The Smack

by RICHARD LANGE

  “We hauled ass out here,” she continued. “Found you at the hospital. Hug wanted to beat it out of you, where the money was, or if there even was any money, but I said, ‘Why push it?’ We knew where you’d be. We could take it slow. He tailed you some, enough to find out where you were staying and that you were definitely up to no good, but we held off until this morning, when you told me something was wrong. I let Hug know, and we went back to watching you, stuck to you all day.” She gazed down at the corpse in her arms. “And now here we are,” she said.

  Petty was still shaken from the firefight, felt it in his hands, his feet. He was angry at himself, too, for not noticing that Hug had been following him, for getting played once again. Right now, though, he had to keep moving. With all the shooting, someone surely must have called the cops.

  He left Carrie sitting with Hug and ran to pick up the money he’d dropped in the street. After returning it to the trunk of the Mercedes, he hurried back to the pickup, where Tinafey was waiting, and untied her wrists.

  “You all right?” he said.

  “What the fuck you think?” she said as she rubbed the feeling back into her hands.

  “Can you help me out?”

  “Gimme your coat,” she said with a shiver.

  Petty took off his jacket and passed it to her. She put it on and followed him to the bed of the truck. He gave her the bags, and he carried the box. They jogged to the Mercedes and put the money in the trunk. Before slamming the lid, Petty reached into one of the bags and pulled out a stack of hundreds.

  “Get in,” he said to Tinafey. “I’ll be right back.”

  He walked over to Carrie.

  “Here,” he said and gave her the cash.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “All you’re gonna get. Be grateful for it.”

  “So you won, huh?”

  “If I was you, I’d hit the road.”

  “Help me get Hug into the car.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Help me get him into the car.”

  The fewer corpses in the street, the better, Petty decided. He hooked Hug under the arms, and Carrie took his feet. They half carried, half dragged him to the Range Rover and wrestled him into the backseat. Carrie’s hands were covered with blood. She wiped them on her jeans and walked around and got behind the wheel. Petty spoke to her through the open window.

  “Drive as far as you can before daylight,” he said. “Then get rid of the body and the car and lay low for a while.”

  “What about Sam?” Carrie said.

  “I’ll see to her.”

  Carrie started the car and flipped down the visor to check her face in the mirror on the back of it. She scratched at a speck of blood on her lip.

  “I can do this,” she said to her reflection.

  “Sure you can,” Petty said.

  She drove off down Mission toward the freeway. Petty took one more look around the intersection—the pickup, the dead man. Wanting to leave the area as clean as possible, he ran over and scooped up the guy’s pistol and Hug’s shotgun and threw them onto the backseat of the Mercedes. As soon as he had a chance, he’d bury them so deep nobody would ever find them.

  “Hear those sirens?” Tinafey said when he climbed into the car.

  “I hear them,” he said. He made a U-turn. The freeway was only a few blocks away.

  “This is some fucked-up shit,” Tinafey said.

  “We’re gonna be fine,” Petty said, because what else was he going to say?

  They got to the on-ramp without seeing a cop, merged onto the 101, and joined the stream of cars heading west. Petty’s pulse slowed a bit, and the ringing in his ears faded. He reached over and squeezed Tinafey’s hand and was glad when she squeezed back. Her head was turned to look out the rear window, to see if anyone was following.

  Petty’s phone rang. It was sitting on the dash. He was busy negotiating the transition to the 110 and couldn’t get to it.

  “Can you check who that is?” he said to Tinafey.

  She picked up the phone and held it out so he could see the screen.

  “It’s the hospital,” she said.

  30

  PAPA SMURF’S USED-CAR LOT, BEST AUTO SALES, WAS NORTH of downtown Houston, across the street from a Walmart Supercenter. Petty parked in front of the office, a mobile home set on a cinder-block foundation. The red, white, and blue pennants strung overhead snapped like firecrackers in the cold wind. Two salespeople, a black man and a white woman, hunched over cigarettes on the lee side of the single-wide. They nodded and said “Howdy” as Petty climbed the stairs to the office and went inside.

