by Rusty Barnes
“So I don’t get any till Nina stops calling?”
Rosie put the sunglass stem in her mouth. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“All right. I hear you.” It was around 1 a.m. My eyes were bleary and shot.
“Where does this road lead, Jason?”
“Somewhere west,” I said immediately, before I realized what she meant.
“I can’t run forever. I know I don’t have much family here in the States but that don’t mean I want to crash in a different state every night for the rest of my life.”
“You won’t have to,” I promised blindly. What else could I say? More people had probably been enlisted to get rid of us, especially considering the three bodies we left in Apalachin. This wasn’t going to be over quickly. But I didn’t say any of that. “It’s going to take some time,” I said.
“What’s your best guess?” Rosie said sarcastically.
“A year. Maybe more.”
“You’re kidding me,” she said. I wondered what a gentler man might have said to keep her happy.
“Three guys tried to kill us two days ago,” I said. “Let’s get settled beyond the day to day and have this conversation again.”
“Fair enough,” she said. Abruptly, she spoke again. “Irish?”
“Yeah.”
“I need to get off the road.” I weighed the possible options of response and decided to roll with her.
“OK. First decent-sized city—Hudson—we stop for the night.”
CHAPTER 36
THE BUDGET INN SEEMED like a decent spot, a worn-down indie hotel with garish orange painted buildings. The front desk clerk’s head nearly brushed the low ceiling. He was the tallest, skinniest man I’d ever seen. He took two hundred bucks in lieu of my credit card, which I was glad for. I walked back outside to the minivan and Rosie. The heat had gone high in the night, and I felt a lethargy come over me. Since killing Otis’s boys back in Apalachin, I’d been running on solid adrenaline, despite the long sleep I’d gotten in Elmira. It seemed like time to make a solid plan. Rosie brought in our bags and I sat in an uncomfortable chair looking at online maps. I wanted somewhere in the Midwest, but having Rosie with me complicated things. She’d stick out big time in the country, it was clear in the way she’d been treated so far. So we needed Chicago or Cleveland or Missoula or even farther, somewhere like LA.
“What’s the situation?” Rosie said.
“Just trying to figure it out,” I said.
“You really think Otis will send people this far?”
I thought about that for a few moments. If someone had fucked my woman, several times over, someone who worked for me and whom I was supposed to trust? “Yeah,” I said.
“I just don’t understand guys,” she said. “Sometimes you all think with the wrong head.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Rosie laughed.
“Let’s find a diner or something,” I said. Day and night had begun to blend for me, and time just passed without me noticing it or knowing what to do next or where to go. I depended too much on luck. Luck favors the prepared. Rosie and I needed to prepare.
CHAPTER 37
WE DROVE PAST THE MOTEL entrance and headed out to where the town proper began. I’d expected a middle-class neighborhood, but this place looked full of rich people, manicured lawns and sprinkler systems and probably private schools for their rich little kids. We stopped at a place called Waffles. You could see Route 80 from the parking lot, but the place was small enough that we wouldn’t attract much attention. Rosie ordered Belgian waffles and strawberry topping for both of us when I was in the can, orange juice and a couple scrambled eggs on a side plate.
“You didn’t need to order for me,” I said as I slipped into the booth.
“I know what you like,” she said.
“Well, yeah. In some cases.”
“All cases, Irish. You better not forget I’m still pissed at you.”
“I know, Rose. Can we just eat?”
“I think we should head for Chicago,” she said.
“That’s not so far away,” I said. “I don’t know if that’s far enough away.”
“Seriously?”
“I just don’t know. Maybe Eddie and those other guys were the only ones.” It had struck me strangely. They weren’t the only ones. I knew it as well as I knew Rosie’s eyes, but I didn’t want to tell her how bad it might get. I didn’t know anything about Chicago, either. “Maybe we should head south?”
“Into the heat? Fuck that,” Rosie said. “And what do you mean, maybe?”
“Just what I said. Those guys probably aren’t the only crew after us.”
“Well, what do we do?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to kill anybody else. I had to back there. I’m just a slug with a brain but I could have figured something else out, maybe.” Our waffles came, huge things almost an inch thick and covered in strawberries and whipped cream. “I just don’t know.”
Rosie pointed her fork at me. “You didn’t have any choice. They wanted us, they didn’t get us. Don’t go regretting shit now.”
“It’s hard not to,” I said.
“You’re going to have to learn to be harder than that.”
“The fuck does that mean?” I said. I flashed back to the minivan. She’d been awfully cavalier about killing those guys. “Go kill someone, then come back and tell me how it feels for you.”
“Maybe I have,” she said, forking in another mouthful.
“Bullshit,” I said.
“I’ve seen it done,” she said, speaking around her fork. “A couple times.”
“Bullshit.”
“How you think I’m still so calm?” She had a point.
“I guess we’ll talk about that, then.”
“It’s a topic,” she agreed. I tore into my eggs and waffle. It seemed better than talking over death.
“As long as we’re talking about tough shit, I need to call Nina.”
“Oh no you don’t.”
“She might tell me who else Otis has on our trail.”
