The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel (2 page)

The moment froze. I was afraid to speak. I didn’t want to spook Andy, not while he had the gun up. I guess Boy felt the same way. I could sense him repressing a growl. Then … the girl moved. She disengaged herself from her mother’s clutching hands and edged warily down the stairs. I knew what she was walking into, could foresee it in an instant. Let’s say she survived the next hour, day, week, month, year. Let’s say she made it all the way into womanhood. Where would that find her? Turning tricks at a truck stop? Up in some spike house with a needle in her arm? Living with a man who beat her just like Daddy did? Talk about your human sacrifice. It may have been the bravest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

I couldn’t let it stand.

“Hey, mister,” I piped up, applying my most innocent bystander gloss, “do you know whose dog this is?” Three heads swiveled toward me. The gun swiveled, too, but I ignored it, for part of running a good
con is shaping the reality around you. Or denying it, as the case may be. By disregarding the gun, I momentarily neutralized it, for what kind of fool doesn’t see the obvious? It’s destabilizing to people. They don’t know how to react, so mostly they just do nothing, which buys you some time to make your next move. At that point, I don’t know if I felt supremely courageous or just dumb-ass dumb. Both, probably. But one thing you learn on the razzle is that once a con starts, the worst thing you can do is break it off. Then you’re just twisting in the wind. “Because, um, I found her down the street and she seems to be lost.”

“Ain’t a she,” said Andy.

“No? I didn’t look.” I bent down to check out Boy’s underside. “Hey, you’re right, it’s a boy. Anyway, used to be.” I smiled broadly and started walking Boy forward.

Andy aimed the gun. “Stop,” he said.

“Oh, look, I’m not trying to get in the middle of a thing here. I’m just trying to return this dog. Is he yours?”

“Just let him go.”

Well, I thought I knew what would happen if I did that. Boy would take off running, and probably none of us would ever see him again. I weighed my own selfishness—I wanted that dog—against his needs and safety, and dropped the rope. Boy surprised me. He plopped down at my feet, content, apparently, to let me run the show to whatever outcome I could achieve. You gotta love that about dogs. When they trust you, they trust you all the way.

“Now clear out,” said Andy.

Here’s where my play got dicey. Make or break time. “Hang on,” I said, bleeding avid enthusiasm into my voice. “What kind of gun is that?”

“What?”

“Because it looks like a 1980s Hi-Power. Is it?”

“The hell should I know?”

I squinted at the gun, straining to see detail, which I didn’t really need to do, since one of the many things you learn about in my line
of work is guns, in detail. “Two-way thumb safeties, nylon grip, tridot sights. Yep, that’s a Mark II. Bet it’s got the throated barrel and everything.”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

“The thing is,” I said, “I’m kind of a collector. Any chance I could buy it off you?” This was the heart of my play, based explicitly on what the mother had said about drinking and God knows what else. I knew what else. Crank. Crystal meth. I could see it in Andy’s dilated pupils, his scrunge-brown teeth, and his generally tweaky demeanor. A guy like that’s not likely to be long on cash, and addiction is a voice that never shuts up. He might could want to quell it for a while. Very slowly, again not to spook him, I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my bankroll.

Funny. For someone supposedly off the razzle, I still kept my cash in a grifter’s roll, big bills on the outside, small bills within. I held the roll lengthwise, between my thumb and first finger, so that Andy could see its Ben Franklin veneer. “I think I have a grand here,” I lied easily. “If that’s not enough, we could hit my ATM.”

Andy licked his lips, imperfectly processing my offer. “Maybe I’ll just take it,” he said.

Oops. I hadn’t considered that. “Sure, yeah, whatever,” I vamped. “You could do that. But what kind of example does that set for your little girl?” This was pure bafflegab—nonsense—and I knew it, but that didn’t halt my improv. “Look,” I continued, “like I said, I’m not trying to get in the middle of a thing, but it looks like you guys have a problem. If you take my money by force, the problem gets worse. If you start shooting, it gets way worse, right?” I looked at the mother for confirmation, silently encouraging her to nod, which she did. “On the other hand, you sell me your gun, you’ve got a little scratch, you can take your girl out for ice cream, come back later, everybody’s calm, you can all work out your business.” I knew he’d take “take your girl out for ice cream” to mean
go score
, and hoped his need was such that he’d opt for the line of least resistance.

