The Bride Stripped Bare

by Rob Bliss

  “Yes, sir,” the tailor said, “I will be available to assist in your dressing this evening.”

  Gord started unhooking the vest, smiling and dancing with joy where he stood, as Gorman put the jacket back on the mannequin. “At the Swamp Hotel, you mean?”

  Gorman’s hands froze. He looked at Gord, glanced at me, cleared his throat. “Yes, sir.”

  The tailor held his stare, and I saw a slight look of fear cross Gord’s face. His Adam’s apple jumped. Gorman’s hands didn’t move off the shoulders of the mannequin, and his eyes didn’t blink. I watched them both, as though there was some unspoken Mexican stand-off happening in front of me.

  Gord shook his head slightly and said in a choked, hushed voice. “I wasn’t sure.”

  Dust motes held in mid-air as the two stared at each other. I glanced down and saw Gord slowly clenching his hands.

  “Are you sure now, sir?” Gorman asked slowly, shadows filling his eyes.

  Gord’s jaw muscles clenched and he swallowed a few times in rapid succession. He was terrified. I was confused. I assumed for half a second that he was having some kind of reaction to the cocaine.

  “I’m…yeah… I’m sure,” he mumbled.

  The tailor straightened the shoulders of the jacket on the mannequin, looking away from Gord. The stand-off was over, and it didn’t look as though Gord had won. He quickly, but carefully, undid the hooks of the vest, handed it to the tailor without looking at him.

  And then another very strange thing happened. Gorman looked at me, lifting his chin, and smiled. Showed black teeth, smiled with his eyes as well, and looked like everybody’s favorite grandpa instead of Death warmed-over. Except, that was, for the black teeth.

  I was in shock and my head lurched back an inch.

  “Would you like assistance in removing your uniform, sir?”

  I glanced from Gorman to Gord, but my friend wasn’t looking up. His fingers paused on the hooks; ears trained on the tailor’s voice—the change of tone from morose to friendly—kept his eyes always on the floor. A whimper escaped from the back of Gord’s throat, which he quickly covered up with a cough.

  The stand-off hadn’t ended, it had just changed gears. But I still couldn’t tell what it was about.

  Gorman helped me with the jacket and vest first, putting both back on a mannequin, before he took Gord’s vest. Gord held it in two hands patiently, like a schoolboy waiting to be sentenced to detention. A thin film of sweat shone under the yellow light on his forehead. I gave him a questioning look, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. Just held the vest until Gorman was ready to take it from him.

  We left, me lagging behind Gord as he hammered feet down the dusty hardwood stairs, saying nothing, beelining for the door.

  I turned to thank Gorman, who bowed and smiled. Smugly. He had won something and was smiling at his victory. Stood between the two mannequins, a skeletal hand on either of their shoulders.

  The tailor smiled his black teeth. His eyes twinkled at me as he pushed one of the mannequins over, let it crash to the floor. The mannequin holding Gord’s uniform.

  Then, still smiling his immense horse teeth, he put an arm around my mannequin, and brushed an invisible flake off the jacket which I would be wearing for the wedding.

  ««—»»

  Gord had punched his way through the tailor’s street-level door and was gone. I caught up to him as he sat in the truck, hands clenched on the steering wheel, foot revving the gas. As soon as I got in—before I had finished closing the passenger door—he squealed the tires and shot off, smoking rubber down the main street.

  I held onto the dash with one hand, working to get the seatbelt on with the other.

  “Whoah, Gord—what the fuck!”

  I looked over and saw his face streaming tears. He couldn’t hold the wheel straight, wiping tears away, the truck slewing across the lane divider. Almost hit a pickup with hay bales in the back.

  “Gord, what’s going on? You’re gonna get us killed!”

  “Fuck man—I’m already dead!” he stammered out. I thought he was about to reveal that he was dying of cancer. Something back at the tailor’s had maybe triggered his sorrow. But I was wrong. “I fucked up—but I didn’t know! How the hell was I supposed to know?” He banged his palms on the wheel and yelled at the windshield.

