by Tom Corcoran
How many questions could I ask, sure to miss the most important and not have answers, anyway? Had “Muffin du Jour” Best—who, for some reason, I had not met at her father’s office—told Samantha about the trust agreement? Had Samantha been on the boat with Sam Wheeler when Omar was killed? Or when Jesse’s place was tossed? I knew two things with certainty: Sam would have recognized undue nosiness—no way he’d have discussed my dilemma with his client—and she was a player, friend or foe. That knowledge, alone, was worth the trip.
“Any chance we could pull over?” I said. “Need to use a coin phone.”
“We’re already here, sir. Dozens of pay phones inside the building.”
A sweeping ramp led into the airport. Sedans hogged lanes, pushed for position, raced for unseen off-loading space, rental return line advantage. The closer we got to Departures, the more frenzied the traffic, the more at ease I became. The chauffeur asked which airline I was flying.
“ComAir.”
He said, “Con Air. That’s fine, that’s fine. Good outfit.”
I envisioned Nicolas Cage landing the plane on Caroline Street.
I also pictured some kind of last-minute trick, a sudden right turn into an unmarked quonset hut, the Buick’s rear door locks failing to release. But the driver steered toward a parking sliver. A policeman, somehow recognizing the car as a limousine, stopped a van and waved us to the curb. I checked my back pocket for my wallet, held tight to the carry-on bag. The driver shifted into Park and started to get out.
“You’re okay. I got the door.” I handed him a ten.
“Good flight, sir.”
The Buick eased back into traffic. I stood a moment to get my bearings, then started past the redcap line at a curbside checkin counter. I could taste the beer I’d drink on my way to the gate. On second thought, rum and Coke.
Someone nudged me. “That’s my getaway car.” A Southern accent, sharp with menace. “I could shoot you right now and get away with it.”
I turned my head, looked into the man’s eyes. Beyond contempt I couldn’t read a thing. I hadn’t seen Scotry Auguie in almost twenty years. He poked a finger at my face, then swiveled his hand so it pointed at a black taxi. “All the safeguards inside that building ain’t shit. Bang, bang. They don’t stop nobody out here.”
The shiny Chevy had silver tips on its twin exhaust pipes, a silver chain around its rear license tag, a white sign on the roof. Its rear door swung open.
“Get in there.”
Auguie was right. He probably could shoot me and get away with it. He wanted information, or I’d have been dead already. I got in and slid across the seat. As Auguie got in, he made sure I saw the pistol in his hand. A risky call for an ex-felon, holding a piece. As if kidnapping were a walk on the beach.
The driver, a huge black man with a roll of skin above his shirt collar, had the cab in gear. He lifted his foot from the brake. The Monte Carlo accelerated into middle-lane flow. The driver’s neck was as big around as my waist. The bulk of his upper arms looked like a normal man’s thighs. After a moment I noticed Jesse Spence in the front passenger seat. Stone-jawed, displeased, no longer the lost-looking friend who, three days earlier, had stumbled into my living room, distressed at having found solid proof that his house had been creeped.
A half-sized compact disc and six pounds of Mardi Gras beads hung from the phony taxi’s rearview mirror. No legit cab company would allow a view-obstructing safety hazard. The meter wasn’t even bolted to the dashboard. But the driver wasn’t stupid ; he kept his speed below thirty on the airport exit road. In a one-mile stretch, passing again billboards for the House of Blues and Bubba Gump Restaurant, we passed three cars that had been pulled over for speeding.
Spence said to the driver, “How we doing?”
The black man checked his mirror. “Way back there.”
No one spoke, then, for almost five minutes. The cab headed east on 1-10, toward the city, then exited on Clearview and went south past a mall. Besides the portable fare meter, the dash was dolled up with religious figurines, icons, miniature photos of unidentifiable deities, two or three voodoo items.
Spence said to the driver, “How we doing, now?”
“Dat gentleman’s long gone, that’s right.” The man lifted a tall bottle of Budweiser from his lap, took a quick swig, then replaced it.
Spence turned. “If you think you still got your baby-sitter with you, your boy with the broken wrist, he got hung up in traffic leaving the airport.”
Auguie said, “He’ll probably give up and catch a plane home to Key West. Get somebody to saw off his fake cast.”
“Anybody want to tell me why I’m suddenly the enemy?”
