"No,” whimpered the orthodontist.
"Was Prime Minister of Bulgarian People's Republic. When reactionaries pull down Berlin Wall, they take Comrade Georgi out of case and bury him in ground. Like rubbish!"
Larionov shook his head in disgust and laughed again. “They tell me that in old days, Comrade Georgi once jump out of case and dance a jig."
Wally gaped at him, horrified.
Larionov slapped his knees, giggling. “Scientist and technician, they gasp like have heart attack. What I would give to be there."
"Spare me the anecdotes. Explain to me in layman's terms what just occurred."
Larionov shrugged. “Difference in chemical purity, in concentration to what we use at Institute. Is spasm is all. Contraction of larynx and muscles. Tequila that kill him contribute. Formation of residual gases. Who can say?"
He wrenched Stockwall to his feet. “Come. Demo is anxious for us to buy him suit of clothes. Dark distinguished suit. Be presentable for America, the three of us, when we walk on airplane."
Dr. Stockwall trembled, chewing his nails.
Larionov howled. “Is joke, dentist. Research Institute on Biological Studies humor."
* * * *
Wally was desperate. It was impossible to reason with the demented Red. He agreed to go clothes shopping for the corpse and they settled on a time after dark to remove the bags of offal.
Wally spent the day pacing malls, racking his brain. He gradually devised a plan. Rather than cloaking Greg Gregg the Gringo like a CEO, he selected casual wear. He'd noticed in his grisly shopping for Larionov that powerful drugs requiring a prescription in the U.S. were sold over the counter. At a farmacia, he bought sedatives and a liter of vodka. He rented a subcompact sedan.
At nightfall, Larionov and Wally lugged two black plastic bags downstairs to the trunk of the rental car. The Russian said, “Magnum opus not so heavy as when we go up stairs with him. Blood and bodily fluid wash down drain."
"Never mind."
Stockwall handed the laced vodka to the appreciative Russian and told him to enjoy.
The overdeveloped Cancun hotel zone had the Caribbean on one side, a lagoon on the other, and was linked to the mainland by short bridges. Only near the south end could Stockwall find a stretch of undisturbed land. Even in this slender break between hotels and condos, he could see construction cranes silhouetted against the sky like praying mantises.
He parked as close to the beach as he could and popped the trunk. “I'll be the lookout. Don't take all night."
Larionov was groggy from the vodka. Dragging the bags, furrowing the sand, the dictator-preserver weaved and staggered to water's edge. He untied the bags. Instead of emptying the contents into the sea, he rubbed his eyes and curled up in the fetal position.
Damn, damn, damn, damn, Wally thought, backpedaling; I overmedicated. Five more minutes of consciousness and the gore would be fish food.
To complicate things, joggers approached. An insane activity, day or night, he thought. Dr. Wally Stockwall did not run unless he was being chased. Gasping for breath, he ran lurchingly to the car before that happened.
Driving to the hotel, he figured to get rid of Greg and give Sally Jo the bad news that he'd been called home for an orthodontic emergency, that they had to catch the next flight out.
Wally brought the clothes he'd purchased for Greg Gregg into Larionov's room. How he wished he could merely leave him, but both rooms were registered in his name. Prudence took precedent over squeamishness. He took a deep breath and threw off the bedding.
Sally Jo heard noises earlier in the stinky Russian's room, as she did now. She'd had her fill of Wally disappearing to play silly games with his crackpot pal.
She knocked, to no avail, so she unlocked the connecting door, opening it to her husband bending over a young sleeping man, who was buck naked except for a pair of shorts.
"Oh my God!"
Wally spun around. “Lovey, it isn't what it seems."
"He's so young. Did you slip him a Mickey Finn?"
"Sal. Angel pie."
"You're out of your sicko closet, admit it."
Wally spread his arms. “Honeybunch."
"I just knew."
"There is a plausible explanation, my precious."
"Pervert!"
Sally Jo slammed the door so hard the knob fell off. Dr. Stockwall listened to drawers banging and suitcases tossed about. He waited for the sound of his spouse's footfalls in the corridor. Then he dressed Greg in the shorts, sandals, and an I (heart) CANCUN T-shirt. Stitches sealed an abdominal incision. Wally did not dwell on the particulars of the slice.
