The Take (24 page)

“Eddie,
please, she was so worried. I just wanted her to know we were all right. She
said she wouldn’t tell anybody.”

“I don’t
fucking believe this,” he said. “You told her where we were!”

The two
of them sputtered at each other a little more, while Val smiled. Then, he
looked over at Linda in the chair, naked against the towel.

“And
you, baby doll, you must be the sister.”

He
eased over next to her. With the gun still pointed at Eddie and Felina, he ran
a hand across her bare shoulder. She turned away.

“Val!”
said Eddie. “Leave her alone. She’s out of the picture.”

Val
continued stroking her skin and smirking.

“I
dunno, buddy boy. I think she’s pretty much in the picture, if you ask me.”
Then he stopped, having had his fill for the moment. He turned his attention
back to Eddie and Felina. “Okay, boys and girls. Show’s over. That garbage bag
in your hand, Eddie. ‘S’that the jack?”

Eddie
nodded.

”Set it
down, real easy-like,”
Val said.

Eddie
complied and said, “Listen, Val, there’s no need to get violent
about this. Just take my share and get
out.”

”You
mean like you took my girl and got out?”

”Hey!”
Felina spoke up. “He didn’t take me. I went with
him. I wanted to get away from you, you fucking pig!”

He
reached out and slapped her with his left hand. She
doubled over, yelping in pain, as Eddie
bent down to her side.

“The
bitch gets it, buddy boy. And you do, too. I can’t have you dropping the dime
on me to Salazar. Now back
away
from that money.”

He
raised the gun into firing position. Linda leaped screaming from her chair, the
towel falling behind her. As she lunged into Val’s midsection, the gun went
off. The shrill crack boomed through the apartment. Val tried to extricate his
gun hand from Linda’s slackening body. She slid to the floor and immediately,
Eddie was on Val, knocking the gun free.

They
struggled until Eddie was able to land a solid right to Val’s jaw. He staggered
backward, as Eddie dove for the gun. Val recovered, then planted a kick in
Eddie’s chest just as he gained a grip on the gun. The weapon, shaken from his
hand, slid under the sofa.

Val
went for another kick, and Eddie ducked it just in time. Scrambling to regain
his balance, Eddie blocked a punch. He countered with one of his own and it
scored. He felt teeth loosen from its impact. He threw a hard right that landed
flush on Val’s nose, reeling him back. He punched his face again, then again,
as Val wobbled farther and farther back toward the front door. A blow to the
solar plexus bent him over in pain, while the final uppercut sent him flying
backward out the door, onto the balcony. He completely lost his balance,
back-tumbling into the wooden balcony railing. It gave way on impact and Val
plunged over the edge. His scream was silenced when he landed face-up on
Charlemagne’s upraised sword, impaled through the heart.

Eddie
stood there on the balcony looking down, breathing fast. Felina ran to his
side, gasping at the grim sight. She twined her arms around his waist.

They
rushed back inside. Eddie dropped to the floor by Linda’s side, but her blank,
upward stare told the story. He got a blanket off the couch
to cover her nude body. He knelt by her in
shock, as Felina pulled at his sleeve.

“Come
on, Eddie,” she said. “Now. Someone’s called the cops already.”

He rose
slowly, his eyes still fixed on the horror of his sister’s corpse. Felina
continued tugging at him until he grabbed the trash bag.

The two
of them ran down into the street. Eddie opened the front door of the van, heaving
the bag inside. He was about to jump in himself, when Felina said, “Eddie,
look.”

She
motioned toward Val’s pickup, parked two spots up from the van.

“What
of it?” he asked.

”The
money, Eddie. Val’s share is in there. It’s gotta be.”

He
hesitated for a second. The cops were no doubt on their
way at this very moment, since Val’s
gunshot could’ve been heard a mile away. They had to split.

But —
if Val’s share was in the truck …

He ran
up to the pickup. Through the window two canvas gym bags lay partially exposed on
the floor of the passenger side, beneath a blanket. He pulled out his revolver
and smashed the window with its heavy butt. Within seconds he hoisted the gym
bags out of the truck and ran back to the van.

They
climbed into the van, as he turned the key. It wouldn’t start up, so he turned
it again. Sirens rang loud and fierce in the distance. They grew close, closer.
He knew these weren’t fire engines.

