Irv said, “Honey. Normally, people in our profession never meet with our customers.”
“That’s right,” said Milburn. “But we made an immaculate conception in your case.”
Irv staring at Milburn, like who is this guy!
Irv said, “We looked you up, honey, ’cause number one, we’re our own collection service, and you owed us some money. And number two, we wanted to get to meet you, a girl who had morals we can relate to.”
“Yeah?” Ricki sat down at her dressing table. Her knees weren’t taking this very well.
“It takes a special kind of girl to tack a halo on her own mother. Takes the kind of girl who knows what she wants and goes after it.” Irv paused, cleared his throat for effect, and switched over to his consultant’s voice, down to business with the good Death. “Now, is what you’re telling us that there’s somebody else standing in front of you in the gravy train? And you want us to finish this up, clean this guy out? Let the money flow?”
“That’s right. That’s the situation,” she said.
“Who’s the lucky guy this time, your daddy?”
“Adopted brother,” Ricki said.
“Jesus F. Christ, is she something or what?” Irv said to Milburn, clapping his hands and doing a little wiggle in the hips. “Well, like I said. We wanted to meet you anyway, ’cause we had an idea we could help you out in another way. Like with some of the assets that will be coming your way.”
“What assets?” She had picked up a hair brush, was holding it now like a hammer. Like maybe she’d brush these two guys to death.
“Well, we had occasion to have a few drinks at a place up in Matecumbe.”
Ricki said quietly, “Vacation Island.”
“Ri-ii-ight. Very go-oo-od.” Irv nodded at her and nodded at Milburn. “Vacation Island. Now that’s what we would consider proper payment. For killing a guy who’s related to a woman we already killed.
“See, I don’t know if you’re perceiving this thing all that clearly. You kill one person, and nobody knows exactly what the deal is, ’cause this person could be into all kinds of bad shit. But you kill a second person shortly thereafter, a person who in this case is even related to the first, well, now you’ve established a pattern. Patterns, honey, we don’t like patterns. Bad for business.
“So, if I say that yes, we’ll do this, we’ll yank the plug on some guy you name for us, so you can be a rich rich lady, then I’m saying it with the understanding that I can take a nice long vacation myself after the deed is done.
“Vacation Island,” Irv said. “Vacation Island.”
“Well, forget it then,” Ricki said. “Take your three and split.” She started counting the money on the dressing table.
“Honeybuns, honeybuns.” Sounding grieved. “Think about this. You’re not in a great position here. There’s people around who don’t care about you, who would just as soon you were an earthworm farm.”
“Who?”
“Us, honeybuns. Me and my friend. Us.”
“Forget it. Forget the whole thing. I’m finished with all this.”
“Nobody’s finished with nothing,” said Milburn. “Hey, man. Let’s just wet this broad and take our cash and our bonus and get on with it.”
“See? See what I’m telling you? My associate wants to go have lunch. He wants to pinch out your flame and go have lunch. You see what you’re up against here?”
“OK,” Ricki said, her voice misty. “I don’t give a shit. You can have Vacation Island. It sucks anyway. I just want the money. You do this guy, and you got it. But it has to be an accident. None of this dildo stuff. A real live accidental death.”
“Everybody’s a joker,” said Irv. “Everybody’s up for an Oscar.”
“His name is Thorn,” Ricki said. “I drew you a map, how to find his house.”
A half hour after they left Ricki’s, Milburn was still going on about how they should have killed her, and Irv, concentrating on finding a decent restaurant on Duval Street, let him talk. He finally found a place beside a dime store. On the other side of it was a shop selling bikinis and T-shirts. Across the street was the Hemingway bar, its big doors open and inside looking dark and empty. Parachutes draped from the ceiling, Jimmy Buffet on the jukebox, moaning about what a drunk he’d become.
Irv hated Key West. It wasn’t all the gay guys checking him and Milburn out, and it wasn’t all the tourists with their funny hats and matching clothes. It was the smell. The funk of vegetables rotting in the sun. Food becoming something else.
