Free Hush Money by Peter Israel Page A

say she’d gone looking for Daddy and Mommy and hadn’t found them, and I’d be the last to argue with him.
    â€œWho pushed her?” I asked him.
    He shrugged, as though he accepted the idea readily enough, but either he didn’t know or didn’t care.
    â€œShe pissed a lot of people off,” was all he said.
    It got very quiet then, except for the crash and suck of the waves. Seeing that I hadn’t clubbed him to death, some of his gang had gone back into the sea to try their luck, and in between us and them a troop of sandpipers were skipping at the water and darting back from the surf like they were afraid of getting their feet wet. I was trying to put a few things together in my mind, but the squiggles he’d drawn in the sand weren’t much help.
    â€œYou and Robin Fletcher must go way back together,” I said finally.
    He’d let on along the way that he came from Visalia, which is up in Tulare County, and there aren’t enough people up there yet so that the one doesn’t know the other, unless the other’s a grape-picker from Teotihuacan.
    â€œYeah,” he said, “you could say that.”
    â€œIs she on the Jesus trip?”
    â€œYeah,” with a half laugh, “I guess she still is.”
    I tried on the Society of the Fairest Lord for size, but he didn’t flinch. On the other hand he didn’t laugh either.
    â€œWas Karen into Jesus?”
    â€œYeah,” he said. “At one time or other she was into just about everything.”
    I’d heard that before, and also the answer to my next question.
    â€œWhat about you?”
    â€œI’ve been there,” he said, and in that same tone which had made Sister Robin seem a lot older than her tender years.
    It surprised me. I mean, I don’t know what makes one person go looking for Jesus and another not, but he didn’t seem the type any more than Sister Robin did, any more than it fit for two country kids like them to come on with battle-weary eyes like they’d seen the future and couldn’t stand the sight of it.
    â€œDid you take Karen into it?”
    He looked at me like I was out of my mind. Then he laughed, the first big-hearted laugh I’d gotten out of him, also the last. But all he’d say was: “No, I didn’t take Karen into it.”
    And that was that, or almost. We walked back along the beach, watching the non-action of the surfers, talking hardly at all. Once I asked him about his degree, what he was working toward, and he said, “I’m in no hurry,” and I guess that’s typical enough these days. But then when we were most of the way, he stopped and looked at me directly, a little trace of smile in his eyes, and he laid it on me:
    â€œListen,” he said, “I’ve got nothing special against you, Mister Cage, you play your game the way you have to and you take what hits you, but you give a message to the people you work for. Tell them they’re not going to get what they want sending a pigeon around to do their dirty work for them, any more than the other ways they’ve tried. It won’t cut it. We’ve got it and they’ll get it when the time’s right. We’ll decide that, also the price. Meanwhile you can tell ’em to lay off. And I guess that goes for you too.”
    It came out flat and easy, not at all like a prepared speech but more the punchline of some other conversation we’d been carrying on the whole time, one where the words meant other words entirely.
    Except that somebody had forgotten to clue me in on the code.

7
    Never once but twice, they say.
    I wanted to take a look inside that van, but two of Ford’s spear-carriers were standing guard over it, and rather than make a ruckus I got into the Mustang and took off. I checked in with my bereaved father over at Bay Isle and gave him the five o’clock news. If Ford’s message had been intended for him, he gave