by Eric Beetner
“What if I can’t just walk in and get it?”
“I’ll get it for you,” Clyde said.
“You’d do that?”
“If it means all this shit is over and I can go home with my wife and daughter, hell yes, I’d do that.”
The light turned green. I stayed still. Griffin was sweating, but that was nothing new. The car behind us honked.
“Tell you what,” I said. “You meet me there and—”
HONK again.
“We meet up at your car place and—”
HONK.
“Hold on a sec.”
I jerked the door open and wiped my nose with the back of my hand as I took five long strides to the shitty little Jap hybrid behind us. I pulled my gun from my belt.
“I’m on the motherfucking phone and you honking your damn horn isn’t helping me do the business I need to do.” The driver, a shit scared dude in his early twenties, Gap sweater over Gap jeans and probably Gap fucking underwear, held his hands up. He squirmed in his seat like he wanted to go somewhere, but he didn’t know how to get there.
“You honk that shit one more time and I’m gonna fucking end you.”
I don’t know if he heard a goddamn word through the window, but he saw the gun, the look on my face and he got my message. I went back to the car, took a deep breath, and said, “Meet me there in forty-five minutes.”
81
CLYDE
I situated Madeline and the baby in the back seat of our car and headed for home. Just like me and the guys planned, my phone rang.
“Hello,” I said. Then I made agreeable and noncommittal sounds. It was Brent on the other end, helping me with my excuse. When I hung up I looked at my wife. “I have to go to the shop. The cops and insurance guys need to talk to me.
She blew out a breath but nodded. “I can’t wait for this to be over with. I want a guard dog for the house. A big one. And I think I want a Taser, too. I want to nuke any mo-fo that comes near me and little Jane here.”
“Jane?”
Madeline said she liked the name Jane. It was simple and she was a Jane Austen fan, which I never actually knew, so she wanted Jane for the first name and I could pick the middle name. We had talked about names. All kinds of names. Natalie. Morgan. Jessica. Lula. Now all of a sudden its Jane. Fine. She was alive and beautiful and I was going to end this shit so I could hold her forever.
I pulled into the driveway, never so happy to see our house. I helped them in, set little Jane in the bassinet, kissed her, kissed Madeline, and headed back out to my car.
82
BRENT
I hung up from talking with Clyde, gave him the excuse he needed to be able to leave the house. Thanks to the pharmaceuticals in my system, I wasn’t feeling much of anything, so Ernie drove. Betty sat beside him and Sean’s wife sat in the back with me. The Virginia forest was a blur outside the window. I wondered if this was what LSD or mushrooms was like. We had the plan down pat. Go in, get set up, get Sean clear, and blow Skeeter away. I still wasn’t clear on how that was going to not be considered murder. When I brought it up, Ernie just said, “Don’t worry about it, kid.”
We couldn’t get close enough to Clyde’s Rentals to park, so we parked at Hertz. My foot was completely unusable, so I slung an arm over Linda and an arm over Betty and hobbled to the back door. Ernie carried the duffel bag of whatever weapons he’d managed to collect. I hadn’t bothered to tell anyone I couldn’t use a gun. I hoped it wouldn’t matter. I was counting on Ernie or someone else to take Skeeter out of the picture.
It was almost laughable that we unlocked the back door to get into the storeroom when the entire front of the building had been destroyed. The storeroom was hot and muggy. No air conditioning. Ernie set his bag down and unzipped it. “Check the front,” he said. Betty knelt to help him while Linda and I hobbled that direction. Blood stains splattered the floor, dried and crusted. Any security detail was long gone. The building would have to be leveled. Someone had strung up police tape, which had come loose and whipped around in the wind. I leaned on what was left of the counter as Linda took a look around. “Quite a mess,” she said. She looked a little pale and sickly, kept rubbing her side. Guess I’d forgotten she’d been shot, too. “Where are all the cops?”
