Gutshot Straight with Bonus Excerpt

by Lou Berney

  But all that was history, ancient. Gina held the briefcase in one hand and put her other hand on her hip like she was standing on top of a mountain. Took a big, long breath of fresh mountain air.

  “Ah!” she said.

  Gina suspected she might be feeling just a teensy bit guilty about what she’d done to Shake, but she wasn’t sure. That was the tricky thing about guilt. It always landed on her so lightly—barely a soft, butterfly-wing breath—that she never knew if it was really there. Gina promised to consider the issue more thoroughly at a later, more convenient date. If, at a later date, of course, it was still an issue, which in her experience it rarely was.

  She just needed some clothes now. Or at least a top. She couldn’t walk around Vegas in the grimy, sheer, practically see-through tank she was wearing, not if she didn’t want to attract more attention than usual.

  At the far end of the long hallway, a housekeeping cart was positioned outside the open door of a room.

  Gina did a rumba around the cart and breezed into the room.

  “I forgot my camera!” she called into the bathroom.

  A maid poked her head out. She gave Gina a skeptical and vaguely unfriendly look, then went back to picking pubes or whatever off the toilet seat.

  Gina marched straight to the suitcase that was propped open on the suitcase caddy. Pink: jackpot. The jeans in the suitcase were designer knockoffs of questionable taste, but Gina found one top she liked, just about her size: a long-sleeved, waffle-knit henley with a flattering cut and some funked-up Chinese characters silk-screened across the front. She peeled off her grimy tank and tossed it in the trash can. She pulled on the henley, then rummaged around in the suitcase.

  What she could really use now …

  Shazam, and there it was: a long-billed J.Crew baseball cap.

  But no Marlboros. Apparently there was a limit to Gina’s super-powers.

  In the bathroom the maid flushed. Gina pulled her hair into a ponytail and screwed the cap on low. Borrowed a pair of DG shades and slid those on. She checked herself out in the mirror, then remembered to go back and grab the briefcase she’d set on the dresser and almost forgotten.

  That would have sucked.

  “Gracias!” she called to the maid on her way out.

  AFTER SHE BOUGHT A PACK of cigarettes in the hotel gift shop, Gina drove out to Summerlin. She couldn’t go back to her apartment, of course, so she was grateful she’d thought to keep her passport stashed in a box at a Mail Boxes Etc. At the airport she cut past the rental-car booths to get to the escalators. She thought she glimpsed the hard-eyed gal at Avis, and it spooked her out a little. This was where—just less than a week ago, hard to believe—she’d taken the first step down the path that eventually led her straight, and handcuffed, into the trunk of a Lincoln Town Car.

  That had been a shitty path. Gina wasn’t going anywhere near that path again. She was going to be smart this time and blow this Popsicle stand, the Popsicle stand being in this case the entire North American continent, thank you very much.

  At the Delta Airlines ticket counter, she produced the wad of bills she’d taken from an envelope in Shake’s pocket after he blacked out.

  “Where can I go in Asia, first class, one way, right now, for …” She paused to count the money. It was less than she’d been hoping, about what she’d expected. She subtracted enough for a hotel once she got to wherever in Asia she ended up. “… for, say, a couple of grandish.”

  “Are you serious?” the gay guy behind the counter said.

  “Do I look serious? Or Dubai, maybe.”

  He lifted one eyebrow, then tap-tap-tapped on his keyboard.

  “First class is out of your price range,” he said, “but a coach seat to—”

  “Ugh. Please.”

  “Ugh yourself.”

  “What about Europe?”

  Tap-tap-tap.

  “London is four thousand.”

  “How much is coach?” Gina said, then, “Fuck it. Never mind.”

  She scooped the cash back up, wheeled around, and found a seat in the waiting area that was shielded, mostly, from the rest of the concourse by a bank of slots.

  She was going to have to give this situation some serious analysis. A couple of grandish, plus enough for a week in a decent hotel, was not the kind of stake money that got you off on the right foot; it was definitely not sufficient right-foot kind of stake money.

