15

Again he parked around the corner and approached the Sweet Cage on foot, putting as little weight as possible on the shoeless right one in case of broken glass hidden by the snow. The only car in the parking lot was a black 1980 Lincoln Continental, and for a brief, disoriented moment he thought it was his own company car. On closer examination he realized his mistake; this Lincoln had out-of-state plates. It was Bill Gerard’s own car. There was no one inside.

Two sets of fresh footprints, one male from the driver’s side and one female from the other, led from the Lincoln to the side door. They looked to him to be the only prints made since the snow had stopped. Charlie went first to the side door and tried it very gently. It was locked, and so was the front door. He looked at the pay phone on the corner and tried to come up with a legitimate excuse he could use for needing to get into the Sweet Cage outside business hours. Nothing remotely convincing suggested itself, but he moved over to the phone anyway and dialed information.

“Have you got a listing for a Sidney McCallum?”

“I have an S. J. McCallum on Tennessee and a D. S. on Twenty-third.”

“Give me both of them.”

He tried S. J. McCallum on Tennessee first. S. J. turned out to be a young woman who objected violently to being awakened before dawn on Christmas morning, and though she wasn’t Sidney, the torrent of abuse that came flowing over the line at Charlie was vivid and raunchy enough to suggest some sort of kinship with him. D. S. on Twenty-third stood for D. Sidney McCallum, and when he picked up he hadn’t been to bed yet.

“I can’t help it, I’m still pissed off about my mom and her husband just up and taking off for the Garden of the goddamn Gods with no warning and leaving me with my kids. Plus which that asshole boyfriend of Rusti’s tonight really got my adrenaline going.”

“I thought you were supposed to get tired after a big adrenaline rush like that.”

“Well, I’m not. So what’s up?”

“I got no place to go. Can I come over?”

This caught Sidney off guard. “Yeah. That’d be good. I got something to talk to you about anyway. I could make you some eggs and coffee if you want. Kids won’t be up for a couple hours, hopefully.” Charlie wrote down the address and limped back to the Mercedes as fast as he could.

Five minutes later Sidney let him into his house. “Sorry it’s such a mess. We don’t have anybody over, usually.” It was disorderly but clean, with toys as the predominant factor in the disorder. Charlie looked around the room for a key rack as Sidney led him back to the kitchen. “So, you just been out wandering around?”

“Yeah, more or less.”

“I do that sometimes, after I get off. Nights when I don’t have the kids, anyway. Just get out there and drive around with no particular destination.” He looked down at Charlie’s sock. “Looks like you lost a shoe, there.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t offer an explanation and hoped Sidney wouldn’t press it.

“You want to borrow some boots or something? What size are you?”

“Nine.”

“I’m a thirteen wide. Sorry.” He opened a cabinet. “I can make some coffee, if you want some.”

“I’d rather have a drink, if that’s okay.” There was no key rack in the kitchen, either.

“I don’t think I’ve got anything. I don’t drink at home much, because of the kids. . . .” As Sidney opened the refrigerator Charlie was vastly relieved to see two bottles of Schlitz inside the door. “Hey, what do you know, you’re in luck.” Sidney pulled out one of the bottles and cracked the cap off on the edge of the counter.

Charlie took it from him gratefully and held it before his eyes. Two beers wouldn’t stop the pain in his head, but it would do something toward taking the edge off.

“I think I’ll join you, come to think of it,” Sidney said, reaching for the other one, and Charlie’s heart broke a little as the big man cracked the second bottle open for himself. He took a first expectant sip of his own and his heart broke a little more as he realized that the bottle must have been in the refrigerator for a year or more. The beer was sour and lifeless, bitter as fermented aspirin, but he tried to convince himself that he could get it down. He swallowed the tiny sip with some difficulty.

“Here’s to next year, Charlie,” Sidney said, and took a giant swig that reversed course before it got to his throat, spraying the door of the refrigerator and Charlie’s overcoat with spoiled beer. “Shit! Gone skunky on me. Told you I don’t drink much at home. Yours okay?”

