Gutshot Straight with Bonus Excerpt (23 page)

T
he statue where she was supposed to meet Ziegler was in the center of Plaza de Francia. Gina spotted it right away. A black bust of a guy with a big mustache, near what she was pretty sure was called an obelisk.
FERNANDO MARíA VIZCONDE DE LESSEPS
was engraved in the stone column the bust sat on. Gina remembered the name from the story the debonair guy at the antiquities shop had told them. She didn’t remember much of the story. Something about the French, and the Panama Canal before it was the Panama Canal. Gina had been distracted, too busy scoping out the cute little tamale of a shopgirl, trying to figure out who she reminded Gina of. The Latina actress on
My Name Is Earl
, maybe? With corkscrew hair instead of straight?

“Well, well, well,” Ziegler said. He’d come sneaking up behind her. He was exactly ten minutes early. The sun had just begun to sink. “I’d say I’m surprised to see you, Gina, but I’m not.”

His material was thin. It annoyed Gina. “We’ve already been down that road, Roland,” she said. “Let’s make a deal, whaddaya say?”

“You have them?”

She jiggled her purse—the real one, which she’d picked up at the hotel. She’d left the dummy back on Isla Taboga to fox Shake.

“You?”

He lifted the small, hard-sided suitcase he was carrying. It didn’t look that strange that he was carrying a suitcase. There were a lot of people in the crowded plaza carrying even odder things—like, one guy, a big ceramic goat.

“To complete the transaction,” he said, “please step into my office over here.”

He nodded toward the doorway of a nearby building.

“What’s wrong with right here?” she asked. She liked all the people around; she liked that there was a guy nearby who looked like a cop.

Ziegler pulled an exasperated face. “I’m not going to hand over six million dollars in cash in the middle of a crowded plaza.”

“We could stroll to the edge of the crowded plaza,” Gina suggested.

Ziegler just looked at her. “Your choice,” he said.

Gina knew what choice he meant: Take it or leave it. She hesitated. She knew what Shake would do, but she wasn’t about to walk away from 6 million bucks.

“Fine,” she said.

Doughboy smiled his good teeth at her. “Follow me.”

They entered the building. Ziegler, who had the keys, started to lock the door behind them. Gina put a hand on his to stop him.

“Yeah, right,” she said.

He shrugged. He led her down the narrow, dimly lit hallway to a big, dimly lit room. In the center of the room was a gigantic antique scale model of the Panama Canal.

“Wow,” Gina said.

“They’re storing a few items here while they renovate the main museum on Plaza de la Independencia. I arranged for the security staff to take a nice long siesta so we could have the place to ourselves. Us and our guest, of course.”

The hair on the back of Gina’s neck prickled as she realized that someone was standing behind her. She turned.

“You remember Señor Cornejo?” Ziegler said.

The debonair owner of the antiquities shop. He bowed. Gina relaxed. Sheesh, she was jumpy.

“He’s here to verify the authenticity of the merchandise,” Ziegler said.

“Just in case there might have been a mix-up?”

“Better safe than sorry.”

“How’s about I verify the authenticity of that six million dollars first?” Gina said.

“Not here.”

He led her and Cornejo past the scale model of the Panama Canal, down another corridor, up a staircase, into a smaller, stone-walled room furnished with a couple of plush sofas and lit by about a thousand candles.

“Very romantic,” Gina said. What was up with Ziegler and his thing for candles? The guy, no big news flash, definitely had a couple of screws rattling around in that doughy head of his.

He went to the balcony, which overlooked the square, and pulled the curtains open. It was dusk, and the moon was impossibly, beautifully ripe.

“We need the right atmosphere for a transaction of this magnitude,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

“I think I want to see what you have in that suitcase of yours.”

Ziegler set the suitcase on top of the coffee table and opened it.

“You want to count it?”

“You betcha,” she said.

Inside the suitcase were stacks and stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Gina thought it would have made her dizzy, looking at all that cash in one place, but it didn’t. She felt calm and clearheaded. She picked up a packet of cash at random and riffled through it. Ten grand per packet, just like at Moby’s, way back when. She replaced that packet of cash and riffled through several other packets.

Ziegler had been waiting with melodramatic patience. “Well?”

“Okay.”

“The foreskins?” Ziegler asked.

