Stiffed (16 page)

‘With a silenced gun.  Ronnie was moaning about having to search the house.’

‘Fuck!
’ Kate spits.  ‘That’s fucked up.  Ronnie’s married to his sister.  Fucking Leroy.’

‘I’ve met her.  Denise.’

‘Denise is here?’

‘She’s looking for Junior.’ 

The gun lowers from my neck.  Kate is silent, lost in her own thoughts.  I stare out the window at the forlorn looking Green Gables Shopping Mall, its large car park mostly empty.

‘Who the hell is Leroy Taylor?
’ I ask.

‘He’s the motherfucker that took Earl’s money,’ Juan answers, putting the indicator on and turning in the fo
recourt of a Holiday Inn. 

* * *

They’ve pushed me into the windowless bathroom in their hotel room.  There’s no way out except through the door.  The vent in the roof would just about accommodate one arm.  Juan has made it clear that if I open the door he’ll shoot first and ask questions later.  If try to shout for help he’ll break my neck with his bare hands.  He strikes me as the kind of man that would enjoy doing it.  I haven’t bothered to lock the door; there seems little point.

For the past five minutes they’ve been having one hell of a row.  It’s been difficult to catch most of it because they’re at the far end of the room and they’ve got the television on loud to mask their words. 

The basic gist is that Juan is seriously pissed off with Kate.  He feels she duped him into letting her free when she didn’t actually have the money.  And now they were going to have to find a way to get the cap and/or Sally from Redneck and Cowboy, who are the last people Juan wants to see right now.  In response, Kate seems to be swapping from placating him to berating him.  I know that tactic all too well.  She’s the arch-manipulator.

Whilst they work their differences out,
I’ve taken the opportunity to fill the sink with warm water and slip out of the bloodied shirt.  I doubt Sally’s husband will want either the shirt or his tie back.  My face is a mess – bright red from sun and stained a mottled brown on one side.  I dampen a towel and mop at it carefully.

The cut is above my ear amongst my red
hair.  It’s difficult to see it clearly, and I’m no expert, but I think it’s going to need a couple of stitches.  It’s damn sore, that’s for certain.  I lean down to the water and gently scoop it up to my face, letting it trickle down my neck.

I turn the towel round and dampen another section
then wipe my torso and arms.  Even I can smell my own stale sweat.  The bruising on my side looks worse than ever, a mix of blues and purples and there are ugly marks where The Rock punched me. 

I let the water drain from the sink, then take one of the small glasses and fill it with cold water.  I down it in one, refilling it and draining it again.  I drink two more cupfuls trying to quench my thirst.

All being well Annabelle should now be free and having her injuries treated.  At least one of us might get out of this calamity alive, albeit losing fifty percent of everything she’s worked for. 

I drop the seat on the toilet and sit on it.  I wonder how Sally,
Paavo and Jason are getting on?  Assuming I ever see them again, I’ve no idea how I’m going to apologize.  My famous barbecued ribs, a crate of beer and a bucket of Annabelle’s ice cream are unlikely to do the job.

The door outside slams loudly.
  A few moments later there’s a knock on the door.

‘Tadhg?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Juan is calling Earl.  I still have the gun.  If you open this door
, I’ll shoot.’

I shake my head.
  And to think I took her in and gave her shelter and sustenance. 

‘Did you hear me, Tadhg?’

‘Yeah, I heard you.’

‘You should have gone to the police when you found Tony,’ Kate says.

‘Yeah,’ is all I can think to answer.  I should have gone to the cops and taken my chances with Pirelli.

‘I would still have my million dollars if you had, you fucking bastard.’  She kicks the door.

The woman should be certified.

