by Lou Berney
Gina and Cornejo waited. Gina felt embarrassed and a little icked out. Cornejo just seemed embarrassed. He cleared his throat.
“Señor Ziegler,” he said. “I wonder …”
“Right, yeah,” Ziegler said without looking up from the foreskins. “You can show yourself out?”
Cornejo bowed again and glided off through a door on the other side of the room, which Gina hadn’t even noticed before.
She reached for the suitcase. “If we’re done here?” she said.
Ziegler looked up from the foreskins. It seemed to take a second for his eyes to rack back into focus. He returned the glass case with the foreskins to the padded envelope.
“So wait,” he said, “what about my invitation?”
“Thought about it,” Gina said. “But islands make me claustrophobic. I’m a gal needs wide open spaces.”
She started to slide the suitcase filled with money off the coffee table. The suitcase was heavy. In the best possible way.
“Actually, Gina,” Ziegler said, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”
Her hand tightened on the handle of the suitcase.
Fuck, she thought. As simple as that: Fuck.
Everything had been going so smoothly.
Gina should have known better. She had known better.
Fuck.
“Good news,” Ziegler said, “I’m now the proud owner of the one hundred extraordinarily rare, extraordinarily valuable foreskins. The most prized religious relic in the world.”
He waited, smirking. She refused to give him the satisfaction.
“Want to know what the bad news is?” he finally asked.
“You’re a doughy asshole who can’t get a girl like me even though he has a hundred million dollars and two private islands? How heartbreaking is that?”
One corner of Ziegler’s smirk took a hit but then recovered.
He turned toward the door through which Cornejo had exited.
“Gentlemen?” he called out.
Gina closed her eyes. Fuck.
When she opened her eyes again, Dick Moby and Jasper had stepped into the room. Both had guns drawn.
“You fucker,” Gina told Ziegler.
“Imagine Mr. Moby’s delight when I called to tell him I’d found his missing vixen.” He pried Gina’s fingers one by one off the handle of the suitcase. “Sorry, babe, you’re a peach, but you’re not worth six million bucks.”
Gina tried to distance herself from the moment and appreciate, in an objective sort of way, the sturdy architecture of Ziegler’s double cross.
“You keep the foreskins and the money …”
“And your pals here get their carnival prize.” Ziegler grinned. “Everybody wins.”
The Whale stared at Gina with his cold, dead eyes.
“I’m going to skin you alive,” he told her, “you fucking cunt.”
“Oops.” Ziegler chuckled. “I guess not everybody wins.”
Gina was good in situations like this. She stayed cool. She didn’t panic or puke or pee her pants like most girls would have.
“Let’s all go for a ride,” Ziegler said. “Somewhere with more privacy—and soundproofing.”
Gina felt like panicking, puking, and peeing her pants. She just didn’t do it. She assured herself that that was an important distinction; she tried to believe that staying cool right now might make a difference.
“Why don’t we stroll instead?” she said. “It’s such a pleasant evening out.”
“Get her,” Moby told Jasper.
“It is you!” a voice said.
Gina turned. The Whale and Ziegler and Jasper turned.
“Who the fuck are you?” Moby asked the guy who’d appeared in the doorway Gina and Ziegler had come through.
“It is you!” the guy said again, excited. He stared kind of wild-eyed at Gina and didn’t seem even to notice that there was anyone else in the room. “I knew it was you! When I saw you out on the plaza!”
The guy was tall, with reddish hair and an open, friendly face, and Gina had never seen him before in her life. She had no idea what he was talking about. Given her current predicament, though, and the strong sense that her luck had nowhere to go but up, she wasn’t about to split hairs.
“Hi!” she said, delighted. “Ohmygod! How have you been?”
The guy frowned. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
Gina laughed. “Of course I do!”
“Get rid of this fucking turd,” the Whale snarled at Ziegler.
“How did you get in here?” Ziegler demanded. “This is a private … function.”
“The side door was unlocked,” the guy told Ziegler. Without taking his eyes off Gina. She still had no idea why he thought he knew her.
