Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) (24 page)

Unless everybody was dead.

I put that thought out of my mind and concentrated only on the road, the rippling ribbon of asphalt rolling under my wheels. I felt the sideways pull of the curves, the displacement of gravity as I sailed over the hills into the blackness.

Where would they flag me down? Somewhere past the loop, I reasoned, since there were other ways to get to Ranch Road 2222. Just a few miles past it, up a steep hill, then around that harrowing curve with the breathtaking view was Bingo’s house. I chewed up the miles, and finally just ahead, at the crest of the hill, there was a shape.

It turned out to be a Mercedes station wagon. Two figures walked out to the middle of the road and pointed flashlights at me, signaling for me to pull off the road next to them. I slowed down and eased off the shoulder into tall dry grass. The figures turned out to be Roberto and his nameless companion. Both had double-barrel shotguns as well as flashlights.

“Toss your gun out of the car,” said Roberto.

Out it went.

He walked over, pausing to pick it up, leading with the shotgun. The feel of my cold, wet gun in his hand elicited only a curled lip. As he came alongside he said, “Let’s see the money.”

I held open the Safeway bag with what was left of the $100,000 after Vick had been to Antone’s. Roberto gave Nameless the OK sign, then came around to the passenger side and got in, curling his lip again at my appearance. “You’re late,” he said. “We better get a move on.”

“To Bingo’s?” I asked.

When he nodded, I decided that all the witnesses who weren’t on Bingo’s team were most likely not going to see the sun come up again. And by my estimation, it was nearly six o’clock. Not long to live.

I begged for a cigarette.

&&&

A car that looked like Barbra Quiero’s Mercedes was in the drive when we pulled up. The station wagon stopped just short of the drive and flashed its high beams three times. Afterwards, a figure got out of the passenger side of the Mercedes and put his black cowboy hat back on his head as the car backed up and pulled out onto the road and sped away.

The driver had looked like Barbra Quiero. It had to be, I reasoned. Well, Bingo had lied when he said she wouldn’t be out at the house, but at least they had let her go. The figure with the black cowboy hat turned out to be Bingo. He motioned for the station wagon to park in front and for me to pull in beside it.

We went inside. Nameless led the way, I carried the money, and Roberto tried to fuse a couple of my vertebrae with the shotgun barrels.

Bingo wrinkled his nose, looking over the pile of paper money as Roberto stacked and counted it, sorting out the counted stacks on one side of the shotgun lying across the long heavy oak dining table. “What the hell happened to you?” he asked. I had tracked in mud over the Navaho rugs and I was still dripping. At least he didn’t have to worry about me scuffing the floor. I had no shoes.

“Ed the Head and I went for a swim,” I said. “I didn’t have time to shower off before coming out, and I guess Ed was going to wash up on shore.”

He gave me a blank look, then almost laughed, slapping Roberto on the back, then going around the end of the table to sit down across from me. “That’s what they call gallows humor, isn’t it, Martin?”

“Except it’s not a gallows I have to worry about, is it?”

He shook his head slowly, pushing a liter bottle of Absolut over to my side, motioning for me to sit down. Roberto slid a chair against my legs. “Drink up, Martin. I insist.”

I plopped down in the chair. Squish. Roberto gave me a little elbow room and went back to counting the money. He slipped a rubber band around a stack, wrote down a figure on a notepad, and started packing it all in a briefcase. Nameless wasn’t in sight, but I could hear him moving things around in an adjacent room.

The interior of the house was totally committed to Southwestern style, with lots of pink and white and various desert tones, desert textures, Saltillo tile, Navaho rugs, rawhide- backed chairs. The dining area was high-ceilinged and looked out on a cactus garden on one end. There was a fireplace made of local limestone at my back and a wet bar with gold fixtures and a granite backsplash in one comer. Right out of
Texas Monthly,
except for the Danelectro case against the wall, which would be too hip for them. On the wall just over Bingo’s head was a glass-framed watercolor of a cow skull and cactus garlanded with marigolds.

“You seem like you’re in a hurry, Bingo. Got a plane to catch?”

