Gutshot Straight with Bonus Excerpt (9 page)

A
valet whistled at Shake when he stepped out of the hotel.

“Taxi?”

Shake showed him the crumpled twenty Gina had left him—or, more precisely, had neglected to find when she went through his pockets.

“Will this get me out to the suburbs?”

“Not back,” the valet said.

“Not a problem,” Shake said.

THE CAB CREPT DOWN THE STREET
until the driver spotted 281. The house was a small but attractive Spanish-style three-bedroom, designed to look larger than it really was, with a red tile roof and an improbably lush green lawn. It was more or less identical to every other house in the development, but Shake wasn’t a snob about that kind of thing.

He rang the doorbell. He heard, inside, a soft booming chime. A second later a little black girl, call her eight years old, flung open the door with gusto.

“Hi,” Shake said.

“Hi.”

“What’s your name?”

“Nancy,” the little girl said. “With two
e’
s.”

Shake had to think about that for a second. Nancee.

“That’s a pretty name.”

“It’s French,” Nancee said. “My sister is Amy with two
e’
s.”

Aimee.

“I like names like that,” Shake said. “That are unique but without working too hard at it.”

The little girl studied Shake, then shut the door.

A few seconds later, the door opened again. Standing there now was a black woman in her thirties. She was sharp-angled and regal.

“Hello, there, Aimee,” Shake said. “I was just talking to your sister.”

He thought the woman might smile at that. She didn’t.

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Artemis Wallace?” Shake asked.

“We’re getting ready to eat dinner,” she said, “if you’re here to sell me something.”

“You’re Vader Wallace’s sister?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Sister-
in-law
.”

“My name’s Shake. I’m a friend of Vader’s from—”

Shake stopped himself. He noticed Nancee peering at him from behind her mother.

“—from the office,” he said. “He told me to come by if I was ever in town. On a business trip.”

“What office, Mama?” Nancee asked.

“This man was in prison with your Uncle V,” Artemis told her.

Nancee’s eyes went wide. “Uncle V has a
white
friend?”

The mother, Artemis, took a long look at Shake. She was asking herself, Shake figured, the same question.

SHAKE SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE
, sipping a Coke and watching Artemis Wallace prepare dinner. Nancee and Aimee, a year or so younger than her sister, sat across the table, watching him.

“So you just stopped by to say hello,” Artemis said without looking at him. It was less of a question than a general musing.

“Well,” Shake told her, “Vader always said, actually, I ever needed anything, when I got out, you-all might be able to help.”

“He said that.”

“We were pretty tight. He watched my back, I watched his.”

Shake thought he heard a soft chuckle, but Artemis had her own back to him and he couldn’t be sure.

“
You
watched
V’s
back?”

“Prison can be a complicated place,” he said. That much at least was true.

“What’s prison?” Aimee asked.

“He means the office. Where Uncle V works,” Nancee explained to her younger sister.

“Right,” Shake said. Then, “Excuse me,” he told Artemis, “you don’t want to do that.”

Artemis finally turned to look at him. Without an overabundance of fondness. “Don’t do what?”

“Crush your garlic. It’s always better if you slice it.”

“You’re a chef?”

“No, but I’m a pretty good cook. And I know better cooks than me who’d have a stroke if they saw what you were doing right now.”

She looked at him for a long time, then turned back away. She put down the garlic press and drew a butcher’s knife out of the wooden block. Started slicing.

“What did you say your name was again?”

“Shake.”

“Shake.”

“I’m hoping to open a restaurant someday. But it’s a hard business.”

Artemis glanced up at something behind Shake and to his left. “Hi, baby,” she said.

Shake swiveled around. Standing in the doorway to the kitchen, frowning in a business suit, one long rope of dark braided muscle and malice, was Vader Wallace.

Shake held on to his smile for dear life.

“Vader,” he managed to say, “my man.”

Vader shook his head. “I’m Darth,” he said.

“They’re twins!” the two little girls chirped.

Shake’s relief was expansive: It spread to the horizons then dropped off and enveloped the entire globe in a big bear hug.

“He never—That’s right,” Shake said. “Of course. When he said identical, I didn’t really think—”

“Daddy has a mole,” Nancee said.

