Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

by C. J. Box

  NINETEEN

  ON ZUNI STREET I noticed two things simultaneously: the streetlights were out, and my headlights splashed on Garrett’s H3 Hummer as well as a dirty four-by-four pickup with Montana plates.

  “There he is,” I said aloud.

  Because it was so dark, the Appaloosa Club stood out, with its neon beer signs in the barred windows and the fact that it was surrounded by either boarded-up shells of structures or low-rent businesses closed for the night. The lights of the city washed like cream across the sky but didn’t reach down into this dark hole not far from it.

  Besides the H3 and what I assumed was Jeter’s pickup, there were two or three others: classic seventies Buick and Cadillac boats with gleaming chrome and fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirrors. One of the license plates I noticed was “13 13,” framed by the green Colorado mountains. The thirteenth number in the alphabet was “M,” so “M M,” or Mexican Mafia.

  I pulled to the curb, punched the light knob in, and the H3 went black.

  I sat for a moment in scared silence. He was obviously already inside. I could hear thumping bass from the Appaloosa. My eyes adjusted to the darkness, and the shape of the club emerged. It was small and boxy. The Pacifico, Corona, and Negra Modelo beer signs seemed to increase in color and intensity. I considered going home.

  “No!” I yelled inside the Jeep.

  I launched outside in time to see a rectangle of light appear on the front of the club—the door opening—and the inverted “V” shape of Jeter Hoyt and his broad back in a long cowboy duster fill the doorway for a moment before the door closed behind him. He’d been scouting the club from the outside and just gone in.

  I always traveled with a winter survival kit in my Jeep. I threw open the hatchback, unzipped the duffel bag in the back, and pulled out a navy watch cap. I thought if I pulled it low over my eyes that possibly—possibly—Garrett wouldn’t recognize me. I wanted to follow Jeter inside and get him out before something awful happened. I’d keep my head down and, if necessary, drag him back outside before Garrett noticed him or recognized me.

  As I strode toward the club I dug my cell phone out of my pocket and speed-dialed Cody. Not that I planned on a conversation, but I simply wanted to make contact. I didn’t expect him to answer. I clutched the phone. I thought if I went inside and all hell broke loose, I wanted him to hear it later as a voice mail so he could get to our house to be with Melissa.

  I eased the front door open and slipped inside. The thumping of the music—I didn’t recognize the song or the artist but it was crude and raw—hit me in the face and made my heart beat even faster. I took it in quickly: The place was smaller than it looked from outside and both darker and emptier than I had imagined. A couple of morose Latinos in biker gear perched at the truncated front bar. A bald, obese bartender in a wife-beater was behind the bar. His thick arms and shoulders were covered in tattoos, and he had a soul patch under his lip grown long and braided. He was pointing a remote at the crappy single television mounted above the bar in the corner. There was a small cracked linoleum dance floor that was empty and a series of unoccupied booths along the far wall. In the back, beneath a black light, was a round table with five people under a thick halo of smoke.

  Jeter was at the bar between the two bikers, trying to get the attention of the bartender with the remote. The duster he was wearing went down to his knees. It sagged beneath his arms. Hardware— and lots of it. He called again to the bartender and was ignored as the fat man rocketed through the channels so quickly it was like a malfunctioning slide show. He blasted through channel after channel until there was a glimpse of female flesh and one of the bikers yelled, “There!” and he slowly circumnavigated back to it, something on one of the premium cable channels.

  I didn’t want to stand next to Jeter and create more of a display than necessary. I took a stool ten feet away from him and kept my head down. I watched him peripherally, noted how agitated he was getting from being dissed. Finally, the bartender placed the remote under an ancient black-and-white movie poster of Anthony Quinn in Viva, Zapata! and turned to Jeter with bored contempt. I feared for the bartender.