Their erstwhile demo was astonishingly light. Greg wasn't as loosey-goosey as yesterday, either. Larionov had rendered him stiff, yet pliable. He could be molded at the joints like a mannequin. They labored down the steps, and Wally said to the clerk, who didn't move his eyes from his comic book, “Too much tequila, too much tequila."
With Greg Gregg securely belted in, Wally started the car. He saw flashing lights and swung around the block. Policia cars squealed to a halt in front of the hotel. Out of the back of one came two cops and Larionov. Presumably, the law had been summoned by the busybody joggers who took offense at the gore. Supporting the yawning Bolshevik, they (also presumably with his room key) entered the hotel.
Swell. Wally wondered where to go. Then he had a brilliant cerebral flash. Hide Greg Gregg in plain sight! If Wally went to an isolated locale, it would be his luck to be nabbed disposing of the body, a gutted and embalmed one at that. In the hubbub of Cancun nightlife he would be leaving an acquaintance to savor his extreme intoxication alone.
Then off to the airport and home to an uncertain future. But for now, Wally was optimistic.
On the main boulevard, he parked in a public lot adjacent to a shopping plaza. Darkness and decreased pedestrian traffic worked in his favor. Arm cinching the waist of his inebriated companion, Wally scuttled to a sidewalk bench. He informed potential witnesses with what was becoming a mantra, “Too much tequila, too much tequila."
They sat on the bench. Greg Gregg behaved admirably by staying vertical, although he leaned into Wally. This drew a raised eyebrow now and then, in a vein similar to Sally Jo's cruel accusation.
Loudly, Wally announced to Greg, “I'm going for coffee. A cup of java will perk you up. I'll be right back. Hang in there, guy."
"Marty!” screamed a young blond woman in a flowered sundress.
The woman crossed the street, dodging traffic.
Fists raised, she cried euphorically at Greg Gregg the Gringo, “Oh, Marty, Marty, Marty, you sweet lovable drunk. When you didn't return from your swim, we thought you'd drowned. We have the police out looking for you, you twit."
Oh so carefully, Wally stood.
"Excuse me, sir. Are you with Marty?"
"No, no. We were sharing a bench. Ships passing in the night, as it were."
"Does he look normal to you?” the girl asked. “He's not responding to me and his eyes are weird."
Wally continued to retreat. “Sorry. I don't know what's normal for him. Frankly, he may have had too much tequila. Too much tequila."
Greg Gregg lifted his head as if baying at the moon.
"Ahhhhoooouuuu."
Dr. Stockwall stumbled to his car. Burning rubber as he accelerated away, he could still hear the girl's shrieks.
Copyright (c) 2008 Gary Alexander
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Fiction: GANG OF THREE by Jas. R. Petrin
"One for all and all for one, right?"
"You realize,” Robideau pointed out, “I'm not a peace officer anymore. I'm just filling in for Chief Butts until he gets back from his well-earned vacation. I don't have any official powers."
"But what we got here, Chief, is grand larceny, an’ somebody's got to do somethin’ about it!"
Ex-chief Robideau gazed up at the incensed Pete Melynchuk from the Scrabble board at the back of Tom Hedges's barbershop. Tom, often called Tomah
awk Hedges for his inclination to give customers more than their money's worth, sat scowling over the last move of the game with his chin in his hand, struggling to find a word that would eliminate Robideau's narrow lead. Pete continued to stand over them, flinty eyed and hotly determined. Robideau sighed.
"Right. Let's have the details. Where exactly did this grand larceny take place? Where were you when the case of beer disappeared?"
Pete folded his arms and thrust out his jaw. The very picture of an injured citizen.
"Side of the road outside the Netley Hotel. I was in the pub all evening. Won the fifty-fifty draw, that's how I bought the beer. Set it down for maybe half a jiffy so's I could fish out the keys to my truck, an’ when I turn around—gone! A whole two-four of Sleeman's Honey Brown!"
The ex-chief nodded. He did care about robberies, even the theft of a case of beer. Things like that shouldn't happen. Not here in End of Main. Here most folks didn't even lock their doors.
"Is ‘yeiao’ a word?” Tom Hedges asked.
