Read Angels in Heaven for Free Online

out of town and staying out. Don’t get me wrong. I love Davenport and I always will. I go back every chance I get, like every centennial of the
town’s founding.
    Somehow it came to pass that we both
in our own ways did manage to get out of town, although in my case I didn’t
have a lot of choice. I was sent down south to a farm for bad boys outside Springfield, while Billy miraculously made it to state college. Hell, in those days it was
a big deal even to finish high school without getting thrown out or knocked up.
And Billy got through college too, graduating in something like bus. admin.,
and then he went to a couple of places I forget and then to New York, while I
went to a couple of places I’d like to forget and then, finally, out to the
West Coast.
    We kept in touch for a while and
actually contrived to meet once, in Chicago, but the rest was silence, like the
Sphinx, I think it was, said. Mom wrote Mrs. Baker once in a while and still
exchanged Christmas cards with her, so I guess that’s how Billy knew that Tony
joined the cops after he came out of the army. Why Billy hadn’t written to his
mom and asked her to forward the letter to me was another question. Perhaps he
didn’t want her to know he was in Mexico, let alone serving as rat food in a
high-security slammer there.
    All of which led, of course, to a
further question: could Running Deer, once the strongest and bravest of all the
Apache, ignore the cunning, master tracker Gray Wolfs cry for help? Not while
the wind still whistled through the sycamores, he couldn’t. It would
unfortunately mean I would have to postpone calling up Mel, dazzling the prez,
losing my soul, signing my life away, and buying a decent suit, but had Running
Deer spoke with forked tongue that afternoon in the shack after school? Forget
it, redskin brother.
    I got out the memo pad again.
    On the top I wrote, in capitals, “MEXICO.”
    Under that I wrote, “1. Diarrhea
medicine (large size).” Under that I wrote, “2. Make that 2 bottles.” And under
that, “3. Call Benny.”
    I called Benny.
     
     
     

CHAPTER
FOUR
     
    Benny was in.
    Although highly displeased to have
been rudely awoken at such an ungodly hour (ten-thirty), he agreed, after
simmering down, to make it to my office as soon as possible. To pass the time
until he came, I first gave LAX—the main Los Angeles airport—a quick call,
dropped by Mrs. Morales’s for a coffee, then went back to the office and got
down from my small shelf of reference books a Reader’s Digest World Atlas so I could see what it had to say about Mérida. The handsomely bound volume had
been a Christmas present from Porcupine Head a couple of years earlier. I had
no doubt at all she’d obtained it by some simple fraud; in my day what you did
was to use the address of some friend or friend of a friend who was leaving
town and whose apartment lease only had a month to go. Then you joined assorted
record-of-the-month clubs and book-of-the-month dittos under a phony name, and
you collected all the bonuses they gave you for joining, one of which was often
the Reader’s Digest World Atlas, and then you either sold them or gave
them to hicks like me for Noël, hoping I didn’t know how the scam worked.
    Anyway, about Mérida I found out nada. It was there on the map of Mexico, of course, down there in the southeast
corner in the bend of Yucatán, not that far away from Guatemala and what used to be called British Honduras, but there was no separate entry giving any
details. The atlas did say, at the beginning, some rubbish about it was once
thought that the world was a flat disk surrounded by a lot of water and
Paradise was in the Far East somewhere, which was terribly picturesque and all
that but not exactly helpful.
    I was in the midst of listing some of
the items I very much wanted to know about Mérida when Benny showed up, looking
as ever the exact opposite of what he really was. What he looked like was Sonny
Tufts’ (Sonny