Hook and Shoot (9 page)

Burch pulled the pistol out and checked the chamber. His hands had a light tremble. Maybe I'd hit him too hard.

“You okay?”

“Fuck off.”

Maybe not.

I lifted the door and stepped aside. Burch led with the gun and cleared the space. The foul mattress set was still there, chuckling. I had a brief hope it had scared
any intruders away, then Burch pointed at the freezer. I was ready to look at it this time, still didn't enjoy it.

The padlock was on the floor, also torched, and the lid was closed. We went over and Burch lifted it. The hot air swept in and mixed with the chilled, made a rolling cloud of mist that lapped over the edge of the box. Burch stuck his hand in and waved the mist out.

Empty.

“This your work?” Burch said.

“You know where I was all night.”

“It's been established you have no shortage of acquaintances who could handle this sort of thing.”

“It wasn't me.”

“I don't believe you.”

The mist shifted. Something flat was at the bottom of the freezer.

Burch saw it too. “Fetch.”

I tried not to think about getting thrown into the bathtub and held underwater with the rusty mesh lid, Tezo and Parasite sitting on it and laughing. And that's all I could think of while I reached into the freezer and pulled out a brown envelope. I worked on breathing and opened it.

Inside was an unfolded sheet of regular paper. It was a photo of me and Burch carrying the dead body into the storage unit. The photo showed part of the limo and had been taken from the roof of the
unit across the narrow aisle with some kind of night vision lens.

We stared at it in silence.

I turned the sheet over. Printed on the back:

We have two freezers ready for you.

Abandon Eddie.

Midnight.

Burch drove. Between that and the Yakuza putting a midnight deadline on my pulse, I felt pretty confident I was going to die in a fantastic suit. It would be an epic mystery to Gil and the boys.

Eddie was on his phone talking about the Elite Combat deal, getting documents sent to him.

I stared out the window and tried to act like I didn't want to jump out of the limo every time it got below twenty miles per hour.

Eddie finished and dropped the phone on the seat. He looked like he was getting ready for horrible news. “Okay. What did you guys find?”

“Somebody broke in and emptied the freezer,” I said.

“Was it the cops?”

“No.”

He let out the air he'd been holding. “All right.
Wait, how did they know he was there?”

“Nobody went through his pockets. Maybe he had a tracking device on him.”

Eddie scanned the interior. “You think he put anything like that in here?”

“All the killing he was trying to do, you see him stash anything under your seat?”

“No.”

“Your ass hurt?”

“That's enough.” Eddie spent a few seconds frowning. “Well, this is good, right? Saves us the trouble of getting rid of him.”

“Good for you and Burch. My fingerprints are all over the place, the body, the sword.”

“Oh yeah. If it makes you feel any better, I doubt they'll go to the cops. My guess is they'll use it to blackmail you into fighting Zombi.”

“So the same thing you used it for.”

“Different intent,” Eddie said. “I want you to win.”

“My hero.”

He tried to bow sitting down. It came off looking like constipation. “So that was it? They just broke in and took their buddy?”

“That's it.” The only part I didn't like about lying to Eddie was it had been Burch's idea.

Eddie stared at the side of my head. I thought he was scrutinizing me for honesty, but he must have
been waiting to see if I'd catch him.

“Wait,” I said. “How does the Yakuza know I might fight Zombi?”

“Busted. We announced it this morning.”

“But that's only if the Elite deal doesn't happen. You buy them, Zombi fights a scrub in that promotion and I get somebody else in Warrior.”

“Well, here's the thing.” He glanced at the closed privacy panel between us and Burch. “Will you put your seat belt on first?”

“Why?”

“This sucks. I'm more scared of my security than the Yakuza. Just stay over there, okay?”

“Tell me.” I got to the edge of my seat and leaned forward.

Eddie tried to slip back into a crease in the leather. “I need you to fight Zombi. Whether it's for Warrior or Elite.”

“No. Elite is a huge step back.”

“But a leap forward from where you were before.”

“Yeah, that was before. And I wouldn't call it a leap.”