“I’ll call you in an hour and tell you where you can find them,” Gina said.

Ziegler snapped the lid of the suitcase closed, almost catching Gina’s fingers.

“Nice try,” he said.

“Didn’t think you’d fall for that,” she said. Although truthfully she thought maybe he might.

She opened her purse and took out the padded envelope she’d retrieved from the hotel safe. Ziegler pointed at Cornejo. Gina handed it to him.

Cornejo opened the padded envelope and very carefully withdrew the glass case with the foreskins. He spent a long time, longer than it had taken Gina to count the money, carefully examining them.

“Oh, my,” Cornejo said every few seconds.

Ziegler tapped his foot. He really, Gina realized, wasn’t a patient kind of guy. She guessed you kinda had to not be, if you were going to end up making a couple of hundred million bucks by the time you were forty.

“The verdict?” Ziegler said when he just couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Well,” Cornejo said slowly, “to be
absolutely
certain, of course, I would like to have time for a more extensive examination, but—”

“Genuine?” Ziegler said.

“Genuine,” Cornejo pronounced with a little bow.

Ziegler’s delight seemed almost childlike. He grabbed for the glass case with both hands and stared at the foreskins for a long time.

“Just think,” he whispered, but then didn’t finish.

Gina and Cornejo waited. Gina felt embarrassed and a little icked out. Cornejo just seemed embarrassed. He cleared his throat.

“Señor Ziegler,” he said. “I wonder . . .”

“Right, yeah,” Ziegler said without looking up from the foreskins. “You can show yourself out?”

Cornejo bowed again and glided off through a door on the other side of the room, which Gina hadn’t even noticed before.

She reached for the suitcase. “If we’re done here?” she said.

Ziegler looked up from the foreskins. It seemed to take a second for his eyes to rack back into focus. He returned the glass case with the foreskins to the padded envelope.

“So wait,” he said, “what about my invitation?”

“Thought about it,” Gina said. “But islands make me claustrophobic. I’m a gal needs wide open spaces.”

She started to slide the suitcase filled with money off the coffee table. The suitcase was heavy. In the best possible way.

“Actually, Gina,” Ziegler said, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”

Her hand tightened on the handle of the suitcase.

Fuck
, she thought. As simple as that:
Fuck
.

Everything had been going so smoothly.

Gina should have known better. She
had
known better.

Fuck
.

“Good news,” Ziegler said, “I’m now the proud owner of the one hundred extraordinarily rare, extraordinarily valuable foreskins. The most prized religious relic in the world.”

He waited, smirking. She refused to give him the satisfaction.

“Want to know what the bad news is?” he finally asked.

“You’re a doughy asshole who can’t get a girl like me even though he has a hundred million dollars and two private islands? How heartbreaking is that?”

One corner of Ziegler’s smirk took a hit but then recovered.

He turned toward the door through which Cornejo had exited.

“Gentlemen?” he called out.

Gina closed her eyes.
Fuck
.

When she opened her eyes again, Dick Moby and Jasper had stepped into the room. Both had guns drawn.

“You
fucker
,” Gina told Ziegler.

“Imagine Mr. Moby’s delight when I called to tell him I’d found his missing vixen.” He pried Gina’s fingers one by one off the handle of the suitcase. “Sorry, babe, you’re a peach, but you’re not worth six million bucks.”

Gina tried to distance herself from the moment and appreciate, in an objective sort of way, the sturdy architecture of Ziegler’s double cross.

“You keep the foreskins and the money . . .”

“And your pals here get their carnival prize.” Ziegler grinned. “Everybody wins.”

The Whale stared at Gina with his cold, dead eyes.

“I’m going to skin you alive,” he told her, “you fucking cunt.”

“Oops.” Ziegler chuckled. “I guess not
every
body wins.”

Gina was good in situations like this. She stayed cool. She didn’t panic or puke or pee her pants like most girls would have.

“Let’s all go for a ride,” Ziegler said. “Somewhere with more privacy—and soundproofing.”

Gina
felt
like panicking, puking, and peeing her pants. She just didn’t do it. She assured herself that that was an important distinction; she tried to believe that staying cool right now might make a difference.

“Why don’t we stroll instead?” she said. “It’s such a pleasant evening out.”

“Get her,” Moby told Jasper.

