Long Fall from Heaven. George Wier
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door opened and Micah stood there in his underwear looking down at Cueball, his abdominal muscles rippling with his breathing. Micah shielded his eyes against the glare of the parking lot light. “Come in,” he said. “Give me a sec to get some clothes on.”
“Might as well put your security uniform on,” Cueball said.
Cueball entered and stood in the cave-like darkness of Micah’s living room. Micah shuffled off down the hallway and flicked on the light.
The room was neat as a pin—the way Micah kept everything with which he came in contact, be it possessions or relationships. From the bedroom, Cueball heard the sounds of hurried dressing and mild oaths.
“What gives?” Micah asked from down the hallway and a half-closed door.
“There’s been a killing,” Cueball said.
“Who?” Micah asked.
“Jack Pense.”
“Damn,” Micah responded. His bedroom door slapped the wall of the trailer and Micah’s long stride brought him into view.
“Rusty called and woke Myrna up a few minutes ago. Somebody broke into the DeMour warehouse. They knocked Jack on the head, tied him up, and then—just for good measure—beat him to death.”
“Shit,” Micah said. “Anybody told Jenny?”
“No,” Cueball said. “I’m sorry, Micah.”
“Yeah. Me, too. Anything stolen over there?”
“Don’t know. It’s a big warehouse. I told Rusty to hold off calling the cops until we’ve arrived.”
“Fine,” Micah said and moved toward the door, but Cueball slowed his advance with a gently raised hand.
“Now, I know your first instinct is to go and tell Jenny. But she doesn’t know yet and the news can keep for another few hours. Meantime, we’ve got work to do. Rusty is waiting for you in the warehouse. I’ll finish up his rounds for him, which shouldn’t take long, then meet you there. Not a word to anyone about this. After you’ve checked the place out, go ahead and call the local cops.”
“Okay,” Micah said. And that was that.
• • •
Jack Pense had retired from running an armored truck crew for Wackenhut Security ten years before. Too young for social security but with not enough income to support himself and his common-law wife, Jennifer Day, Jack had come to work for Cueball Boland’s security firm a week after he was pensioned off.
During the drive to the warehouse on the back side of the Island, Micah summoned up an image of Jack’s face—round, tired and somewhat pained. Mostly what he associated with him were a stack of read and re-read Sackett and Longarm novels and the stubs of chewed Muriel Magnum cigars. Also, he had known for years that Jack sometimes laced his on-the-job coffee with Southern Comfort and that he probably took too many pain pills, but who could blame him? Jack’s ruptured discs and three fused vertebrae weren’t imaginary. Jack’s favorite topic was his injuries and his general health. He could be downright expansive on the subject. Aside from this, Micah’s and Jack’s conversations mainly kept to football, old western movies, and the antics of Depression era desperadoes such as Bonnie and Clyde, Raymond Hamilton, and Joe Palmer.
Micah had liked Jack Pense. Micah didn’t like many people.
“Damn,” he told the Island. It said nothing in return. It lay mocking and silent in the haze of the breaking dawn, a little exotic, a little seedy, and—as always—a little menacing. To his right and slightly over his shoulder, the sky and the horizon waters of the Gulf glowed with coming light while ahead loomed the grim, gray silhouette of the DeMour warehouse. “Damn,” he said once again.
[ 3 ]
Micah Lanscomb and Cueball Boland had met five years earlier in a manner that in another time and in a more conventional place might have seemed strange. But Galveston is a port city, one with a threadbare allure many find irresistible. Its citizens are used to seeing the odd and the offbeat wash up on their shores.
Besides owning NiteWise Security, C.C. “Cueball” Boland was a pool hustler who operated his own billiards room a block off The Strand. Additionally, he was a retired Dallas cop who gambled moderately on poker, drank a fair amount of whiskey when the situation seemed to call for it (which it frequently did), and never failed to notice a pretty girl. Which is to say that he had all of the usual male vices and a couple he had cobbled together on his own. One vice he didn’t have was philandering because his wife, the former Myrna Hutchins, had been the center of his erotic universe since sixth grade. Nor could he ever be accused of disloyalty to friends. It was this last quality that had gotten him into trouble several times since his retirement eight years earlier. Or as Myrna often said, “C.C. is the only man whose learning curve is a straight line.”
Myrna said a lot of things like that, the kind of one-liners Groucho Marx would have appreciated. To his credit, Cueball listened to her. It was Myrna’s dry wit and uncanny sense of proportion that had attracted him to her long before the raging hormones of his early teens took charge of him, body and soul. Over the years it was his sense of loyalty that gathered to him a smattering handful of long-time friends, those few who had proven equal to the engulfing depths of his devotion. Much later in life, one of those friends was Micah Lanscomb.
Micah came into Cueball’s life from the rain, both literally and figuratively. Lanscomb was soaked, thin and weathered, and wore an impenetrable and taciturn demeanor. He was a head taller than his fellows and his shadow came before him, a palpable, inescapable thing that parted idle chatter like the wake of a great ship traversing middling waters. If the person meeting him were pressed on the matter, he would have said that the tall man was engaged in weighty matters, which, on the face of it, was the simple truth.
The pool hall was already quiet that fateful evening. The jukebox was being given its requisite thirty minutes to cool down, the plug disengaged and held against the wall by a racked billiard cue. The repairman who’d fixed the turntable motor and charged Cueball sixty bucks for the service call had advised a cooling down period each night—just one more thing Cueball could add to his religious regimen. It was either that or replace the damned thing, but Cueball had a soft place in his heart for old jukeboxes.
Outside the storm freshened, diminished, and came on once again with a howl. Then suddenly, like an apparition, a wet stranger appeared just inside the doorway, dripping on the bare wooden floors.
“Help you?” Cueball asked.
“I don’t have any money,” the stranger said, “but I’m hungry and I’ll wash dishes and clean the place up to cover it.”
Cueball closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he turned and opened them again he saw his own reflection in the long mirror behind the bar—a nondescript gray man of sixty-two years with graying hair and a face that people found difficult to remember even when they were looking right at it. He was five ten and weighed a hundred and sixty-five pounds—neither tall nor short, neither stocky nor skinny. The clothes he wore were usually as unmemorable as the body they covered. A writer friend had once told him that there was something about him reminiscent of the flicker of old black-and-white film—quick celluloid images at the corner of an unfocused eye like those long-ago RKO newsreels from childhood afternoons spent at the quarter matinee.
He turned back to the man and stared at him. This was, beyond doubt, the kind of person he’d always resolutely, and with little success, sought to avoid—gaunt, hollow, needy, empty. A man like the thousands of others who wander this great and turbulent land looking for the one unnamable thing that might fill them, the undefined Holy Grail of their rootless existence. Yet there was a tiny something besides emptiness in the man’s eyes—something that said there was a story there worth hearing. And Cueball Boland was a man who listened to stories.
Cueball shrugged. “Pete,” he said quietly to the huge black man behind the bar. “Put a rib-eye on the grill and turn on