He
turned the key again, and again the engine only whirred.

Start, goddammit. Start.

Felina
anxiously looked on, urging the engine to turn over.

Finally,
there was ignition. As he slammed it into Drive and jerked the van out of the
parking spot, they were rolling at last. Down one block to Rampart, a quick
right, where they were swallowed up in traffic.

Felina
tore into the gym bags. Bunches of banded money packets were stuffed inside.

“Bingo!”
she shouted. “Eddie, we got it! We got the whole thing.”

Eddie guided
the van up onto the westward Interstate, but the thrill of the money ricocheted
off him. Another million dollars could never chase away the nightmare he’d just
endured.

His
sweating subsided, and his breathing lightened up a little, but … but Linda was
still back there. Naked. And dead.

He
choked, blinking back tears.

Finally,
he spoke, “When we get out of town a little ways, we’ll stop and stash the rest
of the money like we was gonna do.”

“Oh,
Eddie,” Felina cried, “then, it’s Mexico. Mexico!”

R
ain pelted the
roof of the van, and turned the Interstate slick. The lights of Baton Rouge
appeared in the distance. A gas station loomed at the first exit for the
capital city.

“Let’s
pull in here,” Eddie said. “We need gas. Sign back there said a rest area’s a
couple of miles up the road. We’ll stop there and finish stashing the money.”

He
edged the van up to the regular pump and filled it up. After paying, he came
back to the passenger side window. He spoke to Felina in a raised voice over
the heavy rain.

“I’ll
be right back. I gotta take a leak.”

The
tiny men’s room stank. The light bulb over the sink couldn’t’ve been more than
twenty-five watts, if that. Rather than illuminate anything, it only threw a
gray film over the walls and floor.
 
Eddie could hardly see as he stepped into a puddle.

Just as
he moved in front of the urinal and reached for his fly, the door opened.

Shit,
why couldn’t he have locked the door? He hated being in these tiny shithouses
with other guys. You never know what kinda —

The man
entered. He came up close behind Eddie, casting his own wide shadow over the
immediate area. The man’s long breaths tingled the back of Eddie’s neck,
unnerving him. He steeled himself for some kind of queer proposition or
something.

Finally,
the man said in a hushed voice, “Lowell?”

Eddie
spun around. In the half-light, he faced a stocky man, somewhere in his
forties, with a crewcut perched above dead eyes. Eddie’d never seen him before.

Or,
wait, had he?

“Who’re
you?” he asked.

The man
said in a soft voice, which Eddie recognized as carrying an East Texas accent,
“Mr. Kilgore sends his greetings, and his apologies for the mix-up the other
night.”

His arm
moved swiftly in an underhand thrust, jamming the knife hard into Eddie’s
stomach. With a quick upward push, the big blade sliced its way into his heart.
Eddie was dead before his body hit the puddle of piss on the floor. The man
wiped off the knife and left, climbing into the waiting iron-gray Jaguar
outside.

“W
here in Mexico
will you be traveling to, señorita?” asked the uniformed immigration officer.

“Acapulco.”

Felina
breathed the word as softly as the rain that tapped the van’s windshield there
at the Brownsville/Matamoros border crossing.

The way
she said it, well, it meant a lot more than the name of an unabashed tourist
trap. It whispered her dreams of another world, of escape from bitter memories
of a barefoot childhood, of life on the softer side.

It
hinted of a place that would welcome her as a real woman, not as the overheated
fantasy figure of her ragged past. It told of a beautiful future on white sun-drenched
beaches against a silvery sea, where la tristeza, the sadness of life, existed
only in the close, shimmering harmonies of the
Mariachis
. It spilled the secrets she never told, yielded the
pleasures she never knew, promised the cloudless days that for her had existed
only in rumor.

Now
that she had the entire take, and her mother by her side, it would all come
true.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

After thirty years as a professional musician (piano), Mike Dennis
left Key West  and moved to Las Vegas to become a professional poker
player. He turned to writing when his first novel,
The Take
, was published
in 2009.

His next book,
Setup On Front
Street,
was the first of a set of noir novels called
Key West Nocturnes
. These books will lift the veil on Key West and
reveal it as a true noir city, on a par with Los Angeles, New Orleans, or
Miami.
The Ghosts Of Havana
is the
second book in that set. The third,
Man-Slaughter
,
is now available. The fourth,
The Guns Of
Miami
, will be coming in late 2013.

