by Robert White
“Shut up, Jack.”
“That is, after he’s fucked her brains out and-”
She leaned over and unzipped me; then she dug around until she found what she wanted and began kneading my testicles in a vise-like grip with her fingertips.
“Tell me how it hurts, Jack,” she hissed through her teeth. Her face was close into mine and her hazel eyes were as yellow as a badger’s. She squeezed again, and I screamed.
“I’ll take care of Tanya. But there is no way out for you,” she said and flecks of spittle hit me in the mouth. “No way out for you or your stupid little fag brother.”
I rocked against the seat back but nothing eased the terrible pressure of her fingertips. I felt as if someone had pulled my spinal cord out of my neck, dipped it in kerosene, and jammed it back in.
“Beg me to kill you,” she said.
I made gagging sounds. The cords were cutting my flesh as I tried to escape the pain.
“I said beg me to kill you and I will,” she said.
I begged her and I meant it. She put the barrel of her gun into my temple and pulled the trigger. She pulled it again. The click-click-click of dry-firing sounded like rain on a tin roof.
She checked her watch. “I guess Randall will have to kill you. It’s time.”
She started the car and drove down the alley and turned left onto the strip. The streets were nearly empty now and there were few people walking. We drove slowly to Little Minnesota, where it was completely deserted except for Carlos’ car stopped at the intersection. No cars approached ahead or behind besides us. We pulled up right behind him and stopped.
“Come on, bitch,” she whispered.
Then Tanya, the attractive dark-haired girl who had mixed with the gaggle of teens, appeared walking alongside the arcade with the black bag held in her arms like a side of beef.
Jesus, I thought, could she be any more conspicuous? Where were all the damned cops now?
“Come on, come on, hurry up,” Marija urged.
Tanya was in no great hurry with her burden. She loped across the intersection toward Carlos and shot a stern, pouty look in Marija’s direction, although she couldn’t possibly see her through the windshield. “Look at the silly little bitch,” Marija said and stiffened in her seat with anxiety. “It’s too heavy for her.”
The passenger door flung open and she wrestled the bag in. Carlos’ arm reached out and pulled the bag inside and Tanya jumped in before the door closed. Marija closed the distance with a tiny squeal of rubber. In the deserted street, it sounded extra loud.
“I’ve never seen anything so smooth,” I said. “All of you should take this on the road and make real money giving fuck-up scenarios for police academies.”
“Shut up, Jack,” she snapped.
“Remind her to take a shower before you go down on her,” I said. “She’s been rooting around in all that nasty garbage.”
“Talk yourself into some courage because you’re going to need it. I’ll tell you about some of the things Randall has planned for you on the way back...”
#25
We drove back the way we came without incident – a two-car tandem of thieves, a transvestite, Marija’s lesbian lover, who might or might not be innocent, a former landscaper about to become a former human being. What else could I write for my epitaph? Not much, I realized. I was one of life’s little people, a loser.
If Marija wanted me to beg for the coup de grâce on the way back, I didn’t give her the satisfaction. Pathetic as my life was, I wanted more of it – just simple breathing would do, expelling carbon dioxide and taking on oxygen and nitrogen seemed a blessed gift to me just then. I had one small victory to hope for and that was to get Calderone enraged enough to kill me on my own terms.
She pulled up the long driveway beside a deserted and overgrown apple orchard. I detected a tiny glow of light through the bends in the road as we neared an old farmhouse. Single-storied and swaybacked, it couldn’t be seen from the road.
It wasn’t until she parked up to the front door that I spotted the kerosene lamp in the front window. Calderone came out and loosened my restraints. I felt the nylon ties at my ankles stretch and split apart as he thrust the knife between them. He had to use a key to undo the waist chain.
He pulled me out of the car by grabbing a fistful of my shirt and said into my face: “I owe you for so many things, I don’t know where to begin. Trying to fuck my woman, upsetting me over those people from the bank, stopping me from doin’ that little girl’s boyfriend, taking off with my money, and in general treating me like shit when I ain’t done nothing but right by you by tryin’ to put a little money in your pocket. Payback’s gonna be one cold dirty bitch, Jack.”
