Read Gutshot Straight with Bonus Excerpt Online
Authors: Lou Berney
G
ina parked the Town Car on the far side of the lot, made sure she had a clear angle on the front entrance of the Jungle, killed the lights. Lucy, in the passenger seat, was trying again to talk her out of the plan, but Gina was only half listening. Or maybe just a quarter. She was busy instead:
She knew she wanted to start her own business. She knew she didn’t want to blow the money like some idiot, on clothes and jewelry and expensive cars that cost a fortune just to insure. Well, she’d blow some of the money, of course, but then she’d get busy. She had tons of ideas, and not the sort of kooky, half-baked shit your typical stripper came up with in the slow early-evening hours before the club filled up and the world seemed full of hope and possibility. Lucy, for example, bless her heart, had wanted to use her end from the Moby score to build a Disneyland for dogs. Gina tried to talk her out of it, but Lucy held firm. She had been convinced, by Oprah or somebody else on TV, that if you just followed your passion, you’d make millions.
Gina knew that wasn’t true. It was one of those things that made you feel warm and gooey inside but had no basis in reality.
Most rich people, Gina knew, got rich in boring but smart ways. By doing boring but smart things. By having a passion for making millions, whatever that took.
One of Gina’s ideas: a chain of high-end dry cleaners. These would be places with wood floors and lots of light, comfy chairs and no dry-cleaning smell. Where you could drop off your clothes on the way to the office and pick up a premium nonfat vanilla latte at the same time.
Get it? You take a chore most women dread and you make it not so dreadful. And you give the busy businesswoman a chance to knock off two errands (dry cleaning, latte) with one stop. Like killing two birds with one stone.
Gina wondered if that would make a good name for her company: Two Birds, One Stone. Now,
that
was a philosophy she could get behind.
One thing for sure: As much fun as schemes could be, she wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life running them; a little voice told her that the older you got, the less fun the schemes became.
“You know?” Lucy said.
“I know,” Gina said. She hadn’t been paying any attention and had no idea what Lucy was asking. “I do.”
She squeezed Lucy’s hand, which she was holding in her lap. Lucy squeezed back, and Gina wondered if they had time to fool around a little, before the shit jumped off.
If only Shake had been here in the car with them, too, Gina considered, wow, that would have been fun for the whole family.
She traced a fingertip along one of Lucy’s legs—Lucy had the world’s most luscious gams—but then, nope, too late, the doors to the Jungle swung wide. Light spilled into the parking lot, and out stomped the Whale. To say he looked angry would have been a colossal understatement. To say Jasper, following behind, looked unhappy would have been an even bigger one.
“Looks like somebody just got some bad news,” Gina said.
Moby and Jasper crossed to the Whale’s car, got in, drove off.
“Gina—” Lucy started to try one more time.
Gina pressed her finger to Lucy’s lips. “Shhh,” she said.
FOO FIGHTER AT THE DOOR
didn’t recognize Gina in the wig and the makeup.
Lucy, bless her heart, played it perfectly cool.
“Fresh meat for the graveyard shift,” she told him, and pushed Gina along with her into the club.
THE KEY TO THE WHALE’S
office was right where Gina had ditched it last week when she’d spotted the Whale rumbling down the hallway toward her—on the carpet, against the wall, next to the base of a potted fake fern. Good karma for sure, though not a good reflection on the Jungle’s crack team of crackhead Dominican janitors.
Gina knelt and pretended to fix the strap on Lucy’s glitter-crusted stacked-heel peep-toe. When the hallway was empty, she slipped the key into the lock.
“Grrr,” she said. “Aargh.”
“What?” Lucy asked.
“The dipstick changed his locks.”
“I thought he did. I told you. And he bought a safe finally.”
“I don’t need to get into the safe this time.”
“Let’s please, Gina, just forget this and—”
“Don’t worry. I know how to pick a lock.”
Not really. But Gina had seen it done on occasion, heard it explained by a former customer, figured how hard could it be, right?
“What if he comes back? Sometimes he comes back.”
Gina had come prepared with a lock-pick set she’d borrowed from that former customer a few weeks ago. In anticipation of a moment just like this one.
