. He threw his arm around me and pulled me to the shore; all the while telling me that I was going to be alright and that he wouldn’t let anything happen to me… He was a good kid… The best kid. And although I trusted Tommy maybe more than anyone else, I was reluctant to go swimming again after that.

One day on a hot summer afternoon, a few weeks after that, we’d been sitting on the sidewalk playing with a bunch of GI Joe’s outside of my house; when a few of the kids from his year rode up to us on their bikes. I can’t rightly remember what they actually said but it was somewhere along the lines of ribbing Tommy for being dumb and calling me a baby because I was a few years younger than them. The kids? I don’t even remember their names to be honest, although they were considered the coolest in the neighbourhood by some de facto ruling scale that kids place on one another. At least by the kids my age. They smoked cigarettes and swore without repercussion and talked about boobs that they had seen in movies and in their older brother’s dirty magazines.

Tommy had been my best-friend for that whole Summer. He’d saved my life. But still, there was something in me that reacted to the taunting of the bigger kids in a way that I regret to this day. To deflect from the insults about my age and to seem cooler than I was to a group of kids whose names I barely knew, I joined in with them… I called Tommy dumb and told him that our games were dumb and that I wished that I didn’t have to hang around with him. Then I used my Dad’s word: I called Tommy Barton a retard.

The other kids laughed and pointed and started chanting ‘Retard! Retard! Retard!’ while Tommy looked up at me, at first with confusion, then with abject betrayal on his face. When he started crying and threw his GI Joes to the ground I knew that I had done wrong. I knew that I had hurt him. But I didn’t do anything. I didn’t apologize or try to silence the other kids. I just let him run to his bike and ride off crying.

When the other kids left and I was alone on the sidewalk with mine and Tommy’s toys… I started to cry too. I’m not looking for your sympathy here. I mean, I was crying because I felt bad. And I felt bad because I had done a really shitty thing. When I told my Mom what I had said she slapped me across the face. Not hard. Just enough to let me know what a little prick I had been. She demanded that I ride over to Tommy’s house and beg that boy, my friend, to forgive me.

I cycled over to Tommy’s determined to apologize. To throw myself at the kid’s mercy and hope to goodness that he’d forgive me. But he wasn’t home.

I didn’t tell his Mom what I had done but I waited in the kitchen while she cooked. The later it got the more worried she became. I was still there when she called the police, I was still there when they came to the house. Freddy Bianchi was one of the beat cops who turned up. My Uncle Freddy. While his Mom spoke with the other officer in the kitchen, Freddy and I went into the backyard. Me sitting on a swing, head hung low, with Freddy crouched down beside me. I told him everything. From playing with the GI Joe’s through to calling him a retard to try an impress some kids I now hated.

Tommy didn’t come home that night. He didn’t come home the night after or the one after that.

I appeared on the local news with his Mom, Tommy’s dad had made a run for it before the kid was born, I was interviewed by newspapers and stopped on the street by people wanting to know more. Tommy became one of those milk carton kids and I became a local celebrity. Search my name online and after the link to my agency website it’s pages and pages of old articles about Tommy Barton.

Tommy wasn’t the first ‘mentally challenged’ kid that went missing in Staten Island. The longer he was gone the louder the whispers of that name: Cropsey, grew. But Andre Rand had nothing to do with Tommy’s disappearance.

Three weeks later the body of ten year-old Tommy Barton was found in a flophouse off of Seeton Square. Beaten bloody and in a state of decay, his bike, his casio watch and his wallet with the picture of a killer-whale on it and less that four dollars in the folds were stolen.

No one really knows what happened to Tommy. Best guess is he got snatched by desperate junkies. He wasn’t… He wasn’t ‘interfered with’. They arrested a guy, an addict who professed his innocence but still landed a life sentence.

I wouldn’t leave my room for days after my Dad had told me what had become of my friend. I was only seven years-old and I blamed myself. I blamed myself because Tommy wouldn’t have left like he did if I hadn’t joined in with those other kids to mock my friend. I blamed myself because I was too damned afraid to stick-up for him. I blamed myself because Tommy Barton was my best friend and the last words that I had said to him was to call him a ‘Retard’.

I know, as an adult, that it wasn’t my fault. That kids do and say stupid and spiteful and hurtful things. I know that they say them to the ones that they care for not really meaning them because they don’t understand what they’re doing… But there’s still a seven year-old version of myself inside of me somewhere who knows precisely that if it weren’t for him… Tommy Barton would still be alive.

