“Never been to Mexico in my life, Brute,” she said with a grin. “Give it up.”
“With a name like Cruz, you gotta have been in Mexico.”
Her eyes flicked to him. “Why would you think my name is Cruz?”
He laughed and said, “Okay.” But she looked like a Cruz.
She clicked on the radio, dialed around, found a country station. “Instead of worrying about where I’m from, see if you can get the Alabama accent going.”
The first song up was Sawyer Brown singing “Some Girls Do,” and Cohn sang along with it, all the way to the end, and then shouted, “Jesus Christ, it’s good to be back in the States. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and North Ireland can go fuck itself.”
* * *
RANDY WHITCOMB, Juliet Briar, and a man whose real name might have been Dick, but who called himself Ranch, lived in a rotting wooden house on the east side of St. Paul, that sat above a large hole in the ground called Swede Hollow; once full of houses full of Swedes, the hole was now a neglected public park.
Whitcomb was a pimp. He’d become a pimp as soon as he could, after his parents had thrown him out of the house twelve years earlier. He liked the idea of being a pimp, and he liked TV shows that featured pimps and pimp-wannabes and his finest dream was to own a Mercedes-Benz R-Class pimpmobile in emerald green. He enjoyed the infliction of pain, as long as he wasn’t the object of it.
Briar was his only employee.
She was a heavy young woman in a shapeless gray dress; her hair the sad tatters of a curly perm gone old. She sat half-crouched over the steering wheel of Whitcomb’s handicapped van, and alternately chirped brightly about the sights on the street, and sobbed, pressing her knuckles to her teeth, fearing for what was coming. What was coming, she thought, would be a whipping from Whitcomb, with his whipping stick.
He’d broken the stick out of a lilac hedge a block from their house. A sucker, looking for light, the branch had grown long and leggy, an inch thick at the butt, tapering to an eighth of an inch at the tip. Whitcomb had stripped the bark off with a penknife; the switch sat, white and naked, spotted here and there with blood, in the corner of the room next to his La-Z-Boy chair.
He’d beaten her with it three times over the summer, when her performance had sagged below his standards.
He liked the work. He couldn’t stand up, so he made her drop on the floor like a dog, on her hands and knees, while he sat on his chair and whipped her with the switch. The thing was limber enough that it didn’t break bone—he wouldn’t have cared, except that broken bones would have kept her from waiting on him—but it did maul her skin. So she laughed and chirped and pointed and giggled and then sobbed, the fear rising in her throat as they got closer to the house.
They couldn’t afford a van equipped for handicapped drivers, and Whitcomb hadn’t been trained on one anyway. They did get one with a hydraulic ramp, bought used and cheap through CurbCut, a St. Paul charity. At the house, Briar parked next to a wooden ramp built by Make a House a Home, and Whitcomb dropped the ramp and rolled out of the van, used the remote to retract the ramp and close the van door. He hadn’t spoken a word since the airport, but his breath was coming in fast chuffs.
Whitcomb was getting himself excited, though, of course, nothing would come of it. He’d taken the bullet low in the spine, and he’d not have another erection in this life.
Now he spoke: “Inside.”
“The light’s on,” Briar said. She stopped. She was sure she’d turned the lights off as they left. “I turned them off.”
She was stalling, Whitcomb thought. “Ranch must be up.”
“Ranch is
not
up.”
Stalling. The crazy bitch had got the flight wrong, and now a pharmaceutical salesman was wondering why he couldn’t find his sample case, and somebody else was wondering why a green nylon bag was going round and round on a baggage carousel somewhere else. Eventually they’d look in it, and find the sample case, and put two and two together, and the whole goddamn racket could come down around their ears. She was stalling.
“In the house,” he said.
“The light . . .”
He shouted at her now: “Get in the fuckin’ house . . .”
She turned and climbed the ramp, unlocked the door and pushed inside, holding the door for him, and he bumped over the doorjamb and turned toward the living room and accelerated. Moving too fast to turn back. And there were the Pollish twins, Dubuque and Moline, sitting on the couch, big bulky black men with cornrowed hair, drop-crotch jeans, and wife-beater shirts.
Ranch was lying in a corner on a futon, facedown, mouth open, a white stain under his chin, breathing heavily.