He seemed to be leaning that way. I could see him mentally converting a thousand dollars into chunks of scud. “What’s in it for you?” he asked.

“I told you, I’m a collector. I’ve got the Mark I and the Mark III, but the Mark II, boy, those are rare.”
^*
I dared a step forward, arm outstretched, dangling my bankroll like bait. “What do you say? Deal?”

The ladies and I held our breath. Maybe Boy did, too.

“I’m keeping the bullets,” said Andy at last.

“That’s fine,” I said. “Who collects bullets?”

Then, so slowly it made my teeth ache, Andy lowered the gun, pressed the slide release, and dropped the magazine into his hand. Still manifesting my goofy enthusiasm, I strode over and made the exchange, then stepped back quickly before he could change his mind. “Oh, man,” I said, “wait’ll the guys in the gun club see this.”

The next sound you hear will be Andy saying, “What the fuck?” when he finds out what a grifter’s roll is.

“What the fuck?” said Andy. He threw down the roll and took a menacing step toward me.

“Funny thing, though,” I said, raising the gun, “didn’t you chamber a round?” Andy stopped. I let my voice go hard. “Go on, get out of here.” He turned back to grab Sophie, but, “Oh, no,” I said. “No.” Then he looked at his dog. “Not him, either,” I said. “Get.”

Andy got.

Was there a round in the chamber? Did it matter? You can bluff with the best hand, too.

The truck rumbled off. I’d memorized the license plate and would soon be dropping a dime, for there’s no way that guy wasn’t holding. Meantime, I encouraged Sophie and her mother to clear out to a shelter somewhere, which they thought was a pretty damn good idea. We agreed that Boy would stay with me.

So, happy ending, right? Sure, except for one thing. Someone videoed the whole thing through a window. It was on YouTube by dusk.

It didn’t really matter that thousands of people saw Radar Hoverlander in action.

But it sure as hell mattered that one person did.

“N
ude models,” Vic Mirplo announced. (This was two hours earlier.) “Radar, we’re talking undressed, unclad, au natural, bare-ass bare, stark staring stripped, live nude girls, naked and in the buff, right here in my studio any time I want.” Vic leaned back on his couch, arms splayed wide and a paintbrush clamped in his teeth in unconscious allusion to Franklin Roosevelt’s self-satisfied cigarette-holder chomp. “That, my friend, is the best part of this gig.” It occurred to me that where FDR might have struck such a pose upon ending a depression or battling fascism to its knees, Mirplo’s triumph was the slim victory of placing himself in the same room as a naked woman who wasn’t a stripper.

At a price he considered, well, worth it.

“Ten bucks an hour,” he said. “Can you believe it? They come over. They take off their clothes. They stand there. For as long as you want. In any position you want. And all you have to do is paint.”

“Yeah, small problem with that,” I said. “Vic, you don’t paint.”

“I paint,” he said. “I put pigskin on canvas.” He meant pigment, of course, but Vic often missed his intended words by that wide a mark.

“Don’t you think there’s a little more to it than that?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, you know, like … training? Vision? Skills?”

“I got skills, Radar. I got mad skills. Watch this.” Vic jumped to his feet and attacked an easeled canvas with the fervor of a rabid javelina.
He used the brush, his hands, sponges of various sizes and textures, even a squirt bottle. What Mirplo lacked in aesthetic sense he made up for in fury, and in less than ten minutes he had created something so visually distressing that it made me want to shoot the painting, just put it out of its misery. “See?” said Vic, sinking back down on the couch, exhausted, as if he’d just run a marathon. “I’m telling you, Radar, you gotta get in on this art shit. Easiest goddamn money you’ll ever make.”

“So you’ve sold stuff, then?”

“I will,” he said. “I’m creating a buzz.”

“What you’re creating,” I said, “is hazardous waste.”

Vic smiled indulgently. “Ah,” he said, “the ol’ Hoverlander sense of humor. It never gets old.”

At this point, Vic’s latest model walked back into the studio, returning from her pot break. She looked to be about twenty-five, with pallid lips, ringlets of dirty blonde hair, and the hundred-yard stare of someone who’d just come back from a pot break. Shedding her kimono, she struck a standing pose on the low platform Vic had crudely comprised from a couple of wooden pallets and a thrift-store blanket. Here in Santa Fe, you’d expect the blanket to be Navajo. It wasn’t. It was acrylic, with figures from
Star Wars
. Vic immediately stood and affected a pose of his own, what I imagined he imagined to be his artiste stance.

