Two for the Money (32 page)

“What?”

“When are you going to be done at the dentist’s?”

“Why?”

“Maybe I want to fill
your
cavity.”

She laughed and said, “That’s medicine I’ll gladly take. I’ll be home in half an hour.”

“Good,” he said, and suddenly noticed the trail of red across the floor down at the end of the counter. “Hey, Kare, hold on, will you?”

“Sure, Jonny.”

The thin red streak led from the side door across the floor and around into the first backroom. What the hell was it, anyway? It wasn’t . . . blood?

He followed the red trail into the second backroom.

And found the slumped shell of his uncle.

Jon started to shake.

He approached his uncle tentatively, bent down saying, “Unc? Uh . . . Planner?”

He shook his uncle’s shoulder and could feel how slack the body was, and turned him off his side and saw Planner’s face, saw the queer smile, saw how white the face was, saw the blood his uncle was soaking in, and ran back to the phone.

“Je . . . jesus,” he sputtered into the receiver.

“Jonny?”

“Listen . . . something . . . something terrible’s happened.”

“What should I do, Jonny?”

“Nothing. Go . . . go home when . . . Larry’s through and . . . I’ll call you in an hour. O . . . okay?”

“Are you all right?”

“I . . . will be.”

He hung up.

Shaking, he felt the cramp buckle him over, overpower him, and he heaved his breakfast onto the old wooden floor of his uncle’s antique shop.

The housing addition had a vaguely English look to it, rough wood, watered-down Tudor architecture, occasional stone. It was more plush than your run-of-the-mill housing addition, carefully laid out on gently rolling hills, each lawn spacious and immaculately tended, though the spread-out
nature of the addition and the lack of trees made it look barren and lonely and cold against the clear sky. It was on the edge of Iowa City, on one of the less-traveled routes out of town, just beyond a modest commercial area dominated by a Giant grocery store, Colonel Sanders Chicken, and filling stations. On the other side it was surrounded by sprawling farmland, and at that very moment a farmer was on a tractor working slow and hard along the horizon, making the cluster of houses seem out of place and somehow irrelevant, to the farmer’s life at least. Though the houses were not crackerbox identical, there was still a housing addition sameness to them, which was only emphasized by the contrived effort to avoid repetition that amounted mainly to alternating one-story homes with split-levels. Walter slowed as he approached one of the one-story homes, focusing his vision on the number on the door, making sure this was the one he was after.

This particular house was dark wood with light stone and sat on a corner next door to a house that was light wood with dark stone. It was just another house in another (if elite) housing addition, with the only noticeable difference being that this had a red Mercedes Benz in the driveway instead of a Ford LTD or a Cadillac. The house was a surprise to Walter, as the whole addition had been. It was not the sort of neighborhood where he’d expected to find the home of a dope peddler.

Of course Sturms was more than a dope peddler, Walter supposed, though he didn’t know what else you’d call him, really. Supplier, maybe. From the looks of the housing addition Sturms evidently thought of himself as a district sales manager or something.

Walter had a low regard for people who dealt in drugs, and knew his father, Charlie, shared that low regard. Once they had discussed the subject and his father had told him that the Chicago Family was only into drugs because they had to be, and they were in it mainly as financeers, not fucking around with diddly-shit pushers and such.

Walter guessed that in Iowa City circles Sturms was probably considered to be “the Man,” which wasn’t particularly impressive, since most towns have one. Just the same, Charlie had assured his son that Sturms
was
important, in a small-time way, because he was the dope guy in Iowa City, and Iowa City was one of the big drug centers in that part of the midwest.

And Sturms was important for another reason.

He was important to this Iowa City trip, because if Walter and Charlie ran into any trouble, Sturms was someone they could turn to.

“Doesn’t he know you?” Walter had asked, on the drive down from Wisconsin that morning. “Doesn’t he know you’re supposed to be dead?”

“He’d know me by name, sure,” his father had said, “but not by sight. And we sure as hell won’t be handing him no goddamn calling card. Look, I just mentioned him ’cause if we get in a tight squeeze, we can call on the guy, see, just drop a few of the right names and he’ll jump for us, is all.”