  So.

  She nibbled a thumbnail. A guy walking past gave her a glance. Nothing hinky about it, though it was hard to tell for sure. Gina knew she was radioactive in Vegas. The Whale’s network ran wide, and the kite on her had been up for almost a week. By now every sketchy character in town, and every boyfriend/girlfriend/lover/bartender/cabdriver of every sketchy character in town—and who did that leave, exactly?—had an eyeball peeled for Gina and the big coin she’d pay out if they rung her up.

  Gina remembered the way the pirate waitress at Treasure Island this morning had kept looking at her, wondering, trying to place where was it she’d seen Gina before.

  She nibbled her other thumbnail and shivered. She didn’t like thinking about eyeballs getting peeled; she didn’t like the way this train of thought was dragging down her hearty-breakfast, hot-shower, plucked-from-the-jaws-of-the-Whale, good-vibe bounciness.

  She snapped open the briefcase and looked inside. Just like she’d heard them discussing back at the motel: a hundred antique postage stamps, yellowed with age, lined up neatly ten by ten beneath the glass of a second case. All of them were blank: no numbers, no writing, no pictures. Was that what made them so valuable? Or was it because they were old? They looked crazy old, some of the paper so thin, so fragile it was almost translucent.

  Just how valuable?

  Gina could guess how badly the Whale wanted to get his hands on her. Really, really badly. Which meant the price he’d been willing to pay—the stamps—must be really, really high.

  So.

  So … what if a girl, into whose hands fate had delivered these stamps, what if this girl managed to sniff out someone—just saying—willing to take them off her hands at a win-win sort of price? Even at fifty cents on the dollar of what they were really worth, those stamps would definitely get her off on the right foot. Much more than a couple grandish would, that’s for sure.

  Staying in Vegas for another day or two—was it worth the risk?

  Gina thought of that hard-eyed gal downstairs at the Avis counter and felt spooked all over again. If that woman had recognized in Gina the ghost of her young self materialized before her, didn’t that mean, when you flipped it around, that Gina had been looking straight into the hard, tired, bitter, broken-down eyes of her own future self?

  Had that woman been, twenty years ago, where Gina was now? Sitting in a plastic mother-of-pearl chair in an airport terminal, trying to decide if a risk was worth taking?

  Spooky.

  Gina shifted uncomfortably in her plastic mother-of-pearl chair. No way, she assured herself, am I that woman. No way, in twenty years, will I end up hard, tired, bitter, and broken down, working a rental-car counter at the airport.

  Which, okay, is probably exactly what that woman twenty years ago had assured herself, too.

  Gina had every intention of remaining young and hot forever, but she also admitted the improbability of that outcome. Not the hot part—she took really excellent care of her skin and stayed out of the sun as much as possible—but the young part, the part where the currency of her looks would never be stronger against the dollar, the euro, the yen. That part was a bubble just waiting, like all bubbles, to pop.

  Gina was ready for it. She knew she had better be ready for it.

  SHE TOOK THE SHUTTLE BACK to long-term parking and—cautious—instructed the driver to drop her off a couple of rows from the Town Car. After he drove away, she used a dime to unscrew the Town Car’s license plate and switched it out with one from a nearby Escalade. The Escalade was sparkly clean, like it hadn’t been
sitting out here in the desert dust for days and days, getting blasted with jet exhaust from above. Like it had just been dropped off and the owner wouldn’t be back for a while.

  She smiled and figured Shake would be proud of her for thinking of that.

  She was still thinking about that guy. Which was unusual, but not unpleasant.

  He was late thirties, she guessed, maybe a little older. Fit, a face with some mileage, but the more interesting for it. Eyes that had thrown her when he first opened the trunk. His eyes weren’t the eyes of a guy who should have been driving that car, doing a job like that. Thank God.

