The Martini Shot

by George Pelecanos

  I felt my heart beat in my chest. It was hard to breathe.

  Annette came into my arms and we kissed.

  “Goddamn, girl. Thank you.”

  “I want to talk to you,” she whispered. She didn’t look pleased.

  “Later,” I said.

  We made out for a long while, standing there on the carpeted floor. I could have kissed her for hours. But somehow we moved into the Magic Room, along with the music, the wine, and the candles. Then I was between her, both of us in fluid motion, my hands entwined with hers above her head, her hair spread out on my pillow, our chests damp with sweat.

  “Can I get on top?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  I withdrew and turned over onto my back. She moved onto me quickly, like an animal to prey. Her heavy breasts, long free from restraint, bumped my chest. I had torn her panties off her in a moment of impatient lust, and she had kicked her evening shoes to the floor. Only her stockings and garters remained.

  “I’m gonna fuck you, Victor.”

  “Get on it,” I said.

  But first she went down on me, hungrily licking my balls and shaft.

  “I can feel your vein with my tongue,” she said, lifting her head to smile at me. “And you’ve got that bend in the river.”

  My rod was throbbing and slightly bent below the head. An overzealous woman had scarred me in bed one night, long ago.

  “Are you complaining?” I said.

  “You know I like it.”

  “Stop talking, then.”

  “Don’t you want me to talk to you?”

  “Yes, I do. You know I do.”

  She laughed, steadied me, and slowly slid herself down upon me. I closed my eyes and heard her gasp. Her hips moved like the tides. With each of her downstrokes I thrust upward and put my cock deep inside her. She reached behind her, pushed my thighs apart, and tickled my balls.

  “How’s that feel?” she said, as she picked up the pace.

  I looked up at her, riding me. Her eyes were alive in the candlelight, and her hair was tossed about her face. I found her spot and stroked it, but she pushed my hand away.

  “I’ll do that,” she said.

  She fingered herself. I watched her eyes go dreamy, and I reached out and brushed her cool lips.

  “Pull on my tits,” she said, and I pressed my thumbs and forefingers to her nipples and pinched them lightly.

  “Harder, Vic,” she said. They were tough as licorice, and I pulled on them, and she said, “Oh.”

  “What’re you going to do next?” I said, knowing the answer.

  “I’m gonna come all over your cock,” she said, and I laughed.

  She climaxed, it seemed, in slow motion. Afterward, she went down on me, artfully. I came like a horse, and she took it all in. When we kissed, I could taste my own release in her mouth.

  We were as close as two people could be. I never wanted to leave that room. I wanted to be with her forever.

  We were lying in bed, nude, looking at each other, talking mostly with our eyes, working on our second bottle of wine. A slow, beautiful song, Jim James singing with heavy reverb from another world to ours, was playing from my portable speaker. I was not wearing a watch but I knew it was very late. The moon had dropped, and its light pearled the room through my floor-to-ceiling windows.

  “Can we talk?” said Annette.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’m worried about you, Vic.”

  “Skylar’s death hit me kind of hard, I guess.”

  “I’m not talking about that. I found a gun in your bathroom while I was changing. In the vanity under the sink.”

  “Did you pick it up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know it’s not real. It’s light as a feather. There’s no guts to it; the thing can’t even shoot blanks.”

  “I know. It’s a prop gun. So what? You must have it for a reason.”

  “I don’t know why I have it, to tell you the truth. I only know that I wanted it.”

  “I know why. You’re going to use it in some way on the guys who killed Skylar.”

  I told her what I’d found so far. I shared everything with her, including my fears. I’d never opened up to anyone in that way before, not my male friends, not even my wife. It had been one of the problems in my marriage, maybe the biggest problem. That, and our differing visions for the future. Claudia, an Army brat who’d moved around her whole childhood, wanted a house in a neighborhood, babies, membership at the local pool, a savings card for the grocery store, stability. I wanted none of those things. The more I left town to work on shows and the longer I was away, the less comfortable I’d become with the idea of staying in one place. We’d split up after five years. Claudia remarried, had children, and lived in a Colonial on an oak-lined street. I’d gotten what I’d wanted, too.