He shoved me ahead of him and added a hard kick to my lower back as I stumbled up the rotten steps to get inside. The bag was sitting on the table. Carlos and Tanya were standing nearby. When Randall opened it, he drew back from the stacked bundles of money.
“Whew, what the fuck’s that smell?”
“I dropped the money into a swimming pool,” I said.
“You dumb fucking-”
“Forget it, baby, we can clean it up later,” Marija said. “Money spends no matter what it smells like.”
Randall thrust a steel pair of cufflinks on my wrist and cuffed me to the table leg. He said to me, “You so much as twitch, you’re gonna get dropped to the floor.”
I watched him take the money into the other room. He returned to the women and opened his arms. In his hands he held a couple blue diamond-shaped Viagras. He embraced Marija and this time she let him. He gave her a long passionate kiss, and then he reached out an arm for Tanya, who curled into it. The women kissed him and then kissed each other. Carlos stood there with a nervous smile and eyes pinned. He had shot up during the trip to keep his high.
Then it struck me: the bundles of money on top of the bag were neatly arranged. I hadn’t done that. After showing Calderone the bag’s contents, I had stuffed the money carelessly back inside and zipped it up. My heart started hammering. I risked a look at Carlos, but I couldn’t read his face. During those long minutes when I was Marija’s squeeze toy, Carlos could have slipped out of the car and made it to the arcade before Tanya. He had infuriated Calderone yesterday by scoring meth at Little Minnesota with all the cops about. That much I knew because some of those stinging slaps that rocked my head were for ‘my dope fiend brother.’
But he might have done something else too, right under Randall’s wrathful and suspicious eye.
My instructions to Stevie were to square up the dumpster in front of the glass-paned window. Carlos remembered how I had fooled that Montreal cop Thierry Delorme all those years ago. I had to steal an arc welder, and give myself a crash course in the art of welding to pull it off. The same frigid day I was strip-searched by Delorme I came back at night and broke into the basement of the building. With the cops on stakeout, I cut a hole through the back of the bin and climbed into it for the bag of eighteenth-century silver chalices and trays.
If my drug-crazed brother had decided to do a double-cross, driven by his need for the operation, then once inside the arcade, nothing more than a crowbar was needed to whack out a few glass panes; the bag could have been retrieved from inside through the hole I wanted Stevie’s welder to cut. It was supposed to be my ace in the hole, not my brother’s. Pippin’s men were watching the outside. By the time they figured out the bag of money was missing, it would be too late. I’d have Carlos safe and the money both. That was the plan, anyway, but everybody has a plan before the fight.
All I knew for sure was that once I turned the money over Carlos and I were both dead men walking. It’s only at the exchange they can get you, my father said, and he was a past master of dead drops and fallbacks.
If a man isn’t distracted while he’s having sex with two women, he’s never going to be. I looked at Carlos and then at the bag on the table. I stared until he gave me the answer; one glance at the bag told me all I nee
ded.
I mouthed the word “key” to him. Carlos’ answer was to lift up his shirt and show me the gun in his pants.
He nodded his head in the direction of their noisy sex: Tanya’s clichéd urgings and Randall’s guttural noises.
I saw the silver and black Taurus sticking out of his pants. I had to try to keep very still because I felt my body starting to shiver uncontrollably – shock, pain, cold and hunger were taking their toll. I was down to the dregs. The white-hot volts of pain that rippled through me meant I wasn’t going to be walking fast much less running.
The most fear I ever felt, the worst spasm of blank desperation that welled up in me like a sob, happened right at that moment. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t bear to see the answer. The dog had returned to his vomit.
The gargling noise from the couch forced me to look. Marija was leaning over Randall’s back while he plunged in and out of Tanya with a sucking noise. He had her pinned to the sofa with one hand around her throat and was slamming into her pelvis like a maniac. She had her hands on his forearm and was trying to twist free from the relentless jackhammering. Once she realized he wasn’t letting go, she clawed and pulled at his thick arm. It was hopeless. He increased the frenzy of his thrusts into her; his back glistened with sweat. Tanya’s eyes opened in terror. Marija had been fondling his sac from between his legs and moved up to watch the agony in her dying lover’s face. Her hand slipped between her legs as she masturbated to Tanya’s death throes.
