The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel (27 page)

Hidden benefits, yeah. Like keeping my father alive. This was my cue to go a little nuts.

I took it in stages.

“Ms. Plowright,” I said. “Miriam …” (See? That’s a broken play.) “I thought you understood that the presentation was just a formality. Last night—”

Miriam cut me off with a laugh. “Last night, you were a grade B lay with a grade D scam. You want to know why I came out here today? For a laugh.”

“Now look, that’s just not fair. This thing is legit. The numbers—”

“Oh, legit,” mocked Plowright. “The only number I’d trust about you is your shoe size.” She stood up. “I’m out of here.”

“Wait!” I said, standing, my voice now breaking into shards of anxiety. “What about my, you know …”

“Your dad? Your
dad
?” She turned to Louise and Martybeth, really working hard to suppress her glee. “Do you know what this yabbo told me? That you two kidnapped his father and were holding him hostage to this deal.” She turned back to me. “That’s when I knew it was all nonsense, by the way.”

“But it’s true,” I protested, plaintively.

“Oh, you don’t say. Really, truly true? Well, that explains why you’re so desperate to sign me on to this clownish deal.” She patted my cheek, a gesture I visibly found infuriating. “Look, pretty boy, this isn’t my first chicken dance.” She waved a hand at her surroundings. “This den of iniquity.” She glanced at the girls. “These two laughable insider traders.” Then back to me. “Your endangered dad. It all adds up to a con game, and not a very clever one. And then the good-faith money? Honey, if I fell for that, I’d deserve to get ripped off. So, bye-bye.” She went to pat my cheek again, but this time I grabbed her wrist with my hand, and held her arm there in midair. “Let me go,” she said.

“We had a deal,” I growled. “We came to terms.”

“You came to terms. I was jerking your chain.”

I raised my free hand in threat.

“That’s enough,” said Red Louise. “If we can’t reach an agreement like sensible people, then we’ll find another way.”

Her other way, unfortunately, involved her Glock.

I
t wasn’t intended to happen like this. Allie, having double-crossed me, was intended to endure my vituperation for a while, then lose her patience and reply with ire in kind. Then would ensue an escalating frenzy of recrimination, insults, even grappling on the floor (though with this gacky carpet, I was now not so sure). Eventually, our fury would spend, Miriam would evacuate in a self-righteous huff, and I’d devolve, in Louise’s eyes, into a total dickhead loser who couldn’t even save his father’s life. By such means we’d achieve our twin goals of finding out where Jay was at with this play (not a part of it) and categorically easing ourselves out. Later, Louise would discover that Woody’d slipped the noose on his own, but by then she’d have put us off her mental map. All because Allie and I would get so convincingly evil on each other. It was the best part of our script, but we never got a chance to play it.

A gun is the ultimate improv.

Now Allie and I would have to improvise likewise. She made the first move. “This doesn’t concern me anymore,” she said as she wriggled her wrist free from my hand and turned to go. Louise nodded to Martybeth, who sidled over and placed herself in Allie’s path. In other circumstances, you’d have viewed this as comical, a distaff Mutt and Jeff, little Martybeth giving away a good six inches to Allie yet defiantly thrusting her sweater pies at the taller woman, itching to take her on.

Allie weighed the consequences of starting a brawl. No doubt she
could whip Martybeth—one good shot to the sweater pies—but such sudden movements tend to trigger others, notably ones involving triggers. Best to keep things on the talking tip for now. Allie didn’t give ground—Miriam never would—but she let her shoulders sag just a little, to indicate that she wasn’t going to try to bull her way out, at least not yet. She looked back at Louise and said, “Well?”

“Sit down,” said Louise. “Both of you.”

We sat. Louise remained standing, her gun angled down and away, but casually ready. I tried to gain a sense of her competence with firearms. It affects how things go. “You do know how to handle that thing, yes?” I said. “I mean, when it comes to not accidentally shooting people.”

“If I shoot you,” she said, “it won’t be an accident.”

