Charlie Hustmyre - House of the Rising Sun

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“If you want to change your life, you’ve got to get out of this town.”

“I was out of town for almost five years.”

“And look what happened when you came back.” Her voice rose. “You started right back where you left off. It’s this town.” She slapped her palm hard against the table. “The Messina family, they suck you in and won’t let you out.” She realized that she was talking about herself. With or without Ray, she had to get away.

“I needed a job and they gave me one,” Ray said. “It’s not like I had any other offers.”

They were drifting into the past again. “You could have gotten a regular job, something that didn’t involve them.”

“I’m not involved with them, at least not the way I used to be. I throw guys out who had too much to drink or get too rough with the.. .”

“Whores,” Jenny said.

“Too rough with the girls.”

“You’ve got to leave, Ray, and not look back.”

He shook his head. “I can’t leave until I sort this out.”

“Why?”

“The Messinas have friends,” he said. “If they think I had something to do with what happened, especially with Pete getting killed, they’ll find me. It doesn’t matter where I go.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

He sat quietly for a minute, then said, “I need your help, Jen.”

She was afraid neither of them would ever get out of this town alive. “What do you need?”

“To stay here for a couple of days.”

She nodded.

“And I need to borrow your car.”

“All right.”

“Were you serious about what you said?” Ray asked.

“I said a lot. We both did, but I meant every word of it.”

“I’m talking about you not going back to the House.”

Jenny nodded. “I’m through with that.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m getting out of New Orleans.”

“Where to?”

“Maybe back to California. The weather is perfect, and you should see the beaches.” She had only lived there for a year, but she loved it, working at a health club teaching aerobics classes to middle-aged women and swimming classes to kids. Jenny desperately wanted Ray to say, Yeah, California sounds nice. Maybe we should go together. But he didn’t say that. Instead, he said he needed to call Charlie Liuzza.

“Are you crazy?” Jenny said.

“He said to call him if I needed anything,” Ray said. “Well, I need something.”

“He’s a killer,” Jenny said. “If Tony or Vinnie or even Carlos himself really wants you dead, Charlie is the guy who’s going to get the order.”

Ray shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Jenny didn’t believe Ray was thinking at all. “He’s with them, you’re not.”

“I talked to him a couple days ago. He’s all right.”

She got up and walked into the kitchen, carrying her plate and glass. She left his sitting on the table. “You’re not calling him from my phone.”

Ray stood up. He looked at his drowned cell phone sitting on the small bar that separated the kitchen from the dining nook. “I’ll use a pay phone.” Leaving his dishes behind, he walked toward the door.

Jenny looked at him. “Ray, don’t call him. Let’s just go, let’s leave right now.” She set her dishes down on the countertop. “I’ve got a credit card. Let’s get in the car and go.”

With his hand on the doorknob, Ray turned and looked at her. “Are you going to be here when I get back?”

She was scared, scared of the Messinas, scared for Ray, and scared of what Tony would do to her if he found out she had lied to him. From personal experience she knew how brutal he could be. But more than anything else, now that she had found Ray again, Jenny was scared of losing him.

He stared at her, waiting for her answer.

She nodded. “I’ll be here.”

Ray stepped out and pulled the door closed behind him.

Jenny started to cry.

“You look like shit,” Charlie “The Rabbit” Liuzza said.

Ray said, “I feel like shit.”

They sat at a back table inside Hobnobber’s, a businessman’s happy-hour bar across Canal Street from the French Quarter. A place Ray hoped mob guys didn’t go.

The Rabbit said that after Ray called him, he had made a few phone calls to guys he trusted, guys who worked for Old Man Carlos directly. “You got yourself in quite a jam.”

Ray knew he was in a jam. He just didn’t know why. “What’s it about?”

“According to what Tony’s saying, Vinnie put a hit out on you.”

“What?”

“He thinks you set up the robbery and got his son killed.”

“That’s bullshit!”

Charlie held up his hand. “Keep your voice down.”

Ray nodded. Speaking more calmly, he said, “I didn’t have anything to do with it. Guy with a tattoo on his hand sticks a gun in my face. That’s the first I knew about it.”

“I believe you. I know you’re a stand-up guy, but what I found out, you got even worse problems than that.”

Confused, Ray said, “Worse than Vinnie and Tony trying to kill me?”

Charlie nodded. “Yep.”

The guy knew how to build suspense, Ray thought. “How much worse can it get?”

“The Old Man is involved.”

Ray felt his stomach doing flip-flops. Jenny had been right. If the Old Man wanted him dead, who better to send than the Rabbit?

His thoughts must have been plastered all over his face because Charlie said, “Don’t worry about it, kid. I’m not here to whack you.”

Ray’s throat was so tight he could barely speak. “Why not?”

“I took my wife shopping at one of those outlet malls in Mississippi. We stopped at a casino on the coast. She likes the slots. I played a little blackjack and walked away with fourteen hundred of the casino’s money. I been gone for two days. Haven’t heard from anybody. Last I knew, you were doing Vinnie a solid, trying to find the crew who robbed us.”

“I appreciate that.”

“But if he tells me something different”-Charlie jerked his finger back and forth between them-“next time we see each other, it’ll be different.”

Ray nodded as Eric Clapton’s version of “I Shot the Sheriff” started playing on the jukebox. The song reminded him of prison. “That song was big on my wing,” Ray said. “Guys with boom boxes used to play it all the time.”

Charlie, shaking his head, said, “Fucking boom boxes in prison, next thing you know they’re gonna open up whorehouses in the yard.”

Ray was listening to the familiar lyrics of the song, wondering the same thing he always wondered when he heard it. He took a sip of Jameson, then said, “You ever wonder who shot the deputy?”

“Huh?”

Ray pointed up toward the ceiling, like he was pointing to the notes as they drifted across the bar. “That song is Clapton’s version of the old Bob Marley tune ‘I Shot the Sheriff.’ What I want to know is, who shot the deputy?”

Charlie cocked his head, listening to the words. “What are you talking about?”

“The guy in the song, he says, ‘I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy.’ If that’s true, then who shot the fucking deputy?”

The jukebox played, I shot the sheriff, but I swear it was in self-defense. Freedom came my way one day, and I started out of town. ..

Charlie nodded. “Nobody shot the deputy. I think the guy’s saying he shot the sheriff, and he could have shot the deputy, too, but he didn’t.”

“No,” Ray said, thinking about the arguments he had gotten into at Terre Haute over the same thing. “If you listen to the words, the deputy is definitely dead. The guy says, ‘They want to bring me in guilty, for the killing of a deputy.’ So somebody killed the deputy. It just wasn’t him.”