  Papa’s real name was Chris Peters. He got his nickname from his side business. Actually, it was his main business, the car lot merely serving as a front for his real source of income, money laundering. Launderers were sometimes called Smurfs, after the cartoon characters, and the means by which they legitimized illegitimate funds was known as Smurfing. As far as Petty could determine, this was because the army of day laborers and dope fiends required to scrub any significant amount of cash had reminded someone of the busy blue elves.

  The reception area of Best was furnished with a water cooler and a few chairs. A Texas state flag hung on one wall, posters of luxury cars on another. A little Christmas tree blinked in the corner, and the receptionist’s desk had been draped with red and green garlands. The receptionist picked up the phone to let Papa know Petty had arrived and went back to reading her Enquirer.

  Papa came out and shook Petty’s hand. He was a fat man who wore chili-pepper-patterned suspenders over Brooks Brothers button-downs and alligator-skin cowboy boots with pressed khakis. A fringe of bright red hair ringed his otherwise bald head, and he waxed the ends of his handlebar mustache into two tight curls.

  “Rowan, old buddy, always a pleasure to see ya,” he said with an amiable drawl.

  “Nice to see you, too,” Petty said.

  They’d done business in the past, but nothing involving anywhere near the amount of cash they’d be talking about today. Papa led Petty down the hall to his office and told him to have a seat. More Texas crap covered the walls, and a Stetson hung from a set of mounted bull horns. Papa dropped into a big chair behind a big desk and leaned so far back it seemed he might tip over.

  “What can I do you for?” he said.

  “I’ve got some money I want to send overseas,” Petty said.

  “How much?”

  “Close to two million.”

  Papa tried to play it off, but Petty could tell he’d surprised the man when he sat upright and began fiddling with a pen lying on the desk, rolling it between his fingers like a baton twirler. He wanted to ask Petty where he’d gotten so much money, but that was against the rules, so he settled for, “How hot is it?”

  “Getting colder by the day,” Petty said.

  “You know the deal, how it goes,” Papa said.

  Petty said he did, but Papa still went through the steps. Petty would give him the cash, and he’d divide it among his Smurfs. These Smurfs, over the course of a few months, would make a series of deposits into some of the hundreds of accounts Papa controlled at various banks across the country. All the deposits would be in amounts of less than ten thousand dollars so that the banks wouldn’t be required to report them to the IRS.

  The money would then be gradually wire-transferred to a bank in China, a country with lax reporting laws and one not likely to cooperate with American authorities of any stripe. Petty would be provided with ATM and credit cards giving him access to his funds in the Chinese bank, minus the 30 percent Papa took for his services.

  Petty’s eyes wandered while Papa explained all this. He looked at the cowboy hat hanging from the horns, looked at the bronze sculpture of a bronc rider sitting on the desk and the old-fashioned adding machine next to it. His gaze lighted on a framed photo of a younger Papa—full head of hair, no mustache—hugging a little redheaded freckle-faced girl who had the same smile he did. Petty st
ared at the picture, testing himself. For a second he thought his grief had eased some, gone from being a raw, oozing sore to a dull throb he could manage. But not yet. A flood of acid tears stung his eyes, and the cold, black snake lurking inside him coiled tighter around his heart.

  She had another seizure. All alone in the darkest dark. The doctors did what they could, which was exactly nothing. The tumor had turned out to be a bad one, the worst, a glioblastoma. “Picture an octopus,” Dr. Wilkes said. They’d been able to remove its body, but the tentacles remained, and Sam had had another seizure, and it killed her.

  That’s what they called to tell Petty the night of the shoot-out. “We have bad news.” At first he thought he was going to lose it. Surely there had to be a limit to how much a man could deal with at one time.

  “Pull over,” Tinafey kept saying. “Let me drive.”

  But instead of breaking down, he shifted into problem-solving mode, and his thinking was as clear as ever.

  “I’ll drop you at the hotel,” he said to Tinafey.

  “I’m goin’ with you,” she said.

  “It’s not your problem.”

  “Go to your daughter. Now.”

