by Mike Faricy
“That ain’t gonna happen, I just told ya, no one does this to Tubby.”
“Looks like I already have. Now you just stay there nice and quiet like and I’ll leave. This is my one and only warning. I see either of you get off that floor it’s gonna be one of the last things you ever do.”
Bulldog shook his head ever so slightly, like he couldn’t believe how stupid I was, then mumbled something I couldn’t pick up.
“What was that?”
“I said you’re as good as dead, Haskell, dead meat, you hear me,” he growled, but I was already halfway up the stairs and heading for the backdoor.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Are they okay? The guy you hit with the wrench, and the other guy you shot?” Louie asked.
“Okay? That’s not the point, man. I wasn’t about to hang around, and ask to help out. I don’t know, and I don’t care if they’re okay. I left them in Bulldog’s caring hands. I just wanted to get out of there in a semblance of one piece.”
“Dev, at what point do you get the police involved?”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea. Why didn’t I think of that? You know, just tell them I happened to be window peeking, and then I assaulted a guy with a pipe, and I think he might be dead. Shot another guy when he ran down the basement stairs to help his assaulted friend, and threatened to kill the bunch of them on my way out the door.”
“Well, that’s certainly one version.”
“Arghhh, Louie. The problem is I told you my version, but that’s not what the law is going to think. Hell, they’ll lock me up while they sort it out, and I’m convinced that fat ass Tubby has someone already in jail just waiting for me to be locked up so he can kill me.”
“There is that,” Louie shrugged and took a sip. “So, your plan?”
“Plan? I don’t know, possibly relocate to some obscure place, Iowa or somewhere.”
Louie shook his head.
“Just kidding, man. I don’t know, but I’m sort of officially on the run. I’m sure Tubby has a price on my head by now. He’s probably got all sorts of sleaze balls out there looking for me. I can’t go home, can’t go to the office. It’s a pretty safe bet your place and Heidi’s are probably being watched. God, even The Spot isn’t safe for me right now,” I said. I was still stiff after sleeping fitfully in the back of the Aztek. I had a goose egg on my forehead, and my left hand was still sore and a little swollen, thankfully it was working more or less.
“Want another?” Louie asked, then signaled the bartender without waiting for my answer. We were seated on bar stools at Tootsies, just the two of us in the place, well and the bartender, but then again, it was only a little after nine in the morning.
“You got any coffee?” I asked, as he poured me another beer.
“I think there might be some, but it’s probably been on since last night, let me check,” he said, and pushed the refilled pint mug across the bar toward me.
“Never mind, I can live without it.”
“Suit yourself,” he shrugged, then sat down on a stool at the end of the bar, and went back to reading yesterday’s paper.
“There must be somewhere you can land, maybe just let things cool down. I don’t know, what about getting word to Tubby? Maybe tell him you’re backing off and gonna forget the whole thing? No offense, Dev, but probably not the brightest idea you’ve had, hanging around and peeking in the window at that chick’s house.”
“Oh yeah, Crickett. What a piece of work she turned out to be. And by the way, remember she contacted me, not the other way around. God, and I tried to help. I tell ya, no good deed goes unpunished. As far as getting word to Tubby, maybe that would work, but then there’s his lunatic enforcer, Bulldog. Who knows what that animal will do? And by the way, what’s with Tubby shacking up with Crickett? Where’s his idiot kid, Ben?”
“Maybe he’ll forget.”
“Tubby?” I gave Louie a look that suggested otherwise.
“So again, you got somewhere you can go where no one would think of looking? God forbid, but have you got anything like a plan?”
“I’m sort of coming up with one. I’m still in the rough outline stage right now.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Oh. My. God. Look who finally came back for more.” She giggled then gave me a passionate kiss and an improper squeeze at the front door. “You just get those firm little buns in here. Look who came back to see mommy, kids.”
I was really at the end of my rope. Brenda Livingston had been a weekend gone very wrong over a year ago. She stalked me for about four months after that, before directing her attention to some other fool. I swore I would never, ever call her back and now here I was being ushered into her basement apartment. She grabbed my rear, and squeezed as I walked past.