“When I scouted you at the Porter fight for Burbank, one of the ring girls was six months pregnant.”

“No, she was just tubby.”

Eddie kept quiet and let me make the rest of his points for him.

“Gil will never go for it.”

“I'll make it worth his pain. Yours too.”

“Is this how you train to be an asshole? Max reps of making and breaking promises?”

“I'm just surviving. This is what needs to happen.”

I scowled out the window and thought about the photo and note Burch had in the front seat. The Yakuza was giving me an out. Walk away from Eddie before midnight, and I'm off their radar. Stick around, I end up in a freezer, my blood frozen solid in my eyes, nose, throat.

If by some chance I happen to survive, I get to go back to fighting for a musty promotion against their secret weapon.

And here was Eddie, doing everything in his power to make me come across the limo and stomp his ears together, save them the trouble.

“Think about Gil,” he said. “This is one step back so you can take three forward. He'll see that. We need to hold each other up.”

Hold me up. Right. First an arm, then a leg, one piece at a time until I see the big picture and realize it's a spiderweb.

“Get me everything you can on Zombi.”

We walked Eddie into his home office, down the hall past the security room, the far wall overlooking the
pool. Vanessa was out there in a black bikini floating on an air mattress, one foot hanging off and dipping in and out of the water. Even a man walking to the electric chair would have noticed. We stared until it felt like we should put money in a slot to keep watching, then Burch opened the closet to make sure the Yakuza hadn't hired the boogeyman.

The walls were covered with faded battle flags and battered pieces of armor, dented shields, chipped swords. There was a small cannon pointed at the glass wall, which seemed irresponsible. Eddie's desktop was a map of North Africa under glass, lines and military icons sketched across it with red grease pencil. The date on the legend said it was from 1940.

“Which side do you pretend to be?” I asked him.

“Huh?” He was looking at a stack of papers churning out of a printer. He lugged it all to the desk and fell into his chair.

Burch said, “What else do you need, boss?”

“Tell Vanessa lunch.”

We closed the office door and went to the kitchen. The view was the same through the glass wall.

Burch sighed. “Perks, eh? Almost worth the risk of life and limb.”

“I'll let her know about lunch.” I wanted some privacy to call Gil. I needed to call Marcela back too, tell her what I could without making her worry. I
didn't want to lie to her. I hadn't done it yet—and suspected it was linked to me still having an enclosed skull—but the truth would get her on a plane to Vegas. Usually my way and harm's way are the same one-way street, but this time I had a choice. I would lie to her to keep her safe and resolved to make up for it by turning my back while Vanessa got out of the pool. I moved toward the glass doors.

“Sit,” Burch said and pointed at the slab table. “We have time. He'll be lost in those papers for hours, forget to take a leak, let alone eat. We need to talk about this.” He dropped the brown envelope on the table and got two bottles of water from the fridge.

We sat across from each other. He slid a bottle over and pressed his water against his right temple, waiting for me to say something about it. I rubbed my bottle over my left knuckles.

“Fair enough,” he said. “Who took this photo?”

“Great question. When we find out I'd like to ask him why he didn't just kill us and Eddie and be done with it. He had the drop.”

Burch removed the photo, shook his head at it. “If the lads ever saw this, they'd take the piss 'til I'm dust and bones. In my defense, I was having too much fun watching you grimace with that blood bag slopping all over you.”

“I was busy looking for a chance to kick your teeth in.”

“Shame on us, Mr. Wallace. We're supposed to be professionals.”

“That is my profession.”

“One of them, eh? I'm having a hard time labeling you.” He cracked his water and drank half the bottle. “What's this photo tell you?”

“It tells me you no longer have blackmail evidence framing me for a murder that I didn't commit. That evidence now belongs to an international crime syndicate, and I can stop them from using it and/or killing me by walking out the front door right now.”

“Let's expand a bit, yeah? Try to think of other people.”

I spun the photo, me and Burch eyeballing each other across the garbage-bagged corpse. “They have that same evidence on you too. I can drop you off at the airport.”

