The Smack

by RICHARD LANGE

  “Satan dances in an empty pocket,” Petty said. “Ever heard that one?”

  “We are not religious,” Bernard said.

  “It’s not a Bible thing. It’s something my buddy Mike Dooky used to say.”

  “Ahh,” Bernard said. “Like when you say, ‘The devil made me do it.’”

  “Exactly,” Petty said.

  “Where else should we go on our trip?” Patricia said.

  She and Bernard were driving cross-country, having a big adventure. Petty suggested the Grand Canyon, Vegas. “Don’t miss Vegas,” he said. Tinafey told them where to get the best ribs in Memphis.

  The sun put on a show going down. The sky looked like it was on fire, bright orange flames, billows of purple smoke. Petty explained it was smog that created the gaudy colors, the sun shining through the poison. When the streetlights flickered to life, he stood to go. He wanted to look in on Sam before it was too late.

  “Do you want to come along?” he asked Tinafey. “I’d like you to meet her.”

  They were back in the room by then. He was getting ready to leave, and Tinafey was sitting on the bed. She squinted at him and rocked her head from side to side.

  “I’m kinda feelin’ that wine,” she said.

  “You’re all right,” Petty said. “She’s gonna love you.”

  “I’d have to change clothes and everything.”

  “I’ll wait,” Petty said.

  Tinafey threw a pillow at him. “Why you bein’ so insistent?” she said.

  “You said you wanted to help me.”

  “Yeah, but how’s me goin’ with you now gonna do that?”

  “Because you know how to talk to anyone,” Petty said.

  Tinafey scoffed at this. “Shee-it, boy, you’re supposed to be the hustler,” she said.

  “I know,” Petty said. “But whatever I’ve got doesn’t work with Sam.”

  Tinafey wore a baggy gray sweater Petty hadn’t seen before, one that hid her curves. He drove to the hospital this time, stopping at McDonald’s on the way for ten chicken nuggets with both sweet-and-sour and honey mustard sauces.

  Sam was listening to music on her phone when Petty and Tinafey entered her room.

  “Back again?” she said.

  “You’re yelling,” Petty said.

  She took out her earbuds. “Sorry.”

  She didn’t say anything about being transferred to another hospital, so maybe Diane had worked some magic. Her hair was brushed and pulled back, her eyes were bright, and she looked even healthier than she had in the morning.

  “This is my friend Tinafey,” Petty said.

  “Hi, Tinafey,” Sam said.

  “Do you like Sam or Samantha?” Tinafey said.

  “Sam’s fine.”

  “How you doin’, Sam?”

  “Ready to get out of here.”

  “I hear that.”

  “I got you something,” Petty said to Sam. He showed her the McDonald’s bag.

  “Oh, my God, I thought I smelled deliciousness,” she said.

  Petty handed her the food, and he and Tinafey pulled up chairs next to the bed. Mrs. Kong was asleep. Her snores alternated with the beeps of her machines.

  “Did you hear anything new?” Petty said to Sam.

  “Another doctor stopped by, my neurologist,” Sam said. “But all she did was introduce herself and say hi. And Jessica brought me a care package.”

  She gestured at a basket sitting on the shelf next to Petty’s flowers. It was full of Goldfish crackers, See’s Candies, and trashy magazines.

  “She’s taking care of my cat,” Sam continued. “I was worried about him.”

  “You have a cat?” Petty said.

  “Sherman,” Sam said. “Stinky Sherman.”

  She pulled up a photo on her phone and showed it to Petty and Tinafey. The cat was a calico with bright green eyes.

  “I like cats,” Tinafey said. “They don’t suck up to you like dogs do. You feel special when they want to be with you.”

  “I’m the only one who can pet Sherman,” Sam said. “He’s very antisocial.”

  Tinafey kept Sam talking, as Petty had hoped she would. He stayed out of it, sat back and let the women get acquainted. Their conversation warmed the room, chasing away the hospital’s clinical chill. They seemed to forget Petty was there, and he felt like he was eavesdropping as they swapped stories.

