Free Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg Page A

the city. Bone said okay, it was a deal—if he could use the car that afternoon, after they got it back. The man was not enthusiastic, but he finally came around. He even agreed to come by and pick Bone up.
    As he put the phone down, Mo finally made it to her feet. In her customary chinos and sweatshirt she meandered over to him.
    “My, aren’t we all business today,” she said.
    “An atavism, is it? Back to the halcyon days of paper pushing?”
    “I’m busy, yes.”
    “Why?”
    “Necessity.”
    “What necessity?”
    “Food and shelter.”
    She smiled indifferently. “Oh yes, those.”
    Bone looked at the baby on the floor, dirty and happy, shaking a rattle. “How’s he doing?”
    “Baby’s doing fine. But Daddy’s not so hot.”
    “What’s his problem?”
    She shrugged. “Who knows? He was up half the night. With you most of the time, I think—out on the deck.”
    “I was asleep.”
    “So I gathered.”
    “Was it pain? His leg?”
    “Pain maybe. But more in the head, I’d say. He was very excited. Agitated. He kept saying something about ‘a way out.’ You know what he meant by that? A way out? Do they still have those?”
    “If I find one, I’ll let you know,” Bone said.
    By two o’clock he had his car back—temporarily—plus one hundred and sixty dollars in his wallet. And he was driving up into the Montecito foothills along serpentine blacktops past low-slung California homes hugging their little patches of hillside amid scraggly live oak and chaparral, all of it tinder eight months of the year, a torch waiting to be lit. The view explained: an often breathtaking vista of the sprawling redroofed city below, the harbor and channel islands, the dazzling sea. It was a view that did not come cheap. Lots sold for thirty and forty thousand dollars an acre, and the houses were not built on them so much as into them, expensively tethered, like craft meant for flight.
    So the socioeconomic range in the foothills was a small one, running from rich to richer. It was the sort of place where people ran the sort of ad Bone was answering now:
WANTED —Young man for live-in, part-time yard and pool work. Nice room, meals, plus $50/mo.
Call 969-2626.
    Bone had called after seeing the ad in the noon edition of the paper. The lady who ran the ad, a Mrs. Little, evidently had liked his voice or what he said on the phone, for she made a pretty big thing out of granting the interview—he was the first one she had gone that far with, she explained, which of course brought Bone close to tears. He almost told the lady to go play with herself, but the position sounded too good not to look into, offering not only freedom from Cutter but a bed, food, and a few extra dollars in the bargain. Right now he would have put up with a good deal for all that.
    When he reached the address he was not surprised at the opulence of the house, all glass, redwood, and rock set behind a cut-stone fence that would have stopped a tank. At the door he had to wait quite a while before a stout little Mexican maid finally answered his ring. He started to tell her who he was and why he was there, but she turned and walked off, apparently knowing a handyman when she saw one. A few minutes later the lady of the house came in, smiling warmly, introduced herself, and asked him to join her in the sunroom. She was tall and black-haired, probably about fifty, though carefully reconstructed to resemble a thirty-year-old. The resemblance was poor.
    With a careless little-girl insouciance she dropped into a chair, threw out her legs, lit a cigarette. “I’ve been out in my studio welding,” she said, explaining her denim pants and jacket, her workboots. “I’m a sculptor.”
    “I thought maybe you’d been riding.”
    “Horses?” She laughed at that. “Not on your life. Montecito horsey set—now there’s a group for you. Weird. Really weird.”
    Bone said nothing for a moment and the woman just sat there looking up at him, appraising