“Yeah, it’s a little flat, but it’s okay,” he said as he took a running shot at another sip. This one tasted worse than the first, and he set the bottle down next to the sink, admitting defeat. “On second thought, it is kind of skunky.”

Sidney shook his massive head sadly and poured both bottles foamlessly into the sink. “I’ll make some coffee anyway. You go on into the living room and sit down.”

Charlie sat down on the living room couch and looked around, trying to picture where the keys might be if they weren’t in Sidney’s pant pocket. If they were, Charlie had no idea what he’d do. The options seemed limited to knocking Sidney cold when he wasn’t expecting it, or asking him nicely if he could please borrow the keys for a couple of hours. Neither possibility held much promise. After a couple of minutes Sidney came out of the kitchen, set a cup of coffee in front of Charlie, and sat down in a recliner opposite.

“So you’re probably wondering what I wanted to talk to you about.” Until that moment Charlie had forgotten that Sidney had mentioned something he wanted to discuss.

“Yeah. So what’s on your mind?”

“You think that kid’s gonna press charges?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it.” He hadn’t thought about it.

“I can’t believe I did it. Makes me sick to my stomach. Feels like a fucking hangover. But he was going after her with a tire iron, Charlie. A fucking tire iron. And that new boyfriend of hers was no fucking help at all. He was curled up there in a fetal position whimpering while this guy smashed his driver’s-side window and came after him and Rusti.” He shook his head. “But still. I don’t know why I couldn’t have just fucked him up a little and sent him on his way. Those hands of his are crippled for life, probably.”

“I thought that was the idea. Him being a guitar player.”

Sidney smiled a little at the thought. “Yeah.”

“Look at it this way: it’ll make it harder for him to beat anybody up.”

“Yeah. When I think about Rusti’s black eye I don’t feel so bad. But that’s not really what gets me, Charlie. It’s the principle. I just don’t believe in solving problems with force all the time anymore. Karma and all that shit.”

“But you’re a bouncer.”

“You’d be surprised how many troublemakers’ll walk away quietly with a warning. It’s all in the voice. And the intensity of the stare.”

“Sure, I’ve seen you do it. But sometimes the stare doesn’t cut it.”

“I know, I know. So what do you think the odds are there’ll be charges filed?”

“Who knows. I know the cops pretty well who took him to the emergency room, and they weren’t any more impressed with him than you were, so I doubt they’ll cause you any trouble. He was delirious when they took him away.”

“You ever handled an assault case, Charlie?”

“No. You’ll have to get yourself a criminal lawyer if he files charges himself, but I’d be real surprised if he did. Does he know you?”

“Kind of. He knows I’m the bartender at the Sweet Cage.”

Charlie wrote a name and number down on a Marlboro ad on the back of a TV Guide on the coffee table in front of him. “Call this guy if it comes up. Tell him the whole story, don’t leave anything out, and he’ll have the kid’s ass in a legal sling. Nothing to worry about.”

He tested the temperature of the coffee with a measured sip, then took a long drink. It was hard for Charlie to concentrate on anything but what was happening back at the Sweet Cage. The way he figured it, Bill Gerard and Renata were at that very moment going through his money. His money. Some of it was stolen from Bill, true, but most of it he and Vic had earned fair and square.

The big man sighed and stood up. “You want some scrambled eggs? I’m gonna have some.”

“Sure,” Charlie said, and Sidney went back into the kitchen. Charlie stuck his hands into his overcoat pocket and fingered his own keys, and as he sat jingling them it came to him. He had a distinct mental image of Sidney at the Sweet Cage going to his coat hanging behind the bar to get his keys; he kept them in his overcoat pocket so he’d always know where to find them. He went to the closet by the front door and opened it. He looked through it, trying to figure out which of the coats was the right one.

“Oh, sorry,” Sidney said from the kitchen doorway. “I should’ve taken it when you first walked in the door. Like I said, we don’t have people over very often.” Charlie smiled stiffly and took his own overcoat off to hang it up, as though that had been his intention all along. “I was just going to ask if you wanted three eggs or four.”

