Next Last Chance

by Jon A. Hunt

  She still pressed warm against me as only a lover can. Her breathing was serene, not frantic, not gasping with passion. My fingers still twined greedily in her copper hair. I extricated myself and maneuvered her onto the leather cushions, naked but for the overcoat we’d shared as a blanket. She murmured inarticulately without waking. Long well-shaped legs escaped the overcoat for me to admire from ankles to the vibrantly-hued butterfly tattoo. Crudely snipped photos didn’t do the ink-work justice. The artist wouldn’t have been affordable to many. And JD would never have condoned anything disreputable as a tattoo. Sandra had been around money before JD. She just didn’t look like a girl with “history.”

  Asleep, she’d become that same guileless teenager who petted Whiskey’s nose outside Hillbriar’s stables. Pure. Untarnished. I’d say she must’ve been a cute kid, but the faint scar under her jaw reminded me I had no idea what she’d looked like years ago. Freckles, maybe.

  I took my metal guard dog with me to the kitchen, where I could watch the houseguest I shouldn’t have without disturbing her. I rummaged for a coffee filter. My phone blinked irately.

  If I’d missed any calls from JD…

  Sandra didn’t join me in the shower. She was above that sort of thing and frankly I needed space to sort my thoughts.

  If my mind hadn’t been made up about whether to run Nolman Endicott to earth today, Sandra had made it up for me. Now, instead of another eighty-five grand, Mr. Endicott had tricky decisions to make. If he delivered on his threat, what was left for him to sell? If he didn’t, what then? Extortion isn’t necessarily an easy way to make a living.

  Rico and those two professional neck-snappers downstairs were bigger concerns. And finding Clarence DeBreaux. I just hadn’t factored Sandra into my plans. More correctly, I had no plans and Sandra distracted me from making them.

  I abandoned thinking altogether and lathered up to get clean like people do in showers.

  The coffee hovered between done and burnt when I returned to the kitchen wearing my last clean shirt. Sandra perched on a bar stool wearing my shirt from yesterday, not because her own clothes needed laundering but because she wore what she wanted. None of the buttons were fastened. She smiled over the rim of a mug she’d found, descended lightly and took her coffee into the bathroom. Just the mug, not my shirt. She draped that over my shoulder as we passed. One couldn’t get too familiar with those curves, I decided, and watched her till the door shut.

  An unopened package of powdered sugar donuts from the cupboard made the coffee taste better. While hot water ran in the other room I tapped the screen of my phone.

  JD hadn’t called. The mystery DC number had. Jerry Rafferty—or somebody in his building—had. A few times. I called back the number I recognized.

  Sorry, the Lieutenant was not at this number. Would I mind holding? I said no, I didn’t mind. Just like last time, the line fell silent and my phone rang against my ear.

  “What? Don’t you like me anymore?”

  “You told me to get some sleep,” I said.

  A glance at the microwave clocked surprised me. Donuts and coffee were late lunch.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Smally’s got your friend on watch now. If you’re still interested.”

  “Very.”

  “This isn’t exactly our little secret. You’d better get on your way.”

  “You aren’t?”

  “Not while my place is full of feds. Find it yourself, Brother Buttons.” He hung up.

  Rafferty hadn’t invented a cutesy nickname for me, he’d told me to visit a bar in Printers Alley. Everything seemed to happen in bars lately. But where else did I expect to find a drunk?

  When my favorite bath towel came out to see me with Sandra Donovan wrapped inside, I had my shoes tied and was checking the shape of my hat. Her green eyes flicked to the kitchen counter. I’d stowed Nolman’s manila envelope in my sock drawer, so the worst evil she saw was a half-empty donut box. She didn’t touch them.

  “You have to go.”

  “So do you,” I said. “Staying here isn’t an option.”

  She retrieved her underthings and paused to lift my gun from the counter. Neither item seemed less probable in her hands, which bothered me. She set the .45 on my palm.

  “I can go with you.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from brushing disheveled curls from her cheek with the back of a finger. She’d been careful not to wet her hair in the wrong man’s shower.

