The Right Wrong Number: An Ed Earl Burch Novel

by Jim Nesbitt

  The call came. Too late — the setup man dead, the quarry on the loose out there in that great big wide-sweeping world where anybody can hide for as long as they want to. Until they get stupid or full of pride or drawn to danger. Or broke and in need of a quick injection of cash. Or grabbed by the need to inflict some painful revenge.

  Crowe wasn’t stupid. And he wasn’t addicted to danger — that deadly sin rode in the soul of his crazy wife. What would bring a man back to the first place anyone would look for him? Three words turned in Louis’ mind. Money. Pride. Revenge.

  He lit up a Kent with an old Ronson Varaflame butane. Silver plated. With a diamond check pattern etched into the sides. New Orleans was oh-for-two; wrong about Yates, unable to deliver Crowe or his wife on a platter.

  And the set-up man was dead — Carlos Benitez, the best independent fence in Houston, an old Crowe associate, the only one canny enough and mercenary enough to move hot goods wearing the greaseball brand. Xed out. Extry dead, as one of Louis’ cracker prison buddies used to say.

  It meant Crowe wasn’t using his old Mexican network; at least he wasn’t using anybody brown known to New Orleans or anybody connected in Houston. And that meant the passive act had to be dropped; Louis knew he had to start making his own moves to find Crowe, the wife and the goods.

  Louis took a deep drag on his Kent. Exhaled smoke. A three-word mantra.

  Money. Pride. Revenge.

  They were no closer to Crowe and getting their hands on the coke, the China white and those diamonds. And whatever else Crowe had skimmed from the boys from New Orleans.

  Turn around the assumptions. Maybe Crowe and his wife aren’t partners. Maybe there was a double-cross. Maybe she’s got her hand on his money. And his balls. Maybe Crowe was more jock than Yuppie. Maybe a dose of macho won’t let him let his wife get away with pulling a deal on him. Maybe he wants some payback along with his money.

  “We gotta do a rethink, guy.”

  “On what?”

  “On why this guy’s back in town and why he isn’t using his old connections.”

  “Why?”

  “He just iced his best shot for moving the goods.”

  “That we know about.”

  “That New Orleans knows about. New Orleans is way behind the curve on this one, Jack. We can’t sit and wait for a phone call. We gotta hit the street, guy, and come up with our own line on Crowe.”

  “What else is New Orleans wrong about?”

  “Question of the day, guy. If they’ve been wrong about who he’s connected with, they may be wrong about everything else. Like being partners with his wife. Like just being some Yuppie ex-jock with a good mind for figures and a taste for small-time larceny.”

  “Never underestimate someone who kills somebody.”

  “Quote of the day, guy. Quote of the day. We been underestimating the shit out of this Crowe. New Orleans, too. Time we quit doin’ that, guy. Gotta start beatin’ our own bushes.”

  “What about this new player?”

  “Cop from Dallas. New Orleans says he’s a nobody.”

  “New Orleans won’t have to face a bullet from this asshole.”

  “I think we’re gonna have to make a couple of calls to the Big D.”

  “I can handle that. Know some good people up there. From the old Campisi outfit.”

  “You do that, guy. And do it quick. I got a guy I gotta see crosstown.”

  “Certain cop friend of ours?”

  Louis smiled around the new Kent on his lip.

  “Could be, guy. Could be.”

  “One question, Louis.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Is New Orleans on the button about anything?”

  “One thing and one thing only.”

  “The wife?”

  “Bingo. We find her, we find him. And we get the goods.”

  “How d’you figger?”

  “He’s here to kill her. After he makes a sale. Business first. Then pleasure.”

  “We play it that way, the goods will be gone.”

  “We get him, we get who he did business with. We also get something much bigger.”

  “And what would that be — a trip to Disneyworld?”

  Louis smiled, stood and shot the cuffs of his pearl gray shirt, the one with the monogram on the pocket and the black bone buttons.

  “A pot of long green, guy. A much bigger pot than New Orleans would ever let us dip our beaks into.”

