Payback (29 page)

“For
got?
” Billy said. “How could he forget?”

Jackie raised his eyes. “Hey listen. He won't forget to sell at three o'clock.”

“And send the money to Vienna?”

“If he doesn't, then he isn't forgetting,” Jackie said, “he's absconding.”

“Terrific. You think he's absconding?”

“No,” Jackie said. “Slovo's pretty cool.”

“So what else can go wrong?”

“Your mouth,” Jackie said. “How much've you been doing?”

“Me? Not a thing, kid.” Billy popped a lude and then swallowed it with vodka. “I was up. I was scudding on a natural high.”

“How much?”

“I don't know. If you want to know the truth, I don't know. I don't know if I did or if I didn't. If I did—what'd I do?”

“Does it worry you?”

“No. Dr. Strangelove,” Billy said. “How I learned to stop worrying.… No. Right now what I worry about is Mitchell.”

“Take it easy,” Jackie said.

“I don't want to take it easy. If I wanted to take it
easy
,” Billy said, “I wouldn't
bother
doing coke.”

Even Jackie had to laugh.

“But seriously, folks. I want to call him.”

“Uh-huh. And do what? Do your Bela Lugosi imitation?”

“Couldn't hoit,” Billy said.

“Maybe … I don't know.” Jackie flipped the humidor and reached for a cigar. “I think we hold it till tomorrow. If he doesn't pay tomorrow—”

“We don't call,” Billy said. “We strike. As in the headline ‘Killer Strikes Again.'” He laughed. “So I hope you've been creating in the lab. And if not, start tonight.”

“Doing what?” Jackie said. He picked up the lighter that the girl had left lying on her Carlton 120's.

“I don't know,” Billy said. “However, what I know is what Mitchell knows too. He pulled the sweetener off the market? Everywhere? Fine. We can doctor something else. Do a tablet,” Billy said. “Because people think you can't do a tablet so we'll do it. Do an aspirin. Do a
children's
aspirin. Kill a kid,” Billy said. “And then watch it how he pays. No. I'm not worried.”

Jackie said nothing, but he gave a little look. Jackie, who used to wear outfits from Sears, from Barneys when it used to be Barneys Boystown, and shitty white shirts. Jackie giving looks, a little roll of the eyeballs, and glancing through the big dark windows at the pool.

“What's she doing?” Jackie said.

“Who?”

“Lois Lane. Brenda Starr. Whatever.”

“Joanna … Reese, I think she said.” Billy looked up and saw her walking past the pool. “She's from
Entrepreneur
. She's doing an article about Mitchell and she asked about the lawsuit. My perspective.”

“That was it?”

“Pretty much.” Billy stood now and paced around the chair. “What's the matter there, Toots. You don't trust me anymore?”

“Not at the moment,” Jackie said. “You'd get a speeding ticket, talking. What else did you tell her?”

“Nothing,” Billy said. He laughed. “Okay. I said—this is cute—I said Mitchell might've done it. The poisonings?”

Jackie looked up at him.

“Well … what the hell,” Billy said. “The little broad wrote it down. I told her he might've sent a letter to himself. Which he might've,” Billy said. “I mean, think about it.”

Jackie just looked at him. “Shit.”

The telephone rang.

***

Joanna felt chilly now, standing at the cliff, leaning her elbows on the low iron gate, looking over at the beach, her eyes going over to the upended ladder and the lever on the rail. She wondered, if she pushed it, if the ladder would descend. And if anybody'd notice. She thought, I have to try. She turned and then rested with her back against the rail and looked casually around, as though she were dreamily gazing at the house, and then reached back and pushed it. She didn't have to look because she heard it, a series of mechanical creaks. She stood there and waited. Then she walked away again, casually, idly, aware of the enormity of what she'd just done, feeling pleasure and the first cold inklings of fear.

***

Jackie hung up and said, “He rented it this morning. Diego said a dark blue eighty-eight Wrangler. Like the one I saw in front.”

“Wait a second,” Billy said. “Wait a second, wait a second.”

“Why? They're together. The guy's name is Mitchell and the girl's name is Reese.”

“No,” Billy said.

“No?”

“I don't know. I'm not ready for this. Christ.” Billy paced around the chair. “Call the Punta Hotel.”

“What for?”

“To make
sure
,” Billy said. “Diego, I gotta tell you, his marbles 're in his ass.”

“You should've talked to him yourself.”

