by Dave Stanton
“That’s right. Just make it quick. The less said the better. Just make your point and let him be. If he asks questions, don’t answer.”
Sheila led us into the building. It was a larger room than I expected, and my eyes took a moment to adjust to the dim lighting. The air was dusty, and the murmur of voices from the day drinkers was barely discernible. At the far end of the bar sat a man with shoulder-length blond hair, a dark shirt with some fancy embroidery, and lizard-skin boots.
Cody and I followed as Sheila approached him. “Hello, Jimmy,” she said. He turned to her and blinked a couple times. Then, his mouth fell open, and his eyes widened. Cody and I leaned on the bar and watched them. “It’s been a long time,” Sheila said.
Jimmy stammered something unintelligible, then managed a weak smile. “What brings you out here, Sheila?” Trying to sound cool, like he wasn’t surprised.
“Let’s go sit, and I’ll tell you.”
They moved to a far table, and Cody and I took a table about fifteen feet away. Jimmy was facing us, and we stared him down as Sheila spoke quietly. When Jimmy responded, he furrowed his brow and kept turning his hands up, then his eyes went round, and he sucked his cheeks in. After ten minutes, Sheila left the table and headed to the lady’s room.
We walked over and sat across from Jimmy.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“We’re bad news for you, that’s who,” Cody said.
“This has got to be some kind of joke, right?” Jimmy said, and raised his highball to his lips, but I slapped the glass out of his hand. It thudded against the wooden floorboards, and I could hear the chatter at the bar grow quiet. “I ain’t laughing,” I said.
“Whoa,” Jimmy said.
“I hope you have the right answers for Sheila,” Cody said.
“Hey, I’m just—”
“But maybe you’ll have to learn the hard way.”
Jimmy swallowed, out of words for the moment.
“Don’t be an asshole all your life,” I said, as Sheila came back to the table.
They talked a few minutes more while we went to the bar to assure the bartender everything was cool. We waited there until Sheila and Jimmy stood and walked toward the front door.
“I’m going to ride with Jimmy,” Sheila said, once we were standing on the sidewalk in front of the bar. “We’ll continue north to Lake Tahoe.”
I squinted into the midafternoon sun and watched Jimmy hand his keys to his stepmom.
“Just a nice, pleasant drive,” Cody said to Jimmy. “We’ll be right behind you.”
Sheila climbed behind the wheel of the Lamborghini. Jimmy gave me a curious look, then got into the passenger seat. It had been fifteen years since he’d seen me last. I’d recognized him—did he recognize me, or had too much booze killed his memory?
Sheila kept the Lamborghini under eighty for the next hour, as we drove along the desert floor under the shadow of granite walls veined with moss and gnarled branches. We passed through the small town of Bishop, climbed out of the valley and into the Sierras, then drove past a sign for Mammoth Mountain Ski Resort. South Lake Tahoe lay three hours ahead.
“Did Sheila give you much background on Jimmy?” I asked Cody, as we tailed the Lamborghini along the increasingly curvy road.
“Enough to know he’s a real loser.”
“You think he’s a bad person?”
“He ain’t a good person, Dirt.”
“Does that give her the right to extort his money?”
“Extort?”
I looked at Cody. “Yeah. That’s what she’s doing, right?”
“Watch the road, would you?” he said, as a big rig came around a corner. “Extortion means she would specifically threaten him. As in, ‘Give me the money or I’ll break your legs.’”
“So, having us rattle him a bit is no issue.”
“Not the way I see it.”
“Do you know what her game is, Cody?”
“Her game? What are you talking about?”
“She’s got to have some angle to convince him to share his winnings. Do you really think Sheila planned on Jimmy handing over a chunk of money just for the asking?”
Cody didn’t reply. I glanced over and saw a flicker of uncertainty on his face.
“She said there’s some people from his past he wants nothing to do with,” Cody said, lighting a cigarette and exhaling the smoke quickly. “She felt her knowledge of, or access to, these people would motivate him.”
“Who are these people?”
