“I, uh …” I ran out of words.

  “I think you’re going to say, ‘I’m ready to cut the crap.’ ”

  What could I say? “I’m ready to cut the crap.”

  “Yeah, you are.” He extended a beefy hand, one silver ring on his pinkie. “Honey Moon,” he said.

  “Honey Moon?” I said. “Really?”

  “Radar Hoverlander?” he said. “Really?”

  And just like that, we were friends.

  12

  A Cup of Ex-wife

  We convoyed just across the Arizona line to a truck stop in Lupton called Speedy’s, where we stopped for a coffee and a confab. I had one eye on the clock, for Vegas was still seven hours down the road and I knew I’d need some sleep along the way. But what I needed more, obviously, was Honey Moon’s data dump. He’d gone to some lengths to make himself available to me—to let me discover him, that is—and I had to know why. Fortunately, he didn’t play hard to get with me.

  Nor with the perky waitress. When she asked him how he liked his coffee, he winked and said, “Like my ex-wife: hot and bitter.” She rewarded him with a smile and a wiggly retreat. “Mm-mm,” he murmured, admiring her walkaway ass, “like two puppies in a pillowcase.” His voice was smooth and creamy, with Southern roots and Midwest overtones, and he pitched it just soft enough that he seemed not to be addressing her, yet loud enough that she might hear. And that’s how you deliver a lewd compliment without being offensive. I knew he was ghosting that waitress, getting inside her mind and motivation. Day in and day out, no doubt, she gets groped and grab-assed by every horny trucker within armshot. Annoying? Hell, yeah. But validating, too; the kind of validation that brightens a dead-end day. Honey’s approach gift-wrapped all that approval and tied it with a bow of respect. Not run-of-the-mill. Not in her line of work. Some call this charm, but with grifters it’s supercharged charm, because it goes deep into the mark’s mentality, discerns what she wants and gives it to her. For some it would be the difference between getting slapped and getting laid, but I got the feeling that it was just Honey Moon’s standard practice to enchant anyone who crossed his path, because the enchanted are more likely to become allies … or marks. I wondered which I was intended to be. “So why were you following me?” I asked.

  “Who said I was?”

  “You did, when you said my name.”

  “Now come on, I could—”

  I cut him off. “I know: You could have recognized me from my picture in the paper and just wanted to shake a hero’s hand. But you didn’t. We were in Santa Fe, then we were at that rest stop, now we’re here. So, what’s that phrase you used?”

  Honey smiled, showing teeth stained brown from too much coffee and too many clove cigarettes. “The one about cutting the crap?”

  “That’s the one,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Crap cut. Your daddy asked me to keep an eye on you.”

  “See I get to Vegas on time?”

  “See you get there at all.” The way he said this sent a shiver down my spine. I’d been so focused on the danger to Woody—trying to determine what level of fabricat it was—that I’d basically looked off the possibility of risk to me. But it stood to reason: If Woody was in real jeopardy (granted, an as yet unsubstantiated if), then so might be his succors, i.e., me. This cast Mr. Honey Moon in a different sort of light.

  “You’re my guardian angel?” I asked. “Is that what you’re selling?”

  “Not selling anything, amigo. Woody Hoverlander asks a favor, I say yes, and that’s from way back. How you deal with it is all on you.”

  The waitress returned with our coffee. She glanced at Honey and found him making eye contact with her. He communicated much with his look. Another dose of approval, sure, but also a depth of understanding for her lot in life. I saw it pass between them: his blanket acceptance of everything she was and everything she did. I now got that the earlier lewd compliment had just been his way of speaking to her in a lingua franca. His real message was here in his silent look, his intelligent eyes, and his not-half-trying smile. He seemed beatific in this moment, almost religious, and it had an effect. The waitress, surely no giggly girl, giggled girlishly, and withdrew in a fluster, fully seduced by his acceptance.

  “You made her feel good,” I said.

  “Everybody’s on their own road, Radar. And every road is hard. No need to strew nails.” It occurred to me that this resonant philosophy may have been Honey’s means of schmoozing me. But it didn’t feel like schmooze. It felt like belief.

