by Lou Berney
“I was gonna take your advice, believe it or not. About getting a woman in my bed. I was gonna give it the old college try.”
“Be the first time you take my advice,” she said. “No, I didn’t see her.”
Shake checked his watch. It was time to go. “And I’ll send something for you too,” he told Idaba, “soon as I can.”
“I don’t want no money.”
“Your severance package.” He braced himself. “Now let’s have it. The part you’ve been waiting for.”
She slapped him hard, no hesitation. He rubbed his cheek. He’d told her to make it convincing, but still.
“Hell, Idaba. You could have pretended you were pretending.”
“Huh,” she said.
From the corner of his eye he could see One Love watching them. “Now storm off. I don’t want Baby Jesus bothering you.”
“He won’t bother me. You the one. Be careful, you hear me?”
“Go. Unless you’re planning to slap me again.”
“Be careful. You hear me?” And then she stormed off.
SHAKE RESTED FOR A MINUTE and then made his way over to Front Street. One Love followed, on his cell phone, reporting in to Baby Jesus.
Front Street was crowded. Tourists who were staying on the island, plus cruise-ship day-trippers tendered over from Belize City. Shake kept his eyes open. Golf carts were parked on both sides of the street and it didn’t take him long to spot one with the key still in the ignition. Shake liked to call it Blissful Idiot Syndrome. He saw it all the time. You went on vacation to a place as beautiful as Ambergris Caye, and it never occurred to you that the rules of the real world might still apply.
He heard Gina’s voice in his head before he could stop himself. “Blissful idiot?” she’d say, and wink. “Look who’s talking.”
Shake slid into the golf cart and eased it out onto the street. He went fast enough that it didn’t seem suspicious, but not so fast he’d lose One Love, who hurried to keep up. It was the first golf cart Shake had ever stolen, after who knew how many Honda Accords and Cadillac Escalades and delivery vans big enough to accommodate, for example, a one-eyed safecracker flown in from Belfast, plus his entire safecracking rig.
Shake turned left on Black Coral Street. He turned left again, into the alley that ran behind the buildings on Front Street. One Love had to hang back on the corner. The alley was deserted and Shake would make him if he tried to follow.
Shake pulled over halfway down the alley. He parked the golf cart tight, scraping up against the stucco back of a building that fronted Front Street. He got out of the cart and walked back up the alley toward Black Coral Street.
One Love eased back into the shadows. Shake retraced, by foot, the route he’d just driven in the golf cart. Black Coral to Front Street, back down Front Street. One Love followed. He was trying to figure out what the hell Shake was up to, Shake knew it.
Halfway down Front Street, Shake stepped into the little shop that sold hair products to black people living in 1983. He calculated that One Love would wait outside the shop for a minute or two before he got suspicious and followed Shake inside. Before he wondered what Shake was doing in a shop that sold hair products to black people living in 1983.
A minute or two should give Shake enough time. He hoped so.
The same Mayan girl was behind the counter of the shop. “I’m going to borrow your back door,” he called over his shoulder. He’d noticed the door the first time he’d been in the shop a couple days ago, a lifetime of professional habit at work. Old getaway drivers don’t die, they just spot the nearest exit. “Okay?”
The Mayan girl yawned. Shake slipped out the back door. The stolen golf cart was parked a few feet away. He got in, pulled it forward, and parked again, this time flush against the back door of the shop.
Shake jogged, as fast as his cracked ribs would let him, back toward Black Coral. He’d been counting seconds in his head, another old habit. One Mississippi, two Mississippi. Sixty-two Mississippis after he entered the shop, he heard a sharp metal wunk as One Love tried to push open the back door of the shop and found it blocked by the stolen golf cart.
Wunk-wunk-wunk. Shake smiled. One Love wasn’t getting through that door.
Pijua’s little Toyota minitruck was idling at the corner of the alley. Shake rolled into the bed of the truck and pulled a tarp over himself, thinking how he wouldn’t want to be One Love when Baby Jesus found out what happened. On the other hand, he supposed, One Love probably wouldn’t want to trade places with Shake either.
