Gutshot Straight

by Lou Berney

  A .45 automatic, if he was not mistaken.

  Cold metal touched the nape of his neck.

  “Back inside,” the voice behind him said.

  Shake stepped back inside. Dick Moby’s bagman eased the door shut behind them.

  “That was fast,” Shake said.

  “On the bed.”

  “Jasper, right?”

  “That’s right. Sit.”

  Shake obeyed. “How’d you find me?”

  A shrug. “What I do.”

  “No, really,” Shake said. “That fast? C’mon, I’m curious.”

  Shake saw an embarrassed smile flicker across Jasper’s round, sleepy-eyed face.

  “Got lucky,” he said. “The waitress at the restaurant downstairs.”

  Shake thought for a second. The pirate waitress. “She recognized the girl.”

  Jasper nodded. “She knew that Mr. Moby was looking for her. He put the word out last week. So she gave me a call.”

  “For the record, you remember, Jasper,” Shake said, “I really didn’t want to have to coldcock you with that phone book, back at the motel.”

  “I remember.”

  “The girl’s long gone.”

  “Figured that,” Jasper said.

  “With the briefcase. You know her?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “She roofed me. My head feels like a piñata. After the party.”

  Jasper thought for a second, then reached into his pocket and tossed Shake a pill bottle. Vicodin. Shake opened the bottle and swallowed a couple.

  “Thanks.”

  “She a serious piece of work,” Jasper said.

  “Cute, though, don’t you think?”

  “That what you want to talk about right now?”

  “Is her real name Gina?” Shake asked.

  “Gina Clement,” Jasper said.

  “What is she? A stripper?”

  “Yeah. She ripped off Mr. Moby.”

  “She told me she was a Mormon housewife.”

  Jasper smiled again. “You believe her?”

  “I think I probably would have helped her out either way,” Shake said, “tell you the truth.”

  Jasper didn’t have anything to say about that. He stood between Shake and the door, far enough away that Shake couldn’t make a grab for the gun, close enough to blow a hole in him, sleepy eyes closed, if Shake tried.

  “You gonna pop me?” Shake asked.

  “After you tell me where she is.”

  Shake had to appreciate the guy’s candor, but it didn’t make him feel any better about the situation he was in.

  “You think I know?”

  “Not really.”

  Shake thought he recognized something familiar about Jasper’s accent. He took a stab.

  “Jasper, you’re from New Orleans?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Lower Ninth. Before it went underwater.”

  “Gentilly,” Shake said. “I heard it got hit hard, too, though not like the Ninth.”

  “Fats Domino.”

  “Right. His house was three blocks from mine. I used to get my hair cut at a little place in the Ninth. You remember the baseball player Will Clark, played for the Giants, who was from New Orleans?”

  Jasper nodded. “Barber had a picture of him right above the sink.”

  “Small world,” Shake said.

  “Seem that way sometimes,” Jasper said, “but it really ain’t.”

  Shake sensed that Jasper’s capacity for patience was impressive but not limitless.

  “Let me ask you something, Jasper.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Are you under orders to pop me, or is that your own initiative?”

  “My … what?”

  “The Whale doesn’t know anything’s gone sideways yet, does he?”

  Jasper didn’t answer. Apparently there was a limit to his capacity for candor, too.

  “That’s why you have to find the girl and the briefcase with those stamps fast,” Shake went on. “Before he finds out.” Shake gathered himself for the closing argument. “So that makes the two of us, doesn’t it, just two guys punching the clock and taking home a paycheck. We’re in the same boat here.”

  Jasper looked down at the .45 in his hand.

  “You’ve got the gun, I realize,” Shake said.

  “Different boat,” Jasper agreed.

  “Yeah. But I know you don’t want to pop me. It’s a pain in the ass for you, all the way around.”

  “Nothing personal.”

  “We could work together to find her. You help me, I help you.”

  “How you gonna help me?” Jasper asked mildly.

  Shake worked that one around for a second. He had a few answers. None plausible. None persuasive.