  “What were you thinking?” said Annette. “A gun? ”

  “I don’t have a plan.”

  “Talk to the police and tell them what you know.”

  “Not yet.”

  She shook her head in aggravation. “Why are you going up in the Condor?”

  “I can’t live my life inside my head all the time. I have to do something.”

  “‘Where are you going, Lieutenant? To finish this.’”

  “Funny,” I said.

  “Seriously, Victor. You should hear yourself. You sound like a character in one of your scripts.”

  Annette took a sip of wine and placed her glass on the dresser. She got up on one elbow and faced me. I was still on my back.

  “Steve was a lot like you.”

  “Your husband,” I said.

  Unlike my marriage, hers had ended involuntarily. Her spouse had been a carpenter who worked on set construction for features. They’d met on a show in Wilmington, North Carolina, when Annette was an assistant in the art department on a Dino De Laurentiis production. Steve had never outgrown his fascination with the muscle car culture of his youth. He’d flipped his vehicle, broke his neck, and burned to death in a street race on a foggy two-lane ten years ago. I knew she’d loved him very much. There were many photographs of Steve in her hotel room. She loved him still.

  Steve and Annette had not had children, and now, at forty-four, she knew her maternal ship had sailed. Like me, she had become a professional wanderer, a hotel dweller, without roots, a person with tired eyes who worked seventy-hour weeks. It was hardly a healthy atmosphere in which to raise a child.

  Film and television productions were like circuses that arrived in town and brought excitement to the locals for a short period of time. We came and went, leaving the straights to their families, their backyard barbecues, their churches, their nine-to-fives. “We’ve got sawdust in our veins.” I’d heard that expression muttered by my coworkers countless times.

  “Steve was always talking about the experience,” said Annette. “How he only felt alive when he was red-lining his car. He was selfish, Vic. I loved him, but I’ll never forgive him for that. You’re being selfish, too.”

  “I want to live.”

  “So did he. But he died horribly. It happened because he took a chance that he never should have taken. I couldn’t go through that again. I won’t go through it, Victor. Do you understand?”

  There was no malice in her voice, or threat. She was simply telling me her truth.

  “Yes. I understand.”

  But I didn’t say I’d stop. I’d already begun to make plans.

  We slept in. Near noon, Annette went down to the basement, where there was a bank of coin-operated washing machines and dryers, to start her weekly laundry. While she was gone, I called the one named Wayne from my room phone. I introduced myself by name and said I had been Skylar’s coworker and friend. He said, “Who’s Skylar?” I said I wanted to make him whole financially, in exchange for his promise that he and his partner, Cody, would leave Laura Flanagan alone. He said he had no idea what I was talking about. I told him that I didn’t care; he didn’t need t
o admit anything—I knew. I was willing to pay him off, but only on my terms. After some negotiation, he agreed to meet in the place that I insisted upon. He was cagey, but also greedy, and that made him stupid. His voice and word choice told me he was uneducated, inarticulate, and proud of it. Wayne gave me the location of the house where he and Cody “cribbed up.” I told him I’d see him that night.

  Annette returned carrying her empty laundry hamper on her hip. I told her I had some errands to run. It wasn’t a lie, except by omission, and she read it. I moved to kiss her mouth, and she gave me her cheek.

  “I’ll call you later,” I said.

  “I know what you’re doing,” she said. “If you care about us, you’ll stop.”

  She looked at me with disappointment and walked out of my room.