“That’s the part you explain,” said Spence.
I looked down at the pistol that Auguie still aimed at my belly. “Why don’t you put that son of a bitch away?” I said. “I was about to get on an airplane. I sure as hell don’t have a weapon in my pocket.”
“I’ll keep it where it is. I might want to shoot you.”
For the second time in a half-hour I was in a movie. This one B-grade and surreal. Clearview turned into a secondary through a combination storefront and middle-class residential neighborhood. I wasn’t riding a swamp express, but this buggy ride promised worse.
We crossed a strange-looking bridge. My first time on the Huey P. Long. I hoped there would be a return trip to the airport, but from the looks of the bridge’s condition, I didn’t want to trust the structure again. On the south side of the Mississippi the car hurried through a roundabout. We were fewer than eight minutes from I-10, three minutes from the residential area, but we had entered an undeveloped tract of sparse woods and overgrown open land. Less than a minute later, we rolled into a low-rent business strip that would make any abductee wish for swamp.
Not a boulevard. Two one-way streets a quarter-mile apart. A “no-man’s-land” median—crabgrass, tailpipes, rain-sogged cardboard boxes. Two-bit seafood shacks, radiator shops, people alongside the road pouring gas into their tanks. Pawnshops, empty buildings, storage-shed complexes. Wholesale tires, psychic readers and advisers, alarm companies. What the media would call a neighborhood in decline. The local currency likely to be amphetamines and tire irons.
The Monte Carlo slowed, turned right into an unpaved, rutted expanse that surrounded a concrete-block building. No identifying signs on the building. A FOR LEASE placard at a thirty-degree angle in a wide mud puddle.
Why had Auguie and Spence automatically classified me as a rip-off artist? They were on offense. I had no defense. If I could swing the momentum, there was a gap in their armor. They had spotted the burned-hand man. But they hadn’t done all their homework: Scotty had screwed up when he’d guessed that the man’s cast was fake. He had screwed up by glomming on to me and letting the other boy go free.
It’s hard to formulate a sales pitch in front of a firing squad.
Auguie took my carry-on bag, yanked me out of the car, and pushed me ahead of him. This was a new, updated version of the man nicknamed “Cool” Auguie in college because nothing ever bothered him. Spence led us inside through a rear door. The black man carried his beer, the fake fare meter, and the rooftop lighting assembly.
Long ago it had been a nightclub. At best, a puke-and-razor joint. There were Jax and Schlitz and Pabst signs; no ads for O‘Douls or Sharps or Beck’s. A row of shelves and a crippled metal sink outlined the section where the bar used to be. A pile of splintered stools lay in a rear corner. The odors of urine and mildewed rats’ nests commanded a physical presence. With each step, my shoes stuck to the floor.
Auguie shoved me toward a decrepit card table and upended my carry-on bag. My point-and-shoot camera thunked on the table, yesterday’s skivvies tangled in its strap. “Empty your pockets.”
My wallet. My house keys. The mini-roll of five hundred-dollar bills.
“Lookie here,” said Auguie. “Party time. Crisp new ones.”
I pulled out—oh, shit, the Ziploc
with two telephone bugs—the one from Spence’s phone, and the one I’d found outside my broken window.
A poisonous look in Spence’s eyes. The extra transmitter irrefutable proof that I had tumbled his apartment. He palmed the camera, toggled the flash, took my picture, pocketed the camera. Then he picked up the hundreds and went for the door. “Let’s go buy me a new TV.”
Auguie showed the black man an evil grin, then swiveled his head toward me. “Our survival program. You just won yourself a free one-hour sample.”
“they, Spence,” I said. “Chloe Tucker’s dead. They’re looking for you.”
His facial muscles tightened. He looked around to face me, paused a beat. “Give me one thing that’ll make me stop this.”
“The man with the cast was shot by my neighbor, trying to break into my place. He got away, but he dropped that other bug. He’s one of the bad guys.”
“Gimme one more.”
“Samantha Burch has been in Key West all week. I didn’t know who she was until I saw her picture on Makksy’s desk.”
Spence nudged Auguie. They walked out. The door slammed.
