by Dick Denny
“I’m sorry, but coming up I learned a lot of stuff but never this, okay?” She sounded a galvanization of annoyed and embarrassed and it was adorable.
“So they didn’t teach you to drive at Secret Society Ninja School?” I didn’t mean to, but when I said it out loud I ended up laughing even more.
“I’m sorry,” she shot back at me. “Do you know the arts of misdirection, stealth, and precision assassination?”
“No.” I smirked a big annoying smirk. “But I can drive stick-shift.”
We pulled to a stop twenty feet short of the red light. “Hardy har,” she mock-laughed.
“You gotta pull up. There’s a sensor, and if it doesn’t get the car that light’s just going to be red forever.”
She shot me a dirty look like I was messing with her. But slowly she allowed the car to creep forward closer to the line. She looked even more annoyed when the light went green.
I smile. “For a virgin, you’re doing great.”
“Shut up. Don’t distract me.”
“That why you don’t have the radio on?”
Her silence spoke volumes.
“Would you rather I drive?” I asked.
“Yes.” The hesitation she had given her answer was the same as a teen boy answering Want Seven Minutes in Heaven with the Playmate of the Year?
“Well,” I thought about it for a minute. “Tough, you’re doing fine.”
“Bastard.” She was starting to smile.
“Naw, they may have turned out to be pieces of shit but they were married.”
“Go to hell.” You could tell she was mad at herself for not hiding the smile on her lips.
“Sweetie, I’m pretty sure that ticket got bought a long time ago.”
At that, she couldn’t hold back the laugh she was denying anymore. To her credit, she was keeping the Charger between the lines. Everything she was doing was right, just not necessarily skillful or quick.
“So,” I said cautiously, knowing the next thing out of my mouth could probably get me in trouble. “Any of the girls you work with at Sharky’s working girls?”
“Working girls?” she asked, coyly curious.
“Yeah, you know.”
“I do.” She smiled sweetly stopping at the next red light that had caught us. “But I’d rather you have to elaborate.”
“Hookers.”
She feigned shock and a mock Southern belle accent. “Now, Mr. Decker, why-so-ever would you be looking for a lady of ill repute? That’s as shocking as the preacher serving whiskey during communion at a special service.” She had pronounced “ever” as ehv-ah, said “lady” with at least three As, and “communion” as ka-mu-union. She continued in the same accent. “I won’t think about it today, I’ll think about it tomorrow”—pronounced to-mah-row but that was the point I interrupted her.
“Okay, Scarlett O’Hara, enjoying that?”
She grinned. “Immensely.”
“Seriously, though, any of the girls from work have a side gig?”
She nodded and, thank God, her voice went back to normal. “A couple, yeah.”
“Independent or do they have representation?”
“Representation?” She shot me a sideways glance.
I deserved it for trying to pretty up a dirty thing. “A pimp?”
She shook her head. “No, most of them just get cash for Johns they meet at work.”
“That’s what I reckoned.” I nodded, a bit let down.
“Why?” she asked curiously.
“I put a feeler out on the pimp network about Uriel. I was hoping to cast a wider net.”
Gretchen pulled onto Gavin Street, but we were still plenty of blocks from the building. We’d have been there ten minutes ago had I been driving. “Tell me that’s not a real name for a thing,” she said as she eased through the turn.
“What?”
“The pimp network?” Her eyebrows shot sky-high as she said it.
I shrugged. “I dunno. Sounds official though, doesn’t it?”
She smiled. “It really does. Almost like you didn’t make it up.”
“Well, I didn’t make it up,” I answered with a defensive smile.
“Bull,” she retorted, laughing.
“Jammer made it up,” I corrected her.
She nodded. “Okay, that makes sense. So, you’ve been asking about Uriel on the Pimp Network?”
“Yeah, she’s been reconning parks. So, I wanna know if the working girls have noticed anything,” I answered with a yawn. I was getting tired.
“That’s good thinking,” Gretchen admitted, then gave me a smile.
“Well, you don’t have to sound so fucking surprised.” I laughed.
She laughed. “Sorry.”
