by David Liss
Rose let out his island laugh. “There’s a reporter there out to do a story on your crew.”
“Shit. From where?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if the reporter plans to observe or if there’s someone on the inside already who is a reporter undercover. I don’t know what this person thinks he knows, but there’s probably more of a story there than he realizes.”
B.B. bit his lip. “Okay, we’ll take care of it. What’s number two?”
“You know the legislature is taking up that bill in the next session to severely limit door-to-door sales. I’ve just received word that if I go against it, I am going to face severe fund-raising problems. Now, you know I want to help you out, B.B. I’ve always stood up for you, always valued our relationship. But it’s going to cost me to go against this bill, and if it’s going to cost me, I’m going to have to make up that cost somewhere.”
“He wants another donation,” Desiree said. She’d been doing a lot of that sort of thing lately, stating the obvious as though B.B. wouldn’t have understood what Rose meant without her help.
“Christ, Otto, can’t this wait?”
“I came to see you about the reporter, but since I was here, well, it seemed like as good a time as any. Of course, I know you were busy mentoring. If you would rather mentor than take care of business, that is your own concern. Still, I am not entirely certain you want the business community to learn just how important this mentoring is to you.”
Fuck if here wasn’t Rose putting on the squeeze, trying to use his charitable nature against him. A man wanted to help out the unfortunate, and he had to answer to one opportunistic cynic after another. And the thing was, Rose put all that work into crime prevention, after-school programs for the kids in Overtown, but no one could say anything about that because he was black and those kids were black, and all of that meant that Rose was a saint. So now he had to stand out here, talking bullshit with a state legislator while Chuck sat by himself at the table, his friendly mood deteriorating with each minute.
“How much are we talking about?” Desiree asked.
“Same as last time, my darling.”
Same as last time meant $25,000. These little payouts were adding up to huge money.
“Give us a moment, Otto,” Desiree said. She put a hand on B.B.’s arm and led him about twenty feet into the parking lot. “What do you think?”
“I think I don’t want to pay him any more money.”
“Of course not, but if this bill goes through, you’re going to have a lot of problems.”
“So you’re saying we should pay?”
“Probably, but make it clear that this is the last time. You don’t want him to think he can come to you to strap on the feed bag every time he’s feeling he needs a few extra dollars. This is starting to feel like a shakedown.”
B.B. nodded. “When we get rid of him, get on the phone to the Gambler and make sure he gets the heads-up about the reporter. And his crew should be making a payment after the weekend. Make sure he can get the cash to us.”
“Okay.”
They walked back over to Rose, who was still grinning as though he were about to deliver a singing telegram.
“I’ll have the money by next week,” B.B. said, “but this is the last time.”
“Come now, my friend. You know I cannot make any guarantees.”
“We can’t make any guarantees, either. You get me, don’t you?”
“Of course, B.B.”
“I’ve got to get back inside.”
“Yes. That boy might be tempted to start mentoring himself,” Rose said.
***
With B.B. back inside the restaurant, Desiree remained leaning against the clean car, arms still folded as she looked at Otto. Her shoulder-length dirty-blond hair blew lightly in the wind and lifted her chin, which accentuated the sharpness of her nose. She knew that if she held her head just so, she could make herself look pointier and angrier, and she wanted to look angry now. Desiree wasn’t quite ready to confront B.B. She wasn’t quite ready to say the things she needed to say. The end had to come, and she knew it, but it didn’t need to come tonight.
It wasn’t fear. People who had never met B.B., who knew him only by reputation or by the size and ingenuity of his operation, feared him. Desiree, however, knew better. No, it wasn’t fear. It was obligation- and it was pity. But she felt no pity for Otto Rose.
“Oh, come, Desiree. Don’t give me that look, beautiful. You know it is business. If you work for a man like B.B., you must expect men like me to deal with him as he deserves.”
She shook her head. “Don’t back me into a corner, Otto, by saying things about B.B.”
“You’re right. You are nothing if not loyal. I am sorry I spoke so. I won’t say another word about B.B., but may I say a word about you?”
“If you must.” She let her expression slacken a little, took some of the heat off.
Otto took a step closer. “You are much too- too good- to work for a man like B.B. I don’t merely mean good at your job, though I do believe that. I mean you are a good person.”
“You don’t seem to have a problem doing business with B.B.”
He laughed. “I’m a politician, my dear. It is too late for me to be good. But it is not too late for you, young and talented and lovely as you are. Why don’t you leave him?”
The question needed dodging, and Desiree fought the urge to physically duck. She didn’t want to deal with his probing now. “I owe him, okay, Otto? That’s all I want to say.”
“I know you owe him. But how much can you owe? Do you owe him enough to help him do what he does? Or to help him with those boys?”
“He is just their mentor, Otto. No one can say anything about B.B. and his boys. I live in the same house with him, remember? I’m the live-in help.”
“Yes, of course. The better to make the world believe that the two of you are lovers. He may not do anything with those boys, Desiree, you must know that he wants to, and how long before he gives in to that?”
“I don’t want to hear it. I won’t listen.”
“I don’t mean to push. It is only that I want to help you, and I become eager. Let’s then not talk about B.B. Let’s talk about you, my dear.”
