Woke Up Lonely A Novel - By Fiona Maazel Page 0,135

into the smoke socket. When Olgo opened the door, a plume of dew came at his face.

The man told him to hop in. “You’re in luck. I’m pointed exactly that way.”

His voice was phlegmy, as if the walls of his nose and throat were slopped in roux. He was missing fingers that mattered for making a good impression.

“The name’s Jerry. You?”

“Jonathan.” Olgo said it deliberately, testing the consonants for what pleasure they gave his tongue in bringing them to life.

“Well then. Hope you don’t mind the dogs. The bald one, you can put one of them pups on your arthritis and the skin is so hot it cures you. Folklore, but I done it. And I got arthritis in places no one but a pup’s gonna go without complaint.”

Olgo looked away. If he had wanted to talk, he also had standards. He thought about retreating to the backseat, claiming fatigue, only between it and the tailgate was a trellis for keeping the dogs put that did not seem so reliable. The bald one already had his snout wedged through.

Olgo said, “Is that okay? Your dog like that? I think he’s stuck.”

“Not really. But just see what happens you go find out.” Jerry laughed, like whatever mauling had befallen him in the past was good times. Olgo thought he even flourished his knuckle stumps, though maybe he was just swatting the air.

“I’m going to see my wife,” Olgo said. “She doesn’t know I’m coming, though.”

“Yeah? I had a wife once. But we don’t talk. When I came back from the services broke, she didn’t like it. Now my son and his family live near, but it still feels like I got nothing.”

“What do you do these days?”

“This and that.” He rolled up his sleeve and began to savage his bicep. When he was done, the patch of skin was candent and striking against the livid ink sealed into his arm.

“Oh Christ,” Olgo said, and he reached for the door handle.

Jerry grinned. “At eighty miles an hour, I’d say you’re not gonna make it.”

The tattoo was bigger than any Olgo had seen on file. It stretched from elbow to shoulder, and the rungs of the double helix were pearled—this version more science, less metaphor.

“Are you taking me back to them?” Olgo said. “How did you even know where I was?”

Jerry pointed at a CB radio bolted to the underside of the steering column. The radio was waterproofed in plastic. “Looks like it’d be in the way, but it doesn’t bother me none.”

Olgo said, “I don’t understand.”

“It’s like this. There’s an APB out for that car you were driving, for one. Ugly business with that car. Someone spotted your plates, said there was some jackass cursing all up and down the highway. Also, the feds put out the word. Found out maybe you wasn’t there when they came a-knockin’.”

“So everyone knows I’m out?”

“Everyone with a CB. Whole world is listening. All that fancy equipment, and some idiot is still using the CB.”

“Are you taking me to the Helix people or not? Because I’m pretty sure it’s not me they want, just anyone. To make a point. I do this for a living, conflict resolution, so, ah, talk to me. There’s no need to be confused about what we each stand to gain.”

“Sure there is. We’re all confused. Let’s call it the human experience.”

Olgo frowned. A preacher man.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Jerry said. “I’m seventy-nine next week. God willing.”

Olgo pressed his head to the glass—how was he even having this conversation?—and began to regret in earnest having left the Helix House. Why couldn’t he have waited for Hostage Rescue? Wherever Jerry was taking him, security would be tighter and the turncoats fewer.

“So let me get this right: You’re a bounty hunter for the Helix? At age seventy-nine?” Sixty might well be the new forty, but seventy-nine was eighty and eighty was nine hundred.

“Seventy-eight, thanks.”

“I have money. I could get money.”

“Oh, don’t talk stupit. I don’t like that kind of talk. I’m principled.”

“You’re above money?” Olgo cowered with the thought. In all his years negotiating, it was always the principled who stood their ground with the least remorse.

Jerry shook his head, said, “I’ll tell you all about it later,” and pushed Play on a cassette deck sized like a hardback novel.

And so it went: Show tunes. Oklahoma! and Cats and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Jerry singing in tandem but not in key. He had several five-gallon jugs of gas in the