“Why go to all this trouble for a measly hundred grand, Bingo? Seems like you’d have ten times that much stashed away for a quick trip south.”
He jutted his jaw out defiantly and said, “It’s no trouble, really. The money isn’t much, this is true. But it’s my money. I paid for those records to be made, so I deserve the money. Victor doesn’t deserve anything but a quick adios.”
I took another drink, and that seemed to please him. It didn’t seem to have any effect on me.
Bingo leaned back in his chair again, balancing himself as he talked, stretching his neck muscles out, rolling his eyes. I tried to imagine him dangling at the end of a rope, a noose cutting into the smooth brown flesh around his throat. “Fat people disgust me,” he said. “You, Martin, come on, drink up ... I don’t have any reason to like you. But at least you look like a human being, not some big mountain of lard. I could forgive Victor’s nasty little proclivities when he looked like a man, but when I think of him, little fat dick folded up against his blubber, wanking off at the thought of torturing boys, oh, it makes me sick. Drink up, Martin. I don’t have much time. Roberto could hurry you up, you know.”
Roberto tapped another stack of papers on the table, paused to look at the shotgun, then over at me.
I picked up the bottle again, took a long drink, letting the liquid gurgle, knowing that I had to do something, even if it was incredibly stupid, because soon the vodka would have an effect. So it wasn’t altogether faked when the bottle wobbled in my hands as I took it from my mouth. But when I reestablished my grip around the neck of the bottle I raised it over my head and walloped Bingo in the face as hard as I could.
He went over backward, grabbing for Roberto’s shotgun, and
I scrambled over the table after him. The shotgun clattered to the floor as I went all the way over, down on top of him. The chair folded into kindling wood under our combined weight, and the fall freed my wrists from their bonds. Bingo had a lot of the fight knocked out of him, at least temporarily, and I had already gained a strange, if uncomfortable, advantage by the time I heard Roberto unsnap a holster and cock a pistol. I adjusted my position and saw him as he stepped back and crouched down, but after I smashed the bottle against the clay tile and jabbed a pointed edge against his employer’s jugular, there wasn’t much he could do.
But Nameless came into the room blasting. His first barrel of buckshot blasted plaster and glass off the wall over our heads, destroying the cactus and cow skull watercolor. Bingo panicked as a long shard of glass from the painting stuck in his eye. Breaking free of my hold, he howled something in Spanish and bolted upright, just as Nameless's shotgun thundered again. Blood rained. He fell.
“Dios mio,” cried Nameless. “Jefe, forgive me!”
But El Jefe wasn’t in a forgiving mood. His heart had been strained through the back of his rib cage.
I struggled to wrench myself out from under the twitching body, able to see only Nameless’s spastic leg movement from my position as he reloaded the double barrel. I couldn’t see Roberto, but I heard the crack-crack-crack as his bullets started flying. I felt a hard lump between my body and Bingo’s and realized it was Roberto’s shotgun just as Nameless fired his again, powdering the tile floor where Bingo’s hand had been when it was still attached to his arm. I blew what must have been parts of it out of my mouth and wrenched the shotgun out from under Bingo’s body and quickly squeezed off a round toward my left, where it sounded like Roberto’s pistol shots were coming from. There was a crashing sound and I saw his blue suit as he tumbled down, minus parts of both kneecaps. Nameless cried out in Spanish and his shotgun took a bite out of a table leg and the floor. I blasted again and crawled away a few feet to the end of the table, looking for a way out, then heard the clacking of leather soles on the clay tile. I risked peeking over the table top. Roberto was screaming in anguish, rolling a bloody pattern on the floor, peppering the stucco walls with lead.
“Dios mio,” echoed Nameless’s voice again as his clacking feet took him out of the house.
And I rolled out from under the table just in time to see him hit the front door at a dead run. Seconds later a Mercedes engine turned over, gravel flew, and rubber melted on pavement.
