Not wanting to waste any more time, DJ did the needful. He trudged beside Blunt’s chair, his titanium leg thumping on the tile floor, hoping that’d be enough to get him up and moving. It wasn’t, of course.
At least shoving a gun in Blunt’s face was funny. DJ rubbed his forehead, then placed the muzzle of his Glock against the tip of Blunt’s nose. Blunt didn’t react, so DJ pushed, twisting the end of Blunt’s nose almost a full ninety degrees before he sputtered, and his eyes flashed open.
He jerked his head back. The top half of Blunt’s easy chair reclined until his feet were elevated above his head, so a fat vein in his forehead swelled as all the blood rushed upward—or downward, depending on your point of view.
A sharp breath cut through the TV’s babbling.
“Jesus! DJ!”
“Morning, beautiful.” DJ relaxed his arm, letting the Glock down near his hip. This wasn’t the first time the two of them had greeted each other this way. These sorts of jokes kept their relationship lively, and sometimes, like now, a Glock on the nose was good for a laugh.
“I’ll pay you back, I promise, DJ! I got money! I got it!” Blunt began to shiver and moan. That vein in his forehead engorged. “Please, man, we don’t have to do this!”
“Do what? You think I’m gonna kill you with this thing? Come on, son, if I was gonna kill you, you’d have earned something a hell of a lot worse than a bullet through your nose.” DJ looked at his handgun. “Unless there’s something you did you think I’d be upset about?”
Like sell meth or rent a boat to a murderer.
“No, no—man, you know me. Same old, same old. Wouldn’t do nothing to endanger our friendship. You just, uh, seem upset.” Blunt couldn’t take his eyes off the Glock.
“Do I?”
Blunt nodded. His jaw muscles jittered.
“So,” Blunt’s eyes crossed at the Glock, then darted back to DJ’s, “what’s got you in a bad mood, DJ?”
DJ sighed and headed to the couch to his left. Brushing aside an old pizza box and some crumbs, he sat down, resting his wrist on his knee, the Glock pointed in Blunt’s general direction.
“Lately, a whole hell of a lot.” He thought about going into Jerry and the mess with Garner, but that seemed like lesser business now. “A man in my condition shouldn’t have to put up with this much. You know what I’m saying?”
“Anything, uh, specific?” A bead of sweat rolled off his forehead. “What brought you here?”
“You did. I always thought you were some small-time weed dealer, Blunt. Slinging a little pot to tourists looking for a good time, and that, combined with the boat rentals and slip fees, was enough to get you through life comfortably.”
“You’re right, man.” Blunt’s jaw quivered again. Pretty bad tell for a man who should’ve been a practiced liar. “It’s enough—it’s totally enough!”
“Then what’s with the meth in the kitchen?”
Blunt pressed his eyelids together, holding them there for a moment while his eyes bounced in his head. He was spinning up some kind of lie.
DJ tapped the Glock’s muzzle on the table. “Don’t think too hard now, Blunt. I don’t like it when my friends start thinking too hard while I’m sitting down for a nice chat. Makes me wonder if I’m being lied to.”
But Blunt didn’t hear him. His munching jaw muttered out mushy words, giving form to the cocoon being spun up, fiber by fiber for whatever big lie he was going to push on DJ. Whatever was on his mind, he lost it when DJ pulled the trigger.
Bam!
Drywall particles and fuzzy pieces of insulation came down from the ceiling to rest on Blunt’s T-shirt—right across the bridge of Jim Morrison’s nose. The 9mm round left a neat hole.
Blunt hardly noticed the dust. He was too busy giving DJ a wide-eyed stare.
“I don’t appreciate the lies,” DJ said. “You lied to me.”
“When?” Blunt whispered through his astonishment.
“You’re dealing meth.”
“I—well, things are different now. It’s what people want! If I’m gonna run a business, I gotta listen to my customers!”
“When did Bobby the Blunt ever care about what other people wanted him to do?” DJ asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Money’s got you making bad choices.”
