King Maybe

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Yeah, well, you cling to that in the middle of the night. Especially considering that you’ve got a goddamn gun in your hand.”

  “Junior!” Ronnie said.

  I said, “You should see what they did to him while Stinky was getting his over-upholstered ass down the driveway.”

  “Onto the golf course,” Stinky said. He could never resist an opportunity to correct.

  “Not hard to figure out what the weapon was,” I said. “And I didn’t even see it happen.”

  He shoved the gun into the base of my skull, hard. “This is what I should have done the first time I wanted you dead. Not hire a bunch of palmy hitters who—”

  “Don’t mess up my car,” Ronnie said.

  “Your car?” I said, and immediately tried to erase it with, “Yeah, don’t mess up the lady’s car.” I turned the razor so the blade was facing away from me.

  “Whose car is it, then?” Stinky said.

  “Hers,” I said as Ronnie said, “Mine.”

  Stinky said, “Looks a lot like the one you drive, Junior.”

  I said, “I borrowed it from her,” as Ronnie said, “I bought it from him.”

  There was a pause. My fingers were cramping around the razor. Stinky said to Ronnie, “You’re fast.”

  I said, “I was just telling her that a few minutes ago.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be sitting here,” Ronnie said. “What with Jujube or whatever his—”

  “Jejomar,” Stinky said, his voice rising.

  “Tell me why you want to kill me,” I said.

  Ronnie said, “You mean this time.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said.

  “Just looking for clarification,” Ronnie said, sounding aggrieved.

  “Don’t act even dimmer than you are,” Stinky said to me. “You told those beasts with bats that I sent you for the stamp, and they came to kill me.”

  “Really.” I let go of the razor and said, “I’m moving slowly here, Stinky,” and reached into my pocket. “Explain this.” I had the stamp pinched between my fingertips.

  “It’s the fake?” Stinky said, but the question mark deprived the sentence of most of its authority.

  We all sat there for a minute. Then he said, “Gimme.”

  “In your fucking hat,” I said, pulling it away. “You do anything I don’t like, and I mean anything, and I swear I’ll use the last bit of life I have left to chew it into a spitball.”

  “You guys are both lunkheads,” Ronnie said. “He thought—Junior here did—that you found the stamp, sent him after it, and tipped off that bat fetishist, all as a fancy way to kill him.”

  “Preposterous,” Stinky said. He settled his weight farther back in the seat, which made the car dip. “As you should know from recent experience, Junior, when I want to kill you, I’ll hire someone to shoot you.”

  “Like that other man just did,” Ronnie said.

  Stinky said, “What other man?”

  I said, “Never mind.”

  “And you thought,” Ronnie said serenely to Stinky, “that they caught Junior in the act, as people say, and he told them you sent him, and they said, ‘Well, all right, then, thanks, here you go,’ and gave him the stamp as a reward and came after you.”

  “Well,” Stinky said, “when you put it that way—”

  “I said the exact same thing,” I told him. “When she reacted to my theory, I mean. Word for word.”

  The pressure on the gun eased off. “You going to give me the stamp?”

  “You going to give me the thirty-five K?”

  “I haven’t got that kind of money in my pocket.”

  “Well,” I said, “this will give you motivation to get it.”

  “You don’t trust me,” Stinky said, and Ronnie burst out laughing.

  I said, “What’s so funny?”

  “Both of you,” she said. “You’re hopeless.”

  Stinky said, “Who are you anyway?” He was looking at her like someone who’s just seen something new and is trying to count its legs.

  “A mere girl,” Ronnie said.

  Stinky nodded, stopped nodding, and nodded again. Then he shook his head once as though to clear it and said to me, “So you didn’t rat me to them?”

  “Would I be alive if I had? Would I have this?” I waved it around a little. “So you didn’t set me up?”

  “Of course not.” He thought for a moment. “Were you ever a Boy Scout?”

  “No.”

