Twitch was in the goddamn trunk.
Despite my best instincts to keep the corpse disposal on the down low, I yelled out, “No!”
The two gunslingers stood there in their best John Woo mutual-destruction poses.
“Mr. Malone?” Blanc said. “Please keep your voice down.”
I looked around at the neighboring houses, remembering that it was one of those nosy motherfuckers who’d dropped the dime on Junior and me in the first place.
Behind me, I heard a loud thump, much like a body wrapped in a rug and then wrapped in plastic would make when dropped suddenly. I turned back to see the “movers” unzipping their jumpsuits. Wild-eyed, they reached inside. Gentle smile gone, the old lady was beelining for something in her cleaning bag.
I held my hands up. “Wait, wait, wait!” I said to them in an Irish whisper. Christ, I hoped they spoke English.
They glared at me, but kept their hands where they were.
I was frozen, caught between keeping the cleanup crew from adding more weaponry into the mix and a firefight in the middle of the street.
“Mr. Malone?” Blanc said in a tight, angry voice. His gaze remained along his extended shooting arm, never breaking eye contact with Twitch. “Will you kindly come down here and explain this situation?”
I looked back at the cleanup crew. Both movers kept their hands inside their jumpsuits. The old lady stood stone-still, a dead expression on her face and a small snub-nosed revolver in each hand.
I made the double-handed open-palm motion for them to stay where they were. I thought back to my tenth grade Spanish. “Espera, espera!”
The guy with the ponytail scrunched up his face. “The fuck you saying, homes?”
Well, that answered that.
“Just hold up one minute. We have a misunderstanding happening.”
The abuela shifted the black pinpricks that replaced her eyeballs to me. “No a good time for meesunderstanding.”
No shit.
“Now, Mr. Malone,” Blanc said, a bit louder from outside. I didn’t like that he was abandoning his own volume control.
I approached the car slowly. Up the block, I saw headlights turn at the top of the street. “Guys, there’s a car coming, so I strongly suggest that you both put your dicks back into your pants.”
“Him first,” Twitch said, a fear on his countenance that I had never, ever seen in the lifetime of knowing him. This was really not good. Both of his eyelids were spasming like two moths had landed on his face and were having simultaneous epileptic fits.
Twitch was a tiny pink man who made his way through life knowing he could make people fear him when he needed to. Especially those who initially underestimated what he was capable of.
Which was not the man on the end of his gun that night.
Not Louis Blanc.
“You’re joking,” Blanc said to Twitch. I saw a muscle jumping with tension under Blanc’s dead eye, right under the thick scar. I was pretty sure even Blanc had never come across a Twitch before.
Two psychopaths, their eye muscles doing Cirque du Soleil, juggling their newborn emotions in the middle of the street.
With guns.
And I fucking hated guns.
I repressed the screaming of such sentiment. I really did.
I looked back up the street. The car was five houses down. “Put the gun down, Twitch.” I reached back into our history and used as much of my senior authority as I could draw on.
The headlights reflected off the panel van. Six cars away.
Twitch’s whole head twitched.
Blanc’s arm tensed.
Two cars.
Twitch lowered the gun into the car.
Blanc moved his hand inside his coat.
The car passed. The face of a little boy, maybe five years old, was pressed against the passenger side window. The driver didn’t even look over. The kid waved. I gave him a little wave back.
Blanc said, “You want to tell me who this is and why in sweet fuck all he was hiding in your trunk?”
“I didn’t know he was in there.”
“He didn’t,” Twitch said.
Blanc looked at us, back and forth. “There’s no answer that either one of you is going to give me that isn’t going to sound utterly ridiculous, is there?”
“Nope,” I said.
Blanc shook his head and blew out a deep breath. “Let’s make strides to end this evening, then, shall we?”
***
Twitch and I sat in the car as the movers efficiently hustled the remains of Galal Shaughness into Miss Kitty’s trunk.
