Gutshot Straight with Bonus Excerpt (22 page)

He went on to tell her, the words rushing out before he could even think about stopping them, about how his wallet had been stolen, how he’d been talked into this insanely stupid and demeaning Building Bridges tour in the first place, how no convention planner in his or her right mind would choose Oklahoma City over Kansas City or San Antonio, how he’d been held hostage in a cruddy restaurant and charged way too much for a cruddy meal and then mugged and hit on the head with an almost-full beer can, how he had no money, how the final three chapters of his bloodsucking-vine novel were missing, how that had been the absolute last straw, how he was sorry in advance if he offended her with what he was about to say, but he’d really grown to truly despise Panama. He almost told her about losing Vivian but just in time skidded to a stop at the edge of that cliff, heels digging in.

The woman was no longer staring at the bandage on his forehead.She seemed finally to be really looking at Ted. At his eyes, the rest of his face.

She seemed a little surprised by what she found there.

“What is this expression?” she asked. ‘ “Just one
doggone
second’?”

Ted had to take another big breath. He’d really worn himself out.

‘ “Doggone’ is like a kind of emphasis, I guess,” he said. “You can use it instead of a curse word.”

“You wanted to use a curse word instead?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “I did.”

“But you were too polite?”

“I’m going to leave now,” Ted said. He felt drained; he felt sad and embarrassed; he just wanted to go home to a life he didn’t like very much anymore. “I’m very sorry I bothered you.”

He was startled when the woman laughed. It wasn’t musical—it was more like a nasally honk—but neither was it unkind.

“Don’t give up on Panama,” she said. “I think Panama has just been having a doggone bad day for everybody.”

T
hey woke up just after nine, which gave them twelve hours until they were supposed to meet Ziegler on Isla Taboga.

“Want to do some homework?” Shake asked Gina.

She nodded. “You read my mind.”

They left the foreskins in the hotel safe and chugged across to Isla Taboga in a beat-up little ferry that looked like it had been in business since colonial times. The Pacific was glass-flat but a darker shade of green-blue than the Caribbean up by Portobelo. Standing by the rail, breeze in his face, Shake had a feeling—without even dipping a toe in either one—that the water down here was colder.

There were only a few other people on the ferry. Shake asked about this, and a weathered old man told them Isla Taboga was mostly a weekend destination for day-trippers from Panama City. During the week, the old man said, the island slept. Shake—homework—made a note of this.

The ferry docked across from an abandoned hotel and a sandy beach. A cobbled footpath wound around a hill and up to the main square. Across from the whitewashed stone church, a few more weathered old men sat around playing chess. Flowers were everywhere—growing wild, spilling off the iron balconies of the old buildings that lined the square—hibiscus and oleander and crepe myrtle. The sunlight up here felt to Shake thick and golden, like syrup.

“Why do you think Ziegler picked this place?” Gina asked.

Shake shook his head. “No telling.”

He strolled over to the church where they were supposed to meet tonight and tried the door. It was locked. There was one small restaurant on the square. A waiter in a long white apron had begun setting the outdoor tables. A sign said the restaurant was open till ten.

Shake crossed to the other side of the square. From that vantage point, he could see the ferry chugging back across the bay to Panama City. A quarter turn around the island was a row of smaller wooden docks. A few small fishing boats bobbed in the water.

“Public but quiet,” Shake said. “Fishing boats we could hire to get back if we missed the ferry or if he tried something hinky on that end. Remote, but not so much so we’d get nervous. He had to know we’d come check it out.”

“Seems fine, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Shake said. That’s what worried him.

Gina strolled over to one of the chess games. As she studied the board, she rested a hand on the shoulder of the old man next to her. It was such a friendly, familiar, casual gesture. Shake doubted that Gina herself was aware she’d done it. He decided right then that if he hadn’t already been in danger of falling for this girl, he was now.

And that’s just what it was, wasn’t it? Danger.

He asked himself to be serious for a second. To be forty-two years old and not seventeen. Because what would life with a girl like Gina really be like?

