Plainclothes Naked (9 page)

“Nice place for a honeymoon,” McCardle teased, holding the door for Carmella as Zank pushed her through to Number Three.

“Which is exactly what this ain’t,” Zank said.

The big lady sat on the bed without saying a word. She fixed her gaze on McCardle, who winked at her. Her

peach capri pants, he noted happily, matched the bedspread. The walls were the color of ball park mustard. If his plan went the way it did in his head, he’d have her under the blankets and ready to tussle in not too long. That, or she’d be dead. Either way.

“Tony,” Mac said to his partner, “we need to talk. Private-ito.” But Zank was in no mood. “Can’t it wait?”

McCardle sulked. Tony grabbed him by the arm and moved him to a corner of the room, beside a battered color TV chained to the wall. “What is it? We got business here.”

“You got
beez
-iness,” Carmella chimed in, “at least let
me
watch the goddamn television.”

Tony tossed her the remote, and she clicked on Jerry Springer as the kidnappers huddled. Today’s topic was “Women Who Love Men Who Call Them Mommy.” McCardle caught a glimpse of a Chinese man in a diaper and had to look away.

“So spill,” Zank hissed, giving Mac’s shoulder a serious whack to let him know it better be good.

McCardle licked his lips and looked at Carmella. She was so
sexy!

And there was so much of her....
Yum!

His plan, he knew, could go two ways. That was the genius part. He’d worked it out in the Gremlin while holding Zank’s piece on Carmella. The idea was to tell Zank about the money between Carmella’s tits, then finagle Tony into going for it himself. Tony didn’t know what their hostage was capable of, but McCardle did. All she’d done to Tony was comb his nostrils. What was that? McCardle knew better. And not just because his foot still throbbed where she’d spiked him.
Twice.
No, he’d seen something in her eyes. He knew how to spot a thrill-killer from his stint at Lewisburg. You had to, or you’d end up somebody’s thrill.

If Tony tried anything, Carmella would definitely fuck him up. But Tony was his own kind of monster. As soon as Carmella made her move, whatever it was,Tony would go berserk. He couldn’t help him self. One time, at a Pirates game, when a blind teenager accidentally bumped him at the water fountain, Tony spun around and punched him in the mouth. Then he pushed the terrified youngster to the ground and yanked his shoes off. The blind boy man kept screaming

“Why?” But Tony didn’t care. He threw the kid’s Hush Puppies in the trash and started throttling him.

That’s how Tony was wired. He was a throttler. Which was perfect. The second Carmella provoked Tony into choking her, Mac would step in and kill him, thereby saving her life and, in his much-mulled over fantasy, gaining her outsize, willing body in gratitude.

On the other hand—Plan B—if Tony killed Carmella before Mac could intervene, that worked, too. They could share the money. Tony was a maniac, but he was a
fair
maniac. On every job they’d done, he’d split the take a clean sixty–forty.

“How much you say she’s holding?” Tony whispered, eyeing the saucy rest home supervisor while Mac explained that he didn’t know for sure, but it looked like a tasty wad.

Much to McCardle’s disappointment, Tony didn’t take the bait. “I don’t believe you! We got the chance for serious money, and you’re tripping over chump change some pudge stuffed in her boob-wedgie.”

“Well ... yeah,” Mac said, a little hurt. “Why not?”

Disgust curled Zank’s lips. “You want it, you take it,” he said. “I got better fish to fry. You even know why we checked in here?”

“THEY LOVE THEIR MOMS!”
Jerry Springer shouted, and Tony ripped the plug out of the wall so hard the TV nearly toppled.

McCardle was stung. Though, come to think of it, he wasn’t 100 percent sure what they were doing at the Pawnee. The embarrassing truth showed up on his face.

“The Black Dino doesn’t know,” Zank mocked, pinching Mac’s cheeks and squeezing them until his eyes watered. Zank’s voice was getting louder, and McCardle watched Carmella, perched on the edge of the queen-size bed, straining to hear. “The Black Dino thinks we dropped my mother out a fucking window, took off with some fat Spic bitch, and checked into this fleapit so he could pinch a chunk of lunch money. The Black Dino’s not too fucking bright is he?
Is he?
” he repeated, louder still, pretend bitch-slapping him as Carmella slipped off the peach bedspread.

She padded forward with the remote held high over her beehive and a look in her eye that stuck McCardle’s tongue to the roof of his mouth.

