Gutshot Straight with Bonus Excerpt

by Lou Berney

  Jasper’s heart tightened some more, too much. It felt as though the threads of a screw were being stripped.

  An hour ago.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  JASPER DROVE FAST. Shake had taken his .45 after he’d hit him with the door, but Jasper still had his backup piece. He put it on the seat next to him. Jesus help the cop who pulled him over right now. Jasper was glad for the cop’s sake that no cop pulled him over.

  Jasper flew across the parking lot outside Lucy’s apartment house. He’d decided what he would do. If Rock Star hadn’t finished yet, if it wasn’t over yet, Jasper would tell Lucy he suspected he loved her and did she, in light of that, want to go away with him somewhere far away?

  He would promise to keep Lucy safe and respect her and treat her as an intelligent, equal human being. He would do his best to make her happy. What she considered happy, not what he did, which was a fundamental mistake he thought a lot of men made. He would try to be a good man, something at which he had no real practice but for which, when it came to her behalf, he had a sincere desire.

  Jasper flew up the stairs to Lucy’s apartment. That’s what he’d decided to tell Lucy. He was prepared to face the consequences. The consequences would be Mr. Moby.

  An hour ago.

  If it wasn’t over yet.

  Lucy’s door was closed. Jasper kicked it open, one kick, the wood splintering around the lock.

  Rock Star, sitting on the sofa, jumped a foot in the air and looked up at Jasper with alarm.

  “Fuck!” Then, when he saw it was Jasper, he said, “Fuck,” in a different sort of way, like he was relieved and annoyed and laughing at himself. “You scared the shit out of me, J!”

  “Where is she?” Jasper said.

  Rock Star shrugged. “She’s not home yet.”

  Jasper felt a surge of relief like a wave lifting him onto his toes.

  He was calm again; he had returned home to himself, a deeply reassuring sensation.

  “Glad you’re here, my man,” Rock Star said. But Jasper could see that something was bothering him. He clicked too fast through the channels on Lucy’s TV. “But hey, listen, if it’s cool with you, Mr. Moby said I could handle this, you know? I was hoping this was going to be, like, my first real gig, you feel me?”

  “I feel you,” Jasper said.

  “Primo!” Rock Star said, bouncing around with delight and relief. He flipped some hair out of his eyes so he could see the TV. “Not that I don’t want you to participate, my brother. I mean, we’re going to have some fun. Party like it’s 1999, hee-hee.”

  Jasper considered. “Phone book around here?”

  “What? I don’t know.”

  “Never mind.” Jasper decided to do it old-school, with the butt of his backup piece. He knocked Rock Star off the couch and tossed Rock Star’s gun away. Rock Star tried to crawl off and escape. He was quicker than Jasper expected, but his head was scrambled from the whack Jasper had given him, and he crawled the wrong way, into the bathroom instead of out the front door, and hit a dead end.

  Jasper followed him into the bathroom and whacked him again. He found Rock Star’s cell phone and dialed Mr. Moby.

  While the phone was ringing, Jasper told Rock Star, “Tell him it’s done. Tell him, ‘Me and Jasper will take care of the aftermath.’ You say another word, I’ll kill you.”

  Rock Star managed to nod. Mr. Moby answered. Jasper put the cell phone close to Rock Star’s bloody, broken-up mouth. With his other hand, he held his gun pressed into Rock Star’s stomach.

  “It’s done,” Rock Star said. His voice sounded strange, because of the broken-up mouth, but Jasper didn’t think Mr. Moby would notice. “Me and Jasper will take care of it.”

  “The aftermath,” Jasper murmured.

  “The aftermath,” Rock Star said into the phone.

  “Good,” Jasper heard Mr. Moby said. He clicked off.

  Jasper smashed the phone on the floor, then put the pieces back in Rock Star’s pocket.

  “Different circumstances,” he explained to Rock Star, “I’d kill you. But I have business that’s not going to wait, so that’s your good fortune. You feel me?”

  Rock Star nodded. He was crying a little.

