gun in one hand, bottle of gasoline in the other. “What’s on your mind now, smart guy?”
“I’m just wondering what it’ll take to buy us out of this. I mean, you know that you have to run, right?”
“Well, obviously.”
“You’ll never see the Penny Skim. And the Merlin Game, that’s gone, too.”
“I have my own resources.”
“I’m sure you do,” I said. “But wouldn’t, say, a hundred thousand, cash, improve the picture?”
Hines squatted down beside me. “And where would I find this windfall?” he asked. “Tucked inside your BVDs?”
“I have it,” I said. “Buried back at my place. It’s my dash cash.” Okay, so I added a zero. You bait what hooks you’ve got.
“Your dash cash,” he repeated. “You have a way with words, bub. I’ll give you that.” He thought for a minute. “Maybe I’ll deal,” he said. “Answer one question first.”
“Shoot,” I said.
“What’s your real name?”
I answered without hesitation, “Radar Hoverlander.”
Hines stood up, accidentally baptizing me with a slosh of gas. “See, that’s the problem,” he said. “It might be. It might not be. You might have a hundred grand in dash cash buried in your backyard. You might have a dead goldfish.” He shrugged. “There’s just no way for me to know. So we’ll do things my way.” He walked back to the Song Serenade. “And oh, by the way, if you had been capable of, I don’t know, thirty seconds of honesty anywhere along the way, I wouldn’t have to kill you now.”
See what I mean?
Anyway, Hines splattered more gas inside the car and this maddened Mirplo to the point of action. He leapt to his feet, but the steel braid connecting him to us flopped him back down. He landed in the snow and mud with a goopy sploosh. Despite everything, I had to laugh.
Hines glared at me. “What’s so funny, funny boy?” Well, that made me laugh even harder. It was a syntax thing. Funny, funny boy. That just cracked me up.
I suppose I was becoming hysterical.
But whatever, it was contagious. First Vic got it, as he tried to wipe the mud off himself, but just succeeded in smearing it around. “I’m a mud man!” he shouted. Next Billy went off, muttering under his breath, “Shirley Temple? Shirley bloody Temple, mate?” Finally, Allie started, with a chuckle that morphed into a cackle, then unstoppable serial laughter. For no reason I can think of, she flicked some mud at me. It hit me just above the eye and resounded with a soft splat. I fell back melodramatically, as if shot. Thwacking down hard into the mud, I sent up a cratered cascade, much of which landed on Billy.
“Mate!” he howled in protest, and started flinging handfuls of mud at me. I returned fire. Allie and Vic got caught in the blowback, and soon joined in.
Pause for a moment to view this scene from above. Four young grifters are bound together by coils of cable cinched snugly at their waists and wrists. All of their actions are two-handed, and none of them can move far without moving the others. Being good grifters, they have a finely honed understanding that random times call for random actions. Being on the verge of death, they seem to have lost all sense and reason, but that’s bluff. They dive on each other, hurl mud, try to stand, fall down, drag each other down, flop around like beached flounders, and generally make idiots of themselves. Off to the side stands an FBI agent with two guns but no clue. Should he fire a warning shot? Into someone’s leg, maybe? Just start killing indiscriminately? He’d rather not put bullets into people if he can avoid it. Bad for the evidence trail. He can’t understand how people could take so dire a moment and turn it into a mud fight. Maybe he doesn’t know how to have fun. Maybe he hasn’t grasped what every good grifter knows: that the best offense is a good pretense. Nor does he notice that the fight is developing its own rhythm and cadence. First one grifter is standing, then brought down. Now two are up, now down. Three get to their feet; the other drags them down, reeling them in by the fistful. They’re laughing, carrying on, having a wonderful time. The fibbie yells at them to stop. His problem, he’s not a whimsical person.
His other problem, he didn’t hear someone call shenanigans.
We were Brownian motion, a Heisenberg uncertainty principle, bouncing and jouncing and flinging mud like chimpanzee dung.