She strolled back over.

“I want to learn chess,” she said.

“God help the world.”

“Do you think he’ll try to screw us over?” Gina asked.

“Fifty-fifty.”

“He’s offering a lot more than the foreskins are worth.”

“A guy with his kind of money, eight million bucks is probably a rounding error. Why would he want to hassle with a double cross?”

“But his ego.”

“On the other hand. Yeah.” Finally, for the first time in the ten or fifteen minutes since they’d been here, one of the weathered old chess players moved one of his pieces. “And we know he likes to play games.”

“So?”

“So as long as we keep things public, I think we’ll be okay.” Shake didn’t mention the other thing that he thought might increase their chances, at least marginally, of being okay: the Glock 19 he’d lifted off Dikran, which Shake had hidden in the bottom of the leather day pack he was carrying. Gina had wanted to bring along towels and sunscreen in case the beach on Isla Taboga was any good.

A question raised itself: Why had Shake hidden the gun beneath the towels? Why hadn’t he told Gina about the gun? Why hadn’t he told her about his meeting with Lexy, the deal she had proposed?

That was three questions, he realized. He didn’t have an answer to any of them. At least no answers he wanted to admit to himself.

“I’m surprised,” he said casually, “that Ziegler hasn’t tried to cut a separate deal with one of us.”

“He can tell how much we like each other,” Gina said, not missing a beat. She never did. She bumped her shoulder affectionately against his. “Wanna get some lunch?”

IT WAS A LITTLE AFTER ONE
, but they were the only customers at the restaurant on the square. The waiter in the apron brought them good, simple fried fish, corvina with the head still on, along with arroz con coco and a couple of bottles of ice-cold beer, Atlas, a local brew.

The drowsy, sun-baked plaza, the flowers everywhere. The smell of the flowers, the smell of the Pacific, which was different in subtle ways from the smell of the Caribbean. More citric, cleaner, rowdier. The food and the wine and Gina across from him.

Shake was about to say it when she beat him to the punch.

“I could get used to this,” she said. She gazed out at the plaza. “I think this might have been the life I was supposed to have.”

“Not the one you ended up with?”

She shook her head and smiled. “There was a mix-up at headquarters. When I was born.”

“An in-file in the out-box.”

“You know?”

“I do.”

He drank the rest of his beer and studied her while he did it.

She turned and caught him. “What?”

“I can’t decide,” Shake said. “If you’re a good girl gone bad, a bad girl going good, or . . .”

“Just a bad girl?”

“That’s not exactly what I mean.”

“I already warned you, sweetie.”

“I know,” he said. “No heart of gold.”

Her expression became unusually serious, almost melancholy.

“It’s just who I am,” she said. “Sometimes . . .”

“What?”

“I don’t know. What if free will, what if it’s just an illusion? I don’t mean like there are Greek gods or anything. But what if the way you’re born, the way you grow up, by the time you realize what’s happened, it’s already all wired. You’re wired. You think you’re making choices, but really you aren’t. And the smart play is to recognize that. That you’re a certain way and nothing is going to change that, even if . . .”

“Even if?” he asked.

“Even if sometimes you wish you could.”

Shake thought about it. “Maybe the wishing is a start,” he said.

“Think it works like that?”

“What are the odds?”

They smiled at each other. A long moment passed—a lazy, sun-baked, flower-scented moment that Shake didn’t want to pass at all. Or if it must pass, he wanted to take Gina by the hand and follow it, this moment, remain inside its protective flower-scented bubble, wherever it led, leaving the present—or was it the future?—forever behind.

“Nature calls,” Gina said. “Which is a polite way of saying I have to pee like a racehorse.” She stood up. “Be back in a jumping jack flash.”

Shake watched her walk into the restaurant and disappear. Two of the old chess-playing coots on the plaza, he noticed, were studying their game with such intensity, bent so far over their board, that their heads were almost touching each other.