You’d think with all that gingerbread on the storefronts, all that fresh paint, all that incense coming out of the little purple boutiques and the hammers going nonstop up and down Duval, they’d take more care with their garbage. Irv pictured a festering carcass down in the bowels of the city. Only city he’d smelled worse than this was New Orleans, the French Quarter. Another queer town.
“This guy,” said Milburn, as Irv was combing his hair in the window of the dime store, “this guy isn’t going to be real happy to see us.”
“Yeah.”
“He told us, I remember it, ‘Don’t ever show yourself within ten miles of me.’ ”
“I remember. A nice guy. Sweetheart.”
“I feel dorky in this uniform. We don’t look like any boat captains I ever saw.”
“Hey,” said Irv, putting his comb back in his pocket, making Milburn squeeze out of the way has he headed for the restaurant. “Hey, man. You dressed us like this.”
“I feel like a part of the vegetable kingdom,” Milburn said.
Irv stared at him. What was with this guy?
“Here’s the scene, Mr. Tomato. We’re going to see him. Lay it out for him. We know something’s coming down the pipe, something big. We can smell it on the way, and we want a small piece of it. We don’t tell him about Vacation Island or any of that. We just go in there and act like we are there to give further assistance, but we’re not in anybody’s farm league anymore. You, you just stand there and try not to fart. I’ll handle it.”
“I say we go to the nude beach and get out of these things, forget Grayson, forget anything coming down any pipeline. You already got Vacation Island. You’re pushing our luck we go in there. This guy is very unfriendly on the phone. I have no desire to become business partners with this person.”
“I have no desire to become business partners with this person.” Irv doing his sissy imitation. “Listen to you, man. Listen to your stupid self.”
Irv swung the doors of the restaurant open and nearly whacked two thin young men who were walking past. One of them gave him the fluttering eye. Irv smacked his lips at the guy, blew him a kiss. La-di-da.
Shaking his head and groaning, Milburn dragged himself after Irv. As they were being seated, Irv reached around and touched the flat automatic holstered under his shirt. Mean little SIG/Sauer nine-millimeter printing its silhouette into his lumbar region. He tucked his khaki shirt in tight around it.
They had a beer at a bar that opened onto Duval. Sitting at a little table almost on the street. Irv watched all the bartenders fussing with ferns, polishing the brass light fixtures. While Milburn complained about his eye, couple of guys at a table nearby, dressed as Kmart managers, were having a late lunch, a conversation about somebody stealing stock from the warehouse. Everywhere you looked, people ripping off what they could.
Milburn ordered fried chicken, and Irv scowled at him.
“I like fried chicken,” Milburn said.
“And you, sir?” The waiter was wearing jeans and an undershirt.
“Give me a barf bag,” he said. And while the waiter watched him, Irv just sat there, taking the waiter’s scorn or whatever he was sending out. Finally the waiter left.
“Can’t you ever be nice?” Milburn asked him.
“What is it with you ordering fried chicken?”
“I like fried chicken. Just because Irv senior is fried chicken czar doesn’t mean I can’t ever eat the stuff.”
That was it. Milb
urn was dead.
“Hey, enjoy it,” Irv said. “Eat every greasy morsel. Slide it down into that grease pit of a body. It could be the last fucking food you ever eat.”
“Jesus, Irv. I thought you’d be happy for once. Vacation Island. Think about it, man. You and me, running a whole big resort.” Milburn raked his fork across the white tablecloth, a little kid, excited. Trying to whip Irv up. “I see myself as losing some weight. You know, getting down to my fighting weight, one-eighty or something. Get into one of those little bikini suits, start doing weights. Slay the women. Just stay out in the sun all day and fucking slay the women.”
“Sure, Milburn. Sure. Dream on.” Dead man. “And like get out of this business. I don’t like it anymore. It’s not fun.” Lowering his voice. “It was fun, but it isn’t anymore. I’m having bad dreams. I like the idea of getting into something legit. You know. Like we had our fun, and now we’re getting older and more serious. Mid-life crisis and all that shit. I’m ready for it, whip myself into shape, and sleep good again. I don’t see any reason we couldn’t be happy running a place like that. We can do it. Shit, the two of us? We’re a fucking team, man.”
