Gutshot Straight with Bonus Excerpt (7 page)

“Sure is.” Gina popped her lips, snapped the lipstick shut, then gave the woman one last smile. Coolly, calmly, in no particular rush, she exited the ladies’ room. Coolly, calmly, she sauntered across the lobby to the elevators. When the doors opened on her floor, she pushed a bellhop out of the way and sprinted down the hall to her room, high heels in hand. She stripped off the cocktail dress and threw on her True Religions and a sweatshirt, then dragged the gym bag full of cash out from under the bed. Sixty seconds later she was pounding down twelve flights of bare cement service-emergency stairs. She hit the crash bar running and burst through the fire door into an alley. She stopped for a second to get her bearings—Wilshire was . . . left, then left—then took off again. She was almost out of the alley when a car screeched to a stop and cut her off. Her momentum carried her hard into the side of the car. She pinballed off and tumbled to the asphalt, ripping a hole in her jeans and scraping her knee.

Big hands grabbed her shoulders and jerked her to her feet. A giant, bald, unbelievably ugly guy grinned down at her. Gina tried to fight free, but he slapped her so hard she saw sparklers.

“Let me go,” Gina said quietly, reasonably.

The bald guy just kept grinning, then said something she didn’t understand in a foreign language she didn’t recognize.

“Fuck you,” Gina said, which she guessed was pretty universal. He slapped her again, and for a quick second, Gina thought she was back onstage at the Jungle, watching the disco balls scatter broken shards of bright light across the ceiling. She licked the corner of her mouth and tasted blood.

“Ah,” someone said.

Gina turned to see the woman with the pale gray eyes and the silky accent.

“Hi,” Gina said. She blew a strand of hair out of her face and smiled cheerfully. “Think we can make a deal?”

The woman lifted a hand and gently stroked Gina’s cheek. She smiled, not unsympathetically, then shook her head.

J
asper’s head felt stepped on. Inside and out. Ached like a son of a bitch.

From a phone book—who would have thought that?

Jasper had been hit in the head by a lot of things in his life—elbows, fists, fists holding a roll of quarters, other heads, chairs, butt of a gun, fiberglass spoiler ripped off the back of a Ford Contour—but none of them, at least as far as he could recall, had resulted in such a lingering, stepped-on ache. He considered for a long moment the bottle of extra-strength Tylenol he’d picked off the shelf, then decided it wasn’t up to the task at hand. He needed something with a little more fight in it.

He moved to the end of the aisle, past a pyramid of soda-pop bottles—this was the Walgreens on the south Strip, across from what used to be the Aladdin and was now (Jasper had to think for a second) the Planet Hollywood—and got in line at the pharmacy counter. There was a white lady tourist in line ahead of him. Thirty years old, give or take, expensive-looking eyeglasses, blue jeans with some interesting stitching on the back pockets, but no butt to speak of.

The pharmacist looked at the piece of paper the lady tourist gave him and smirked at it. Then he smirked at the lady. Then he smirked at Jasper.

“The honeymooner’s affliction,” the pharmacist told the lady. “We get a lot of that in Vegas.” Then he smirked again at Jasper.

Jasper didn’t like that. He felt sorry for the lady, the back of her freckled neck blushing with embarrassment. Jasper knew from the girls at the club that a bladder infection wasn’t anything to joke about. He stared the smirk right off the pharmacist’s face.

“Why don’t you hurry on up and go get the lady something for her headache,” he told the pharmacist.

The pharmacist did that. He handed the lady a white paper sack. She gave Jasper a whiff of a thank-you smile before she hurried off. Jasper didn’t smile back, because his head hurt when he moved his skin at all. He’d discovered this when he told the pharmacist to hurry up.

“Can I help you?”

“Need something for a headache.”

The pharmacist looked up at Jasper, a little confused.

“You got a bladder infection?” he whispered.

“I got a headache,” Jasper said, impatient. “Bad one.”

“Do you have a prescription?”

Jasper sighed.

Jasper could tell that the pharmacist didn’t like the way his day was starting. He glanced at Jasper’s hands resting half curled on the counter. Jasper had always had big hands, ever since he was a child.

“Listen,” the pharmacist said, but then he didn’t seem to have anything for Jasper to listen to.

