The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (21 page)

“Joe has contacts. He got some sedative and handed it to me early this morning. I couldn’t get it down Torran until noon.

“When he was out, I got the belt off him. I know it isn’t safe to stay here. I can’t get it out of Mexico without Joe’s help. So I hid it in the house and came to get Joe and tell him. Now I’m afraid to go back there, because if Joe talked to the wrong people and there’s another group after that money, they’ll be at the house now. If you come back with me and help me get the money, and help me get it to El Salvador, I’ll give you seventy thousand.”

“Half, sweet.”

“One hundred thousand. No more. Final offer.” The liquor had gotten into her bloodstream. Her lips looked swollen and she weaved slightly.

“Half, and be good, or I’ll take it all.”

She leered at me. “Maybe we could stick together, huh? Your money is my money?” She laughed. It looked funny to see her standing there laughing, because behind her I could see Joe Talley’s hand, palm upward, the steam curling around it.

She turned toward the bottle. I got there first. She cursed me. She clawed at my face and I slapped her so hard her eyes went off focus. Then she turned sweet. “You gotta help me, honey,” she said. “Gee, I don’t know your name.”

“Russ, sweet. Be good. Stand by the door. There’s prints to get rid of. That heat is going to make time of death tough for them to determine.”

I cleaned up and we left. A man was standing up the walk talking to a woman who stood in front of the neighboring cabaña. I turned back toward the door, waved, and said, “See you later, boy.”

Her face and eyes were empty as we got into the cab. She gave the address “Ocho Calle Revocadera.”

“You know the language?”

“Twenty words, Russ.”

I held my hands low and took a look at the automatic. It was a toy. Twenty-five caliber. Curly designs etched into the steel. The clip was full. The cab took fifteen minutes to put us by the gate in the wall around the house. She sat in the cab and started to tremble. “I’m scared,” she said in a low tone.

I held the door and she got out. I paid the driver and the cab went away from there. I looked at the gate. There was a chain for a padlock, but no padlock. I slipped the catch and pushed it open. The lawn was deep green, unkempt. Flowers straggled in wild confusion along the side of the pink stone house.

“What room is he in?”

She was shivering again. “In . . . in the back.”

“Did you lock the place up?”

“Yes.”

I took a look at the side door. The wood was splintered and pieces of the brass lock lay on the stone step. I pushed her to one side, kicked the door open and went in fast, whirling on balance, the way I had been taught. The hallway was empty, dim. I listened. The house was silent.

“Come in,” I whispered. She came in obediently. She was chewing on her lip. The liquor was sweating its way out of her.

“Where did you hide it?” I whispered, my lips close to her ear.

“You’ll take me with you, Russ?”

“Of course.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

“Come on, then.” She walked with extreme caution. I followed her. It was hard to walk silently on the gayly patterned tile floor. She peered into the next room and then walked in. Suspended from the ceiling was a huge fixture, like a fruit bowl. She pointed up at it. I picked up the antique Spanish chair from its position near the door and put it silently under the fixture. She put her hand on my shoulder and stepped up onto the chair, reached her hands up and around the edge of the fixture.

The flick of movement was off to the side. I turned, firing as I turned, my snapping shot drowned by the resounding smash of a heavier weapon. He stood gaunt in the doorway, wearing only pajama pants, his eyes glittering and feverish, black stubble on his face, his lips cracked and caked with white.

As the muzzle swung toward me, I saw the tiny holes appearing in his naked chest, all left of center. His left. The little automatic shot well. He tried to hold onto the doorway and steady the weapon. He trembled with effort but he could not stay the slow sagging of the muzzle. When he fired it, it was aimed at the tile. It smashed tile, whirred by my head and chunked into the wall behind me. His knees made a clocking sound on the tile and he folded awkwardly onto his face, getting one hand up but not far enough.

I turned toward Anne Richardson. Both her hands were clamped on the rim of the light fixture and her feet were still on the chair. But her knees sagged so that all her weight was on her hands, and on the fixture. It pulled free of the ceiling and she came down with it, hitting cruelly against the heavy arm of the chair, tumbling off onto the floor while the glass splashed into all corners of the room.