PIJUA DROVE UP PAST THE high school and over the bridge that spanned the Cut. That part of the ride wasn’t too hard on Shake’s ribs. The next part, ten miles north on a rutted sand track, was.
For the first time it really hit Shake that the restaurant was gone. His restaurant. Shake remembered how for the first few weeks the local fishermen had tested him. Steering him toward the snapper with the milky eyes. Shake would toss the bad snapper back and say, “Would you feed this to your family?” He gradually earned their respect. Or else the fishermen just got tired of him making a scene every time, pain-in-the-ass cabrón.
And not just his restaurant gone, Shake realized. His life in Belize too. A life, for better or worse, that he’d expected to live for a long time. It felt like he’d lost his balance. Like he’d reached for the rung of a ladder, and the rung wasn’t there. The ladder wasn’t there. Maybe there’d never been a ladder at all.
Shit. Pijua hit a bump and Shake couldn’t breathe for the next thirty seconds. Finally, though, the truck slowed and stopped. Pijua gave him an all-clear rap on the back window of the cab. Shake climbed out from beneath the tarp and out of the truck bed. Pijua came around to shake his hand.
“Thanks,” Shake said. “I mean it.”
Pijua looked around, dubious. They were in the middle of nowhere. “For what?”
“I know,” Shake said.
“Seem like you gotta have a better option, amigo.”
“Seems that way to me too. I agree.”
“Might be tricky, you know, but we can get you over to the mainland.” That had been Shake’s original plan, when he thought he still had his Wahoo. Now, though, he realized he had bigger problems.
“That doesn’t help me any,” Shake said. “And it sure doesn’t help you any.”
Pijua slapped at a mosquito. “You thinking Baby Jesus got reach over there too. Somebody high up.”
“Yeah.” As much dope as Baby Jesus ran up into the Yucatán, the odds were good that he had a cabinet minister or two in his pocket. Maybe he didn’t, but Shake would rather not test the theory by walking up cold to airport security at Goldson International in Belize City. Shake’s passport was fake paper that he’d picked up a few years ago in Vegas. But it was in the name he’d been using while he was in Belize, so that didn’t help him any.
“I need to find a way out of the country that Baby Jesus won’t know about,” Shake said.
“How much he want?”
“Two and a half.”
“American?” Pijua slapped at another mosquito. “Shit.”
“And then we’d have to start talking about the other people want to kill me. The girl with the freckles.”
“Idaba said she didn’t see no girl with the freckles.”
“Idaba wasn’t there about to get shot.”
“How about,” Pijua said, but then didn’t finish the thought.
“This is my only option,” Shake said. “I wish it wasn’t.”
Pijua sighed. “You in a pickle, amigo.”
PIJUA GAVE SHAKE A MACHETE, promised he’d have his daughter say a rosary for Shake, and then drove back toward town. Shake began to hike north, hacking his way through the brush. There was a better path on the beach, just a hundred yards or so to his right, but it was too exposed. Shake couldn’t afford to be spotted.
About an hour later, around three, Shake turned seaward. The resort was on the other side of some low dunes. There were a dozen o
r so small bungalows, white stucco and red clay tile roofs, grouped around the pool with the leaping dolphins. Farther on was the main, two-story building, with a long balcony that faced the beach and the ocean beyond.
The resort looked just like the glossy photo on the business card. Except—not exactly. Shake noticed, as he got closer, that the stucco was chipped and a lot of the roof tiles were missing or broken. The pool was empty. You could see the dry rusty tubes in the dolphin mouths, where the water used to flow. A flexible plastic drainage tube, a couple of feet in diameter, snaked from the roof of the main building down to the ground.
There wasn’t anybody around. No guests, no staff. Shake asked himself if he was surprised by any of that. He wasn’t.
He found Harrigan Quinn pacing the balcony of the main building, talking on his cell phone. He was wearing a peach-colored polo shirt and pressed khakis, deck shoes without socks. When he saw Shake down below, he didn’t seem surprised at all. He killed the call and spread his arms wide.