  Sam asked Tinafey if she’d ever been married. Once, Tinafey said. To a maniac. And that was enough. There wasn’t anything a woman needed from a man that was worth putting up with that kind of crazy. Sam revealed that she’d come close to getting married a year earlier, but the guy had dumped her for a girl in his band. The band was called the Grit Eaters. Sam called them the Shit Eaters. She laughed when she said this, the first time Petty had heard her laugh since they’d reunited. It gave him hope. She couldn’t be that sick if she was laughing.

  She laughed again when Tinafey told a story about her grandmother, how when she was in the hospital the nurses kept catching her smoking in the bathroom and nipping from airplane bottles of rum she’d smuggled in.

  “Ninety-two years old,” Tinafey said. “Wasn’t nobody gonna tell her what she could do.”

  “She’s my new hero,” Sam said. “I’m gonna be like her when I’m ninety-two.”

  “Flora Mae Miller,” Tinafey said. “She ran a bar in Smokey City, and she’d give me two dollars every year on my birthday, tell me to buy myself a hamburger.”

  “I wish I had some rum right now,” Sam said.

  “Girl, me, too,” Tinafey said. “I was so nervous about meetin’ you.”

  “How come?”

  “I told your daddy, ‘She don’t want strangers around while she’s laid up in there. She’s got enough aggravation with the doctors pokin’ her every five minutes.’”

  “That’s true, but I’m glad you came,” Sam said.

  Petty let them go on until they ran out of steam. He’d planned to stay fifteen minutes, but an hour passed before he and Tinafey finally stood and stretched and made jokes about keeping Sam up too late. Tinafey moved to the bed and hugged Sam.

  “You have a good night,” she said.

  Petty stepped up and hugged Sam, too.

  “Thanks for the McNuggets,” she said.

  Tinafey took Petty’s hand as they walked to the car. The evening had turned cold, and the traffic signals cycled red, yellow, green with icy clarity.

  “I think you scored me some points back there,” Petty said.

  “She’s a nice girl,” Tinafey said. “No thanks to you, I bet, but she’s a nice girl.”

  Bernard knocked on their door when they got back to the motel and asked if they wanted to go to dinner with him and Patricia at a restaurant in Chinatown their guidebook recommended.

  “It’s up to you,” Petty said to Tinafey.

  “Chinese sounds good,” she said.

  The Frenchies didn’t have a car—they’d been riding buses everywhere—so Petty offered to drive.

  The restaurant was a twenty-four-hour neon-sign dive that had seen better days, a dingy, low-ceilinged dining room filled with worn Formica tables topped with lazy Susans. Wood paneling and smoked mirrors straight out of the seventies covered the walls, and the red linoleum on the floor harked back to sometime even earlier. Two cops slurped wonton soup at one table, and a mariachi band ate silently at another, the silver trim on their costumes winking in the fluorescent light.

  The waiter wore a black vest over a white dress shirt. He was difficult to understand around his accent. Petty and Tinafey and the Frenchies ordered more food than they could possibly eat and laughed at themselves when plate after plate piled up on the table. Fried shrimp and spareribs, egg foo yung and chicken chow mein, all of it shiny with grease.

  As far as Bernard and Patricia knew, Petty sold time shares and Tinafey was a hostess at a Reno steak house. So it was pure coincidence that Bernard brought the dinner conversation around to scams. How it happen
ed was, he bet Petty five dollars that he could take a quarter from under a napkin without touching the napkin. Petty had learned the trick when he was in first grade, but he humored the guy. Bernard put a quarter on the table and covered it with a napkin. After making a few hocus pocus passes over it, he reached under the table and came up with a coin.

  It was another quarter, one he’d palmed, but they were supposed to believe it was the one he’d placed under the napkin. Petty feigned amazement and lifted the napkin at Bernard’s invitation to verify that the quarter had indeed passed through the table. This revealed the original quarter still sitting there, but it also allowed Bernard to snatch it up without touching the napkin, as he’d promised.

  “Voilà!” he said. “You owe me five dollars.”

  “Check him out,” Tinafey said. “He got your ass.”

  Petty took a five out of his wallet.

  “No,” Bernard said. “This is not necessary.”

  “Come on,” Petty said. “I made the bet.”

