Romeo's Rules

by James Scott Bell

  “You intend to stay in Los Angeles, Mr. Romeo?”

  “I don’t have to answer that, do I?”

  “You don’t.”

  “Then I won’t. Thanks for stopping by.”

  Davis stood. “Off the record, here’s some advice. Don’t make trouble here. Don’t play hero for Natalia Mayne. You’re not qualified and you’ll just make things worse all over. People who play cop always do it badly.”

  He left the way he came.

  Ira came back outside and asked if I would be needing to get bailed out of jail anytime soon.

  “Do they still charge people with being a public nuisance?” I said.

  “You might very well bring the charge back into fashion,” Ira said.

  “Facilis descensus Averni.”

  “Yes, indeed. The descent into hell is easy. I don’t want you descending there.”

  But eight hours later I did just that.

  “HOW YOU DOING?” I said to the bartender.

  “Better than most,” he said. “Not as good as some.” He was globular—round head, round nose, round torso. He had fat fingers that rested on the bar top like knockwurst samples.

  McKeever’s was a local dive bar. Faux-wood walls and two antler chandeliers emitted a hunting-lodge vibe. Big game to be had here in Glendale. I’d come by bus. I was getting the hang of the L.A. metro system.

  “What can I get you?” the bartender said.

  “Two things,” I said. “I’ll have a shot of Woodford, neat, and a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I want to talk to LaFleur.”

  “Who?”

  “There’s a guy owes me money, and you’re the guy to see when a certain guy owes you money. You’re Franklin, right?”

  The bartender looked at me for a long moment.

  “No idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “I know about you and about LaFleur and about Arvand Andandi. Arvand owes me money. I was told to talk to you about that.”

  “And who told you that?”

  “I can’t tell you. You got an idea about that?”

  He looked up and down the bar, then said, “Have one on me.” He turned around and grabbed a bottle of Woodford, poured me a generous slug, set it in front of me. Then he flipped open the bar top at my right and disappeared into the back.

  I sat there and drank the bourbon and thought about the next step.

  I knew I was getting closer to the inner circle of whatever pit I’d been dragged into.

  A couple of minutes later a large man in a nice suit sat on the bar chair next to mine. His hair was jet black and moussed to beat any high wind. He smelled of Lilac Vegital.

  “How you doing?” he said.

  “Are you the guy I’m supposed to talk to?” I said.

  “I’m the guy who’s supposed to talk to you,” he said.

  The bartender returned to his spot and poured a drink for my new companion.

  He took the drink in his left hand and that’s when I noticed he was missing his little finger.

  After a sip, he said, “How do you know what you know?”

  I said, “That’s an epistemological question.”

  The guy thunked his glass on the bar top and looked at me.

  “I don’t like the way you talk,” he said.

  “You’re not the first to say that. It’s kind of a handicap with me. I’m orally challenged.”

  He just stared.

  “Want me to bring it down a level?” I said.

  “You want to keep all your parts working?” he said.

  “Let’s take a shortcut,” I said. “You’re one of the layers between LaFleur and anybody else. You’re paid to be bad and push swaggah. I get that. I get that people need a job. That’s yours. Part of your job is to intimidate, and that’s what you’re doing. You’re good at your job. You get points for that. But I’m not intimidated and now we can leave that part out of our little talk. I have some business to conduct with Mr. LaFleur. I want to apply for a job myself.”

  The nine-fingered guy gave me a long look, right between the eyes. I looked at the bridge of his nose. That’s one way to keep from blinking.

  “You saying you want to do what I do?”

  “Depends in part on what you do. I don’t do windows and I don’t sing. But I can do almost anything else.”

  “What I think is this,” Nine Fingers said. “You want to find someone and do him dirty, and I just can’t let that happen.”

  “What if I say you can tag along? A meet and greet. Your boss can hear me out, you’ll be right there alongside?”

  He pondered that, but his pondering was an effort. He was being asked to do something complicated. Thinking was not his job.