“I’m not Sienna Miller,” Gina said, “if that’s what you’re thinking. The actress? I get that every now and then.”
“You stole my wallet!” the guy said.
Gina blinked. Tried to think. His—Shit!
The airplane; the airport; the baggage-claim area when they’d landed in Panama City.
“The Cocksman?” she said.
He winced. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that. My name is Ted Boxman.”
“Let’s go!” the Whale snarled.
“We’re leaving,” Ziegler said. He set the suitcase full of money on the floor so he could grab the Cocksman’s arm. So he could move the Cocksman away from the doorway. The Cocksman wrenched his arm free.
“No!” he said. “I want to explain to her the repercussions of her actions.”
“Take your time,” Gina encouraged him. Her processors were humming, white-hot. Door number one to her left, the door she and Ziegler had come through, was blocked by the Cocksman. Door number two, to her right, was blocked by Jasper and the Whale. Her best shot was probably the balcony, straight ahead, a more or less clear shot, but the balcony would involve a twenty-foot drop to the cobblestones below and maybe breaking some key bones, the prospect of which Gina wasn’t crazy about.
On the other hand, when you compared that to getting skinned alive, hey, not much of a dilemma.
“I’ve had the worst three days of my life, thanks to you,” the Cocksman said. “And I really actually do, I want to thank you for that.”
Gina cocked her head, curious despite herself. “Really? Why?”
Ziegler had grabbed the Cocksman’s arm again, but he seemed curious, too.
“It was the kick in the pants I needed,” the Cocksman said, “and I needed one, because I’d spent the last eighteen months just sort of feeling sorry for myself. If you hadn’t stolen my wallet, if everything that happened to me hadn’t happened to me, and I’m not saying that stuff was fun, but I would never in a million years have—”
“Yo, Ted,” Jasper said quietly.
The Cocksman stopped talking and looked over at Jasper. Jasper turned his gun up and to the side, sort of a backward L, so the Cocksman would be sure not to miss it.
“You’ve got a gun,” the Cocksman said, surprised.
“That’s right,” Jasper said.
“Oh,” the Cocksman said. He saw Moby’s gun then, too. He saw the suitcase on the floor. He seemed to realize, finally, that the worst three days of his life weren’t over yet. “Oh.”
Ziegler set the padded envelope with the foreskins on the coffee table so he could use both hands now to pull the Cocksman away from the door. The Cocksman allowed himself this time to be pulled, then shoved onto the couch.
“Sit there,” Ziegler said. “Don’t move. You understand? You call the police, anything like that, you’re a dead man.”
“Yes,” the Cocksman said. “I understand.”
“No,” Jasper said.
“He’s seen us,” the Whale said.
The Cocksman, Gina could tell, didn’t understand the implications of this. He looked to Gina for an explanation. She felt a sharp pinprick pang at the base of her throat.
“Leave him out of this, why don’t you,” she
said.
“You want me to leave your friend out of this?” the Whale asked. Gina realized she’d just made a terrible mistake. Not the day’s first.
“Fine,” Ziegler said. “Let’s all go for a ride.”
Gina tensed. But then Moby—like he knew what she was planning, the fat, poisonous lizard—took two steps to his right and cut off her clear angle on the balcony.
“Get her and let’s go,” the Whale told Jasper.
“Not so fast,” a new voice said, and Gina felt such a rush of relief she almost really did, this time, pee her pants.
Chapter 48
Shake stepped into the room, the Glock drawn. He was still breathing hard—from the sprint across the plaza, through the building, back through the building till he found the stairs, up the stairs, down a hallway, finally here—but tried not to show it.
Ziegler was to his immediate left. To Ziegler’s left, a redheaded guy Shake didn’t recognize was seated on the couch. Continuing clockwise, Moby with a gun stood by the balcony, Jasper with a gun against the wall, Gina to Shake’s right.
“Who the fuck is this?” Moby said. He moved his gun from Gina to Shake. Jasper kept his gun on Gina. Shake put his gun on Jasper.