  “You gonna disappear. I’m gonna tell Mr. Moby you didn’t have the stomach for the job. I’m gonna tell him not to worry about you, you’ll keep your mouth shut. But he might send someone looking for you anyway, so you best really disappear. It comes down to your word or mine, he’ll take mine. But I’ll kill you first. You understand?”

  Rock Star nodded.

  Jasper considered for a second, then changed his mind—he decided there was no shame in that, if the change was well reasoned—and shot Rock Star in the head.

  He carried the body to the trunk of his car. Then he went back upstairs to tidy up. He turned the sofa back right side up and picked Rock Star’s gun off the floor. When he straightened up, Lucy was standing in the doorway.

  All right, son, Jasper thought, here it is; here’s your chance.

  “Lucy,” he began slowly.

  But she was looking at the splintered wood around the lock on the door. She was looking at the gun in Jasper’s hand. When finally she turned her eyes up at him, there was the worst kind of stunned horror in them, the worst kind of searching question.

  You? How could you … ?

  She thought he was there to kill her.

  Oh, no. Oh, no, no.

  “Lucy,” Jasper said, “you don’t understand.”

  But she was already turning and running, and Jasper, his heart tight beyond anything he’d ever experienced yet, knew he’d never catch her.

  LUCY DROVE AND DROVE AND DROVE, until the fuel light flashed. A hundred and fifty miles east of Vegas, she pulled over at a truck stop to fill back up.

  She was still shaking.

  And yet—the cold rush of a desert wind blowing through her—she felt exhilarated. She felt liberated.

  The scales had fallen from her eyes. Lucy remembered the story from Mass as a child. Paul? Standing back there in the doorway of her apartment, she’d been able to see clearly for the first time.

  Providence—in the form of Jasper, come to murder her—had given her that gift.

  So many years she’d wasted—waiting, pretending, wishing.

  Waiting for the courage. Pretending the life she led wasn’t all bad. Wishing for a savior to drop a bucket down from the sky and save her from stormy seas.

  How many times over the years had she thought about leaving? How many times had she come so close?

  There was no good in the life she led. There was nothing good in it at all.

  Understanding that, finally, was the kick in the ass she needed.

  She’d go to college. She’d meet a nice man. Or woman. She wasn’t sure about that yet, but so what?

  Lucy, pumping gas in the middle of the night, at a truck stop in the middle of the desert, unsteady on her big heels and wearing a short, short crimson dress that snapped in the wind around her thighs, laughed.

  She had nothing. She had a couple of hundred dollars in her purse. A nice watch she could sell.

  She had, at last, everything.

  JASPER TOOK CARE OF THE AFTERMATH in the trunk, then drove back to the club. Mr. Moby was in a poisonous mood. When Jasper told him that Rock Star had bitched out and bolted, Mr. Moby said, “Thank fucking God I got you, Jasper.”

  That made Jasper feel proud and ashamed.

  “We’re gonna find that whore,” Mr. Moby said. “And we’re gonna find that asshole ex-con who fucked all this up in the first place.”

  Jasper, in a poisonous mood himself now, nodded. He was on exactly that same page. Oh, yes he was.

  Chapter 28

  The connecting flight to Panama City was two hours out of Dallas when a storm system blew up from the Gulf and they had to return to DFW. Shake and Gina spent most of the night in the airport terminal there, half sleeping, propped up in the hard plastic chairs. So di
d George Turtle, Ted the Cocksman, and the entire hard-drinking, backslapping Building Bridges gang. Who, as luck would have it, were headed to Panama, too. Shake learned everything there was to learn about enhanced feline nutritional systems. Gina asked Shake in a whisper if she could borrow his shoelaces to hang herself. Shake told her she’d have to wait till he was done hanging himself.

  The next day, around one, they finally landed at Tocumen International, Panama City, Republic of Panama.

  The silver lining, Shake calculated, was that the storm system had delayed all flights to Central America, so if Alexandra or Moby had already figured out where they were headed—and the odds of that were pretty good—they’d still be at least half a day behind. Marvin Oates and the foreskins, on the other hand, would now be at least a day ahead.

  They cleared customs and parted ways with the Building Bridges contingent at the luggage carousels. Gina was so giddy to part ways she gave several of the purple-tag boys big enthusiastic hugs.

