Gutshot Straight with Bonus Excerpt (16 page)

“Wow,” Shake said after they’d finished dessert. Shredded coconut flavored with a sweet heavy syrup, plus a miniature flan and green tea with cinnamon.

“Beats the food in stir?”

He smiled. “You ever do time?”

“Does working for the Whale count?”

“What did you do before that?”

“You name it. Worked at Starbucks. Sold cell phones at the mall. Cocktail waitress. Various entrepreneurial activities of the less-than-legal sort, when the opportunity arose. I never turned tricks, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I wasn’t thinking that.”

“I wouldn’t ever do that. I didn’t even like giving lap dances. Sex should be all about fun, not profit. Or fun
and
profit, not just profit.”

“What about love?”

“Sex should be about fun, profit, and love? Or fun and profit, but not love?”

“Well, that’s one of the great conundrums, isn’t it?” Shake said.

The waiter brought espressos and the bill, which came—with tax, tip, and the wine—to under seventy-five bucks. Shake wondered how long it would take him to learn Spanish and find an apartment down here.

“I bet you had fun stealing the Whale’s three hundred grand.”

“That’s different.” Gina giggled. “What about you? Besides the driving?”

“I was a cook.”

“Aha.”

“You have to have something to show your PO,” Shake said, “and most kitchens don’t care where you come from, as long as you get there on time and don’t stab the waiters.”

“When I was young, like seventeen, I was a topless shoeshine girl. That was my introduction to the adult-entertainment industry. My first day, I went up to this guy’s hotel room, right, and it turned out I was really supposed to give shoeshines. I thought I was just supposed to look cute and topless and maybe do a little dance.”

Shake laughed. “What did the guy say?”

“He was apologetic. He said he had a big job interview in the morning and wanted his shoes to look really good.”

“So tell me.”

“About the various entrepreneurial activities of the less-than-legal sort?”

“I like to live and learn.”

She shrugged. “Mostly small-time stuff. I wouldn’t even really call them cons. Pretending to be some rich guy’s daughter’s friend, while she was away in Europe for her junior year abroad. That sort of thing. I did a couple of honey traps, with this friend of mine, but those take forever to set up right.”

“You’ve a had a full life,” Shake said, “a girl your age.”

“Twenty-six,” she said. She hawk-eyed his reaction. “Well? Don’t lie or I’ll know it.”

“I was thinking twenty-four,” he said, which was the truth.

She seemed satisfied. She sipped her espresso. “So you were nineteen, huh, your first time?”

“Good memory.”

“What happened?”

Shake knew what she meant. He thought about it. “I fell in with the wrong crowd,” he said. “What’s your story?”

She glanced away from him, which wasn’t like her at all.

“I was born into the wrong crowd,” she said, “if you know what I mean.”

Shake did. And for a splinter of an instant, looking across the table at her, the candlelight softening the angles of her face, he thought he glimpsed a young woman more complicated, sadder and sweeter, than she’d ever admit.

Or maybe that’s just what she wanted him to glimpse. Shake wasn’t sure.

She turned back to him. Smiled. Winked.

“How about a nightcap before bed?”

T
he waiter went to the back and brought out the restaurant manager. Now Ted was being glared at by three people: Nerlides, the waiter, and the restaurant manager, who was short and unshaven. He smelled pungently of sweat and cigarettes.

The waiter and the manager talked rapidly and angrily at Ted in Spanish. Then Nerlides talked rapidly and angrily at Ted in Spanish. She seemed to be under the impression she was translating.

Ted kept trying to explain—English, mime, the few Spanish words he knew—that he had somehow lost his wallet, but that it was going to be okay, he intended to pay, he had not noticed the missing wallet earlier because the shuttle van from the hotel had been complimentary, the wallet was just probably back at his hotel room, and Ted was in no way attempting to pull a fast one on the waiter, the manager, or Nerlides.

He tried to make them understand that he would go back to his hotel room, find his wallet, and return to pay the bill. He took a step toward the door to demonstrate.

“Ai-ai-ai!”
both the waiter and the manager said, or something like that, and they each grabbed one of Ted’s arms to stop him. They marched him, Nerlides following along, to the back of the restaurant. Through the suffocatingly hot, cramped kitchen to a suffocatingly hot, cramped office off the kitchen.

