Gutshot Straight

by Lou Berney

  “Gentlemen,” the DJ breathed into the mike, “The Jungle is proud now to present, on stage number one, the sexy, the sizzling …”

  Slowly, languidly, Gina moved through the packed house. She was wearing one of her favorite outfits—black leather thigh-high boots, red leather boy shorts, and a tiny cutoff T-shirt that said DUH—and in her platforms she was a head taller than most of the dopes staring slack-jawed up at her.

  She felt great. She felt sleek and fluid. She felt like a silk curtain drifting in a breeze.

  Gina giggled. Or something like that.

  Tonight was the night.

  “Gentlemen, put your hands together for … the queen of the jungle.” She climbed the steps to the main stage, and the first funky riff of Prince’s “Kiss” kicked in. Gina blew the DJ a smooch—good song, good boy—as guys from every dark corner of the club oozed toward the stage, crowded the rail, and the sky rained money.

  TWO SONGS LATER’RILO KILEY’S “Smoke Detector” and “Turn It On” by the Flaming Lips—Gina was down to her thong, her boots, a light sheen of perspiration, and nothing else. Normally the top girls bought their way out of the stage rotation—the real money was on the floor, in the VIP rooms—but tonight Gina needed the elevated perspective. And sure enough …

  Right on time she spotted the Whale as he rumbled into the club. Fat and scowling, so pale he glowed like a grubworm under the Jungle’s black lights. Gina spotted him during her final stroll along the rail and felt a little chill of fear and excitement.

  The Whale gave the room a quick, bored glance, then turned to ream out the doorman about something. Lucy was with the Whale, and so was Jasper, his varsity-team muscle, and also some ferrety dude Gina didn’t recognize. The Whale had one hand on poor Lucy’s ass and the other deep in his front pocket, gently jiggling loose change and, probably, his own wiener.

  All the silly stories Gina had heard about the Whale before she took the gig at the Jungle, she now—after five months working for the foul-tempered, foul-smelling creep—believed most were probably true. Didja hear about …

  How one time a dancer smarted off to the Whale and he slapped her so hard he broke her jaw?

  How one time the Whale set a guy’s car on fire, with the guy inside it, then went to dinner downtown at the Golden Nugget afterward and ordered the porterhouse special?

  How he used his titty clubs to launder money from his drug operation and didn’t bother with a safe for all his cash, because who the fuck was stupid enough to rip off the Whale?

  Gina smiled and plucked a ten from the teeth of a gray-haired guy with his chin propped on the rail. She hoped that last story at least was true. She was counting on it.

  The song ended. Gina sat on the stage steps to pull her T and shorts back on. She watched the Whale, his hand still on Lucy’s ass, make his way toward the door across the room marked NO ADMITTANCE.

  “Hey, cookie,” the gray-haired guy from the rail said. He squatted next to her and breathed cheap, watered-down gin into her face. “What say you and I go back to my hotel for a private dance? I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Gina stood up, hands on her hips, and gazed evenly down at him. She was a hundred feet tall, and he was a sad gray mouse.

  “You really think you can handle me in private?” she asked.

  A second passed before he blinked.

  “No,” he admitted weakly.

  She gave his cheek a friendly pinch and followed the Whale through the crowd.

  LUCY KNEW THAT HER HANDS gave her away when she was nervous, so to keep them busy she opened her purse and fumbled for a Tic Tac. The Whale gave her an annoyed scowl, then leaned across his desk.

  “What’d you say?” he asked O.T.

  Lucy took a deep breath, disguised as a yawn. She glanced at her watch. She felt like she was going to hornk up her lunch, she was so scared. She started saying a rosary in her head, in Spanish, and that helped some.

  O.T. shifted around in his metal folding chair and tried to smile. I said, “Mr. M, I’m a little short again this week, but it’s because—”

  “Do I give a fuck?” the Whale said. He flipped through the stack of hundred-dollar bills on the desk in front of him. Bored. “Jasper?”

  “Mmmm?” Jasper was standing directly behind O.T., against the door.

  “Do I give a fuck?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Didn’t think so.”

  The Whale slid open the cabinet door behind him, the one with the fake wood paneling, and tossed in the stack of hundreds. Lucy got a quick peek before he slid the door shut: shelves loaded with stacks and stacks of bills.

  Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia… .

  “You need to get you a safe, Mr. M,” O.T. said. He laughed nervously and looked around like maybe he hoped someone else in the room was laughing, too.

  The Whale laid his arms on the desk. Big, pale, pimply slabs, like they should have been hanging from hooks and attracting flies in an outdoor village market. He stared at O.T. “Why is that?”

  O.T. stopped laughing. “What? I just meant—”

  “Why do I need a safe?” the Whale asked. “Who the fuck is stupid enough to steal from me?”

  Lucy caught Jasper looking at her, but not in the creepy way most guys—the Whale especially—looked at her. Jasper looked at her like she was a human being, somebody’s daughter and sister, which she was, not just a pair of admittedly rockin’ 36Ds in a too-tight spandex mini-dress and three-inch spikes.

  Jasper was the only gentleman in this place. He always made sure, if he was around, that one of the bouncers walked her out after a shift. He did the same thing for the other girls, too, not just her, which made Lucy like him even more.

  The Whale called Jasper a dumb shine, sometimes right to his face. Lucy didn’t think Jasper was dumb. His round face was intelligent, just in a quiet, a sleepy, a shy way; she wished she’d had a big brother, growing up, exactly like Jasper.

  Jasper’s skin was a pretty color. A bit dark, a bit creamy, like expensive wood. His sleepy eyes were darker and less creamy, but a pretty color, too.

  She gave him a friendly half-a-smile. Jasper glanced quickly away.

  “I asked, ‘Who the fuck is stupid enough to steal from me?’ ”

  “Mr… . Mr. M,” O.T. was stammering, “I didn’t mean—”

  “Except you,” the Whale said. He stood up.

  Jasper cleared his throat. The Whale scowled at him. “What?”

  Jasper nodded at Lucy. “You want me to take her outside? Lucy?”

  “I know her fucking name. No.” The Whale had moved behind O.T., who wasn’t sure if he should turn around or keep looking straight ahead. “She’s a big girl. She’ll survive.”

  “Mr. M,” Jasper started to say, but then the Whale suddenly hooked a fat, pale, pimply arm around O.T.’s neck and jerked him out of his chair.

  Lucy stared in horror as O.T. gagged and kicked. The Whale squeezed harder. O.T. twisted, flailed. His eyes had too much white in them, an awful wet white, like they were going to plop out of their sockets.

  Lucy would have kept staring, frozen, but Jasper moved across the room toward her. He lifted a big hand and gently covered her eyes with it.

  “Be all right,” he murmured.

  JASPER DRAGGED O.T.’S BODY DOWN the hallway toward the back exit. The Whale locked his office door.

  Lucy felt blank, light-headed. The narrow, dimly lit corridor was thick with the smell of cigarette smoke and watermelon-scented body spray. The Whale’s voice came to her from the end of a long, long tunnel.

  “Let’s go eat a steak.”

  He started walking, then turned back when he realized she wasn’t following him. “What?”

  “I gotta use the ladies’ room,” she said.

  “Hurry the fuck up. I’ll be in the car.”

  GINA FINISHED CHANGING INTO HER street clothes—a pair of Dark Baja True Religions that fit her like a glove and a Runnin’ Rebels sweatshirt
—then touched up her lip liner. She put her hair up in a ponytail, then tried it down. Up? Down? She decided it looked better up. Half past midnight. A minute later, Lucy pushed open the door to the undressing room and stepped inside.

  She looked like hell, her face bloodless and eyes empty. She went to the sink and ran some cold water, then just stared in a daze at herself in the mirror. Gina gave her a second, but they couldn’t afford much more than that. She reached over and turned off the faucet.

  “Lucy?”

  Lucy continued to stare at her reflection.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Lucy said finally, her voice shaking. Gina put two fingers under Lucy’s chin and turned her face away from the mirror. Kissed her on the lips. Kissed her again. Took Lucy’s upper lip between both of hers and tugged gently.

  “Don’t wig on me now, Loosey Change, okay?”

  Lucy drew in a deep breath and held it. “You really mean it?” she whispered. “You love me?”

  She gazed up at Gina with those black Spanish eyes of hers. Gina felt a faint familiar ache of sweet melancholy, fading almost as soon as it started, like a breath of wind not quite strong enough to rattle the leaves in a tree.

