Day Shift
Page 43

“Hell, no!” the old man huffed in his hoarse, wheezy tone. “We all have. We ain’t dead. We’re old. We got nothing to do but watch. You understand me?”
“We understand you,” Olivia said.
“Can I have one of them cookies?” He hobbled closer to the table, and Manfred stood to offer him the chair. “Thanks, sonny, don’t mind sitting for a minute.” He backed up to the chair and lowered himself into it.
“Please have one,” Fiji said. “And some tea.” She fetched another glass and handed the old man a cookie on a napkin.
It was not pleasant to watch the old man eat the cookie, though he seemed to enjoy it a lot. “We’re always getting healthy shit for breakfast, oatmeal and egg whites,” he said, spraying a few crumbs. “Makes you want something with a lot of sugar and fat in it.”
“I’m Fiji Cavanaugh. I made those, and I’m glad you like them.”
“We got two women down at the hotel, they want to know if they can come to your Thursday night shindig,” he said. “Your class.”
Manfred thought Fiji looked completely taken aback. “Of course. Do they need help getting down here?”
“Mamie does. Suzie rolls along like a tank.”
“I’ll be sure they get here and get back,” Fiji said. “Maybe my friends Manfred and Olivia here can help.”
The old man turned his beady eyes on them. “You’re the tough girl from the pawnshop,” he said. He turned his gaze on Manfred. “And you’re the phone psychic guy?”
Manfred nodded.
“I’m Tommy,” the man said, extending a wrinkled hand scattered with age spots. “Tommy Quick. Ain’t so quick no more. Used to be Carlo Bustamente, back in the day.”
“Wow,” Manfred said. “Early days of Vegas, right?”
The old man wheezed with laughter and withdrew his hand from Manfred’s. “There hasn’t been any late days of Vegas!”
Fiji and Olivia cast questioning glances Manfred’s way, but he waved a hand. The rest of the story would have to wait for Tommy’s departure. “So, how’d you come to be in Midnight?” he asked. “Did you lose a bet or something?”
The wheezy laugh again. “You might say that, or you might say I got lucky, sonny,” Tommy told Manfred. “I’ll tell you about it. So I’m in a terrible dive in Vegas, see, the kind you wouldn’t want your mom to stay in. Not that I know your mom, but I’m just saying. It was a place so bad that only broke old people, like us, or broke young people, like your average little criminal, would choose to live there.”
They realized he was waiting for an acknowledgment, and they all nodded like puppets. “Anyways,” Tommy went on, “this woman come by the place we’re staying. Now, we’ve been praying we won’t get stabbed every time we go out to get groceries, you understand?”
He paused again, waiting. They nodded obediently. “This woman says there’s a place in the boonies in Texas where we can live, eat three meals a day, have our rooms cleaned, be comfortable. We says, ‘What’s the catch?’ And she says, ‘The catch is, it’s in the boonies in Texas.’” He laughed again.
Manfred could manage only a weak smile. But Fiji grinned. “So you agreed, then?” Fiji said encouragingly.
“Yeah, me and Mamie and Suzie. The next thing we knew, we were in the Midnight Hotel and being trotted out for every visitor. There’s one other old guy, Shorty Horowitz. He was in the hotel next to ours, but we only knew him by sight. He was the only other guy broken-down enough to take this cockamamie offer.”
Manfred exchanged glances with Fiji and Olivia. That was a lot of glances. He could tell that like him, they didn’t know what to make of this. “Are you supposed to do anything in exchange for this safe place to live?” Manfred asked, finally.
“They haven’t told us nothing yet.” Tommy was completely unsurprised by the question. “Except to act happy if we got asked any questions. If we’re supposed to do something, it must not be anything urgent. We’re bored. We got nothing to do. So the reason I came down here was, what’s up with the kid?”
Diederik came out in his new clothes, denim shorts and a striped T-shirt, and waited shyly for them to notice him.
“You look great!” said Fiji. “I’ll have to run out this afternoon to get you some more in case you grow again.”
The boy, who was less of a boy every day, smiled back at her. “You are most kind,” he said in his odd accent. “I will be glad to repay you with work.”
“I’ll be sure to save all my odd jobs for you, young man,” she said. “In fact, tell the Rev I’ve asked you over to work for me and to have lunch with me.”
His olive face lit up with pleasure, and the boy hurried out of the shop and over to the chapel.
“Weird,” said Tommy, shaking his head. “He’s the opposite of a dwarf, huh?”
“We don’t know what’s up with the kid,” Manfred said. “But we figure no one else needs to be concerned about it.”
“I gotcha. So this is one of those things the Whitefields don’t need to know about?”
“They don’t know . . .” Olivia’s voice trailed off.
“They don’t know we ain’t genuine old people waiting for a nursing home with a loving family and some money?”