Gutshot Straight with Bonus Excerpt

by Lou Berney

  “What’s that you say?” Baby Jesus said. “What is the lesson you have learned?”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” Shake said.

  Chapter 2

  Shake’s flat above the restaurant faced east, toward the sea, so he never bothered with an alarm clock. The light came slanting in early, spreading like it had been dropped and spilled on the polished ironwood floor. When the dogs that guarded the bar next door woke up and started barking at the seabirds, Shake was already out of bed, sliding on his flip-flops.

  He walked down to the end of the pier and put on a pair of swim goggles. You never knew what you might see out here in the crystal-blue water. Huge schools of tiny silver fish, swirling like snowflakes. A spotted ray banking and swooning. Shake stood for a second to let the sun warm him up, and then dove in.

  Back in the States, Shake had taken long drives to relax. An empty stretch of country two-lane, the soothing sizzle of rubber on asphalt, a Flatlanders song blasting from the deck. But Ambergris Caye was an island only twenty miles long and half a mile wide. Almost everyone got around by bike or boat or golf cart. So now when Shake wanted to forget his troubles, he had to hit the water.

  Usually his morning swim did relax him. This morning, though, no matter how hard he worked, he couldn’t shake Baby Jesus. Who seemed to backstroke right along beside Shake, smiling sweetly, snip-snipping his big fingers like scissors.

  Shake figured, best case, that he had two or three months for business to pick up. If it didn’t, if he couldn’t keep up his payments, Baby Jesus would take over the restaurant. He would take over Shake.

  Shake picked up the pace and swam till he could barely lift his arms above his head. Finally, exhausted, he rolled onto his back and let the current carry him back down toward his pier.

  When he climbed out of the water, Idaba was on the beach, supervising the little Kriol boy who raked up the sea grass. If the little boy missed a spot, Idaba would snap her fingers, loud, and make him go back and get it.

  Shake dried off and walked over. Idaba handed him a cup of coffee.

  “I’m gonna take the boat into town later,” Shake said. “We need anything you know about?”

  “Mangoes,” she said.

  “All right,”

  “Good ones.”

  “You sure? I was gonna hunt around till I found some bad ones.”

  She looked at him. The boy almost grinned, Shake saw it building, but Idaba snapped her fingers at him and the little boy scooted off down the beach.

  “You know what you need?” she asked Shake.

  He sat down on the sand with his coffee and watched the waves smack and foam against the reef, half a mile offshore.

  “What do I need?” he said.

  “You need a woman.”

  He glanced over at her. “What?”

  “How long it’s been?” she said. “Since you have a woman in your bed?”

  “Well,” he said. He took a sip of coffee and pretended to muse. “I guess if you’re offering …”

  She snapped her fingers so close to his head that it made his ear ring.

  “Be serious for one minute,” she said.

  “What I need,” Shake said, “I need a prep cook knows how to prep or cook. Either way, it’s an improvement. I need a roof that doesn’t leak and wiring I don’t have to say a Hail Mary every time I flip a light switch. I need TripAdvisor to delete that dipshit’s review, the one said my conch ceviche was undercooked.”

  “A woman in your bed. That’s the only way to fix when your heart been broken.”

  “I need to go back in time and kick my own dumb ass for borrowing money from Baby Jesus.”

  He turned to look at her.

  “Who says I’ve got a broken heart?”

  “You don’t think I see?” She snorted. “I see it the first time I meet you.”

  “That wasn’t a broken heart. That was a rough ferry ride from the mainland and a plate of bad huevos rancheros.”

  “Be serious. When a woman break your heart, you need to find a new woman. It’s no good, a man all by himself.”

  That sounded like lyrics from a reggae song, but Shake knew better than to say so.

  Idaba snapped her fingers again anyway, right next to his ear, like a gunshot going off.

  “Hey!” he said. “What was that for?”

  She was like one of those old nuns he’d known as a kid, growing up in New Orleans, who could read your mind like a book.

  “You think I don’t see?” she said.

