Page 1 of The Bad Weather Friend

The colonel had given each of them a small white envelope. Rosco turned his between thumb and forefinger. “I got me a bad feelin’ about this.”

“It’s a tip,” Dooley said. Few people tipped freight handlers no matter how much sweat the load broke out of them, but it happened once in a while. “You suddenly don’t like money, give it to me.”

“If it’s a tip,” Rosco said, “why he didn’t just fold a bill to each of us?”

“He’s old school. Discreet. He’s got style.”

Rosco tore open the envelope and extracted a pair of hundred-dollar bills. “Double damn! I knew this was trouble.”

“Two hundred bucks is your idea of trouble?”

“It was a ten, even a twenty, okay. This shit means he’s buyin’ our souls.”

“Mysoul’s priced a lot higher,” Dooley said.

A man of many superstitions, Rosco crumpled the bills in his fist and solemnly declared, “I got to find a church, put this in a poor box, clean me of it.”

At the airport, the Mayweather jet was taking on cargo. Rosco worked the forklift, while Dooley got the paperwork straight with the guys who would take possession of the crate and get it properly secured aboard the plane.

When he inserted the paperwork—with the recipient’s address—in a plastic envelope that was fixed to the crate, Dooley pretended to shudder as if he had received a shock and, in a stage whisper, fearfully declared,“It’s alive!”

“Asshole,” Rosco said.

The funny thing was, when Dooley smoothed his hand across the flap of the packet to seal it, a strange feeling quivered through him, so strange that his pretense of a shudder became a real, icy chill. It passed quickly. He didn’t know what the moment meant, so he put it out of mind.

Later, he called Cecelia, his wife, to tell her about the two hundred bucks. “Don’t cook tonight. Order in whatever you and the kids want, have Grubhub bring it.” On the way home, he stopped at a Baskin-Robbins to buy an ice cream cake.

Dooley was fundamentally a family guy, and not a clueless goof like those on TV. He loved—adored—Cecelia and their two teenage daughters. There was nowhere he would rather be than at home. They shared the news of their day over dinner and then ate too much ice cream cake while playing 500 Rummy.

He was so content in his uncomplicated life that his dreams were always pleasant. That night, the white-suited colonel came to him in sleep, walking out of a dazzling turbulence of hundreds of swooping parrots, escorted by a dozen earthbound flamingos, with a white cockatoo perched on his right shoulder. It was quite unlike any other dream Dooley had experienced. In this dreaming, Dooley realized what quality Talmadge Clerkenwell possessed that he had previously sensed but could not name, which made him so certain the old man never lied about anything important, never to obtain an advantage or to harm someone. The quality was kindness, profound benevolence extended not merely to all men and women and children, but also to animals. Surrounded by bright flamingos that stood in a reverent stillness, the colonel spoke, although his voice came from the cockatoo on his shoulder. He asked Dooley to forget the crate had been unusual in any way, to remember it as just another crate. To forget the chill he’d felt when he sealed the invoice envelope. To forget the name of the recipient, Benjamin Catspaw. To forget the address to which the crate had been sent. And Dooley did forget. As the cargo jet cruised through the night, westering high above the earth, in his bed Dooley erased all—but only—what he’d been asked to delete from his memory.

The cockatoo fell silent, and the voice came from the colonel himself when he said,“But remember me, Dooley Peebles. Remember me if ever the world goes so wrong that there seems no way to make it right again.”

Then the cockatoo flew off his shoulder, and the flamingos took flight, whirling away with the parrots that had been floating at the perimeter of the dreamscape. Wings bloomed from the old man, and he also flew away. Dooley thought he, too, could fly; he tried, but it wasn’t that kind of dream.

A BAD MORNING

Benny Catspaw was twenty-three when he decided that he wasn’t paranoid, that in fact someone was out to get him. He didn’t think anyone meant to murder him. There were many ways to “get” someone short of shooting him in the head. There were gangs that sometimes merely cut off your legs and ears, while others were satisfied with throwing acid in your face, and still others neutered you and left you with a photo of your package so that you could study it in your old age and wax nostalgic about what might have been. The United States had opened itself to a wide variety of international gangs; the Mafia wasn’t the only game in town anymore. The thugs of more recent vintage prided themselves on their flamboyance and on the fact that they were no less psychologically than physically cruel. Nor did Benny believe that anyone was trying to ensure that he would be committed to an asylum; he was not Ingrid Bergman gaslighted by Charles Boyer. For sure, however, someone was trying to thwart him.

Thwart:to hinder, obstruct, frustrate, baffle.

For three years, he’d been a licensed real-estate agent working with Hanson “Handy” Duroc, who founded Surfside Realty, one of the most successful brokerages in Orange County, California. Located in Newport Beach but with listings countywide, Surfside specialized in properties with an ocean view or with a dock on the fabled yacht harbor, as well as focusing on estates in the most prestigious gate-guarded communities. Although Benny had come from nothing and had known more than his share of disappointment, he had big dreams and worked hard. He wasn’t among the top five agents at Surfside, but he expected to ascend to that honored realm in two or three years.