  “Why don’t you tell me where I can reach you?” Nine said.

  “Well, that’s just it, I’m kind of in flux right now. I had accommodations but the landlord thought I needed to move along.”

  “Why do you talk that way?”

  “What way?”

  “Like you’re educated or something.”

  “I am educated or something. But don’t count that against me.”

  He put his four-fingered hand on my shoulder. And squeezed it just a little more than congenially.

  “I kind of like you,” he said.

  “I’m touched.”

  He smiled, took his hand away. “Let’s do the interview right now,” he said.

  “With LaFleur?”

  “Right here, in the open,” he said.

  “I’m good with that,” I said.

  “I’ll make a call. We’ll see. What are you drinking?”

  “Woodford.”

  “Have one on me.”

  “Don’t get me drunk. I’m a nasty date.”

  He laughed and got up. He took out his phone, walked away.

  The bartender, as if this had been rehearsed, filled my glass with another shot of bourbon. I would sip judiciously. I needed to keep my head about me when, to channel Kipling, all about me were losing theirs and blaming it on me.

  The nine-fingered man sat back down. “Twenty minutes,” he said.

  “LaFleur?”

  He nodded. “My name’s Stratemeyer.” He offered his right hand.

  I shook it. “Phil,” I said.

  “Phil who?”

  “Just Phil.”

  “One name, huh?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Sort of like Madonna.”

  “I want to kiss you,” I said.

  He laughed. “There was a guy who played a funny flute. Zamfir. Yeah. I was a sick kid. I was in bed a lot. Watched a lot of TV. I remember that commercial. I think he must have sold a lot of records in his day.”

  “How’d you go from sick kid to this?” I asked.

  “Funny, it was another commercial,” Stratemeyer said. “It was Jack LaLanne and his juicing machine. I got my mom to buy me one. I got totally into it and you know what? It worked. I got better and I got stronger. And Jack LaLanne was my hero. I started working out with weights. I got big pretty fast. I got hired on to bounce at some clubs in San Diego. That’s where I’m from.”

  He paused and took a sip. Feeling convivial, I took one, too.

  “So I eventually ended up doing some security work and stuff like that,” he said. “One thing leads to another in that life, and here I am.”

  “Can I ask how you do it with only nine fingers?”

  He held up his hand and looked at it, turning it a couple of times. “You know the Yakuza?”

  “Sure.”

  “I spent a year in Fresno. Had some dealings.”

  “Fresno?”

  “You’d be surprised. The trade is in meth. Fresno’s a hub between Hawaii and the rest of the U.S. Don’t ask me why these things work out the way they do. This and that happened, and I got an enforcement job, part of a local boryokudan,”

  “Violence gang?”

  “You speak the language?”

&
nbsp; “A little.”

  “You impress me more and more,” Sratemeyer said. “Yeah, that’s what it was. And then one of our guys was killed in a firefight and it was my fault. I took the blame, anyway. I cut off my own finger to show my respect.”

  I downed the rest of the bourbon.

  “Now what about you, my friend?” he said.

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  “I don’t have my resume on me.”

  “That’s okay. You’re from where?”

  “Back east.”

  “Specifically.”

  “New York.”

  “Great city. What part?”

  “Long Island,” I lied.

  “You look like a guy who can take care of himself. What’ve you been doing the last few years?”

  “Keeping alive,” I said. “And so good night.”

  I slid off the stool. Stratemeyer put out his paw and grabbed my arm. “Where you going?” he said.

  “I’ll be back another time,” I said.

  “What about the meet?”

  “When I think I can trust you,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Stratemeyer got up and grabbed my shirt in both his hands. “We worked out a deal.”

  The bartender slid over to us. “Take that outside, guys.”

  “I’d like that,” Stratemeyer said. “But I don’t want to get in the way of a productive relationship.”

  I brought my arms up between his and pushed out. My shirt ripped.