“That’s all she told me. She wasn’t specific.”
We drove on and dropped into a forested valley where the road was straight and flat. I didn’t think Cody was hiding anything from me, and I couldn’t really blame him for his lack of insight into Sheila’s plans. I remembered the first night I’d met her. We ended up at my cabin to sign my contract, and she had me panting like a stray dog in heat. And when I dropped her off, most of my questions were still unanswered. But that didn’t mean I would continue to let her draw me into her scheme without knowing what I was in for.
Regardless of my suspicions about Sheila, I was happy Cody was enjoying her sensual charms. At least one of us was. He seemed much happier than I’d seen him since his divorce.
I lit one of Cody’s smokes, and he handed me a beer. “What the hell, old buddy,” I said.
“That’s more like it, Dirt. Whatever happens, happens. I doubt we’ll run into anything we can’t handle.”
We settled in and enjoyed the last couple hours of the drive, reminiscing about old times, times we were drunk, women we’d bedded, and even men we had killed.
22
Garrett Rancour rolled out of bed and brewed a cup of coffee in the little percolator in his room at the Motel 6 on the edge of Carson City. Rancour enjoyed staying at the hotel. It was a nice change from the dingy room in San Jose he’d rented after being released from county lockup. He appreciated getting a break from his whacked-out roommates, who weren’t much of an upgrade from the jailbirds Rancour had bunked with during his fifteen-month jolt. He appreciated the solitude of the hotel, and the freedom it gave him from the constant presence of idiots.
Speaking of idiots, he wondered where Sanzini was. A wide grin split Rancour’s face as he recalled the events of the previous night. Sanzini had gotten his ass kicked twice, first by the bouncer in the cathouse, and then, he’d taken a royal pounding by the hard-case dude out in the parking lot. He had behaved like a moron, and gotten just what he deserved, including the loss of his coat.
Rancour considered what Sanzini would do next. Without Rancour’s help, Sanzini would be clueless as to the whereabouts of Jimmy Homestead. Having taken a serious beating and minus his leather jacket, he would probably plant his dumb ass on his Harley and ride home to his mother’s house to lick his wounds. What else could he do?
With Sanzini out of the way, Rancour could plot his own course of action. What a perfect victim Jimmy Homestead was. Sanzini had said Homestead was a waste case, and Rancour had overheard the whore saying he’d been ripped out of his mind. So, a guy who likes to party and get laid has a pot of money fall into his lap. Well, a fool and his money are soon partying. Isn’t that the old saying? No, a fool and his money are soon parted. That’s what was on the horizon for Jimmy Homestead.
Rancour stuck his wallet, which was down to eighty bucks, in his back pocket and put on Sanzini’s jacket. The morning air was brisk and smelled of diesel. He kick-started his chopped Honda, revved the motor, and wheeled out of the lot toward the center of town. The first chore was to come up with some slab. To get by until he could rob Homestead, he figured he needed at least a grand.
The ideal target would be a place of business with plenty of cash on hand, no security cameras or guards, and minimal traffic. Chain stores typically had well developed anti-theft systems, so Rancour ruled them out. He was looking for a ma-and-pa-style hardware store or restaurant, or maybe even a bar.
If he couldn’t find a suitable mark,
he might consider boosting a car, which was a much easier operation. The problem was converting the car into money. In San Jose, it would be no problem—he knew a couple of chop shops that would pay cash and have the car stripped down to the frame in an hour. But he had no such connections in Carson City.
Rancour began contemplating riding back to San Jose and stealing a car or two. He could then return to the Tahoe area with plenty of dough and track down Homestead without having to sweat going broke. But returning to San Jose might delay or distract him from what he was starting to believe could be something really big. How much money might Homestead have on him at any time? How much cash might he keep at his house? Twenty grand? Fifty grand? More?
He spent the better part of the morning driving around Carson City, casing businesses. By noon, he had migrated away from the main boulevard to an industrial area, where he turned behind a row of warehouses built along a dry creek bed. On the other side of the creek, an empty field stretched about a quarter mile to a solitary white building standing on the edge of a road. A scattering of cars surrounded the building.