&&&
I dove out the back door, piled into the Ghia, and peeled out through the same cloud of smoke and dust he’d left in. The wrenching curves that could pull you apart at forty miles an hour, I took at fifty-five. Down the hill past where I’d been stopped, off into the gravel, back again. I couldn’t hear his engine or hear his screeching wheels but I flew through his dust shortly after he’d made it and I breathed his smoke just after he belched it and I could feel the rumble of his engine and I knew I would get him. I knew I would get him.
Just atop the crest of the next rise, through the raw V that the road had been laid into, the sun was setting fire to the hills in the east, just this side of town. The sky was turning a battleship gray and somewhere out there, I was sure, birds were starting to sing. But the next song I heard was that of screeching tires and impacting metal and flying glass. I braked and downshifted and got a shocking surprise as I topped the hill.
Just on the other side was a roadblock of blue and whites and a couple of sheriff’s department vehicles. The Mercedes station wagon had taken out quite a bit of the midsection of one of them. I stood on the brake and did my best to correct the skid and still ended up in the ditch, window-deep in Johnson grass, choking from dust.
I got the door open and tumbled out. I heard feet coming toward me and in back of them, nearer the roadblock, a shout. Then another, and a whooping sound. “Whooee,” hollered a booming voice. “Sumbitch made it through the roadblock. Car didn’t, but he sure as shit did. Reyes, radio EMS and tell ’em to bring a putty knife.” I knew they were talking about Nameless. Now he would get to tell Bingo he was sorry again. Face to face, more or less.
As I hoisted myself upright, other voices told me to freeze. Uniforms, uniforms with guns—their eyes bugged out as I emerged from the ditch. One of them started laughing, the other flicked out his handcuffs. Then another voice boomed out in the crisp early morning air, “Hold on, hold on just a second. That’s Fender.”
I welcomed that voice. It was Lasko’s. I staggered out to the middle of the road and looked toward the tangled mass of metal that had been the station wagon, looking like it was trying to burrow into the patrol car. Twenty yards past the roadblock a headless bundle of clothing and entrails twitched on the pavement.
There was a fragment of reflective glass in the road down by my feet and I looked at it, a sliver of a hole going down into the center of the earth. Staring back up at me from the depths was a monster. Green-black spikes jutting out from a head that was mostly black, now cracking and dry but covered with red pinpoints of blood, clothing daubed with green and black muck encasing a body that swayed, patches of it shimmering and red- tinged, dripping with Bingo Torres’s life fluid. No shoes. That monster was me.
“Godawmighty,” said Lasko. “Godawmighty Jesus.”
&&&
I told Lasko most of my end of the story on the way back to town, and he told me his. Vick had phoned the police right after I left with the ransom money, so they managed to run right into Bingo’s cowboys as they dropped over to perform the radical vasectomy. I just hoped that they hadn’t already been over to the Radisson. Sure, they’d apparently let her go, but that didn’t mean that someone wasn’t waiting there for her when she returned. And by now I was sure as hell that she hadn’t merely been paranoid when she said she was being followed.
“Just relax, Martin,” said Lasko as we got back to town. “She’s either OK or she ain’t. We find out when we get there.”
“What were you doing out there on the roadblock, anyway? I thought this wasn’t your case anymore.”
“Martin,” he growled affectionately, “get real. I hear this shit on the radio coming down, wild horses ain’t gonna keep me away.”
We pulled up in the ho
tel drive right behind a big black limo. A uniformed cop came over to Lasko’s window and nodded hello. “It’s OK,” the cop said. “She’s in there alone, and we’ve got men posted in the halls, too. But Watson just radioed and said—”
Lasko shushed him and nodded at me to go on up alone. “Thanks,” I said. “She doesn’t have any reason to trust anyone else. Just give me a minute.”
The bell captain and the desk clerks turned white as I padded into the lobby. I showed them my key and told them to send up some more towels.
&&&
The hall was quiet as I got off the elevator. Most of the rooms had do not disturb signs hung on the doors. I was shaking from head to toe. The cops stationed by the exits squinted their eyes hard upon seeing me, then spoke discreetly into walkie-talkies and eventually let me pass.