  “You weren’t my only client,” I lied.

  Sandra came up on her tiptoes to kiss me, just a quick, electric reminder. Then she returned to the bathroom with her things. I made sure the gun was still loaded and had a round in the chamber. Why I felt the need to check is anybody’s guess.

  We went down separately, Sandra by the elevator, me via the stairs. She’d be seen, of course, but at least we weren’t leaving hand in hand. I drove out of the garage first to catch the attention of my two best friends. I grinned at their car in the outside lot. Del grimaced. Nick stabbed me to death with his eyes. That was probably the best he could manage with a broken trigger finger, unless he was left-handed. They pulled out and tailed me as expected.

  The black BMW slinked out of the garage and took a different direction, I hoped a circuitous route to Hillbriar. With Sandra, one never knew.

  Printers Alley was within walking distance but I hoped to commit as many of my shadows to their cars as possible before going afoot myself. Nick and Del circled the block when I stopped for gas. My other shadow pulled up to the opposite side of the same pump. Andy Honeywell swept out of the driver’s side Hollywood-style, in skin-tight slacks and an athletically fitted blouse. I admired my grin in her mirror shades.

  “Can you talk?”

  “For about nine gallons,” I said. “But wouldn’t you rather I listened?”

  Honeywell’s voice barely carried above the wind. “I don’t know who else to trust.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  She ignored the wisecrack. I made too many anyway. “You mentioned I should look into Pennington’s earlier trips here. I found something else.”

  “Eight gallons to go.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she continued from behind the fancy shades, fiddling with her side of the pump, “so I wandered the hotel. I heard Pennington talking with someone.”

  I didn’t ask how sure she was; the man had a very recognizable voice.

  “Keith was in the hall. Maybe he saw me. The talking stopped and I went back up to my room.”

  Hal Dover’s thugs cruised past a second time. Very slow pumps.

  “He probably meets people all the time like that,” I said.

  The wind was doing a number on Honeywell’s normally restrained hair. “I suppose. But it sounded like an argument. And on my way through the elevator lobby I passed a face I knew.”

  “Besides Keith’s, you mean.”

  Her pump finished first and the nozzle made a startling clattery pop. “I’m pretty sure it was Jonathan Donovan.”

  It wasn’t easy to seem disinterested. “I don’t know why you’re telling me this.”

  Honeywell tipped her sunglasses down. From a distance she’d appear to be reading the pump display. Up close, her gray eyes just looked worried. She’d be an excellent field agent in time; fresh out of the academy and her gut was already telling her something wasn’t right.

  “Watch your back,” I said.

  Honeywell bumped her shades back in place, tugged the receipt from the slot, got in her car and left. The conversation we never had was over before Nick and Del came by a third time.

  Broadway downtown swarmed with navy and gold jerseys. The Predators’ last game of the season was tonight. Traffic pulsed through the intersections, alternating sports fanatics and automotive steel, directed by cops in reflective vests. It was a congested mess. It was perfect.

  Del and his surly passenger with the misaligned nose were replaced in my rearview mirror by a panel van. As long as they though
t I was in my car, they had no reason to abandon theirs. The van’s driver pounded his horn when I shifted the Dodge into park and got out between the Tin Roof and Margaretville, but a tide of hockey fans swept me out of sight before anyone could react further. I shouldered toward Church Street. Printers Alley wasn’t far.

  Two blocks up the crowds thinned till any jostling would have to be deliberate. Most people only wore jackets as protection against the renewed drizzle, rather than to hide firearms. I kept an eye on my reflection in passing windows. Agent Keith’s reflection followed mine. He was hiding something under his jacket. I hadn’t asked Honeywell where she was headed.