  “Really?” Stinky sounded surprised.

  “But you were a Cub—” Ronnie began.

  “Skip that,” I said.

  Stinky leaned forward to look at me over the gun, which was now beneath his chin. “You were a Cub Scout but you never became a Boy Scout?”

  “One of my early failures.”

  “Out of many,” he said.

  “I’d like not to point out that you’re the one who ran away over the eighteenth hole, leaving his valiant houseboy with his legs on backward.”

  Ronnie said, “Eeewwww.”

  “So do you remember the oath?” Stinky said. He seemed to have gotten past Jejomar, with the dependable resilience of the sociopath.

  “What oath?”

  “The Boy Scout oath.” Stinky sounded like he’d had a long day of talking to stupid people.

  “I told you, I was only a Cub Scout.”

  “Why?”

  “He couldn’t climb a rope,” Ronnie said.

  “What’re you, Jiminy Cricket? If I want my conscience singing out all the time, I’ll take some sodium pentothal.”

  Ronnie turned back to Stinky, pushing the gun barrel aside. “Careful with that thing,” she said. “He’s touchy about the Cub Scout episode. He still can’t climb a—”

  “Fine, fine, fine,” Stinky said. He put the gun beside him on the seat. “Is there some oath you do believe in?”

  “Sure,” I said. “The oath of the Tarzana Ham Sandwich and Skateboard Club. I belonged to it when I was a kid.”

  “Then by the oath of the whatever you just said, do you swear you didn’t have anything to do with those sadists showing up?”

  “I do.”

  “Okay.” Stinky looked down at the automatic as though he’d forgotten he put it there. “Perhaps we need to reconsider the situation.”

  “There’s a situation?” I said. “One that we’re both in?”

  Lights swept the lawn to our left and then flared in the rearview mirror. “Everybody down,” I said, and we all dove for the floor. My hand rolled on something, and I picked up one of Ronnie’s fugitive lipsticks.

  The car came down the block slowly and slowed even more as it passed us. The beam of a flashlight nosed its way through the passenger window and zipped snoopily around over our heads. From the backseat I heard Stinky whisper, “Ama namin, sumasalangit Ka Sambahin ang ngalan Mo—”

  I said, “Shut up.”

  Stinky left off, but I could still hear his lips moving. He sounded short on spit.

  The car accelerated, and the noise of it gradually fell away.

  “Okay,” I said. “There is a situation.”

  “I told you we should move,” Ronnie said, her voice pitched a little closer to the soprano range than usual. “Why didn’t they get out of the car?”

  “There are two possibilities. The good one is that they didn’t see anything and decided to keep searching. The bad one is that they did see something and decided it would be too noisy to take care of us here.” I handed her the lipstick. “Found this.”

  “I looked everywhere for that.” She pocketed it. “What a relief.”

  “What a relief?” Stinky said, clawing his way back to eye level. “This team of sadists is after us and getting your lipstick back is a relief?”

  “It’s a
hard color to find,” she said. To me she said, “How long should we give them?”

  “Three minutes.”

  “Why three minutes?”

  “I don’t know. Same reason I asked for ten minutes before. It sounds kind of cool, suggests that I know what I’m doing.”

  Stinky said, “You don’t know what you’re doing?”

  “If I knew what I was doing, Stinky, would I be here?”

  “I’m not good at this,” he said. “I should be home, with my things.”

  “Wouldn’t recommend it, not for quite a while. What were you saying back there?”

  “Saying? When?”

  “During the flashlight.”

  “Oh,” Stinky said. “Then.”

  “Should I go out the way we’re facing,” Ronnie said, “or turn the car around?”

  I said, “Why does everyone ask me everything?”

  “Okay,” Ronnie said. “Turn around.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said. “If you want to decide, just decide.”

  “Just looking for . . . you know, the logic of it. I mean, since our lives might depend on it and all.”

  “I figured they saw something,” Ronnie said, “and decided to wait for us up ahead.”