Louise became preoccupied with plotting her path forward. I ghosted her available scenarios. She could let us go, of course, but that didn’t rate high on the likeliness scale, not when she (thought she) still held the Ace of Hostage. Plus, there are technical terms for people like us if you let them go running around loose: complainants; witnesses. At the extreme other end of alternatives lay the possibility of making us both dead and similarly tying up the loose end of Woody in due course. This also rated long odds against, for unless these two were terribly adept at cover-up, which they probably knew they were not, then killing us must necessarily turn into a gun-and-run situation, with Martybeth and Louise on the lam like Thelma and same. But flight works better with cash in hand, and to kill us now, without landing a payday, was to accept the worst possible outcome. Louise struck me as a lesser-of-evils type. And in that instant, I knew she’d try to sustain the play.

Which she did. She flipped a chair around backward and straddled it, bringing her face close to Miriam’s. “Okay,” she said, “here’s what’s what.” She cocked her chin in my direction. “He wasn’t lying about his father. I have him stashed, and no one gets him back until someone meets my price.”

“So the insider trading thing …,” said Miriam, dryly.

“Don’t get smug, sister. You were smart enough to see through that, but not smart enough to keep your wisdom to yourself.”

“In which case,” said Miriam, “I’m just an innocent bystander.”

“You were. Now you’re an interested party.”

“Not that interested.”

“Completely interested,” said Red. “Because you’re no longer ransoming his father’s life.”

“No.”

“No. You’re ransoming his.”

To her credit, Allie managed the most convincingly derisive laugh I’ve ever heard. Man, if she ever meant that laugh, I’d want to kill me myself. There followed chapter and verse about the many nasty things that Louise and Martybeth were welcome to do to me for dragging Miriam into this mess. She was very convincing. I felt cold.

“Well, if that’s how you feel,” said Louise laconically, “then I guess you can go. But just so you know, we know you spent last night with him.”

“So I fucked him. That doesn’t mean I’m going to fuck my clients for him.”

“Yeah,” said Louise, “it doesn’t. But I planted a camera.”

With evident glee, Martybeth flipped open her smartphone, hit a couple of keys, and started a silent video playback. I saw Allie lying the length of me, and me running my fingers down her spine like tiny skiers jumping the moguls of Mount Back.

“That doesn’t look like fucking,” said Louise. “That looks like making love. So whatever you two have going on between you, we think it’s more than just casual sex. Maybe you’re working both sides against the Mirplo. But that’s yesterday’s news. Today’s news is, Miriam plows up a million dollars by tomorrow afternoon, or she can kiss her lover, or conspirator, or whatever, good-bye.”

Allie played a desperation card. “I already told you I don’t give a rat’s ass about him.”

“Then that’s his bad luck. But we’ll give you a chance to have second thoughts.” Louise gestured me to my feet with the gun. She groped in my pockets for my car keys, tossed them to Allie, and said, “Now go.”

Allie went.

I stayed put.

I knew a guy once, a proper gentleman who hated profanity like a cat hates baths. When we got in trouble together, which we did fairly regularly, he would say, “Well, aren’t we fornicated now?”

Man, he didn’t know what fornicated was.

They tied my hands behind me, which I hate, and gagged me, which I really hate because it steals my voice, the spinach to my Popeye. Then they walked me to the Segue and belted me into a back seat, which is a really effective restraint when your hands are tied, because what are you going to do, push the release button with your nose? Try it sometime, let me know how that works out for you. They didn’t blindfold me, and I know not why, for isn’t that part of the Shanghai trifecta? But anyway they didn’t, so I had a side-scrolling view of Las Vegas as we headed northwest through its suburbs, then its outskirts, to the verge where the buildings stop and the desert starts. There we entered a failed commercial development where nothing stood but a Stash My Sh*t storage facility. It wasn’t much, just a line of concrete lockers with roll-up steel doors, alone and forlorn, on a broad, cracked slab of asphalt. In these befallen times, the manager’s office was closed and shuttered, with a sign that read, F
ACILITY
S
ELF-MONITORED
, U
SE AT
O
WN
R
ISK
.

Louise parked the Segue, and I waited in the car with her while Martybeth got out, presumably to open a unit and prepare it to receive its guest. I tried to catch Louise’s eye in the rearview mirror with a series of friendly, nonthreatening gestures, mostly of the kitten eye and raised eyebrow variety. She conspicuously paid no attention. After a moment, Martybeth returned, taking unsuccessful pains to hide the worried look on her face. Louise opened the window, and Martybeth
whispered to her, a wholly ineffectual security measure when the man in the back seat reads lips.