“Three, I guess.”

Sidney returned to the kitchen and Charlie saw the coat hanging at the far end of the rack. He stuck his hand into one pocket, then the other. In the second pocket was a large key ring. Quietly he slipped the keys into his own coat pocket and turned toward the front door.

Again Sidney appeared in the kitchen door. “Can’t find a hanger?”

“No, I found one.” He took the coat off and hung it in the closet as Sidney returned to the kitchen.

“Another minute and they’re done.”

If he bolted there was always a chance Sidney would follow and get the keys back, and he’d never get into the Sweet Cage without them. He sat back down on the couch and flipped through the TV Guide, telling himself that Bill and Renata had a lot to hash out and would thus still be at the Sweet Cage on his return. The TV Guide was full of ads for the same cartoon Christmas specials he’d had to watch over and over, year after year when he lived with Sarabeth and the kids. He could still practically recite dialogue from some of them.

Sidney stepped out of the kitchen with two plates of grayish scrambled eggs and set them down on the coffee table with a bottle of Tabasco sauce.

Charlie took a bite of the ashen scrambled eggs, noting something crusty and old sticking to a tine of the fork. The eggs were bland, and he shook a considerable portion of the Tabasco on them.

“How are the eggs?”

“Good, thanks,” he said, and with the addition of the Tabasco it was almost the truth.

“I feel a lot better about all this, Charlie. I owe you one.”

“No, you don’t. The eggs are enough.” Charlie hadn’t realized it, but he really had been hungry. If he had any more time to spare he would have asked Sidney for more, but as soon as the plate was empty he stood up, leaving the plate on the table.

“I guess I’d better get going, then,” he said.

“Yeah, I should get a couple hours’ sleep before the kids wake up.”

It occurred to Charlie that he had no idea how many kids Sidney had, nor anything else about them. “Wish them a merry Christmas from me.”

“I will, buddy. Merry Christmas to you, too. You’re a real friend, you know that?” Sidney got him in a tight bear hug that actually hurt his sides. “Be seeing you soon.”

He opened the door and Charlie headed back to the Mercedes.

“Hey, got rid of the Lincoln, huh?”

“Company car,” Charlie said as he got in.

He pulled into the Sweet Cage lot and parked perpendicular to Bill Gerard’s Lincoln, almost touching it, so that Bill wouldn’t be able to leave without moving the Mercedes or damaging both vehicles. Charlie didn’t stop to ask himself exactly what he intended to accomplish with this maneuver, but he felt resourceful doing it. He stepped out and looked at the snow. There were the same two pairs of footprints leading into the building, along with his own from earlier, and no new ones beside his leading away from either door. At the front door he tried three of the keys on Sidney’s ring before he found the one that slid into the lock and turned. He pushed the door open slowly, made relatively certain the dark front room was empty, slipped inside, and pulled the door quietly shut behind him. The light behind the bar was on, and so was one in Renata’s office to its side. He crept along the wall opposite, listening for voices. Hearing none, he approached Renata’s office.

From inside he could make out the sound of Renata’s breathing. She sounded as though she were laboring at something. He pulled Roy Gelles’s little gun from the inside pocket of his overcoat and pushed the door open.

Renata looked up at him from behind her desk, her hands underneath it. “You’re just full of surprises tonight, Charlie,” she said, her voice low.

He gestured with the revolver. “Let’s get those hands where I can see ’em.”

“Don’t be a fucking idiot. Keep your voice down. You watch too many stupid old movies.”

He aimed the empty gun at her face. “I want to see your hands on the desk.”

“I can’t. Look.” With her head she gestured for him to move around the desk, and with some misgivings he did. Her hands were cuffed to its leg, forcing her to sit leaning forward.

“Bill did this?”

“You’re a genius, Charlie.”

“Shit. Where is he? What if he comes back? This thing’s not loaded.”

The gangster movie aspect of the situation that had thrilled him moments ago had lost its appeal.

