Rough Trade

by Todd Robinson

  The waitress gave me a half wave in front of a suspicious gaze. Guess she’d seen the whole boys-in-blue display. Great. Now we were getting shady looks from staff whose names I couldn’t be bothered to learn.

  “Are you working tonight?” Audrey asked.

  Crap. I was on the clock in less than three hours. I couldn’t good and well work an eight-hour shift with this hanging over my head. “I gotta clear this up. Lemme see if G.G. can cover.”

  I grabbed the bar phone and dialed G.G. It rang four times before his groggy voice came over the line. “This better be good.”

  Without my asking, Audrey placed a large shot of whiskey for me next to the phone. “G.G.—sorry, homie. Were you asleep?”

  “Nah, man. I had to get up anyway to answer a phone call from some white boy who casually refers to me as ‘homie’ after I worked all night.”

  I lifted my shot to Audrey and downed it. “Is there any way you can cover for me tonight?”

  “You shitting me, right Boo? I worked three in a row. April Fools ain’t for another couple months.”

  “You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t an emergency.”

  He sighed. “You killing me, man.”

  “It gets worse.” As I said it, I realized I had another responsibility and another problem.

  “I ain’t hearing that.”

  “I might need you for a few nights.” I grabbed a bar napkin and a pen. On it, I wrote, Can you feed Burrito tonight when you get off? I slid it to Audrey. If I planned on laying low from the cops, it was more than likely for the best that I stayed away from my residence for a while.

  “Come on, Boo. Kendra’s already pissed at me for working too much.”

  Audrey nodded and smiled through her puffy red eyes that looked like they might start spilling tears at any moment. She loved Burrito like he was the grandson she’d never been blessed with, and she was the only human the malevolent little bastard never tried to bite a chunk off of. “Christmas is coming. Tell her you need the extra money to lavish her with gifts.”

  He paused. “That might actually work.”

  “Can you do it?” I slid my house keys off the chain and handed them to Audrey.

  Another sigh. “Yes. But last time you bubbleheads needed extensive shift coverage, you both got taken to the cleaners pretty bad. You wanna 411 me on this one, or am I better off not knowing?”

  “Junior’s being questioned for murder.”

  Another pause. “I ain’t hearing that. Tell Audrey I’ll be in by nine.”

  Click.

  ***

  Junior forgot to tell me where he parked, so I had to lap the block to find Miss Kitty. Once I got behind the wheel, I stopped and froze. Other than my little jaunt in Byron’s Neon out to the beach, I hadn’t driven a car in almost six years. And when I did, it certainly wasn’t the boat that Miss Kitty was. After three attempts, and a blaring horn from the Nissan that nearly clipped me, I got the car onto Comm Ave.

  Before I really thought about it, I was turned toward Jamaica Plain and Ginny’s apartment. I had to start somewhere, and the only connection I had to Byron and his killer were Ginny and Dana. I should have called her from the bar phone, but lacked the forethought. I was winging it. Safe to say they were going to be none too happy to see my ass after this morning. I hoped she’d cooled off since then.

  Fifteen minutes later, I pulled up on McBride Street and sat. I scanned the street up and down for a police presence. Even though Underdog had told me I wasn’t on their radar yet, I had no idea when I would be. In the meantime, I was going to keep my head low.

  I walked up the street, wary of any eyes that might be on me, either neighbors recognizing me from the day before, my mystery attackers, or—Christ. Being paranoid really started to suck when you knew you had every reason to be paranoid.

  I knocked on Ginny’s door and waited, shivering.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Boo, Ginny.”

  “Go away, you pricks!”

  “Ginny, I’m alone. I can’t apologize for the things Junior said earlier. I…we both know he has issues. I really need to talk to Dana. And it’s cold as balls out here. Can you please open the door?”

  “Dana’s not here. He went to work. We will have this discussion tonight.”

