“Hello, Caligula,” Dewey muttered.
A blonde-haired girl with a certain stripper aura about her was snuggled up to Whitlaw, nuzzling his jowls, while he peeked down the front of her blouse, chuckling at his good fortune. The LeRoy Neiman painting Nick had mentioned hung right above the love birds’ nest. Its canvas was a jumble of color splashes that looked like Secretariat thundering down the backstretch all alone at the Belmont Stakes.
A couple of the wrestlers we’d seen back in Pensacola were also at the condo. One of them was a big guy whose ring name had been Captain Love. The other wrestler in attendance was none other than Little Dick Hoover, minus the mustache.
The wrestlers were dancing across the white carpet with another pair of blonde girls who looked like they probably worked at the same club as Whitlaw’s sugar pot. All in all, they were not an intimidating crew, and my confidence in Nick rose just a bit.
Of course, the dancing stopped as soon as we walked in. Whitlaw pushed the girl aside, sat up straight, and slammed his drink down on the glass coffee table. He waved his hand at Captain Love, and the big man walked over to the stereo and mercifully killed the Buffett.
“Have you two got shit between your ears?” Whitlaw asked. “I thought I told you we’d talk tomorrow.”
“We’ve come for our wages.” Eddie spoke in a measured and reasonable tone. “It can’t wait until tomorrow.”
Whitlaw shook his head like his initial anger had been nothing but sawdust caught in his wig. He plucked his drink off the table, playfully jiggled the ice, and stood up. He was smiling, and he appeared very much at ease. It was a posture that left me feeling a bit anxious.
“Why can’t it wait, Eddie? What’s your big hurry? You planning on going somewhere?”
Nick pointed at Whitlaw. “Maybe we think you’re planning on going somewhere.”
“Oh, really? And where might I be heading, Mr. Travel Agent?”
“Cabo San Lucas,” Nick said. “And I don’t think you’re planning on coming back.”
Whitlaw’s smile shriveled. He ran his hand across his chin and studied the five of us. For the first time, he appeared mildly concerned. He took another swallow of his drink. The gin seemed to stoke his agitation.
“Goddamn that little half-assed Delta pilot. You told me he knew what the fuck he was doing.”
“We both took a chance,” Nick said. “Who else was willing to make those flights? I didn’t see people lining up at your door.”
Dewey, Cash, and I were parked in our designated spot, directly behind Nick and Eddie and just at the edge of the foyer. I felt Dewey tug on the back of my shirt, so I turned to see what was so important. He gestured toward the walls of the entryway. They were covered with framed photos of Whitlaw standing beside famous country musicians. Hank, Junior. Freddy Fender. Charlie Pride. Loretta. It was like a music hall of fame.
Of course, the photos only served to complement the two guitars propped up on stands beside the wall. They were both acoustic models, one a Gibson autographed by Willie Nelson, the other a Martin signed by the Gambler himself, Kenny Rogers.
Dewey whispered, “He knows everybody in Nashville.”
“You know what they say in that commercial,” I told him. “A toupee can change your life.”
Eddie, Nick, and Whitlaw were still arguing about the money.
“We don’t care if you’re beating feet out of here,” Eddie said. “We don’t blame you. All we want is the eight grand you owe us.”
“Eight grand?” Whitlaw pretended to be flabbergasted. “Just how do you figure I owe you that much? What about all those pills I give you, Eddie? Do you think I get those for free? You come to me nearly every damn day wanting something. There ain’t a doctor in Florida that would give you so much as a Bayer aspirin anymore. Hell, you’ve done conned all of them once or twice. They know what you are.
“And you,” he said to Nick, “you’re the one who got me hooked up with Sosebee in the first place. Do you know how much that little shit is gonna cost me?”
Eddie clenched his fist, opened it back up, and ran his fingers through his hair. “Goddamn you. I’m not leaving until I get my money.”
Whitlaw flashed his SOB smile again. “Son, I’m doing you a favor by not giving you that money. Hell, it’d be negligent to fill your pockets with that kind of cash. You’d probably be dead by morning, a needle sticking out of your arm in some alley.”