I knelt by her and turned her over gently and saw where the bullet had entered, just below the bare midriff, dead center, ranging upward. She gave me an odd little smile and said, “Tell . . . tell them I . . .” Then she chopped her heels at the floor so hard she broke the straps of both cork-soled shoes and they came off. She arched up a few inches and dropped back and died. I wondered what I was supposed to tell them.

I went to the front door and listened. There was no traffic in the road. The nearest beach house was four hundred yards away, and the sound of the surf was loud.

Torran was dead. That look of affability was gone in death. He looked weak, vicious, cruel. He looked like a punk, a dirty small-time killer. I searched the house. The kitchen was small. The girl in the white dress lay with her head under the sink, face down, the big red purse under her stomach, her white dress high on the bare strong brown thighs. The slug had made an evil mess of the back of her head. Her companion, a dark man I had never seen before, was one eighth alive. At least he was breathing. His pulse had a flutter like the wings of a captive moth. He had two in the belly.

When Torran had regained the belt, he had put it where a sick person could be expected to put it. Under his pillow. I opened it. Each compartment was hard as a stone with money. It was crammed in so tightly the belt would have to be cut to get it out without tearing it.

I looked at it. All the money in the world. Fresh money, still in the mint wrappers. All the money in the world for all the things in the world. I sat on the bed that smelled of fever and sickness in the room with the drawn blinds and ran my fingertips back and forth across the visible edges of the stacks of bills. I thought of crazy but possible things.

It was done very, very neatly. It was done the way experts do it. A gardener was working in front of my cabaña at the Hotel de las Americas. Another man was coming down the path with a covered tray. I unlocked the door and went in. When I was three steps inside the room the gardener shoved the muzzle of the weapon through the screen of the side window. The waiter tossed napkin and tray aside, kept the light machine gun the napkin had covered. He held it centered on the small of my back. At the same instant the third man stepped out of my bathroom and covered me with a professional-looking revolver.

I raised my arms and stood there. With no accent at all the man in front of me said, “Sit down and hold onto your ankles.”

I did as directed. They took the gun first. Then they took the money belt off me. They put the gun and the money belt on the bed. They seemed to be waiting for someone. I felt better. I had a lovely idea. “Police?” I asked. My voice sounded like something crawling up the side of a wall.

“But of course,” the English-speaking one said.

We all waited. Broughton came in. The white caterpillar eyebrows showed no surprise, no elation. He looked like the deacon standing at the end of the pew waiting for the collection plate to be handed back.

“You saved us some trouble, Gandy,” he said.

“Glad I could help.”

“We didn’t find Brankis until yesterday. We’ve gotten excellent cooperation from the Mexican authorities.”

“Put that in your report, Broughton.”

He nodded. “I will. You nearly made it, Gandy. One day later . . .”

“My hard luck, I suppose,” I said. “Can I get up on my feet?”

He nodded. I got up. He showed expression for the first time. I was something low, dirty and evil. Something you’d find under a wet rock. Something he wanted to step on.

“We’re taking you back,” he said.

“Kind of you, sir.”

I grinned at him. I gave him a big broad grin and he turned away from it. I was laughing inside. I was laughing so hard I hurt. Let him have his fun. Sooner or later he was going to find out about the wire I sent before returning to my cabaña – that wire to Washington Bureau Headquarters, giving the case code name, reporting recovery, requesting instructions.

You see, it looked like all the money in the world, but sometimes even that isn’t enough.

It started off just like any other Friday night. I left my office in the Emcee Publishing Company building on Forty-Sixth Street at five-oh-five. I went across the street to the quiet, dim little bar in the Hotel Marlo where every Friday night for the past year or so, I’d been stopping off after work for a dry Manhattan. I felt good. I had that Friday-payday glow of satisfaction that you get when you’ve got a good tough week’s work behind you, money in your pocket and two free days at home with Fran and the kids ahead of you.

I wasn’t looking for any trouble. I would have the one drink, leave the Marlo and make the five thirty-seven Express bus to Jersey. I’d meet Johnny Haggard on the bus, and we’d bull it all the way home about our jobs and what we were going to do about the crab grass on our so-called lawns. Johnny lives next door to me in Greenacres, a new development just outside of Wildwood in North Jersey. There are plenty of acres there, but not much of it green, what with the thin layer of topsoil the builders used over all that fill. Anyhow.

