Voodoo Ltd qd-3

by Ross Thomas

  “And with such a very little gun,” she said. “What now?”

  “We wait,” Stallings said.

  Rick Cleveland sat down behind the brunette secretary’s desk. “Wait for what?” he asked.

  “For whatever happens,” Stallings said.

  “Well, what d’you guys think’s going to happen?”

  “Something awful,” said Ione Gamble.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —200

  Forty-two

  At 8:49 that night, Otherguy Overby lay flat on the treehouse floor, peering down at Colleen Cullen as she ended her final security sweep through her five-acre grounds. In her left hand was a two-foot-long flashlight and, in her right, the sawed-off shotgun—aimed straight ahead— its shortened stock pressed hard against her right hip.

  At 8:51 Cullen returned to the inn, mounted the nine steps to the porch and went inside. A minute later all the interior lights went out.

  The only lights left burning were the two 100-watt ones on the porch.

  Overby had discovered the treehouse just after 8 P.M. as he slowly made his way through what he regarded as the forest primeval but was actually a well-tended three-acre stand of pines, sycamores, eucalyptus and a few rather old live-oak trees. Earlier, he drove past the entrance to the inn’s long brick drive with its always lit red neon sign warning of no vacancy. He stopped a quarter mile farther up the narrow blacktop road, parked the rented Ford on the shoulder, got out, locked the car and disappeared into what he suspected to be the wild wood.

  Eight minutes later he tripped on a root, tried to regain his balance, but fell on his butt and found himself staring up at the moonlit treehouse in the old sycamore. The tree was only a yard or so from the long brick drive and less than twenty yards from the inn itself. Overby guessed that the treehouse was fairly new and at least fourteen feet above the ground. Six 2 x4s, each two feet long, had been nailed to the tree’s thick trunk at two-foot intervals to provide a crude ladder.

  The treehouse itself wasn’t a house at all but merely a platform in the form of a trapezoid that had been wedged into the sycamore’s first crotch. Its floor was about six feet long by four to five feet wide. The support frame was more 2 X 4s; its flooring, 1x10 pine planks. It was obviously a place far too dangerous for kids, and Overby, who had never had a treehouse, wondered if Colleen Cullen had built it—or had had it built—because she’d never had one either.

  Just before 9 P.M., a black Ford sedan sped up the brick drive, stopped, then backed into the fan-shaped parking area as if positioning itself for a getaway. Overby watched from the treehouse as Georgia Blue, illuminated by moon and porch lights, slipped out on the passenger side. She held a revolver with both hands and made a quick visual sweep of everything in front of her. Quincy Durant got out on the driver’s side, a pistol in his right hand, the blue $8.95-plus-tax Voodoo, Ltd. —201

  moneybag in his left. Durant hurried to the nine steps that led up to the inn’s wraparound porch.

  Georgia Blue, walking backwards, followed Durant—her eyes and weapon raking everything to his rear. When Durant reached the bottom step he stopped and said something over his shoulder that Overby couldn’t hear. Durant then waited for Blue’s back to touch his.

  Overby nodded his approval.

  Durant took his time going up the steps. Georgia Blue, her back still to him, went up even more slowly, placing both feet on each step before moving up to the next riser. After they reached the front door, Durant rang the bell. A moment later every light bulb in every room on every floor of the old three-story mansion was ablaze. Overby, from his treehouse perch, liked Colleen Cullen’s decision to light up the whole place all at once with the master power switch. Yet he wondered how she’d managed to keep the front porch lights on but everything else dark and decided to ask her.

  Durant tried the front door. It opened and he went in. Georgia Blue backed in slowly, her pistol still in its two-handed grip and moving from side to side in a sixty-degree arc. After the inn’s front door closed behind them, Otherguy Overby looked at his digital watch. The time was 8:59:33.

  A familiar voice drifted down to them from the staircase. “Y’all are on time at least.”