  “Know what?” I asked. “Goddamnit, Gordy, there’s some weird shit going on with you since I got here. You gotta start telling me! What’s with the coke—what was that party last night—I had some fucked-up dreams!” My face burned with anger as I stared at the road ahead, watching to see if Gord was about to kill us. I glanced at the speedometer and he was doing close to sixty-five. I didn’t know what the speed limit was, but it wasn’t that.

  “I can’t tell you now,” he said, smearing the heel of his palm under his eyes. “I think I said too much already. Fuck, I don’t know. I gotta make a call. They gotta understand it was a mistake—a tiny little nothing mistake!”

  “What’d you say? You mean back at the tailors? I didn’t hear anything.” I swallowed from fear; my hand clutched onto the door handle. Looked at the speedometer again, felt the truck slow. “What did you say? The ‘Swamp Hotel’—was that it?”

  He looked at me in anguish and muttered, “Aw fuck, I’m dead. You did hear it. Fuck it, I’m calling.”

  I kept asking what ‘Swamp Hotel’ meant, but he wasn’t answering. Pulled to the side of the road, tires grinding gravel, trees on either side—it didn’t take long to get us back into the wilderness. I could see a mountain range in the distance and wondered if that was the Rockies.

  Gord pinned the truck in park, killed the engine, and dug a cellphone from a pocket in the visor over his head. His hands shook and the odd tear fell, which he blinked away, trying to read the screen of the phone. He scrolled through phone numbers until he got to one. Took deep breaths before punching a key to dial the number. One hand gripped the steering wheel as he held the phone to his ear, waiting for the line to pick up. I watched his fear increase as he spoke.

  “It’s me. Look—I didn’t know, okay? I figured he’s already called you since this town is so…close-knitted. It was a small mistake—it’s nothing, not a big goddamn deal!” His eyes flickered over to me for a second. “Yeah, he was there. But he doesn’t know. The wedding’s tonight—in just a matter of hours. Hours!” He paused and listened. I listened too but couldn’t hear even the tiniest metallic echo of the voice coming through the phone. Gord’s head sagged forward to touch the steering wheel, eyes closed, before he interrupted the person he was listening to. “Okay, okay, fine—then let me go. I’ll leave today—we’re gone and never coming back, I swear. Tell my folks it’s off, I left, they’ll ask their questions, but then they’ll go too. I won’t say a goddamn word. I’ll go to another country. I’ll get off the continent—whatever you need. She can have him, have anyone and everyone—I don’t care.” His head leaned back against the headrest and he didn’t blink as he stared at the ceiling of the cab. I stared at the road ahead. No cars passed. The road was abandoned, only we were on it. Gord’s jaw tightened and his voice dropped. “Then, you know what, I’m saving myself. I’m not going to lay down and take this shit. It was a fucking tiny mistake—you’re not giving me a shred of mercy. So I’ll get it for myself. Any of your boys get in my way and I swear I will fucking kill them and take them to hell with me!”

  He rolled down his window and tossed the phone onto the road, swearing under his breath. Gripped the wheel, cranked the engine to life, and spat gravel off his tires. The engine revved up high, the speedometer needle jerked, and I held on.

  “I’m sorry, Chris, for bringing you into this shit.”

  “Gord, you gotta tell me what’s going on!” I yelled at him.

  He shook his head. “If I say any more, who knows what they’ll do. I just wanna get out of this backwater shithole—alive!”

  “Where are we going? Back to your place?”

  “Hell no! They’re proba
bly already there. I don’t know where to go so I’ll just keep driving until I think of something. And pray to goddamn God.”

  “Who’re you running from? Paco?”

  A simple question. All I could think of since, of all the people I’d met since I arrived, Paco was the scariest, meanest, rudest piece of shit ever. I could see him wanting to hunt down and kill Gord…and me.

  Gord stared at me as though a slow light was trying to shine in his brain. “Paco?” he repeated softly.

  “Yeah. Did you forget to pay for the coke or something?”

  His head swiveled slowly to gaze through the back windshield, and a smile bloomed on his lips.

  “Fucking Paco!” he yelled and laughed, banging the heel of his palm on the wheel.

  “It was him, wasn’t it? Shit. I don’t know why you’d get mixed up with that unstable fuck. Is he gonna kill you?”