  I didn’t turn around and look behind me at the table of five, but tried to see who was there via the filmed-over backbar mirror. Five people, three males and two slutty-looking Anglo females. The smoke they were creating and the dirty mirror distorted the view. There were dozens of empty glasses on the table and an overflowing ashtray. The black light behind them added a garish touch, lighting up dirty fingerprints on the empty glasses, the lipstick on the girls, and the brilliant white of overlarge T-shirts on the two Hispanic males. It was boy-girl-boy-girl-boy at the table. The dark man in the middle was grinning stupidly and bobbing his head to a rhythm while a blond girl next to him stared intently at his ear and rocked up and down and I realized she was giving him a hand job under the table. The other girl, whose hair was jet-black and spiked, fingered a silver ring on her bottom lip and shot glances at the action taking place next to her. Garrett sat on the far left end of the table with a coffee mug in front of him with the string and label of a tea bag hanging over the lip of the mug. For some reason, the bored look on his face and what he was drinking struck me most of all because he had the temerity and confidence to drink hot tea in a place like this. I almost admired him for a second, but only for a second. Again, I wondered what his connection was to these gangsters and why he wanted to be involved with them.

  I was heartened by the fact that the five at the table didn’t seem to notice Jeter at the bar. They were so self-absorbed that they hadn’t even looked up. I knew it would be a matter of seconds, though, before they did. Jeter was hard to miss with that damned big coat.

  Getting his attention wasn’t easy. I wanted him to look at me so I could signal to him to get the hell out of there. He’d have to see me there, right?

  “I’m looking for a shitbird named Garrett Moreland,” Jeter asked the bartender loud enough for me to hear. I was shocked by his brazenness. “Is he in here?”

  The bartender appeared not to have heard. I glanced into the backbar mirror to assure myself that Garrett hadn’t, either.

  “Jeter!” I hissed. “Let’s go.”

  The biker nearest to me looked up from his drink and scowled at me, but Jeter didn’t acknowledge I was there.

  “Garrett Moreland, I said,” Jeter growled. “Is he in this shit hole?”

  The bartender made a point of ignoring him. Instead, he waddled down the length of the bar, asking each biker if he needed anything and going by me as if I didn’t exist. As he passed, I marveled at the quantity and misogyny of his tattoos; skulls with spikes driven through them, women impaled on the hood ornaments of late-seventies Chryslers and daggerlike penises, the American flag dripping blood into the open mouth of a caricature of former VP Dick Cheney.

  “Jeter, goddammit!” I yelled, trying to shout above the music. “We need to leave!”

  The biker to my right wanted another beer. The fat bartender ambled back to where he’d started with the biker’s empty glass to fill it from the tap. He never even glanced my way. While he filled the glass from the tap right in front of Jeter, I saw the Montanan do a frightening thing: He smiled.

  “Either you tell me if Garrett-fucking-Moreland is in the building, you fat greaser,” Jeter drawled, “or a particular kind of hell will break out all around you.”

  There was a beat of silence when the song ended. The bartender filled the glass. When it was full, he nodded almost imperceptibly toward the table in the back.

  “Much obliged,” Jeter said, turning slowly around while keeping one hand on the bar. I could see him squinting toward the table under the black light.

  “Jeter …” I said.

  Because I was concentrating on Jeter, I almost missed the movements of the bartender, who was fishing around under the counter. And with the deceptively quick movements of a fat man who for years has concentrated solely on the speed of his arms, the barten
der stepped back with a black baseball bat and raised it above his head and smashed Jeter’s hand with it. I could hear the bones break with the same muffled snapping sounds of dry branches underfoot.

  I was frozen where I sat.

  Jeter didn’t cry out, didn’t even pull his hand away. Instead, he turned back toward the bartender with an I-can’t-believe-you-did-that look.

  Surprised that the blow didn’t bring this crazy Anglo in the silly coat to his knees, the bartender cocked back and swung again, smashing Jeter’s misshapen hand on the bar, presumably breaking every bone that hadn’t been broken by the first hit. I’ll never forget the sound of contact, like hitting a Ziploc bag filled with pretzels.

  I don’t know why the bartender did it. I’ll never know or understand. All I can guess is that he was reacting to the insult and that he’d done the same thing before in similar situations in order to drive people out of the club. But like my life those past two and a half weeks, what happened next was beyond analysis.