  He asked Bernard if he knew any more tricks. Yeah, sure, Bernard said. He could tie a knot in a napkin without letting go of the corners. He could fold a cigarette without breaking it. It was all kid stuff, frat-boy keg-party bullshit, but the dude apparently fancied himself some kind of sharper. Petty didn’t say anything to burst his bubble. He just smiled and ordered another Tsingtao.

  “Here’s one for you,” he said. “My dad and his buddies used to pull it. One of them would go into a store—a pharmacy, a locksmith, a dry cleaner’s—and act all frantic, pretending he’d lost a watch, a special watch his grandpa had given him. He’d ask the clerk if he’d found it, maybe in the parking lot.

  “‘No,’ the clerk would say. ‘No watch.’

  “‘Well, if you do find it, there’s a thousand-dollar reward,’ my dad’s friend would say, and he’d give the clerk his phone number so he could get in touch with him.

  “An hour later my dad would go into the same store. ‘Anybody lose a watch?’ he’d say. ‘I found one in the bushes.’

  “‘Hey,’ the clerk would say. ‘Some guy was just in here looking for that.’ Then, more often than not, he’d start angling to get the reward for himself. He’d say, ‘Why don’t you leave the watch with me, and if the guy comes back, I’ll return it to him?’

  “‘I don’t know about that,’ my dad would say. ‘But check it out—it’s a nice watch, and I’m hard up right now. How about if I sell it to you for five hundred dollars?’

  “The watch my dad had was nothing but a twenty-dollar swap-meet special, but the clerk, thinking he was gonna get a thousand bucks for it, would say, ‘Sounds like a good deal to me.’

  “My dad would take off with the five hundred, the clerk would call the number my dad’s buddy had given him, and whoever answered would say, ‘Nobody by that name lives here.’”

  “Aha!” Bernard said, delighted.

  “But this must be illegal, no?” Patricia said.

  “What it is is the clerk getting what was coming to him,” Petty said. “He was trying to pull his own scam.”

  “Payback’s a bitch,” Bernard said. It sounded funny with his accent.

  “Exactly,” Petty said.

  “I know this phrase from Tupac,” Bernard said. “‘Ballad of a Dead Soulja.’”

  “Tupac?” Tinafey said. “Listen at you, talkin’ about Tupac.”

  When it was time to pay, they agreed that Bernard would put the meal on his card and Petty would give him cash for his and Tinafey’s share, which came to forty dollars. Petty took out two twenties and showed them to Bernard, then secretly swapped one of them out for a single before handing the money over. Bernard shoved the bills into his pocket without checking them again.

  Hey, Frenchie, Petty thought. Who’s the sharper now?

  17

  THE SHIPMENTS OF MONEY FROM BAGRAM ENTERED THE United States at Fort Bragg’s Pope Field, where master sergeant Scott Lindstrom worked in the cargo warehouse. Alerted by Keller, Lindstrom took charge of the containers the cash was hidden in, surreptitiously removed the money, and snuck it off base. He then sent it from North Carolina to Diaz’s cousin in Los Angeles.

  Diaz had never met Lindstrom. He was a friend of Keller’s, someone Keller swore they could trust. And this turned out to be true. The books had balanced perfectly in the end. Diaz had had Tony check each package before locking it away, and every dollar that passed through Lindstrom’s hands on its way from Afghanistan had made it to L.A. For his service, Lindstrom was due a quarter share.

  He didn’t seem surprised when Diaz called out of the blue and said he was in Fayetteville at a Holiday Inn near the base. They kept the conversation vague, agreeing to rendezvous that evening at an Applebee’s.

  Diaz got there early and waited for Lindstrom at the bar. He ordered a beer but didn’t drink it. The restaurant was crowded and noisy, with football on the TVs and a big birthday party spread over three tables pushed together. All the men at the party had shaved heads or high and tights. The place catered to soldiers from the base. Unit flags hung on the walls—Eighty-Second Airborne, the Sky Dragons, Special Forces—alongside photos of troops in uniform.

  Lindstrom materialized out of thin air, like he was trying to sneak up on Diaz. The first thing Diaz noticed about him was his permanent smirk. All the other features on his pinched face swirled around it. The second thing Diaz noticed was how jacked the dude was. He was the same height as Diaz, but every muscle on his body put a strain on the flesh laid over it, and his neck looked like a tree trunk rooted to his torso. So it was funny when he spoke and his voice came out as high and squeaky as that of a kid whose balls hadn’t dropped yet.