Irv had just shoved Grayson’s door open and walked in. Milburn behind him talking about being polite. Polite. What’d he think, they were missionaries? Inside the door they just stood there, Irv soaking up the ambiance. Place gave good ambiance.
Should have known Grayson would have a fag secretary. Blond guy looked like he’d just gotten off a Swedish cruise ship. Blue eyes. Handsome sucker, and he wasn’t having any of it from them either. Grayson was in, doing important business on the phone, and he wasn’t seeing anybody didn’t have an appointment. Not even old friends, not even old friends who’d come a long way. Not even old friends who had a wad of money.
Irv stood back away from the secretary and looked at the waiting room. It was in a one-story Conch house, with wood floors and couches and rocking chairs and paintings of seascapes and scenes from New England. Palms in clay pots. Somebody’s parlor. This secretary didn’t even sit behind a desk. He was there in a white wicker chair, reading a paperback, wearing tennis clothes. But on the glass-topped table beside him there was an appointment book, so Irv knew he wasn’t shitting them. He was the gatekeeper all right.
Saturday morning, just jerking off a few leftover clients before he was off to the tennis club. It didn’t sit well with Irv, kind of snob shit that ragged his ass.
“Hey, Adonis,” Irv said, pretending to study a painting of sea gulls on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard, “tell me something. You ever been shot? I mean with a pistol. Smith and Wesson, like that?” He heard Milburn making noises behind him.
“You two better leave now,” Rolfe said, or Ingmar or whatever the fuck he was.
“I got this crazy urge. Call me nutty, but I just feel like opening up a new asshole for somebody. Does this mean I’m a sociopath? Is this what this means? I get down here, all this Hemingway stuff everywhere, and I feel like killing something and hanging it on my wall.”
The kid was on his feet now. The guy had forearms. And calves. Probably a hell of a backhand.
Irv walked over to one of the potted palms, opened up the fly on those stupid khaki shorts, and took a leak.
The kid had the phone up to his face and was punching in the numbers. Irv zipped up and drew out the automatic.
“Put it back to sleep,” he said. “We want to see our man, Grayson, is all we want. But we want that one thing very bad.” “Back here,” said the blond. Businesslike now, like he’d had this experience before. You really wanted to see Grayson, you had to pull your gun.
He led them down a hallway lined with photographs. Ground-breaking ceremonies, ribbon cuttings. Same young stud in every one. Dark-haired, trim little guy with a haircut from Princeton or Yale or somewhere like that. Irv decided he would like this guy, like doing business with a person with a good haircut like that. Not some stringy, greasy-haired college dropout like Milburn.
The secretary said, “I’m sorry, Philip. Guy’s got a gun.”
“It’s Philip, is it?” Irv cooed.
The four of them stood around and stared at each other. Finally Milburn sat in one of the green leather chairs, and that seemed to break the spell.
“If you’re who I think you are, I am pissed off. I am very pissed off anyway. But if you are who I think.”
“We’re the guys you have your friends call up. That’s who we are. We’re the kind of people, things usually get messy when we’re pissed off.”
“Randy, go sit in the den,” Grayson said.
“Randy stays,” Irv said. “Right here. I don’t want him to call up his doubles partners or anything like that.”
Grayson was in tennis togs, too. His were more colorful, though. Dark green shirt, yellow wristband. Off-white shorts. Thick, hairy legs. He went about five-nine. Kind of guy you expect to see delivering the six o’clock news. Hell of a haircut.
He sat down behind his desk. It was a long teak thing, modern, completely bare. Not even a phone. Behind him there was a computer terminal, screen, printer. And the place was full of palms, the same kind Irv had watered in the other room. Five or six of them. Air smelled of fresh dirt.
“You stupid sons of bitches,” Grayson said. Elbows on his desk, grinding the thumb of one hand into the palm of the other. “Put that stupid gun away.”
Irv slid it into the front pocket of those pants.
“Now what do you want here?”
“Nothing much,” Irv said.
“The bitch didn’t pay you, I suppose.”
“She paid us,” said Irv.
Grayson seemed surprised.
“OK, then what?”