“What, do you want to ask me out on a date?” she asked, but she kept her voice playful, careful to sound anything but bitter or sarcastic.
“I would not dare to hope for such good fortune,” Otto said. “I have something a bit more formal in mind. I know you depend on B.B. for protection, so maybe you would feel you had more options if there was someone else offering you protection.”
“You?”
“I could offer you a job in my office, Desiree. I know your worth, and I can promise you it would be a high-ranking job. Of course, nothing in politics pays well, but it would be a fine opportunity for a talented young lady like yourself.”
“What kind of protection can you offer me when you might be voted out of office every election cycle?”
He laughed. “Who is there to challenge me? You must at least listen to my advice, darling.”
She nodded.
“Let’s sit in my car for a few minutes.”
“You sure you’re not asking me out on a date?” she said.
“I am almost sure,” Otto said.
He led her to his massive Oldsmobile, painted a shiny sun yellow. He opened the passenger side for her, and she slid onto the leather seats. He went around to the other side, slid the key in the ignition, and got the engine revving. In a moment he had the air-conditioning going and the low murmur of dance music from the radio.
He put a hand on top of hers. Maybe he did plan to offer her a job, but he wasn’t sure she wouldn’t be willing to give him more. “Shall I tell what I have in mind?” he asked.
“First, I should tell you something,” she said. Then she lashed out, cobra fast, and had a hand on his throat. She slid over to his side and straddled him, as if they were having sex. She could
feel the bulge in his pants, and she could feel it diminishing. In an instant it was both hands on his throat, and she was leaning forward, putting all of her weight- not ever above 110 pounds- straight down on him.
She liked the heat of his skin, the bulging under her palms, under her thighs. It was sexy, but not exactly sexual. It was powerful, and she liked that.
Desiree knew well that she had small hands, and they weren’t strong, even for their size. Surprise and the confines of the car worked in her favor, but Otto could escape her grip almost certainly if he tried, if he really tried; still, she had a few crucial seconds here, the advantage of his disorientation, and she planned to be well away from him before he even thought to struggle.
“Otto, we’ve done business together for a long time,” she said, “and it’s been good for everyone, but if you ever pull shit like this again, I’ll kill you. You try to humiliate B.B., try to make suggestions about him, use it as leverage, whatever- you’re going to disappear. You think you’re smarter than he is, and you think I’m cute, and maybe you are and I am. But don’t you ever forget what else we are.” She let go of his throat. “You don’t want to be his enemy.”
Otto coughed and put a hand to his Adam’s apple but was otherwise quiet and still.
An old couple strolled through the parking lot, staring unabashedly at the small white woman straddling the large black man in the car.
“I’ve got some phone calls to make,” Desiree said. She gave him a quick kiss, just a peck, really, but directly on his dry lips, and then slid off and opened the driver’s-side door. The old man had looked away, but the woman continued to stare over at her.
“You want to say something?” Desiree asked, and she turned her empty, judgmental eyes away.
Otto was just now rousing himself from his wounded surprise. He reached out to close his door, but he met her eyes as he did so, and, of all things, he offered her another of his grins. “Does this mean you don’t want the job, my darling?”
“Not at this moment.” She strolled over to B.B.’s Mercedes and shook her head softly. The thing was, Otto might have been a player and a schemer, and in his own way he might have been every bit as bad as B.B., but he had a sense of humor, and that alone made her hope she wouldn’t have to wrap her hands around his throat again.
Chapter 6
THERE I WAS, survivor of a double homicide, in the Kwick Stop’s public bathroom. Halfway to the store I realized I needed to piss and piss badly, so badly that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t pissed myself during the shootings. It was all I could do to keep from ducking behind a tree and taking a whiz under the canopy of stars; but public urination, even obscured public urination, seemed a bad idea. What if I had been caught? What if the cops picked me up and found evidence? Hairs and fibers and that sort of thing? My knowledge of police investigations came from a pastiche of television and movies, so I had no idea how it worked in real life.
When I walked into the store, I spotted the bathrooms in an instant- in the door-to-door book trade, you grow skillful at quickly finding the toilets in convenience stores- and rushed back without even the pretense of calm. In general, I didn’t like to act as though I needed the bathroom; it embarrassed me that complete strangers should know about my body functions.
In this case, however, I was in no frame of mind for the casual shop, a pantomime of interest in beef jerky and then a rub of palm against palm, like, Oh, I sure could do with a hand washing, before a calm stroll into the bathroom.
When I looked up from the urinal, I realized I must have already pissed since nothing was coming out and the crampy, stretched feeling had faded into a tranquil fatigue. I zipped up and washed, checking in the mirror for signs of blood. Nothing in my hair or on my hands or clothes. It all looked okay. I splashed some water on my face again because I thought that’s what you do in a crisis. You wash your face. Did it really help, or was it a myth circulated by the soap industry? Not that soap stockholders would gain much here; the inverted pear-shaped dispenser contained only encrusted pink dregs of soap gone by. Nothing in the way of towels- only one of those rotating towel machines, where someone else’s dirt gets pressed or washed or just permanently affixed before it comes back around again. I grabbed a wad of toilet paper from a loose roll propped above the dispenser and then dabbed it gently against my face.
