Nine
At ten minutes past 2:00 a.m., Frank Luck leaned his aching back against his Ford’s tailgate. He sighed, and slowly peed an evening’s worth of Coors Banquet into the weeds that bordered the parking lot. He limited his drinking to Saturday night dinners in Avon, partly because he didn’t tolerate alcohol as well as he used to, and partly because he didn’t tolerate what Avon had become since 1980, when he was twenty-two and peed like a racehorse.
Even in 1980, Avon had been less a ranchers’ town than a bedroom community for maids, and busboys, and ski waxers, who worked the resorts up the interstate in Vail. But these days the tourists flooded up and over the Divide in greater numbers, even in summer. So, Avon had remade itself to their liking. Today Avon’s bars served more craft ale than Coors and called themselves gastropubs.
But whatever Avon’s bars called themselves, and their beer, they still closed at 2:00 a.m.
Frank zipped up his Levi’s, then retrieved the six pack of Coors from the cooler in his pickup’s bed box. Then he set off walking, to share a couple of them with someone else who understood that the difference between craft ale and Coors was only the price of the resulting urine.
* * *
Frank pushed open the unlocked glass front door, then crept into Bristlecone Senior Apartments’ dim-lit lobby, past the worn plastic-covered couches and unattended reception desk, to the stairwell.
He tugged the dented fire door open, then climbed the stairs toward the room of Rosaria Martinez, his best friend’s widow. The rusty steel stair treads creaked and the bulb in the stairwell’s first-floor light remained burned out, as it had been for months. As old folks’ homes went Bristlecone was no gastropub.
By the time he paused at the landing he was puffing. He pushed the stairwell door open a crack then peered down the barely lit corridor.
Frank wondered whether the people who came to places like this, to grow older and die, got used to the smell. Or whether it was the smell that killed them.
The corridor was empty, and snores and coughs leaked through the closed doors of the room-plus-bath apartments. He counted to the fourth door on the right, across from the corridor’s linen closet. He stopped alongside a linen cart parked outside the closet door and cocked his head.
Rosie’s door was ajar and her room’s lights out. Normally she left it wide open, and waited up for him with the lights on.
From the dark a woman coughed. As he pushed the door open she wheezed, and rattled out a fit of coughs.
Finally she rasped a whisper, “Three blind mice.”
“What? Rosie, you sound awful.”
“Three blind mice!”
He stepped through the door, toward the bed in which she lay. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed a flash of motion.
Frank stiffened and turned.
A man stood, silent and silhouetted against the faint light. Frank realized he had been standing in the room, behind the door.
Frank pointed at the guy with his free hand. “You people need to take better care—”
The man lunged at Frank, his right hand thrusting, and a blade that he held glinted in the light.
Frank swung the six pack, clobbered the son of a bitch on his temple, and heard him blurt out a curse.
But the man just staggered sideways a step, recovered, and lunged with the knife again.
Frank jumped back, and the blade missed his gut by inches. He retreated into the corridor, swung the linen cart between himself and the man as the guy pursued him.
Frank Luck had won his share of bar fights. In recent years, his win percentage had dropped. He had two inches and forty pounds on this guy, but he was half Frank’s age. It was summer, but he wore an oversized parka. Its sleeves were pushed up, and his bare forearms were muscular, like a jockey’s. His skin was brown, and his eyes gleamed, black and unblinking, like a timber rattler’s.
Frank carried a folding knife in his jeans pocket. But knife fighting with someone who seemed to know how to use one would be stupider than playing pool with a man who walked into the bar with his own cue.
The man circled Frank, eyes on the six pack that was Frank’s only weapon.
Frank had heard Mexicans curse all his life. He had heard Arabs curse on the nightly news often enough. Snake Eyes, here, was as Mexican as falafel.
Frank shoved the linen cart at his opponent.
Snake Eyes stepped out of its path like a matador, smiling. But his long jacket caught on the cart’s handle, as it rolled past. Something clattered from his pocket to the floor.
Eyes on Frank, Snake Eyes inched forward. With a toe he swept the flat metal object out of his path, and under the linen cart.
Frank heard distant footsteps, then flicked his eyes away from his adversary, toward the sound.
Snake Eyes seized the moment and spun.
His left foot slashed up and caught Frank flush on the point of his jaw. White light flashed behind Frank’s eyes, then faded to blackness.