  I left the hotel and dropped off my dirty clothing at a full-service laundry shop, then had a late breakfast at a Greek diner. Afterward, I drove out to a trailer park on the edge of town, where Kenny “G” Garson, our picture car coordinator, lived in a silver mobile home he towed from job to job. His Harley-Davidson edition F-150 was parked beside the Gulf Stream, under a stand of pines. As I went up the grated retractable steps of his trailer, I could hear Rush Limbaugh’s voice coming loudly from a radio inside. Kenny listened to loops of Limbaugh repeats on the weekends.

  I knocked on the frame of the screen. Kenny appeared and suggested we sit outside. It was only March, but the weather had turned warm and would stay that way through October. The city was on a river, but open water was hundreds of miles away. There were no gulf or ocean breezes here. When the winds came, they came in the form of a hurricane. In this part of the country, productions tended to wrap before the summer months, as the weather was unbearably hot and humid from May till September. We were due to finish in about four weeks.

  Kenny directed me to a folding chair with a canvas back, not unlike my cast chair in the Village.

  “Ain’t got your name on it,” said Kenny. “Is that all right?”

  “I can manage.”

  He was wearing a T-shirt over shorts and sandals. His sunglasses were on a leash and hung over his barrel chest. We settled into our chairs.

  “What can I do you for, Vic?”

  “I need a car for the weekend.”

  He nodded toward my red Focus, parked in the shade on a filled spot of gravel and shells. “What’s wrong with your rental?”

  “It’s got four cylinders.”

  “Ford turbocharges some of those fours now.”

  “They didn’t juice that one. I need something with more horses.”

  “Why? You planning on robbin a bank?”

  “Nothing that serious. Can you fix me up?”

  “Sure. Short notice, though.”

  “I’ll pay the penalty.”

  “Why not just go to Hertz?”

  “I’d rather give you the money.”

  “Lookin out for ol’ Kenny, huh.”

  “Why not?”

  Kenny’s eyes twinkled. He had the loveable local-boy look of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. He had raised four boys who were now men, and was still married to his high school sweetheart, Jolene. They had a house on the Redneck Riviera, two blocks from the beach in Alabama, near the Florida line. Rumor was that Kenny had done time for vehicular theft as a young man and turned his passion for automobiles into a living. Ours was a business that allowed felons to reform, if they had skills. Kenny had a down-home way with people and the salesman’s ability to pick someone’s pocket with a smile. Plus, the man knew cars.

  “So you want somethin fast.”

  “It should be roomy as well. I plan to have a big man riding along with me.”

  “That leaves out a rice burner.”

  “I would think.”

  Kenny, who’d lost an uncle at Guadalcanal, didn’t care for Japanese cars. Though Kenny had been born after the war and had never known his uncle, he nevertheless had held a grudge. Also, like me, he was a union man. We went American when we could.

  “I know a fella’s got a clean black Marauder. Two thousand and four. Last year Mercury produced the ve-hicle.”

  “Is it fast?”

  “It’s a V-eight. A little on the heavy side, but it’ll move ya. Got the heads and block of a Mach One Stang.” Kenny brushed a hand through his short gray hair. “What are you gonna do with this car, Victor? Like the man in that movie said, ‘I gots to know.’”

  “I’ve got an appointment to talk with a couple of guys tonight. They might not like what I have to say. Could be I’ll have to make a hasty retreat. It would give me immense peace of mind if I knew my ride could fly.”

  “Immense peace of mind.” Kenny barked a laugh. “God, you’re fancy. I wish I was as smart as you.”

  “How much for the car?”

  “Say, three hundred. Five if you want a driver.”

  “You throwing your chauffeur’s cap into the ring?”

  “Hell, I ain’t doin nothing all weekend but playin with my pecker.”

  “You better be sure.”

  “This has something to do with Skylar, right?”

  I nodded.

  “I liked that boy,” said Kenny.

  I paid him with per diem money and told him I’d be in touch.