  Gord flinched, a crease slicing between his eyebrows, looking at me like I just grew a horn out of my forehead. “What? No, Paco’s okay. I mean, yeah, he’s a fucking psychopath, but he really has nothing to do with these people.”

  “What people?”

  He waved away the question. “Never mind.” He glanced behind him again, then scanned the left side of the road, rubbing his chin. “There should be a lake around here. Miser’s Pond. We can go around the south end of it and double back. It’s the long way around, but it’ll get us to Paco without getting us nailed.”

  I glared at him. “You want to go to Paco?”

  “No, Chris, calm down.” He reached under his seat and pulled up one of the cocaine sandbags, tossed it onto my lap. “Here, keep it, snort the whole bag. Relax.”

  I clutched the bag in my fist and shook it at him. Could barely speak in coherent sentences. “Relax? With coke? Are you fucking…Paco!” I rolled down my window and tossed the bag. Felt sorry for whatever animal would eventually stumble across it.

  “Hey! That was good shit!” Gord said, but not angrily.

  “Gordy—what the goddamn hell is going on?” I spat out, leaning over to stare at the side of his face. Hoping my bulging eyes would make him confess.

  But it just made him chuckle.

  “Okay, sit back. I can tell you about Paco. He’s just a drug runner.”

  “Just?”

  “Hear me out. He operates a tunnel that goes from here to Canada. That’s the tunnel we were in. Now do you get why he was so suspicious of you? He’s suspicious of everybody for a year or two, then he calms down…a bit. He’s the contact for Mexican druglords to ship Columbian coke to Canada and to get Canadian weed down here. B.C. Gold—it’s some seriously good shit. You had some last night.”

  Flashes erupted through my memory of the party, and then of Paco’s place. The psychotic bastard was starting to make sense. Looks were deceiving. On the exterior, his place was a dump, but underground he had a sophisticated operation going on. No wonder there were pallets of sandbags—not just a pile or two. And the arsenal he kept was now justified in my mind as belonging to a major drug-runner, not a survivalist nut-job.

  Suspicious of everybody for a year or two! Made sense. And it also made sense why Gord and I loaded the coke into the truck while Paco stayed underground. Just in case the operation got busted (cop helicopters dropping out of the sky?), then only Gord and I would get nailed while Paco locked himself behind his computerized, punch-pad subterranean doors and made his escape to Canada.

  “Motherfuckin’ Paco,” I mumbled.

  “Yup. He controls that tunnel. We just gotta convince him to let us through it. I was thinking about going to the airport and flying out of here. But my passport and all my I.D. are at the apartment, including my fucking bank card and credit cards. Shit. Gonna take a while to replace all that, then I can fly far away. I’ll hold up in Canada until then.”

  I threw up my hands. “Shit, man, mine is too! Who’s at your place? How am I going to get home?”

  “Neither of us can worry about that right now, you gotta trust me. We just get to Paco’s, go through the tunnel, get to Canada. That’s the only plan right now. Once we’re out of this country, we can figure out the small stuff.”

  “My passport! My ticket home! That’s small stuff?”

  “Chris,” he said calmly. “Trust me. I’m getting us out of this.”

  And that was when the police siren blared behind us.

  — | — | —

  Chapter 7

  Simultaneously, Gord and I twisted in our seats to look through the back windshield. A single cop in a single cruiser, red and blues spinning. I glanced at the road behind the cop, which wound in a gentle arc and vanished in the trees. No one else in sight on the road, either behind us or in front.

  “Where the hell did he come from?” I yelled.

  “Probably out of the forest,” Gord said, matter-of-factly, not a hint of sarcasm in his tone. Glanced repeatedly in the rearview mirror. “There’s only one, so that’s good. We got a bit of a headstart. And I think that’s the start of Miser’s Pond right there.”

  I looked where he was pointing. A marsh at the side of the road, the trees thinned, stumps broken and chewed, standing like pillars to a lost civilization in the shallow water. Sunlight was reflecting orange off the flat surface of the mirror-still water. I shook my head and looked at the green digital clock on the truck’s dashboard, reading 12:42. According to the position of the sun in the sky, it should’ve been about five or six o’clock. The sun was going down and it was verging on twilight. (I’m such a geek, I know.)

