Gun Work

by David J. Schow

  “Slide it,” said Barney, not dumb enough to reach for it.

  Carl Ledbetter had a New York City number.

  “Can I have a drink, please?” said Rainer.

  “No. Stay put. Malcolm, keep driving. Go around the park.”

  Barney punched the number. Something in his gut roiled. Carl answered on the third ring. Moment of dead air. Showtime.

  “Hey, Carl. Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner.”

  Pause, for disbelief. There was no mistaking Barney’s voice, no save and no waffle leeway for Carl.

  It would take every ounce of fiber Carl possessed not to hang up and run. Barney knew Carl knew that, or was realizing it right this second. He had just enough free time to try sucking air. Maybe he would faint.

  “Tell me where you are, Carl, or your pal Felix is going to die an extremely messy and disgusting death. No meeting place. No rendezvous. Where you are right now. You stay there until I get there. Answer now.”

  Imagine hearing the voice of a long-dead relative or loved one, and think about how you would react. Blasé is not among the potential multiple choice answers.

  Carl babbled. Corrected himself. Added superfluous detail. Said it all again. Once was enough. Barney hung up on him in mid-sentence

  Barney kept watch on Malcolm. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” There was a possibility that Malcolm might ram the limo into a parked car, dump himself free, and run for his life while his former boss ate a lot of bullets. Barney would have to bail and walk, blending into the pedestrians, losing the gun en route. Malcolm might have tried that; he certainly had the iron for it. But he had just been gracelessly sacked.

  At Central Park West and 71st, Barney said, “Stop the car, Malcolm.” He moved to disembark, attaché case first. “Felix? Listen to me: If you ever see me again, it’ll be because you tried to call out the dogs or track me down, or tried to phone up some kind of retribution. You’re not hurt, just scared. Don’t let that make you do something rash.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what the hell I’m supposed to do?”

  “Go back to your life. Enjoy your dinner. Enjoy all the rest of your days, because they’re a gift I’m giving you right now. Do not squander this gift. Try not to hold it against Malcolm. He’s a good guy.”

  Barney stepped out. Rainer had more to say. “Hey!” Barney expected some parting threat, some you-can’t-get-away-with-this horseshit. But Rainer said, “If you see Carl, do us all a favor and kill the sonofabitch, and I’ll forget you ever existed.”

  Ever the dealmaker, that Felix.

  As soon as he was clear of Felix Rainer, no harm no foul, Barney called Carl’s cell again, this time with specific instructions. The danger of Felix Rainer burning up his own phone as he vented anger and tried to vector on Carl was too great. Carl would have to be run around town a bit, from Barney’s secure cellphone.

  Barney told Carl to go to Penn Station, buy a ticket for Elizabeth, New Jersey, board the train, and commute. Then Barney cabbed back to where his anonymous car was stashed, and caught up with a rattled-looking Carl while he was still in the ticket line. Carl proved too shaken to arm himself or attempt to set up a sting. Carl generally had other guys do that sort of work. Ex-friends, for example.

  “Walk with me,” said Barney. “Twitch funny and I’ll blow your heart right out onto the pavement.”

  For a moment Carl feigned surprise at seeing his old friend, then thought better of it. Like Rainer, he avoided Barney’s gaze, submissive, willing to be led, or at least impelled. His dislodged tooth had been replaced — badly, the substitute being slightly yellower than the rest of his dentition. Cheap cap. Overall, Carl appeared badly used by his most recent fiscal year.

  “What do you want?” said Carl sullenly. He was in the bag and he knew it.

  “Let’s start with your wallet.”

  Carl started to say you’re kidding, but no comedy waited in Barney’s gaze. He mutely relinquished the same wallet Barney had seen in Mexico, containing the same picture of Erica, which was the only thing Barney appropriated. He handed the wallet back as though it was roadkill. Carl had exactly twenty-two bucks in cash.

  “Yeah, take her,” said Carl, still moping. “Keep her. I wish I’d never met that creature. You deal with her. You’re welcome to her. I hope you’re up to it.”

  Barney ignored the obvious bait.