“I’m sorry, Boo.”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t know what to do with him anymore. He’d more than likely saved the lives of Ginny, Dana, and me. Then he’d almost gotten the both of us killed less than an hour later.
I needed Junior.
My crew had always been an assemblage of misfits, each bringing an enriching quality to the mix, a quality that sometimes made them outcasts in the first place. Together, we were formidable. Broken down into parts, we were a flying mess of dysfunction.
But Junior and I were the core—the yin and yang at the center. I needed his sometimes idiotic common sense the same way he needed my pragmatism. Ollie brought the smarts, Twitch brought the…efficiency?
We were all broken pieces.
Together, we were a reasonably functional human being. But sometimes…the wrong two pieces in the wrong situation…
Ollie once called our family unit “ReVoltron.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it made Twitch laugh like hell..
Blanc rapped his knuckles on my window. I rolled it down, and he handed me the keys. “Follow my car. The apartment should be ready and sparkling by the morning.”
“Gimme five minutes,” I said, turning the key. Miss Kitty’s old engine coughed up a few hairballs, then roared to life. “It’s an old car. Gotta let her warm up.”
Blanc stared at me, I’m pretty sure wondering whether or not Miss Kitty had it in her to not break down on the ride. I wasn’t sure how much more he was willing to take before he cut his losses by putting bullets into us and ending his night. Truth be told, I was surprised he hadn’t already.
“Mr. Blanc?” Twitch said.
“What?”
“Pleasure to meet you. Big fan.”
I wished I could say that Twitch’s declaration of fandom for the hired killer surprised me, but my surprise glands had been emptied out and had shriveled up and died at that point.
Blanc walked back to his car, muttering in great puffs of frozen breath.
“You’re staying here,” I said to Twitch.
“But…”
“I need you to stay here and watch the apartment while this crew cleans up your mess.”
Twitch sank a small amount into himself at that. I could easily have said our mess, but didn’t. I also could have said that I didn’t mean it that way.
I didn’t do that either.
But I knew Twitch well enough to know what worked. I needed to give him purpose. “Watch them. Make sure they don’t walk out with anything that’s not theirs.”
Twitch pepped back up again. “I can do that.” Eager to please his big brother.
It felt dirty. It felt manipulative.
But I also knew that it was what I had to do. The first part of which was untethering myself from Twitch. And I had to do so leaving him no opportunity to pull his ninja routine on me again. I didn’t need him popping out of the goddamn glove compartment when I least expected it.
Part of him no doubt knew I was giving him the royal blow-off, but the greater part of him, the part that needed the task, needed to be of use, overrode the obvious.
Blanc pulled his black sedan up to the window as Twitch climbed out.
“Where’s he going?”
I held my hand up until Twitch was out of earshot. “He wants to make sure that they don’t miss anything. Shall we?”
Blanc believed my lie about as much
as Twitch did, but in the greater interest of ending the debacle of a night, he simply rolled up his tinted window with a whirr.
Oh hell, I’d forgotten something. “One sec,” I said, holding up a finger.
“Fer fook’s seck,” I heard Blanc say through the window as he slammed his car back into park. I noticed that the more frustrated he got, the heavier his accent became. A little more effort on my end, and Blanc would be spouting about green clovers and blue diamonds.
Trotting back into the house, I waved at the crew, who gave me looks like they were still hoping to get a chance to shoot me. Twitch was in the kitchen, his head in the fridge. His tiny pink face popped up as I passed. “You okay, Boo?” he said through whatever it was he was already chewing on.
“All good,” I said as I ran back into Dana’s room, opened the closet, and retrieved the trumpet. I still had a feeling it was all connected to the damn trumpet, since it was the only thing that Dana had kept of Byron’s that wasn’t underpants, skinny jeans, and brightly colored polo shirts.
Worst-case scenario, I’d give the damned thing to Ollie as an apology and call it a day.