  She took his empty cup and headed back up to the restaurant. Shake stretched his legs out. It was true that he’d been suffering from more than bad huevos rancheros when he first arrived on Ambergris Caye. But that was two years ago. If his heart had been broken then, that didn’t mean it was broken now. He no longer felt a stab of pain, for example, every time he thought about Gina. Every time he thought he smelled her shampoo on the pillow next to him. Every time he stepped onto the veranda of the restaurant and imagined how much she’d love the killer view.

  Not every time.

  He tried to remember how long it had been since he’d had a woman in his bed. Six months? He had opportunities. He was a decent-looking guy, he took care of himself, he owned a restaurant on the beach of a tropical island. A lot of the women he met were on vacation, far from home, ready to live and let loose.

  But he could never work up much enthusiasm for it—a one-night stand with some divorced recovery-room nurse, too much makeup and a fresh dolphin tattoo on her ankle, she and her girlfriends three sheets to the wind and flying back to Louisville in the morning.

  Shake called over the little Kriol boy with the rake and told him there were some homemade cinnamon rolls in the pantry, and to make sure he took a few home for his family.

  “Thank you, Mr. Shake,” the little boy said. Shake guessed he was about seven or eight years old, skin almost the color of the ironwood floor in Shake’s apartment.

  “I think she can read minds,” Shake said. “Idaba.”

  The little boy shrugged, as if to say, Of course she can, don’t be foolish. And then he went running up to the kitchen to get his rolls.

  SHAKE TOOK THE BOAT INTO town, an eighteen-foot Wahoo that had come with the restaurant. The old Mercury outboard broke down on a fairly regular basis—usually when Shake had some expensive grouper sitting on ice—but today he made it to the municipal wharf without incident.

  He tied up and walked to the market. A lot of visitors were underwhelmed by San Pedro, the only town on Ambergris Caye. Three streets, a few restaurants and bars, a layer of white sandy grit covering everything. Shake liked it. San Pedro felt like a real place to him, life going on, not like some of the other places he’d been to in the Caribbean. In San Pedro there were plenty of tourist traps selling Tshirts and scuba trips, but also places where you could buy plastic buckets or used bicycle parts or old romance novels written in Spanish. You could get your hair cut by a guy who worked out of his garage.

  Shake located the fisherman he liked to use. The snapper looked good, so Shake took that and some lobster, some conch. The fisherman was about to make a run up to the northern resorts and agreed to drop off the fish on his way.

  When the Garifuna ladies with the fruit carts saw Shake coming, they started clucking and cooing. In their brightly colored head wraps and skirts, they were like a flock of naughty tropical birds.

  “Shake!”

  “Come taste my fruit, boy!”

  “Taste how sweet!”

  “Shake, what’s shaking?”

  That last one always cracked them up. It never got old.

  Shake bought mangoes and papayas. On second thought he also bought some plantains, thinking he might fry them up with the snapper tonight. He felt good about that until he remembered they had only seven reservations on the books for tonight, and not much hope of any walkins.

  Shake paid for the plantains and walked over to his buddy Pijua’s joint. It was early for lunch, b
ut Shake hadn’t eaten breakfast and Pijua turned out the best food on the island, probably the best in Central America.

  Pijua’s daughter sat him at a table inside, by the window, with a view of the marina. Shake tried not to guess what kind of phenomenal walk-in business Pijua did. He was shouting distance from the wharf, from all the bars, a quick golf-cart ride from the fancy resorts south of town. To get to Shake’s restaurant from town, you had to take a taxi boat or the island ferry. Twenty minutes each way, minimum.

  “Perfect spot,” the guy who’d sold Shake his restaurant had assured him. “Quiet, romantic, secluded.” Then the guy was on a flight home to Orange County before the ink on the deed was dry. Shake supposed that should have given him pause.

  Pijua delivered Shake’s pulled-pork empanadas and sat down across from him. Shake took a bite.

  “What’s a guy gotta do,” Shake said, “to get the recipe for these?”

  Pijua laughed. “Grow up in my mama’s kitchen. Have her whack you on the head with a wooden spoon every time you fuck up.”

  Shake took another bite. “Small price to pay.”