“Small business. Small priority,” I said. “They’ll have the Hertz and Enterprise security guards watching things. They’ll do a half-assed job. So much for Homeland Security.” I tried not to think about the fact that it was Clyde and his fucked up way of making money that was responsible for all of this. That, and my mistake with the SUV.
Wooden barricades had been set up beyond the small lot. I wondered if Skeeter would just crash on through or get out and move them aside. Then I wondered if maybe he’d just come in the back like we did. I hopped back to the storeroom and saw that Betty was standing guard, peeping out the door.
Ernie handed me a gun. “Hold this,” he said. “It’s yours until this is over. Get your finger off the fucking trigger, imbecile. Don’t put it there until you’re ready to shoot. And take the safety off before you fire it.”
Right. Whatever. Dick.
83
SEAN
Skeeter insisted on stopping at a gas station. We had to drive five miles out of the way to get there. He climbed out and told me to fill the tank. He kept one had on the butt of the gun in his waistband and lifted a finger into the air with the other while we stood beside the pump. I figured he must have been hallucinating. He stood close to me, and I could smell his stench even over the smell of the gas. After a minute a guy came out the door the shop and walked our way. Skeeter dropped some folded bills on the ground. “Yo, man, you dropped this,” the guy said and bent over. When he came up again he had palmed the bills and handed Skeeter a small package.
Great. Just fucking great.
I finished with the gas and climbed back into the car. At least if the guy was stoned he couldn’t notice how nervous I was. I didn’t know what Ernie had planned. I could only hope he didn’t want me as dead as we all wanted Skeeter.
84
SKEETER
How many fat people live in Virginia? Four out of every five fat people in the world must live in Richmond. I swear to fucking God. And the asshole driving the car was no different. Clean as a whistle but still the stench of moldy skin poured off of him.
I knew one thing only . . . I was going to end this today. Take my money and go. Okay, I guess that’s two things I knew. Or three. I was thirsty and I hadn’t gone in to get anything to drink. Fucking fat fuck had to be watched. Fucker.
The airport always bugged me. Always. I hated Clyde Fucking McDowd and his fucking rental lot. I hated no trees and sunlight popping off all those windshields all over the place. I hoped they got that cop’s body. Stupid dumb-ass fucker.
Some asshole had put up barricades. I made the fat fucker get out and move them while I kept the gun pointed at his back. Cops were all gone, which was a good thing. Mood I was in I’d have capped anyone standing in front of me. Except Mr. Sloppy, who had my cash inside.
We got closer and parked. I’m not stupid. I knew they were watching for me, waiting for me, so I kept Fats in front of me while we walked toward the front. I’d done a good job of taking out the front end, if I do say so myself. It was nice to know that Clyde would be thinking about me for a long time to come.
85
ERNIE
I was airborne in 1971 in ’Nam. I’d fly in, patrol, leave. I had diabetes thanks to Agent Orange, COPD thanks to smoking, and erectile dysfunction, but that was likely just because I was married to Betty. ’Nam was like one of those Dickens novels. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Every so often, the air would go still and a guy just knew all hell was gonna break loose. Times like that, I’d get that flutter in my gut, like that first downward drop on a roller coaster. It was a heart in my throat feeling and I had it now, waiting for that punk assed tweaker to get close enough for me to end.
“That’s because you don’t recognize it,” I said, slamming a clip into my .45.
“You’re right. I don’t.”
I handed her the weapon. “Use it on the tweaker,” I said. “You see him, you shoot.”
She shook her head like I was nuts. And maybe I was. But I couldn’t wait until the next reunion trip to DC to tell the guys about this.
“Car’s coming,” Linda said.
“Right. I’m ready.”
86
CLYDE
I parked at Hertz and ignored the security guard who waved at me. No time, fellas. I got a crazy guy to deal with. I was still in scrubs. Dirty, smelly, wrinkled scrubs. I looked like I’d pulled the clothes out of medical waste. My building was ruined. I could see it from a block away. Ruined. Everything ruined. I went to the back door, hoping Skeeter wasn’t there yet, hoping everyone else was. There were no red suitcases filled with cash. I’m sure Skeeter suspected that. During his more lucid moments, he wasn’t exactly stupid. Close, but not exactly. So where did that leave us? Shoot first, ask questions later?
