The Right Wrong Number: An Ed Earl Burch Novel

by Jim Nesbitt

  “No. Helped Burch do a Nexus check. On the husband. That’s it.”

  “Friends of ours think different. They think you and Burch are helping the little missus. They see you as the guy who helped the missus crack into a computer and grab somethin’ that didn’t belong to her.”

  Hand up, palm out. Pain wave recedes. Brief return of the scowling focus of Krukovitch’s barroom debating form.

  “That doesn’t make any sense. I’m Burch’s friend, not hers. She’s bad news for him or anybody. Even me. You guys are proof of that. I’m not even involved in this deal and I’m still getting my ass kicked by pros. Burch is my friend but he’s on his own with this one. I told him that before he left.”

  A look passes between the hired muscle.

  A shrug from the thin black man.

  “Man makes sense. You know her rep.”

  A roll of the eyes from the wrestler. A look of expectation from Krukovitch — the nervous high school rhetoric ace waiting on approval from the head master.

  “No sale, Jack.”

  A fist to the stomach. Another body fold. More bile on the floor and any shoe leather that gets in the way. Blackout on the edges of sight. The body jerks upward, feet leaving the floor. Hard hands vice each armpit, leveraging the lift, leaving a swelling and bloody face dangling inches from the wrestler’s upturned mug.

  “I think you’re holdin’ out on us. Now listen — I’m not nice like my friend. I’d just as soon snap your neck as keep talkin’ to you. But my friend, he’s cultured, he’s refined. He believes in keeping the channels of diplomacy open. Me — talk’s cheap and you don’t have enough money for my time. Myself — I see you as helpin’ your buddy and that bitch get their hands on somethin’ that belongs to some people who want it back.”

  A shake of the head.

  “I’m tired of dealin’ with you.”

  Feet slap-slam to the floor. Legs buckle. Body spins to the pull of the wrestler’s right arm. Bloody and pointed chin in a massive hand. Quick twist to the right, head snapping beyond ninety degrees. A loud pop of the neck.

  Body slides to the floor, legs and arms jerking, eyes sightless and bulging. Strong smells — urine and feces — float upward.

  “Christ, I hate this part — that stink.”

  “Man, I can’t believe you. You fuckin’ waste the guy just when we get him talkin’. Then you complain about the odor. Make up your mind — you dainty or you a stone cold killer?”

  “Try me an’ see, Jim.”

  “Ain’t no Jim here, muthafucka. Just a stupid ass usin’ his muscle when finesse was workin’.

  “Wastin’ our time, Jack. He wasn’t gonna talk. He was stallin’.”

  “You wrong, man. Fucker wasn’t in on it. I could feel it. We had him dancin’ just right between sugar and the stick. And you break his neck for nothin’. Not what a pro would do.”

  “Shut the fuck up and grab that box of his. We gotta split.”

  “What we need this for? We know he wasn’t in on it.”

  “No, we don’t know. We’re muscle. We do as we’re told. We get his laptop. We already got his files and computer from home. We give it to Ivan the Brain and he tells our people whether our friend here was doin’ what we know he was.”

  “Wastin’ him was doin’ what we told to do?”

  “Hey — they said leave a callin’ card.”

  “Messin’ him up did that.”

  “I gotta live in this town. You don’t. Can’t afford to have somebody pointing a finger at me.”

  “You keep shit like this up and you won’t be livin’ here long. You won’t be livin’ at all.”

  “Shut the fuck up an’ get moving.”

  SIXTEEN

  Burch elbowed his way through the river of people flowing up and down the main concourse of the Astrodome, the harsh overhead lights flashing off the clothes and jewelry of a crowd wading deep in full-blown rodeo chic

  Earrings dangled under sprayed-stiff piles of Big Hair, necklaces of turquoise or onyx or carnelian nestled in deep cleavage, coin-sized conchos on belts cinched above the packed hips of tight Wranglers, pearl speed snaps flashed on shirts with flames blooming across the chest or aqua-on-purple-on-black Aztec symbols only a bubba could love. Golden blouses with ruffles and shoulder cutouts shimmered in harsh fluorescent light, plate-sized buckles rode above the crotch of men both beer-bellied and whippet thin, silvery bands accented black bullrider hats riding low across eyes challenging, drunk, happy, pissed-off, wary and sometimes all of the above.

