by Thom Whalen
* * *
Randal and I visited a few other bars during our evening in Syracuse. Randal dragged me into the seediest ones that he could find, but none of them fell below the threshold set by the Pioneer. And no one in any of them admitted to having heard of anyone called Warts Weber. The bars were seedy enough to discourage ordering food so, at seven, we stopped at an A&W. I had a Papa Burger and root beer float. The carhop there hadn’t heard of Warts, either, but that didn’t surprise us. We asked only because we were asking everyone.
When we returned to the Pioneer at midnight, the lot was empty and the windows were dark. I was surprised. I thought that all bars stayed open after midnight. But, at eighteen, I knew nothing about bars. I wasn’t old enough to go into The Ace of Clubs, Wemsley’s only bar. Sam Barrett, the owner, was known to be strict about admitting minors and Wemsley was too small for anyone to get away with fake ID.
Randal and I sat on our bikes outside the Pioneer for a minute and looked at the seemingly deserted building.
“Trap?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied. My heart had its own opinion. It was beating like a bass drum in my chest.
“Only one way to find out,” he said and dismounted.
He was going to find out if it was a trap by walking directly into it. Randal was crazy. I followed him, thinking that made me as crazy as him. Back then, I didn’t know that crazy was contagious. Experience has made me wiser now.
When he knocked on the door, a big man opened it. He was no insurance agent. His greasy tee shirt failed to cover the lower extremity of his hairy gut where the waistband of his dirty jeans sagged. Even so, his stained cuffs failed to reach the tops of his tattered sneakers.
“Wanda said that she would tell us about Warts Weber,” Randal said.
“In the back,” the big man said and stepped aside.
Randal walked boldly into the dark bar. I expected to get a bullet in the head or knife in the belly as I followed him through the door. I imagined that my guts would soon get chopped to hamburger like Billy’s. That had to hurt.
For the first time, I saw the wisdom of life insurance. If I’d bought a million dollar policy this afternoon, then my parents could be rich when they woke up in the morning. They could have mourned my death in style, lounging on a beach in the Bahamas with rum cocktails in their hands.
The only light came from an open door at the far side of the bar. Randal threaded past empty tables with inverted chairs lifted on top, legs pointing heavenward like a dead forest of elf-sized timber.
After closing Elsa’s every night for more than two months, it was a familiar sight. But this place felt different – hostile where Elsa’s felt quiet and friendly.
The big man followed us. I figured him for the cook, mostly because he was wearing a greasy apron. I knew about short order cooks now. I knew what they looked like and I knew how they smelled and I knew that they could be crazy dangerous.
Wanda, the barkeep, was sitting beside an old wooden desk in the office. I had time to look at her more closely than this afternoon. She was big. Not so much fat as sloppy through the chest and neck. But her forearms were thickly corded and her calves were bunched with muscle. She was strong underneath the flab.
Her face was square, her features chunky. I doubted that even plastic surgery could make her pretty. Her teeth were yellow and snaggled and her neck-length hair was lank and greasy.
When we were in the office, the big cook leaned against the doorframe, blocking the exit. Maybe it was a thoughtless gesture or maybe it was meant to be as threatening as it appeared.
The desk drawer near Wanda’s right hand was pulled open. I couldn’t see into it but suspected that she had a pistol waiting there, just in case.
There was no reason to beat about the bush now. Randal got directly to the point. “Where can I find Warts Weber?”
“What do you want with Warts?” she asked.
“I got personal business,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it with anyone else.”
Wanda shrugged. “I’m Wanda Weber. Some people call me Warts. Either people who know me real well or people who don’t know me at all. You can call me Wanda.”
“You’re Warts?” Randal said. He did not conceal his surprise.
Wanda laughed. It was an unpleasant sound. It had the character of a klaxon. “Surprised that I’m a woman? I’m a feminist. Anything a man can do, I can do better.”
“That’s okay,” Randal said. “I just want to be sure that I’m not talking to the wrong person.”
“You probably are, because you are talking to Warts Weber.”
I stared at her face. Homely as she was, her skin was as clear as any I’d ever seen. Not a wart, mole, or acne scar in sight.
She saw me staring and laughed again. “That’s not where the warts are, kid, but don’t worry, I got plenty. If we get to know each other real well, I’ll show ‘em to you. Then we’ll be intimate friends.”
I blushed. I didn’t want to see Wanda’s intimate parts but I wasn’t about to insult her by saying that so I said nothing.
“My name’s Randal,” Randal said. “This is Gunner.”
“Are you randy?” Wanda asked with a sly grin.
“I’m Randal. Nobody calls me Randy.”
“So what’s your business with me, Randy?”
“I was told that you knew a guy named Billy Paul.”
She curled her lip. “Knew?”
“He’s dead. Died three weeks ago up in Wemsley.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
“I was told that you knew him. I’d like to know what he was up to before he died.”
“No good, I expect. Billy Paul was never up to any good.”
“That’s not very specific.”
