Gutshot Straight

by Lou Berney

  “You have to be qualified for a cash rental.”

  “Okay,” Gina said. “Great. I’ll do that.”

  The woman looked her over. Gina thought she saw the woman’s expression soften a little.

  “Takes three to four weeks, sugar.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Gina leaned forward. She made her voice tremble, but not too much. “Please, it’s really important. If I don’t—I have to—Is there any way at all you can, you know …”

  A long moment of silence passed. Gina felt the woman wavering, sensed her filling in the blanks from her own experience. Maybe a drugged-up boyfriend years ago, who used to beat her. Maybe a drugged-up boyfriend years ago, she shot in a fit of rage because he used to beat her, then had to get out of town pronto.

  “Sugar.” The woman finally sighed. “I—”

  Gina slid a packet of hundred-dollar bills across the counter. Ten grand.

  “And you never saw me,” Gina said. “You don’t remember a thing about me.”

  The woman eyed her for a second, then turned away and started punching numbers into the computer. Gina looked down and saw that the ten grand had already disappeared off the counter, just like magic. She smiled.

  “Full-size all right with you, miss?” the woman asked.

  THE CAR WAS A BUTTER-COLORED Ford Crown Victoria, big and luxurious, with butter-colored leather seats and a primo sound system. Gina set the cruise control to eighty-five—why dawdle, right?—and blew through the deserted desert night. She stopped briefly in Barstow for coffee, then hit the outskirts of L.A. just as the sky behind her turned pink and pearly.

  She swung off the 10 and wound through Beverly Flats to Wilshire. The valet at the Peninsula took her keys with a polite smile and didn’t give her a second glance. In her jeans and sweatshirt, sunglasses and baseball cap, she was just another movie star on the down low, for all he knew.

  She crashed out and slept till early afternoon, then ordered room-service pancakes and champagne. After that she strolled over to Rodeo Drive and hit the shops. She bought a black cocktail dress with a hint of flapper sass at Gianfranco Ferré, heels to match at René Caovilla, some panties so expensive she had to laugh, a pair of teardrop pearl earrings. She had a latte at an outdoor café, then bought some more shoes, a bag, a necklace. She bought five hundred dollars worth of makeup. Another dress, another bag, a couple of cute James Perse tops, some high-end denim.

  “I could get used to this,” she confided to an Arab woman in a burka who was standing next to her at the corner, waiting for the light to change. The woman’s eyes darted over to Gina, then darted quickly away. Gina thought she saw a smile crease the dark cloth.

  Gina did get used to it. For the next couple of days, she lived like a fairy-tale princess, or at least the kind of princess in the kind of fairy tale she’d write. She hit Melrose for funky casual, a handmade leather bag from Argentina and more bling, Montana Avenue for beachwear and high-end lotions, oils, and exotic ungents (and more bling), the Grove for an iPod and a supply of trashy magazines. In between the heavy shopping, she went total spa jihad—Thai massage, seaweed wrap, facial, hot stone something or other. Back at the hotel the afternoon of her third day in L.A., she spread out all her purchases on the bed. Not bad for fifty-some grand and a few days’ work. At some point she’d want to figure out how to retrieve her stuff from Vegas, where it was safe for the time being. If doing that proved impossible, though, no big wiggie. There was nothing she owned, Gina knew, that money couldn’t replace—more of and even better.

  She soaked for an hour in the tub, then put on the black Gianfranco Ferré and the pearl earrings. She went downstairs to the hotel bar. She ordered a martini and checked the crowd for movie stars. The only guy she recognized was a guy from TV, one of the lesser networks, a roly-poly sitcom dad who also did fried-chicken commercials. He gave her the eye from across the bar, but Gina could see neither the fun nor the profit in it, so she picked up her martini and carried it out into the lobby.

  Two beefy black guys in suits aroused her attention. They stood motionless across from the concierge desk, flanking a big wooden door. Curious, Gina made her way over. Before she even had a chance to select which of her many smiles to lay on them, the beefier of the two guys stepped aside and opened the door for her. She glimpsed glittering chandeliers inside, heard the plaintive coo of a string quartet.

