The Smack

by RICHARD LANGE

  “How?”

  “You want my advice? Move out of your apartment.”

  “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “I don’t know,” Petty said. “You’ve got to think for yourself from here on out.”

  “This is fucking crazy,” Tony said.

  “It gets crazier,” Petty said. “Avi also knows about your mom’s store, so she’s in danger, too.”

  Tony brought his fist down on the table, made everything jump. “If he fucks with her, he’s dead,” he said.

  “Have her close up for a while and take a vacation,” Petty said. “That way Avi can’t use her to find you.”

  “How am I gonna explain that?” Tony said. “She doesn’t know anything about what’s going on.”

  “Once again, you’re gonna have to think for yourself,” Petty said.

  Tony ground his palms into his eyes. “Mando’ll kill me if he finds out about this,” he said.

  “That your cousin?”

  “He’ll kill me if I fuck this up.”

  “So don’t fuck it up. Get out of your apartment, get your mother out of her store, and lay low until Mando gets back.”

  Tony continued to shake his head. Plates clattered in the kitchen, and someone back there whistled. The man at the counter asked the waiter what time a certain bus made its first run of the day. The waiter didn’t know.

  “Hey,” Petty said to Tony. “Look at me.”

  Tony’s bloodshot eyes rose above the tips of his fingers.

  “Man the fuck up,” Petty said.

  “Right,” Tony said. “I have to. I just fucking have to.”

  Maybe things would work out for the kid. Petty doubted it, but at the same time he didn’t wish anything bad on him.

  They drove back to L.A. in silence, Petty getting lost in the taillights of the car in front of them on the freeway. Forty years of fighting gravity, and what did he have to show for it? A failed marriage, a daughter on dope, and a wallet full of maxed-out credit cards. Every time he managed to put together two pennies, he threw it away in a poker game. And now, to top it off, the biggest score he’d ever gotten close to had gone south, and he was an accessory to murder. He was sure somebody somewhere was having a good laugh at his expense.

  But he still wasn’t ready to give up on himself. He wasn’t a quitter, never had been. You asked yourself the hard questions, the whos, whats, and whys, but you didn’t let the answers drag you down. You took a hot shower, you got a good night’s sleep, you figured out what had to be done, and you did it.

  When they got to Tony’s neighborhood, he had the kid drop him off a block from his car, didn’t want him to see what he was driving.

  “Good luck,” he said as he slid out of the truck.

  “You ever shoot anyone before?” Tony said out of nowhere.

  “I told you, I don’t mess with guns,” Petty said.

  “I shot some hajis in Afghanistan, but it was from far away,” Tony said. “Today, though, that guy—” He paused and shook his head, looked like he was about to cry.

  “Listen,” Petty said. “It was him or you, right?”

  “Right. He would have killed me if I didn’t kill him,” Tony said. “Killed you, too.”

  “So you did what you had to do,” Petty said. “Simple as that.”

  “Him or me,” Tony said.

  “You or him,” Petty said. He closed the door, eager to end the conversation and be on his way. “You’re tired,” he said. “Get some sleep.”

  He waited to walk to his Benz until the truck had turned the corner. He thought he’d feel better as soon as he got behind the wheel and even better when he reached the freeway and started putting some miles between him and Tony and the day’s trouble, but when he got back to Hollywood there was still a stone where his heart should have been, and his throat was still clogged with mud. The look on the cowboy’s face when he realized he’d been shot kept strobing behind his eyes, and the feel of the guy’s ear through the plastic before they dumped him in the hole clung to his fingers. He took deep breaths as he cruised the empty predawn streets, flexed his jaw and rolled his shoulders, forcing himself to relax. You did what you had to do, he thought. The words circled in his head like a chant, a mantra. You did what you had to do. What you had to do. What you had to do.

  14

  PETTY PULLED A MASTERCARD WITH SOME ROOM ON IT OUT OF his wallet and passed it to the girl behind the counter at Gucci. His hand still hurt from last night’s digging.

