The Barkeep

by William Lashner

  “I figured that would have to happen. Just leave Justin be.”

  “If that is what Cody wants.”

  “That’s what I want. Now go downstairs and wait for me.”

  Cody stepped aside and watched as Derek walked by him and started climbing down the stairs. Cody, still with the gun, weighed it in his hand as he looked at Justin.

  “Nice shooting,” said Cody. “You riddled him.”

  Justin struggled up to lean on an elbow. “I wasn’t trying to kill the kid. The gun just went off.”

  “Twice by accident?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I told you they loosened the pull.”

  “It was looser than I thought.”

  “I’m going to have to take this back to protect you and the innocent people of Philadelphia, if there are any left.” He gestured at the envelope and the mess of bills scattered now over the floor. “Is that the money you were going to pay that Vern guy?”

  “All of it but the four hundred I paid you.”

  “I’m going to have to take the money, too.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Why don’t you pick it up for me. And don’t forget I have your gun.”

  “There’s that, true.”

  “And I saved your life.”

  “Yes, you did. Who the hell is that guy anyway?”

  “That’s Derek. I met him outside the hotel when I followed your guy Birdie.”

  “He’s a menace.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.” Cody waved the gun. “Let’s go, I need to get the fuck out of here, and fast.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “As a fifth of bourbon, baby.” Cody leaned over, picked up the empty envelope, tossed it at Justin. Justin stared at Cody for a moment, and then rose to his knees, crawled over to the money and started stuffing the envelope with it.

  “When you were talking about the partnership opportunity you had been offered, was it with that Derek?”

  “He’s something, he is. An actual phenom, except he doesn’t throw speedballs.”

  “Then what does he do?”

  “This and that.”

  “He was sent to murder me.”

  “It’s his special talent.”

  “And he’s going to tidy up Vern.”

  “He’s very neat.”

  “For a killer, you mean.”

  “He’s a force of nature is what he is.”

  “Like a monster.”

  “More like a gun.” Cody raised the Glock and hefted it in his hand. “All he needs is someone to aim him. And I’m going to be the one to do it. That’s what he means by taking care of him.”

  “And you can’t find him something honest to do?”

  “Like make little Kewpie dolls? He’s a fricking genius at what he does. You should see the way he opens locks, the way he goes about his business. He’s a better killer than you are a bartender. Between the two of us, Derek and me, we have one talent. But so far he’s been aimed at all the wrong people. Maybe I’ll aim him at the right ones for a change.”

  “Have Derek, will travel, all wrongs righted, for a price?”

  “There’s a lot of crooks who want to kill other crooks. And you want to know something, Justin? I don’t have a problem with that, especially as I’m going to have to buy some new teeth.”

  “Even if it’s for the right reasons, it’s wrong, you know that.”

  “Do I? Derek’s a killer, sure. But so is this, and you went out and bought it from me. What did you intend to do with it, Justin? You meant to kill, for what you thought were the right reasons. So how will what I’ll be doing be any different?”

  “He’s going to eat you alive.”

  “Maybe, and maybe he’s already started. You don’t want to know my dreams lately, rough stuff. But there are some benefits to the whole arrangement, too. Like the money. And the power’s not bad, either. And along with the money and the power will come the women.”

  “When did you decide all this?”

  “For certain?”

  “Yeah, for certain.”

  “When he had his arm wrapped around your neck.”

  “So you agreed to it all to save my life.”

  “That’s one interpretation.”

  “What’s the other?”

  “I’m sick of being poor, I’m sick of being the guy who’s afraid his bets won’t come in. I’m sick of getting beat on by two-bit leg breakers. Let those assholes be afraid of me for once. Are we done here?”

  Justin gathered up the last of the bills, put them in the envelope, tossed it to Cody. “Yeah, we’re done. And you’re taking my money because?”

  “Because I have the gun.”

  “It’s my gun.”