“You cops? I didn’t have you pegged as cops.” She pointed her double chin at me. “He’s too young and you’re too cool.”
“We’re not cops,” Randal said. “Billy and I had a business arrangement. He owed me. Now that he’s gone, I’m the sole proprietor. I figure I can hold up his end. You’ll find me better to work with than Billy.”
“I’d find a ratsnake better to work with than Billy.”
Randal smiled. “He didn’t set the bar too high.”
“So who’s the kid? Your bodyguard?” She laughed, long and deep and ugly. Wanda found the world a funny place.
“An intern,” Randal replied.
Wanda laughed at that, too.
I didn’t find humor in either answer.
When her laughter ended, Randal said, “The first order of business is for me to find out if Billy was square with you when he died.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Billy was never square with anyone.”
“How much did he owe you?”
“You going to make good on his debt?” For the first time, Wanda looked interested. She leaned forward and looked hard at Randal.
“That depends, doesn’t it?”
“On what?”
“On if I’m taking over Billy’s business or not. If his business died with him, then his debts died with him and they got nothing to do with me. But if I’ve got his business, then his debts are part of it and I’ll make good on them.”
“That’s how it is?”
“That’s how business works.”
“What if he owed a lot of money?”
“If he owed more than his business is worth, then I’m not going to take it over. That’s obvious.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Obvious.”
She stared at us in silence for a minute.
Randal let her think.
I was sweating buckets and not just because we were four people close in a small office. Wanda’s hand was twitching near her open desk drawer. It was after midnight. At this hour, in this neighborhood, there was no one on the street. The bar was located in the middle of a gravel lot with no other buildings nearby. If things went bad, no one would hear the gunshots.
After
a while, she said, “I don’t do business with people that I don’t know.”
Randal shrugged. “Everyone’s a stranger when you first meet him. You got to get to know people somehow.”
“Tell you what, Randy. How about you come back to my place tonight and we spend a while getting to know each other real well?”
I thought about Wanda’s warts and wondered what Randal was going to say.
“Sorry. I’m married.”
“You got no ring.”
“It’s a long, dull, complicated story. But it ends with me being faithful to her, regardless.”
She looked at me with a yellow grin. “How about you, Gunner? You wanna do some interning tonight?”
It was the second time in a week that someone had offered to relieve me of my virginity in no uncertain terms and it was the second time that I preferred to keep it. A few weeks ago, I never would have guessed that could happen. “I’ve got a girlfriend,” I said.
“She don’t need to know. I ain’t gonna tell her nothing.” Wanda laughed. “I’m a feminist. I believe in sexual freedom.”
Randal looked at me with no expression on his face. Last time, he stormed the beaches for me and he got crabs. He wasn’t offering to get warts this time. I was on my own.
I shook my head. “I just couldn’t do that to her.”
“Jesus, it’s hard for a horny woman to get laid in this town.”
“So how much did Billy owe you?” Randal asked.
“Besides a lifetime of devoted passion?”
“Besides that.”
“He owed me for his last two keys. Call it an even thousand.”
“You gave him two keys on credit?” Randal asked.
“Hell, no. My business is strictly cash on delivery. He stole them. Grabbed them and ran off without paying. I almost caught him but he hopped on his damned motorcycle and raced off.”
“When was that?”
“Last month. You say he was killed three weeks ago?”
“Just about exactly.”
“Then he stole my grass a couple weeks before that. Maybe ten days.”
“So what do you propose that we should do about it? I’m not going to hand over a thousand bucks for nothing.”
She thought for a minute, then said, “You buy from me, two keys at a time, and pay an extra twenty percent premium against what Billy owed and you’ll be square after six buys.”
“Five buys. Twenty percent is a fifth.”
“Six. There’s interest.”
“Five. I got no reason to pay Billy’s interest.”
Randal was negotiating. I didn’t want to negotiate. I wanted to get out of here alive and never set foot in Syracuse again. Why was he negotiating? Surely he wasn’t serious about buying kilos of marijuana from Warts.
“The deal’s six. Take it or not, I don’t care. I got all the business I need without you.”
“Okay, six. But I’m going to think on it before we work out the final details.”
“Those was the final details,” she said.
Randal pursed his lips. “What was the rest of his business? Who did he sell to?”
“Hell if I know. He talked about some motorcycle club somewhere up in the mountains. Maybe it was them. But he didn’t sell to bikers down here. They wholesale from me and do their own distribution. Billy wasn’t shy about poaching on anyone so that made him scared about being poached on. Made him paranoid. He never named names.”
Randal shook his head. “I’m going to have to investigate that. If I can learn enough about his distribution, then I’ll be back in a week to set up a deal with you.”
“You know where to find me.”
The business was finished for now. The big cook stepped out of the doorway and let Randal and me leave.
Wanda didn’t move her hand away from her desk drawer until we were out of sight.
They say grass can make you paranoid. They’re right. I never smoked up in my life and it had already made me as paranoid as hell.
I was still shaking when I got back to Wemsley in the small hours of the morning.