In It for the Money

by David Burnsworth

  The bartender, a woman named Maureen he had gotten to know real well the last time he’d been in town, leaned across the bar and kissed him full on the lips.

  She pulled away, but kept a hand on his shoulder. “It’s been a long time, Mick. How’re ya doin’?”

  Maureen had dark brown hair with long, flowing curls held back by a bandana. It had been a few years, but her tanned face still looked good to him. And, aside from another tat on her right arm, she hadn’t changed much at all.

  He said, “I’m doing okay now. How’re you doin’, Mo?”

  “Can’t complain. What can I get you?”

  “Draft and an inch of whisky. Get yourself a round.”

  She poured his two drinks. “Last time I let a man buy me a round, I had a bad night.”

  Crome took out his vaporizer. “You didn’t pick the right man.”

  She slid the drinks across the bar to him. “You’ve got that right. How long are you in town?”

  He vaped and exhaled. “I’m workin’ a job with Blu. Think I’m going to stick around Charleston for a while. If nothin’ else, it’ll keep me closer to here.”

  She leaned forward again and traced his cheek. “You better if you know what’s good for you.”

  He gave a cackle. “No one’s accused me of knowing that before.”

  “Always a first time for everything.” She moved to another end of the bar to serve a fat biker with skull tattoos on his forearms.

  Crome observed the clientele. Blue-collar types drinking low-end beer from cans. A biker seated at a back table selling bags of reds, whites, and blues. A hippie hawking dime bags. These were his people, and he felt at home with them.

  Maureen came back to check on him.

  He said, “You got a man now?”

  “Depends,” she said.

  He gave her a grin. “On what?”

  “On if you’re going to take off again.”

  “You believe I’m stupid enough to think you been waitin’ for me to come back?”

  “No.” She stooped down to meet his gaze again. “Let’s just say you came back at a good time.”

  Crome thought about what she said and decided to play it straight. “To tell you the truth, Mo, I was hopin’ you’d be here, that I’d get to see you. But that’s not the only reason I’m here.”

  She gave him another million-dollar, filled with wisdom, smile. “I know. Why don’t you tell me the other reason you’re here so we can get that out of the way?”

  He leaned forward because he didn’t want any of the others to hear him.

  She met him across the bar.

  In her ear, he whispered, “I’m looking for Jimmy Z. Who could tell me where he is?”

  She eased away, straightening her back, turned around, and poured him another draft. When she placed it in front of him, she said, “Guy in the green shirt.”

  He nodded and she walked away and checked on another customer, not looking back at him again for quite a while.

  In the mirror behind the bar, Crome found the man she’d dimed. The guy wasn’t particularly big, but he looked like he could handle himself. Maybe six foot, two hundred pounds, more arms and chest than legs—typical meathead mistake. He wore his thinning hair tight to his scalp, which looked pink when it wasn’t reflecting the dim lighting like an alternate moon.

  The man in the green shirt wasn’t alone either. With him were three other guys, all taking turns playing horseshoes. And all of them fit the same pumped-out chest and twig-leg description.

  Crome bet they all shot up the same steroid juice. He sat there, drinking his beer and contemplating his next move. He could take them all in a straight up fight, but here they all had those horseshoes. Beating it out of them wasn’t the smart play right now. He also couldn’t just walk up to them and ask where Jimmy was. Everyone in the bar had seen Mo kiss him. They might assume she told Crome who would know and, sometime in the future, want to explain to her in not so nice terms why that had been a mistake. And then Crome really would have to come back and deal with them, horseshoes or not.

  No, the best way to handle this was to get some information on them, give it to Gladys and Harmony and Tess, and see what they come back with. Then Crome would know what the play should be.

  He needed names and plate numbers.

  About the same time Crome headed to Bert’s Bar, Blu and Tess were following up on a lead. The man who had held Jimmy and his receptionist hostage and then committed suicide by charging the police had paid for an apartment on King Street above a high-end clothing store. The apartment was under another name, but Harmony had tracked down the address through the account the rent was getting paid from.

  The police were good, but they probably hadn’t made the connection yet, and that gave Blu and Tess an opportunity to check things out.

  Riding in her Beetle with the convertible top down, Blu found himself enjoying the sun more than he thought he would. The little car had some scoot, most likely due to the turbo badge on the trunk lid, and they made good time as she weaved through traffic.

  She parallel-parked at a meter on King one block down from the address they came to see, the small car easing into a tiny spot between two SUVs. They got out and walked along with the tourists down the sidewalk, Tess window shopping along the way. She stopped and gaped at a purse, left Blu on the street, and went inside the store.

  At the rate they were going, with her stopping and shopping, the store-lined block was going to take a while to walk. He dragged on his vaporizer while he waited.

  Five minutes later, Tess exited the store carrying a shopping bag with her purchase. The store looked high-dollar to Blu and he dared not ask what kind of money she’d just dropped. She held up the bag with the store’s name on it, did a made-for-camera pose, her blonde hair falling over her shoulders, and joined him.