* * *

I’ve slipped the bloodied shirt back on and I’m sitting tied to a chair with telephone flex.  The yellow, now mostly dark red, tie has been wrapped around my head, keeping a face cloth stuffed in my mouth.  Thankfully, Kate has turned the television off.  She’s now in the bathroom, loudly humming Poker Face by Lady Gaga.  She only knows a couple of the lyrics, and some of those sound wrong, and is giving it her own tuneless treatment whilst also altering the timing.  Juan has gone to check out the planned meeting point for their rendezvous with Redneck and Cowboy.

I’ve spent the last
few minutes trying to loosen my bonds.  I remember reading somewhere that you should keep your wrists crossed as perpendicular as possible when someone is securing them, then if you straighten them there should be some give.  I’d say I’ve gained about a millimeter.  Certainly not enough to work a hand through.  Maybe it was the other way round – keep them as straight as possible.  Who knows?  I’m still stuck in this damn chair.

The bathroom door opens and Kate exits
holding the gun in her right hand.  She’s still wearing her sunglasses but she’s let her blonde hair down.  She’s also undone all the buttons of her denim shirt revealing the silky camisole underneath.  She’s wearing nothing on her lower half other than her white with red hearts hipster panties.  Kate might be quite flat-chested, but she has fantastic long, dancer legs. 

She glides towards me singing: ‘
Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na-na-na.  Oh, oh, oh, oh, ohhhh, ohh-oh-e-oh-oh-oh, I’ll get him hot and flash what I’ve got.’

As she nears I can’t help noticing the bruising on her legs and
the dark yellow stain in the crotch of her panties.  A reminder perhaps that not so long ago she was herself trussed up and being interrogated by Redneck, Cowboy and Juan.

She slides onto my lap, wrapp
ing her legs around me.

‘
Na, na-na.  Na, na-na.  Na-na-na-na, my poker face.  Da, da, da-da.  Da, da, da-da.’

She
hum-sings some more of the song, grinding her backside into my thighs, staring at my face.

Twenty four hours earlier Captain Prick would have been fully at attention, straining to burst through underpants and trousers.  Right now he’s immune to any feminine charms, in the main because Kate is holding the barrel of the gun to my temple.  Nothing counteracts the charms of a beautiful but crazy woman like the threat of one’s brains being blown across a hotel room.

We sit like that for a while – Kate alternating between humming and singing, grinding into my thighs, the gun bumping into the side of my head.

Eventually she stops and puts the gun on the desk next to us.  She wrestles roughly with the tie, dragging it down so that it loops round my neck
, and fishes the washcloth from my mouth.  She then pushes her sunglasses up into her hair and loops her arms around my neck.

The bruising round her eyes is extensive and ugly, the eyes themselves
woven with red silk.  She pulls a lazy smile and I notice that one of her teeth is chipped.

‘What’s wrong, baby?’ she coos, dragging a fingernail along my cheek.

What’s wrong?  I shake my head.  ‘Where do you want me to start?’

‘Oh, poor baby.
  You’ve not been having a very good day?’

‘I’ve had better.’

The slap thwacks against my cheek taking me by surprise.

FUCK!

‘You’ve had better?’ 

She grabs me by the ears and
starts shaking my head. 

FUUUCCCCKKKKKKKK.
  Painful would be an understatement.

‘You’ve had better!’ she screams.

She lets go, then places her head high on my chest, looping her arms around my back as if consoling a bereaved relative.

I can feel a trickle of blood snake down my face where she’s re-opened the wound.  My ears feel as if they’re on fire.  Kate has clearly fallen over the cliff edge from sanity into a chasm of madness.  The possibility that she’ll
wig-out completely and put a bullet in my head feels very real.

‘Why did you kill Tony, Tadhg?’ she asks without moving.

‘I … I didn’t kill him,’ I say hesitantly.  ‘He was already dead when I got into bed.’

She doesn’t say anything for a while, mulling over my answer.

‘He was my knight in shining armor.’

‘You were in love with Tony Marino?’
I say, unable to hide my incredulity.

‘He was going to sort out the probl
em with Earl and Leroy, but he didn’t turn up to the truck stop.’