  Shake went to find a place to change their money. He discovered that the official unit of currency in Panama was the good old American greenback. His second surprise, as they took a cab in from the airport, was Panama City itself. It wasn’t what he’d expected. Rising up from the brilliant green rain forest, perched on the edge of the Pacific, was a true city—dozens and dozens of gleaming skyscrapers, plus dozens and dozens more in the midst of construction. It was nothing like Shake’s one other experience with Central America—grim, grimy little San Salvador, where years ago he’d once spent a few days helping a friend liquidate his export-import business. Shake did not recall that trip with affection.

  He rolled down his window. The heat here was intense and wet. And the smells. In Las Vegas, desert dry, the smells tended to be of the inorganic sort: car exhaust, baking asphalt, the chlorine pumped into the giant fountains, lagoons, and canals outside the hotel-casinos. Here the smells seemed richer, sweeter, more jungly: life blooming, life rotting, the rain about to fall and the river about to flush it out to sea.

  And plenty of car exhaust, too.

  Overall, Shake liked it.

  The cabdriver tapped his horn a few times and gunned around the bus in front of them. The driver of the bus beeped back. Shake had noticed that although the traffic and drivers here were the worst he’d ever encountered in his life, the horn-honking was much more expressive than in the States, civil and musical. That was another thing he liked about Panama.

  And the buses, too. Rickety old American school buses, each individually painted wild colors, with psychedelic stripes and flames and movie scenes and portraits of doe-eyed Spanish beauties and the names of these women written in elaborate cursive script. Even the front windshields were painted, leaving just a narrow strip of glass free for the driver to see out, like a soldier peering through the gun slit of a concrete pillbox.

  The cabdriver saw Shake looking at the bus they’d just passed.

  “Diablos rojos,” he said.

  “Red devils?” Shake asked after a second.

  “Because the driver are so crazy driver.” He shook his head with resigned exasperation, then tapped a quick rhythm on his horn and gunned around another bus, narrowly missing a cast-iron street lamp.

  “I like Panama so far,” Shake told Gina.

  “You know what this humidity is going to do to my hair?” Gina asked. “And if there are giant cockroaches, I’m warning you now, I’m gonna freak.”

  Gina picked a hotel from the guidebook Shake had purchased at the airport. Shake told the cabdriver to drop them off a couple of blocks away. Just in case.

  “Have fun at Carnaval,” the driver told them. Shake remembered: Fat Tuesday was in two days.

  He followed Gina into a hotel that looked okay from the outside. Inside, the place was better than okay—hushed marble elegance and fresh orchids everywhere. It was definitely not coach class, and Gina seemed to approve.

  “Good day,” the desk clerk said in English.

  “We don’t have a reservation,” Gina said.

  “It is not a problem,” the desk clerk said. “One room or two?”

  “Two,” Gina said.

  “One,” Shake said.

  The clerk waited, pleasantly nonplussed.

  “You worried I might decide to screw you?” Gina asked Shake. “Or you’re hoping I might decide to screw you?”

  “One room, please,” Shake told the clerk.

  “I’ll consider that a yes,” Gina said.

  “I will just need a credit card, please, to secure any incidental expenses.”

  To Shake’s surprise, Gina produced a MasterCard.

  “Don’t run it,” she told the clerk. “We’ll pay cash when we check out.”

  “Of course. I will just keep the number on file.”

  He took the card from her and read the name on it. He looked at Gina. Then Shake.

  “Mr. Ted Boxman?”

  “Like ‘Cocksman,’ ” Gina explained, “but with a B instead of a C.”

  THE ROOM WAS BANANAS, Gina saw with glee, almost as luxe as the one she’d had at the Peninsula in L.A. There was a private balcony with a view of the sea and a giant bathroom with an old-fashioned claw-foot tub.

  Gina bounced on one of the two queen-size beds. She decided, actually, this room had the edge over the Peninsula. Better sheets, more character—a whiff of colonial charm—and, best of all, she wasn’t paying for it with her own money.

  She watched Shake check out the balcony, watched the muscles moving beneath his shirt as he leaned on the railing, and reflected that … well, yes, she guessed she really hadn’t paid for the room at the Peninsula with her own money either. She’d paid out of the three hundred grand she’d lifted off the Whale.

