Hollywood Moon (43 page)

“Oh, yeah, this is the time,” Jerzy said. “I gotta get in the spirit of things to come.” And when he looked closely, Dewey
saw fury in the big man’s bloodshot eyes.

“Main-tain, dawg,” Tristan said with real concern in his voice as he and Dewey walked to the door. “A dead woman ain’t no
good to nobody.”

“Don’t hurt her!” Dewey said, his voice tremulous, and this time he was very close to meaning it.

When the door was closed, Jerzy walked to the bed, and when Eunice could actually smell him, she lost some of her aplomb and
said, “How about a cigarette, Jerzy? Let’s you and me have a smoke and talk things over.”

By way of an answer, he took the roll of duct tape from his jacket, bit off a ten-inch strip, and taped her mouth shut.

And at last Eunice Gleason trembled in fear.

He said to her, “Now I’m gonna burn a pipe. And when I’m finished smokin’ glass, I’m gonna rip off that tape for two minutes.
And in that two minutes, you’re gonna give me the right answers. ’Cause if you don’t, I’m gonna put that tape back on your
mouth and go to work on you. And when the tape comes off again, you’re gonna beg to tell me the right answers.”

He saw sweat beading like pearls on her forehead. That pleased him.

W
HILE GETTING READY
for work the next morning, yet another overtime shift, Malcolm Rojas was nervous and anxious. His mother had been complaining
again about not receiving her share of his recent paycheck.

After he’d eaten the cooked breakfast she’d prepared for him at 6
A.M
., he said, “If you don’t stop nagging me about money, I’m gonna move in with my friend Phil.”

That stopped her, and she looked worried when she said, “Who’s Phil?”

“A guy I work with in the warehouse,” Malcolm said, trying quickly to come up with details about a fictional friend to make
his threat more plausible. “Phil and me been talking about sharing the rent. His mom’s always nagging him too.”

“I’m not always nagging, sweetheart!” his mother said, pouring him more orange juice. “But money’s not easy to come by, and
it’s not cheap living here in Hollywood. You know that.”

“Maybe it’d be better for both of us if I move out,” Malcolm said. “And pretty soon I’ll have enough money to do it. I’ll
be getting a new job.”

“You’re not thinking of quitting your present job?”

“Pretty soon I am,” he said.

“For what? Where you gonna work?”

“I have… prospects,” he said.

“Where? Who with?”

“I’ll tell you when it happens,” he said. “Now I gotta go or I’m gonna be late.”

After he brushed his teeth, his mother was waiting at the door with his lunch in a paper bag. “Please don’t do anything yet,
sweetie,” she said. “Let’s talk it over about you quitting your job. And don’t worry about giving me any money this time.
Okay?”

“Okay,” he said, pleased at how he could still manipulate her.

When she reached up and put her hands in his hair, about to kiss him on the cheek, she said, “My sweet boy.”

He grimaced and said, “Don’t do that! How many times do I gotta tell you?”

She jumped back so fast she bumped her head on the door frame. “I’m sorry!” she said. “I’m sorry, sweetie. Sometimes I forget
how grown-up you are.”

When he was driving out of his parking space, he felt miserable, and it was all because of her. He vowed that when he started
working for Bernie Graham, he really was going to move away from her forever. Her touch gave him an icy-cold feeling that
would usually be followed by heat. He could feel it coming already. He knew the heat would grow as the day progressed. It
might turn into the thing he couldn’t control, the burning sensation in his belly that worked its way up to his skull when
he thought of all those bitches.

Tristan Hawkins fell onto Eunice Gleason’s bed, fully clothed. Dewey tried to get some sleep in his own bed but could not,
suffering from severe acid reflux, which seldom troubled him like this. At 6
A.M
., Dewey was dressed and in the kitchen making coffee when Tristan shuffled in, yawning and scratching.

“Jerzy shoulda called us by now,” Dewey said. “I don’t like this. I got a bad feeling about this.”

“Shut the fuck up and pour me some coffee,” Tristan said. “I got enough to worry about. Anyways, this was mostly your plan.”

“I thought she’d fold ’em the second she saw you two,” Dewey said. “I was wrong.”

“How long you been married to that woman, Bernie?”

“Nine years.”

“Nine years and you ain’t figured out yet that she’s twice as smart as you and ten times the man?”