  Fatter, colder drops bounced off the pavement. People quickened their steps and clutched their collars to their throats. I could have gotten into the alley quicker from the south, but the Church Street entrance meant anyone following me would have to do it on foot and get wet, too. I turned under the green metal arch into the alley. The fat drops joined into fluid sheets. Bricks temporarily gleamed. My feet splashed in a shallow river with an asphalt bed. More of the alley’s occupants ducked into doors than out of them, trailing frantic wakes. Neon signs in the windows smeared to garish greasy colors. One of the smears might be letters that spelled Brother Buttons. I tugged my hat brim down and unzipped my jacket so the .45 was handy.

  A redwood of a man propped up the wall under the tattered awning. A couple in front of me stopped and he waved them through the single glass door. He wasn’t really a bouncer. The rain forced him to keep his smutty paperback stowed.

  “Still inside?” I asked. The awning stopped weather as effectively as a tennis racquet.

  “Yeah,” Smally said. “He might’ve spotted me but there’s no back door. What about the guys following?”

  “Plural?”

  “One looks like a fed. Don’t know about the other two, they’re keeping pretty far back.”

  “I’d rather they stayed outside,” I said. There was a chance Del, Nick and the man inside going by DeBreaux would recognize each other. If they did, nobody’d answer my questions.

  “Alright.”

  “If you have to shoot, leave the fed for last.”

  “Alright.”

  I pushed through the door into Brother Buttons.

  Twenty-five

  Less a proper drinking establishment, more a basement where beer happened to be served, Brother Buttons retained none of the charm of its renowned speakeasy days. Stained paneling hid the original bricks. Bare bulbs feebly challenged the cigarette smoke. The only windows looked out onto the steps down from the alley; their smudged glass was barely transparent. Two red-faced women crowed ‘Stand By Your Man’ into a karaoke machine’s microphone on the low stage up front. They didn’t know the words and were too blurry-eyed to follow the lyrics on a TV bolted to the wall. Neither appeared to have brought a man to stand by. The other patrons were the more respectable kind of soaked. Brother Buttons only qualified as a destination when the weather turned ugly and nicer bars ran out of tables. This place had few tables or chairs, but they’d sell cheap beer to anyone without reservations.

  Clarence DeBreaux had one of the rare tables to himself, and three uninhabited chairs, where the smog pressed to the floor. His eyes were red-rimmed dots pointing through the haze at me. If I recognized the sideburns at that distance, he’d know I was staring. No back door, Smally had said. If so, odds were fair Mr. DeBreaux and I might have a conversation.

  The eye-dots angled downward. Whatever DeBreaux scribbled on the napkin required more attention than I did. He glanced up again when I took hold of an empty chair.

  “Seat’s taken.” The voice had a scabby quality imparted by years of breathing other people’s unfiltered smoke. There was no ashtray among the drained beer bottles.

  “I’ll leave when the other person comes back,” I said.

  “No other person.”

  I sat and refrained from wearing my trademark smartass grin. I’d read that smiling at certain primates could be misinterpreted as a challenge. The drunk across the table had a decidedly apelike unpredictability. Or maybe that was just his sideburns.

  “I don’t want to talk.” His eyes were permanently bloodshot, under unkempt brows. The mouth beneath the bird-of-prey beak moved like it was gnawing an invisible bone.

  “Gabe Andrews said you might be able to help me with my Rico problem.”

  “Only problem you got that’s mine is you’re sitting at my goddamn table.”

  ….stand by your maaaaaaaan! The amateurs up front compensated for what they didn’t know by furiously belting out the part they did.

  “We may be able to help each other.”

  “What the fuck you know about my troubles? I never met you.”

  “Nope. But there’s a couple of Buck’s employees from the old days in Vegas outside, and I bet they’ll remember you.”

  DeBreaux plainly hadn’t read that article about primates. Now he grinned at me. I absolutely recognized a challenge. “What makes you so sure I can’t handle them, too?”

  He’d been inside for hours and not taken off his raincoat. Past the zipper peeked the brown leather of a shoulder holster. An empty shoulder holster. His left hand had stayed under the table the whole time. I shouldn’t have missed that.

  Applause and laughter up front wasn’t for me. The women had drawled their way to the end of the song.