  “There a problem here?” Another guy, almost the same size as Stratemeyer, was now at our side. He flipped open a leather case, revealing an LAPD shield. “Why don’t you just call it quits?” he said.

  “Good idea,” I said.

  Stratemeyer gave me his ten-watt smile and said, “Sure thing. No hard feeling, huh?”

  He stuck out his right hand and, for appearances, I took it.

  Big mistake.

  NOBODY’S PERFECT, AS they say. Operating on enough levels, trying to keep track of every move yourself, you’re bound to mess up on occasion.

  The trick about life is to learn to mess up less often and, having messed, clean up to your ultimate benefit.

  What happened to me in that moment was being mesmerized by a fake police badge, which is easy enough to manufacture. There was a guy in New York when I was a kid, stopping cars out in Queens at night, flashing a phony badge, and raping women.

  My mistake was in not figuring out that the cop was a shill and had probably been watching me for a while.

  And when I was about to leave, they implemented plan B.

  Which involved Stratemyer holding my right hand in a vise grip, pulling slightly, while Fake Cop jammed a needle into my side.

  The fast-acting barbiturate got me staggering like a drunk, which was not going to be an uncommon sight here at the bar. The cop made a pretense of arresting me. At least I think he did. He was saying something about my rights as I went to sleep.

  WHEN I WOKE up I was as naked as the proverbial jaybird. I was sitting in all my glory on a hard, cold chair in the middle of a room, an empty room. I was in a sitting position because something nylon and ropey was around my body, securing me to the chair.

  My head was filled with cotton, but the cold was helpful. It ran up my scrotum to my spine and from there spread out like Oklahoma settlers. I breathed in and out hard, throwing oxygen into my system. I wanted to be ready for what was coming, which was going to be bad.

  There was a small table over by one wall. On that table was something metallic. I couldn’t quite make it out.

  I moved against the ropes. It was four lengths around, biting into my arms. One strand went down between my legs. Whoever tied me up was a Boy Scout or a sailor.

  There is some give in rope, no matter what it’s made of. Houdini made some good coin getting out of ropes. When I was a kid I read Tarbell’s complete course on magic and knew some Houdini secrets. He was a muscular guy, and expanding and retracting his muscles got him out of a lot of restraints.

  I started expanding as much as I could, inhaling and exhaling, flexing and letting go.

  Not much give. And what good would it have done anyway? I was locked in this place and someone was going to come in any time and deal with me.

  A few minutes, or maybe it was half an hour, went by. Finally the only door to the room opened and in came Stratemeyer and my old friend, the Lucy Liu lookalike.

  “This does not have to be outcome determinative,” she said, closing the door behind her.

  “You could have at least left me my briefs,” I said.

  “You should not have come back.”

  “I left all my fresh underwear here.”

  “I want you to tell me what you have said to, and received from, Natalia Mayne.”

  Stratemeyer had wandered over to the little table. He was looking at whatever was on it.

  Lucy stepped a little closer, and now I could see her fully in what little light there was. She was dressed in a tasteful fawn-colored suit with white ruffled blouse. Like she was about to show a model home and talk about a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage.

  “If you talk to me,” she said, “there may be a way for us to keep you intact.”

  Stratemeyer walked over to me, carrying the table. He set it down next to my left hand. I could now see what was on top of it. A buck knife. And a hand towel.

  “I want you to keep all your body parts,” she said, “especially the ones that carry your seed.”

  Stratemeyer snorted.

  “You’re not going along with that, are you?” I said to him.

  “It’s a living,” he said.

  “A good one,” Lucy said. “We might have been able to use you, but that’s out of the plan now.”

  “There’s a plan?” I said.

  “Cooperate with me,” she said. “I want to know everything Natalia Mayne said to you, and you to her.”

  “I could lie,” I said.

  “Mr. Stratemeyer will be the sole judge of that.”

  “That’s hardly cricket,” I said.