  “And why do you figure they saw something?”

  “I knew you were going to ask that. When I got down, I hit the brake pedal with my hand.”

  Stinky said, very fast, “Ama namin, sumasalangit Ka Sambahin—”

  “That,” I said to Stinky. “What the hell is that?”

  “The Lord’s Prayer. In Tagalog.” There was a pause that felt like someone waiting for a slap, and he sniffled again and said, “Ting Ting taught it to me.”

  I said, “Great guy, Ting Ting.”

  He said, “Have you seen him?” in the tone of someone who has come to think that “hope” is nothing more than a girl’s name.

  “We don’t move in the same circles,” I said. “They’re a younger, more energetic couple, go out a lot. And then there’s her. She kills people.”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Ronnie said. “Go straight or turn around?”

  “Turn around.”

  “I feel so vindicated,” she said. “The three minutes up?”

  “Who’s counting? Just get us out of here.” To Stinky I said, “Give me the gun.”

  He said, “It’s not loaded.”

  “It’s not—”

  “If it was loaded, do you think I would have let them do that to Jejomar?”

  “Right, right, right. I’m sorry, I really am. So why’d you bring it?”

  “I felt safer. It fooled you, didn’t it?”

  “Here we go,” Ronnie said, and there we went, into a very tidy three-point turn. We crept slowly, lights still out, to the corner of Stinky’s street, and she started to make a left.

  “No, no,” Stinky said. “Dead end. That way leads to the country-club gate. It’ll be closed by now. Have to go right.”

  “Got it.”

  “And turn the lights on,” I said. “This is like having the Goodyear blimp over us with a big arrow pointing down and flashing the words ‘Here they are.’”

  “It’s so easy to criticize.” She flipped the lights on and made the turn.

  Instantly, headlights went on behind us.

  Stinky said, “There’s someone back there.”

  “This is the first night I’ve ever driven this thing,” Ronnie said. “Does it have any punch?”

  Normally the car has a big fat Detroit gas gulper, wedged into it by Louie the Lost, but Louie’s engine developed a cracked block, so the original Toyota putt-putt was back in place. I said, “Not so’s you’d notice.”

  “Well, let’s find out.” She jammed her foot down, and the car gave a little gargle and leaped forward, accelerating by a good five miles per hour. She slapped the dashboard. “That’s it?”

  “You have to talk to it.” I looked back, past Stinky, at the dazzle of light behind us.

  “What do you say?”

  “It’s too embarrassing.” The lights behind us doubled in brightness and grew closer.

  “Does it have a name?” Ronnie said. She was bouncing backward and forward to urge the car on, as though she were rowing it.

  “That’s what’s embarrassing,” I said. A nice-looking house crept by on the left, at a rate of speed that gave me time to appreciate it. I reached back and snatched the gun from Stinky’s hand. “Are you sure this thing isn’t loaded?”

  “Well, I didn’t load it.”

  Ronnie said, “Pookie? FooFoo?”

  “Get down,” I told Stinky, and the moment he ducked, I pulled the trigger.

  Both my ears turned inside out, Ronnie screamed, and the back window exploded into a million diamonds. And then the horn of the car behind us began to blare and the car slowly drifted left, bounced right, swerved left again, and jumped the curb. Then it came to a stop.

  “What a shot,” I said, although I hadn’t actually been aiming.

  “Oh, my God,” Stinky said. “I could have saved Jejomar.”

  Ronnie said, “Uh-oh.”

  I said to her, “It felt too easy, didn’t it?”

  Half a block in front of us, a black Porsche pulled away from the curb and immediately telegraphed its intentions by weaving back and forth at about eight miles an hour.

  “Shoot him, Junior,” Stinky said, a bit imperiously.

  Ronnie didn’t have to brake much to stay back. She started weaving in opposition to the car in front of us: it went left, we went right. “Slow is good,” she said. “This car is aces with slow.”

