Setup on Front Street (17 page)

BK said, "We just needed him to front
the strip club, nothing more."

"What about the investment
money?"

"We knew his lease was coming up for renewal
this year. We did the investment thing two years ago to reel him in. Right
about that time, the building came up for sale, so we bought it for good
measure. To have something extra to hold over his head in case he got cold feet
when the time came."

"And
when the time came, he backed off and you took his money."

"Well, hey,
I
didn't take it …"

"No," I said, glimpsing Whitney.
"I
know
who took it. And I
also know who's got it."

"Anyway," BK went on, "when
Sullivan found out his money was gone, he went crazy. He said he wasn't going
to let us take over his lease, that he was going to renew it as the Irish bar.
I tried to talk some sense into him."

"You tried talking some sense into
Sullivan?"

"I tried to tell him that he could
make twice as much money with the Russians as he was making by himself, but he
wasn't having any of it. Even my father here tried talking to him. He told my
father if they tried any funny business, that he knew people in New Orleans
that could take care of anyone who fucked with him. He said he wasn't afraid of
us, or the Russians, or anybody."

I held back a little chuckle.

That was Sully, all right, and it got his
ass killed.

I said, "And I came along right when
you needed a patsy. It couldn't've been better timing. Like it was tailor-made."

"Right. Ex-con just out of prison,
comes back for his share of the dough, kills his partner over it, goes right
back inside. That was the plan. Even when you were out here to the house the
first time."

Whoa,
what was this?

"That was part of the setup?" I
asked, not hiding my surprise.

"It was. My father got you out here
just so he could tell you you'd never see your money unless Norma went back to
the Fun House. Of course, he knew you wouldn't let her do that, and that you'd
give him shit about it. He also knew you couldn't get the money, anyway. And
Sullivan, by that time, was already a dead man, he just didn't know it. So when
he was killed, you'd naturally think my father had it done to keep you from
getting your money. You'd have no reason to think otherwise."

He soaked up more of his blood with the
handkerchief. What the handkerchief missed went straight to the widening
splotch on the chair.

"And so … everybody lives happily ever
after," I said. "Everybody but Sully."

I looked over at Vasiliev.

"How about it, Yuri? You think you're
gonna live happily ever after?"

The horns outside were now honking
furiously. Everyone in the room was distracted by the long, loud bleats.

Amid the racket, BK lurched toward me.

"Don Roy!" he cried as he moved
with his arms outstretched. "You've gotta believe me! I had nothing to do
with Sullivan's death. These fucking Russians —"

Now that he was on his feet, he'd gotten
between me and Vasiliev, right where I didn't want him, and Vasiliev took
advantage of it.

He quickly reached under his shirt in his
rear waistband as BK approached me. I caught the sudden move.

"BK!" I shouted. "Get
down!"

I yanked at one of his hands, trying to
jerk him to one side.

In one swift, catlike move, Vasiliev pulled
a backup revolver and began firing. BK was hit from behind with the first shot
and went down. The second caught me mid-thigh, pushing me back against the
wall.

With BK out of the line of fire, I shot
back several times, hitting Vasiliev in his side and his shoulder, spinning him
around, then down to the floor. The revolver flew from his hand.

At the same moment, Alexei had drawn his
spare piece, too, from an ankle rig, but Shimmy unleashed his twelve-gauge at
Alexei's gut. It nearly tore him in half as he was sent hurtling backward into
the wall. Some of Whitney's plaques cascaded to the floor.

A panicked Chernenko sprang out of his
chair with a gun he'd gotten from God knows where. I turned my two pistols on
him, both blazing, sending him down.

Shimmy had zeroed in on Milton and Bradley.
Milton froze in fear, terror all over his face, but Bradley dove toward the
floor by the couch and retrieved one of the guns I'd kicked under there. Shimmy
fired twice at his lunging figure, hitting him once in the ankle. Bone and
blood spattered from his wound, staining the base of the couch's buttery
leather.

From under the couch, he retrieved an
automatic, pulling it up with both hands. He got off two quick rounds, one of
them hitting Shimmy around the collarbone. The sawed-off fell to the floor as
the shot flung him backward out of the office doorway.

I fired both of my automatics a bunch of
times at Bradley, hitting him with almost every shot. He collapsed into a pool
of his own blood, most of it flowing from two head wounds.

Sharp
movement on my left grabbed the corner of my eye.

I wheeled
around on one leg as best I could, seeing Vasiliev with blood pouring out of
his side, crawling to where his spare piece had fallen.

He
reached out for it.

"Don't try it, Yuri!"

He picked up the gun with an unsteady hand,
then rapidly raised it into firing position. I squeezed the trigger on the .22
and it just clicked.

Empty.

In an eyeblink, I did the same with the
nine and caught him in the stomach with my last two shots. He fell backwards,
his face stiffened by death.

My attention turned to the big desk.
Whitney had reached inside his drawer and now held a revolver in his hand. With
a firm grip, he took aim at me. I dropped to the floor the instant before he
fired, landing on my wounded leg, nearly passing out from the sharp volts of
pain.

From my prone position near the doorway to
the office, I grabbed Shimmy's shotgun as Whitney aimed again. I had to get the
shot off. Otherwise, I was a sitting duck.

This time, before I could shoot, a loud
report came from the doorway behind me, just in time, right over my head. I saw
Whitney stumbling back into his chair as a little red blotch appeared on his
upper chest.

I looked up.

Ryder stood in the doorway, a smoking
automatic in his hand.

"Where the hell were you?" I asked
as I threw the shotgun aside.

I struggled to my feet.

"The plane arrived a couple of minutes
early and they were gone by the time I got there."

Fucking government, I thought. Can't ever
get it together.