“I can’t hear you!” Zank shouted, at the exact second Carmella whipped the remote off his temple. She reared back and banged him again before he could even turn around.

“Spic bitch, huh?”

“Spic bitch,” Tony smiled, shaking off the second blow. His temple sprouted a bloodless egg, as if something under the skin had hatched and wanted out.

Carmella was so stunned by his disturbo grin she forgot to hit him again. The remote dangled from her raised hand, neglected.

“You wanna play?” Zank asked her, as happy as McCardle’d ever seen him. “The fat Spic bitch wants to play with a white boy?”

Tony let out a yip, and Carmella dodged his first punch with sur prising grace. Ducking under it, she caught Zank on the chin with a punishing uppercut. McCardle had to admit, she fought like a man. He was still thinking about it when he saw the big-barreled .357 in his partner’s hand. Tony held the thing like he meant to shoot, but instead he just poked her. He shoved the barrel hard in Carmella’s stomach, then giggled and jabbed her in her breast.

“Doughy,” he laughed. “We got us the Pillsburita Dough-girl.”

Zank eeny-miney-moed Carmella’s bosoms with the muzzle. “So where’s the dough-girl keep her dough? A dumb-ass black birdy told me there’s some dough-re-mi in there somewhere.”

Zank turned to McCardle and waggled his eyebrows, sharing the fun, and Carmella made for the gun. She ripped it from Tony’s hand, then Tony snatched it back. Carmella slapped at the barrel and for one frantic second, Zank bobbled the weapon, which is when McCardle tried to grab it and fired in his face.

The shot was so loud it left McCardle deaf. When he opened his eyes,Tony was screaming silent movie–style. He must have juked at the last instant because his face was still there, though something was off with the right side of his head. A patch of hair had been blasted down to scalp. The flesh at his temple was scorched, as if he’d napped on a hot radiator. A tarry blotch showed up where his ear used to be.

The ringing in Mac’s skull blotted out whatever his partner was screaming. He watched Zank reel in a tight circle, stretching the collar of his Ban-Lon to the side of his head. Tony wore nothing but Ban

Lon, and now McCardle knew why. In a pinch, it could stretch neatly over a head wound.

The stench of cordite watered McCardle’s eyes, and he all but for got Carmella until he saw her plunge a nail file toward Tony’s other ear. Slightly giddy, he heard himself think:
It’s Get Tony in the Ear Day!
He felt sad that his good friend only had two ears. Soon the fun would have to stop. He felt worse when he realized she wasn’t going for Tony, she was going for
him.
He jerked, and the flimsy metal pierced the skin under his jaw.

“Ow,
shit!
” McCardle cried, barely hearing himself.

By the time he plucked the file out—he closed his eyes and
tugged
—Carmella had the gun on Zank. Mac hadn’t seen how she’d gotten ahold of it, but it didn’t matter. She had the thing, and she was bug-eyed with fury. With her free hand, she rubbed her breasts where Zank had abused her. McCardle found the gesture spectacularly arous ing, despite his injury.

“I
might
not shoot you,” Carmella informed them, “but I’m gonna make you wish I did.”

Poking Tony with the gun, the exact way he’d gun-poked her, Carmella nudged him to the battered desk by the bed.

“Hands on the chair,” she ordered. “I’ve got to
think.
”

Tony’s ear bled freely now, and Mac could see that he had not, in fact, shot the whole thing off. Just the top part, drenching the rest in blood. It looked, to McCardle, like Tony was wearing a wet red ear muff. His own wound turned out to be no more than a scratch.

“Tony, you okay?” McCardle squeezed as much genuine concern as he could into his voice. If Tony even suspected he’d meant to shoot him, he knew it was over. On the off chance Carmella spared him, his partner would assassinate him without blinking.

Mac McCardle died in the Pawnee Lodge,
McCardle thought to him self, trying the sentence out. He imagined hearing the words in Dan Rather’s voice. When he was little, Auntie Big’n always liked to watch the
CBS Evening News
while he tamped her. She left the bathroom door open, so they could catch the TV in the full-length mirror. Thus reflected, Dan Rather had seen him through the most heinous moments of his tender young life. In the full flush of shame, McCardle

used to hear Dan talking from the Motorola. “Now Little Tinky’s cleaning his auntie’s lady-place.... Now he’s patting her nice and dry... .”