“Give her some air,” Marija said.
Tanya’s hoarse gasping filled the room. It was sickening to hear.
Calderone went back to shoving himself inside her. The slap of skin on skin drowned out her terrified gasps.
“Fuck that pussy, baby. Fuck her good,” Marija said. She was a depraved, wild-eyed maenad to his Bacchus.
Tanya went limp, her whole body sagged into the couch, and her hands slipped from Calderone’s wrist; one arm dangled at the side of the sofa as he kept pumping.
“Ease off, baby,” she said. “Give her some air.”
My eyes pleaded with Carlos: Now. He had frozen in place; his face whitened in terror. We were meant to see this psychotic spectacle, the aphrodisiac of death and sex.
He eased off on her throat and the strangled sobs were weaker, not bone-chilling as before. They kept their game going until nothing but tiny whimpers and twitches of her body showed she held on to life.
“Finish her off,” Marija said.
Calderone leaned all his weight over Tanya’s body now and strained. His arm was stiff and his still-hard penis slid along her pubic ruff. He got off the couch panting with his erection still intact. Marija slid around his knees to engulf his penis and deep-throated him. One hand glided between her legs, which opened and closed to a sucking rhythm. My brother stood mute as Calderone reached his loud climax. If heaven has many windows in a single mansion, hell has even more doors. Tanya was wherever she was, in oblivion, gone from this dimension and as still a witness to their violent orgasms as she had been its catalyst.
“Carlos,” I said. “Now.”
His hand was shaking. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t even draw the gun. He was too stunned by horror to react.
“The gun.” I said it louder.
Now they were both looking at us. Calderone’s chest heaved from the last spasm, but he understood something was wrong. Marija pivoted on her haunches, her hooded eyes and lips puffy from the fellatio. She had one hand around Calderone’s organ like a captured bird.
“What... what the fuck you doin’, Carl?” If it weren’t for Marija’s post-coital fondling, he’d have crossed that space and kicked him through the wall.
“Carlos – the gun, now!” I said.
My brother’s stony look didn’t change but he took the gun out and slid it across the table to me. It was so mechanical and brazen an act that Calderone was at first stupefied. When he did react, it was with such speed that Marija was knocked out of his path.
I had the gun up, safety thumbed off, in one motion. The shot missed Calderone’s head. The arc of my arm swing took my aim high, but it passed close enough to his head before boring through the ceiling rafters that it pinned him to the floor in mid-stride. He looked like one of those brawny Soviet statues in some heroic pose. I adjusted the gun sight to his face; six o’clock was his mouth. My heart and brain flooded with adrenalin. He took a quick step backward at the moment I fired again. Another bullet missed.
“OK, OK, OK,” he said. He stood back with his hands raised like useless dinosaur paws in front of his massive chest.
I aimed at Marija. I centered on her left breast.
“Get over there with him,” I said.
She stood up and walked over to him.
“Carl,” Calderone said. “Carl, what are you doing, bro?”
I pointed the gun back at him and told him to shut up.
“Get the key, Carlos. Find the handcuff key,” I said. I kept calm but I was boiling inside.
My brother still hadn’t moved.
“You can’t go anywhere dragging a table with you, Jack,” Marija said.
“Don’t say another word because I’m thinking of the parking lot right now,” I said.
“You ain’t got the balls to shoot me, Jack,” Calderone said. “Any pussy can fire warning shots.”
“Those weren’t warning shots,” I said. “You moved your head.” I was silently praying the clip was full and that Randall or his biker pals hadn’t been plinking at cans with the ammo.
“All right,” Calderone said. “One-fourth. We all get even shares all around.”
“Carlos, find the key now!”
