Victor Gischler - Gun Monkeys

I decided Jeffers wouldn’t appreciate all of the real and gritty drama in its entirety, so I boiled it down for him.

“I’m looking for Tina.”

“She was looking for you too,” said Jeffers. He was looking dead at me but not focusing too well. “She got tired of waiting and left.”

“To go where?”

“Oh, my God. Oh, oh, oooooh.” He trailed off into a sad, throaty moan and slumped into the lawn chair next to the table.

“Jeffers.”

“I’ve messed it all up,” he said. “Oh, God why can’t I die? Look at me. How come I don’t die?” He started crying, a long, high-pitched feeble blubbering.

“Knock it off,” I said. “Answer my question.”

He kept on crying and groped for the mirror with the cocaine. He curled his arm around it lovingly, drew it to him, pushed his face down into the powder.

“Stop that.”

He sniffed, tears dropping from his face at the same time, clumping in the white powder. He pressed his whole face into it, snorting and crying and writhing, coughing out sobs and sniffing in the powder when he could take a breath.

“Stop that. You look like a retard. Stop it.”

“I need it.” Sniff .

“You don’t need it. This isn’t helping.”

“I need it, need need need it. Oooooh, please oh please.” His face was still down on the table. He scooped the powder onto him with both hands, into his eyes, mouth, on his cheeks like he was trying to burrow into it, hide like an ostrich.

I grabbed him under the arms, pulled him out of the chair.

He went limp, dead weight, cried at full volume like an infant. His skin was slippery. I pulled him to the edge of the pool, dropped him. Moans.

“Sorry about this,” I said.

I dunked him into the cold water. In and out, in and out. I kept that up for a while until he shouted at me between dunks.

“Okay, okay. Stop.”

I pulled him away from the pool, let him lie on the grass. He was still crying, just a little, but it wasn’t the out-of-control tantrum like before. He was spent now, defeated, but I could talk to him.

“Oh, Tina. I wish Tina were here.”

“Me too,” I said. “She could make us some coffee.”

“She was so much more than a coffee maker.”

Whatever.

“Oh, God, where is everybody?”

“I don’t know.” I turned one of the pool chairs around, sat looking down at him lying sprawled on the grass, eyes crunched up, lips pulled back in a feral grimace. “Tina’s undercover FBI, you know.”

Jeffers picked his head up, looked at me like I was Sherlock Holmes or a Martian or God. “How did you know about that?”

“Just tell me where you think she might have gone.” You dumb shit .

“I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.” He shook his head back and forth in the grass as he spoke.

“Guess.”

“She just left. Went away and never came back. I need her.”

“You don’t need her. Straighten up and think for a minute, will you?”

“She said she had a plan. She said we’d get the money and leave this place, just be together, her and me.”

Deluded asshole.

“They fired me from the bank,” said Jeffers. “Froze my accounts.”

There was a lot of that going around.

“Where’s Tina’s room?” I asked.

“Tina’s gone. Gone gone gone gone-”

“Where’s her room !”

“Past my office. All the way at the end of the hall.”

I left Jeffers on the grass, found Tina’s room.

She’d cleaned it out quickly. Naked hangers in the closet along with a suitcase-sized emptiness between some old boxes. Nothing helpful in the boxes. Her dresser drawers were empty. I looked under the bed. Nothing there. I kicked over the wastepaper basket near the bed, and a stack of papers fell out. Credit card bills. Visa. Sears. Phone bills. Junk mail.

I went back into the kitchen, rummaged the fridge and found a can of light beer. My hand hurt again. It was too soon to take another pain pill. I took one anyway, washed it down with the beer. I took a stool. Sat there. Thought. Scratched my head. Drank the beer.

I went back to Tina’s room and picked the old phone bill out of the trash can. There were no local calls listed. I guess they’d be on Jeffers’s bill. This statement was for a calling card. Tina had made twenty-two calls to Spring City, Tennessee.

I went back to Jeffers. He was passed out. I shook him awake, and he opened his eyes flinching at the daylight.

“What is it?”

“Did Tina ever say anything about Tennessee?”

“She has some family there, I think. A brother? Tom. Yeah. Good old Brother Tom.”

“Get straight,” I advised him. “Go someplace. Do you have a relative you can stay with? A brother or something?”

“I don’t know. Let me think.”

“Don’t think too long. Agent Dunn might lose his patience and come for you here. Lay low for a while or don’t. Whatever. I’m going. I have work to do.”

“No.”

“No what?”

“Please.” He started misting up again. “Don’t leave me. Please. I can’t die. I’m trying to die, but I won’t die.”

“You’ll die,” I said.

“I used to be a banker.” He started crying again.

“We all used to be something.”

On the way back through the house, I used Jeffers’s phone, called the airlines, asked questions, wrote down the appropriate information. Then I called Marcie at her hotel room.

“Charlie!” She practically shouted into the phone. “I’m getting pretty God damn tired of sitting in this hotel room.”

“Shut up and listen. There’s a flight leaving for Acapulco in fifty-one minutes. Go get a ticket.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll catch up when I can.”

“When?”

“Maybe a day. Maybe two.”

Maybe never.

Time to drive.

The concrete snarl of Orlando’s tangled road cluster faded away as I took the turnpike to I-75 and aimed the Impala north. The Florida-Georgia state line put itself behind me, then Atlanta, and I branched off toward Chattanooga.

Spring City was a small town along Highway 27 surrounded by low mountains. The temperature had dipped considerably during my trek north, and the sharp wind hissed and whistled through the cracks and creases in the convertible’s top. I’d driven all the way wearing my pea coat and with the heat on.

The dead, flat sky was a uniform gray.

I’d made decent time, stopping only four times to fill up with gas or coffee or take a piss. I didn’t want to risk driving such a distance on pain pills, so my stomach burned with too much aspirin.

At the local Days Inn, I asked for a room and checked in under the name Peter Tork. I wanted something around back, away from the traffic noise. They gave me 126.

I pulled into a service station, hopped out of the car near a pay phone. The wind bit into me immediately, and I pulled the pea coat tight.

I unfolded the phone bill I’d salvaged from Tina’s trash can, dropped the coins into the slot, and dialed the number. It rang three times.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” I said. “Is Tina there?”

“Who can I tell her is calling?” A Southern accent, not too thick.

“I’m an old friend from Florida. Pete.” It seemed plausible enough when I’d rehearsed it, but coming out of my mouth, it sounded pretty weak.

“She ain’t been there long enough to make old friends.”

“Is this her brother Tom?”

“This is her husband Tom.”

Bingo. She told Jeffers it was her brother. Sure. That made sense. Hussy with a badge.

“Oops. My mistake.” I chuckled. Kept it light. “She said to give her a visit if I was ever in the neighborhood.”