The Hemingway Thief

by Shaun Harris

  I almost made it to the door before I turned back and stuffed the derringer in my pocket.

  Chapter Three

  The race was the Baja 500. Grady was nuts about it. It was his third favorite subject to talk about after women and college football. Few women ever came to the Hotel Baja, and in June with two months until kick-off the race shot up to number one with a bullet. The contingent of trucks, cars, and motorcycles took off from Ensenada to bust through five hundred kilometers of desert, scrub brush, broken roads, hills, valleys, and anything else that was never supposed to support a vehicle. It attracted thrill seekers and hangers-on from all over looking for glory in the small subculture that was into that sort of thing. According to Grady there was little, if any, money in it, but there were enough women in pleather pants and bikini tops to make it worthwhile.

  A tiny sliver of the route ran by a spot up on a bluff about a mile away from the hotel. The actual race wasn’t until next week, but Grady had been dragging me up there with a cooler of Tecate and sandwiches to watch the practice racers for the last couple of days. He had been trying to educate me on the different models of large bore motorcycles, stock VWs, and all the rest to no avail. I didn’t give a shit about any of it. I went because the spot was up on a bluff that overlooked the Pacific. I liked having a brew in the sunshine and watching the surf crash into the cliff. The occasional blast of neon and motor oil that each vehicle brought was really more of an annoyance than anything else.

  “Now what was that last one called, Coop?” Grady asked. He leaned back in his canvas folding chair and put his thumb and forefinger under his beard.

  “That would be a 1972 Ford Who-Gives-A-Fuck,” I said, and shoved my hand into the icy cooler water. I came up with a can of Tecate and popped the top.

  “Wrong,” Grady said. “It was a stock VW. Can you tell me what type of engine it might have had?”

  “I can’t. Can you tell me what happened to the drunk guy after I left last night?”

  “You need to apply yourself, Coop, or else you’ll never graduate from Grady’s School of Off-Road Racing,” he said, wagging his finger at me. He chuckled and locked his fingers behind his head. “Don’t worry about that guy. Doc’s got him on a cot in his room. He sedated him, but he should be up for talking by supper time.”

  “Digby agrees that the guys from last night will be back,” I said.

  “Probably,” Grady said. “He say anything else?”

  “No. If they’re coming back, then why are we just sitting here?”

  “You wanna go up to Ensenada and make a complaint?” Grady said, and tossed his beer can at the orange crate we used for empties. He missed and waved at it with his hand as if it would jump up into the crate on its own power if properly beckoned.

  “Yes, goddamn it, something,” I said, getting up and properly disposing of the empty for him.

  “OK, fine, but be prepared to spend some time in jail for shooting the guy’s toe off. Either that or bring enough cash to pay off every cop from here to there. That’s if we even make it to Ensenada.”

  “Why wouldn’t we make it to Ensenada?” I asked. Grady looked at me as if I were a child who just said something cute and incredibly naive.

  “Dell and Andy were dumb, but they weren’t stupid,” Grady said, and grabbed another beer. “Ain’t much traffic between here and the city. All they have to do is camp out on the mountain road and wait for us to come by. Wouldn’t take much to stop a car up there. They take us out and they can take their time getting to the kid.”

  “Can’t we call somebody?”

  “Anyone we call is gonna want you to answer for the guy’s toe. Had to shoot him, didn’t you? Couldn’t handle a little criticism?”

  “I’m just a roiling ball of rage, Grady. I can’t help it,” I said. “So we’re stuck here, is that it?”

  “Were you planning on leaving anytime soon?”

  “No.”

  “Then what do you care?” Grady said, rolling the cold can along his sweaty forehead. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t want to do shit until the guy wakes up and we can talk to him. We got plenty of supplies and they don’t. Water truck’ll be here tomorrow. We’ll wait ’em out for a couple of days. Sound good?”

  “I still think we should do something.” I grumbled.