“It is you!” a voice said.

Gina turned. The Whale and Ziegler and Jasper turned.

“Who the fuck are you?” Moby asked the guy who’d appeared in the doorway Gina and Ziegler had come through.

“It is you!” the guy said again, excited. He stared kind of wild-eyed at Gina and didn’t seem even to notice that there was anyone else in the room. “I knew it was you! When I saw you out on the plaza!”

The guy was tall, with reddish hair and an open, friendly face, and Gina had never seen him before in her life. She had no idea what he was talking about. Given her current predicament, though, and the strong sense that her luck had nowhere to go but up, she wasn’t about to split hairs.

“Hi!” she said, delighted. “Ohmygod! How have you been?”

The guy frowned. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

Gina laughed. “Of course I do!”

“Get rid of this fucking turd,” the Whale snarled at Ziegler.

“How did you get in here?” Ziegler demanded. “This is a private . . . function.”

“The side door was unlocked,” the guy told Ziegler. Without taking his eyes off Gina. She still had no idea why he thought he knew her.

“I’m not Sienna Miller,” Gina said, “if that’s what you’re thinking. The actress? I get that every now and then.”

“You stole my wallet!” the guy said.

Gina blinked. Tried to think. His—Shit!

The airplane; the airport; the baggage-claim area when they’d landed in Panama City.

“The Cocksman?” she said.

He winced. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that. My name is Ted Boxman.”

“Let’s go!” the Whale snarled.

“We’re leaving,” Ziegler said. He set the suitcase full of money on the floor so he could grab the Cocksman’s arm. So he could move the Cocksman away from the doorway. The Cocksman wrenched his arm free.

“No!” he said. “I want to explain to her the repercussions of her actions.”

“Take your time,” Gina encouraged him. Her processors were humming, white-hot. Door number one to her left, the door she and Ziegler had come through, was blocked by the Cocksman. Door number two, to her right, was blocked by Jasper and the Whale. Her best shot was probably the balcony, straight ahead, a more or less clear shot, but the balcony would involve a twenty-foot drop to the cobblestones below and maybe breaking some key bones, the prospect of which Gina wasn’t crazy about.

On the other hand, when you compared that to getting skinned alive, hey, not much of a dilemma.

“I’ve had the worst three days of my life, thanks to you,” the Cocksman said. “And I really actually do, I want to thank you for that.”

Gina cocked her head, curious despite herself. “Really? Why?”

Ziegler had grabbed the Cocksman’s arm again, but he seemed curious, too.

“It was the kick in the pants I needed,” the Cocksman said, “and I needed one, because I’d spent the last eighteen months just sort of feeling sorry for myself. If you hadn’t stolen my wallet, if everything that happened to me hadn’t happened to me, and I’m not saying that stuff was fun, but I would never in a million years have—”

“Yo, Ted,” Jasper said quietly.

The Cocksman stopped talking and looked over at Jasper. Jasper turned his gun up and to the side, sort of a backward L, so the Cocks-man would be sure not to miss it.

“You’ve got a gun,” the Cocksman said, surprised.

“That’s right,” Jasper said.

“Oh,” the Cocksman said. He saw Moby’s gun then, too. He saw the suitcase on the floor. He seemed to realize, finally, that the worst three days of his life weren’t over yet. “Oh.”

Ziegler set the padded envelope with the foreskins on the coffee table so he could use both hands now to pull the Cocksman away from the door. The Cocksman allowed himself this time to be pulled, then shoved onto the couch.

“Sit there,” Ziegler said. “Don’t move. You understand? You call the police, anything like that, you’re a dead man.”

“Yes,” the Cocksman said. “I understand.”

“No,” Jasper said.

“He’s seen us,” the Whale said.

The Cocksman, Gina could tell, didn’t understand the implications of this. He looked to Gina for an explanation. She felt a sharp pinprick pang at the base of her throat.

“Leave him out of this, why don’t you,” she said.

“You want me to leave your friend out of this?” the Whale asked. Gina realized she’d just made a terrible mistake. Not the day’s first.

“Fine,” Ziegler said. “Let’s all go for a ride.”

Gina tensed. But then Moby—like he knew what she was planning, the fat, poisonous lizard—took two steps to his right and cut off her clear angle on the balcony.