“You going to do that in front of me?” Rosie said, cutting her waffle with a vengeance.
“I guess not,” I said.
“Will they trace the call?”
“I don’t know if they can do that.”
“Check the GPS,” she said.
“It’s turned off.”
“This is turning my stomach,” Rosie said. “But you do what you gotta. I’ll meet you in the van.” She took the keys and immediately left. Her gait suggested someone in a great deal of internal turmoil. I rubbed my eyes clear and pushed the recall button on Nina’s last message. The phone connected, the line picked up, but I heard nothing.
“Hello?” I said.
“Who is this?” The voice was Nina’s, but she clearly had some issues. Her pitch had gone high, and I could hear an excited babble of voices in the background.
“It’s Candy,” I said.
“You fucking asshole,” Nina said. I heard a door bang closed and the talking cease.
“I don’t know what I expected from you, but running like a bitch wasn’t in the equation.”
I couldn’t see any point in being subtle. “Tito told me Otis wanted my head, so I took off.”
“He sent some guys after you.”
“No kidding,” I said. “How many?” I thought of shooting the driver in the head, the way the blood sparked in the light.
“Three,” Nina said. “But what about me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who’s going to protect me and Miguel now?”
“Otis isn’t going to hurt his own kid or you.”
“I don’t think you know Otis very well.”
“Is he there with you now?”
“Fuck you,” Nina said. “Is that Dominican gorilla with you?”
“Speaking of fuck you,” I said. “Is there anyone else I should worry about?”
“You got three guys after you.”
“I ha
ven’t seen anyone,” I lied. “I think we had a tail into NY, but I’m pretty sure we lost them.”
“It won’t matter. He’ll keep sending people.”
“Up to him,” I said.
“You know you haven’t asked me once how me or Miguel are doing.”
“Nope,” I said. “You knew what you were doing. I knew what I was doing. We got caught so we stopped.”
“I hate you,” she said.
“Don’t call this number,” I said, and hung up.
CHAPTER 38
THE WAFFLE HAD PICKED UP more business in the time I was on the call. There were eight or ten vehicles in the lot, but the minivan was not among them, and my stomach dropped. Where did she go? I walked to the end of the parking lot to look behind the building, but saw nothing. I pushed her number into the phone, but no one picked up. Then I saw her pull into the opposite end of the lot from which we’d come. She drove up to me and powered down the window.
“You want a ride, buddy?” Rosie said.
“You scared the shit out of me.” She opened the door for me and shifted into the passenger seat.
“I went to get some supplies,” she said, indicating the back seat, where I saw a couple small bags.
“What you get?” I said.
“I figured they’d be tracing calls to the bitch’s phone, so I bought a couple phones with three months of calls on them.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted. I took the sim card out of my phone and tossed it into the parking lot, then tossed the phone in the back seat. “Good move.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, and put on her sunglasses. “Chicago here we come.”
I drove the highway distracted. Six or seven potential scenes ran through my head. In none of them did Rosie and I come out unscathed, now that Nina had called. I’d hoped that we already dealt with the worst part. Now it seemed as if the problems were just beginning. Having disposed of the first three guys, I knew Otis would send Tito or come himself, neither of which would be good things. Otis didn’t get his hands dirty anymore, but he might make an exception in this case. Tito was someone I did not want on my bad side, and he’d given me out of respect the only break I was going to get, and would be the biggest baddest pain in the ass I’d ever had. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. This whole long Midwest drove me fucking insane. How could people live in a place with no hills?
“Something you want to discuss, Irish?” Rosie said.
“Not really,” I said.
“What can she do?” Rosie said. “We’re a long way away.”
“Not far enough,” I said. I laid the smaller portion of what I thought about on her. I didn’t think Chicago would be far enough. I thought Texas, maybe, some small town on the Gulf where we could still get to Houston enough to shake the cobwebs out of our hair. I didn’t mention what I thought about Tito and Otis. I didn’t think he’d follow us that far, but I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t expected killing anybody.
After I finished talking, silence ruled for a good five minutes, and I felt sweat starting to run down my armpit. I broke the stasis by taking a knock at a bottle of water. Rosie spoke when I set it down.
“Galveston?” she said.
“Like that Glen Campbell song?” I said.
“Never heard of him,” Rosie said. “Wait. Did he do that joint with Amy Winehouse? Put horns and drums and shit in?”
“No, that’s Mark Ronson,” I said.
“Some white dude,” she said. “It’s hot there, right?”
“All the time.”
“It’s an island, you say?”
“Yep.”
“Maybe we can get a house on stilts,” she said.
“Could be. I know they got jobs there that pay really well. On duty two weeks, off duty two weeks working on oil derricks.”
“You mean you would stop busting heads.”
I smiled at her. “More or less.”
“And I’d be your stay-at-home bitch?” she said.
“Last I checked you were nobody’s bitch,” I said.
“Damned straight,” Rosie said. “Don’t forget it.” Rosie stayed silent and still except for pushing the search button on the radio. “I’d be able to wear bikinis full time.”
“If you wanted to, I guess.”