  There was the soft luster of buffed animal skin. Cowhide and snake, ostrich and kangaroo. Boots, vests and jackets fringed or vented. No glow from Burch’s scuffed ensemble — snakeskin boots with small tears marring the dull reptile pattern, a well-worn leather blazer that used to be jet black, but was now striated with brown-edged cracks. It used to have a full complement of buttons but was still full cut enough to cover a Colt holstered in a shoulder rig. Too hot for the weather, too shabby for the company but the best he could do now that his Tito-era linen jacket was ripped beyond repair.

  Tito’s dead and so’s his country. There ain’t no Yugo in the Yugo anymore — damn good start to a honky-tonk tune.

  Yessir, punch it up on the ol’ jukebox. A tune with an international conscience, complete with pedal steels and twin fiddles backing up words about a country shattered by ethnic hatreds and ancient religious conflicts and that everlasting lust men have for killing each other. A real weeper in two-four time. A timeless classic right up there with “Faded Love.”

  And the Yugo, that car without a country — lemme tell ya friend, that’s just a bad automotive mistake most people would rather forget.

  Dead dictators, Balkan wars, Communist clunkers and dreams of jukebox glory. Burch shook this line of thought out of his head as he navigated, one hand gently parting the wave of people, tapping a shoulder or cupping a strange arm, the other holding a warm Frito pie, a greasy Texana marvel of fairgrounds, high school football games and rodeo arenas, second only to the corny dog in health-threatening tastiness.

  A simple delicacy — open a bag of Fritos, from the side, not the top. Only Fritos would do. No substitutes, nothing by Golden Flake. And the thin chips only, not the wide ones made to scoop bean dip. Ladle a couple of dollops of chili into the bag. Homemade was best, Wolf Brand if it had to be canned. Never Hormel or Dinty Moore. Deadly in salt and fat content — nothing but gristle, lard and a little corn meal. Grab a spoon and dig in. Good and good for you. Yew bet.

  Burch popped out on the far side of the flow and headed for a beam in the hallway wall, a niche where he could lean a shoulder, munch his goodies and watch what needed watching. A cold Coke would be nice. An icy Pearl would be better. Burch had neither.

  From his post, he had a clear view of a concession stand about twenty yards down on the opposite side of the crowded concourse. Two long tables covered in heavy red cloth patterned with scattered prints of horseshoes, bucking broncs, snorting bulls and lean cowboys. Folded T-shirts and stacks of gimme caps lined the tabletop. A tall hinged exhibit rack loomed behind the table, draped with caps, hangered T-shirts and cheap straw cowboy hats.

  Two Vietnamese girls and an older woman waited on customers. A Vietnamese man, rail thin and weathered with a jet-black razor-cut pompadour and half-moon spectacles, sat to the side closest to Burch in a folding metal chair, his face in three-quarters profile to Burch’s line of sight, pointed the opposite way, eyes down, reading a newspaper.

  The man matched Jennings’ description. A sign above the souvenirs gave final confirmation, Vu Nguyen Thanh Enterprises. All Burch had to do was watch, hope the man kept reading his paper and pray one thing happened and another didn’t — Crowe showed up but didn’t see Burch before Burch spotted him.

  The question of why Crowe would run the deadly risk of returning to Houston, where too many players serious and small wanted him dead, nagged at Burch until he kicked it around with Jennings. The semi-retired spook ha
d a ready answer — Savannah’s electronic larceny wrecked Crowe’s pipeline of long green. He was on the run and needed a quick injection of cash from product cached in Houston and, save for those icy diamonds, not that easy to transport.

  Crowe also needed new buyers, players who weren’t tied to New Orleans or the Mexican cartels and weren’t dancing in the conga line of killers who wanted to snuff out his candle. Vu Nguyen Thanh fit the bill. Jennings knew Thanh in South Vietnam as a pilot who flew ground support missions in rugged Able Dog Skyraiders and rose through the ranks to become a trusted hatchet man for the cowboy flyboy who served as premier and vice president of the doomed republic, Nguyen Cao Ky.

  Like most ex-pat Vietnamese gangsters, Thanh was fiercely unaffiliated with anybody but his own kind. He also saw himself as a patriot and serious businessman, not a racketeer.

