By the Balls

by Jim Pascoe

  “Hold on. I said I had three requests.” I pulled the bag full of oranges from my bottom drawer and laid it on top of my desk. “You got a whole bag of oranges here, and they seem pretty valuable to you. So I’ll be taking one. Think of it as payment.”

  His smile—the broadest smile I’d ever seen on his narrow face—told me he was buying my game. “You drive a tough bargain, Drake, but . . . I think we can deal with these terms.”

  I nodded and handed the oranges over to Bixel, and, like a trio of roaches, the scoundrels scurried from my office.

  I leaned back in my chair and kicked my feet up on my desk. Tony’s eyes flicked down as he poured some whiskey into an empty coffee cup, and when they flicked back up he saw me peeling my pilfered orange. He knew me well enough to know that I usually had a good reason for doing what I did.

  I bit into the pulpy flesh of the orange; its juice ran down my chin. Tony smiled and sipped his liquor.

  “Something tells me that orange ain’t quite as valuable as you were making it out to be.”

  “I’ll say. Tasty though. Want a slice?”

  “I’m not much into fruit.”

  “Suit yourself.” I tossed a small note, about the size of a business card, his way. “Read this out loud.”

  “Beast Benton falls in the fourth. Hey, ain’t that the guy fighting Samson Sanders tonight?”

  “That’s right. And when our buddies peel the label back on that bag of oranges, they’re going to find what they were expecting: a card just like this one inside a small envelope. Too bad the one they have says Sanders is the one hittin’ the mat.”

  “Going to put some money down on Sanders?” he asked.

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  He passed me the cup. I knocked a shot back.

  “Hell, Ben, when those guys find out that you’ve screwed ’em—”

  “Yeah, that could be a problem. That’s why I told old Mrs. Twitchell to take her kid and get out of town. No matter how the cards fall, they’ll be better off somewhere other than Testacy City.”

  “I’m more concerned with you. Small-Tooth Kelley won’t be too happy that he’s lost a fight on your account.”

  I popped the rest of the orange into my mouth, then lit up a cigar. Not a bad day’s work, and it wasn’t even noon.

  “Don’t worry about me, Tony. I’ll take care of myself.”

  _______________________

  Henry Goiler worked the fabric of his cheap brown tie until it collapsed into a sloppy knot. Frustrated, the detective jerked the tie’s thin end from the tangled bunch and unraveled the whole mess. He opened and closed a fist of fat fingers in his right hand. The joints radiated a small throbbing, enough for him to shake his head in disgust.

  Christ, Henry Goiler thought, I’m not even forty, and I’ve got arthritis. Normally he could ignore the pain, faze it out like it were some trivial thing, But lately, no matter what he did, he could still feel the pain pulse, tight and hard, in the back of his brain.

  “What’s the matter, baby?”

  His eyes flicked up in the mirror and looked across the room at the slim black hooker lounging naked on the small room’s bed. She smoked a cigarette with fury, as if it would be the last one she ever smoked. That was how Lucinda did everything—with fury. Not too long ago, just looking at Lu would get Goiler’s engine running hot. But lately, he had trouble making it through even a brief afternoon diversion.

  “You shouldn’t be so tense,” she said.

  “Yeah? Well, I am.”

  The phone rang. Eyes narrowed, he looked at Lucinda. She gave him a shrug. It rang again. Who the hell would call him here? Maybe his buddy Bo Stickler had decided to give him a jingle with a little change in plans. When Goiler went boozing, he went with Stickler, and tonight he intended to booze it up hard. He reached for the phone as it rang a third time, then stopped. He flexed his chubby digits, hand hovering just above the phone.

  “Ain’t you gonna answer it?” Lu asked.

  He shot her a malevolent glance that told her to shut up. He remembered that he hadn’t told anyone where he planned to spend his lunch break, so no one, not even Bo Stickler, knew he was shaking time at the Purple Knights Motel. At least no one who didn’t follow him there. Warning bells went off in his head as he grabbed the receiver and put it to his ear.

