Machine Gun Jelly (Big Bamboo Book 1)

by Shane Norwood

  “Ssssh,” he said, “I’m incognito, man. Family name, see? Don’t wanna upset the sponsors.”

  “Oh, I understand,” said the girl. “I won’t say anything. This is really exciting. Do you play golf as well as your brother?”

  “Well, I really don’t like to talk about it, baby, but better, really. I actually taught him to play.”

  “No?” she said, her eyes wide in her pretty, pale face like two blue marbles. “Do you play professionally, too?”

  Monsoon gave a deprecating smile.

  “Oh no no, babe,” he said, “wouldn’t be fair to my baby bro. ’Sides, golf just a little bitty ol’ game. I got bigger fish to fry.”

  “Like what?” said the girl, leaning forward.

  Monsoon tapped the side of his nose and assumed a mysterious expression.

  “Government biz, baby. Workin’ for the man. Can’t discuss it.”

  “Oh,” she said, disappointed.

  He gave her the full piano-key tooth display. “Let’s change the subject, doll face. Which part of Scandinavia you from?”

  The girl’s eyes widened. “I’m an exchange student from Stockholm. However did you know?”

  “I’m trained to notice these things,” he said, flashing the Steinway again.

  Actually, since she was wearing a sweater with a reindeer pattern, spoke like she had just swallowed a mouthful of gravlax, and had a Scandianvian Airlines hand baggage security tag and a Saab keyring attached to her handbag, Monsoon didn’t exactly need to be Hercule Poirot to figure out that she wasn’t from Kansas.

  “Actually, my grandfolks were from Scandinavia, so we have something in common.”

  “Were they? From where?”

  “My grandfather is a prize-winning elkhound breeder from Norway. Bjørn Eggen Christiansson. Maybe you heard of him.”

  The girl shook her head, dubiously. Monsoon thought he might have overdone things a bit, which was ironic because the part about his grandfather was actually true.

  Bjørn Eggen Christiansson was his paternal grandfather, was from Norway, and did breed elkhounds. Once a year he faithfully visited the grave of his late wife, Maybelline, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, after which he visited Vegas to tell Monsoon what a useless waste of space he was, how he was nothing like his father, and, if not for the promise that Bjørn Eggen Christiansson had made to his own son, he would not cross the road to piss on Monsoon if he was on fire, before leaving Monsoon a considerable sum of money and going back to Norway, presumably to breed more elkhounds. As a matter of fact, he was due to arrive next week.

  Monsoon changed tack, back to safer water.

  “Hey, where’s my manners at? I’m being rude, baby girl. What’s yo’ name, and what y’all drinkin’?”

  The girl beamed at him. “I am Brita Gudjonssen,” she said, extending her hand, “and I would like a Fuzzy Navel.”

  Monsoon gently took hold of her hand, thinking, touchdown. He ordered her drink and a bourbon for himself, and then said to her, “Brita, would you please excuse me for a moment?”

  Brita smiled at him. He walked through a doorway into an adjoining room where a basketball game was in progress on a big screen. It was 4:15 to go in the fourth quarter, and the Lakers were leading the Pacers. It was game five in the playoffs, and the Lakers were up three to two in the series. Monsoon wanted them to win by six. In fact, he seriously wanted them to win by six, the reason being that if they didn’t win by six the betting slip in his top pocket would be worthless and he wouldn’t be able to pay his bar tab. As anyone could tell you, not paying your bar tab in one of Don Imbroglio’s joints was not an especially good idea. Furthermore, if the Lakers didn’t win by six he would be into the Don for a grand, which, as anyone could tell you, was an even worse idea than not paying your bar tab. Much worse.

  Monsoon had always tried to steer clear of borrowing from the Don on account of the Don’s easy payment plan, whereby it was easy for the Don to have you turned into salami if you didn’t pay up. But lately things had been even tighter than usual, and he was desperate. All his usual sources he either owed money to, or they wouldn’t take his action on credit. Getting involved with the Don was like going down a one-way street. There was no turning back. He knew it was a hard road to go down, and he knew he had probably fucked up royally, but his gambling urge had overriden his common sense.