  “You’re the man, right?” he said.

  “I guess I am,” Diaz replied.

  They didn’t shake hands. Lindstrom moved his chair away from Diaz’s, put some distance between them.

  “You heard about Keller?” Diaz said. Neither had mentioned him during their phone call.

  “Yeah,” Lindstrom said.

  “How fucked up is that?”

  “Dude was a junkie,” Lindstrom said. “I don’t have any sympathy for junkies.”

  “We all got our problems,” Diaz said.

  “What’s yours?” Lindstrom said.

  “I’m getting out of the army after twelve years of shit shoveling,” Diaz said. “I got no problems at all.”

  The bartender asked if Lindstrom wanted anything. He ordered tonic with lime. Diaz pretended to sip his beer. A country song came on, and the grunts at the birthday party sang along. Lindstrom watched them, his smirk more pronounced than ever.

  “So you live in L.A.?” he said to Diaz.

  “Used to,” Diaz said warily.

  “I’m only asking because that’s where you had me send the packages.”

  “I didn’t have you send them anywhere. That was Keller.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Right,” Lindstrom said.

  “What else did Keller tell you?” Diaz said.

  Lindstrom shrugged. “Enough,” he said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Enough to make me comfortable doing business with someone I’d never met.”

  Diaz was uneasy. Lindstrom wouldn’t even look him in the eye. Instead he kept flexing his forearm and watching the muscles and tendons there jump. Diaz had had to share more information than he’d wanted to in order to get Keller on board. Keller had evidently passed some of this info on to Lindstrom, and who knew who he’d talked to about it? It was too late to worry about that now, though.

  “You here to deliver what’s mine?” Lindstrom said.

  “That’s right,” Diaz said.

  “Outstanding.”

  Lindstrom waved the bartender over. “I’m getting a shot of Jack to celebrate,” he said to Diaz. “Want one?”

  “I’m good,” Diaz said.

  “I usually don’t drink when I’m in training,” Lindstrom said. “But fuck it. It’s not every day you get your pot of gold.”<
br />
  “What are you training for?”

  “The NPC All-Military’s coming up. I’ve been dialing it in, doing doubles to get ready.”

  “Bodybuilding?”

  “The real deal.”

  “A thong and all that?”

  “Posing trunks. You wear them so the judges can see your glutes.”

  Lindstrom downed his shot and chased it with a sip of tonic. His arm was so big he could barely bend it at the elbow. “Every little thing counts,” he said. “Like this.” He pointed to an indentation in his biceps. “That’s the baby’s butt, the cut between the two heads. I’ve been working on it for weeks.”

  Diaz fingered the knife in his jacket pocket. He wished now he had a gun.

  The birthday party got louder when the waitress delivered the cake. It had a picture of a girl in a bikini on it. A girl in a bikini shooting an M4. This earned another smirk from Lindstrom. Then the Panthers scored, which started a commotion at the other end of the restaurant. Lindstrom smirked at this, too. He was one of those guys, Diaz could tell, who thought the whole world was stupid but him.

  “So where’s my money?” Lindstrom said.

  “You know Clark Park? The river trail?” Diaz said.

  “Come on, bro. All the way out there?”

  “You want me to give it to you here?”

  “Works for me.”

  “Not for me. I don’t like the idea of someone checking tapes and seeing me pass you a bag.”

  “Checking tapes?” Lindstrom said. “Who’s gonna be checking tapes?”

  “Hopefully nobody,” Diaz said. “But I’m not gonna make it easy for them if they do. This is a big score. I’m covering all the bases.”

  Lindstrom scoffed at this and stared at his forearm again. “I know the trail,” he said.

  So did Diaz. He’d scouted it the day before.

  “Park at the nature center,” he said. “A quarter mile down the trail is a bridge. Meet me there at midnight.”

  “Midnight?” Lindstrom said. “That’s four hours from now.”

  “Midnight,” Diaz said. “Got it?”

  Lindstrom shook his head in annoyance. He ran a thick finger along a bunched blue vein on his wrist.