“Um, Jena,” he said, stroking an imaginary Vandyke beard, “that pose isn’t working for me. Let’s try another.” It took a moment for Vic’s request to leap across Jena’s distended synapse gaps, but eventually the girl blinked, rolled her neck slowly, and settled into a yoga seat on the blanket. “
Much
better,” said Vic, evidently satisfied with the full Sharon Stone–scape the new pose presented. He turned to me and reverently mouthed the words, “What a muff!”

There are times, and this was one of them, when I consider my ability to read lips less a blessing than a curse.

Vic returned to work. I couldn’t bear to bear witness to any further crimes against canvas, so I headed out. As he waved a distracted
farewell, a great glob of bruise-colored paint fell off Vic’s brush and soiled his jeans like the numinous spew of a sick pigeon. I thought this would irk Vic, since he washed his clothes only under grimmest duress and had been known to wear the same pants for seasons at a time, but he just smeared the color into the cloth and said, “What the hell. Makes me more arty.”

What had the world come to, I mused as I walked out into the New Mexico sunshine, when a Mirplo could be legitimately concerned with looking more arty?

What, indeed?

I’d been in Santa Fe about a month, and so far it struck me as the sort of place you could get tired of in about a month. Not that it lacked appeal. The climate was good, the people relentlessly friendly—well, friendly the way people are when they make their living off tourists and they know it. The architecture agreed with me—low adobes that blended sensibly into the desert scrub and cactus by design, utility, and civil statute. I’m told that no new buildings in Santa Fe may be over two stories high, unless architected into setback levels, which gives the tallest structures in town the look of taupe wedding cakes. I didn’t mind. It kept the scale human. After Los Angeles, the last city where I’d spent much time, a little human scale was a welcome change of pace.

I think what got to me about Santa Fe was exactly how open and accessible it was. I hadn’t been in town two weeks when I started to recognize the same faces—and they started to recognize mine. At the coffee joint or the grocery store, they’d nod at me as if to acknowledge,
Oh, you’re still here? If you were a tourist, you’d be gone by now
. This there was no denying: Santa Fe was definitely a three-day tourist town. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the Plaza, Loretto Chapel, a quick spin through the art galleries, maybe a day trip to Los Alamos, then it’s up the road to Taos or down the road to Albuquerque. If you’re not outta here, pretty soon you’re from here, and in a town this small, that tends to get noticed. Which is when a grifter like me gets edgy.

Check that
, I reminded myself.
Ex-grifter
.

It was back in March when Allie and I decided to go straight, about three months after our measured skedaddle from L.A., and just about three months before this moment here. We’d been propping up a
cervecería
at a Mexican beach, amusing ourselves by tapping out lewd suggestions to each other in Morse code,
^*
when the conversation turned to what to do with the money we’d made off the California Roll. That scam, a scheme to rob China through certain banking irregularities (okay, skims), had netted us north of half a million each—not counting Mirplo’s cut, which he scrupulously kept to himself, and who can blame him, for when you’ve been burned as many times as Vic has, you tend to wear asbestos Depends. But Allie and I had made common cause, sharing our resources as we shared our love: with enthusiasm, abandon, and the devil-may-care joie of two lonely, deeply suspicious con artists who, after a lifetime of looking over our shoulders, had finally found someone who’d have our back. This, in part, was why we decided to give up con artistry. Having traveled so far down separate paths, alone and on the wrong side of the law, we had to view it as a sign that our peculiar skew lines had crossed. The universe, we concluded that night, had handed us a second chance, an abundantly funded clean slate, with the cops who’d dogged us through the California Roll either dead or bought off, and the ponderous Chinese banking system we’d ripped off none the worse for wise. Two smart cookies like us (we flattered ourselves) could easily and legitimately manage seven figures of working capital without having to resort to the sort of flimflammery that had been our respective culling cards for so many years. We could start a business. Buy a franchise. Learn a trade. There’s nothing we couldn’t do once we determined to leave our bent lives behind. And frankly, the prospect turned us on, Allie especially. “When the world is your oyster,” she said, “there’s no telling how many pearls you might find.” Having sold no few bogus pearls
in my time, I had to admit that the chance to chase the real deal held a certain innocent appeal.