  “Knees or nuts. Either way you go down. Andrews ain’t any cleverer if he sent you to talk with me. Rico might be any of a dozen men, I never knew which. It’s not like I kept his picture in my wallet.”

  I’d never been handed a better segue in my life.

  “Keeping pictures isn’t exactly your strong suit, is it?” I said.

  Without a table full of beer bottles between them, Ellis Ball hadn’t stood a chance. DeBreaux moved quick as a fired slug and made as much noise. I dodged to my right, guessing he’d be less able to swing his weapon that direction. The table slammed over my left shoulder and glass crashed. I came up with the Smith & Wesson but there was no need for it. Instead of blasting my nether regions, Clarence DeBreaux had bolted.

  The real world needs more than a loud argument to start a barroom brawl. Hollywood primes its melees with wall-to-wall angry drunks, and Brother Buttons’ visitors were too sober. The semiautomatic in my fist also discouraged group participation. Still, there was a lot of violent movement at the door. Smally plowed toward me, a locomotive through a flock of sheep.

  “Where’s DeBreaux?”

  “You said there was no back door,” I reminded him.

  Smally raised cinderblock shoulders in a shrug. “Those other guys split in different directions. Figured something was up.”

  “Yeah, something. Get see where they went? I’ll check that imaginary back door.”

  Smally sneered but was used to being told where to go in spite of his size. On his way he snatched the phone out of the bartender’s hand. It was an old-fashioned landline and the coiled cord snapped back at its owner minus the handset. The glass door banged shut. Nobody jumped up to volunteer for karaoke. Nobody dug out their cell phones to call the cops, either.

  The restrooms were up beside the bar, which meant the swinging door beyond the pool table led to a storeroom. I darted through. Nothing worse than an unseen pull chain smacked my cheek, still swinging from DeBreaux’s passage. If the air hadn’t tasted like rain I wouldn’t have tugged the chain. A bare bulb flared with the click. Dirty bricks resisted the glare, peering between shelves that sagged under boxes and battered kegs. Brother Buttons had plenty of chairs in the storeroom. One of the nested stacks had been knocked over, and beyond them four steps jogged up to an unlatched steel door with wind-driven water hissing around its edges.

  Stepping into a carwash would have been drier. A razor’s edge of incandescence from the doorway only carved ten yards through the deluge. Everything seemed three shades too dark for that time of day. And there was a shadow running like hell southward on the near side of Third Av
enue. DeBreaux really hadn’t wanted to talk. I sprinted after him.

  He’d lose me for sure in all those wet navy and gold jerseys on Broadway. But I wasn’t the only interested party. Heavy determined footfalls sounded behind me, Nick, Del, or both. Or someone worse. Most of the possibilities wouldn’t much care how many bystanders got hurt.

  DeBreaux had the same concern. He skidded to the sidewalk side of a parked van and stopped. He had a big heart, so big he sometimes cried. He couldn’t endanger innocent people. My shirt wasn’t the right colors, though, so I was fair game. Whether he pulled the trigger first, Third Avenue erupted in staccato bangs and a lot of lead moved both directions very fast.

  A puddle welcomed me when I dove between parked cars. Windshields exploded. I held very still with my face crushed against the bumper of a Cadillac with Missouri tags. Shit like this was why I hated parking downtown.

  Then came a rhythmic bang-bang-bang-bang, four identically spaced shots, sharper than the others, probably 9mm instead of the .45 caliber hand cannons the rest of us carried. Something caught all four shots, each with a grim yielding smack. After that all I heard were pounding rain, far-off sirens, hockey fans screaming down on Broadway.

  I stayed a while in my personal pond. The sirens increased. Official red and blue lights brightened the mists and glazed wet bricks, vehicles and dumpsters. I rose warily to a crouch, my eye on one of those dumpsters. A form sprawled behind it. The feet were cockeyed. I recognized the shoes. Crossing the street half stooped, I was less worried about getting hit by a car than having my head blown off. No cars moved along that street now in either lane.