She slid one pick into the lock and felt around with it. Felt a thingy she could press down. Then she slid the other pick in and sort of turned them both like she’d been instructed.
She was more startled than Lucy by the sharp
click
.
“Hey!” she said. “How’d I do that?”
She hustled Lucy into the Whale’s office and shut the door behind them.
“Go unplug the phone and computer cords,” she told Lucy, just to keep the girl busy and not flipping out.
Gina shuffled through Moby’s Rolodex. It was massive, unfortunately, probably three or four hundred index cards. But she couldn’t rush; this was her one shot, and she knew it.
Lucy finished disconnecting the phone and computer cords. She stood by the door with her eyes closed and appeared to have entered the catatonic phase of flipping out, which under the circumstances suited Gina fine. Just as long as she stayed quiet.
But, seriously,
damn
. This was taking forever.
“Just grab the whole fucking thing!” Lucy blurted, her voice rough and panicked.
Gina kept shuffling methodically through the Rolodex and didn’t look up.
“He can’t notice anything’s missing,” Gina said. “That’s the whole point.” She tapped her bean. “You see? Always thinking.”
And then, finally, almost to the very last card—there it was. Had to be.
R
OLAND
Z
IEGLER
.
P
ANAMA.
No address, but a phone number.
“Let’s go!” Lucy said.
Gina copied Roland Ziegler’s phone number onto the inside of her wrist with a ballpoint pen, then put the card back where it belonged.
“Gotcha,” Gina said with a smile, as Eddie Van Halen’s opening riff started ringing all over again in her head.
Panama . . . ah . . . ah
.
BACK IN THE PARKING LOT
, Gina took Lucy’s hands in both of hers.
“I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me, Loosey Ends.”
“Let me come with you.”
“Too risky. I’ll call you the minute I cash out. Then we’ll hook up on Maui.”
“No you won’t.
We won’t.” “I promise!
I will!”
Lucy usually wasn’t very complicated, but Gina was surprised by the smile Lucy gave her now—resigned and amused and pissed. Heartbroken, but also relieved.
“You promise,” she said.
“I do!” Gina protested. But before she could go on, Lucy gave her a quick kiss to shut her up.
“Take care of yourself, okay?” Lucy said. Then she turned and walked away and hailed one of the cabs that lurked along the east side of the Jungle.
How, Gina wondered, did Lucy know she was lying about Maui, when Gina herself hadn’t even realized it until a second ago?
That question, and Lucy’s walking away without a smile or a wave back at her, made Gina feel a little melancholy.
She climbed into the Town Car and fired it up, then rolled down her window, because this time of night, three in the morning, the breeze in the desert was never cooler, never sweeter.
Before she could shift into drive, though, a bright red muscle car rolled up in front of her, cutting her off.
She felt a little trill of excitement—fight! flight!
Shake!
He strolled over, rested his forearms on her open window, smiled.
She smiled back.
M
r. Vanilla Milk Shake,” she said.
“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he said. Shake supposed he should be mad at her for everything she’d done to him, and he was. But more than mad, he was relieved, especially when he spotted the briefcase she’d stolen lying in the backseat be hind her.
And, oddly, more than relieved, he was just happy to see her again.
Eyes a pale green in this light. Crooked smile. Dusting of freckles across the bridge of her interesting nose. Shake had liked Gina’s face the first time he saw it, but he found it even more appealing now that he’d had a glimpse of what was really behind it.
“I just knew it,” she said. “I had a feeling.”
“Did you?”
“That you were following us.”
“Your sexy friend doesn’t lie nearly as well as you do.”
“She’s got a heart of gold,” Gina confided.
“What’s your heart made of?”
She scoffed. “Who needs a heart these days?”
She was looking in the rearview mirror. Shake decided to provide assistance.
“There’s a car parked behind you. I’m parked in front of you. You’re not going anywhere.”
“Why would I want to go anywhere?” she asked with surprise that seemed so genuine that Shake had to think, or hope, at least part of it might be.
Then, “Sexier than me?”
