Gutshot Straight with Bonus Excerpt

by Lou Berney

  “He can tell how much we like each other,” Gina said, not missing a beat. She never did. She bumped her shoulder affectionately against his. “Wanna get some lunch?”

  IT WAS A LITTLE AFTER ONE, but they were the only customers at the restaurant on the square. The waiter in the apron brought them good, simple fried fish, corvina with the head still on, along with arroz con coco and a couple of bottles of ice-cold beer, Atlas, a local brew.

  The drowsy, sun-baked plaza, the flowers everywhere. The smell of the flowers, the smell of the Pacific, which was different in subtle ways from the smell of the Caribbean. More citric, cleaner, rowdier. The food and the wine and Gina across from him.

  Shake was about to say it when she beat him to the punch.

  “I could get used to this,” she said. She gazed out at the plaza. “I think this might have been the life I was supposed to have.”

  “Not the one you ended up with?”

  She shook her head and smiled. “There was a mix-up at headquarters. When I was born.”

  “An in-file in the out-box.”

  “You know?”

  “I do.”

  He drank the rest of his beer and studied her while he did it.

  She turned and caught him. “What?”

  “I can’t decide,” Shake said. “If you’re a good girl gone bad, a bad girl going good, or …”

  “Just a bad girl?”

  “That’s not exactly what I mean.”

  “I already warned you, sweetie.”

  “I know,” he said. “No heart of gold.”

  Her expression became unusually serious, almost melancholy.

  “It’s just who I am,” she said. “Sometimes …”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. What if free will, what if it’s just an illusion? I don’t mean like there are Greek gods or anything. But what if the way you’re born, the way you grow up, by the time you realize what’s happened, it’s already all wired. You’re wired. You think you’re making choices, but really you aren’t. And the smart play is to recognize that. That you’re a certain way and nothing is going to change that, even if …”

  “Even if?” he asked.

  “Even if sometimes you wish you could.”

  Shake thought about it. “Maybe the wishing is a start,” he said.

  “Think it works like that?”

  “What are the odds?”

  They smiled at each other. A long moment passed—a lazy, sun-baked, flower-scented moment that Shake didn’t want to pass at all. Or if it must pass, he wanted to take Gina by the hand and follow it, this moment, remain inside its protective flower-scented bubble, wherever it led, leaving the present—or was it the future?—forever behind.

  “Nature calls,” Gina said. “Which is a polite way of saying I have to pee like a racehorse.” She stood up. “Be back in a jumping jack flash.”

  Shake watched her walk into the restaurant and disappear. Two of the old chess-playing coots on the plaza, he noticed, were studying their game with such intensity, bent so far over their board, that their heads were almost touching each other.

  He looked at Gina’s beer. Considered the moral implications of the act, then finished it for her.

  He glanced at his watch. They had plenty of time to take the ferry to the mainland, grab a nap, pick up the foreskins from the hotel safe, and be back to the island well before nine o’clock. He was pretty sure Ziegler would show up early, and Shake wanted to be here long before he did.

  Ziegler wouldn’t have needed time to put together the cash. Shake wondered again why he would have lied, why he wanted to push the exchange back a full day more than necessary.

  He could think of several reasons. He didn’t like any of them.

  Gina’s purse was on her chair. She’d left it in full view, as if to vividly reassure Shake that she’d be returning from the ladies’ room.

  He glanced at his watch again.

  The waiter in the long apron approached. “Will you and the señora like some coffee?”

  Shake sighed.

  “The señora’s not returning,” he said.

  Chapter 46

  When she was sober, during the workweek, when she was sober and got pissed off about something, Gina’s mother used to just whale on Gina’s ass. The see-stars-and-fireworks kind of getting whaled on. Gina, when she got to high school, turned it into a joke she told people—that she’d learned how to run as fast as she did to keep her mother from catching her.

  The other girls on the track team, all of them black except her, they couldn’t believe that a white girl like Gina could run so fast. But they did know, a lot of them, about getting whaled on, and her joke cracked them up.