  “I did do something,” Grady said. “I did a little investigating. I found this.” He leaned over the side of his chair and the aluminum legs squeaked a complaint about the weight shift. He grabbed a knapsack, placed it on his lap, and started going through it. He pulled out a bag of weed, a postcard, and a small leather portfolio. He handed me the portfolio.

  “Where did these come from?” I asked. The portfolio was cracked soft brown leather and looked like something you’d find in your grandfather’s desk. I untied the string, pulled open the flap, and reached inside, finding a wad of yellowed papers. It didn’t have a title, it was handwritten, and at most there was enough for possibly one-third of a book, but I recognized it at once as a manuscript.

  “Recognize it?” Grady asked. He had produced a pack of rolling papers and was getting to work on a fresh joint. I flipped through the stiff, crackling pages. Some of them were typewritten and some were in a rolling loopy handwriting. I found a heading about a quarter of the way through that read, Chapter 17 (Forward to Scott). It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.

  “What makes you think I should recognize it,” I said.

  “Because you’re supposed to be a writer,” he said with a smirk. “Here, I found this with it too.” He handed me a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.

  “They go together?” I said. I held the relic of a manuscript away from me as if a wider perspective were needed. At arm’s length it still looked like an old bundle of paper.

  “Doc thinks so. I showed it to him this morning ’cause you hadn’t gotten up yet. Says chapter seventeen is about Scott Fitzgerald. It matches the copy of the book. You read it?”

  “A Moveable Feast? Yeah, in college.”

  “I tried to read him once. The one about the fish and the old fart.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I gave up halfway through. I don’t like fishing, let alone reading about it. I found that in Richard Kimble’s room. It was in his suitcase under the bed.”

  “I can’t believe you tossed his room.”

  “Hey, I helped him out of a jam last night because he was a customer. I’m not going in whole hog unless I know what he’s involved in.”

  “Why are we involved at all? It had nothing to do with us until you went all Billy Jack on the guy.” Grady adjusted himself in his lawn chair so that he could look me in the eye.

  “People need help, and if you can help them, then you do it,” he said. “You don’t, then you’re not a man, are you?”

  “I guess.”

  “No guessing. That’s the fact of it. Are you a man, Coop?”

  “The way I pee would seem to suggest so, yes.”

  “Then there you have it,” he said, and slapped his bare thigh for emphasis.

  “You didn’t have to go through his things,” I said. A truck that looked like Optimus Prime and a praying mantis had a love child roared by, drowning out Grady’s answer, but I could tell from the look on his face he didn’t care much for the man’s privacy.

  “Goddamn it,” Grady said when the truck passed by. We had placed our chairs under the shade of a rock wall that nearly blocked out the sound of the racers until they were almost on top of us. “What was that? I missed it.” I raised my hands to show I had no idea. Grady threw his empty can in the road, and I turned back to the manuscript.

  Red pencil marks littered the pages along with extensive notations in the margins. At the top of each page, the initials HB were scrawled in quick and impatient handwriting. I looked back at the leather portfolio it came in. A brass plate with the same initials was stamped on the outside.

  “This looks like it could have been one
of the first drafts of the book,” I said, thumbing through to the last page. A final note was written there in the same impatient bloody scrawl as the others. It read “I won’t let him ruin all that we have left.”

  “Is it worth something?” Grady asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said absently. The note was odd. I was pretty sure HB was the editor, probably a name I had once known and had forgotten. The question was: for whom was the note written? The date at the top of the page was January 1962. Hemingway shot himself in ’61. I doubted the note was meant for a dead man. I slid the pages back in the portfolio and dropped it back into Grady’s bag. I looked down to find a business card in my lap. It must have fallen out of the portfolio when I pulled out the manuscript. “It might be worth something if it’s real.”

  “How much?” Grady asked. The card looked expensive, thick stock, embossed lettering. The information, however, was rather spartan. It consisted of a name, N. Thandy, not even a full name, a PO box in Atlanta, and an occupation: Collector—Rare Books and Antiquities.