“When that clock strikes midnight I'll be in Eddie's hip pocket. Where will you be?”

I stalled, spent some time studying the photo. “You know what this tells me? They don't give a shit about us. Live or die, whatever, but they'd rather not deal with the hassle. And they followed us the whole night but didn't just blast the limo, wipe us all out.
The man they sent to kill Eddie made a ritual out of it. Eddie's death has significance to them.”

Burch was a statue.

“This isn't about money, is it?”

Burch walked over, rapped on the glass wall, and waved Vanessa in.

I slid the photo into the envelope. “We're done talking about this?”

“What's left to talk about?”

“If this isn't about money, what's it about?”

“Keeping Eddie alive. Simple as that.”

“Simple. Even when we show him the photo and the midnight deadline.”

“Yeah, we're not doing that.” He glanced at his watch, then at Vanessa taking her time paddling to the pool's edge.

“Bad call.” I tapped the envelope. “This'll scare him, and he needs to be scared right now. Keep him from doing something stupid.”

“Mate, he was almost strangled and stabbed last night. If that don't temper the impetuous streak, naught will. We ain't showing him.”

We slapped eyes across the kitchen. The pans hanging off the wall made soft gonging sounds, chanting us on to meet in the middle. I felt the table under
my forearms. It would make a nice chopping block.

Outside Vanessa stepped onto the baking concrete, hustled toward the house on her tiptoes.

I let my shoulders relax. “For now. He decides to roll out for tacos at 11:45, it's going on the fridge.”

Burch curled a lip at me. He looked confused, like he'd ordered gravity to release me into space, yet there I sat, yawning. “It's
my
call. You keep your mouth shut 'less I say otherwise.”

“All this fucking secrecy. I have to lie to Marcela and Gil, we aren't telling Eddie about this, and you won't tell me what he pulled in the first place to bring it all down. What did Eddie do?”

Burch stared at me until Vanessa came through the glass doors, wrapping a sarong with orchids on it around her waist. “Holy crap, the pavement is a million degrees. What's up, boys? You playing nice in here?”

“The boss needs lunch.”

“I'm hungry too.” She opened the fridge. “Chicken salad with fruit?”

“Fine,” Burch said, still giving me the ball bearings.

I was beyond staring down anybody for free, and Vanessa's exposed tattoo was more interesting than Burch's flaring nostrils. It covered her back and looked half-finished, the vibrant colors at the top fading to hollow black outlines above her sarong. The red, purple, blue, and orange flowers started tiny at
her neckline and grew down her spine and across her shoulder blades. Perched on those was a willowy white butterfly that looked like it could take flight at any moment.

She moved her arm and the scene shifted. I realized the flowers weren't growing out of a stem—the scaled green tendril behind them was a snake, its slitted yellow eye peering out from between the petals. It was watching the butterfly, and I couldn't tell if it wanted to keep the delicate thing safe or eat it.

Vanessa turned and caught me looking. She went pale and I thought she might vomit onto the food in her hands, then she clenched her jaw and glanced at Burch.

He shook his head.

I scooped up the photo and envelope and headed toward the hallway.

“Where you going?” Burch said.

“You two can stay in here and whisper to each other. I get to fight a guy named Zombi in two weeks, and I have thrown exactly one punch in preparation. Now, it happens to be one of my favorite punches ever, but still. Just the one. So I'm going into the gym. Wanna come?”

The kitchen was silent until Vanessa clanked some plates onto the counter and cleared her throat. “Is there any way you two will grow up before I serve this?”

I walked out. I don't like to disappoint women, but I'm used to it.

I went outside and past the pool to call Gil. I could feel the hot concrete through my shoes. The Jacuzzi rolled and bubbled. I tried to ignore the worm it put in my belly and gave it the finger.

The sun pressed an ember into the back of my neck until I got under a pergola covered with a dense vine that put shade over a long marble table and eight chairs. I sat facing the glass wall and couldn't see anything inside—just a reflection of the pool area and me sweating into my suit. Behind me the statues and landscaped walking paths rose high enough to block the walls and desert beyond.