Gutshot Straight with Bonus Excerpt (21 page)

T
hey ate lunch on the veranda. Two new Panamanian waiters Gina hadn’t seen before. Ziegler drank three glasses of wine and didn’t eat much. How you could live on your own private tropical island, one of your own
two
tropical private islands, and still look doughy—it baffled Gina. The bridge of her nose was already starting to burn.

“After a while, you know,” Ziegler said, waving his fourth glass of wine out at the water, “it’s just adding zeros. Making the money. You start to look for something larger in your life. Some meaning. I think it’s why I like it out here. Out here there’s something you can believe in. You can smell it, can’t you? The . . . I don’t know . . .” He sucked in a deep breath. “The
wildness
.”

She could smell something all right, but it wasn’t wildness. She’d been on her flirty best behavior all through lunch, sustained by the momentum of the magnificent snorkeling, but had started to feel cranky again. Doughboy liked to listen to himself talk, and she’d been listening along with him for quite some time now.

“This country hasn’t been tamed yet. I like things that haven’t been tamed.”

“Cut to the chase, Roland,” she said.

He went to the railing and tossed crumbs from the bread basket to the fish swarming below.

“I don’t want to pay eight million for those foreskins, Gina. Not if I can help it.”

“That’s the price we negotiated.”

“That’s the price we negotiated when there were
two
sellers.”

He let that statement hang portentously in the air, like it would take Gina a second to crack the code and figure out what he was implying. After which he probably expected her to draw her breath in sharply and say:

Wait, are you saying—you mean . . . ?

Please. She’d anticipated this move of Ziegler’s even before he’d slipped the piece of paper into her hand last night.

“I was there, Roland, remember?”

“You’re in for half, I presume?” he said. “So looking at four million?”

“Go on.”

“All I’m saying, I see a way for both of us to improve our cash-flow perspective.”

“Cut Shake out.”

“Six million. All yours.”

“You save two million . . .”

“And you take away an extra two.”

“What makes you think I’d consider screwing my partner for an extra two million dollars?”

He turned back around from the railing and smirked at her.

“Your eyes,” he said.

THE RESTAURANT WAS ON THE TOP FLOOR
of the visitors’ center. Alexandra sat outside on the terrace, sipping tea at a table that looked directly down on the Miraflores Locks. When she saw Shake approaching, herding a furious Dikran in front of him, her face betrayed not the slightest hint of surprise.

“Shake,” she said pleasantly, “so nice to see you.”

“Lexy.” Shake sat down across from her.

“Panama City is a lovely city, yes?” she said. “Very cosmopolitan. And I am fascinated by this canal.”

Shake looked down. A cargo ship with Russian markings, unbelievably big, like an apartment building laid on its side, was being tugged toward the lock gates by what looked like two toy locomotives running along each side of the canal at a forty-five-degree angle.

“Do you know about the French?” Shake said. “How they tried to build it first?”

“The French,” Lexy said in a dismissive way. “Do you know, Shake, the locks, your president at the time, the first Roosevelt, he hired famous men to decide, when these locks were built, how do we make them beautiful? What ornaments and things? He asked famous architects—the man who arranged Central Park in New York City, among one.”

“What did they decide?”

“You see for yourself, yes?” she said, sweeping a hand over the view. “They decide the beauty is already there, in the art of the engineering. They advise your president, Do not touch the locks, or they will be ruined.”

Shake smiled. “Good advice.”

“I think so.” She sipped her tea. Without looking at Dikran, who still stood, hulking and fuming, in front of Shake, she said, “I see you have—how do you say?—get the drop on Dikran here.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Motherfuck,” Dikran said. “Give gun back.”

“I think I’m gonna hold on to it for a while, Dikran, if you don’t mind.”

Dikran filled his eyes to the brim with martyred Armenian suffering and turned to Alexandra for a ruling. She shrugged.

“Finders keepers,” she said. “Go get Shake now a nice cup of tea, please.”

Dikran recognized that he was in no position to question orders. He stalked off.

“So,” Alexandra said.

Shake studied her. Why had he always been attracted to beautiful but dangerous women? Was it some defect of character? Or a strength?

He did the math in his head and imagined, for a second, a little girl, she’d be four years old now, with Lexy’s gray eyes and his . . . what? His nose, maybe.