  “You mean, would it be worth enough to kill for?” I said, sliding the card into my pocket.

  “We don’t know they were gonna kill him,” Grady said, reaching into the cooler for a new beer. I noted it was his fourth since I’d arrived. I had no idea how many he’d had while waiting for me. “They may’ve just wanted to rough him up until he spilled where he stashed the book.”

  “You don’t know they were after the book,” I said. “He could’ve knocked up some rich guy’s daughter for all we know.”

  “You got a point there,” Grady said with a chuckle. “You’re a smart guy. Guess that’s what makes your books so popular.”

  “The name on the cover is what makes my books so popular,” I said, and took the remains of the joint Grady proffered. “I don’t know much about rare books and what they go for, but my agent does. I’ll give him a call. See what he has to say. If I can get him to stop . . .” I thought I saw the edge of the rock wall move, and for a moment I wondered how good Grady’s weed was. Could it have hit me that quickly? Was I being paranoid? I decided to err on the side of caution and slid the derringer out of my pocket, holding it close to my thigh.

  “Stop what?” Grady said.

  “Anybody there?” I yelled to the shadows.

  “You got me,” a voice said from behind the wall. I saw the gun first. It made my tiny derringer look like an action-figure accessory. Its nickel plating gleamed in the sun, and a cruel grin followed it.

  “Bet you motherfuckers didn’t expect to see me again, huh,” Dell said, and racked a round into the chamber.

  Chapter Four

  “We certainly didn’t expect to see you this soon,” Grady said casually. “Where’s your buddy?”

  Dell stood with his legs shoulder width apart, leaning back on his heels. A long, ugly gash was sutured up the left side of his face. It would leave a scar that no woman, despite the saying, would dig. He wore the same suit as last night, evidenced by the blood on it, some from his head and some from his partner’s foot.

  “Hospital up the road,” Dell said. His non-gun hand was stuck in his pocket, and every part of him was relaxed save the eyes. They were alive with a hateful electric fervor. I had no doubt he’d pull the trigger. He’d do Grady first and then me; probably take his time with me. The derringer hidden against my thigh felt infinitesimally small. There was a layer of greasy sweat between my palm and the handle, and I suspected that if I were to draw the gun, it would fly out of my hand and land innocuously next to his Italian loafers. “But we still got a job to do, ya know?”

  “I admire your work ethic,” I said, which was the truth. I doubt I would have tried to write anything the day after a night like Dell had.

  “I can’t wait to hurt you dead,” Dell growled. Perhaps he thought my admiration was insincere.

  “Ok, Dell,” Grady said, taking a sip from his beer. “What now?” Dell turned his attention and his gun on Grady.

  “What happens now is you tell me which eye you want a bullet in,” Dell said.

  “That’s a stupid fucking question, and I’m not going to answer it,” Grady said.

  “Look, man,” I said raising my hand and leveling the little two-shot at Dell’s chest. “I got a gun. You got a gun. Let’s just talk this out. I mean Grady and I don’t even really know what’s going on here, you know? Maybe this doesn’t have to get violent.”

  “Sure it does,” Dell said. He took another step from the shadow of the rock wall and into the sunshine. He stood in the middle of the little dirt track. I heard a high, insect-like whine from somewhere in the distance. Dell was too focused on our standoff to hear it. “Andy wanted me to kill you slow, but I’ll kill you quick and make something up to tell him.”

  “I appreciate that.” Grady said. The whine was getting louder now, but it could have just been the sound of the surf as it traveled up the bluff. “It’s mighty white of you.”

  “Honestly,” Dell said. “I just don’t have the time. I gotta kill you two, then kill the asshole with the book, then find the book. You’re lucky you caught me with a full dance card, is all.”

  “Who you working for?” Grady said. Dell’s head dropped back and he launched into a theatrical guffaw. When it waned down to a giggle he shook his head.

