Shoot the Money

by Chris Wiltz

  Good outfit, but choosing it had used up most of the time Karen had hoped to spend with Tom Rivers. She raced through the courtyard and cursed the worn lock on the tall wood gate to the street that demanded a safe cracker’s touch to open.

  She turned up Bourbon to walk to Dumaine, not too many people on the street in this residential part of the Quarter. She’d walked a half block when she spotted a couple crossing Bourbon on Dumaine, a cowboy with a date who looked more than just a few sheets gone. Her feet managed a step now and again, but the man was mostly dragging her. He had to jostle her up the curb. Her head flopped forward, and she dropped the shopping bag she was carrying. The cowboy didn’t see it.

  “Hey,” Karen called, “you dropped your bag.”

  He didn’t hear her. They went past the corner building, and Karen couldn’t see them. She ran to the corner and picked up the bag. The couple hadn’t gotten very far. The girl was no longer on her feet at all; the cowboy had stopped to figure out how best to carry her.

  Karen heard him speak roughly to her, calling her a bitch. He shook her. The way her head flopped she’d get whiplash.

  “Hey,” Karen called again, moving toward him.

  The cowboy jerked around to look at her as the girl’s head fell toward him. He cracked his jaw on the side of it. “Shit,” he said.

  As Karen came up, the cowboy grabbed the lower part of the girl’s face. It looked as though he was going to try to twist her head off.

  “What are you doing?” Karen said.

  The cowboy stood still a second, then he shoved the girl backwards into Karen and took off running.

  Karen struggled to keep herself and the girl upright. Even though she wasn’t as tall as Karen and quite thin, Karen couldn’t hold her for long. She tried to maneuver her toward the wall of a house only a couple of steps away, but she wasn’t going to be able to carry her that far. She might drop her, crack her head against the stucco wall, or fall down with her.

  She was trying to get her to the ground as easy as possible when she heard someone walking up behind her. She glanced over her shoulder to see Luc.

  “Karen, what’s going on?”

  “Her date just unloaded her on me.”

  “You know her?”

  “No.”

  Luc pulled the girl’s arm around his shoulder. “Let’s get her to the stoop there.”

  “If we put her down, I’m not sure we’ll get her back up. My place is just around the corner on St. Philip.”

  “I hope she doesn’t get sick all over us.”

  “She’s not drunk. That guy slipped her something.”

  “Then let’s call 911. Let them deal with it.”

  “Where will they take her? Where’s the new Charity Hospital since the old one got flooded? Do you feel like spending the night at some hospital in East Fuckover? I don’t.”

  “There’s a charity hospital. I think they’re using University Hospital. It’s not far.”

  “They’ll want someone to go with her.”

  “We don’t have to go.”

  “Then what? She wakes up all alone tomorrow morning, no idea what happened to her? Let’s go to my place.”

  Holding her arms over their shoulders, supporting her at the waist, they carried Raynie to Karen’s.

  When they got to the wood gate, Karen put the key in the lock and tried to get it to turn while supporting her half of Raynie’s weight with her hip. She jiggled the key, worked it gently, lost patience, and gave it a vicious twist. “You try it,” she said to Luc. “It needs testosterone.”

  First try, the lock turned. Luc pushed the gate open with his foot.

  ***

  They dropped Raynie on Karen’s bed, lifted her head so Karen could get the purse over it, and swung her legs up on the mattress. Raynie’s skirt inched up her thighs. Karen pulled it down.

  “Let’s take her shoes off,” she said and started unbuckling the one closest to her.

  Luc lifted Raynie’s leg. From under it he got the lace-up top Karen had rejected earlier. He rubbed it between his fingers and held it by its shoulder straps. “Nice little number. Not as cute as the one you have on.”

  Karen took it and threw it over the back of a chair. “There’s a bottle of rum on a table in the living room. I could use a Cuba Libre,” she said.

  “Okay, boss.” Luc left the room.

  The red polish on the girl’s toenails was chipped, the shoe Karen held was scuffed from dragging along the sidewalk. She watched the girl breathe, her breaths deep and even. With a soft moan, the girl turned. Karen gathered the rest of her clothes from the bed and tossed them to the chair. She listened to the girl breathing again, then she kicked off her shoes, picked up the girl’s purse from the floor and opened the French doors to the courtyard. She crossed the courtyard barefoot to the living room where she opened the two sets of doors. The apartment was laid out in an L. Karen was paying more rent than she could afford without the money in the safe deposit box, but the private courtyard, like another room with all the doors open, was worth it. She turned on the ceiling fan, sat on the sofa, and emptied the little black purse.

  A lipstick rolled out on the coffee table. There was a compact, a small box of soft brown eye shadow, an eyebrow pencil, a folding comb, twenty-two dollars, and loose change at the bottom of the purse. No wallet. Inside a zippered pocket was more money and a key. Karen was counting the money out on the table, six one-hundred dollar bills, when Luc came in with the drinks.

  “She’s not broke,” he said.

  “No ID,” Karen said. She put all the makeup back in the purse, folded the money and zipped it along with the key in the inside pocket.