  “Is your clock broken?” I asked, then glanced at the cop behind us. “And why aren’t you pulling over?”

  “Sorta, and I’m waiting to make my move. Got a plan that might work.”

  The truck started to slow and Gord edged to the side of the road, only half of the truck on gravel, half on asphalt. Gord kept his eyes on the rearview and side mirrors, one arm hanging out his open window, one hand on the wheel, his left foot easing pressure down on the brake pedal.

  His right foot free, he twisted it, hooked it beneath his seat, used his shoe toe to shuffle out the .357 Magnum. I had forgotten about that secret piece of weaponry. He also inadvertently nudged out another bag of coke. I’d forgotten about that, too. We were fucked.

  I glared down at the floorboards and asked Gord from between unmoving lips, “What the fuck are you doing, Gordy? You are not seriously going to kill a cop, right?”

  “Just do what I tell you when I tell you.” His foot pushed the gun across the floorboard to my side. “Try to pick it up without looking like you’re picking it up. Take your shoes and socks off if you have to.”

  I was aiding and abetting, and I knew it. Sweat poured into my eyebrows. I could fry and die for this. I didn’t know what Gord had planned (well, I could guess), but I knew cops didn’t like it when you had bigger firepower in your vehicle than they had on their hips. I was going to die in a cop shoot-out. I would die in a matter of seconds. But I tried to block out the fear and concentrate on doing what Gord had said, since I had no plan to get out of such a mess, and he seemed to have one. I had to help him out. I really wished I had snorted half of that bag of coke I’d thrown away.

  I slipped off my shoes and used my toes to slip off both socks, glancing in the side mirror at the cop. Wasn’t easy, but I managed to lift the gun high enough to get it in my hand. Put it delicately on the seat between me and Gord.

  Between clenched teeth, I said, “Okay, now what?”

  “Got your seatbelt on?”

  “Yep.”

  “Hold on tight, duck low when I say to duck.”

  My heart was hammering, and I felt a strong urge to piss. My back was stiff, pressed hard against the seat, though I glanced with my eyes only—didn’t dare move my neck—over at Gord, waiting to see his next move so I would know more.

  My sockless toes were scrunched in and freezing cold, almost numb. Gord took his hand off the wheel, foot hard on the brake, softly clicked the transmission into reverse
and held it there. Put his hand back on the wheel while his other hand slowly picked up the gun. Cocked it and raised the barrel to just under the line of the windshield. His eyes stayed on the rearview, watching the cop get out of his car, hoist his pants up, tilt his hat back, adjust his mirrored sunglasses, and sidle towards us.

  “He’s going for his gun,” Gord said quietly. “As soon as he does, you get on the floor. Got it?”

  “Yep,” was all I could mutter.

  His feet flashed from brake to gas and he yelled, “Hit the deck!”

  I dropped to the floorboards and curled into a ball, hands covering my head. The truck sped backwards and Gord fired a stream of bullets over my seat, through the passenger window. Cop bullets shot into the truck from outside. The windshield shattered. Brakes squealed, Gord’s foot on the pedal, and he fired more rounds through the shattered glass. He jammed the truck into park and leapt out of the vehicle.

  I rose off the floor, glass sliding off me, and peered over the dash. Bullets had punched the clock and radio and Gord’s door. There were a few bullets in the cop car.

  And at least one in the cop.

  I peered over the ledge of the smashed windshield to see Gord checking out the cop on the ground, blood splashed across the lawman’s face and chest. Swore under my breath and quickly got my socks and shoes back on, figuring I’d have to run for my life at some point. Peered back over the dashboard to see that Gord had the cop’s gun in hand as he wrenched open the door of the cruiser. He searched the interior, grabbing a shotgun, which he brought to me, tossing it through my window.

  “They don’t teach you how to shoot in that college, do they?” he chuckled. “Time to learn.”

  I left the gun where it lay on the bench seat, edged myself up off the floorboard, and watched him go back to the cruiser. He stretched the handset of the radio up to his mouth and yelled into it.