Surfside operated out of a quaint, beachy, two-story white-and-yellow building on Pacific Coast Highway in Corona del Mar, which had long ago been annexed by Newport Beach. On the far side of the alleyway behind their offices, a vacant lot was an invaluable asset in this parking-challenged community. On this warm Tuesday morning in October, Benny slotted his Ford Explorer among the gleaming vehicles belonging to his fellow agents—a flotilla of Mercedes and enough Teslas to collapse the power grid.

He used the back entrance, which required a key because even in this monied community, there were drug-addled vagrants who were of the opinion that an unlocked alley door was an invitation to step inside and bunk down or urinate. Before Handy Duroc had ordered that the door must remain locked, an MS-13 enforcer named Santiago—with a shaved head, a second face tattooed on the back of his skull—had paid them a visit in search of a cook with whom he had a score to settle. The cook worked in the trendy restaurant two doors south of the realty offices. The enforcer was so incensed by his error that he wanted to pistol-whip and execute someone working at Surfside—he didn’t care whom—to reassure himself that he wasn’t losing his edge. He chose Tina Finestra, the firm’s number two agent, who weighed one hundred and ten pounds. This was his second mistake. Tina had twelve years of martial-arts training. And attitude. She was determined that no thug from El Salvador would prevent her from conducting a series of showings she had scheduled for a client who was qualified to buy a house in the thirty-million-dollar range. She smashed Santiago’s nose, took his gun, breaking two of his fingers in the process, and drove him headfirst into a wall. He fell to the floor, stunned, flat on his back, and Tina dropped on him, using the gun butt to hammerhis crotch repeatedly until he passed out. Tina was on time for her first appointment with her clients, and when the police revived the unconscious Santiago, he cried like the child that he was now unlikely ever to father.

This October morning, when Benny Catspaw let himself in by the alley door and locked it behind him, the first person whom he saw was Tina Finestra. Her blond mane looked as if her personal live-in hairdresser micromanaged every strand before she’d left her house. A Botoxed, lip-plumped laser-smoothed blemish-free wonder, she was thirty-two but could pass for twenty even if you didn’t squint. She was dressed as though about to film a frivolous cable-TV show titledRealtors to the Stars, but she projected the no-nonsense savvy and confidence of a business genius who was also a ninja assassin. There were times when Benny found her desirable, but she scared him so much that he never seriously considered asking her for a date. He suspected that her lovers had a life expectancy approximately that of the mate to a female praying mantis.

She favored him with a smile so warm that he knew he was in some kind of trouble when she said, “Handy wants to see you in his office.”

This was the second Tuesday of the month, which always began with a gathering of agents in the second-floor conference room for what Handy called a “dirt review.” By the word“dirt”he meantreal estate, properties on the market or soon to be. He would know every listing held by other firms that were coming to an end without a sale having been made, and he would discuss how best the sellers might be cajoled into switching to Surfside. Among other subjects were the ideal price for each new listing and the price reductions needed for “blind, tasteless turkeys,” whichwere houses that drew no interest because they lacked a view and were the creations of architects better suited to designing prisons and pissoirs.

The door to Handy’s office stood open, and though it bore no resemblance to the gates of Hell as they were usually depicted, Benny hovered silently in the hallway for a long moment before rapping gingerly on the frame. Handy called out, “Come in, come in,” in that affable voice that suggested he was always expecting someone who delighted him. “Ah, it’s you, Benny,” he said, still buoyant but slightly deflated, as might be a man who needed to tell a friend that a mutual, valued acquaintance had just been shot by his wife, though not mortally. He came to Benny and clapped him on the shoulder and closed the door and said, “Sit down, son, take a load off,” as he led him to one of four armchairs arranged in a circle.

At forty-eight, Handy was old enough to be Benny’s father, but he’d never before called Benny “son.” Between the ages of seventeen and twenty, Hanson Duroc had been a lifeguard on the main beach in Newport, before he had segued into the dirt business. He was six feet three, as fit as a twenty-year-old, as smooth faced as a thirty-year-old, and as perfectly tanned as though God personally airbrushed him with light of a higher quality than mere sunshine. His teeth gleamed whiter than white. His eyes blazed bluer than blue. His hair was waxed into a stiff, stylish, blond flame—yet he didn’t look ridiculous, as did most middle-aged men who strove to appear youngish by adopting that coiffure.

By contrast, Benny was five feet ten, with a thatch of unruly brown hair, eyes the color of weak tea, a nose that reminded him of Dustin Hoffman inThe Graduate, and a tan that would have been a lot sexier if it hadn’t caused his smattering of freckles tobrighten into flecks of molten copper. When he compared himself to Handy Duroc, which he didn’t dare do often, he took comfort in the fact that he was considerably more intelligent than the broker. Benny was confident that intelligence mattered most, and that it guaranteed his eventual ascent to the heights—though when he considered any aspect of contemporary America, from business to politics to the arts to the sciences, he had to admit that flash, filigree, and flimflam defeated substance almost every time. However, he had faith that this triumph of sizzle and sham was a transient condition, a blip, in the noble arc of this great nation that had for centuries mostly rewarded merit and hustle.

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