by Lou Berney
He sat up in bed. Too fast, but he didn’t care.
A housekeeper rolled her cart into the room. Not Gina. When the housekeeper saw Shake, she fired off a stream of apologetic Spanish.
“It’s okay, no problem,” he assured her. He lay back down, then rose again, more slowly this time.
“You want I to go?” the housekeeper said.
“No, it’s okay. No problem.”
She nodded the question: You sure?
Shake nodded the answer: I’m sure.
The housekeeper began to dust, and Shake shuffled to the shower. The hot water revived him in certain ways, but none of the important ones. He shaved, got dressed, returned to the room. The housekeeper had turned the TV to CNN, to keep her company while she dry-mopped the marble floor.
Shake didn’t really have anything to pack. He took one last, long look around the room, even though he knew that this—remembering everything that had happened in this room—would make the moment worse. It did.
“You have fun at the Carnaval, yes?” the housekeeper asked.
Shake considered. “Yes,” he said. “Expensive but fun.”
Though it wasn’t the millions of dollars he was talking about, of course.
“ … California State Penitentiary at Mule Creek,” a grave voice said.
Shake looked over at the TV. On-screen was a wide-angle shot of a low-desert landscape he knew all too well: squat gray buildings, fence line topped with coils of razor wire.
“The three men escaped,” the reporter’s grave voice continued, “by cutting through a cinder-block wall and overpowering two guards. One man—”
The screen cut from a shot of the prison to a mug shot of one mean-looking motherfucker in an orange jump. Vader Wallace. Glaring out at the world. Glaring right at Shake.
Shake winced and didn’t bother listening to the rest of the news report. He took the elevator to the lobby. When the assistant hotel manager behind the desk saw him, he went pale.
“Señor Boxman.” His eyebrows prostrated themselves abjectly, begged for forgiveness. “I am so sorry. The señora, she—I tried to—But the safe … and—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Shake said. “We were both out of our league.”
“Yes, señor.” The assistant manager contemplated this fact with sadness.
“About the bill,” Shake said.
“The señora, of course,” the assistant manager said. “She has taken care of it. Yesterday?”
Shake remembered the hotel in Vegas, right before he blacked out.
“She owed me one,” he told the assistant manager. “But I’m still gonna kill her if I ever find her.”
“Ah,” the assistant manager said. He nodded knowingly. He seemed to understand that Shake wasn’t really going to do that, find Gina or kill her, either one, no matter how much he might want to do both.
Shake left the hotel and walked until he ran out of room to walk. He found himself on the causeway. He took a seat on a bench and gazed out over the sparkling water and the prospect, less sparkling, of his own future.
What the hell, he thought, it had been fun. And the trend, when you averaged it all together, the sharp spikes and dips, was upward. A week ago, for example, he’d been living in a six-by-nine cell; a good day for him was when the mess served banana pudding instead of butterscotch. He’d never dreamed he’d get to eat fresh fish on a Pacific island with a girl like Gina.
He’d never dreamed a girl like Gina existed. That was for sure.
Maybe there was something to be said, after all, for making your own decisions. For not letting the current of life carry you along at its whim.
He dug in his pocket and found a coin stamped with a bird perched on a royal shield on one side and the sharp-beaked profile of a man who resembled a bird on the other. The paper money here was U.S., but the coins were Panamanian balboas.
He flipped the coin, slapped it on his forearm, started to call it. But then he heard the putter of an engine behind him and turned.
Gina, astride a battered orange Yamaha, took off her helmet and smiled at him.
“Three million dollars says it’s tails,” she proposed.
Shake tried to play it cool, but who was he fooling? He smiled, too.
“Where’d you get the ride?”
“Borrowed it from a friend of mine,” she said.
“This friend meet the generally accepted definition of friend? The borrowing meet the generally accepted definition of borrowing?”
She patted the seat behind her. “Might be enough room for two, sport.”
He stood, flipped her the coin. She caught it. Looked at it.