  Carl tried another tack: “How did you get to Felix?”

  “Irrelevant. Tell me about Mexico.”

  “Oh, god, there was nothing I could do! I tried, but there was no way out—”

  “You left me for dead. I didn’t die.”

  “— and I’m so goddamned sorry, man, you know how it went, I couldn’t help it—”

  “Stop; I’m getting all misty over how much of a damn you gave for me. The money. Your little friends in the kidnapping business. Stay on track.”

  “That bastard Tannenhauser promised that —” Carl saw Barney’s expression and clammed up. He clarified: “The guy in charge of the hostage hotel.”

  “Tannenhauser,” said Barney. El Chingon had a name at last.

  “Erica was banging him the whole time. But she outfoxed him and managed to scoot with most of the money — over a million-five.”

  “Wasn’t Felix irritated about that?”

  “Felix? Man, Felix didn’t give a crap. All he did was ice me out.”

  There was no shortage in the world of greedy people looking for short cuts to financial success, as far as Felix Rainer was concerned. There was always fresh meat, or in Felix’s parlance, “fungible commodities.” If one deal went rancid, you divorced yourself from the particulars and concentrated on the next deal in the hopper.

  Barney resisted the urge to grill Carl about the pipeline, about how Felix Rainer could see some sort of obscure profit from this labyrinthine process, or how Carl and Erica were supposed to make out using other people’s money. It didn’t matter. It was like most scores: There was a prize, and everybody was screwing everybody else to get it. It did not need to be made legitimate or sensible via reverse-logic, it was a classic black-box scenario. Doesn’t really matter what’s in the box. What matters is whether you might get killed for it, and how you could better your odds.

  “One last thing: the blond fellow you sent to kill me. He didn’t make it.”

  Honest confusion drained further color from Carl’s face. He had no idea what Barney was talking about. Score another point for Erica.

  “Are you talking about a... a... hit man?”

  “Yes, Carl. The kind of man you hire to do the sort of things you are too much of a coward to do. Like the way you lie to old friends so they’ll stop a bullet you’ve earned — a warm body to throw to the wolves so you can skate and pretend you’re innocent.”

  Carl’s lips worked dryly against each other. He was taking his medicine like a punished child who thought the word sorry could set him free.

  “If Erica is the heartless criminal mastermind you made her out to be, how did she get the money away from you?”

  “We left Mexico on separate flights. When I landed I found out she’d flown to a different city.”

  “Why didn’t Felix go after her?”

  “What for? His deal was with me, period.”

  “Where is Erica now?”

  “I wish I could tell you. I don’t know. I really have no idea, for almost a year, now.” Carl mustered a bit of gall, enough to add, “But what about you? How did you —?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Barney interposed.

  Barney had steered him between Eighth and Ninth, on 35th Street, walking west toward the Javits Convention Center.

  “I’m telling you, you can shoot me, torture me, whatever, but I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

  They stopped. Cabs soared by. It was dark now.

  “I know this sounds stupid,” said Carl, “but I’m glad you made it.” Right about now, Carl would say anything or perform any abasement just to keep brea
thing. He tried to play the buddy-buddy card. “You know that little piece of the GPS you stashed in my coat? I didn’t find out about it until they stopped me at the airport. I set off the damned alarm. That was pretty slick. I should have listened to you more...”

  Barney put his hand on Carl’s shoulder in a comradely gesture. This was supposed to be the part where all was forgiven in gruff camaraderie. “Okay, Carl, I believe you. But you shouldn’t have left me twisting. Just shouldn’t have.”

  Before Carl could respond, Barney jammed the SIG into his chest and fired two rounds completely through him. Before Carl could slump, Barney jammed the SIG under his jaw and blew the top of his head — and whatever else Carl was thinking — upward into the westerly breeze in a fine red spray.

  The killing had begun.

  Barney did not get a single drop on him. He was clean.

  Action is transient. Context takes the rest of forever.

  You’ve really lost it now, Barney thought. Let your anger boil over and get the better of you.

