Whiplash River

by Lou Berney

  “Huh,” Idaba said, and walked off.

  Shake had thirty minutes or so before he had to start prepping, so he walked down to the palapa and climbed into the hammock. He didn’t even know that he’d fallen asleep until he woke up, the wind rising and the hammock creaking.

  He rolled out of the hammock. When he stepped off the pier, he saw Roger and Armando off in the distance. They were strolling together along the beach path, laughing and kicking at the garbage that had washed up with the tide. Both of them late, as usual. Shake was too tired to be pissed. He lifted a hand. Roger and Armando saw him and waved back. Shake turned, started up the beach, and his restaurant exploded.

  Chapter 8

  Shake saw the flash first, the restaurant windows blinking from dark to light, and then he felt the air around him sucked away, sucked out of him. The next thing he knew he was lying flat on his back in the sand. Watching with interest as a million tiny burning embers floated silently down on top of him.

  Silently because the whole world had gone silent. Just Shake alone with his thoughts. A couple of seconds later his ears started screaming and he could make out a thump-thump-whumping that sounded like the sail of a sailboat flapping in the wind.

  He lifted his head. The thump-thump-whumping was the sound of flames, pouring out of his restaurant.

  He tried sitting up. A good idea in theory. The pain started at the top of Shake’s head and radiated down to the soles of his feet. He tried again, more slowly, an inch at a time, and made it up onto one elbow. Different kinds of pain started to distinguish themselves. Bare skin scraped raw. Head buzzing and throbbing. An iron hoop locked tight around his chest that made it hard to breathe. Getting tighter. That was the worst.

  No, the worst wasn’t even pain. The worst was that Shake couldn’t think straight. He’d have a thought and then it would slip away, water through his fingers.

  Like, Get away from the flames. Get up and get away from the . . . what?

  The flames. Why was that, again?

  Shake saw a figure emerge, hazy and rippling, from the smoke. Embers snowing down all around her. Her? A girl. A child. Striding out of the smoke toward him. She had a grim, fierce expression on her freckled face and reminded him . . . Shake tried to remember, in the cartoon strip, the name of Charlie Brown’s friend with all the freckles.

  Shake thought he might be dreaming. Maybe he was still asleep back in the hammock. He’d had dreams like that before, where he thought he’d woken up but really hadn’t. He hoped he was still asleep, because he saw that Freckles had a gun. A big-ass .44 revolver. She’d stopped twenty feet away and was pointing the gun at his face.

  She stared at him with that grim, fierce expression. Her lips moved, but Shake couldn’t hear what she said. She looked like she couldn’t be fifteen years old. The .44 was almost as big as she was. She used both thumbs to cock back the hammer.

  This was the second time in less than twenty-four hours that Shake had teetered on the edge of his own life and gazed down into the darkness. It didn’t get easier with practice.

  “Drop your weapon!” a voice yelled. Freckles looked over. So did Shake. Another figure stood rippling in the heat, standing a hundred or so feet up the beach in the opposite direction.

  It was Evelyn. She had a gun too, and was pointing it at Freckles. She looked just as grim and steady as Freckles did.

  Shake knew for sure now that he had to be dreaming.

  “Drop your weapon!” Evelyn told Freckles again. “Do it now!”

  Freckles swung her gun toward Evelyn, and the restaurant exploded again. Shake was slammed back to the sand as gunshots rang out, three or four. A big black wheel of smoke rolled over him. His head felt light, too light, like it was being lifted delicately away from the rest of his body.

  He closed his eyes and tried to take steady breaths. When he opened his eyes again, the smoke had rolled past and Evelyn was kneeling next to him. She pressed two fingers beneath his jaw, checking for a pulse. When she saw that his eyes were open, she smiled at him. Just the most dazzling smile he’d ever seen. “Never a dull moment at your place, huh?” she said.

  He tried to say something.

  She bent closer. “What?”

  “Have I got a deal for you,” Shake said as his head finally did float away, into a black empty sky.