“Hey, Jasper,” Shake said.
“Shake.”
“How’s the nose?”
“Hurts.”
Shake glanced at Gina. “You didn’t want dessert?”
“Boy,” she said, “am I glad to see you.”
“Maybe I should have gone with ‘Think again’?”
She considered. ‘ “Not so fast’ was okay.”
“I’ll come up with something really good in about an hour. That’s what always happens.”
“I know,” she agreed. “What took you so long?”
Dick Moby put the pieces together and turned to Jasper. “This the dickhead ripped me off at the motel?”
“This the one,” Jasper said. “The one fucked everything up.”
The way Jasper said that, quiet and hard—Shake got the sense that there was more to the “everything” in Jasper’s mind now than Shake just slamming him in the head with a phone book or nailing him in the nose with a hotel-room door.
Shake glanced at Gina again. “What took me so long?”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t figure it out,” she said. “I’ll be gravely disappointed.”
“I was your backup plan.”
“That makes it sound so … I don’t know.”
“Calculating and cold-blooded?”
“See what I mean?”
Shake had worked out the details on the ferry making the return trip to the mainland. Gina hadn’t wanted to lose him back on Isla Taboga, she’d just wanted to delay him. That had been Marvin’s dual function—to slow Shake down and at the same time tell him where Gina was headed. That way if the exchange with Ziegler went down without a hitch, Gina would be gone—with all the money—before Shake showed up. In the event there was a hitch … well, then—here he was to bail her out.
“It was a pretty good plan,” Shake told her, “except for the part where you weren’t at the statue like you were supposed to be.”
“Doughboy wanted to go somewhere more private.”
“What did I tell you about that?”
She grimaced. “I know, I know.”
When Shake arrived at the de Lesseps statue, he guessed that’s what had happened; he also guessed that Ziegler—the arrogant, impatient prick—wouldn’t have wanted to go far before he got his mitts on the foreskins. Shake had searched the windows of every building on the square, without really knowing what he was looking for until he saw the window aglow with candlelight.
Ziegler had inched over to the coffee table. He reached for the padded envelope.
“If no one minds,” he said, “I’ll just grab these and mosey off while you folks—”
Shake, Moby, and Jasper all swung their guns to Ziegler, who froze.
“Looks like everyone minds, Doughboy,” Shake said.
Shake swung his gun back to Jasper. Jasper swung his gun back to Gina. Moby swung his gun back to Shake.
“You think you’re gonna live through this,” Moby told Shake, “you’re even more of a half-wit than I thought you were.”
Shake decided to ignore this. He’d made some questionable decisions, he had to admit, over the past week.
“So, gentlemen,” he said, “I’m sure you’ve noticed that the walls are made of stone. How we gonna resolve this situation without an undue withering hail of ricocheting bullets that’s more than likely to take us all out?”
Jasper, despite whatever new ax he had to grind with Shake, seemed to be wondering the same thing.
The Whale, on the other hand, stared at Gina with pure malice.
“Think your little girlfriend,” he hissed at her, “that Hidalgo bitch, think she’ll recognize you tonight when you show up in hell? When you don’t have no skin?”
It was the first time, Shake realized, he’d ever seen Gina’s mind stop working. Her face just went blank. For an instant he thought it was because of the no-skin threat, but then he realized she was trembling with fury, not fear.
“You killed Lucy?” Gina asked Moby. She looked like she was about to spring across the room at Moby and claw his throat out.
“Gina,” Shake said. If she heard him, though, she didn’t show it.
“She was a bleeder,” Moby told Gina. “But I already knew that.”
Shake braced himself. In about one second, Gina would pounce at Moby and Shake would discover firsthand just how many shots from a Glock you could get off before being chewed in half yourself. He glanced at Jasper and saw that Jasper was thinking along the same unhappy lines. But short of divine intervention, there was nothing now they could do to stop the inevitable, no way to stop Gina from—
“Lucy ain’t dead,” Jasper said.
Moby and Gina looked at him.
“What?” Moby said. So did Gina. So did Shake.
