Desperate

by Daniel Palmer

Through the peephole’s fish-eye lens, I saw Roy dancing on his feet, calling to mind the old adage ants in his pants. Whatever he had to say, he didn’t want to waste time. I started to open the door, but someone other than Roy, someone who had been standing in the hall out of my view, pushed it open with a good degree of force. Roy came stumbling into the room, evidently shoved inside by the same individual who threw open the door. Following closely on Roy’s heels, and closing the door behind him with a quick click of the lock as he entered, was Nicky Stacks.

  Stacks struck an imposing figure in a dark blue suit, lighter blue oxford shirt, and no tie. I hoped Nicky wouldn’t want to get his nice clothes covered in my blood, but the smoldering fury in his eyes didn’t make me optimistic. Roy worked his way over to the far corner of the hotel room, where a small desk might provide momentary shelter from Stacks if the rhino-sized man decided to charge.

  “I’m sorry, Gage,” Roy said as he shuffled past me. “Nicky made me bring him to you. He wants to talk.”

  “I can speak for myself,” Stacks said, hovering by the door. It was not lost on me that he was blocking my only way out.

  As if Stacks could read my thoughts, he put his finger to his lips in a stay quiet gesture, then pulled open his suit jacket just enough to flash me the gun holstered there. It was an impressive showing and secured my full cooperation. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the gun in Stacks’s holster hadn’t recently been pushed into Roy’s face.

  “Sit down,” Stacks said, pointing first at me and then at the bed.

  I caught the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee.

  “Do you want a cup of coffee? I have enough for two,” I said.

  “I don’t drink coffee,” Stacks said.

  “Do you mind if I have one?” I asked. I didn’t need the coffee to wake up. I wanted something to do with my hands.

  “I think you need to just sit and listen,” Stacks said. “You too, Roy. Pull up a chair.”

  Roy grabbed the wooden desk chair and pulled it over to the bed. Nicky took up roost on the edge of the dresser directly across from the bed and eyed us both. I’d met him only once, but Nicky’s massive head appeared to have grown in size since then. It was a boulder stuck on a meaty neck. For a while he just glowered, saying nothing, and then he leaned back slightly. As he did, he touched one of his thick fingers to his eye as if he were trying to make sense of what he saw and couldn’t believe people like us actually existed. I could have said the same thing about him. Roy sat beside me as if we were siblings being scolded for some offense. It didn’t take an advanced degree in materials science to know that Roy’s little talk with Nicky hadn’t gone very well.

  “Do you want to tell me what happened out there?” Stacks asked.

  I looked to Roy, my partner, the leader of the pack. Roy didn’t even gesture for me to answer, so I took it upon myself to tell our side of the made-up story.

  “We were ambushed.” I tried to sound tough, because Nicky still thought I was Roy’s ne’er-do-well cousin from Florida, a genetically related badass. To my ears I sounded pretty unconvincing.

  “It all happened really fast,” I continued. “I shot Jorge and Roy knifed Lucas, and we had to run because otherwise we’d have been killed.”

  I looked to Roy, but he didn’t seem at all pleased, which was alarming. Wasn’t I corroborating our story? Roy’s body language, chin to his chest, face buried in his hands, implied this was far from over.

  “Are you checking with Roy to make sure you two clowns have your story straight?” Stacks asked me. “Because if you are, don’t bother. Now, do you feel like telling me what really happened out there?”

  I didn’t say anything, not sure I could if I tried. Dread constricted my windpipe.

  “No? Not the talkative type? Well, that’s okay, because I know what happened, so let’s just move on.”

  I continued to remain silent.

  “I’ve been on the phone with my business associates for an hour since you two jackoffs screwed everything up,” Stacks said. He pointed a wagging finger first at Roy and then at me. “It would appear we hired four of the stupidest assholes to handle this drop.”

  I was a bit surprised because Stacks implied the Moreno brothers were at fault as well.