“That ice ain’t hardly nothing!” Blunt yanked the lever on his chair, making the footrest collapse. He began to roll forward, probably to get up and go to the kitchen to show DJ that all he had was that tiny stash divided out into those little baggies—it wasn’t like he was playing Heisenberg.
Then, his eyes met the Glock in DJ’s hand, now leveled at his face.
“You might be dealing a teeny-tiny little bit of something, but it’s indicative of a pattern of behavior that I can’t let slide,” DJ said.
“There’s no pattern! It’s just the one thing—an ounce that a new connection offered me. I took it, because I’m trying to get out, okay? I needed some quick cash because I don’t want this business to ruin me. I swear! Please don’t tell Garner what you saw.”
“I ain’t working for that dude.”
Blunt nodded so hard his forehead jiggled. “Right! Why would you? You’ve got all the money you need, right? Well, I don’t. I’m just trying to turn it all around, but I need cash.”
“Hmm.” DJ wiped a piece of insulation fuzz off his forehead. “That why one of your boats was caught speeding away from a murder scene a few hours ago?”
Blunt cracked a smile. He must’ve thought DJ was telling one of his sick jokes, but DJ’s expression turned Blunt’s grin upside down.
“You’re serious?” Even in a room lit by just the TV, Blunt’s skin went visibly whiter. “Which one?”
“Purple Daze. You ain’t sold it, have you?”
“Sold it?” Blunt’s eyes searched the space in front of him. He combed his long, shaped fingernails through his mat of gray-black hair. “No, no, man, I didn’t sell that one. I just had—”
He trailed off. Then he hopped up out of his chair, a lost expression shadowing his face.
No sense in stopping him now. DJ had already put the fear of God in him—which was all he needed to do from the start. The ground rules were established. Blunt wasn’t going to lie to him now.
“You just had what?” DJ asked, as Blunt slipped past him, heading in the direction DJ had just come from. DJ turned and followed him.
Blunt didn’t stop to answer. That is, until DJ grabbed him by the shoulder and forced him to spin on his heel. Blunt lost his balance, then caught himself on his card table in the dining room.
He gave DJ a low, guilty look, his head down and his eyes slanted at DJ sideways. He looked like he’d be sick any moment.
DJ rested a firm hand on his shoulder. He took a step closer to Blunt, so that the two of them were barely a hand’s width apart.
“Listen to me, man,” DJ said. “You got some trouble coming your way—I know. Whether you were in on it or not, somebody broke the law in your boat. They killed two people, and set fire to a doctor’s house over in PR.”
Blunt’s face twisted into a pained expression. He was taking it pretty hard. DJ reassured him with another squeeze to his shoulder.
“Bud, I know things sound real bad. And I know it ain’t like you to participate in things quite as serious as murder. But the fact is, that boat is registered to you. The cops probably ain’t found it yet, but, loath as I am to admit it, they’re going to. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in a week, maybe longer. But they will find it.
“You can be sure they’re gonna come without knocking. They’re gonna bring a search warrant with them, and they might even have a dog or two.” DJ swung his head in the direction of the kitchen. “They ain’t gonna be too pleased when their dogs get a whiff of this place.
“Might be those two or three officers pull each other aside for a little powwow, where they say, ‘Hell, we got this sumbitch’s boat with two bodies on it. He’s probably a firebug too. And the dog says he’s been h
aving all kinds of parties and not inviting us—why don’t we put two in his head and say he lunged at us?’”
DJ took his hand off Blunt’s shoulder and looked down at the poor, pot-bellied bastard. The daylights were scared clean out of him.
“What am I gonna do, DJ?”
“Long-term? That’s the question that might save your hide—but I don’t know the answer,” DJ said. “Short-term? All I know is what I can do for you. But you gotta tell me who rented that boat.”
Blunt considered DJ’s question. One could almost see the wheels turning as the man tried to figure out why DJ wanted to know about one of his rentals. What would DJ care about a murder? Blunt didn’t know about Armstrong. DJ was tight-lipped like that; nobody knew his business unless he wanted them to know. Blunt probably couldn’t say whether or not DJ had a job or where his money came from.
“She was some corporate lady,” Blunt said.