  “You don’t know where she is?” Jasper said.

  “No.”

  “Stand up,” Jasper said.

  “Jasper,” Shake said, “if you just—”

  There was a knock on the door. Shake and Jasper turned.

  “Housekeeping!” a woman’s voice called.

  Shake heard the snick of a key card.

  “Get it,” Jasper told him. The door started to open, and Jasper slipped behind it, surprisingly nimble for a guy his size. Shake caught the door and stopped it halfway, decided Jasper must have been a defensive end, not an offensive tackle.

  The Latina housekeeper peered around the blocked door and up at him.

  “We’re all set here,” Shake said.

  She seemed dubious and mildly disgusted. “You no want some towels?”

  “No thanks. Everything’s just bueno.”

  She shook her head and wheeled her cart away. Shake started to close the door, then slammed it back wide, fully open, nailing Jasper in the face. The .45 tumbled to the carpet. Shake grabbed it and closed the door.

  Jasper crouched, dazed, and held his bloody nose.

  “Damn,” he said.

  Shake checked to make sure a round was chambered, then pointed the .45 at Jasper. He motioned toward the bathroom.

  “In there,” he said.

  JASPER SAT ON THE FLOOR by the sink, and Shake handcuffed him to the U-bend pipe beneath it. Then he handed Jasper a towel for his nose and the bottle of Vicodin.

  “Better watch out,” Jasper said.

  “Don’t hold a grudge, Jasper. Like you said, nothing personal.”

  Jasper shook his head. “Not me you better watch out for.”

  “The Whale?” Shake asked.

  “The girl,” Jasper said.

  Chapter 14

  A valet whistled at Shake when he stepped out of the hotel.

  “Taxi?”

  Shake showed him the crumpled twenty Gina had left him—or, more precisely, had neglected to find when she went through his pockets.

  “Will this get me out to the suburbs?”

  “Not back,” the valet said.

  “Not a problem,” Shake said.

  THE CAB CREPT DOWN THE STREET until the driver spotted 281. The house was a small but attractive Spanish-style three-bedroom, designed to look larger than it really was, with a red tile roof and an improbably lush green lawn. It was more or less identical to every other house in the development, but Shake wasn’t a snob about that kind of thing.

  He rang the doorbell. He heard, inside, a soft booming chime. A second later a little black girl, call her eight years old, flung open the door with gusto.

  “Hi,” Shake said.

  “Hi.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Nancy,” the little girl said. “With two e’s.”

  Shake had to think about that for a second. Nancee.

  “That’s a pretty name.”

  “It’s French,” Nancee said. “My sister is Amy with two e’s.”

  Aimee.

  “I like names like that,” Shake said. “That are unique but without working too hard at it.”

  The little girl studied Shake,
then shut the door.

  A few seconds later, the door opened again. Standing there now was a black woman in her thirties. She was sharp-angled and regal.

  “Hello, there, Aimee,” Shake said. “I was just talking to your sister.”

  He thought the woman might smile at that. She didn’t.

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “Artemis Wallace?” Shake asked.

  “We’re getting ready to eat dinner,” she said, “if you’re here to sell me something.”

  “You’re Vader Wallace’s sister?”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Sister-in-law.”

  “My name’s Shake. I’m a friend of Vader’s from—”

  Shake stopped himself. He noticed Nancee peering at him from behind her mother.

  “—from the office,” he said. “He told me to come by if I was ever in town. On a business trip.”

  “What office, Mama?” Nancee asked.

  “This man was in prison with your Uncle V,” Artemis told her.

  Nancee’s eyes went wide. “Uncle V has a white friend?”

  The mother, Artemis, took a long look at Shake. She was asking herself, Shake figured, the same question.

  SHAKE SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, sipping a Coke and watching Artemis Wallace prepare dinner. Nancee and Aimee, a year or so younger than her sister, sat across the table, watching him.

  “So you just stopped by to say hello,” Artemis said without looking at him. It was less of a question than a general musing.

