Dead Bang

by Robert Bailey

  “He didn’t say anything about the Second Amendment, either.”

  “Mark’s show, man,” said Chet. “I’m just the usher.”

  “When Mark wants to do a show about the Second Amendment, let me know. We can talk about the ‘six-shooters and lever rifles’ the terrorists would like us to ‘cast aside.’”

  “You’d do that?” asked Chet.

  “I don’t want to do him any favors,” I said. “But then, neither do you. Call me.”

  “That’s not fair. Why do you say that?”

  “Mark thought the state police were going to be in the studio until about fifteen seconds before the segment,” I said.

  “Shit happens. It’s a live show.”

  “So, what was the original plan? You hoped I’d be arrested on air?”

  Chet shrugged. “How would I know that?”

  “That’s the best ‘Aw shucks, who me?’ take I’ve ever seen, Chet.”

  • • •

  The marshals on the door of the federal building were decked out in flak vests and shotguns. I wrote, “Agent Svenson: Commander K is Manny—Art,” on the back of my business card and left it on the windshield of Matty’s white Oldsmobile.

  Back at my car, I slid in, pulled the door shut, and hit the power locks. With closed eyes, I savored a moment of stillness in familiar surroundings. The sounds of people and vehicles filtered in, and I scrounged napkins from a fast-food bag I found under the seat.

  I worked on my glasses again and wiped my face. The smell of cement dust lingered in my moustache. My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I flipped it open and said, “Hardin.”

  Wendy said, “Thank God. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, doll,” I told her. “I’m on my way.”

  “What happened? The only thing on TV is downtown Grand Rapids.”

  “Then you probably know more than I do.”

  “Daniel just walked in,” said Wendy. “Sure you’re okay?”

  “Really, I’m fine. See ya in a bit. I have to stop for soda.” I slipped the phone back in my pocket.

  A police officer posted at the parking attendant’s booth scrutinized exiting vehicles. He looked to be in his mid-twenties and kept his hand on his holstered pistol. I peeled my ID out of my wallet and tucked it over the visor so I didn’t have to reach for my body if he wanted to chat.

  It took twenty minutes, but I finally rolled up to him. Maybe he didn’t like my moustache. In any case, he rapped a knuckle on my window, and I let it down. He asked, “You have any explosives or firearms in the car?”

  “Just the pistol on my hip,” I said. “I’m a private detective.” I took my ID off the visor and held it out to him.

  He took the card with his left hand and watched me for a long moment before he glanced at the licenses. “This your current address?”

  “Yes, sir, it is.”

  He took his right hand off his pistol and produced a notepad from his breast pocket. As he wrote on the pad, he asked, “What happened to you?”

  “I was in the building when the bastard set off the bomb.”

  “You all right?”

  “Nothing clean shorts and a shower won’t cure.”

  He looked up from his pad, his eyes vaguely amused, and said, “Mind if I look in the trunk?”

  I had an electric trunk release, but I switched off the ignition—to put the officer at ease—and handed him the key ring by the trunk key. “Help yourself.”

  He opened the trunk. After a moment he called out, “You own a cat, Mr. Hardin?”

  “Wife does,” I said, “but the kitty litter is for traction.”

  He banged the trunk shut and walked back up to my window. I took the keys back and fired up the engine.

  “What kind of mill is that?” he asked as he handed me my ID.

  “Big Cadillac with a street-performance cam.”

  “Drive careful, Mr. Hardin,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. I left.

  At Meijer’s Thrifty Acres on the Beltline, my first port of call was the restroom. I washed my face and neck. For lack of a better word I would have to say that my dark brown hair looked “frosted.” The gray at the temples was an inside job.

  Coke and Pepsi seem to take turns. This week Coke was on sale—sixty-nine cents for a two-liter jug. Add a dollar for the Pepsi, unless you had a “Preferred Customer” card, in which case you saved a dime. I picked up a couple of each. At the checkout stand the only issue was “paper or plastic?”

  “Plastic’s fine,” I said. “Just double bag it.” I left with a double bag in each hand to save wrangling a cart.