I kept my head down, hunched my shoulders, and jogged the last three hundred feet. When I looked up again, the old woman was holding the back door open for me.
I ducked in. The old man pressed a gun into my hand while my eyes adjusted to the dimness of the storeroom.
“I’ll tell you what I told your squirrely friend there,” he said, nodding in Brent’s direction. Brent rolled his eyes. “Keep your fucking finger off the trigger until you want to use it. And don’t fucking point it at me.”
I lowered it and let it hang next to my thigh.
“What’s next?” I asked.
“McDowd, you here?” Skeeter
Ernie put his fingers to his lips, then did a peace sign in the air, pointed his two fingers at his own eyes, then at me, then made a fist in the air, like we were all Navy Seals or something.
“Whatever,” I said. I opened the door to the small area behind the counter and took a minute to absorb the destruction. I hadn’t been quite prepared. I thought it looked bad on the outside. “Here,” I said.
Skeeter had Sean in front of him. It was like a toothpick hiding behind a building. There was no way I could hit Skeeter with any kind of bullet. Even if I fired through Sean at point blank range, that bullet would only make it halfway through the belly before it stopped. Sean Griffin, I decided, would make an excellent CSI dummy. I could picture those techs testing all sorts of bullets on that big mount of flab he carried in front of him.
“You got that suitcase?” Skeeter asked.
“In the back.”
He peeked out from behind Sean’s back. “The fuck it doing back there? Get it. Let’s get this over with.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
I hoped everyone was in place and knew their role.
87
BRENT
I spoke to Ernie. “I really think the women should be somewhere else in case this gets ugly.” Lord knows everything else had, so it was a legitimate concern.
Linda spoke up first. “It’s my goddamn husband out there.” I waited for Betty to say something about it being her son-in-law, but she stayed quiet. We didn’t have time to argue the point because Clyde came into the back room with a worried look on his face.
“He’s got Griffin and he’s using him like a shield.”
Ernie looked thoughtfully at the door. “That’s a lot of shield.”
“I can’t hit him,” Clyde said. I knew I couldn’t. Didn’t feel like it even needed saying.
“I might could do,” Ernie said, scratching the stubble on his chin.
“Daddy, don’t you dare take a shot unless you know you can get him,” Linda said. Since the first time I met her the Detroit was gone out of her voice and the full Virginia came back. The deeper we got into this both she and Ernie betrayed their backwoods lineage more and more.
Clyde was antsy. “I gotta get back out there.” He was looking to Ernie for an answer like a soldier waiting for his commanding officer.
“Lemme think, lemme think,” Ernie said.
I grabbed a banker’s box of old receipts off the pile of strewn wreckage, kinda glad I’d procrastinated with the filing of last year’s paperwork. “Give him this,” I said. “Tell him it’s the money. He lets Griffin go and we’ve got him.”
I couldn’t believe I was so eager to orchestrate another man’s death, but I recognized it was the only way to tie up the last loose end of this thing. It was Skeeter’s own damn fault, too. If he’d just faded away and recognized when the game was over this wouldn’t be necessary.
“It might work,” Ernie said.
I handed over the box to Clyde who took it and hefted the weight a moment. How he thought it compared to thirty grand or whatever amount Skeeter thought he was gonna get, I don’t know. He took it through the door with him though, so it was a plan.
Me and Ernie crowded the doorway to peek through and watch the action, guns at the ready to bust in at the right moment and end this. I already knew, and I think Ernie did too, that I would let him go through the door first.
88
SEAN
Clyde came back with a box. I sure as hell wished I knew what they were up to because that box didn’t have my Detroit money it, I was sure of that. Why move it from a suitcase to a cardboard box? But at least they had a plan. More than I had right then.