“My shit always works sometimes.” I stuck my tongue out.
Gretchen stopped the car and looked at me with her jaw almost on her chest. “That’s why you got the Mike Lowery Ferrari!”
“Huh?”
She’d just tossed a curveball and instead of me swinging at it, it’d beaned me.
“‘My shit always works sometimes’. That’s literally a Will Smith line from Bad Boys—verbatim.”
I thought about it for a second. “Yeah, but in Bad Boys he drove a Porsche. He didn’t get the Ferrari until Bad Boys II.”
She bit the corner of her lip. “That’s true.” She slowly got the car going again.
“The thing I’ve been chewing on,” I said chuckling as I watched her extreme concentration, “is if Gabrielle was going to give me a Ferrari, why the Bad Boys II Ferrari and not Robin One?”
“You know,” she admitted, “on the surface, Robin One makes more sense, but I get why she didn’t.” We stopped at a yellow light that a more experienced driver would have ran. “You can’t grow the mustache.”
I shot her a wounded and dirty look. “I can grow a damned mustache.”
She smiled consolingly. “Yes, you can grow a ‘stache, but not the Selleck Stache.”
I gave it a ponder for a moment. “That guy is fucking blessed by the gods of righteous facial hair.”
“Yep, the other thing is you wear suits all the time. Magnum never wore a suit unless he had to for a gig.” She gestured at my tieless suit and Chucks. “This is just a life choice you’ve made.”
“Hey!” I glanced at myself. The Armani suits Lucifer had hooked me up with were far superior to the cheap things I’d worn when I’d first met Gretchen. “A man has to have standards.”
“Some men have standards.” She batted her lashes at me. “You have a uniform.”
I laughed because not laughing would have hurt. The truth hurts. Bullets hurt worse, but that was kind of an apples-to-oranges scenario.
We got back to the office and it took twelve minutes and forty-one seconds for Gretchen to park the Charger—not that I timed it or anything. I totally timed it. But she managed to get the muscle car into the spot without hitting the Ferrari.
We took the stairs up and saw the office lights on through the powdered glass door. I opened the door with the sawed-off double-barrel in my right hand. The look in Mary Jo’s eyes was frightened but controlled. Yuri looked like he was spoiling for a fight; my hope was it was with someone other than me. Even with the Wrath of God, I was pretty sure that Russian bastard could take me.
I saw Yuri’s eyes dart to the boomstick, so I asked with confident nonchalance. “So, what do I owe ya for this?” I jiggled it with my hand to draw attention to it.
Yuri stomped to me with an angry intensity and then wrapped his arms around me pulling me into a bear hug. Mary Jo, not wanting to be left out, grabbed Gretchen. They squeezed each of us, and then they switched. After, there was a flurry of conversation that broke down into one statement and five questions. We called the cops. Who was that? What the hell is going on? How the hell did you survive that? What do you need us to do? And lastly, and also my favorite, the fuck?
For an instant, I turned into Inigo Montoya. “Let me explain. No, we don’t h
ave time. Let me sum up.” I went on to give them the short and skinny on the situation. World was ending, probably. As fucked up as it was, Yuri didn’t really question it, God love that Russian bastard.
Mary Jo sat in one of the office chairs with her jaw dropped like she was doing a nutcracker impression. Yuri just nodded and when I was through asked the question proving what kind of grand bastard he was at his core. “I can get Draganov. When you need Yuri?”
I couldn’t help but smile. I saw Gretchen wipe the corner of her eyes but obviously, she wasn’t crying…well, then again, she was definitely crying.
“I’ll let you know when I need it, Yuri.”
I poured drinks and we finished them just about the time Mary Jo’s phone dinged with a text. The Uber she sent for was there, and her sister was expecting them.
At the door Yuri held out Jammer’s Kimber 1911.
“You keep it, Yuri, just to be safe,” I assured him with a wave of my hand.
He adamantly shook the pistol then opened his jacket revealing a brace of Makarov pistols. “Yuri safe.”
