by George Wier
“Ex-husband.”
“I think you’re still in love with your ex-husband. So, all I’m saying is that you’re safe in my company.”
“Safe...from you, you mean?”
“Yeah. Safe from me.”
“That’s good to know.”
The two lapsed into silence and did not speak again until they pulled up in front of Rachel’s house.
“It wouldn’t do any good to invite you in for a drink, would it?” Rachel asked.
“I don’t know about good, but I assure you, it wouldn’t be bad. Who knows. I might accept.”
“Well then. Would you like to come in for a drink?”
“I would. But no alcohol. Alcohol and Indians...bad combination.”
Rachel laughed. “I have juice. Lots of it. Would you please accompany me into my house then?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When Sully Kross came through the front door of Rachel Ward’s house and grabbed Gil by the shirt and twisted, the only remark that Skillet could make, with his nearly numb and tingling foot, could say was, “What the fuck?”
After hounding Lily during the five long years after high school to marry him, and running up against the unassailable “No” wall, Sully decided he was going to kidnap her, take her down to South Texas where his cousin had a ranch where they could live, knock her up and force her to marry him. The problem was that he had become completely reliant upon Lily for nearly everything. At age twenty-three, Lily took over her mother’s whorehouse when the old woman suffered a stroke that paralyzed the entire right side of her body. With the old battleaxe ensconced in the Pemberton Heights mansion with a twenty-four hour nurse in attendance to make sure she 1) ate, and 2) stayed clean, it was up to Lily to run the Kitty Klub. While she good was with numbers and with the girls in general, she needed a good bouncer. That was Sully, who took to the new job like the veritable duck to water. But every chance he had to be alone with Lily, Sully put the question to her again. Would she or wouldn’t she marry him? No. A thousand times no. So Sully began to plan in earnest.
These plans were interrupted when a small-time hood named Kenny Houghton moved to Austin from New Orleans and tried to steal the Kitty Klub’s clientele and as many of the girls as he could.
Lily tasked Sully with handling the problem, and Sully recruited a couple of former basketball players to help him out.
Houghton had taken over a small motel in extreme South Austin—so far south, in fact, that most people considered it to be in the country—and it was there that the big event went down.
Sully and three goons pulled into the parking lot on a Saturday night and started going from room to room, pulling girls—most of them Lily’s girls—from their beds and putting them into the back of Sully’s friend’s big Ford sedan. It was Sully himself that ran across Houghton. He caught him in the act of servicing one of his own whores and began to beat the crap out of the man. Before it was over, Houghton left the motel on foot and wearing nothing more than his underwear. He was black and blue all over.
And that was the Houghton Incident, the history of.
Sully weighed into Gil and Skillet like a tornado through a barbed wire fence, going at Gil as if he were Kenny Houghton in the flesh, even though he knew the man was long dead and buried. He strong-armed Gil against the wall behind him and broke the idyllic painting of a little girl crossing a bridge over a brook that had always reminded Sully of Rebecca From Sunnybrook Farm. Rachel had received the picture and frame as a gift on her seventh birthday. Gil’s eyes rolled back in his head for a second and then re-focused on Sully. Gil frowned and brought up the gun that was in his right hand to point it at Sully and Sully lobbed Gil bodily to the left and into the living room, where the two had apparently taken painstaking care to break every stick of furniture. Gil’s right shoulder connected with the overturned coffee table, his right arm went flying back at an impossible angle. The gun went sailing off across the room to disappear amid the wreckage. Gil let out a scream.
“Shut the fuck up,” Sully said to Gil, then hunched over him and started striking Gil’s face with his fists.
Sully was vaguely aware there was another presence in the room and so ceased pummeling the man. He looked over at Skillet, who had a .38 in his hand, pointed at him.
“Shood him,” Gil said.
“We ain’t paid to shoot him,” Skillet said. “Besides that, you been raggin’ on me about how I ain’t earnin’ my keep.”