The black man said, “Go stand over there.” He motioned me toward a side wall. He began to mumble, an intense ramble about “loyal friends” and “judgment.” I took a few steps backward, wondered if he’d pull out the pistol with his left hand or his right hand. I caught something about “pro football,” and “Jacksonville.” I glanced behind myself, and stopped eight feet from a plain concrete-block wall. A waist-level bar rail was bolted along its length. The big man drained a Bud bottle—a fresh one, because it was almost full-and threw it past my head. It shattered against the wall. He moved toward me, his arms and hands low, his face almost happy, his eyes glossy, lustful. It crossed my mind that he was about to hug me. Oh, no …
He stopped twelve inches from me, put his hands on his hips, sized me up and down like a candidate for his favors. He licked his lips, then enunciated: “You ever met Flipper?”
I wanted to know nothing about his “Flipper.”
He leaned toward me. Suddenly, one of his elbows shot forward, caught me at the belt buckle, and launched me against the wall. The only pain I felt was in my lower back, where the oak bar rail cracked into my spine and lower ribs. I didn’t feel my head hit the wall, but heard it as if standing aside as a spectator. The sound reminded me of a goofy game my brothers and I had invented late one summer when the honeydews had come in season. We had carried an arsenal of overripe melons to the garage roof, then, one by one, dropped them on the driveway. We had joked about the “splat” sound they’d made as they split and blew apart. We called them Victor Charlies. We had splatted two dozen before our mother saw the mess from the kitchen window. I remembered the exact yellow of the warm sunlight as we scrubbed concrete rectangles, with the sounds of a pickup baseball game coming from down the block, a game we’d been forbidden to join.
“Oh, what a shame,” said the black man.
His voice jerked me back. The nightclub’s floor tasted like everyday dirt. Nothing exotic, no regional flavors. It felt like a layer of sawdust had caked on one side of my mouth and one eyelid. I felt glass imbedded in my face.
The huge man squeezed my head in both hands and lifted me as if I were a papier-mâché dummy. A six-pack of carving knives whirled in my lower back. The glass particles in my right cheek moved in circles of pain as he flexed his hands. My arms flopped at my sides, limp, weirdly detached. If I’d had food in my stomach, it would have found daylight. For an instant I feared that, if I lived, Teresa Barga would not patiently wait for me to heal. She’d find someone more fun, less damaged, less likely to step in such shit. Just as quickly, the thought of her gave me a reason not to succumb.
This would have to be fast. I reached up and grabbed the man’s wrists for leverage. My brain said, kick him in the balls. Brilliant idea. Perfect timing. My legs said no dice. I couldn’t will them to move. I opened my mouth as wide as I could and flapped my tongue at him—a bizarre greeting I’d seen in a David Lynch film about New Orleans. The black man looked puzzled. Neither of my legs would move. The man’s breath smelled like ant-poison granules. I felt his fingers loosen. End of chance: he was dropping me, and I couldn’t hold myself up. I would be down and he would stamp me like a rodeo bull. I roared with pain and frustration, howled smack in his face. My right knee nailed his groin. He dropped me, then fell and rolled away, a half-turn. I attempted a sky diver’s rolling, collapsing landing. Pain nailed me. I wound up flat on my back. Glass shards, again. A massive arm swung down. His softball-sized fist buried itself in my abdomen.
Back to splatted honeydew. The warm yellow sunlight changed to colors of piss and blood.
21
A cluttered metal desk. Scattered catalogs, crumpled tax notices, loose invoices, dirty ashtrays. The garbage of a bankrupt hillbilly slop chute. Also on the desk, my mini-zoom and a stack of photographs. Jesse Spence held the pictures so I could see them. The grab shot he’d taken of me: I looked like a bad boy being hustled to the whipping shed. Three versions of the Muffin du Jour/Ray Best/Samantha Burch picture, Tazzy Gucci’s office memento at Imperial Limo and Vending. Small, but decent focus in all of them. Then three similar views of my fractured window frame on Dredgers Lane.
“If the One-Hour had fucked up your film, you’d be dead meat.” Spence let his mild Southern accent slip through. He also made a point of exhibiting no emotion. “Auguie would’ve let our man do his thing with you. Fortay was pissed, getting looped in the balls like that.”
I took pleasure in the fact that I’d connected. “Fortay?”
“His real name.” Spence spelled it for me.
“Tell Fortay it was my body’s reaction to pending death.”