“Just think, Lexy,” he said, “if we’d stayed together, maybe we would have settled down, started a family, bought a nice little house in the suburbs.”

“Yes.” Her gray eyes twinkled. “I think exactly this is what did happen if we stay together.”

“You never know.”

She started to answer, then didn’t. Together they watched the water boil in the lock; they watched the Russian freighter begin its slow, inexorable rise.

“So,” Shake said finally, “if trouble was a city, where would I be right now?”

Alexandra sipped her tea and mused. “New York City, I think.”

“That’s a lot of city.”

“It is a lot of trouble.”

“I realize, Lexy, we’re past the point where I might be able to ask you, for old times’ sake, to perhaps—”

“I am afraid so, Shake,” she said.

“Thought so,” he said.

“The girl,” Alexandra said. Surprising him. “Gina? You like this girl?”

“I suppose I do.”

“But she is the one who leads you, yes? Into city of trouble?”

“I let myself be led, pretty much.”

“Always a stand-up guy, Shake.”

He wondered if that and half of $8 million would buy him enough of a head start. To hide from Alexandra. Dick Moby. In Shake’s more optimistic moments, he thought it just might, just possibly. For a few years, at least.

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, Lexy,” Shake said. “I’d really prefer not to have to do that. I’d like to know—”

“You’d like to know what the price is?”

“Yes. I would.”

“To get out of this mess you are in?”

“Yes,” he said. “You are assuming there is a price.”

“No. I’m hoping.”

Alexandra sipped and mused. “Could be a very high price.”

“I’m fully prepared to pay a high price, Lexy,” Shake said. “The money, if that’s what you’re—”

“What if price is not money?” she said.

This stopped him. “The foreskins?”

She waved a dismissive hand.

“I don’t understand,” Shake said, even though he was starting to. He felt too hot suddenly. Hot and clammy.

“No?” Alexandra asked innocently, indulging Shake his weak attempt at self-deception.

“You want me,” Shake said slowly, “to give you Gina.”

“Do I?” Alexandra said, her gray eyes twinkling.

Dikran returned with Shake’s tea. He set the cup and saucer in front of Shake, then stalked off to sit glowering a few tables away.

Shake turned the handle of his cup from two to three o’clock. Then from three to four, four to five.

He told himself to stand up, say good-bye, walk away, hope for the best.

He told himself to stay seated, shut up, think it through.

He told himself that in life as in cards there was always a smart play and always a dumb play. There was never anything in between.

He stood up. Then he sat back down.

“But why—” he started to say.

Alexandra put a comforting hand on top of his. “Drink your tea, Shake,” she said. “We have all lunch for negotiation.”

BY THE TIME THEY LANDED BACK
in Panama City, it was almost six-thirty. Ziegler offered to have his driver drop her off at the hotel.

“I can manage,” she said.

“You’re sure?”

“I’ve got a couple of errands to run first.”

He kissed her hand like he’d done last night.

“You’ll consider my proposal?”

“I always consider every proposal,” she said without being funny.

She started to turn, but Doughboy still had her hand.

“How long have you known him?” he asked. “This Shake guy?”

“Long enough.”

“Long enough to be sure he won’t try to cut
you
out?”

She shrugged. “He might.”

“But you think you’re smart enough to see it coming, don’t you?”

She started to nod but then thought about it and didn’t.

“I can manage,” she said. “Thank you for the lovely day.”

“I mean it, Gina,” he said. “After we’re done with this, I want you to come back to the island with me. I’ll teach you how to live well.”

“You think I need lessons?”

He chuckled but didn’t saying anything. Gina guessed Shake would have said something like,
No, but you could use the practice
.

How much was an extra $2 million? An extra $2 million was a
whole
lotta love, is what it was.

“See you tomorrow,” Gina said.

The tinted glass of the limo window slid up. When it was halfway, Gina leaned down and gave it a quick flirty smack of a kiss, the glass where Ziegler’s mouth would have been. Then she whirled on her heel before he could say anything and headed for the cab stand.

G
ina made it back to the hotel just after eight. Shake was lying on the bed, watching a cooking show in Spanish.

“Have fun today?”

“Did,” she said. “Went snorkeling and saw some manta rays.”

“But no sloths?”

