Gutshot Straight with Bonus Excerpt (27 page)

Pijua’s daughter brought the pork empanadas. The woman pretended to reach for the bottle of ketchup on the table and Shake laughed. And then he realized she was serious. And then she laughed.

“You should have seen your face,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d fall for that.”

“You’d be surprised what I fall for,” Shake said.

She hit him again with that flash grenade of a smile.

“Good to know,” she said, and Shake felt the back of his neck flush with heat.

WALKING BACK TO THE WHARF,
Shake saw a thirty-six-foot Esprit cruiser slide by on its way to the Cut, between San Pedro and the north end of Ambergris. It had flames painted on the side and a couple of big Rasta bruisers lounging on deck. Baby Jesus’s boat, the one he used to run product up to the Yucatán.

Shake didn’t let the sight of the boat bring him down. He was still thinking about the woman back on the deck at Pijua’s, that smile of hers. Evelyn. Whatever happened from here on out, Shake decided, his day had already turned out better than he’d hoped.

Chapter 3

S
pecial Agent Evelyn Holly had been at the table for twenty minutes, nursing a diet Mountain Dew and keeping an eye on the shithead inside. She knew that she couldn’t lurk around the restaurant much longer without ordering food, but she was on her own dime this trip, not Uncle Sam’s, and everything on the menu seemed to cost twice what it should have.

She ducked behind the menu when the shithead walked past. But then he turned around and came right up to her table. Charles “Shake” Bouchon, smiling right at her. Evelyn almost burst out laughing. He’d already made her, less than half an hour after she’d begun tailing him? But she stayed cool and realized that the shithead was just hitting on her. That almost made her burst out laughing too.

Well, no time like the present. She’d been planning to approach him in a day or two anyway, strike up a conversation.

“I’m not selling,” he said.

“Awesome,” she said. “ ’Cause I’m not buying.”

She hoped that might catch him on the wrong foot and it did. But Bouchon didn’t get flustered like most guys would have. He didn’t flee or try to force a clever comeback. Instead he just stood there, amused, and seemed to appreciate that she’d caught him on the wrong foot.

The waitress appeared. Evelyn bit the bullet and ordered one of the pricey entrées. And then realized, as she handed over the menu, what a knucklehead she was. Everything seemed to cost twice what it should have because the prices were listed in Belizean dollars. There were two Belizean dollars to every U.S. dollar.

“My name’s Shake,” Bouchon said. “I know you were just dying to know that, be honest.”

Be honest, he was kind of a nice-looking guy for a shithead. Evelyn hadn’t guessed it from the California Department of Corrections mug shot that she’d studied on the plane down from L.A. Grim stuff, that. Here in person, though, she saw that he had good sharp angles, chin and cheeks and brow. But the angles not
too
sharp, softened just so by the wry smile, the warm eyes, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He had a touch of an accent that sounded like it had a little Brooklyn in it, but Evelyn knew it must be New Orleans, where his sheet said he’d been born and raised.

When he asked about the book she was reading and then told her about the restaurant he owned, Evelyn thought:
Wow, could this be any easier?
She’d arrived in Belize without much of a plan. Take a few days and just get to know the shithead a little, let him think he was getting to know her. Develop a bond. And then, when Bouchon let his guard down,
wham!
Evelyn would put the screws to him.

Evelyn loved that saying:
putting the screws to someone.
She loved doing it.

But at this point, Bouchon definitely had his guard up. Evelyn didn’t let the wry smile and the warm eyes fool her. You didn’t stay alive as long as he had, in the kind of company he’d kept, without staying on your toes. He’d only done two relatively light stretches in prison, which in his line of work was evidence that he was one careful shithead.

She reached for the ketchup. He laughed because he thought she was kidding. She wasn’t kidding. The empanadas looked like something you might reasonably put ketchup on. He stopped laughing when he saw her face. So she laughed.

“You should have seen your face,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d fall for that.”

“You’d be surprised what I fall for,” the Shithead said.