  She drove back to the Strip. She slipped through the lobby of the Venetian in her cap and sunglasses. Without, she hoped, being spotted. She laid out a couple of bills for a room, went upstairs, then came back down to complain about the smell of puke in the room. The room didn’t really smell like puke, but it was such a plausible lie that the desk clerk didn’t blink. He switched her information in the computer and gave her a key card for a new room two floors up.

  Gina had no intention of using the new room. She hurried back to the old room, where she’d left the door propped open with the brass security claw.

  If someone had spotted her, or if the desk clerk ratted, Gina didn’t intend to make it easy for them.

  She raided the minibar for a Luna protein cookie and a miniature bottle of vodka. She dragged the yellow pages out from beneath the nightstand and flopped them open on the bed.

  She leafed to the S’s.

  “Stamps and Coins, Rare—Dealers.”

  That was easy. Gina finished the vodka and Luna cookie and realized how sleepy she was. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept, not counting maybe an hour or two in the suffocating trunk of the Town Car that left her more tired than when she started.

  She tore the page out of the phone book and decided to take a nap. Reward for a mission accomplished more quickly than expected. Even a go-go-go girl like herself had to stop occasionally and recharge.

  It was still early. Lots of daylight left. She’d have plenty of time, when she woke up, to find a buyer for those antique stamps.

  Gina stripped down to her undies, curled up at the end of the bed, dragged the comforter over her.

  What was the harm in a nap, just a little one?

  Chapter 11

  When Shake woke up, he had no idea, for one unnerving moment, where he was. The room he was in was dark, quiet, cool. Prison was none of those, so at least he knew he wasn’t back there. His right wrist hurt like hell—he wasn’t sure why—and his mouth tasted as if something rank and furry had crawled inside, dragging with it something even ranker and furrier.

  He tried to turn onto his side, but a stab of pain in his wrist put him back down fast. Then he remembered the handcuffs, the rusted U-bend pipe under the sink, the hotel room with the faux-vintage pirate treasure map framed above the bed.

  He remembered Gina.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Very slowly he sat up, careful not to torque his aching wrist. He reached up and moved his free hand around the bathroom counter until he found the wall-mounted hair dryer and, just beneath, the light switch. He flicked the switch, and the flare of brilliant white light, bouncing mirror to mirror, was like a hammer hitting his little glass eyeballs.

  He didn’t know what time it was. He pushed open the bathroom door with his foot. He didn’t have an angle on the hotel room’s window, but along the wall he could see alternating pickets of light and shadow. It was still light out at least, though not for much longer.

  That meant it was probably … what? Five o’clock?

  “Shit,” he said again.

  He tested the cuff around his wrist. There was a little play, not much. He reached up and moved his free hand around the counter again until this time he found a trio of small plastic bottles. Shampoo, conditioner, body lotion. He deliberated, then selected the shampoo for its gelatinous quality. He opened the cap with his teeth, then squeezed the goo—it smelled like lavender—over his hand, his wrist, lubed it up under the cuff and all around. Then, careful not to pause to consider how much this was going to hurt, Shake yanked hard.

  SHAKE SAT ON THE EDGE of the bed, gently massaging his hand, the cordless room telephone cradled between his ear and shoulder. According to the clock radio on the nightstand, it was almost 5:30 P.M. Even later than he’d thought.

  He listened to the phone ringing.

  Don’t answer, he thought. We can do this some other time.

  She answered.

  “Yes?” Alexandra said.

  “It’s me.”

  “It is done? No problem?”

  Shake considered. “Small problem.”

  “Ah.”

  “The girl got away,” Shake said. “With the briefcase.”

  There was a pause.

  “Just curious, Shake,” Alexandra said lightly. “What in this situation would you call ‘big’ problem?”

  Shake winced and went into the bathroom to run cold water over his hand.

  “I’ll get the girl back. Or the briefcase. Both.”

  “You just a need a little time,” Alexandra said.

  “Yes.”

  “Fine.”

  Fine. Shake winced again. Not because of his hand this time. Because this was going even more badly than he’d expected, and he’d expected it to go pretty badly. He waited for her to ask the question.