  Jennings’ take:

  Thanh thinks he’s a goddam Swiss banker, open to doing business with anybody but the fuckin’ Chinese — a long history of bad blood between the Chinks and the Viets. Hate each other long time. Don’t let that banker shit fool you, son. Thanh’s a killer, likes to use a blade. Turning your back on him will get you dead, muy pronto.

  Burch thought there was another reason for Crowe’s risky return to Houston — pride. It was the pure arrogance of an ex-jock who wanted to impose his talented will on his opponents one more time by suddenly shifting course and scoring on a broken-field run. Throw in the blind conceit of a man who always thought he was the smartest guy in the room because he usually was. Crowe came back to Houston just to prove he could.

  That left one more question Burch didn’t need help from Jennings to answer — why take a run at Crowe? Because the arrogant Jason Willard Crowe was exposed and vulnerable. Because it offered another chance to grab up more of Crowe’s cash. And it offered another opportunity to wreck Crowe’s money pipeline, leaving him weak and wide open to the killers on his trail and unable to come after Burch and his feckless client and lover. Jennings would call that “neutralizing the threat by proxy” and pat him on the back with a chuckle.

  Standing at the edge of the concourse, Burch felt slightly naked and exposed. One-man stakeouts — the textbooks pegged them as extremely difficult to maintain. Too easy to be spotted, too many exits and options to cover, too little time to stay in one place before you become as obvious as a dog turd floating in a rich man’s swimming pool.

  The smell of the chili took his mind off these tactical troubles. He spooned up a Frito-studded lump of reddish-brown goo, triggering instant salivation at the anticipation of another bite. Two, then three followed. Always the total pro, Burch kept his mouth happy and his eyes on the subject. His brain noting the number of pages the man carefully turned and smoothed –- five — and the taste and texture of each bite — crunchy grease with a slight backbite of dry fire that held the promise of later returns elsewhere in his digestive pipeline.

  He finished the Frito pie and belched. He checked his watch — thirty minutes until the Grand Entry of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, a youngster on the rodeo circuit compared to granddaddies like Cheyenne and Calgary, but a big-money event that cowboys clawed each other up to enter. A hot ride here could earn a cowboy ten or twenty large and mean the difference between breaking even on a year of driving and flying to 150 rodeos around the country and putting some money in the bank for that dream ranch.

  Thirty minutes until the crowd in the concourse started heading toward their seats, thinning the thick cover between him and Thanh. Burch was in a good spot for a man eating a snack — a ledge with napkin holders, condiments and the predictable number of crushed cups and crumpled wrappers started five feet from where he stood and ran the twenty feet between him and the snack stand opposite Thanh’s souvenir operation, an overflowing trash can was between him and the ledge. But when the crowd disappeared, he would have to move.

  The thin and leathery Mr. Thanh kept reading. A large man with the shoulders of a linebacker and the up-on-the-balls-of-the-feet stride of a third baseman passed by the stand, his back to Burch. Closer to Burch, a woman with shoulder-length red hair, a “Luv ya Blue” t-shirt from the Oilers’ glory days, skin full of freckles and the carriage and bearing of an Afghan hound, brought her baby carriage to a sudden halt, causing an instant diversion in the hallway’s current of humanity, a change in stasis accompanied by curses, collisions, spilled beer and some deft sidestepping.

  The baby was howling, maybe from hunger, maybe from a damp diaper or lack of sleep or the fear of being crushed by a crowd of duded up strangers. Burch couldn’t tell, the mother didn’t seem to know and the baby couldn’t say. The mother seemed flustered. Instead of steering the carriage to the side of the hallway, where she could tend to her child and not be jostled by the traffic, she dropped her rose-colored quilt bag of baby supplies and her brown leather shoulder bag with the nickeled sliver conchos and long fringes right where she stood.

  She bent over her child, unsnapping a powder blue jumper, pulling the top of the diaper forward and leaning in to do a quick nasal inspection. She grimaced, shook her head then reached into the quilt bag for a fresh diaper.

  Burch managed to keep most of his attention focused on Thanh, still reading his newspaper. The sports section now, keeping him just as unaware as the mother doing her diaper drill ten feet away.

  Thanh folded the paper, then pointed to the tall stacks of T-shirts, issuing quick orders to the women working the stand — quietly, while remaining in his seat, calmly puffing a cigarillo stuck on the end of an ebonite holder with a thin gold band.

