by Brad Smith
“Hey, there’s my girl,” Parson said, straightening up from his work.
“Your girl’s over by the pool, sunburning her fake tits,” Dusty told him.
Parson laughed at that, then nodded past her. “You remember Cherry,” he said.
Dusty never gave Cherry a glance. “Yeah,” she said.
“What do you know?” Parson asked.
“I know you’re fucking with me, as usual,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me the guy who’s got the cylinder is a cop named Hoffman?”
“I didn’t mention that?”
“No, you didn’t. What the fuck is going on?”
Parson tossed the cloth onto the hood of the ’Vette. “I really don’t know. How did you find out it was Hoffman?”
“I had a long conversation with the guy who phoned it in when the thing came off the river,” Dusty said. “An ex-cop named Brownie, a fat fucking lush with a low threshold for pain.”
“He gave Hoffman up?”
“Oh, he told me all kinds of things,” Dusty said. Now she glanced at Cherry, without wanting to. He dropped his gaze to the concrete floor, as if something of interest had suddenly caught his fancy. She quickly turned back to Parson. “He told me this Hoffman has money problems, and he’s looking to sell the coke to get himself square. Which is what he would tell me if that was true, but it’s also what he might say if the police were trying to set somebody up here.”
“Somebody like me?” Parson asked.
“That’d be good by me,” Dusty said. “They nail your ass and I’ll go home and sleep like a baby. No, it’s me I’m worried about.”
“You didn’t used to be so selfish.”
“I don’t have time for your bullshit, Parson,” she told him. “What’s this guy saying? Is he trying to sell you the coke?”
“Yeah.”
She exhaled. She glanced out the big doors. The blonde was again reclining on the lounge, stretched out in the sun like a lazy hound. “So you have two choices,” she said as she watched the woman. “You can buy it and hope for the best, which would bite you on the ass if it turned out to be a setup. Or you could tell him to fuck off, and then you’re out of it.” She had a sip of coffee before turning back to Parson. “Now doesn’t door number two sound like the smart choice?”
“It’s my property, Dusty.”
“I don’t need to be reminded about whose property it is,” she told him. “You forget who you’re talking to? All I want is to be kept out of it. You can understand that, can’t you? I did three fucking years for this.”
“He was asking about you,” Parson said.
The words rolled off his tongue so easily, so matter-of-fact, and yet she was almost positive he was lying. Almost. She turned and walked away from him, toward the back of the garage where a large window overlooked the river. She stood there a moment, trying to gather herself. There was no reason to believe him. He would do anything or say anything. She knew that better than anyone.
She looked past the manicured lawn to the water beyond and then she saw the boat. It was moored alongside an elaborate dock of cedar and stainless steel. At first she thought it was another Chris-Craft, a similar model, but looking closer she realized it wasn’t. And when the current suddenly shifted, blowing the boat sideways slightly, she saw the name etched in gold along the bow.
Down Along Coast.
She knew that Parson would be watching her, knowing what she was seeing, and she spoke without turning. “How’d you manage that?”
“Bought it at the police auction,” he said. Proud of himself. “Should’ve seen their faces. They had already torn it to pieces once, looking for more dope, and after I bought it they did it again, just to make sure.”
“Why would you buy it?”
“I’m a sentimental guy, Dusty.”
“No, you’re not,” she said. She turned and walked back toward him. “You have no idea how badly I want to be clear of all this.”
Parson shrugged. “Technically it’s your dope. You want to hide your head in the sand and pretend it doesn’t concern you, go ahead. I were you, though, I wouldn’t put much faith in that. I’d try to find it. Take it out of circulation and you know you’re safe.”
“You mean give it to you,” Dusty said. “Or are you just worried about my well-being?”
“Little bit of both, Dusty.”
Dusty glanced at Cherry, who had been strangely quiet the entire time. She knew why. Turning back to Parson, she removed the lid from the paper coffee cup and dumped the contents over the hood of the gleaming Corvette.
“You missed a spot,” she said, and left.
