Thompson was licking her lips. I could tell that it wasn’t the first time she’d ever held a pistol, but she seemed to me to be right on the verge of going shaky. Couldn’t blame her for that. Her voice quavered when she spoke.
“Okay. Now I’m not real sure how we’re going to handle this, but we need to get some real estate in between Stan and the rest of us.”
“Can I make a suggestion?” I asked this question standing right where I was, because I thought the next thing that moved might get shot.
“What’s on your mind?”
“Why don’t I walk over there so you can hand that toy cannon to me?”
“Sounds okay, I guess.”
I pressed against the side of the Navigator to make sure she’d have a clear shot at Chaladian in case he changed his mind. Then I circled around behind her so I could take the gun with my left hand without having to reach across her body. I looked straight at Chaladian while I did it. I made sure he understood how happy it would make me to drill him. If he thought about trying something while I got my paw wrapped around the automatic, he came down on the side of staying alive. The pistol felt comfortable in my left hand.
“There’s a set of car keys in my right pants pocket. Why don’t you fish it out?”
It seemed to take her forever, but she finally got it done.
“They’re for a rental car, so there’s a tag on the ring with the make, model, and license number. Do you see that?”
“This ain’t my first time at the swimmin’ hole, buddy. You don’t have to talk to me like I’m ten years old.”
“Sorry. Now I have a job for you, Stan. Using fingers only, no thumb, pull the fob for these fancy wheels out of your jeans and toss it over to Katrina here.”
“What if I don’t?”
“Well, Stan, put yourself in my position. We’ve just established that you can beat the crap out of me in a fair fight, and I can’t outrun you if I have a woman and a little girl along with me. So what options would I have at that point?”
“Have you ever killed anyone, Mr. Judas Maccabeus Davidovich?”
Looking down the barrel of his own gun, he said “Judas” with lip-curling contempt. I involuntarily winced. But Dr. Phil wasn’t in the neighborhood, so I figured I’d have to handle the psychological trauma all by myself.
“I did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I killed more of them than they did of me. And one time I shot a fella in the knee to discourage him from coming after me. It worked real well.”
Chaladian smiled at me. I kid you not, the sonofabitch actually smiled at me. Then he dipped the fingers of his left hand into his pants pocket. I kept my eyes peeled for a derringer or one of those mini twenty-five-caliber jobs that they call “ladies’ guns,” but what he came out with was a fob. He tossed it at me instead of Thompson. I took a side-step to my left and let the fob fall on the sidewalk. Just as it hit, the siren cranked up across the street and the ambulance sped away. I stayed focused on Chaladian, though. He didn’t move a muscle.
Thompson picked up the fob. She dropped it into the palm of my right hand. I worked it a couple of times to be sure I knew which button locked the doors. Then I let out a deep breath that I didn’t realize I’d been holding.
“Now, Hurricane, get Luci up. You’ll find the rental car if you walk carefully around this block. Get Luci in the car, U-turn, straight for two blocks, take a right, park, wait for me. Give me five minutes. If I’m not there, go to the police. Got it?”
“Uee plus two, ralph, park, wait five. Can do.”
Luci was wide awake by now, of course. I had no idea how much she’d seen, but I switched the gun to my right hand so I could hide it from Luci with my body while Thompson walked off with her.
Thompson retrieved Luci from the street side. Then, cool as a Miles Davis riff again, she took her own sweet time getting her luggage out. She and Luci were four steps down the sidewalk when Luci realized that he’d forgotten her doll. So back they came while Jay Davidovich stood there in the gloaming working really hard at not shooting Chaladian, at least while Luci was there to see it. If Chaladian was sweating over that possibility, I couldn’t see it in the glow of the one Omaha street light in the vicinity.
Once Thompson and Luci were finally under way, I counted to ten to give them some time to make tracks. The idea of just putting a bullet in Chaladian’s knee at that point did more than cross my mind. It stopped right in the middle of my brain and did an impatient little dance to make sure it had my attention. Thing is, though, if I plugged him he’d be talking to cops soon, whether he wanted to or not. Which meant that, well before midnight, Kent Trowbridge would be sitting in a squeal room at Omaha police headquarters doing Q and A about how someone in his entourage had shot the guy who’d fingered him for coke possession. And that meant you could just put his Major Performing Artist contract in the shredder. Loss prevention specialists are supposed to prevent losses, not cause them.
So it seemed crystal clear I had to go another route. I did, resuming my dialogue with Chaladian.
“What you want to do now, buddy, is get into your truck. Back seat.”
Chaladian favored me with a five-second wait, just to show that he was the one in charge even though I was holding the gun. Then he slowly rose. Keeping his eyes on me, he sidled over to the Navigator and climbed into the back seat. I then used the fob to lock the doors and roll down the back window.
“If you wait ten minutes before you unlock the door and get out, you’ll find the fob and your unloaded gun five paces down from the corner of the street behind us. Less than ten minutes, and you can kiss them both goodbye.”