Clyde set the box on a part of the counter that wasn’t crumbled in a heap.
“Here you go, Skeeter. Take it and get the hell out of here.”
“Walk it on over here,” the greasy little monkey said.
“You want it, you come get it.”
Skeeter shuffled his feet a bit, moving nervously behind me. He shoved me forward. “You get it.” He hid behind me like I was a tree or a big rock. I’d never been more committed in my life to dropping a few pounds.
I locked eyes with Clyde to see if there was anything I could get from just a look. Some clue, some sign of the best course of action. I got nothing so I stepped forward. My feet crunched over bits of the crash. Glass and parts of the chewed up counter where I’d pitched the fit that got me saddled with the wrong damn car. What a stupid mistake. I could have avoided all this if I’d only chosen to suffer through a few days of a stinky car. It might have been worth it or maybe Linda’s never-ending nagging about it would have been a worse fate than getting shot and chased and the whole damn thing.
I moved slow, trying to get something out of Clyde. He watched behind me, keeping an eye on Skeeter. When he flicked his eyes to mine I tried to give him a lifted eyebrow, a tight lip, something to let him I know I wanted a cue. Do I duck and cover? Do I do what he says? Is that really my money in the box?
Setting my life right counted on giving that money back once I got home to Detroit. It may have been a pipe dream at that point, but the alternative wasn’t pretty. And I’d seen a whole lot of not pretty the past few days.
Somewhere in the mix of odors—Skeeter’s three-day sweat, the lingering sting of gasoline from the crash, the slightly foul smell of blood from the cop they said got shot here—I swore I got a whiff of Ernie’s after shave. He was old school, my father-in-law. He had smelled the same for fifty years. I didn’t even know the brand when I saw it in his bathroom at the house. Some old timey concoction he probably bought in bulk before the company went out of business. But it was distinct and it was there.
As soon as it settled in my nose, I knew it was going to be all right.
89
BRENT
I felt Ernie tense up next to me. The gap between Sean and Skeeter was growing and he saw a window for action. I hated to throw a wet blanket over the whole affair, but I felt it was a fair question worth asking so I whispered in his ear, “Are we really going to gun this man down in cold blood after we lured him here with a lie?”
The way I phrased it made it sound even worse
than it was.
Ernie turned to me, gave me his best grizzled old veteran stare. This was another guy who liked the smell of napalm in the morning.
“That skinny tweaker son-of-a-bitch shot my daughter. Brought violence to my home. Tried to kill me and my wife. Not to mention he’s a scumbag, drug dealing waste of space who wouldn’t be worth the money it cost to jail him. If he turns and runs I’ll shoot him in the fucking back and still sleep easy tonight.”
Ernie turned away from me again, his argument made. Hard to contradict any of it. Still, it was killing a guy . . .
Ernie’s boot on the door sounded as loud as a gunshot, or so I thought. He took two steps into the former lobby of Clyde McDowd Rents and fired off a shot. Now that was loud, especially compared to the shots when we were all outside.
Against my better judgment I was right on his heels.
Griffin did the right thing and hit the decks. The box of receipts dumped on top of him as he went down. Clyde was moving behind the broken counter and struggling to get the gun free from his belt. I had mine out in my hand, but my finger wasn’t even on the trigger. Ernie seemed to have this well in hand.
Skeeter fired back with a wild shot that went somewhere over our heads. He sprinted to the left, hot footing it across the floor full of shrapnel. I don’t think Ernie’s shot got him. That or he didn’t care.
90
SKEETER
A fuckin’ ambush. Y’know what, it’s gettin’ so you can’t trust a goddamn soul in this world.
91
CLYDE
By the time I got my gun out Skeeter was zipping across the floor so fast it looked like he was water-skiing on a lake. I knew the first time I met the little creep it would be bad news. I almost mentioned to Corgan that I didn’t trust him and didn’t want to work with him, but somehow admitting that I had doubts about Corgan’s hiring practices was also an admission that taking me on as the go-between was maybe a bad idea.