by David Berens
Country Cooper watched in horror as his pal left him bleeding out on the boat at the Black Dog Wharf. Dadgum, Jed, he thought. How am I gonna do this drop now? He felt all alone. First Troy had ditched him, now Jed. And now he was losing a ton of blood from a damn graze wound to his testicle. He wondered if he was going to die here, all alone. Nobody cared about him, he knew that now. Not Jed, not Troy, not the girl, not Boonesborough. He pulled his lucky little finger keychain out of his pocket and studied the tiny digit. His mama had told him it would bring him good luck, but all that ever seemed to come to him was bad luck—extremely bad luck. But mama was gone and Country was alone again. He wished he could think of someone who cared. No one came to mind.
But then again, he thought, Buff cared. Buff had been there when he was down and out. He gave him work and promised him a place in his war against all that was wrong in Massachusetts. Buff would save him. He gently pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. It was smeared with blood, but it seemed to be working. He dialed and waited.
Buff picked up on the second ring. “Is it done?”
Country felt tears well up in his eyes. He had let his general down. The job was so damn easy and it would have been done by now except for the dang hole in his balls.
“They done left me,” he said, sniffing back the snot dripping from his nose. “And I cain’t do the liftin’ right now. Buff, I ain’t feelin’ so good.”
“Where the fuck is Jed?” Buff demanded.
“He cut out a few minutes ago. He got all namby pamby when he saw Banksy down below.”
“Banksy? Who the hell is Banksy?”
“I told ya before. He’s the cop that was gonna help me keep this thing on the down-low. Yeah, well, he saw Mrs. Summerton’s body and went all moral and shit on me. I had to take matters into my own hands.”
“Jesus Christ, Country. Did you kill a cop?”
“Well, he ain’t dead yet, just asleep in the bed down below.”
“Asleep? What in Sam Hill is going— You know what, I don’t want to know. You need to buck up and get this thing done. I don’t care how you do it.”
“But Buff, I cain’t barely stand up, let alone get the drop done and git rid of these—”
Buff hung up before he could finish. It’s over, Country thought. He wasn’t going to get the drop done. He wasn’t going to be in on the big job. He was through with The Sharks. They would most likely make him disappear somehow. He laid his head back on the deck and stared at the sky.
Unless, he thought. Unless I can somehow get it done. If I can suck it up and make this happen, then Buff will know I’m worthy of the inner circle.
He sat up, groaning with the effort. Somewhere below him, he heard a banging noise and muffled shouts.
“Aight, Banksy,” he said, pulling himself to his feet. “Time to go for a swim.”
29
Fifty Grand
The Tail Spinner strip club was nearly deserted. The only Sunday night patrons were a couple of truck drivers who may or may not have spoken any English, sitting at the bar with their heads down over a paper container stacked high with microwaved chicken wings. They never looked up at the dancers on stage, and thus the girls were making a pass up and down the catwalk, eyeballing the backs of the two men and plopping down next to the pole.
Daisy Mae and Ellie Mae refused to be deterred. They knew persistence, and sometimes annoyance, paid off. More often than not, a man who didn’t want to be bothered would pay twenty bucks to make them go away. But when they tried to talk to these two guys, they were met with wide smiles and nods.
“They don’t understand you, stupid,” Ellie Mae said to Daisy Mae, smiling back at the men. “Ain’t worth the time.”
“You can give up if you want to, but I’m stayin’,” Daisy Mae ran her fingers through the first man’s black hair.
He ignored her and went back to devouring his wings. The bartender slid two cold beers across the bar to the men, who smiled the same vacant smiles and nodded their heads again and again.
Daisy Mae spoke in a loud and slow voice to the closest truck driver. “Do … you … want … to … buy … me … a … beer?”
The man repeated his head bobbing. Daisy Mae looked at the bartender. “You saw that. Fill ’er up.”
The bartender shrugged and pulled an icy pint glass out of the cooler behind the bar. He filled it and placed it on a coaster in front of Daisy Mae. Ellie Mae tapped the man on the shoulder insistently.