The manager pointed to the telephone on the desk next to the computer and made Ted understand that he’d better call someone to bring him some money,
pronto
, or he, the manager, would call the police and have Ted arrested.

Ted couldn’t believe that this was happening to him. He was soaked with sweat. He didn’t know who to call. He couldn’t call the hotel. George would still be on his “date.” Ted didn’t know Frank the Facilitator’s last name. The other guys, even if he remembered their last names, would still be on
their
“dates.” He couldn’t call his credit-card company, because that number was on the credit card in the wallet he didn’t have with him. He couldn’t call his brother, of course. He could call Hannah, his favorite colleague at the Chamber of Commerce, but how mortifying would that be? And what could she do, ten o’clock at night, from the United States? What if her surly husband answered?

It was incredibly difficult to think clearly in this suffocatingly hot, cramped office, with three people glaring at him and yelling in Spanish. Ted understood now, in a way he never had before, how the contestants on
The Amazing Race
would sometimes make what he, Ted (at home on his comfortable couch in his comfortable house, a glass of iced tea in his hand), would consider somewhat questionable decisions. Like walking thirty blocks to the Hermitage instead of taking a cab—when they were in a race, after all.

“PayPal!” Ted said in desperation, and pointed at the computer.

All the Spanish yelling stopped. The restaurant manager nodded. “PayPal,” he said, giving Ted what might pass for a friendly clap on the shoulder.
“Bueno.”

Ted sat down at the computer, wiped his sweaty palms on the legs of his trousers, and thanked God he remembered his password. He e-mailed eighty-four dollars from his account to an e-mail address the restaurant manager wrote down on the back of an envelope. Then he logged off, cleared cookies and history to be safe, and exited Explorer.

The waiter and Nerlides had wandered off. The manager pulled up a chair, and together he and Ted waited for the transaction to process. When the eighty-four dollars showed up in the manager’s account, fifteen minutes later, he clapped Ted on the shoulder again.

“Vámonos,”
he said.

Ted stepped outside the restaurant and took several deep breaths of night air that wasn’t cool, exactly, but at least immeasurably fresher than what he’d been breathing in the restaurant office.

A cab waited at the curb. Ted remembered, just in time, that he didn’t have the money to pay for it.

He started walking. The hotel wasn’t too far, only a few miles away, he calculated. He’d always had a decent sense of direction, and it felt good to be moving. He tried to think what could have happened to his wallet. He assured himself, without really believing it, that this would be a funny story he could tell people someday.

He noticed that the neighborhood had begun to change. Less light and music now, fewer restaurants and clubs. Actually, there were no longer any restaurants and clubs at all. Just run-down gray apartment buildings and, from the alleys, the sour smell of garbage.

Ted walked faster. He stepped around a hole in the sidewalk that someone had tried to fix by stuffing a red plastic Coca-Cola crate into it, but the hole was bigger than the crate. Up ahead, on the other side of the street, three young guys sat on the hood of a parked car, passing a joint back and forth and drinking cans of beer. When they noticed Ted, they slid off the hood of the car, hitched up their pants, and strolled across the street. They timed their stroll so they reached the next corner just before he did.

“Hola,”
Ted said, in what he hoped was a gruffly nonchalant way. He tried to edge around the guys, but they edged with him.

The tallest young guy said something to Ted in Spanish.

“No habla español,”
Ted explained. He edged some more. So did the young guys. The shortest young guy offered Ted the joint, and Ted saw that the middle young guy had a knife.

Ted remembered then, a sharp click of revelation—the very attractive woman from the plane, the surprising round of hugs at the baggage carousel, the way she’d squeezed his bicep, the way her other hand had brushed across his—

“Give us your wallet,” the young guy with the knife said, in perfect English.

W
hen they got back to the room, a little after midnight, Shake asked Gina which bed she wanted. He wanted the one by the window, but he tried to be a gentleman whenever possible.

“Just shut up,” Gina said. She got behind him, and he felt her put a shoulder to his back. She guided him to the big leather chair. “Sit.”

He sat. She turned the radio on and fooled with it until she found some bass-heavy hip-pop thing with a girl singer spelling out the words she’d just sung. Shake probably wouldn’t recognize it if he heard it a hundred times. But he liked it; he liked the way Gina, in that sea-green dress, her back to him, let the beat start moving her.