  “For real?” Tinafey said.

  “Merry early Christmas.”

  Tinafey hugged the gold leather purse to her chest. “It’s too much, isn’t it?” she said.

  It was, but at least now Petty could be sure she wouldn’t forget him when she left for Memphis, and that sliver of space in her memory was worth two grand.

  They’d been walking up and down Rodeo Drive for the past hour, Tinafey getting off just saying the names of the stores they passed: Prada, Dior, Tiffany. She’d tried on shoes at Jimmy Choo and spritzed perfume at Chanel before they’d stopped at Gucci and she’d picked up the purse and said, “Isn’t this gorgeous?”

  “I’m gonna carry it out,” she said to the salesgirl now.

  The girl slid her old purse into a bag, and Tinafey kissed Petty on the cheek as they left the store.

  “I wasn’t askin’ for it,” she said. “I was showin’ it to you.”

  “I know,” he said. “But I wanted you to have it.”

  She kissed him again and held the purse out in front of her and chanted what sounded like a nursery rhyme: “Gucci, Gucci, Louis, Louis, Fendi, Fendi, Prada.”

  Petty smiled. He’d been feeling good ever since waking this morning and finding himself safe in bed at the hotel.

  “Where do you want to go today?” he’d asked Tinafey over room-service breakfast, finally ready to do the sightseeing he’d promised her.

  “How about Beverly Hills?” was her response.

  Tinafey looked into a few more stores and had him take photos of her posing with her new purse in front of a palm tree and next to a Lamborghini parked at the curb. They sat down at a café that had tables outside and ordered coffee. Tinafey was hoping to see somebody famous, but most of the passersby were tourists.

  “If you were Beyoncé, you wouldn’t be hangin’ around here anyway,” Tinafey said. “When you’re that big, you got people who do your shoppin’ for you.”

  “You’re probably right,” Petty said.

  “Or you come at night, after the store’s closed. That’s what Michael Jackson did.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I wouldn’t be like that, though. I’d want people to see me. I’d sign autographs, take pictures, be a nice person. I’d be grateful for my fans.”

  “I’m a fan of yours,” Petty said. “What are you gonna do for me?”

  “You’re my number one fan,” Tinafey said. “You get special treatment.”

  She reached under the table and gave his thigh a quick squeeze while grinning her gap-toothed grin, then sat back and said, “So what happened yesterday?”

  “What do you mean?” Petty said, feeling like she’d set a trap for him.

  “You come in at five in the morning covered with mud, all tore up, groanin’ like an old man in the shower, and I’m not supposed to notice?”

  “It’s nothing you want to hear about.”

  “Meanin’ it’s nothin’ you want to talk about.”

  “Right.”

  “Meanin’ you don’t trust me.”

  Petty shifted in his chair, uncomfortable. A skinny blonde passed by, walking a dog wearing a sweater. The sky was clear, the sun was out, but there was still a chill in the air, one you didn’t notice until you were in the shade.

  “I trust you fine,” Petty said. “But this is one of those the-less-you-know-the-better deals.”

  “Oh,” Tinafey said with mock seriousness. “One of those.”

  “Look,” Petty said. “Why’d you com
e with me from Reno?”

  “To have fun.”

  “Right. And that’s what we’re gonna do now.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “I don’t think so,” Petty said. “Not anymore.”

  “And how long we got?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Together. Here. How long we got?”

  Petty had been trying to figure that out himself. If the cowboy had been in regular contact with Avi, Avi probably knew Petty was staying at the Loews and that he’d made contact with Tony. Eventually he was going to wonder what had happened to his man, and Petty didn’t plan to be around if someone came asking questions. At the same time, it was important that he didn’t look like he was running away, like he knew anything about the cowboy’s disappearance.

  “I’m leaving for Phoenix on Friday,” he said to Tinafey. “That gives us three more days.”

  Tinafey tapped her long, red fingernails on the table and thought this over.