  Shooting Carl Ledbetter on a public street in the middle of New York City was almost a reflex action. It freighted no pang of guilt or remorse. It was what needed to be done. Barney could tell by the way Carl was losing his wits and trying to dissemble that he was attempting to buy talking time to forge fresh lies, to con him, to excuse what he had done by saying it was just business, not personal. That was how Carl’s death had been — impersonal.

  Strategically it was a matter of sheer gut sense. It was time. But Barney still felt played. He had done exactly what Felix Rainer had wanted, like a puppet or a robot. A hit man.

  You’ve ignored gunshots, even though their sudden sound attracted your attention. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, you dismissed or rationalized it: That’s not really gunfire. It’s a backfire. It’s construction noise. It’s always something else. That was how Barney could shoot a man three times and walk away. He was just another pedestrian who chose not to notice. Less than a block away, a gunshot made even less difference. Citizens ignored these sounds. They kept their noses down and minded their own damned business... although usually making sure to travel away from wherever the distressing sound originated. The same thing happened when someone screamed in the night. People shut their windows, turned their backs, cranked up the TV.

  In seconds, Barney became just another person hurrying away from something potentially nasty, focused on doing the Manhattan shuffle, hands in pockets, eyes down. Had he lingered, he would have seen several other New Yorkers gingerly step around the fallen man on the sooty sidewalk. He’s a bum, a drunk, that’s not really blood, that’s not half his head gone; I’m just seeing things.

  Barney walked north along the Hudson, disassembling the SIG, dumping the parts and ammo. His gun hand had begun trickling threads of blood.

  He flew back to Los Angeles that night, using a standby scheme that was a fringe benefit of Sirius’ airline connections.

  By the time Felix Rainer recovered his senses, he had nobody to look for and nobody to consult, since Carl was no longer talking.

  Karlov asked, “How was the gun?”

  “Perfect,” Barney told him.

  Armand asked, “How was the ammo?”

  “Primo,” Barney told him.

  Sirius asked, “How was New York?”

  “I can take the city for about ten days at a spell,” Barney told him. “But longer than that and my skin begins to itch.”

  “How are your hands?” one of them asked.

  “Well, I can still feed myself and wipe my own ass, which I count as progress.”

  “Find out what you needed?” another of them asked.

  Felix Rainer had been willing to sacrifice Carl Ledbetter, and Carl had been eager to sacrifice Erica, if only she could be found. Dead end. It really did start to look as though she had outsmarted everyone, and Carl had never even met this person who was responsible for his heavy losses. Never seen her live, in the flesh. She was the best ghost of all, an unbeatable mystery. What was the next link in the string, when everybody was equally willing to eat their own soldiers?

  Armand said, “You look spent, amigo.”

  “Yeah,” said Barney. “I’m gonna sleep now, lapse into a coma I feel I’ve earned. I have to check in with Dr. Brandywine. Two days, say, to lock and load. Then you guys suit up, because we’re going to Mexico.”

  The four fishing enthusiasts wearing aloha shirts and tinted sports sunglasses assembled in the bar at the Hotel del Rey to discuss their strategies for bagging swordfish and marlin once they received shipment of their fishing gear and caught a connecting flight to Mazatlan, after tonight’s recreational stopover in Mexico City.

  Their conversation was extremely boring.

  The pallet holding their heavily insured custom fishing equipment was marked PRIORITY - CUSTOMS - EXPEDITE, and sailed through clearances with barely a nod of notice. As El Atrocidad had counseled, nobody smuggles stuff into Mexico... and that was not even considering the art of properly placed baksheesh, the bribe, a.k.a. el soborno or la mordida, literally “a little bite.”

  The next day, once they checked out of the Hotel del Rey, they simply vanished. Happens all the time in Mexico. It happened to a hundred thousand people a year in the United States. People got lost, got waylaid. Got murdered and never found. Went underground. Changed identities. Advantaged ironclad credit for other people who never existed in the first place. They ran from spouses, assumed disguises, ducked under Witness Protection, or just plain etherized without a trace. Out of nearly seven billion people on the entire planet, the percentage was microscopic, not even worth mentioning.