“We have enough money for first and last,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“But we still have to worry about Otis?”
I sighed. “Probably.”
“Maybe we need to get a big dog.”
CHAPTER 39
WE HIT I-59 SOMEWHERE in Texas and I woke Rosie up. It had already gotten hot. I’d bought a bag of mini-candy bars and left them in my pocket. I tried to pull them out but found just a sticky blob, bad enough that I had to stop and get new shorts. I stood by the roadside changing while semis blew through at eighty miles-per-hour blaring the horn.
“Now I know why they call you Candy,” Rosie laughed.
“Screw you,” I said. I threw my old shorts into the ditch.
“You could have washed those,” she said.
“Yep. Probably.” Just then a black Lexus pulled up behind us tight on the bumper of the van. “Give me the gun, Rosie.” The passenger side door of the Lexus opened first and everything moved in slow motion for me. I had the derringer in one hand and the .357 in the other. Tito came barreling up the passenger side. I shot at him through the window and way too close to Rosie. The rear side window went star-shaped. I couldn’t tell if I’d gotten Tito or not, but I didn’t have time to worry about it as a gorilla with a gun had me down. I put the derringer in his gut and let go a round. He screamed and went down. I could hear Rosie fighting with someone on the other side of the car. By the time I got there Tito had gone down motionless. Rosie stood over him, her hands trembling around the .38 Airweight. I hadn’t even heard her shoot.
I went back to the other side of the road. The Gorilla had crawled back to the Lexus, clawing at the door. I shot a hole in his throat with the derringer and kicked him into the drainage ditch, but not before stripping his wallet and getting the keys for the Lexus. I was sure the papers were clean on that. I knew how Otis did business. Now he knew how I did mine.
“You OK, Rosie?”
“No.”
“Reload and get your shit. We’re taking their car. We can’t be seen with bullet holes in the window.” She didn’t say much, but hustled her bags into the backseat of the Lexus. I put the van into neutral and ran it into the ditch with the bodies of Tito and the gorilla.
“All right, let’s go,” I said.
“I didn’t think—”
“Don’t think,” I said. “It’s over.”
“It’s not my first,” she said.
“I hope it’s your last,” I said. “And you apparently have a story to tell me some time.”
“No story,” she said. “Nothing that compares to this.”
The air conditioning in the Lexus had been cranked, so it felt like a tomb to me. I shut it off and powered the windows down.
“You OK?” I said again.
“Stop asking me,” she said.
“We’ll be in Houston in a couple hours. A nice hotel and a day or two to sleep it off you’ll be fine.”
“I don’t need to sleep,” she said. “I am a ghetto bitch who got lucky. I haven’t forgot nothing.”
I said nothing about this. I just stepped on the gas and watched the needle move to eighty miles-per-hour. I set the cruise control, then reloaded my derringer and stuck it back in my pocket. I felt a wave of protectiveness come over me. Rosie didn’t deserve to live like this for the rest of her life. I tried to promise to myself that the gorilla would be the last man I ever killed. I didn’t feel good about this. Still, there was Otis.
CHAPTER 40
DRIVING DOWN I-45, I noticed there wasn’t a lot to see. It took forever in Texas to get where you were supposed to be going. They tried to make it easier in Houston with the long loops around the city, but o
utside the loop was another story. Rosie seemed to have disappeared into herself, and I had nothing to think about but how far Otis and his men were behind us. I could smell ocean coming through the AC unit, so I knew we were closer than I probably knew to Galveston.
Abruptly, Rosie spoke, for the first time since Houston. “Turn around, Irish.”
“Why?” I said.
“I just have a feeling.”
“I’m supposed to drop the plan because you have a feeling?”
“Galveston is tourist country.”
“We’ll fit in that way. I’m pale as a ghost.”
“There aren’t enough people. We can’t get lost there. We can walk into a mall in Houston and nobody would bat an eye.”
I considered, dropped, then reconsidered what she’d said. The tourist season probably hadn’t begun yet, and it was a town of maybe fifty thousand as opposed to the millions in Houston. I also needed to dump this Lexus, and that would be much easier in Houston. Leave it on a street somewhere and let somebody else connect it to the dead bodies we’d accumulated along the way.
“All right,” I said. I found a feeder road and got us around going north. I had Rosie pick out a hotel near the River Oaks Section and Rice University. If all else failed, we were still young enough to pass as students. I didn’t like it, but Rosie was right. We got off the freeway onto Allen Parkway, the apartments on the right and Buffalo Bayou on the left, green and ugly with a running trail slashing down its center next to the water. The hotel itself was a faux Spanish, or maybe the real thing, I wouldn’t know. I mistrusted everything I saw in this city of surface area and false fronts. We’d taken a wrong turn down Montrose first and ended up in a squalid section of thrift stores and warehouse-sized porno stores, the occasional bar, and people sitting on the sidewalks on old couches and overstuffed chairs. And here I had to pay fifty bucks to valet-park this fucking Lexus I needed to get rid of in the worst way. All my senses were in hyperdrive and the dry heat crawled over my body like a second skin.