“There he is!” Quinn said.
Here I am, Shake thought.
Chapter 14
Quinn explained to Shake that the resort was closed for renovations. Fertility tourism, you had to understand, was a top-shelf racket. You couldn’t cut corners. You had to pamper the gals. They’d expect the very best, from Italian tile to Frette linens to a special kind of toilet made only in Japan. The special toilet squirted warm water up your ass and then blew your ass dry.
Shake let that pass. Quinn caught him thinking it, though. His eyes twinkled. “You think that’s what I’m doing, Shake? Blowing hot air up your ass?”
“What happened?” Shake said, looking around, innocent. “The construction crew doing the renovations knock off early today?”
“Go ahead and ask,” Quinn said. “I’ll tell you the truth. It used to be simple, before nine/eleven. You wanted to move your money from here to there, you moved your money from here to there. Now, though, Christ, the regulations and the government sniffing around. Whoever even heard of a forensic accountant, twenty years ago?”
They were sitting in the resort’s outdoor café. Or what someday might be the resort’s outdoor café. Right now it was just a concrete slab and a couple of plastic beach chairs, with a big faded umbrella advertising a brand of Italian liqueur Shake had never heard of.
“So, yes, I’m experiencing a liquidity issue,” Quinn said. “I went deep on this place. I threw the bomb. Let me ask you a question, Shake. When you die, are you gonna look back and regret the things you did, or the things you didn’t do?”
What Shake was starting to regret was this conversation. He was starting to think he should just take his chances at airport security in Belize City.
An old Kriol man, older than Quinn, shuffled out of the main building and handed them two cans of lukewarm Coke. Then he shuffled away.
“Who’s trying to kill you?” Shake said.
Quinn leaned back and studied Shake. “I told you.”
“They’re trying to kill me now too.”
“You?”
Shake told him about the restaurant blowing up, the girl with the freckles putting the gun on him.
“Because—what?” Quinn said. “What you did for me the other night?”
Shake waited.
“The why doesn’t matter,” Quinn said. “Okay. I see your point.”
“The who matters. And no hot air up my ass.”
Quinn drummed his fingers on the plastic arm of his beach chair.
“I might have an idea,” he said finally. “That’s all.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Back in the eighties, this was after Nicaragua, after Berlin, I did some consulting work in Southeast Asia. I told you before, the kind of people hired me. The business of relationships? Bringing folks together? Well, Vietnam back then, you remember maybe, it was the Wild West. The Reds had gone free market, Saigon was a boomtown. And Cambodia, with the Khmer Rouge gone. It was Filene’s Basement on a Saturday afternoon. Anything you wanted, a five-hundred-year-old stone monkey demon chiseled right off the wall at Angkor. If you knew what you were doing. If you had the right connections.”
“Long story short,” Shake said.
“Hey. You want to tell it?”
“Go ahead.”
“Anyway,” Quinn said. “I got to know this kid at the U.S. embassy in Phnom Penh. Just starting out, assistant to the assistant something. Nice kid. I showed him the ropes. Showed him how to tie a few knots with the ropes. Okay? We made some money together. Sticky Jimmy. That’s what everyone called him. Funny story, how he got that name. Let me tell you that story.”
Shake almost stepped into it, before he realized Quinn was having fun with him.
“So jump ahead to the present day,” Quinn said. “I’m reading the newspaper a few weeks ago. I turn the page and guess who’s looking back at me from the financial page?”
“I’m gonna guess Sticky Jimmy.”
“Sticky Jimmy. That’s right. But now the kid’s not a kid anymore, he’s got his own company, natural gas, it’s doing well. You ever heard of fracking? Getting the gas out of the shale? Anyway, our boy came up with a way to do that, a better way. Some engineer on his payroll did, I mean to say.”
The sun had started to set during all this.
“Take it easy,” Quinn told Shake. “What I’m telling you, Sticky Jimmy is legit now. Pure as the driven snow. You think he wants any of it coming back to him, what he was up to in Cambodia?”
“So he goes after you?” Shake was dubious.