  FOURTEEN

  Burch woke up and felt her eyes on him, icy and green, like a cougar sizing up a mule deer from a perch in the desert rocks. He groaned. As he did every morning. From the pain of prematurely arthritic knees, an ankle full of bone chips that rattled like a fishing lure, an elbow that occasionally locked up with a wafer of loose cartilage and a wrist that was shattered in a car wreck fifteen years gone and hit him with dull pulses of discomfort that provided a nice backbeat to the sharper notes played by earlier injuries from the gridiron and other youthful obsessions.

  He groaned for another reason — terminal stupidity.

  Louie, that ancient saloon seer, was right. He’d never learn. Show him a good woman and a lady from a lower hell. He’d pick the one who would wreck his life — every time. And he couldn’t blame his dick. Ol’ John Henry wasn’t at fault. No sir. It was a sickness. An addiction to emotional pain. An automatic overdrive on his hormones, an override on his survival instincts. And one day it might just kill his fat ass.

  Maybe today.

  He rolled toward the nightstand and groaned again. A bottle of Maker’s Mark poked its red-waxed neck from underneath the tilted shade of the lamp, a few inches of amber left near the bottom. Next to that, two juice glasses with dregs of whiskey and water that was once ice, the unholstered Colt with its worn bluing and fresh scrapes, an extra magazine of slugs both jacketed and hollow point, a pack of Luckies, his Zippo.

  A crooked white stick to the lips. The snicking sound of metal. Rowel on flint. Flame. Blue smoke deep into the lungs. A lid snapped shut. Another groan.

  “In pain, lover? Got a hangover head?”

  “Still doing a systems check. We did what I assume we did, right?”

  “Umm.”

  “How were we?”

  “I was fabulous. You provided adequate service.”

  “I was a reluctant partner.”

  “You were a drunk lover. But then again, so was I. We used to be at our best that way, remember?”

  “I remember a lot of things about us, Slick.”

  “Don’t ruin the morning, Big Boy.”

  “Didn’t know you were sentimental.”

  “I’m not. I just want to fuck you again. It helps if I’m thinking good thoughts.”

  “Didn’t know that mattered.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  Her fingers were on his cock. It stirred and rose. Her mouth followed. He watched, taking a final drag on the Lucky and tossing it into the thin liquid layer at the bottom of one of the glasses. Her wild curls spilled across his belly.

  He sat up slowly and pulled her toward him. Her long legs slid along his flanks, scissoring him with her knees. His cock slid into her cunt. Seated, she leaned forward and tongued his mouth. He leaned back on the heels of his hands and let her ride.

  “Ahhhh, baby — I missed having you inside me.”

  Burch said nothing. He didn’t dare. He stayed quiet and picked up the pace of his upward thrusts. When something this bad for you feels this good, silence is the only hope for salvation. Like an unspoken prayer from a man doomed to always repeat his mistakes.

  They were at the home of an old friend, a man named Jennings. An ex-Army intelligence officer, one who didn’t live up to the derogatory letter of that old Groucho Marx line. A freelance journalist with work appearing regularly in Esquire, Texas Monthly, Outdoor, Playboy, Field & Stream, American Handgunner and just about any other rag that valued the same manly male myth pumped out by aging Hemingway devotees like McGuane and Harrison. A
sometime security consultant who was still as sharp with a .45 as he was a nine iron.

  In his younger days, when he still had hair and didn’t have a belly that plowed ahead of him like the prow of a broad-beamed icebreaker, Jennings dialed up Charlie on field telephones and dropped true believers from choppers hovering above the Delta.

  Before that, he played icy counter-spook games in Berlin, back when there was a Wall and not long after an American president, soon to be dead, could draw roars of approval for calling himself a pastry instead of what he meant to call himself — a citizen of that divided city. Back when two world views were still locked in a remorseless yet ritualistic struggle, one where brutality and cunning were equally valued. Along with a high church reverence for the perverted rules of the game — a chess game for death artists in priestly raiment.

  Jennings was a man who still loved all the tools of his old trade, electronic or violent, brain-driven or muscle-bound. He still loved to keep a hand in, no matter how small the stakes or large the risk. As long as it didn’t get in the way of working on his short game, hunting for the perfect chicken-fried steak or settling in with his nightly fix of Armagnac and a pricey double corona.

