by Hart Hanson
It was looking more and more like I was going to get shot in the gut by a filthy fat biker, after which Keet would take the heavy bag off that crane, hang Avila in its place, and start clipping off his extremities with a pair of bolt cutters until Avila gave up the location of Keet’s barrels of money. (These are the kinds of developments that result when you let civilians run an operation.)
“The reason I sent Slim and Nick to your place,” Keet told Avila, “was to gauge your security levels. Slim’s got an eye for that shit.”
“Lemme shoot him,” says Slim.
“I admire your focus,” I tell him.
“Being nice to Slim ain’t gonna help you none.” Tums laughs, lighting another of his skunky, weed-packed cigarillo blunts.
“My head,” Nick said, probing for the blood.
“How come poor little Nick doesn’t get a nickname?” I asked.
“Tums is my real name. I bet you thought I have a nervous stomach, didn’t you? But I don’t,” offered Mr. Tums. He carried a gun in a nylon holster in the small of his back. Not a big one, a .32. If I could just figure out how to cross twenty-five feet of dusty real estate, disarm Mr. Tums, flick off the safety, and shoot fat-boy Slim through the eye before he emptied two barrels of double-aught into my central body mass, I might have a chance of survival, assuming that Keet wasn’t packing some surprise of his own.
“Why you wanna know who’s guarding me if you don’t want to kill me?” Avila asked.
Keet spit and said, “I been finding kids like you and raising ’em out of the gutter for years. Isn’t that right, Tums?”
“It is right,” Mr. Tums said, billowing smoke. “Dime a dozen.” He pointed his blunt at Nick and X-Ray, not that either of them was paying attention, due to their respective headaches.
“I know how to deal with people like you,” Keet said.
“Does it all the time,” Mr. Tums said. “Every day.”
“Street rats got an outsize opinion of theirselves,” Keet told me. “The size of their brains. How tough they are.” He turned to Avila. “You, Biz, you are the worst of all, given how far you’ve risen on those qualities. But what I’m going to do is kill him.”
(Pointing at me again!)
“Then everyone who guards you. Other people around you.”
(Bodyguard. Cousin Rocky . . .)
“Street kid wraps himself in layers of protection,” Keet explained. “To make a point, you gotta cut through the layers, get to the heart. What’s the girl’s name, Tums?”
“Nina,” Mr. Tums said, scratching his ankle, providing me with a side-view glimpse of his sidearm—a Seecamp LWS .32. Fine little gun, beautifully balanced, often loaded with hollow-point bullets to make up for its diminutive size, magazine of six rounds. Deadly in the right hands but not very accurate past about ten yards. Excellent for close-in work, bullet to the spine or back of the head and gone before the body hits the ground, bullet doesn’t even exit, just rattles around your insides, wreaking havoc.
I revised my opinion of the amiable, stoned Mr. Tums.
“You’ve always been able to pull the fillies, Biz,” Keet said. Then, to me, “Getting laid since before he first got hair on his cookie.”
Was this a good time, I wondered, to point out to Keet the weird, molester vibe he gave off? I decided no.
“So I have no doubt you’ll be able to replace . . . what’s her name again?”
“Nina Sprey,” Mr. Tums said.
“You’ll be able to replace Nina Sprey in no time. But eventually, nobody will want to be anywhere near you and you’ll get lonely and tell me where to find my barrels.”
I knew it wasn’t the best of times to let my mind wander, but it occurred to me that it was a good thing that Delilah wasn’t here or listening in, because nothing Keet was saying in any way suggested that he’d been working with Willeniec, which was unfortunate, because if somehow I survived this afternoon, I’d like Willeniec’s death to be attributable to Keet.
“Aside from the part where I get killed,” I told Keet, “that’s a solid plan.”
“Can I shoot him?” Slim asked.
“What if Mr. Avila were to tell you where the barrels are right now?”
“Worth a shot,” Keet allowed. “No pun intended.”
“He’d kill both of us,” Avila said. “I’m sorry, Dr. Sergeant, then he’ll just kill us both.”
I’m already moving toward Mr. Tums when Keet nods permission for Slim to kill me, even though I don’t have a chance of evading Slim’s double-barreled shotgun blast, but hey, sometimes you gotta spit in the eye of probability.
“No!” Keet barks.
I know what’s happened without even glancing over my shoulder.
Avila has stepped between me and the fat man. Like a well-trained pit bull, Slim stops himself from pulling the trigger and I hit Mr. Tums low and hard, reaching around for the sweet little Seecamp, flipping off the safety, and jamming the barrel into Tums’s right ear while I yank us both to our feet, maneuvering his body mass in front of me as a shield.
Mr. Tums doesn’t struggle. He raises his hands to the heavens. It’s astonishing how inspiring a hollow-point .32 can be when properly implied.
I peer past Tums. Avila steps up to Slim, still frozen by his boss’s No!, and takes the shotgun. Keet has conjured up a Colt .45 from somewhere on his person, and aims it, expertly, at Avila, which is a prime example of irony in the Human Comedy because not five seconds before, he stopped Slim from blowing Avila in two.