Looking around, I could see BK groaning on
the floor. He'd taken one in the shoulder blade, but it didn't look
serious. Shimmy was still writhing
in pain in the hallway, badly hit.

As I
helped him up, I turned back to Milton, still paralyzed on the other side of
the bloody office.

"You say whatever you want to the
cops, Milton. Just leave me and Shimmy out of it. Got me?"

He nodded, still in shock.

"If the cops even
think
I was
here tonight," I said, "you will have a very short life expectancy. I
promise you that."

I looked back at Ryder.

"Get out of here," he said to me.
"I'll take care of all this."

"Thanks," I said. "Safe's in
the bedroom closet. It's open."

I grabbed the satchel. Shimmy and I limped
out the door, bleeding and leaning on each other as best we could. I then saw
what all the commotion outside was about.

Ryder had pulled his car into roadblock
position in the street, right behind where Doc sat in the parked Buick. The
partygoers' cars were jammed up behind it, wall-to-wall honking horns and
cursing drivers.

Even though I hurt like hell, I had to
laugh.

Doc pulled the big deuce up directly in
front of the house. We tumbled inside.

As he took off, he told us that with all
the racket going on back there over Ryder's car, you couldn't really hear any
of the shots from in the house. The ruckus was still going on as we sped off
unnoticed into the night.

Shimmy was bleeding pretty badly. He let
loose with a few tortured wails.

I told him, "Take it easy, bubba.
We're gonna get us both fixed up right now."

Doc was full of concern, but still calm, as
I knew he would be.

"Where to, man? We gotta get you taken
care of."

"Turn right down here, then head back
toward town. I know a guy who used to be a doctor."

THE
guy who fixed us up had one of Yale Lando's medical school degrees, which he'd
gotten after they took his real one away. He pulled me and Shimmy through, all
right, but we were hurting for many months afterward. Shimmy lost a little of
the use of his left arm, but he's right-handed anyway, so there was no real
harm done.

The doctor, meanwhile, may have plucked the
bullet out of my thigh, but it was Norma who brought me back to health.

She looked after me in a way that I wasn't
really
expecting. You
know, she really took care of me. She'd run and get me a drink of water if I was
thirsty, she cooked all my meals for me, she waited on me hand and foot, that
kind of thing. While I was recuperating, she showered me with love.

Let me
tell you, nothing will bring you back faster than that.

It meant
everything to me, knowing that she really loved me that much.

I'd gotten a little over four hundred
thousand of Whitney's money from his safe. Or should I say,
my
money. I
gave Doc and Shimmy a hundred grand apiece, plus I paid for our doctor bills,
about another ten. That left me with right around two hundred large.

Which is what I had coming from the diamond
deal in the first place.

I gave Doc an extra twenty-five hundred and
told him when he got back to Vegas, to mail it to the guy whose Visa card I'd
gotten from Yale. Charles Brockaway, that was his name. I figured Norma and I
had gone through around fifteen hundred on our little spree up in Miami, so an
extra grand worth of vig should take care of Brockaway.

I don't know, it just seemed like the right
thing to do.

Ryder let Milton get away clean, then he
split himself, right before the black-and-whites arrived.

First, though, he took the Russian papers
in the safe.

Then he made sure to crack open the file
cabinet and spread Whitney's files on Sullivan and Caribbean Holdings all over
the room. After checking through the files, the cops eventually found out that,
after Sully's death, his wife hadn't renewed his lease on the bar, but that the
owners, WA Properties, had leased it to Keys Good Times, Inc., with the stated
intention of making it into a strip joint.

They also found what Ryder had showed me,
that two Russians had applied for a liquor license to be used at that location.
This alerted the FBI to possible mob activity, and Ryder later entered the
picture "officially", making sure that Sully's connection to the
whole thing was emphasized.

Gradually, then, the investigation of his
murder shifted in that direction, toward the Russians, away from me, and Ortega
was finally out of my face.

BK pulled through, and since he was the
only known survivor of the bloodbath, he was heavily grilled by the cops. I'm
told he put on a fine show for them.

His story, which I'm sure Ryder had helped
him with that night before he left, was that BK and his father were discussing
a legit real estate deal with the Russians, that he was naturally unaware of
any of their criminal activities.

During this meeting, he said, a couple of
armed Cubans came bursting in, shooting up the place, shouting "
¡
Viva
Cuba libre!"
 
Something
about they knew there were Russians there and they were all pissed off over how
the Russians and Castro ruined Cuba. For a couple of weeks afterward, everyone
was on the lookout for gun-blasting Cubans.

The cops ate it up. So did the papers.

As soon as he recovered, though, BK
resigned as mayor and left town. I don't know where he went.

Rita divorced him and stayed here. She
continues to live in the big house on William Street. I see her around town
from time to time.

I don't think she ever remarried.

As for me, I'm off the grift for good. I
got me a straight job running Mambo's sports book and bolita game, generally
taking care of things when he's not around.

Norma and I are back in her place and we've
got this nest egg now. Sort of a little, I don't know … a little security … for
the future.

This time I swear I'm not going to blow it,
I'm not going near any dice tables anywhere, but I
am
going to take care
of the woman I love, the most wonderful woman in the world.

Now, just in case you're wondering, I know
the score here. I mean, I'm not stupid. I know there's an outside chance the
Russians might eventually figure out what happened.

Most likely they won't, but if they do,
they'll probably come looking for me.

And you know, I can't really blame them.
They had big things cooking down here. They were set up pretty sweet, all ready
to move into Cuba, until I derailed their whole deal.

So Norma and I had a long, long talk about
it. We talked about moving, like to Miami or somewhere, or maybe leaving the
state altogether.

But in the end, we just couldn't.

This is our home.