It made sense that Sturms wouldn’t know Charlie. Walter knew that his father had been high up enough in the Family to make it unlikely for a nobody like Sturms, stuck clear out here in Iowa, to know him personally. And, too, his father looked different now, since his “death.” Walter figured an old friend could easily pass Charlie on the street without recognizing him. Charlie had lost weight, was damn near skinny. And there was the work that plastic surgeon did, too, changing Charlie’s bumpy, several-times-broken nose into something small and straight, right off a movie star’s face.

All of this floated down Walter’s mental stream, but he wasn’t thinking about any of it, really; these were non-thoughts, passing quickly, skimming across the surface of his mind, part reflex action, part Walter’s semiconscious attempt to stay calm. He had driven slowly through the housing addition, noting the children on bicycles, the teen-aged boys mowing lawns, a husband or wife hosing down family cars in drives, none of it making any impression on
him, no more than a boring sermon in church, though all this middle-class straight life reminded him to keep calm, to drive slow, to make as if the man sitting next to him was just taking a nap.

Walter thought about a lot of things, but the only thing he really thought about was his father, because his father was hurt and his father’s being hurt was the only thing that was really on Walter’s mind.

They’d come out of the antique shop awkwardly, with Walter trying to keep his one arm under the huge cardboard box of money, while looping his other arm around his wounded father’s waist. It was like being in one of those races at a picnic where they strap your leg and somebody else’s together and tell you to run. It was like that, only with blood.

Walter’s father had trailed blood out of there and Walter had been very worried. He knew that his father had high blood pressure and also knew that having high blood pressure could make a wound worse for a person, maybe make him bleed more, maybe make him more prone to shock. In the car he had looked at the wound in his father’s leg, exposed as it was just below the line of the Bermuda shorts, and Walter was stunned by the realization of how frail his father’s legs looked, how skinny they were, how the flesh just hung helpless on the bone. Walter was surprised, too, that such a small wound could leak so much blood. His father had stopped the bleeding by ramming a wadded handkerchief in against the hole in his bare thigh, but the wadded handkerchief hadn’t stopped Walter’s worrying.

Charlie would say, “Don’t worry, just get out of here,” whenever Walter asked him about the leg. Charlie had said it while Walter helped him out the antique shop door, and he said it while Walter helped him into the car, and he said it as Walter drove out Dubuque Street toward the Interstate 80 approach. And then Charlie passed out.

Walter had pulled into a driveway that led down to a tree-sheltered
fraternity house and backed out and headed back on Dubuque toward the downtown. He stopped at a Standard station to use the pay phone. He found Sturms’s number in the phone book and dialed.

“Yes,” a voice had said. A bored tenor voice.

“Mr. Sturms?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“You don’t know me, but we have mutual friends.”

“Really.”

“I was told you could help out in a pinch. I have a man with me who needs help. He needs a doctor.”

“Who is this?”

“We have mutual friends.”

“You said that before. What kind of mutual friends?”

“Chicago friends. Milwaukee friends.”

“Name one.”

“Harry in Milwaukee. Now listen, I’m not screwing around. We need some help here.”

“How bad do you need the doctor?”

“I don’t know. Not bad I hope. But bad enough to bother you when I rather wouldn’t.”

“The guy isn’t dying or anything, is he?”

“Not unless it’s from old age, waiting on you to make up your mind if you’re going to help us or not.”

“Shit. I guess you better bring him out to my place. Where are you now?”

Walter told him. Sturms gave Walter directions.

And so now Walter was pulling into the oversize driveway of the house that was dark wood with light stone. He stopped the blue Olds alongside the red Mercedes, his foot on the brake, the car still in gear. He stared at the dark rough wood of the double garage doors and after ten seconds honked the horn once. He reached a hand over and patted his father’s shoulder, as if to reassure the unconscious man.

The garage door swung suddenly up and out of view and a man motioned at Walter to pull the Oldsmobile inside and
Walter did. The man shut the garage door and walked over to meet Walter as he got out of the car.

The man was in his vague thirties, with the build of a linebacker, and had light brown hair that was neither long nor short and had been expensively styled to look natural. He wore a long-sleeve rust-color shirt and white slacks and was tanned and handsome in a standard sort of a way, except for a broad, flat nose.

