It was a good question. Smith pondered it. He always had a hard time coming up with an answer to that question, even when a homicidal fat man wasn't pursuing him. He spent most of his life avoiding answering that question. Now, he thought, would be a good time for an answer. A good answer.
"Fuck if I know."
"'Fuck if I know?' Is that all you can come up with? 'Fuck if I know?'"
"I don't hear you coming up with any ideas," Smith said. Smith did have some ideas, but they were all pretty bad ideas.
They had to shake Fat Sam, but how? The RV wasn't exactly built for high-speed maneuvering. They could stop and take a stand, but that seemed even dumber than trying to shake the tail with some Steve McQueen bullshit.
Smith turned to Spew, kneeling between the seats, and asked, "You have any ideas?"
Spew was flattered. Smith had never asked his opinion on anything before. Mostly, Smith's conversations with Spew were limited to telling him not to fuck up again.
Spew wracked his brain, an effort so strenuous that Smith could hear the gears grinding.
"I might have an idea."
Kathy was back in Papa's office, a thin sheen of stripper sweat cooling her body under her terrycloth robe. She had some explaining to do.
"What the fuck happened out there?" Papa demanded.
Kathy looked at Santonio Roethlisberger Polamalu, who looked away quickly. Polamalu had called for the meeting, but right now, he believed Kathy had the floor.
"It's your show," he said. "You tell him."
"I broke the guy's fucking arm," Kathy said.
Jesus, Papa thought.
Kathy continued, "I told the guy, 'No hands.' But he didn't listen. I warned him again not to touch me. He touched me. I told him if he does it again, I'll break his fucking arm. He did it again. So I broke his fucking arm."
This, Papa thought, is why you should always check references. He looked at Polamalu and asked, "And where the fuck were you?"
"I was at the door."
Papa raised his eyebrows and asked, "And?"
"And this chick went and broke the guy's fucking arm. I'm standing there, minding my own business, and next thing I know, the guy's on the floor yelling, 'Bitch broke my fucking arm.' I'd like to say, for the record, that I'm very disconcerted by this turn of events."
"Disconcerted?" Papa asked.
Kathy said, "May I say something?"
"Go right ahead. Bradshaw or whatever the fuck his name is here is apparently too disconcerted to continue," Papa said, glaring at his disconcerted bouncer.
"These guys know they aren't supposed to touch the dancers. They know that violations of the rule will be dealt with harshly. I was just enforcing the rule. What's the harm?"
Polamalu said, "I'll tell you what the harm is. If some fucking guy needs his fucking arm broken, I'm the one who does the breaking. It's my job. If the dancers usurp my duties as chief enforcer of the rules, it undermines my authority. Without that authority, we have anarchy, chaos, disorder, the complete breakdown of social order…"
His voice trailed off when he noticed Papa was staring at him with an expression of disbelief. When Papa found Polamanu, he was working in the sideshow at the county fair, bending rebar with his teeth and lifting 100pound weights with his scrotum. And now he's talking about "usurping" and "undermining his authority" and "social order."
"OK, look, you," Papa said, pointing at Kathy, "I pay you to shake your ass on stage. And you," he said, pointing to Polamalu, "I pay you to break guys' fucking arms. It's a clear division of labor. Let's try to keep it that way."
As Kathy and Polamalu got up to leave, Papa said, "Cat, stay, sit."
Kathy sat. Polamalu left, giving Kathy one last hard look.
"So," Papa said after they were alone, "where'd you learn to do that?"
"Learn to do what?"
"What have we been talking about?"
"Oh, that. It's easier than you think. It's just a matter of leverage and applying the right amount of force at the right point. There's really nothing to it."
"You know, maybe you could do something for me. Pays better than shaking your titties for a bunch of drunks. You interested?"
Nunn and Smith stared at Spew in disbelief.
"I didn't say it was a good idea," Spew said. "All I said was I had an idea. You might have assumed I had a good one, but that's not my problem. I didn't saying nothing about it being a good idea. I just said it was an idea. Remember, you asked me if I had any ideas. You didn't ask me if I had any good ideas."