  It wasn’t entirely a joke. The trick, when you were getting whaled on, was to run fast in your mind. Stay a step ahead of whatever bad shit you were feeling. You couldn’t let the bad shit catch you until you were somewhere nice. Where, in the sunlight, you’d wonder, “Huh, that was the shit that was bringing me down?” As if you’d had a dream that freaked you the night before but in the morning just seemed kind of dumb, like a Chihuahua covered in tinfoil barking at you.

  Gina stepped off the boat. She was feeling some bad shit right now, about what she was doing to Shake. But, girlfriend, believe it, was fast. Gina, in her mind, was staying a step ahead. Come time, she’d take a breather and let the bad shit she was feeling catch up—when she was $6 million richer and on a plane to somewhere far, far away. Come time, she’d be happy to take the bad shit she was feeling to dinner at a nice place in Dubai, and they could work through their issues then.

  She’d come across a quote from Wordsworth, her one year in college, that summed up the philosophy perfectly: Creativity works best when strong emotions are “recollected in tranquillity.”

  Exactly. Awesome.

  She took a cab from the Amador Causeway back to the hotel. She walked into the lobby. The young assistant manager with the eyebrows was bent intently over the computer and didn’t notice her. Gina dinged the bell at the front desk, which startled him. Though it was hard to tell how much that had to do with the bell and how much with what seemed his ongoing state of general bestartlement.

  “Hi!”

  “Señora Boxman,” he said nervously.

  “Good afternoon, cutie-pie.”

  “How may I be of—”

  “I’d like you to open the safe for me, por favor.”

  “What? But, señora—I’m afraid that—” He pulled himself together and managed a chuckle. “You are joking,” he said. “But of course.”

  She leaned close. “I’ve never,” she told him in a friendly, conspiratorial whisper, “been more serious in my life.”

  He tried another chuckle. It failed miserably. What looked like a faint rosy rash appeared on each of his cheeks. Gina felt bad for the poor guy, but she didn’t have the time right now to be gentle.

  She selected the smile she never liked to use, the one she’d inherited from her mother, the one that used your lips, your teeth, but never your eyes.

  “Open the safe for me,” she said.

  “As you wish,” the assistant manager croaked.

  SHAKE HAD AN ADVANTAGE: He knew where Gina was headed. He took Dikran’s Glock from the leather day pack, stuck it in his waistband, jogged down the hill to the docks on the far side of the island. The next ferry didn’t depart for another twenty minutes, which meant Gina would have hired one of the private fishing boats to take her back to the mainland. Shake planned to do the same.

  But of course—he should have anticipated this—Gina had paid off all the other fishermen; there wasn’t another fucking boat in sight.

  You already know how to play chess, don’t you? he asked the Gina in his mind. The Gina in his mind just smiled back at him and put a finger over her lips. Shhhh.

  Shake jogged back to the ferry landing. He still might have just enough time. He calculated that he’d be about forty minutes behind Gina when the ferry docked in
Panama City. Half of that he could make up on the drive to the hotel if he could convince a cabdriver—money or gun or both—to let Shake drive. The other half … well, he’d have to hope for a little luck breaking his way; he’d have to hope that the assistant manager at the hotel, the one with the combination to the safe, had the grit to stand up to Gina for a few minutes.

  Shake didn’t bother to hope he might be able to stand up to her longer than that. Not a chance.

  Shake reached the landing. The ferry’s engines were revving, but the gangway was still down. He started toward it, then felt someone move up on him from behind; he felt something hard shoved against the small of his back.

  “Move a muscle and you’re a dead man,” a voice said.

  Shake ceased the movement of all muscles. He tried to place the voice.

  “Marvin?” he said finally, surprised. Shake glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough: The man pressing against Shake’s back what might be a gun in the pocket of his windbreaker was Marvin Oates, bug-eyed Vegas hock-shop proprietor.

  “Keep your mouth shut and do exactly what I say,” Marvin ordered.