“So, benefit-of-the-doubt, fundamentally nice guy that I am, that picture of Burch’s daughter backed up your riff about not knowing who she was. Then, the window damage—obviously, your house—okay, maybe a neighbor shot somebody trying to Watergate you.”
Spence sat in a squat red vinyl-covered chair that the health authorities would condemn on principle. We were in a twelveby-fifteen room with no windows. No sign of Scotty Auguie or the man who’d tossed me around like a rag dummy. The stench—old smoke and urinal deodorizers—and the lack of oxygen placed me still inside the ex-roadhouse. A dirt-caked fluorescent light hung on two skinny chains from the cobwebbed ceiling. I lay flat on my back on the slide alley of an old shuffleboard machine, the kind you played in bars by aiming a steel puck at trip wires below top-hinged bowling pins, picked up splits by caroming the puck off side rails. When you connected for points, the machine generated intoxicating cash register sounds.
I felt decidedly cashed out and caromed. The constant ringing in my ears throbbed—the shaky rhythm of my pulse. Cockroach excrement and what I hoped were coffee splatters streaked the wall near my head. Someone with a flowery feminine cursive had penciled six times on the wall the words “Chop a tulip.” Impossible to decipher.
I had other challenges. My indecisive body couldn’t tell me if I needed to barf, take a dump, sever my head at the neck, shop for a wheelchair, or just plain die. I wasn’t twenty-two anymore. I couldn’t hope for a movieland one-day recovery. Spence reached into a small paper bag and pulled out a plastic dispenser. Icy Hot Chill Stick, topical relief for muscle pain. I wanted to ingest the whole thing at once. I hurt too much to reach for it.
Spence tossed the Icy Hot onto the metal desk. He took a plastic bubble pack out of the bag—tweezers—then crumpled the bag and chucked it into a doorless ice maker stuffed with file folders. “I made a few calls. I located Cool Auguie in St. Barth’s. He’d heard from Cahill and was already planning to fly into the country, so he detoured and we met in Tallahassee. Hold still.”
Spence came at my face with the tweezers. I felt sharp pain as he removed a glass silver. “Right away we determine Scotty didn’t leak it, and no way I told anyone. So we went through our old defense lawyer to check with Buzzy Burch in pris
on. Buzzy said he’d never told a soul, but he’d heard some shit inside, that somebody’d pegged Tazzy as a target. Hold it.” Another yank, just below my eye. Pain zigged through my face. “He’d also heard from Samantha, that Zack had told her some weird shit had gone down in New Orleans. Hold still.” He was harvesting the whole damned Budweiser bottle. “So we’ve been watching Tazzy, from an apartment near the limo place, taking turns, day and night, peeping out the goddamned window. This afternoon, the garage door goes up, the limo pulls in, you get out of the car. We say, ‘No shit,’ and Tazzy hustles you into his office door. Confirmation of everything I’d suspected. Cool went ballistic …”
“ … and you think I’m one of the bad guys.”
“Sure.”
“I’m right where I was when you drove away from the emergency room. Trying to keep Cahill from getting fucked up …”
“ … like you are, right now. Hold still.”
I barely felt that one; it must have been a skinny silver. I wanted to sleep. I also wanted to know why Tazzy Gucci had asked me to fly to New Orleans. He probably knew from the start that he wasn’t going to help me. What could he have gained from my presence, or learned from what I said?
“Why am I alive?”
“I’m walking out of here with Cool, knowing Fortay’s going to hurt you. I think, one, you’re going to get what you deserve. Two, I say to myself, all these years, Rutledge has been a straight dealer, never a player, never a fuck-around. Maybe he’s just stupid, caught in the middle. So I tell Cool Auguie to shut his mouth a couple minutes and drive to a One-Hour Photo. Riding in the car, I work it like eleventh-grade geometry, one step at a time, facts only.”
“Starting with your trashed apartment.”
“Starting with you walking into Mangoes when I was expecting Cahill. Big fuckin’ red flag. You had no business there.” He pulled another sliver and put the tweezers on the desk. “Then you’re curious about Badass Joe Blow, whatever his name, Omar Boudreau. Red flag dos. Like, you’re there where you’re not supposed to be, you’re eyeballing the joint for threats. Then Cahill never shows, and I go home and my place is a Bosnian war zone.”