  “It’s all I have time for,” she said. “So, will you tell me, please?”

  “It’s not anything that’s going to help or hurt you,” I said. “I have nothing to do with domestic spats. I didn’t care.”

  “Why did you go to her home?”

  “You have people surveilling her, don’t you?”

  “Why, Mr. Romeo?”

  “To check on her. I helped her out once.”

  “At the church.”

  “Yep. You could answer a few questions about that for me.”

  She smiled. “Not today, no. What was your purpose in going to her home at night?”

  “I just wanted to see how she was doing.”

  “That’s a lie,” Stratemeyer said. He touched my throat with the knife. “Don’t do it again.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “Let’s use a little rationality here. What motive do I have to lie to you?”

  “To save your precious seed,” Lucy said.

  “All right. That’s a pretty good motive, I’ll grant you. But I’m telling you, we didn’t talk about anything domestic. In fact, she wanted me to get out of there quick.”

  “Lie,” Stratemeyer said.

  “Hey, give it some time,” I said. “Consider more evidence.”

  “What evidence?” Lucy said.

  “I mentioned motive,” I said. “Why would I lie to you if I have no motive?”

  Lucy walked around me in a small circle. Her heels clicked on the floor. She stopped in front of me and said, “Let the way of honor decide.”

  “What—” I was interrupted by Stratemeyer crushing my left hand flat on the table. My fingers spread out like a starfish.

  And then Stratemeyer placed the tip of the carving knife on the table between my little and ring fingers, down low near the crook.

  Helpless to move, knowing what was about to happen, I did the only thing I could and became a blowfish of
adrenaline, my body expanding in anticipation. I made a survival strain against the ropes. The ropes fought back like they’d been trained specifically for this moment.

  “Let me give you one more chance,” Lucy said. “What did Natalia Mayne tell you, exactly, in her own words?”

  “She told me about becoming a model,” I said. “How she met Mayne. That’s all I wanted to know.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing of significance.”

  Lucy looked at Stratemeyer. Stratemeyer said, “He’s not telling us the whole truth.”

  “Is that true?” Lucy asked. “Are you telling us the whole truth or not?”

  “You know what?” I said. “I’m doing my best under the circumstances, which are not great, I’ve got to be honest with you.”

  “Honesty is what I’m looking for,” Lucy said. “And a little retribution. You murdered our man in Phoenix.”

  “Now, look,” I said. “That was not murder under any definition of the term you wish to trot out.”

  “It has hurt our enterprise.”

  “Enterprise? Isn’t that a high-minded way of putting it?”

  “Everything is enterprise,” she said. “Even waking up and deciding what to do with the day.”

  “Okay, but your boy was going to kill me, and he knew what he was doing. I knew what I was doing. I won. That’s life.”

  “Life is honor,” she said. “Show him the way of honor.”

  My brain shot out the realization that this was going to happen, really happen. In that fraction of a second, even as the blade of the carving knife sliced through skin and tendon and bone, my brain shouted for action and it seemed to unfold as if it had been preplanned, scripted, mapped out.

  As the first impulse of pain shot upward from the severed joint to my hand and wrist and arm, I was expanding my chest and pulling my right arm out of the rope restrains with a force that only comes from neurophysical desperation. The sort of thing that enables mothers to lift cars off their trapped children. That stuff is actually true.

  My arm came free and I knew I needed to move as fast as I ever had, as accurately as I ever had.

  Getting your little finger sliced off your hand has a way of focusing your attention. All of the following happened in one, smooth motion: my right hand shot over and grabbed Stratemeyer’s hand, the one that held the knife, from below. With the ropes now looser on me I was able to shift my body slightly to the side and, pushing simultaneously with my feet and thrusting upward with my hand, I plunged the knife under the chin of Mr. Stratemeyer and further, upward into the tangle of his spinal nerves and brain stem. Whatever God or nature designed for that particular area, it was not to sheath a sharp, steel blade.