  “I don’t have time for this, Marvin.” Shake turned calmly, quickly.

  “Hey, I told you not to—” Marvin shut up when he realized that Shake had the barrel of the Glock pressed to his forehead. “Oh.”

  “Finger?” Shake asked.

  Marvin nodded and removed his hand from the windbreaker pocket.

  “She said you didn’t have a gun!” Marvin whined.

  “She?”

  “I just want a finder’s fee. Ten percent. Or fifteen.”

  “You’re working with Gina?”

  “She said you’d have the foreskins.”

  Shake waited. Marvin’s bug eyes bugged even wider.

  “That liar!”

  The ferry had pulled away from the landing. Shake was tempted by the thought of shooting Marvin. Or at least smacking him with the butt of the Glock. Before Shake could succumb to the temptation, Marvin, who’d been stewing, said, “Ha!”

  “Ha?”

  “I,” Marvin announced triumphantly, “know where she is.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “I do! She told me to meet her, once I had the foreskins, at this place in the old town. I know the exact place! Plaza France, or something like that. At the statue of some French guy. Ziegler was going to be there, and we were going to get the money then. So ha!”

  Shake realized that the universe was supposed to be infinite, filled with multitudinous possibility and variation. On some planet somewhere, for example, Shake had his own restaurant; on some other planet, Ferdinand de Lesseps had succeeded in building his sea-level canal through the Panamanian isthmus. But nowhere, not in the darkest, most far-flung corner of the universe, could Shake imagine a Gina so dumb she’d tell Marvin Oates where she was really going to meet Ziegler.

  She knew that Marvin would slow him down, but she also had to know he wouldn’t slow Shake down for long.

  She had to know that Marvin would immediately spill his beans.

  She had to know—

  Shake smiled. Of course.

  “So what do we do now?” Marvin asked eagerly.

  “You,” Shake said, “are going to walk up the hill. There’s a restaurant on the square. You’re going to sit down and eat lunch. You’re going to find a nice hotel, get a good night’s sleep, then take the ferry back to the mainland in the morning.”

  Marvin nodded, trying to follow all this.

  “Then you’re going to fly home.”

  “Fly home? What?”

  “Because if you don’t,” Shake explained, “I’m going to hunt you down and I really will beat you to death with a gravel-filled sock.”

  Marvin scowled sourly. He looked at the gun in Shake’s hand.

  “You think just because you have a gun,” Marvin said, “you can tell me what to do.”

  “That’s right,” Shake said.

  Marvin considered this, then wheeled and started trudging angrily up the hill. He paused after a few seconds and turned back around.

  “The least you could do is reimburse my expenses,” he said. He took a hit off his inhaler. “I’m out almost two grand because of this stupid trip!”

  Shake waved the gun toward the top of the hill. Keep moving.

  “Check’s in the mail,” Shake assured him.

  Chapter 47

  The statue where she was supposed to meet Ziegler was in the center of Plaza de Francia. Gina spotted it right away. A black bust of a guy with a big mustache, near what she was pretty sure was called an obelisk. FERNANDO MARíA VIZCONDE DE LESSEPS was engraved in the stone column the bust sat on. Gina remembered the name from the story the debonair guy at the antiquities shop had told them. She didn’t remember much of the story. Something about the French, and the Panama Canal before it was the Panama Canal. Gina had been distracted, too busy scoping out the cute little tamale of a shopgirl, trying to figure out who she reminded Gina of. The Latina actress on My Name Is Earl, maybe? With corkscrew hair instead of straight?

  “Well, well, well,” Ziegler said. He’d come sneaking up behind her. He was exactly ten minutes early. The sun had just begun to sink. “I’d say I’m surprised to see you, Gina, but I’m not.”

  His material was thin. It annoyed Gina. “We’ve already been down that road, Roland,” she said. “Let’s make a deal, whaddaya say?”

  “You have them?”

  She jiggled her purse—the real one, which she’d picked up at the hotel. She’d left the dummy back on Isla Taboga to fox Shake.