I told all of this to Pickman as we made the drive under clear skies from The City to North Carolina. He didn’t say much in return. Just nodded his head and ummed and ahhed sympathetically. Told me that I can’t blame myself… I don’t know why I told him exactly; it just seemed right to fill him in. Maybe I felt a little bad for shutting him down in Accident and Emergency when he had asked me the night before. Maybe I just needed to get it off of my chest. Either way I felt closer to him after I had spoken.

I’m not so sure that Christian was right when he psychoanalysed me. Did I still feel guilty thirty years down the line… perhaps I did. I can speak to God’s honest truth that when Thomas Baldwin walked through my office door and presented me with the case, Tommy never entered my mind. Well… not at first… Shit… Maybe the psychopath who broke my hand was right… Maybe subconsciously I was looking for redemption. It’s like George MacDonald wrote: ‘The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended’.

Thinking about it; as I relayed the story to Pickman… Really thinking about… I had a debt that needed repaying. An apology that I couldn’t give to who deserved it. Maybe that was the driving force behind trying to find Donny for his brother…

The drive was just shy of five hundred and fifty miles and took a little over eight hours, so every couple of hundred miles we stopped to stretch our legs and grab something to eat or a coffee. To be frank it gave me a break from Pickman’s choice of music. The Pinto only had a tape player and three cassettes. “The Power and The Glory” which was a compilation album of a lot of eighties soft rock – good for driving to be fair, a greatest hits collection of Tina Turner – I’m not going to pretend otherwise: she’s amazing, and a Phil Collins album – that I would happily have thrown out of the window if I had to listen to one more goddamned song. Most of the rest stops were what you would expect, mostly truckers; road weary and a little wired from all the caffeine and sugar.

We made our first stop at nine in the morning where Pickman took a liking a waitress just outside of Bethesda. A pretty blond who worked the table well for her tips, I doubted that she could have actually been that interested in Pickman. But he claims to have gotten her number anyway while I sat on the bonnet of his shitty copper coloured Ford Pinto drinking cheap bourbon from the bottle with the last of my pain medication. I will say that it was real kind of her not to ask about my hand or face.

My hand still hurt. And it would hurt for weeks after; but I chose to self medicate and for the most part it did it’s job.

“I think she really likes me.” Pickman pulled from nowhere after we had left the waitress about half an hour down the road. “You think that I could start a new life in Bethesda?”

“What’s in Bethesda that’s worth moving out of the city for?”

“Aside from the waitress?” Pickman was already looking up the town on his phone while driving. “It says here that it placed number one in Forbes most educated towns in 2014.”

“What happened the last few years?”

Pickman shrugged.

“Who’d they vote for last time around?”

He continued to tap away at his phone, eyes half on the screen and half on the near empty road: “Not him.” He looked up at me and smiled. “So… you know… It’s got that.”

I smiled back at him.

“Can you imagine me settling down with a family? Maybe getting a job in hardware store or something… You know wholesome…”

“Is that what you want?”

He turned his phone off and put his eyes fully on the road: “I won’t say I haven’t thought about it. Like I look at you and your husband and you guys are happy right?”

“Yeah.” I was. We were. “Although with the job I do I wouldn’t say David and I exactly live the white picket fence life.”

“I’m gonna be forty next year Ramsay.” You could hear it in his voice that this wasn’t a sudden dawning realisation. It was something that he’d probably thought about a lot recently. “I don’t wanna be doing this in my fifties.”

“Doing what?”

“Running between safe houses for fear of retribution from gangsters…”

Pickman drove in silence for a little while after that. No doubt trying to reconcile the life he lead with his impending milestone birthday and new desire for a more ‘Leave it to Beaver’ existence. Funny how that works…

Next stop on the I-95 was outside of Richmond, Virginia. We grabbed lunch at a diner that was little more than a shed that served eggs overcooked. But it did what it did pretty well, unlike the coffee shops in The City that I had been in more recently, it knew what it was.

“So are you gonna tell me what we’re looking for in North Carolina?” Pickman sipped at his coffee.

“There’s a trailer park between Kinston and Goldsboro. Your friend the porn collector gave me roundabout directions.”

“A trailer park?”

“A trailer park.”

Pickman Looked at me expectantly waiting for me expand on what I was telling him.

“We’re gonna need to ask some questions around Goldsboro and see if we can’t find out a little more.”

“How’s this gonna help with your case? You think that the trailer park has something to do with the kiddie porn?”

“More that there’s a chance that it’ll provide another thread for me to pull on. If nothing else it will give me the opportunity to find the name of someone who does know a little more.”