In addition, Mike has begun the Jack Barnett / Las Vegas series,
centering around a reluctant ex-private investigator in Sin City, USA. The
first entry in that series, a novelette called
Temptation Town
, is now available, as is the second installment,
Hard Cash
, also a novelette. The third
in the series, a full novel called
The
Downtown Deal
, is now available.

Mike also has a collection of short stories,
Bloodstains On The
Wall.
 In addition, his stories have been published in A Twist Of Noir,
Mysterical e, Powder Burn Flash, Slow Trains, and
The Wizards Of Words 2009
Anthology
.

Two individual short stories in the noir genre,
Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Eyes
and
The Session,
are now available on Amazon Kindle.

Mike has an experimental rockabilly novel,
Cadillac’s Comin’
, a hard tale of a one-hit wonder who recorded for
Sun Records in the chaotic early days of rock & roll.

In late 2010, Mike moved back to Key West, where he enjoys year-round
island living with his wife Yleana, whom he married on a warm December night in
2012 on the rooftop of an apartment building in Havana, Cuba.

Contact Mike at [email protected]

http://mikedennisnoir.com

Please leave a review on Amazon.

HERE IS AN EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW FROM

SETUP
ON

FRONT
STREET

The FIRST in the
Key West
Nocturnes
series

by Mike Dennis

NOW AVAILABLE

SETUP ON FRONT STREET

© Mike Dennis, 2011

ONE

March, 1991

I
got back to Key
West on the day Aldo Ray died.

This kid sitting next to me on the bus
had one of those old transistor radios, and the news crackled out of it
somewhere south of Miami. The big C got him, it said.

Ray was one of my favorite Hollywood
tough guys. Like myself, he was powerfully built, with a harsh, scratchy voice,
cutting a bearish figure on the big screen. But he had a well-hidden,
squishy-soft center, which usually meant big trouble for the characters he
portrayed.

As the Greyhound made its way down the
Keys that morning, I gazed out at the hot, lazy island hamlets, thinking about
Ray and about what I had to do.

And there could be no room for
squishiness.

≈≈≈

We lumbered into
the downtown Key West terminal. I stepped off the air-cooled bus into the
steamy embrace of the thick humidity I remembered from long ago. I started
sweating right away. As I took a full stretch, my bones creaked and cracked,
and I frowned.

Three days on a bus gives you the
creaky bones.

Three years in the joint gives you the
frown.

The passengers stood around: an
odds-and-ends collection of smelly backpackers, Jap tourists here on the cheap,
plus a couple of scowling Miami jigs — low-grade street types draped in
gold, probably down here to make a dope drop.

As soon as the driver pulled the bags
out of the belly of the bus, I snatched mine and headed across the small
parking lot for a little rooming house nearby on Angela Street. It wasn’t even
a two-minute walk, but by the time I got there, splotches of sweat had stained
the front and back of my guayabera.

Welcome home, pal.

Inside, I signed the register, then paid the
deposit. I paused for just a moment, looking at my signature. "Don Roy
Doyle," it read. That was the first time in a long time that I’d written
my name for anything other than prison shit.

Before my frown dissolved at this liberating
thought, I remembered what got me sent up in the first place.

The clerk pushed me the key. I headed upstairs
with more than a little snap in my step. Slipping the key into the lock, I gave
it a turn. Then I stepped back just a shade.

I cracked the door a couple of inches, but I didn’t
push it all the way in. Instead, I closed it again, then reopened it. Opening
my own door. With my own key. How long had it been?

The room was boiling. I flipped the AC on high,
then peeled off my clothes. With nobody around.

By normal standards, I’m sure it was just an
average-sized room, but compared to my Nevada cell, it seemed gigantic. It was
a lot more space and a far better view than I’d been used to, and it was all
mine.

Smiling, I turned the light on and off a few
times, watching the bulb react to my switch-clicking. Then I moved to the
center of the room where I stretched my arms out as far as they would go. I
turned a couple of complete three-sixties without touching anything.

With those luxuries under my belt, I checked out
the rack. It was huge, compared to the little slab I’d slept on for years. I
hadn’t had my feet up in three days and sweet sleep was calling me.