  Anyway, he had borrowed a grand from the Don’s front man. The first two hundred had gone on a horse that had lost under suspect circumstances. It ran like someone had fed it a pork pie and, if the jockey had pulled any harder, its lips would have fallen off. Then he had lost four hundred in a poker game when some clown who didn’t know a full house from a shithouse had filled an inside straight through blind providence and taken the pot.

  So he had staked his last four Cs on the game. The Pacers were on the ropes, and the Lakers were at home, and Jack Nicholson was there wearing yellow shorts and brown socks and was ready to step onto the court and straighten things out if anyone got out of line, so it was money in the bank. Monsoon watched a trey go down, making it Lakers by eleven with 3:56 to go, and walked back through to where Brita was sitting, smiling vacantly into the ether like a benign six-foot doll.

  “How’s yo’ drink?” he said.

  “Oh, it’s delicious, thank you.”

  “Where are all your friends?”

  “I left them, ja? Sometimes I think it is better to be alone. More things can happen.”

  “More things like what?”

  “Like meeting Tiger Woods’s brother. Can I meet Tiger?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, great! When?”

  “Tomorrow, if you like. He’ll be here.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No, I ain’t. Tomorrow, I promise. Just excuse me again, would you?”

  Brita smiled a puzzled smile as he walked back into the other room. She was still smiling when he returned. Monsoon wasn’t. One second to go, Lakers by five. O’Neal at the free throw line. He hadn’t even bothered to look.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “Nothin’, nothin’. Listen, Brita, you wanna go someplace else?”

  “Sure.”

  “Come on, then, this way.”

  “But what about the drinks?”

  “Oh, that’s okay. They know me. Let’s go.”

  Brita stood and straightened her skirt. She had a Rubenesque figure and was a good foot taller than Monsoon. He used her size to cover his retreat, hiding behind her as they scuttled toward the fire exit.

  Back at Brita’s hotel, where they went after Monsoon had explained that it wouldn’t be thought proper for them to go to his hotel suite, he being who he was and all, Brita demonstrated her enthusiasm for the fairway, and Monsoon showed her his nine iron and found out what was par for the hole. Afterward, he told her that he really liked her and wanted to see her again, but that he worked for a clandestine government agency and would be going away tomorrow to Uzbekistan on a mission of national importance, but he would visit her in Sweden when he had finished keeping the world safe for democracy.

  Brita said that she was disappointed that she wouldn’t get to meet Tiger, but that she still liked him anyway, and that she also liked to travel and was training to be a pediatrician and that when she was qualified she wanted to go overseas and devote herself to charity work. Which is just as well, because when she recovered from the mickey that Monsoon had slipped her after he had made full and vigorous use of her various orifices, she realized that she had donated three hundred dollars from her purse.

  Private investigation work is glamorous. It is mysterious, veiled ladies wafting tearfully into grim offices in clouds of expensive perfume, and hardened lonely men, men who know the score sitting behind the wheel on rainy deserted streets thinking profound, embittered thoughts in the lamplight. It is all sharp clothes and willing dames not-necessarily-in-distress. It is wisecracks and snappy comebacks to colorful, improbably named villains and hard-boi
led cops.

  Of course it is. And Sister Theresa wore fishnets and a G-string under her habit, and had a crack pipe hanging from her rosary.

  Private investigation work is sifting through the sordid pieces of broken lives like some wino rummaging through the garbage. It is endless hours of tedium, and furtive watching, and shit food and bad coffee. It is ill-kempt, disillusioned men sitting in crappy cars surrounded by cigarette butts and greasy burger wrappings, worrying about money. The only score they know is the score from the baseball game they’re listening to on the radio while waiting to drop the dime on some poor hapless bastard scurrying out of somebody else’s wife’s apartments at four in the morning, where the poor schmuck was only trying to squeeze a drop of joy and comfort from his miserable and meaningless life.

  Jordan “Baby Joe” Young ought to know. He had tried it.