“Just do it,” Billy said. “The number's in the book.”

Jackie took his time. “What's she doing by the cliff?”

“
Hector
,” Billy hollered, then waited while Jackie got up and got the book. Billy listened to him dial. Like mysterious music. CLICK pa-pa-pa-pah. CLICK pa-pa-pa-pah. His hearing so acute he'd hear raindrops falling on the other side of town. Jackie said, talking to the telephone, “Yeah. Hablar English? Yeah,” and then Hector dragged it in; Hector, wearing just about half of his uniform—the black serge pants and the shirt with no tie. Hector, who looked like a vicious busboy in a restaurant in hell.

Billy said, “I want you to go out and check the ladder. No. Get the lady. No. Just go out there and talk to her. Politely.”

Hector stared him down. “Abou' wha'?”

“About the fucking weather,” Billy said. “And I want you to get dressed. Like a decent human being in a jacket and a tie.”

“Aroun' here?” Hector said.

“What is this—Spanish Harlem? Yeah, around here.”

Billy watched him go. Slowly. With a swing in those toreador buns.

Jackie hung up and said, “They're registered together.”

Billy said, “Jesus.” It hit him like a rock. Like a rock going into a television set. Sparks going everywhere. Glass cracking up. “Sweet Jesus,” Billy said. “What the hell're we gonna do?”

Jackie got up and went over to the bar. “Have a party,” Jackie said.

33

Jackie left the bedroom where the girl slept fitfully with Technicolor dreams. Downstairs, he heard Billy talking patiently to Rocky. Billy saying, “Listen—we left the ladder down so he
will
climb the cliff. Because we
want
him, okay?”

Jackie, very quietly, hurried to his bedroom where he picked up the phone, got the number for La Punta, and asked for Mr. Mitchell. Figuring Mitchell would be waiting by the phone for a signal from the girl. That, or he'd be waiting on the turf around the house. So Jackie was a little surprised and then puzzled that Mitchell was on the phone. In the bar, the clerk said. He said he'd hold on and then waited, pacing, for three long minutes while he thought of another plan. Good. He hung up.

***

Mitchell held the phone while a Latin Liberace played an endless lugubrious arrangement of “Perfidia.” Mack sipped his Coke. Finally the guy in the downstairs garage came back and said, No señor, the Wrangler wasn't there. He remembered señora took it out around six. Mitchell checked his watch. It was 7:35. Mack said, Relax. Women do that. You're late, they get pissed and take a walk. Mitchell said, It's possible, and ordered a tequila martini and a steak.

***

Billy, in the den, had a pistol on the desk—the old Remington.

“You gotta be kidding,” Jackie said. “You doing cowboys and Indians?”

“Symbolic,” Billy said. He was charging it with powder.

“That antique gunpowder?”

“New.” Billy said. “And I can do without your attitude.”

“Attitude.”

“Negative ions,” Billy said, his foot doing nervous little rhythms on the floor. “Negative ions put water in your brain. I'm serious. You get a lot of water in your brain, it's like thinking under water. It's contagious,” Billy said. “Because you put it in the air.”

“The ions,” Jackie said.

“The ions. Yeah.” Billy had the six lead balls on the desk. “So basically,” he said. “I wish you'd get the fuck out.”

“Of the house?”

“Of the room.”

Jackie took a pad of paper and a pen from the shelf below the desk. “Let me try to understand. If he comes, you're gonna kill him.”

“Cut the ‘if,'” Billy said. “His lady doesn't show, he gets nervous, he arrives.”

“And you kill him.”

“How it goes.”

“If he's dead, then he doesn't pay the money,” Jackie said.

“But he's paying—okay? You don't want to let greed start to ruin your perspective.”

“Right.” Jackie moved to the living room and sat with the paper in his lap. Through the window at the back, he saw Rocky and Hector on a moonlight patrol. Billy, in the den, started whistling while he worked. Billy was a loon. Bad disintegration. Drugs, Jackie thought, really fucked you in the head, turned your brains into beans.

He looked at the window, checking his lamplit reflection in the glass. He had cool steady eyes. He had calm steady hands. He had a marketable talent so what was he doing? and why was he always getting short ends of sticks? While a guy like Billy, no matter what happened, landed squarely on his feet—rich; he thought the money was a slow second prize.

Shit, Jackie thought.