Sully began to calm himself. His own pistol, a .45, was in the rear waistband of his pants. If he made any quick and overt moves, he had no doubt the black man would shoot him. These fellows appeared to have no conscience. They were reptiles.
“I thaid shood him!” Gil was starting to talk funny. A quick glance that way revealed that half of Gil’s face looked as though it had been used to hammer nails into roofing shingles on a hot summer day. Maybe the guy had broken one or more of Gil’s teeth.
“You gonna pay me my fair share if I shoot him? I mean, in advance?”
“Yeth! I pay hugh! Shood ‘im!”
Skillet looked Sully in the eye. “Sorry,” he said.
Skillet lowered his arm to aim downward and pulled the trigger. The report was deafening in the enclosed space and made a jarring rattle as the sound echoed around inside the house like a pinball in a machine and kept returning to their ears.
Sully collapsed to the floor and grabbed his right foot. “Shit! Shit! You shot my foot you fucker!”
“I said I was sorry,” Skillet said.
Sully began scrambling for the hallway on his hands and one knee, cursing, moaning and crying as he went. Gil noted the gun in the back of his belt and decided he’d better follow the man to make sure he left without coming back to shoot them both.
Gil was moaning. Skillet looked over to make sure his partner was going to be all right, and he was watching him when he noticed him pass out. His breath came in sips and gurgles. Skillet reached down and tilted Gil’s head so that he wouldn’t choke to death on his own blood, which trickled from the corner of his mouth.
Gil took two steps and watched the tall, balding man pull himself out the front door. It wouldn’t do to go out there and kill him in broad daylight. No, the time for killing had passed.
The front door slammed with a bang.
“Sheee-it!” Skillet said, and went back to see to Gil.
He took a blanket from the woman’s trashed bedroom and laid it over Gil. Then he went to the kitchen, found a dishrag and got it good and wet, and returned to begin cleaning Gil up. After that he found a bottle of Advil in the woman’s bathroom and brought it to his prostrate partner with a cup of water.
Gil came awake as Skillet was getting him to swallow the Advil.
“Shid,” Gil said.
“Yeah. Don’t try to talk. I think you lost a couple of teeth. It’s gonna hurt for awhile.”
Gil swallowed the Advil, the water, and some amount of his own blood.
“Thwallowed them.”
“Good. That was pain reliever.”
“Doah. I beant by teeb.”
“Oh. Swallowed your teeth. Well, I’m sure it’ll all come out in the...wash.”
Gil was going to try talking, but Skillet shook his head. “No. Don’t try to talk. We’re getting out of here.”
Skillet helped Gil slowly to his feet and to the front door. He had a difficult moment when he realized he would have to decide something. Gil’s Expedition was parked around the block, so it was either try to help the incapacitated man limp the length of two city blocks, or go and fetch the vehicle, bring it back, and help him out to the car. They stood at the front door while the tumblers slowly clicked over in Skillet’s head.
In the end, Skillet opted to leave Gil there and retrieve the vehicle. He fished the fob out of Gil’s front pants pocket and said, “I’m gonna get the car. Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
Gil nodded. The man’s fac
e was contorted in pain. Skillet didn’t like seeing him like that, so decided the few minutes it would take to go and get the car would be a few minutes without having to watch to poor fellow suffer.
When Skillet opened the front door, he saw the trail of blood from the bald man. At that moment he heard a motor race and saw a little red MG sports car jerk into gear and peel rubber on the street. At the house across the street, an old man had come outside and was staring at Skillet. He turned to watch the MG race away, then regarded Skillet again.
“It’s okay,” Skillet called to the man. “The son of a bitch is gone! I’ve already called the cops.”
The man nodded and went back inside his house.
“We gonna try again tomorrow?” Skillet asked. He had the passenger door to Gil’s Ford Expedition open and stood there talking to him on the street.