He looked at Gina’s beer. Considered the moral implications of the act, then finished it for her.

He glanced at his watch. They had plenty of time to take the ferry to the mainland, grab a nap, pick up the foreskins from the hotel safe, and be back to the island well before nine o’clock. He was pretty sure Ziegler would show up early, and Shake wanted to be here long before he did.

Ziegler wouldn’t have needed time to put together the cash. Shake wondered again why he would have lied, why he wanted to push the exchange back a full day more than necessary.

He could think of several reasons. He didn’t like any of them.

Gina’s purse was on her chair. She’d left it in full view, as if to vividly reassure Shake that she’d be returning from the ladies’ room.

He glanced at his watch again.

The waiter in the long apron approached. “Will you and the señora like some coffee?”

Shake sighed.

“The señora’s not returning,” he said.

W
hen she was sober, during the workweek, when she was sober and got pissed off about something, Gina’s mother used to just
whale
on Gina’s ass. The see-stars-and-fireworks kind of getting whaled on. Gina, when she got to high school, turned it into a joke she told people—that she’d learned how to run as fast as she did to keep her mother from catching her.

The other girls on the track team, all of them black except her, they couldn’t believe that a white girl like Gina could run so fast. But they did know, a lot of them, about getting whaled on, and her joke cracked them up.

It wasn’t entirely a joke. The trick, when you were getting whaled on, was to run fast in your
mind
. Stay a step ahead of whatever bad shit you were feeling. You couldn’t let the bad shit catch you until you were somewhere nice. Where, in the sunlight, you’d wonder, “Huh,
that
was the shit that was bringing me down?” As if you’d had a dream that freaked you the night before but in the morning just seemed kind of dumb, like a Chihuahua covered in tinfoil barking at you.

Gina stepped off the boat. She was feeling some bad shit right now, about what she was doing to Shake. But, girlfriend, believe it, was
fast
. Gina, in her mind, was staying a step ahead. Come time, she’d take a breather and let the bad shit she was feeling catch up—when she was $6 million richer and on a plane to somewhere far, far away. Come time, she’d be happy to take the bad shit she was feeling to dinner at a nice place in Dubai, and they could work through their issues then.

She’d come across a quote from Wordsworth, her one year in college, that summed up the philosophy perfectly: Creativity works best when strong emotions are “recollected in tranquillity.”

Exactly. Awesome.

She took a cab from the Amador Causeway back to the hotel. She walked into the lobby. The young assistant manager with the eyebrows was bent intently over the computer and didn’t notice her. Gina dinged the bell at the front desk, which startled him. Though it was hard to tell how much that had to do with the bell and how much with what seemed his ongoing state of general bestartlement.

“Hi!”

“Señora Boxman,” he said nervously.

“Good afternoon, cutie-pie.”

“How may I be of—”

“I’d like you to open the safe for me,
por favor
.”

“What? But, señora—I’m afraid that—” He pulled himself together and managed a chuckle. “You are joking,” he said. “But of course.”

She leaned close. “I’ve never,” she told him in a friendly, conspiratorial whisper, “been more serious in my life.”

He tried another chuckle. It failed miserably. What looked like a faint rosy rash appeared on each of his cheeks. Gina felt bad for the poor guy, but she didn’t have the time right now to be gentle.

She selected the smile she never liked to use, the one she’d inherited from her mother, the one that used your lips, your teeth, but never your eyes.

“Open the safe for me,” she said.

“As you wish,” the assistant manager croaked.

SHAKE HAD AN ADVANTAGE:
He knew where Gina was headed. He took Dikran’s Glock from the leather day pack, stuck it in his waistband, jogged down the hill to the docks on the far side of the island. The next ferry didn’t depart for another twenty minutes, which meant Gina would have hired one of the private fishing boats to take her back to the mainland. Shake planned to do the same.

But of course—he should have anticipated this—Gina had paid off all the other fishermen; there wasn’t another fucking boat in sight.