  “Miss,” the beefy guy said.

  Gina nodded, not missing a beat, and entered a ballroom almost as vast as the hotel lobby. Even posher, if possible. Marble pillars, walls draped with Asian silk tapestries, a polished parquet dance floor around which men in tuxedos gracefully guided their bejeweled partners.

  Now this, Gina noted with approval, was a party. She crossed to a bar set up opposite the string quartet and exchanged her empty martini glass for a crystal flute of champagne. She took a sip and looked out over the crowd, tried to gauge the cumulative net worth. Most of the men were in their fifties and sixties, silver-haired and pink-cheeked, while the women averaged a good ten years younger. Clearly a gala for wives, not girlfriends. There were only a few twentyish girls like Gina, who made it a point to ignore her.

  “Hello, there,” said a voice behind her. Gina felt a hand on her elbow, gentle but proprietary. She turned to find a rich old coot grinning at her. He’d just come off the dance floor, and there was a faint dew on his pink cheeks and forehead, along the edge of a hairline too perfectly uneven to be real. He smelled musty, but expensively so. “My wife went to call the sitter, so I thought I’d come flirt with the most beguiling girl at the party.”

  “How sweet,” Gina said. How creepy, she thought, that an old coot like this had kids young enough to need a sitter.

  “Bernard Craig,” he said. He paused, still grinning, as if he expected her to know the name and be impressed. Gina was bored already.

  “Caroline Graham,” she said.

  “Let me guess,” Bernard Craig said. “You’re a curator at the Getty. Early impressionists.”

  Gina smiled and reached for another glass of champagne. She noticed a striking woman standing by herself at the end of the bar. The woman was probably late thirties but looked a decade younger, with glossy black hair cut in bangs and eyes the color of pale gray frost. She wore a très tasty silk dress the same shade as her eyes.

  “Vice president of acquisitions at Sotheby’s in New York,” Gina said. “My area is Near Eastern antiquities, though I also have an interest in jade.”

  “Aha,” Bernard Craig said, pleased with himself. “Not far off, was I?”

  “Quite close,” Gina said. By now she’d idly ascertained, by the way the fabric shifted when he moved, that Bernard Craig’s wallet was in the inside pocket of his jacket. “And I do enjoy the early impressionists.”

  Bernard Craig started to say something he clearly anticipated to be witty but then glanced over her shoulder and stiffened. Gina figured he’d spotted his wife. She took the opportunity to stand, lean close, and strum her fingers lightly but suggestively across the pleats of his tuxedo shirt.

  “Caroline Graham,” she whispered. She let her lips brush against his ear. “Our Beverly Hills office has my number, if you’d like to give me a call.”

  Then she was off, without a glance back. She passed the two beefy guards at the door and made her way to the lobby ladies’ room.

  In the ladies’ room, she plucked Bernard Craig’s wallet from her bag and held it to her nose, inhaled the rich scent of calfskin. She played the game she always played with herself and guessed, let’s see, eight hundred dollars inside? A black American Express?

  Before she could open the wallet and check, though, she heard the outer door to the ladies’ room swing open. Gina had just enough time to drop the wallet back into her bag and turn to the mirror. The striking woman with the black bangs and gray eyes entered. She joined Gina at the mirror. Gina pretended to check her hair, then realized after a second that the woman wa
s gazing at Gina’s reflection, not her own.

  “You look familiar to me,” the woman said. Her voice was as silky as the dress, with an accent Gina didn’t recognize—Russian, maybe.

  “Do I?” Gina asked.

  “Are you a movie star, perhaps?”

  Gina smiled and turned to the woman. She’d been in more of a boy mood when the night began, but she always made it a point to keep an open mind.

  “Are you hitting on me, perhaps?” Gina asked.

  The woman smiled back at her.

  “I know now,” she said. “A business acquaintance of mine in Las Vegas. He faxed me photo this morning.”

  Gina turned back to the mirror. She took out her lipstick.

  “Vegas?” she said. “Never been, but I hear it’s fun.”

  “This girl in photo? She could be your twin, I think.”