FOURTEEN
There wasn’t a lot of conversation leading up to it. Virgil had combined wheat all afternoon, the new clutch working like a dream, and after he’d emptied the last hopper and done the evening chores he walked up to the house, where he found a brown Taurus sedan parked in the driveway and the three of them waiting for him in his kitchen. It was nearly dark when Virgil walked in and saw them, the chubby little poser who had taken his boat under the pretense of being a cop, along with a very big drugstore cowboy and a skittish black kid who looked as if he was about to jump out a window.
The poser seemed to think he was in charge. He wanted to know if the woman named Dusty had been by to see Virgil and although Virgil wasn’t at all sure about the motives of the woman named Dusty, he knew in a heartbeat he wasn’t about to turn her over to this bunch.
“Never heard of her,” he said. “Where’s my boat?”
“Never mind your boat,” the man said. “And never mind the bullshit. I know for a fact that the woman was here. What did she want?”
“She wasn’t here. Where’s my boat, fuckhead?”
“This man and his boat,” the cowboy said, sounding amused. He had a heavy accent, Eastern European maybe.
“Tell me what the woman wanted and we’ll talk about your fucking boat,” the poser said. “Who’s she working for?”
“I got no idea who you’re talking about,” Virgil said.
The cowboy began to emit grumbling sounds from his chest. Grumblings of impatience, Virgil suspected. There was a baseball bat in the back kitchen, near the door, Virgil’s version of home security. If he had known what was waiting for him after seeing the sedan in the driveway, he would have picked it up on his way in.
“Why would you want to do this the hard way?” the poser asked.
“You got hearing problems?” Virgil asked. “I told you I never heard of the woman. So why don’t you take your little road show here and go away? Come back when you have my boat.”
“Talk, talk,” the cowboy said. “Too much talk.”
“You can go piss up a rope, Duke,” Virgil told him.
“Duke. I like that,” the cowboy said, and he hit Virgil in the temple with a hard right hand.
Virgil was expecting it, but he wasn’t expecting it to be that quick. He rolled away from the punch but it still got him pretty good. He fell backward but remained on his feet, still thinking about the baseball bat, but the poser stepped in behind him, blocking the entrance. Virgil half turned and drove his work boot into the cowboy’s knee, causing him to howl in pain. Virgil turned and slugged the poser flush in the face with a looping right cross. The poser went down on his back, his stubby little legs flying up in the air. For a moment he resembled a turtle on its shell, arms and legs flailing.
The cowboy was on Virgil at once, grabbing him by the shoulders and slamming him face-first into the refrigerator, rocking it back against the wall. For some reason Virgil found himself wondering if anything had spilled inside. Falling to one knee, he brought his elbow up into the cowboy’s balls, freeing himself from the man’s grasp, then turned and hooked the big man in the jaw. But the cowboy returned the punch, snapping Virgil’s head back against the fridge. Virgil lowered his shoulder and drove the cowboy backward, across the room, and up against the kitchen counter. He pounded the man in the kidneys several times with his
right hand, while the cowboy hammered at him from above with both fists. He could hear the cowboy grunt in pain from the body blows and Virgil stepped back and fired a vicious uppercut to the man’s jaw. The cowboy made a sound like a man about to lose his lunch and Virgil thought for a moment that he had him, and then he felt something come down hard on his skull above his left ear, dropping him to the floor. The poser, still holding the gun he’d used on Virgil’s head, began to kick him, and the cowboy joined in.
“Motherfucker!”
Virgil, covering up, heard someone yell and he assumed it was the black kid, who was presumably still in the far doorway, not joining in on the fun. The two other men grew bored with kicking him after a while, it seemed, and the cowboy grabbed Virgil by the hair, pulling his head up while the poser leaned down to talk to him, the semiautomatic hovering a couple of inches from Virgil’s face.
“Okay, smart guy. What did she want?”
“She wasn’t here,” Virgil said. He was gasping for breath and he could feel the blood oozing out of his scalp, running down his neck into his shirt collar.
The cowboy brought his large Western boot down on Virgil’s left forearm. The cracking of the bone sounded like a firecracker going off. Virgil howled, cursing the man.
“Leave the dude alone!” the black kid yelled. “He just some farmer. He don’t know nothin’.”
