Run For the Money (6 page)

The rage on Dad’s face changed to confusion. “Who the hell
are
you?”

“Don’t matter. I’m telling you to leave. At least for tonight. You go and think about this. You come back when you’re ready, but you got to cool off. These kids want to do what comes natural you got a right to disapprove but this shit—” Bo turned to reference Mandy’s bruised face, but she was no longer in Steven’s arms. Bo spun his head around to his other side in time to see Mandy fire the gun.

Dad clutched at his gut. The guy even died like a black and white movie. He stayed up for a few seconds, gurgled out a pained sound and his knees started to curl under. He would have gone down with an Academy Award worthy performance, but she squeezed off three more rounds and he flopped backwards, slamming hard into a short coffee table and then ended up face down on the carpet, bleeding out.

Steven froze again. The kid stood still more than an art class model.

Mandy kept the gun up and aimed, a two-handed grip. Very Angie Dickinson in
Police Woman
. She exhaled a half dozen times before she brought it down. Bo stood still, knowing it was not his moment and letting her have it.

A thin line of blood had made it from her nose to her mouth and she ran her tongue along her top lip, wiping it away.

She turned to him. “Seriously, who are you?”

“Just a dude.”

“Well, thanks. Really.”

“No worries.” He stayed put. Let her work it out in her own time.

“We’ll stash him in the garage. In the morning we’ll start digging. I know my mom’s body is out there somewhere. When we find it we’ll call the cops.”

Steven nodded silently.

Bo ran a hand through his hair, stripping out some of the rain water. “You guys got any pot?”

Mandy set the gun down on the wet bar. “Yeah. Good idea.”

––––––––

H
ousekeeping was not going to be a selling point of this motel. Hourly rates, no questions asked, probably enough coke residue on every solid surface in the room to get you high
–
these were the things in their brochure.

Slick moved through the room wondering if he would have been better off spending the night in the cell they’d reserved for him. He felt bad his new roommate got stood up, felt bad, too, he didn’t have a chance to make his mark by looking that roommate square in the eye when he came at him with his erection leading the way, looking to pop the new guy’s cherry. Slick would stare him down, grab hold of that dick and yank hard. Not like jerk-off hard. Not pleased-to-meet you hard. Pulling the head off a chicken hard. Popping that sonofabitch off and seeing the same spray of warm blood as he did in his youth watching Grandma dispatch a chicken for dinner. Lot of people used an axe, but Grandma always said, “God made them heads to pop off so damn easy, why dirty up a perfectly good axe blade with it? Makes ‘em go dull. Save that for the hogs. Them chicken heads to come off with a flick of the wrist.”

Slick kinda looked forward to that.

The bedspread was a hideous multicolored pattern that should have come with an epilepsy warning. The carpet was green except in the spots it was worn down to nothing, not even enough shag for the fleas to survive. The painting over the bed was a western scene onto which someone had drawn a huge cock on the horse riding into the sunset.

In the bathroom the toilet paper holder had been ripped off the wall and the roll perched on the back of the toilet had barely enough on it to handle what was brewing in Slick’s abdomen.

He turned and caught sight of himself in the mirror. Turned away.

Mirrors were not his friends. Not in a vampire-castle-cover-them-with-sheets sort of way, but when you grow up ugly you don’t need to be reminded of it.

He made himself look. He needed a shave. Even if it did make his scar more pronounced this quarter-inch layer of scruff itched like hell. He wondered again if he should take some of that $642,000 and get a little work done. Maybe a nose job. But unless they could strip off his entire face and start over, he doubted having a chiseled nose resting on a bed of gnarled roots would look anything but freakish. Pull out all his teeth and give him new ones, they could do that. Pin back his ears. Tighten up around his eyes, make them less dark. He had a list to make Joan Rivers blush.

Fuck it. It’s the hand he was dealt. Best to continue to make use of it. If you can’t join ‘em, scare ‘em. It had been working so far.

He’d gotten Emma to go for him. She kept her eyes closed during sex, but at least she was there. He tried his best to be genuinely sweet around her. He knew it was a little bit beauty and the beast between them, but he would ride it out as long as he could.