She didn’t answer my knock. As I put the key in the door and let myself in I heard water running. The bathroom door was partially shut and there were two suitcases parked at the foot of the bed, two airline tickets by the telephone.
The water stopped and she called out. Her voice was vibrant, just a bit tremulous and sweet with bathroom reverb. She said, “Bingo, is that you?”
I didn’t say a word, just listened to a big bass drum of a heart. Thunk, thunk. She called out again, those red artificial nails appearing on the edge of the door as it slowly swung open and she leaned out, her back turned toward me, wet and naked, the mellow dark color of her skin uninterrupted by tan lines.
“Daddy, is that you?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
After I answered, she spun around quickly, reeling as if she’d been struck. She turned and stood knock-kneed, her hands trying to shield the large V of glistening pubic hair at her crotch, then ducked back into the bathroom and slammed the door.
I knocked on it hard and told her to come out.
The lock finally clicked, and the knob turned in my hand. I stepped back to let her pass. As she went by I breathed in her fragrant, wet smell. It saddened me. Her hair clung to her head, no longer a spiky crown. The robe had been thrown on hastily, drooping off one shoulder, the dark button of one nipple peeking out like the eye of a pet that had misbehaved. She plopped on the corner of the bed, sighing. The robe fell open further and she didn’t bother to fix it.
Now I could see the catlike aspect of her face as a familial feature. Mexican royalty, or, at least, South Texas Mexican royalty. She rubbed her nose and let her hand fall in her lap, a balled-up fist, the red nails protruding like hard little daggers.
“I see you made it,” she said. “Chicken dick.”
There was a small rumble of clomping feet, and soon the room was crowded with uniforms. Lasko was trying to wedge his way through the throng, saying, “Hold on, hold on just a minute here.”
An eager young officer stopped at the foot of the bed, gun drawn, handcuffs dangling. He looked down at the wet girl, then at the muddy, bloody bass player I saw in the mirror and said, “Which one of you is B. Q. Torres?”
“She is,” said a voice. I turned around. It was Detective Watson, elbowing a couple of his men out of the way. He gave me an astringent smirk, whipped out his own handcuffs, and fastened them on her thin wrists. “You,” he told her, “are under arrest for attempted murder.”
She rolled her eyes, smirking. “Who says I did that?” Watson grinned from ear to ear, looking back at me over his shoulder. “You’ll find out later. Could be several people, though. Could be me, ’cause I think you did. Could be Roberto Villareal, for one. Or it could be Retha Thomas. She’s starting to come around.”
&&&
It turned out that parts of an Absolut bottle were embedded in my shoulder, a tooth was broken, and my leg needed stitches. Those things got me an escorted trip to Brackenridge Hospital, where I was sponged off, jabbed with needles, stitched, swabbed, probed, and bandaged. It took a few hours. Next to the Saturday night drug overdoses, car wreck and shooting victims, I was a low priority. A black officer kept an eye on me, even through the most embarrassing probes and sponges.
While they were putting on the finishing touches, Lasko came back and pulled up a chair, dismissing my sentinel. After they’d read Barbra Quiero Torres her rights and told her that her beloved daddy was dead, he said, she confessed.
“She was also pretty relieved that Retha is gonna be OK,” said Lasko. “The two gals were pretty dang close, but this hot stud deejay by the name of Bone came between them. He was living with Retha, but he snuck over to Barbra’s apartment one night for a quick one and Retha found out.”
“Whoa,” I interrupted. “Barbra told me she was going with a deejay, and Retha used to have a boyfriend named Bone.” Lasko shook his head. “There’s only one deejay involved in
this case, and his name is Bone. He says he was living with Retha when he cheated on her with Barbra. The gals had a big falling out over it. Retha knew all about Barbra’s daddy’s troubles back here, and heard about the rumors going around about Vick, how it was that he ‘helped out’ guys when they needed it. After she got here, she got to the bottom of those rumors. Turns out that Vick has paid the emergency room bills for fourteen broken digits, six or seven broken arms, and five broken legs over the last ten years. And ten years is as far back as we’ve had time to check, so likely there’s a lot more.”
