Free Unpaid Dues by Barbara Seranella Page B

he?"
    She did a quick calculation, surprised to realize
that he would have aged. She avoided driving past her old haunts,
seized by an unreasonable certainty that if she turned down certain
familiar streets she would find herself with the old gang and nothing
would have changed. It would all be exactly as she had left it:
Boogie would still be a little kid. Sleaze would still be alive and
flashing his trademark devil-may-care grin. Her few close women
friends would still be capable of laughing without it sounding forced
and harsh. Flower George would still be leering at her with his one
good eye. In her mind, Thor was always in his twenties, old enough to
be on the lam from a felony warrant back East, young enough to still
be crazy dangerous. "Mid-thirties," she said. "God, he
could be as old as forty." ,
    St. John raised an eyebrow. "Old as that, huh?"
    "I didn't mean forty was old."
    " How tall is he?"
    " Six feet, maybe six-one, I never measured
exactly."
    She had a quick image of herself holding a wooden
ruler next to Thor's erect penis. Ten inches, like the Aerosmith
song. They had both been impressed.
    "Build?" St. John asked.
    " Strong. He was very strong."
    "Hair?"
    Munch looked over at the open lube bay If she didn't
soon claim the bay Stephano would tie it up for another hour.
"Reddish, like, not a carrot top, lighter. Blondish."
    " Beard? Mustache?"
    "When I knew him he wore a full beard, covered
his neck." She turned so that her feet were pointing toward her
toolbox.
    "Eyes?" St. John turned the page.
    " You mean the color?"
    He looked up at her, his pen marking his place.
    " Yeah, listen, I only have the rest of my life
here. You think you could step it up? You know what I want."
    "You want to find him, see if he had anything to
do with Jane's death."
    " That's right"
    " I really don't—"
    "Why would you want to protect any of these
assholes?"
    "It's not that."
    " What then? Are you worried this is going to
come back to you? You want to be an anonymous source?"
    She looked past his shoulder, feeling the increasing
gap between them. She didn't want to be a source at all. Anonymity
wasn't the issue. She knew how this worked. They could start pulling
on some of those threads from the past, and the next thing she knew,
her whole life could unravel.
    " I have another question I'd like answered,"
he said. "The autopsy showed that Jane never gave birth. Why
would Jane Ferrar be clutching a doll?" He paused.
    "I don't know." She remembered how Jane
sometimes sucked her thumb, and tried not to picture her dead.
    " I'd really like to find out where she spent her
last days."
    "And who killed her," Munch added.
    "Yeah, especially that. We haven't been able to
get any kind of line on Jane's whereabouts prior to her murder. She
didn't have a current driver's license, hadn't applied for any
government aid, didn't have any utility bills or a listed phone
number. Her last known public activity was an arrest five years ago
for shoplifting?
    " What was she stealing?"
    St. John flipped backward in his notebook. "A
stuffed animal, an Easter bunny"
    Munch said to herself the most dangerous phrase in
the English language—the short version of the Serenity Prayer: Fuck
it. She looked St. John full in the face.
    "Thor had brown eyes. Ten years ago he drove a
Ford pickup. Sixty-two or sixty-three. Brown, stick shift, six
cylinder." He also owned a big black boat of a Chrysler New
Yorker, but that car was long gone, so she didn't mention it.
    "He had some felony beef in Pennsylvania, I
don't know what it was, but knowing Thor, it was for hurting someone.
He's one of the scariest guys I've ever known. Unpredictable,
violent, and smarter than you would think. His last name might have
been Mc-something. He did a short stretch at Chino about twelve years
ago. I'm sure he's been back since. If not there, then some other
joint."
    " How about identifying marks?"
    "Oh yeah," Munch said, "he had a few
of those."
    She told him almost everything she