Cash Burn

by Michael Berrier

  But this job was his alone. This would show her that he didn’t need her for everything, that he could create his own paydays if he needed to.

  The light seeping into the hallway irritated his eyes. He wanted to crush it forever.

  She had her job, and he had his. So it had gotten a little away from him. He’d made a mistake with the motel phone, and somehow they’d figured out who he was. Now he had Mr. B’s guys tracking him. The truth was, he’d bungled it pretty good. But he still had the list. And Mr. B’s thirty-two grand.

  And tonight he’d finish it.

  The hallway flooded with light. The kitchen door.

  A waiter stepped into the frame. The door swung back. Flip jumped away from the wall and pinned him with the crowbar.

  “Be quiet,” he hissed. “Don’t say a thing. This is a gun in your side. You feel it?” He shoved it into the waiter’s ribs.

  “Don’t. Don’t.”

  “Quiet, I said.”

  The waiter was stiff as plywood under Flip’s grip. A noise like a whimper escaped from his throat.

  “You’re going to Mr. B’s door, and you’re going to knock. I’m going to have this gun on you. Don’t say anything wrong. Understand?”

  A shake of the waiter’s body made Flip think he was nodding. They walked like lovers to the office door. “Now knock.” Flip brought his arm back and shuffled to the side, the barrel of the pistol digging into the waiter’s side.

  He knocked three times. From behind the door, someone asked who it was.

  “It’s Tony.”

  “What do you want?” It was a voice Flip didn’t know. Not Mr. B. Not Garrett or Ronny.

  Flip whispered, “Tell him you’ve got some food for him.”

  “I got some food for you.”

  Muffled voices inside talked it over. Flip shifted his feet. He peeled the tape off the peep hole, staying to one side.

  A voice cursed on the other side of the door. “I can’t see you, man.”

  “Tell him the light’s burned out.”

  “The light’s burned out. Open up.” He edged away from the gun. Flip let him.

  The door opened a crack and Flip burst inside.

  The guy behind the door trotted backward, off-balance. It was the spider. Not such a smooth mover now.

  In a second, Flip saw his odds. They were not good. Garrett brought a shotgun up. Mr. B sat behind the desk, grinning. Ronny, against the wall, was the only one in the room Flip didn’t worry about.

  The spider regained his footing and jumped to the wall. “Hi, Flipper.” Behind his desk, Mr. B leaned forward.

  His hands were hidden. His gold necklace swayed, flashed in the glow of the fluorescents overhead. It was enough to drive Flip crazy.

  “You said the wrong thing.”

  Mr. B glanced at Garrett. To Flip, the barrel of Garrett’s shotgun was a gaping cave, beautiful and terrible in its blackness.

  “Wha’d I say?” Mr. B asked.

  “You said you were going to my father’s house. That was the wrong thing.”

  Mr. B’s grin turned down and Flip guessed what was about to happen. He dropped to the floor.

  The front of the desk exploded.

  Splinters of wood spun through the air. Flip rolled to the corner as another shot rang out.

  His shoulder was rocked. A bullet. His left arm went limp.

  Beneath the ringing in his ears, he thought he heard Mr. B shouting.

  Flip got off a shot in Garrett’s direction. Garrett flinched. Flip didn’t know if he’d hit him or not.

  He rolled back toward the door.

  The spider looked like he might try to climb the wall back-first. He wasn’t moving with all the lead flying around.

  Garrett was down.

  Ronny cowered behind a chair. It was just Flip and Mr. B.

  Flip’s left arm hung dead. He shot at the desk as Mr. B disappeared behind it. Flip scuffled to his feet. Firing, he advanced on the desk. Three shots. Four. The bullets shattered the wood in a frantic pattern. Six shots, seven.

  The trigger snapped. No recoil. No shot. Empty. He had no more cartridges.

  He dropped the gun and hurdled the desk.

  Mr. B trembled in a ball. He was a mess. Flip wrenched the gun from Mr. B’s hand. Underneath Mr. B, blood spread across the floor planks like a living thing.