  He heard giggling, then a woman’s voice on the other line: “Hello.”

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  She giggled again, then asked if she could get some champagne.

  “Champagne?”

  “Yeah, you know, like in those little bottles? Isn’t that the complimentary champagne that comes with the fantasy suites? Can you bring some down to 254?”

  “This ain’t no front desk, lady.” He slammed the phone down and mopped his round forehead with a dirty handkerchief.

  Goiler sat down on the bed. He hunched forward, placing his forearms on his knees. “Gimme one a them cigarettes,” he said.

  Lu snubbed out her butt and grabbed the pack from the side table built into the padded bed frame. She crawled to him feet first and wrapped her legs around his waist from behind. She put her arms over his shoulders and shook a smoke from the wrinkled pack. She slipped the cigarette between his lips then lit it.

  “You in some kind of trouble, Henry?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  When she ran her hands front to back through his thinning hair, he lifted his head to look into the mirror he faced. She rubbed her nose along the edge of his ear without breaking eye contact with her reflection.

  “It’s just that you’re so tense all the time these days. Always in a hurry. You used to take your time with me. . .”

  She fixed his tie for him, pulling it tight—but not too tight—against his unbuttoned top button, the way he liked it. He blew smoke at the ceiling.

  The phone rang again.

  He got up, knocking the hooker back across the bed like a losing lottery ticket. He shook his fingers and made a quick fist. The bones in his hand let out a popping sound. His fist opened and grabbed the phone from its cradle.

  “I tol’ you this ain’t the front desk!”

  “If you’re done fooling around, Goiler, I need you to do some work,” the man on the line said.

  The cigarette dangling from Goiler’s lips stood erect as he took a quick pull from it. He held the receiver up as he blew smoke out the corner of his mouth. “Hal, I . . . I’m ready. Gimme the lowdown.”

  “The only kid of some rich family has been kidnapped. The family is being blackmailed for her return. They don’t want to take any chances, Henry. They’re going to pay, but they want to make sure they get the kid back. They need a courier that can guarantee the job’s done right. You’re it.”

  “Yeah.”

  Hal Reddy, Goiler’s boss at the Always Reddy Detective Agency, gave the rest of the details point by point and no more. The pickup: an address in the west hills. The briefcase: full of money. The drop: a phone booth in an isolated part of town, south of Highway 15.

  “Yeah, got it. There anythin’ else you want me to do?” Goiler sucked in the last drag of his smoke so close it burned the filter.

  “Just the standard stuff,” the boss said. “You have a problem with that, Henry?”

  “No.” He peered up at the mirror and saw Lucinda behind him. She hadn’t even started to get dressed. She was on her back and her legs were spread open like high holy heaven.

  “Say, Hal, you gonna tell me how you found me here?”

  Hal Reddy had already hung up.

  * * *

  Goiler screamed out the window of his four-door sedan: “Come on already!”

  “Yo, chill down, a’ight? I couldn’t get away from the bitches.”

  Bo Stickler pounced onto the vinyl passenger seat and slammed the door shut as the car pulled away. Already he had both his head and his long, scrawny arms waving out the window like a tattered flag. He blew raspberries back toward his home,
but no one was at the door to receive them.

  “Did you do like I tol’ you?”

  Bo brought his body back in the car. His bloodshot eyes brimmed over with tears from the wind. He wiped them away as he said, “What’s dat?”

  Goiler snapped his fingers in Stickler’s face. “Faze out, Stick. Faze out. When the dames realize you ain’t listenin’, they just give up. Then you’re free.”

  “Got it.” Stickler rubbed his hands together. “Just like that Bugs Bunny shit. Big cartoon grizzly come after Elmer Fudd, and his ass is down, spread out, flat on the ground. Playing possum. All nervous and shit. Goddamn that’s funny, Henry.”

  Goiler didn’t laugh.

  “Yeah, that shit’s funny,” Stickler said to himself. “That some funny shit.”

  The car’s engine kept a steady noise running. They passed the bar. Stickler watched as it went by like a fading memory.

