by Lou Berney
“Eight million,” Ziegler said. “Take it or leave it. And word to the wise? I never bluff.”
Shake looked at Gina. Gina, just her eyes, told Shake, Fuck yeah!
“Eight million it is,” Shake said. “I guess we are running a charity here.”
FUCK YEAH! EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS. Never in Gina’s wildest dreams—Well, okay, maybe in her most wild wildest dreams, but still.
Doughboy drove them farther up the coast. To, he said, a private airstrip where awaited his private jet to fly them back to PC. Just Gina and Shake, not Ziegler—who, he told them in typically mysterious fashion, needed to remain behind.
On the ride up, Gina let her mind play with interesting details and implications. What kind of guy paid $8 million for some old foreskins?
There was only one answer to that question: a guy with more money than sense.
A guy with a couple of private islands and a condo in Manhattan with an incredible view of the park.
Just Gina’s type of guy, in other words.
But, seriously—she couldn’t be happy with $8 million?
Four million dollars, she reminded herself. That was the deal she’d made with Shake back in Las Vegas.
He gazed out the window. Her partner.
Crazy thing, wasn’t it, how long, long ago Las Vegas seemed now?
Shake turned and caught her staring at him. He winked. She wanted to jump him right here, in the back of the four-by-four.
They reached the airstrip. Ziegler walked them to the little jet. The pilot was one of the waiters from dinner, which did not inspire confidence.
If I get killed in a plane crash just before I score eight million dollars, Gina thought, I’m going to be so fucking pissed.
Four million dollars. It was weird how she had to keep reminding herself she had to split the take.
“I’m going to need some time to put together the cash,” Ziegler said. “Why don’t we say not tomorrow but the evening after?”
“Fine,” Shake said.
“And no offense, I’d like to take certain precautions. Not that I doubt your honesty, but I’d like to bring in my own expert for verification.”
“And we’d like to meet somewhere public next time,” Shake said. “Not that we doubt your honesty either.”
“Isla Taboga,” Ziegler said. “It’s just off the coast from Panama City. You take the ferry. There’s a church there, at the top of the hill. Iglesias San Pedro. We’ll meet in the square outside it. Nine o’clock, evening after next.”
“You’ll have the money,” Shake said.
“You’ll have the foreskins,” Ziegler said.
The waiter-pilot came forward and opened the door to the little jet.
Ziegler took Gina’s hand and kissed it.
“A pleasure,” he said, as into her other hand he slipped a piece of paper.
Shake—on his way up the steps to the plane, his back to them—didn’t notice.
“Pleasure’s mine,” she said.
“See you soon,” Ziegler told Gina with a smirk.
He started to walk back to his car. Shake, at the top of the steps, had turned back around to watch him go.
“By the way, kids,” Ziegler called to them, “I was bluffing. I would have gone to ten!”
Then, laughing, he slid into the four-by-four and drove off.
WHEN THEY GOT BACK TO THE HOTEL, they fell into bed and wore each other out. Shake felt both very old and very young. It was a strange sensation, but he wasn’t gonna make noise about it.
Afterward, tired as he was, Shake couldn’t sleep. He could tell by her breathing that Gina couldn’t either.
“So what do you think?” she asked him after a while.
“He’s a prick, for one thing.”
“A prick who owns two private islands.”
“Is still a prick.”
“Who owns two private islands.”
“Go native with him, then,” Shake said.
She giggled. “I didn’t take you for the jealous type.”
“I’m not.”
“Not jealous?” she asked. “Or not the jealous type?”
He chuckled. Like she thought he was really gonna answer that.
“One thing keeps bugging me,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Alexandra mixed up in this.”
“Your gray-eyed Armenian lady boss who isn’t so nice either.”
“I don’t see it. Her dealing foreskins to some prick.”
“Eight million dollars, buttercup.”
“Still. It’s not her kind of dance. Moby would have probably paid her that cash for you, straight up. Why dick around with some foreskins?”
“Pun intended?”
“I knew it was a bad one before it even came out.”
“Who knows?” Gina didn’t seem to find this avenue of exploration as intriguing as Shake did. She asked him did he mind if she turned off the light on the nightstand? After, of course, she’d already turned off the light on the nightstand.
“I don’t mind.”
“Whatcha gonna do with your split? Your four million?”
“Don’t laugh.”
She laughed. “Not a little restaurant of your own somewhere?”
“Nothing fancy,” he said. “American regional with some flair. Locally grown ingredients.”
“Gonna wear one of those big hats?”
“A toque? I just might.”
“Were you ever her kind of dance?”
“Who?”
“You know who.”
He smiled in the darkness. It amazed him, how she could pick up on something like that.
“Lexy and I were never meant to be,” he said.
“I see.”
“Jealous?”
“I’m not the type either.” She leaned over to kiss him.
Chapter 40
Shake woke the next morning to find Gina already dressed, in the bathroom, spraying perfume out in front of her then stepping quickly through the resultant cloud.
“You’re a lazy bum,” she said when she realized he was awake. “It’s almost nine.”
“You look like a girl with a plan.”
She came back into the room and hopped onto the bed. Had some fun for a minute bouncing Shake around on the mattress.