“Ohhh, isn’t this going to be fun,” she said to the cat she was holding. She wore a black leather vest edged in white lace, and barely held together by just two little buttons. Her tight leather skirt was extremely short, I think I owned belts that were wider. She wore a black garter belt that easily extended four inches below her skirt, and held up her hose that had a seam running up the back, and some sort of floral pattern across her thighs.
When she spoke she used two different voices, one for me, and a high pitched one for her cats. She cradled one cat, but I could see three others, two curled up on the couch, and another one under the coffee table that held a half dozen statues and a couple stacks of ‘Precious Moments’ collector plates; the kids with the big eyes. There was an end table on either side of the couch, each one had a Tiffany-style lamp sporting butterflies, and lots of little figurines scattered around, more ‘Precious Moments’ stuff. An oversized painting of two reclining naked guys, clearly excited, hung over the couch. I knew there had to be more cats running somewhere around the place.
“Great to see you again, Brenda, it’s been awhile.”
“Too long, baby, I’ve been in heat ever since I got your phone call.” Then she switched to her cat voice and said, “Oh, we are all going to be such naughty girls.”
I could feel my eyes already beginning to water and my arms were definitely starting to itch. I’d taken four Benadryl on the way over, and stuffed a half dozen more in my pocket. I knew I was bound to need them. I sort of spit a cat hair off my lips, and smiled at Brenda.
“This is Princess Di,” she said in that high-pitched voice then held a yellow-striped cat out in my direction.
I wasn’t sure if I should take hold of it or just pet the thing, my nose suddenly began to twitch. “She’s just lovely,” I said, and stepped over to the dining room table. “Hey, I picked up some wine, if I remember this was one of your favorites.” I set the paper bag on another stack of collector plates, and pulled out one of four bottles, then opened up a second bag and brought out a little rubber mouse with a bell on its tail. “And, well I figured I better get something for all your friends to keep them happy.”
“Oh, that’s so sweet. Yes, because you and I are going to be busy, Mister.” She pointed first to me, then herself as she said ‘you and I’, then she ran her nails across my chest and growled.
She picked up the rubber mouse, placed it in her mouth, and switched personalities again. “Look what he brought for us, who wants to play?” she squeaked then shook her head from side to side making the little bell ring. The cats couldn’t have been less interested.
“Princess Di? Come on, sweetie, come get it. Good, good, that’s my girl yes, yes right under the couch. Oh, you little darling.”
There was a box of Kleenex nestled between a half dozen wide-eyed, red-cheeked dolls on a bookcase. I pulled a piece out of the box to blow my nose, but I think I only succeeded in rubbing more cat hair onto my face.
“Bring that wine into the kitchen, Dev and let’s get this party going. I’ve got a wonderful eggplant dish I know you’ll just love, I’ve gone Vegan, darling.”
I followed her into the kitchen where the table was set for two. A large, unlit candle emblazo
ned with gold angels sat in the middle of the table, and a gray-striped cat walked back and forth across the dinner plates. Brenda ignored the cat and lit the candle. She took two wine glasses off a shelf stacked with more plates, all emblazoned with state flags. She blew into the glasses to remove some of the cat hair. “Let’s get started,” she said, and raised her eyebrows.
I twisted off the cap and filled her glass almost to the rim, then did the same to mine.
“God, we’ll both end up passed out, and forget all the nasty business we were going to catch up on.” Then she grinned and made a series of kissing noises.
I took a big sip and hoped I passed out first.
“So,” she said over our eggplant dish. “What finally brought you to your senses?”
We were seated at her kitchen table. The gray-striped cat had disappeared, and now a black one nestled on Brenda’s lap. She occasionally pinched a bit of food between her thumb and forefinger, and attempted to feed the cat who clearly wanted nothing to do with eggplant. Throughout the course of the meal, the cat continued to never show any interest and Brenda would ultimately stick the morsel into her mouth.