I almost slipped down the icy steps in my haste, and could see Blanc shaking his head in disbelief. He rolled the tinted window down a crack. “May we please move on now?” His gaze, even through the small window opening, very noticeably moved to the case in my hand.
“Yep,” I said. “Don’t want to forget my trumpet.”
“You don’t strike me as a musical sort,” Blanc said.
“Huge fan of John Coltrane,” I said, fumbling in the cold with the car keys and frozen fingers.
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. Since I was a kid.” I opened the door.
“Well, then, why do you play the trumpet?”
“Huh?”
“Coltrane played the saxophone.”
“Milo Davis?” I only knew two names of jazz musicians. I’d officially used them both.
“Closer. Miles Davis played the trumpet.”
Okay. Guess I only knew one. “What I meant. My lips are icing over.”
Blanc reached over and opened the passenger door. When the interior light turned on, he made a point of removing his gun from his jacket once again. He didn’t point it at me, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to. He just placed it on the seat and laid his hand over it. “Mr. Malone. Is there something in that case I need to know about? That I might possible have to shoot you over?”
I guess Blanc watched the same TV shows I did. Slowly, I opened the case and showed him the trumpet. “We good?” I asked.
“As good as we’re going to be, I suppose.” He reached over the seat and pulled the door shut.
I tossed the trumpet onto the back seat, climbed into Miss Kitty, and followed him away from Ginny’s house.
Blanc drove down to Centre Street, popped into the traffic circle, and hopped onto Arborway, then Parkman Drive. Wherever our destination was, I was glad we weren’t cutting through the city proper.
After a good stretch of suburbia, I was beginning to relax. By relax, I mean I was finally able to unclench my anus without fear of soiling myself at the idea of driving a corpse around town.
A couple more turns and we were on MA-9. By the time we jumped on and off the turnpike, I wondered just where the fuck we were heading. I didn’t think we’d be pulling over in the middle of the Tobin and tossing the departed into the Charles, but I sincerely hoped we weren’t going to drive into New Hampshire to dig a shallow grave in a field outside Nashua. My already shot nerves weren’t up to the road trip.
Once we pulled off outside Billerica, I started allowing myself to believe that we might get out of this.
And then came the flashing red and blue lights.
Not a hundred yards off the exit, and the cops crawled out of a side street and hit me with a woop-woop.
Anus clench re-engaged.
There was no way Blanc didn’t see the lights or hear the siren. He didn’t pull over.
So I didn’t either.
We kept driving.
My mind raced, bordering on panic.
Goddamn it.
Goddammit.
We didn’t speed up.
We didn’t slow down.
We just kept on keeping on.
Despite the barely above-freezing temperatures in the car, a greasy sheen of sweat popped out on my forehead and across the back of my neck. I was glad I didn’t have Twitch in the car. Behind me was a real cop. And I wasn’t sure that, things being what they were, Twitch wouldn’t have blasted him too.
I needed to get out of this without another goddamn body.
And if I could swing it, I wanted to apply that stratagem to the rest of my life. Which I would be spending in a cell if I couldn’t figure the best way out of my current predicament.
“Pull over the Buick,” barked from the loudspeaker on top of the black-and-white.
Blanc didn’t pull over.
Neither did I.
The siren woop-wooped again. The officer repeated himself with more force. “In the Buick. Pull over to the right and shut off your engine.”
Blanc put on his right turn signal.
So did I. It seemed we were pulling over after all.
Sour bile jumped up from my empty stomach, coating my throat and mouth.
But Blanc didn’t pull over. He made a right turn.
And gunned it.
Fuck it.
So did I.
Miss Kitty’s beautiful powerhouse of an engine roared like an enraged primeval beast and spat gravel under her wide tires as I cornered hard. I let loose a blaze-o’-glory howl that rattled the windows. Fuck it. Fuck it all!