  Burch cursed himself silently for letting his attention stray. He never saw Thanh fuss with the dark stick of tobacco and the elegant holder, the flame of a lighter or match didn’t catch his eye. Not good. And there was strong need to get a whole lot better. Right away. No time for distractions.

  The crowd was starting to thin. Grand Entry was now fifteen minutes away — all flags and glitter, flashing lights and galloping horses, cowgirls with muscled haunches in tight denim, cowboys with tight lips and fancy-tooled chaps flipping to the motion of their mounts. Booming music and bombast from the rodeo announcer — part carney barker, part play-by-play man and pace setter, a mouthpiece who could make, break or get in the way of a show with the timing of his patter and the smoothness of his delivery. The good ones were like a just-right dash of Tabasco; the bad ones made you think of an alarm clock someone forgot to turn off.

  Burch shook his head and cursed again. A wandering mind was a quick ticket to the land of the hurt or the dead. And a man his size in one place this long might find that ticket faster than he could think about it. He had to move. His choices were poor. Few spots offered the combination of clean sight line, position out of Thanh’s field of vision and plausible explanation for being there. But with the Frito pie out of hand and into his belly, he could no longer pose as the snacking rodeo redneck, greasing up for the contest to come.

  Sometimes events make up a man’s mind. Burch felt a presence at his left elbow, slightly to his rear, just out of the edge of his vision. His hand eased into his jacket until it rested on the grip of the Colt.

  “Easy, hoss. Just a friend here not a baddie. Course a baddie would have you all wrapped and ribboned right now, but that ain’t me. A friend sent me — a friend I am.”

  Sam I am.

  The phrase leapt into Burch’s mind from the books he used to read his young nephews.

  Sam I am.

  I sure do like green eggs and ham.

  “My friends don’t talk as much as you do, pard. Or nearly as fast.”

  The man laughed. The sound was thin and horsey.

  In a combo move that was more fluid than his bearish body could usually pull off, Burch turned his head, smiled like he was seeing a long-lost friend, hooked his right leg behind and between the other man’s legs, draped his right arm around the stranger’s thin shoulders and jammed the snout of the Colt into the left rear ridge of the man’s ribcage, thu
mbing the safety off, careful to keep the gun shielded by his jacket, the wall and the man’s body.

  “Dammit, that hurts.”

  “ ’Sposed to do that. You got two seconds to tell me who the hell you are or I’m gonna smack your face into this steel beam here and walk away.”

  “You won’t do that, mister. It’ll draw the attention of that Asian gentleman over there you been watchin’ for the last fifteen minutes. And that special someone you hope will show up — fella by the name of Crowe that’s married to that old girlfriend of yours. You make too fast a move, it’ll draw looks from people you hope ain’t lookin’ this way and it’ll upset that delicacy you just wolfed down — gotta give a Frito pie a chance to settle.”

  “So you noticed my dining habits and know about Jason Willard Crowe. I’m not impressed — any shithead in Texas knows how to order up a Frito pie and every wiseguy and cowboy from here to New Orleans has got Mister Crowe’s name on their lips. And I’ve been in town long enough and have made enough noise for those same shitheads to pick up a line on me and my lamentable track record of love.”

  “Who’s talkin’ too much now?”

  “It’s infectious. Like watchin’ somebody yawn. I’m gettin’ tired of this buddy-buddy pose — who the hell are you and who sent you? And make it quick, bud — this Colt’s cocked and my hand’s startin’ to twitch.”

  “Jennings. You know him, right? Round fellow with a beard and a taste for golf, Cuban cigars and women about a quarter century younger than himself. Spooky type fella — and I don’t mean Casper the Friendly Ghost-type of spook neither.”

  “Nice talk. No sale. Jennings is a man about town. If you know about me you know about him.”

  “Try this on for size, pard. Jennings said to remind you to stop carrying a torch for your first ex. Belle — and I don’t mean ding-dong. She ripped your heart out and he doesn’t want to hear you crying across a long-distance phone line at four in the ay-yem. That’s a quote, bubba.”

  Burch looked at the man — under six feet; thin and bony in the body and face; the grey-white pallor of too many cigarettes, too little exercise and too many all-nighters; a greasy, swept-back wedge of thick black hair that looked like it was drawn by a cartoonist’s hand; acne scars along the jawline; the grey Oriental eyes of a husky.