  “Here’s the thing, Gage,” Stacks said, looking directly at me. It felt incredibly unsettling to hear him say my name. “I’m sure Lucas Moreno wants to kill you for killing his brother, but I told my associates, in very clear language, that it wouldn’t be right. If what Roy finally confessed to me is true, and I believe it is, then Lucas had no business taking matters into his own hand. If there was a shortage on the drop, it should have been brought to my attention. That’s the way we do business. He had no authorization to execute anybody. None!” Stacks slapped the dresser with the palm of his hand. It made the mirror on the wall shake.

  “The good news is, my associates agree. Lucas should not have threatened Roy, period. We have protocols for this sort of thing, ways of handling problems that don’t attract so much attention as an all-out gunfight. It should have been up to me to make the deal whole and decide if I should put a bullet in your stupid heads or not. Do you two understand me?”

  We both nodded like a pair of charmed cobras.

  “Now, this might sound all well and good to you,” Stacks continued, “but there has to be retribution paid for what happened, something to set things right between my associates and me.”

  “Nicky, I’m sorry,” Roy said, shaking his head. He sounded on the verge of tears. “I screwed up, man. I’m sorry. I was desperate.”

  “Shut up!” Stacks snapped. “Just shut the fuck up! Don’t speak. Don’t say a fucking word until I ask you to say something. Let me be very clear about this. Don’t interrupt me again.” Stacks’s voice came out as a low rumble of thunder.

  “The retribution I must pay is the money Lucas took from the deal, which means your little gunfight at the O.K. friggin’ Corral has cost me five hundred large.” Stacks paused. His eyes locked on me, two black beads cold as death, making me feel incredibly small under his gaze. Microscopic, even. “Because of you”—Stacks pointed his thick finger first at Roy, then to me, keeping it steady as an arrow in a bow—“I don’t have the pills and I don’t have the cash.”

  Roy again hung his head in shame while I stared blankly ahead. This was my new reality. Thanks to the crying woman, Roy, Nicky, and Lucas Moreno were all part of my life now.

  Stacks went silent, pondering how to phrase what he wanted to say to us next.

  “The bottom line is that the five hundred grand I should have made from the drop is now the property of my associates. The good news is that I’ll continue to do business with them, but not with you two mules. You two are dead to me. No more work, no more deals, no more nothing.

  “As I see it, my associates have been made whole for their loss, but me, Nicky Stacks, I’m out five hundred grand. Now, my associates consider this matter closed. They’re not going to punish Lucas for going rogue because one dead brother appears to be punishment enough. But they aren’t going to make me whole for my loss, either. They’re kind enough just to let me keep working in this town. So I’ve decided you two fuckheads are going to make me whole.”

  “What do you want us to do, Nicky?” Roy asked.

  There it was again: us, the proverbial we. We were a pack of two. I was with Roy, and Roy was with me.

  “What I want you to do is get me one million dollars,” Nicky said. “Let me repeat: you owe me one million dollars.”

  Roy blanched. His hands came up to his face and froze there, as if Nicky’s words were a punch he had to deflect. He tried to speak, but his voice was stuck in his throat.

  “I’m going to give you two weeks,” Nicky said. “Two weeks to come up with the money. I don’t care how you get it. Gamble. Play scratch tickets. Beg, borrow, or steal. You owe me this money. Now, Roy, if you run, I’ll find you, and if I can’t, as a gesture of goodwill, my associates will help. We’
re quite resourceful. We’ll know where you’d go to get a new identity. We’ll know how you’d go about disappearing. We’ll know all the underground routes you’d take to drop off the grid. There’s no place you can hide from us.”

  “But . . . but . . . we don’t owe you a million, Nicky,” Roy stammered. “We only lost half that.”

  “You owe me for pain and suffering,” Stacks said, with just the whisper of a smile.

  “How are we supposed to get that kind of money?” Roy asked.

  “You should have thought about that before you tried to steal from me.”

  “And what if we can’t get the money?” I asked softly.

  Nicky reached inside his suit jacket. I almost jumped to my feet, ready to duck for cover if he came out wielding what I thought he might. But instead of taking out his gun, Nicky withdrew an overstuffed business envelope. I looked at it, puzzled by its contents.