Actually, the eggplant dish was pretty good and I was on a second helping. Either the wine, the Benadryl, or both were kicking in, and I was beginning to experience some difficulty focusing on our conversation. Plus, I was trying to avoid putting my foot in the cat litter box sitting beneath the kitchen table. I’d already kicked it at least a half dozen times spilling some of the contents onto the floor. Brenda was beginning to slur her words, apparently oblivious to the cat litter I’d scattered over her feet.
“Hit me again, Devil,” she giggled, then held out her empty glass. I got to my feet, kicked the litter box in the process, and stumbled to the kitchen counter. Brenda turned in her chair and faced me with a wry smile as she held out her glass. I noticed that her leather vest had become unbuttoned, leaving her rather exposed, not a complaint on my part. Somewhere over the course of feasting on eggplant, the black cat had vanished and I think Princess Di was now on her lap.
I attempted to fill her wine glass, but my hand kept weaving from side to side missing the glass occasionally and spilling wine across her thighs. I stopped once her glass was half full.
“Don’t hold back, I want it all,” she grinned, then bit her lower lip seductively and let out a loud “Meow.”
By the time I had finished filling her glass, there were four or five cats in the room swirling around her feet. She noisily slurped her wine, then leered at me, and growled in a deep voice, “They like to watch.”
‘Great’, I thought, a third personality and I dug into my pocket to take two more Benadryl.
It was sometime after three in the morning, Brenda was snoring, wearing her garter belt and one stocking. There were at least three cats in the bed with us. I climbed out of bed and made my way to the bathroom in the dark. There were stacks of collectable stuff piled all over the bedroom and I had to negotiate the narrow, cleared path leading to the bathroom. I think it was a cat that ran into the bedroom as I opened the door. I closed the bathroom door and turned on the light. My face was red and blotchy. My eyes were swollen, and I looked like I’d gone a round with Mike Tyson. I was unable to breath through my nose, and I’d broken out in what looked like hives on my neck, arms, and chest. I remained in the bathroom for a good half hour hoping my sinuses would clear. They didn’t and I finally turned out the light, and headed back into Brenda’s bedroom.
At first I thought she was up, but then in the moonlight coming through the open basement window I saw her in bed and heard her snoring. A large figure seemed to drift quietly across the narrow path, even in heels Brenda wasn’t six feet tall, plus she didn’t have a shaved head. He seemed to stare at her, well and the cats, probably wondering what in the hell was going on.
He pulled his T-shirt over his head then cautiously unbuckled his jeans. A cat circled my ankles. I think it was Princess Di, but couldn’t be sure in the dark. I quickly picked it up, then whispered, “Excuse me.”
As he turned, I tossed the cat toward his face. It sailed screeching through the air, flaying with its paws, as it flew across the room, claws out looking for anything to clamp onto. The sides of his face turned out to be most convenient.
Princess Di clamped on just above his ears and hung on for dear life. He screamed, then attempted to pull her off, which only made her dig those claws in deeper. It gave me the opportunity to aim a well placed kick that dropped him to his knees. As he landed on the floor, Princess Di released her grip, and scampered under the bed. I picked up an empty wine bottle and hit him over the head. It gave off a hollow sort of ‘thunk’ sound, so I hit him again, and he stopped moving.
I didn’t recognize the guy, and wasn’t about to take the time to ask any questions. Brenda half groaned, rolled over on her side, and resumed snoring as two cats snuggled up against her.
I looked for my clothes and quickly got dressed, then called 911 from Brenda’s phone in the living room, and reported a burglary in progress. I slipped out the door and into my car. As I rounded the corner, I saw flashing lights about three blocks back racing down the street.
Chapter Twenty-Six
It was the knock on the driver’s side window that woke me.
“You look like absolute shit,” Charlie Bergstrom said as I stepped out of the Aztek. “What are doing up here again, anyway.”