“I don’t think they live underwater, pumpkin.”

He smiled.

She went over and kissed him. “How about you?”

“I went to the Miraflores Locks. Learned all about how the canal works.”

“Interesting?”

“It was,” he said.

He kissed her back. “Big day tomorrow.”

“Wanna stay in and order room service? I’m whacked.”

“Me, too,” Shake said. “We can hit the hay early.”

She looked into his eyes. He looked into hers.

“I’m glad you had a good day,” he said.

“Right back at you,” she said.

T
ed Boxman had never fully understood the phrase “adding insult to injury” until he reached the end of the paperback he was reading. It was a horror novel, one of the only books in English for sale at the hotel gift shop, about a group of young American tourists in Mexico trapped on a hill covered by a giant diabolical bloodsucking tropical vine. The story was much scarier and more nerve-racking than you’d ever guess from the premise, and Ted had been driven forward page after page by curiosity and mounting dread. Then he reached the end of the book and discovered that because of a printing error the last three chapters of the book were missing.

And, of course, the hotel gift shop did not have another copy.

That was the insult. Ted’s injuries were both metaphoric and not at all so. On the metaphorically injured side, he’d been trapped in Panama City for the past two days because every flight back to the United States had been fully booked. Nothing whatsoever available until the day after tomorrow. He’d been trapped in his hotel room the entire time because he had no money (he’d charged the book, and meals, to his room account), and the replacement credit card that Citibank had promised would arrive in less than twenty-four had, of course, not. Not that Ted had been eager to leave his hotel room. He was persona non grata with Frank the Facilitator and all the rest of the Building Bridges guys (who at this very moment were downstairs in one of the ballrooms, at the Day Four Meet-N-Mix). Apparently Nerlides, his “date” from the first night, had filed an official complaint with Building Bridges.

This reflected badly on all of them, Frank told Ted. It was one thing to be maybe a tad too aggressive with a girl—that was part of the traditional courtship process—but when a client of Building Bridges tried to weasel out of a restaurant check . . . well, that made all of them look like poor, desperate losers, which they were most definitely not.

“Yes, uh-huh, you most definitely all are,” Ted had said. Which was probably an inadvisable comment, but Ted had been really angry and still aching (see below) from his not-metaphorical injury.

Frank had called Ted a pissant and banned him from all further Building Bridges Panama City events. Even though Ted had already paid a 100-percent-nonrefundable deposit and even though—this was the real irony—Ted wouldn’t have gone to another Building Bridges event if Thelonious Monk himself, Ted’s hero, had returned from the dead to groove until the wee hours.

Ted had sustained his not-metaphorical injury when he’d been mugged that first night. The young guys on the deserted street had demanded his wallet. Ted explained that his wallet had already been stolen. This information—translated for the others by the middle mugger, the one with the knife, the only one who could speak English—was met with skepticism. Ted didn’t need to understand Spanish to pick that up. There was a brief conference in rapid Spanish among the muggers. Then the short mugger said something to the tall mugger and pointed at Ted. The tall mugger seemed outraged by whatever this suggestion was.

“He no want to frisk you,” the middle mugger explained helpfully. “He no want to touch your butt.”

Ted, needless to say, didn’t want that either. His hopes rose, because it seemed that even though the short mugger’s Spanish flew fast and furious, the tall mugger refused to budge on his no-butt-touching policy. But then the short mugger suggested what seemed to be an alternative approach—Ted found this ominous—and the tall mugger shrugged.

“Take off your pants,” the middle mugger instructed Ted.

That’s when Ted decided to make a break for it. It seemed like sound reasoning at the time. They couldn’t really throw the knife at him, could they? No, as it turned out, but they could throw one of their almost-f beer cans. And this was the country, remember, that had produced superstar New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, the pitcher who’d led Ted to victory in his fantasy baseball league a few seasons ago. Ted had glanced back over his shoulder to see if they were going to throw the knife at him. At that instant the almost-f beer can nailed him, flush in the forehead. Ted staggered and almost ran into a wall. Beer flowed down his face and stung his eyes. Beer and, he realized, blood.