  Pijua’s real name was Manuel. He had been born in the Cayo highlands, on the border between Belize and Guatemala. Up there they had a little river shrimp that people called a pijua. A delicacy, hard to find and hard to catch. When Pijua was six or seven years old, it became his goal in life to catch one of those shrimp. When he finally caught one, he was so excited he ran through town yelling, “Pijua! Pijua!” That’s what he’d been called ever since, Pijua, shrimp, the guy a head taller than Shake and built like a truck.

  Shake glanced around the restaurant. There wasn’t an empty table and it was barely eleven-thirty. Pijua read him.

  “Give it time, amigo,” he said. “Your food’s good. Took me three, four years, my first place, before it really got going.”

  “Is that all?” Shake said.

  Pijua put his palms up, conceding the point. “Everybody I know,” he said, “I always send them up your way.”

  Shake knew it. “I appreciate it.”

  “Even though they come back and say, ‘Why you can’t do lobster like that, man?’ ”

  “Now you’re just bullshitting me,” Shake said. “Which I appreciate as well.”

  Pijua let Shake eat for a minute.

  “At least you didn’t borrow no money from Baby Jesus,” Pijua said. Watching Shake as he said it.

  “Is that what you heard?” Shake said.

  “Because you don’t want to borrow no money from Baby Jesus.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that.” Which was true.

  Pijua let it drop. His daughter hollered at him from across the room.

  “Shit, man,” Pijua told Shake. “Like I said, your food’s good. Stick it out, you’ll see. The wind turns around.”

  “The wind turns around.”

  Pijua slapped him on the shoulder and headed back to his kitchen.

  ON HIS WAY OUT, SHAKE passed a woman seated on the outdoor deck. At a table by herself, going over the menu. She was in her late thirties or early forties, somewhere around there, and pretty. The paperback book next to her purse was one Shake had read when he first moved to Belize.

  He walked past her, made it down the wooden steps to the street, and then stopped. He sighed. It was like he could feel Idaba watching him, with that carved-rock expression of hers that he could never interpret.

  He turned around and climbed back up the wooden steps. What the hell.

  “Hi,” he said.

  The woman glanced up from her menu. Shake decided that maybe her face was more interesting than pretty. Or maybe interestingly pretty. Her eyes were dark with a vaguely exotic tilt, like there was an Asian branch of her family tree. But she also had the rosy cheeks of a Minnesota farm girl and a square, all-American jaw.

  “Not interested,” she said. “Thanks.”

  Her bluntness took him by surprise. And then after a second he remembered the plastic bag of fruit he was holding.

  Shake smiled. “I’m not selling anything.”

  “Awesome. ’Cause I’m not buying.”

  She smiled back at him, a helluva smile, like the sun sliding out from behind a cloud and lighting up the sky. Shake stood there like an idiot until Pijua’s daughter rescued him by coming out to take the woman’s order.

  “Try the pulled-pork empanadas,” Shake said, finding his footing again. “You won’t be sorry.”

  “The fish tacos, please,” the woman said. But when Pijua’s daughter started to write the order down, the woman said, “Wait.”

  Pijua’s daughter gave Shake a wink and headed back inside.

  “My name’s Shake,” he told the woman. “I know you were just dying to know that, be honest.”

  The woman considered. She was wearing a UC Santa Cruz T-shirt and khaki cargo shorts that showed off a nice pair of legs.

  “Evelyn,” she said. “Shake?”

  “A nickname.”

  “I hope so.”

  She hadn’t asked him to sit down, but she hadn’t asked him to leave either. Well, not in so many words. Shake decided to stay until she told him to leave, in so many words. He nodded at the paperback by her purse.

  “So where do you stand on the scarlet macaw?” he said.

  The book was a true story about the fight over a rare kind of bird. The government of Belize wanted to lower the cost of electricity by building a dam on a river where the scarlet macaws lived. Don’t worry, the government said, the birds will be fine. A group of environmentalists called bullshit on that and said the scarlet macaws would not be fine. They suggested that eco-tourists would pay a lot of money to go watch the scarlet macaws, if the government would just be smart about it.