‘He was going to … to make them go away?’ I hazard. 

‘Forever,’ she mutters.  ‘They’re not going to stop chasing me until they get the money.’

It sounds like Kate had been trying to lure her pursuers to the truck stop, where Marino would dispose of them.  Only Marino had been unavoidably delayed.  Instead, Redneck, Cowboy and Juan had traded shots with Barry White and Junior,
before both sets of adversaries disengaged and set-off after Kate.

‘But whose money is it?’ I ask.

‘Mine.  It’s my money, Tadhg.’

‘I mean, before it became yours?’

‘Earl’s.  Earl’s drug money.  It was dirty money and now it’s mine.’

‘And Leroy Taylor
stole it from Earl?’ I ask. 

‘Leroy helped me get it from Earl.’

‘But you never gave Leroy his share?’ I hazard.

Kate doesn’t answer, gently rocking to and fro.

This whole thing is starting to make some sense. Kate and Leroy had somehow managed to liberate a million dollars from Redneck.  Kate had then taken both his and her share and disappeared, coming back to Carrick Springs, hiding by shacking up with a gullible patsy.  Marino had spotted her in the pharmacy and she’d seduced him, persuading the mobster to help her deal with Redneck and Barry White if they managed to pick up her trail.  Clearly, one or both of them did so and Kate had decided to try and deal with the problem in one go.  Perhaps she hoped that one of her two pursuers would kill the other, then Marino would finish the remainder off.  However it was planned, Marino didn’t make it, leaving her to her own devices.

I test my hypothesis: ‘How did you know that Earl had found you?’

Kate starts to hum the song again.

‘Kate?’ I prompt.

‘He contacted Mr Pirelli.  He couldn’t just turn up uninvited on someone else’s patch.  Then Tony told me.  We hatched a plan.  Tony arranged with Earl that he’d bring me to the truck stop.  I contacted Leroy through a friend.  I offered to meet him so I could give him half of the money.’

‘At the truck stop,’ I add.

‘Hmmmmm.’

Maybe I’m not such a mediocre journalist after all – I’m bang on the money. 
Metaphorically speaking.  Hopefully, that’s all it will be – metaphorical. 

‘But how did Earl find you in the first place?’ I ask.

She shrugs.

I guess it doesn’t matter.  Maybe he put out feelers and Pirelli told him that Marino had
recently bumped into her.  There are still a couple of outstanding questions, such as how Kate and Leroy managed to steal the money in the first place, and some elements of last night which don’t quite add up.  Since it makes little sense to me, I decide to focus on the latter.

‘When you came back to the house,’ I ask, ‘how come you didn’t just take the cap and run?  Why go to get in
to bed?’

‘I thought it would be nice
to give you a leaving present.  A thank you.  Only …’ she trails off.

I shake my head.  Only Kate would think it rational to run home from a
shoot-out and to delay her flight to say thank you to the schmuck that had put her up for the past seven months, before disappearing with a million dollars.  It’s an example par excellence of some of her kooky, left-field thinking, like making me get an all-over body wax because she said the static from my body hair was giving electric shocks, or hiding a million dollars in a Crusaders cap, or sitting on my lap in a camisole and panties holding a gun to my head humming Poker Face. 

Or she thought she was getting into bed with Marino.  Whatever her intentions, s
he was clearly under the impression that Redneck and Barry White were ignorant of where she was residing.  But one of them did, as they had already dispatched her knight in shining armor before heading to the truck stop. 

‘This is so fucked up,’ she mutters.

For once I couldn’t agree with her more.

We sit like that for what seems an age – Kate on my lap, resting her head against my chest, humming
to herself as I try to work at the knots tying my wrists to the back of the chair.

There doesn’t seem much point pressing Kate further on the events that led up to today.  I have a pretty good idea what happened and why.  Instead
, I need to focus on the here and now.  I ask: ‘Where’s Juan gone?’