by Steve Brewer
Tony turned back to the house’s bloody interior. Nick looked squat and foreign next to the tall, damp cowboy, but he kept that All-American Colt pointed at Big Jim’s gut. Just the two of them left. Everyone else was either loading up or dead.
“Let’s go,” Tony said. “There’s room in the van.”
“I can’t leave my own car here,” Nick said.
“We need to hurry.”
Nick’s face creased into a grim smile. “You go on ahead.”
Tony glanced at Big Jim, who, for the first time, looked truly scared.
Aw, hell.
“You don’t have to kill him,” he said. “Leave him to clean up this mess with the cops. We’ll be gone.”
“I don’t think so,” Nick said.
“You don’t want another ghost rattling around inside your head.”
“He’ll have lots of company.”
Tony stared at them for a few seconds, making up his mind. Then he nodded and turned away.
Behind him, Big Jim muttered, “You son of a bitch.”
Tony wasn’t sure which one of them he meant. He didn’t go back to find out.
Chapter 60
Nick waited until he heard the van drive away, the trailer rattling behind, before he spoke to Big Jim.
“You know what comes next.”
“You finally see your chance to run this town. All you’ve got to do is pull that trigger.”
Big Jim’s face was beaded with sweat and his glasses were steamed up. Spit flew from his lips when he talked. Made Nick think of a pressure cooker.
“You got me all wrong, Jim. I’m not interested in running this town. I can’t stand it here. All I want is to get out.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“I needed money—”
“Hell, you’ve got that now. You’ve been mixed up with these fucking crooks from the start.”
“That’s what you’d tell the cops.”
“Like they’ll listen to me. Look around. I’ll be lucky to stay out of prison myself.”
Nick thought it over long enough that Big Jim let a little hope leak into his eyes. That made it sweeter.
“I don’t like leaving loose ends.”
“I won’t tell the cops you were here. I won’t say a word!”
“I know you won’t.”
The Colt roared, and Big Jim sprawled backward onto the marble floor. His eyes rolled back in his head and his mouth hung open, like he had one more thing he’d meant to say. His hat rolled a few feet on its brim before coming to rest against Shamu’s bare foot.
Nick heard sirens in the distance.
Chapter 61
Eve waited until the boys in the back of the van were finished crowing and high-fiving before she said, “This is bad, Tony. This is a bad one.”
“I know.”
The others got real quiet.
“This isn’t us,” she said, “all this bloodshed. That’s not how we work.”
“You’re right. We stumbled into something back there. Bad blood between Nick and Big Jim. Guess it had been building for a long time.”
“Did you shoot any of those men?” She wanted to add “with those hands, the hands that touch me at night?” But she didn’t say that. She kept her eyes on the road, nothing but empty desert up ahead.
“I shot at Shamu,” he said. “I don’t know if I hit him. We were all shooting at once—”
“I shot that asshole,” Ross said from the back. “Hard to miss him. Like shooting a beached whale.”
Tony looked back at his crew. “Ross? Not now.”
“Sorry.”
To Eve, he said, “Nick did most of the shooting. He didn’t really need our help. That old mobster is a hard man.”
“He let us down once before, Tony. Word got out, people found us. And now we’ve left him behind again. What if he’s talking to the cops right now? Be pretty easy to blame everything on us. An alert goes out for a van pulling a horse trailer—
“He wouldn’t do that,” Tony said. “He’d never talk. He’s old school.”
“He did before,” she insisted.
“He talked to his girlfriend. He thought he could trust her. He was wrong.”
It was very quiet in the van for a while. Eve finally said, “I can’t keep doing this, Tony.”
“I know.”
“Not with all the shooting.”
“I know, sugar.”
“We’ve got to stop.”
“Well—”
“I mean it, Tony.”
Someone in the back cleared his throat. Someone else snickered.
“We’re certainly due for a vacation,” Tony said. “At least that. We’ll need to stay off the radar for a long time.”