  Luc handed Karen her drink and sat beside her. “What are you—Mother Teresa or something? Take care of the poor, the sick, the needy, bring home perfect strangers, put them in your bed?”

  “Do I have to be Mother Teresa to help a poor kid who almost got raped tonight? I came along, it’s up to me to help her. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “Take it easy. So you played the Good Samaritan. It’s not what I expected, that’s all.”

  “You expected hard-ass Honeycutt to leave an unconscious woman on the sidewalk and go have a drink?”

  “Why are you so pissed?”

  “I’m not.”

  He’d hit a nerve, though, with that Mother Teresa stuff. The last thing Karen wanted to be was someone who took care of other people. The whole time she was growing up her mother had acted as if she was running some kind of missionary refugee camp, a string of needy people moving in and out of the house, most of them women. From her bedroom Karen would listen to them cry, her mother talking softly to them. There would be the occasional hysterical laughter then more crying. In the morning the house would smell like a Catholic church from all the candles they’d light to whatever saint needed to intervene. As the years passed they made a subtle shift into the New Age. They still lit candles and they still liked the Virgin Mary and the saints, but they began to talk about things like karma and becoming one with the universe, guru-talk. Karen’s mother became a guru junkie. The most potent gurus were the ones who helped her get in touch with her spiritual self by screwing her all the way to enlightenment, liberation, reincarnation, whatever.

  Karen said, “I’m not Mother Teresa, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Or the Good Samaritan.”

  “Got it.”

  “Or hard-ass Honeycutt.”

  “I’m sorry I ever brought that up. I only heard a couple of people call you that.”

  “I believed you the first time.”

  They sipped at their drinks until Luc said, “Why did you call me tonight?”

  “You offered to buy me a drink, remember?”

  “Yeah, but you’re not desperate for someone to buy you a drink, and you don’t seem too interested in me. If you’ve been talking to LaDonna or looking at the paperwork, and you want to know if I’m stealing from the bar, I’m not.”

>   “You just got more interesting.”

  “No offense taken. LaDonna probably doesn’t remember, but I told her one of the bartenders was stealing. I didn’t tell her I’d put my money on Little Joe, but I would.”

  Little Joe had been hanging around the Quarter since the sixties, an old hippie with his long hair and the faded tattoo of a peace symbol on his forearm.

  Karen said, “You usually work with him on Saturday nights.”

  “I’ve never seen him pocket any money or even give a drink away. But sometimes I don’t come in until the late shift on the weekends and he works alone a couple of nights a week. I say it’s him because he’s got the most opportunity. Zachary only works part time.”

  “Why do you think somebody’s stealing?”

  “Because LaDonna’s always complaining that things are slow. She cut back on kitchen and wait staff, let one bartender go. If things are that slow why are we using the same amount of liquor?”

  Karen nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”

  He stared at her for a few seconds. “Where did you come from, Karen? All of a sudden you show up out of nowhere and start running the show. Not that somebody doesn’t need to since Boy Wonder left.”

  “Ramon?”

  “Yes, but we’re talking about you.”

  She picked up her drink and settled back into the corner of the sofa. “Like you said, out of nowhere. I came back home.”

  Luc waited, but when she didn’t say anything more, he said, “The way you talk, a little bored by everything, defensive but not giving anything up—if you didn’t look so healthy I might think you just got out of jail.”

  Karen laughed. “In a way, I just did.”

  Luc waited again, then said, “But you’ll tell me about that some other time.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Is this the way you flirt? A lot of women like to be aloof. They keep themselves at a distance, but you can tell they’re interested by the way they look at you out of the corner of their eyes or the way they toss their hair or move a shoulder. Even when they’re trying hard not to act interested, something gives them away. The way they circle a foot. Especially when they’re wearing those beg-me-to-step-on-your-balls high heels.”

  Karen folded her legs up on the sofa. “You’re showing off now.”

  They both jumped when the girl cried out from the bedroom. Karen ran through the courtyard and stood by the side of the bed. The girl had been restless, her skirt hiked up to her underpants, one arm flung over her head. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. She didn’t look old enough to drink legally. Karen watched until she settled down into a deep sleep.

  When she got back to the living room Luc had taken off his shoes, stretched his legs out, his feet on the coffee table, ankles crossed. Karen folded one leg under her and sat down. “She’s still out.”

  “You really think she’s okay, sleeping it off?”

  “Probably.”

  “Probably. Is that good enough for you.”

  “Nervous, aren’t you.”

  “Yeah, I suppose I’m nervous. Yeah. Definitely. An unconscious woman makes me nervous. What I don’t understand, why aren’t you nervous?”

  “I’ve seen it before. She’ll sleep eight or ten hours, wake up tired, and she won’t remember what happened.”

  “This happened to you?”

  Karen hesitated before she said, “When I was in high school. I used to sneak down to the Quarter with this fake ID I got from a guy on Decatur Street. I’d tell my mother I was spending the night out with a friend.”

  She’d only caught Karen once, and then she’d bought Karen’s story that she’d changed plans, gone to another friend’s house and forgot to call. Her mother let it go because she was tired of fighting and because she was giving her attention, most of it, to—who was it then? The Sikh? Maybe the swami. She always got the two of them confused.