“I’d lose the Pocahontas wig,” Shake said. “It doesn’t really suit you.”
She seemed suddenly to remember the black wig with braids and peeled it off.
“Are you gonna answer the question?” she asked.
“Sexy is subjective,” he said. “It’s in the eye of the beholder.”
“Does that approach really work on some girls?” she said, amused. “Where you pretend you’re not that interested? Throw them off and make them wonder?”
“You’re sexier than your friend with the heart of gold and the great legs,” he admitted. “Yes.”
“Was that so hard?”
Shake smiled, though, because he could see that Gina couldn’t help wondering how her own legs stacked up. But the hell if she was gonna let
him
know that.
“I was thinking earlier,” she said. “It’s like
Snow White
. You know? The evil queen sends her huntsman to kill Snow White. He takes her into the woods, but then he feels sorry for her and lets her go.”
“Funny. I don’t remember Snow White drugging the huntsman, cuffing him to a bathroom sink, and robbing him blind.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s in there. You should rent the DVD.”
And with that she grinned, jerked into reverse, cut the wheel hard to the right, punched the gas. The Town Car’s nose whipped left, almost knocking Shake on his ass. The back bumper clipped the Honda Civic parked behind. The Civic, much lighter than the Town Car, lurched sideways, and Gina, cranking her wheel, careened backward through the gap.
“Shit,”
Shake said. He hopped back into Vader’s Road Runner and took off after her. He gunned toward the parking-lot exit to cut her off, but she anticipated that and—still in reverse—jumped the curb behind him. By the time he made it onto the Strip, she was at least several blocks ahead of him.
Good luck with that, he thought. No Lincoln Town Car in the world was going to win a race with a 1969 Plymouth Road Runner that could do the quarter mile in thirteen seconds. Even discounting, Shake thought modestly, the professional wheelman who was making that run.
He ate up the distance between them in about a heartbeat.
Gina slalomed between two cabs and stomped it on the straightaway.
“Huh,” Shake mused to the miniature travel gnome hanging by a miniature noose from the rearview, “all that and the girl can drive, too.”
He slalomed around the same two cabs. Gina glanced in her mirror at him. Shake lifted a finger off the wheel to wave.
“Better watch the road,” he counseled her as they neared the south end of the Strip, where traffic was heavier, even at three in the morning. Up ahead, across from the Venetian, a fender bender had locked up most of the southbound lanes.
Gina pounded the brakes and squealed to a stop a foot from the back of a city bus.
Shake stopped, too, several cars back, and climbed out of Vader’s Road Runner.
A drunk panhandler on the corner noticed Shake. He glanced around to remind himself where he was, then tuned his pitch accordingly.
“Mi amico,”
he said. “Spare a little something for the troops?”
Shake tossed him the keys to Vader’s Road Runner.
“All yours,” he said. “Treat her right.”
The panhandler looked at the keys. Looked at the car.
Shake walked up the line of cars. Gina was pounding her horn, but traffic was barely inching forward. He tapped the barrel of Jasper’s .45 against her passenger window.
She slapped the horn once more, in frustration, then hit the button and unlocked the doors.
Shake slid in next to her.
“What do you say,” he suggested, “we go somewhere quiet to talk?”
G
ina stewed and steamed all the way to Caesar’s. He directed her to pull off there and park in the big garage. When she killed the engine, he held out his hand. Gina pretended for a second she didn’t know what he wanted—she figured it was worth a try—then dropped the car keys in his palm. He set them on the dash but kept the gun in his hand.
She didn’t think he’d actually shoot her, but she’d been wrong about these sorts of things before, so she played it cool.
Funny thing? She was glad, in a way, he’d caught her. Or maybe she was glad he was the one who caught her, if someone was going to do it.
He smelled nice, like lavender.
“Did you take a shower?”
“No,” he said, “but I did use shampoo. Thanks for noticing.”
“You’re not gonna give me up, are you? The Whale’s a bad fella, Shake, I’m not fooling.”
“So you thought it would be a good idea to rip him off?”
She giggled. “You heard about that, huh?”
“I’m all up to speed on you now.”
She doubted that. So did he, by the way he was looking at her. She liked that look.