  “Hey, I already know you called in. You can’t just avoid me. We’re going to share a shift sooner than later. I understand you’re pissed. You have reasons to be. So do I. In the meantime—”

  “In the meantime, why don’t you two go eat a bag of dicks?”

  “I’m alone. Junior is—“

  “Actually…” came a voice from directly behind me.

  I spun, my heart seizing. I skidded on the icy steps before I realized I was neither getting arrested nor taking a pipe to the head.

  Twitch stood there, an impish smile on his face. “S’up?”

  “The fuck are you doing here, Twitch?”

  “I’m helping.”

  “How—” Before I finished my question, I realized that, with many things Twitch, I was probably better off without the answer.

  “I been here the whole time. I can’t go home right now, what with Summerfield’s boys on the prowl for us. Maybe.”

  “What?”

  “I was lying on the floor of the back seat.”

  Jesus. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I dunno. Thought I might need the element of surprise.”

  “For what?”

  “For whatever.”

  Fair enough. I knocked on the door again. “Ginny? You still there?”

  Nothing. Then, “Yes.”

  “Listen. Junior’s been taken into custody. No matter what you think about our sociological belief systems, this has gotten way out of control. I need to talk to Dana and I need to do it now.”

  I heard the deadbolt click back. Then the door opened a slit. “What has he been taken into custody for?”

  Did she not know yet? “Have the cops been here?”

  “No. Why would they be? What did you do, Boo?”

  Shitshitshit. “Byron is dead. The cops think me and Junior did it.”

  “Oh God,” came a soft voice from behind the door.

  Dana’s voice.

  Then just about the worst thing that could have happened, happened. My anxiety and temper caught up with me. All the lies, the deceit, the confusion and my desperation boiled over. The world snapped red.

  And I lost my temper.

  I pressed my weight against the door, pushing Ginny back. “Hey…HEY!” she protested as I moved into the doorway.

  “Enough,” I said. “Dana, we need to talk right now.”

  I saw a fearful look on Dana’s face as he saw mine, which I could only imagine wasn’t at its friendliest.

  He bolted to my left, into the kitchen. As I pressed Ginny into the wall behind the door, I heard a phone drop to the floor. Dana screamed, “I’m calling the police.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said, double-timing my step.

  Dana was picking a wall unit phone from the floor, his face absolutely terrified. I grabbed the cord and yanked it out of the wall. “For fuck’s sake,” I yelled. “Do none of you people know what a goddamn conversation is?”

  “Get out of my apartment!” Ginny yelled, shoving me hard from behind.

  I lurched toward Dana, who screamed and grabbed a cutting board from the counter and swung it at my skull. The scarred wood whistled a hair from my temple.

  On the backswing, I caught Dana’s wrist and squeezed the bones together. He squealed and dropped the board.

  “I just want to talk, you dumb shit!”

  “Let him go!” Ginny screamed, raising a George Forman grill over her head.

  Then the unmistakable slide of an automatic having a round chambered froze the room.

  “What’s wrong with you people?” Twitch said.

  I didn’t even want to turn and look at him. “Twitch? What are you doing?”

  “
Taking control of this ridiculous situation.”

  True that.

  He went on. “Now, Boo? Let go of that guy’s arm.”

  I did.

  “Ginny? Put down George Forman and step away from George Forman.”

  She did.

  “Now, can we all have a conversation in the living room?”

  I slowly turned toward my armed friend. “Give me the gun, Twitch,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I need to prove a point.”

  Twitch re-set the chamber, removing the bullet from the breech. “Everybody calm?”

  Dana and Ginny nodded, although the terror never left their eyes.

  Twitch handed me the gun.

  I placed the gun on the counter next to Dana’s hand and stepped back.

  “We just want to talk. We didn’t kill Byron. If you don’t believe me, well, you can shoot me.”

  Ginny yelped as Twitch bent over and whipped out another gun, a smaller one, from an ankle holster. “The fuck, Boo?” he said. “How do we know he wasn’t the one who iced his boyfriend in the first place?”

  Shit. We didn’t.