Dewey poured two cups of coffee and said, “The milk’s in the fridge. The sugar’s in the cupboard there.”

After sipping his coffee, Tristan said, “Lemme ask you somethin’ about that woman. Would she stick big money in a bank account
somewheres, knowin’ full well that if your business enterprise ever got brought down, the cops could find that money without
a whole lotta trouble? Especially if they got all the records around here, and what must be stored in those computers out
there in the other room? Would she do that?”

“I know what you’re getting at,” Dewey said. “Don’t you think I’ve looked for evidence of a safe deposit box?”

“Bernie,” Tristan said, dead-staring him. “Did you ever think she might do what you do? Like maybe take the cash to some nice
fireproof, earthquake-proof, safe and secure storage locker? A place where she could go in and clean it out in a minute and
boogie on outta town?”

Dewey’s eyes flickered just for an instant, but it was enough for someone as streetwise and sly as Tristan Hawkins. Dewey
looked away and had a sickening thought that in this unholy foursome, he might actually be the dumbest!

“Speak to me, Bernie,” Tristan said. “This ain’t the time to be gamin’ me. Your old lady might be past talkin’ at this point.
We may be on the verge of grabbin’ what we can and gettin’ the fuck outta Dodge.”

At that moment, the resolve of Dewey Gleason melted. He was so far out of his depth, he was ready to join forces with this
wily young man sitting across from him. He said, “I did find a key in her wallet one time, and yeah, it looked like a padlock
key.”

“And where’s that key?”

“I don’t know. It was gone the next time I looked.”

“That means,” Tristan said, “I was right when I told the Polack that you had no intention of transferrin’ funds and havin’
a way to beat the wait period, and all that bullshit you said. You hoped to get that key and whatever information you needed
to get in her secret place and clean it out and leave poor Creole and the dumb Polack with nothin’ but your half-dead wife.”

“Don’t say ‘ half-dead,’ ” Dewey murmured, and Tristan thought he was about to start blubbering.

“Get used to it, Bernie,” Tristan said. “She might be fully dead by now, because I seen how the Polack gets when he smokes
crystal, and it ain’t pretty.”

Then tears did well in the eyes of Dewey Gleason, and Tristan said, “So, all in all, it might jist be you and me against the
fuckin’ world right now. And I’m ready to tear this place apart to scope out a key and try to find the lock it belongs to.”

Dewey said, sniffling, “She drove me to this! I’m not a violent person. I never hurt anybody in my —”

“Me neither,” Tristan interrupted, “but if you don’t main-tain and get hold of yourself, I jist might do some violence on
you
. Now wipe your fuckin’ nose and let’s get to work!”

They had begun ransacking Eunice’s closet, searching in the pockets and linings of every hanging piece of clothing, when Tristan
heard the man sob.

Eunice was startled by Jerzy’s snores. He was lying on his sleeping bag still clothed in his black T-shirt and filthy jeans,
but he’d removed his boots and she could smell his feet. With the blindfold removed now, she was able to see light through
the cracks in the blinds. She’d never needed a cigarette more. She’d been lying there for four hours and had not yet been
harmed. If he had not chased his pipe full of crystal with a cocktail of downers, she knew the night might have ended in horror.

At 2:30
A.M
., he’d sat astride her with a buck knife in his hand, wired from the methamphetamine, and said, “Do you and me have this
heart-to-heart, or do I cut your left nipple off to start with?”

With tears soaking the blindfold and her mouth taped shut, she’d nodded her head vigorously, and he’d said, “Okay, I’ll play
along for one question and one answer. Here’s the question: Are you ready to pay us five hundred thou to get away from here?”

Her nodding was so robust it made him laugh, and he dug his nails under the tape and ripped it off her face, along with some
dermis at the corners of her mouth. But she did not cry out in pain.

“You got some balls, woman,” he said. “That musta stung.”

With as much composure as she could muster, Eunice said, “Now the blindfold, please. And a cigarette. We’ll talk, and you
won’t be sorry.”

Jerzy emitted a loon laugh and said, “Momma, you totally are a devil-woman! If you wasn’t so old, I’d prob’ly fuck you jist
to absorb some of your test-tosterone! Maybe I’ll let you gimme a blow job before we say good-bye if you promise not to gnaw
my cock off.”