He giggled. “As a matter of fact, I do. I don’t think I can stick around for this payola thing. Such a trial would result in a lot of time indoors for Bingo, and Bingo doesn’t like to be cooped up indoors like a mushroom. You see, Victor and his disgusting little hobby complicates things. It attracts things like that girl, Retha Thomas, snooping around, then she gets herself hurt real bad,” he said, knitting his eyebrows to show his distaste. “You see? It makes it very uncomfortable for me, since, as you can guess, I have other interests besides record promotion that are not, uh, as they say, completely legal? They are a little bit illegal, and like they say, you can’t be just a little bit pregnant, and you can’t be a little bit dead. So you, you have stumbled into this thing and I really am sorry, but the minute you stumbled into it you became a little bit dead. Now we have to help you get all the way, and I was wondering, Martin, would you rather get too drunk and fall in the lake and drown, or would you rather get too drunk and drive your Karmann Ghia off this mountain out here?”

“Let me have a drink and think about it,” I said. I took a big two-handed drink. There was no other way to do it. Roberto had tied my hands.

“Victor,” said Bingo, rocking back in his chair, “is going to have a heart attack. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a fat tub of shit with nothing to lose if he testifies against me,” he spat, slamming his fist down on the table. Roberto looked up, grinned, and went back to shuffling papers. There were big stacks of them, and he was having trouble arranging them in a large black leather carry-on bag. The briefcase was full. Roberto’s shotgun lay next to it, a few inches from Bingo’s drumming fingertips, but a long way from my tied hands. I eased my chair back a few inches. The legs made a barking sound on the tile.

“You’re going to help him have this heart attack, aren’t you?” I said.

He nodded. “I got a guy down there now. He’s going to tell Vick he’s going to cut his balls off. But don’t worry. Vick will have a heart attack before he gets his zipper down.”

“Why go to all this trouble for a measly hundred grand, Bingo? Seems like you’d have ten times that much stashed away for a quick trip south.”

He jutted his jaw out defiantly and said, “It’s no trouble, really. The money isn’t much, this is true. But it’s
my money.
I paid for those records to be made, so I deserve the money. Victor doesn’t deserve anything but a quick
adios.”

I took another drink, and that seemed to please him. It didn’t seem to have any effect on me.

Bingo leaned back in his chair again, balancing himself as he talked, stretching his neck muscles out, rolling his eyes. I tried to imagine him dangling at the end of a rope, a noose cutting into the smooth brown flesh around his throat. “Fat people disgust me,” he said. “You, Martin, come on, drink up ... I don’t have any reason to like you. But at least you look like a human being, not some big mountain of lard. I could forgive Victor’s nasty little proclivities when he looked like a man, but when I think of him, little fat dick folded up against his blubber, wanking off at the thought of torturing boys, oh, it makes me sick. Drink up, Martin. I don’t have much time. Roberto could hurry you up, you know.”

Roberto tapped another stack of papers on the table, paused to look at the shotgun, then over at me.

I picked up the bottle again, took a long drink, letting the liquid gurgle, knowing that I had to do something, even if it was incredibly stupid, because soon the vodka would have an effect. So it wasn’t altogether faked when the bottle wobbled in my hands as I took it from my mouth. But when I reestablished my grip around the neck of the bottle I raised it over my head and walloped Bingo in the face as hard as I could.

He went over backward, grabbing for Roberto’s shotgun, and

I scrambled over the table after him. The shotgun clattered to the floor as I went all the way over, down on top of him. The chair folded into kindling wood under our combined weight, and the fall freed my wrists from their bonds. Bingo had a lot of the fight knocked out of him, at least temporarily, and I had already gained a strange, if uncomfortable, advantage by the time I heard Roberto unsnap a holster and cock a pistol. I adjusted my position and saw him as he stepped back and crouched down, but after I smashed the bottle against the clay tile and jabbed a pointed edge against his employer’s jugular, there wasn’t much he could do.

But Nameless came into the room blasting. His first barrel of buckshot blasted plaster and glass off the wall over our heads, destroying the cactus and cow skull watercolor. Bingo panicked as a long shard of glass from the painting stuck in his eye. Breaking free of my hold, he howled something in Spanish and bolted upright, just as Nameless's shotgun thundered again. Blood rained. He fell.

“
Dios mio,”
cried Nameless. “
Jefe
, forgive me!”

But El Jefe wasn’t in a forgiving mood. His heart had been strained through the back of his rib cage.