  He still kept a network of nasty friends, inside and outside of the game. Some were cold-eyed muscle. Some were romantics, pretenders and wannabes who never would be. Others could punch up a full dossier with the touch of a button. Or have somebody iced with a coded word. And more than a few were part of the Saigon Mafia, what law-enforcement types referred to as a criminal element well-wormed into the heart of the community of Vietnamese expatriates who live along Bellaire Boulevard in the southwest pocket of the city.

  Bellaire wasn’t Tu Do Street and Houston lacked Saigon’s fetid colonial decadence, but an old ’Nam hand like Jennings could still wheel his way off the 610, find a bowl of tongue-scorching bún bo Hue, a cold bottle of 33 and an old ARVN acquaintance working the shady and lucrative side of life.

  Jennings looked like Friar Tuck, with a fringe beard and a glint of evil merriment in his blue eyes, and could always be counted on to hide the fragile nuggets of his true self in a thick layer of highly believable half-truths, amusing images, bawdy turns of phrase, clever truisms and total fabrications.

  About women. About war. About golf games and family. About whether he was an heir or a po’ boy. About the insignificance of both. About Faustian bouts of drinking and feasting. About long military fasts in the cold or tropic wet. About politicians and saints. Even about death. Delivered with the weary, story-telling touch of a veteran boulevardier. Shuffled and reshuffled, according to audience and need.

  Sometimes Burch would call the bluff. Always between the two of them. Never in front of others. It’s all cover, Jennings would say with a shrug. Except for the stories that appeared under his byline. Those he told straight and well, with the familiar, from-the-shoulder tone of two men taking measure of each other with midnight long past and with deep whiskies in hand. Which was the only other place where he used no cover and stepped into the open in honest, naked friendship.

  Male bonding say the libbers, the sensitive males, the pop psychologists and the psychic emasculators of both sexes, with a dismissive sneer, a shrug of self-mockery or a slight smile of amused contempt. But after Burch’s first divorce, the one that left him gutted and howling in sleepless pain deep into the night, it was Jennings who called him twice a week and listened to him wail in anguish. Not any of his closer acquaintances from the force. Not any of the people with whom he regularly hoisted a glass at Louie’s, male or female.

  Only Jennings. And Louie — but only at closing, when Burch, isolated all night in the smoky crowd by his pain and bitter drunkenness, was still on a stool, still hoisting Maker’s to his lips. Louie’s loyalties came from commerce and saloon camaraderie — a friendship with a regular patron, loyalty to Burch’s contribution to his bottom line. Jennings’ came from only one place.

  They first met in Germany, when Burch was serving with an armored outfit near the Fulda Gap. And again when Burch was a cop in Dallas. Jennings came up to do a piece for Texas Monthly about the son of a prominent investment banker who was garroted in the bathtub by his gay lover, an artist and crystal meth addict who was once the father’s lover as well. Burch had caught the case and chased down the killer in Toronto, slamming him to the floor of an art gallery off of Yonge Street with a forearm shiver that would have made his old line coach proud.

  But he had also managed to piss off the father, a well-connected disciple of that establishment discipline known as the Dallas Way. A suspension. The lover arrested during the course of that suspension. At his own expense. Cold shoulders from his superiors. Extra embarrassment for the father. A scandal aired and a demotion from the Dallas Way hierarchy. Another black mark in Burch’s long skid out of the department. Another angle for Jennings’ story.

  Ironclad loyalty was the coin of Jennings’ friendship, given freely and expected in return. That and a willingness to open a vein for a friend. One overseas phone call from the Racehorse’s office and the three-bedroom condo was Burch’s for the using, overlooking the long green fairway of the seventh hole at Champion’s Golf Club, an old-style duffers-only-no-tennis string of links on the northwest side of town. Within view of the clubhouse that Jack Burke and Jimmy Demaret built. A costly and cushiony clue that one of Jennings’ cover stories might indeed be fact — an heir to the Piggly-Wiggly grocery chain fortune.