  “You shouldn’t have said that about my father.” Mr. B’s eyelids fluttered. He looked up at Flip, coughed a sputtering cough and clutched himself.

  From the corner, Ronny said, “Hey, Flip, man. I’m leaving, okay?”

  Flip didn’t watch him leave. Something seeped down his arm from his crushed shoulder.

  The spider had edged away from the wall. He was near the door, calculating. Flip watched his eyes.

  Mr. B’s new gun was in Flip’s hand. Plus, he could go for the shotgun. Garrett didn’t look interested in firing it anymore. He was using both hands to hold onto a rib. He kept saying, “Oh, man. Oh, man. Oh, man.”

  Flip watched the spider.

  “You’re wondering, is this empty?” Flip held up Mr. B’s gun.

  The spider smiled. “Doesn’t matter.”

  Flip waited. The spider stood motionless, waiting in the middle of a web for dinner.

  “I like you, Flip,” the spider said. He spat on the floor and nodded in the direction of Flip’s feet, where Mr. B hid dying. “You come in here, shoot it out. Just like the Old West, man. I got to hand it to you.”

  “Are you going to leave my father alone?”

  The spider grinned. “Sure, Flip. What you think I’m gonna say?”

  “I want you to mean it.”

  “I mean it. I mean it for real.”

  “So why are you standing there? Your meal ticket’s on his way out.” He looked down at Mr. B and stepped away from the red tide creeping over the floor. Pain flared from his shoulder. He couldn’t move that arm. His head began to swirl. “You might as well go away too.”

  “Yeah. It’s like a car wreck, man. Just watching to see what happens. That’s all.” He backed up a step toward the door. “Hey, one thing. Like I said, I like you. You ever need a wingman, look me up. This is my neighborhood. Ask anybody for Luis.”

  The spider crept out.

  53

  “What a mess.” Hathaway’s face lit for an instant in a camera flash. The forensic photographer scrabbled around for another angle on Barnes. Hathaway took the gum out of his mouth and turned it between his thumb and fingers. The movement pulled his eyes away from the bloody lump Barnes had become, but he must have decided not to leave the gum at the scene. He popped it back into his mouth.

  “You think it was Flip,” Tom said.

  “’Course it was Flip.” Hathaway pointed at the victim’s mouth. A wad of paper was hanging out of it. Maybe three pages. It was tinted red and gray from blood and saliva.

  Tom ran his tongue across the roof of his mouth where Flip had jammed the end of the tether after the beating two weeks ago. The tender skin there had healed enough that it only felt like he’d burned it with hot pizza.

  “You’re right.” Tom called over to the detective. “Hey, Lance.”

  Lance was talking to one of the bartenders in the hallway. His gray sport coat hung open and might not have fit well enough to button even if he wanted to. He was skinny apart from that gut. When he was done with the bartender, he came back to where Tom stood with Hathaway over Barnes. The photographer circled off to snap pictures of bloodstains.

  Lance started putting on the latex gloves. “What?” He was staring down at what was left of Barnes.

  “We’re pretty sure Flip Dunn did this. See the paper in the mouth?”

  The second glove snapped at the wrist, and both hands were covered. He flexed his fingers. “What about it?”

  “It’s what he does. Stuffs something in the mouth of his victims.”

  “Oh, come on, Tom,” Hathaway said. “You have to fess up.” He told Lance, “Tom tried to put a t
ether on Flip and got beat up. When he woke up, the end of the tether was in his mouth. That right, Tom?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lance looked back down to the victim. “You got a picture of this Flip Dunn?”

  Tom took it out of his pocket, but before he could show it to the detective, Lance crouched down to get a closer look at Barnes. He pinched an edge of the paper sticking out of Barnes’s mouth, folded the page back. It was one of the few white spaces left.

  “Looks like names and phone numbers. Some . . . notes.” He peered closer, pulled the edge farther back.

  The way he cursed told Tom something good was scrawled there.

  He straightened and stripped off the gloves. “Give me the description.”

  Tom rattled off Flip’s stats. He handed the picture to Lance, and Lance got started on the radio. Another APB on Flip Dunn, this time for a 187.

