Whiplash River
Authors: Lou Berney
WHIPLASH
RIVER
Lou Berney
For Ellen and Kate
Contents
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T
he view from the veranda was a killer.
A sugar-sand beach, palm trees, the Caribbean glittering beneath a full moon. A wooden pier curved out over the water, with a thatch-covered
palapa
perched at the far end. Straight off a postcard.
Shake had bought the Sunset Breeze more than two years ago. You'd think he wouldn't even notice the view anymore, but he did. Every single time he stepped onto the veranda of the restaurant,
his
restaurant, that was still his first thought:
Straight off a postcard.
Charles Samuel Bouchon was the name on his birth certificate, but he'd gone by “Shake” since he was nineteen, his first fall for grand theft auto, some twenty-five years ago now. One of the old black cons on the yard had started calling him “Vanilla Milk Shake.” Just an offhand nickname, and not exactly affectionate, but that was a funny thing about life: you never knew what was going to stick.
Shake made his way over to the honeymooners to clear their empty plates. They were young, barely into their twenties, fresh and scrubbed and flushed pink from a day in the sun. Holding hands across the table.
“So how did that lobster treat you?” he asked.
“Oh my God!” the girl said. “It just . . .”
“It rocked!” the kid said.
Already finishing each other's sentences. Shake pointed it out.
“That's a good sign,” he said.
“Is it?” the kid said. Earnest.
Shake shrugged. Sure, why not?
The kid dimpled with delight. The girl giggled and squeezed her husband's hand tight.
“So how long will you be in Belize?” Shake said.
“Not long enough,” the kid said.
“I wish we could stay here forever,” the girl said. “It's like paradise.”
“It
is
paradise,” the kid said.
“We're from Buffalo,” she explained.
Shake smiled.
The girl gazed out at the moonlit sea, at the flames of the tiki torches snapping around in the breeze.
“Was it your dream?” the girl asked Shake. “To own your own restaurant? In a place like this?”
“It was,” he said. Though he didn't mention where the dream had been dreamed. Long nights in the sweat-sour darkness of Block A, staring at the wall while his cellie in the tray above grunted and flopped in his sleep. It had been Shake's second stretch for grand theft auto, but twenty years down the line, Shake no longer a boy but a professional wheelman of some repute. And determined, once he walked out of the Mule Creek State Correctional Facility, to walk a straight path and never again wobble off it.
Well, that hadn't worked out exactly as planned. There had been a few wobbles. But now, finally, here Shake was. Palm trees and
palapas
and grilled lobster with a tequila lime sauce that did, if he did say so himself, rock.
“You really have the life,” the kid said with a sigh.
Shake smiled again, tighter this time. “You don't know the half of it,” he said.
Â
IF SHAKE'S FIRST THOUGHT WHENEVER
he stepped onto the veranda of his restaurant was
Straight off a postcard,
his first thought whenever he pushed through the double doors into the kitchen was usually
Shit.
Tonight the waiter was cursing the prep cook in Spanish, the prep cook was cursing back in English and waving around a boning knife, and the grease trap was on fire.
Business as usual, in other words.
“Armando!” Shake yelled. “Roger!”
They shut up, but neither made a move for the fire extinguisher. Shake grabbed it himself and poured foam on the grease trap. When the flames were dead, he showed the fire extinguisher to Roger, the prep cook.
“Ever seen one of these before?” Shake asked. “Just curious.”
Roger was a scrawny recovering alcoholic from Detroit who spent most of his shift recovering from the alcohol he drank on his breaks. He thought about the question.
“Fire extinguisher?” he said. “Shit. Sure I have. Hit a A-rab with one, one time. 7-Eleven store outside Gary, Indiana. Pissant tried to kick me in the nuts.”
As hard as it was to believe, Roger was the best of the dozen or so prep cooks Shake had hired and fired over the past two years.
“Why he do that?” Armando, the waiter, asked. He was a mestizo from Guatemala, barely five feet tall. Not a drinker, just foul-tempered and forgetful. Exactly the qualities you wanted in a waiter.
“I was robbing him,” Roger said. “And I dropped my screwdriver.”
“Hijo jesu,”
Armando said.
“Pinche idiota.”
“Screw you, greasy little bean-eater!”
Shake felt a headache building, chugging toward him, a freight train ready to flatten him where he stood.
He'd worked in kitchens before. He'd known that running his own restaurant wouldn't be easy. But he'd never guessed just how unbelievably not easy it would turn out to be.
Fights in the kitchen. Fires in the kitchen. Crooked suppliers and corrupt inspectors. Third-world wiring and fourth-world plumbing. Tropical storms, swine-flu scares, cockroaches the size of lobsters. And, bane of Shake's existence, the Internet, where a single bad review on TripAdvisor could kill business like a stake through the heart.
Idaba, the hostess, pushed through the doors. A Garifuna woman in her sixties, with a tie-dyed head wrap and big gold nose ring, she was Shake's only competent employee. She made sure he never forgot it.
She looked around. “Problem?”
Shake studied her, but it was impossible to tell if she was being ironic. She had a hell of a straight face, grave and expressionless, her big block head like something the ancient Mayans had carved out of dark volcanic rock and killed sacrificial goats on.
“Problem?” He kicked fire-extinguisher foam off his shoe and raised his voice because Armando and Roger were still cursing each other. “Why would you think that?”
She might have frowned at him, might not have. Again, impossible to tell.
“The nine o'clock four-top canceled,” she said.