Whitlaw scratched his chin in a thoughtful way. “I’d hate to pick up the paper and read that. It’d really break my heart. ‘Eddie Del Canto, pro wrestler, found dead in alleyway. Drugs suspected.’” Whitlaw dotted the air with his finger, as though he were following the lines of Eddie’s obituary. “‘A once-promising talent, Del Canto never lived up to his potential.’”
Whitlaw finally pushed the wrong button. Eddie clenched his fists again and took a step toward the boss. Nick grabbed Eddie by the back of the arm and stopped him.
“Whoa, hoss. Keep your cool.”
Captain Love stepped forward and tried to act as peacemaker. He had his hands up in the air—palms open—as though he were approaching a twitchy rottweiler.
“Come on, Eddie. Take it easy. Why don’t you let me drive you down to the strip and buy you a beer.”
“Fuck off, Ronnie. I quit drinking.”
That proclamation could have best been described as breaking news.
Eddie gave Whitlaw the finger, then turned around and lumbered toward the door. Whitlaw smirked as though he knew it was all over, that he’d gotten the best of Eddie and Nick and they were going to walk out of there like a couple of jobbers, with their tails between their legs. All in all, it didn’t seem like such a bad ending to me. We all could have imagined a lot worse.
And then Nick pulled out the shooting wedge and leveled it at Whitlaw. The act caught us all by surprise. My heart jumped up and took off like Secretariat.
“Open the fucking safe,” Nick said.
Whitlaw somehow managed to flinch and smile at the same time. “What safe? This ain’t no goddamn bank.”
Nick grabbed the front of Whitlaw’s warm-up jacket and leaned into his face. “Open it,” he growled.
Whitlaw pushed Nick’s hand aside and straightened his jacket. “Get your hands off my damn Tacchini, boy. This is a two-hundred-dollar warm-up suit.”
By now, Eddie had turned around to see what was happening. He appeared to be as shocked as the rest of us.
Whitlaw surveyed the situation (Love, Little Dick, and the girls already had their hands in the air) and it drained some of the piss out of him. He decided it was time to negotiate.
“I tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “I’ll write each of you a check for a grand. But that’s it. That’s as far as my rope stretches.”
Nick just laughed. Eddie stepped back up to the front of the room and took his place beside Nick.
“You think we’re fucking idiots?” Eddie said. “I haven’t taken that many folding chairs to the head.”
Nick stuck the muzzle of the BB gun to Whitlaw’s temple and bluffed his ass off. “Open the safe, and get the goddamn money, or I’m gonna paint another horsey picture up there on the wall.”
Whitlaw slipped off his Guccis, climbed atop the sofa cushions, and swung the Secretariat painting away from the wall. Sure enough, there was a safe right where Nick said there would be one.
“You just dug your own graves,” Whitlaw said. “Five of them, to be exact. I don’t even know these other three characters, but I’ll get you. You can bet your fucking ass on it.”
He pulled out stacks of green bills. They were clean, and they looked like little cakes. Dewey found a Burdines shopping bag in a closet. He held it out so that Whitlaw could drop the money into it. Meanwhile, Cash and I walked around the condo jerking the phone cords out of the wall. Cash used the cords to hog-tie the Captain and Little Dick. As for the girls, we told them to get the hell out of there and keep their mouths shut. We gave them two hundred dollars ap
iece from Whitlaw’s stash, and they seemed more than obliged to follow our instructions.
It appeared everything was taken care of. My heart had even slowed to a trot. But then Whitlaw reached into the safe one last time and produced his trump card: a .357 Magnum.
“I couldn’t interest y’all in a handgun, could I?” He cackled and then hopped down from the sofa. He slipped his feet back into his Guccis and leveled the gun at Nick’s chest. Nick swallowed hard and leveled his shooting wedge at Whitlaw.
Whitlaw was grinning like Mr. Ed. “Well, what do we have here?” he asked.
Nick clenched his jaw like a gunslinger. “I believe they call it a Mexican standoff.”
“Quit trying to jerk me off,” Whitlaw said. “That’s a fucking air pistol.”
“The hell it is,” Nick said.
