by Tom Pitts
“Jerrod’s friend, Sky, but he didn’t know where it was coming from, no way. We were only gonna sell him four pounds, then sit on the rest until he wanted more. That’s all, Jerrod will tell you.”
“More what?”
Tristan was bewildered. His eyebrows arched. He wondered if it was a trick question. “More weed,” he answered.
Jimmy was getting tired of the interrogation. Either these kids were stupid as they come or they were not telling him the truth. He stood for a moment weighing his next move.
“Go downstairs and ask him,” said Tristan.
“Maybe we should.” Jimmy stepped toward the door and opened it a crack. From the kitchen, he could hear the familiar sound of chopping. Paul and Linda seemed to be occupied. Jimmy returned the stun gun to his jacket pocket and unholstered the .38. Directing them with the gun, Jimmy said, “Alright. One at a time. Let’s go down to the scene of the crime.”
They crept down the stairs in single file. First Tristan, then Becky, then Shelly. The girls wishing they had the courage to run for a phone, call for help, scream, anything. Tristan was sullen, broken, resigned to his fate being in someone else’s hands. They tip-toed past the kitchen where Paul and Shelly’s mother’s noisy laughter would have drowned out any noise they made anyway. Shelly turned her head toward the happy sounds and felt the hard poke of the .38 in the middle of her back.
They reached the door to the garage and passed on through. Jimmy shut it as quietly as possible. The laughter and conversation from the kitchen was suddenly cut off. They stood in the bright light on the smooth cement of the garage floor with an echoing silence filling the space between them.
“Becky? C’mere for a minute,” said Jimmy as he walked to the rear of the Camry. He fished in his pocket for the key as he waited for her to walk over to him. Jimmy stuck the key in the lock located just to the left of the In-n-Out bumper sticker.
“Now, Becky,” his voice was patronizing, as though he were speaking to a 10-year old. “I want you to ask Jerrod where my duffel bags are. I want you to make him understand how serious this situation is.”
Jimmy opened the trunk.
Becky saw her boyfriend laying there, dead. The few hours that had gone by only furthered his grotesque appearance. Bluish-gray with rigor mortis setting in, Jerrod resembled a zombie. Becky had never even seen a dead body before. She wanted to scream, but instead her body convulsed. She turned slightly to the left and promptly threw up. The sour stink of the white wine mixed with bile rose up from her feet.
Shelly cried out, “What is it? What’s wrong?” But Tristan knew exactly what was wrong. He’d guessed it before. He tried to shut it out, tried not to believe it. He hoped against hope that their little scheme would not have this kind of price tag. All those miles in the car trying to communicate with Jerrod in the trunk. He felt his stomach churning as well.
“Go ahead, Becky, ask him,” said Jimmy. “Ask your stupid boyfriend if he knows who he told about your little plan. Ask him if he regrets getting in over his head. Ask him how it feels to steal from me.”
Becky heaved, her stomach emptied. Only bile was left, but she still heaved.
“What’s a matter? You want to comfort him? Why don’t you climb in there with him and give him a hug?”
“Is he okay?” Shelly was crying now. “What’s wrong with him?”
The garage door started to open. Jimmy pointed the gun at Tristan and Shelly, but neither of them had moved to hit the opener. He saw headlights reflected in the rear window of the Camry. He slammed the trunk shut and concealed the .38 under his jacket.
As the door rolled up, Damon Lafleur first was angry about the strange car sitting in his garage. He thought the girls had some male guests over to visit. They’d better not be smoking weed here in the garage. It was not a good time for company and he planned to say so. Then he saw Becky on her knees retching. The girls were fucked up, now he was going to have to mete out some discipline as well. He stopped his car and, leaving his headlights on, unbelted and climbed out, slamming his door.
“What the hell is going on here?” he said. It was taking him a moment to realize that the man in front of the car was way too old to be a friend of the girls. The man wearing the leather blazer was stone-faced, angry. Before he could ask the question again, the stranger pulled a snub-nosed .38 from under his jacket and said to Damon, “Get in here, fuck-hole.”