“We’ve got problems,” I saw her say. “He’s gone.” I couldn’t see Louise’s response, but I read the tension in the back of her neck, down behind the ponytail. “Just gone,” continued Martybeth. “Come look.”

Louise went with Martybeth. I lifted myself as far as the seat belt would allow and craned my neck to watch them walk together to one of the storage units. They stood there inspecting it, at a loss. I could just barely make out the source of their consternation: somehow, a bottom corner of the door had been pried up. Not much. Enough for a man to wriggle through, especially a spry one. A nearby shank of rebar might have played a part. I found it inspiring to see the evidence of Woody’s resourceful escape. Here I’d been having a little pity party for myself (you’re never in the best of moods when you’ve been hijacked), but in that moment I figured that if there was something to this business of being “a Hoverlander,” then maybe I’d manage, too.

They came walking back toward the SUV, Martybeth looking hangdog and Louise radiating fury. It sucks, I guess, when your criminal mastermind plans go blooey.

“We should have left him tied,” I saw Louise say.

“How would he pee?”

“He could’ve pissed in his pants.”

“Sweetie, that’s cruel.”

Sweetie?
Okay, that’s news. I wondered if Jay knew that his staunch softballer switch-hit.

“Whatever,” said Louise. “We still have this one.” Meaning me. “And we won’t make that mistake again.” Then she smiled. I did not like the look of that smile.

For, as it turned out, excellent reasons.

An hour later, just after dusk, I’m locked in the dark, bound and gagged, but butt naked so I can pee any time I like into this here conveniently placed slop bucket. Such consideration. A feature of all the finest hotels. I think they took particular delight in stripping me bare,
but if I was meant to find this humiliating, it really just annoyed. Of rather more concern was the comprehensive use they made of duct tape, encasing my hands and feet in giant balls of the stuff, securing my elbows and knees, then cinching the whole enterprise together so that all I could do was lie on my side like an abandoned bike or rise briefly and awkwardly to my knees. They taped my mouth as well. No yelling for help for young Radar. (Not that anyone would hear me out here—
Last Stash My Sh*t for 500 Miles.
) A slit and a straw gave me access to a bowl of water, but food would have to wait.

Well, wait for what? Presumably for Allie to pull together my ransom, and that grieved me, for there went the bankroll for Operation Citizen. It further grieved me, naturally, to find myself in such a fornicated situation in the first place. I had completely underestimated Red Louise. As for Martybeth and her distaff affections, I plain never saw that coming. Radar’s radar was seriously on the fritz—had been, in fact, since Woody first waltzed onto the scene and drove a wedge between me and my plans. Now look at me. As a function of failed focus, I’d hit a new low. Between my ambivalence toward Woody and my half-assed determination to go straight, I was never fully committed to the snuke nor fully committed to turning my back. Throw in the problematic relationships with my beloved, my jackalope, and the rapidly morphing Mirplo … Grifters shouldn’t have relationships. It makes us lose track.

Speaking of relationships, if Martybeth and Louise were lovers, then what did that make Martybeth’s come-on to me? A purely professional move? Ouch, my feelings.

The hours passed. I think I nodded off.

“He shoots, he scores!”

What?

“He shoots, he scores!”

Yutzes! They left my cell phone in my pants, and left my pants … 
where? I tried to echolocate the sound of Vic’s voice, but it bounced indiscriminately within the bare concrete box. Then I remembered that my phone also lit when it rang and … yes, there it was, a faint pulse of light, diffused through denim, in the far back corner. But how to get there? You’d be surprised how big a ten-by-twelve storage space can be when it’s pitch-black and your only means of movement involves struggling to your knees, flopping forward, rolling over, then getting back to your knees and repeating that clumsy dance.

Of course the phone stopped ringing just as I reached it. Not that I could’ve answered it anyhow. Feeling now truly forlorn, I took what comfort I could in having found my jeans. At least I had a pillow.

“He shoots, he scores!”

Oh, now that’s just mean. The caller must’ve thought so, too, because the phone cut off after one ring.