  THE WATER TAXI HAD DROPPED Evelyn off at the Pelican’s Roost, a stop north of Bouchon’s place. She didn’t realize the mistake until she was already on the pier and the boat was gone. A little boy raking the beach said it would take thirty minutes to call another taxi boat, so Evelyn decided to hoof it. She wanted to surprise the shithead before he opened his restaurant, pop in and catch him off guard. If it was even open after what had happened last night.

  Evelyn was about a hundred yards from the restaurant when it blew. She saw the blast knock Bouchon to the sand. A fireball rolled up into the sky and her first thought was Un-fucking-believable. She pulled her SIG Sauer out of her purse and sprinted down the beach. She hadn’t left her firearm behind this time—no way. That was the story of her life in some ways: many mistakes, none repeated.

  She reached the beach in front of Bouchon’s restaurant just as a petite young woman stepped out of the smoke. She had so many freckles it looked like she was wearing a mask. Peppermint Patty walked toward Bouchon and pointed a giant Ruger .44 at him.

  “Drop your weapon!” Evelyn yelled at her. Peppermint Patty glanced over. She didn’t look scared or surprised by Evelyn’s gun. She looked like a dog that wouldn’t bother to bark, it would just bite you.

  “Drop your weapon!” Evelyn told Freckles again. She took up her trigger slack. “Do it now!”

  Peppermint Patty swung around. Evelyn fired at the same instant the restaurant blew again. She staggered and knew she’d missed. Peppermint Patty staggered and fired back. Evelyn fired again, two quick shots.

  Evelyn had been a crack shot since her earliest days at Quantico, and even before that, eleven years old and out hunting quail with her dad. But she’d never had to hit a target staggering around, thirty meters away, while staggering around herself, heavy smoke and chunks of burning thatch whooshing down.

  Peppermint Patty fired another wild shot at Evelyn and then took off running, so Evelyn kicked off her heels and gave pursuit. She gained ground. No little girl in Daisy Duke cutoffs was going to shoot at Evelyn and then beat her in a footrace. But Peppermint Patty veered suddenly. She ran straight toward the burning restaurant.

  Evelyn had to pull up. The heat was so intense near the fire that it felt like her contacts were fusing to her eyes.

  Peppermint Patty ran right along the wall of the restaurant, a crazy risk. A flaming beam rolled off the roof and just missed her. She reached the corner of the veranda and cut around it. Evelyn sprinted the long way around. When she got to the road that ran behind the restaurant, Peppermint Patty had disappeared.

  Evelyn hurried back to Bouchon and checked his pulse. Steady, and his eyes were open. He hadn’t been shot. He looked like he was going to be okay. “Never a dull moment at your place,” she said, “huh?” And then she felt stupid, how cheesy that sounded.

  He said something she couldn’t hear.

  “What?” He said it again and still she couldn’t tell what it was.

  Evelyn jogged back up the beach to find her purse, her cell phone. For a split second she thought about making another run for it, but even she—expert rationalizer that she considered herself—couldn’t justify fleeing the scene of a gunfight she had actually participated in. She found Cory’s number in her phone, hit the call button, and prayed for the sake of her career that he got there before the cops did.

  Chapter 9

  Terry heard the explosion off in the distance and just about jumped out of his shorts. Shitfire! He wondered how much of the dynamite Meg had used. They’d happened by a demolition site a week ago, first day they got to Belize, nobody around and the dynamite just sitting there. Terry didn’t know what Meg wante
d dynamite for, since they had the guns her friend Jorge in Guatemala City had given them. But Meg said the more the merrier when you aimed to kill a body, so they helped themselves to some dynamite.

  It had come in handy after all, now they had two bodies to kill. Meg had said, I told you so, didn’t I, and Terry admitted she had.

  He was sitting alone in the golf cart, parked in the jungle. Meg rolled her eyes when he called it that, the jungle. Well, it was jungle to him. The middle of the island up here was one big mess of twisted-up trees and big vines hanging down and the leaves so heavy in places the sun could barely push through. And plenty of snakes, you could be sure of that.

  All that made Terry think of Tarzan, and Tarzan made him think of Meg, standing there naked in front of him this morning, her hair slicked back from the shower and her body shining wet. An interesting fact about Meg’s freckles was they were just mostly on her face, hardly anywhere else.

