Gutshot Straight with Bonus Excerpt (20 page)

S
hake woke the next morning to find Gina already dressed, in the bathroom, spraying perfume out in front of her then stepping quickly through the resultant cloud.

“You’re a lazy bum,” she said when she realized he was awake. “It’s almost nine.”

“You look like a girl with a plan.”

She came back into the room and hopped onto the bed. Had some fun for a minute bouncing Shake around on the mattress.

“I thought I’d get out, look around. Maybe check out that statue, the one the guy at the shop was talking about?”

“Ferdinand de Lesseps,” Shake said.

“And whatever else there is to see. As I may have mentioned, I really want to see a sloth.’ Cause really, when am I ever gonna make it back to Panama, right?”

Then, in not the next breath but the one just after:

“You wanna come with me?” she said.

Shake propped himself up on one elbow and studied her. Was the invitation sincere? Or was it calculated to forestall his suspicion? Or was it—who knew with this girl?—somehow both?

It wouldn’t be in bed, Shake realized, that Gina finally wore him out.

“Sure,” he said. “Count me in.”

“Cool,” she said, without the slightest hint that his answer might have surprised or thrown her. Instead she grabbed the room-service menu from the nightstand and started flipping through. “You want to order breakfast up or go out? I’m not starving, but I could use some coffee and eggs.”

“Never mind,” Shake said, trying again, watching closely. “Go on without me. I think I’m gonna sleep in, then find somewhere I can get a massage.”

Her eyes didn’t tell him a thing. “ ’Cause you’re old,” she said. “Poor, poor boy.”

“I’m gonna try to find someone to sell me a walker.”

She made a tent of the room-service menu and put it on his head like a hat. It fell off after a second.

“Okay, then,” she said.

He waited. If she were smart, she’d ask again was he sure he didn’t want to come sightseeing with her? If she were smarter, she wouldn’t ask, she wouldn’t resort to such a naked ploy as that.

“What kind of massage? Better not be the kind with a happy ending.”

“What’s wrong with a happy ending?” he asked.

“They’re never really either,” she said, “in my experience.”

“Inscrutable aphorisms from the college girl.”

“That’s a long story. I’ll tell it to you sometime if you’re nice. I was a Division I track star.”

“What?”

“Briefly.”

She hopped off the bed again.

“Go back to sleep if you’re gonna go back to sleep, or come with me if you’re gonna come with me. Sheesh. I like a man who knows what he wants.”

She was impossible to read. But it was sure fun trying.

“I know what I want,” he said. “Meet here for dinner?”

“Gotcha,” she said, and blew him a kiss on her way out the door.

SHAKE WENT TO THE BALCONY
and watched her leave the hotel. She strolled out onto the street without a care in the world—and without glancing over her shoulder up at the balcony. Either she didn’t consider the possibility that he might be spying or she didn’t need to glance up to know he was.

He thought about tailing her, wherever she was headed, but decided against it. That wasn’t the sort of behavior a healthy relationship was built on.

And besides, he had work to do.

After Gina turned the corner and disappeared, Shake went inside and quickly put his clothes on.

G
ina turned the corner, and a limo was waiting for her. She got in the backseat. The driver was one of the Panamanian waiters from dinner last night, the one who wasn’t a pilot.

Ziegler handed her a Mimosa.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“You’ll see.”

“Whatevers.” She was in a cranky mood suddenly and didn’t know why. Earlier this morning she’d been in a great mood. Getting dressed, getting ready for an adventure, it always gave her such a delicious buzz. It’s why, she guessed, she’d never really been much into drugs. Improvising lies on the fly was like flying, like playing jazz,
great
jazz—coke or E couldn’t compare to that.

She couldn’t remember her first kiss, and there was some uncertainty in her mind about when exactly she’d lost her virginity. She knew to
whom
, of course—she wasn’t that bad; she just couldn’t precisely remember if it had happened that first night at the beach house, or was it the night after, when his parents were back in town and they took the blanket down to the water? One of those nights, definitely. Or, possibly, the night before the first night at the beach house. It might have been then.

Give a girl a break. It was a long time ago, she’d only been fifteen, and the experience, let’s face it, had been less than magical.

But damn, she could vividly remember her first score. Ten years old. A store at the mall called Wet Seal, which her mother called Wet Snatch. Ten years old, Gina didn’t get the joke, of course. She’d been looking at a ring. You weren’t supposed to touch, so she did. She liked the way that felt. The tingle. She liked the tingle when she picked up the ring and put it in her pocket and walked out the door.

That was the moment—a few minutes later, once a security guard caught up to her at Sbarro and grabbed her by the arm—when Gina discovered she had a natural gift for lying. It was like, to stick with the jazz metaphor, discovering you had perfect pitch or picking up a saxophone and discovering you knew exactly where you needed to put your fingers to make beautiful music.