Evelyn smiled. This would be so easy. It almost wasn’t fair. “Good to know,” she said.

SHE ATE THE EMPANADAS, ADMITTEDLY
fantastic, talked herself out of dessert, and then drove her rented golf cart back to the resort.

From her bungalow, she called to check on Sarah. It was noon in L.A. Sarah told her that Andre had come by to take her to breakfast at the Farmers Market. Evelyn didn’t say the approximately one thousand things she had to say about that. About how the sneaky asshole waited until Evelyn was out of the country to show even the slightest interest in his own daughter.

“Send me a text later,” Evelyn said. “Tell me how much you miss me.”

“Mom!” Sarah laughed. “You’re such a dork.”

Evelyn had been gone less than twenty-four hours and already she missed Sarah so much it ached.

“Don’t text when you’re driving. Don’t borrow my yoga mat and lose it again. Don’t join a cult.”

“Check, check, oops,” Sarah said. “Too late.”

And don’t believe anything that your asshole of a father tells you
, Evelyn thought but didn’t say.

“Does it seem like a nice cult at least?” Evelyn said. “Do they have a cute secluded compound in the desert?”

Her daughter was, literally, the last teenager in California who would ever join a cult. Or text while driving. Evelyn knew that Sarah would probably spend the rest of her weekend studying for the SATs, practicing her jump shot, and downloading recipes for healthy, delicious, onepot meals. Maybe taking a break to learn Farsi and help inner-city kids create a sustainable dairy farm.

She wouldn’t, in other words, be smoking pot or luring a skateboard punk rocker up to her bedroom or sneaking into a club to see Social Distortion. Nor any of the other myriad transgressions that Evelyn would have committed, sixteen years old and left more or less on her own for a week.

Sometimes Evelyn couldn’t believe that she and Sarah came from the same gene pool. If they didn’t have the same laugh, the same scowl first thing in the morning, the same gangly legs, Evelyn might have seriously wondered about some mix-up in the maternity ward, a nurse switching one baby for another.

“Text me,” Evelyn said. “Every fifteen minutes if it’s convenient, okay?”

“Mom!”

A few minutes after Evelyn hung up, there was a knock on the door. She took her firearm out of her purse, chambered a round, and checked the peephole. On the deck of her bungalow stood Cory Nadler, of all people.

Evelyn stuck the gun back in her purse and opened the door.

“Cory?” she said.

“Hi, Evi,” he said. He looked cranky and sweaty. “Can I come in?”

“Sure. Of course.” She took a seat on the edge of the bed. He sat in the wicker chair with the floral-print cushion. He was wearing a navy suit that looked way too hot for this climate. “What are you doing here, Cory?”

“I’m with DSS now,” he said.

“Diplomatic security?”

“Out of the embassy in Mexico City. But I’ve been doing liaison work in Belize the last couple of months. I happened to be looking through passenger manifests this morning and I saw your name.”

“Cory,” she said, “take your coat off. That suit looks way too hot for Belize.”

“It’s fine,” he said.

“Is it wool? You look like you’re dying.”

“It’s tropical wool.”

Evelyn cocked her head, dubious. “I don’t think it is.”

“Evi, shut up for a second, okay?” Cory was eight or nine years younger than she was, in his early thirties, but he’d probably been one of those kids who, in kindergarten, listened to classical music and wore sweater vests. The kind of man her daughter would probably marry someday. “You can’t be here, Evi.”

“I’m on vacation,” she said.

“Vacation.”

She shrugged.

“Did you pack a bathing suit?” he said.

“Maybe.”

Cory sighed. “Evi,” he said, “I’ve known you for how long?”

“So you know I need a vacation.”

“I know you’ve still got a major, major hard-on for the Armenians, even after you were explicitly told to cool it with all that.”

“Real girls don’t get hard-ons, Cory. You’ve spent too much time in Bangkok.”