  “Hey, Henry, I thought we was drinking?”

  “There’s work to do first. See that briefcase back there?”

  “Filled with cash, init?”

  The detective smiled at his drinking buddy.

  Goiler opened the car’s ashtray and picked out a butt with still a little tobacco. A great flame jumped out of his Zippo and lit what was left of the end.

  “I got smokes,” Stickler said.

  Goiler eyed him again. “I coulda left you the one waitin’. Picked you up all pussy-whipped and ready for drinkin’. But I figure with you with me, we do this drop, then we go huntin’.”

  The car’s engine seemed farther away now. Its noise was no less steady. Stickler leaned against the passenger door and shot his drinking buddy a cockeyed look.

  “You want to go huntin’, Stick?”

  Bo pulled out his Camels, took one for himself, then offered one to Henry.

  * * *

  Goiler carried the briefcase in his left hand in case he had to pull his gun. He walked alone down an almost empty street. Mosquitoes swam heavy in the thick air, and Goiler fanned the air around him with a frantic arm to keep them away. He hated bugs.

  Before he reached the corner he got to a dusty vacant lot. Construction trailers huddled along one side. He looked up at the sun; telephone wires drooped like an old hag’s tits against the yellow sky. His eyes followed them down the pole to the dented gray phone booth.

  Goiler worked against the tight springs and forced the door to the side. He plopped the case to the metal floor and shook the feeling back into his left hand. The door snapped closed in his face. Searching the ground, he found a piece of broken wood and jammed it in to keep the door open. Then he walked away.

  He could almost feel the eyes boring into his back. They were out there.

  When Goiler turned the corner he picked up his pace, circled back, and met up with Stickler to grab a vantage point from where they could watch the phone booth.

  Bo Stickler had picked up a stone and was marking time by scraping at the mortar of a building’s brick exterior. Stickler thought that erosion was every man’s duty.

  They didn’t wait long before some twenty-something with dirty strawberry hair strolled along, stepped inside the phone booth, and checked the briefcase. The cash was there, all there, so he snapped it up and started walking away.

  The kid’s neck kept twisting left and right as he looked for his tail. He was doing more looking than seeing. Goiler and Stickler had no problem following him down a couple streets, zigging and zagging until he got to an abandoned-looking two-story house.

  This structure stood as a lost attempt at revitalizing this sad area; the house couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, but already the neighborhood had repossessed it. To the left of the entrance the garage door, all crumpled and off-center, looked like it had fallen down a flight of stairs. On the other side of the front door, the picture window displayed shards of glass and bits of curtain.

  Standing on the small cement porch, the kid with the suitcase looked all around one last time. He disappeared inside.

  “What’s the plan, Henry?”

  “This ain’t breakin’ outta Alcatraz and it ain’t no presidential election. We go in there and get what’s ours.”

  “Don’t I git a gun or nothing?” Stickler said.

  Goiler paused and gave Stickler a hard once-over with his eyes before he pulled out a .22 with the handle wrapped in black electrical tape and passed it over.

  “Now that’s better,” Stickler said. “We gonna go in there and git what’s ours. And that’s the shit.” He stuck the gun down the front of his pants. “You know what I’m saying?”

  No question. Goiler slowly twisted the doorknob. The door was unlocked. They walked straight inside.

  The first thing they saw was the set of stairs in front of them; next to the stairs, a small hallway with a closed door at the far end. On the door someone had painted 9:00 in yellow.

  Muffled voices whimpered and moaned from behind this door. Stickler moved toward the sound. Goiler snapped his fingers; Stickler stopped and glanced back at the detective who made a motion that they should circle around.

  The small foyer they were in spilled over into a large vacant room to the left. Broken pieces of the window were embedded in the pile carpet; dirt and sand had blown in to mix with the stains on the floor.

  They followed a short, tight hall from this room to a dirty empty kitchen. Beer and whiskey bottles stood on the counter like a miniature glass cityscape. Several ashtrays sat stacked in the sink.