  “Buddy, you don’t wanna kn—” Dell started, but stopped when he heard the buzzing roar coming around the rocks. It was too late. He only had time to drop his jaw as a VW pickup slammed into him. His body spun over the hood like an epileptic ballerina, catapulted into the air, and came to rest at the edge of the cliff. The VW slid to a stop, kicking up a cloud of dust that drifted back up the road toward us. Grady burst out of his chair and sprinted to Dell with a speed I wouldn’t have expected from him. In a moment he had Dell’s gun in his hand. He slid it into his belt at the small of his back and dropped his T-shirt over it as the VW’s driver approached.

  “Oh fuck, man,” the driver said, pulling his helmet off. He was dressed in white and neon-green leather and I wondered how he could stand the heat in an outfit like that. He held his helmet in one hand and in the other a small plastic box I assumed was a first aid kit. Grady held his empty hand up to the driver’s chest.

  “Just a second, friend,” Grady said. The driver took a step back and ran his gloved hand through his sweat-tangled hair.

  “You fucking kidding me?” he said with wild eyes. “That guy needs help.”

  “You can’t help a dead man,” Grady said, placing his hand on the driver’s shoulder. I looked down at Dell. His shirt was torn across his chest and there was a deep gash running the length of his sternum. His face was an oleo of blood, grime, and dust. There was a sickening crater above his ear, but I could hear a blood-filled gurgle wheezing from his crushed larynx. He wasn’t dead, but he was on his way.

  “Oh, Jesus,” the driver whimpered. “I killed him?”

  “Not your fault, man,” Grady said. “But you do know you’re in Mexico, right?”

  “Is he fucking dead?” the driver said.

  “Yeah, which goes back to my point,” Grady said. “You’re in Mexico and you killed a man.” The driver started to protest and Grady put up his hands. “Not your fault, I know. And it doesn’t matter that we’re witnesses. The authorities down here only see a gringo in trouble, get me?”

  The driver tried to look over Grady’s shoulder, and Grady shifted his body to keep Dell’s broken body out of sight. I shuffled over to it, careful to keep my gun out of the driver’s eye line. I knelt next to Dell’s cracked skull, and breath escaped him like a draft through an old house. His one open eye looked back at me with a cow’s dull focus. And then it was gone. He was gone. No more Dell.

  “What do I do?” the driver asked. Grady patted him on the back with his big, reassuring paw. He hadn’t given Dell a second glance after his first cursory check of the mangled body. Dell was dead, that was true, but there was no way Grady could have known that. I wondered if it even matt
ered to him.

  “Lucky for you, we’re here,” Grady said. “Our hotel is just down the road. Can you help us move him, you know, out of the way? Just to the side of the road. There’s gonna be other drivers coming and we don’t want any more accidents, right? After that we’ll take care of the rest.”

  “I’m sorry,” the driver said, rubbing the back of his neck with a blue bandana. “Was he a friend of yours?”

  “No, he was a piece of shit, buddy,” Grady said with a smile. “Don’t give him a second thought.”

  When we arrived at the hotel, my body felt like I had just played four quarters in Soldier Field without pads. Apparently the VW only had room enough for two, while the truck bed could hold a romance novelist and a cooler full of beer quite nicely.

  “Sorry, dude, you drew the short straw,” the driver had said to me, nodding toward the truck bed while sliding his helmet over his head. His name was Glenn, and after his initial shock he seemed to be taking the situation in stride. It was the Grady effect. He seemed to have a way of getting you to accept the unacceptable and move on. He had done it with me last night. How else could I explain sleeping so soundly after putting a hole in a guy’s foot?

  Grady was out of the truck before it came to a stop, but I had to roll out of the bed with help from the driver. My legs felt atrophied, and I leaned against the tailgate to keep from falling. Grady sprinted across the parking lot and kicked open the front door with one leg.

  “Is he some kind of cop or something?” the driver asked, looking after him. He had his helmet off and held it against his chest like a teddy bear.

  “That’s what he tells me,” I said. I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out a pulverized pack of cigarettes. I tossed the useless mess aside with an angry grunt. “You got any smokes?”