Jasper shrugged. He’d said it. What else was there to add?
“You told me that longhair did her,” Moby said. “He told me. The one used to work the door, then bitched out afterward.”
“That was the plan,” Jasper said. “I didn’t like it.”
“She’s alive?” Gina said. “She’s safe?”
“Who the holy motherfuck,” Moby sputtered at Jasper, “ever asked you did you like a plan or not?”
“She’s safe,” Jasper told Gina. He looked at Shake in a deeply unfriendly way. “She’s gone.”
“Lucy Hidalgo?” said the guy on the couch. He had a bandage on his forehead and looked vaguely familiar, but Shake couldn’t place the face.
“You know her?” Gina asked, surprised.
“Excuse me,” Shake said. “Who is this guy?”
“It’s the Cocksman,” Gina said. “Remember? He prefers to be called Ted, though. He saw me in the plaza and followed me in here to thank me for lifting his wallet.”
“To thank you?” Shake said.
“Shoot the bitch,” Moby told Jasper. Meaning Gina.
“Say what?” Jasper said.
“Whatever happens,” the Whale said, “I want that fucking cunt dead.”
“I shoot her,” Jasper said, “he’s gonna shoot me.” Meaning Shake.
“Then I’ll shoot him,” the Whale said. “That so fucking hard to figure out?”
Shake gave Jasper a few seconds to get the oars in the water, then stepped in to help with the rowing.
“Jasper,” he said, “I hope I don’t have to point out to you the fundamental flaw in that scenario.”
“Fine,” Moby said, “we’ll both shoot him.” He swung his gun from Gina to Shake.
Shake swung his gun from Jasper to the Whale. “Jasper,” he said, “let’s talk this out. Let’s—”
“Be still and let me think,” Jasper said to Shake. “Wasn’t for you, wouldn’t be none of this happened in the first place.”
“I’d do it ag
ain,” Shake said. He looked at Jasper. Jasper looked back at him. Jasper’s expression didn’t soften, exactly, but at least he didn’t pull the trigger and blow Shake out of his socks. That was a start.
Jasper looked at the guy on the couch. “What you mean? You know Lucy?”
“I think I know her,” the guy, Ted, said. “I mean, I know a Lucy Hidalgo. I just met her last night. At dinner? She’s my girlfriend’s sister. I mean, she’s not really my girlfriend, Mariana’s not—that came out completely wrong and presumptuous. But you know how sometimes when you meet someone, and you spend all day with them, and then the next day, and there’s this connection that just—”
Ted stopped. He’d realized that Jasper, in his surprised excitement, had swung his gun at him. Jasper realized, too, and swung his gun back to Shake. Shake swung his gun from Moby to Jasper.
“She’s here?” Jasper said. “You know where she is?”
“Of course,” Ted said. “She’s living with my … with her sister for a few weeks.”
“What are the odds,” Shake asked Gina quietly, “it’s the same Lucy Hidalgo?”
Gina shook her head. “I have no idea. My brain’s about to explode as it is.”
“She just quit her job,” Ted said. “She was a bookkeeper. She’s taking some time off to get her life straightened out.”
“Bookkeeper?” Jasper said. He frowned.
Damn, thought Shake. Then, taking a stab, “Hey, Ted, does your girlfriend’s sister Lucy look like a bookkeeper?”
Ted glanced down at his shoes, embarrassed. “I don’t know. I mean, you know, what does a bookkeeper look like, really?”
“Does this bookkeeper,” Gina said, “have a bod that belongs in the museum of all-time incredible bods?”
“That’s not really for me to say,” Ted mumbled. “I didn’t notice.”
“Jasper,” Shake said, “I think you may have a bingo.”
“Huh,” Jasper said, his round, sleepy-eyed face wide with the wonder of it all.
“Jasper,” Moby snarled. “Get your shit together and let’s end this.”
Shake decided to give it another, cautious try. “You don’t want any part of this situation,” he said, “do you, Jasper?”
“No,” Jasper said.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Dick Moby swung his gun from Shake to Jasper.