  Cody opened the envelope, riffled the bills, took out four hundreds and tossed them onto the tatami. “Something tells me I’ll be needing it more than you.”

  “Be careful, they loosened up the pull.”

  “I’ll send you a postcard. Remember that favor you owed me?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Well, here it is. All I’m asking is that you keep your mouth shut about me and Derek. I’ll take it from there. Can you do that for me?”

  Justin looked at Cody for a long moment, not sure what the hell to do. Then he decided. Cody had just saved his life, he owed him something. And Justin sure as hell wasn’t a masked avenger out to right all wrongs, he was just a guy with one goal in his life now, and stopping Cody wasn’t it.

  “Good luck,” said Justin finally.

  “Name a drink after me, maybe.”

  “Something fruity?”

  “Not anymore. My tastes are changing.”

  “How about a Black-Eyed Cody. Tequila, salt, pickle juice, shot of Tabasco. It’ll taste like a punch in the face.”

  “Sounds wicked. Perfect.”

  With a final nod, Cody headed down the stairs.

  And Justin lay down on the tatami, surprised to find how calm he was. It is funny how focused the mind can become in the face of mortal danger. All he needed was a deranged hit man to attack him every morning and his life would be perfect. He thought through what had just happened, how Cody’s life was going to be twisted in all bad directions from here on in, and how he himself had dodged death’s dance. And then something that Derek had said hit him with the full force of its meaning. He had asked where Birdie Grackle was and Derek had replied, He said he had to give someone a message.

  What kind of message, and to whom?

  Justin lurched to standing and staggered toward the stairs. He caught his balance and then made his way as quickly as he could down to the second level, where his futon lay open on the floor. Beside it was a small crate, turned over to create a table, and on it was a lamp and his cell phone. He picked up the phone and made a call.

  “Yes?”

  “Frank?” said Justin. “Is everything okay?”

  “Who is this? Justin? Yeah everything’s fine, sure. You ready to give back that money already?”

  “Well, not really. Something came up. But is anybody there? Is everything okay?”

  “Sure, kid. What could be wrong?”

  “Just do me a favor, all right? Don’t let anybody in the house. Hunker down for the night. Or better yet, take Cindy and the kids on a jaunt and hunker down in a hotel somewhere.”

  “What are you talking about? What’s going on?”

  “Just trust me on this, okay? I’ll tell you everything later, but it could be a tough night for someone. I’m getting out of here myself. Just do it.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, little brother. I’ll do it. And you’ll tell me about everything tomorrow, including what happened to my money?”

  “I’ll tell you what I can,” said Justin.

  When he hung up, Justin paced a bit. He was going to follow his own advice and get the hell out of Dodge himself. Or at least out of this death trap of a house where there
was no place to hide. He wondered a moment at where he would go, and then made a call. The phone rang. And rang.

  No answer.

  64.

  ARISTOCRAT ROYAL

  “All I have is some vodka and ice,” said Annie from the kitchen. “Will that do?”

  “In a pinch,” said the old man in a growly Texas drawl. He was standing in her living room, leaning forward at the waist, his lips cruelly pursed. “And just between you and me, what say we forget about the ice.”

  “How many fingers?”

  “A handful,” said the old man. “It’s been a day.”

  “Yes, it has,” said Annie, pouring a little for herself over ice and a good long pour for the stranger. He had buzzed up from outside, claiming to be an old friend of Mac Chase and asking if he could come on up and talk to her a bit. She had hesitated, but when he mentioned that he also knew Justin, her curiosity had defeated her caution and now here he was, a decrepit old man with yellow hair and false teeth, wearing a ratty checked jacket, standing loose-limbed and ragged in her apartment.

  “This is about it,” she said, bringing over the glass. His sallow eyes lit up at the sight of it, as if it were half-full of some magic elixir rather than the cheapest vodka in the State Store. “The bottle’s dead.”

  “You with that glass is about the two prettiest things I ever done seen,” he said when he took the drink from her hand before raising it high. “As we say in Texas: To wine, women, song, and vice. To syphilis, the clap, crabs, and lice. I’ve had them all, the best ones twice.”