  He said, “You want to put the bag in your trunk?”

  “No,” she said. “This way we look like everyone else.”

  The statement was humorous for several reasons. First, she did not look like everyone else. And second, he didn’t look like everyone else either. He liked to wear black, even in the summer. His skin color was a natural shade of olive, and he was tall, lean, and muscular, while most everyone else wasn’t.

  But he decided to live in her fantasy for the moment. Especially the one where others thought he and Tess might be together, him being the clichéd middle-aged man with a woman half his age. Maybe it was a good cover, after all. The people around them would be more inclined to think he was pathetic and less inclined to wonder why they were really there in the first place.

  In other words, it could work.

  At the address she’d come up with, they found the entrance between two shops, a large wooden door with a keypad to the left. Tess gave Blu a smile, typed in a four-digit code, and opened the door.

  He didn’t bother to ask her how she’d come up with the access code. She was obviously very good at snooping. If he could afford it, be able to not worry about all the bad situations his jobs generated, and be strong enough to avoid temptation, he’d want her and Harmony on his team. They could get into places he and Crome would never be able to, and they had access to an entirely different set of sources.

  The door swung open with nary a squeak from the hinges, and they were inside a small corridor facing a set of carpeted stairs. The smell was of old wood with a slight hint of mildew, typical Charleston.

  At the top of the stairs, they found another small corridor with four doors, two on each side. The number for the apartment they looked for was on the far left door.

  Blu said, “Lemme guess, you have a key.”

  Tess smiled again, reached into her purse, and removed a key on a ring. “It’s the building master.”

  “Ever heard of illegal entry?”

  She spread her hands
open. “The guy’s dead.”

  That was the same conclusion Blu had come to, he just wanted to hear her thoughts on the subject. There was always an element of risk. He never knew what was behind a closed door, and he found more times than not someone on the other side with a gun and a trigger-happy finger.

  She inserted the key, turned it, and the lock clicked open.

  Blu waved Tess behind him, drew his Beretta, and pushed open the door. A fat bald man with his back toward them rummaged through something. As the door crested the half-open point, the hinges let out a squeal. The man flinched and turned.

  It looked like he reached for something.

  Blu said, “Hold it right there. I don’t want to shoot you, but I will.”

  The man stopped reaching.

  “Good,” Blu said. “Now, put your hands on your head.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  His green, shiny shirt said golf wear. So did his beltless trousers.

  Blu said, “I’m the one holding the gun, a Beretta with a full mag in case you want to know. Safety’s off too. Now, hands on your head.”

  He complied. “Don’t shoot. Go ahead and take whatever you want.”

  Tess said, “It looks like you beat us to it.”

  “This is my brother’s place. Was my brother’s place.”

  The man hadn’t tried to turn around or do anything stupid, but Blu kept pressure on the trigger. There was no telling who this guy really was, brother or not. To Tess, Blu said, “Get his wallet.”

  He could feel her giving him a look that said, “You get his wallet.” But she didn’t argue.

  Blu said, “She’s going to take your wallet out of your back pocket. If you so much as cough, I’ll drill you. Do we have an understanding?”

  “Yes.” No nod.

  Tess went for the wallet. As soon as her torso half blocked the man, he spun, grabbed her wrist with one hand while reaching for something with his other.

  Blu pulled the trigger and caught the man in the shoulder with a perfect shot, missing Tess, which was his first intention, and doing serious damage. The shot spun the man back and away.

  Tess dropped to the ground.

  The man, still standing, grunted and tried to grab at something in his pocket.

  Blu put another round in him, this one through the triceps.

  He grunted again, both arms folded against his chest, leaking blood, and charged into Blu.

  Blu side-stepped, but wasn’t completely out of the way as the man collided into him, slamming him against the wall. The man tried a headbutt and almost nailed him with a direct shot to the nose. Blu moved his head just enough and the man’s forehead tagged him in the shoulder, a brutal blow causing him to drop the gun.

  As Blu’s mind came to the conclusion the best move at this close range was a knee to the man’s groin, Tess tagged the man with a hard kick to just that region from behind.

  Another grunt, this one more of a squeal, and then the man dropped to his knees.

  Blu raised his foot and pushed the man backward.

  He fell on his back, writhing.

  Blu had to admire the guy. The man was tough, if more than a tad stupid. With his eyes on the man, Blu picked up his gun, holstered it, and rubbed an aching collar bone, which wasn’t broken but now pretty bruised up. He said, “It didn’t have to go down this way.” To Tess, he said, “Better call the police.”

  The man on the floor, still writhing, said, “No cops.”

  Tess said, “You need a hospital.”

  “No cops.”

  Blu said, “She’s right. You’re going to bleed out if we don’t get you some treatment.”

  The man tried to stand, but couldn’t.

  To Tess, Blu said, “Get his wallet. Let’s see who he really is.”

  A voice in the doorway said, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  Both Blu and Tess turned to the still open door.

  Another man Blu had never seen before, this one a slightly younger version of the fat man on the floor, pointed a Glock at them. He said, “Pick my brother up.”