From where Skillet was standing, Gil didn’t look so good. The left half of his face had nearly doubled in size and was so purple that it made the rest of him appear green. When Gil turned to regard Skillet, Skillet saw that his head very nearly resembled the butt end of a purple plum in the amber glow of the dome light. The gash in Gil’s forehead had ceased bleeding, but it was up under his bangs. With his hair combed down you could probably still see it. Skillet also suspected that Gil couldn’t move his right arm. He’d seen him reach across himself when they first got into the Expedition and engage the gearshift with his left hand.
“Dotta chanz,” Gil said. “ ‘at one ‘as scwewed.” Gil sounded like a person trying to talk immediately following dental surgery—or Elmer Fudd, take your pick.
Skillet thought on it. There really wasn’t much chance she’d be home alone for the next week after they’d fucked over her place. Once she realized nothing had been stolen, she’d be scared shitless to stay there. They would have to pick up her trail again somewhere along the way. In the meantime, it was apparent that Skillet wouldn’t be getting any money for all his hard work.
Skillet nodded, and stood there in the darkness.
“Whad?” Gil asked.
“I know I’m not supposed to ask this, but what did she do?”
“Jure dot ‘posed ta ‘ast. Pissed off wong peeble, dad’s whad.”
Skillet nodded again. “Just askin’.” He stood there. He’d almost said, Maybe it was us who pissed off the wrong people.
“Whad esse?” Gil asked.
“My ten thousand. I want it. Now.”
“Whad foah? Din soot ‘im when I thaid. An’ jure fud wen’ da seep.”
“I shot him in the foot. And I don’t have much control over my foot. You promised.”
Gil thought on it for a moment, then opened one of the little compartments between the seats and pulled out a tall stack of hundred dollar bills and handed it over. It was a slow and difficult task for him, because he used his left hand for the entire procedure. Skillet leaned far inside and accepted the money, then did a quick disappearing trick with it. He continued to stand there with the door open.
“Whad?” Gil asked.
“You wouldn’t do to me what you did to Bob, would you?”
Gil chuckled. “Naybe tho, Naybe nah.”
“Really sorry about the foot, boss. It’ll never happen again.”
“Goothe. Doan thu eeny trugs wid dad, ‘kay?”
“No sir. My drug of choice is alcohol and womens.”
Gil nodded.
Skillet closed the door.
By the time he pulled away, Skillet had melted into the night.
I have got to start flying solo, Gil thought to himself. He would have said it aloud, but it hurt too much even to whisper to himself.
“Oh my God!” Rachel exclaimed.
Billy moved past her quickly, drawing his sidearm from his shoulder holster. He snapped a look into the formal dining room at the front of the house, then back the length of the foyer and into the living room and the rear of the house.
There was blood in the living room. Billy followed the trail back through the foyer and realized they were tracking in it. It was mostly dried, though.
He reached in his pocket, removed his keys and handed them to her.
“Go get in my car,” he whispered. “Lock it and wait for me to come out. If I’m not out in five minutes, drive off.”
Rachel shook her head. “I’m staying with you.”
Billy pursed his lips. For some reason he couldn’t make himself angry with this woman. “Fine. Stay behind me then, but not too close. I think they’re long gone.”
She nodded.
Billy moved into the living room, then back around into the kitchen. Nothing.
He stepped around her again. “Bedrooms?” he gestured with his gun to the north side of the house.
Rachel nodded.
She waited in the hallway as he checked out each of the rooms and bathrooms, then came past her again in the hallway, shaking his head.
The house was completely trashed. All of the bedroom drawers and closets were tossed, the cabinets in the bathrooms opened and their contents spilled across the rooms. Everything from the living room that once had a home on the various shelves were scattered across the room. Most of the fragile things were broken.
Once Billy was certain the intruders had fled and the house was secure, he went searching for how they had gotten in. He found it quickly enough. One of the glass panes for the back French doors had been shattered. The culprits had reached through and simply unlocked the door and let themselves in.