I filled Pickman in on the details I’d gathered so far. From the moment that Thomas Baldwin had come into my office, through to the email from this TiCK ToCK. I told him about the two Stephen’s: Sisk and Crops and the films that they had made together and that those films were linked by a shared location to the forty-five second film clip that the brother had received in the mail. I told him about Eddie Russo and Assistant Chief Raganella – his suicide and the Police Department’s mishandling of the case.

Pickman was interested and keen to know more; how the case had come on and how I used some pieces of information and discarded others. I let him be interested and answered any questions he asked with as much information as I had to give. Something was happening here; in my relationship with Pickman. We were actually becoming friends.

“So the guy in the trailer park is scum?”

“Yeah. Real high level scum by the sound of things. But I’ve only the information that Roland Burgess gave me to go on.”

“If we find him. If we get there and he can’t help you. Then what do you do?”

“Then I need to rummage around into the two Stephen’s. The Cine Boy’s films were made in both Florida and San Francisco. For some reason they filmed on both coasts. Someone out there in either locale has to know something. That the location used in the clip that Thomas had been sent was the same location that they had made several of their public films means that their involvement is pretty much a foregone conclusion.”

“Whatever you find out… I want to help.”

“You’ve already helped.”

“I mean really help. I’m no angel but this is something else.”

“I appreciate it Pickman.”

He nodded and finished his coffee. I raised my hand and asked for the check and within a few minutes we were back in the car and on our way.

The further south we went the hotter it got, and Pickman’s shitty Ford Pinto had nothing that even approached working air-con. Topping out at one-oh-four once we reached Goldsboro City limits I was sweating through the band-aid that covered the bridge of my nose and my hand in it’s cast had gotten mighty itchy. Pickman wasn’t enjoying it much either and I could see the rings of sweat under the arms of his t-shirt and around his neck.

Goldsboro’s population had been in decline since the early nineties and it was easy to see… While it still held a certain charm in places, the city had seen it’s best days behind it. Did you know that fourteen percent of the US population lives below the poverty line? In Goldsboro it’s twenty-five percent.

Pickman liked it. And that didn’t surprise me. If he wanted to move to another town out of New York then perhaps Goldsboro held the promise for him if he wanted to keep up his current career path.

I did my research on the town when I got back to the office after our trip to the hospital and while I waited for Pickman to get his car. With a crime rate one hundred and thirty five percent higher that the national average, one hundred and eighty one percent higher for violent crime, it’s not much of a surprise that someone like Johnny Ives would make a home for himself nearby.

We drove around town for a little while. Both of us keeping our eyes peeled for a red and black vintage Ford Texaco pick-up or a diner called Fanny’s (or there abouts). I’m not being judgemental and maybe it was entirely down to my research coupled with the pain meds and the whisky but there was certainly edge to the parts of the town that we saw.

While the truck never made an appearance there was a diner near the southern exit of the town that followed the 45. Called “Penny’s”, what it lacked in charm it made up for with its down home appeal.

“There’s a pornstar called Penny Carolina.” Pickman informed me as he parked his car. “You think that maybe she owns this place?”

“Unlikely.”

As we entered the diner, Pickman was searching through his phone.

Penny’s was decked out in red formica tables that had seen better days and beaten brown pleather seats that made up the booths. There were a few people dotted throughout sipping on coffee or chewing on pie; mostly men who seemed as worn as the seating. The floor looked sticky and proved to be so as it sucked the soles of my shoes to the linoleum. Behind the counter a black woman who must have been in her late fifties stood leant over a book of crosswords, her brow a skein as she chewed on the end of a short yellow pencil.

“She’s gorgeous!” PIckman from behind me.

“The waitress?” raising my eyes in surprise.

He looked up from his phone and snorted: “Penny Carolina,” still talking about the porn star. “I’ve seen every scene she’s been in. How awesome would it be if she owned this place.”

“She doesn’t.”

“I think you’d like her.”

“I’m gay Pickman,” a little annoyed that I had to remind him.

“I mean like how she is… Not ‘like’ like her. She always comes across so well in her performances. A real pro but you know… with a sweet kinda Southern charm. Kinda like that waitress in Bethesda.” He held the phone up in front of me to show me a pretty blonde woman in her mid twenties. Looked just like another porn actress to me.

As I sat at the counter, Pickman sat next to me. He must have found a video and hit play because suddenly the diner was filled the moans and groans of two people fucking for the camera with the fast rhythm of the wet slap of flesh providing a back beat.

The waitress looked up from her crossword book and Pickman actually blushed as I shook my head.

