Free Slice by Rex Miller Page B

a little, warily.
    “Do you have any idea why I can't get across the [something] to the other side of [something else]?” The inflection was that of a sincere question, his eyes cast downward as if in a map, his Pillsbury-Doughboy-meets-FrankenKong face a pleasant, beaming, lost, wrinkled, jowly, and deceptively cherubic mask of fat and friendly exasperation.
    “Huh?” She had moved closer and looking into the front seat of the car she saw a huge man of indeterminate age staring and shaking his head at a street map.
    “Can you help me?” he asked, pointing at the map. She moved closer, right by the window and he had her then. He knew if he could get them within touching distance he had them. Always. That was the reality of the track record.
    If they were reluctant to get within arm's length, it usually meant that they were too wary to con into the vehicle. But if they got that close to him, he always had them. They'd get in a car with Daniel Bunkowski no matter if he was bleeding, drenched in sweat, covered in sewer filth, or immaculate and in a rented summer tux. The ease with which a victim went with Daniel seemed to be in almost inverse proportion to the social acceptability of his appearance. It was as if anybody who looked like THAT couldn't possibly be a bad guy too. It was too much of a cliché, perhaps.
    The trust factor. He began working on it now with the girl. His eyes never looked at anything but the map, and at her eyes. He let himself blink a lot, squint, shake his head, and put more movement into his normally static and inert facial features, sniffing, grimacing, scowling, licking his ups, shaking his head, all the while the torrent of words flooded out of his mouth, a river of busy verbiage lapping against her resistance.
    “When I tried to cut through there it was a one way street, see?"
    “Yeah. They got the town all screwed up now with the one-ways."
    “Yeah. They got the town all fucked up now.” He said the word to her naturally, really bummed out by the crazy street system. “You can't find your way around for shit.” The big head moved, the words testing her probing getting the lay of the land and the temperature of the water.
    “Yeah,” she agreed, laughing, the phrase “fucked up” as common to her as blue sky.
    “I haven't been here in a few years,” he said. “Are you from here or what?” Big friendly smile.
    “God, no. I came here with Mom a couple years ago. We're from California."
    “No shit,” he said, his face lighting up like a Christmas tree. “Where ‘bouts in California?
    “Bakersfield,” she told him.
    “Oh, God. That's wild. I'm from L.A."
    They both laughed.
    “No kiddin?” she said, having to stop herself from saying “no shit.” And he was telling her the first thirty-five things he could remember from doing time with cons from the Los Angeles area, saying things about how great it was out on the Coast, how much it sucked back here, and in the wave of California dreaming and nostalgia for the palm trees and the ocean and all, she was soon sitting in the front seat of the car and the car was moving then as he talked and, yeah, she agreed, “I can't wait to get outta this shitty city.” And he laughed like that was the funniest remark he'd ever heard in his life. And she smiled at his recognition of her wit and acumen and personality.
    “God, what happened to you?” she said, natural as you please. He told her about the accident on his Harley, and they talked bikes for a while. God. How cool, she told him, “I love bikes.” And before he could stop her she was off and running on the long and intensely boring tale of how somebody named whatever asshole name—Kevin or whatever—used to take her riding in the “hills,” and that went on to the point where it was starting to give Daniel a headache to concentrate even fractionally on the pitch so he finally had to interrupt her and say, “Hey, excuse me and all, but shit, I just gotta ask. Have you