  “Three days, huh?” she said. “Well, we best make the most of them.”

  Petty smiled at her response. If she’d asked for something else right then—another purse, a pair of shoes—he’d have knocked over the nearest bank to buy it for her.

  “How’d I get so lucky?” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Tinafey said.

  “You’re the hottest woman out here.”

  Tinafey smirked at this. “Ain’t you smooth?” she said. “You must be pretty good at your hustle.”

  “I better be,” Petty said. “I’ve been doing it long enough.”

  “Partin’ fools and their money, huh?” Tinafey said.

  Petty shrugged, like You got it, and reached over and covered one of her hands with his. “But this is no hustle,” he said.

  Tinafey scoffed again. “See, that’s hustlers,” she said. “They don’t even know when they’re hustlin’.”

  “You’re not gonna show me any mercy, are you?” Petty said.

  “It’s all right, baby,” Tinafey said. “We’re all some kinda fucked up.”

  A homeless woman, a muttering crone layered in filthy sweaters, caught her attention. She called the woman over and gave her five dollars.

  “Bless you,” the woman said.

  “Bless you, too,” Tinafey said.

  The woman continued on her way. Tinafey turned to Petty and wrinkled her nose.

  “Did you smell that?” she said. “Ooooooweee!” She reached into her old purse for a bottle of Purell and squeezed some onto her hands. “Don’t it break your heart?”

  That night Petty called Don. The old man’s betrayal, his plotting with Avi to send him to L.A. to look for the money and to take it from him if he found it, had enraged Petty. Under normal circumstances he’d have bitten off his own tongue rather than talk to the man again, but in order to create a cover story that would allow him to deny any involvement in the cowboy’s disappearance, he had to report in, as he’d promised to do when he left Reno.

  “Rowan, hey, how’s it going?” Don said.

  “Not good,” Petty said. “Our little thing was a bust.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s no money. I found the guy and got into his apartment and looked around, but there was nothing there.”

  “You’re sure?” Don said.

  “I’m sure,” Petty said. “The trip was a total waste of my time.”

  Don paused, then said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah, well, great,” Petty said. “Your sorry and five bucks might buy me a beer.”

  “What are you gonna do now?”

  “Something that’ll make me some money. A buddy of mine’s got a deal going in Denver. I might head out there.”

  “Well, good luck to you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  “I mean it,” Don said. “It was good seeing you again.”

  “Good seeing you, too,” Petty said, choking on the words. “Take it easy.”

  He ended the call and hoped he’d never see either of them, Don or Avi, again.

  The next morning he and Tinafey got directions from the hotel’s concierge and drove to the Santa Monica Pier. The same tourists who’d been strolling Rodeo Drive the day before swarmed the pier today, but the beauty of the place made it easy to ignore them. The sky was once again a dreamy blue; the sea a crystalline purple that seemed to be lit from below. The swath of coastline on view stretched all the way from Malibu to the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Catalina Island, forty miles away, looked close enough to swim to.

  Petty and Tinafey walked to the end of the pier. The massive wooden structure breathed under their feet, rising and falling with the swell. Fishermen lined the rails. They stared down at the water and slowly cranked their reels to get rid of the slack in their lines. Tinafey peeked into a few buckets. Nobody was having much luck. She told Petty a story about fishing with her grandfather, how he’d snag catfish by hand—hogging, he called it—groping blind in their hidey-holes and dragging them out.

  A commotion erupted near the bait shop. An old Filipina, barely five feet tall, had hooked something big. Her family swarmed around her, shouting advice in Tagalog, but the woman slapped away all helping hands, determined to land her catch by herself.

  She reeled in her line, and a baby tiger shark, two feet long, came into view. Tinafey gasped and clutched Petty’s arm. The woman had the shark halfway to the rail, where a kid waited with a gaff, when it bit through the line. Down, down it dropped, back into the sea, sinking quickly from sight. A groan rose from the onlookers, and the woman hissed her disappointment and throttled her pole as if to punish it.