Quinn shrugged. “I knew what he was up to. I’m the only one. We were up to it together.”
“Why now?”
Quinn shrugged again. “You asked. It’s just an idea I have. Jimmy’s moving up the ladder, he’s getting his picture in the papers. He’s taking care of loose ends. I don’t know.”
Shake decided that the who probably didn’t matter any more than the why. What mattered was the what.
“You know what William Faulkner wrote?” Quinn said. “William Faulkner the writer?”
“Not William Faulkner the astronaut? The light heavyweight?”
“He said, ‘The past isn’t dead, it’s not even past.’ ”
“I need a favor.”
Quinn lit up like Shake had just given him the best news of his life. “Name it,” Quinn said.
“I have to get out of the country.”
Quinn mused. “You think they’ll take another shot at you? Maybe. But it’s me they really want, right? So maybe if you lay low for a while . . .”
“It’s not just that.”
“There’s someone else trying to kill you too?” Quinn looked impressed.
“I have to get out of the country quietly. I thought you might be able to help.”
Quinn frowned.
He frowned.
Shake, already hot and tired and his ribs aching, felt the air go out of him. You knew you were in bad shape when even your worst option wasn’t an option. He remembered what his dad used to say at times like that. He called it getting fired from the carnival. Because if you couldn’t even meet the standards of the carnie riffraff who worked the state-fair midway, you were in some bad shape, pal.
But then Quinn laughed. “That’s it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I owe you my life. You lost your restaurant because of me. Your livelihood and passion. Sticky Jimmy tried to have you iced because of me. And that’s all you want? You want to get out of the country? I’m disappointed, Shake, I’ll be honest with you. I don’t even get to break a sweat with this favor.”
Quinn’s one employee, the old Kriol man, shuffled up to take the Coke cans away. Quinn waved him off. “Get out of here! You see we’re having a conversation?” The old man shuffled away. Quinn turned back to Shake. “You have these kind of problems with your joint? The quality of the local workforce, I’m talking about. I don’t want to sound like an asshole, but there it is.”
&
nbsp; “Can you help me?” Shake said.
“Where do you want to go? When do you want to go? How many beautiful blond girls you want waiting naked for you when you get there? Or brunettes, if that’s what you like.”
Shake put his elbows on the table and rested his head in his hands. Quinn laughed again. “Okay, okay. I get it, you’re under a lot of stress and I’m not helping that, am I?”
“No.”
“Here’s what I can do. Okay? I’ve got a buddy lives on the mainland. The line of work he’s in, let’s just say he needs to come and go without attracting scrutiny. Into the country, out of the country. He knows where the back door is, in other words. He knows which windows are unlocked.”
“Dope.” Shake shook his head. If it was dope, then Quinn’s buddy on the mainland probably worked for Baby Jesus, and Shake was out of luck again.
“No, not dope. Birds, snakes, that sort of thing.”
“Birds and snakes?”
“Exotic pets. It’s real money, believe it or not. And you get caught, it’s just a slap on the wrist, not like dope.”
Shake felt a stirring of what might actually be called hope. He’d have to find a way to the mainland, get to Quinn’s buddy, but if the buddy really did know a back door out of Belize . . .
“Just a quick hop over the border,” Quinn said, “and then we’ll be drinking margaritas in Mexico, you and me.”
Chapter 15
When Evelyn got to the clinic, Shake was already gone.
“You’re joking,” Evelyn told the nurse.
“No.” The nurse looked as pissed about it as Evelyn was, so Evelyn didn’t push. She left the clinic and went down by the water to sit and think. She supposed she wasn’t that surprised by this new wrench thrown at her. She’d been shot at twice and reamed out by DEA. She’d ruined two of her favorite dresses. Why wouldn’t the shithead choose this opportunity to disappear?
A scrawny Rastafarian with a Cat in the Hat hat asked her if she’d be interested in some smoke. She told him to get lost.
She was scheduled to fly back to L.A. in three days. Her hotel was already paid for. Evelyn decided to stop feeling sorry for herself and find the shithead. Do what she’d come here to do.