“I know that Charles Samuel Bouchon, aka ‘Shake,’ alleged former wheelman for and close associate of the Armenian
pakhan
in L.A., allegedly owns a restaurant on this island. I know that you’re still pissed off that your ex-husband—”

“Stop. Thank you. Right there.” She didn’t need anyone to walk her back through it. Seriously.

The short version was that Evelyn, a couple of years ago, had helped build a slam-dunk case against the Armenian mob. Evelyn had been
this close
to taking them down, top to bottom,
pakhan
to foot soldier, when the district attorney in Los Angeles blindsided her by negotiating a deal between the Armenians and the feds. It turned out that the Armenians knew the whereabouts of a fugitive Wall Street swindler that the Department of Justice was desperate to nail. So DOJ got their swindler, the Armenians got a time-out called on the racketeering investigation, and the asshole D.A. in Los Angeles—Andre Guardado, Evelyn’s ex-husband—was the hero of the hour.

Well, that was then, this was now. Now, as far as Evelyn was concerned, whatever time-out the Armenians had earned two years ago had expired. Game on.

“Here’s the thing, Evi.” Cory leaned forward, the shoulders of his allegedly tropical wool suit coat bunching up. “DEA has been down here since October with a major, major ongoing. Okay? Serious stuff, a drug kingpin here in Belize with ties to the Zeta cartel. You have any idea how long it took me to get the Belizean government on board?”

“Good for you, Cory. I always thought you’d make an excellent liaison.”

“DEA has put the kingpin together with Bouchon a couple of times. It’s maybe nothing, it’s maybe something. So help me God, Evi, if you step on this investigation, if you disrupt or compromise it in any way . . .”

“I’m not going to step on anything.”

“Because you’re on vacation.”

“Exactly.”

It had taken Evelyn almost a year to track down Bouchon. Alleged former wheelman for and close associate of the Armenian
pakhan
. Alleged, her ass. He’d worked with the Armenians for years, and his relationship with Alexandra Ilandryan, if the rumors were true, had been closer than close. With his cooperation, Evelyn could put her, and every Khederian, Ghazarian, and Bazarian, behind bars till the end of time.

Bouchon wouldn’t
want
to cooperate. That was okay with Evelyn. She did her best work with shitheads who didn’t want to cooperate. Back in elementary school she’d been a gleeful playground bully, taller and stronger and craftier than the other kids. Her brothers, whom she had bullied relentlessly, still called her Evil Lynn.

Cory was studying her. “And Mike,” he said. “If I called your ASAC, he’d confirm that?”

She shrugged again. Mike was her supervisor, the assistant special agent in charge of the Los Angeles field office. “Mike knows I’m on vacation,” she said.

“But not
where
, I bet.”

Evelyn had learned early in life that the advantage of having a great smile was the impression you could make when you shut it off abruptly.

She did it now. Cory shifted uncomfortably.

“I’m not, you know, I’m not going to call Mike,” he said. “I just want to make clear that if you stay down here—
on vacation
—you have to keep a low profile. It’s critical. A low, low profile. And
stay away from Bouchon.
”

Evelyn turned the smile back on. “Of course,” she said. “Absolutely.”

Chapter 4

T
he young honeymooners from last night were back again. Shake told Idaba to seat them inside tonight, since the wind had picked up and the tables on the veranda were getting blasted. Plus, there was only one other customer so far, an older man eating by himself. Shake didn’t want the dining room to look deserted if the woman he’d met at Pijua’s actually showed up.

He didn’t know if she would or not. She was a tough read. But it was still early, only a little after seven, so there was time. It occurred to Shake that a high percentage of the women he’d been attracted to over the years had been tough reads. He wondered what that said about him.

In the kitchen, Roger was explaining to Armando how soccer was a sport fit to be played only by homosexuals, and how that made anyone who watched soccer, like Armando, even more of a homosexual than the homosexuals who played it. Armando was asking Roger if everyone from Detroit liked giving the business to dogs and other stray animals, and getting the business from dogs and other stray animals, or was it just the
pendejos
like Roger? Neither Armando nor Roger was doing any work. They were lounging around and rolling a lemon back and forth across the floor.

