Gutshot Straight with Bonus Excerpt

by Lou Berney

  The only other time Gina had been snorkeling had been at Disney World, one of the water parks there, where you paddled across a cramped little artificial lagoon you hoped none of the splashing kids around you had taken a dump in.

  “This is freaking awesome,” Gina said. She was underwater when she said it, with the snorkel mouthpiece in her mouth, which probably explained Doughboy’s puzzled look when he turned his mask toward her, his beady, close-set eyes behind the mask.

  “Blah-wab?” he said. She guessed that meant, What?

  Gina tried again. “This. Is. Freaking. Awesome.”

  Ziegler wasn’t paying attention. He’d grabbed her wrist and was pointing to the left. She followed his finger and saw drifting nonchalantly past—four or five freaking feet long if it was an inch, sleek and beautiful—a shark.

  Ziegler pointed at the shark. Then pointed at Gina.

  She was confused. Did he want her to, like, catch it? If he thought she was going to try to catch that shark, he was seriously out of his head.

  Ziegler pointed at the shark again, then back at Gina, then at himself. He grinned around his snorkel mouthpiece, and Gina finally got it, then, what he was trying to tell her.

  THE PLACE WAS CALLED EL PERICO, and if it wasn’t the worst dive bar in Panama City, Shake didn’t want to go near the one that was. At least not without a hazmat suit and a detachment of riot police.

  It was only noon, but there were already a dozen or so customers—each one sitting by himself, hunched around a drink at the bar or at one of the little tables, silhouetted by the light streaming in through the big doors propped open to catch the breeze. A hard-eyed, acne-pocked stripper was on a small stage. She was doing something, a sort of sluggish shuffle around the pole, that could not by the most generous stretch be called dancing.

  Shake waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness and the haze of cigarette smoke. He hoped his instincts, in this case, were correct. Historically speaking, his instincts were usually correct about half the time, which when you thought about it was probably the worst of all possible past performances. If your instincts were usually wrong, for example, a smart player would learn to ignore them.

  His instincts this morning weren’t wrong. He spotted, at the far end of the bar, Dikran’s big, bald, bullet-shaped head. Dikran was hunched around a drink, watching the stripper, his back to Shake.

  Shake checked to make sure there was no mirror behind the bar, then moved silently up behind Dikran. He stepped up onto the rung of Dikran’s stool for leverage and used his forearm to slam the big, bald, bullet-shaped head against the bar. With his other hand, he grabbed the Glock that was sticking out of Dikran’s waistband.

  Dikran spun around and swung wildly. Shake ducked the punch and jammed the barrel of the Glock into Dikran’s gut.

  Shake tried to remember—he was a car guy, not a gun guy—if Glocks had safeties. If this one did, and it was on, and Dikran processed the implications quickly enough, Shake knew he was a dead man.

  Dikran, though, didn’t move. Unless, of course, you counted the surge of blood that turned his squashed, ugly face even uglier, bruise-purple with rage.

  “Calm down, big boy,” Shake said. He didn’t want Dikran to pop a vessel before Shake extracted the information he needed.

  “You motherfuck,” Dikran sputtered. “I kill you.”

  The bartender glanced down the bar at them with a bored look. He said something in weary Spanish that Shake guessed probably meant, “Take it outside.”

  None of the other customers, nor the stripper, had so much as glanced up. Even though Dikran’s head had cracked the bar and made the shot glasses jump.

  “Is she here in Panama?” Shake asked. It didn’t make sense that she would be, but nothing else about Lexy’s involvement in this made sense either.

  If she wasn’t here in Panama, Shake’s plan would require some drastic revision, and it wasn’t much of a plan to start with.

  “Fuck you!” Dikran said. “I tear your head off like onion and use it to—”

  “Shut up.” Shake dug the barrel of the Glock hard up under Dikran’s rib cage and ripped the testosterone patch off Dikran’s arm.

  “Fuck!”

  “Is she here?”

