Big Stupid (POPCORN) (4 page)

Then Big Stupid tossed him against the wall and he joined his buddies in La-La Land.

The room spun and blurred, and I realized Big Stupid had tossed me over his shoulder.

“Whoa,” I croaked. “Where you going? We won.”

He started jogging, his huge shoulder bruising my ribs. “The girl.”

I realized I didn’t hear the screaming anymore.

“She ran for it,” Big Stupid said. “Maybe calling for help.”

He ran down the center of the quiet residential street, me bouncing on his shoulder like a bare-ass sack of potatoes.

I sat low in the passenger seat of the Humvee, my head just above the dashboard. I cast about the WalMart parking lot.

The last thing I needed was a cop or a security guard asking where my clothes went.

My ass was sweating on the imitation leather seat.

I replayed current events slowly through my brain one more time, trying to figure how a blowjob went so bad so fast.

It’s hard to think straight when you’re naked and three dudes are raining fists down on you and a giant black guy is jumping through a glass window and some woman is screaming her face off.

So in the muggy quiet of the WalMart parking lot I tried to figure it out. Why lure me to her place and then let loose a trio of bully boys on me. Is that something she’d planned all along or decided after we got to her place? And she’d said something.

I reached back, tried to comb the debris away from the memory I was groping for, the sounds of fists hitting flesh, men grunting and struggling then glass shattering. What had she said?
He knows. We’ve got to find out who he told.

Evidently I knew something. I wish I knew what I was supposed to know.

I saw Big Stupid crossing the lot, headed back for the Humvee. About damn time. I’d seen firsthand that he could move fast when he wanted to, but this wasn’t one of those times.

He ambled like a crippled glacier around to his side, climbed into the vehicle and handed me a shopping bag.

“Thanks.” I opened the bag, started taking out clothing.

I pulled out a Hawaiian shirt with a tropical pattern in muted yellow and forest green. It looked like some Jimmy Buffet shit Ray would wear. “I said just a regular T-shirt.”

“Those colors are good for your skin tone,” said Big Stupid.

“Skin tone? Okay, forget it. Clothes are clothes, right?”

He put his hands on the wheel, waited, looking straight ahead.

He’d also purchased me a pair of Levi jeans, size 34 waist, Spiderman boxer shorts, white ankle socks, and generic white sneakers.

I put on the shirt last, the polyester immediately sticking to my sweaty skin. On reflex, I patted the pockets of my jeans.

“Oh, shit.”

Big Stupid turned his head, looked at me without expression.

“My wallet and private investigator I.D. are in my other pants. Motherfucker. We have to go back.”

A pause, then Big Stupid said, “Maybe that’s a bad idea.”

“Well, I got no identification and no fucking money, so if you have any better ideas, I’m all ears.”

He turned his head back, looked straight out the front window. A second passed. Then another second past. I thought maybe he’d gone into some kind of catatonic state.

“Okay,” he said finally.

He cranked the Humvee and drove it back toward Sandy’s house.

I grabbed my gym bag from the floor and pulled out the revolver Ray had given me, double checked the ammo. Loaded for bear.

Big Stupid glanced at the gun. “What are you going to do with that?”

I made a face at him like that was a dumb question. “What the hell you think I’m going to do?”

A few seconds slid by. There always seemed to be pause before Big Stupid said anything. Like the words left his brain and got lost on the way to his mouth.

“In my experience,” he said, “guns usually cause more problems than they solve.”

I blinked at him.

I said, “Well, in my experience I find that I do not like getting my fucking ass kicked, and I’m going to blow some son of a bitch’s face off before I let it happen again.”

He moved his huge shoulders in a way that might have been a lazy shrug.

I told him to pull over a half block from Sandy’s house. We sat there for five minutes watching, but nothing happened. I climbed out of the car, tucked the revolver in the back of my jeans. The shirt hung down and covered it well enough.

“Stay here,” I said. “Back in a few minutes.”

I approached her driveway slowly, ready to turn tail and sprint back to the Humvee if I needed to. Nobody jumped out at me. No surprises. The front door wasn’t even locked. I pushed, and the door creaked open slowly. I paused, listened.