I took Jammer’s pistol then shifted it to my left hand so Yuri and I could shake. Mary Jo and Gretchen hugged again. They left without another word, because really what was there to say? I shut the door after they’d headed down the stairwell. Then I wrapped my arms around Gretchen and held her there for a moment.
“What now?” she asked quietly into my suit jacket.
I glanced out the window and could see the horizon getting lighter; it’d be daylight soon enough.
“Let’s try to get some sleep. See if shit gets clearer after we get some rest.”
She nodded and we headed back.
It felt like my socks peeled off my feet instead of pulled. I got my shirt off and accepted that my Old Spice deodorant needed a new liberal application, but I said fuck it and would try to remember when I put a shirt back on. I hung my underarm rig off the corner of the headboard and put my 1911 under the pillow as I slid into bed. The sheets were deliciously cool and Gretchen was warm. It felt so good spooning up behind her it had to be wrong, because right never felt that good.
I shut my eyes and instantly drifted off. It was the bliss brought on by exhaustion or would have been had it not been for the knocking on the goddamned outer office door.
“Not it,” Gretchen whispered, and I didn’t have to look to tell she had her finger pressed to the tip of her nose.
I rolled away from her and kicked my legs off the bed. I looked at the clock and realized I’d been in bed for a total of four minutes. I pulled on my pants and tugged a T-shirt over my head as I stumbled toward the door, 1911 gripped reflexively in my dick-beater. I yawned as I stepped into the outer office. I could see the silhouette of a person banging on the wood door as opposed to the door’s powdered glass window. There was a courtesy to that.
I banged my knee on the corner of Agnes’s desk and hopped on one foot to the door where I unlocked it. I thumbed back the hammer of my pistol, holding it behind my thigh, and pulled the door open.
There stood Switch, in a blue hospital gown with yellow ducks, and with an annoyed look on his face. “The hell, man?”
Chapter Seventeen
“The Hell, Man?”
“The Boys Are Back in Town” Thin Lizzy
I don’t think it would shock anyone to hear that I asked literally the first thing that popped in my head: “What the fuck are you wearing?”
Switch was an early- to mid-fifties subcontinental guy with plenty of gray in his righteous beard. But he stood there in a light blue long shirt-looking thing with off-red roses on it. He had red socks on his feet with yellow grippy paws coming up the sides, so I assumed they covered the bottom.
My second thought was I wanted a pair of those socks because the tile floor of the office was cold and when I got up in the middle of the night to use the can I constantly had to remind myself that I was too much a traditional man for slippers. Those socks would be perfect.
“I just got out of the hospital.” He turned and made it painfully obvious that that wasn’t a long shirt he was wearing a barely tied hospital gown.
“Well, fuck, man, come on in.” I stood to the side and held the door. From the back I heard Gretchen stirring. Either we’d woken her up or she’d not fallen asleep either. “Do you want some other clothes or anything?”
“A drink.” He was adamant about that. “You’re taller and skinnier than me. None of your shit is gonna fit.”
I pulled the Macallan out of the drawer and splashed some into a glass that I hadn’t cleaned from earlier, but there wasn’t lipstick on it so I handed it to Switch. He took it and slammed it back like Jäger at a frat party.
Gretchen ran out of the back in shorts and a T-shirt and hugged herself into Switch’s side. “It’s so good to see you.”
He smiled at her. “Well, you and Megatron have been visiting.” He pointed an accusatory finger at me. “But that son of a bitch never visited once.”
I almost corrected him son of a demon, but son of a bitch was probably just as accurate, depending on what metric you were measuring with.
“Hey,” I knew it was probably pointless to defend myself, but Mickey would always tell Rocky to keep his mitts up. “I fucking hate it when I’m laid up and people pop around. If I’m laid out I’d RATHER be left the fuck alone. Do unto others, cock bag.”
Switch set the glass down and Gretchen extricated herself from the grasp she had held him. “You could have snuck me a fucking burger.” Switch still sounded surly, but he didn’t argue my point so I took that as a little victory.
“What if I had a box of some of Jammer’s shit? Would you wear any of that?”