Rancour rode away from the warehouses and made his way to the white structure. It was an Italian restaurant, the parking lot half full with the Thursday lunch crowd. Across the road, there was perhaps another quarter mile of open field leading to a residential neighborhood.
Rancour parked at the restaurant. As he approached the entrance, a group of businessmen walked out, past a sign near the front door listing hours as 11:00 A.M. to 11:00 P.M. daily. He went into the place, where it was dark and ritzy in an old-fashioned way, like maybe it was a hangout for wealthy retirees. Rancour became immediately aware his clothes would draw attention to him. He approached a counter where pies and cakes were displayed. Behind a cash register on the counter sat a short, fat woman with a mustache an adolescent boy might be proud of. A waitress, middle-aged and wearing her hair in a bun, walked to the counter and handed the fat woman a slip of paper and some twenty-dollar bills.
“Could I look at a menu?” Rancour asked the waitress. She handed him one and hurried away toward the dining room.
Rancour left quickly. He drove down a small street in the direction of some cookie-cutter houses, parked under a tree, and checked out the menu. The dinner entrees were expensive, and there were over a hundred different wines listed.
He rode off and familiarized himself with the street layout surrounding the restaurant, then went back to the warehouses and timed how long it would take him to get to the freeway heading to Reno. He found an on-ramp five minutes away.
After filling his tank, he stopped at a sporting goods store and spent thirty dollars on a pellet gun that resembled a semiautomatic pistol. At a drug store, he bought a pair of flesh-colored pantyhose.
When the sun went down, he saw there was no moon—a good omen. He waited at his hotel room until nine o’clock, then rode back to the restaurant. A small cluster of Joshua trees stood in the field across from the joint, on the opposite side of the highway. Rancour killed his headlight and turned off the road. It was almost pitch black, and he had to ride very slowly. He reached the trees and waited, watching the parking lot grow less crowded. At ten o’clock, he counted twenty cars remaining. Probably ten belonged to employees, he figured.
Rancour pushed his Honda out of the desert scrub and rode to the warehouse complex from where he’d originally spotted the restaurant. The area was dark and deserted. He parked his bike behind a garbage bin, opened the pack secured to the sissy bar, and pulled out the pellet gun and panty hose.
It wasn’t quite ten-thirty when he climbed out of the creek bed and walked across the field. There were fewer parked cars now. He pulled the stocking over his face and stuck the pellet gun in the back of his pants. Staying in the shadows, he watched a man and woman walk out from the main entrance and drive away. Then, he ran through the flood of lights in the parking lot and burst through the front doors.
The short, fat woman working the cash register earlier in the day was still there. She stared at Rancour, her eyes like black marbles pressed into a ball of dough. No one else was around.
Rancour leaned over the counter and aimed the gun at her ear. “Open the register and give me the money. Do it now.”
She blinked and locked her eyes on him, her face void of emotion.
“Are you fucking deaf?” Rancour hissed. “Give me the money, or I’ll blow your fat face all over the wall.”
“No,” she said.
Rancour braced himself with his left hand and swung his legs up and over the counter. The woman was perched on a padded barstool. Rancour shoved the pellet gun into one of her round eyes. “Last chance. Open it.”
Her pudgy finger pushed a button and the door to the cash register clicked open. Rancour hit her across the base of the skull with the butt of the gun, and she fell forward. He pushed her back and began stuffing bills into a plastic bag he pulled from his pocket. When the register was empty, he walked out from behind the counter and saw a man coming around the corner. The man wore a black vest and a white shirt. He was six feet, or taller. Flat waist and wide shoulders. Curly dark hair. Maybe thirty. “Face down on the floor,” Rancour said, aiming the gun at his chest.
“You bad thief,” the man said in a thick accent. But he moved back a step.
Rancour bolted out the door, and a few seconds later, he was sprinting across the field, high-stepping over the terrain, ripping the stocking from his head. He heard a shouted curse, looked back, and saw the man was chasing him.