  She took Lucy’s hand and pressed the warm palm to her sternum. “You have the key to my heart, sweetie.”

  “Three A.M.,” Lucy said.

  “Three A.M.”

  “The volcano.”

  “You know I’ll be there,” Gina said.

  Lucy nodded and hurried out of the room.

  Gina smiled and picked up the key Lucy had left on the edge of the sink.

  THE WHALE’S PRIVATE OFFICE WAS at the far end of the hall on the left, between the undressing room and the fire exit. Foot traffic was bad for a few minutes, girls on crystal breaks clattering on high heels to the bathroom and back. But then Gina heard the next song start pounding through the walls—seriously: more of that stupid hair metal?—and the hallway cleared.

  She slid the key into the lock and heard the velvety snap of the dead bolt. She slipped inside Dick Moby’s office and shut the door behind her. Flicked the lights on. The cabinet was behind the desk, beneath the mini-fridge, right where Lucy had said it would be.

  The air in the room was hot, stale, heavy with Whale funk. Gina knelt on the carpet and pulled open the cabinet doors. She almost giggled out loud when she saw all the money stacked on the shelves inside—bricks of hundred-dollar bills, ten grand per. Thirty bricks, thirty-five, forty. Shit! She cupped a hand to her mouth and did, then, giggle out loud.

  She helped herself to one of the Whale’s Kools from the pack on the desk and tucked it behind her ear for later. She figured he wouldn’t miss one little cigarette, a thought that almost started her giggling again. Instead she assumed her most serious, all-business frowny-face, yanked down the zipper of her gym bag, and started stuffing in the money.

  DICK MOBY HONKED TO HURRY the dumb cooze across the parking lot, but—as always—Lucy took her good, sweet time. Your average jig had nothing on a Mexican girl when it came to sheer laziness—Mexican or Costa Rican, whatever the hell she said she was. Lucky for Lucy she had a blow-your-mind bod. Long, long legs, riding up to a perfect round ass. Put her in those shorts where the bottom half of her brown ass hung out and it was like looking at a painting in a museum. Big tits, real ones, just the right amount of give and jiggle. Probably in a few years the whole package would sag and wrinkle beyond rescue, what always happened with the Mexicans. The Indian blood in them. By then, though, who’d give a fuck? Not Dick Moby. He’d have long since plucked another fresh peach from the tree and let the juices dribble down his chin.

  He tapped the horn again, but lightly because he was in an indulgent mood after the fun with O.T. Besides, waiting for Lucy to cross the Jungle parking lot gave him time to remember he’d left his cigarettes in the office.

  Lucy climbed into the Caddy. Dick Moby cut the engine.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, a flinch of fear in her voice that both annoyed him and pleased him.

  “Forgot my smokes,” he said.

  “In the office?”

  “Where else but the fucking office?”

  He popped the door and heaved himself out of the Caddy. At the door he shoved through a pack of drunk conventioneers waiting to pay their cover. The longhair working the door, the one thought he was a rock star, spotted him and looked nervous.

  “Uh, Mr. M, I thought—”

  “Hurry up and move these assholes inside,” Dick Moby said. “Like a fucking bus station out here.”

  “Hey!” one of the conventioneers slurred cheerfully. “Who the hell you calling asshole?”

  Dick Moby ignored him. Time was you could beat a drunken asshole to a pulp in the parking lot and a crowd of off-duty cops would cheer you on. Nowadays, though, every other beatnik faggot was a VP for some big company that made fiber-optic Internet microchips or some shit, and you so much as raised your voice, they’d have lawyers crawling up your butthole till the end of time. Dick Moby didn’t need the aggravation. Besides, he was so hungry for a porterhouse he could taste it.

  Out of habit he paused to check the main floor. The four stages were occupied, most of the wall booths, no girls were lounging around the bar playing video poker. Satisfied, he pushed open the door marked NO ADMITTANCE.

  One of the newer girls, Gina, came walking down the hallway toward him. Already dressed out, a gym bag slung over her shoulder. She gave him a calm, indifferent glance.

  Dick Moby grabbed her arm as she passed and stopped her.

  “What?” she said, annoyed.