Shake plated the conch fritters for the honeymooners and took the order out himself. The honeymooners were holding hands across the table again. They looked even younger and more sun-flushed than they had the night before.

“Good day?” Shake asked.

“Oh my God,” the girl said. “It rocked!”

“We went ziplining,” the kid said.

“This is the most amazing week of my life,” the girl said. “I’m not even kidding.”

“I know!” the kid said.

They started gazing into each other’s eyes, so Shake left them to it. On his way back to the kitchen he stopped to check on the other table, the older man, who had ordered the lobster and a bottle of a good Argentine white.

“How’s that lobster treating you?” Shake said.

“Let me ask you something,” the older man said.

“Fire away.”

“Harrigan Quinn, by the way.” The man held out his hand and Shake shook it. “Call me Quinn.”

“Shake.”

The man kept his grip, strong, on Shake’s hand. He was a youthful seventy or so, tall, tan, and fit, with craggy good looks and a full head of wavy white hair. He reminded Shake of someone, but Shake couldn’t put a finger on who. He was wearing pressed khakis, a pale pink polo shirt, and on his tan wrist a Patek Philippe that could have paid off a lot of Shake’s debt to Baby Jesus.

“This is your place, I take it?” the man said.

“For better or worse.”

“All right. Here’s my question.” He finally gave Shake his hand back. “You know what’s the one thing, not music, that’s the universal language? Not sex either.”

“Food?” Shake guessed.

“Food. I’ll tell you why.”

He pinched the crease on his khakis and crossed his legs. Shake could sense him settling in for the long haul.

“Excuse me, Mr. Quinn. I should get back to the kitchen.”

“Harry. Please. I’m not your high school principal, am I?”

The woman Shake had met at Pijua’s entered the dining room. Shake watched Idaba lead her to a table.

“Harry,” he said. “Enjoy your meal and let me know if there’s anything you need.”

He escaped and crossed the room. He waited till Idaba handed off the menu and then stepped up to the woman’s table.

“Evelyn,” Shake said. “I was positive there was a remote chance you might show up.”

She’d changed into a dress and her dark hair was down around her bare shoulders. In this light—tabletop candles and the lanterns on the wall turned low—her smile was even more dazzling.

“I had to see it for myself,” she said. “The kind of place that the kind of guy like you would own.”

“The kind of guy like me?”

She looked around the room, taking her time and not missing anything. Shake had a feeling, he couldn’t explain it, that maybe her father had been a cop, maybe her brothers and uncles too.

“I see you’ve got a ‘ye olde sailing ship’ thing going on.”

“That was the previous owner,” Shake said.

“A little on the nose for a place on the beach, don’t you think?”

“Like I said.”

“But I dig the—mermaids?”

She pointed toward the wall at one of the few additions that Shake was responsible for. Hung there were half a dozen folk-art figures made from painted coconut shells, leather, old tin cans.

“The kind of guy like me?” he asked again.

She opened the menu. “So. How good are the conch fritters?”

“On a scale of nine to ten?” Shake pondered. “Hard call.”

She started to answer but stopped because Armando, the waiter, had come up next to Shake. Armando tugged at Shake’s sleeve. Shake wasn’t thrilled by the timing. He was warming fast to Idaba’s advice about getting a woman in his bed, if that woman turned out to be this woman.

“What?” he said.

“He want you, boss,” Armando said.

“Who?” Shake looked around. The old guy, Harrigan Quinn, was flagging Shake down. He had pulled his chair over and was sitting now with the young honeymooners. Shake wondered how they knew one another.

“Tell Idaba to take care of it,” Shake said.

“He say it got to be you, boss.”

“All right.” Shake turned back to Evelyn. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not through with you yet.”

Shake paused, then hurried back across the room. Idaba was watching him with what might have been interest.

