Lawrence Block - Eight Million Ways to Die

"You stopped calling your service."

"I stopped calling my service. I stopped leaving the house. I guess I been eating. I take something from the refrigerator and eat it without paying attention. Kim's dead and Sunny's dead and this Cookie's dead, and maybe the brother's dead, the boyfriend, and what's-his-name is dead. The one you shot, I disremember his name."

"Marquez."

"Marquez is dead, and Calderуn disappeared, and Ruby's in San Francisco. And the question is where's Chance, and the answer is I don't know. Where I think I am is out of business."

"The girls are all right."

"So you said."

"Mary Lou isn't going to be turning tricks anymore. She's glad she did it, she learned a lot from it, but she's ready for a new stage in her life."

"Yeah, well, I called that one. Didn't I tell you after the funeral?"

I nodded. "And Donna thinks she can get a foundation grant, and she can earn money through readings and workshops. She says she's reached a point where selling herself is starting to undermine her poetry."

"She's pretty talented, Donna. Be good if she could make it on her poetry. You say she's getting a grant?"

"She thinks she's got a shot at it."

He grinned. "Aren't you gonna tell me the rest of it? Little Fran just got a Hollywood contract and she's gonna be the next Goldie Hawn."

"Maybe tomorrow," I said. "For now she just wants to live in the Village and stay stoned and entertain nice men from Wall Street."

"So I still got Fran."

"That's right."

He'd been pacing the floor. Now he dropped onto the hassock again. "Be a cinch to get five, six more of them," he said. "You don't know how easy it is. Easiest thing in the world."

"You told me that once before."

"It's the truth, man. So many women just waiting to be told what to do with their damn lives. I could walk out of here and have me a full string in no more than a week's time." He shook his head ruefully. "Except for one thing."

"What's that?"

"I don't think I can do that anymore." He stood up again. "Damn, I been a good pimp! And I liked it. I tailored a life for myself and it fit me like my own skin. And you know what I went and did?"

"What?"

"I outgrew it."

"It happens."

"Some spic goes crazy with a blade and I'm out of business. You know something? It would have happened anyway, wouldn't it?"

"Sooner or later." Just as I'd have left the police force even if a bullet of mine hadn't killed Estrellita Rivera. "Lives change," I said. "It doesn't seem to do much good to fight it."

"What am I gonna do?"

"Whatever you want."

"Like what?"

"You could go back to school."

He laughed. "And study art history? Shit, I don't want to do that. Sit in classrooms again? It was bullshit then, I went into the fuckin' army to get away from it. You know what I thought about the other night?"

"What?"

"I was gonna build a fire. Pile all the masks in the middle of the floor, spill a little gas on 'em, put a match to 'em. Go out like one of those Vikings and take all my treasures with me. I can't say I thought about it for long. What I could do, I could sell all this shit. The house, the art, the car. I guess the money'd last me a time."

"Probably."

"But then what'd I do?"

"Suppose you set up as a dealer?"

"Are you crazy, man? Me deal drugs? I can't even pimp no more, and pimping's cleaner'n dealing."

"Not drugs."

"What, then?"

"The African stuff. You seem to own a lot of it and I gather the quality's high."

"I don't own any garbage."

"So you told me. Could you use that as your stock to get you started? And do you know enough about the field to go into the business?"

He frowned, thinking. "I was thinking about this earlier," he said.

"And?"

"There's a lot I don't know. But there's a lot I do know, plus I got a feel for it and that's something you can't get in a classroom or out of a book. But shit, you need more'n that to be a dealer. You need a whole manner, a personality to go with it."

"You invented Chance, didn't you?"

"So? Oh, I dig. I could invent some nigger art dealer same way I invented myself as a pimp."

"Couldn't you?"

" 'Course I could." He thought once more. "It might work," he said. "I'll have to study it."

"You got time."

"Plenty of time." He looked intently at me, the gold flecks glinting in his brown eyes. "I don't know what made me hire you," he said. "I swear to God I don't. If I wanted to look good or what, the superpimp avenging his dead whore. If I knew where it was going to lead-"

"It probably saved a few lives," I said. "If that's any consolation."

"Didn't save Kim or Sunny or Cookie."

"Kim was already dead. And Sunny killed herself and that was her choice, and Cookie was going to be killed as soon as Marquez tracked her down. But he'd have gone on killing if I hadn't stopped him. The cops would have landed on him sooner or later but there'd have been more dead women by then. He never would have stopped. It was too much of a turn-on for him. When he came out of the bathroom with the machete, he had an erection."

"You serious?"

"Absolutely."

"He came at you with a hard-on?"

"Well, I was more afraid of the machete."

"Well, yeah," he said. "I could see where you would be."

He wanted to give me a bonus. I told him it wasn't necessary, that I'd been adequately paid for my time, but he insisted, and when people insist on giving me money I don't generally argue. I told him I'd taken the ivory bracelet from Kim's apartment. He laughed and said he'd forgotten all about it, that I was welcome to it and he hoped my lady would like it. It would be part of my bonus, he said, along with the cash and two pounds of his specially blended coffee.

"And if you like the coffee," he said, "I can tell you where to get more of it."

He drove me back into the city. I'd have taken the subway but he insisted he had to go to Manhattan anyway to talk to Mary Lou and Donna and Fran and get things smoothed out. "Might as well enjoy the Seville while I can," he said. "Might wind up selling it to raise cash for operating expenses. Might sell the house, too." He shook his head. "I swear it suits me, though. Living here."

"Get the business started with a government loan."

"You jiving?"

"You're a minority group member. There's agencies just waiting to lend you money."

"What a notion," he said.

In front of my hotel he said, "That Colombian asshole, I still can't remember his name."

"Pedro Marquez."

"That's him. When he registered at your hotel, is that the name he used?"

"No, it was on his ID."

"That's what I thought. Like he was C. O. Jones and M. A. Ricone, and I wondered what dirty word he used for you."

"He was Mr. Starudo," I said. "Thomas Edward Starudo."

"T. E. Starudo? Testarudo? That a curse in Spanish?"

"Not a curse. But it's a word."

"What's it mean?"

"Stubborn," I said. "Stubborn or pig-headed."

"Well," he said, laughing. "Well, hell, you can't blame him for that one, can you?"

In my room I put the two pounds of coffee on the dresser, then went and made sure nobody was in the bathroom. I felt silly, like an old maid looking under the bed, but I figured it would be a while before I got over it. And I wasn't carrying a gun anymore. The.32 had been impounded, of course, and the official story was that Durkin had issued it to me for my protection. He hadn't even asked how I'd really come by it. I don't suppose he cared.

I sat in my chair and looked at the place on the floor where Marquez had fallen. Some of his bloodstains remained in the rug, along with traces of the chalk marks they place around dead bodies.

I wondered if I'd be able to sleep in the room. I could always get them to change it, but I'd been here a few years now and I'd grown accustomed to it. Chance had said it suited me, and I suppose it did.