  He studied her, eyes slitted. Something was off, he could feel it—the nerve ends at the base of his skull tingled—but he wasn’t sure what. A mob guy he once worked for back in Dallas used to tell him he had reptile radar. Dick Moby had taken that as a compliment.

  “Thought you were on till four,” he said. She was one of his top earners, though he himself didn’t pretend to understand it. Fix that nose, stick a couple of real tits on her, teach her how to smile more like a whore and less like she could be teaching Sunday school—then she’d bring in even more dough.

  “Was.” She shrugged. “But I started my period about an hour ago, so unless you want it to look like a slasher flick out there every time I give a lap dance, get your paws off me.”

  Dick Moby had to smile, a little, at the girl’s balls. Maybe that’s why she made so much money; maybe that’s why some guys liked her. He dropped her arm.

  “I don’t trust you,” he told her. “I got my fucking eye on you.”

  She shrugged again. “Yeah, whatever.”

  He watched her saunter calmly down the hall and out the door behind him.

  “I got my fucking eye on you,” he growled again, then turned and rumbled down to his office. He swiped the pack of Kools off the desk, then paused. That weird reptile radar of his again. He walked his eyeballs slowly around the office once, then twice: the desk, the desk chair, the cabinet behind the desk, the TV on the cabinet, the door, the chair, the cardboard file boxes filled with the dancers’ sheriff cards, the meat-colored carpet, the liquor license in the frame with the cracked glass, the desk, the desk chair, the—

  The cabinet behind the desk.

  He squatted, with effort, and peered at the dented metal door of the cabinet. Closed tightly and carefully.

  Too tightly, too carefully.

  Dick Moby suddenly felt half a century of undigested animal fat in his body, the weight of it, porterhouses and prime ribs, dialing down the aperture of his arteries until they were just pinpricks, squeezing off the blood to his heart and making him dizzy. A faint concentric throb spread out from the center of his chest, like ripples on a pond.

  He slid open the door to the cabinet. Inside, the briefcase was still there, but the shelves were empty and all the cash was gone.

  “Bitch,” he hissed.

  Dick Moby gripped the cabinet door with both hands and wrenched it off the rails, flung it pinwh
eeling so violently across the office that it stabbed through a cardboard file box and stuck there. He stormed back through the club, shoving aside convention geeks and dancers, into the parking lot. But the cab stand was empty, and the bitch—Gina—was gone.

  LUCY SAT ON A BENCH beneath the volcano and watched it erupt—smoke boiling, red lights flashing, a few tourists gaping—for maybe the fifth time since she’d arrived. She looked at her watch. Four A.M. Gina was an hour late. A cab pulled up, but it was two men in business suits who climbed out.

  Maybe Gina was just running late?

  Maybe Gina had gotten caught in traffic?

  Maybe Gina had stopped off to buy a bottle of champagne so she and Lucy could celebrate?

  Maybe Gina had meant to say four o’clock instead of three?

  Maybe Gina … ?

  The businessmen from the cab went into the casino. The tourists watching the volcano erupt moved on. The Strip outside the Mirage was almost deserted. Lucy told herself not to look at her watch again. She told herself not to cry.

  Four-oh-nine A.M.

  The volcano was quiet now, just the scent of sulfur and chlorine drifting slowly over Lucy, choking her.

  GINA TOOK A CAB STRAIGHT to the airport. That’s where the Whale would expect her to go, and she wanted a few eyewitness accounts to throw him off track when his goons sniffed around.

  She instructed her cabdriver to pull up outside the international terminal, then asked him was this where you caught Air France? He said yes. Air France, you’re sure, to Paris? Yes. She tipped the cabdriver a C-note so he’d be sure to remember the conversation.

  Once inside, she made her way across to the domestic terminal and down to baggage claim. All the rental-car places at McCarran were open twenty-four hours. Gina ignored the booths staffed by twenty-something boys and picked the one occupied by a hard-eyed gal in her forties, ex-hooker or ex-dancer or both. Bleached-blond hair, sun-cured skin, perfect manicure. Either the woman would hate Gina on sight or else she’d recognize the ghost of her young self materialized right before her and feel a pang of motherly tenderness. Gina was counting on that second one.

  “Hi,” Gina said, “I need to rent a car, but I don’t have a credit card? Just cash?”