  I sipped my coffee. It was, according to specs, hot and bitter. I wondered if I’d forever think of bad coffee as a cup of ex-wife. “So, Guardian Angel,” I said, returning to the subject at hand, “what kind of danger am I in?”

  “I wonder what I could tell you,” Honey drawled, “that you’d believe. Your daddy says you’re not a credulous man.”

  “My father doesn’t know me,” I said, with rather more bristle than I’d intended.

  Honey eyed me thoughtfully. “Maybe not,” he said. “But I suspect you don’t know him all that well, either. I know him well. We’ve run more games together than you can count. And ever since I met him, he’s the one man on God’s green earth I trust with everything. So let’s start with that and see where we get from there, hmm? I’ll tell you my tale, and you decide if it’s the truth.”

  “There is no truth,” I said, “only consistent narrative.”

  Honey smiled. “That there sounds like something Woody would say.”

  It probably was. That’s probably where I got it.

  They met in a pool hall, as grifters will, though by that late date, the early 1990s, pool-hall culture was a relic, a shadow of its former self. You could still find a game, even rustle up a hustle, but the big money had disappeared. Neither one of them could quite figure out where the big money had gone. They’d both enjoyed reasonably successful runs through the Reagan years, for deregulation had blown the lid off interest rates, and money market funds had boomed. Putting a Ponzi tap on that vein required little more than some Mayflower names on Letraset letterhead and a quarter-page ad in a metropolitan daily. But Woody and Honey had their vices, and by the time Reagan’s trickle-down detumesced into recession, they were down at their respective heels, reduced to a sad handful of short cons and the dwindling opportunity of pool-hall plucks.

  “Tried to hustle each other,” said Honey. “Believe that? Sandbagged our asses off and were both so good at playing bad that we got ten games deep before we cottoned. So we racked our cues, sat down, got acquainted. Been partners of many sorts ever since.”

  “And these vices you mentioned?”

  “Mine was the powder,” said Honey, “of course.” He shook his head in mournful memory. “Damn, I must’ve sucked six Cadillacs up my nose before I got wise. Your daddy helped me with that. Kept calling me stupid, and wouldn’t take ‘I know’ for an answer. One of the reasons I owe him.”

  “And his?”

  “Oh, gambling, for sure. You must know that.” But I didn’t, and the fact that I didn’t struck me with sudden worry. I quickly combed my earliest memories for any resonance of card-room trips or track runs but came up empty. Which meant that Woody’d been more than usually adept at hiding his habit from his near and dear, and if you think it’s a piece of cake to pull this off, it’s not. Just ask the pothead papa who only ever sparks up in the garage. His kids know. They don’t know what they know, but they know. Now Honey claims that my dad was disastrously hooked on outcome, but it’s news to me, and if I can’t backpredict any evidence of it, then that’s a hole in Honey’s tale.

  Check again, Radar. Your recollections are rusty. They’ll take some prying loose.

  I let my mind slide back to that narrow span of years before Woody got gone. Was there anything? A kitchen table poker game? Church bingo? Powerball tickets? Even scratchers? Nope, nothing. It struck me as strange—an inconsistent narrative—that someone like Woody, who based his life and business model on high-risk, high-reward exploits, should be so devoid of the gamble. No, not devoid. Cleansed. I continued to plumb my past. For practical reasons, I wanted to find something, anything, that validated Honey’s claim. Why? Simple. If Honey’s on the straight, then he’s an ally or at least a resource. Otherwise, he’s a problem, and I already have enough of …

  Wait, problem: There it is. An argument, heard through walls, between my parents late one night. “You have a problem!” says my mom. Woody’s saying no, and she’s firing back with the fierce rhetorical, “Then what’s in the medicine bag?!” What indeed? And at the next opportunity, curious young me checks out the beat-up doctor’s satchel Dad keeps on a high closet shelf. Does Woody play doctor? I wouldn’t put it past him, but there’s no medicine here, just random plastic circles of various colors and kinds.

  Chips, I now realize. Chips from all different casinos. Plus dice and cards, cash, and pieces of paper that must’ve been betting slips. Did I repress this memory, or just consider it unimportant? It’s sure as hell important now.

