Bad News

Which was too bad, because nothing else happened until Thursday.

Two-something in the afternoon, it was, when the knock sounded at the motor home door. Little Feather was reduced by then to watching daytime talk shows, hating herself for it, remembering with new nostalgia the good old days in Nevada, dealing blackjack in cheap joints, fending off cheap drunks, driving around in her own little blue Neon; sold, when she’d moved east.

The estranged couple on this particular program had not quite come to blows yet when the knock sounded at the door, and Little Feather, with some embarrassment, realized she wanted to stay seated here in front of the television set; she wanted to see what would happen next in those people’s lives, rather than respond to something happening in her own. “I gotta get out of this,” she muttered to herself, offed the set with an angry gesture, and hurried over to open the door.

Andy. And with him a woman, late thirties, attractive without fussing over it, bundled up in a fox fur coat, gri

“What say, Little Feather,” Andy greeted her. “I’d like you to meet A

“Hi,” A

“I haven’t heard a thing about you,” Little Feather said, thinking, this is why I never picked up any vibes from Andy. “Come in,” she invited, “and tell me all about yourself.”

“Thanks, we will.”

They came in and went through the process of uncoating and accepting an offer of coffee and generally settling in, so it was a good five minutes before they sat together in the living room and Little Feather said, “Okay, Andy, what’s happening?”

“Beats me,” Andy said. “I come north to find out what’s doing with the DNA. In fact, we called Gregory and Tom, you know, over at the Tea Cosy, and turned out they had a cancellation, some guy already broke his leg at some other fun spot, so A

“But don’t ski,” Little Feather suggested.

“I skied in my teens,” A

Little Feather nodded. “I’m pretty good at après-ski myself,” she said. “And with Andy talking DNA in front of you, I take it that means you’re in the loop on this thing.”

“Well, sure,” Andy said. “Pillow talk, you know.”

A

“It’s a whadayacallit,” Andy explained.

Little Feather said, “What I really want to know is, how are things with Fitzroy and Irwin?”

“Well, they had to leave,” Andy told her.

Little Feather had suspected that. “Permanently?”

“Oh, yeah, they won’t—” Then Andy shook his head, and said, “Not like that. You know, there’s permanent and there’s permanent.”

“Yes.”

“Well,” Andy said, “they are permanently retired from this particular little operation here, because they’ve got a lot of stuff to take care of out west all of a sudden, so that’s where they went.”

“They’re out west,” Little Feather echoed.

“On their way,” Andy said. “So how you doing here?”

“I’ve got cabin fever,” Little Feather said, “and I’m going nuts, and nothing is happening, and it won’t be until next week sometime that the DNA comes back, and I’m stuck here. I’ve been leaving messages over at the Four Winds, because I didn’t know what was going on, and I hope you don’t think I was in on anything with those guys.”

“Little Feather,” Andy said, “we all understand that you were a helpless pawn in the hands of those guys, and we know you’re go

“Helpless pawn” hadn’t exactly been the self-image Little Feather had been hoping to project, but what the hell; leave it alone. She said, “Thank you, Andy, I’m already glad.”

Andy said, “We thought we’d find a nice restaurant tonight, one of those on the slopes, where you can sit there and dine at your leisure and watch the skiers fall down the mountain. You wa

“I’d love to,” Little Feather said.

“Great.” Getting to his feet, Andy said, “We’ll pick you up at seven.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

At the door, A

Meaning, Little Feather knew, don’t you dare look crosseyed at my man. “Chums it is,” she reassured A

47

Ah, but what of Fitzroy Guilderpost and Irwin Gabel?

Well, in the first place, by the time they arrived in San Francisco and Portland, respectively, they were both extremely hungry. And messy as well, unfortunately. Both had tried to attract attention by shouting a lot every time their transportation had paused on the journeys across the continent, but raincoats and Nerf balls had muffled their cries, so it wasn’t until their respective semis were unloaded that they were discovered and, er, rescued.

In Fitzroy’s case, rescue initially took the form of arrest, since he gave every indication of being an escaped convict. Fearing the effects of Irwin’s tapes, damn his sniveling eyes, Fitzroy had been reluctant to divulge his true identity, but when the officials of Central Hudson Correctional Institution in Swell Haven, New York, faxed a response to the police of San Francisco that they were missing none of their inmates at the moment, Fitzroy had no choice but to submit to fingerprinting and to reveal his true identity to all questioners.

Whereupon it turned out the tapes had not surfaced, but a few California state warrants did surface, referring to scams and other outrages he’d performed in the Golden State some years ago (which had caused him to relocate eastward in the first place), warrants that had not at all stale-dated. Bail was not granted, conviction was slow but certain, and off Fitzroy went to a small but sometimes su

As for Irwin, he had not, in fact, given those tapes for safekeeping to a trusted friend, for the simple reason that Irwin had no trusted friends. In his original concept, he would have hidden the tapes until it was time to threaten Fitzroy with them. Once Fitzroy had become aware prematurely of the tapes’ existence, that fact had seemed sufficient to Irwin to assure his own future in the partnership. Now, the partnership was finished, and so very nearly was Irwin. Fitzroy and the tapes had forever lost their urgency in his mind.

Having been plucked from the raincoats, hosed down, and temporarily hospitalized, Irwin at last got to tell the story he’d concocted during all those idle hours in Missouri and Nebraska and so on, that he had been kidnapped from a Greyhound bus at that rest area on the New York State Thurway by the friends of a jealous husband. No, he didn’t want to press charges, nor even mention the husband’s name, to spare the lady embarrassment. All he wanted was to eat a lot, and then be released from the hospital.

When all of that had transpired, Irwin arranged to have his luggage and other scant possessions forwarded from the residential hotel in which he’d been living in New York to the residential hotel into which he’d moved in Portland, having absolutely no desire to confront Tiny and Andy and John ever again; who knew what they’d think up to do next?

Instead, using dubious but passable credentials from his recently arrived luggage, he got himself a job as a chemistry teacher in a suburban high school, and if he hadn’t subsequently been discovered in the backseat of that car in the school parking lot with that fifteen-year-old girl student, he would no doubt be there still.