“Almost three hundred large. Cash. Sweet.”
“Till Moby put the word out and the Armenians dinged you in L.A.”
“I mean, what are the odds? A whole big city, and that lady with the gray eyes, she and I end up at the same party?”
“You’d be surprised how the odds don’t apply when you most need them to. That’s been my unfortunate experience.” Then he said, “No.”
She worked back. “No you’re not going to give me up?”
“I’m going to bring that briefcase to the gray-eyed lady you mentioned and hope she forgives and forgets.”
“She’s your boss?” she asked, testing him. He was a guy, after all.
“She’s not my boss.”
“But you work for her?” All innocent.
“Does that approach work on some guys?” he said.
Gina smiled. “She’ll do that, you think? Forgive and forget?”
It was the first time, really, since she’d met him, that he didn’t look calm and sure of himself. He’d managed to look calm and sure of himself—vanilla milk shake, cool like ice cream—even when she’d handcuffed him to the pipe under the sink.
“I think she harbors a certain fondness for me that may, possibly—if I’m lucky, if she’s in a good mood, if professional considerations don’t factor too heavily—may inform her decision.”
“What are the odds, right?”
He sighed. “What are the odds Moby’s bagman would find me, this entire city, in less than half a day?”
She scooted over a little closer to him and put her hand on his knee.
“So listen,” she said. “Here’s an idea.”
He lifted her hand off his knee. He set it back on the steering wheel.
“I’m taking the stamps,” he said.
“They’re not stamps.”
“I don’t care.”
“They’re foreskins.”
He looked at her.
“You don’t want to know,” she said. “It’s a long story. But the important thing—”
“I’m taking them. Whatever they are.”
“Don’t you want to know what they’re worth?”
“Definitely not.”
She held up a finger. Then another one. Then three, four, and a thumb. She gave him a Queen Elizabeth wave, all wrist.
He wanted to ask. Gina knew he did. So she waited. She could wait, when necessary, with the best of them. Sure enough, after a second . . .
“Five hundred grand?” he asked.
“Five million.”
She liked that his eyes didn’t go wide, that he didn’t whistle or say “Holy shit.” He kept his cool.
“How do you know that?”
“Gets better,” she said. “I have the name of the guy the Whale was going to sell them to.”
“The foreskins.”
“I know. It’s weird. They’re ancient religious relics or something. They used to keep them in cathedrals, in special relic holders.”
“Reliquaries.”
“Wow!”
“I grew up in New Orleans,” he explained. “Everyone’s a Catholic.”
“Roland Ziegler is the guy’s name.”
Shake laughed. Gina didn’t like not having any idea why.
“What?”
“Roland Ziegler is the buyer?”
“So?”
“Roland Ziegler is a ghost.”
“A ghost like dead?”
“A ghost like invisible.”
“Explain, please.” She was enjoying this: It was like a business conference, it was like they were already partners.
“Roland Ziegler is a fugitive. The DOJ’s been wanting him in a bad way for nine, ten years.”
“Who’d he kill?”
“That’s not why the DOJ would want you in a bad way.”
Gina considered. “Money.”
“Very good,” Shake said. His approval gave Gina a little tingle, she was embarrassed to admit. She put her hand back on his knee. He picked it up and set it right on the steering wheel again. “He managed a hedge fund back in the nineties. I know about him because he helped the Armenians set up some burn companies.”
“But that’s not why the feds want him.”
“No. His big play, he swindled a bunch of old folks out of their retirement savings. I heard he cleared north of a hundred million. Probably an exaggeration, but probably not much of one. The feds busted him, but he got bail and bounced before the ink was dry. He’s not been seen nor heard from since.”
“A hundred million. That means he can afford to buy himself some foreskins, doesn’t it?”
“Did I mention the DOJ’s been hunting him for nine, ten years? Did I mention he’s not been seen nor heard from since? Did I mention he’s invisible?”
“I know where he is.”
“Panama?”
“Hey! You know?”
“That’s one rumor.” He shrugged. “Croatia is another one. Penang, too, I think.”
“Well, Mr. Cool, I know for
certain
he’s in Panama.”