  Dikran just glared at him. He knew he was a bad liar and didn’t even attempt one.

  Shake relaxed. He moved back a few feet in case Dikran in his rage decided to risk a gut shot from the Glock and hammer Shake with a nuclear head butt.

  Even odds, Shake figured.

  The bartender looked at the gun in Shake’s hand, looked at Shake, said the thing in Spanish again. This time he also made a shooing motion toward the door.

  “Hay no problema,” Shake assured him.

  “Take me to her,” he told Dikran. “Now.”

  Chapter 42

  They ate lunch on the veranda. Two new Panamanian waiters Gina hadn’t seen before. Ziegler drank three glasses of wine and didn’t eat much. How you could live on your own private tropical island, one of your own two tropical private islands, and still look doughy—it baffled Gina. The bridge of her nose was already starting to burn.

  “After a while, you know,” Ziegler said, waving his fourth glass of wine out at the water, “it’s just adding zeros. Making the money. You start to look for something larger in your life. Some meaning. I think it’s why I like it out here. Out here there’s something you can believe in. You can smell it, can’t you? The … I don’t know …” He sucked in a deep breath. “The wildness.”

  She could smell something all right, but it wasn’t wildness. She’d been on her flirty best behavior all through lunch, sustained by the momentum of the magnificent snorkeling, but had started to feel cranky again. Doughboy liked to listen to himself talk, and she’d been listening along with him for quite some time now.

  “This country hasn’t been tamed yet. I like things that haven’t been tamed.”

  “Cut to the chase, Roland,” she said.

  He went to the railing and tossed crumbs from the bread basket to the fish swarming below.

  “I don’t want to pay eight million for those foreskins, Gina. Not if I can help it.”

  “That’s the price we negotiated.”

  “That’s the price we negotiated when there were two sellers.”

  He let that statement hang portentously in the air, like it would take Gina a second to crack the code and figure out what he was implying. After which he probably expected her to draw her breath in sharply and say:

  Wait, are you saying—you mean … ?

  Please. She’d anticipated this move of Ziegler’s even before he’d slipped the piece of paper into her hand last night.

  “I was there, Roland, remember?”

  “You’re in for half, I presume?” he said. “So looking at four million?”

  “Go on.”

  “All I’m saying, I see a way for both of us to improve our cash-flow perspective.”

  “Cut Shake out.”

  “Six million. All yours.”

  “You save two million …”

  “And you take away an extra two.”

  “What makes you think I’d consider screwing my partner for an extra two million dollars?”

  He turned back around from the railing and smirked at her.

  “Your eyes,” he said.

  THE RESTAURANT WAS ON THE TOP FLOOR of the visitors’ center. Alexandra sat outside on the terrace, sipping tea at a table that looked directly down on the Miraflores Locks. When she saw Shake approaching, herding a furious Dikran in front of him, her face betrayed not the slightest hint of surprise.

  “Shake,” she said pleasantly, “so nice to see you.”

  “Lexy.” Shake sat down across from her.

  “Panama City is a lovely city, yes?” she said. “Very cosmopolitan. And I am fascinated by this canal.”

  Shake looked down. A cargo ship with Russian markings, unbelievably big, like an apartment building laid on its side, was being tu
gged toward the lock gates by what looked like two toy locomotives running along each side of the canal at a forty-five-degree angle.

  “Do you know about the French?” Shake said. “How they tried to build it first?”

  “The French,” Lexy said in a dismissive way. “Do you know, Shake, the locks, your president at the time, the first Roosevelt, he hired famous men to decide, when these locks were built, how do we make them beautiful? What ornaments and things? He asked famous architects—the man who arranged Central Park in New York City, among one.”

  “What did they decide?”

  “You see for yourself, yes?” she said, sweeping a hand over the view. “They decide the beauty is already there, in the art of the engineering. They advise your president, Do not touch the locks, or they will be ruined.”

  Shake smiled. “Good advice.”