  With the tables now officially turned, and with Blu having shot the man’s brother, he decided not to push his luck. He didn’t have a brother, but if someone had shot Crome, Blu would have emptied five clips in retaliation. He hoped the man in the doorway had better self-control.

  Blu stepped around the man on the floor, hooked his hands under the man’s arm pits, and tugged him up.

  The man on the floor let out a yelp in protest but didn’t fight Blu.

  His brother said, “Step back.”

  Blu did.

  The man slipped his left hand around his brother and eased him backwards through the doorway, the Glock still pointed at Blu.

  Tess watched, not speaking or moving.

  There was a lot of blood on the floor.

  When the two men were gone, Blu said, “What the hell was that?”

  Tess replied, “I’m not sure.”

  He looked around the apartment. The place was trashed, and not just from the scuffle. The floors were cluttered with the contents of overturned drawers and cleared shelves.

  “We should get out of here,” he said, although he really wanted to go through the place. “The neighbors most likely heard the gunshots and have called the police.”

  “The entryway downstairs had two cameras,” she said, “I spotted them as we entered. We’re already caught on video.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” he said.

  She shrugged. “It was too late anyway. I figured if we didn’t set off any alarms, we’d have the place to ourselves to look as long as we wanted. If no one suspected anything, they wouldn’t feel the need to review any video files.”

  “Are we going to stand here and discuss potentialities or are we going to get the hell out of here?” Blu asked.

  She said, “The time to leave was sixty seconds ago with the two bald guys. Charleston P.D., if they were indeed called, are on their way.”

  She was right. The lesser of the evils was to be sitting down on the floor, fingers laced on top of their heads, when the police stormed the place, which was in less than a minute. He told her what he thought.

  She sat cross-legged on the floor in the center of the room but away from the man’s blood, and laced her fingers on top of her pretty head.

  Blu did the same beside her, their elbows touching, and began counting.

  By the time he had gotten to twenty-five, he heard the downstairs front door bang open and two sets of heavy footsteps bounding up the stairs.

  The first officer dropped to a knee, his police-issue Glock trained through the open door on Blu and then Tess. He said, “Don’t move.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Maureen lived in a trailer park on the outskirts of South Myrtle with her seventeen-year-old son, Stevie. They didn’t have a lot of money, but they didn’t ask for any handouts either. As soon as Stevie graduated from high school, Maureen said he was headed into the Navy, and Crome respected that.

  The kid had been in his room asleep when they’d come in, and they’d done their best to keep the noise down, but once they’d retired to her bedroom, all bets were off. Crome had forgotten how well he and Maureen were together, and now, the next morning, Tuesday, he sat up in bed vaping, his head reeling, while she showered.

  She came out, a towel wrapped around her solid, tanned figure. “Morning.”

  He smiled at her. “Morning.”

  She crawled across the bed and kissed him.

  And then another hour later, they both squeezed into the small shower together.

  And after another hour, Crome mounted his Harley and roared away to get breakfast while Maureen went to her other job as a cashier at one of those dollar stores. Before leaving he’d checked his phone a
nd found three missed calls, two from Blu and one from Harmony.

  He sat at a booth at the first Waffle House he came to and, after ordering coffee and a Grand Slam breakfast, returned Harmony’s call. Because, well, she was hot and Blu was just Blu.

  Harmony answered, “Where are you?”

  “Myrtle Beach.”

  “You picked one hell of a time to run off, Crome.”

  He didn’t know her well but immediately sensed things were not kosher in the lowcountry.

  Blu was now officially in trouble. Patricia had to pull quite a few strings to get the police not to arrest him and Tess on the spot for trespassing and discharging a weapon inside the city limits. Even though the video clearly showed the two men Blu and Tess described enter before them.

  Blu, however, lost his gun. More like it was confiscated pending further investigation into the shooting.

  Tess, Patricia, Billie, and Blu sat at a booth in the rooftop bar overlooking Calhoun Street and Marion Square. Blu took a hit off his vaporizer while the women sipped white wine spritzers.

  Patricia was not happy.

  Neither was Billie.

  Hence the feeling of being in trouble.

  Blu hoped it wasn’t because he was in some strange apartment with an attractive woman twenty years his junior. But one could never tell.

  The sulfur smell of the lowcountry wafted through the open area along with a gentle breeze.

  Patricia asked, “Just what did you two think you were going to do in that man’s apartment?”

  Look for clues was the obvious answer. But in Blu’s experience, obvious answers didn’t go over with upset women. In particular, Billie, who sat across from him and Tess and next to Patricia.

  He kept his mouth shut and his eyes focused elsewhere.

  Billie said, “Patricia asked you two a question. I suggest you answer it.”

  Blu begrudgingly met her glare. “Tess tracked the man who held Jimmy and his secretary hostage and found him connected to the apartment. We figured the police didn’t have the information yet, so we went to see what we could find out.”

  “Yeah,” Tess said. “Only someone beat us to it.”