She told him about the index card she’d found in the Whale’s Rolodex. And the phone number.
Shake laughed again. Again, Gina didn’t like not knowing why.
“What’s so funny, sport?”
He dug around in the glove box, found a cell phone, handed it to her. “Call the number,” he said.
“Where’d you get this?” she asked.
“It came with you, the car, and all the trouble I’m in. Call the number.”
“Fine,” she said. She read the number off the inside of her wrist, dialed, put the phone on speaker. After a few rings, a woman’s recorded voice said something in Spanish. Then the same woman’s voice told them in English they’d reached Anita’s Bakery in Panama City, Panama. Please place your order at the beep.
Gina killed the call. “I must have dialed the wrong number.”
“It’s not the wrong number. It’s a telephone dead drop.”
She frowned. “You have to know what to order.”
“The code. That’s my guess.”
Gina shrugged it away. Minor setback. “We know he’s in Panama for sure, then. That’s something.”
“A capital city of seven hundred thousand inhabitants. Throw in, once you get out of the city, remote jungles, inaccessible mountains, private islands, a culture of corruption, and a guy, with money to burn, who doesn’t want to be found.”
“You want me to do the math, right?”
“I hate that cliché.”
“Me, too.” Gina considered. “Panama. I thought there was just a canal.”
“The country is a beautiful, fascinating, undiscovered gem.”
“And a tailor. And a hat.”
“The hat was actually invented in Ecuador.”
“Do a lot of reading in the joint, did you?”
“
New York Times
Sunday travel section, cover to cover. You can understand why. I hear the food down there’s good.”
“Fine. We go down there and flush his multimillion-dollar ass out of hiding.”
Shake started to laugh and almost said,
How we gonna do that?
Just as Gina expected. But then he stopped himself. Gina expected that, too.
Shake studied her briefly. She enjoyed the moment.
“It’s not a half-bad idea,” he said slowly. “But it’s not a half-good one either.”
“He wants these foreskins. If we put the word out, he’ll come to us.”
“If we’re not careful, he won’t be the only one.”
“So we’ll be careful. We’ll sell out and split the take, fifty-fifty.”
He studied her some more.
“Or you can just go back to your lady boss and explain what happened. I’m sure she’s very fond of you. I know I am, and I’ve barely known you twenty-four hours.”
“Well, we’ve been through a lot together, Gina,” he said.
Gina smiled. She liked that he could tease her and at the same time still be serious (his mind turning and turning—she could see it in his eyes) about what she was proposing. She liked that he didn’t seem to be trying to talk himself into, or out of, the idea but was just squaring the corners up in his mind, taking a cool, objective look at all the angles.
“If we’re gonna do this,” he said finally, and Gina felt a bounce of happiness, “I need to know what they—these foreskins—are really worth. If they’re really foreskins. Which a large part of me hopes they’re not.”
“I told you already,” she said, “they’re worth five million dollars.”
“Your source?”
Gina shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “An expert,” she said.
“What I thought,” he said. “Forgive me if I’d prefer some independent verification.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“You’re the local girl.”
She thought about it while Shake took the car keys off the dash and jiggled them in the hand that wasn’t holding the gun.
“That’s making me nervous,” she said.
“Good.”
“Wait!” She remembered a regular of hers, a shy, awkward, older guy who always wore a tie and a corduroy jacket to the club. He was a professor at UNLV. “I know someone who might know something. Let’s go!”
Shake just jiggled the keys in his hand for another minute. Gina had the feeling he wasn’t merely trying to decide whether or not he wanted to visit this someone who might know something about the worth of the foreskins; he was trying to decide whether or not he wanted in on the $5 million. With her.
She remembered the same look on his face back in the motel room this morning—yesterday morning?—when he’d been trying to decide whether or not to give her up to Jasper.
She didn’t understand his ambivalence now. This deal was a total no-brainer!
“That fucking Van Halen song,” he said at last, “has been going through my head for the past fifteen minutes.”
“Tell me about it.”
He stopped jiggling and handed the keys to her.
“Okay,” he said. “What the hell.”