Whitlaw snorted. “You fucking half-wit, I’ve been collecting guns all my life. You don’t think I’d know something like that? That’s a twenty-two Daisy. You probably paid fifteen dollars for that thing at Western Auto.”
“So what if I did?” Nick asked. “I don’t think you’d look too good with a glass eye.”
Whitlaw laughed. “You couldn’t hit a goddamn bull in the ass with that thing, much less my eye. Besides which, if I decide to pull the trigger on this bad boy, I’ll blow a hole right through you and take out your fat friend standing there behind you.”
When he heard this, Dewey edged closer to me.
“Now quit fucking around and drop it,” Whitlaw said, “before I really get pissed.”
A helpless feeling washed over me. It was like being in the backseat of a car as it spun out of control, the steering wheel just out of my reach.
“Plan A,” Cash whispered. “We should have put his ass in the trunk when we had the chance.”
Nick eyed the muzzle of the Magnum, and, ever so slowly, lowered his arm to his side. He looked at the floor and sighed like he’d just dumped an approach shot into the water.
Whitlaw grabbed the shooting wedge and stuffed it into the elastic waist of his pants, then he motioned toward the door with the Magnum.
“All of you,” he said, “get your asses over there. Slow and easy, too. Any of you get cute, and I’ll pick off two or three of your buddies before you even know what happened.”
Dewey’s face had turned whiter than Whitlaw’s carpet. Cash, though, looked like he was trying to think his way out of the jam. It was a welcome sight, seeing how my own mind had already kicked itself into high gear.
“Goddammit,” Whitlaw said, “this is the last fucking thing I need right now. Why couldn’t you two fucking leave well enough alone?”
I’d gathered from my encounter with Dot Knox that it was sometimes best not to answer a question. Obviously, Eddie had not learned the same lesson.
“Why couldn’t you not be a greedy prick?” he asked Whitlaw.
“Fuck you,” Whitlaw said. “I’ll have your goddamn asses dumped in the swamp with the gators. Won’t nobody ever find you.”
He kept the gun on us, but edged over to the corner of the living room, where Cash had hog-tied the Captain and Dick. He tried to unfasten them with his free hand, but Cash’s knots were unyielding.
“Who the fuck did this?” Whitlaw asked.
Cash raised his hand.
“Get your ass over here, Mr. Eagle Scout. Untie these boys.”
Cash walked over and surveyed his handiwork. “Can’t do it,” he told Whitlaw.
“Fuck you,” Whitlaw said. “Don’t tell me you can’t do it. You tied it, you can fucking untie it.”
“I need a knife,” Cash said.
“Yeah, and I need a fucking blow job. But y’all screwed that up for me, didn’t you?”
Cash held up his hands as if they were useless in the matter. The gesture really pissed off Whitlaw. He swung the gun around and aimed it at Cash, flat out turning his back to us.
“I said get down on your goddamn knees and untie those boys. Now you fucking do it, or I’ll kill you where you stand. I’ll call the sheriff of this county, who hunts in my dove field and happens to be a close, personal friend of mine. I’ll tell him you were breaking and entering, and he won’t give a good goddamn.”
With Whitlaw railing like a maniac, I seized the opportunity. He was about four quick strides away from me. It was a gamble whether I could reach him before he turned back around. But somehow, that felt appropriate. I grabbed the Kenny Rogers guitar, which was perched in its stand beside me, raised it over my shoulder, and made a charge. I had the back of Whitlaw’s head in my sights, sizing it up like a high hanging curveball.
Whitlaw was still yelling at Cash, not paying us any attention. Unfortunately, Little Dick gave him the heads-up.
I was still a couple of strides away from Whitlaw, when he spun in his Guccis. “What the hell?” Those were the last words he spoke before pulling the trigger.