The beat moved her over to him. She faced him, still moving, smiling a little, and flicked one of the dress straps off her shoulder.

“Whatcha doin’ there, sport?” he asked.

She turned around, flicked the other dress strap off, peeked at him over her shoulder with a look that was at once both playfully wholesome and the playfully complete opposite of wholesome, whatever that was. The whole time Gina kept moving to the beat, swimming along with it.

“I lied,” she said. “Sometimes I do like giving lap dances, when it’s for fun.”

“And profit.”

She didn’t answer. She slid up against him, then back down. Shake breathed her in. Her lips, those lips, almost brushed his when she slid back up. Almost, but not quite.

It took every ounce of willpower he had, seriously, to put his hands on her shoulders.

“You’re not supposed to touch, mister, but I suppose we can make an exception.”

He moved her gently away from him. Arm’s length.

“We’re gonna keep this professional,” he said.

“Why?”

Good question.

She kept moving to the beat, moving beneath his hands. Which wasn’t making things easier.

“Which bed do you want?” he asked.

She stopped moving to the beat and looked at him. She wasn’t surprised, exactly. Maybe disappointed by his resistance. Maybe pleased. Shake couldn’t be sure.

“You don’t trust me, do you?” she said.

“I don’t really trust anyone.”

“I can’t really be trusted,” she said.

“A perfect match.”

She went and turned the radio off and plopped down cross-legged on the bed by the window.

“Shake?” She tugged her dress straps back up, one, then the other.

“Gina?”

“I’m not sure I trust me, and I
am
me, you know?”

He thought he knew what she was trying to tell him, and he appreciated it.

“I know what I’m getting into,” he said. “No warranty, expressed or implied.”

She blew a strand of hair out of her face. For one second, Shake came alarmingly close to standing up, walking across the room, and kissing her.

Instead he said, “We need to get busy tomorrow morning. If we’re gonna find those foreskins, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

She laughed. “I seriously doubt it.”

“What’s your brilliant plan? There are probably a hundred hotels in Panama City your boy Marvin might be holed up in. We have no idea what name he registered under, and we can’t just—”

He stopped. She was waiting very politely, hands folded in her lap, for him to finish.

“You’re saying he’s
that
dumb? He’d use his own name?”

“I’m saying,” she said.

Shake grabbed the phone book from the desk.

“I thought you said there were probably a hundred hotels in Panama City.” She eyed him dubiously. “You’re gonna call every single one?”

Shake smiled and flipped the phone book open.

“I’m not that dumb,” he said.

W
hy in the fracking world, Marvin Oates wondered, if you had hundreds of millions of dollars, would you choose to relocate to this steaming, sweltering, filthy, probably malaria-ridden swamp of a country? Where the street numbers made no logical sense whatsoever and the street names seemed to change every time you crossed an intersection? Marvin had ditched his rental car after about ten minutes. But even the cabdrivers had no idea where anything was. The last cabbie—
who lived here, in Panama City!
—had asked if he could borrow Marvin’s map. Which was a piece-of-shit map to start with.

Hadn’t Roland Ziegler, that millionaire dipshit, hadn’t he ever seen the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy? Hadn’t he heard of, oh, say, New Zealand? That’s where Marvin would go if he had a couple of hundred million bucks and was on the run from the feds. Or somewhere at least like Tunisia, maybe, where the heat was dry, where it didn’t seem like every step you took you were being cooked from the inside out, like fracking dim sum.

Marvin slogged back down the block he had just slogged up. Number 276 was next to Number 214, which made perfect sense. He slapped at what felt like a mosquito on his forearm. On the plane down, he’d read a history of the Panama Canal. It said there were two kinds of mosquitoes. The kind that carried malaria was the one kind, and the kind that carried yellow fever was the other.

Great.

This morning before leaving the hotel, Marvin had doused himself with crop-duster quantities of DEET, but the humidity had the sweat running off him in rivers, the DEET running with it.

The guy at the hotel had asked Marvin, when he checked in, if he wanted to sign up for a day tour to the rain forest, to see the sloths.

Jesus fracking Christ.

There was actually a third kind of mosquito, too, he remembered, the one that carried dengue fever.