“Be still now,” Darth told her affectionately. He gave both little girls a kiss, then turned to Artemis. “Who’s this?” he asked about Shake, not unfriendly.

Artemis considered. Shake knew she was too smart to believe a word he’d said about his warm, close, personal relationship with Vader. But he also sensed she didn’t exactly feel the love for her jailbird brother-in-law. And just maybe, what the hell, she’d appreciated Shake’s performance.

“This is Shake,” she said finally. “He’s a good friend of Vader’s.”

AFTER DINNER DARTH TOOK SHAKE
out to the garage. He dug out a cardboard box marked in Sharpie with a giant
V
.

Shake started going through the box while Darth checked stock quotes on his iPhone.

“We were never anything alike,” he said. “That’s the funny thing. I had my comic books, my X-Men collectible figures. You know? Stayed indoors and out of trouble.”

“The yin,” Shake said. He came across Vader’s Rolex. Probably a fake, but he slipped it in his pocket anyway. “Or is it the yang? I can never remember.”

“The nerd is what I was. But it worked out. Junior high, a teacher turned me on to the music of numbers, best thing that ever happened to me.”

Shake paused to wonder for a second what he’d consider the best thing that ever happened to him.

“Except for my three ladies in there, of course,” Darth said quickly.

“Those have to be the two cutest little girls on the face of the planet,” Shake said, and meant it. “You’ve done well for yourself.”

Darth sighed. “What I tell my brother. You have to work hard and make an investment in your own self-worth; it all comes back to you manifold. You ever read
The Purpose Driven Life
?”

“Can’t say I have.” Shake dug a pair of Jordans out of the box. A couple of sizes too big. He started to toss them back, then stopped to think. He stuck his hand deep into one of the shoes and came out with a roll of bills.

“It’s like any book, need to take a lot of it with a grain of salt, but there’s some truth in there. Or something close enough to the truth to be useful, you know what I mean?”

“I remember that book,” Shake said. “The guy killed that judge in Atlanta and escaped from the courthouse. Killed a deputy and another person, too.”

“That’s right,” Darth said. “Took a lady hostage in her apartment, but she talked to him. Told him about this book she had. How God had a plan for him. They stayed up all night, talking about the book. He didn’t kill her, and she made him pancakes in the morning.”

“Convinced him to turn himself in.”

“Funny thing? Came out later she’d had a stash of methamphetamine. They snorted that all up first. That’s how she got him to untie her. They didn’t put that part in the papers when it happened.”

“If God’s got a plan for me,” Shake said, “I’m not sure I want to know what it is.”

Darth put away his iPhone and turned to Shake, who flinched a little despite himself. It was uncanny how much he looked like his brother.

“You want to see V’s ride?”

“His ride?” Shake said.

Darth led him across the garage, past the Honda Pilot, and pulled the dust cover off the other car. A candy-apple red, mint-condition 1969 Plymouth Road Runner.

Shake gazed at the car with the admiration he usually reserved for a bowl of homemade gumbo.

“Boy howdy,” he said.

“He tell you about this?”

Shake heard a phone begin to ring back in the house.

“He told me,” Shake said, “that if I put so much as a scratch on it, I’d be going home in a motherfucking bag.”

“That’s V.” Darth chuckled.

The phone in the house stopped ringing.

“Who is it?” Darth called to Artemis.

“Nobody,” she called back.

Darth nodded at the Road Runner. “Go on,” he told Shake. “Keys are in it.”

W
ho you calling nobody?” Vader said into the phone. Stuck-up high-yellow bitch. He had to admit she was a good mother, though. He loved those little girls. “Just told you it was me.”

“A friend of yours just left,” Artemis said.

Vader sniffed the plastic mouthpiece. It smelled bad, like pickles gone off. He caught a CO watching him sniff the phone. The CO looked away
real
quick. Yes he did.

“What you talking about?” he said. Bitch. “Put my brother on. What friend?”

“You know. Shake.”

All the sound in the yard dropped away like a door slammed shut.

“Shake,” Vader said.

“He borrowed your car, like you told him he could.”

