Page 8 of The Bad Weather Friend

Right now, the only thing that sort of concerned him was why he was making all these baseball analogies. He wasn’t a big fan of the game. He didn’t dislike baseball; he simply had no interest in the sport. It seemed something must bemeaningfulabout this changeup farm-team up-for-bat stuff, as though hehad a psychic premonition that a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball was coming straight at his forehead.

Handy Duroc loved baseball. He was a stone Dodgers fan. But Handy, with his coiffed hair, was the past. Handy had already done all the damage he could do.

Benny went into the house. He stood in the living room, turning slowly in a circle, considering the sleek modern decor. An L-shaped Italian sectional in white mohair. A free-form coffee table of white quartzite and stainless steel. The minimalist Swedish armchairs with sloped backs gave the impression that they were about to be launched at high speed along a track in an amusement park. Everything stood on a pale-gold Tufenkian carpet hardly more colorful than the honed-limestone floor.

If the scene said one thing more than any other, it declared that this was a house in which you would never see a cockroach either quick and skittering or sluggish from breathing industrial toxins. Whether someone might be shot in the back here one night—well, such was life that you never knew.

The doorbell rang.

He wasn’t expecting anyone, but he answered it anyway because he continued to believe in opportunity, which could ring the bell as easily as knock.

The FedEx woman was maybe thirty, lean but muscled, wearing a polo shirt with the company logo, khaki shorts, and running shoes.

Her name was Umeko, Japanese forplum blossom. She always sprinted from her truck to his door, ran in place while she waited, and then dashed back to her truck, not because FedEx imposed a cruel schedule on her, but because she viewed her job, in part, as preparation for the marathons she ran six times a year. Hermother, Kimiko, had died of a heart attack at the age of forty-one, when her daughter was seventeen, whereafter Umeko had decided to eat a healthy diet and get plenty of exercise.

As he signed for a medium-size FedEx box, and as Umeko jogged without going anywhere, she said, “It’s from Boca Raton.”

“I don’t know anyone in Boca Raton.”

“I do,” she said. “I was there a few years ago to visit my auntie Hoshi and my uncle Buck. Very lush. Not Auntie Hoshi and Uncle Buck. They don’t drink. Boca Raton is very lush.”

“Did you run there and back?” Benny asked as he returned the electronic device with the screen that he’d signed using his finger as a pen.

Grinning, she said, “Hey, I might’ve tried except for Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Have a nice day, Benny.”

“It could still turn out that way,” he said, as Umeko sprinted along the front walkway toward the street.

Only then, standing just outside his front door, did he look at the air bill and see that the sender was one Talmadge Clerkenwell.

(While that name makes you uneasy or even inspires a quiet dread, you must remember that Benny has never seen it before and consequently has no clue as to its fateful nature. He might even be smiling as he stands there, charmed by Umeko, bathed in the warmth of the late-morning sun, not yet fully aware of the terrible forces aligned against him. One thing common to all of us in this life, if we are wise enough to understand, is that we live always under one threat or another and must never let our guard all the way down. That is why you, though not Benny, can be thrust into a state of suspense even if the chapter ends not with immediate peril but merely with the name Talmadge Clerkenwell.)

TRASH BARREL

At the Mayweather Universal Air Freight facility at LAX, Tyler Looney used the lavatory and spent the rest of his fifteen-minute midmorning break sitting on his forklift, in the warehouse, drinking a Red Bull and thinking about changing his last name.

He was the piano man and lead singer in a rhythm-and-blues band packing clubs and drawing the attention of some recording-company executives during its periodic weekend gigs in West LA. He worried that the group couldn’t go all the way—whateverall the waymight be for his out-of-fashion music—with a front man named Looney.

Because he loved his parents, Harlan and Lucinda, because his dad was a proud and dignified sous-chef in the main restaurant at a major hotel, Tyler hesitated to make the change. He thought perhaps that if he took his mother’s maiden name for performance only, his father, who was crazy in love with her, wouldn’t feel disrespected. However, her maiden name was Pinkflower. Maybe Tyler Pinkflower was a contrarian—therefore cool—name for a black musician steeped in the blues and rock and roll ... or maybe it wasn’t. He vacillated on the issue.

As he got off the forklift and went to a nearby trash barrel to throw away the empty Red Bull can, he was softly singing Sam Cooke’s classic “Wonderful World,” wishing his voice was as creamy as that of the late, great soul man. As he sang, he dropped the can in the barrel—and spotted the fiberscope discarded among the refuse.

He knew this was not a cheap piece of equipment, and he fished it out of the trash. The scope, complete with spring headband and handheld control, appeared to be in good condition.

On that morning shift, only Felix Domenico would have been inspecting a consignment with the device. Felix had staggered past this trash barrel and collapsed unconscious about sixty feet away, in an intersection of two aisles that passed through high palisades of freight awaiting distribution.

Tyler took the fiberscope to the dispatcher, Henry Berger, who was in his office. Henry was a good guy but perpetually harried. At the peak of the morning outrush of delivery trucks, his eyes often seemed to bulge in their sockets. Most of the time, his hair stood on end because he had a habit of nervously running a hand through it. Henry would probably have a stroke before he was fifty.

As the dispatcher accepted the fiberscope, he regarded it as if it were the seventh of the seven signs of the Apocalypse. “What was Felix doing with this? What was he inspecting? He must have been inspecting a shipment. What shipment was he inspecting?”

“I have no idea,” Tyler replied. “How’s Felix doing?”

“We haven’t heard yet. If he pulled a consignment out of the dispatch sequence, where is it?”

“I have no way of knowing,” Tyler said. “It’s a big building.”

“Was it an overnight consignment has to be delivered today, or was it second-day, third-day, maybe an Express Saver shipment?”

“I just fork things around like I’m told,” Tyler said, “and try not to hurt my hands.”

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