“You can’t watch that in here.” The waitress shuffled along the counter to us as Pickman struggled to turn down the volume on his phone.

“I’m sorry about my friend.” I pulled the waitress’s attention off of Pickman and on to me. “He’s a little on the slow side.”

Pickman looked up from his phone at me annoyed as he finally found the volume and silenced the ‘fuck me harder!’ of Penny Carolina.

“I’m hoping that I could maybe ask you a couple of questions. If you have time.” I said looking around the near empty diner.

“You police?”

“Private Investigator.” I reached into my jacket pocket and handed her a business card which she took and turned over in her well manicured fingers.

“From New York? Your friend here a P.I. too?”

“Yes Ma’am.” I don’t know why I did that. Immediately trying self correct I looked at the name badge on her left breast. “Maybelline.”

She looked down at me with an annoyed squint and sighed: “Don’t matter if you can read son… You still gotta order.”

I picked up the laminated menu and glanced it over: “I’m looking for someone.”

Maybelline rolled her eyes at me with something like bored resignation. A foot tapping on the floor behind the counter. “If you ain’t gonna order then you and your creepy friend there oughta leave.”

Pickman looked up from his phone with mock indignation. The porno he was watching still playing now at least silenced.

“If we order do you think that maybe you’d answer a question or two?”

“Depends on how well you tip now don’t it.”

I pulled out a twenty from my wallet and lay it on the counter between us. Maybelline scrunched up her nose and looked down at the twenty and then back at me. I tossed out another twenty and an extra ten and smiled at her when she scooped up the bills in her hand.

“You still gotta order.”

Pickman looked up from the porno: “You do Shrimp n’ Grits? That’s a Carolina thing right?”

“We do,” She sighed. “But I wouldn’t if i were you. The shrimp ain’t exactly fresh.”

“What’s good?” I asked.

“The grilled cheese is edible.”

“We’ll take two grilled cheeses then. And two coffees.”

“Can I get a milkshake?” Pickman finally turning the porno off and putting his phone back in his pocket.

“Are you twelve?”

“I’ve just got a sudden craving is all.”

“Two grilled cheeses, a coffee and a milkshake.”

“Strawberry if you have it.”

Maybelline placed our order and fixed our drinks – handing Pickman his tall glass of pink goop first before placing a cup in front of me and pouring tar looking black liquid from the pot.

“About those questions?”

“What you looking to know that you think I could help with?”

I sipped at the coffee. It was bad.

“Do you have a regular customer here? Drives a vintage red Ford Texaco? Driver’s door painted black?”

“You mean Johnny?” Her lip curled. “What you want with Johnny?”

“I represent a relative of his in New York. Well… a law firm who represented a relative. She died recently and has left a fair inheritance to a Mr Johnny Ives. We just don’t have a current address for him but have managed to track him down to this area.”

“Shit! Really? Like that teevee show? Heir Hunters?”

“Almost exactly like that.”

I’d used that line before. Numerous times. There’s something about someone suddenly coming into money that makes people feel happy for them. Or jealous. Either way you find out about what people really think of each other while making them more inclined to talk. I didn’t know Maybelline from Adam. If I’d have told her that I was looking for a scum bag who ran a farm of kids out of a trailer park it could have gone one of two ways: She might have known and informed him or she might have called the police and I might have lost a possible lead. Of course there’s the option that the police out here know exactly what Johnny Ives is and does for a living. With a crime rate like they have in Goldsboro it couldn’t be discounted completely.

“Johnny’s usually in here most days for his supper. Orders the same thing every damn time like it’s the best food he’s ever eaten.”

“What’s he order?”

“Sausage and grits. Slice of apple pie and ice-cream for dessert.”

“Can I get that?” Pickman next to me.

“You’ll make do with your grilled cheese.” I told him.

“What time does he usually get in for?”

“Usually just as I’m finishing day shift. Somewhere around about six or seven o’clock. Some days he’s a little later. Look, I can just tell him that you’re tryin’ a find him.”

“That’s not necessary.” The bell in the kitchen dinged and Maybelline turned from us to fetch out grilled cheese sandwiches.

The plates put in front of us actually looked pretty good. I shouldn’t say I was surprised but I was. The surface appearance of the diner suggested a certain lack of general care but if a business is going to stay open it has to make its money somehow. Here, it seemed, the trick was above average grilled cheese.

Maybelline noticed that I seemed surprised when I took my first bite. “The trick is,” she started, “that we use three types of cheese; Gruyere, Monterey Jack & German Smoked and then fry the sandwich in butter and bacon grease rather than grill it.”