  “Where are you staying, by the way?” Alexandra said. “In case I need to reach you?”

  Shake pictured the hotel across the street: gondolas, Doge’s Palace.

  “I’m at the Venetian Hotel,” Shake said. “Room 1512.”

  “I call you tomorrow,” Alexandra said. “Get some rest, then find the girl and the briefcase. Both. Yes?”

  “Yes. Both.”

  Shake clicked off the phone, turned off the cold water, and noticed the soap dish for the first time. He dried his aching wrist and sighed. In the perfect center of the soap dish, alongside a chocolate turndown mint wrapped in foil, Gina had left the small silver handcuff key for him.

  Chapter 12

  Alexandra hung up the phone and took a sip of tea. She did not indulge the desire—fleeting, but powerful—to sigh.

  There was no place for melancholy in the heart of a pakhan. The heart of a pakhan was a small, smooth, round stone. If this stone occasionally appeared to glisten as though wet from the rains or the river, that was merely a trick of light and perspective, a testament to the beauty of the stone, and nothing more.

  Alexandra took another sip of tea and sighed, okay, a small sigh, sure. Did it not make her an even more formidable pakhan, that she could feel and yet still see the world with clear eyes? That she could act without hesitation or doubt on what she saw and ignore what she felt? A wet stone was still a stone, after all.

  She had affection still for Shake, yes, but it was no more than that. She had given him this little errand because he had always been loyal. Because he had always been reliable. It was just good business.

  Was it just good business, she asked herself, that she went personally to send Shake on this little errand? When she just as easily could have sent Dikran or someone else?

  Shut up, please, she told herself back.

  The deputy attorney general came padding out of the bathroom in a robe, smiling shyly, stupidly.

  Alexandra looked at him, then looked away and thought, Oh, Shake, Shake, Shake, Shake. Why do you put me in such a position? Why do you force me to turn my heart to stone and make such an unhappy decision?

  Then she picked the phone back up. It was suddenly heavy, this small object, as if it—or she—had been enchanted by a witch in a fairy tale. Alexandra needed all her strength, all her will, just to raise the phone to her ear. But she did.

  DIKRAN TOLD THE HOUSE MOTHER to bring him another bitch—not a Chinese this time.

  “She Thai.”

  “Do I care?”

  “You want a Ukrainian?”
>
  “Yes. Bring a Ukrainian. Now!”

  Dikran found the remote under the pillow and turned on the TV. The Chinese bitch on the bed next to him snored. Chinese were too small. No stamina. Ukrainian girls were sturdier.

  The Little Soldier in his lap lay heavy on his thigh. Purple, sticky, and sore, but already starting to stiffen again. Dikran wished only to watch ESPN and go to sleep. But the Little Soldier taunted him.

  Dikran glared angrily at the testosterone patch on his arm. He did not blame the Little Soldier for these troubles of his. He blamed this stupid patch and the stupid fucking doctor who said wear it or maybe your heart collapse floosh like a smashed football.

  An irony was that Dikran much preferred Chinese girls. Their secret eyes and white smiles. But with the testosterone patch, Chinese girls were not sturdy enough for the Little Soldier. Had not the stamina.

  On TV on the field sideline was babbling a girl with orange hair and tits spilling out. The Little Soldier stirred. Like the taut string of a violin plucked by a finger. Twang, twang. Fuck! What business, Dikran thought angrily, had a woman on ESPN on the sideline with tits spilling out every which way? Dikran wanted to sleep, but he was too angry.

  “Where the fuck the Ukrainian bitch!” he hollered through the wall. He pounded the wall to punctuate each word, twice for the exclamation point.

  Stupid fucking doctor. Dikran thought he would like to kill that fucker. Roll a testosterone patch very, very tight, it could be done, and stick it up his—

  The phone rang. Dikran answered.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Where is the ass-lick?”

  “He said he was at the Venetian. Room 1512.”

  “Good. I will go there.”

  She clucked impatiently at him. “He’s not at the Venetian, Dikran.”

  “I will check anyway. I will find him.”