“I thought I’d get out, look around. Maybe check out that statue, the one the guy at the shop was talking about?”
“Ferdinand de Lesseps,” Shake said.
“And whatever else there is to see. As I may have mentioned, I really want to see a sloth.’ Cause really, when am I ever gonna make it back to Panama, right?”
Then, in not the next breath but the one just after:
“You wanna come with me?” she said.
Shake propped himself up on one elbow and studied her. Was the invitation sincere? Or was it calculated to forestall his suspicion? Or was it—who knew with this girl?—somehow both?
It wouldn’t be in bed, Shake realized, that Gina finally wore him out.
“Sure,” he said. “Count me in.”
“Cool,” she said, without the slightest hint that his answer might have surprised or thrown her. Instead she grabbed the room-service menu from the nightstand and started flipping through. “You want to order breakfast up or go out? I’m not starving, but I could use some coffee and eggs.”
“Never mind,” Shake said, trying again, watching closely. “Go on without me. I think I’m gonna sleep in, then find somewhere I can get a massage.”
Her eyes didn’t tell him a thing. “ ’Cause you’re old,” she said. “Poor, poor boy.”
“I’m gonna try to find someone to sell me a walker.”
She made a tent of the room-service menu and put it on his head like a hat. It fell off after a second.
“Okay, then,” she said.
He waited. If she were smart, she’d ask again was he sure he didn’t want to come sightseeing with her? If she were smarter, she wouldn’t ask, she wouldn’t
resort to such a naked ploy as that.
“What kind of massage? Better not be the kind with a happy ending.”
“What’s wrong with a happy ending?” he asked.
“They’re never really either,” she said, “in my experience.”
“Inscrutable aphorisms from the college girl.”
“That’s a long story. I’ll tell it to you sometime if you’re nice. I was a Division I track star.”
“What?”
“Briefly.”
She hopped off the bed again.
“Go back to sleep if you’re gonna go back to sleep, or come with me if you’re gonna come with me. Sheesh. I like a man who knows what he wants.”
She was impossible to read. But it was sure fun trying.
“I know what I want,” he said. “Meet here for dinner?”
“Gotcha,” she said, and blew him a kiss on her way out the door.
SHAKE WENT TO THE BALCONY and watched her leave the hotel. She strolled out onto the street without a care in the world—and without glancing over her shoulder up at the balcony. Either she didn’t consider the possibility that he might be spying or she didn’t need to glance up to know he was.
He thought about tailing her, wherever she was headed, but decided against it. That wasn’t the sort of behavior a healthy relationship was built on.
And besides, he had work to do.
After Gina turned the corner and disappeared, Shake went inside and quickly put his clothes on.
Chapter 41
Gina turned the corner, and a limo was waiting for her. She got in the backseat. The driver was one of the Panamanian waiters from dinner last night, the one who wasn’t a pilot.
Ziegler handed her a Mimosa.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“You’ll see.”
“Whatevers.” She was in a cranky mood suddenly and didn’t know why. Earlier this morning she’d been in a great mood. Getting dressed, getting ready for an adventure, it always gave her such a delicious buzz. It’s why, she guessed, she’d never really been much into drugs. Improvising lies on the fly was like flying, like playing jazz, great jazz—coke or E couldn’t compare to that.
She couldn’t remember her first kiss, and there was some uncertainty in her mind about when exactly she’d lost her virginity. She knew to whom, of course—she wasn’t that bad; she just couldn’t precisely remember if it had happened that first night at the beach house, or was it the night after, when his parents were back in town and they took the blanket down to the water? One of those nights, definitely. Or, possibly, the night before the first night at the beach house. It might have been then.
Give a girl a break. It was a long time ago, she’d only been fifteen, and the experience, let’s face it, had been less than magical.
But damn, she could vividly remember her first score. Ten years old. A store at the mall called Wet Seal, which her mother called Wet Snatch. Ten years old, Gina didn’t get the joke, of course. She’d been looking at a ring. You weren’t supposed to touch, so she did. She liked the way that felt. The tingle. She liked the tingle when she picked up the ring and put it in her pocket and walked out the door.
That was the moment—a few minutes later, once a security guard caught up to her at Sbarro and grabbed her by the arm—when Gina discovered she had a natural gift for lying. It was like, to stick with the jazz metaphor, discovering you had perfect pitch or picking up a saxophone and discovering you knew exactly where you needed to put your fingers to make beautiful music.
Gina had convinced the security guard that the ring she’d taken from the store was actually hers, that she’d set it down when she’d tried on another ring and left it behind by mistake. She’d explained that the ring was a birthday present her mother had given her two months ago, a sentimental keepsake that had belonged to her mother’s great-aunt. The great-aunt, when she was a child, had played one of the Lollipop Guild Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, but her movie career was cut short when she died young of diabetes. There had been an inflatable moonwalk at the birthday party, but Gina had not been allowed to wear the ring while bouncing in case the ring accidentally punctured the moonwalk or another child.
Where the hell had all that come from? Gina had no idea. But at age ten she’d learned two things for sure: The getting into trouble had been fun; the getting out of it had been narcotic.