  “I think so.” She sipped her tea. Without looking at Dikran, who still stood, hulking and fuming, in front of Shake, she said, “I see you have—how do you say?—get the drop on Dikran here.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Motherfuck,” Dikran said. “Give gun back.”

  “I think I’m gonna hold on to it for a while, Dikran, if you don’t mind.”

  Dikran filled his eyes to the brim with martyred Armenian suffering and turned to Alexandra for a ruling. She shrugged.

  “Finders keepers,” she said. “Go get Shake now a nice cup of tea, please.”

  Dikran recognized that he was in no position to question orders. He stalked off.

  “So,” Alexandra said.

  Shake studied her. Why had he always been attracted to beautiful but dangerous women? Was it some defect of character? Or a strength?

  He did the math in his head and imagined, for a second, a little girl, she’d be four years old now, with Lexy’s gray eyes and his … what? His nose, maybe.

  “Just think, Lexy,” he said, “if we’d stayed together, maybe we would have settled down, started a family, bought a nice little house in the suburbs.”

  “Yes.” Her gray eyes twinkled. “I think exactly this is what did happen if we stay together.”

  “You never know.”

  She started to answer, then didn’t. Together they watched the water boil in the lock; they watched the Russian freighter begin its slow, inexorable rise.

  “So,” Shake said finally, “if trouble was a city, where would I be right now?”

  Alexandra sipped her tea and mused. “New York City, I think.”

  “That’s a lot of city.”

  “It is a lot of trouble.”

  “I realize, Lexy, we’re past the point where I might be able to ask you, for old times’ sake, to perhaps—”

  “I am afraid so, Shake,” she said.

  “Thought so,” he said.

  “The girl,” Alexandra said. Surprising him. “Gina? You like this girl?”

  “I suppose I do.”

  “But she is the one who leads you, yes? Into city of trouble?”

  “I let myself be led, pretty much.”

  “Always a stand-up guy, Shake.”

  He wondered if that and half of $8 million would buy him enough of a head start. To hide from Alexandra. Dick Moby. In Shake’s more optimistic moments, he thought it just might, just possibly. For a few years, at least.

  “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, Lexy,” Shake said. “I’d really prefer not to have to do that. I’d like to know—”

  “You’d like to know what the price is?”

  “Yes. I would.”

  “To get out of this mess you are in?”

  “Yes,” he said. “You are assuming there is a price.”

  “No. I’m hoping.”

  Alexandra sipped and mused. “Could be a very high price.”

  “I’m fully prepared to pay a high price, Lexy,” Shake said. “The money, if that’s what you’re—”

  “What if price is not money?” she said.

  This stopped him. “The foreskins?”

  She waved a dismissive hand.

  “I don’t understand,” Shake said, even though he was starting to. He felt too hot suddenly. Hot and clammy.

  “No?” Alexandra asked innocently, indulging Shake his weak attempt at self-deception.

  “You want me,” Shake said slowly, “to give you Gina.”

  “Do I?” Alexandra said, her gray eyes twinkling.

  Dikran returned with Shake’s tea. He set the cup and saucer in front of Shake, then stalked off to sit glowering a few tables away.

  Shake turned the handle of his cup from two to three o’clock. Then from three to four, four to five.

  He told himself to stand up, say good-bye, walk away, hope for the best.

  He told himself to stay seated, shut up, think it through.

  He told himself that in life as in cards there was always a smart play and always a dumb play. There was never anything in between.

  He stood up. Then he sat back down.

  “But why—” he started to say.

  Alexandra put a comforting hand on top of his. “Drink your tea, Shake,” she said. “We have all lunch for negotiation.”

  BY THE TIME THEY LANDED BACK in Panama City, it was almost six-thirty. Ziegler offered to have his driver drop her off at the hotel.

  “I can manage,” she said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’ve got a couple of errands to run first.”

  He kissed her hand like he’d done last night.

  “You’ll consider my proposal?”