I hung my head as a new wave of nausea swept over me. “Nice guy . . . end of an era ...” I groaned, which caused the nurse to ask me if it was something she’d done. I shook my head and looked up at Lasko. “So Retha came out here to get even with Barbra for the boyfriend thing by blackmailing Bingo?”
He shrugged. “Partially, I guess. And she was trying to impress the IMF guy by volunteering to come out and check things out. When she got the goods on both Vick and Bingo, she thought she could parlay it into a job. She asked both Vick and Bingo for jobs, but they just tried to buy her off with a few hundred bucks. And you can guess that the IMF guy didn’t have any further use for her, either.”
“And Barbra followed her out here once she got wind of things?” I said.
“Uh-huh. She claims she wasn’t trying to kill her, she just got mad and flew into the proverbial rage. Said she was sick of people trying to put the bite on her dad, especially when it’s her ex-best friend.”
“What does Retha say?”
“Nothing. She’s opened her eyes and mumbled something. She recognizes her parents, and seems to understand that she’s in a hospital. The doctors think she’ll come out of it without too much damage, but it’s real likely that she won’t remember what happened. Retroactive amnesia, they call it.”
The nurse stepped back to admire her handiwork, handed me some forms, and ducked out. Lasko gave me a grocery bag with a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, both a few sizes too big. I put them on and checked out at the ER desk, paying the bill with the band’s American Express card.
&&&
Retha was sleeping. The doctor said he thought she was going to be all right, but it would take time. Her eyes were still rimmed with black and yellow, her head sporting a turban of gauze. But she was no longer in limbo. Soon she wouldn’t need to be hooked up to all the tubes and machines that were plugged into her. Lasko and the doctor led me out to the hall once again.
“Her parents are asleep,” said the doctor. “First sleep they’ve had in a week, and nobody, but nobody is going to disturb them.”
An aide came padding up and said something about an emergency. The doctor shook my hand and trotted down the hall. Lasko put an arm around me and told me that Monday morning I’d have to have an interview with the DA, but not to worry about it right now. First things first—Ladonna was in the waiting room.
I went in there and we clung together like two sandburs. And we stayed that way as Lasko drove us to her place. We stayed that way for the better part of the day, and we stayed that way all night too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Monday morning the DA wanted me to look at two mug shots. At least one of the faces in the p
hotos belonged to one of the two cowboys I’d given the $20,000 to in the parking lot of Rosie’s Roadhouse, which is what I told the DA. Afterwards, he put the photos back in a folder, asked me to wait, and left the room. Fifteen minutes passed. A black female assistant came in looking like she’d been up all night with a sick child. She asked a lot of questions and took a lot of notes. Before she left, she made sure that she had a number where they could get in touch with me.
Lasko came in and plopped down in a chair, put his feet up, and got comfortable. “We got us a whole new case this morning,” he said.
I was prepared for the worst. “Barbra’s confession is inadmissible?”
“I don’t think it’s worth the paper it’s written on,” he said. “We don’t have a shred of evidence to support it. Roberto, who I’ll lay odds will never dance conjunto again, says it’s bullshit. So does her mother, who flew in from LA with a hotshot lawyer last night. So does one blood-smudged partial print we got from the dresser and the blood that was under Retha’s fingernails, neither of which match Barbra’s.”
“Whose do they match?”
“The man who did it, Bingo. Her dad.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty dang sure. The first thing we showed ole Roberto after he come out of surgery yesterday was his spare blue lame suit, all covered with Retha’s blood. It was found stuffed in a minnow bucket down by the boat dock. Plus we got the cowboys that you just ID’d one of. They’ve worked for Bingo for almost ten years. Mostly down on his ranch near Beeville, but he used to fly them up here for special chores.
“Anyway, these folks are real talkative. Including the ex- Mrs. Torres, who is a damn good-looking six-foot blonde by the name of Cassandra Whitestone. What we know now is this: Bingo slipped out from surveillance Sunday night wearing Roberto’s blue lame suit, went to La Quinta, and waited for Retha.”
Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) Page 19