  “Can we talk to the other victims?” Tom asked.

  “You know better than that. I’ll get over there and do a photo lineup when I’m done here. If you want, I’ll give you a call and let you know if I get a positive.”

  “Fair enough. Thanks. And thanks for the heads-up on this.”

  Lance waved them off and got another set of gloves going.

  Tom took one last look at what Flip had done to Barnes. For the hundredth time, he wondered why Flip hadn’t turned him into roadkill too.

  He caught up with Hathaway in the hallway. The uniforms had set up floodlights. Light glinted off the thousands of shards of glass that crunched under the soles of their shoes. Hathaway was looking up at a dark hole in the ceiling where the remnants of a shattered bulb were still threaded into the fixture.

  “Took his time setting this up, didn’t he?”

  “I guess,” Tom said. “Let’s get over to the brother’s. See if we get lucky.”

  “Seems to me you’ve already been lucky.”

  “Yeah. I get that.”

  At this hour, Venice Boulevard was just a string of lit-up asphalt waiting for traffic. In a couple of minutes they were off the main boulevard and prowling toward the banker’s place. The houses here sat toward the back of their lawns like mausoleums. Most of the windows were dark. A few glowed with the lonely blue flicker of late-night television.

  Tom scanned the sidewalks. It was walking distance from the Ragtop to the brother’s house.

  “You think he got clipped in that firefight?”

  Hathaway steered one-handed, his other elbow propped outside. “Maybe. A lot of holes in that room. Bloodstains in the hallway too.”

  Hathaway turned onto the banker’s street, cruised past his house, and parked three doors down.

  “Doesn’t look like anybody’s up,” Tom said.

  “They’re about to be.” Hathaway killed the engine and opened his door.

  Tom followed. Nobody was on the sidewalks. He checked his watch—2:35.

  Hathaway reached the door before Tom and leaned into the doorbell. It took three rings before they heard a woman’s voice behind the door asking who was there.

  Tom said, “It’s Tom Cole, Mrs. Dunn. We talked over the phone a few days ago.”

  No response.

  Tom tried again. “We need to talk to your husband.”

  The porch light lit up, and door hardware started unbuckling. She opened the door about six inches. Tom held up his badge.

  Mrs. Dunn’s bleary eye peeked back, scared out of sleep. “Jason’s not home.”

  Tom looked at Hathaway, then back through the crack in the door. “Where is he?”

  A flicker of something painful moved across her cheek before she said, “I don’t know.” She began to close the door.

  Tom put his hand on the panel. “Have you heard from his brother?”

  “Philip? No.”

  “If you hear from him, you need to call me. It’s very important.” He pushed a business card through the gap.

  She took it. “I haven’t talked to him in years.”

  “I hope it stays that way. But if you see him, try to stay away from him. And call me right away.”

  That eye looked from Tom to Hathaway and back. “I understand.”

  Tom turned.

  “My husband doesn’t have anything to do with his brother.” The door had opened a little wider.

  “Good. But Philip’s in the area. The immediate area. It’s a little too coincidental for me.”

  “They hate each other, Officer. They have for years.”

  Tom approached the door. “Why is that?”

  She stared out at him. Tom felt that she was performing some kind of assessment of him and Hathaway.

  The gap widened another six inches. “Maybe you should come in after all.”

  54

  Flip stared at the waning moon, his eyes on the single bright misshapen orb above. For once, he felt a sense of kinship with it. Endless cycles, waxing, waning, orbiting around and around, lifeless, dusty, dry.

  Pointless.

  From this alley he could watch its motion another hour maybe. If he lasted that long. His idea was to hide here until the sirens died down and then make his way to Diane’s. She would know what to do. After all, she was the one he orbited.

  But since dropping to this spot against the bricks, he himself had waned. This alley had become too comfortable to leave. The asphalt carpet, the bricks mortared together to cradle his back, the mirrors of the puddles reflecting the moonlight—he’d even grown fond of the fetid smell of garbage seeping from the trash bins. And anyway, there was no standing now. He was dizzy enough just sitting here staring back at the moon’s prying, half-blinked eye.