"No,” Robideau told him. He turned his attention back to Pete Melynchuk. “You shouldn't drive when you've been drinking,” he cautioned sternly.
"Never touched a drop. Drank tea all evening."
"Yeah, right. This happened ...?"
"Like I said, last night. No, this morning. One a.m. Or something."
"Cans or bottles?"
"Bottles."
"Any witnesses?"
"I just told you. Me."
"Any other witnesses?"
"Not a living soul."
"Meaning the street was deserted?"
"You could've fired a cannon."
"How about ‘aioey'?” Tom asked.
"I don't think so,” Robideau replied. He said to Pete, “Somebody must have been there. Somebody besides you."
"Nobody."
"What you're saying, then, is that this beer of yours simply vanished into thin air.” Robideau shot a suspicious gaze at Melynchuk. “You're not trying to pull something here, are you, Pete? There really was a case of beer?"
"Chief! On my mother's eyes!"
"'Eye',” Tom Hedges said. “Yeah, that works.” He brightened, dropping the tiles in place. “Triple score for the y. Looks like I win, Chief. How about that!"
* * * *
Robideau got in his car and drove the block and a half to the Netley Hotel. He could have walked it—should have—but winter had struck the town early. He hated winter. Hated it more with each passing year. He envied Butts, who was enjoying three weeks at a time-share out in the South Seas. He liked to imagine there was a place in the sun for him too. A little bungalow at the edge of a beach, ukulele music, and no phone. Definitely no phone.
He stopped in front of the Netley and got out near the spot where Pete claimed to have been parked. His boots crunched on a delicate coating of thin sleet, a frozen glaze on the light snow that had accumulated early last evening. He looked at the ground. A plow had been by, and a sanding truck, and a number of citizens heading to their jobs. No chance of footprints, that was for sure. Across the road stood Buzz Taylor's Seniors’ Retirement Lodge, a slab-sided old frame structure rubbing shoulders with a row of shops. To his left the hotel parking lot, and south of that the hotel itself.
Last evening this would have been a noiseless scene, as peaceful as the open prairie. No way anyone could have crept up on somebody without that person knowing it. But Pete, on the other hand...
Pete insisted he hadn't been drunk. Of course he would say that. More likely he had staggered up to his truck, fumbling his keys out, and firing it up with the remote starter he had won at the Legion last fall—a lucky guy in many ways, Pete. The truck had scarcely any muffler. A one-man band could have marched past unnoticed. Then he would have spent a minute or two brushing snow off the windshield, a more likely reason to set the beer down on the ground. And the fluffy snow would have muffled any footsteps—
"Chief! Chief Robideau!"
—As for footprints, the state Pete must have been in, he wouldn't have thought to look for them—
"Chief!"
Robideau looked up to see Buzz Taylor beckoning to him from the top of the Lodge steps across the street, holding the door open and leaning out into the cold, his breath blossoming in vaporous clouds from his lips. “Got a minute, Chief?"
It was warm in Buzz Taylor's sitting room. A little too warm. The chief accepted the mug of black coffee pressed on him, drinking it in short sips to keep from burning his tongue. Amazingly, Buzz too had been robbed.
"My ice scraper, Chief. Big, heavy, steel job. Sixty bucks I paid for that thing. Always leave it by the front step, never know when I'm going to need it, chip the ice off the walk so the old ladies don't fall on their clavicles and sue me. Been leaving it there for years. Now, all of a sudden—poof! Gone!"
A case of beer and now an ice scraper. Practically a crime wave. What was going on in town?
"It's pretty bad when a man can't even leave his ice scraper beside the steps of his own house. Sixty bucks, Chief. What am I s'posed to do? Hire a rent-a-cop to sit there an’ watch it for me?"
"It's only an ice scraper,” Robideau reminded him, then realized instantly it was the wrong thing to say. Buzz launched into a venomous tirade on how this was the first step on the road to ruin. The thin edge of the wedge—or of the ice scraper, so to speak. “First the scraper, Chief, an’ after that, bigger things. Steal the potted plants, then the screen door. Poleaxed in our beds next, if we let this kinda thing go by."
Robideau decided not to mention the beer.
"Have you talked to your roomers? Maybe one of them borrowed it."