He stopped, waiting for her to say something. But Eve was done talking about this. For now. This was not the time for this conversation, not while they were all buzzing with adrenaline, not with the three stooges in the back, listening.
“We’ve got enough money to retire, if we want,” Tony offered. “After the fence picks up this horse tomorrow, we’re all sitting pretty. We can put the rest behind us.”
Eve couldn’t stand it. She had to have the last word.
“Give me that speech again after you wash the blood off your face, okay?”
Nobody said anything in the van for a long time after that.
Chapter 62
Nick steered his Lincoln past the security gate at Villa Mirage just as a flashing squad car pulled in from the highway. He watched in his rear-view as the cops stopped at the guard shack, which looked empty because the trussed-up guard was out of sight on the floor. The cops tooted their horn. Nothing.
Fucking amateurs.
Nick pulled up onto the desert highway and breezed away. One glance backward. The cops were turning into the driveway of Big Jim’s house.
The southbound Town Car surged forward, climbing through its gears. Nick got it up to eighty, then held it there. He’d drive to Vegas, switch cars, then cut west across the desert into California. Go over to the coast for a few days, get some sea air, wait for Tony Zinn to deliver the rest of his money.
Nick felt a load lift as the glow of Fowler faded in the rear-view mirror. The dying Starlite, his debts, the cops, Bobby Crabs. He’d left all that steaming mess behind. Let the investigators and the lawyers and the mobsters and other scavengers pick over the bones. He didn’t give a damn. He’d be gone.
Nick recognized now that his whole scheme had been ill-conceived. Too much heat after the robbery, too much riding on Cindy’s faked numbers, too many people involved. He’d gotten in over his head. He should’ve known that ripping off the insurance company was too complicated for a guy like him. All that paperwork and money-shuffling and bullshit. That wasn’t Nick’s style. His talents lay in other areas.
Now he could start over. Take his cut of the loot and buy himself a new identity in a new place. Maybe a small town, somewhere his ex-wife couldn’t find him, somewhere you didn’t end up shooting your neighbors. Retire properly this time. Learn to play golf or fish or—
Thump-thump in the back of his car. Then again, thump-thump.
From the trunk.
Aw, hell. He’d forgotten about Lola. She must be awfully tired of being stuck back there. What had it been? Two, three hours now?
The isolation was good for her. Gave her lots of time to think about the many ways she’d betrayed him.
Thump.
The sound of a loose end.
Thump.
He’d let her stew a little longer. Get farther out into the empty desert. Then he’d pull over. Let her out of the trunk, scared and blinking. Tell her good-bye.
He rested his hand on the Colt lying on the seat beside him. It still held a couple of live rounds.
Pop, pop.
For more about this author, go to www.stevebrewer.us.com.
Fender Benders – Bill Fitzhugh
FENDER BENDERS. Copyright © 2001 by Reduviidae, Inc., Kindle Edition
copyright © 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
To the songwriters, who can say in a three-minute song
what I struggle to say in three hundred pages.
And to the musicians, who can convey more
with the right four chords than I can in an entire book.
And to Kendall, who is a song unto herself.
Fender Benders
1.
Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana
Fred Babineaux was halfway between Morgan City and Houma when he decided he had a brain tumor. He couldn’t think of anything else to explain the king-hell of a headache swelling inside his aching skull. It was a tumor, he was sure of it, a tumor the size of a pink Texas grapefruit.
Fred was driving south on a narrow stretch of highway that traced the spine of a levee separating two cane fields thirty feet below on either side of the road. He was heading for Terrebonne Bay to meet with a man who wanted to buy a boat from the manufacturer Fred represented. The sale would mean a fat commission but at the moment Fred would have forfeited that plus two months’ salary to make the headache disappear. He picked up the can of Dandy’s Cream Soda that was sweating in the cup holder. He held it to his head for a moment hoping the cold would soothe the pain. When that failed, Fred thought maybe the problem was dehydration or low blood sugar, so he gulped half the can.