  His heart charged in his chest. Pump faster and faster. Get what blood’s left through these veins.

  Diane would know what to do. His cell phone had been in his good hand for a long time. He’d meant to call her before he’d become engaged in this staring contest with the unwinking, pitted eggshell overhead.

  Another hour, maybe two, and the moon would pass behind that wall, and he would be alone. The water and oil puddled in the street wouldn’t glow any longer when the moon turned away.

  He had her number stored in his phone. She could be here in ten minutes, helping him into a car. Maybe she would nurse him herself. Or maybe she would take him to a hospital. She would know what to tell the doctors to keep the police out of it. If that was possible.

  He set the cell phone on the pavement and reached for his left arm. Adjusting it was like moving a piece of a cadaver. Someone else’s arm sewed onto his shoulder. He tried bending the arm with his right hand, as if he could pump sensation back into it by levering it back and forth. Finally, he gave up again. It was dead.

  Like he would soon be. If he didn’t make the call.

  But she might be with him again. Her mark. The one this job was all about. She hadn’t told Flip much about her plan, really. She never did. She just gave instructions and expected him to carry them out. That was his job. Stand by for more orders. Don’t call me. I’ll call you. Then we’ll be together.

  Deep down, he always knew she was stringing him along. Since the first night he was back. When he’d read the letters she’d written to him while he was in Lancaster, something had told him that she had a reason to keep him on a hook. He didn’t want to believe it. He wanted to believe that a girl like her might want him. He thought maybe there was a chance that what he’d done for her over the years might have earned him something from her, even as she grew up and he had to grow meaner and meaner to survive. She liked part of his meanness, that was sure, but now, with the last drops of his life oozing through the sponge of his clothing and onto the blacktop, he saw it all clearly. Finally.

  She had no desire for him. He was just another tool in her kit. Another piece to the puzzle of the life she was assembling for herself. What would the rest of the puzzle pieces look like? She’d shown up in the evenings dressed like any of the career women striding the sidewalks of Beverly Hills or Century City in their heels and skirts,
entering office buildings or shops. She spent her days in that world and her nights plotting and planning how to set the next piece of the puzzle into the frame.

  No, a wounded convict had no place in that puzzle. If he called her, she wouldn’t even answer. She hadn’t answered in a week. And if she did, she would have an excuse for not coming.

  He could call his dad. Inglewood was only fifteen minutes away. The old man might drive over in his Buick. Flip pictured him covering up the seat with a towel to keep the blood off the upholstery. He imagined the words he would say. The disappointment. Again.

  No.

  And then there was Jason. Closest of all. That snug house in Cheviot Hills. The perfect little lawyer wife. The sweet little job handling other people’s money all day long.

  Other people’s money.

  Flip’s mind flashed on the familiar image of Jason as a boy, counting the cash from the paper route they shared.

  He smiled. Kids playing with cash. Daffy Duck sitting at a folding table.

  The walls framing the moon at the end of the alley were spinning now, a dizzy rotation around that glowing eye. The back-and-forth motion was hypnotic.

  He closed his eyes. Very tired now. Very sleepy.

  He caught again the image of Jason at the summer card table, the fan blowing air at Flip, Jason not letting the fan blow on him for fear of ruffling the piles of bills he’d collected.

  Jason counting and recounting, as if the number could grow larger by repetition. Keeping a list of those he’d collected from and those who still owed him.

  And Flip poking fun. Calling him the cartoon character who was crazy for dough.

  Jason preferred to sweat rather than have anything interfere with the organized stacks before him.

  Beads of sweat stood out on Jason’s forehead like dewdrops.

  Twelve-year-old Jason lifted a five from a stack. He pursed his lips like a lady and dabbed at his forehead with the bill to make his little brother Philip laugh.

  And Philip laughed.

  55

  Across the boardroom table, Scotty Inverness scooted in and perched his reading glasses on the tip of his nose. “Somebody get the door,” he said.