“He’s taking a dump.”

“Where are the keys?”

“I don’t know. His pocket, probably.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll lift the desk and you can slip the handcuffs out from around the leg. We can get out before he gets done in there.”

“Not yet. He’s got your money.”

“How’d he get that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, it sure wasn’t under Bonnie’s tree.”

“He came by the house with it a few minutes after you left. He accused me of being in on it with Vic.”

“Just Vic? Not me?”

“He wasn’t very clear on anybody else but Vic. He’s been trying to get me to talk.”

“How?”

“Pull back the collar of my sweater.” He reached down and pulled at it, and she winced. Three circular red welts marked the right side of her neck.

“Jesus, are those cigarette burns?” He noted an odor of freshly smoked tobacco in the room.

She nodded, without a discernible trace of self-pity. “There’s a shotgun under the bar. You know how to use one?”

“Lot better than I do one of these things.” He put Roy’s gun back in his overcoat pocket.

“Go get it and wait. When he comes back in here, wait until I say ‘All right, I’ll tell you what I know.’ That’s your signal you’ve got a clear shot.”

“I’ll be outside, behind the stage,” he said. She nodded.

The shotgun lay easily handy on a shelf below the front bar. Charlie pulled it out and took a good long time opening the breech to avoid any audible clicks that might carry to Gerard’s stall. It was loaded and ready. He took an extra handful of shells from a small box next to where the shotgun had been and dropped them into his coat pocket. He hadn’t fired a gun of any kind since the army, and didn’t think he’d fired a shotgun since he was a teenager. He tried to think of the last thing he’d shot, but couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe a duck, or more likely quail. He’d never been too keen on getting up before dawn to go sit in a fetid duck blind and wait for the ducks to come. He closed the breech and carried the gun, barrel up, to the small circular stage. A first attempt to kneel behind the stage brought on another terrible burst of pain in his hip, and he ended up lying on his side, ready to rise when Gerard crossed from the men’s room to Renata’s office.

His free hand brushed against something soft on the floor, and he picked up what he recognized as Amy Sue’s blue panties. He wondered why she hadn’t put them back on after her last dance, then decided he didn’t want or need to know. He rubbed the silky material between his fingers for a second, then hooked one of its legs over the barrel of the gun and began twirling it in a circular motion, watching the shiny blue panties gyrate in the cold, stale air of the club.

He stopped when he heard a toilet flushing, barely noticing as the panties slid midway down the barrel. He clicked the safety off and peered around the corner of the stage. The men’s room door opened and Bill Gerard strutted tall and potbellied out of it, buckling his belt, his normally immaculate silver hair a disheveled mess. Over his arm was draped the jacket of a brown three-piece suit, its vest hanging unbuttoned from his narrow shoulders. Even thirty feet away Charlie could see he had an erection and needed a shave. He followed Bill’s head with the end of the barrel, leading it just slightly. When the moment came to pull the trigger, Bill surprised him by yelling, and the moment was lost.

“You know what really pisses me off,” he bellowed into the office. “I’m going to miss my grandkids opening their presents this morning if I don’t get on the road soon. And by the time I get back I’ll be exhausted.”

He disappeared into the office and Charlie rose awkwardly and painfully to his feet. He heard Renata’s voice, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. Bill Gerard had stopped yelling, but even at a normal conversational tone his nasal, braying voice was loud enough to hear from Charlie’s position.

“So how much longer are you going to keep me here on Christmas?” Charlie was twenty feet from the door. “Seems to me we could clear this up pretty easy if you decide to talk to me.”

Renata said something, but Charlie couldn’t hear what it was.

“Fair enough. Now you know what I want you to do for me? I want you to open that pretty little red mouth of yours, and when you’ve learned who’s in charge here maybe you’ll be a little more forthcoming with the information I require.”

Charlie couldn’t make out Renata’s reply, but he was close enough now to see through the doorway. Gerard had pulled his cock out of his fly and was holding it, erect, inches from Renata’s expressionless face. She showed no sign that she saw Charlie standing outside the door behind Gerard.