  I found a fortyish man with folded arms standing guard at the front of my car. He had a dark complexion, a walrus moustache, and a round face with angular features. “Something I can help you with, sir?”

  He showed me the snub-nosed revolver in his right hand, then tucked it back into his left armpit. “I have a gun,” he said, making it sound like “gawn” in singsong East Indian English.

  “So do half the people in this parking lot.”

  “You have something that does not belong to you.”

  “I have soda,” I said.

  “You know what I have come for,” he said. “I will tolerate no silliness.”

  I didn’t have a clue. “Right you are,” I said, “It’s, ah, in the trunk.”

  “Where is this trunk, please?”

  “The boot,” I said. “The back of the car.”

  “Very well.”

  “C’mon,” I said, and started for the back of my car, moving to the right to leave space for him on my left. When he came abreast of me, I swung the bag in my left hand from behind and clubbed him on the head and shoulders. The blow bent him forward, and I stood him up with a roundhouse uppercut with the bag in my right hand. The backhand stroke drove his head into the door of the pickup truck parked next to my car. He crumpled onto the pavement, and the revolver clattered out of his hand.

  I put my foot on the revolver, and it crunched. Plastic. The man moaned and rolled onto his back. His eyes fluttered open, but the vacancy lights were on. I nudged him with my foot and said, “What do you say, stud? Coke or Pepsi?”

  14

  MY HOUSE GLOWED IN THE NIGHT like Granny’s birthday cake. Every lightbulb in the house pumped kilowatts of money into the thirsty dark. The yard looked like a parking lot. Wendy’s Cadillac and Daniel’s Camaro filled the apron in front of the garage. Karen Smith’s Monte Carlo blocked the loop in front of the house. I had to park on the lawn.

  Rusty thundered up, dragging his chain along the runner wire that ran overhead from the house to the shed. I squatted down to rub his head and ears until he calmed down and then headed for the house with the flowers and the soda.

  Daniel, half a head taller than me, with my features and his mother’s fair skin, met me at the door for a hug. I shook my head. “Better let me get cleaned up first.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “The Waters Building has a long history. It just collected a little dust along the way.” Daniel took the soda.

  “That got shook up,” I said. “You might want to crack it open slow and over the sink.”

  “Just stay right there,” said Wendy.

  Karen appeared at the bottom of the stairs with a basket of laundry in her hands. “I saw it on cable news,” she said. “That ‘Commander K’? That was Manny!”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “I left Agent Svenson a note. How’d you talk her into releasing your car?”

  Karen shrugged. “She left a message to come and get it. Ben and I drove in and brought it back.”

  “Anybody follow you?”

  I got another shrug.

  Ben announced from the living room. “I found the car I want to buy. Karen’s. She said she’d take twenty-five hundred.”

  I looked down at Karen. She smiled and tilted her head. “We’ll take a look at it tomorrow,” I said.

  Ben’s head loomed over
the rail, and he showed me a stunned face. “Holy snot rockets, what happened to you?”

  “I got a little dusty when they blew up the Waters Building. I need a shower. Tell me about the car.”

  “I drove it in from Karen’s house,” said Ben. “It runs out like a champ.”

  “Too late to look at it tonight. Best to see it in the light. Tomorrow,” I said. I held out the roses and put my left hand behind my back.

  “Cool,” said Ben.

  Wendy came down the landing with a trash bag in her hands and held it out like it was Halloween.

  “Don’t like roses?” I asked.

  “The coat goes in the bag,” said Wendy. “You go straight to the shower. I’ll bring you some clothes.”

  I gave her the flowers.

  Wendy studied them for a moment and then rolled her eyes up to mine. “Roses?”

  “It was that or the tulips.”

  Wendy leaned forward to see if I had something in the hand behind my back. “What tulips?”

  “These tulips,” I said, bent forward and stole a kiss.

  “Blahk!” said Wendy, one eye closed and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “You taste like wet cement!”