I had to lick some of last nights wine off my teeth, and spit another cat hair from my lips, before I could speak. At least the swelling around my eyes had gone down, and I could almost breathe through my nose again. My arms still had welts from the hives, but not as severe as last night, and the constant itching had pretty much subsided. “Just in the neighborhood, thought I’d drop in and say hi.”
Charlie just shook his head and said, “Come on in and I’ll make you breakfast, you can maybe get cleaned up, a shower is definitely in order.”
I was feeling a thousand percent better after the shower. We were sitting out on Charlie’s deck, eating pancakes and drinking coffee. I was dressed in a clean shirt and a pair of Daryl’s jeans.
“So, she’s with the old man, Tubby, and not that jackass son of his,” Charlie said, and then sipped some coffee.
“Looks that way. To tell you the truth, no one is more surprised than me. I sort of knew her in a different life. But, there they were, the two of them. She was sitting on his lap and nibbling his ear while old Tubby was working his way through a very large pizza.”
“And then those guys got you.”
“Yeah, my fault for not paying better attention.”
Charlie nodded, like that was a given. “Think they would have killed you?”
“No ‘think’ about it. That was their plan. They as much as said so, something about ‘now it was going to be a late night’ because they had to deal with me. I’m a hundred-percent sure on what ‘deal with me’ meant. Not pretty.”
“So you’re back here like a bad check.”
“I suppose, I honestly don’t know where else to go. I’m willing to bet they got folks in jail, just waiting. Most likely, people ready to track me on the street. I’m sure they’re watching my house, my office, and any friend’s place, just waiting to nail me. I made it out last night, but my luck can’t keep working like this, sooner or later it’s gonna run out, it has to, the law of something or other. Whoever that guy was last night, how in the hell did he even find me? I don’t know…”
“You ever think about going to the police?”
“You sound like my office pal, Louie. Based on your son’s experience, that may be the worst place I could end up.”
He nodded, but didn’t say anything for a while. “Are they on the take down there in the cities, the cops?”
“No, I don’t think so. I think they’re sort of caught between a rock and a hard place. They can’t really do much until an actual crime has been committed. The problem is the crime they seem to want to commit is to kill me.”
“From everything you’ve told me, I think it’s probably past the time when you can just sit back and attempt to hide from reality. Might be time to get a little more aggressive.”
“Aggressive? You mean like start killing these guys, or going after Tubby, good luck there.”
“Well, I think all of this, everything you’ve told me, still seems to revolve around that drug shipment, the cocaine. Get back to basics, that’s where the emphasis should be. All the rest of this nonsense is just a distraction, a side show.”
“I’m not sure I want to go there,” I said.
“I’m pretty sure until you do, this sort of thing is going to continue. Find where that stuff is stashed, and get it back in DEA custody. You do that, and your pal, Tubby and his crew, will have a lot more on their plate than worrying about you. When was that stuff highjacked from the DEA, a few days ago? I’ll lay you odds, they still got it wrapped up somewhere waiting for things to cool down, so they can move it. That’s your ticket. You find that shipment and you’ll be safe.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
On my way back into town from Daryl Bergstrom’s, I was thinking of all the property I’d seen listed to Big Boy Enterprises on the internet. Not the office buildings, restaurants, or bars, but the low-rent dives listed as ‘restoration works in progress’, like the place where Destiny Meyers was murdered. A place like that might be the perfect locale to hide a highjacked van full of contraband. Well, as long as you could keep the residents away.
I pulled into an internet café on the East side of town. I think I was the only native English speaker in the place. I paid cash for an hour online, and sat in a cigarette-stained, Formica booth, next to an overflowing ashtray, and three empty Starbuck’s cups, searching the Big Boy Enterprises website.
There were seven ‘work in progress’ addresses listed on the web site. I drove past all of them in the early afternoon, then drove back to the one where Destiny Meyers and Duncan Nixon had camped out. Nothing had improved over the ensuing week. The security system on the front door was still deactivated, so I just walked in. The hallway leading back to Destiny’s former nest was littered with a mattress, empty, half-pint liquor bottles, and a condom. The door on the room next to hers was still open, but there was a different guy passed out on the floor.