He snapped out of it and then he was rummaging in their clothes tossing them behind him like a dog digging in a leaf pile.
I pointed the gun at Calderone’s flaccid member still oozing jissom.
“Wait, motherfucker!” Calderone yelled.
“The key, now,” I said.
“It ain’t in here!” Carlos wailed.
“It’s back there in the other room on the window shelf,” Calderone said.
Carlos said, “I’ll get it.” He took off giving the two a wide berth.
“Wait!” I said, but he was already running into the other room.
“You want to think about this, Jack,” he said. “We’re all in this.” He gestured behind him to the prone body of Tanya. “We just have to keep our cool.” He lowered his arms to his side. Marija kept her voluptuous body in repose but her face was assessing my nerve.
“He’s right,” she said. “Look, we’re all in this now. Let’s think how we can all get what we want-”
“-and go our separate ways?” I finished for her.
“I can’t find it!” Carlos hollered from the next room. “No fuckin’ key here!”
I could hear him knocking things around in there.
“Jack, why don’t we-”
“Shut up,” I said.
The noises in there stopped.
“Never mind the key!”
“He ain’t coming back,” Randall said and showed a razor-thin smile; he spoke softly. “Your brother’s gone, man.”
“Carlos!”
No answer. Silence from the room. Carlos was gone and I was alone
“Just listen to Randall for a second,” Marija said.
“Shut up,” I said. I was holding a gun on two naked people yet I was the one losing authority by the second. Then it clicked: Carlos had the money. He had gone out a window.
I hadn’t fired a gun since those camping days in the Minnesota woods. My arm muscles were stiffening up. The more time they had to keep conning us, the worse it was going to be for me. My torso was turned awkwardly because of the drag on my arm from the handcuff. I knew Randall was imagining his hands around one of the weapons he had stashed. Marija was thinking the same thing. It was just a question which one moved first and left the other one standing there to catch any bullets I might fire off in a panic.
/> I thought of that effeminate math teacher and wondered how he’d like knowing his words so long ago were prophetic. The chain was beneath the table top. It would be one shot, no more time because he would know his best time to make a move was before my brother returned, and the odds would change back in my favor. I tried to remember my father’s advice: “Grip, stance, sight alignment, picture.” Come on, Jack, picture it in your mind and put the bullet there – there, right there!
I featured the angle where the bullet had to go. Both of them stared at me. I leaned slightly so that the chain would go taut and hoped neither would trip to what I was going to do next.
I let my breath out slowly and soundlessly and waited for time to slow down to grains of moments and then microns. I twitched – something gave me away. Calderone moved at the same time I whipped my arm under the table. If he had been coming at me instead of sideways through the kitchen door, he’d have slammed my head into the table and that would have been that. Game over. I put the barrel up against the chain and fired off a round. I shattered wood and blew splinters into my hand from the blowback. I shot again and missed the entire chain.
Marija was on me by then. He body hit me hard enough to buckle my legs and crumple me to the floor but not hard enough to dislodge the gun. She flung her body over my back reaching for it – a mistake that enabled me to adjust my body. Her teeth sank into my shoulder while her fingers tore at my face to find my eyes. I had a clear view of the chain above me and I risked it all to shoot it and not her. If I failed, I was a dead man. She would climb my body and smother me with her weight in the confined space. The gun fired, my arm dropped like lead, and I dug the scalding barrel deep into her ribs. She howled and bucked.
I squeezed off another round where it would rip her heart into pulp but nothing happened. Either the gun jammed or the magazine was empty, but it was not a time to wonder. I pulled my arm back for some momentum before she could anticipate me and cracked her hard with the gun to the side of her face. It stunned her, but it didn’t dislodge her because there wasn’t enough force behind the blow. She whipped her arm out and hit my forearm at the exact place to cause the gun to drop. I grabbed a hank of her hair and tried to twist her head down. At the same time I tried to scoot out from beneath her, but she was slippery and strong. She was now on my midsection and primed for some real damage, and I had the terrifying fear that Calderone would come raging back into the room and squash me flat while she occupied me with her flailing claws.