  “Definitely pro-macaw,” the woman said. “But don’t ruin the ending for me.”

  The way she said it, the corner of her mouth turned up, Shake could tell she’d seen enough of the world to know how the story ended. The government built the dam, some government ministers made a whole lot of money, electricity prices went up, not down. And the scarlet macaws in Belize had disappeared.

  “If you want to have dinner tonight,” Shake said, and then stopped when he realized how that sounded.

  “Most people do,” she said. “I feel like I’m pretty conventional in that way.”

  “What I mean,” Shake said, smiling again, “I mean I own a restaurant. I do the cooking there. If you’re looking for a completely unbiased recommendation.”

  “I see.”

  “The Sunset Breeze. It’s up north a little bit. You can take a taxi boat.”

  Pijua’s daughter brought the pork empanadas. The woman pretended to reach for the bottle of ketchup on the table and Shake laughed. And then he realized she was serious. And then she laughed.

  “You should have seen your face,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d fall for that.”

  “You’d be surprised what I fall for,” Shake said.

  She hit him again with that flash grenade of a smile.

  “Good to know,” she said, and Shake felt the back of his neck flush with heat.

  WALKING BACK TO THE WHARF, Shake saw a thirty-six-foot Esprit cruiser slide by on its way to the Cut, between San Pedro and the north end of Ambergris. It had flames painted on the side and a couple of big Rasta bruisers lounging on deck. Baby Jesus’s boat, the one he used to run product up to the Yucatán.

  Shake didn’t let the sight of the boat bring him down. He was still thinking about the woman back on the deck at Pijua’s, that smile of hers. Evelyn. Whatever happened from here on out, Shake decided, his day had already turned out better than he’d hoped.

  Chapter 3

  Special Agent Evelyn Holly had been at the table for twenty minutes, nursing a diet Mountain Dew and keeping an eye on the shithead inside. She knew that she couldn’t lurk around the restaurant much longer without ordering food, but she was on her own dime this trip, not Uncle Sam’s, and everything on the menu seemed to co
st twice what it should have.

  She ducked behind the menu when the shithead walked past. But then he turned around and came right up to her table. Charles “Shake” Bouchon, smiling right at her. Evelyn almost burst out laughing. He’d already made her, less than half an hour after she’d begun tailing him? But she stayed cool and realized that the shithead was just hitting on her. That almost made her burst out laughing too.

  Well, no time like the present. She’d been planning to approach him in a day or two anyway, strike up a conversation.

  “I’m not selling,” he said.

  “Awesome,” she said. “ ’Cause I’m not buying.”

  She hoped that might catch him on the wrong foot and it did. But Bouchon didn’t get flustered like most guys would have. He didn’t flee or try to force a clever comeback. Instead he just stood there, amused, and seemed to appreciate that she’d caught him on the wrong foot.

  The waitress appeared. Evelyn bit the bullet and ordered one of the pricey entrées. And then realized, as she handed over the menu, what a knucklehead she was. Everything seemed to cost twice what it should have because the prices were listed in Belizean dollars. There were two Belizean dollars to every U.S. dollar.

  “My name’s Shake,” Bouchon said. “I know you were just dying to know that, be honest.”

  Be honest, he was kind of a nice-looking guy for a shithead. Evelyn hadn’t guessed it from the California Department of Corrections mug shot that she’d studied on the plane down from L.A. Grim stuff, that. Here in person, though, she saw that he had good sharp angles, chin and cheeks and brow. But the angles not too sharp, softened just so by the wry smile, the warm eyes, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He had a touch of an accent that sounded like it had a little Brooklyn in it, but Evelyn knew it must be New Orleans, where his sheet said he’d been born and raised.

  When he asked about the book she was reading and then told her about the restaurant he owned, Evelyn thought: Wow, could this be any easier? She’d arrived in Belize without much of a plan. Take a few days and just get to know the shithead a little, let him think he was getting to know her. Develop a bond. And then, when Bouchon let his guard down, wham! Evelyn would put the screws to him.