Marvin scowled. Things had started out so well. He’d been brilliant, if he did say so himself, when the blond chickie showed up with that briefcase of hers. Marvin had played it cool, stayed cool, gave nothing away. And the foreskin nab itself—that had been a masterwork of decisiveness and crafty improvisation.

Ziegler, though, the potential buyer, had been harder to find than Marvin had expected. Marvin had been slogging around this hot, hellish swamp of a city for two days now and hadn’t turned up a single lead.

He slogged an extra block in what he knew for certain was the wrong direction, but he didn’t have any other bright ideas, and the place he was looking for was the last one on his list for the day. And hey, of course, sure enough, there it was, the shop, in exactly a spot where it shouldn’t have been.

Marvin pushed through the door. A bell
tink
ed once. He sucked in a big blast of could-have-been-colder A/C and glanced around. Polished wood floor, spotless glass cases, oh-so-tasteful framed art.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. You couldn’t compare an absurdly pretentious place like this to Marvin’s establishment back in Vegas, which was for the
serious
collector of antiquities. This place, clearly, peddled overpriced, dime-a-dozen crap to dilettantes, rich tourists, and local Botox-swollen trophy wives.

Even the clear, whiskey-colored light filtering in through the big windows felt expensive.

A girl with jangling bracelets jangled over to him, smiled, said something in Spanish.

“I want to talk to your boss,” Marvin told her. He looked around for a chair. His feet felt like they’d been battered and fried. Like they were made of soft cheese that had been battered and fried.

“Of course,” the girl said. She jangled away.

A couple of minutes later, the boss came out. He looked like he was trying to look like Clark Gable—black hair slicked back, skinny black mustache, a dark suit he probably thought was in just the most perfect understated taste. The cuff links probably cost even more than the suit.

“Marvin Oates, Las Vegas,” Marvin snapped. He said it like he expected the guy to know who he was. He didn’t really expect him to, but in his experience it was tactically smart to put your opponent immediately on the defensive.

“Ah! Of course,” the guy said, with such genuine feeling that it threw Marvin for a second. Maybe the guy
had
heard of him. It wasn’t out of the question, after all. It wasn’t like, in the world of serious collectors, Marvin was some nobody. What with the Internet and all. “Such a pleasure, Señor Oates. My name is Antonio Cornejo. At your service.”

“Fancy digs,” Marvin said in a collegial way. “Overhead must butt-fuck you to death.”

“I’m sorry?” Cornhole said. Apparently his English wasn’t as good as he thought it was. “In what way may I be of assistance, Señor Oates?”

“I’m looking for this collector guy, heavy into religious relics, Roland Ziegler.”

The jangly shopgirl and the only other customer in the place, a bent old man browsing the cases, both glanced up when they heard the name.

“Roland Ziegler?” Cornhole mused. “Hmmm. I’m afraid I’m not familiar with someone of this name.”

“C’mon,” Marvin said. “Millionaire collector, world-famous fugitive, hiding out in Panama the last three years, you’re saying you’ve never heard of him?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“You’re afraid not.”

Cornhole pondered. “Have you, Señor Oates, tried the telephone book?”

“Of course I have,” Marvin said, insulted. He stood there, stumped. He wished there had been a chair to sit in. It was almost five o’clock, and he was starving.

“Forget it,” he said finally, and stomped out of the shop. He slammed the door open so hard on his way out that the bell
tink
ed twice.

DINNER DID NOT IMPROVE MARVIN’S MOOD.
He added up all the money he’d blown already on this stupid, misbegotten trip. Airfare, rental car, hotel, cabs, meals. Factor in the revenue dripping away minute by minute with his shop shut down, and Marvin wondered if he should wish he’d never come across those foreskins in the first place.

But that was dumb-ass. Those foreskins were worth millions. He just needed to be smart about this. Smart and patient. He needed a nice cold soak in the tub and a good night’s sleep.

He slogged back to his pit of a hotel and slogged up the stairs—the elevator was out of order, of course. By the time he got to the third floor, it looked like he’d already taken a bath.

He took a hit off his inhaler and unlocked the door to his room. The housekeeper had drawn the blinds, for no apparent reason, and the room was dark. He slogged across and yanked open the blinds. Late-afternoon sunlight poured in, and that’s when Marvin saw her, sitting in the chair by the bathroom. Smiling at him.

“Frack.” He sighed.