I didn’t even pull back the covers.

≈≈≈

I came to at twilight. The
humming AC cooled the room to perfection. I felt rested for the first time
since I left Nevada. I took a long, warm shower in wonderful solitude, without
worrying about anyone trying to fuck with me.

Afterward, I pulled a fresh guayabera and a clean
pair of cotton pants out of my bag. I could wear what I wanted now, so I took
my own sweet time getting dressed.

With my brushed-back hair still wet, I headed down
the stairs, out into the warm night. Man, I felt great.

And now, it was showtime.

TWO

F
irst stop, Sullivan’s.

Right in the heart of Duval Street, Key West’s
main drag. It was still happening, still the Keys’ hottest Irish pub, packed
with tourists and fancy-assed locals, slamming back the whiskey and cold brew
as fast as it could be poured.

Not my kind of place, but so what.

People crammed the tables along the wall opposite
the bar, wanting to feel the music coming from the high-energy piano player in
the window. No Irish folk songs here, only hard-driving rock & roll.
Dancers filled the aisle down the center.

The AC blew full bore, but it was no use in this
crowd. Hairdos, which earlier in the evening had poofed up perfectly in the
mirror at home, now hung limp over sweaty foreheads.

Almost buried in the racket, the continuous
ringing of the cash register bled through. Nothing had changed in three years.

I shoved my way to the rear of the club where I
spotted him in his usual seat in the far corner. There were a couple of others
at the table with him, including a cooing brunette, not his wife, running long
manicured fingers through his hair. She had his total attention, so he didn’t
see me until I was right up on him.

"Hello, Sully," I said, disregarding the
others.

It startled him.

I sat down without being invited while I waited
for him to say something. Finally, he gathered himself.

"Don Roy! Well, son of a gun! When’d you get
back?" He stuck out his hand.

I shook it, raising my voice to be heard above the
music. "Fresh out. Just got in today."

My eyes scanned the room, taking in the frenzied
activity.

"Looks like things have gone pretty well
since I’ve been gone. Real well." His nod said they did.

Sully didn’t look like he’d changed any at all. He
hadn’t added any weight to his slender frame, while his well-preserved boyish
face showed dollar-green eyes, still cold and indifferent.

We looked at each other for a second. Then I said,
"Let’s go upstairs for a minute." I picked up a napkin from the table
and wiped sweat off my neck and forehead.

The piano player kicked off a Jerry Lee Lewis tune
as Sully excused himself. We got up from the table, heading for the back steps
to the office.

The office.

It was more like Sully’s tribute to himself. Quiet
lighting and tasteful furniture were upstaged by dozens of photos on the walls.
Tacky framed pictures of Sully with his arm around various VIPs reminded
visitors of his respectability. Most were taken during his ten years in Key
West, but a few offered glimmers into his New Orleans past.

There he is with rogue governor Edwin Edwards.

Here’s one with aging mobster Carlos Marcello.

Over here, he’s getting the bear hug from Al Hirt,
while French Quarter emperor AJ Frechette looks on.

I had to admit, not bad for a tough New Orleans
Irish Channel kid named Frankie Sullivan, who started from zero.

Now, according to this fancy-looking Chamber of
Commerce certificate decorating the wall above his desk, his grifter days are
behind him. The Chamber conveniently forgot to include in that certificate that
he came here a few years ago on the lam, and now he’s Mister Francis X
Sullivan, solid citizen and dispenser of good times to those who count here on
this island at the end of the road.

He moved around behind the desk and sat in the big
chair. Even though he was a little guy, he seemed to fill it up. I took the
seat in front. The desk was big, too big, made of dark wood.
Great Balls of
Fire
was only faintly audible from downstairs.

"So, you look good," he said uneasily.
"You’ve slimmed down a little."

"Prison’ll do that."

"A little gray around the temples, too,
huh?" He fingered his temples, saying, "Yeah, we’re getting to that
age, you know. I’ll be forty-six next time. You and me, we’re about the same
age, right?"

His hair was still brown all over, with glints of
red reflecting in the office light.

"I just turned forty." I didn’t like
saying that.

He reached into a desk drawer for a fresh pack of
cigarettes. I could tell he was trying not to notice that I never took my eyes
off him, off his every movement. He slowly stripped off the cellophane top,
then shook a few partway out of the package and held it out toward me.