Moline had one of Whitcomb’s beers in one hand and a piece-of-shit .22 in the other. The twins were managers in the sexual entertainment industry, and were known around the St. Paul railroad tracks as Shit and Shinola, because stupid people found them hard to tell apart. The cops and the smarter street people knew that Dubuque had lost part of his left ear in a leveraged buyout on University Avenue. Moline pointed the gun at Whitcomb’s head and said, “Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you in the motherfuckin’ head.”
“What are you talking about?” Whitcomb asked. “What are you doing in my house?” He rolled across the room to Ranch and jammed the foot-plate on the wheelchair hard into Ranch’s ribs: “You alive?”
Ranch groaned, twitched away from the pain. The door slammed in the kitchen. Dubuque jumped and asked, “What was that?”
“Woman runnin’ for the cops,” Whitcomb said. “She knows who you are. You’re fucked.”
Moline looked at the front door, then asked, “Why you running Jasmine down my street?”
“Jasmine?” Whitcomb sneered at him. “I ain’t seen her in two weeks. She’s running with Jorgenson.”
“Jorgenson? You pullin’ my dick,” Moline said.
“Am not,” Whitcomb said. “Juliet’s all I got left. Jasmine got pissed because I whacked her lazy ass with my stick, and she snuck out of here with her clothes. The next thing I hear, she’s working for Jorgenson. If I find her, she’s gonna have a new set of lips up her cheek.”
Dubuque said to Moline, casually, “He lying to us.”
“Juliet knows us, though,” Moline said. He was the thinker of the two.
“I’m not lying,” Whitcomb said.
Moline stood up, pulled up his shirt, stuck the .22 under his belt and said, “Get the door, bro.”
Whitcomb figured he was good: “The next time you motherfuckers come back here . . .”
Dubuque was at the front door, which led out to the front porch, which Whitcomb never used because of the six steps down to the front lawn.
“We come back here again, they gonna find your brains all over the wall,” Moline said, and with two big steps, he’d walked around Whitcomb’s chair, and Moline was a large man, and he grabbed the handles on the back and started running before Whitcomb could react, and Dubuque held the door and Whitcomb banged across the front porch and went screaming down the steps, his bones banging around like silverware in a wooden box.
The whole crash actually took a second or two, and he wildly tried to control it, but the wheels were spinning too fast, and there was never any hope, and he pitched forward and skidded face-first down the sidewalk, his legs slack behind him like a couple of extra-long socks.
Moline bent over him. “Next time, we ain’t playing no patty-cake.”
Juliet showed up three or four minutes later, crying, “Oh, God, oh, God. Are you all right, honey? Are you all right? The cops are coming . . .”
Whitcomb had managed to roll onto his back. Most of the skin was gone from his nose, and he was bleeding from scrapes on his hands and forearms and belly.
He started to weep, slapping at his legs. He couldn’t help himself, and it added to the humiliation. “Davenport did this to me,” he said. “That fuckin’ Davenport . . .”
* * *
BRUTUS COHN didn’t have much to unload. He tossed his suitcase on the motel bed and said, “I need to take a walk—haven’t been able to walk since I got on the train in York. You get the guys together. See you in a half hour.”
Cruz nodded and picked up a pen from the nightstand and handed it to him: “Write my room number in your palm. Remember it.”
Cohn wrote the number in his palm and Cruz led the way out, and he said, “See you in a bit, babe,” and gave her a little pat on the ass. She didn’t mind, because that was just Cohn being Cohn, no offense meant.
So Cohn took a walk, looking up and down the street. They’d gotten off at Exit 2 in Wisconsin, a major fast-food and franchise intersection outside the built-up part of the metro area.
From the front of the motel, straight ahead, he could see a Taco Bell, which made his mouth water, and a McDonald’s, both a block or two away. Closer, an Arby’s, Country Kitchen, a Burger King, and a Denny’s. To his right, across the main street off the interstate, a Buffalo Wings, a Starbucks, a Chipotle, and a couple of stores. To his left, a supermarket, a liquor store, some clothing stores, a buffet restaurant. Behind the hotel, to the left, a Home Depot.
Excellent. He needed fuel, liquor, and a hardware store, and here it all was.