Nunn turned back to the road.
Smith looked out the side window.
"It's better than, 'Fuck if I know,' " Spew said.
"Not much," Smith said. "Let's see, your idea is to take a stick of dynamite, put a short fuse in it, light the fuse and throw it at the Cadillac. You couldn't blow up this guy on two tries and he was pretty much standing still. Christ, the one time, he was asleep."
He turned to Nunn and said, "No offense."
"None taken," Nunn said.
He turned back to Spew and continued, "What makes you think you can throw a stick of dynamite from a moving vehicle and have it blow up another moving vehicle. I mean, all due respect, but I don't see it happening."
"If it doesn't blow up the car then it fucks up the road and he can't follow us. All I'm saying is it's worth a shot, unless you have something other than 'fuck if I know' in mind."
Smith thought about it and said, "Well, if you put it that way."
Smith and Spew got up and started to make their way to the rear of the RV. They got a few steps before finding Traci on the floor, surrounded by pots and pans, out cold.
"How long's she been here?" Spew asked.
Smith said, "Help me get her on the bed."
Smith grabbed her around the shoulders and Spew lifted her feet and they flopped her onto the bed.
Spew looked at her and asked, "What's with her tits?"
Sid and Eddie were sitting at a traffic light when the RV zipped past, followed closely by a white Cadillac.
"Ain't that the guy?" Sid asked.
"What guy?"
"Big fat guy in the Caddy."
"He did say something about a big fat guy in a Caddy, didn't he?"
"Yeah, big fat guy in a Caddy."
"You sure that's the guy?"
"How many big fat guys are there in Caddies?"
"How the fuck would I know?"
"Shit, you're always saying how you know things."
"I know more shit than you do, always thinking with your dick, but that ain't sayin' a lot."
"Think we should go after him?"
"Suppose so."
Smith and Spew knelt on the bed in the back of the RV, peeking through the rear window at Fat Sam's Cadillac. They were careful not to disturb the unconscious Traci With an I, although it wouldn't have mattered. She was out, dreaming of a peaceful, serene place, a shining city on a hill, where people were judged by the content of their character and not whether their boobs were the same size.
Spew pulled a stick of dynamite and a framing spike from his duffel bag. He tried poking a hole in the end of the dynamite with the nail, but it wasn't working. He reached in the bag and came out with a hammer.
He handed the dynamite to Smith and said, "Here, hold this while I hammer the fuse hole in it."
"Fuck you. Are you out of your fucking mind? I'm not holding that while you hammer on it."
Spew held the stick of dynamite against the wall of the RV and smacked it with the hammer. Smith shut his eyes. He was expecting to open them in time to see his eyeballs being blown from their sockets. It didn't happen.
"Perfectly safe, see?"
Smith held the dynamite, flinching when Spew tapped the nail a couple of inches into its end. Spew then cut a piece of fuse and inserted it into the hole. He peeked out the window at the Caddy, thought for a minute, peeked out again, did some counting on his fingers and took another peek when Smith finally said, "You're jus
t going to guess anyway, right?"
"Well, yeah, but I thought you'd feel better if it looked like I was actually trying to figure it out."
Spew snipped the fuse.
"That should do."
He slid the window open.
He flipped open his Zippo and struck the wheel with his thumb.
He touched the end of the fuse.
The fuse sizzled.
"Well, here goes," he said.
He heaved the dynamite out the rear window.
The dynamite bounced off of the Cadillac's grill, flipped into the air, glanced off of the windshield of a pickup truck behind the Caddy and rolled to the side of the road, where it came to rest under the front bumper of a UPS truck parked by the side of the highway.
In the back of the truck, the UPS man was servicing his best customer, the horny cougar from Green Fucking Acres.
"I'm coming," she screamed.
Just as the explosion flipped the truck onto its roof.
The UPS guy and the cougar remained entwined under a pile of Amazon.com boxes. "Oh my god!" the cougar proclaimed. "That was incredible."