I don’t remember hearing it, but I saw the flash from the muzzle, like a hiccup of flames. I didn’t feel a thing. I kept moving forward. Cash had already reached around from behind Whitlaw and pulled his arm down to his side. I was swooping in for the knockout blow, when the guitar began to feel strange in my hand. At first it felt lopsided, and then hot, as if it were melting, as if Whitlaw’s bullet had caught the neck of the instrument and set it afire. First, my hand burned, and then my arm and my shoulder. I took my best swing. I tried to get the good hip rotation, arm extension, and everything behind it. I was thinking short and compact, just like Bob Horner’s stroke. But nothing happened. The guitar never came down. Instead, I found myself standing dead still, as if I’d come up against an unforgiving wall. My ears were ringing, and Cash and Whitlaw were still on the floor wrestling. First, Eddie jumped into the fray with Cash, and then Dewey. I still wanted to get in on the action, but I couldn’t take a step forward. In fact, my knees had turned to water. My head was pounding and I was nauseous, and the shaggy white carpet was coming up to greet me. I saw Nick’s face, and then I was sinking into the lake again, down to the bottom of a brown water cove, the muck pulling at me as I reached out for a pair of hands that were too far away from me, still hoping they might lift me up one more time.
40
The first person I saw was a girl with dark hair.
“Rachel?”
“No, I’m Gail. You stay quiet now. You don’t need to be moving around.”
My body felt heavy, my pulse lurching as if my veins were filled with hardening cement.
The next face belonged to Cash. But just as I’d lined him up, my eyelids betrayed me.
“Hey, man, can you hear me?”
The best I could manage was a grunt.
“Listen,” Cash said, “Whitlaw got a piece of you—in the shoulder. You’re at the county hospital. We told them we found you on the road, no ID or nothing. But they’re gonna have the cops here soon enough. We gotta get you out of here.”
I understood what was required of me. But every time I blinked, I would sink into a sweet and peaceful darkness where it seemed the cops would never find me.
“Unhook the damn IV,” Dewey said. “Hell, they’ve pumped him full of Dilaudid.”
My peace was finally broken by a searing pain. It felt like my shoulder had been pierced with a white-hot railroad spike. The pain shot right across my jaw, locking it up so that I could barely utter a profanity. And then I realized that Dewey and Cash had lifted me out of the bed.
“Can you walk?” Cash asked.
“Do I have a fucking choice?”
Dewey braced me against the wall while Cash checked the hallway. Standing there I began to shiver, soaked in a cold sweat, swelling up with nausea.
“How bad is it?” I asked Dewey.
“Went in one side, came out the other,” he said. “Missed all the bones and arteries. You’ve got the luck of the Cartwrights.”
I finally looked down to check myself out. Someone had dressed me in a green hospital gown. My right arm was in a sling, bandaged close to my body.
My gear-shifting arm, of all things.
“I don’t think I can drive,” I told Dewey.
Cash laughed. “I’ll take care of that.”
“What about Nick?” I asked.
Dewey’s expression turned sour. “They got their damn money, and then we tied up Whitlaw and got the hell out of there. Nick wanted to come to the hospital with us, but we threatened to put his ass in the trunk if he didn’t get the hell out of town.”
“That’s good,” I said. “You made the right call.”
And then Dewey smiled. I couldn’t imagine what he might have found so amusing at that particular moment.
“What?”
“The guitar,” he said. “We couldn’t get you to let go of Kenny Rogers’s guitar. Even after your ass had been shot. Man, you were holding on to that thing for dear life. It’s still in the car.”
The sun had just finished creeping above the treetops when we pulled up to Nick and Dewey’s house. Cash and Dewey helped me inside and got me situated on the couch. Cash told me he’d clean the blood out of the Chevelle and drop it off at Lance Hillin’s house. After that, he was going to visit a dentist friend of his. He said he’d have the guy come over and take a look at my shoulder.
“A dentist?”
“He can keep the wound clean,” Cash said, “give you some painkillers and antibiotics. And trust me, you’re gonna need those fucking painkillers.”
I was already in need. Whatever they’d given me in Pensacola had worn off, and now it felt like Willie Stargell had taken a round of BP on my shoulder.
Dewey turned on the TV for me and went back to his bedroom to get some shut-eye. I was wide awake, the pain throbbing in time with my pulse, banging out an angry 4/4 beat. I lay there in my old, familiar spot, with the morning light cutting a line across the room and a man reading the news on the TV screen. They were showing films of people rioting in Iran.
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