  Sam’s body still lay on a gurney in intensive care. An orderly drew back the sheet so Petty could see her. It wasn’t her, though, not anymore. Petty didn’t know what had made Sam Sam, but whatever it was was gone. He reached out and touched the cold clay that remained.

  Tinafey was standing beside him. “She looks peaceful,” she said.

  Petty took her word for it. He couldn’t bring himself to look at Sam’s face. Watching her sleep all those years ago, a baby sighing and stretching in a patch of sunlight, he’d never imagined that one day he’d see her dead. He felt alone again, like he’d felt before she was born. It hadn’t been a good feeling then, and it wasn’t a good feeling now.

  A woman took him to an office. She apologized all the way there. “It’s a terrible time for this, but there are documents that have to be signed.” Petty scribbled his signature on the papers she put in front of him without bothering to read them. The woman asked what he wanted to do with the body. “We have a list of funeral homes,” she said.

  Petty picked one at random and called from the cafeteria. The man who answered acted sympathetic at first but quickly launched into a sales pitch. You couldn’t get colder than that, Petty thought, but on the other hand, what a perfect time to pick someone’s pocket. They settled on fifteen hundred bucks all in—transport, cremation, and a box for the ashes.

  Petty called his mom next. She took the news hard. All the years Petty had been roaming the country, chasing down scores, she and Sam had been close, each the only family the other had had. It was rough listening to her go to pieces. Petty had never heard her weep like that, not even when she found out his dad had been killed. He felt like he might weep, too, but no, not there in the fucking cafeteria, in front of the bored girl at the cash register and the orderly eating a burrito and the janitor mopping the floor. Joanne said she was flying out, hip surgery or no hip surgery. Petty told her that wasn’t necessary. He’d bring Sam to her.

  He thought the police might appear at the hospital or be waiting at the motel when he and Tinafey returned after midnight, but nobody leaped out of the shadows to slap handcuffs on him. They stayed at the motel just long enough to pack their bags, then Petty drove to the Marriott at Staples Center and checked them into a room on the sixteenth floor that had a view all the way to the ocean. He got dizzy looking out at it and had to sit on the bed. “I’m probably just hungry,” he told Tinafey. He ordered food from room service but fell asleep before his burger arrived.

  He spent the next three days in bed, drifting somewhere between asleep and awake, between alive and dead, unable to muster the strength to swim to shore. Every breath was an effort. He couldn’t bear to be touched, couldn’t string words into sentences. He only cried once. A knife to the chest, a clutch of strangled sobs, and a few fiery tears that gave him no relief. It wasn’t any kind of grief he’d ever heard of.

  On the second day he put on the news to see if they were saying anything about the shoot-out. There was a story on an investigation into a body found shot to death on an East L.A. street, that of a recently discharged army sergeant, Armando Diaz, and the subsequent discovery of two more corpses in a house in Boyle Heights, one of them being Diaz’s father, Hector Diaz, the other his cousin Antonio Mendoza, age twenty-one. Speculation was that all the killings were connected to the drug trade. Petty turned off the TV and had Tinafey pour two bottles of minibar Scotch into a glass. He tossed back the drink and felt sick for an hour afterward. All night long he thought he heard cops out in the hall.

  On the morning of the fourth day, he sat straight up out of a dream weird with numbers and was suddenly wildly alert. He rolled to the edge of the mattress, stood, and felt the floor level and steady beneath his feet. The worst seemed to have passed.

  “You okay?” Tinafey said.

  “Okay enough,” he said, which was all he’d ever been anyway.

  He put on his clothes, went down to breakfast, and came up with a plan.

  Papa pulled one side of his mustache, straightening the curl. When he let go, it sprang back into place. He was asking for an exact amount. Petty blinked his eyes clear and got back to business. He gave Papa the figure, and Papa punched it into the adding machine and yanked the handle. He tore off the strip of paper that showed how much money Petty was entrusting him with, what his cut would be, and how much Petty would have left afterward.

  “Your receipt, suh,” he said, passing the tape across the desk with a flourish.