“It’s about this deal. This lady, what’s her name, Truman?”
“Kate Truman,” Grayson said, closing his eyes briefly and exhaling through his nose. The topic was a direct hit.
“My associate and I are phasing out of the liquidation business. Too much bad karma associated with it. Take lifetimes to purify all we done already. We’re on the lookout for other opportunities. Work with less of a hemoglobin factor. You see what I’m saying?”
Grayson said, “I think I do.”
“And we were putting two with two the other day, and it kept coming up with your name. Like this woman, Kate Truman, and how she had to get buried on account of something that’s to your advantage. Of course, the daughter just wants the inheritance. But we were real curious about how it was a cost-effective thing for a man like you. I mean, we figured this girl didn’t just get our phone number from the yellow pages, and when we asked her about it, she said well, yes, it was you.
“So, it seemed like a natural coincidence. Synchronicity and all that. Us looking for a new career and you expanding your horizons all at the same time.”
Grayson had propped his chin on his right fist. The Thinker, giving Irv the full magnetism of his attention. Guy must have girls oozing under the doors at night. He sat up and pulled a red bandanna, of all the crazy things, out of his tennis shorts and wiped the sheen off his forehead. Some kind of cowboy nut probably, a saddle sniffer.
“Before I say anything else, let me make this clear. I think you two are scum. You’re worthless asshole trash, and you’re going to wind up as pet food.”
“He doesn’t like us,” Milburn said. “Boo-hoo.”
Had to hand it to that Milburn.
“But I think I can use you. I think I can take advantage of your greed and stupidity and make an arrangement here that might be of mutual benefit. That’s my idea of good business. Where everybody walks away happy.”
“Everybody screws everybody else at the same time. Daisy-chain economics,” Milburn said. Man, the guy was really working, huffing along, trying to pull even. But no, Irv had already decided about Milburn.
“I was just on the phone,” Grayson said. “With a friend of mine. A man from up in your neck of the woods in Key Largo. A nice old gentleman who is maybe slightly confused from
not having enough blood running through his brain anymore.”
“He must’ve been talking to my daddy,” Irv said to Milburn.
“This gentleman is going to be a wealthy man soon. One way or the other he is soon to receive a million dollars. A million cash dollars.”
Irv smiled. Yeah, he’d known there was something like that happening. He looked over at Milburn. The guy had a tit in his mouth he was so happy.
“In fact, I know the time and date that a transaction is to occur in which a million dollars in cash will be arriving at a particular address. I don’t want this transaction to be completed. It is important to me, very important that such a deal is not completed. In fact, it’s so important that I’m willing to deal with scum like you two to see that it does not reach fruition.”
“All right so far,” Irv said. Trying not to sound the way he felt.
“If the person or persons delivering the cash have to be hurt during this arrangement, then so be it. If one or more people have to be sacrificed, that’s acceptable to me. But the old gentleman I mentioned. He is absolutely not to be touched. Absolutely off limits. The two of you intercept this cash and disappear. Buy a ranch and raise pigs. Do anything. But don’t ever appear in my line of sight again. Ever.”
Irv was thinking maybe he’d find out which it was, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, this guy went to. What courses he took that made him such a hardass. It wasn’t too late; Irv could go back to school, turn himself into this person.
Or no, maybe take his cash and go out to Hollywood, take some of those acting classes he’d always heard about. Buy himself an agent, get a part opposite Jack Nicholson. No, not Nicholson. Much as he liked the guy, Jack would upstage him. No, some broad. How about Julie Andrews? Yeah. Clickety clickety. Let the cash from Vacation Island fill up his bank account while he used the million for his movie career.
Irv stood up. “This sounds suitable.” He walked over to Milburn, stood behind his chair. Put his left hand on Milburn’s shoulder. “I think I can work with you, Grayson, even though you’re clearly a shitty judge of character.”
Irv reached into his trouser pocket, drew out the nine-millimeter, took off the safety, and snugged the barrel against Milburn’s neck. Before Milburn could even wriggle, Irv aimed straight down into his body and fired twice. Just more hammers nailing more nails in more buildings. An inspired moment.
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