“Asylum,” Chris said.
They were met inside the front door by the host, Dominick, who was Fat Jack’s minority partner. Dominick was tall, cadaverous, with mournful eyes, and he seemed out of place midst the forced hilarity.
Raising her voice to be heard over the din, Laura asked for Fat Jack and said, “I called earlier. I’m an old friend of his mother’s,” which was what you were to say to indicate you wanted guns not pizza.
Dominick had learned to project his voice clearly through the cacophony without shouting. “You’ve been here before, I believe.”
“Good memory,” she said. “A year ago.”
“Please follow me,” Dominick said in a funereal voice.
They did not have to go through the cyclonic commotion of the dining room, which was good because that meant Laura was less likely to be seen and recognized by one of the customers. A door off the other side of the host’s foyer opened onto a corridor that led past the kitchen and the storeroom to Fat Jack’s private office. Dominick knocked on the door, ushered them inside, and said to Fat Jack, “Old friends of your mother,” then left Laura and Chris with the big man.
Fat Jack took his nickname seriously and tried to live up to it. He was five feet ten and weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds. Wearing immense gray sweatpants and sweatshirt that fit him almost as tightly as Spandex, he looked like the fat man in that magnetized photograph that dieters could buy to put on refrigerators to scare them off food; in fact he looked like the refrigerator.
He sat in a baronial swivel chair behind a desk sized for him, and he did not get up. “Listen to the little beasts.” He spoke to Laura, ignored Chris. “I put my office at the back of the building, had it specially soundproofed, and I can still hear them out there, shrieking, squealing; it’s as if I’m just down the hall from hell.”
“They’re only children having fun,” Laura said, standing with Chris in front of the desk.
“And Mrs. O’Leary was just an old lady with a clumsy cow, but she burned down Chicago,” Fat Jack said sourly. He was eating a Mars bar. In the distance children’s voices, insulated by soundproofing, rose in a dull roar, and as if talking to that unseen multitude, the fat man said, “Ah, choke on it, you little trolls.”
“It’s a nuthouse out there,” Chris said.
“Who asked you?”
“Nobody, sir.”
Jack had a grainy complexion with gray eyes nearly buried in a puff-adder face. He focused on Laura and said, “You see my new neon?”
“The clown is new, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Isn’t it a beauty? I designed it, had it made, and then had it erected in the dead of night, so the next morning it was too late for anybody to get a restraining order to stop me. The damn city council just about croaked, all of them at once.”
Fat Jack had been embroiled in a decade-long legal battle with the Anaheim Zoning Commission and the city council. The authorities disapproved of his garish neon displays, especially now that the area around Disneyland was slated for urban renewal. Fat Jack had spent tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting them in the courts, paying fines, being sued, countersuing, and he had even spent time in jail for contempt of court. He was a former libertarian who now claimed to be an anarchist, and he would not tolerate infringement on his rights—real and imagined—as a free-thinking individual.
He dealt in illegal weapons for the same reason he erected neon signs that violated city codes: as a statement against authority, to champion individual rights. He could talk for hours about the evils of government, any kind of government, in any degree whatsoever, and on Laura’s last visit with Chris, in order to get the modified Uzis she wanted, she had listened to a lengthy explanation of why the government did not even have the right to pass laws forbidding murder.
Laura had no great love of big government, whether the left or right, but she had little sympathy with Fat Jack, either. He did not acknowledge the legitimacy of any authority whatsoever, not that of proven institutions, not even that of family.