“Now open up for Bill,” Gerard said, and he moved a little closer to Renata as Charlie drew a bead on his head. “Come on, goddamnit, I’m not funning here.”

Gerard’s head was fifteen feet from the end of the barrel. Charlie hesitated. Pretend it’s a duck. A motionless, curly-haired duck with a hard-on. He squeezed the trigger and the gun went off, prompting a startled yelp of pain from Gerard and a speckling of red spots against the white of his hair instead of the explosion of skull and brains Charlie had anticipated. “What the fuck . . .” Gerard’s voice was up an octave as he turned around, his cock still in his hand. “Charlie? Jesus, the one guy down here I thought I could trust.” He took a look at the shotgun. “A four-ten? You tried to kill me with a fucking four-ten loaded for snake? I don’t know whether to laugh or be insulted.”

“Don’t move, Bill.” Charlie advanced on Gerard. “That was just to get your attention. At this range I’ll kill you dead.”

Gerard smirked, let go of his dick, and reached into his vest. He came out with a .22 caliber pistol and waved it at Charlie. “You really shit in your nest now, Charlie. Now set that fucking thing down.”

Charlie still had a bead on Bill Gerard’s head, and he tried hard not to glance down at Renata, who had discreetly moved off the chair and onto her knees, her head within striking distance of Gerard’s cock, still semierect and swinging.

“You half-assed farthammer, you haven’t even got both your shoes on. Come on, Charlie. I want to hear what all you’ve done to betray my trust before I shoot you. I want the details. I want—” Gerard’s voice cracked, his eyes went wide, and he lowered the pistol. “Oh, sweet Jesus . . .” Charlie finally allowed himself to glance down at Renata and found her with her mouth around Gerard’s joint, though not the way he’d intended. She had a good sideways grip on his shaft, her teeth bared and poised to bite it right into three separate pieces. Bill’s momentary panic turned quickly enough to rage, and he placed the barrel of the .22 against Renata’s right orbital bone. “If I even get the idea you’re thinking about biting down, you’re gonna be minus an eye.”

Charlie took three quick steps forward and fired, the end of the barrel less than a foot and a half from Gerard’s face. Snakeshot from the four-ten tore into it and Gerard fell backward. Renata released her grip, pulled away, and watched as he hit the ground, his face dotted with tiny, oddly clean holes that pooled quickly with blood and began overflowing as he lay there, raggedly sucking in air.

“I helped you a lot, Charlie. Goddamn.” His voice was sticky, his throat filling with liquid.

“Charlie!” She barked it, and there was no question of who was in charge. “Pick up the fucking pistol and finish him.”

He picked the pistol up off the floor and aimed it at Bill Gerard’s pocked, oozing face. Bill didn’t look like he much cared what Charlie did next. “He’s dying anyway.”

“Take that pillow and put it over his face.”

He picked up a green velvet throw pillow from a chair in the corner of the office and placed it over Gerard’s face as ordered. He didn’t resist; in fact he seemed only vaguely aware of Charlie’s presence. Charlie pressed the muzzle into the pillow and fired. The sound wasn’t too bad, he thought, but he started to worry about the noise the shotgun blasts had made. He almost lifted the pillow, then changed his mind. Renata looked coolly down at him.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was a four-ten? I almost got us both killed, firing at him from that distance.”

“That’s why I told you to wait until I said, ‘I’ll tell you what I know.’ ”

“I couldn’t hear what you were saying from out there. Anyway if I’d waited any longer he’d have had his dick in your mouth.”

“So fucking what? It ended up there anyway, didn’t it? The idea was for me to blow him until his guard was down; then I’d give the signal and you could get close enough to kill him.” She shook her head in wonderment at his in-ability to follow the simplest of instructions.

Charlie sighed. “In order to give me the signal, you’d have had to interrupt the blow job and he would’ve heard me.”

“I wouldn’t have said it until after he came.”