  She laughed at that as the old man slurped down a slug of the vodka. The bawdy toast was so inappropriate coming from this strange and desiccated man that she couldn’t help herself. She was feeling unaccountably confident and strong, able to laugh off things that would have bothered her before, as if Justin had performed a sort of alchemy, transmuting her from a substance dreary and leaden into something far shinier.

  “So how do you know Mackenzie?” she said.

  “Oh, we’re old friends. You mind I set a spell?”

  “No, please sit. Of course.”

  “Thank ye, ma’am,” he said, dropping onto the couch. “Not everyone is so hospitable to an old man already most ways out the door.”

  “You look better than that, Mr.—”

  “Bickham, Vernon Bickham. My friends call me Vern.”

  “You look healthy enough to be with us a long time, Mr. Bickham.”

  “You lie nice, almost as nice as you look,” said Vern. He took another slurp. “Old Mac sure could pick them.”

  “So how did you meet Mackenzie? In school?”

  He laughed at that, and she felt immediately stupid, like Flounder in Animal House.

  “No, missy, we was in the shack together.”

  “Oh,” she said, taking an involuntary step back. But of course, she should have known from the ravaged look of his face and the tattoos peeking out from his shirtsleeves. “Then how do you know Justin, too?”

  “Oh, the boy and me, we had our run-ins, though I don’t expect that we’ll have any no more, seeing as how things turned out.”

  “And how have things turned out?”

  “Why don’t you sit down, miss.”

  “Is something wrong with Justin?”

  “By now I’m sure everything’s righted up perfectly. Sit on down. I got a story to tell that you’ll want to hear.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “Maybe I don’t blame you.”

  Annie looked at the old man carefully, trying to figure out what he was after. Probably money, and she was ready to pay him just to get him out of there. It had seemed a clever idea letting him into the apartment at first, trying to wile out what information she could for Justin, but it seemed not so clever now. The man scared her for some reason, even though he was old enough that it seemed she could turn him into dust with one well-placed kick. Just being close to him, she didn’t feel so new and shiny anymore. She took a seat as far away from him as possible.

  “After I got out of the army,” said Vern, waving his mostly empty glass in the air for emphasis, “I fell in with a guy named Booker. He was one of them smart guys, you know, ugly as sin and always reading books, which is how he got his name. We did us some jobs, Booker and me, small stuff, you know, E-Z Marts and such. We was doing all right, nothing spectacular, but old Booker he kept on telling me that the big one was right around the corner. So one day, we’re holed up in some motel outside Laredo and he tells me he got me a job that pays hourly. Now I’m not interested in no such job, I got myself some standards after all, but he tells me it ain’t the job that matters, it’s where the job is. Right across the street from the Laredo National Bank.”

  He lifted his glass and emptied it.

  “How about some more of this bug juice?” he said.

  “I told you, I killed the bottle.”

  “What else you got? Whiskey? Wine? Hell, I’d even take a beer, just to lubricate the bladder, you know what I mean?”

  “I don’t have anything.”

  “Why that’s…that’s…that’s un-American. How are we going to peaceably pass the time without anything to drink?”

  “Maybe you should head off to a bar,” she said with a slight smile, “and find some better company.”

  “No need for that, missy, we’ll figure something out I suppose. There’s always the Lysol.” He put his glass down on the coffee table and rubbed its rim with his thumb as if he were figuring it out. “So there I was, in Laredo, waking up early in the morning to bus tables in a twenty-four-hour diner. I was a table-bussing fool, I was, and my share of the tips wasn’t so bad at that, but all the while I was keeping an eye on the bank. And I got me a bead on who’s going in that bank, who’s going out, who opens up and when. I tell everything to Booker, and Booker, being the brains, he sets it all up.”

  Her cell phone started singing a jaunty little tune in the kitchen. Annie jumped up to answer it, but the old man shook his head.