Jasper waited. Finally the pharmacist went to the back and returned with a little white sack.

“Appreciate it,” Jasper said. He dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the counter and left.

JASPER FIRED UP THE EXPEDITION
so he could run the air conditioner, swallowed three of the little white capsules, and reclined the leather seat a bit so he could think better.

It was a little after nine. Jasper did not look forward to calling Mr. Moby with the bad news. The good news was that Jasper didn’t have to do that yet. Mr. Moby always stayed up late and slept late and didn’t even turn his cell phone on till noon at the earliest. And he wasn’t expecting to hear from Jasper about the exchange until later tonight. Which gave Jasper plenty of time to hunt down the girl, the briefcase, and the guy who’d belted him with that damn phone book. If he could find them, or even (Jasper took a second to work this out) just the girl, then he would not have to call Mr. Moby with the bad news. There would be no bad news.

That was good news.

Jasper could feel the white capsules starting to do their thing. He didn’t like to think about what Mr. Moby stayed up all night inflicting on poor Lucy. He felt bad for her. He felt bad for many of the girls, the kinds of lives they led. Full of drugs and asshole customers and evil boyfriends and bladder infections and not very much of what you would call a spiritual dimension. But Jasper felt a special kind of bad for Lucy, and not just because Mr. Moby was a special kind of evil boyfriend, which most certainly he was.

Jasper had read a newspaper article once about a river in the jungle that flooded, and how the tops of the trees drooped heavy and black with tarantulas.

That had made him—he didn’t know why—think of Mr. Moby.

There was a sweetness about Lucy. A spiritual dimension, or at least maybe the potential for one. She saw the human in you.

Jasper wondered if he might be in love with Lucy. Not that it mattered one way or another. It mattered about as much as whether or not the food in Pakistan or Siberia would agree with him.

But when he thought of that poor girl with Mr. Moby all night . . .

Shut it down, boy
, he told himself,
shut it off
. Jasper was good at that:

keeping the focus. Like when he played football. Watch the line. Find the hole. Go.

That was another thing he’d been hit in the head with. A head in a football helmet.

Focus.

Jasper rearranged himself in the Expedition’s leather seat. He walked himself back in time till he was once again outside that motel room this morning, knocking on the door. Jasper knew he wasn’t the quickest thinker in the world, but he had near-perfect recall, and when he had time to work things through at his own pace . . . well, then there wasn’t hardly a knot he couldn’t solve.

He closed his eyes and pictured the door to the motel room opening. The girl sitting on the bed. Holding a plastic cup of water. There was another plastic cup sideways on the carpet. The guy—Shake was his name—had a prison haircut and looked tired.

Jasper could see it all, spread out before him in vivid, luxuriant detail. He turned the air conditioner up another notch and, eyes still closed, started searching for clues.

G
ina waited till she was sure Shake was out cold, tested the handcuffs, then left the room. She shut the door behind her and slid the do not disturb card into the slot. She felt bouncy with energy, with optimism, with beatific goodwill toward her fellow man. Never underestimate, she confided to herself, the restorative power of a hearty breakfast, a hot shower, and a narrow escape from murder and dismemberment and God knows what else the Whale had planned for her. Now all she needed was a cigarette and she’d be perfectly golden.

Those had not been a good couple of days, back in L.A., after she’d been thrown into the trunk of the Town Car. The bald, ugly giant drove her to some abandoned place on the water and locked her in a cargo container with no light, no air, no smoking, and a smell she’d never forget as long as she lived. Which, at the time, had not seemed like it was going to be very long at all—just however long it took for the lady with the pale gray eyes to work out her price with Dick Moby.

But all that was history, ancient. Gina held the briefcase in one hand and put her other hand on her hip like she was standing on top of a mountain. Took a big, long breath of fresh mountain air.

“Ah!” she said.

Gina suspected she might be feeling just a teensy bit guilty about what she’d done to Shake, but she wasn’t sure. That was the tricky thing about guilt. It always landed on her so lightly—barely a soft, butterfly-wing breath—that she never knew if it was really there. Gina promised to consider the issue more thoroughly at a later, more convenient date. If, at a later date, of course, it was still an issue, which in her experience it rarely was.