Ted would find out later it was just a small cut on his forehead. He didn’t even need stitches. But at the time he didn’t know that. And, more important, the muggers didn’t know it either. They flipped out when they saw the blood sheeting down his face and dripping off his chin. They gathered around Ted and showered him with nervous apologies, in both Spanish and English. The middle mugger put away the knife and, inexplicably, offered Ted a stick of gum. Ted, inexplicably, took it. Then the muggers bolted and disappeared in the night.

It was the best thing that had happened to Ted all day, getting hit in the head with that beer can. Which pretty much summed up the kind of a day he’d had.

He turned on the TV, then turned it off. It was driving him crazy, that he couldn’t finish his book. He was almost certain that things weren’t going to end well there on the hillside covered with the blood-sucking vine, but it was the
how
, not the
what
, that made a good book good.

He went downstairs. He had to pass the doors to the banquet hall. Ted dreaded a chance encounter with Frank the Facilitator or George Pirtle or, God help him, Nerlides. Luckily, though, the doors to the banquet hall were closed. From behind them came laughter and the muffled bass beat of bad eighties pop rock. Ted hurried over to the front desk. The clerk informed him that yes, he did know of a bookstore that sold books in the English language. And no, it was not far, the walk; the walk was not dangerous.

“You’re sure?” Ted asked.

“I am sure,” the clerk said, “yes.”

Ted didn’t have any money to buy another copy of the book about the bloodsucking jungle vine, but he’d already devised a workaround. He wouldn’t
buy
the book, he’d just stand there at the shelves and
read
the last three chapters. Ha!

He left the hotel in good spirits. As promised, the walk was not far and he encountered no danger along the way. The bookstore was a pleasant place, light and airy, with a small café that spilled out onto the sidewalk in front. The English-language section, next to the café, was a pretty good size. Ted searched the shelves for the book about the blood-sucking vine. He knew that it had to be here. It was an international bestseller; if it was sold in a hotel gift shop, then certainly—

It wasn’t here. He checked again. He checked the shelf above and below, in case a careless browser had misplaced the book. The author’s other novel was there, but Ted had already read that one. There were no fewer than six copies of that one.

Insult added to insult added to injury, Ted thought with a grimace, even though he knew now he was just feeling sorry for himself.

He turned to leave. And noticed, reading at one of the tables in the café, an attractive Panamanian woman. She had warm, intelligent brown eyes and hair that corkscrewed charmingly every which way. She had what must have been two dozen bracelets on each brown arm and was reading a book by Flannery O’Connor that had been translated into Spanish.

Ted remembered liking Flannery O’Connor, her stories, in college. He checked the stack of books at the woman’s elbow. There was the same book by Flannery O’Connor, but in English, and beneath it was—

Shit!
The bloodsucking-vine novel he’d been searching for! In English!

Ted hesitated, then made his way over to the woman’s table. He hesitated again when she glanced up at him, but her intelligent brown eyes were so warm, so curious—what could it hurt to ask? Probably she’d just laugh, musically, when he explained his predicament; she’d be more than happy to let him borrow her book and quickly skim the last three chapters.

“Excuse me,” he said, “this is going to sound really crazy, but can I ask you a favor?”

The woman frowned. Her eyes no longer seemed so warm. She sighed, a great gust of annoyance.

“Fuck,” she said, “off.”

Ted, startled, took a step backward, bumped into a chair, and sat down without meaning to.

When she saw this, when she misinterpreted that he was not fucking off but doing just the opposite of that, she made a sound like a growl.

“I said fuck
off
,” the woman snarled. She scooped up her books, stood, and marched away to the checkout counter, her many bracelets clanking.

MARIANA’S LIFE THESE PAST FEW DAYS
had been one giant pain in the ass after another.

There was work: her boss. Cornejo had been flitting in and out of the shop at odd hours for the last two days. “Top-secret business,” whatever that meant. What it meant was that she’d had to work late yesterday and missed lunch today.

There was the apartment: her landlord. He insisted that Mariana was violating the terms of her lease by allowing her sister to stay with her for a few weeks. In retaliation for this perceived violation, he refused to fix Mariana’s badly leaking refrigerator.

There was family: Mariana’s sister. Who had dropped from the blue sky a few days ago and just seemed to assume she could stay with Mariana as long as she wanted. An impression shared by their mother, father, grandmothers, and four brothers, all of whom—the brothers—had apartments and houses much less cramped and more suitable for a lazy, messy, irresponsible sister who had decided to just irresponsibly up and quit her very good job as a bookkeeper for no apparent or rational reason.