  When Barney introduced his crew to the hidden wonders of La Pantera Roja, it took Armand nearly a full minute to stop laughing. He buttoned his mirth when Barney informed him that a special deal had been cut with the management of the sex motel — absolute privacy for a premium price. The desk man, an avaricious toad named Umberto Somethingorother, had winked knowingly. Sí, comprendo totalmente.

  “You told him we’re all gay?” Armand roared.

  “Not in so many words, but it’s not a first for him,” said Barney. “Just tip big for his shitty microwave food and we’ll be fine.”

  They swept the room for surveillance cameras or mikes and found none. There was a wall mount bored out behind a huge velvet painting of a naked Amazonian temptress (the frame hard-bolted to the beams, like everything else in the room), but nothing had been hooked up to it for years.

  Each man set to the task of cleaning and checking equipment with a minimum of chitchat. They were no longer acting the part of visitors on fishing holiday and silently subsumed to their tasks with knowledge and competence — no rivalries, few jokes. The talk, the sizing up and slapjack of weapons, the speculations were for men between battles, not rubbing elbows with crunch time.

  For the dirty and dangerous outing Barney had in mind, he had no wish to involve his local allies near the city, but he decided to risk a phone call to El Atrocidad in order to find the best and quickest way to procure a nondescript, used vehicle. As it turned out, the big wrestler was already involved. Past his pleasure and bonhomie at hearing Barney’s voice and learning he was still among the living, Atrocidad shared the bad news:

  “Amigo, you remember Flecha de Jalisco?”

  “Of course,” said Barney. The gravel-voiced técnico in whose debt he would always remain. “Cristobal. I hope nothing bad has happened.”

  “His son, Almirante, was taken by los secuestradores last week. They demand a ransom, or will start cutting off his fingers.”

  The news hit Barney like a body blow.

  “There is something very interesting about these criminals,” said Atrocidad. “They specified a money drop at the bridge on the Rio Satanas.”

  “I think I know where they might be keeping him,” said Barney. He described the brown brick building where he had captured Carl Ledbetter. “It’s in a bad part of the city, a freefire zone, like Neza.”
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  He pictured El Atrocidad going crimson with fury. “Can you find it?!”

  The implication was that an army of incognito luchadors stood ready to rush the walls in a beefy, unstoppable wave.

  “Give me a day, camarado. I promise I won’t leave you out. But, and this is muy importante, how many days for the money?”

  “Dos dias mas.”

  “All right, two more days. Tell Flecha that if he speaks to the secuestradores, to tell them he has the money, whatever amount it is. That he will make the drop exactly as instructed.”

  “But he doesn’t have the money yet.”

  “By tomorrow, amigo, they’ll have bigger problems than hurting Almirante — that’s my promise, too.”

  “You are going to fight these culos? Not without me, not without Flecha and Medico Odio and—”

  “Calmasé,” said Barney. “You’re not going to be left out.”

  El Atrocidad struggled with this for a moment, then cleared his throat and said, “Your word, that is enough.”

  “My word. On mi vida. You keep your cellphone by you at all times.”

  A modification to Barney’s plan had presented itself, and it solved a lot of problems. He had no desire to put these good men in harm’s way, but the resolution struck him with such clarity that it seemed perfectly, immediately, obviously important.

  They were able to purchase outright a blue paneled van with a cracked windshield and most of the tread still on the tires, from a nephew of El Atrocidad’s who had managed to keep himself blissfully uninvolved with killers or kidnappers. The van stayed nicely low-profile in the Pantera Roja’s conveniently conceived security carport.

  It fell to Barney to explain to his companions that they now had a complication... and a clock.

  They switched their tourist duds for job clothes — loose, but not enough to snag; dark, but not so dark as to prevent ID by a friendly. Under their garments, Armand’s special body armor covered them in two pieces from mid-thigh to upper arm, about T-shirt length. Without the side zippers, donning them would have been like trying to squeegee into wet rubber.

  Everybody paused to marvel at the bullet scars on Barney’s torso, which Barney endured with something like resigned tolerance. He drew the line at letting Karlov measure them.