Gina had convinced the security guard that the ring she’d taken from the store was actually hers, that she’d set it down when she’d tried on another ring and left it behind by mistake. She’d explained that the ring was a birthday present her mother had given her two months ago, a sentimental keepsake that had belonged to her mother’s great-aunt. The great-aunt, when she was a child, had played one of the Lollipop Guild Munchkins in
The Wizard of Oz
, but her movie career was cut short when she died young of diabetes. There had been an inflatable moonwalk at the birthday party, but Gina had not been allowed to wear the ring while bouncing in case the ring accidentally punctured the moonwalk or another child.

Where the hell had all that come from? Gina had no idea. But at age ten she’d learned two things for sure: The getting into trouble had been fun; the getting out of it had been narcotic.

“Do you know anyone with perfect pitch?” she asked Ziegler.

“What?” He looked at her blankly. Doughboy didn’t like being asked questions that threw him off or made him think or weren’t about him. Which was another thing that set him—far—apart from Shake.

“Never mind.” She tipped back the rest of her Mimosa. She thought about how, earlier, back in the room, she’d asked Shake if he wanted to come along with her today. She thought about how he’d said yes at first, then no. Watching her the whole time. Gina smiled. She liked lying to Shake almost as much as she liked fucking him. And for the same reasons. He knew how to play; he raised her game.

Was that why she was in a cranky mood right now? Because she’d lied to Shake?

But that didn’t make sense. How could something make you feel good and bad at the same time? Because, crankiness aside, she could also feel in her veins right now that familiar hum, the tingle she always got when she did something she wasn’t supposed to be doing.

If she was going to be honest with herself, she had to admit that Shake had his share of faults. He was almost
too
easygoing. Zero ambition. Gina knew he’d never have the giddyup to start his own restaurant.

On the other hand, was that so terrible?

There were a lot of tangled paradoxes here, especially for nine-thirty in the morning. Which was, like, six-thirty Vegas time.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Ziegler said.

“Then I guess you don’t know me very well,” she said with a big bright smile.

SHAKE WENT DOWNSTAIRS.
The nervous young assistant hotel manager with the expressive eyebrows was at the desk. When he saw Shake approaching, his eyebrows tensed.

“Don’t panic,” Shake assured him, “I’m not going to ask you to open the safe for me.”

“Of course not, Señor Boxman,” he said.

“Open the safe for me,” Shake said.

“What?” The manager was so panicked he actually clapped both hands to his cheeks, like that Edvard Munch painting in Oslo. Shake knew about the painting,
The Scream
, because one of the guys at Mule Creek claimed to know one of the guys on the crew who stole it a few years back. But then something happened with the crew, Shake couldn’t remember what, and they’d ended up ditching the painting. It had been your typical criminal clusterfuck. A bunch of sociopaths with one good idea and nine bad ones.

“I’m just kidding,” Shake told the assistant manager. He had not meant to cause such masterpiece-grade panic. “I don’t want you to open the safe for me.”

The guy’s eyebrows expressed great relief. “No, Señor Boxman. Of course not.”

“I have a question.”

“Please.”

“Where’s the worst dive bar in the area?”

“Pardon me, señor?”

“Cheapest booze, skankiest hookers?”

The assistant manager straightened the posture of his eyebrows and made a soft guffaw sound through his nostrils.

“Señor Boxman,” he said, “I am very sure I would know of no such establishment.”

“But you have a brother-in-law,” Shake said. “Right?”

The assistant manager nodded warily. “Three. Yes.”

“And I bet at least one of them is a major asshole.
Pendejo?
Am I right?”

Shake knew he was right, the way the assistant manager’s eyebrows danced and knitted.

“So,” Shake said, “where would your
pendejo
brother-in-law hang out?”

AT THE AIRPORT, ZIEGLER’S PANAMANIAN
waiter-driver handed them off to his Panamanian waiter-pilot. They flew in the little jet for about an hour, buzzing east to west across practically the entire length of the isthmus. Doughboy still wouldn’t tell Gina where they were headed, nor why he’d wanted to meet with her separately from Shake.

She pretty much knew, without asking, the answer to that second question. And since Ziegler wasn’t exactly a mystery wrapped in an enigma when it came to his motives, she was pretty sure she knew the answer to the first question, too.

Sure enough: The plane banked around a scatter of several small islands just off the coast, then came in low over water that was impossibly green, impossibly clear, and landed on the island farthest out.

“Welcome to my lair,” Ziegler said with a big grin, and Gina pretended like she was surprised and delighted.

Which, actually, she kind of was, delighted, once she got a good look at his house. It was gigantic, right on the pure sugar beach, with a sweeping teak veranda built partly over the water. As they came up the path, a woman in a starched white uniform hurried out of the house and handed Gina a cool, wet towel scented with aloe.

“So,” Ziegler said, “surf or turf?”

“For lunch?”

He chuckled. “Want to hike my jungle or snorkel my reefs?”