"No, thanks," I said. "I quit right
after I got locked up."

"You quit? Hey, way to go. I wish I could do
it. Was it hard?"

"Cigarettes are like money in there. It’s
like smoking dollar bills."

"Really?"

"No point to it. When I looked at it like
that, it made quitting a lot easier."

He nodded and stuck one between his lips.

"Listen, boyo, I was real sorry to hear about
your mom. She was a great lady."

I looked away. "At least she didn’t suffer
much."

"Thank God. We should all be so lucky. Too
bad it happened after you went away. She’s in heaven right now, I know."

He flicked his gold lighter. The flame licked the
tip of the cigarette, then he pulled in the first drag, a deep inhale. He let
out the smoke in a thin, gray curl toward the ceiling. For just a split second,
I thought about having one, it looked so good.

I wanted to move on to something else. He picked
up on it.

"Man, we just had the biggest St Paddy’s day
ever. You shoulda been here. The town was mobbed with tourists and the Irish
ambassador himself was here from Washington. Miami TV was here to cover it. BK
was here — oh, did you know, he’s the mayor now after taking over from
his daddy? Like, who didn’t see that coming, right? Anyway, all the local
bigshots showed up."

He leaned back, drawing again on his cigarette. He
blew a perfect smoke ring to celebrate this big event. He looked like he was
finished with this story, but then he added, "We took in thirteen
grand!"

That wasn’t what I wanted to talk about, either.

I saw the Bushmill’s bottle on the shelf to my
left, along with several rocks glasses lined up around it. I reached for it,
then poured a shot into one of the glasses.

I gently sipped the magic fluid, pushing back the
temptation to chug it. My first taste of Irish whiskey in three years. It was
the good stuff: single malt, ten years old. It went down slow and warm.

For just a moment, I remembered back to when I was
a teenager, watching my grandfather drinking this stuff from a private stash.
He and my grandmother didn’t have much money, but he’d sometimes manage to save
up enough to buy a bottle of the single malt, then he’d squirrel it away so she
wouldn’t find it. He used to tell me about one of our ancestors — I
forget which one — who was a bigshot at the Bushmill’s distillery over in
Ireland way back when.

I almost smiled.

"Thirteen grand’s pretty strong, Sully."

"Damn right it is. And it’s gonna get
stronger. I’m thinkin’ of opening another Sullivan’s up in South Beach. And get
this. I got an angle to move into Cuba when they open things up down there.
Should be pretty soon now."

"Cuba?"

"Oh, man. It’s gonna be great. Castro’ll be
history by the end of the year, you know, now that the Soviet Union is no more.
The Russians are gone, so he’s on his way out. And when he goes, things are
gonna explode here."

"You think so?"

"Well, you know they don’t have shit down
there right now. There’s all kinds of shortages all over the damn place. And
the infrastructure? Forget it. They won’t be able to accommodate a lot of
tourists for quite a while because they need everything."

"Everything?"

"Damn right. They need telephones, gasoline,
good hotels, fucking toilet paper, the whole ball of wax. Paved roads, every
goddamn thing."

"Really."

"No shit. It’s gonna be years before they’re
really ready for the huge number of Americans who want to go there. And until
then, a lot of people are gonna stay here and in Miami, in real hotels, and
just take short day trips to Cuba. Man, this is where it’s at right now."

"You said you’re working an angle to move
down there?"

"I can’t tell you about it now, cause it’s
still in the planning stages, but the deal kind of involves BK."

"What’s BK got to do with it?"

"Well … I can’t really say anything just yet,
but he’s behind it."

"Sounds like you’ve got big plans,
Sully."

I sipped slowly at the Irish whiskey.

"Expansion," he said. "That’s what
it’s all about. Hey, man, you got to move up or move out. This is the nineties,
you know?"

This was only 1991, but I was already tired of
hearing people say, "This is the nineties." The way they said it, I
don’t know, it was like it excused any type of idiotic behavior or off-the-wall
attitude
. Hey, I know I’m an asshole, but so what! This is the nineties!

I hated it.

They’d even picked up on it in the joint. It
looked like I was in for another nine years of it, but I swear, if I heard even
one more person say it …