“What target?” Angie said.
“They were supposed to hit a building allegedly housing members of Noriega’s secret police. Instead they went two doors down.”
“And?”
“Wasted a whorehouse at six in the morning. Sprayed everyone inside. Two johns, both Panamanian, and five prostitutes. Your boy then allegedly walked through the room and bayonetted all the female corpses before they torched the place. That’s just rumor, mind you, but that’s what my source remembers hearing.”
“And the army,” Angie said, “never prosecuted.”
Oscar looked at her like she was drunk. “It was Panama. Remember? Killed nine times as many civilians as military personnel? All to capture a drug dealer with former ties to the CIA during the administration of a president who used to run the CIA. This shit was fishy enough without calling attention to your mistakes. The rule of combat’s simple-if there are photographs or members of the press in attendance? You broke it, you buy it. But if not, and you cap the wrong guy or guys or village?” He shrugged. “Shit happens. Set the torches and march double-time.”
“Five women,” Angie said.
“Oh, he didn’t kill ’em all,” Oscar said. “The whole squad went in there and unloaded. Nine guys firing ten rounds a second.”
“No, he didn’t kill them all,” Angie said. “He just made sure they were all dead.”
“With a bayonet,” I said.
“Yeah, well,” Devin said, and lit a cigarette, “if there were only nice people in the world, we’d lose our jobs. Anyway, Scott Pearse musters out, comes back to the States, lives with his dad, who’s retired, a couple years, and then his dad dies of a heart attack and a few months later, Scott wins the lottery.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he won the Kansas State Lottery.”
“Bullshit.”
He shook his head, held up a hand. “On my mother. I swear. Good news was he picked the winning six numbers, and the jackpot was for a million-two. Bad news was, eight other people picked the same numbers. So he collects his payout, which is like eighty-eight grand after the IRS gets through, and he buys a black ’68 Shelby GT-500 from a classic car dealer, and then shows up in Boston, summer of ’92, and takes the postal exam. And from there on in, far as we know, he’s been a model citizen.”
Oscar looked at his empty mug and empty shot glass, said to Devin, “We staying for another?”
Devin nodded vigorously. “They’re buying.”
“Oh, yeah!” Oscar waved at the bartender, circled his finger over the table to indicate another round.
The bartender nodded happily. Of course he was happy. When the tab was on me, Oscar and Devin drank only top shelf. And they threw it back like water. And ordered more. And more.
By the time I got the tab, I wondered who’d gotten the better of the deal. And whether the bill would max out my Visa. And why I couldn’t just have normal friends who drank tea.
“You want to know how the United States Postal Service deals with several pieces of mail that don’t reach their destination?” Vanessa Moore asked us.
“Pray tell,” Angie said.
We were on the second floor of Bubba’s warehouse, which serves as his living quarters. The front third of the floor is mined with explosives because…well, because Bubba’s fucking nuts, but he’d somehow managed to deactivate them for the length of Vanessa’s stay.
Vanessa sipped coffee at the bar that begins at the pinball machine and ends at the basketball hoop. She’d just come from the shower, and her hair was still damp. She wore a black silk shirt over ripped jeans and her feet were bare and she kneaded a sterling silver necklace between her fingers as she swiveled slowly from side to side on the bar stool.
“The post office deals with complaints first by telling you mail occasionally gets lost. As if we didn’t know. When I mentioned that eleven letters were sent to eleven different destinations and none arrived, they recommended I contact the Postal Inspector’s office, though they doubted it would do much good. The Postal Inspector’s office said they’d send an investigator by to interview my neighbors , see if they had something to do with it. I said, ‘I put the mail in the box myself.’ To which they responded that if I provided them with a list of the destinations, they’d send someone to interview people on the receiving end.”
“You’ve got to be joking,” Angie said.
Her eyes widened and she shook her head. “It was pure Kafka. When I said, ‘Why don’t you investigate the carrier or pickup driver on that route?’ they said, ‘Once we’ve ascertained that no one else was involved…’ I go, ‘So what you’re telling me is that when mail gets lost the presumption of guilt is laid on everyone but the person entrusted with delivering it.’”
“Tell ’em what they said to that,” Bubba said as he came into the kitchen and bar area from somewhere in the back.
She smiled at him, then looked back at us. “They said, ‘So will you be giving us a list of your neighbors, ma’am?’”
Bubba went to the fridge, opened the freezer, and pulled out a bottle of vodka. As he did, I noticed that the hair above the nape of his neck was damp.
“Fucking post office,” Vanessa said as she finished her coffee. “And they wonder why everyone’s switching to e-mail, Federal Express, and paying bills by computer.”
“Only thirty-three cents for a stamp, though,” Angie said.
Vanessa turned on the bar stool as Bubba approached with the bottle of vodka.
“Should be glasses by your knee,” he said to her.
Vanessa dropped her eyes and rummaged under the bar.
Bubba watched the way her damp hair fell across her neck as she did so, the vodka bottle motionless and aloft in his hand. Then he looked over at me. Then he looked at the bar. He placed the bottle on top as Vanessa placed four shot glasses on the wood.
I looked at Angie. She was watching them with her lips slightly parted and a growing confusion in her eyes.
“I’m thinking I’m just going to cap this asshole,” Bubba said as Vanessa poured the chilled liquor into the glasses.
“What?” I said.
“No,” Vanessa said. “We talked about that.”
“We did?” Bubba threw back a shot and placed the glass on the bar again, and Vanessa refilled it.
“Yes,” Vanessa said slowly. “If I have knowledge that a crime is to be committed, I have a sworn duty to notify the police.”