The police car blazed to life, full sirens and lights as it slipped the corner behind me. My eyes flicked to the rearview and I wondered about the ramming power of Miss Kitty.
I almost shot past Blanc before I noticed he had, in fact, pulled over in a wide driveway-cum-parking lot blocked from the road by a tall fence rimmed with razor wire.
I slammed my foot on the brakes and turned into the lot, skidding only inches short from smashing into the flank of Blanc’s car.
The police car screeched alongside us, blocking me from turning back onto the road, should that option be one I had under consideration.
But to be honest?
I had nothing.
My mind was a clean slate of panic.
Both doors of the police car flew open, two officers erupted from the vehicle with their guns drawn out low and screaming at me.
“Put your hands high, palms up!”
I placed my palms flat on the interior roof and stared straight ahead, afraid to so much as gently blink.
The lead officer came to my driver’s side. The second officer, a female cop, nervously moved both her gun and her gaze back and forth from my hands to Blanc’s car.
The lead officer, older than his partner by at least a decade, tried opening my door, and found it locked. “Open the door.”
I made the slightest movement of my hands to do exactly that when Officer Two shrieked, “Keep your hands where I can see them!” Her gun moved toward my head so fast the sight tapped the window.
I didn’t shit myself, so that was something, but I did let out an impressively forceful fart.
Even in my peripheral vision, I could see how badly her hands were shaking. I was guessing the two didn’t see too many situations like the one I’d put them in the middle of out here in the boonies. It looked like it was a night of firsts for a lot of people.
Trying to keep my voice even, I said, “I can’t do both, guys.”
Before they could figure out what to do next, a loud clank struck the air and the driveway gate started grinding its way slowly open.
Emerging from between the gates, walking two thick-necked pit bulls on inch-and a-half chains came a…troll?
The guy was barely five feet tall with an inch or two for spare change, but walked with the swagger of a man twice h
is size. “Put the guns away, R.J.,” he said casually, scratching a beard with more hair than remained on his pate.
“What’s going on here, Bray?” said the older cop. Presumably R.J.
“They’re here to see me.”
The lady cop said, “We got an APB…”
Uh oh…
“Don’t care if you got an XYZ. They’re here to see me. Lou?”
Blanc stepped out of his car. “Officers.” His sly smile was back on, but there was something underneath it. Something deadly. “Bray.”
“Be with you in a moment, Lou,” Bray said, turning his attention back to R.J. “Would you mind stepping to the side with me so we can discuss this? The bitch can stay in the car.”
“Hey,” the female officer said, but with more hurt than anger or authority.
R.J.’s graying moustache wiggled ominously, but he holstered his piece. “Listen to the man, Stephanie.”
Steph, while unhappy with the new orders, if not being stripped of her opportunity to shoot me, also put her gun away.
The two pit bulls in Bray’s grasp snarled and chuffed, but didn’t bark. White foam rimmed their wide jaws as they looked over the assemblage, no doubt wondering which of us they’d like to digest chunks of the most.
Laconically, Bray spat out the frayed toothpick from between his teeth. He gave a short, sharp whistle through his wet lips and said, “Stand down.”
Both dogs immediately plopped their haunches onto the gravel and sat at a stiff attention that would have impressed the hardest drill sergeant.
“What’s the story here, Bray?” R.J. said, walking toward the side of the car. Even though Bray had the dogs heeled, the old cop kept his eyes on the two, his hand only a short distance from his gun.
“Just a misunderstanding. These boys are dropping off a car for me.”
“The Buick?”
“Yeah. You didn’t call it in yet, did ya?” Something dangerous flared in Bray’s eyes as he stroked his beard.
“Not yet. Figured that since we were this close to your place, we’d wait and see where it was headed.”
“You did right, R.J. Walk with me.”
Their quick exchange rattled me deep. The way the old cop was laying things out made it sound like they were looking for Miss Kitty. Specifically.
Rough Trade Page 15