You already know how to play chess, don’t you?
he asked the Gina in his mind. The Gina in his mind just smiled back at him and put a finger over her lips.
Shhhh
.

Shake jogged back to the ferry landing. He still might have just enough time. He calculated that he’d be about forty minutes behind Gina when the ferry docked in Panama City. Half of that he could make up on the drive to the hotel if he could convince a cabdriver—money or gun or both—to let Shake drive. The other half . . . well, he’d have to hope for a little luck breaking his way; he’d have to hope that the assistant manager at the hotel, the one with the combination to the safe, had the grit to stand up to Gina for a few minutes.

Shake didn’t bother to hope he might be able to stand up to her longer than that. Not a chance.

Shake reached the landing. The ferry’s engines were revving, but the gangway was still down. He started toward it, then felt someone move up on him from behind; he felt something hard shoved against the small of his back.

“Move a muscle and you’re a dead man,” a voice said.

Shake ceased the movement of all muscles. He tried to place the voice.

“Marvin?” he said finally, surprised. Shake glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough: The man pressing against Shake’s back what might be a gun in the pocket of his windbreaker was Marvin Oates, bug-eyed Vegas hock-shop proprietor.

“Keep your mouth shut and do exactly what I say,” Marvin ordered.

“I don’t have time for this, Marvin.” Shake turned calmly, quickly.

“Hey, I told you not to—” Marvin shut up when he realized that Shake had the barrel of the Glock pressed to his forehead. “Oh.”

“Finger?” Shake asked.

Marvin nodded and removed his hand from the windbreaker pocket.

“She said you didn’t have a gun!” Marvin whined.

“She?”

“I just want a finder’s fee. Ten percent. Or fifteen.”

“You’re working with Gina?”

“She said you’d have the foreskins.”

Shake waited. Marvin’s bug eyes bugged even wider.

“That liar!”

The ferry had pulled away from the landing. Shake was tempted by the thought of shooting Marvin. Or at least smacking him with the butt of the Glock. Before Shake could succumb to the temptation, Marvin, who’d been stewing, said, “Ha!”

“Ha?”

“I,” Marvin announced triumphantly, “know where she is.”

“No you don’t.”

“I do! She told me to meet her, once I had the foreskins, at this place in the old town. I know the exact place! Plaza France, or something like that. At the statue of some French guy. Ziegler was going to be there, and we were going to get the money then. So ha!”

Shake realized that the universe was supposed to be infinite, filled with multitudinous possibility and variation. On some planet somewhere, for example, Shake had his own restaurant; on some other planet, Ferdinand de Lesseps had succeeded in building his sea-level canal through the Panamanian isthmus. But nowhere, not in the darkest, most far-flung corner of the universe, could Shake imagine a Gina so dumb she’d tell Marvin Oates where she was really going to meet Ziegler.

She knew that Marvin would slow him down, but she also had to know he wouldn’t slow Shake down for long.

She had to know that Marvin would immediately spill his beans.

She had to know—

Shake smiled. Of course.

“So what do we do now?” Marvin asked eagerly.

“You,” Shake said, “are going to walk up the hill. There’s a restaurant on the square. You’re going to sit down and eat lunch. You’re going to find a nice hotel, get a good night’s sleep, then take the ferry back to the mainland in the morning.”

Marvin nodded, trying to follow all this.

“Then you’re going to fly home.”

“Fly home? What?”

“Because if you don’t,” Shake explained, “I’m going to hunt you down and I really will beat you to death with a gravel-filled sock.”

Marvin scowled sourly. He looked at the gun in Shake’s hand.

“You think just because you have a gun,” Marvin said, “you can tell me what to do.”

“That’s right,” Shake said.

Marvin considered this, then wheeled and started trudging angrily up the hill. He paused after a few seconds and turned back around.

“The least you could do is reimburse my expenses,” he said. He took a hit off his inhaler. “I’m out almost two grand because of this stupid trip!”

Shake waved the gun toward the top of the hill. Keep moving.

“Check’s in the mail,” Shake assured him.