“How’s everybody doing over here?” Shake said.

“I want you to hear this too, Shake,” Quinn said. Saying it like he’d known Shake all his life. Making Shake almost believe it. “You’re going to love this.”

Shake forced a smile. He decided that Quinn, with his craggy good looks and alert blue eyes, looked like he could have acted in B-movie westerns when he was young, the handsome deputy who took a bullet for the girl he loved.

“I’ll tell you what,” Shake said. “If you could just give me a—”

“A while back I was in Nicaragua on business,” Quinn said. “My first time in Central America. Like the lovebirds here, that’s why I thought of it. Anyway. I get invited to a big shindig at a mansion outside Managua, beautiful place, amazing view of the volcano. This would have been the late seventies, before the Sandinistas. The shindig was a surprise birthday party for the
commandante
himself, Somoza. The whole nine yards, fountain filled with champagne and a stripper popping out of a cake.”

Shake looked over at the honeymoon couple. They were looking at him. Shake realized that they didn’t know Quinn at all, that he must have invited himself over to their table.

“Next thing I know,” Quinn went on, “wouldn’t you know it, I’m in the back of a limo barreling up the volcano. Me and Somoza—‘Tachito’ everybody called him—and the stripper that popped out of the cake. She’s the one driving the limo, still naked as a jaybird, nothing on her but a little chocolate frosting. She must’ve been doing a hundred, hundred and ten, laughing like crazy and coked out of her mind. Somoza’s bodyguard, he’s about to have a coronary. So he says, ‘
Commandante
, maybe we should slow down.’ So Tachito, Somoza, nice and calm he snaps open his holster and pulls out his piece, Beretta 92F. And he points it at the stripper’s head—she’s got us up to a hundred and ten by now, remember—and he tells his bodyguard, ‘You want to slow down?
No problemo.
’ ”

Quinn chuckled and took a sip of his wine. The honeymoon girl was looking at her husband, telling him with her eyebrows to do something. He was pretending he couldn’t speak eyebrow.

“Quinn,” Shake said, but that was all the edgewise the old guy gave him.

“Now, I’m about to have a coronary, you’ve got my word on that. Because if Somoza pulls that trigger and shoots the stripper, we all go flying off the side of the volcano and the monkeys down in the jungle below will be picking us out of their fur for the next few days.”

Shake hoped Idaba would know what the hell to do with this guy. He turned to motion her over. Instead, though, he found himself staring at a man in a ski mask.

A man in a ski mask. With a gun.

Shake was so surprised that he just stood there when the man in the mask stepped past him, lifted the gun, and leveled it at Quinn.

“So long story short,” Quinn was saying, “the stripper looks back at the gun Somoza has pointed at her, and she just keeps laughing. You know what she says?”

Quinn noticed the man in the ski mask. The honeymooners did too. Time stopped for one fat, floating second, like even the gunman was waiting to hear the end of the story.

And then everything sped up to a blur. Shake grabbed the gunman’s arm, the gunman pulled the trigger. The explosion of the gun going off was like plate glass shattering inside Shake’s head. The bullet blew a hole through the wall behind Quinn, about a foot above his head.

The honeymoon girl screamed and Quinn ducked down behind the table. Shake tried to hold on to the gunman’s arm, but the gunman was stronger. He yanked his arm away before Shake could get his other hand on the gun.

Shake was dead. Just standing there, breathing, thinking how quick it was going to be, all the lights going out.

But the gunman ignored Shake. He swung the gun back around and fired at Quinn again, missing again, smashing a lantern. Quinn was on the move, crawling fast across the floor toward the next table over. The gunman blasted away at him, but either he was nervous or a terrible shot or both. Plates exploded, wood crunched, one of the glass portholes in the kitchen doors blew out. Quinn made it to the table and then went crawling for the next one.

Shake ducked down and scooted over to the honeymooners. The girl was still screaming, the pitch rising and falling like a car alarm. He pulled the table over on its side to provide some cover for the three of them. It wasn’t much cover, but you had to play the cards the dealer flopped.