Walter said, “Is the doctor here?”

Sturms said, “I haven’t been able to get him.”

“Jesus. What’s the problem?”

“Out on a house call. What happened anyway?”

“My father’s been shot.”

“How?”

“Never mind how. You don’t really want to know how, do you?”

“I guess not. How bad is he?”

“Caught a bullet in his thigh. He’s unconscious.”

“Let me take a look at him.”

Walter led Sturms around to the other side of the car. Sturms just peeked in the window, then turned to Walter and said, “Let’s go inside.”

“You going to help me move my father?”

“He’s all right where he is.”

“Well . . .”

“Moving him inside won’t help him any. Come on. We’ll try the doctor again.”

Walter followed Sturms into the house. The first room was the kitchen, where all the appliances were pastel green and the wood was maple brown. Dozens of bottles of pills sat on the counter. Walter’s surprise registered on his face.

Sturms grinned, said, “Wondering why I’d leave my stock out in the open like that, kid?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“That’s not merchandise. Those are vitamins I take. I wouldn’t touch that shit I sell. Haven’t even touched grass in years.”

Walter was led into a large living room with an open-beam ceiling of the same dark rough wood as the outside and pebbled plaster walls the same rust color as Sturms’s shirt. The carpet was burnt umber, and thick and fluffy like whipped egg whites. There was a sofa, a recliner and a chair with an ottoman, all dark brown imitation leather with button-tufted seats and backs. Cocktail table, end tables, even the stereo and television complex were dark Spanish-style hand-carved wood, looking lush and expensive. It was an attractive room, only slightly marred by two out of place abstract paintings over the sofa, a red spattered on a field of white, and a white spattered on a field of red. Sturms told Walter to sit, and Walter went to the sofa so he could sit with his back to the paintings. Air whooshed out of the cushion as Walter settled his ass uneasily down.

Sturms left the room momentarily and came back with a yellow telephone, which he plugged into a jack behind one of the sofa’s end tables. He brought the phone around in front of Walter and sat it in front of him, on the cocktail table, next to a bowl of artificial fruit.

“Now call Harry in Milwaukee,” Sturms said. “I want some proof of who you are.”

“You haven’t even called the doctor yet,” Walter said.

“I’ll get you something to drink while you’re doing that. What would you like? A beer? Maybe a Pepsi?”

“You haven’t even called the doctor yet, have you?”

“You call Harry. Then I’ll call the doctor.”

“You son of a bitch,” Walter said, and jumped up off the sofa.

Sturms showed Walter the gun. Walter didn’t know where the gun had come from, but Sturms most certainly did have it. It was an automatic, silenced, smaller than the ones Walter and his father had carried earlier that day. Those nine millimeters were under the seat of the Olds right now, not doing Walter a hell of a lot of good.

“What’s going on, honey?” a female voice said.

A tall brunette with a short haircut and dark tan skin was
standing in the background. Like Sturms’s gun, she’d popped up from nowhere. She was wearing a warmup outfit, a trimmed-in-brown beige tee-shirt and matching short shorts, breasts bobbling under the skimpy top. Walter sat down again.

“Nothing, baby,” Sturms said. “Go get my friend and me a couple of beers, will you?”

“Sure thing, honey.”

“My wife,” Sturms explained, as she took her time bob-bling out. “Sweet kid. She painted those pictures there, on the wall, behind you.”

“Talented,” Walter said.

“Now why don’t you call Harry?”

“I don’t know his number.”

“I thought he was a friend of yours.”

“He’s a friend of that man bleeding out there in your fucking garage.”

“All right,” Sturms said, sticking the gun down in his waistband. “I’ll call him and let you talk to him.”

He crouched and dialed the number from memory. It took a few seconds for the direct-dialing long-distance wheels to turn, and then he said, “Could I speak to Harry, please . . . Mr. Sturms in Iowa City is calling. I’ll hold . . . Hello, Harry, it’s good to hear your voice. No, everything was fine with the last shipment, no problem, everything’s terrific. No, it’s something else . . . I have a guy here says he’s a friend of yours, wants some help from me. I’ll put him on.”