“Heads. How do you like that? You win.”
“Why’d you decide to cut me back in?”
“Who says I’ve decided?” she asked. “Come on if you’re coming on.”
He hesitated for a second—once again, who did he think he was fooling?—then went around and started to climb aboard the Yamaha. Gina goosed the throttle, and the bike’s seat squirted out from beneath him. Gina stopped a few yards away.
“Whoops,” she said.
“Sure. Now that you’ve got my last balboa.”
“Come on. I was just teasing.”
He walked over and tried again to climb aboard. Again she zoomed away at the last second.
He stood where he was and crossed his arms. Gina smiled her sweetest smile. “I’m sorry. I really am. Come on.”
“How do I know you’re not gonna screw me over again?” Shake asked.
Gina revved her engine and winked.
Acknowledgments
I HAVE TRIED, WITH THIS BOOK, to get my facts straight and keep them so. As a reader, I like novels that are grounded in careful, meticulous research and historical accuracy. That said, I did take certain small liberties and would like to point them out now.
Philippe Bunau-Varilla, the Frenchman responsible in large part for convincing the Americans to build their canal in Panama, not Nicaragua, comes across in this novel as something of a bullshitter and con man. This is the impression one draws from reading David McCullough’s masterful and massively entertaining book, The Path Between the Seas, but other historians do take a kinder view of Bunau-Varilla’s wheelings and dealings (French historians, as you probably guessed, but hey).
As for the one hundred foreskins at the center of this novel, they did in fact disappear during the final days of World War II, but in East Prussia, not Belgium. Experts now surmise, based on documents released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the defrocked Belgian Jesuit in whose possession the foreskins were last confirmed may have bartered the foreskins to Red Army officers in exchange for safe passage the hell out of East Prussia. Our best guess, at this point, is that the foreskins are in the hands of a private collector who may not appreciate the full value and significance of what he or she has in his or her hands. For help with the complex history of the foreskins, I am indebted to Professor Tom Cooney, director of the Institut d’antiquités génitales in Oakland, California.
I have never heard either Rilo Kiley’s “Smoke Detector” or “Turn It On” by the Flaming Lips played in a strip club in Las Vegas. I have, however, heard Prince’s “Kiss” lots of times (careful, meticulous research; see above), and one time the dancer was wearing exactly what Gina wears during that scene in the novel.
Readers in Panama are probably still scoffing in disbelief at Gina’s lack of success in spotting a sloth, and rightly so. It’s ridiculously easy to spot sloths in the jungles of Panama, especially when you have a crack naturalist guide, as did I, like Mario Bernal Greco. Mario claimed, or at least I thought he did, that a sloth will only come down from its tree once every five days to have a bowel movement. I did not put this in the novel because I could not verify it, and my copy editor would have totally busted me on it (see below).
I’d like to thank some of the people who made this book possible. I’m going to keep the list short because I suspect that the longer th
e list, the more pissed the people left off it will be.
I’m incredibly grateful to Richard Parks, Marjorie Braman, and Peggy Hageman.
I also have to thank my copy editor, Maureen Sugden, who pointed out that methamphetamine users tend to urinate less often than normal and that, according to statistics, the average act of “adequate” sexual intercourse lasts only between three and seven minutes(!)
Finally, several people were generous enough to read a very early version of this story and give notes: Teena Booth, Dede Gardner, Jonathan Hludzinski, Jeff Hoffman, Rachel Long, Mark Poirier, Ed Rugoff, Will Strouse, and Joanne Wolf.
ALSO BY LOU BERNEY
The Road to Bobby Joe and Other Stories
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
GUTSHOT STRAIGHT. Copyright © 2010 by Lou Berney. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berney, Louis.
Gutshot straight / Lou Berney. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-176604-6
1. Ex-convicts—Fiction. 2. Crime—Fiction. I. Title. PS3552.E73125G88 2010
813’.54—dc22
2009025215
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10 11 12 13 14 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
EPub Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780061963469
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