Shake grimaced. That left them with only twelve covers for the night. Eight the night before. That put them deep in the red for the night, the month, the year. Ever since January, when the resort located just up the beach had switched over to an all-inclusive meal plan and sucked up half their business.
They'd been in the red even before then, to be honest.
Running his own restaurant in Belize was by far the most stressful job Shake had ever had. Driving getaway for the Armenian mob, a Humvee full of Salvadoran gangbangers trying to ram you into the Los Angeles Riverâthat, by comparison, was like listening to soft jazz in the tub.
“You want me to comp their dessert?” Idaba said. “The honeymooners?”
“Are we sure they're really on their honeymoon?” Shake said. “Can we ask for proof?”
Idaba waited. Shake calculated how much the complimentary coconut pie would cost him, how much the chocolate cake, how much if the honeymooners wanted both.
“Fine,” he said finally.
He needed some air, so he grabbed a bus tub full of dead lettuce and rotten mango and carried it out back. Out back was a weedy patch of crushed coral beneath a browning palm, with a Dumpster and a propane tank and a million or so of Roger's cigarette butts scattered everywhere.
Shake emptied the bus tub into the Dumpster, noticing that the floodlight above the kitchen door had burned out. He remembered he'd just changed the bulb, but before he could do anything useful with that information, a pair of hands grabbed his shoulders. The hands spun Shake around and slammed him so hard against the propane tank that Shake's teeth clacked together and rust puffed off the tank.
The guy who'd slammed Shake was big, and built, a dark-skinned bruiser in baggy plaid shorts and a Rasta tank top that said
ONE LOVE.
Shake recognized him, one of the thugs who hung around the bar that Baby Jesus owned down in San Pedro.
Shake had hoped this was just a random mugging. No such luck.
“Listen,” he said, but instead One Love hit him in the stomach. Shake doubled over and the guy went for his kidneys, two hard chops that dropped Shake to his knees.
“You like that,
guna boi
?” One Love said.
“No,” Shake said.
“Maybe you like another one, then.”
Shake didn't follow the logic. He turned his body, thinking he might trap a kick to the ribs and bring One Love down.
But the kick didn't come. Shake looked up. One Love took a step back as a golf cart rolled up. The cart's shocks creaked as Baby Jesus heaved himself out. He was even bigger than One Love, enormous, like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon.
“Shake! My friend!” Baby Jesus held his arms wide. His face was round and smooth and alarminglyâfor a guy that big, in his late thirtiesâcherubic.
Shake climbed unsteadily to his feet. “Friends,” he pointed out, “don't punch friends in the kidneys.”
Baby Jesus chuckled and wagged a finger at Shake. “Friends pay back the money that they borrow.”
“Plus the point and a half a week, don't forget.”
“Oh! Such onerous terms! Baby Jesus is such a bad man, yes?”
Baby Jesus arched his eyebrows and looked over at One Love, who nodded in agreement. Because yes, Baby Jesusâwho ran the dope trade on Ambergris Caye and controlled a key leg of the lucrative cocaine distribution route between Lima and the Florida Keysâwas in fact a bad man. Very.
Baby Jesus frowned at One Love and said something sharp in Kriol. One Love caught the drift and stopped nodding. He shook his head. “No!”
“No!” Baby Jesus said. “Of course not, Baby Jesus is not a bad man!” He wagged his finger again at Shake. “Tell me, Shake, who else would help you buy your restaurant? Who else would loan the necessary funds toâI am being honest hereâa person of such dubious character and past transgression?”
Good question. Another one was why Shake, who should have known better, had borrowed money from a Central American drug lord known for shooting his rivals, breaking down their bodies like raw chicken for the fryer, and dumping the pieces at a place on the reef called Shark Ray Alley.
“Baby Jesus is who!” Baby Jesus said.
All Shake could say in his own defense was that he'd been at a difficult point in his life when he borrowed the money from Baby Jesus. When Shake found the restaurant for sale on Ambergris Caye, he'd recognized it as a miracle, a gift, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to slam the book shut on his past.
Unfortunately, the most recent chapter of that book had left Shake stone-cold broke, and Baby Jesus was right. Who else would have loaned Shake that kind of money?
“You know what?” Shake said. “I was just about to say âBaby Jesus.' I was this close.”
Baby Jesus rocked back on his heels, a parade balloon tugging on the guide wires, and surveyed the restaurant. “Business is good?” he said.
“Couldn't be better,” Shake said.
Baby Jesus gave him a sweetly cherubic smile.
“I was barely a week late,” Shake said. “First time in almost two years.”
“Exactly,” Baby Jesus said. “That is why we snip the problem in the bud. Yes? Snip, snip, snip!”
He brought two big fingers close to Shake's face and worked them like scissors. Shake made the mistake of watching the fingers and not One Love, who stepped up and hammered him with a blind-side roundhouse to the jaw. Shake hit the ground again.
When his vision cleared, Baby Jesus was crouched next to him.
“Next month's payment will be on time, yes?” Baby Jesus said.
Shake nodded.
“Excellent.” Baby Jesus gave him a friendly pat on the cheek. “And you have learned your lesson?”
Shake remembered what the honeymoon girl had asked him earlier, if now he had the life he'd always dreamed of. He nodded again, but when he tried to speak, his jaw was still numb from the punch.
“What's that you say?” Baby Jesus said. “What is the lesson you have learned?”
“Be careful what you wish for,” Shake said.