She felt his fingernails again and the blindfold was pulled and twisted and finally torn away, along with some of her hair,
but again she did not utter a sound. She looked up at the naked lightbulb in the ceiling fixture, blinked several times, and
then looked at Jerzy’s face. It seemed like his dilated eyes were all pupil with no iris showing. She turned her head for
a glance around the empty room.

“It could use a woman’s touch,” Jerzy said. “But I don’t think you’ll be here long enough, one way or the other.”

That was when he’d gone to his leather jacket crumpled on the floor and removed a plastic bindle from a zip pocket and shaken
several capsules into his large, filthy hand. He’d swallowed them down with a pint of gin from the other pocket. When he raised
the bottle, his T-shirt was hiked, and she could see a gun inside the waistband of his jeans.

“Please unchain one hand so I can smoke on my own,” she’d said.

That was the moment. He’d reached for her left wrist, but she’d jerked her right hand forward and said, “This one’s killing
me.”

It made no difference to Jerzy which hand he freed, and he’d unlocked the padlock that joined the link around her right wrist,
the one that was so tightly cinched that she knew she had no chance of slipping out of it. But when Creole had linked her
left wrist, he’d put the padlock through the chain one link looser, and Eunice thought there was maybe a chance with that
one.

Shaking his head in admiration, Jerzy tossed the padlock onto the floor and said, “If I ain’t careful, I’m gonna ask you to
divorce Bernie and marry me!”

When her right wrist was free, she lowered her arm painfully and said, “Thank you, Jerzy. I don’t think I’ll be looking for
another husband, but I will definitely be eliminating that son of a bitch who put you up to this. Can I have that cigarette,
please?”

Jerzy Szarpowicz didn’t know what the hell to say to this woman now! So she’d figured out that her old man was in on the gag!
He could hardly wait to hear what she said next. He walked over to the kitchen counter to her purse, and she only had a few
seconds when his back was to her, but she used her right hand to manipulate the chain encircling her left wrist. She thought
she just might be able to pull free. It was possible!

He dropped the purse beside the bed, and when he gave her a cigarette and lit it, she took the biggest pull on a smoke that
he’d ever seen, and she said, “Bless you, Jerzy.”

“Yeah, well, you better hold your prayers till we talk.”

Between desperate puffs, inflating her lungs with smoke, Eunice watched the downers already having an effect on Jerzy, despite
the meth he’d smoked.

“How close are you to Creole?” she asked.

“We ain’t in love,” Jerzy said.

“I wanna make a deal with you and you alone,” Eunice said.

“Ain’t you takin’ advantage of my kindness with all your wants?”

Eunice said, “If you will kill my husband, I’ll give you three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That’s all I’ve got. If
you wanna share it with Creole, that’s up to you. But I have a feeling you’re too smart for that.”

Jerzy took one of the cigarettes from Eunice’s pack, lit it, stood up and started pacing, and said, “Fuck me! You are one
evil-eyed, cold-blooded, backstabbing devil-woman!”

“I know I’m in no position to make deals,” she said. “I’ll lead you to the money this morning, after you kill Bernie for me.
I want him dead.”

“Any other requests?” he said. “You want me to run down to the market and get you some peppermint ice cream?”

“There’s a key,” she said. “It’s in my apartment. I’ll tell you where I hid it. Take a taxi there. Deal with Creole any way
you want, but kill that son of a bitch I’m married to. Use your knife to keep it quiet. Bring the key back here, unchain me,
and I’ll drive with you to the storage facility where the money is.”

Jerzy was wishing he hadn’t mixed the downers with the glass. His head was spinning and he was having trouble following the
conversation. Then he said the one thing she hoped he would not say. “Why don’t you jist tell me where the key is, and I’ll
phone Creole and he’ll bring it here along with Bernie. And after you tell Bernie how to get the money outta storage, I’ll
take the money away from him at the storage place and kill him for you. I never liked the motherfucker anyways.”

“Won’t work,” she said quickly. “Nobody can get into the storage facility but me. There’s a real security guard in the office
where you check in. He’s even armed. He’ll never let Bernie or anyone else in there without me. Is it safe to kill Bernie
here in front of Creole? Will he permit it?”

“You think I’m gonna leave you here alone while I taxi to your crib?” he said.

“There’s nothing I could do,” she said. “You can chain up both my wrists to the bed and tape my mouth again. But I wish you
wouldn’t. My lips hurt like hell.”