Late at night, when Auntie Big’n was sawing logs in her nightie, Dan would talk some more to Little Tinky, which was his special name for him.

“It’s okay, Little Tinky,” the newsman would reassure him. “You’re a fine young man! George Washington Carver had to tamp down his old auntie, too. Same with Bruce Lee and Morley Safer! You’re gonna be okay, Champ!”

Hearing Dan’s voice in his head, repeating his kindly message, the young McCardle would doze off knowing the closest thing he’d ever known, in his little lifetime, to actual peace.

“I said
BEND OVER
,” Carmella barked, bringing Mac violently back to the present. She waved the gun around, pointing first at one man, then the other, a vicious gleam in her eye.

One side of his head sticky with blood, Zank cursed and leaned for ward to plant his hands on the back of the desk chair. The bruise on his forehead had morphed to marbly purple, and his nostrils were scabbed. Mac knew Tony sometimes kept a shiv in his sock. But if he was pack ing now, he was being cagey about it.

Carmella stepped forward and rubbed the .357 through McCardle’s chinos, up and down his butt-crack. “Now you, Gomer.”

“Oh great,” he complained, “I’m Gomer again.” Though the truth was, he nearly swooned from her high-caliber caress.

Carmella’s heavy face broke into a grin. “You giving me lip? You

disrespecting
me? Just for that I’m gonna ask you to do him.” “Do who?” Zank sounded worried.

“Who you think?” Carmella blew them both a kiss and sat down on the bed, crossing her majestic legs. She sighed deeply and settled back on a pair of pillows against the wall, as though ready for a really good TV show. “You
putos
got a favorite movie?
I
do,” she announced. “My favorite movie in the whole world is
Deliverance.
Mmm! That Burt Reynolds is a
real
man. But you know what? That is not even the

reason Carmella likes the film. Burt, he’s hot in every movie. Even
Cannonball Run
. It’s not really about Burt, it’s about that one scene. You know the one?
Squeal like a peeg!
Now you’re with me, right? Now you know what La Carmella is talking about... .”

She leaned forward, pressing the gun to her lips, as if speaking into a blue steel microphone.

“You two
pendejos
have been
muyo
mean to Carmella! But Carmella is going to give you the chance to apologize. In a
special way.
Do you know what that means? Do you, little black man? Eh,
chanate,
what do you say?”

Mac was panicky about giving the wrong answer. “Sq-squeal like a pig?” he stammered. “T-Tony, do you know that scene?”

“Don’t talk to me,” Zank snapped. “Don’t nobody fucking talk to me.”

Tony swiveled around, to say more, and Carmella fired again. This time the bullet tore into a wall, shattering plaster and sending the fake oil painting of a rowboat full of happy gypsies tumbling onto the desk.

“Ho-kay,
be
that way?” Carmella shrieked. “You want to have atti tude? You want to call Carmella a fat Spic bitch? You want to act like you got some kind of
machismo, Meester Zank?
Thass right, I know your name. Your mama told me everything. And I got news for you,
To
-ny, the more macho you act, the more fun it is for Y-O-
Me.
”

She snorted and turned on McCardle. “Now you, my little black stallion. I want you to cha-cha behind your big white poppa and pull down his
pantalones.”

Mac swallowed. “You want me to
what?
Hey, Carmella, this wasn’t my idea. I just came along to help out. I didn’t know nothin’, I
swear.
” “You, shut
up!
” Carmella slapped a hand off her prodigious thigh. “You should say
‘Gracias!’
You get to be the
man.
Now drop your

fancy little trousers. Show Carmella what you got!”

Keeping his eyes fixed on the fallen gypsy painting, McCardle told himself to be strong.
Look at the little family,
he thought to himself.
They’re all alone in a great big ocean! The waves are huge! The sharks are everywhere, but they’re SMILING! They’re probably singing happy Gypsy songs! They’re—

“NOW!” Carmella shouted. “When Mama wants her hot sauce, Mama doesn’t want to wait.”

McCardle unbuckled his pants and Zank lashed at him over his shoulder. “You fucking
think
about it, you’re dead!”

Mac cast a pleading look at Carmella, who pointed with the gun, indicating his manhood—still covered by his banana-yellow boxers. Why had he chosen those, today of all days? McCardle tried to will Dan Rather back into his head, to get him broadcasting. But the news man was absent, in the field, tracking down another trouble-spot.