  All of us have heard the phrase “He got his head blown off.” I’m here to tell you that doesn’t actually happen. I know because when Jeter reached into his duster with his right hand and came out with the sawed-off double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun that was once referred to as a coach gun because it was the weapon of choice for stagecoach drivers, and pressed the muzzle into the bartender’s forehead with both hammers cocked and fired both barrels, well, the bartender’s head was not actually blown off. The top right quarter of it disappeared, and what was left of the mirror behind the bar was spattered with blood, brains, and chunks of bone, skin, and hair. The bartender dropped to the floor as if his puppet strings had been clipped, taking a shelf of beer glasses with him.

  The sound was tremendous, and my ears were ringing. The two bikers at the bar dismounted and scrambled and passed me, running toward the door. I watched them from above, detached, as if my own soul and perspective were removed from my body.

  Jeter was enraged. He stared at his broken hand for a moment, saying “Why in the hell did he do that?” before recovering and breaking the shotgun open with his undamaged right hand. The two huge, spent, and smoking shells hurtled back over his shoulders on either side of his head. He transferred the weapon under his left arm and dug into his duster pocket for two fresh shells. He reloaded and he snapped the shotgun closed with an upward jerk, turning toward the back table while he cocked both barrels. His broken left hand hung uselessly by his side.

  “WHICH ONE OF YOU SHITBIRDS IS GARRETT MORELAND?”

  I realized that the high-pitched noise in my ears was one of the girls shrieking.

  The gangster on the right end of the table farthest from Garrett pushed back so hard in his chair that he sent it flying behind him. He stood up next to the table. The dark boy in the middle, who had been getting serviced, stared openmouthed while he inexplicably felt the sudden need to button himself back up. The blond girl next to him screamed while holding her hands to the sides of her face. Garrett still had both of his hands on the table wrapped around his mug, his bearing remarkably calm, his eyes taking in the man with the shotgun, who was approaching him, as if trying to place him, trying to figure out why he’d called out his name.

  “You the shitbird Garrett?” Jeter asked him.

  Jeter didn’t notice that the man who had stood up was bent slightly forward now, his arm behind his back digging for something in his pants.

  Jeter pointed the shotgun with one hand, said again, “You Garrett Moreland?”

  And the gangster pulled his weapon, a semiautomatic, and fired four quick rounds—pop-pop-pop-pop—with the weapon held sidewise out in front of him. Jeter’s coat danced, and he stumbled back a step, then swung the shotgun over and it exploded again and kicked higher than Jeter’s head. A great bloom of red spattered across the chest of the gangster, who fell back over the chair he’d previously sent skittering across the floor.

  Patiently, Jeter slid the shotgun back into its sling inside his duster and came out with a stainless-steel .45 semiauto. He shot the dark boy in the middle point-blank in the neck before the gangster could rack the slide on the pistol he’d been fumbling for. The gangster’s gun skittered across the table and fell to the dirty carpet.

  “Run away, girls,” Jeter said. “I’ve got business here with young Mr. Moreland.”

  The blonde kept screaming as she ran, her hands still pressed to the sides of her head. There was a moment when our eyes locked as she ran toward the door, and I wondered if she’d be able to identify me later.

  Jeter stepped aside for the female with the spiked hair, not expecting her to stop, turn, pause, and shove a pistol into his armpit and pull the trigger three times with muffled bangs. He cried out with a yelping sound, the hand with the pistol dropped to his side, and he staggered several steps to his left before collapsing on the dance floor in a heap.

  “Goddammit!” he bellowed, sounding more angry with himself than with the girl. He writhed on the floor, making himself a moving target for the girl with the spiked hair, who clumsily tried to aim at him. He rolled to his belly and came up with the .45 and took her down with three rapid shots.

  Like a bear cub, Jeter rose to all fours and, with a grunt, he was back on his feet. The second gangster he’d shot was still sitting upright at the table, his hand clamped to his neck. Arterial blood squirted out between his fingers. Jeter staggered over to him and put the muzzle of his .45 to the man’s forehead.