  “I think we should let that be,” he said.

  “It’s just the phone,” said Annie.

  “I know what it is,” said the old man as he reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun. “Let it ring and sit back down.”

  The tune continued.

  She sat back down, just like he said, right back down. She wasn’t one to obey orders, but suddenly, in the presence of the old man’s aggression, she felt strangely hollow. The sight of the gun, along with the still-raw memory of Janet Moss without half her head, had scooped out something inside her. Her spunk was punked by fear. The phone kept singing until the song died with a final burp.

  “It’s a kidnapping deal, right?” continued the old man, the gun now resting on his thigh, as innocuous as a cobra. “We bust into the manager’s house before dawn. I stash the family into a bedroom and keep them there with a gun. Booker, he takes the manager to the bank to open the safe. If it all runs smooth, we make out like bandits. Which is the way it should be, don’t you think, since that’s what we were?”

  “Do you want money?” said Annie, her teeth clenched to stop them from clattering. “Is that why you’re here?”

  “You got money?”

  “Not much.”

  “But you got something, don’t you? Jewels or something. You got to have something. Everybody’s got something.”

  “I have some jewelry. You want me to get it? Please let me.”

  “In time. But right now we got other fish to fry. Relax yourself, because I’m going to be here awhile. You got a cigarette?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “Light me up, sweetie.”

  She hopped up with an alacrity that bothered her. There was a pack of cigarettes in a drawer in the kitchen. While there she checked her phone quickly. The call was from Justin. Oh yes, Justin. Just the image of him calling gave her a shot of strength. She thought of grabbing the phone and making a desperate call, but when she craned her neck to check out the living room, the sallow
eyes of the old man were tight on her. She took the cigarettes and a pack of matches and brought them back to the living room, lit two, handed one to the old man. He put the stick in his mouth and sucked it greedily before coughing out the smoke.

  “Smooth,” he said.

  The phone started up again, and they watched each other as the ringtone sang and then died.

  “Who called before?”

  “Just a friend.”

  “If it really was a friend, she won’t be calling no more, or I might get a bit jittery. And you don’t want me getting a bit jittery, what with no more alcohol to soothe my nerves. So I was telling you about Laredo and that plan of ours. Son of a bitch, damn if it doesn’t go as smooth as the skin on your soft, pretty cheek. The family, they don’t make a peep, the vault is stuffed to the gills with payroll, Booker empties it out like he was a vacuum cleaner. A hundred and fifty grand, said the paper. The sweetest score of my life until I gets to the place where we was supposed to meet up at the car, and the car is gone. Booker booked with all the cash, that sly son of a bitch. I should have known never to trust no one what read all the time.”

  He took another inhale and coughed himself sick. He glanced around halfheartedly for an ashtray before flicking the cigarette toward Annie. She flinched, even though the butt never got near her, landing instead on the carpet, where it smoldered until she put it out with the sole of her shoe.

  “It took me three years to track the some-bitch down,” said Vern. “Booker had moved out of Texas, changed his name, broke with his friends, was living like a ghost. But even a ghost has a mother. Once I found her, stashed out in California with a new name, it wasn’t so hard to find him. She didn’t want to say nothing, but cracking her was easy as cracking walnuts. Utah, she told me. A small town out of Provo called Spanish Fork.”

  “What do you want?” said Annie.

  “A girlie like you, what I really want is to screw you till you’re blind. How would you like that?”

  “I’d rather you shoot me.”

  He laughed, a wet arrogant laugh. “It ain’t necessarily an either-or proposition. In my heyday you might have ended up happy and dead at the same time. Sadly, I’m not up to the screwing part no more. Used to be all my limbs was loose and limber, all but one. Now they’s stiff as boards, all but one. No, all I can do now is pass the time until the coast is clear. The hotel I was staying at got a sudden infusion of cop, so I needa hide out a bit before I hightail out of this stinking town. And you and me, we’re going to pass the time together.”