  “I love you too damn much,” she’d said, so quiet he could barely hear it. “It ain’t good for me.”

  “I’ll be good for you,” he’d said. “C’mon over here.”

  She was back to her old self then. Pushing him flat on the bed and calling him a goddamn moron and saying it was a good thing he had such a big goddamn cock. Terry got embarrassed when she talked like that. The way he saw it, you couldn’t get too proud about what you just came by lucky, never putting any work of your own into it.

  There was another explosion, and some pop-pop-popping. Terry figured that must be gunshots. A second later he remembered that the first explosion was supposed to be his signal. Oh, hell, he thought. He had a good idea what Meg would say about it, he didn’t get down there to pick her up on time. Terry cranked that golf cart, out of the jungle and down the sand road. You never saw a golf cart cranking along like that, he thought. Old Ironhead in his number three car up in heaven just looked down in awe.

  Meg was waiting by the side of the road. “What’d I tell you to do, Terry?” she said when she climbed in. “The one thing?” They drove about a mile and ditched the golf cart. About another mile on was where they’d parked the boat, in a little cove you couldn’t see from land or water. They drove the boat up the coast of the island to their hidey.

  Their hidey was a little cement-block fishing shack with a metal roof, miles from anybody else. Jorge had rented it for them. It wasn’t much to look at, but there was a bed and a shower and a little porch where Meg could sit in the breeze and paint her toenails.

  “Did you get him?” Terry finally had the nerve to ask. Meg hadn’t said more than two words on the trip to the hidey. Turn here, get in the boat, hurry up. Terry couldn’t tell if she was furious or just her normal ferocious self, quietly working things out in her head.

  “Go cover up the boat,” she said. “I got to call Jorge.” He went and covered up the boat. He could hear her on the cell phone talking to Jorge, but Terry couldn’t tell what she was saying. When she hung up, he walked back up to the shack.

  “Jorge says that ain’t his real name,” Meg said. “He did some checking on it.”

  “Ain’t whose real name?”

  “The son of a bitch broke your nose.” The chef at the restaurant. They knew his name because Meg saw it last night on a sign at his pier. She’d called Jorge last night to say she was gonna kill the chef. Jorge said fine, kill who you want, just make sure you take care of the old dude, pronto. But now, Meg said after she talked to him on the phone, Jorge was saying hold on about killing the chef or the old dude.

  “Jorge says that son-of-a-bitch chef ain’t no chef at all. He says he used to work for some badass people back in California. For some Russians or Armenians, whatever kind of Mafia it is they have out there in Los Angeles.”

  This news made Terry feel a lot better about his broken nose, that it was a Russian or Armenian Mafia badass broke it and not just your run-of-the-mill chef.

  “Jorge says he thinks the son of a bitch broke your nose might be the old fucker’s protection. We got to lay low for a while. Lay low on the son of a bitch and the old fucker, both of them.”

  Terry might not know much, but he knew his darling redheaded girl inside and out.

  “But we ain’t gonna do that,” he said. “Are we?”

  Chapter 10

  Shake woke up in a room he didn’t recognize. Moonlight moved at a strange angle through the wooden slats on the windows. The air smelled like disinfectant.

  He remembered the restaurant exploding. On fire. His first thought, with a jerk that hurt every inch of his body, was Idaba.

  “Go back to sleep,” she said. She was sitting in a chair by his bed, making a necklace by sliding wooden beads, one by one, onto a wire. He was so relieved to see her that he didn’t mind how much it hurt to sit up.

  “You weren’t inside,” he said.

  “Do I look like I was inside?” She snorted, no evidence of an expression on her big stone face. He noticed, though, that she’d put the necklace down in her lap and had laid a hand on his arm. “Geraldine brought her new baby round to the Fish and Hook. I went over there to see if he was ugly as the daddy.” Geraldine was one of the bartenders at the Fish and Hook, the bar next door to Shake’s restaurant.

  “Armando?” Shake said. “Roger?”

  Idaba shook her head. “They’re all fine. Nobody hurt but you. Now lay back down.”