“No matter what,” Mr. Tums whispers, “you and me can come out of this alive, Santa Anas. You and me.”
I tell him, “Stand up.”
Avila points the shotgun at Keet’s belly; Keet has his Colt pointed at Avila’s head. Slim stands obesely. The two boys realize they might be expected to display an interest outside of their own aching heads.
“You want us to do something, Mr. Keet?” X-Ray asks.
“No,” Keet says.
“I can take him,” Slim says, meaning Avila.
“It’s a shotgun, Slim. Four-aught buck,” Keet says, “but I appreciate the thought. You see a way out of this?”
Asking me.
(Finally someone had the sense to ask an expert.)
“I do see a way out.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Nick, you drop your shorts around your ankles and lie down and look away,” I say.
“Fuck you, faggot.”
“Do what he says,” Keet says.
Through the corner of my eye, I see Nick drop his pants and lie down. I motivate the pliable Tums toward Avila, tightening my grip and pulling him close. Tums’s arms drop to his sides like they are simply too heavy to hold up.
“You boys don’t do a damn thing,” Keet says.
“What I’d like to see is what happens when one of these hollow-points hits you in your big, fat, greasy guts,” I tell Slim. “I bet you wish you’d shot me now, you greasy blimp.”
“Slim,” Keet says, “this is a serious motherfucker. He knocked out Tums with that choke hold and is using him like a shield.”
Which is true. Mr. Tums is no longer conscious. Luckily for me, despite his height, Tums weighs a maximum of one fifty. I’d have been struggling pretty hard if the situation was different and Slim was my human shield.
“This goes on too much longer he’ll have brain damage,” I say. “Then he’ll only be as smart as fuckfat.”
Slim’s eyes flicker. I’m getting to him.
“Not your fault,” Keet tells Slim. “It’s on me we didn’t put this boy down first chance we had.”
“What you wanna do for a next step?” Avila asks, his eyes never leaving Keet, the two of them locked to each other like a suicide pact.
“X-Ray?”
“Fuck you.”
“
You pick up that baseball bat.”
“You aren’t the boss of me,” X-Ray says.
“Do every damn thing the man tells you,” says Keet. “Don’t make me say it every time.”
X-Ray picks up the bat.
“Now hit Slim real hard on the top of his head. Overhand. Like chopping wood.”
“What?”
Keet laughs.
“If fat boy is still conscious after you hit him, I’ll shoot him in his belly. No way I can miss a target that big. So give it your best effort first time.”
“I wanna watch,” Nick says from the ground.
“Shut up, Nick,” Keet says. “Do what he says, X-Ray. Put Slim down with one hit.”
“Come on, now,” Slim says.
“Here’s hoping the kid kills you,” I say.
Keet says, “Now.”
Slim hollers just before X-Ray swings hard, over the top, like driving the last spike in the railroad, and the sound of the whomp! as the bat hits Slim’s pumpkin-size head is spectacular. I suspect that X-Ray bears a grudge against Slim.
X-Ray says, “Sorry, Slim.”
“You did a good job. He can’t hear you,” Keet says.
“Throw the bat over to me.”
“Fuck you,” X-Ray says.
“What’d I tell you?” Keet asks the boy. “Tums is purple.”
X-Ray tosses the bat to me.
“Tums’s eyes are open,” Keet says, “but he ain’t seeing nothing. He dies and I got no reason not to shoot you.”
I shuffle me and the unconscious Mr. Tums over to within four feet of Keet and aim Tums’s wicked little gun at his right eye.
“Mr. Avila, come over here and take Keet’s pistol. If he doesn’t like it, I’ll shoot him.”
“Now I’m Mr. Avila?”
Keet doesn’t wait for Avila. He lays his gun down on the ground, winks at me with his creepy, milky eye, and walks toward the house, whistling his ventriloquist’s whistle.
“Stop,” Avila says.
“Pick up Keet’s weapon,” I tell Avila. And then to X-Ray: “Follow your boss.”
“Do it,” Keet says without looking back.
X-Ray spits at me, hits Tums with a wad of chewing tobacco, and follows Keet toward the house.
“What’s going on?” asks Nick. I drop Mr. Tums like a sack of groceries, which also makes an interesting noise.
“You’re driving,” I tell Avila. “We should get out of here before Keet comes back with a machine gun.”
When we left, Avila driving, Keet was still inside the log cabin. Mr. Tums lay on his back, eyes open, like a kid looking for animal shapes in the clouds, and Slim made a small mountain of lard, bleeding from what I hoped was a fractured skull, while poor, stupid Nick, pants around his ankles, missed everything because he kept on doing as he was told.
I emptied the shotgun into the decked-out Harley. It did that immensely satisfying thing that things seldom do in real life: it exploded and set the nearest of Keet’s King palms on fire.
“What did you do that for?” Avila asked.
“I’m vindictive,” I said, “and I don’t like a loaded shotgun in the car.”
I wiped my fingerprints and dropped it out the window.
About half a mile from the highway, we passed a gray Ford Expedition with tinted windows heading toward the Harbor Ranch. I wondered if Delilah was in there and what the hell they’d make of the mess we’d left behind.