“It’s good!” Pickman approved with a thumbs up and a mouthful of food.

“You know where Mr Ives lives by any chance?”

“Somewhere on the road between here and Kinston. I ain’t ever really bothered to ask him.” She turned from us and opened up her book of crossword puzzles. “I think I’ve answered enough of your questions… well as much as fifty bucks will get you anyhow.”

“Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

Maybelline gave me something of an insincere smile and lowered her head into her book.

After Pickman and I finished our food, I paid and we made our way back to the Pinto.

“Don’t you wanna hang around and wait for him?”

“Not yet.” As we got in I persuaded Pickman to drive once around the block and park us at the side of a disused factory building; far enough away from the diner that if Maybelline did speak to Johnny Ives she wouldn’t see us. But close enough that we’d be able to recognise his truck pulling into the entrance of the diner’s car park.

While we sat as the sky slowly bruised and Tina Turner belted out her classics, Pickman spoke for the first time that day about Christiansands and The Dutchman.

“You had any idea’s on how we’ll find The Dutchman once we get back to New York?”

“I had hoped that you might be able to shed some light on that.” I turned the rearview mirror to me and prodded at the puffy light blue and yellow bruises around my eyes. “You’ve met the guy so I figured that you had an angle on him.”

“It was Barney over at O’Toole’s who hooked us up.”

“Then we start with Barney.”

“You not think that Christian’s guy would have started there?”

“We don’t know who Christian’s ‘guy’ is yet. He might be another one of Keena’s gorilla’s. In which case I highly doubt that he would have given it much thought.”

As the tape stopped, Pickman ejected and flipped it before putting it back into the cassette player. I smiled forgetting how annoying that used to be to have to do. “Christian isn’t gonna have any boneheads working for him though is he?”

“You saw the guys that Keena keeps around. If Keena’s been put in charge of finding The Dutchman I wouldn’t be overly shocked if he just roped one of his own into doing the dirty work.”

Pickman opened his door and got out. Lit himself a cigarette and stood looking over the roof of the car while I put his rearview mirror back into position.

“Did you take Christian’s seeds to your contact?” I asked.

“On my way to picking up the car.”

“And?”

“And he’s looking into it.”

“So what is this ‘guy’ you have? A weed farmer? Biologist?”

“Agriculturist.” Pickman ducked his head into the car and smiled.

“So a farmer?”

“He’ll tell us what’s so special about the seeds.”

“It might not be the seeds. If Christian wasn’t blowing smoke out of his ass it might be more to do with the soil where the seeds grow.”

Pickman shrugged at me and returned his head to outside of the car. “There was a very popular strain of marijuana that was doing the rounds a few years ago called Lamb’s Breath.”

“Lamb’s breath?”

“As in ‘Lamb of God’. So good it was like getting mouth to mouth from Jesus himself.” Pickman laughed. “He made that. A Hybrid strain that mixed a few lesser strains together.”

“You’ll have to forgive my general lack of enthusiasm.” I hadn’t smoked weed since my mid twenties.

“Looks like Maybelline is done for the day.” said Pickman exhaling a puff of smoke.

I turned to the car park of Penny’s diner and watched Maybelline turn left and back into town, weighed down by her bags and my fifty dollars. “That’s good. It means that if Johnny Ives does turn up tonight then she won’t have a chance to talk to him before we do.”

“Have you used that line before?” Pickman ducking his head back into the car,

“What line?”

“About the Heir Hunter’s thing?”

I laughed: “Yeah. It’s a go to tale. People love the idea that someone can suddenly come into a small fortune. Gives them hope that maybe they’ve their own Great Aunt that they’ve never met somewhere sitting on piles of cash.”

I check my watch: half six and still no Johnny Ives.

As Pickman sat himself back into the driver’s seat he switched off Tina Turner and turned on the Radio. The news: More duplicitous shit out of D.C, Russia annexing yet another piece of someone else’s country and Pop Star Austin May appearing in court charged with assaulting a Paparazzi. Same shit as always.

It was just gone seven o’clock when that red vintage Ford Texaco truck rolled up and into the car park at ‘Penny’s’. I couldn’t make out much more than a shaded form with the way the last of the sun was reflecting off of the dirty windshield.

“Shit!” Pickman started fidgeting excitedly. “Now what?”

The truck disappeared from view and I toyed with the idea of walking into the diner to lay eyes on Johnny Ives but decided it better to wait it out until he left.

“Now we wait til he’s eaten his sausage and grits, gets back in his truck and drives home.”

“We gonna tail him?”

“That’s the plan.”

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