The bathroom smelled like shit and piss and sickly floral deodorizers struggling to beat down the stench of crap and piss. My hands trembled violently, and I felt the need to puke. The problem with puking was that I would have to get on my hands and knees to do it, and the floor was covered with a deep coat of gummy dried urine, and there was a fuzzy lump of gray shit in the toilet. My reptile brain had no intention of letting me mark territory already well scented up by creatures more powerful and less hygienic than I.
Instead, I reached into my pocket for the check, the check Karen had written so that she could buy books for her now orphaned daughters. “Karen Wane,” it said in the top left corner. It seemed odd that she and her husband wouldn’t share the same account.
If I were worried about them passing the credit app, it might be worth considering, but under the circumstances it hardly mattered. I tore up the check and dropped the pieces in the horrifically unflushed toilet. One of the shreds fell into a viscous pool by the toilet’s side, and I had to pick it up by its tiny dry corner and then daintily drop it in. I flushed, using the toe of my shoe so I wouldn’t have to touch anything, and then went to wash my hands again.
Should I have flushed the check in two different toilets? Of course, it wasn’t as if cops were going to don hazmat suits and go wading through treatment plants in search of check fragments. Still, I had to pound down that feeling of nausea again, a process that involved closing my eyes and trying hard to think of nothing. In about a minute I felt sure I wouldn’t puke, so I pushed open the door and got out of there.
The convenience store was a couple of miles from the motel. I could easily have walked it, would have preferred to, but that wasn’t the way it worked. I had to wait for Bobby, so I grabbed a sixteen-ounce ginger ale from one of the wall-length refrigerator displays in the hopes it would settle my stomach. Then I stood on line behind a guy wearing jeans and a black T-shirt.
I couldn’t see the man’s face, and all but a few strands of hair were hidden under a baseball cap with a glittery Confederate flag emblazoned along the front, but I could tell he was probably in his thirties or forties, and he was chatting with the girl at the counter, a teenager, plenty young but not very pretty. She had a long-faced, horsey look to her, with an upside-down U-shaped mouth that seemed never to close entirely; the whole package ended up resembling nothing so much as an Easter Island statue. No matter, as the man in the Confederate hat liked her plenty, and his eyes rested with particular interest on her large, squishy-looking breasts, which flashed out of a short-sleeved blouse one or two buttons past modesty. The Confederate laughed at something and slapped the counter and peered into the girl’s shirt unapologetically.
“Oh shit,” he said. “I think I must have dropped my quarter in there. Let me just get it out.” He raised his hand like it was getting ready to slide into the cleavage.
“Jim,” the girl said through a fan of splayed fingers, “you stop that.” She glanced at me as though trying to decide something, then looked back at the Confederate. “You’re so bad.”
On the radio, an eager voice encouraged everyone to “Wang Chung” tonight, which was one of the many confusing songs I figured I’d understand when I knew more of the world. Sort of like the lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the comprehension of which I assumed required a familiarity with European arts and music. An educated person would know precisely what a scaramouch was and why he ought to do the fandango.
The unnaturally bright fluorescent lighting in the store made me feel as if I were onstage or caught in a police searchlight, which was a particularly unhappy metaphor. Getting out of there, escaping the lights, the bad pop, th
e freakish customer and clerk, took on a kind of urgency. I would gladly have stolen the ginger ale if I’d thought I might get away with it. The Kwick Stop, never the sort of place where I felt comfortable, now seemed too small, and it was getting smaller. I didn’t want to leave the ginger ale, and I didn’t want to say anything to the counter girl. It also seemed a foregone conclusion that the man with the Confederate hat wouldn’t much like a kid with a northern accent and a tie telling him he had to hurry it up. But I was thirsty and my stomach lurched violently, so I twisted open the cap and took a drink. It did make me feel a little better. Less like puking, anyway.
“You can’t drink that before you pay for it,” the Confederate man told me. He grinned broadly, exposing a mouth full of wild and white teeth. “It’s called stealing, and we got laws about that here.”
Only now did I recognize him. The guy from the Ford pickup outside of Bastard and Karen’s trailer. The split-level haircut was tucked under his hat, but it was the same guy. An icy terror burst in my chest and radiated out to my limbs. But what the hell was I going to do? Run? The guy had seen me go into a trailer where two people were murdered.
The nausea, I realized, most likely stemmed from my desire to suppress the one obvious fact in all of this- once those bodies were found, the cops were going to come looking for me. No matter what the assassin had told me, no matter what sweet lies he tried to conjure, I knew full well that I would be their prime suspect. It wasn’t a matter of maybes or ifs. They would want me. APB on Lem Altick. Take no chances with Lem Altick, boys, he’s probably armed and dangerous. The only question was if my being totally innocent would save me.
I walked up to the counter and put down a dollar. The soda was seventy-nine cents.
“Wait your turn,” the girl told me. “Can’t you see that there’s people ahead of you?”
“There aren’t people,” I said. My voice sounded edgy and nervous, and I wished I would shut up. “There’s person, and he’s not buying anything.”