  Durant and Blue looked up to find Colleen Cullen on the halfway-up landing and beginning her descent to the foyer with the sawed-off shotgun in the crook of her right arm. Her left hand trailed the banister. Durant thought it was an effective, even graceful entrance despite the shotgun and the black jeans and the black cotton sweater and the black athletic shoes with the high tops that had to be laced up.

  “We’re the first?” Georgia Blue asked.

  “Just did my outside rounds,” Cullen said. “Nobody out there but rabbits and raccoons.”

  “Where will we be?” Georgia Blue said.

  “Be right where you were before—in the parlor,” Cullen said, turned and led them toward the closed sliding doors.

  When they reached them, Durant said, “You first, Colleen.” She shrugged, shoved the left door back into its recess and went into the parlor followed by Durant, then Georgia Blue. Once all three were in the room and heading for the big round oak table where some drinks had been laid on, a man’s voice behind them barked an order. “Hold it!”

  Durant and Blue stopped immediately. But Colleen Cullen whirled around to aim her sawed-off shotgun not at the intruder, but at Durant and Blue.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —202

  “Do something with your hands,” Cullen said.

  Durant dropped the blue moneybag to the oak floor and raised his hands shoulder height. Georgia Blue merely held her arms and hands away from her body.

  “Man behind you’s got an Uzi,” Colleen Cullen said. “You gotta know what that is.” Her eyes flicked to Georgia Blue. “Now here’s what you do, Slim. First, use two fingers of your left hand and pull up your front shirttail. Then use two fingers of your right hand to pull your piece out from between your tummy and your panties and lay it in my left hand.”

  Blue did as instructed. As the .38 revolver was deposited in Cullen’s left hand, she gave it a quick glance of recognition and said, “Looks like I get to sell you one more time, sweet thing.”

  She shoved the revolver down into her own left rear pants pocket, then turned herself and the shotgun slightly toward Durant. “Same thing, Mr. Tan Man. Two fingers only.”

  “Mind if I use a thumb?” Durant said as he carefully took the revolver from his hip pocket, placed it on Cullen’s palm, smiled and said, “Get a better offer, Colleen?”

  “Sure did.”

  “How much better?”

  “Too much for you to top it.”

  “Too late to try?”

  “Way too late,” she said. “Now I’m gonna turn around and go lay these pieces on the table and I expect you all to stay put on account of the Uzi back there. When I get rid of these, then we’ll get down to—

  well, whatever it is we’re gonna get down to.”

  Cullen turned and walked six steps toward the big round oak table.

  Just as she began her seventh step there was a short burst of automatic fire. Durant guessed four rounds but changed his mind when only three rounds pierced Cullen’s black sweater just above her waistline and about where her spine was.

  The rounds slammed her forward and her legs collapsed first.

  Before she reached the floor both barrels of the shotgun fired and tore two joined holes in the oak. The holes reminded Durant of a fat solid-black 8 that had fallen on its face.

  Durant didn’t move. But Georgia Blue did. She sighed first, turned, went to the nearest straight chair, sat down, crossed her right ankle over her left knee, used the knee to support her elbow, then cupped her chin in her palm, glared at someone other than Durant, then said,

  “That was a stupid fucking thing to do.”

  “One less witness,” said the man who had ordered them to “Hold it.”

  “You can’t kill everybody off,” she said. “First the limo driver. Then the two Goodison twits u
p in what—Oxnard? And now Colleen. It’s dumb.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —203

  “Only one to go,” he said. “And you can do him.”

  “Why me?”

  “To earn your money and share the liability, why else?”

  “I don’t think she’ll do it,” Durant said.

  “Whyever not?” the man said.

  “There’s nothing in it for her.”

  “Three hundred thousand dollars isn’t nothing.”

  “The blue bag at my feet,” Durant said.

  “The moneybag?”

  “The moneybag,” Durant agreed. “Except there’s no money in it.

  Just magazines. Old copies of Architectural Digest mostly.”

  “You’re lying, of course.”

  “Take a look.”

  “Lying or not, I’m afraid Georgia will still have to kill you as a kind of—what shall we call it—penance?”

  “Penance is good,” Durant said. “And she’s got a lot to be penitent about. But it wouldn’t be smart.”