And now there was
this
.

Mariana looked around the hotel ballroom in despair. The American men were—
Forgive me, Lord
, she thought,
but no other word will do
—grotesque. Leering and preening, hairless and fat, most of them as old as her father. They murmured sly asides to one another. When they spotted a woman they liked, they moistened their lips greedily with small purple tongues.

Mariana realized, thirty seconds after she arrived at the function, that she’d been recruited to this event under the most blatantly false premises.

You should have known better
, her mother would grunt if she ever found out about this.

Yes, Mariana admitted with a cringe, she should have known better. But she’d been bored with her life, with the men in it, with Latin men in general, and the Building Bridges website had been very sleekly, very professionally constructed. So why not? Mariana had thought. It was a lark, an excellent opportunity to practice her English. If anything more came from the afternoon function . . . well, then that was—she paused to remember an English colloquialism she enjoyed—that was
gravy
.

Two of the other women at her table were clearly prostitutes from Colón. The other was a beautiful but skeletal young Colombian girl who could not have been a day over sixteen and could barely speak Spanish. She ate the entire bowl of nuts on the table, then looked around for more.

Mariana slipped the young Colombian girl a ten-dollar bill and told her to run away as fast as she could. The girl just looked at her without comprehension. Mariana sighed and headed for the door.

“Where ya goin’, sweetness?” said a man whose hair transplant had gone badly awry. Mariana just shook her head and tried to step around him. He stepped in front of her again, then laughed and swiveled his hips to pretend they were dancing. Mariana waited, burning a hole through his sternum with her eyes, until the man lost interest and wandered away.

Her mother would never, ever find out about this. Mariana planned to take this afternoon to her grave. This afternoon and everything in it.

She left the hotel and walked to the new bookstore off Calle Uruguay, the one with the café. It was quiet there, as she’d hoped, the rustle of paper soothing, the smell of the coffee, the creak of the wooden floor. She picked out a few books to buy, then sat down to read. She’d begun finally to relax, to feel the cautious return of some peace to her mind, when the American approached.

“Excuse me,” he said. She looked up, alarmed. Had one of the Americans from the hotel followed her here? How? “I wonder if I could ask you a favor?”

The American had a small bandage on his forehead, a damp pink spot at its center. Mariana did not want to imagine what was beneath that bandage, or why.

Grotesque
.

“Fuck off!” she told the bandage, and gathered up her books as quickly as she could.

TED, STUNNED, WATCHED THE WOMAN
with the bracelets and the corkscrew hair storm off. And then, before he really realized what he was doing, he was on his feet, too, storming right after her.

He could feel his face flushing, the cut on his forehead throbbing.
What am I doing?
he thought, alarmed. He had no
idea
what he was doing! It was like he was having—it was like an out-of-body experience, except that he was very much in his body right now, too much so. His body was propelling him at great speed, without any input at all from Ted, toward the woman with the bracelets.

She was at the cash register, waiting for a cashier so she could pay for her books. When she saw him, the fierceness in her eyes should have scorched every bit of resolve from Ted’s soul. But, strangely, it didn’t. There shouldn’t have been any resolve there to start with.

“I
swear
to all that is holy,” she said, “if you do not leave me alone, I will have my four brothers—”

“Just one doggone second, please,” Ted said. More forcefully than he’d intended; he could tell this by the surprise on the woman’s face. “I don’t know why you’re being so rude, and probably it’s none of my business, but I just want you to know that I asked you one polite question, I’m actually a very polite person, and I’m actually one of those people who wish the world were a more polite and civil place in general, and I really debated coming over in the first place, because I didn’t want to bother you, I really wasn’t trying to ‘pick you up,’ but I did come over, which maybe was a mistake, but it’s not like I should get lethally injected because of it, and all you had to say, all you had to say was, you know, ‘Excuse me, I’m reading,’ and I would have said, word for word, ‘I’m very sorry I bothered you,’ and I would have left you alone, not another word, and you wouldn’t have had to have your four brothers do to me whatever you want to have them do to me, which—just let me say?—I’m really not that scared of, given everything that
has
happened to me the last few days, you don’t have the slightest idea.”