He has
two
of these islands
, Gina reminded herself.

She picked reefs. Already laid out in one of the bedrooms, which was about three times the size of their room back at the hotel, were a half dozen designer bikinis in Gina’s size. She changed into one and joined Ziegler on the beach.

They put on their masks and swam out a few hundred feet. Right off, thirty seconds in the water, Gina saw a huge spotted ray, size of a coffee table. It floated toward her, under her, then flicked the tips of its wings and shot away. An hour later she’d seen two more velvety rays, three turtles, more schools of iridescent fish than she could count. On and on and on.

The only other time Gina had been snorkeling had been at Disney World, one of the water parks there, where you paddled across a cramped little artificial lagoon you hoped none of the splashing kids around you had taken a dump in.

“This is freaking awesome,” Gina said. She was underwater when she said it, with the snorkel mouthpiece in her mouth, which probably explained Doughboy’s puzzled look when he turned his mask toward her, his beady, close-set eyes behind the mask.

“Blah-wab?” he said. She guessed that meant,
What?

Gina tried again. “This. Is. Freaking. Awesome.”

Ziegler wasn’t paying attention. He’d grabbed her wrist and was pointing to the left. She followed his finger and saw drifting nonchalantly past—four or five freaking feet long if it was an inch, sleek and beautiful—a shark.

Ziegler pointed at the shark. Then pointed at Gina.

She was confused. Did he want her to, like, catch it? If he thought she was going to try to catch that shark, he was seriously out of his head.

Ziegler pointed at the shark again, then back at Gina, then at himself. He grinned around his snorkel mouthpiece, and Gina finally got it, then, what he was trying to tell her.

THE PLACE WAS CALLED EL PERICO
, and if it wasn’t the worst dive bar in Panama City, Shake didn’t want to go near the one that was. At least not without a hazmat suit and a detachment of riot police.

It was only noon, but there were already a dozen or so customers—each one sitting by himself, hunched around a drink at the bar or at one of the little tables, silhouetted by the light streaming in through the big doors propped open to catch the breeze. A hard-eyed, acne-pocked stripper was on a small stage. She was doing something, a sort of sluggish shuffle around the pole, that could not by the most generous stretch be called dancing.

Shake waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness and the haze of cigarette smoke. He hoped his instincts, in this case, were correct. Historically speaking, his instincts were usually correct about half the time, which when you thought about it was probably the worst of all possible past performances. If your instincts were usually wrong, for example, a smart player would learn to ignore them.

His instincts this morning weren’t wrong. He spotted, at the far end of the bar, Dikran’s big, bald, bullet-shaped head. Dikran was hunched around a drink, watching the stripper, his back to Shake.

Shake checked to make sure there was no mirror behind the bar, then moved silently up behind Dikran. He stepped up onto the rung of Dikran’s stool for leverage and used his forearm to slam the big, bald, bullet-shaped head against the bar. With his other hand, he grabbed the Glock that was sticking out of Dikran’s waistband.

Dikran spun around and swung wildly. Shake ducked the punch and jammed the barrel of the Glock into Dikran’s gut.

Shake tried to remember—he was a car guy, not a gun guy—if Glocks had safeties. If this one did, and it was on, and Dikran processed the implications quickly enough, Shake knew he was a dead man.

Dikran, though, didn’t move. Unless, of course, you counted the surge of blood that turned his squashed, ugly face even uglier, bruise-purple with rage.

“Calm down, big boy,” Shake said. He didn’t want Dikran to pop a vessel before Shake extracted the information he needed.

“You mother
fuck
,” Dikran sputtered. “I
kill
you.”

The bartender glanced down the bar at them with a bored look. He said something in weary Spanish that Shake guessed probably meant, “Take it outside.”

None of the other customers, nor the stripper, had so much as glanced up. Even though Dikran’s head had cracked the bar and made the shot glasses jump.

“Is she here in Panama?” Shake asked. It didn’t make sense that she would be, but nothing else about Lexy’s involvement in this made sense either.

If she wasn’t here in Panama, Shake’s plan would require some drastic revision, and it wasn’t much of a plan to start with.

“Fuck you!” Dikran said. “I tear your head off like onion and use it to—”

“Shut up.” Shake dug the barrel of the Glock hard up under Dikran’s rib cage and ripped the testosterone patch off Dikran’s arm.

“Fuck!”

“Is she here?”

Dikran just glared at him. He knew he was a bad liar and didn’t even attempt one.

Shake relaxed. He moved back a few feet in case Dikran in his rage decided to risk a gut shot from the Glock and hammer Shake with a nuclear head butt.

Even odds, Shake figured.

The bartender looked at the gun in Shake’s hand, looked at Shake, said the thing in Spanish again. This time he also made a shooing motion toward the door.

“Hay no problema,”
Shake assured him.

“Take me to her,” he told Dikran. “Now.”