Vader hung up the phone. Then he picked the receiver back up and pounded it against the cinder-block wall until the plastic burst into pieces and spun away. Then he ripped the rest of the phone off the wall and pounded that to pieces. Then he pounded his fist against the wall until it looked like raw meat and the cinder block was streaked red, and two, then three, COs came flying out of nowhere to drag him bellowing down to the floor.

G
ina dreamed that Lucy was driving a cab in New York City. It was raining, but Lucy wouldn’t stop for her. Gina in the dream felt annoyed, aggrieved. Like, c’mon, how long can one person hold a grudge? Shake might have been in the back of the cab. It zoomed by too fast for Gina to tell for sure.

She woke up and looked at the clock by the bed. It was almost four o’clock in the afternoon. She’d been asleep for—oh, shit, her heart busted a little hip-hop move in her chest—three hours.

She sat up fast. Three hours. If one of Moby’s guys had spotted her at the airport, or in the hotel lobby, he would’ve had plenty of time to check out the decoy room, go talk to the desk clerk, figure out what had happened, and—

The door to the room beeped. A key card in the lock.

Gina leaped off the bed. She’d bolted the door, hadn’t she? She looked around for something to use as a weapon, but the door was already clicking open. She hadn’t bolted the door.

A guy in his early thirties entered the room, wrestling two roll-on suitcases behind him. When he saw Gina standing there topless in her undies, he stopped.

“Oh,” he said.

“I’m here for the threesome your wife arranged,” Gina said.

The guy blinked.

Gina looked at her watch. “Am I early? Fuck. Sorry.”

She hurried her clothes on, grabbed her shoes, the briefcase.

Coming down the hallway toward Gina was the guy’s wife. She was walking slowly and using both thumbs to type rapidly on her BlackBerry. At the same time talking into a Bluetooth headset.

“That’s ridiculous,” the wife was saying, exasperated. She barely glanced at Gina.

“Back in an hour!” Gina called over her shoulder as she blew past and ducked into the elevator.

GINA PULLED IN TO THE PARKING LOT.
The strip mall was on the sketchy side, even as strip malls went. A Laundromat, an Asian-foods grocery store, a place (disturbingly adjacent to the Asian-foods grocery store) with a sign that said
SNAKES, ETC
.

The place she was looking for, next to the Laundromat, was on the sketchy side, too. Grimy windows and a big rip flapping through the plastic canopy above the front door. Across the canopy, beneath the rip, was printed
MARVIN OATES FINE JEWELRY AND PAWN
.

On the door, painted in smaller letters, it said
PURVEYOR OF RARE COINS, STAMPS, AND OTHER FINE COLLECTIBLES
.

Sketchy.

This was disappointing. Gina had been expecting . . . oh, she didn’t know, maybe a cozy book-lined shop with comfy leather chairs and a Dickensian vibe. A kindly old proprietor with pince-nez and a sweet-smelling pipe.

On the other hand, though, she admitted, the sketchiness of Marvin Oates Fine Jewelry and Pawn was also promising. At least when it came to the kind of quick, cash, no-questions-asked buyer she wanted Marvin Oates to hook her up with. Gina told herself not to jinx things by thinking of a number. Good luck with that. She hoped, fingers crossed, the stamps in the briefcase might bring fifty grand. That seemed reasonable, didn’t it?

Dubai, here I come. Dubai or wherever
.

She took the briefcase and locked the car behind her. On the street in front of the strip mall, a few cars whizzed by without slowing; no one, she was sure, had followed her here.

The shop door was locked, but next to it was a red button that looked sticky. Gina pushed it with her elbow. After a second, a buzzer buzzed and the door clunked open a crack.

Gina stepped inside and squeezed past a pair of dusty glass cases filled with coins, watches, rings, what looked like a couple of old bullets. At the back of the shop, sitting behind another dusty glass case, was a chubby, bug-eyed guy in his fifties who looked sour with indigestion.

“We’re closed,” he said.

“Then why’d you buzz me in?” Gina said.

“I thought mistakenly you might be a serious collector.”

“Who’s to say I’m not a serious collector?”

He grunted and picked up the book he’d been reading. A fat paperback with a dragon on the cover, and a girl in a metal bra, a tiny guy with a huge sword.

