desperado days

Janet Evanovich "sets the mood":
{excerpt: One For The Money. Janet Evanovich. Copyright 1994. Harper Collins. New York, New York.}

-----------------I was spooked over John Kuzack's death and not anxious to walk into a dark apartment, so I made a point of getting home early. I'd just locked the door behind me when the phone rang. The voice was muffled, so that I had to strain to hear, squinting at the handset as if that would help.

Fear is not a logical emotion. No one can physically hurt me on the phone, but I flinched all the same when I realized it was Ramirez.

I immediately hung up, and when the phone rang again I snapped the plug from the wall jack. I needed an answering machine to monitor my calls, but I couldn't afford to buy one until I made a recovery. First thing in the morning I was going to have to go after Lonnie Dodd.

* * * *

I awoke to the steady drumming of rain on my fire escape. Wonderful. Just what I needed to complicate my life further. I crawled out of bed and pulled the curtain aside, not pleased at the sight of an all-day soaker. The parking lot had slicked up, reflecting light from mysterious sources. The rest of the world was gunmetal gray, the cloud cover low and unending, the buildings robbed of color behind the rain.

I showered and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, letting my hair dry on its own. No sense fussing when I was going to get drenched the instant I stepped out of the building. ...

This was the sort of day to read comic books under a blanket tent and eat the icing from the middle of the Oreos. This was not the sort of day to chase down desperados. Unfortunately, I was hard up for money and couldn't be choosy about selecting desperado days.

Lonnie Dodd's address was listed as 2115 Barnes. I hauled my map out and looked up the coordinates. Hamilton Township is about three times the size of Trenton proper and roughly shaped like a wedge of pie that's suffered some nibbles. Barnes ran with its back pressed to the Conrail tracks just north of Yardville, the beginning of the lower third of the county.

I took Chambers to Broad and cut up on Apollo. Barnes struck off from Apollo. The sky had lightened marginally, and it was possible to read house numbers as I drove. The closer I got to 2115 the more depressed I became. Property value was dropping at a frightening rate. What had begun as a respectable blue-collar neighborhood with trim single-family bungalows on good-sized lots had deteriorated to neglected low-income to no-income housing.

Twenty-one fifteen was at the end of the street. The grass was overgrown and had gone to seed. A rusted bike and a washing machine with its top lid askew decorated the front yard. The house itself was a small cinder block rancher built on a slab. It looked to be more of an outbuilding than a home. ...A sheet had been tacked haphazardly over the front picture window. Probably to afford the inhabitants privacy while they crushed cans of Bull's-Eye beer against their foreheads and plotted mayhem.

I told myself it was now or never. Rain pattered on the roof and sluiced down the windshield. I pumped myself up by applying fresh lipstick. There was no great surge of power, so I deepened the blue liner and added mascara and blush....I studied Dodd's picture one last time.

Didn't want to overwhelm the wrong man.

I dropped my keys into my pocketbook, pulled my hood up, and got out of the car. I knocked on the door and caught myself secretly hoping no one was home. The rain and the neighborhood and the grim little house were giving me the creeps. If the second knock goes unanswered, I thought, I'll consider it the will of God that I'm not destined to catch Dodd, and I'll get the hell out of here.

No one answered on the second knock, but I'd heard a toilet flush, and I knew someone was in there. ..."Open up," I yelled at the top of my voice. "Pizza delivery."

A skinny guy with dark, tangled shoulder-length hair answered the door. He was a couple inches taller than me. He was barefoot and shirtless....

"I didn't order no pizza," he said.
"Are you Lonnie Dodd?"
"Yeah. What's with the pizza delivery shit?"
"It was a ploy to get you to answer your door."
"A what?"
"I work for Vincent Plum, your bond agent. You missed your trial date, and Mr. Plum would like you to reschedule."

"Fuck that. I'm not rescheduling nothing."
The rain was running off my jacket in sheets, soaking my jeans and shoes. "It would only take a few minutes. I'd be happy to drive you."

"Plum doesn't have no limo service. Plum only hires two kinds of people . . . women with big pointy tits and scumbag bounty hunters. Nothing personal, and it's hard to see with that raincoat on, but you don't look like you got big pointy tits. That leaves scumbag bounty hunter."

Without warning he reached out into the rain, grabbed my pocketbook off my shoulder, and tossed the contents onto the tan shag carpet behind him. The gun landed with a thunk.

"You could get into a lot of crap carrying concealed in this state," he said.
I narrowed my eyes. "Are you going to cooperate here?"
"What do you think?"
"I think if you're smart you'll get a shirt and some shoes and come downtown with me."

"Guess I'm not that smart."
"Fine. Then just give me my stuff, and I'll be more than happy to leave." Truer words were never spoken.
"I'm not giving you nothing. This here stuff looks like my stuff now."

I was debating kicking him in the nuts when he gave me a shove to the chest, knocking me backward off the small cement pad....
"Take a hike," he said, "or I'll shoot you with your own fucking gun."

--------------------------- {end excerpt}
----------------What do I think is excellent about this author's writing? She brings you into the narrative: you can feel that apartment, you can feel the crank phone call, you pull the cord out of the wall jack, you feel the rain, the bleak neighborhood, and the ambivalence about the mission. Never been to Trenton in my life, yet I feel I kind of know it, from reading this author. Trenton. Shady characters, fast food, no-frills real estate. Organized crime. Pollution. Attitudes formed on the cynicism and cheery desperation (bravado?) of the disadvantaged and incurious.

Some of what I read in her books is vulgar for my taste -- I wouldn't write it, and if I were her editor, I'd red-pencil it...and she would probably dump me, & get new editor...!

Some people might criticize me for reading -- and enjoying ! -- fiction that has some grungy references, "f" word maybe more frequent than a polite person might advise, and people engaging in extreme behavior -- you know, I wouldn't go out and do the things that the characters in these books do, not even the "good guys"...! But it isn't a book of advice, written in seriousness, it's Entertainment.

It makes me think of "Get Smart," the first show I ever really watched that wasn't a cartoon -- my dad would be watching it and laughing -- and I remember a conversation:
my mother -- "Isn't that violence - on - television?"
(something they had probably agreed that they were against)
and my dad answered, "Oh, but it's done with a laugh."

With a laugh. So that was all right. And I knew he didn't mean, "with a laugh," as in -- you would laugh at people really getting shot, he meant -- it was funny, and was to laugh at, and not to be taken seriously and certainly not to be imitated, or looked to as a standard of behavior ...

A sort of laying-out of the concept of artistic license, and it lodged in my awareness.

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