  “How far to a turnoff, Stinky?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You live here.”

  “I don’t get out much.”

  The car in front of us was slowing even more. We were going about five miles an hour, and it kept weaving back and forth.

  “I am behind people like this all the time,” Ronnie said between her teeth. “Why don’t you do what the nice man said, Junior? Shoot the fucker.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Weave left. That way I can get a good shot at the driver’s side.”

  “Left, Pookie,” she said to the car, and we swerved. It was a slow swerve, but it was a swerve.

  The back window of the Porsche was tinted, and I couldn’t make out the driver’s silhouette, but a driver usually likes to be close to the steering wheel, so I aimed at where I thought it would be, closed one eye, sighted, drew a deep breath, and pulled the trigger.

  “You were close,” I said to Stinky. “It was almost not loaded.”

  “You mean, that’s it? There aren’t any extra ones stuck in there anywhere?”

  “Not a one. I could throw it at them.”

  “Uh-oh,” Ronnie said again, and then for a third time, “Uh-oh.”

  I said, “Two?”

  “Two,” she said. “The one in front of us and two behind us.”

  Stinky said, “Oh, my God. Bats.”

  I looked back to see two guys who were as wide as they were tall and had those big, sloping shoulder muscles that seem to begin at the ears and make the head look really, really little trotting toward us, holding the biggest baseball bats I’d ever seen. I said to Ronnie, “What’s in front—” and canceled the rest of the question because the Porsche was in a very wide swerve to the right, all the way to the curb, and then it pulled left until it was perpendicular to us and stopped, blocking the road.

  The door opened, and a much slighter guy got out, no hurry, all the time in the world. He was slender and kind of classical-musician-looking, dressed all in black and smoking a cigarette. He had an elegant swoop of steel-gray hair that picked up the moonlight nicely, and over his shoulder was yet ano
ther bat. He paused, found the bright center of the headlights, stepped into it, and, swear to God, riffed his swoop of gray hair with the fingers of his free hand. He was posing.

  “That’s him,” Stinky said, his voice breaking on the pronoun. “That’s the Slugger.”

  I said, “I’m surprised he didn’t bring his mirror.”

  Ronnie said. “Where’s reverse?”

  “Two down.”

  She slammed it into reverse and floored it. I’d like to say we shot backward, but it was more demure than that. We rolled backward at a dignified, favorite-auntie speed, gradually picking up velocity, and then Ronnie cut the wheel sharply left and we all heard and felt a loud thump followed a hoarse scream, and as the other guy’s bat landed on the trunk with malice aforethought, she said, “Engine in back?”

  “It’s a Toyota,” I said. “The engine is in the fucking ashtray.”

  “In the Porsche, you idiot.”

  The bat shattered the left backseat window, and the car filled with flying glass and Stinky’s shriek.

  “In the back,” I said. “I think.”

  “Okay. Put on your seat belts.”

  I said, “Oh, for Christ’s—” And Ronnie dumped the car into neutral, raced the engine to the red line, and threw it into gear.

  We jumped forward with a squealing-tire abandon that was a new element in my relationship with the car, and Ronnie leaned on the horn, one long, pulsating bleat of desperation to wake up the neighbors. The slight figure of the Slugger jumped elegantly out of the way, and Ronnie twisted the wheel left, hopping the curb on the driver’s side and, still gathering momentum, clipped the front end of the Porsche at a sharp angle, knocking it cattywampus, and then we were around it and hurtling downhill.

  “Directions!” Ronnie shouted.

  I said, “Go right, then just head downhill.”

  She tore her eyes from the rearview mirror. “Watch behind us.”

  I looked back. We hung a gentle curve and then made the right, and even looking backward as I was, in my peripheral vision I could see the Valley opening itself welcomingly below us, glittering a relieved Hello there. Ronnie had brought the car’s speed down to something like the limit, and she said, “Anything?”