He hit the Taco Bell first and got a Grilled Stuft Burrito with chicken; while he ate, he read the
Star Tribune
about the Republican convention. The paper was just short of hysterical, which was good. The more confusion, the more cops doing street security, the better. Besides, he was a political conservative and wished John McCain well. He liked the thought of a bunch of little anarchist assholes getting beat up by the cops.
Out of the Taco Bell, he stopped at the supermarket, got some apples, one doughnut, and three Pepsis. He picked up a bottle of George Dickel at the liquor store, then carried the whole load down to Home Depot, where he bought a box of contractor’s clean-up bags and a crescent wrench, the biggest one he could find.
“Big wrench,” said the cute little blonde at the checkout.
He gave her a twinkle: “I gotta big nut to deal with,” he said.
She giggled, seeing in the comment a double entendre of some kind, which may or may not have existed, Cohn thought, as he walked back to the motel with his bags.
* * *
SO THE GANG was back in town.
Jesse Lane was a white man with dirty-blond hair that fell on his shoulders, a thick face with eyes too closely spaced, a bony nose marked by enlarged pores, and thin, pale-pink lips. A handmade silver earring, big as a wedding ring, hung from his left earlobe. Fifteen years earlier he’d done time in an Alabama prison, for armed robbery, where he picked up the weight-lifting habit. He was still a lifter, and showed it in the width of his shoulders and his narrow, tapered waist.
Lane owned a farm in Tennessee, on the ’Bama border, where he grew soybeans and worked on cars in a shop in the barn. His specialty was turning run-of-the-mill family vehicles into machines that could flat outrun the highway patrol—not for crooks, but just the everyday
Dukes of Hazzard
wannabes.
Tate McCall was a black version of Jesse Lane. He’d done a total of ten years in California, both sets for robbery, but had been clean for eight years. Like Lane, he’d been a lifter, but where Lane was square, McCall was tall and rangy, like a wide receiver, with hands the size of dinner plates. McCall owned a piece of a diner on Main Street in Ocean Park, a neighborhood in Santa Monica.
Jack Spitzer was from Austin, Texas. He looked like a big-nosed French bicycle racer, or a runner, mid-height but greyhound-thin, his thinning black hair slicked back on his small head. His nose had been broken sometime in the past. He was mostly unemployed.
Lane was sitting at the computer desk, McCall was draped over an easy chair, Spitzer sat on a bed, more or less facing the other two. Lane and McCall were wearing golf shirts and slacks, while Spitzer wore a short-sleeved dress shirt and a black sport coat, because, all the others thought, he was carrying a pistol in the small of his back, the dumb shit.
Rosie Cruz came through the door that connected Cohn’s two rooms and said, “He’s coming.”
“Nothing around here to see but chain restaurants,” McCall said.
“How’d you know?” Cruz asked.
“I looked,” McCall said. “While you were pickin’ up Brute.”
“And that’s what Brute’s doing—looking,” she said. “You know what he’s like.”
“We gotta get this shit straightened out,” McCall said, looking at Spitzer.
Spitzer said, defensively, “I’ll do whatever Brute says.”
“Goddamn right,” Lane said.
* * *
THEY ALL SAT, waiting, the television on but muted, a CNN chick soundlessly running her mouth with a forest fire on a screen behind her head. A minute or two, then a key rattled in the door lock, and Cohn came in. He was wearing tan golf slacks, a red golf shirt, and a blue blazer, carrying a grocery bag and a plastic sack. He looked like a city manager on his day off.
He saw them and flashed his smile, genuinely happy to see them, and they knew it. He shut the door and said, “Boys. Damned good to see you. Jesse. Tate. Jack . . .” He stepped through the room, shaking hands, slapping shoulders. Cruz was leaning in the doorway to the second room, watching.
Lane said, “Man, you’re looking good. I like that beard.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Cohn said, scratching at the beard. “Let me run down the hall and get some ice.”
He picked up the ice bucket, went out, and was back in a minute with a bucket of ice cubes.
“Got some Dickel,” he said. “I been drinking nothing but scotch and gin, and it’s good, but it ain’t bourbon.”
McCall said, “We got some shit to figure out.” He looked at Spitzer.
“All right,” Cohn said. “Let’s get it out.” He found a glass, scooped some ice into it, and poured in a couple of ounces of bourbon. “I think we agree that Jack sorta screwed the pooch the last time out.” He took a sip of the drink and closed his eyes and smiled: “That’s smooth.”