“Who’s that?” Avila said, craning his neck to look at the Expedition.
“Either more bad guys,” I said, “or good guys who showed up too late to do us any good.”
“You mean police?”
“Or your security team.”
“I told them not to come.”
“Yeah, well, you get killed, they don’t get paid. Am I fired now?”
“You’re fired now,” Avila said.
“Thank you,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t suffer some kind of flashback from the hellish smell of gunpowder and adrenaline that emanated from my torso. A gust of hot air from the open window and Willeniec whispered, Oneofthesedaysoneofthesedays, and I knew he was warning me that counting on good luck was a dead man’s folly.
THE WAY A SOLDIER THINKS
I’m toying with the idea of simply dropping Avila off at his gate, so Nestor or another one of the green-polo-shirt brigade can drive him the rest of the way up to the house in a golf cart, but once again, there are flashing lights at the end of his driveway.
This time it isn’t EMTs.
“Cops,” Avila said. “You think Keet sent someone after Nina?”
But it was a combined LAPD/sheriff’s department team executing a search warrant. The lovely Nina was loudly unhappy about it. Avila was barely out of the car before Nina informed him that he was (I am quoting) “a pussy bitch.” Of course, Nina hadn’t seen Avila facing down a sociopath with a sawed-off shotgun earlier in the day, shielded by nothing but a sheen of sweat. Nina was also agitated that the police had already found a sandwich bag full of weed in the refrigerator, and she insisted that Avila tell them that it had been left by an employee (looking directly at me) so she wouldn’t have to go through a bunch of (direct quote again) “legal-ass shit.”
During that conversation, Cody waited a few yards up the driveway, his ears closed and his eyes fixed on the middle distance, convincingly demonstrating that he was deaf and blind when necessary. We could hear cops going through all the cupboards and closets in the house.
“What are they after?” Avila asked Cody after Nina flounced off to take her pirate ship across the shining water to her refuge on the island.
“Search warrant says barrels,” Cody said.
“Can I see the warrant?” I asked.
Cody looked to Avila for permission. Avila shrugged and headed into the house, leaving Cody and me to come to terms without wasting any more of his time. No wonder he was running his own company.
“He didn’t say yes,” Cody informed me, glancing at my extended hand.
“Silence indicates consent,” I informed Cody. (How come everybody doesn’t know that?)
“Mr. Avila shrugged,” Cody told me, “which is the kind of silent that indicates he doesn’t give two shits if you see the warrant or not, which means he’s leaving it to my discretion.”
“If you’re embarrassed sharing information with the hired help, it might make you feel better to know that he fired me.”
“That does make me feel better, because now maybe he won’t leave the house without me or one of my guys.”
But he slapped the warrant into my hand. The wording was lifted directly from the fake warrant Willeniec had shown me just a few days before and which Delilah had taken from me.
This search was Delilah’s doing. She was on the task force.
But Delilah wasn’t here, which told me she’d probably been in the Expedition at Keet’s place.
“Any chance you’ll tell me what I’m up against?” Cody asked. So that was why he’d shown me the warrant. Fair enough.
“Avila is into some kind of clusterfuck with a wrongdoer named Asher Keet,” I told him. “He’s a local crime boss of some nature.”
“I’ve heard of Keet,” Cody said.
“Keet sent the two guys who tangled with Nestor—”
“Lou. You win. His name is Lou.”
“Keet sent the two guys who messed with Lou to gauge the strength of your security forces. He threatened to start taking out your guys one by one to get what he wants out of Avila.”
Cody’s eyes narrowed when he heard the threat. It could have been ego, but I like to think it was concern for his people.
“When was this?”
“Couple of hours ago.”
“What does Keet want from Mr. Avila?”
“Barrels of mo
ney.”
I waved the warrant in his face before handing it back to him.
Which is when the gray Ford Expedition I’d last seen down in Temecula rolled into the driveway and disgorged, among others, Delilah.
“Mr. Fiso,” Delilah said in an extremely neutral manner.
“Delilah,” Cody said, matching her neutrality.
“Can I speak with you, Mr. Skellig?” Delilah asked, and she took my arm and dragged me several yards toward the observatory wing of Avila’s ludicrous house.
But whatever Delilah wanted to know was superseded by the sight of Bismarck Avila, exiting his mansion, shedding his clothes as he went, stripping down to his banana-hammock underwear, striding out onto his playtime dock and diving into the lakelet and swimming toward his island. We both watched silently for a moment as he swam with the strong, steady strokes of a surfer.
“Dude!” Delilah said. “Clock the abs.”
She waved at a passing member of the warrants team to get his attention and said, “Tell Deloitte to get a couple of divers into that lake. There’s nothing saying those barrels aren’t on the bottom.”
Then she turned back to me.
“Thank you for providing a link between Keet and Avila,” she said. “Though not one that would hold up in court.”
“Why won’t it hold up in court? Also, where were you today when I was almost killed?”
“We can’t just trespass onto private property without a reason.”
I hadn’t thought of that.