  Barry Mason lived in the Southern District, a neighborhood of mostly black, working-class residents that locals called the Dirty South. But it didn’t look all that dirty to my eyes. The houses were relatively small ramblers and shotguns, neat and tidy, with largeish yards bordered by chain-link fences. Behind the fences were mixed-breed dogs with a touch of boxer or pit, and in the yards sat johnboats, children’s toys, motorcycles, and tricked-out GMs, Caprice Classics, and Cutlasses with oversized tires and aftermarket rims. To me, the area said family, work, and play.

  I went through a gate and stepped into his yard, where a black Buick Grand National was up on cinder blocks. Barry came out of his yellow-sided rambler to meet me, along with two of his dogs, a pit-Lab mix and something smaller I couldn’t identify. Both of them were the same shade of tan.

  “They’re all right,” said Barry, as the large dog galloped toward me. “Nothin but yard dogs. Just let ’em smell you.”

  I stopped walking and allowed the big animal to sniff at my jeans. His ears were pinned back, so I knew I was good. The smaller one was meaner, kept her distance and glared.

  “Buster, Sandy,” said Barry. “Go.”

  The dogs went back into the house through the open door. I thought of Annette. I told you Buster was a dog’s name.

  Barry approached. He was wearing a Panavision-issue T-shirt, and as always, he’d cuffed up the sleeves. He didn’t need to do that. His arms were as big as a pencil-pusher’s thighs. Barry was a mountainous man, six foot two, three hundred pounds, much of it muscle. He didn’t need to showcase his guns to make an imprthree-ession. Folks would have stepped out of his way had he been wearing a dress and Buster Brown shoes. But certain kinds of men roll like that into adulthood. It all went back to where you came up. Where I was raised, we wore our tees the same way.

  “Barry,” I said, and shook his hand, big as a first baseman’s mitt. “Thanks for seeing me.”

  “You want to come inside?”

  “Will we be alone?”

  “My wife and kids are in there, watchin the widescreen.”

  “Let’s stay out here. I won’t keep you long.”

  Barry went over to the Buick and leaned his big ass against the front quarter panel. I followed and stood before him. He already knew what this was about. I’d told him over the phone.

  “Let’s talk about Skylar,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “He fronted you a pound of weed. Is that right?”

  “Yeah.” He looked me in the eye. Whatever he’d done, Barry was no liar. “Then something went down, and I couldn’t pay him.”

  “Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”

  “Couldn’t. You coming to me today as a boss?”

  “No. J
ust tell me what happened.”

  Barry shook his head, as if the action could erase the memory. “The get-high was for my nephew. He been trappin like a fool.”

  “Trapping?”

  “Dealing that tree.”

  Trapping. I took note of the term.

  “If your nephew’s in the game, he must have his own connect. Why would you go to Skylar?”

  “My nephew’s man came up short, and my nephew, goes by Daymo, needed some product to fill his pipeline. Told me if I could get him some, he’d have the money for me right away.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “On account of he’s my sister’s kid. I ain’t want him out there tryin to cop cold from gangstas he don’t know. I was looking to control the situation. Protect him. I didn’t think for a minute that my own blood would do me like that.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Had a man-to-boy talk with Daymo, is what I did. Put his nothin ass up against a wall. He promised to get me the money the next morning. But when the next morning came…”

  “Skylar was dead.”

  Barry looked away.

  “It wasn’t a random robbery,” I said. “Skylar paid the collectors off with cash mixed with prop money. They murdered him because of it. I’m pretty sure of that.”

  “They. Who the hell is they? ”

  The Wild Bunch, I thought. Walon Green. Greatest screenplay ever written.

  “Two young white dudes. They go by Wayne and Cody. I need to confirm that it was them.”

  “And?”

  “I aim to keep those assholes away from Laura Flanagan.”

  “That skinny little girl in wardrobe?”

  “She and Skylar were together.”

  Barry crossed his arms. “I’m sorry, man. You know I been stressin behind this.”

  “You can help me make it right.”

  “How? I can’t bring that boy back.”