Switch helped himself to another splash of Scotch and I went in the back, coming back with a printer paper box with the word “Jammer” scrawled across the side in black marker and an inarticulate hand. I set it on Agnes’s desk and Switch flipped the top off and started rummaging through its contents. He came up with a pair of olive drab cargo pants that were cut off into frayed knee-length shorts. He bent and started tugging them up his legs right there in the office, but luckily at the angle we were standing, Gretchen and I were spared a shocking view by the gown, box, and desk combined. He then pulled off the gown and pulled on the black Han Shot First T-shirt that was iconic Jammer.
“I think some shoes are in there,” Gretchen offered helpfully.
Switch shook his head. “Do I want the crazy foot funk that Jammer, flat-footed bastard that he was, had? No, thanks.” Yet there was a pain in his voice. Switch missed Jammer almost as much as I did. “Plus, there’s a pair of good boots in my truck.” He paused. “Where is my truck?”
“We put it in storage,” Gretchen assured him. “We even made sure the storage place got paid, too. That way your truck didn’t end up on Storage Wars, or some knock-off thereof.”
Switch paused and shot a wary glance at Gretchen. “Did you really just say ‘thereof?’”
She nodded enthusiastically.
“What the hell?” Switch sighed.
“What?” My lips turned up into what I knew was an annoying smile. “Just because her lexicon ranges beyond the pale of the common vernacular isn’t a sin worthy of chastisement or further derision.”
Gretchen beamed; Switch chuckled and shook his head. “You can go to hell, Decker.”
I shrugged. “Sooner or later.”
“So what’s the plan?” Switch asked as he plopped in Agnes’s seat.
“Well, first,” I asked, “how the fuck did you get out of the hospital? Last I checked you were laid up with fuck-all wrong with you.”
He scratched his beard. “I’ll be honest, I don’t know. One second I was lying there, the next I felt fine. All the IV catheters were out and, I mean, you can’t even tell where they were.”
“Like you re-spawned in a video game?” Gretchen asked with an insane glee in her eyes as she leaned her elbows on the desk.
Switch and I glanced at her. “O
kay,” I said cautiously. “That’s the winner of the Nerdiest Thing You’ve Ever Said Award.”
Switch nodded in agreement. “That made me want to break your glasses and take your lunch money.”
“I don’t wear glasses,” Gretchen reassured us. That made me picture her wearing glasses. Imagining a sexy librarian look. That worked. There was a quasi-long pause, then she asked, “You’re picturing me wearing glasses, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said honestly. Switch shrugged.
“And?” she asked coyly.
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t kick ya outta bed for eating crackers.”
Switch nodded.
Gretchen laughed.
“Well,” I said putting the Macallan bottle back in the drawer—I knew if I didn’t we’d end up getting drunk and I had a feeling in the back of my mind that being sloshed wouldn’t help things later in the day. I’ve not learned a lot in life, but I’d learned to trust my gut…“looks like Gabrielle kept her end of shit.”
Switch looked confused.
Gretchen calmly and with a far more rational tone that I think any of our lives deserved explained, “Nick did a job for the archangel Gabrielle and the deal was she got you fixed up.” She then turned her shining eyes to me. “Want to give him his present?”
Switch glanced at us suspiciously at that. But I got up and went to the back, coming back with a case larger than a lunch box but smaller than a briefcase. He slowly opened it like he expected to get glitter bombed; I couldn’t blame him for it because the second I’d thought of it I’d wished I’d done it.
Inside the case lay a Glock 19 Gen 3; it had been on sale. Modified with a lighter trigger, a flared mag well, and tritium night sights. Next to the 19 was a Glock 43, single-stack subcompact pistol. Both had two magazines and Kydex holsters for all; the 19 on his hip and the 43 in an ankle rig.
“We tossed your Glock 17 in the river after the shootout because, you know, it’d been in a shoot out,” Gretchen explained as Switch pulled back the slide on the 19. “But we owed ya, so Merry Christmas, Happy Chauncha, Groovy Kwanza, Happy No Special Day Because You’re Jehovah’s Witness.”