  “This is a faith-based conversation, Twitch. I’m asking them to believe me. Dana?”

  “Yeah?” Dana still hadn’t taken the gun off the counter. Trembling, he stared at it like the gun itself was a life-or-death situation.

  “Did you kill Byron?”

  “No.” His eyes stayed on the gun.

  “Look me in the eyes and say it.”

  His eyes flicked up from the gun and into my own hard gaze.

  “No.”

  I waited. I waited for my fine-tuned bullshit detector to go off. It didn’t. I believed him. I’d looked into the eyes of killers before, and Dana’s weren’t those.

  “Twitch, you got any more guns on you?” I asked.

  “Hell, I didn’t think I was gonna need more than two today.”

  “Please give the other gun to Ginny.”

  The electricity in the room amped up a notch.

  Twitch’s shoulders slumped like a kid who was getting his Xbox taken away. “Man. I don’t know how good your math is, but that equals two guns to none.” Twitch’s eye started fluttering like the intro to “Hot For Teacher.”

  I looked at Ginny. “We need them to trust us right now.”

  Twitch stared hard at me, but handed the gun to Ginny.

  Ginny didn’t reach for Twitch’s offering. She took a deep breath, then said, “I believe you, Boo. I don’t need the gun.”

  “Excellent,” Twitch said, placing his gun back into his ankle holster. “Anybody want me to run to the store for beer?”

  ***

  “I don’t know anyone who would want Byron dead,” Dana said, his eyes locked onto the bottle of Sam Adams that Twitch handed to him. We’d all sat down in the living room, leaving all firearms and cooking-related bludgeons in the kitchen as a show of good faith.

  “How long were you two seeing each other?”

  “About three months. It wasn’t very long.”

  “Before he ran off, he snorted a load of coke inside Junior’s trunk. Did he owe anybody money?”

  “He owed me money.”

  “How much?”

  “About two thousand.”

  “For what?”

  “I lent him some money. Charged a trip for him to the Netherlands. His combo booked some dates in Europe, and he didn’t have the money up front to foot the trip.”

  “His combo?”

  “Jazz combo.”

  Fucking jazz. Why couldn’t they just call themselves a band like everybody else?

  Dana went on. “He plays…played the trumpet in an old-school torch singer combo called Ellie Confidential and the Brass Balls Band.”

  Clever name. Had to give him that much. “Why the break-up?”

  “He came back from tour. My bills came due. He didn’t have any money, he said. Kept blowing me off. Started acting erratic and weird.”

  “When was this?”

  “He came back about two weeks ago. Last week, we changed the locks and I told him not to come back without the money he owed me.”

  “You said he was starting to act erratically. How?”

  “Paranoid. Every sound made him jump.”

  Well, I sure as shit knew those feels.

  “He was acting strung-out,” Ginny added.

  “Okay. Well, when Junior and I . . .did our thing, he seemed to think we were working for someone else.”

  “Who?” Dana asked.

  “That was what I was hoping you could tell me.”

  Dana shook his head and looked at Ginny, who said, “No idea.”

  “He also seemed to think that whoever Junior and I were working for was after something in your house, probably with his stuff.”

  “Again,” Dana said, “not a clue.”

  “So, you mind giving me a clearer definition of exactly what items of his you’ve been keeping here and let me decide for myself?”

  Ginny and Dana exchanged guilty looks.

  Over his bottle, Twitch’s eyes darted to mine.

  “What?” I said.

  “Mostly clothes,” Dana said. “He tended to live out of a bag.”

  “Mostly clothes is not entirely clothes,” I said.

  “Something else too,” Dana said.

  “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  The expressions they again shot one another along with the silence told me they weren’t. And if they suddenly revealed to me that they’d been sitting on six kilos of heroin, I…I didn’t have an answer for what I was going to do.

  I gave Dana a minute to continue. Instead, he and Ginny looked at each other again.

  “What other stuff?” Twitch finally asked.