“What the hell are you doing with a pop gun like that behind the bar anyway? Loaded with snakeshot, for Christ’s sake?”

“Sidney’s in charge of all that. He doesn’t want to kill anybody.”

“From a liability point of view, that’s pretty stupid, Renata. You’d both be in a lot more legal hot water for Sidney maiming somebody than for killing him.”

“Well, now I know.”

“So where’s the money?”

She nodded at a satchel like an old-fashioned doctor’s bag sitting on the floor of the office. Charlie picked it up and set it on the desk. “Go ahead and open it. Bill already showed me.”

Charlie took a deep breath. He undid the latches and opened the bag.

“How much money is it, Charlie?”

He almost wept at the sight of all the stacks of Franklins jumbled together in the satchel, held together with rubber bands. “It’s a whole lot of money.” On top of the pile was an envelope containing two plane tickets, in the names of G. and B. Newman. He tossed the .22 onto the pile with a little prayer of thanks. Bill Gerard had saved his plan.

“Is it enough to take me with you, or are you going to kill me, too?”

He looked up at her, stunned. “I’m not going to kill you.”

“A man’s just had his brains scrambled by a twenty-two-caliber slug on my office floor, Charlie. It’s going to make it difficult for me to stay in business. It’s going to be a neat trick just staying out of jail. Looks like you’ve got a lot more than this club is worth in that bag of yours. If you’re not going to take me along, I’d just as soon you killed me.”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“Take me with you, then. I’d make it worth your while. I can be a lot of fun, Charlie.”

He looked at the tickets. Next to them in the envelope was an itinerary and an invoice indicating that they had been paid for in cash. Neither G. nor B. Newman had been assigned a full name or gender. They could be Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Newman. He had the name and address of a document artisan in New York who would supply him in two days’ time with a fake passport, and paying for another for Renata was easy enough. The very fact that there were two tickets in the bag was proof that Vic had planned to bring a woman along with him anyway, wasn’t it? The possibility lurked in the back of his mind that he’d been wrong about Vic’s plans, but he didn’t entertain it long.

“All right. You can come with me.”

Bill Gerard had more than saved his plan. He had made Charlie’s fondest fantasy come true, a fantasy he’d never even articulated to himself, but there it was, buried in the depths of his unconscious brain: him and Renata, in the tropics somewhere, screwing on top of his big pile of money with a fully stocked wet bar next to it.

“Pick up the desk, then.”

Charlie lifted the corner of the desk, the pain in his hip masked by euphoria. “You think anyone heard the shots?”

“Probably not,” she said, pulling the chain of the cuffs clear of the leg. “We’re pretty well insulated for sound because of the music. The four-ten’s not that loud for a shotgun, and you got a pretty good muffle on the twenty-two with the pillow. It’s probably best not to hang around any longer than we have to, though. Now why don’t you dig in his pocket for the key to the handcuffs and we’ll go to my house and I’ll pack a bag.”

He knelt down and stuck his hand in Bill Gerard’s pant pocket. The body twitched once, almost imperceptibly, when he touched it, and in a panic Charlie yanked the gory pillow away from its face. The wounds were no longer bleeding.

“Don’t worry, he’s dead. Just find the key.”

Again he slipped his hand into the pocket and pulled out Bill’s wallet, then an overloaded key ring, which he tossed to Renata.

“He’s not going to keep handcuff keys on the same ring as his house keys, now, is he? Check his shirt pocket.”

In the shirt pocket was a tiny pair of keys on a small wire ring. He opened the cuffs and she again pulled the collar of her sweater away from the burns. “I’d better get some antibiotic on these. Come on, let’s get going.”

“Could I get a beer before we go?”

She reached into her bottom drawer and handed him a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. “Here. We’ll take it back to my place.”

“Hold on a second.” Charlie knelt again by Gerard’s feet and pulled off his shoes. Size eleven. He took off his one shoe and both socks and put on Bill’s dry socks, then tried on the left shoe, a burgundy wing tip. It fit better than his own. He put the other one on and took a walk around the room. His remaining problems seemed small.