“Fuck you,” spat Damon. He didn’t even think about it. His face was still numb from the last blast of blow. He was angry to have his plans for the evening tampered with. He wasn’t sure if this was a robbery, rape, home invasion, whatever, but, one way or another, it was the girls that brought this scumbag with a gun into his home. He wasn’t going to let this asshole order him around in his own house. He had his own gun under the seat of the Mercedes, a Glock. He had two more upstairs in the master bedroom. He squeezed his right hand, wishing that he was holding one now. He tried to take in what was happening in his garage. Becky on the floor, Tristan looking scared—that pussy—and Shelly in tears, choking back sobs. He scanned for some solid object he could hit this prick with. Then Damon noticed the suitcases on the floor. The gears in his mind snapped into place.
“Fucker,” was all he said.
Jimmy stepped forward and lifted his right hand. He smashed the butt of his gun into Damon’s cheek. At the same time, with his left hand, he grabbed a hold of Damon’s white shirt collar and yanked the man forward as hard as he could. The combo surprised Damon and he fell forward to the rear of the Camry, smacking his head on the bumper, making a deep, hollow bell sound. Jimmy gave him two hard kicks to the stomach and ribs as he lay on the ground.
Jimmy pointed the gun at Shelly, “Shut that fucking door.”
Shelly was still trying to grab breaths between her sobs. Her eyes were wide and red and Jimmy thought she was close to going into shock.
“Shelly, hit the goddamn button.”
With a mournful cry she reached over and hit the garage door button and the loud door began to roll down.
“Now get up, tough guy,” said Jimmy.
From a fetal position, Damon replied, “Fuck you.”
Jimmy gave him another hard kick, this one to the face. He leaned over and, pressing the barrel of the gun into Damon’s ear, said, “I saw the way you looked at those suitcases. Where is my shit, you stupid fuck?”
Damon made a sound, half-groan, half-growl. No answer at all. The only sound came from his pocket. The familiar sound of a cell phone vibrating.
Jimmy pushed Damon onto his back. He could see the man was bleeding from his nose and lips. There was a cut below his eye where he’d struck him with the gun and his cheek was swelling rapidly. Jimmy felt Damon’s pockets for the cell phone and found it inside the expensive-looking blazer. He pulled out the phone and looked at the number. San Francisco. Caller unknown. He stood up before he hit accept and tried to sound anonymous when he grunted, “Yeah.”
“You never called me back.”
Jimmy recognized Jose’s voice immediately. He thumbed the off button and stared at the phone, trying to connect the dots.
Inside the kitchen, Linda heard the garage door open.
“Shit, I think that’s my husband,” she said as she picked up the straw and quickly snorted the last line of cocaine from the marble slab.
“Husband?” said Paul, thoroughly buzzed and bewildered by now. He watched her vacuum up the last of the blow and then hide the marble and the straws in the drawer beside the fridge. He had been waiting for Jimmy to come back in and tell him their problems were solved. He had been waiting for the hot middle-aged mom to invite him up to her bedroom. He realized now that neither of those things were going to happen. He felt drunk and stupid. He hopped up off the tall chair and knocked it backward to the floor.
“Oops, sorry ‘bout that.” He could hear the inebriation in his own voice.
“Just pick it up, and put your jacket back on,” said Linda, suddenly sober and
agile as she moved through her kitchen, pouring out drinks and putting the vodka bottle and ice-cube tray back into the freezer. “Just let me deal with him,” Linda said.
Damon saw Jimmy standing there above him, vulnerable for a moment, staring at the cell phone. He saw his chance and he took it. He reached up and grabbed the man’s crotch, hoping to crush his testicles. He grabbed a hold of whatever he could and squeezed his fist as hard as possible.
Jimmy, caught off guard by the shock of pain and the surprise of seeing Damon lash out as quick as a cobra, squeezed a shot off. It was instinct, not aim, and the bullet went right through Damon’s thigh. As soon as the blast echoed through the garage, deafening in an empty space with cement floors, he felt the hand let go of his balls.
The sound was like a starter pistol to Shelly. She, too, saw her chance and bolted through the door back into the house.