“Do you know anyone with perfect pitch?” she asked Ziegler.
“What?” He looked at her blankly. Doughboy didn’t like being asked questions that threw him off or made him think or weren’t about him. Which was another thing that set him—far—apart from Shake.
“Never mind.” She tipped back the rest of her Mimosa. She thought about how, earlier, back in the room, she’d asked Shake if he wanted to come along with her today. She thought about how he’d said yes at first, then no. Watching her the whole time. Gina smiled. She liked lying to Shake almost as much as she liked fucking him. And for the same reasons. He knew how to play; he raised her game.
Was that why she was in a cranky mood right now? Because she’d lied to Shake?
But that didn’t make sense. How could something make you feel good and bad at the same time? Because, crankiness aside, she could also feel in her veins right now that familiar hum, the tingle she always got when she did something she wasn’t supposed to be doing.
If she was going to be honest with herself, she had to admit that Shake had his share of faults. He was almost too easygoing. Zero ambition. Gina knew he’d never have the giddyup to start his own restaurant.
On the other hand, was that so terrible?
There were a lot of tangled paradoxes here, especially for nine-thirty in the morning. Which was, like, six-thirty Vegas time.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Ziegler said.
“Then I guess you don’t know me very well,” she said with a big bright smile.
SHAKE WENT DOWNSTAIRS. The nervous young assistant hotel manager with the expressive eyebrows was at the desk. When he saw Shake approaching, his eyebrows tensed.
“Don’t panic,” Shake assured him, “I’m not going to ask you to open the safe for me.”
“Of course not, Señor Boxman,” he said.
“Open the safe for me,” Shake said.
“What?” The manager was so panicked he actually clapped both hands to his cheeks, like that Edvard Munch painting in Oslo. Shake knew about the painting, The Scream, because one of the guys at Mule Creek claimed to know one of the guys on the crew who stole it a few years back. But then something happened with the crew, Shake couldn’t remember what, and they’d ended up ditching the painting. It had been your typical criminal clusterfuck. A bunch of sociopaths with one good idea and nine bad ones.
“I’m just kidding,” Shake told the assistant manager. He had not meant to cause such masterpiece-grade panic. “I don’t want you to open the safe for me.”
The guy’s eyebrows expressed great relief. “No, Señor Boxman. Of course not.”
“I have a question.”
“Please.”
“Where’s the worst dive bar in the area?”
“Pardon me, señor?”
“Cheapest booze, skankiest hookers?”
The assistant manager straightened the posture of his eyebrows and made a soft guffaw sound through his nostrils.
“Señor Boxman,” he said, “I am very sure I would know of no such establishment.”
“But you have a brother-in-law,” Shake said. “Right?”
The assistant manager nodded warily. “Three. Yes.”
“And I bet at least one of them is a major asshole. Pendejo? Am I right?”
Shake knew he was right, the way the assistant manager’s eyebrows danced and knitted.
“So,” Shake said, “where would your pendejo brother-in-law hang out?”
AT THE AIRPORT, ZIEGLER’S PANAMANIAN waiter-driver handed them off to his Panamanian waiter-pilot. They flew in the little jet for about an h
our, buzzing east to west across practically the entire length of the isthmus. Doughboy still wouldn’t tell Gina where they were headed, nor why he’d wanted to meet with her separately from Shake.
She pretty much knew, without asking, the answer to that second question. And since Ziegler wasn’t exactly a mystery wrapped in an enigma when it came to his motives, she was pretty sure she knew the answer to the first question, too.
Sure enough: The plane banked around a scatter of several small islands just off the coast, then came in low over water that was impossibly green, impossibly clear, and landed on the island farthest out.
“Welcome to my lair,” Ziegler said with a big grin, and Gina pretended like she was surprised and delighted.
Which, actually, she kind of was, delighted, once she got a good look at his house. It was gigantic, right on the pure sugar beach, with a sweeping teak veranda built partly over the water. As they came up the path, a woman in a starched white uniform hurried out of the house and handed Gina a cool, wet towel scented with aloe.
“So,” Ziegler said, “surf or turf?”
“For lunch?”
He chuckled. “Want to hike my jungle or snorkel my reefs?”
He has two of these islands, Gina reminded herself.
She picked reefs. Already laid out in one of the bedrooms, which was about three times the size of their room back at the hotel, were a half dozen designer bikinis in Gina’s size. She changed into one and joined Ziegler on the beach.
They put on their masks and swam out a few hundred feet. Right off, thirty seconds in the water, Gina saw a huge spotted ray, size of a coffee table. It floated toward her, under her, then flicked the tips of its wings and shot away. An hour later she’d seen two more velvety rays, three turtles, more schools of iridescent fish than she could count. On and on and on.
The only other time Gina had been snorkeling had been at Disney World, one of the water parks there, where you paddled across a cramped little artificial lagoon you hoped none of the splashing kids around you had taken a dump in.
“This is freaking awesome,” Gina said. She was underwater when she said it, with the snorkel mouthpiece in her mouth, which probably explained Doughboy’s puzzled look when he turned his mask toward her, his beady, close-set eyes behind the mask.