  Karen gave me a wink and disappeared toward the laundry room with her basket of clothes.

  Ben met me at the top of the stairs. I cleared the Colt and handed it to him with the slide locked to the rear.

  “It’s full of dust,” said Ben.

  “Just brush it out and swab it down good,” I said. “If we take it apart, I’ll have to go zero it again. I need you to empty the magazines, take ’em apart, clean ‘em up, and wipe off the ammo. Maybe Daniel will give you a hand.”

  “Sure, Pop,” said Daniel from the living room.

  “The holster and the leather’s a mess,” said Ben.

  “You should see my car,” I said and left a trail of gray dust down the hallway carpet to the bathroom.

  With the shower running on my head and shoulders, I didn’t hear Wendy come in. The water in the tub ran gray, and I worried about clogging the drain.

  “When the roses are gone?” Wendy called into the shower. “What does that mean?”

  “When the roses are gone, you need more roses, doll.”

  Wendy didn’t answer. I’d worked my way down to my chest and arms when she stepped through the curtain into the tub behind me. She asked for the soap. Washing my back with soapy hands, she said, “I’m glad you’re all right, babe. Rinse.”

  I turned around and found her wearing a wisp of green lacy panties, a towel on her head, and a Mona Lisa smile. My compass needle tingled and stirred to point north.

  Wendy made a circle with her finger and said, “Point that the other direction. I know we had plans, but I have to work tonight.” I turned around into the water. Wendy ran her tongue up my spine and placed a gentle bite on my shoulder, lingering to inject a warm breath.

  “You bit me,” I said.

  “You changed the subject.” She soaped below my navel with her right hand and, with her left, the inside of my thighs from behind.

  “Ah, about what?”

  “You know,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you?” Wendy slid her hand slowly down.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t turn around,” said Wendy. “I don’t want to get my hair wet.”

  • • •

  I heard the ladies downstairs. As I rounded the corner on the landing at the front door, Karen said, “Of course I have underwear. It’s just that bastard Manny left it all in the Bahamas so he could bring back a suitcase full of money.”

  Wendy laughed.

  “Kinda hurt my feelings,” said Karen. “He’d rather have money than my underwear.”

  “Maybe he wanted money and you with no underwear,” said Wendy.

  “He was kinda cute,” Karen chuckled.

  “What was all that eye makeup about?”

  “Manny’s such a nut. It’s ‘Fabbi,’ a character Manny does in his comedy act. Fabbi is, you know, like this real swishy gay guy. Manny does the bit when he has to go through customs. Manny’s Middle Eastern—you know how they are about that—so he nances up to the customs agent doing his Fabbi routine about being a male lingerie model. He leaves a pair of nylon bikini panties with skid marks and lipstick smudges on top of his clothes, and they can’t wait to get rid of him. He said they don’t even put their hands in his bags. Except one time, he said, he found this German custom guy’s phone number when he unpacked his clothes.”

  Wendy and Karen stood folding laundry into piles on top of the chest freezer. I pulled at the front of the T-shirt Wendy had left for me in the bathroom and said, “I don’t mean to intrude, but is this what you want me to wear to Roberto’s?”

  “That’s the thing, hon,” said Wendy. “We can’t go tonight. I told you I had to work.”

  “This is Daniel’s first night home,” I said. “We’re only going to have him for a week.”

  “Ten days,” said Wendy. “I’m sorry, but I got a job this afternoon. I have three nights to get two nights of surveillance on tape out in Holland.”

  “Can’t film much at night,” I said. “And it’s getting late.”

  “It’s in a bowling alley.”

  “You want me to go with you?”

  “Karen is going with me,” said Wendy. “A couple of ladies will be less conspicuous.”

  “So, what are you working on?”

  “Guy works in a bowling alley,” said Wendy. “I’m going to need your recorder and remote camera setup.”

  “It’s at the office, in the closet. You have the keys?” Wendy nodded. “The teddy bear camera’s working, but you’ll get better pictures if you use the glasses with the chip-cam in the frame. Whatever you’re looking at, you’re recording.”