The fields below on both sides of the highway were lush with a young crop of sugar cane flourishing in the promising Louisiana heat. It was hot for late April — eighty-eight degrees and eighty-nine percent humidity. A couple of Snowy Egrets stalked the edge of the cane fields stabbing orange beaks at their lunch. Here and there the familiar smear of armadillo slicked the road. Fred identified with one whose head had been reduced to the consistency of a thick roux.
His dehydration and low blood sugar theories disproved, Fred took his hands off the wheel and steered with his knee so he could massage his throbbing temples. The radio was tuned to Kickin’ 98, “Classic Country for South Louisiana, playing a mix of the old and the new, because a song ain’t gotta be old to be a classic.” They were playing a ballad at the moment, soothing close harmonies Fred hoped might ease his pain. By the end of the song, however, Fred knew the cure would require pharmaceuticals.
He leaned over for the glove compartment when, suddenly, he heard what sounded like an airplane landing on the roof of his car. Startled by the abrupt roar of the thundering engine, Fred jerked his hands back to the steering wheel, narrowly avoiding a long plunge off the road. “Sonofabitch!” Adrenaline poured into his system. His heart rate soared, turning his already bad headache into severe unilateral periorbital pain. Fred looked painfully out the window and saw the crop duster raining Gramoxone onto the sweet young cane. Maybe that’s what caused my tumor, he thought. He’d been up and down these roads so many times over the years there was no telling how many gallons of herbicides and pesticides he’d absorbed. That had to be it. You could strap Fred Babineaux to the bottom of one of those noisy old biplanes, poke a few holes in him, and spray a field with whatever came out. Kill anything it hit.
Fred looked to make sure the plane wasn’t coming again, then leaned over and popped open the glove box. He grabbed the familiar yellow-and-red box of Dr. Porter’s Headache Powder, an aspirin product sold only in the deepest parts of the South. He’d bought this particular box at an E-Z Mart in Shreveport the day before. To Fred’s great relief, the usually impenetrable plastic shrink-wrap on the brand new box sloughed off easily and he quickly fingered out one of the folded rectangular sheets of wax paper that held the powder like a professionally packaged gram of something else entirely.
With one throbbing eye on the road, Fred unfolded the two ends of the rectangle and then the long top. He held one end closed and, with a jerk, tossed his head back and poured the bitter powder into the back of his throat. He chased it with the remainder of his cream soda and, wincing slightly, swallowed the solution to all his problems.
In no time flat Fred had forgotten about his headache. Sadly it wasn’t due to the fast-acting nature of the medicine. At first his face went numb and his breathing became irregular. He considered pulling to the side of the road but the shoulder was only four feet wide before dropping sharply into the boggy cane fields below. The eighteen-wheeler bearing down from behind prevented him from simply stopping in the middle of the road.
Sixty seconds later, with no warning, Fred threw up violently, spewing his fried lunch onto the windshield. Panic set in as his body realized he was dying before his mind could grasp the fact, let alone ask why. Desperate to see the road in front of him, Fred wiped at the vomit covering his windshield. Smearing it only made matters worse. As if his compromised vision didn’t make driving difficult enough, Fred began to hear sounds that didn’t exist and he felt his heart engage in what would best be described as irregular cardiac activity. But at least the headache wasn’t bothering him any more.
Fred’s mind fixed on why he suddenly felt like he was dying. His wheels drifted onto the gravel shoulder, kicking up a spray of rocks that scared the Snowy Egrets into the sky. Had Fred been listening to the radio, he’d have heard the DJ introducing an old Dorothy Dixon song. “Here’s a classic country flashback on Kickin’ 98!” But Fred wasn’t listening to the radio any more. All he could hear was what sounded like a chorus of outboard motors in his head. The auditory hallucinations were part-and-parcel of the process taking place throughout his body, namely, the total cessation of his cellular metabolism. His central nervous system was so compromised that it was shutting down, and not temporarily.
Roy Acuff was singing a tragic song about blood and whiskey and broken glass all mixed together on the road.