It was almost impossible to see in the middle of the black field. Rancour tripped on a rock and shoulder rolled, driving his knuckles into the dirt, still clenching the plastic bag full of cash. He came up on his feet and ran to the edge of the creek bed and slid to the bottom. He leaned tight against the wall and counted to five, trying to catch his breath.
The pursuer came bounding over the edge, his legs running in the void. He hit the ground and tumbled onto his side with a snort. Rancour ran up and shot him point blank in the face. The gun misfired after two shots. The man reached out and tried to trip him up, but Rancour danced away, then reared back and kicked him flush in the ear with his steel-toed boot. He kicked him once more just to make sure, then scrambled up the other side of the dirt bank and ran to his motorcycle.
He shoved the bills into the zippered compartment of his pack, then pulled off his sweat-soaked gray T-shirt. He wiped down the pellet gun, put it in the plastic bag, tied it shut and threw it in the dumpster next to his bike. Then he yanked a black shirt over his head, put on Sanzini’s coat, and, five minutes later, was heading north on the freeway, listening as sirens grew dim in the background.
23
Sheila pumped the clutch and ground the gear shift into third. The Lamborghini jerked ahead. She eased off the gas pedal, then accelerated again.
“Could you take it easy, please?” Jimmy said.
Sheila grimaced and tried to get comfortable in the low, wraparound seat. “Would you light me a cigarette?”
“No smoking in my car,” Jimmy said. “Besides, you need to keep both hands on the wheel.”
“I’d let you drive, but I think you might just be dumb enough to try to lose those guys.”
Jimmy looked at his stepmother. She was just as slinky as he remembered. He even remembered her perfume, and it made him think of sex.
“I’m still trying to make sense of your story,” he said.
“It’s not a story, Jimmy. It’s the truth. And my involvement in this is coming to an end quickly. How it ends for you depends on what you do.”
When Sheila appeared at the bar, Jimmy had been paralyzed by a slew of colliding thoughts. He was basically in the middle of nowhere, and out of thin air, Sheila walked in, a ghost from fifteen years past. It had been that long since he’d seen her, but he recognized her in an instant. He actually thought for a second she may have been interested in a repeat of their one-nighter, which happened when she was in the process of divorcing his fathe
r. But Jimmy was smart enough to realize Sheila had seduced him mainly for the purpose of tormenting John Homestead. Christ, it was sordid, even for Jimmy. It would have been bad if it had just been a quick screw, but Sheila had worked the seventeen-year-old Jimmy over for three lustful hours. How can you ever forget something like that?
What would it be like to do her now? She still exuded the same steamy sensuality Jimmy remembered from when he was a teenager. He thought back to that night with her, how she loved it from behind, panting and crying out when she came. He began to get hard. He could probably offer her a few grand, and she’d pull over at the nearest hotel.
Sheila glanced over at Jimmy’s leering expression. “You need to think about staying alive, not getting laid,” she said, like she was reading his mind.
“Tell me again why someone would want to kill me,” Jimmy said.
“It started with the ounce of coke you stole.”
It happened three years ago, when Jimmy was passing through the Bay Area. He had intended to stay only until he came up with enough scratch to make it to Redding, where he heard a lumberyard was looking to hire a hundred men. He’d landed in San Jose and spent the night in a park, and worked at a temporary agency for a few days, loading trucks. They assigned him a job working with another man, filling a freezer trailer with hundred-pound boxes of beef. The man had arms as thick as Jimmy’s legs and threw the heavy boxes around with ease. His name was Tony Sanzini.
“This is a cake walk,” Sanzini had said. “I could do this all day and not break a sweat.” He pointed across the lot to a construction yard where teams of men were framing an office complex. “You see those dudes? I guarantee you, I could kick the ass of any two of them at a time.”
When they broke for lunch, Sanzini stood on the shipping dock, talking as he ate. “I’ll share something with you because it looks like you could use a little advice. It takes more than strength and fighting skills to get anywhere. Being able to whip ass comes in handy, but brains are more important.”