  Wendy answered with a nod but didn’t offer any details of her male exotic dancer assignment. “So, what have you got?” I asked. “Ladies’ tournament? Something like that?”

  “I think the subject works in the bar,” said Wendy. “There’s a ladies’ event for the next three days.”

  Karen choked and then coughed into her wrist while she rolled her eyes.

  “You going to stay in Holland?”

  “Too far to drive back and forth,” said Wendy.

  “No sweat,” I said. “The boys and I can ‘batch’ it for a couple of days. You going to eat here or get a sandwich on the way?”

  “Karen needs to pick up some things on the way,” said Wendy. “We’ll eat at the bowling alley—give us something to fill time.”

  “I’ll fix something for me and the boys,” I said and started back up the stairs. I lingered for half a step on the landing, and Karen whispered something to Wendy.

  Wendy answered softly, “Well, the guy does work in a bar.”

  They laughed. So did I. I had to sit down on the stairs and hold my hand over my mouth.

  • • •

  I allowed myself one chuckle as I walked into the kitchen. Daniel and Ben sat at the kitchen table cleaning my sidearm and magazines. Daniel looked up and said, “What?”

  “I was just thinking about all the wackos I met today. Some fella in the parking lot at Meijer’s tried to mug me with a plastic cap pistol.”

  “What happened?” asked Daniel.

  “He showed me the cap gun, and I went back into the store. When I got back with the security people, he’d already left.”

  “Don’t seem all that funny,” said Ben.

  “Guess you had to be there. Your mom and Karen have a film job out in Holland for the next couple days, so it’s just us. What do you want for dinner?”

  “Ribs,” said Daniel.

  “A little late,” I said. “We can do ribs tomorrow.”

  I browned up some ground beef with a little garlic salt, added a jar of spaghetti sauce, and boiled some rigatoni. Not exactly Roberto’s, but it only took half an hour. As we sat down, the ladies brought their bags out and set
them at the head of the stairs.

  I took the napkin off my lap, walked over to Wendy, and said, “Give me some sugar, baby!”

  “Oh God, you’re not watching that, are you?”

  “Army of Darkness,” I said. “Our fave. Since you had to work, we thought it’d be a good night.” I picked up the bags. “Give us a call when you get in.”

  “I want to get some tape tonight,” said Wendy. “We’ll find a motel when we wrap up the surveillance for the night.”

  “Shop smart, shop S Mart,” Ben advised from the table.

  Wendy rolled her eyes. I carried the bags out to the car.

  Karen held the seat forward while I dropped the bags into the back seat. Wendy asked, “Do I need to pick up tape?”

  “Plenty of tape in the closet, at my office,” I said. “The batteries are in the charger. There’s a cigarette lighter power plug in there too.” Karen climbed in and pulled the door shut while I walked around the car. Wendy let the window down, and I leaned over for a quick peck. “Be careful.”

  “The last load of clothes came out a little damp,” said Wendy. “Maybe you could take a look at the dryer.”

  “It’s thirty years old, hon,” I said.

  “I suppose we could shop for one,” said Wendy.

  By “shop” Wendy meant a month of going through circulars, followed by a month of visiting appliance stores to compare prices, with return trips to compare options. I said, “I’ll just take a look at it.”

  Wendy gave me another peck and smiled as she put the window up. I watched until after the ladies were well out of the drive. I didn’t see anyone come out after them.

  The washer and dryer had been our first purchase after we bought our house in Detroit. We’d raised three sons, and the machines had done the diapers and dungarees and asked for only minor maintenance. After dinner, I left the dishes to the boys and schlepped myself down to the laundry room.

  The first thing I looked at—the lint filter—paid off nicely. A fuzz-flocked fifty-dollar bill had cut off the air flow. I decided that a dryer that produced fifty-dollar bills should not be replaced. And that’s when it hit me.

  I retrieved Flynt’s card from my wallet and dialed the number from the phone in the laundry room. Flynt’s voice growled something about “voice mail” and directed me to leave a message “after the beep.”