  “They say we all have one somewhere.”

  “And here you are!” the woman said, still smiling. “Life is funny, yes?”

  “Sure is.” Gina popped her lips, snapped the lipstick shut, then gave the woman one last smile. Coolly, calmly, in no particular rush, she exited the ladies’ room. Coolly, calmly, she sauntered across the lobby to the elevators. When the doors opened on her floor, she pushed a bellhop out of the way and sprinted down the hall to her room, high heels in hand. She stripped off the cocktail dress and threw on her True Religions and a sweatshirt, then dragged the gym bag full of cash out from under the bed. Sixty seconds later she was pounding down twelve flights of bare cement service-emergency stairs. She hit the crash bar running and burst through the fire door into an alley. She stopped for a second to get her bearings—Wilshire was … left, then left—then took off again. She was almost out of the alley when a car screeched to a stop and cut her off. Her momentum carried her hard into the side of the car. She pinballed off and tumbled to the asphalt, ripping a hole in her jeans and scraping her knee.

  Big hands grabbed her shoulders and jerked her to her feet. A giant, bald, unbelievably ugly guy grinned down at her. Gina tried to fight free, but he slapped her so hard she saw sparklers.

  “Let me go,” Gina said quietly, reasonably.

  The bald guy just kept grinning, then said something she didn’t understand in a foreign language she didn’t recognize.

  “Fuck you,” Gina said, which she guessed was pretty universal. He slapped her again, and for a quick second, Gina thought she was back onstage at the Jungle, watching the disco balls scatter broken shards of bright light across the ceiling. She licked the corner of her mouth and tasted blood.

  “Ah,” someone said.

  Gina turned to see the woman with the pale gray eyes and the silky accent.

  “Hi,” Gina said. She blew a strand of hair out of her face and smiled cheerfully. “Think we can make a deal?”

  The woman lifted a hand and gently stroked Gina’s cheek. She smiled, not unsympathetically, then shook her head.

  Chapter 9

  Jasper’s head felt stepped on. Inside and out. Ached like a son of a bitch.

  From a phone book—who would have thought that?

  Jasper had been hit in the head by a lot of things in his life—elbows, fists, fists holding a roll of quarters, other heads, chairs, butt of a gun, fiberglass spoiler ripped off the back of a Ford Contour—but none of them, at least as far as he could recall, had resulted in such a lingering, stepped-on ache. He considered for a long moment the bottle of extra-strength Tylenol he’d picked off the shelf, then decided it wasn’t up to the task at hand. He needed something with a little more fight in it.

  He moved to the end of the aisle, past a pyramid of soda-pop bottles—this was the Walgreens on the south Strip, across from what used to be the Aladdin and was now (Jasper had to think for a second) the Planet Hollywood—and got in line at the pharmacy counter. There was a white lady tourist in line ahead of him. Thirty years old, give or take, expensive-looking eyeglasses, blue jeans with some interesting stitching on the back pockets, but no butt to speak of.

  The pharmacist looked at the piece of paper the lady tourist gave him and smirked at it. Then he smirked at the lady. Then he smirked at Jasper.

  “The honeymooner’s affliction,” the pharmacist told the lady. “We get a lot of that in Vegas.” Then he smirked again at Jasper.

  Jasper didn’t like that. He felt sorry for the lady, the back of her freckled neck blushing with embarrassment. Jasper knew from the girls at the club that a bladder infection wasn’t anything to joke about. He stared the smirk right off the pharmacist’s face.

  “Why don’t you hurry on up and go get the lady something for her headache,” he told the pharmacist.

  The pharmacist did that. He handed the lady a white paper sack. She gave Jasper a whiff of a thank-you smile before she hurried off. Jasper didn’t smile back, because his head hurt when he moved his skin at all. He’d discovered this when he told the pharmacist to hurry up.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Need something for a headache.”

  The pharmacist looked up at Jasper, a little confused.

  “You got a bladder infection?” he whispered.

  “I got a headache,” Jasper said, impatient. “Bad one.”

  “Do you have a prescription?”

  Jasper sighed.

