THIRTY-NINE

“WHAT HAPPENED, ANDY?” I ASKED. “They promise to buy a car if you set me up?”

He looked hurt. “They were going to mess me up, big-time,” he said. “I asked a couple of people at the second bar about Gary, and someone made a call, and then he showed up with these other guys.” He sniffed. “Look, they just want to talk to you.” To the others, he said, “Isn’t that right?”

Gary, a lit cigarette dangling from between his lips, stepped forward, keeping the gun trained on me. He looked at the nose he’d damaged and grinned. “Can I ask you something?” he said.

“Sure.”

“Where’s your girlfriend get her Chinese food from? They got awesome egg rolls.”

“Did she find you or did you find her?” I asked.

“I was waiting for you, and then she came by with the food. She got a bit hysterical when she found me in the house.”

“You didn’t have to kill her,” I said.

“Figured the neighbors might have heard the shot, decided I’d have to get you later.”

“Hey, hold on,” Andy said. “We had a deal. You said you just wanted to talk to him.”

“Shut up, Andy,” Gary said, turning the weapon on him briefly. Andy shut up.

I happened to glance up at one of the closed-circuit TV cameras. Gary saw where I was looking and said, “Your friend here disabled that for us. He’s been super helpful.”

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“I want you to stop nosing around the hotel,” he said. “Forever. We don’t need someone like you drawing attention to what we’re doing there, messing things up for us with the cops or the INS or anybody else.”

“I’ve never seen you there,” I said to him. I nodded toward Carter and Owen. “You two, yeah.”

“I work off-site,” Gary said. “I’m what you call hotel support.”

“Support for what?”

He shrugged. “Hotel brings in the workers-”

“Illegals,” I said.

“And before we find them work, we need to get them clothes and food and shit, and I help with the financing of that.”

“By getting kids to rip off people’s credit cards.”

With his free hand, he took the cigarette from his mouth and blew smoke toward my face.

“My daughter did work at the hotel,” I said. “And everyone there covered it up.”

“The fact is,” Gary said, “your daughter should be grateful we covered up the truth.”

I waited.

“I mean, if you killed somebody, would you want the cops to know?”

Slowly, it started to make some sense. “Randall Tripe,” I said.

Gary nodded.

“Whatever my daughter did,” I said, “she must have had a very good reason.”

“I’ll tell you what she did. She shot the fucker. Her aim was off some. A little closer to the heart and he could have gone out quicker.”

“What was he doing?” I asked. “Why did she have to shoot him? You think I’m going to believe she just shot him for no good reason?”

Gary mulled that over some. “Okay, maybe. But dead’s dead. If she’d just minded her own business and done her job, none of this would have happened.”

“What was her job?”

“Front desk, like these two clowns,” Gary said. That’s what Syd had always said. “The hotel’s lousy with Chinks and slopes and Pakis doing the grunt work and getting rented out to other places, but you need people up front who can speak English. So when Sydney was recommended to us, she seemed just fine. She shouldn’t have interfered in other parts of our business.”

“What happened with Tripe?”

Gary grimaced, like he didn’t want to get into it. “Look, sometimes Randy got a bit, well, randy. But the guy had a point. He figured, hey, we’re giving these people the American dream, and they should be grateful. Randy had a way that he liked them-the ladies in particular-to show their gratitude. Your little girl got in the way of that.”

“What are you saying? Sydney shot this guy while he was raping someone?”

Gary didn’t want to talk about this anymore. He waved his gun at Andy, but asked me, “How’d you know to send this dipstick to look for me? How’d you make that connection?”

I said nothing.

“Let me guess. You were talking to that kid. The one who fucked things up for me at Dalrymple’s. That how you did it?”

I didn’t want to get Jeff in any more trouble than he was already. Gary took my silence as admission.

“That stupid fucker,” he said. “I was thinking we wouldn’t have to worry about him.”

“What about Patty?” I asked.

“Hmm?”

“Patty Swain. What’s happened to her? Where is she?”

He smiled. “You don’t have to worry about her anymore.”

Part of me died at that moment.

“And as far as your daughter’s concerned,” Gary added, “it’s just a matter of time now before we solve that problem.” He glanced at his watch. “They might even be there already.”

“You know where she is? You know where Syd is?”

Gary snapped his fingers at Owen. He approached, and I saw that he was holding a roll of duct tape.

“Stick out your hands,” Owen said. With Gary pointing the gun at me, I didn’t have much choice but to comply. He wrapped the tape around my wrists half a dozen times.

Andy said, “Listen, guys, come on, what are you doing here?”

“Shut up,” Gary said to him again.

“Jesus Christ, you’re not going to kill him, are you? That’s insane! You can’t just kill the guy!”

“No?” said Gary, who then raised his weapon to Andy’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

The bullet didn’t even knock him back all that much. His head snapped back, but the bullet went through him so quickly the rest of his body barely had a chance to react. His face had no time to register surprise. He dropped to the floor, his face landing on the tile, dark blood starting to pool almost instantly.

Gary took the cigarette from his mouth, blew out more smoke. “Fuck. There I go making an even bigger mess for myself. That is so me.”

Some droplets of blood, warm and wet, had splattered back onto my cheek.

I wasn’t the only one startled. Carter and Owen had jumped back when Gary pulled the trigger.

Carter said, “Jesus.” Owen was staring wide-eyed. The shot was still ringing in my ears, and must have been for them, too.

“So,” Carter said, “what now?”

“What do you mean, what now?” Gary snapped.

“Tell me we don’t have to drag him down to a Dumpster in Bridgeport, too. If we get pulled over along the way, we’re fucked.”

Gary was agitated. He had been fairly composed up to now, but having lost his cool with Andy seemed to have thrown him off his game.

“Let me think, let me think,” he said.

“I won’t say a word,” I said to him. “Just leave Sydney alone. Let her come home alive. She’ll never tell anyone what you’ve been doing at the hotel. It’s like you said. She’s killed someone. She’s not going to want to talk to the police.”

“Oh please,” he said. He pointed his gun down at Andy’s body and said to me, “You know, that’s your fucking fault. If you hadn’t sent him looking for me, he wouldn’t have ended up like that.”

There was some truth in that.

“Put this asshole somewhere while I think!” he shouted to Owen, who shoved me through the front door of the minivan and slammed the door so hard I was lucky to get my foot out of the way.

Carter said, “If that’s really what you want to do, we can take both of them, dump them in the garbage. We just drive slow so nobody pulls us over.”

Ashes dropped from Gary’s cigarette as he shook his head. “No, no, wait a second. We just fuckin’ leave both of them here. We don’t have to dump them anywhere. Let the cops come here and think what they want. The TV cameras are off. No one has to know we was even here.”

I’d been tossed so hard into the car I was hanging over the open area between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. Slowly, and awkwardly, with my wrists tied together, I tried to right myself behind the steering wheel. Once in a sitting position, I looked through the windshield. The van was surrounded by other vehicles: a Pilot directly ahead, a Civic to the rear, an Accord off to the right, a boxy Element to the left. Gary and Carter and Owen were in front of the van, off the right fender, debating how to handle this new predicament.