I heard the dogs barking, but they were still in the back yard. I went inside, closed the door behind me.

I quickly circled the interior of the house. Nobody home. I pondered what that might mean. Think about it. You just got your ass kicked by Big Stupid, but you can’t call the police because you were just gang beating on some naked dude. Those guys had split, off somewhere licking their wounds.

The lady of the house was a mystery too. Why had she called in the goon squad? I replayed walking into the Saber offices, talking to Prescott, inviting Sandy to lunch, arriving at her house the first time.

I couldn’t figure anything I’d done or said to invite an ass-whupping.

In the kitchen, I found my clothes on the floor. I scooped them up, checked the pockets of my jeans. My wallet and P.I. identification were still there. The relief that flooded me was so palpable I started giggling.

Okay. You’re a private eye. You’re in the house of the woman who set you up for a beating. What do you do now?

I poked around.

Sandy was pretty normal. No dead bodies in the closet. No smoking gun in the kitchen junk draw. I checked the dresser in the master bedroom. Even her underwear was boring.

I crossed the room to her little desk. A leather address book. I paged through it, phone numbers and the usual. I put it in my back pocket. Her phone had a display showing the incoming calls. I scrolled though her incoming calls for the last twenty-four hours, jotted the numbers down on a piece of scrap paper. Fourteen calls in all, eleven different numbers.

I looked around the house one more time in case I’d missed a blinking neon sign that said CLUE. I hadn’t missed anything. Or maybe I just didn’t know what a clue looked like.

There was a picture on her desk, her and some dude, arms around each other like boyfriend and girlfriend. He had the tattoo of a dragon under one ear, the dragon’s tail wrapping around under his throat.

* * *

I went back to the Humvee.

Big Stupid sat there reading a copy of Avengers.

“I like
Bat Man
,” I said.

Big Stupid looked at me. “That’s DC.”

“So?”

He turned back to the
Avengers
. “I don’t read DC.”

“You should broaden your horizons.”

He said nothing.

“You know why Bat Man is better?” I asked.

He said more nothing.

“Because Bat Man has no powers is why. He’s just a bad ass. Anyone could be a super hero with eyebeams or whatever. Bat Man is just smart and tough. That’s why he’s better. Just a regular guy, kicking butt and taking names.”

“He’s rich.”

“What?”

“Bat Man is Bruce Wayne,” said Big Stupid. “And he’s a billionaire.”

“Being a billionaire is not the same as having a super power.”

“But it’s not the same as being a regular guy either.”

“Just drive,” I told him.

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

He put the Humvee into gear and drove. I sulked in the passenger seat, thinking myself around in circles, trying to figure out what had happened and what should happen next.

Eppert was not the inside guy. Sandy had somehow arranged the blame to be put on him to cover her ass.

Five minutes later, Big Stupid said, “I don’t know where we’re going.”

“Me neither.”

“Why were those guys beating you up?”

I sighed. “To find out if I told anyone about Sandy.”

A long pause then he said, “What about her?”

“That she was the inside person at Saber. She thought I was onto her.”

“What now?”

“Don’t know.”

“Think back through the events leading up to it,” Big Stupid suggested.

“I did that already.”

“Say it out loud,” he said. “It’s different when you say it out loud.”

So I told him the story, starting with him pulling up in front of the Saber offices and ending with him jumping through Sandy’s living room window like the Merrill Lynch bull.

“You were outside smoking with her?” Big Stupid asked.

“Yeah.”

“You shouldn’t smoke.”

“Is that relevant?”

“Then she went inside?”

“Yeah.”

“And she stayed inside a long time?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I thought maybe she was ditching me.”

“How long?”

“I didn’t have a stopwatch.”

“Long enough to make a phone call?”

“How the hell do I know?” I said. “Maybe she had to take a shit. Maybe she lost her car keys or—”

I shut up. Things in my brain slid into place, clicked. “Yeah, she could have called somebody. Sure. That was when she arranged it.”

“What did you say to her right before she went inside?” Big Stupid asked.