  Jasper could tell that the pharmacist didn’t like the way his day was starting. He glanced at Jasper’s hands resting half curled on the counter. Jasper had always had big hands, ever since he was a child.

  “Listen,” the pharmacist said, but then he didn’t seem to have anything for Jasper to listen to.

  Jasper waited. Finally the pharmacist went to the back and returned with a little white sack.

  “Appreciate it,” Jasper said. He dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the counter and left.

  JASPER FIRED UP THE EXPEDITION so he could run the air conditioner, swallowed three of the little white capsules, and reclined the leather seat a bit so he could think better.

  It was a little after nine. Jasper did not look forward to calling Mr. Moby with the bad news. The good news was that Jasper didn’t have to do that yet. Mr. Moby always stayed up late and slept late and didn’t even turn his cell phone on till noon at the earliest. And he wasn’t expecting to hear from Jasper about the exchange until later tonight. Which gave Jasper plenty of time to hunt down the girl, the briefcase, and the guy who’d belted him with that damn phone book. If he could find them, or even (Jasper took a second to work this out) just the girl, then he would not have to call Mr. Moby with the bad news. There would be no bad news.

  That was good news.

  Jasper could feel the white capsules starting to do their thing. He didn’t like to think about what Mr. Moby stayed up all night inflicting on poor Lucy. He felt bad for her. He felt bad for many of the girls, the kinds of lives they led. Full of drugs and asshole customers and evil boyfriends and bladder infections and not very much of what you would call a spiritual dimension. But Jasper felt a special kind of bad for Lucy, and not just because Mr. Moby was a special kind of evil boyfriend, which most certainly he was.

  Jasper had read a newspaper article once about a river in the jungle that flooded, and how the tops of the trees drooped heavy and black with tarantulas.

  That had made him—he didn’t know why—think of Mr. Moby.

  There was a sweetness about Lucy. A spiritual dimension, or at least maybe the potential for one. She saw the human in you.

  Jasper wondered if he might be in love with Lucy. Not that it mattered one way or another. It mattered about as much as whether or not the food in Pakistan or Siberia would agree with him.

  But when he thought of that poor girl with Mr. Moby all night …

  Shut it down, boy, he told himself, shut it off. Jasper was good at that:

  keeping the focus. Like when he played football. Watch the line. Find the hole. Go.

  That was another thing he’d been hit in the head with. A head in a football helmet.

 
Focus.

  Jasper rearranged himself in the Expedition’s leather seat. He walked himself back in time till he was once again outside that motel room this morning, knocking on the door. Jasper knew he wasn’t the quickest thinker in the world, but he had near-perfect recall, and when he had time to work things through at his own pace … well, then there wasn’t hardly a knot he couldn’t solve.

  He closed his eyes and pictured the door to the motel room opening. The girl sitting on the bed. Holding a plastic cup of water. There was another plastic cup sideways on the carpet. The guy—Shake was his name—had a prison haircut and looked tired.

  Jasper could see it all, spread out before him in vivid, luxuriant detail. He turned the air conditioner up another notch and, eyes still closed, started searching for clues.

  Chapter 10

  Gina waited till she was sure Shake was out cold, tested the handcuffs, then left the room. She shut the door behind her and slid the do not disturb card into the slot. She felt bouncy with energy, with optimism, with beatific goodwill toward her fellow man. Never underestimate, she confided to herself, the restorative power of a hearty breakfast, a hot shower, and a narrow escape from murder and dismemberment and God knows what else the Whale had planned for her. Now all she needed was a cigarette and she’d be perfectly golden.

  Those had not been a good couple of days, back in L.A., after she’d been thrown into the trunk of the Town Car. The bald, ugly giant drove her to some abandoned place on the water and locked her in a cargo container with no light, no air, no smoking, and a smell she’d never forget as long as she lived. Which, at the time, had not seemed like it was going to be very long at all—just however long it took for the lady with the pale gray eyes to work out her price with Dick Moby.

  But all that was history, ancient. Gina held the briefcase in one hand and put her other hand on her hip like she was standing on top of a mountain. Took a big, long breath of fresh mountain air.

  “Ah!” she said.