She just needed some clothes now. Or at least a top. She couldn’t walk around Vegas in the grimy, sheer, practically see-through tank she was wearing, not if she didn’t want to attract more attention than usual.

At the far end of the long hallway, a housekeeping cart was positioned outside the open door of a room.

Gina did a rumba around the cart and breezed into the room.

“I forgot my camera!” she called into the bathroom.

A maid poked her head out. She gave Gina a skeptical and vaguely unfriendly look, then went back to picking pubes or whatever off the toilet seat.

Gina marched straight to the suitcase that was propped open on the suitcase caddy. Pink: jackpot. The jeans in the suitcase were designer knockoffs of questionable taste, but Gina found one top she liked, just about her size: a long-sleeved, waffle-knit henley with a flattering cut and some funked-up Chinese characters silk-screened across the front. She peeled off her grimy tank and tossed it in the trash can. She pulled on the henley, then rummaged around in the suitcase.

What she could really use now . . .

Shazam, and there it was: a long-billed J.Crew baseball cap.

But no Marlboros. Apparently there was a limit to Gina’s super-powers.

In the bathroom the maid flushed. Gina pulled her hair into a ponytail and screwed the cap on low. Borrowed a pair of DG shades and slid those on. She checked herself out in the mirror, then remembered to go back and grab the briefcase she’d set on the dresser and almost forgotten.

That would have sucked.

“Gracias!”
she called to the maid on her way out.

AFTER SHE BOUGHT A PACK
of cigarettes in the hotel gift shop, Gina drove out to Summerlin. She couldn’t go back to her apartment, of course, so she was grateful she’d thought to keep her passport stashed in a box at a Mail Boxes Etc. At the airport she cut past the rental-car booths to get to the escalators. She thought she glimpsed the hard-eyed gal at Avis, and it spooked her out a little. This was where—just less than a week ago, hard to believe—she’d taken the first step down the path that eventually led her straight, and handcuffed, into the trunk of a Lincoln Town Car.

That had been a shitty path. Gina wasn’t going anywhere near that path again. She was going to be smart this time and blow this Popsicle stand, the Popsicle stand being in this case the entire North American continent, thank you very much.

At the Delta Airlines ticket counter, she produced the wad of bills she’d taken from an envelope in Shake’s pocket after he blacked out.

“Where can I go in Asia, first class, one way, right now, for . . .” She paused to count the money. It was less than she’d been hoping, about what she’d expected. She subtracted enough for a hotel once she got to wherever in Asia she ended up. “. . . for, say, a couple of grandish.”

“Are you serious?” the gay guy behind the counter said.

“Do I look serious? Or Dubai, maybe.”

He lifted one eyebrow, then
tap-tap-tap
ped on his keyboard.

“First class is out of your price range,” he said, “but a coach seat to—”

“Ugh. Please.”

“Ugh yourself.”

“What about Europe?”

Tap-tap-tap
.

“London is four thousand.”

“How much is coach?” Gina said, then, “Fuck it. Never mind.”

She scooped the cash back up, wheeled around, and found a seat in the waiting area that was shielded, mostly, from the rest of the concourse by a bank of slots.

She was going to have to give this situation some serious analysis. A couple of grandish, plus enough for a week in a decent hotel, was not the kind of stake money that got you off on the right foot; it was definitely not sufficient right-foot kind of stake money.

So.

She nibbled a thumbnail. A guy walking past gave her a glance. Nothing hinky about it, though it was hard to tell for sure. Gina knew she was radioactive in Vegas. The Whale’s network ran wide, and the kite on her had been up for almost a week. By now every sketchy character in town, and every boyfriend/girlfriend/lover/bartender/cabdriver of every sketchy character in town—and who did that leave, exactly?—had an eyeball peeled for Gina and the big coin she’d pay out if they rung her up.

Gina remembered the way the pirate waitress at Treasure Island this morning had kept looking at her, wondering, trying to place where was it she’d seen Gina before.

She nibbled her other thumbnail and shivered. She didn’t like thinking about eyeballs getting peeled; she didn’t like the way this train of thought was dragging down her hearty-breakfast, hot-shower, plucked-from-the-jaws-of-the-Whale, good-vibe bounciness.