"Are you kidding me? They're practically all a hunnerd years old. It'd take three of ‘em to lift it—organized crime! And what would they want with it? They don't do a lick of work around here. I'm the one does the heavy lifting. All the rest of them ever do is complain. Like Mrs. Lumpenstetter.” He switched to a sing-song voice. “'Mr. Taylor, it's cold in here. Can't you turn up the heat?’ Put your head into her apartment, Chief, see how cold it is. Gotta be a hunnerd friggin’ degrees. Give you heat stroke. ‘Mr. Taylor, my sink is plugged.’ Mrs. Lump, you can't shove a chicken, three corn cobs, an’ yesterday's Free Press down the disposal at the same time, you got to spread things out a bit.” He gave his head a shake. “An’ then there's the Gang of Three."
"The what?"
"My three losers. Culbertson, Highway, an’ Brewster. I'm always runnin’ around repairing the things they screw up. Those guys got the magic touch. Everything they touch turns to crap. Story of their lives, you ask me."
"But you talked to them?"
"Of course I talked to them. They never seen it."
Robideau finished his coffee. “I'll keep my eyes open."
"That'd be nice,” Buzz Taylor said.
Heading back to his car, Robideau hadn't gone a dozen paces when Arney Arvelson trotted up behind him. Arvelson ran the co-op hardware and dry goods store down the street.
"Chief,” Arvelson said, his distressed, owlish face tinged a mottled pink from the nippy air, “did you get my phone message?"
"Not if you left it in the last twenty minutes,” Robideau said.
"You should have a cell phone."
"I do have a cell phone."
"Okay, but you don't forward your landline to it, do you? Called the office, your place there, and the machine came on, and all I got was your message. Said you were taking over for Chief Butts the next few days."
"What's all this about, Arney?"
His spectacles flashed.
"I've been robbed. What do you think of that?"
"I think there's a lot of it going around,” Robideau said.
"I don't care what's going around, I only care about what happened to me."
* * * *
Billy Highway turned from the window through which he had been peering nervously out at the street. Not that he could see much. The frost was so thick he'd had to melt a dime-sized peephole i
n it with his thumb. He seemed to be losing his nerve.
"That was Robideau down there talking to Buzz,” Billy said. “I'm surprised he didn't come upstairs and arrest us."
"Relax. The Buzzard don't know nothing.” This exhortation came from Creepy Culbertson, sitting crosswise on Billy's narrow cot, bony shoulders flat against the wall, a bottle of Sleeman's Honey Brown clutched in one big-knuckled, arthritic hand.
"Why must you talk like that?” the third man, Alexander Brewster, demanded to know. A pale, pudgy man, with white hair curled around his ears, he was perched on Billy's only visitors’ chair, an armless, wooden, straight-backed job with a spatter of paint stains on its lower spindles.
"Talk like what?"
"Using double negatives. You sound just like a criminal."
"I am a criminal. So are you two guys, now. We're all criminals, so I might as well talk like one."
"I'm sorry we ever started this,” Billy Highway admitted miserably. He had operated his own electronics repair shop years ago but lost it when he drank the profits away. He sank down on the windowsill, and the frost against his backside made him jump to his feet again. He had slivers back there from clambering over that pile of lumber last night.
"I remember correctly,” Creepy Culbertson said, beginning to make a cigarette, “it was you that started it in the first place, swipin’ that beer.” He didn't bother to set down his Honey Brown as he did this, constructing the cigarette with one hand, always fascinating to watch. A pinch of tobacco nipped between brown-stained fingers, a cigarette paper tucked in the palm, then a deft twist, and his pink tongue flicked the glued edge. He popped one end of the smoke in his mouth. “Got a light?” The cigarette waggled when he spoke.
"You'll get me kicked out of here if Buzz Taylor thinks I'm smoking in my room,” Billy told him crossly. With reluctance, he handed Creepy a book of matches. “You pinched the ice scraper."
"We needed it to open the window, didn't we? It was the beer got us all sittin’ around here thinkin’ last night, wasn't it?"
"Buzz Taylor—"
"The hell with Buzzard freakin’ Taylor. You'll be able to buy the place after we pull this off. Kick him out an’ run things yourself."
AHMM, May 2008 Page 7