  “Well,” Shake told her, “Vader always said, actually, I ever needed anything, when I got out, you-all might be able to help.”

  “He said that.”

  “We were pretty tight. He watched my back, I watched his.”

  Shake thought he heard a soft chuckle, but Artemis had her own back to him and he couldn’t be sure.

  “You watched V’s back?”

  “Prison can be a complicated place,” he said. That much at least was true.

  “What’s prison?” Aimee asked.

  “He means the office. Where Uncle V works,” Nancee explained to her younger sister.

  “Right,” Shake said. Then, “Excuse me,” he told Artemis, “you don’t want to do that.”

  Artemis finally turned to look at him. Without an overabundance of fondness. “Don’t do what?”

  “Crush your garlic. It’s always better if you slice it.”

  “You’re a chef?”

  “No, but I’m a pretty good cook. And I know better cooks than me who’d have a stroke if they saw what you were doing right now.”

  She looked at him for a long time, then turned back away. She put down the garlic press and drew a butcher’s knife out of the wooden block. Started slicing.

  “What did you say your name was again?”

  “Shake.”

  “Shake.”

  “I’m hoping to open a restaurant someday. But it’s a hard business.”

  Artemis glanced up at something behind Shake and to his left. “Hi, baby,” she said.

  Shake swiveled around. Standing in the doorway to the kitchen, frowning in a business suit, one long rope of dark braided muscle and malice, was Vader Wallace.

  Shake held on to his smile for dear life.

  “Vader,” he managed to say, “my man.”

  Vader shook his head. “I’m Darth,” he said.

  “They’re twins!” the two little girls chirped.

  Shake’s relief was expansive: It spread to the horizons then dropped off and enveloped the entire globe in a big bear hug.

  “He never—That’s right,” Shake said. “Of course. When he said identical, I didn’t really think—”

  “Daddy has a mole,” Nancee said.

  “Be still now,” Darth told her affectionately. He gave both little girls a kiss, then turned to Artemis. “Who’s this?” he asked about Shake, not unfriendly.

  Artemis considered. Shake knew she was too smart to believe a word he’d said about his warm, close, personal relationship with Vader. But he also sensed she didn’t exactly feel the love for her jailbird brother-in-law. And just maybe, what the hell, she’d appreciated Shake’s performance.

  “This is Shake,” she said finally. “He’s a good friend of Vader’s.”

  AFTER DINNER DARTH TOOK SHAKE out to the garage. He dug out a cardboard box marked in Sharpie with a giant V.

  Shake started going through the box while Darth checked stock quotes on his iPhone.

  “We were never anything alike,” he said. “That’s the funny thing. I had my comic books, my X-Men collectible figures. You know? Stayed indoors and out of trouble.”

  “The yin,” Shake said. He came across Vader’s Rolex. Probably a fake, but he slipped it in his pocket anyway. “Or is it the yang? I can never remember.”

  “The nerd is what I was. But it worked out. Junior high, a teacher turned me on to the music of numbers, best thing that ever happened to me.”

  Shake paused to wonder for a second what he’d consider the best thing that ever happened to him.

  “Except for my three ladies in there, of course,” Darth said quickly.

  “Those have to be the two cutest little girls on the face of the planet,” Shake said, and meant it. “You’ve done well for yourself.”

  Darth sighed. “What I tell my brother. You have to work hard and make an investment in your own self-worth; it all comes back to you manifold. You ever read The Purpose Driven Life?”

  “Can’t say I have.” Shake dug a pair of Jordans out of the box. A couple of sizes too big. He started to toss them back, then stopped to think. He stuck his hand deep into one of the shoes and came out with a roll of bills.

  “It’s like any book, need to take a lot of it with a grain of salt, but there’s some truth in there. Or something close enough to the truth to be useful, you know what I mean?”

  “I remember that book,” Shake said. “The guy killed that judge in Atlanta and escaped from the courthouse. Killed a deputy and another person, too.”