“Fuck,” said Jimmy. He knew that he’d have to leave the businessman on the ground bleeding and follow the girl into the house before she was able to call for help. He picked up Damon’s cell and started taking long strides toward the door after Shelly.
“Don’t hurt her,” said Tristan, his voice still sounding wounded and pathetic.
Jimmy looked at him, angry that the situation had now gotten so complicated, and shot him in the chest. Tristan flew back like a rag doll, instantly dead.
“Useless fuck,” Jimmy murmured.
The tidying up of the kitchen was interrupted by the gunshot. Both Linda and Paul froze and looked at each other, wide-eyed and confused. They heard the door to the garage fly open and saw Shelly running by.
“Mom, call the cops,” she yelled as she ran for the stairs. She bounded up them two at a time, heading straight for her bedroom.
“Shit,” said Paul. He ran after her. He chugged as quickly as he could up the stairs, just in time to have her bedroom door slam in his face. He turned the knob and it swung open. He saw Shelly pounding the 9-1-1 buttons on the land line with her index finger. There was no response, no dial tone, nothing. Jimmy had unplugged it during the interrogation. Paul came up behind her and bear-hugged her and pulled her away from the phone on the nightstand, collapsing with her onto the floor. They struggled. For a young girl, Paul thought, she was putting up a damn good fight.
When Jimmy re-entered the house the only thing he saw was Linda’s ass moving up the stairs as fast as those high heels would carry her. He could hear a commotion from the direction of Shelly’s bedroom and decided to leave the mess in the garage behind him and attend to the newest threat. He came up behind Linda right when she reached the doorjamb of her daughter’s room.
“Let go of her, you son of a bitch.” He heard her say this right before he hit her with the butt of his gun right at the base of her skull.
She dropped to her knees, but was not going down any further. “Asshole,” was the next word out of her mouth. Jimmy hit her again with his revolver. Still she was conscious, curling up on the floor in a fetal position. The arrival of the two had momentarily halted the struggle between Paul and Shelly, but it resumed as soon as Shelly knew her mother was still alive. Jimmy stepped over Linda and reached into the panicked mass of arms and legs that was Paul and Shelly and grabbed Shelly by the throat. He smacked her head onto the hardwood floor. Paul let go of the girl and stood up, not knowing what to do next.
“The time has come, Shelly,” said Jimmy, “tell me where those bags are.”
She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t even breathe.
“You got about ten seconds and then I’m gonna shoot your mother and then I’m gonna shoot you. Then I’m gonna walk downstairs, finish off your old man and your best friend, and drive the fuck outta here.”
Shelly’s face was turning a deep purple. She was pointing, her eyes looking wild and frantic.
“Jesus, Jimmy, she’s trying to tell you something. She’s trying to talk.” Paul was worried now that another person was going to die. He’d heard two shots from the garage and had no idea if the others were still alive. He knew one thing though; those shots would not go unreported. Odds were the police were already on their way.
Jimmy knew the same thing. He figured they had about five minutes to get the fuck out of dodge, but that was long enough to get the bags and get in his car and go. Fuck these idiots, fuck the dead bodies, and fuck Paul too. He still had the .38 in his left hand and, before letting go of Shelly’s neck, he pointed the gun at her mother.
“Talk,” he said. In his head he was counting the seconds metered out by the throb of his own heart in his eardrums. One, thump thump, two, thump thump. He wasn’t sure on what number he was going to start shooting.
Shelly tried to speak. “Deh … deh,” she said. She was pointing behind Jimmy.
Paul looked toward the door and stepped backward into the nightstand, knocking the lamp to the floor.
One word finally escaped Shelly’s mouth. “Dad.”
Jimmy turned his head in time to see Damon Lafleur darkening the doorway with a Glock 17 in his right hand. The Glock was pointed at Jimmy’s head. Damon’s left pant leg was soaked with blood from mid-thigh to his ankle. He looked weak, white, and wounded. He gripped the doorjamb to steady himself with his left hand and pointed the pistol with his right.
“Get away from her,” he said.