  “You?”

  He lifted the small, hard-sided suitcase he was carrying. It didn’t look that strange that he was carrying a suitcase. There were a lot of people in the crowded plaza carrying even odder things—like, one guy, a big ceramic goat.

  “To complete the transaction,” he said, “please step into my office over here.”

  He nodded toward the doorway of a nearby building.

  “What’s wrong with right here?” she asked. She liked all the people around; she liked that there was a guy nearby who looked like a cop.

  Ziegler pulled an exasperated face. “I’m not going to hand over six million dollars in cash in the middle of a crowded plaza.”

  “We could stroll to the edge of the crowded plaza,” Gina suggested.

  Ziegler just looked at her. “Your choice,” he said.

  Gina knew what choice he meant: Take it or leave it. She hesitated. She knew what Shake would do, but she wasn’t about to walk away from 6 million bucks.

  “Fine,” she said.

  Doughboy smiled his good teeth at her. “Follow me.”

  They entered the building. Ziegler, who had the keys, started to lock the door behind them. Gina put a hand on his to stop him.

  “Yeah, right,” she said.

  He shrugged. He led her down the narrow, dimly lit hallway to a big, dimly lit room. In the center of the room was a gigantic antique scale model of the Panama Canal.

  “Wow,” Gina said.

  “They’re storing a few items here while they renovate the main museum on Plaza de la Independencia. I arranged for the security staff to take a nice long siesta so we could have the place to ourselves. Us and our guest, of course.”

  The hair on the back of Gina’s neck prickled as she realized that someone was standing behind her. She turned.

  “You remember Señor Cornejo?” Ziegler said.

  The debonair owner of the antiquities shop. He bowed. Gina relaxed. Sheesh, she was jumpy.

  “He’s here to verify the authenticity of the merchandise,” Ziegler said.

  “Just in case there might have been a mix-up?”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  “How’s about I verify the authenticity of that six million dollars first?” Gina said.

  “Not here.”

  He led her and Cornejo past the scale model of the Panama Canal, down another corridor, up a staircase, int
o a smaller, stone-walled room furnished with a couple of plush sofas and lit by about a thousand candles.

  “Very romantic,” Gina said. What was up with Ziegler and his thing for candles? The guy, no big news flash, definitely had a couple of screws rattling around in that doughy head of his.

  He went to the balcony, which overlooked the square, and pulled the curtains open. It was dusk, and the moon was impossibly, beautifully ripe.

  “We need the right atmosphere for a transaction of this magnitude,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

  “I think I want to see what you have in that suitcase of yours.”

  Ziegler set the suitcase on top of the coffee table and opened it.

  “You want to count it?”

  “You betcha,” she said.

  Inside the suitcase were stacks and stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Gina thought it would have made her dizzy, looking at all that cash in one place, but it didn’t. She felt calm and clearheaded. She picked up a packet of cash at random and riffled through it. Ten grand per packet, just like at Moby’s, way back when. She replaced that packet of cash and riffled through several other packets.

  Ziegler had been waiting with melodramatic patience. “Well?”

  “Okay.”

  “The foreskins?” Ziegler asked.

  “I’ll call you in an hour and tell you where you can find them,” Gina said.

  Ziegler snapped the lid of the suitcase closed, almost catching Gina’s fingers.

  “Nice try,” he said.

  “Didn’t think you’d fall for that,” she said. Although truthfully she thought maybe he might.

  She opened her purse and took out the padded envelope she’d retrieved from the hotel safe. Ziegler pointed at Cornejo. Gina handed it to him.

  Cornejo opened the padded envelope and very carefully withdrew the glass case with the foreskins. He spent a long time, longer than it had taken Gina to count the money, carefully examining them.

  “Oh, my,” Cornejo said every few seconds.

  Ziegler tapped his foot. He really, Gina realized, wasn’t a patient kind of guy. She guessed you kinda had to not be, if you were going to end up making a couple of hundred million bucks by the time you were forty.