And Slovo'd said they couldn't even touch it for a year, and the way they'd set it up, it took all three signatures to make a withdrawal. All three signatures of three phony names, only none of them could know what the other names were. That was Billy's idea. Billy at his rock-bottom paranoid best, and afraid of being zapped. Only meanwhile, Billy sat gnawing at his navel while Jackie did the work. And Slovo made the calls. It was just like at college. Billy and Slovo played the entrepreneurs and Jackie played the worker—took the risks and the falls, and got thirty-three percent. He'd tried to get more. Made a call from the middle of a party in New York, said to Frangie, buy the stock. Only Frangie, that fried-out fucker, didn't care; he'd explained with that sleepy little smile, “I forgot.”

Jackie shook his head.

You go to bed with smokers and you wake up with smoke.

Jesus
, Jackie thought.

He checked his reflection and squinted in the light. Jackie was looking at the big Three-Five, and a man of thirty-five without his first million dollars was a man who'd lost out. The boat sailed at dawn of your thirty-fifth birthday, Jackie's coming up now on May thirty-first and he had to be aboard.

He picked up the pen now and tapped it on the pad, thinking. Then he wrote:

Hi
.

He liked that; Hi.

Guess who we've got?

He liked that too.

Guess what it'll cost if you want to get her back? 2 million bucks. Wire it tonight to that bank in Vienna, only try another number: #
5-31-52.

Jackie's own. And fuck Billy up the ass.

Try the cops or a raid and the girl eats a gun and that's an air-tight promise
.

STAY BY THE PHONE.

Jackie'd take care of the lady in a while. Then he'd do Billy. Then he'd take off.

***

Hector was sitting on the edge of the diving board, playing with the Uzi. When Jackie came out, he stood, looking mean.

“You having fun?” Jackie said.

Wrong thing to say. Hector was deeply into Junior Terrorist, rebel without a cause.

Jackie said, “You want to take a message to the enemy?”

Hector looked suspicious.

“To Mitchell,” Jackie said, and then waited through a shrug. “We're gonna lure him to the house.”

“And then kill him?”

“That's right.”

“Sounds good,” Hector said.

Jackie took the Uzi.

Rocky was at the rail.

“Trade places,” Jackie said.

***

The phone in the living room was ringing, going sharp and shrill on the desk. Mitchell, coming in from his dinner, made a twenty-foot dash and picked it up.

The clerk said, “Señor? You have asked me to put my attention to the phone?”

“Did she call?” Mitchell said.

“The señorita? No-no. A señor, however. I have put it to the bar but señor … disconnect.”

“A señor?” Mitchell said.

“An American. Si.”

“Go on,” Mitchell said. Inside he was quiet; primed; alert. Waiting for incoming.

Silence from the clerk. “That is all, Señor Mitchell.”

“Long distance?” Mitchell said. Even though no one in the galaxy knew that he was staying at the Punta.

“Local, señor. I think the same gentleman was calling you before. I mean, to ask if you arrived. I mean, you and señorita …?”

The incoming hit. Mitchell saw the bright red explosions on the ground and heard the whistling in his ears. He tested it again. Si, the clerk said. An American had called just to ask if Miss Reese and Mr. Mitchell had arrived. That was earlier this evening, and now once again when señor was in the bar.

Mitchell hung up and started heading for his gun.

Mack followed. “What're you thinking?”

“The worst.” Mitchell fiddled with the night-table lamp. What he saw was the gun, the muzzle poking out beneath the crisp triangular folding of the sheet. He pulled up the sheet and for a moment he stood there awed at the intelligence that turned down a bedspread, neatly and precisely, on a pistol and a note.

***

Billy walked into the dark quiet bedroom and looked at the girl, her breathing very slow. He reached over carefully and pulled up her sweater. Got his arm down under her and unhooked the bra and then lifted it. Well … well … well. Not bad. Not big, but not bad. He looked at her boobs going up … down … up … down. He could sync with that, ease himself slowly into gear and go up … down … up … Either that or he could play another tune. Faster than a bullet. Faster than a pump action—semiautomatic going bang-bang-bang. He could do it either way, do it any way he wanted when the girl was all soft, all drowsy—like the whole thing was something in a dream. No struggle, no talk. He sat on the bedspread and looked at her, sweater and brassiere pulled up, like a half-opened present. From Mitchell with love. A little tit for a little tat. He licked his middle finger and rubbed it on the nipple. Magic. It stood and saluted him.