“Shut up, Soup,” the poser said.
“What the fuck, you ’bout to kill the man.”
“I said shut up. Unless you want the same, you little prick. Take a look around, will you?”
“Look for what?”
“Phone numbers, names. Anything. She was here, she might have left a contact. Just look, Soup, make your black ass useful.”
“I’ll look. Leave the dude alone. He ain’t done shit to you. His fucking arm done broke already.”
“Maybe we break the other,” the cowboy said. “Make a match.”
Virgil, his teeth gritted against the pain in his arm, knew that the woman’s phone number was somewhere on the kitchen table, where he’d tossed it when he had come into the house the day she’d been there. It was probably buried in among some newspapers, junk mail and flyers. But it was there.
“Sticking to your story, asshole?” the poser asked him. He was leaning over Virgil again, his face close, his breath reeking of tobacco and bad food.
“She was never here.”
The poser stood up and watched as the black kid went through the motions of searching the room. Virgil, relieved not to be looking at the gun anymore, rolled onto his side, cradling his left arm with his right, and managed to sit up, his back to the kitchen cupboards. The pain in his arm was disorienting and he thought he might be sick. He looked up to see the cowboy smiling down at him. Virgil found himself wanting to smile back, just to fuck with the man, but he couldn’t quite pull it off.
The poser was ransacking the place, knocking over pots and pans, rifling through cupboards; it seemed he was more concerned with creating havoc than with actually finding anything. But the kid was going through the stuff on the table now. Virgil watched him, knowing what he was about to find, and then watching as he found it. The kid’s eyes flickered over what Dusty had written and then the kid gave Virgil a quick look, no more than a flash, and slid the paper under a John Deere calendar Virgil had picked up at the co-op the previous Christmas and not gotten around to hanging up yet. The kid made a show of going through the rest of the stuff on the table, even sweeping some magazines onto the floor, probably to impress upon the poser that he was doing his job.
“Ain’t nothin’ here,” he said finally.
“Time to break other arm?” the cowboy suggested hopefully.
The poser came back over, took the gun from his holster, and pushed the barrel against Virgil’s cheek. “Was she here or not?”
“No.”
The man thought for a while. “You’re either telling the truth or you’re the stupidest fucker I’ve ever seen.”
The cowboy laughed. “Maybe he is both.”
The poser straightened up. “Maybe. Either way I guess we’re done here.” He raised his voice. “Listen up, you fucking hillbilly. I’m going to find this broad and when I do, the first thing I’m going to ask her is whether or not she came to see you. If she says yes, then we’ll be back. And you’re not going to like it. You understand that, dummy?”
“Where’s my boat, dipshit?” Virgil asked.
The poser kicked him in the jaw and he fell over, onto his left side, his weight pressing down on his broken arm. He screamed. He remembered hearing the cowboy laughing as they left.
FIFTEEN
It was after ten o’clock when they got back to the city and Yuri told Hoffman that it was too late to see his main man, as he phrased it, about cutting the cylinder open. Apparently the events of the day had convinced the Russian that Hoffman had no alternative plans with regards to the dope and so Hoffman was allowed to go home for the night. He’d had disturbing visions of the cowboy insisting on coming home with him. They agreed to meet the following day at the pool hall. Hoffman dropped Soup off on South Pearl.
“Don’t you get antsy before morning and take off,” Hoffman told him. “You’ve come this far. You might as well see it through. You gotta assume that fucking Russian is going to want to make this right with you. Give you a taste.”
Soup hadn’t said a single word since leaving the hick’s farmhouse and he didn’t say anything now. He gave Hoffman a look that suggested that he wasn’t too thrilled with the taste of things so far then got out of the car and went off down the block without a word. The truth of the matter was that Hoffman didn’t require Soup’s presence anymore. But until he opened the cylinder and sold what was inside, he didn’t want some halfwit crackhead running around the city telling everybody about it. The story just might filter back to the department. Once the thing was out of his possession, Hoffman didn’t care who knew about it. Nobody was going to believe Soup over Hoffman at that point.