  I fixed Honey with a narrow stare. I didn’t have to tell him that I’d searched the historical record and found evidence to back his claim. I assumed he could read it in my face. So I skipped to the salient question, “What’s he doing in Vegas if he has a gambling problem?”

  “Had,” said Honey with sudden vehemence. “He got over it. I helped him, like he helped me.” Honey spread his beefy hands. “Radar, I’ve rolled with your daddy off and on for twenty years. Slept in the same fleabag motels. Slept with the same gals more than once. You gotta believe me, when he quit, he quit, with not so much as a coin flip since. Now I know what you’re thinking: that he took Wolfredian’s money and pissed it away in a sports book or such. But that’s not what this is about, and if you got any capacity to believe, you gotta put it in that. Otherwise …”

  “Otherwise what?”

  Honey shrugged his shoulders. “Otherwise you can’t save his life.”

  Confirmation, class? Coming from a con man, it could be anything from gospel to overstatement to outright lie. In any case, there’s no way I’d rise to such obvious bait, so instead I drew him back to the narrative, still testing its consistency. “How did you roll?” I asked. “You two, all those years. And I’m not really concerned about the gals.”

  Honey chuckled. “Squeamish, chico? Your pop’s a very robust man.” But he let it go. “We went to Germany,” he said. “Berlin.”

  “Berlin?”

  “I’d served in the Army there in the seventies.”

  “What, Checkpoint Charlie?”

  “In fact, yeah. But that was then. Now it’s ’92, and the Wall’s down. Know what that makes East Berlin?” I shook my head. “The last urban virgin in Western Europe.”

  “Hence, a Liebfrau land rush.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “What did you do, flip real estate?”

  Again Honey laughed. “Nah, man, that’s too much work. We opened a local branch of the United States Redevelopment Fund.”

  “Not sure I ever heard of that.”

  “Well, it didn’t last long.” Or exist, of course, outside their imaginings. “We made friends with big developers, guys who held property options on all these old factories and apartment blocks in East Berlin. Then, when word got out that the USRF wanted to invest—”

  “Everyone wanted a piece of what your friends had.”

  “Prices spiked, our friends made a killing, we got our cut.”

  “Old trick,” I said.

  “Old to us. New to them.”

  I was reminded of what Mirplo had said earlier about being a page ahead in the textbook. “So you were one-eyed men in the kingdom of the blind.”

  “Right on.”

  “And your joneses?”

  “We put ’em away. Europe was good for our heads.”

  “Why didn’t you stay?”

  “Why don’t our kind ever stay anywhere?” Honey’s face went wistful at the memory. “But those were good times, though. We were about your age, a little older.” He looked me over as if appraising me for the first time. “You know your youth won’t last forever, right?” I nodded. “But they don’t tell you how hard shit gets. You don’t lose your competence. Hell, you gain competence. I’m ten times the grifter I was back then. But everything takes more effort.” He stretched his arms over his head, cracking the knuckles of his intertwined fingers. “And you hurt more. But whatever.”

  “So you skated the ocean.”

  “Uh-huh. Back home to America. And find that shit’s changed. Now there’s computers everywhere, Internet, you don’t work in a vacuum anymore. Folks get warned. Folks get wary. I don’t guess you give this too much thought, Radar. Having grown up with it, you know how to game it. For old farts like me and your pop, it was a tough transition.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Tried to go legit, become movie producers. Man, that was a money pit. I tell you what, you want to see a real con artist, lift any rock in Hollywood.”

  “So you didn’t make any movies?”

  “Oh, we made ’em. Just couldn’t make ’em pay. Studio accounting, see.”

  “You almost sound affronted.”

  “Nah. No one to blame but ourselves. We were blind men in a kingdom of one-eyed snakes.”

  “And after?”

  “You know, little this, little that. Eventually we drifted apart. I dabbled in credit card fraud, then went over to the other side and worked in security consulting.”

  “How to close the barn door behind the cow?”

  “Something like that, yeah. Now I’m retired. Semi.”

  “Semi?”

  “I live in Phoenix. Great weather. Couple hundred golf courses. You’d be surprised how many mooks there think a drunk can’t putt.”