Saving her from JB was a good in. He’d seen her around. A danger girl. Liked her men unstable. Daddy issues.

She’d fucked her way through three or four of the town’s nastier criminals but JB was an up-and-comer. Harley rider, shaved head, nipple ring, recreational cokehead. All the qualities a mother looks for in a future son-in-law.

Pool hall. Rainy night. JB gets tough. Coked up, her with her back talk, coked up herself. He slaps her, she punches him back. He fists her gut. She cracks a pool cue over his head. He takes the eight ball, wraps his fist around it and punches her in the eye. She’s out like a light.

Slick steps in. Hauls him out back. Body was never found.

He visited her in the hospital. Took six weeks for her eye to look normal again. Slick liked the time she wore her patch. Thought he could get in her good graces a lot better without benefit of full binocular vision. It worked.

At first it was only a sympathy fuck. A thank you. Slick knew how to treat a woman though and he was well hung. You don’t get features that exaggerated on your face without it spreading to other parts of your body. Or maybe it was some sort of cosmic balance thing. A payback from the universe for being so damn unattractive, we’ll give you the dick most men only wish they had.

So she stayed. To keep her staying, Slick came up with his plan. It was sweet, in its own way. He risked it all for her. If not for Emma he would have stayed a ten cent hood and an ugly face for hire the rest of his life. Emma gave him dreams. Plans. If it weren’t for Bo . . .

A knock on the door.

Fuck, he wished he had bullets for that gun.

“Who is it?”

“You need merchandise?”

Slick opened the door. A thin man in a dirty track suit stepped in throwing a glance over his shoulder. He held a brown paper bag, wrinkled like he’d been to the grocery store two weeks ago and hadn’t dropped it off yet.

“You called about the gun?” Hispanic, with only a trace of an accent, he wore a thick mustache glistening with rain or maybe sweat.

“Bullets. How much?”

“Depends. I’m Hector.” He held out a hand to shake.

“I don’t give a fuck.”

For the first time Hector stopped his fevered scanning of the room in search of trouble and focused on Slick. He drank in the weird topography of his face. Looked up at him standing six inches taller. He did not drop his hand.

“You don’t shake a man’s hand and exchange pleasantries, there’s no reason to trust that man.”

“I’m not giving you my name.”

“I gave you mine.”

“I didn’t ask for it.”

With a crinkle of the bag Hector turned, dropping his welcoming hand, and headed for the door.

“Okay, okay, okay. I’m Slick.”

Hector stopped, turned, held out a hand again. Slick took it and they shook.

“Okay, Slick. Fake names are fine. I gave you one too. Trust, yes, but always with caution. Now then, what do you need?”

Hector set the paper bag on the wood veneer table.

“I need bullets for a thirty-eight.”

“You sure you don’t need a gun. Man downstairs said you needed one.”

“Man downstairs is an idiot. That guy is a lot of things I don’t have the vocabulary for. All I need is bullets for this.” Slick removed the gun from his pocket. Hector smirked.

“That is not a gun, señor. That is a toy.”

“Well, it’s all I got so . . .”

“Why don’t you take a look at my inventory?” He began to unroll the paper bag.

“All I got is a hundred.”

Hector clicked his tongue. “Hmm, a hundred don’t buy much.”

“I’m not looking to hunt pheasants, just protect myself should the need arise.”

“And the need always arises, does it not?”

Hector reached into his bag, careful not to show his inventory to Slick, and removed a small, battered, black Saturday night special of a vintage that would have been good for wine, but not so good for a gun.

“One hundred.”

Slick looked down at it like Hector had pulled a turd out of the bag. His nose wrinkled. “I’ll stick with the bullets for mine. Sentimental reasons.”

Hector cracked the barrel and dumped out six bullets into his hand. He held them out for Slick.

“One hundred.”

“Funny how everything costs exactly what I have to spend.” Hector stood firm. “Fine, here.” Slick handed over the hundred and took the bullets, loading them into his gun. Hector took the money and began counting it.

“Pleasure doing business.” Hector finished counting, pocketed the bills and took his bag off the table.