“Corporate lady?” DJ asked. “How in the hell would you know something like that? She drop off her resume?”
“It’s an educated guess, man. Working in this business,” he motioned toward the weed in the kitchen, “I gotta be good at reading folks. You know how it is. Gotta watch for the wrong type. She carried herself real tight, nice clothes, good hair, no problem paying for something, spoke real clearly—like somebody in charge. Know what I mean?”
DJ furrowed his brow. The islands were sinking under the weight of the free, crazy sort, but plenty of business types hung around too. “Did you take her ID when you rented the boat out?”
Suddenly the jitter disappeared from Blunt’s face, replaced with a sudden confidence. Blunt understood he had something DJ wanted. Here comes the bullshit, DJ thought.
“I can show you her file, but you can’t expect me to do that just for the asking. That’s a bad trade, and like I said, I’m trying to go legit.”
DJ glanced down at his Glock. “I don’t remember this being a negotiation, man. But how about I make a counteroffer?” He raised the handgun, pointing it in Blunt’s face. “How about we don’t trade your nose for a bullet hole, and you give me that lady’s info so I can catch a murderer?”
Blunt’s eyes went wide.
“So, we got a deal?” DJ asked.
“Sure, we do. Yeah. We got a deal.”
Blunt froze in place, testing DJ, seeing if he was kidding around again.
“Now ain’t the time, friend.”
“I’ve got client privilege,” Blunt said as he stepped into the kitchen. “And by showing you this file, I’m breaking the sacred bond of trust between me and my client. You realize that, right?”
“I realize that’s a load,” DJ said, following behind Blunt. “You got rental records in the garage?”
“Yeah.”
He didn’t sound too thrilled about sharing them. As Blunt hit the door out to the garage, DJ remembered there was still one thing he wanted to do.
DJ snatched up the baggie of meth lying on the counter. He tossed it into the sink, turned the faucet on full blast, and smacked the switch to the left of it.
The garbage disposal growled and gurgled, struggling to chew all the baggies for a few seconds, then hit its stride. DJ peered down the drain and didn’t see anything in the blackness. He listened for a couple seconds more, then flipped the switch off and the disposal fell silent. After he shut off the faucet, he turned to see Blunt gawking at him.
“Aw, come on, DJ!”
“That’s some nasty, nasty stuff. It’s nothing but a bag of misery, man. I’m just doing what I can to help you get rid of it.”
“I gotta pay for that now.”
DJ shrugged. “I’ll pay you back when we get to the boat.”
“What boat?”
“My boat—Reel Fun,” he replied. “You didn’t think you were going to ride out of here in one of yours, did you?”
Blunt set his jaw and grumbled, then turned his back on DJ and opened the door to the garage. “You know I’m trying to get out of messes.”
“Complain all you like, hombre. You know I just did you a solid,” DJ told him as he walked across the kitchen. “What’s got you so dead set on going clean, anyway?”
The light came on inside the garage. For a place that he used as an office during the day, it was a real pit. Spilling from the shelves on the far wall was a plastic knot of bins, bags, and boxes. In front of the knot, a half-finished wood dining table rested on a bed of newspapers. Matching chairs were up in the unfinished rafters, new upholstery draped over the beams, as if Blunt tanned the leather himself.
Against the back wall rested an old fridge with its door hanging open, rusted cans of paint inside. Next to it, closer to DJ, was a wooden entertainment center with a small TV on the center shelf and junk on the other shelves. A pair of rusted Beachcomber bikes leaned against the front of the entertainment center, which must’ve been great for TV watching.
“Annie’s pregnant,” he said. “I want to see my granddaughter.”
Blunt moved off to the right. He stood at a kitchen counter in the center of the garage that looked like he’d found it in a junk heap somewhere. A dusty computer monitor and matching keyboard occupied the countertop, along with some neatly stacked papers and a sea-green ash tray nearly filled to overflowing.
DJ was vaguely aware of Blunt’s daughter, Annie. She’d come up once or twice after the two of them knocked back enough beers to choke a bull shark. All DJ remembered was that Blunt had met her mother in the mid-eighties, knocked her up, and blew her off. Despite all that, the torch Blunt carried for his daughter’s mother only burned hotter as time went on.