  “Did you remember the guy?” Luc asked.

  “He’s all I remembered, this nice guy, very polite, interested in everything I had to say—very seductive—until I woke up the next morning in a cab. The driver was hanging over the seat in my face, yelling, ‘Young lady, we’re in the Quarter. Any place in particular you wanna go?’ When I tried to pay him he said my boyfriend had taken care of it.”

  She’d been too scared, too humiliated to ask the driver where he’d picked her up. Later, it made her feel dumb that she let fear and humiliation keep her from asking. She took a bus out to the lakefront and walked three blocks home, got her key from her bag—miraculous she still had the bag with her—and let herself into the lower duplex. When she opened the door, she expected fireworks. She could hear her mother on the phone in the kitchen; by her tone she could tell she was talking to the Sikh. She eased the front door closed.

  Karen went down the hallway and opened the unlocked door to her bedroom. She closed the wide open window behind her bed. She took a long shower, hot as she could stand it, then in pajamas, she walked into the kitchen.

  Her mother was still on the phone. “Hold on a minute,” she said putting the phone under her chin. To Karen: “You’re up early.” It was ten thirty; Karen never got up before noon on Saturdays. Taking in Karen’s wet hair, her mother said, “Are you going somewhere?”

  “To bed. I’m not feeling so well.”

  “I’ll be in to check on you,” her mother said and resumed her phone conversation.

  Karen crawled under the covers, thinking, not this way; it wasn’t supposed to happen this way, until she fell into a fitful sleep.

  Luc said, “Did you ever see the man again?”

  “No, but I looked for him every time I went downtown. I didn’t know what I’d do if I ever found him, but that didn’t stop me from looking.”

  “You never told your mother?”

  “I never told anyone.”

  Luc took his feet off the coffee table, drew one leg up on the sofa, his arm stretched along the back. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Do you want some help looking for the cowboy?”

  Karen looked down. Luc’s knee rested against hers. When she looked up she said, “You know what the guy was wearing who gave me the drug?”

  “What?”

  “A safari jacket.”

  Eight

  Raynie slept fitfully all night, coming in and out of consciousness long enough to wonder where she was but not long enough to care before she’d fall asleep again.

  On the white wrought-iron daybed at the far end of the long living room, Karen couldn’t sleep at all. At first it was because of the girl’s thrashing and moaning, occasionally calling out the name Daniel. Karen had checked on her several times, Luc’s uneasiness over not taking the girl to the hospital attaching to her as soon as he left. Within the hour, though, the girl’s eyes started fluttering, and Karen went back to bed, figuring the girl would get up early and in a panic.

  Still she couldn’t sleep for thinking about Luc, men in general. She was attracted to Luc and that annoyed her. She’d come home with the idea of staying away from men, not dating, see how several months, even a year or two, without a man shaped her. LaDonna had told her once that if she hadn’t gotten a divorce, she wouldn’t have become who she was. The last three months with Jack, Karen had thought about that a great deal. These days every woman was supposed to know that you shouldn’t let your life be defined by a man, but she couldn’t think of anyone who paid much attention to that, though they’d all say they did.

  So let’s say you avoided becoming defined by a man. The problem was how did you fall in love, give a relationship the attention it needed to thrive, and not become defined by it? Was the only solution to be alone?

  Like LaDonna. Except that after seven long years alone, look what had happened to her. Maybe sex was like sweets: deprive yourself too long and all it takes is one irresistible confection, put together just so, one tiny taste, and you go on a binge.

  Her mind floating amid these questions and their no-easy answers, Karen finally fell aslee
p. She woke up to see the girl standing over her, holding a bottle of Jack Daniels by its neck, like a club.

  Karen sat bolt upright and screamed. The girl took a step back and screamed too.

  Karen scrambled from the day bed saying, “Wait, wait, it’s okay,” and fumbling with the switch on the lamp next to the bed, nearly knocked it off its table.

  Raynie crumbled to the floor. She sobbed as she clutched the bottle of Jack in her lap.

  “Hey,” Karen said softly. She reached down and took the bottle. “Come on, come sit on the sofa with me, we’ll sort everything out.”

  “What happened to me?” She wiped the tears off her face with the back of her hand.

  “Luckily not much,” Karen said, “except that a man loaded your drink. Do you remember him?”

  The girl let herself drop into the sofa. She didn’t answer. Karen went off to the kitchen and poured a glass of orange juice. The hands of the big, blue rimmed wall clock above the stove moved to six o’clock. As Karen sat on the sofa facing the French doors, dawn was just beginning to turn the sky milky. She said, “He had on a cowboy hat,” and held out the glass of juice.

  The girl turned to her but didn’t take the glass. “Who are you?”

  “Karen Honeycutt. I ran into him dragging you down Dumaine Street. He wasn’t talking so nice to you. When I asked him what he was doing, he shoved you over to me and took off down the street.”

  “I left the bar with him?”

  “I don’t know. Here.” Karen put the glass of juice in front of her.

  Raynie took it. “No, no I didn’t. I left alone.”