  Baby Joe was Boston Irish, descended from five generations of cops. His father had been a near-legendary officer of the law. Joseph “Mighty Joe” Young had been the most feared and respected peace officer in Boston. He had been only marginally smaller than his namesake, not nearly so good-natured, but a much better shot. That was why the people that shot him to death had deemed it prudent to shoot him in the back one night as he was rolling out of Bad Bob Boyle’s Bar and Grill. Baby Joe had loved and revered his father, who, for all the roughness of his manner, had been a devoted and protective parent.

  Mighty Joe was both the reason Baby Joe had become a cop in the first place and the reason that he had ceased to be one.

  It is considered perfectly acceptable for Boston police officers to let off a little steam when they get off duty, and if things get a little out of hand every now and then, well, blind eyes can always be turned. However, tracking down the murderers of one’s father, one at a time, and decapitating them with a fireman’s axe does not fall under the category of letting off a little steam. Due to the universal popularity of Mighty Joe, the investigation into the decapitations was not pursued with especial vigor and, even though everyone from the hot dog vendors at Fenway Park to the secretary of the Genteel Christian Ladies Flower Arranging and Crochet League knew whodunit, Baby Joe was allowed to resign and quietly slip onto the midnight train for all points west.

  Which is why, instead of keeping the streets of Boston safe for innocent people, he was now ensconced in the dimmest recesses of Jonah’s Whale of a Lounge in Vegas, taking a well-earned respite from a busy day spent watching his telephone steadfastly refusing to ring. Word has always traveled fast, even before the web, which meant that regular police work was out, so Baby Joe had set himself up as a private investigator, knowing from the very first day that it was a mistake.

  He began to feel dirty, the kind of dirtiness that won’t wash, like that of Lady Macbeth’s hands, as if his very soul was being soiled by the sleaziness of the life he had undertaken. He was about to quit when he made an interesting discovery. Even in a town where integrity is looked upon as a severe handicap, he found out you could sell it. He inspired confidence in people. People instinctively trusted him. People who didn’t trust their own mothers trusted him. People who would steal from the poor box and not even have the common decency to spit in it afterward trusted him. People who were not even remotely trustworthy themselves, and proud of it, trusted him. Everybody, from the most innocent cherub-faced campus virgin to the most vicious scar-faced scum-sucking douchebag ex-con trusted him. And they were right. Call it quaint, call it naive, call it old-fashioned, call it ill advised…call it what you want, but when Jordan Young gave his word, he kept it. Always.

  So he had transformed himself into something different. A go-to guy for hire. Mediator, deliverer, negotiator, protector. And it had worked. He was doing something he could live with, could look himself in the mirror, and was getting by. Most of the time. Recently things had been kind of slow. In fact, if things had been going any slower they would have been going backwards. Of late, the only thing that was going down in his life was the Guinness, and now, as he stared into the brindled foam of a new-poured pint, watching it settle, he was thinking about how far removed he had become from anything that he was before.

  In his stillness he seemed to be cast in stone, and the cold blue glow from the bar sign above him flickered on the immobile features of his scarred and weathered face like a scene from an old film noir. More than forty years on a hard road, of tough streets, of hard drinking, of barroom diplomacy, and Vietnam, had left him with a face that appeared to be stitched together from disparate pieces of skin, like a living quilt.

  Only the eyes remained untainted, clear, yet distant, as if somehow, when Baby Joe Young looked at the world, he wasn’t looking at the same thing as everybody else.

  Kneeling on the carpet of a two-grand-a-night suite on the strip, Asia Birdshadow was feeling extremely uncomfortable and becoming more so by the minute. It wasn’t the guy’s dick that was bothering her, she having seen more pork in a Turkish mullah’s lunchbox. Rather, the problem was her neck, which was really hurting from the strain of having to hold still so as not to unbalance the ashtray that the fat, sweaty fuck had placed on the back of her head while he was shafting her. She wouldn’t have minded even that so much if the cheap bastard had been smoking a decent cigar, but the stench of the dime-store stinkweed was making her feel sick and it didn’t bode well for a tip.