I replayed the conversation in my brain very slowly this time. Sentence by sentence. Word by word.

“I said I had a hunch that somebody besides Eppert might have been the inside guy for the armored car job.”

“Yeah. She thought you suspected her. She took off.”

I thought about that. Then I thought about it some more.

“Pull over someplace,” I said. “Let’s get a beer.”

We sat at the bar at a place called Ivar’s, a sports pub nestled under the I-10 overpass. The jukebox played Garth Brooks.

A sort of oddball mixed crowd, students skipping glass, ex-hippies, good old boys and a scattering of professionals.

Attorneys on extended lunch breaks loudly played the Golden Tee machine behind us, ties pulled loose, fists filled with frosted mugs of yellow beer.

I finished my own mug of yellow beer, and waved over the college kid behind the bar for a refill.

Big Stupid was methodically making a plate of chicken tenders go away via a dipping bowl of honey mustard sauce.

A glass of iced tea the size of the Stanley Cup was already half empty.

“Hey,” I said.

He ignored me, chewed chicken tender.

“Hey,” I said again with a little more gusto.

He froze in mid-chew, his eyes sliding sideways to look at me without turning his head.

“Have a real drink, man. Come on. I’m buying.”

“I have to drive.”

Whatever.

I pulled Sandy’s address book out of my pocket. Also the scrap paper with the names and numbers I’d written down. I set them side by side on the bar. I sipped beer.

I compared the numbers on the scrap paper to the numbers in the book. I sipped more beer.

It didn’t take long to develop a little system. Cross out obvious numbers that were definitely not clues. The hairdresser. The veterinarian. Put a question mark by first names. If she only write the first name, then that meant she was familiar. Phil, Susan, Monica. Brother, sister, cousin, high school pal? Then sip some more beer. Keep the creative juices flowing.

First and last names together implied a more formal relationship. Boss, doctor, accountant. I circled those names. I wasn’t getting this system out of any shamus handbook. Just seemed to make sense.

The bartender brought me a fresh mug of beer.

Big Stupid had started on a plate of onion rings.

“Look it.” I showed Big Stupid what I’d accomplished on the scrap paper.

He leaned toward the paper, looked at it from under heavy eyelids. “What is it?”

“That’s detective work, hombre.”

He nodded, didn’t ask for details.

I told him anyway.

“What are you going to do with those names now?”

“Find out if the circled ones are important,” I said.

“How?”

“That’s a fuh—” I belched beer fumes through my nose, waved them away. “A fucking good question.”

I kept drinking beer. Stupid washed down onion rings with iced tea. I remember making a trip to the jukebox and playing that Chumbawumba “I get knocked down” real loud.

I remember telling Stupid about my bass boat, being pleasantly surprised that he fished, talked lures. I remember a very dorky esoteric argument about the differences between The Submariner and Aqua Man.

I don’t remember much after that.

* * *

I awoke with a stiff neck on a short couch. I sat up, rubbed my head. A beer hangover wasn’t so bad. I felt bloated, head a little fuzzy. No nausea like after a big bourbon night.

My shoes were on the floor next to the couch.

My head did a slow swivel as I took in my surrounding.

A small living room. Mismatched cheap furniture. A rag rug on a rough wooden floor.

An easy chair with duck tape on the arms. An old, small TV in the corner. A poor house but clean. Gray early morning light seeped in through the blinds.

A little black girl came in from the hallway. She had tentacles of hair sticking every direction out of her head.

Like a big hairy tarantula. She was maybe nine and clutched a white Barbie Doll to her chest.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” she said back.

“This your house?”

She nodded.

“Thanks for the couch.”

She said, “Mama wants to know if you want eggs.”

“Okay.”

“Scrambled?”

“Okay.”

She ran back down the hall, and I could hear her yelling “Mamaaaaaaaa! He wants scraaaaambled!” like some kind of shrill tornado siren.

I put on my shoes.

I headed down the hall, passed bedrooms. Through one open door I saw pink walls and rumpled Princess & The Frog sheets. The little girl’s room, I presumed.

I followed the hall to the kitchen.