I looked at her. “Yeah.”
We crossed into St. Petersburg and I said, “Name some Dylan songs.”
She glanced at the map on my lap. “‘Highway Sixty One Revisited.’”
“Nope.”
“‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.’”
I grimaced at her.
“What?” She scowled. “Okay. Positively Fourth Street.”
I looked down at the map. “You’re a wonder,” I said.
She held up an imaginary tape recorder. “Could you say that into the mike, please?”
Fourth Street in St. Petersburg ran from one end of the city to the other. At least twenty miles. With a lot of lockers in between.
But only one Greyhound station.
We pulled in the parking lot and Angie sat in the car while I went inside, found locker twelve, and dialed the combination on the lock. It popped open on the first try and I pulled out a leather gym bag. I hefted it, but it wasn’t terribly heavy. It could have been filled with clothes for all I knew, and I decided to wait until I was back in the car before I checked. I closed the locker and walked back out of the terminal, got in the car.
Angie pulled onto Fourth Street and we drove through what appeared to be a slum, lots of people lounging on the porches in the heat, waving at flies, kids huddled in groups along the corners, half the streetlights knocked out.
I placed the bag on my lap and unzipped it. I stared inside for a full minute.
“Drive a little faster,” I said to Angie.
“Why?”
I showed her the contents of the bag. “Because there’s at least two hundred thousand dollars in here.”
She stepped on the gas.
19
“Jesus, Angie,” Jay said, “last time I saw you, you looked like Chrissie Hynde taking fashion tips from Morticia Addams, and now you look like an island girl.”
The jail clerk slid a form over the counter to Jay.
Angie said, “You always knew how to smooth-talk a girl.”
Jay signed the form and handed it back. “No shit, though? I didn’t know a white woman’s skin could get that dark.”
The clerk said, “Your personal effects,” and emptied a manila envelope onto the counter.
“Careful,” Jay said as his watch bounced on the counter. “That’s a Piaget.”
The clerk snorted. “One watch. Pi-a-jay. One money clip, gold. Six hundred seventy-five dollars cash. One key chain. Thirty-eight cents in coins…”
As the clerk checked off each of the remaining items and slid them across to Jay, Jay leaned against the wall and yawned. His eyes skipped from Angie’s face to her legs, rose back up over her cutoff jeans and ripped sweatshirt with the sleeves shorn off at the elbows.
She said, “Would you like me to pivot so you could ogle the back?”
He shrugged. “Been in prison, ma’am, you’ll have to excuse me.”
She shook her head and looked at the floor, hid her smile in the hair that fell around her face.
It was odd to watch them occupy similar space, knowing what I did now about their past together. Jay always wore a certain wolfish look around beautiful women, but rather than take offense, most women found it innocuous and a bit charming if only because Jay was so blatant and boyish about it. But there was more to the look tonight. Jay’s face held a melancholia I’d never seen before, an aura of bone-deep fatigue and resignation as he glanced at my partner.
She seemed to notice it, too, and a curious curl formed in her lips.
“You okay?” she said.
Jay pushed himself off the wall. “Me? Fine.”
“Mr. Merriam,” the clerk said to Jay’s bail bondsman, “you’ll have to cosign here and here.”
Mr. Merriam was a middle-aged man in an off-white three-piece suit who tried to give off the air of the genteel southern gentleman, even though I picked up traces of New Jersey in his accent.
“Be mah pleasure,” he said, and Jay rolled his eyes. They signed the papers and Jay scooped up the last of his rings and his wrinkled silk tie, placed the rings in his pocket and the tie loosely under the collar of his white shirt.
We walked out of the station and stood in the parking lot to wait for a cop to bring Jay’s car around front.
“They let you drive here?” Angie said.
Jay sucked the wet night air into his nostrils. “They’re very courteous down these parts. After they questioned me at the motel, this old cop with a real polite way about him asked me if I’d mind following him down to the station for a few questions. He even said, ‘If ya’ll got the time, we sure would ’preciate it, yes sir,’ but he wasn’t really asking if you know what I mean.”
Merriam stuck a card in Jay’s hand. “Sir, if you ever require mah services again, why it would—”
“Sure.” Jay snapped the card from his hand and looked off at the soft blue circles that pulsed around the yellow streetlights fringing the parking lot.
Merriam shook my hand, then Angie’s, then walked with the stilted steps of the constipated or the practicing drunk to his Karmann Ghia convertible with the dented passenger door. The car stalled once on its way out of the parking lot, and Mr. Merriam kept his head down as if mortified before he got it going again and pulled out onto the main road.
Jay said, “If you guys hadn’t shown up, I would have had to send that guy to the Greyhound station. You believe it?”
“If you jump bail,” Angie said, “won’t that poor guy get ruined financially?”
He lit a cigarette, looked down at her. “Don’t worry, Ange, I got everything figured out.”
“That’s why we’re bailing you out of jail, Jay.”
He looked at her, then at me, and laughed. It was a short, hard sound, more bark than anything. “Jesus, Patrick, she give you this much shit on a regular basis?”
“You’re looking rough, Jay. Bad as I’ve ever seen you.”
He stretched his arms out, cracked the muscles between his shoulder blades. “Yeah, well, I get me a shower and a good night’s sleep, I’ll be good as new.”
“We have to go somewhere and talk first,” I said.
He nodded. “You didn’t come fourteen hundred miles just to work on your tans, marvelous as they are. And they are marvelous.” He turned and looked at Angie’s body openly, his eyebrows raised. “I mean, my God, Ange, I gotta tell you again, your skin, I mean, it’s the color of a coffee-regular at Dunkin’ Donuts for Chris-sakes. Makes me want to—”