“How’s about one for me?” she asked.
More smiles and nods. The bartender filled another pint and walked away, wiping down the bar as he went.
“See, Daisy Mae, they’s startin’ to soften up.”
The truck drivers finished their wings, laid some money on the bar, bowed to the Gallop twins, and walked out the door.
“Uh huh,” Ellie Mae said. “They softened right on up out of here.”
“Least we got a beer.”
“True.”
The bartender returned to clean up the napkins and sauce-covered plates. He scooped up the bills next to the mess and counted it out.
“Hey, they didn’t pay for those beers, girls,” he said. “Those will be coming out of your take tonight.”
“Our take tonight?” Daisy Mae flung her arm back toward the now empty club. “You want part of our big fat take? Sounds good to me. How about you, Ellie Mae?”
“Uh huh,” she said, pretending to click buttons on a calculator. “Let me see. Ten percent of nothin’ is … nothin’. Here ya go.”
She opened her palm toward the bartender who did not look amused. He reached out before they could stop him and grabbed the two pint glasses. He poured them into the sink and rinsed the glasses.
“Now, that was just a dang waste,” Ellie Mae said. “C’mon, Daisy Mae. Let’s just go home.”
The twins stood and walked past the shattered remains of the two way mirror that still hadn’t been properly cleaned up. Beyond the opening, they could see two men sitting back in the shadows. Ellie Mae nodded toward the dark room and then pointed to a table in front of them. Daisy Mae followed her lead, but wasn’t exactly sure why.
The DJ had stopped playing music an hour ago and there were no dancers taking the stage. In the quiet, the Gallop twins could hear the men talking clearly. It quickly became clear it was the manager, Winchester Boonesborough, having some kind of meeting with another important sounding man.
“I tried to tell you that boy was never going to be a valuable asset to the organization. He’s too stupid to even pull off a simple drop.”
“But that’s the point, Winnie,” the other man said. “You don’t want anyone too smart for that kind of work. He’s a frontline soldier. Dispensable.”
“Well, where the hell is he now? This soldier of yours.”
“He’s on the goddamn boat.”
“Still?”
“Yes, apparently, his injury is more severe than I thought. He can’t lift a crate of rifles, let alone the one with my ex-wife, for crying out loud.”
“Jesus.”
“Oh, it gets worse. Not only is he bleeding to death on my boat with a million dollars worth of heroin, a terrorist army’s wet dream stash of guns, and my wife’s bloated corpse, he’s also kidnapped a cop.”
“He kidnapped Jed?”
“Not Jed, you idiot. He’s got some other cop friend of his out there, but I suppose the cop wouldn’t play ball, so Country locked him in the bedroom.”
“Ho. Lee. Shit.”
“You’re telling me.”
“And where the hell is Jed?”
“Country says he got spooked and bailed out.”
The two men were silent. Daisy Mae opened her mouth to say something, but Ellie Mae slapped her hand over her mouth. She shook her head sharply and put her finger to her lips. Daisy Mae nodded.
“That boat needs to go away fast. Without Jed, we need someone else to make it happen.”
“But who?”
“I do
n’t care, Winnie. Get on the phone. Get someone. I don’t care who. Pay ’em fifty grand if you have to, but that boat needs to be on the bottom of the ocean before the election.”
“I can’t just hire a hitman to take out a cop.” Boonesborough’s voice rose and the man in the shadows reached out and slapped him.
“Get it together, Winnie. I know you. You can make this work.”
Daisy Mae could see Boonesborough holding his cheek.
“Yes, sir,” he said, his voice tinged with anger.
The man in the shadows stood up from the rickety card table, tossed back a squat drink and laid the glass back down in front of him. He pulled on a suit jacket, straightened his tie, and adjusted a small American flag pin on his lapel.