Across the room, Evelyn had pulled a table over too. Smart girl—Shake congratulated himself on his taste in women. Though he doubted that this incident would speed along their relationship. Idaba and Armando were crouched behind the checkout stand. Roger hadn’t emerged from the kitchen. Either he’d already fled halfway to San Pedro or was so drunk he hadn’t noticed anything wrong.

Three more gunshots.
Bambambam.
More glass breaking, more wood snapping, more sparks showering everywhere when the gunman hit another lantern.

“Screw you!” someone yelled. It took Shake a second to realize that the gunman wasn’t yelling at Quinn, Quinn was yelling at the gunman. “Screw you, punk!”

Are you kidding me?
Shake thought.

Bambam. Bam. Bam.

Idaba peeked around the checkout stand and gave Shake a look that said,
Do something!

Shake gave her a look back that said,
Yeah? Like what?

The smart play, Shake knew, was no play. The gunman was after Quinn. When he got him, there was an excellent chance he’d leave without hurting anyone else. He’d already had a chance to shoot Shake and passed it up.

But the smart play meant Shake would have to sit by and watch an innocent unarmed man get gunned down in cold blood. He didn’t think he could do that. It was, Shake realized, a dangerous defect of character.

When the shooting stopped, Shake snuck a look. The gunman was fumbling with a new clip. Shake didn’t give himself time to think about what he was about to do. He darted out from behind the table, put his shoulder down, and hit the gunman hard from behind.

They both went down. The gun tumbled loose. The gunman bounced up first and grabbed it. Shake was long past his bouncing days, but managed to lurch up and sideways and grabbed the gunman’s wrist.

Now they were back where they’d started. Once again, the gunman tried to yank his arm away from Shake. Shake held on. The gunman yanked again, harder. Shake held on again. The third time the gunman yanked, with all his strength, Shake stepped into it, steered, and helped the gunman bash himself in the face with his own gun. The gunman dropped the gun and stumbled backward, clutching his nose. Shake kicked the gun away. He didn’t want to risk the guy coming at him when he bent down to pick it up.

The gunman glared at Shake and seemed to be thinking about coming at him anyway. His eyes, all that Shake could see because of the ski mask, blinked fast and watered.

“Be smart,” Shake said.

Quinn had climbed out from beneath a table and was tucking his pink polo shirt back into his pants. His face was flushed, but the head of wavy white hair had not been ruffled.

“What are you gonna do now, punk!” Quinn said.

“All of us!” Shake said. Jesus Christ. “All of us be smart!”

The gunman edged back toward the veranda door, still holding his nose. When he got to the door, he turned and ran.

Shake went to the window. He watched the gunman sprint across the beach, stumble once, stumble again, and then make it to the pier. He ran to the end of the pier and jumped into a Boston Whaler that was waiting for him. A second guy in a ski mask was at the wheel of the Boston Whaler. The boat pealed away into the night, kicking up a big sheet of foam that hung, shimmered, and finally collapsed.

Roger, wild-eyed, stuck his head out of the kitchen.

“Yow!” he said. “Ho!”

“Everybody all right?” Idaba said.

The honeymoon girl was still screaming. Shake realized that she’d never stopped. His own heart kept hammering, hammering, like it might never stop either. Shake put a hand on the wall and leaned against it.

“Don’t worry,” Roger said. “I called the cops.”

Oh, no
, Shake thought.
Shit.

OH, NO
,
EVELYN THOUGHT WHEN
the sketchy dude in the stained apron stepped out of the kitchen and announced that he’d called the cops.
Shit.

Well, of course he’d called the cops, or somebody had, but that didn’t make Evelyn’s current situation any less sticky. As a United States law enforcement official, a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, she had sworn duties and responsibilities. She took them seriously. Like, don’t leave the scene of an attempted murder. Like, wait for the cops and answer their questions with truth and candor.