Smith looked at Spew. "Oops?" Spew said.
Chapter Fourteen
"OK. Now what?"
"I can do without the sarcasm," Smith said.
"I wasn't being sarcastic," Nunn said. "But you're the criminal mastermind here and I'm just some guy who doesn't want to die in some piece of shit RV on some piece of shit road in this piece of shit town at the hands of some piece of shit tub of lard who works for some piece of shit two-bit asshole gangster."
They rode in silence.
"You have to admit," Spew, perched between the front seats again, said, "that was pretty fucking cool, the UPS truck flipping right over on its roof. That was pretty fucking awesome, wasn't it?"
Nunn and Smith glared at him.
"Admit it," Spew said, "It was pretty fucking cool."
Nunn and Smith continued to glare.
"Fuck, y'all, motherfuckers."
Spew sulked.
Smith sulked.
Nunn sulked.
Smith's face lit up.
"Take the next exit."
Wiley was walking along the highway when a deputy sheriff pulled alongside him.
"Wiley," the deputy yelled from his cruiser, "what the fuck happened to you?"
Wiley looked himself over and concluded that, yes, he did look like a person to whom something the fuck had happened. His suit was filthy. One of the sleeves had torn at the shoulder. His left pant leg was stained with something he hoped was water.
"Give me a ride to town and I'll tell you," Wiley said.
The deputy felt obliged to help Wiley, the brotherhood of the badge and all of that. And, of course, there was the business when Wiley busted the deputy during a whore roundup and buried the charges as a courtesy.
Wiley opened the passenger door and saw a bunch of paperwork, a laptop and the remains of a McDonald's lunch on the seat.
"Sorry," the deputy said, trying to brush some of the stuff aside. "Looks like you're going to have to ride in the cage."
What the hell, Wiley thought, figuring he was going to wind up riding in the back of a police cruiser one of these days, the way things were going.
He settled into the seat and the deputy eyed him in the rearview. "You look like shit."
"That's good because I feel like shit."
"Well, what the fuck happened to you?"
"It's a long story," Wiley said and immediately regretted saying it.
A long story would require, on his part, a long story and he hadn't really come up with one, or least one that would be remotely plausible.
"Well?" the deputy asked. "I can't really go into it all right now," Wiley said. "Part of an ongoing investigation."
The deputy nodded. "I guess you're in on that shit with the mayor's wife."
"What shit with who?"
It hadn't taken long for word to spread that the mayor's wife had been blown up in a UPS truck. While screwing the UPS man.
Investigators speculated it was tied to the other bombings in Green Acres. The FBI profilers said it matched the pattern, a large explosion, and the mayor's wife was home in Green Acres when those bombs were detonated.
Perhaps, they speculated, the first two explosions were practice. Or that it was related to the terrorists' original communiqué. The mayor's wife was, indeed, in the midst of using her lady parts to engorge a hard-on at the time.
The mayor was reported to be beside himself.
With joy.
Because now, he could dump that harpy and take up with his administrative assistant with little or no political fallout.
After all, he was the victim here. It was his wife who was fucking the UPS man in the back of his van when it blew up.
Still, the mayor couldn't have UPS trucks being blown up in his city. He leaned on the commissioner to make an arrest, fast. The commissioner leaned on D'Onofrio.
D'Onofrio gathered the investigators from the various agencies into the conference room to lean on them. He needed to know what was going on so he could tell the commissioner everything was being handled so the commissioner could tell the mayor everything was being handled.
"Where are we?" D'Onofrio barked.
The investigators traded furtive glances and then lowered their eyes to the tabletop.
"Well?" D'Onofrio insisted.
"We're still waiting for the report from forensics," the fire marshal said. The chief of the forensics lab said, "We're still waiting on the evidence. Wiley was supposed to drop it off yesterday."
The feds said, "We're still waiting for Wiley's report before we start our extraordinary rendition of our suspect."