“Now, I’ve got a damn speech to prepare for at the Amvets lodge,” he said. “When I get done, I had better have a text message telling me all is taken care of or I will burn you. You will go down with this goddamn sinking ship.”
Boonesborough didn’t say anything. The other man, who looked slightly familiar to Daisy Mae, stalked past them without acknowledging their presence.
“We need that money,” Daisy Mae said when the door closed behind the man.
“Hell yeah, we do. But we ain’t gonna drop no guns and drugs and we sure as shit ain’t capable of killin’ no cop.”
“It’s fifty grand,” Daisy Mae said. “And besides, we ain’t gonna do it. T.J. is.”
“No. We ain’t spoilin’ that boy by gettin’ him messed up in somethin’ like this.”
“He don’t even have to do much. All he’s gotta do is take that boat out and sink it. You heard the man, the cop is locked in the bedroom. Hell, we don’t have to tell T.J. about that if we don’t want to.”
Ellie Mae thought about it for a second and couldn’t come up with a good reason not to do it. She jerked Daisy Mae up by her bikini, sending her boobs flying out. It would’ve been a dollar-throwing incident at the Tail Spinner strip club except for the fact that no one was present to see it. Daisy Mae tied herself up and hurried after her sister.
“Where the hell we goin’?” she asked.
“We gotta catch that man.”
Ellie Mae flung the door open, and the light of the real world flooded into the backlight lit, tinsel-lined dance club.
The bartender’s voice echoed behind them as they ran out. “Hey, you gotta pay for those beers!”
Daisy Mae whirled around and flipped him off with both middle fingers.
T.J. Gallop sat in the parking lot, behind the wheel of his mother’s Ford Maverick. The radio was tuned to a local station that played a mix of Jimmy Buffett, Bob Marley, Grateful Dead, and Ronnie “Wayfarer” Hobgood tunes. It was his favorite and he listened to it every night he had to wait on his moms to get off work at the strip club. Most nights he would sleep until they banged on the window to wake him up, shouting for him to open the doors. Tonight, the energy drinks and candy were keeping him wide awake. That, and the conversation he kept replaying in his head from the night before with the man named Troy. Pretty cool dude, that guy. He was unwrapping his second king-size Milky Way when the door of the club burst open and a man came stomping out in a halo of purple blacklight. The man’s face was silhouetted so he couldn’t tell what he looked like, but there was something about the way the guy walked that looked very familiar.
He inched down into the vinyl driver’s seat until he was looking through the steering wheel at the man walking toward him. The shadowed figure stopped, pulled out a cigarette, and struck a match. When the flickering light danced across his face, T.J.’s heart stopped. Standing just ten feet away was the man who had chased him out of his yard looking for all the world like he wanted to kill him—Frank McCorker. But best he could tell, Frank hadn’t seen him. He inched farther down into the seat until he was sure his head was hidden. Odds were against Frank noticing him. He wasn’t expecting him to be here after all. He could hear the man start walking closer again. He walked up to the car parked beside his mothers’ Maverick. T.J. held his breath, afraid the man might hear his heart pounding in his chest. And then he heard their voices.
“Hey, mister!”
Oh, crap. It was his mother’s voice. Then he heard her twin sister’s nearly identical screech call after the man.
“Yeah, hold up a sec,” Ellie Mae said. “We got a proposition for ya.”
Then he heard Frank’s voice. “Sorry, ladies. Nice try, but I don’t do that kind of shit. Get back inside and work the trolls for a trick.”
“We ain’t workin’ girls, ya dipshit.”
“Naw. We might show the boobies, but ya don’t get to touch ’em.”
“Well, mostly not. Unless ya come up with a hundred.”
“I don’t have time for this,” Frank said. “Now if you’ll excuse me—”
“We know where you can find that muscle you need,” Daisy Mae interrupted him. “We got the perfect kid for the thing.”
“For the…” Ellie Mae said, lowering her voice so that T.J. almost couldn’t hear her ... “drop.”