  Petty glanced at the numbers and stuck the tape in his pocket. This was all the ink there’d be between them. Papa stood and tucked in his shirt. He opened the top drawer of the desk, took out a pistol, and slipped it into his waistband at the small of his back. Petty followed him through the reception area and back out to where his car was parked. He was now driving a white 2014 BMW 320i, having traded in the Benz in Arizona.

  Papa called over the salesman Petty had seen on his way in. The salesman drew a gun from an ankle holster and stood guard while Petty and Papa took the money out of the trunk of the Beamer. Petty had managed to fit it all into three large duffel bags, so it only took them one trip to carry it into the mobile home. They stashed the bags in a safe in Papa’s office.

  “I’ll move it to Fort Knox this afternoon,” Papa said. “That’s my other facility, the one where you get shot if you get within a hundred feet.”

  They shook hands good-bye.

  “You doin’ anything special for Christmas?” Papa said.

  “Not really,” Petty said, knowing Papa was only asking to be nice.

  Petty headed out. He drove two hours to Lake Charles, where he checked into a room at the Isle of Capri Casino. He’d been stopping at casinos every night this trip, using them to do his own laundering of some of the hundred grand he’d held onto. He locked most of the money and Sam’s ashes in the room before going down to the hotel’s restaurant and having the blackened redfish special and a margarita for dinner.

  The casino was housed in a paddle-wheel riverboat permanently docked on the lake next to the hotel. Petty cashed in five grand at the cage, took it all in hundred-dollar chips. He played an hour of blackjack at a twenty-five-dollar table, switched to craps until that went cold, then moved on to roulette, where it was just him, the croupier, and a deeply tanned old woman in big sunglasses who blew the smoke from her cigarettes out of the corner of her mouth.

  He was down about a hundred dollars at the end of the night. He returned to the cage, cashed in his remaining chips, and asked for the money in a check. The next morning he deposited the check into one of his bank accounts. If anybody ever asked where the money had come from, he’d say he’d had a good run at the tables, and the check would serve as proof. It was the same routine the next night in the poker room at the Pensacola dog track, only there he walked away a winner, up
four hundred.

  Petty helped his mom out of the BMW at Pass-a-Grille Beach. She steadied herself with her cane before setting off across the parking lot. She was wearing a tropical print dress and a crown of little white flowers. They were at the end of the peninsula, where the beach was nearly deserted. A lone jogger and an old couple walking hand in hand were the only people in sight. A fat orange sun hovered an inch above the horizon. It was important to Joanne that they pour Sam’s ashes into the ocean right as it set, and she hobbled as fast as she could over the sand toward the whispering waves.

  Petty walked beside her, carrying the box containing the ashes and a bouquet of marigolds.

  “Slow down,” he said. “We’ve got time.”

  The sun touched the sea as they reached the shoreline. Petty opened the box and the plastic bag inside and passed the box to Joanne.

  “Do you pray?” Joanne said.

  “No,” Petty said. “But you go ahead.”

  Joanne bowed her head and addressed Sam directly, telling her how much she loved her and how much she’d miss her. “Your dad’s here with me,” she said, “and he loves and misses you, too, but we’re both happy you’re at peace now, at rest, bathed in God’s healing light.”

  Petty watched the sun go down while his mom spoke, watched it collapse into its reflection until all that remained was a white-hot horizon and single pink cloud floating in a purple sky. The sea murmured comfortingly, so vast, so calm.

  “In the midst of life, we are in death,” his mom said. She had kicked off her flip-flops and waded into the water until it reached her knees. She tipped the box and poured out the ashes. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.”

  The breeze caught the ashes and wafted them out to sea. Petty tossed the marigolds after them, and he and Joanne walked up the beach to dry sand and sat on a dune until daylight faded and the first stars appeared. A squadron of pelicans flew past, all in a line, hurrying home. Another bird, this one unseen, skirled and was answered. The air cooled quickly. Petty was conscious of the warmth of Joanne’s arm against his. She had a sweater in the car. He asked if she wanted him to get it.