  Asia Birdshadow was part Irish, part Louisiana Creole, and all woman. Her given name, as inscribed upon her birth certificate by a somewhat taken-aback cleric, was Euthanasia Birdshadow. The elder Mrs. Birdshadow had not enjoyed much of an education and had named her daughter with the belief that Euthanasia was a Disney cartoon from the thirties. Asia had modified it, for obvious reasons. The youngest of eight children raised on beans and molasses in a chicken shack on the levee near Baton Rouge, she had hitchhiked to Vegas the previous summer. In high school, the other kids called her Isis on the basis that she had the body of a goddess and the brains of a cow, and while she was undeniably possessed of a divine chassis, Asia was nowhere near as dumb as her lack of academic achievement might suggest. It had just been that she had not been able to summon up much interest in how to calculate the surface area of a pyramid, how many atoms were in a helium molecule, or who had broken the Treaty of Versailles. Her failings had more to do with terminal disinterest than inability, however. Since her arrival in Glittersville, she had parlayed her outstanding beauty, her exceptional figure, and her ability to suck the varnish off a Brownsville Slugger into a healthy bank balance and a cozy townhouse in Summerlin, thank you very much.

  She was street smart, feisty, wise beyond her years, and spoke French and Spanish fluently. Her interests in life extended no further than getting as far away as possible from the grinding and pestilent poverty she had been born into and ensuring that she would never again have to go without anything she needed or wanted. Ever. And every Monday morning she climbed into her canary-yellow Corvette and drove to the post office on Tenaya, where she bought a money order for one thousand dollars and posted it express delivery to Mrs. Evangeline Birdshadow of Baton Rouge, LA.

  Asia felt the guy’s thighs start to tremble, so she uttered a few token moans just to help the job along. As he started to come, the man took hold of her long copper-colored hair and pulled her head back, knocking the ashtray to the carpet. He began jerking her hair in time to his thrusts, bringing tears to her eyes.

  “Hey, what’s with the hair, you fat creep?” she said, somewhat detracting from the romance of the moment as the john fired his little squirt and collapsed onto his back, panting like a hot St. Bernard.

  Asia got to her feet, stepped over the spent and prostrate mark, and walked into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. She did the necessary and then carefully redid her makeup and adjusted her clothing. Turning around to check that the seams in her stockings were straight, she noticed the dark spots on the back of her dress where the fat greasy bastard had dripped on her. With a sigh, she turned back to face the mirror and
looked long and hard into her own tawny eyes. There were no answers for her there.

  Outside, the john had pulled up his pants and was sitting in a chair by the window, sucking on his cheap panatela with a supercilious leer.

  “Goddamn, girl. Y’all is really sump’n else. I like to had a fucken heart attack. If’n my folks could only see me now. Sheeit.”

  Asia smiled with her lips.

  “Thank you, hon. Glad y’all had a good time,” she said, thinking, If my folks could only see you now, they’d kick the shit out of you, you lard-ass redneck scumbag.

  Hookers who didn’t get the cash up front usually didn’t get to drive Corvettes, and Asia already had the man’s folding stuff in her purse. She was holding out for the extra, although in this case not holding out much hope.

  “Since y’all are so happy with the service, how about a little something extra for my favorite charity?”

  “Why, sure, Lindsey baby,” he said, Lindsey being the name she was using this evening. “Wouldn’t want you to think us good ol’ boys from ’Bama got no appreciation.”

  Shuffling his fat butt forward he reached into his hip pocket, pulled out a wad of bills, and ostentatiously peeled off…a ten.

  Asia gave him a look that would have stunned a basilisk. She reached out and snatched the note. “I never realized that the Hasidic community was so big in Birmingham.”

  In reply, the john exhaled a thick, swirling cloud of stogie smoke into her face.

  She spun on her heel and marched out of the room. “Have a pleasant evening, needle dick!” she said, slamming the door.

  Crispin Capricorn ruefully regarded the ample nakedness of his reflection in his antique gilt-framed mirror. Still flushed from his bubble bath he turned this way and that, vainly trying to strike a pose that would show his pink portliness to good advantage. The sight of his pendulous butt cheeks, with their deep overhanging creases leering back at him in a maniacal ass-grin, elicited a deep sigh. He peered at his chubby face, floating under the massed blond curls of a bouffant pompadour that made Little Richard look like Bruce Willis, and examined the deepening lines radiating from the corners of his eyes. He poked them with the tips of his pudgy manicured fingers.