  “I always consider every proposal,” she said without being funny.

  She started to turn, but Doughboy still had her hand.

  “How long have you known him?” he asked. “This Shake guy?”

  “Long enough.”

  “Long enough to be sure he won’t try to cut you out?”

  She shrugged. “He might.”

  “But you think you’re smart enough to see it coming, don’t you?”

  She started to nod but then thought about it and didn’t.

  “I can manage,” she said. “Thank you for the lovely day.”

  “I mean it, Gina,” he said. “After we’re done with this, I want you to come back to the island with me. I’ll teach you how to live well.”

  “You think I need lessons?”

  He chuckled but didn’t saying anything. Gina guessed Shake would have said something like, No, but you could use the practice.

  How much was an extra $2 million? An extra $2 million was a whole lotta love, is what it was.

  “See you tomorrow,” Gina said.

  The tinted glass of the limo window slid up. When it was halfway, Gina leaned down and gave it a quick flirty smack of a kiss, the glass where Ziegler’s mouth would have been. Then she whirled on her heel before he could say anything and headed for the cab stand.

  Chapter 43

  Gina made it back to the hotel just after eight. Shake was lying on the bed, watching a cooking show in Spanish.

  “Have fun today?”

  “Did,” she said. “Went snorkeling and saw some manta rays.”

  “But no sloths?”

  “I don’t think they live underwater, pumpkin.”

  He smiled.

  She went over and kissed him. “How about you?”

  “I went to the Miraflores Locks. Learned all about how the canal works.”

  “Interesting?”

  “It was,” he said.

  He kissed her back. “Big day tomorrow.”

  “Wanna stay in and order room service? I’m whacked.”

  “Me, too,” Shake said. “We can hit the hay early.”

  She looked into his eyes. He looked into hers.

  “I’m glad you had a good day,” he said.

  “Right back at you,” she said.

  Chapter 44

  Ted Boxman had never fully understood the phrase “adding insult to injury” until he reached the end of the pap
erback he was reading. It was a horror novel, one of the only books in English for sale at the hotel gift shop, about a group of young American tourists in Mexico trapped on a hill covered by a giant diabolical bloodsucking tropical vine. The story was much scarier and more nerve-racking than you’d ever guess from the premise, and Ted had been driven forward page after page by curiosity and mounting dread. Then he reached the end of the book and discovered that because of a printing error the last three chapters of the book were missing.

  And, of course, the hotel gift shop did not have another copy.

  That was the insult. Ted’s injuries were both metaphoric and not at all so. On the metaphorically injured side, he’d been trapped in Panama City for the past two days because every flight back to the United States had been fully booked. Nothing whatsoever available until the day after tomorrow. He’d been trapped in his hotel room the entire time because he had no money (he’d charged the book, and meals, to his room account), and the replacement credit card that Citibank had promised would arrive in less than twenty-four had, of course, not. Not that Ted had been eager to leave his hotel room. He was persona non grata with Frank the Facilitator and all the rest of the Building Bridges guys (who at this very moment were downstairs in one of the ballrooms, at the Day Four Meet-N-Mix). Apparently Nerlides, his “date” from the first night, had filed an official complaint with Building Bridges.

  This reflected badly on all of them, Frank told Ted. It was one thing to be maybe a tad too aggressive with a girl—that was part of the traditional courtship process—but when a client of Building Bridges tried to weasel out of a restaurant check … well, that made all of them look like poor, desperate losers, which they were most definitely not.

  “Yes, uh-huh, you most definitely all are,” Ted had said. Which was probably an inadvisable comment, but Ted had been really angry and still aching (see below) from his not-metaphorical injury.

  Frank had called Ted a pissant and banned him from all further Building Bridges Panama City events. Even though Ted had already paid a 100-percent-nonrefundable deposit and even though—this was the real irony—Ted wouldn’t have gone to another Building Bridges event if Thelonious Monk himself, Ted’s hero, had returned from the dead to groove until the wee hours.