  That seemed so long ago. Funny how things turned out. She’d been so excited by three hundred grand. And now, twists and turns, some scary moments in there, here she was looking at a payday of $5 million, maybe more.

  Or … well, half that. She couldn’t forget she had a partner now.

  She wondered how Shake would look in a nice suit. Very good, she suspected. He had the kind of body she liked on a guy. Lean, shoulders broad but not overbearing about it, a guy who would have been good at sports if he’d been into that whole scene. Which he wouldn’t have been, thank God. Shake was a little bowlegged, but there was a certain charm to that. She wondered what he’d look like out of a suit, out of everything. Good abs, she suspected.

  “This room is bananas,” she said.

  “Nicest place I’ve never been drugged and robbed in,” Shake said over his shoulder.

  “Sheesh. You gonna hold that against me forever?”

  “I need a shower.”

  “Me, too. Then after that I want to buy some clothes.” She held up the MasterCard and twirled it across her knuckles, the way a blackjack dealer in New York had taught her long ago. “Before Cat Food discovers that his card is missing.”

  “Cat Food was the other one.”

  “Wait. Which one was the Cocksman?”

  “No idea.”

  He entered the bathroom and shut the door behind him. She heard the shower start to run.

  “You don’t have to shut the door!” she called. “I wasn’t gonna peek!”

  She had been totally gonna peek.

  THE MAIN SHOPPING DRAG, the Via España, wasn’t very big and had nothing on Rodeo Drive—no Fendi, no Prada, no Dolce & Gabbana. But a high-end local boutique caught Gina’s eye (when in Panama, right?), and she dragged Shake inside.

  She came out of the dressing room in a green dress that fit just, just right.

  Shake was sitting on a leather sofa, sipping mineral water a salesgirl had brought him.

  “You like?” Gina twirled on the ball of one bare foot. “And don’t bother with that ‘I’m deliberating’ act you always do.”

  Shake deliberated.

  “Not bad,” he said.

  Gina smiled and twirled again. He was so full of shit. She knew he knew she kne
w it.

  THEY CHANGED CLOTHES BACK at the hotel and then Shake asked the concierge to recommend the best restaurant in Panama City.

  “Manolo Caracol,” the concierge said without hesitation. “It is beautiful.”

  “The best food in Panama City,” Shake clarified.

  “Manolo Caracol,” the concierge repeated.

  Shake, skeptical, crossed the lobby and asked the desk clerk for a second opinion.

  “Manolo Caracol,” he said. “Without question.”

  The restaurant was in Casco Viejo, the old quarter of town. Casco Viejo was safe for tourists, but it was surrounded by rough neighborhoods, and the desk clerk advised them to take a taxi.

  “What’s the best restaurant in Panama City?” Shake asked the cabdriver. “The best food?”

  Gina told him to shut up already.

  “Food is important to me,” he said.

  “Eurasia is very, very good,” the cabdriver said.

  “Where’s that?” Shake asked.

  Gina pushed herself in front of Shake. “Casco Viejo,” she instructed the cabdriver. “A place called Manolo something something. And please ignore my friend for the rest of the trip.”

  Chapter 29

  Ted traced the seam of the tablecloth with the tines of his fork and watched the ice melting in the exotic-looking but not great-tasting drink Nerlides had ordered for him and waited for her to return from the ladies’ room.

  The restaurant was practically empty, just one other table occupied, on the far side of the room. And the waiter, slouched at the bar, glaring at him.

  Ted was pretty sure it wasn’t just his imagination, the waiter glaring at him.

  The restaurant didn’t seem very clean, and the food hadn’t been very good. But he tried not to be judgmental, because that was a quality he didn’t admire in other people. Maybe what was happening was that he was just imposing his own cultural values on Panama. His father, for example, refused to even try mushrooms. Once, at Golden Corral, Ted had brought him a slice of blueberry pie from the buffet because there was no more cherry. His father had taken a tentative, dubious bite.

  “Do you like it?” Ted had asked. He’d been taking his father to dinner almost every night for the past year, ever since his mother passed away, because his younger brother—