  “I don’t know what you are all about,” Nicky said, slapping the envelope repeatedly against his beefy palm. “But I know you’re not cousins. I got that much out of Roy. Shame on me, because I should have done my background check on you before, but I did it after.”

  Roy and I exchange anxious glances as Nicky tossed the envelope over to me like a Frisbee. It landed on my lap.

  “Go ahead and open it, Gage,” Nicky said. “Roy gave me your address. It was all I needed to do my digging.”

  Nervous as I was, I managed to unseal the envelope without it tearing. I pulled out a stack of trifolded papers from within. My body stiffened.

  “That’s your wife, Anna, right?” Nicky said. “I printed out her picture from her website. Man, she’s beautiful.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked in a voice steeped with alarm.

  “Go ahead and flip through the other pages. I’ve got your parents’ address in there. I know the nursing home where Anna’s mother lives. I’ve got it all. I’ve also got a gun with your fingerprints on it that will be a match for the bullet inside poor Jorge’s chest. So if you run, my buddies with the police, and I do mean my buddies, will find Jorge’s body, which we’re keeping on ice for now, and they’ll come after you. Meanwhile, I’ll take a knife to your precious family and carve them up piece by stinking piece.” Nicky reached inside his suit jacket pocket once more. This time he removed a six-inch switchblade knife, which he unhinged with the push of a button. The blade shot out like a viper’s strike.

  “You two clowns have two weeks to save your worthless lives and come up with my money,” Nicky said, as he hopped down from his perch on the dresser. The wood creaked from the release of his weight. “Like I said, if you run, I’ll find you. If you screw up, I go after your family. If you don’t deliver, you’re all dead, and by all, I mean Anna, Lily, and you two assholes.”

  Nicky walked to the door and paused before opening it. Meanwhile, Roy and I didn’t budge. We were frozen where we sat.

  Nicky turned his eyes on me once again. “You think losing your wife and kid in a car accident hurts?” he said. “Well, let me tell you something, Gage Dekker. You don’t know pain.”

  He walked out the door, leaving Roy and me just two weeks to come up with one million dollars.

  CHAPTER 45

  Roy and I were in the hotel bar. It was just after ten in the morning, so we needed to seek out hotel staff to serve us a drink. Roy ordered a double shot of whiskey, and I nodded a request for the same. Roy was really working his toothpick, gnawing at the thin sliver of wood like a starving termite. I was numb, in shock. In the span of a few hours, I’d become nothing I recognized, nothing familiar to me. The old me wouldn’t drink whiskey before the sun went down. Now I was drinking it not long after it had come up.

  The first swallow passed like a screech of fire, but the second tasted a whole lot better, and before Roy could say a word, I was ordering myself another.

  “I’m sorry, Gage,” Roy said. He took a long drink for himself. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to go down.”

  My eyes went wide.

  “Really? Tell me, Roy, how was it supposed to go down? Was I supposed to have enough in my bank account to cover your cigarette debt?”

  The bartender, a twentysomething guy, was polishing some glass bottles for want of something to do. He shot us a curious over-the-shoulder glance and Roy looked at me, worried, so we took our drinks over to a table out of his earshot.

  “So what now?” Roy asked.

  I wanted to reach across the table and slap Roy across the face. Everything tough about him had been evaporated. Nothing about Roy intimidated me anymore—not a twitch of his sinewy muscle, a flash of his tattoos, or a sneer on his curled lips. It felt like I was pulling apart a matryoshka doll of maladies, with Lily the littlest doll inside Roy, inside the Moreno brothers, inside Nicky Stacks. Roy was no longer the hard man—he was a vulnerable man, same as me. And because of him everything and everyone I loved was in grave danger.

  “What now, Roy, is you’ve got to save your life,” I said. “And in the process, you’ll save mine. So . . .” I knocked on the table for emphasis. “How are you going to come up with a million dollars? How do you criminals do that?”

  Roy looked down at his feet and shook his head.

  “You don’t get this, do you?” he said. “We’re dead. I can’t come up with that kind of money. We’re dead men. Drink up, because you’re not going to have many drinks left.”