  “Aren’t we all just a bit past smart?”

  “Probably,” Durant said. “But if you want her to kill me, you’ll have to let her handle a piece. And if you do that, she’ll take you out first and then work something out with me to save her own ass. There’s this about Georgia: she always knows when to cut her losses.”

  “Kick the bag out in front of you,” the man said.

  Durant took a step back and kicked the bag away.

  “Take another step back.”

  Durant stepped back just as the man came into view. Durant grinned and said, “My God, it must be Jack Broach, Hollywood super agent—and off to World War Two about fifty years late. Is it tonight we raid Calais, Jack?”

  Broach smiled a charming smile. “I’d’ve liked to have done that, Mr.

  Durant. I really would.”

  Broach wore a knitted navy watch cap pulled down over his ears. He also wore a navy-blue turtleneck wool sweater and black pants that were bloused down over jump boots that looked as if they had been spit-shined. Although Durant thought the boots were a bit much he also thought that Broach handled the Uzi with disturbing familiarity.

  Broach suddenly stopped smiling, knelt on his right knee beside the moneybag but kept his eyes and the Uzi on Durant. With his left hand, Broach felt for the moneybag’s zipper, found it, tugged it open and glanced down. The open bag was stuffed with hundred-dollar bills.

  When Broach looked down, Georgia Blue snatched the small .25-caliber semiautomatic from the ankle holster on her right leg—the same leg whose ankle she had rested on her left knee.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —204

  She shot the kneeling Jack Broach in his upper left arm. Broach grunted in either surprise or pain or both, dropped the Uzi, clapped his right hand to his wound and stared at Georgia Blue with astonishment. “You shot me,” he said, making it both a question and an accusation.

  Now on her feet and aiming the small weapon at Broach with both hands, Georgia Blue said, “Give it up, Jack.”

  But his right hand had already darted back to grip the Uzi he had dropped. “Maybe I’ll shoot Mr. Durant myself after all.”

  “You can try,” she said.

  Broach frowned, as if both puzzled and saddened by events. “We did have a deal, you and I.”

  “Where’re the tapes, Jack?”

  “What tapes?” he said. “There were never any tapes—none we could use anyway because Ione didn’t kill Billy Rice and don’t ask me who did because I don’t know.”

  “And the Goodisons?” Georgia Blue said.

  “They became all antsy and wanted to pull out of our blackmail deal and sell their story to some supermarket tabloid and, well, that had to be prevented, didn’t it?”

  “Make him drop the Uzi, Georgia,” Durant said.

  “A head shot, you think?”

  “A head shot would be nice,” Durant said.

  “Of course,” Broach said, “it was altogether different with you and me from what it was with me and the Goodisons. You and I are equals.

  And we made our deal as such.”

  “No tapes, no deal, Jack,” Georgia Blue said. “Sorry.”

  Jack Broach shook his head as if disappointed. He rose with the Uzi in his right hand, pointed downward, his finger nowhere near the trigger. He seemed unaware of the blood that ran down his left arm beneath the sweater and dripped to the floor.

  Clenching his teeth and barely moving his lips, Durant said, “Make him drop the fucking piece, Georgia.”

  “I’m leaving now,” Jack Broach said and walked slowly toward the open sliding door. Just before reaching it, he stopped and looked back at Georgia Blue, who still used two hands to aim the small semiautomatic at him. “Regardless of what you now claim, Georgia, we really did have a deal.”

  He turned and walked through the door into the foyer. Standing near the stairs was Otherguy Overby, the Sauer semiautomatic he had borrowed from Artie Wu in his right hand.

  When Broach saw Overby, he tried to bring the Uzi up. He was still trying when Overby shot him three times without hesitation. Once Broach lay sprawled on the parquet floor, Overby went over, stared Voodoo, Ltd. —205

  down at him curiously, nudged him with the toe of a shoe, then looked up as Durant came through the door, holding one of Colleen Cullen’s revolvers. He was followed a moment later by Georgia Blue, whose small five-shot weapon dangled at her side, seemingly forgotten.