Gina wasn’t being mean, just factual—the guy’s resemblance to a bug was astounding. His big, bulging eyes were so far apart on his head that it was like they were this close to dangling on stalks.

Other than that he looked fairly normal, if you called wearing a plum-colored sweater vest and khaki shorts normal.

“Are you Marvin Oates?” Gina said. “This is your place?”

“Yes,” he said. “Now go away.”

She sneezed. All the dust. She put the briefcase on the counter in front of him.

“How’s about you take one quick peek at what I’ve got in here,” she said, “and I’ll blow you afterward?”

He looked up from his book, startled.

“Really?” he said.

“No,” Gina said, “but I’ll give you permission to imagine it after I leave.”

She smiled sweetly at him. He scowled at her, but then snapped open the case and looked inside.

“Tell me how much these stamps are worth,” Gina said. “Don’t lie to me,’ cause I’ll know it.”

He didn’t answer. He sucked in his breath and stared down at the stamps. Gina waited for him to exhale, but he didn’t. Curious, she watched as the top of his bald head started to splotch with a pinkish archipelago.

“You okay?” she said. It would be just her luck if the guy had a cardiac event before she could find a buyer for the stamps.

He exhaled finally, then looked up at her again. His bug eyes seemed like they wanted to bulge with excitement, but they were already at maximum bulge and had nowhere to go.

“These aren’t stamps,” he whispered.

GINA FOLLOWED MARVIN OATES
to the back of the shop, which was even dustier than the front and cluttered with books, boxes, bags. And a NordicTrack treadmill in the corner that, Gina guessed, hadn’t seen much action.

Marvin Oates put the briefcase on a table and bent over it with a jeweler’s loupe.

“Perfect condition,” he muttered. “Astounding. I’d read about relics like this, rumors and vague conjectures and whatnot, but of course—”

“A relic?”

“A historical object of great religious significance,” he said. He gave Gina a testy glance, then quickly turned his attention back to the . . . whatever it was under glass in the briefcase. “Collected, preserved, venerated. The remains of a saint, a nail from the true cross, cloth from a burial shroud.”

“Like
The Da Vinci Code
?”

He didn’t even bother with a testy glance this time. He just rolled his bug eyes, which was something to see once and then never, Gina hoped, again.

“Relics were important to the early Chris tians,” he said. “But then, during the Middle Ages, with the crusades, the acquisition and exhibition of relics turned into an all-out frenzy. They were the ultimate status symbol for the church’s elite, the bishops and cardinals and whatnot. Whose cathedral had the oldest relics? Which collection represented the most important religious figures? Who had the most fabulously bejeweled philatories?”

“Philatories?”

“A transparent reliquary.”

Gina sighed. She really didn’t have time for this. “So, excellent, they’re relics.”

She peered over his shoulder at the small squares of parchment lined up in ten neat rows of ten each. She guessed maybe they were pieces of paper torn from an old Bible or scroll. Or possibly some kind of ancient dried-out fabric sample. Whatevers. Gina’s interest in the question was close to total nada. The real question . . .

“What are the little fuckers worth?” she asked.

“Don’t you want to know what they are?”

She looked up from the briefcase to find Marvin Oates grinning at her.

Fine. If it would move things along.

“Okay.” She sighed again. “What are they?”

“Guess.”

She lifted her fist to punch him. He squeaked, cringed, and covered his face with his pudgy forearms.

“They’re foreskins!” he said.

Gina was too surprised to lower her fist. She must not have heard him correctly.

“Did you just say—”

“One hundred foreskins. Yes.”

“As in—”

“Have a look.” He angled the case toward her and handed her the loupe.

Gina debated. Mild curiosity triumphed over mild disgust. She took the loupe, wiped off any potential bug-eye juice, and pressed it to the top of the glass case.

Now that you mentioned it, the little stamp-size squares
did
kind of look like skin. Like the skin you peeled off your nose when you had a sunburn?

“Foreskins from babies?” she asked. “Like from a circumcision?”

“Oh, ho, ho, ho, no,” Marvin said. He seemed to be having the best time he’d had in a long time. “These foreskins are from full-grown men.”