  Roy downed half his whiskey in one long gulp.

  “Why didn’t Nicky just kill us? Why give us the chance to run away?”

  Roy gave a dismissive laugh. He straightened his posture and leaned across the table, pointing a finger at me like it was the tip of Nicky’s switchblade targeting my heart. A furious look came over his face, dark and snarling, the kind that can only be perfected behind the walls of a prison. I still wasn’t intimidated.

  “He gave us a chance to come up with his money,” Roy said. “Don’t you get it? Nicky wins either way. He’s just hedging his bets and seeing if we get lucky. You ask me, he doesn’t think we’ll come up with the cash, but if we’re dead, we definitely don’t get it.”

  “So we go to the cops,” I said.

  Roy looked at me like I was an exasperating child who would never learn to ride his bike. “Let’s say we do that,” Roy said. “We go to the cops with the threat, and Nicky produces evidence that you committed murder. You get grilled, you turn on me, and we both go to jail.”

  “So, we’ll be safe.”

  “Your family will be dead,” Roy said, emphasizing his point by repeatedly stabbing the table with his finger, like Nicky would be stabbing my family. “And so will Lily.”

  “Not if we warn the cops. They’ll be protected.”

  “There are crooked cops on Nicky’s payroll, remember? Besides, if we go inside, Nicky has people there who will put us both in the ground.”

  I shrugged away my own mortality.

  “So be it,” I said.

  I would be a shell of a person—skin, bones, and soulless—if anything happened to Anna, or to my parents.

  Ever since the accident, I’d surrounded myself with memories of the dead or with the dying. I’d talked and shared with other parents who had lost a child, and spent my free time in hospital rooms making model rockets for sick kids, some of whom had no hope of ever breathing fresh air again. I gravitated to the people who hungered for second chances, because I’d learned the hardest way possible how precious those chances really were.

  I would sacrifice myself to give Anna the second chance she deserved.

  “You might be comfortable getting shanked on your way to lunch, but not me.” Roy shook his head, his chiseled face flush. “I ain’t going back inside. No way. We’re going to get out from this.”

  “Okay, hotshot,” I said, taking another sip of whiskey. “What’s your plan?”

  “I’m thinking,” Roy said, looking at his finger as he traced some design on the table surface.

  “I heard on NPR that the averag
e bank robbery nets about twelve thousand.”

  Roy looked up at me, trying to get a read on my sarcasm.

  “Do you still have the Oxy you siphoned off? Maybe we could sell that.”

  “Shut up, Gage,” Roy said, his flush turning a different shade of red.

  “Or maybe we could try a kidnapping plot? Extortion? I’m just brainstorming here,” I said in a sarcastic tone. “It’s a little something I learned at work. You toss out ideas, but remember, no idea is a bad idea.”

  Roy’s dour expression darkened even more.

  “Look, Gage, you better start getting creative here,” Roy said. “You got a rich family? Because I suggest you call them and start collecting.”

  “A million dollars? My family doesn’t have that kind of money, not even close. My father has been on disability for twenty years. I send them money to help pay the rent. If you know so much about me, you should know that.”

  “What about Anna?”

  “She doesn’t have it, either.” We fell silent, taking slower sips of our drinks, thinking, thinking.

  Eventually, I was the one to break the quiet. “Look,” I said. “What if Stacks is just bluffing?”

  “Bluffing? Nicky Stacks?”

  “Yeah, what if he doesn’t want to kill me because it would be too high profile? I’m a white-collar professional, and an investigation into my death might get back to Nicky.”

  “What does that mean? What does white-collar mean?”

  “It’s a business term. It means professional, managerial work.”

  Roy got quiet, thinking, the hard man thinking.

  “So, what do you do for a living anyway?”

  “I thought you checked up on me,” I said.

  “Only a little. I didn’t friggin’ look at your stupid job. What do you do?”

  “Why?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “I work for Lithio Systems,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “We make batteries.”

  “For flashlights and stuff?”

  “No. More like cell phones. Computers. Laptops. Airplanes.”

  A smile, the first I’d seen from him.