When he got home the light on his phone was blinking. Rather than check his messages he scrolled down the display list. His ex-wife had called once, and his bank three times. Hoffman didn’t feel like listening to the messages just then, especially since he knew they were all about the same subject. Money owed.
He poured himself a rum and Coke and sat down in the dark, turned the TV on and turned it off, realizing there was nothing he wanted to watch. There never was. The only time he watched sports was when he had a bet on the outcome, and he usually lost. The eleven-o’clock news depressed him, particularly the local news, which only reminded him that the city where he worked was a cesspool. Spending a long day with the likes of Soup and Yuri the cowboy only reinforced that notion. Soup was a child of the city, and the Russian was a recent arrival and obviously a nutjob that the immigration people had typically waved through; between the two of them they represented all that had gone wrong over the recent years. The local politicians were always talking about the city making a comeback. There would be no comeback. When a thing is totally fucked, it is totally fucked. It wasn’t a damaged car you could pound the dents out of and rebuild the engine and bring back to respectability. This city was ready for the boneyard.
There was nothing for him here anymore. He had few friends and no hobbies. He didn’t golf, or fish, or spend time out in the garage building little model airplanes to display in his rec room or fucking birdhouses to sell on the front lawn. He owed a lot of money to a lot of people. There were bars he couldn’t walk into because of gambling debts.
After tomorrow, he knew he was going to have to make a choice. If he made a deal with the Russian, he was only going to have enough money to get himself clear of debt. He would be back to square one, with only his pension to support him. And that monthly check wouldn’t go far, not when he wasn’t working, when he had nothing to do all day but go to the track, or hang out at Dunnett’s.
There was another option. He could tell them all to go fuck
themselves. Call the bank and inform the snotty little shit with the glasses and the blond tips that he and his bosses were the proud new owners of Hoffman’s house. And tell Jackie that the alimony express was off the tracks. Her new boyfriend was supposed to be a hotshot who sold some wireless Internet gizmo to people out in the boonies. He drove a new Audi. Well, let him keep Jackie—who’d never worked a day in her life—in clothes and hair color and red wine. He hoped for Mr. Wireless’s sake she’d rediscovered her sex drive, because when she was married to Hoffman it was missing in action for about ten years.
He mixed another drink, warming to the idea of cut-and-run. He could move south, to Florida, or even Arizona. Rent a place there, a one-bedroom, and live off his pension. Whatever he managed to pry out of the cowboy tomorrow would be gravy. The bank wouldn’t chase him. They’d take the house, which might fetch three hundred grand on the market, and put it against what Hoffman owed, which was closer to four hundred. But they would eat it, they did it all the time. Jackie might track him down and demand a cut of his pension, but he would fuck her around as he had for years and eventually she would give up. She had basically given up on him in every other way a long time ago.
He went to bed happy with his decision and slept better than he had in months. When he got up the next morning he finally listened to his messages. There were no surprises from Jackie or the bank, but there was one that he had missed on the display. It was from the department, telling him he had to come in and sign some documents in order to initiate the processing of his pension. Hoffman took a shower and found a semiclean shirt and drove downtown.
They had the papers waiting for him at the front desk. He’d come in off the street, rather than from below. He didn’t want to walk through the bullpen and listen to the comments from everybody there about his sudden retirement. He was fully aware that he wasn’t well liked anyway, especially by the younger cops, the ones who believed they could make a difference by writing traffic tickets and busting street-level users and ugly hookers. The older cops understood, most of them, but then they were nearly all gone. Guys like Brownie, who for thirty years had squeezed every nickel from every situation he encountered. Brownie had figured out early on that the system didn’t work so he had invented his own system. It was pay as you go, and most of the money ended up in his pocket. He would make enough righteous busts to make it appear that he was doing his job, but the rest of the time he was always willing to give a perp a break, as long as the perp was willing to show his gratitude. Hoffman had to figure that the criminal element in the city lost a good friend when Brownie retired. He was sitting out there even now, in his little bait-and-tackle shop, waiting for Hoffman to show up with a thick envelope as his reward for calling him about the cylinder. Hoffman wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about that at the moment either, after Brownie had spilled his guts to the girl. Brownie might find himself in the same column as Jackie and the bank.