Jimmy didn’t even blink; he just pointed his gun and fired. The bullet hit his target square in the chest and the impact sent Damon back out through the doorway and down the stairs. Three shots now, thought Jimmy, and three bodies. Time was running out.
“We gotta go,” said Jimmy. He said it to Paul but was looking at Shelly. He still wanted an answer to his question.
“Too late,” said Paul. He was looking out of Shelly’s window and could see a set of headlights pulling into the driveway behind Lafleur’s car. “The cops are here.”
Jimmy stood up and looked out the window. There was a car, but there were no lights or siren. It was a black Lincoln Town Car. From the second floor, he could clearly see Jose climbing out of the passenger seat. The other doors opened and three other men exited the vehicle, small and dangerous-looking. They already had guns in their hands.
“Shit,” said Jimmy as he stepped over Shelly, then her mother, and ran down the stairs, skipping deftly over Damon’s lifeless body. Before he hit the last stair, the doorbell rang. It was a sweet, familiar sound. Innocent and sober, like it was a sound from another age, another place. It rang again. Bing-bong. Two slow notes, high and low.
It sounded to Paul like a church bell.
The three still upstairs—Shelly still gasping for air through a crushed windpipe, Linda still covering her head with her hands, and Paul frozen in time trying not to make a sound—listened to the creak of the front door being opened.
“Jose,” they heard Jimmy say.
“Jimmy. Have you got any news? You never called me.” The voice was friendly, thick with a Spanish accent.
“I think it’s here, somewhere in the house,” they heard Jimmy answer.
The next sound was unmistakable. They’d all heard it a million times in the movies. The sound of a silenced gun. Two shots like whispers followed by the meaty thud of a body hitting the hardwood floor. The friendly voice said something in Spanish and the next thing they heard was the sound of doors opening and closing. They heard the door open that connected the garage to the house. The silencer sounded different from the garage. More tinny, more hollow.
They sat and listened to the house being ransacked with no plan but to wait until the intruders came upstairs. Then they’d hear the sound of the silencer up close. They were trapped, helpless. Paul suddenly felt an outpouring of emotion for the young girl he was trying to subdue moments before. She looked up at him, terrified, and he wanted instantly to save her. He looked at the mother curled on the floor; she too was looking at him, expecting something, waiting for him to tell them what to do.
Paul said nothing. He opened his mouth to speak, shaping his lips into an oval,
but no sound came from there. Instead, the three heard a distant siren. A wail that must have been a mile away. As it got closer, it sounded like maybe a few sirens, singing in harmony.
From downstairs, they heard a new voice shouting, “De la policia. ¡Vamos!” Then, more Spanish and more voices. Then the sound of the front door slamming. They could hear the four men slamming their car doors and the wheels squelch as they pulled out of the driveway. The house was silent again. They waited, too, in silence. There was no sound at all. The sirens also began to fade, their cry diminishing at the same slow arc it had risen.
Paul finally said, “Are you okay?”
He’d said it to the mother, but Linda thought he was asking Shelly. Linda sat up, still covering her head with her hands. She answered for her daughter.
“Of course she’s not okay, you son of a bitch, you just tried to kill her.”
Paul wanted to defend himself. Tell these two that all this had not been his idea, his intention. The violence, the consequences, all of it, was just not him. He was a good guy, a fun guy, he was someone else. But Paul knew that it was his fault, he’d set the play in motion, gotten the ball rolling when he knocked on Jimmy’s door.
“No, I wasn’t, I didn’t, I just … I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? You’re sorry?” Linda was glaring at him. She looked different now. Her cheeks were stained with mascara, her eyes were bloodshot, hair frizzed up and knotted, but, to Paul, she still looked good. “You dumb son of a bitch, do you know what you’ve done? What the hell is it you animals wanted?” she broke off into tears.
“We just wanted the stuff back, that’s all. The girls took it, we wanted it back.” He wanted to add that it was a death sentence to him, now, with or without the stuff, Jose and his boys were going to be gunning for him. That is, if he managed to stay out of prison. He was most likely heading there, where a quick shank might end his miserable life.
