Virgin Heat(36)

"Gimme one more month," McCullough said.

Links rocked forward. The chair complained. "Two weeks," he wearily pronounced.

"Two weeks is like nothing," said McCullough.

His boss's eyes had moved to other papers on his desk. "Two weeks of careful, conservative, well- documented work. You got that?"

"Conservative," McCullough said. "Well-documented. Got it." He wheeled out of the cube with two more weeks to run his show exactly as he pleased.





21


It was much too early when the phone rang at Ziggy's bungalow.

With the boundless resentment of the tired, he freed a hairy arm from underneath a sweaty sheet, grabbed at the receiver and said a gruff hello that was muffled by the pillow meant to shade his eyes.

The caller was an associate of Carmen Salazar's. Ziggy was wanted in the garden, right away.

He cursed, rolled out of bed, threw himself under a lukewarm shower. He drank a cup of yesterday's reheated coffee that tasted of aluminum and dust, then started up his rumbling old car and drove toward the bogus candy store.

The car shook his brain, the ruined springs of the driver's seat jostled his bowels, and his mood got only viler as he went. Grogginess lifted, gradually and incompletely, but what replaced it was an edgy residue of stifled lust. Angelina had offered herself to him. Lips parted. Moonlight reaching down her blouse. Why the hell had he resisted, retreating on the crunching beach instead of going forward to press against her, answering readiness with readiness? He wanted to imagine it was gallantry, and maybe it was in part—the barren chivalry of a man who keeps his pants zipped because he knows that once the sex has passed he has nothing much to offer. But if it was gallantry, didn't he deserve to feel better?

He parked, climbed the single cracked step, entered the dimness of the store. The fat guy who always sat behind the counter was sitting there again, airing out his armpits by the filthy fan.

Ziggy walked through to the back, saw Salazar perched in his lawn chair, and the first thing Salazar said to him, said it even before Ziggy had come around to face him, was, "You disappointed me the other day. You let me down."

Ziggy did not deal so well with criticism in the best of times, and this morning was anything but. Sullenly he said, "I don't need to hear that, Carmen. You fuckin' get me out of bed to tell me that?"

"Those men who were here," Salazar continued mildly, "they're important men. Men of the world. The kind of men you've led me to believe you've dealt with in the past."

Ziggy shuffled his feet. His skin itched; his loins felt irritable and heavy, the tug of them was giving him a belly ache. He said, "So Carmen, what's your fuckin' point?"

"I thought you'd pay closer attention."

Ziggy said nothing, sulked. He felt last night's sand in his shoes. It was pissing him off that he was standing up and Salazar was sitting down.

Salazar said, "Didn't it occur to you to wonder why I asked you to that meeting? I do things for reasons, Ziggy. I think you know me well enough by now to realize that."

Ziggy looked at his feet. He should have remembered, but did not in that moment recall, that last time things went sour for him, it was sometimes his attention that faltered, other times his tact. He said, "Jeez, Carmen, I thought you invited me so I could stand in the sun while you sat in the shade and played boss."

Salazar drummed neat fingers on the arm of his lawn chair. His mouth got curvy in what was half a smirk and half a frown. He was not a nice person but he tried to be fair to his men; he tried not to place them in undue jeopardy if they could be just as useful to him doing something else. Salazar had noticed a subtly unnatural waxiness in the flesh at Ziggy's hairline. Ziggy had led him to believe he was not a stranger to mobsters from New York. If the big talker had more than the usual reasons to be wary of the Mafia, Salazar thought he should be given the chance to excuse himself. But if that chance was offered, and if all Salazar got in return was obtuseness, surliness, ingratitude ....

Ziggy passed the silence by plucking at his moistening shirt, and wondering how it would have been if he'd met Angelina's waiting mouth, if his fingertips had followed the moonlight down between her breasts. Much too late, he said, "S'okay Carmen, why'd y'ask me to that meeting?"

But Salazar's brief spasm of concern had passed. He was annoyed now, his reply was crisp and neutral. "We'll be doing business with those men," he said. "You'll be working with them closely. I thought it would be good if you got to know their faces."

At this Ziggy pouted, pawed the ground, bitterly mourned his interrupted sleep.

Carmen added, the mordancy unnoticed, "And if they had a chance to look at yours."