With a thumb click I rolled the window up. I backed away until I reached the corner. I waited sixty seconds to see if Chaladian would jump the gun. He didn’t. I took five paces down the intersecting sidewalk and dropped the fob on the sidewalk. Then I ran like an Alabama virgin with her uncle behind her.
Thompson had found the Dodge Charger that Wells had gotten for me and done exactly what I’d told her to with it. When I slid into the passenger seat I still had the gun. I lied about that.
Chapter Seventeen
“Thanks for gettin’ my fanny outta that mess.” Thompson took the Charger from zero to forty in about five seconds. “But no flat tire is gonna hold Stan Chaladian up for long, so we need a plan in a big hurry.”
“Step one: slow down to the speed limit. Getting pulled over with an unauthorized driver behind the wheel would slow us up considerably.”
“Well, that’s a start.”
“Step two: turn left on the first street you come to that has a traffic light and head back toward downtown.”
“No way I’m goin’ back to the hotel.”
“You got that right.”
“What’s step three, then?”
“I’m working on that.”
I was, too. I did some touch-screen magic on the GPS that came with the Charger, hoping that the damn thing knew the name of Omaha’s airport. It did.
“Eppley Airfield,” the pert, sultry voice said. I decided to call her Ariane, just for fun. Thompson gaped at me.
“Honey, you think if I could fly two people anywhere you woulda found me at a bus station?”
“I’d say we’d better not plan on you flying anyone out of Omaha tonight. The airport is the first place Chaladian will look for us.”
Thompson looked like I’d asked her to help me with a calculus equation.
“Well, Tall Dude, what do they do at the airport except fly people places?”
“They rent cars.” I’d found Avis on my phone and was about to punch it in when, on pure impulse, I went with Alamo instead. “We have to assume Chaladian spotted this car. We need to switch vehicles. Then we need to drive.”
“Drive? To Phoenix?”
“Wouldn’t be
my choice, since Chaladian knows that that’s where you were going. If I were you, I’d call your girlfriend and tell her to meet you in Tucson.”
I could tell she was about to pretend she didn’t know what I was talking about, but Ariane decided to say something about getting ready to enter the freeway in “two-tenths of a mile,” and Thompson obediently whisked over to the right lane.
It took me seven solid minutes to talk a counter boy at the Airport Alamo into reserving a Buick for me. That was because, unlike Avis, Alamo didn’t have my name and account data in its computer—which meant that even if Chaladian made it to the airport before we did, and even if he got the bright idea of checking rental car alley instead of the terminal, he wouldn’t see “DAVIDOVICH AISLE 3” on the Preferred Customer board. I decided not to call Enterprise to tell them about dropping the Charger off at its airport office. I figured I’d just let that be a surprise.
I risked a glance back at Luci. I was hoping she’d be asleep. Not a chance. She just sat there in the back seat, hugging her doll. No trembling lip, no wide eyes. Stoic, as if this kind of stuff went down all the time in her world.
When I looked back at Thompson, I saw her left hand on the wheel and her right hand in her lap, with her thumb moving madly. For a crazy instant I thought she was being insanely self-indulgent, playing with herself at sixty-two miles an hour. Then I realized it was worse: she was texting.
My phone chimed. I glanced at the screen. She was texting me.
“Cn u tk L where I say?”
“What about her mom?” I did not text this. I just said the words, in a normal tone of voice.
Chime!
“Tk my chnces.”
If I’d been Rachel I would’ve burst into tears. As it was my throat tightened a bit. Thompson cared more about Luci than anyone or anything else in the world. And Stan Chaladian, Mr. Ten Percent, was by three orders of magnitude the baddest ass I had ever run into—and that is saying something. Yet she was willing to separate herself from Luci so that Luci would be safe even if Chaladian caught Thompson—which it was eight to one he would if she were running on her own.
“I think we can do better than that.”
She glanced over at me with her eyebrows arched and her lips in an oh-sure oval, the way you might look at a ten-year-old boy who’s just confidently repeated something he heard about sex from the eighth graders.
“Davidovich, it took a lot of guts for you to take Stan on.”
“Not really. Taking him on the second time would be guts. This time it was just being dumb enough to let him catch me from behind.”
“Point is, you didn’t give up. Most guys do with him, when they see that look in his eyes. But guts ain’t enough. If Stan is in the game, the odds aren’t just in his favor—the fix is in.”
I chewed that over for thirty seconds or so.
“I suppose I should say something macho right about now, something about how I’ve been in tougher scrapes than this and next time I’ll see him coming and so forth. But I’ll skip all that. You’re right. Stan is one tough hombre. But I’m already in the soup. Tell you what. Let’s just talk this over again once we get to Tucson.”
It was Thompson’s turn to think things over. She looked like she wasn’t sure what to do with a guy who didn’t bullshit her. Then her expression got crafty.
“I’ll take you up on that, on one condition.”
“Name it.”
“You said your first name is Jay. But Stan called you ‘Judas Maccabeus,’ and it rattled you. And it takes somethin’ to rattle you. So why don’t you tell me what the deal is with that—and make it the truth.”
Oh-KAY. That was your basic gut punch.
“My parents are rack-jobbers. You know what that is?”
“No idea.”