I struggled to wrench myself out from under the twitching body, able to see only Nameless’s spastic leg movement from my position as he reloaded the double barrel. I couldn’t see Roberto, but I heard the crack-crack-crack as his bullets started flying. I felt a hard lump between my body and Bingo’s and realized it was Roberto’s shotgun just as Nameless fired his again, powdering the tile floor where Bingo’s hand had been when it was still attached to his arm. I blew what must have been parts of it out of my mouth and wrenched the shotgun out from under Bingo’s body and quickly squeezed off a round toward my left, where it sounded like Roberto’s pistol shots were coming from. There was a crashing sound and I saw his blue suit as he tumbled down, minus parts of both kneecaps. Nameless cried out in Spanish and his shotgun took a bite out of a table leg and the floor. I blasted again and crawled away a few feet to the end of the table, looking for a way out, then heard the clacking of leather soles on the clay tile. I risked peeking over the table top. Roberto was screaming in anguish, rolling a bloody pattern on the floor, peppering the stucco walls with lead.

“
Dios mio,”
echoed Nameless’s voice again as his clacking feet took him out of the house.

And I rolled out from under the table just in time to see him hit the front door at a dead run. Seconds later a Mercedes engine turned over, gravel flew, and rubber melted on pavement.

&&&

I dove out the back door, piled into the Ghia, and peeled out through the same cloud of smoke and dust he’d left in. The wrenching curves that could pull you apart at forty miles an hour, I took at fifty-five. Down the hill past where I’d been stopped, off into the gravel, back again. I couldn’t hear his engine or hear his screeching wheels but I flew through his dust shortly after he’d made it and I breathed his smoke just after he belched it and I could feel the rumble of his engine and I knew I would get him. I knew I would get him.

Just atop the crest of the next rise, through the raw V that the road had been laid into, the sun was setting fire to the hills in the east, just this side of town. The sky was turning a battleship gray and somewhere out there, I was sure, birds were starting to sing. But the next song I heard was that of screeching tires and impacting metal and flying glass. I braked and downshifted and got a shocking surprise as I topped the hill.

Just on the other side was a roadblock of blue and whites and a couple of sheriff’s department vehicles. The Mercedes station wagon had taken out quite a bit of the midsection of one of them. I stood on the brake and did my best to correct the skid and still ended up in the ditch, window-deep in Johnson grass, choking from dust.

I got the door open and tumbled out. I heard feet coming toward me and in back of them, nearer the roadblock, a shout. Then another, and a whooping sound. “Whooee,” hollered a booming voice. “Sumbitch made it through the roadblock. Car didn’t, but he sure as shit did. Reyes, radio EMS and tell ’em to bring a putty knife.” I knew they were talking about Nameless. Now he would get to tell Bingo he was sorry again. Face to face, more or less.

As I hoisted myself upright, other voices told me to freeze. Uniforms, uniforms with guns—their eyes bugged out as I emerged from the ditch. One of them started laughing, the other flicked out his handcuffs. Then another voice boomed out in the crisp early morning air, “Hold on, hold on just a second. That’s Fender.”

I welcomed that voice. It was Lasko’s. I staggered out to the middle of the road and looked toward the tangled mass of metal that had been the station wagon, looking like it was trying to burrow into the patrol car. Twenty yards past the roadblock a headless bundle of clothing and entrails twitched on the pavement.

There was a fragment of reflective glass in the road down by my feet and I looked at it, a sliver of a hole going down into the center of the earth. Staring back up at me from the depths was a monster. Green-black spikes jutting out from a head that was mostly black, now cracking and dry but covered with red pinpoints of blood, clothing daubed with green and black muck encasing a body that swayed, patches of it shimmering and red- tinged, dripping with Bingo Torres’s life fluid. No shoes. That monster was me.

“Godawmighty,” said Lasko. “Godawmighty Jesus.”

&&&

I told Lasko most of my end of the story on the way back to town, and he told me his. Vick had phoned the police right after I left with the ransom money, so they managed to run right into Bingo’s cowboys as they dropped over to perform the radical vasectomy. I just hoped that they hadn’t already been over to the Radisson. Sure, they’d apparently let her go, but that didn’t mean that someone wasn’t waiting there for her when she returned. And by now I was sure as hell that she hadn’t merely been paranoid when she said she was being followed.