  “I’d be surprised if you were drunk.”

  I sketched a mental picture of Honey running the Wooden Leg hustle up and down municipal links, flamboyantly faux-Irishing his coffee and doubling bets on the back nine. I suppose you could supplement your income with that. Plus, it keeps a man in trim.

  Honey set down his coffee mug and measured me with his eyes. “Trying to run the car trouble con past me,” he said. “I ought to be insulted. But I like you, Radar. I knew I would, from what your old man had to say. I expect you’ll come to like me, too. We’re kindred spirits. But your daddy, now, your dad I love. It’ll sound too dramatic if I say he saved my life, but he did. We’re closer than brothers. I’d do anything for him.”

  “Then call this woman,” I said, writing down Allie’s digits on a paper napkin. “Tell her what you told me. If she buys it, we’ll meet in the morning in”—I consulted my mental map of Arizona—“Kingman. If not, vaya con Dios, okay?”

  “Where in Kingman?”

  “The Dairy Queen,” I said. “It’s right off the highway.” Which I knew from having once worked Route 66 as a certifier of historical landmarks.*

  “I’d rather we traveled together.”

  “I know: You’re concerned about my safety.”

  “That’s right. It’s—”

  I held up my hand. “Look, if Woody’s jammed up like you say he is, then I’m his out, right?” I didn’t wait for a response. “And what good is a dead out? Therefore, I think you’re overdilling the pickle I’m in.” Again he started to speak and again I cut him off. “I don’t hold it against you. You don’t know me. I could be a total flake. It never hurts to put the fear on the mark. If I were who you say you are to Woody, I’d do the same thing.”

  Honey nodded acknowledgment. He tapped the napkin with a beefy finger. “This your girlfriend?” I nodded. “You trust her judgment?”

  “More than I trust mine, sometimes.”

  “You’re lucky,” said Honey. “Having someone like that. I’ve had a lot of gifts in my life, but that’s one I’ve missed.” He pocketed the paper. “Dairy Queen,” he said, then pointed across to the cashier’s counter and a prominently placed rack of Swoop ’n’ Pummel Energy Blast. “You need one for the road?”

  “No thanks.” My coffee had reached room temperature, and I drained it at a gulp. “I take my stimulants like my guardian angels,” I said. “Cool and black.” Honey took this for the compliment I intended it to be. We shook hands. I hit the road.

  Half an hour later, my phone rang. I tapped my Bluetooth to answer.

  “It’s me,” said Allie. “What do you think?”

  “Frankly,” she said, “I can’t tell if he’s a funnel or a shield. But he loves your old man.”

  “Yeah, I got that, too. So do I let him roll with?”

  “Not my call.”

  “If it were?”

  She took a breath, then answered, “I would.”

  “Was I wrong to have him call you?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It kind of makes you part of this.”

  “I am part of this. The anchor part.”

  Our conversation turned to other subjects. The stunning monotony of desert radio. How Boy cornered a lizard in the kitchen. Mirplo’s flying lessons. Then we had phone sex. Thank God for Bluetooth, or I’d have run out of hands.

  *Officially licensed. The things people believe.

  13

  I Come for the Sushi

  I slept in a used-car lot in Kingman, a trick of vagabondage I learned long ago. Many places—streets, rest stops, motel parking lots—if you camp in your car, you’re asking for trouble, either from police or from smash-and-grab knuckleheads. In a used-car lot, though, you’re hiding in plain sight, safe as kittens till the business day begins. Choose, as I did, an eastern exposure, and you have a big yellow alarm clock set to shine in your eyes at sunup.

  Fueled by bad convenience store coffee (a jumbo ex-wife with cream), I drove toward the Dairy Queen, which I recalled to be on Stockton Hill Road, just south of the freeway.

  It wasn’t there.

  It looked like it hadn’t been there in quite some time. Though a sand-scoured DQ stanchion still stood at the corner of the lot, the rest of the signage had been replaced by emblazonments for Arturo’s Fish Tacos. But Arturo was gone, too, and the windows were all boarded up. Another victim of the failed economy; in tough times, fish tacos are the first to go.