  “We…”Ginny started.

  “We held on to his trumpet,” Dana said.

  “Figured it was only fair,” said Ginny with a tilt of her beer.

  That was not the answer I expected.

  “Seriously?”

  They nodded.

  I sighed. “While heisting the means of a man’s income while insisting he give you the money he owes you is certainly both a dick move and one that makes no sense whatsoever—”

  “But—” Ginny started.

  “I am not fucking finished!” I said loud enough to not only make the gruesome twosome flinch but finally shut them up. “A trumpet isn’t quite the item that requires a third party to send a hit squad after the owner. Think harder,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “That’s all we have,” Ginny said softly.

  “How much is that kind of thing worth?” I asked, grasping at straws.

  Dana shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  Twitch raised his hand. “The range is pretty extreme. Anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to a few thousand. Again, assuming there’s no Stradivarius variation on a trumpet. Some shit that Beethoven played would be more valuable.”

  “How in sweet fuck all do you know that?” I asked.

  “Ollie’s got a nice trumpet.”

  “Ollie plays the trumpet?”

  “No. He stuffs it with old rags and fucks it like a Fleshlight. It’s a very specific fetish. Yes, he plays the trumpet.”

  The hell? I’d known the guy for over half my life and had no idea he played an instrument. I had only a half second to think upon the idea that people, no matter how you think you know them, can still surprise you. And the flitter of sadness that he never shared that with me.

  Then I remembered we had a dead jazz musician on our hands and my best friend was being questioned under police custody.

  “So,” I said, turning back to Dana and Ginny, “you took away a guy’s living when he didn’t pay you back the money he owed you, effectively giving him no way to earn the money back to pay you what was owed.”

  Ginny leveled her eyes at me. “Well, when you put it that way.”

  “Just saying.”

  My ineffective line of questioning was abr
uptly cut short by three hard knocks on Ginny’s door.

  Twitch’s eyes went wide. “That’s a cop.”

  It sure as hell sounded like a cop’s knock. Ginny and Dana looked at me. I looked at the door. Then I looked at Twitch.

  Who, somehow, was no longer there.

  Goddamn it.

  I hoped he’d disappeared his ass back to the kitchen to get rid of the two guns we’d left sitting on the counter.

  I poked my head round the corner. Based on the strangely headed outline in the pebbled glass, I narrowed down the possible visitors to a cop in his peaked cap or a town crier.

  “Uhh...” I whispered. “Is anybody going to answer the door?”

  “Is he looking for you?” asked Ginny.

  Fuuuuuuuck. That might be the case.

  “Maybe,” was all I said as I opened the slatted door of the hall coat closet and hid myself behind their coats.

  “Boo. Boo!” Ginny whispered hoarsely. “God damn you.” She walked to the door, where my line of vision ended.

  I heard her paste on the ignorance. “Hello, Officer. Can I help you?”

  “Yeah,” a male voice said. “There was an incident in the neighborhood yesterday. We’re questioning anyone who might have seen anything.”

  I held my breath as the uniform passed in front of the closet. As he removed his hat, I could see a blond flattop and a fairly large frame, but that was about it.

  I hadn’t heard Ginny invite him in. But he was in, nevertheless.

  “What kind of incident?” Dana asked, his voice quavering.

  “We’re looking into the disappearance of Byron Walsh.”

  Disappearance?

  Leaning forward, I could angle my vision through the slats a little better and see most of the living room. Something was off. The cop stood over Dana in his chair opposite the couch and the coffee table. Standing too close, intimidating him with his size. As the cop turned, I saw the curtain over the kitchen doorway part just the slightest bit; then a small shadow moved soundlessly behind the couch.

  What the fuck was Twitch up to?

  Why was he back in the room?

  Something was definitely off. I took a deep breath through my nose and immediately regretted it. I didn’t know exactly where the truckload of potpourri had been dumped in that closet, but my nasal cavity sure did.

  I clamped my hand over my mouth and nose and clenched tightly.