“You still angling for Annie’s mother?”
“It ain’t about that.” A flare of anger skimmed over Blunt’s face. One of the few times DJ had ever seen him angry.
“Then what’s it about? You got some patriarchal urges kicking in in your old age?”
He grumbled something indecipherable at DJ.
“I’m just busting your balls, man,” DJ said. “You wanna be with your grandkid, that’s A-OK with me. I’m just surprised to see you jumping out of the weed game. Does Garner know?”
“Garner don’t care,” Blunt said. “All he cares about is getting back at that reporter who almost burnt down his Shangri-La. He’d torch the whole place himself if he thought he’d catch that guy in the flames.”
DJ’s ears perked up. Maybe there was something to the Garner theory after all. “You think he would?”
“He said as much. We split a bag and a couple of his women hopped on our laps. You know how he gets when he’s relaxed—he talks.”
And Nick Garner was the kind of guy who followed through on his talk. How many people had dreams of starting up a little hippie sex cult on the islands but never got it off the ground? Garner walked the walk.
He had the money to hire somebody to do his work, too. DJ knew his glitzy little tourist-trap fairy land barely generated a dime in profit, but with one of the biggest grow operations in the Northern Caribbean, he was a player in the weed market. Blunt might not have thought it, but Garner wouldn’t let him go easily.
“Do believe I found our lady,” Blunt said.
DJ came out of his head, then looked up at Blunt. “You sure?”
“I can run a business, my man. I ain’t got much, but I got that.”
“Sure. Listen, man, I’m sorry for hassling you. I’ll get you some tax for your troubles—whatever you need to buy your way out of Garner’s thing. You shouldn’t have to miss out on time with your grandbaby.”
Blunt held eye contact with DJ for a moment, probably wondering if this was another of his jokes, but when he realized it wasn’t, a grin swelled beneath his whiskers. “I won’t go tellin’ nobody about your heart, DJ. I know you’d hate that.”
Before DJ could tell him to shut his face, the garage door rattled. Somebody knocking.
“Who the hell is that?” DJ whispered to Blunt as he tucked his Glock into the holster inside the back of his pants. “W
ere you expecting somebody?”
“No, I’m not expecting anyone,” Blunt replied. “But I think I should answer—it’s probably somebody looking for crystal.”
Shadows played over a small gap between the garage door and the concrete floor. “Tell ’em to buzz off. You’re too busy to mess with it right now.”
“You don’t know how persistent these meth heads can get. Now go duck down somewhere. I’ll shoo ’em off.”
DJ looked around the garage, eyeing all the clutter. There should be a good spot to hide with all the junk around, but nowhere made itself immediately obvious.
He walked toward the back door, thinking that maybe his best bet would be to hunker down on the patio and keep an eye on Blunt by keeping the door cracked, but he stopped just short.
To his right, behind the fridge full of paint cans, there was just enough of a gap for DJ’s slim frame to slip through.
So, he did just that. Beyond the fridge, he found that there was a wider spot back behind the entertainment center. It was a couple of feet deep and was blocked by cardboard backing behind the TV. A perfect hiding spot.
A sliver of light squeezed between a stack of wood stain and varnish cans. DJ sunk down until he was on all fours and looked through.
The view wasn’t perfect, but with Blunt’s legs and feet visible, DJ could piece together what was going on.
The garage door rumbled open. A thin black line of grime marked where the door met the ground when it was closed, and the nearest of three men who’d come calling stood half a step beyond it.
“Robert Blount?” a voice with a smooth Puerto Rican accent asked. The lead man’s weight shifted on his legs.
“That’s me. What can I do for you guys?” Blunt’s voice was free of all the nervousness he’d exhibited just moments before. Amazing how the man could change his mood like turning a knob.
“We’re with the Puerto Rican Police Force,” the leader said.
Damn. Were they here to bust him for dealing? DJ felt better than ever about putting the meth down the drain.
Wayward Sons Page 22