She snapped open the briefcase and looked inside. Just like she’d heard them discussing back at the motel: a hundred antique postage stamps, yellowed with age, lined up neatly ten by ten beneath the glass of a second case. All of them were blank: no numbers, no writing, no pictures. Was that what made them so valuable? Or was it because they were old? They looked crazy old, some of the paper so thin, so fragile it was almost translucent.

Just
how
valuable?

Gina could guess how badly the Whale wanted to get his hands on her. Really, really badly. Which meant the price he’d been willing to pay—the stamps—must be really, really high.

So.

So . . . what if a girl, into whose hands fate had delivered these stamps, what if this girl managed to sniff out someone—just saying—willing to take them off her hands at a win-win sort of price? Even at fifty cents on the dollar of what they were really worth, those stamps would definitely get her off on the right foot. Much more than a couple grandish would, that’s for sure.

Staying in Vegas for another day or two—was it worth the risk?

Gina thought of that hard-eyed gal downstairs at the Avis counter and felt spooked all over again. If that woman had recognized in Gina the ghost of her young self materialized before her, didn’t that mean, when you flipped it around, that Gina had been looking straight into the hard, tired, bitter, broken-down eyes of her own future self?

Had that woman been, twenty years ago, where Gina was now? Sitting in a plastic mother-of-pearl chair in an airport terminal, trying to decide if a risk was worth taking?

Spooky.

Gina shifted uncomfortably in her plastic mother-of-pearl chair.
No way
, she assured herself,
am I that woman. No way, in twenty years, will I end up hard, tired, bitter, and broken down, working a rental-car counter at the airport
.

Which, okay, is probably exactly what that woman twenty years ago had assured herself, too.

Gina had every intention of remaining young and hot forever, but she also admitted the improbability of that outcome. Not the hot part—she took really excellent care of her skin and stayed out of the sun as much as possible—but the young part, the part where the currency of her looks would never be stronger against the dollar, the euro, the yen. That part was a bubble just waiting, like all bubbles, to pop.

Gina was ready for it. She knew she had better be ready for it.

SHE TOOK THE SHUTTLE BACK
to long-term parking and—cautious—instructed the driver to drop her off a couple of rows from the Town Car. After he drove away, she used a dime to unscrew the Town Car’s license plate and switched it out with one from a nearby Escalade. The Escalade was sparkly clean, like it hadn’t been sitting out here in the desert dust for days and days, getting blasted with jet exhaust from above. Like it had just been dropped off and the owner wouldn’t be back for a while.

She smiled and figured Shake would be proud of her for thinking of that.

She was still thinking about that guy. Which was unusual, but not unpleasant.

He was late thirties, she guessed, maybe a little older. Fit, a face with some mileage, but the more interesting for it. Eyes that had thrown her when he first opened the trunk. His eyes weren’t the eyes of a guy who should have been driving that car, doing a job like that. Thank God.

She drove back to the Strip. She slipped through the lobby of the Venetian in her cap and sunglasses. Without, she hoped, being spotted. She laid out a couple of bills for a room, went upstairs, then came back down to complain about the smell of puke in the room. The room didn’t really smell like puke, but it was such a plausible lie that the desk clerk didn’t blink. He switched her information in the computer and gave her a key card for a new room two floors up.

Gina had no intention of using the new room. She hurried back to the old room, where she’d left the door propped open with the brass security claw.

If someone
had
spotted her, or if the desk clerk ratted, Gina didn’t intend to make it easy for them.

She raided the minibar for a Luna protein cookie and a miniature bottle of vodka. She dragged the yellow pages out from beneath the nightstand and flopped them open on the bed.

She leafed to the S’s.

“Stamps and Coins, Rare—Dealers.”

That was easy. Gina finished the vodka and Luna cookie and realized how sleepy she was. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept, not counting maybe an hour or two in the suffocating trunk of the Town Car that left her more tired than when she started.

She tore the page out of the phone book and decided to take a nap. Reward for a mission accomplished more quickly than expected. Even a go-go-go girl like herself had to stop occasionally and recharge.

It was still early. Lots of daylight left. She’d have plenty of time, when she woke up, to find a buyer for those antique stamps.

Gina stripped down to her undies, curled up at the end of the bed, dragged the comforter over her.

What was the harm in a nap, just a little one?