"So where the fuck's Wiley?" D'Onofrio asked.
"I have no idea," the lieutenant said.
At that moment, Wiley was in the motor pool, trying explain how he lost the keys to his city-issued Crown Vic.
He wasn't doing a very good job.
Nunn steered the RV onto the exit and asked, "OK. Now what?"
"You know," Smith said, "you really should stop asking me that. It's starting to get on my nerves."
Nunn nodded toward the red light at the end of the ramp and asked, "I mean, now what?"
Stopping could have fatal consequences. So Smith said, "Run it."
"Run it?"
"Don't slow down. Go faster. Just breeze right through it."
Nunn saw traffic. He didn't think running it was a good idea. But it was an idea so he figured what the hell and mashed down on the accelerator.
"Shit!" he screamed as the RV burst through the intersection.
He heard the squealing of tires and horns blaring and the crunch and shattered glass of vehicular collisions. He glanced in his rearview mirror. The intersection was clogged with a pile of cars.
He saw the Cadillac, stopped on the ramp, above the fray. It couldn't get through the intersection. The fat man's face behind the windshield looked ready to explode.
A beat-up pickup truck skidded to a halt behind the Caddy.
Nunn said, "Hey, it worked."
"Just as I planned," Smith said.
Wiley entered D'Onofrio's office and sat, trying to shrink in the chair to brace himself for the shitstorm he knew was brewing. D'Onofrio pretended to be reading a piece of paper on his desk, an old trick. He always did that. It was a power thing. Make the person wait. Make him sweat.
Wiley was sweating.
D'Onofrio set the paper aside and lowered his gaze on Wiley. His eyes grew wide and he said, "What the fuck happened to you?"
"Laundry day?"
"You look like shit."
"So I've been told."
"Do you want to tell me what the fuck is going on here?"
Wiley cleared his throat. He had come up with a story, a pretty good one, he thought, on the way up to D'Onofrio's office. It was complete bullshit and a real cop would be able to tear it apart with little effort. But, he thought, D'Onofrio
was more of a politician than a cop, attaining his position by instinctively knowing which asses to kiss, and he believed the man did not possess a finely calibrated bullshit detector.
"Well, I was following up a lead when these guys ambushed me, put a bag over my head and drove me to the river. The head guy said they were going to cut off my head and put the video of it on YouTube. They spoke Arabic, I think it was."
"Terrorists?" D'Onofrio said.
"I'm pretty sure."
"So, if they spoke Arabic, how did you know they were going to cut your head off and put it on YouTube?"
"Well, uh, they spoke English too."
"Uh, huh. Go on. I didn't mean to interrupt. You mentioned a lead?"
Wiley was beginning to think he had underestimated D'Onofrio. The man might not have a finely calibrated bullshit detector, but he didn't need one to recognize this was bullshit.
"I was working the terrorist angle. I was following up on a guy from Afghanistan. That's when they grabbed me."
"Afghanistan," D'Onofrio said.
"Could have been Pakistan," Wiley said.
"Pakistan," D'Onofrio said.
Wiley wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers and said, "Yeah."
"So that's your story?" D'Onofrio said.
"Seems like it. It's a story."
They shared an uncomfortable moment.
Finally, D'Onofrio said, "Get downstairs and brief the feds on your lead from Afghanistan or Pakistan or whatever-the-fuckistan. Maybe by the time you get down there, you can fill in some of the details. Shoot for plausible, OK? And go get cleaned up. You really look like shit."
Wiley stood and started to say something. D'Onofrio put up his hand.
"Just go. I've heard enough," the major said.
Wiley went.
He would have rather had a prostate exam performed by a gorilla than try to pass this weak shit off on the feds. He took the elevator to the lobby, walked past the front desk and to the curb, where he flagged down a taxi.
He hopped in and the driver, in a lilting voice, asked, "Where are you going?"
"Home," Wiley said, giving the driver the address.
The driver appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent. He had jet black hair and a thick mustache. He looked familiar.
Don't Be Cruel Page 10