Mickey wondered what the surveyor had thought after he found the coyote with the leg in his front seat. How did you fit something like that into your world view? Then he thought about helping the poor guy pack up his big pile of gear from the side of the road and carting it into his motel room. Surveyors sure had a lot of gadgets, all kinds of shit that didn’t seem to have any obvious use. And all of this guy’s stuff was ruined.
Then Mickey sat up straight and thought about it again, trying to be precise. It was probably just him. His attention had been focused on the leg and not the surveyor, but it did seem odd.
The guy didn’t have any maps.
XIV
The sign above the bar read: “This is the year of the rat.”
Hank thought of Howie Lugano and smiled. The paper placemat in front of him with the Chinese calendar on it said the last year of the rat had been 1996. That might have been six years ago, but it was truer now than ever.
At seven o’clock, the lounge at the Golden Dragon Mandarin Palace was hopping, but the woman from the real estate office wasn’t there. Hank hunched over a plate of pan-fried noodles with chicken and vegetables and glanced behind him from time to time, hoping to see her. He assumed she would make a scene when she arrived because there were mostly men in the place.
The lounge had been remodeled sometime in the mid-80s with lots of smoked glass and mirrors, splashes of neon color accenting the ragged black and chrome furniture. It was a decorating nightmare. A Spuds McKenzie poster of the bull terrier—poolside with a bucket of iced-down bottles of Bud, surrounded by women in pastel bikinis—was tacked to the wall behind the bar. Hank wondered for a moment—whatever happened to that dog?—then he turned around to check for her again. He wanted her to be there more than he knew was healthy.
But she wasn’t. The place was stocked with rough looking desert rats hovering around the pool table in the back, drinking pitchers and missing half their shots. There were some tired old men slumped against the wall, talking quietly and sipping cheap well drinks, their faces tanned like leather, taut, the loose parts long since eroded away by years of blowing sand. A couple of burnouts in the corner by the door were deep in an intense conversation. And there was a large group of cocky young guys crowding some tables in the middle near the black and white tiled dance floor—guys in jeans, wearing T-shirts a size too small, who looked like frat boys who never went to college, hipster rednecks who thought they’d been around the block—who leaned their chairs back on two legs and laughed at everything everyone said, as though life were a commercial, an inside joke.
Hank smiled at the sign again, ordered a second beer, and thought of the other two rats he’d already gotten rid of as part of the same assignment. Both of them had flipped on Fazioli and both of them had to pay, just like Lugano. It was the code they lived by, and even they knew that turning on Fazioli was a death sentence. But the years on death row would be spent in a quiet town somewhere where they’d work a job and watch TV, maybe join a bowling league or take up golf, and desperately cling to a life that might have been theirs all along if only they’d never signed on with Fazioli in the first place. Hank imagined that, in some ways, that kind of life was worse than prison because the rats always knew that a guy like Hank would show up one day—from out of nowhere—step out of the shadows of their past, and end it all. But then, maybe that constant fear made them appreciate each moment more. Maybe it made them accept their fate a little easier when that final moment came.
Five weeks earlier, in an apartment building in Lynnwood, Washington, Paul Bruno had admitted as much without words. At two in the morning he awoke with a start—the old senses still working, but rusty—to see Hank standing over him in the darkness. The streetlamp outside threw enough light in the room to illuminate the state of play and Paul Bruno just stared up at Hank with that knowing look the rats always seem to