“But—” she started to say.

“People were smaller back then,” Marvin said. “In every respect, if you know what I mean.”

Then he snickered. “I’m just kidding. I mean, people
were
smaller back then, yes, but these specimens are small of course because they’re only a
part
of the foreskin. You didn’t need to keep the entire thing, just enough for a trophy.”

“A trophy?” Gina didn’t like where this was going, but—intrigued despite herself—she reached out to unlatch the glass case and get a closer look.

“Don’t open that!” Marvin squawked. He batted at her hand until she withdrew it.

“Okay. Sheesh.”

“Do you have any idea how fragile these things are? They’re probably a thousand freaking years old! They should be in a museum!”

He paused to narrow his eyes at her. Which, in the case of bug eyes, was relative.

“Where did you get these?” he asked.

She thought about constructing an elaborately delightful and convincing lie, then decided that this guy wasn’t worth the effort. So she just narrowed her eyes back at him and lit a cigarette. Marvin went into a big, fake coughing fit.

“You mind? I have asthma.”

“Deal with it.”

He started to say something, but she held up a finger.

“Shush,” she said, and listened hard.

There it was again, out back: a sound like a tire crunching very slowly, very gently through gravel, as if the car was tiptoeing.

“Do you hear that?” she asked.

“I just hear my chest constricting because of your smoking, my lungs shriveling and turning black with—”

She blew smoke in his direction, then crossed to the back of the back room and cracked the emergency exit door just a hair.

She peered out. The sun had gone down, and the deserted alley behind the shop was dark. Just a little weak, watery light from a single street lamp. The crunching-gravel sound had stopped.

An odd feeling crept over Gina. Like, maybe, the alley wasn’t really deserted after all.

“So these museum-quality foreskins,” Gina said. She peered out into the alley and wondered what was the point of a streetlight if it didn’t provide any light? “Just how much are they worth, exactly?”

“Five million,” Marvin said. “That’s what I’d guess.”

She glanced over her shoulder, saw that he had the loupe to his eye again.

“Five million?”

“Bad news is, you’ll never find a buyer for them.”

“Five million
dollars
?”

Gina’s skin prickled. She took a deep, calming drag from her Marlboro Red and hugged herself against the chill of the evening breeze blowing in off the desert. She wanted to go give Marvin a big kiss on the top of his pink, splotchy head. Theoretically, at least.

Five. Million. Dollars.

“Oh, I’ll find a buyer,” Gina said. Bet your ass she would.

“No reputable collector will touch these,” Marvin said, “no matter how bad they might want them.”

“So we just rustle up one lacking a little repute.”

“With five million to burn? Ha.”

He was quiet for a second.

“What?”

“There is one guy. The obvious candidate, of course. I hear he’s in Panama now.”

“Panama? What’s his name?”

Marvin didn’t answer for a long time.

“Nobody,” he said abruptly. “Nothing. Never mind. Forget it. Just a rumor. I doubt these are genuine anyway. Worthless, probably.”

Gina flicked her cigarette out into the alley. Orange sparks scattered on the asphalt, and she thought she saw something move by the Dumpster.

She tensed again. Probably just a shadow. Probably she was just being paranoid. Right?

Marvin let rip a big, explosive cough behind her, and Gina almost jumped out of her skin.

“Sheesh!”

She peered back into the alley. Still nothing. She quickly pulled the door shut and made sure it was locked. Marvin coughed again.

“You better not get your cooties all over my ancient foreskins,” she told Marvin.

He snapped the briefcase closed and brought it to her.

“This conversation is over. I want absolutely nothing to do with the contents of this briefcase, which I do not acknowledge having opened or examined.”

“You pussy.”

“I suggest you seek the counsel of an attorney or contact your local law-enforcement authorities.”

“How am I supposed to find a buyer?” she asked.

“Why don’t you ask the people you stole it from? Who were
they
planning to sell it to?” He took a hit from his asthma inhaler and snickered. “Might be awkward, I realize.”

Gina, pissed, yanked the briefcase away from him.

“Thanks for nada,” she said. “And that imaginary blow job I offered you? Forget about it.”