  Another clue — a pair of rare Colt Walkers, the massive, black-powdered sidearm of the Texas Rangers, worth as heavy an amount of change as Jennings would ever care to ask. Assuming he ever would. He wouldn’t.

  One phone call also gave Burch some extra muscle — two of Jennings’ security confederates, a slight, bald-headed, lisping man named Carl and a hulking Cuban black named Benito.

  “You got it,” Jennings said, his voice a murmur and a rumble, flowing from the phone, giving everything the tone of a terrible secret, a warning washed in brandy and smoke. “You’ll like the boys, Double E. Just do what they say and take no prisoners.”

  Jennings was in Scotland working a month-long tour of the ancient greens and fairways, wedging side trips to the Côte d’Azur, Paris and Venice between courses. He gave him a fast warning about his client, knowing Burch would hear it, use it but not walk away from the case because of it.

  “I know you’ll be stupid enough to fuck this bitch so I won’t waste much talk on that but you need to know you’re in a much bigger game than she’ll ever tell you. Her old man took something from the ginzos and they don’t take kindly to that. My guess is she’s either a partner with him or has her hands on what he stole.”

  “Hell — we don’t even know if Crowe is still alive.”

  “You don’t. Everybody else seems to know he’s still among us. Cops included. I suggest you catch up fast.”

  “Cops know that crispy critter ain’t Crowe. That don’t make him alive.”

  “You can’t afford to think that way. Assume every player is on the board unless you knock ’em down personal.”

  “So what has a little bird told you the stakes are — money, drugs or what?”

  “Drugs and diamonds is the word. But who gives a fuck? You don’t take from these people unless you take big enough to buy yourself a new life far, far away from them. And in my book, you can’t take enough to do that.”

  “Your advice, counselor?”

  “She’s gonna use you as a shield until she gets what she wants. Then she’s either gonna toss you to whatever wolves are on her heels or dust you like she did before. But know this — you won’t be left standin’ this time. It’ll be terminal.”

  “So I oughta do her before she does me. But take the goods first.”

  “Nossir. What you ought to do is take a long walk clear the fuck away from all this. Real quick. Failing that — find out her game, blow her brains out and leave it all on a silver platter for the ginzos except for a finder’s fee.”

 
“Assuming she’s trying to pull all of this off and isn’t just trying to keep from getting splashed in the fallout. She’s got all manner of people after her who are pissed at Crowe. On both sides of the law.”

  “You tell yourself what you want to. But you’re gettin’ played like a fish again.”

  “Probably so.”

  “Look — don’t pout. All I’m sayin’ is play heads up or take a walk. You got the boys for four days and my place for as long as you want. Just give me a couple of hours to set it up.”

  “Thanks, bud.”

  “Nada y nada. Keep it low.”

  The two bodyguards moved like wraiths through the condo, both wearing Beretta 92s underneath loose-fitting tropical shirts, one always on watch while the other took care of mundane necessities like groceries or laundry. Quiet and unobtrusive. Quick and low-volumed explanations, cloaked in the tones of consultations about maintaining the perimeter, staying off the phone and staying out of sight.

  Sonic sensors on the outside, miniature versions of the devices the Border Patrol uses along America’s no-man’s-land. Motion sensors on the inside. Installed by the owner, a man who loves his toys. With friends who feel the same way. The boys brought cellular phones with scramblers. Night scopes. Detectors for bugs. And a neat little black box that could read whether a window was being beamed with a laser listening device.

  Burch was old fashioned. He drew particular comfort from the boys’ more conventional stores. Scoped Mini-14s, the favored long gun of the Klan and survivalists, stacked in a corner of the living room. Shotguns in the kitchen, the den and each bedroom — Ithaca pumps with extended magazines. Total pros. Made him feel like a lurching amateur. And as safe as a freshly diapered baby.

  Surrounded by all that professional security, Burch felt a surge of confidence. It gave him the energy he needed to work on Savannah the first day they hit the condo, with Carl and Benito gliding through the background, making sure their backs were watched.

  “That husband of yours — alive or dead? Or a little bit of both?”