  “Sign your stupid name on them papers,” Jeter said in his ridiculous Mexican accent, “or you die, senõr!”

  I walked stunned through the acrid hanging gun smoke and put my hand on Jeter’s shoulder. Shotgun shells and spent casings littered the floor.

  “That’s not him,” I said.

  “Your signature or your brains, senõr!” Jeter said, pressing hard with the gun.

  “Jeter, that’s not him!” I shouted. “Garrett ran out the back while you were on the floor!” I was fairly certain Garrett never saw me.

  Jeter paused, letting that sink in. I could hear the rapid patter of blood on the floor from the wounds inside Jeter’s coat.

  “They all look alike to me,” he said with a harsh laugh, and pulled the trigger. The gangster flopped backward, his eyes wide-open, a smoking hole in his forehead.

  JETER STOOD UNSTEADILY and holstered the .45. His face was drawn and white, his eyes sallow.

  “Man,” he said, “I really fucked this one up.”

  I nodded.

  “I shoulda played that different,” he said. “I never would of thought that girl would have a gun. This is a rough damned place.”

  I didn’t know what to do. Try to get him to the Jeep? Take him to a hospital? Leave him there? Wait for the police to show up? I didn’t hear sirens yet.

  “I don’t want to die here,” Jeter said. “I want to die in Montana. Not in Denver. Not in this shit hole with these shitbirds.”

  He tried to take a step toward the door, but he couldn’t seem to get his legs to obey. Blood streamed from the hem of his coat and pooled on the floor.

  “I’m really shot up,” he said weakly. “It’s like everything warm is pouring out of me. I’m gettin’ real cold. Help me, Jack.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  That grin. “Montana.”

  “We can’t go to…”

  “I can hear Cody talking to me in my head,” Jeter said suddenly. “I just can’t hear what he’s saying.”

  “Cody?”

  “Yeah, I hear him.”

  And I remembered I was still clutching my cell phone. I looked at it, saw the call I’d placed had connected five minutes ago.

  I lifted it to my mouth. “Cody?”

  “Jack, are you all right? Jesus—all I could hear were gunshots.”

  “I’m okay, but your uncle Jeter …”

  “I heard. I’m on my way. Hang tight for five more minutes.” He clicked off.

  Jeter chinned toward the bar. “See if you can find som
e different music on that stereo, Jack. Find some good old country I can die to. Hank Snow, Little Jimmy Dickens, Hank Williams, Bob Wills—something good. I can’t stand the crap they play in this place.”

  With that, he pitched forward like a felled tree. His head hit the dance floor so hard, the fall alone might have killed him.

  I WAS LEANING against the bar when Cody came in. I’d unplugged the beer signs in the windows and turned off all but the black light over the table so the Appaloosa Club looked closed from outside, and no patrons would come in. I was having an out-of-body experience again, thinking I wasn’t really there.

  Cody pulled on a pair of rubber gloves.

  “Help me get him into my trunk,” Cody said. “If we leave him here, the cops will eventually trace him to me.”

  “Where are you going to take him?”

  Cody shook his head. “Up in the mountains. I’ve got a place in mind.”

  “He wanted to go to Montana,” I said dumbly.

  “I’ll get him up there one of these days,” Cody said, grasping Jeter’s collar and dragging him toward the door.

  Cody said, “Jesus, how much hardware does he have under that coat?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” I said, walking behind. “It was terrible, Cody. It was a slaughter house in here. The bartender broke Jeter’s hand with a baseball bat, and Jeter started blasting. Garrett got away.”

  “I heard. You called me, remember?”

  “We’re going to go to prison,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Cody said, looking around the club. “Looks gang-related to me. It looks like maybe a big fight over meth-distribution territory.”

  “Do you really think that’s how the police will see it?”

  Cody paused and looked up angry. “Are you going to help me, or what?”

  “DON’T RACE OUT OF HERE,” Cody said, after we’d lifted Jeter’s body into his plastic-lined trunk and slammed the lid. “Take it slow and easy. The last thing you want is to be pulled over for speeding. Judging by that look in your eye, you’d confess.”