  Shake lay back down. He figured out that he must be in the town clinic. He’d been here once before, a few months ago when he’d sliced off part of his index finger while chopping onions. It had been a different room from this one, but with the same yellow walls, the same smell of disinfectant.

  “Doctor says you gonna be all right,” Idaba said. “Just a concussion, and some ribs he thinks is cracked. Go back to sleep.”

  Shake could feel himself being tugged back under. “Okay,” he said.

  THE SHITSTORM THAT EVELYN GOT from Cory and the DEA guys wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. As shitstorms went, and Evelyn was something of an expert, it wasn’t bad at all. They parked her in a cramped little office in San Pedro, let her stew for a couple of hours, then yelled for a few more hours after that.

  Evelyn remained respectful but defiant. As in, Yes, fellas, I appreciate why you’re pissed off, and take it from me, I know what it’s like to work your ass off on an investigation only to have it go sideways on you, but tell me, what was I supposed to do?

  They told her. They had lots of suggestions, most of them vivid and profane.

  When they finally calmed down, Evelyn pointed out that their investigation of Belizean drug kingpin Walter “Baby Jesus” Jenkins had not, in fact, gone sideways. Evelyn’s actions on the beach when the restaurant exploded were the reason it hadn’t.

  When they finally calmed down again after that, Evelyn explained that if she hadn’t chased off Peppermint Patty, she would have shot and killed the shithead.

  “The fuck do we care some shithead got himself shot?” a DEA guy yelled, the one with the tight black T-shirt and ginormous biceps.

  “The fuck does that have to do with our investigation?” the other DEA guy yelled, the one with the even tighter black T-shirt and even more ginormous biceps.

  DEA guys, Evelyn thought. Maybe if they spent a little less time on the bench press and a little more time using the muscles in their muscle heads.

  But Cory got Evelyn’s point. “If Bouchon got killed on the beach,” he said, “we can’t sell the innocent little propane leak.”

  “So the fuck what?” both DEA guys yelled.

  “Try banging your heads together,” Evelyn said. “See if that helps you figure it out.”

  Cory scowled at Evelyn. As if to say, And you wonder why people in other agencies think everyone in the Bureau is arrogant and condescending?

  Fair enough.

  “The media would have been all over a murder on the beach,” Cory explained to the DEA guys.

  “The federal police would have come flying in like bats out of hell,” Evelyn
said. “And Baby Jesus would have closed up shop until everything cooled out again.”

  Was that not, by the way, the weirdest nickname in the world? Baby Jesus?

  The DEA guys continued to fuss and fume, but in the end, they didn’t call Mike in L.A. and rat Evelyn out. They might be typical musclehead DEA jerks, bitter enviers of the FBI, but they were no rats. And they knew Evelyn was right, even if they wouldn’t admit it. They’d lucked out with the propane thing, thanks to her. They left her with a warning so long and involved and so filled with ominous threats that Evelyn stopped listening halfway through.

  “Got it, fellas,” she said. Whatever. On her way out, Cory stopped her. He started to say something, but then didn’t bother.

  Evelyn walked over to the town hospital, which was really just a clinic. She flashed her creds and told the night nurse that she was there to see the injured man who had been brought in earlier.

  “Mr. Cleary?” the nurse said.

  Quentin Cleary. The name on the shithead’s fake passport.

  “That’s my boy,” Evelyn said.

  The nurse told her he was sleeping. Evelyn peeked into his room. He was sleeping. The formidable black hostess was sitting in a chair next to his bed, dozing too. Evelyn went back to the front desk. The nurse assured her that the patient was going nowhere until the doctor saw him again in the morning. Evelyn checked her watch and figured she’d better grab some sleep herself, while she could. She told the nurse she’d be back at seven.

  She got to her hotel around four in the morning. She looked even worse than she had the first night. Bits of blackened thatch in her hair, face streaked with soot, another dress trashed: one of her favorites, the navy-blue forties-style slip dress with puffed sleeves that she and Sarah had found at a vintage place on La Brea last summer.

  The female desk clerk gave her another sour look. Evelyn smiled back. “Two guys at once tonight!” she said. “Golly! More work than you’d think!” The desk clerk turned red. Evelyn went back to her bungalow, took a shower, fell into bed.