  Goiler had just walked past the cracked Formica counter that jutted out into the center of the room when he heard a scraping sound behind him. He turned and pointed his Beretta at Bo Stickler, who was opening and closing some kitchen drawers. He leaped at his friend and shoved his shoulder hard.

  “What the—”

  “I’m just looking fer clues, man.”

  “What are you, Sherlock Holmes? We don’t need no damn clues!”

  Stickler stared at him without humor. He wanted a drink. The sweat on his skin felt clammy, and he started to shiver. He broke off the stare and motioned his head to the next room, past the counter.

  Twenty or so metal folding chairs were lined up against the far wall next to a battered door with a window that looked out at the next house over. On the floor by the counter lay several metal film reels; next to them were several shoe boxes filled with red, white, and blue poker chips.

  The right wall of this room held wooden double-wide sliding doors. Goiler and Stickler didn’t need to be all that close to hear the muffled voices coming from the other side.

  Goiler motioned to Stickler, who took the hint and stood with his back to the wall next to the doors.

  With his left hand Goiler rolled open one of the doors. It moved quickly and cleanly. He waited for the gunshots and waited to shoot back.

  The only thing that shot out was the flickering light from the tiny 16mm projector in the center of the room. It was busy projecting against the wall opposite the double doors.

  Stickler entered after Goiler and stood slack-jawed.

  From what they could see against the thick red velvet curtain that covered the wall, the movie was an amateur stag film.

  Goiler went over to the curtain and ripped it aside. It led to a recessed room with a large projector screen on the wall. A little girl was gagged and tied to a chair. She blinked through tears as pornographic actions were projected all over her. Transparent images of wet pubic hair tattooed her face like bruises; the oversized glossy red lips cut across her chest like an open wound.

  The clicks and clacks of the projector now seemed louder than the whimpers and moans of the film’s ugly participants.

  Bo Stickler stuck his gun back in his pants and said, “Damn.”

  A noise from behind the door to the right side of the room made both men jump. Goiler snapped his gun arm in the direction of the door. It remained closed.

  Stickler spoke up: “Yo, let’s split, a’ight?”

  “Stay with the
girl, Stick. I’m going upstairs.”

  “But Henry, don’t you want to go drinking?”

  “Stay with the girl.”

  A deep breath, a crack of his knuckles, then Goiler charged through the door. He ran down the hallway until he was back in the foyer with the stairs to his right. Seeing no one here, he went up.

  At the top the path split left and right. The left curled around to the back of the house; the right stood short and sweet and ended in a closed door.

  Goiler smiled for the first time since he’d been in this house. Whoever took that girl downstairs was going to pay, and not because Henry Goiler felt any moral obligation to right the wrongs of the world. But because kidnappers, killers, pimps, and pushers who put themselves on the wrong side of the Always Reddy Detective Agency became his prey. And that made his engine run hot.

  Then he heard the gunshot from below.

  He turned to run back downstairs, but stopped. A small clicking sound caught his attention, something from the room at the end of the hall. He stomped toward it with no effort to conceal his heavy footfalls. He reached the end of the hallway, kicked the door open, and started shooting.

  The red-haired kid with the briefcase didn’t even have time to look up. His body jerked against the impact of the bullets; his head snapped up and down like he was agreeing that this was the end.

  Henry Goiler picked up the briefcase and headed back down the stairs.

  The stag film was over, and the sex sounds were replaced by the clack-clack-clack of the single spinning reel. The light from the projector flooded the scene. The girl sat twitching against the ropes, her head quivering, snot running down her nose and onto the gag still in her mouth.

  At her feet, facedown, lay Bo Stickler.

  “Jesus H.,” Goiler muttered.

  He peered across the room. A ghost-faced punk stepped gun-first out of an open closet. “Drop it! Drop the money, drop the gun, bro!”

  Goiler’s eyes went down to his left fist. He twisted his wrist so the bones made a popping sound.

  “You’re makin’ me tense,” Goiler said.