“Okay, we’re done here ladies. I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”
“We heard it all,” Daisy Mae said boldly. “And the way we see it, you can hire our boy for the job. Fifty thousand I reckon it was. Or we can go to the cops and spill out everything.”
T.J. was shocked at the sudden rage that came out of Frank McCorker.
“You listen here, bitch. You have no idea who you’re dealing with. If you say anything, I am going to rip out your throats. And then you will wish I hadn’t so you could scream for mercy. Now, get the fuck out of my face before I—”
T.J. heard a loud smack. He knew the sound well, as he had been on the receiving end of that smack more times than he could count. One of his mothers had obviously slapped Frank McCorker. The next sound, to T.J.’s surprise, was the sound of Frank growling. It was a low, guttural snarl he had heard coming from the man as he chased him away from his topless wife and crystal clear pool.
Both women started screaming. He saw Frank’s silhouette lunge past the window, his arms outstretched, reaching for the women.
Dangit, he thought, jerking his door open. He jumped up and grabbed the man’s shoulder. He whirled him around and punched him in the nose. T.J. had no illusions about his fighting skill. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d ever been in a fight, except for that one time the drunk guy had followed his moms out of the club, intent on taking them home. He hit Frank so hard that the man’s nose exploded with blood. Most people would have cried out in pain. He was sure that the average man would have at least reached up to hold his nose to see what kind of damage had been done. Frank did neither.
Frank blinked once and spat through the river of blood. His eyes locked on T.J.’s and they immediately changed from narrow slits of anger, to wide open orbs of rage. T.J. was sure the man had recognized his wife’s pool boy. Frank dove at T.J. but, much like the chase through the McCorker’s back yard, T.J. was able to get away from the potential governor-elect. He ran zig zags in and around the parked cars with Frank huffing and puffing along behind him. It wasn’t long before the man was bent over with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath.
“You’d better keep running, you little shit,” Frank said, “because I’m going to murder you when I catch you.”
That was the exact moment that he passed out.
30
Catchin’ Some ZZZ’s
Country pressed his ear to the bedroom door listening for any sound from Banksy. He was sure he had heard the man yelling earlier, but it sure as hell sounded like he was snoring now. The boat rocked in the gentle waves and Country thought for sure he was going to pass out. He was still losing a lot of blood, so he needed to get this thing done and get back to shore as soon as possible. First a trip to the hospital, and then he would be able to tell Frank and Boonesborough how he’d taken care of everything.
He unlatched the door from the outside, a feature they had a
dded to the bedroom for situations that called for locking someone in. He flung the door open, half expecting Banksy to jump out and hit him with something. But it turned out that the snoring he had heard through the door was legit. The man lay on the floor, sound asleep.
Country bent down, wincing as he felt the stitches pull apart in his groin. A new trickle of blood dripped down his thigh. He changed his position to put his weight on the other leg, and it seemed to ease the strain on his wounded crotch. He hooked his hands under Michael’s arms and heaved. The black circle of unconsciousness threatened to close in, so he dropped the man. He had moved him the shocking distance of one inch. He tried to pull the dead weight of Banks’s body, but he couldn’t budge it without feeling as if every last stitch was going to bust open. He let go of the man and flopped backward onto his butt. He unzipped his shorts and slid them off. They were completely soaked and worthless at this point. He crab walked backward to the kitchen, and with effort he didn’t know he had left, he pulled himself up and opened the freezer. He grabbed a half-empty bag of ice and slid down the refrigerator with his back squeaking on the door as he fell. He landed with a thump and was certain the last stitch had broken free. He carefully positioned the ice bag on his manhood and waited until he was numb.
While he sat there trying to figure out how he could get this done, he realized he was pissed. Somehow in all of this, he began to realize that Jed had deserted him in his time of need. He was supposed to be his friend. Hell, he kind of wanted to be Jed. He had a good job, a freaking amazing mustache, and a uniform. But now he kept replaying the memory of Jed running away, leaving Country to lie bleeding on the deck of the boat.