Struggling to keep his car on the highway, Fred began to convulse and suddenly he couldn’t breathe at all. He began to shake like a dog shittin’ peach seeds. Increased amounts of unsaturated hemoglobin in his blood turned his mucus membranes a bluish tint. His body suddenly jerked straight as a board, causing him to floor the accelerator. His head pitched backwards and, a moment later, Fred’s car soared off into the cane field just as the crop duster passed overhead heading in the same direction.
And Roy kept singing about how his soul had been called by his master.
“. . .and I didn’t hear nobody pray. . .”
2.
Forrest County, Mississippi
Mr. T’s was just off Highway 49 a few miles south of Hattiesburg. The place was named after the owner, Buck Talby, a mean old coot with an ulcer. From the outside Mr. T’s looked like it might be a dump but inside it was a genuine shithole. A filthy wooden plank floor littered with peanut shells, cigarette butts, chewed tobacco, and the occasional cockroach dimly lit by three neon beer signs and a flickering florescent tube over a pool table. The clientele consisted of local farm and forestry product workers wearing baseball caps touting brands of outboard motors and oil additives. There were also a few jar-headed looking yahoos from nearby Camp Shelby, a National Guard training facility. Grease-stained work shirts and t-shirts with yellow armpits met the dress code. It was Saturday night and the men were gussied up in the hopes of picking up on a little something the wife wouldn’t have to know about.
It was in this context that Eddie Long stood on the tiny stage with his guitar. He was tall and lean and handsome. He was lost in his music, playing the hell out of a rocking version of ‘Ring of Fire.’ Eddie had tuned out his indifferent audience long ago and was channeling anger into his performance, substituting a torrid run of notes for the mariachi horns of Cash’s version of the song. Every time he bent a note his face bent with it like his life was attached to the strings of his Fender DG21S. He wouldn’t dare bring his big flat top Gibson into a place like Mr. T’s. Damn thing cost too much. The Fender was his road guitar but no less dependable because it cost less. It was Indian rosewood with
a solid spruce top. It produced a sturdy bass and a brilliant treble that Eddie rode like a racehorse.
Eddie’s anger stemmed from the crowd’s neglect. He wanted them to pay attention, to hear what he was doing. He wanted them to be enthralled but he would have settled for vaguely interested. But they weren’t either one and there was nothing Eddie could do but use his time on stage to practice until he found himself in front of a crowd that cared.
What Eddie failed to notice was a guy named Jimmy Rogers, sitting in the back, rapt by the performance. Jimmy had a pen and a pad of paper and was poised to write something. But he hesitated when it occurred to him, not for the first time, that it was impossible to describe the sound of music with mere words. Still, he shook his head and took a stab at it. Can’t win if you don’t play, he figured.
As Eddie reached the mid-point of the song he was snarling and distorting his good looks. He wouldn’t be doing it tonight, but when Eddie smiled it was so beguiling you couldn’t look away. His eyes were the same Cadillac Green as a 1958 Gretsch Country Club Stereo guitar, and he was a right dresser too. He was wearing Wranglers, pressed, with a crisp white t-shirt under an open, untucked denim work shirt. A dark pair of calculated sideburns dropped from underneath his silver belly Stetson, tapering to point down at a pair of cowboy boots that had been selected to convey a heritage that didn’t look nearly as store bought as it was. Halfway between the hat and the boots was a shiny silver belt buckle the size of a butter plate. The result of all this was a sort of disinfected rodeo look. It was the latest in a series of styles Eddie had tested for his stage persona.
Eddie was on the last chorus of the last song of his last night at Mr. T’s when he looked down and noticed a change in the expression of the National Guardsman at the front table. The guy’d been drinking boilermakers all night and had just finished eating an oyster po-boy and a side of tater-wads. Suddenly he had the look of a man who couldn’t hold it down any more. Eddie would have gotten out of the way except the stage was the size of a bath mat and if he jumped off he figured he’d get pelted with a beer bottle. It had happened before. So he just kept playing.