“You know how when you’re in a supermarket you sometimes see a metal tree with plastic bags of junk toys on it, like plastic soldiers and mini-rolling pins and jacks and so forth?”
“I guess. Still see those every once in awhile.”
“Well, the metal trees are called racks, and the people who buy the junk and put it on them are rack jobbers. Rack-jobbing is the stirring-stuff-in-a-vat equivalent of distribution work in the United States.”
“But mom and pop do this because—why?”
“Because rack jobbers own their own business. They aren’t wage slaves. Which is very important to mom and dad.”
“You’re sneakin’ up on Judas Maccabeus, aren’t you?”
“Yes. When you own your own business, once every two or three years you owe money you can’t pay. If you’re a PEP Boys or a McDonald’s you go to your bank for an emergency loan. If you’re AIG, you go to Congress for a bail-out. But if you’re mom and dad you go to Uncle Morty for a mitzvah.”
“That’s like a Jewish good deed, right?”
“Close enough. Anyway, three months before I was born, Uncle Morty’s mitzvah came with a string attached. Namely, that I would be named after a Jewish hero. The hero he had in mind was Judas Maccabeus.”
“Oh.” Thompson stared through the windshield. “Is that the Judas who betrayed our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?”
“No. Different fella altogether. Couldn’t get along with the Greeks, who were running Judea about that time.”
“Well, I can see that. ’Cause the Greeks I’m guessin’ weren’t Christians yet.”
“No. No one was yet. Thing was though, lots of Jews back then got along just fine with the Greeks. Forgot to have their kids circumcised, for example. So JM and his posse, when they saw some Jewish men in their early twenties who were wearing Greek clothes and speaking Greek, they’d check to see if they were circumcised. Just sort of do a little street-inspection.”
“In front of everyone?”
“Pretty much.”
“Oh my Lord! ”
“And if they weren’t, JM would take care of it right then and there.”
“Ouch! It hurts just to think about that! So that’s how he got to be a hero?”
“Well, the main way he got to be a hero is that the Greeks eventually got around to sending an army against him and he kicked their butts. So the Greeks decided that maybe they should go back to Greece and get their butts kicked by the Romans, closer to home.”
She took her eyes completely off the road and turned her head to give me a full, mouth-open stare.
“You are tellin’ me the God’s honest truth, aren’t you?”
“I am. I could probably find it in the Bible, if you have one lying around.”
“I don’t, but no worries. No way anyone could make up a story like that.”
“So we’re good to Tucson?”
“We are good to Tucson. I have got to start readin’ that Bible again.”
Chapter Eighteen
So, I’m thinking, worst case scenario: Chaladian hopped out of his Navigator the second my back was turned; found a cab; gambled that we were headed for the airport; got there and on his way to staking out the terminal somehow spotted us at Alamo; rented a car himself and managed to follow us without me spotting him in the ninety-seven minutes that we’d now been on I-80 West. All the while leaving a high-priced car sitting with a flat tire on a not-so-great street in Omaha, and an accomplice in the hospital with his head split open, both of which invite police attention that you’ve gotta figure Mr. Ten Percent wouldn’t be anxious to have.
No. This did not happen. Electrons randomly colliding in a mindless universe to produce, oh, Katherine Heigl or Sandra Bullock? Yeah, maybe. Not a betting proposition, in my humble opinion, but I wouldn’t totally rule it out. Stan Chaladian being on our tail right now, on the other hand? Not a chance.
Which meant that I would act like that was exactly what had happened. That’s how you come home from an MP gig in Iraq with two o
f everything you’re supposed to have two of and at least one of everything else.
I glanced over at Thompson. She had worked out a little niche for herself in the corner formed by the shotgun seat and the passenger door. She looked like she’d managed to drift off to sleep. Good for her. Let her be.
“I’m wide awake if you need somethin’, tiger,” she murmured drowsily.
“In about twenty miles there’s supposedly a town that has at least four chain hotels just off the freeway. Odds are we’ll pass an information sign maybe five miles this side of it. Keep your eyes peeled and let me know which ones are north of the exit and which ones are south.”
“You got it.”
Then she went back to sleep.
My phone buzzed. I pulled it up and took a quick look at the caller ID. Rachel. Shit.
“Yo.”
“I am such a bitch!”
“No one gets to call you that, including you.”
“I am! I took him back, Jay! I actually took him back! After what he did!”
“He hasn’t hit you again, has he?”
“No.” She almost sounded disappointed. “It’s just…Why did I do that? Why do I do these things?”
“Well, Rache, you had one shrink tell you it’s because you need to punish yourself for stepping out on me. And now you have another shrink telling you it’s because you need to project less-threatening versions of me onto people who don’t scare you the way I do.”
“Jay! That’s supposed to be confidential!”
“You put it on Facebook, Rache.”
“I’d forgotten about that.”
“Let’s hope none of your clients stumble over it. Not a selling point for a small business lawyer.”
“I am a very good lawyer!”
“You are a very good lawyer who should never mix wine with pot.”
“Now you sound like my mother.”
“I take that as a compliment.”
Jail Coach Page 9