  Overby looked back down at the dead man, then up at Georgia Blue.

  “Jack Broach?”

  She nodded.

  “What about the tapes?”

  “There aren’t any tapes,” she said.

  “None they could use anyway,” Durant said.

  Overby frowned, then looked around. “What about Colleen?”

  “Broach didn’t want any witnesses,” Blue said.

  “Except you,” Durant said.

  “He didn’t want me as a witness. He wanted me as a conspirator.”

  She paused. “But then he and I had a deal, didn’t we?”

  “The guy had an Uzi,” Overby said. “A fucking Uzi. How come you two are still walking around?”

  “It’s all Georgia’s fault,” Durant said.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —206

  Forty-three

  After Booth Stallings hung up the telephone on the blond secretary’s desk in Mott’s hotel suite office, he turned to Ione Gamble, who was still slumped in the room’s only easy chair. “More bad news?” she asked.

  “Jack Broach is dead,” Stallings said. “Somebody shot him. He was the one blackmailing you—the one we called Oil Drum.”

  The shock twisted Ione Gamble’s face and made her eyes bulge until she said, “Jack’s dead?”

  Stallings nodded.

  “He was blackmailing me?”

  “Broach always was a no-good son of a bitch,” Rick Cleveland said from his seat behind the brunette secretary’s desk. He lifted his glass of Scotch, said, “To old Jack,” drank it and poured himself another from the bottle that was now one-third empty.

  The shock had gone away from Gamble’s face, replaced by an odd serenity that seemed to erase all other emotions. “You knew Jack?”

  she asked Cleveland, as though inquiring about some mutual acquaintance neither had seen in years.

  “Knew him when he was first starting out,” Cleveland said.

  “I was one of his first clients. When he got too big or I got too small, he dumped me.”

  She nodded politely, looked at Stallings again and asked, “Why would Jack blackmail me? Did he need money? I would’ve lent him money.”

  “You don’t have any to lend,” Stallings said. “He stole it all. Maybe embezzled’s a better word.”

  “I have no money?”

  “Not much.”

  “And you say Jack stole it?”

  Stallings only nodded.

  “Then how do I pay Howie Mott?”

  “You don’t
have to worry about paying Howie,” Stallings said, took the small .25-caliber semiautomatic from a pocket, placed it on the desktop and seemed to forget it.

  “He won’t defend me for nothing,” she said. “I can’t expect him to.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —207

  “There’s not going to be any trial,” Stallings said. “Not for you anyway.”

  “What the hell’s going on, Booth?” she said, her serene look suddenly replaced by anger. “Spell it out. Use babytalk if you have to.”

  “We’re going down to the sheriff’s office in Malibu,” Stallings said.

  “Or maybe it’s called the substation.”

  “The three of us?” she said.

  “Just Rick and me,” Stallings said, picking up the small pistol. “And Rick’s going to tell ‘em you didn’t shoot Billy Rice, but that he did.”

  “You’re not trying to be funny, are you?” she said. “No. Of course you’re not.”

  “Know how much it costs a day to rent a car like yours, Ione?”

  Stallings said.

  “What the hell’re you getting at now?”

  “Four hundred a day plus fifty cents a mile. That’s how much. Plus a five-thousand-dollar deposit—cash or credit card, providing your credit card can stand it. Rick here rented a car just like yours last New Year’s Eve, didn’t you, Rick?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Sure you did. Then you drove into Billy Rice’s driveway that same night around eleven or eleven-thirty, parked it, got out and rang the doorbell. You told whoever answered the door, maybe Rice himself, that you wanted to patch things up—make amends. Something like that. Once you’re both in the living room, you shoot Rice two times, then leave the gun oil that little elm table in the hall beneath the Hockney where whoever comes in will be sure to see it and maybe even pick it up. Which is just what Ione did.” Stallings looked at her.

  “Rick even left the front door open so you or someone else could go right in. The gun Rick used is kind of important because it was stolen off a movie set at Paramount where they were filming a pilot. Rick was a member of the cast—right, Rick?”