“Shit,” Rachel said.
“What?”
“Found a gun.” She stood and pointed.
Billy came over and looked down at it. “Colt. Nine millimeter. Can you get me a plastic bag from the kitchen. It may have fingerprints on it.
Rachel retrieved a small ziploc bag from the kitchen and watched as Billy maneuvered a pocket pen into the barrel, lifted it and placed it in the bag. She sat down on an ottoman in the living room and began sobbing into her hands.
“I’m sorry,” Billy said.
“For what?”
“That there are bad people in the world. That I wasn’t here to catch them or stop them.”
“You’re not a superhero,” Rachel said.
“No. I’m not. Look, take your time and absorb this. Then you’ll have to figure out what’s missing. And the only way to do that is to begin putting it all back together. But you can’t do that just yet. I’ll need to get the local police in here and do a fingerprint sweep of the house, see if we can get some DNA from the blood, take some photos and do up a report. You’ll need the report for your insurance claim.”
“Thank you,” Rachel said. “But call the Westlake Police, not Austin.”
“Sure. But no worries. There is no way that he would come out here this late at night. That is, if we called Austin.”
“He? Who?” she asked.
“Quinn, our favorite Lieutenant of Detectives.”
“Oh.”
“This will take a couple of hours. I’ll stick here through it. In the meantime, let’s see if they disturbed the food in the kitchen. If not, I’ll fix you something to eat.”
Rachel wiped her tears away and smiled up at Billy. “That would be ever so nice.”
Billy started toward the kitchen, then said, “You do know you can’t stay here tonight.”
“I can’t?”
“Not a chance. From where I’m standing, they didn’t take any of the valuables I saw here the other night. The television—and that’s a top of the line TV if I ever saw one; you’re lucky they didn’t break it. The stereo system. I’m willing to bet that if you had real silver flatware in the kitchen, that it’s all still there. I think this was made to look like a burglary.” Billy turned and went into the kitchen.
Rachel got up and followed him.
“Meaning?” she asked.
“Question first,” he said. The kitchen floor was littered with silverware, and sure enough, it was her Sterling flatware.
“Go ahead.”
“How long were you out today?”
“Hours.”
Billy nodded. “They were here. I think they waited for you to come home. But you took too long and they cut out. Or maybe even—”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No. Tell me.”
“Maybe they were here waiting when you came home and I pulled up and asked you to go with me.”
Rachel’s eyes widened.
“It’s possible that if I hadn’t asked you to come with me, you would be dead right now.”
Rachel began backing away from him slowly.
“That’s not all. Some kind of fight occurred here. There’s a lot of blood. Also, I can still smell the gunpowder. Someone was shot in your living room. The blood goes out the front door. It’s dark outside, but I’m willing to bet it’s out there on the front porch and leaves a trail across the lawn.”
Rachel continued backing up.
“Hold on, there,” he said. “What are you going to do?”
“No police,” Rachel said. Her face had paled.
“Why?”
“I have to...I have to call my mom.”
“The Madam? Why?”
“So you do already know everything about me. They have all that in your FBI computer?”
“Yeah. So what good is calling your mom going to do? Isn’t she in her seventies now?”
“I think...I think...Sully was here.”
“Who the hell is Sully?”
“Sully Kross. He’s my mom’s hatchet man. Former basketball player. About seventy years old. He’s in love with me. He bugged my house one time.”
“No shit.”
“So no local cops. Any fingerprints here, you’ll have to find them. Or nobody. I’ll stay at a hotel tonight and try to clean this up later, but no cops.”
“Okay. Okay. No cops. Let me call one or two Bureau people and get some help. I’m staying at the Claremont Hotel over on I-35. They have nice rooms. I can get you a room adjoining mine. Jeez. I’ll need to do a sweep of your car, to see if they’re tracking you.”
“Okay on the hotel room, but no other Bureau people.”
“You know how to make life hard, Rachel.”