  “That’s right,” Darth said. “Took a lady hostage in her apartment, but she talked to him. Told him about this book she had. How God had a plan for him. They stayed up all night, talking about the book. He didn’t kill her, and she made him pancakes in the morning.”

  “Convinced him to turn himself in.”

  “Funny thing? Came out later she’d had a stash of methamphetamine. They snorted that all up first. That’s how she got him to untie her. They didn’t put that part in the papers when it happened.”

  “If God’s got a plan for me,” Shake said, “I’m not sure I want to know what it is.”

  Darth put away his iPhone and turned to Shake, who flinched a little despite himself. It was uncanny how much he looked like his brother.

  “You want to see V’s ride?”

  “His ride?” Shake said.

  Darth led him across the garage, past the Honda Pilot, and pulled the dust cover off the other car. A candy-apple red, mint-condition 1969 Plymouth Road Runner.

  Shake gazed at the car with the admiration he usually reserved for a bowl of homemade gumbo.

  “Boy howdy,” he said.

  “He tell you about this?”

  Shake heard a phone begin to ring back in the house.

  “He told me,” Shake said, “that if I put so much as a scratch on it, I’d be going home in a motherfucking bag.”

  “That’s V.” Darth chuckled.

  The phone in the house stopped ringing.

  “Who is it?” Darth called to Artemis.

  “Nobody,” she called back.

  Darth nodded at the Road Runner. “Go on,” he told Shake. “Keys are in it.”

  Chapter 15

  Who you calling nobody?” Vader said into the phone. Stuck-up high-yellow bitch. He had to admit she was a good mother, though. He loved those little girls. “Just told you it was me.”

  “A friend of yours just left,” Artemis said.

  Vader sniffed the p
lastic mouthpiece. It smelled bad, like pickles gone off. He caught a CO watching him sniff the phone. The CO looked away real quick. Yes he did.

  “What you talking about?” he said. Bitch. “Put my brother on. What friend?”

  “You know. Shake.”

  All the sound in the yard dropped away like a door slammed shut.

  “Shake,” Vader said.

  “He borrowed your car, like you told him he could.”

  Vader hung up the phone. Then he picked the receiver back up and pounded it against the cinder-block wall until the plastic burst into pieces and spun away. Then he ripped the rest of the phone off the wall and pounded that to pieces. Then he pounded his fist against the wall until it looked like raw meat and the cinder block was streaked red, and two, then three, COs came flying out of nowhere to drag him bellowing down to the floor.

  Chapter 16

  Gina dreamed that Lucy was driving a cab in New York City. It was raining, but Lucy wouldn’t stop for her. Gina in the dream felt annoyed, aggrieved. Like, c’mon, how long can one person hold a grudge? Shake might have been in the back of the cab. It zoomed by too fast for Gina to tell for sure.

  She woke up and looked at the clock by the bed. It was almost four o’clock in the afternoon. She’d been asleep for—oh, shit, her heart busted a little hip-hop move in her chest—three hours.

  She sat up fast. Three hours. If one of Moby’s guys had spotted her at the airport, or in the hotel lobby, he would’ve had plenty of time to check out the decoy room, go talk to the desk clerk, figure out what had happened, and—

  The door to the room beeped. A key card in the lock.

  Gina leaped off the bed. She’d bolted the door, hadn’t she? She looked around for something to use as a weapon, but the door was already clicking open. She hadn’t bolted the door.

  A guy in his early thirties entered the room, wrestling two roll-on suitcases behind him. When he saw Gina standing there topless in her undies, he stopped.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “I’m here for the threesome your wife arranged,” Gina said.

  The guy blinked.

  Gina looked at her watch. “Am I early? Fuck. Sorry.”

  She hurried her clothes on, grabbed her shoes, the briefcase.

  Coming down the hallway toward Gina was the guy’s wife. She was walking slowly and using both thumbs to type rapidly on her BlackBerry. At the same time talking into a Bluetooth headset.