Slick slid the last bullet into the chamber, admired the six bullets resting comfortably, snapped it shut. Of course Slick thought of turning the gun on Hector, taking his money back, rooting in the bag for a better gun. Everyone Hector had ever sold a gun to thought of the same trick. But Slick didn’t need more trouble, he needed sleep.

Hector opened the door and slipped out without a goodbye. Slick figured he knew better than to hang around and let his clients think too hard about the new gun they held. If he wasn’t going to get robbed and shot on every sales call, he needed to move fast out of the company of men who would buy a black market gun. Not a trustworthy set.

Slick threw the deadbolt after him, turned and nestled the gun in his hand as he walked back to the bathroom.

Outside, the shouting started.

“Police! Get down! Hands above your head! Now!”

Footsteps thundered louder than the storm. Light beams swished and crisscrossed though the closed curtains like alien ships from
Close Encounters.

Fuck, it was a bust. Hector got himself followed and led them right to me, thought Slick.

Tuck the gun away, through the room, into the bathroom, up on the toilet, open the window, hoist himself through. That toilet paper holder would have been the perfect place to get some footing. Someone beat him to it.

Through the two foot by three foot window and reach across the four and a half feet to the building next door. Thank God for piss-poor building codes. Grab the drain pipe. Hands burning on the way down.

Hit the alley, hear the door kicked in. Start moving. Wind still whipping. Rain still coming. Down the alley, a fast right, back yards and shadows.

Up and over a short fence, the gun slips from his waistband. Stoop to get it, tuck in and move on.

Four blocks down – a church. Lightning might strike, holy water might boil, but there is no other option.

Inside it’s quiet as a grave. The huge double doors make howitzer-loud sounds as they open and close again behind Slick. The rain he drips on the marble echoes off the back wall. It’s dark.

Enough light comes through the stained glass from the parking lot to make the rows of pews visible. Harsh shadows are thrown by the ten foot Jesus behind the altar. Catholic. Shelter from the storm.

Not a soul inside, not even his. He’d written it off years ago as shriveled and black, not worth saving. If the Devil ever appeared, Slick was ready to sell. The Devil was getting enough work from him as is, though. Why buy the cow?

He sat in a pew. The wood was hard, the back too straight. How did people sit there for hours on a Sunday morning? It was all about penance.

Slick tilted over and lay down on his side. He shifted the gun under him to get more comfortable, but comfort was a relative term. He closed his eyes, secretly thankful for the Christian charity he was being blessed with.

A door opened. It wasn’t the big bang of the front doors. That meant no cops. It was an interior door. Slick sat up.

A nun had entered the sanctuary from a door behind the altar. She was still pulling on her habit, her sleepy eyes unfocused.

“Hello? Is someone there?”

Slick wasn’t sure if he could dodge her, make her think it was only a nightmare. Then she lifted a flashlight and it swept over him, swung back to his face. He heard gasping.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I needed to come in out of the storm.” Act contrite. A little lamb, lost from the flock in the rain.

The nun stepped forward down the aisle, keeping the flashlight on him.

“Are you hurt? Do you need assistance?”

“No, sister. Just a place to lay my head. I’m . . . it’s been a long night.”

She moved down the aisle silently except for the rustle of her long robes. No shoes. She glided along like a black shrouded ghost. She stopped one row in front of him. She did not balk as his face. She did not scream or throw him out. She lowered the light.

“We have a men’s shelter downtown. They have beds.”

“I have no car.”

“They have hot meals.”

“I’m just so tired, sister.”

“I understand.” She sat in the pew in front of him, turned her body to speak.

“What troubles you?”

“Too much to explain. Do you think I could stay here for the night? I won’t make a sound. I’ll leave first thing.”

Her face was kind, motherly. The habit hid her hair, pulled her face free of wrinkles so Slick couldn’t tell her age. The outfit made her look old-fashioned. “Are you a member of the church?”

“No, sister. Not anymore.” He didn’t want to have to recite any prayers from memory or, God forbid, sing a hymn. The gun dug into his lower back and he squirmed like a kid who has to pee but can’t get up until communion.

“But you used to be?”

“I used to go to services. As a boy. Not for a long time.”

She cocked her head at him like a dog. “You look as if you need to confess. Shall I get the priest?”