No trouble. No excitement. Nothing different. Everything the same as usual. That’s what I thought . . . But a couple of things happened.

The Marlo is a small, old, side-street residential hotel. The bar is tiny, very dimly lighted, quiet, with no jukebox and usually not very crowded. Sometimes I’m the only one in there having a drink at five-ten. But not tonight. There was a girl there, all alone at the bar when I came in.

There was nothing special about her at first glance. And that’s all I did, at first, was glance at her. Believe me. Listen, I’ve been married ten years and I appreciate a good-looking woman the same as the next guy. I kid with the guys and sometimes with Fran, just to needle her a little, about stepping out and fooling around. You know. But you also know it’s talk with most of us guys. After all, a man’s got a swell wife, a couple of fine kids, a nice home. You can’t have everything. So you make up your mind to that and forget about the things you don’t have.

Herb, the tall, gloomy-looking bartender at the Marlo, saw me come in the door and had my Manhattan half made by the time I got onto one of the leather barstools. I sat there, savoring the first lemon-peel-tart smooth burn of the drink in my mouth, trickling down my throat, and looked at myself in the backbar mirror. I was not the only one. The girl at the other end of the bar was looking at my reflection, too. Our eyes met. She let them hold for a moment and then dropped her gaze, almost shyly.

Some girls can do a lot with their eyes. This one could. I don’t know how to explain it. Her eyes were very dark, extremely widely set, kind of intense and brooding-looking. With that one look she seemed to say: “You seem interesting to me. I think I could get to like you. If you study me closely I think you’ll feel the same way. And if you spoke to me, if you did it nicely, not in a wise-guy way, I wouldn’t brush you off. But
you’ll
have to make the approach. I wouldn’t dare.” You know what I mean?

So using the backbar mirror, I looked her over more carefully. She wasn’t well dressed. She was wearing a trench coat, with the back of the collar turned up and no hat. Her hair was thick and blonde and hung gracefully about her shoulders but that’s all you could say about it. Her nose was a little too broad and her mouth too wide and full-lipped, but somehow those features seemed to fit just right with the dark, brooding eyes and although she wasn’t striking, she was a damned attractive girl. The quiet type. The kind who wouldn’t want a lot of money spent on her, who would be content to just sit and have a couple of drinks with a guy and talk and maybe go to a movie or something . . . You can see the way my mind was working.

I’d almost finished the Manhattan when our eyes met in the mirror again and this time, they held longer and I got the feeling that both of us were trying to tear our gaze away and couldn’t. It was as though we were looking very deep into each other, hungrily. And then when she finally yanked her gaze away, I felt shaken and a little giddy, as though this was my third Manhattan instead of my first.

I glanced sideways at her and she had her legs angled off the stool and crossed. She was wearing high heels, not extreme, but enough to give her naturally gracefully curved legs what seemed like extra length and sleekness. I suddenly realized that my heart was pounding too hard, and so were the pulses in my wrist.

Herb the bartender went down to the girl, seeing she’d finished her drink. He asked her if she’d like another. She hesitated and then caught my glance in the backbar mirror again and turned quickly away and said, “Yes, please.” Her voice was soft, husky, almost a whisper.

I knew then that I’d better get out of there, fast. All kinds of crazy thoughts and ideas were going through my head. I drained my glass, started to get up and somebody swatted me on the back. I wheeled angrily to look into Ronny Chernow’s handsome, grinning face.

“Hi, Kip,” he said. “Living dangerously, I see. Sitting in a cozy little bar, drinking cocktails and flirting with a pretty girl! Ah, you sly old dogs, you quiet ones, you never can tell about your type.”

I got very red. I started to tell Chernow that in the first place I wasn’t flirting, in the second place I was only thirty-one years old, at least a couple of years younger than he was. But he wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring at the girl at the end of the bar and smiling at her. He was looking at her the way guys like Ronny Chernow always look at girls, as though she wasn’t wearing anything; patronizingly, as though he was thinking:
You’re not too bad, Baby. Maybe I’ll give you a great big break and go after you!