  Tinafey wanted to ride the Ferris wheel, so they did, and the roller coaster, too. Petty warned her that the carnival games were rigged, but the barker at the basketball toss convinced her otherwise. Twenty dollars later she’d won a pink stuffed bear worth a buck and was delighted to have proved Petty wrong.

  “‘Don’t play that,’” she said, imitating him, waving the bear in his face. “‘That shit’s a scam.’”

  They went down to the beach and walked to the water’s edge. What waves there were were small and sloppy, rising only a foot or so before making feeble dashes toward shore. Tinafey carried her shoes in one hand, the bear in the other. The gulls she chased squawked their annoyance and fled on bright orange legs.

  It was warm enough for bathing suits, and looking at all the people stretched out on blankets and towels, you’d have thought it was the Fourth of July instead of the second day of December. A little boy and his dad braved the frigid water up to their knees, the boy shrieking like something wounded every time a wave swirled around them. Three high school girls in bikinis snapped photos of themselves after carefully adjusting their straps and smiles. An Indian woman wearing a sari poked at a knot of kelp with her bare foot and backed away in horror when a swarm of flies rose from it like a puff of black smoke.

  “Let’s sit a while,” Tinafey said.

  She picked a spot near the lifeguard station. Petty started to lay down his coat so she wouldn’t get her dress sandy, but she said, “That’s okay. I want to feel how warm it is.” She leaned back on her elbows and turned her face to the sun.

  “I’m gonna get freckles from this, you watch,” she said.

  “I feel like ice cream,” Petty said. “You want anything?”

  “I’ll take a diet soda, if you’re goin’.”

  He walked to a snack bar and waited in line behind a harried mom and the ten preteen boys she was chaperoning. One of the boys slugged another in the shoulder. The woman grabbed the first boy’s arm and yanked hard.

  “Chill out,” the boy said.

  “You chill out!” the woman yelled.

  A girl passed by who resembled Sam, the Sam Petty remembered, not the ghost he’d met three days ago. He wondered how deep his daughter was into dope. Most of the coke fiends he knew straightened out after a while, mainly because they couldn’t afford to keep going. The tw
eakers, too, but that shit took more of a toll, left guys sketchy for life. With alkies, it was fifty-fifty, but the math was simple: those who managed to quit lived, and those who couldn’t died slowly and painfully.

  Heroin addicts and pill poppers had the hardest time of it. Their poison fooled their bodies into thinking it was medicine. That’s why ex-junkies always seemed so sad: the one thing they’d found that made them feel good would also eat them up.

  It was Petty’s turn to order. A soda for Tinafey and an ice cream sandwich for himself. The trash can at the end of the counter was overflowing. Yellow jackets hovered above it like military helicopters on a mission.

  Tinafey was texting when Petty returned. It was none of his business, but still he wondered who it was. She stashed her phone in her purse when he sat beside her.

  “Diet Pepsi’s all they had,” he said, passing her the cup.

  “They’re all the same,” she said.

  A pod of dolphins was making its way north beyond the breakers. They launched themselves out of the water and arched through the air like targets in a shooting gallery, the sun glinting on their backs. Petty and Tinafey followed their progress up the coast until they finally lost them in the glare and the spray and the distance.

  That night after they fucked Tinafey got up and went into the bathroom. Petty lay on his back, watching lights from outside skitter across the ceiling. He smelled weed and wondered why Tinafey thought she had to get high in secret. He didn’t smoke himself, didn’t like the way it separated his brain from his body, but he was fine with other people doing it. He was about to tell her to come out when her voice rose above the hum of the bathroom fan.

  “Rowan,” she said.

  “Yeah?” Petty replied.

  “Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m gonna tell you somethin’.”

  Petty sat up and pulled the sheet to his waist.

  “All right,” he said.

  “My real name’s Yvonne.”

  “Yvonne. That’s pretty.”

  “But I want you to keep callin’ me Tinafey.”