Mickey Finn Volume 2, page 19
“I’ll wash them for you in the morning,” she said.
“You don’t have to.” I was being polite. I was happy to have her do it, but I wouldn’t have asked it of her.
“Come on.” She led the way back to the bedroom and pulled down the comforter and top sheet from a double bed that was set against a wall. I stood in the middle of the room looking around, not moving toward the bed, even though I felt an irresistible urge to lie down and close my eyes.
Tammy turned away and with a few movements was suddenly in her underwear, her slender body sleek and appealing. She was quick to slide onto the bed, and before I could figure out what I really wanted to do, she was patting the open space next to her. “Get in, Jack. I won’t bite.”
I decided I wasn’t in a position to argue. The shower had made me soporific and my eyelids were heavy. I climbed in after her and pulled up the corner of the bedding to trap the warmth. Tammy scooted onto my side and turned, draping an arm over my chest.
“Do you want to—”
I didn’t want to be mean or cruel. I needed what she could give me. “I just have to sleep, Tammy.”
“Oh,” she said, pulling back her arm. “I get it.” But she didn’t pull it back all the way. My eyes were closed, and I was one heartbeat away from not being able to feel what she did next. I kept my eyes closed as she worked her way down my body and then rolled on top. I remember she smelled sweet.
In the morning she was gone. How she got out of the corner without disturbing me was a mystery, but I was grateful.
Last night I would have slept in an abandoned car if I’d known where to find one. I had no money, and I couldn’t go to my friends, or the neighborhood, or anywhere else. This woman, Tammy, who happened to be working in the bar I’d crept into with my last thirty bucks, poured me a beer and told me her troubles. “It’s not supposed to work this way,” I told her. She talked about ways to get out of her jam, though I think most of them involved what I could do to help her. That’s how it seemed, anyway, up until we got to her bedroom.
There were two boxes of cereal next to a bowl and spoon on the small table in the kitchen. Tammy was sitting on the floor, legs crossed beneath her. The cotton bag I’d left on the counter the night before was gone.
“Good morning,” she said. “I’m afraid there’s not much for breakfast.”
I pulled out the single chair and sat down, facing her. “Milk would be nice.”
She hit her forehead with her palm and pushed to her feet. “There is milk.”
She pulled a carton out of the refrigerator, and as I mixed up some Raisin Bran I felt her presence behind me.
“Last night was nice.”
“You saved my life.” I said it without thinking, but it may have been true—literally. My crew had scattered when the job turned to shit. We were all homies, born into this town as lifers. Each of us knew every rathole for twenty miles. I wouldn’t have been able to hide on my own much longer.
Tammy put her hands on my shoulders. They were warm. “I feel the same way.”
She didn’t know we weren’t in the same game, but it was nice hearing her say that. I liked her but she was a mystery. “Where are you from? I’d have known you already if you were from Alford.”
“Not far,” she said. She moved closer and I could feel the pressure of her breasts against my back. Her whole body exuded heat. “My daddy has ties here. He owns Teddy’s, the bar you came into last night.”
That made me think of our deal. “He have something to do with that package I left on the counter?”
“Hmm,” she said. She came around to my side and got down on her knees, sliding her arms around my waist and slowly lowering her head onto my thigh, her tanned but lined face turned to the side. I lowered my spoon and stroked her hair. It was dirty blond, but natural, the dark and light strands existing in a tangle without any help from a bottle.
“You’re in trouble,” I said.
“Hmm,” she said again.
“Me, too.”
She came up and into my arms, forcing me to slide the chair away from the table as she moved onto my lap. “I could tell,” she said, kissing me all the way, like it was last night. Not long after, we were back in her bed, clothes strewn across the floor.
“I want to help you,” I told her. She was lying against my side, her left breast pushed into my ribs as I stared at her cracked popcorn ceiling. “If I can.”
She kissed my chest. “You’re sweet,” she said. “But that wouldn’t be smart.”
I laughed before I could help myself. “Baby, I have baggage like a bundle of dynamite. You keeping me anywhere near you isn’t smart.”
“Do you want to leave?”
“I have nowhere to go.” I thought about it some more and gave her a direct answer. “No, I don’t want to leave.”
She nestled her head into my arm, got smaller. “Someone’s after you, aren’t they?”
It didn’t surprise me that she’d picked up on that. “They are.”
“Are they going to hurt you?”
They’ll kill me if they find me. When they find me. “They are.”
I felt her fingers trace a pattern along the ridges of my abdomen. “Maybe I should help you.”
“You already are,” I said. “What do you think you’ve been doing?” I squeezed her as best I could with her weight on my arm. We didn’t speak for so long I thought she’d fallen asleep.
“Do you know what you did for me last night?”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “I hope I do.”
“I’m talking about the package.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That. I haven’t thought about it. I just did what you asked.”
“Was it hard?”
I shrugged. “Not really. It’s not very noble but I hit him as I walked up to him and he dropped. I found the bag and took it. He was unconscious when I left.”
A wave of tension moved down her body. “Could you have killed him?”
The answer was yes, but it hadn’t happened. “No,” I said.
She relaxed but the closeness we shared earlier was gone. She said, “That’s good,” but more to herself, it seemed, than to me. We stayed like that for a time. Peaceful.
Finally, she asked, “Why are people after you?”
I looked down and found her staring at me. She ran a bar in the blue-collar area of town, a joint that probably stayed in business because there wasn’t a strip club within thirty miles. If she didn’t know about me in particular, she certainly knew all about me in general. “We pulled a job, my friends and I. It didn’t go well.” I moved her hair behind her ear. It was soft. “Actually, it went perfect, until the law showed up.”
“Someone called the cops?”
“No. I figure they must have been moving on the same deal we were.” I didn’t really want to give her any details, but I was so screwed I knew it didn’t really matter. It would be good to tell her, to talk about it. Because it was her.
“We knew some guys that were taking a truck, hijacking it. We also knew who was buying.”
“So you stepped in.”
I shrugged. “There was a lot of cash. We needed a score.”
“What happened when the police came?”
“What you think. We got the hell out of there, the four of us. I even had the money.”
She sat up, pressing against my chest with one hand. Her naked figure was beautiful, the tanned skin uniformly covering her body. I wondered how often she used a tanning bed. “How much?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter. Not enough.” I didn’t like how intent she’d become. Gently I moved her hand off my chest, taking her weight with my arm and forcing her to return to her previous position. She snuggled in but kept her eyes on my face.
“Where is it?”
“We had a spot where we’d meet if things went wrong. I took it there.”
“With your friends?”
“No one was there. I left the money and kept running.”
“You left the money? Why?”
“It was light. Way light. The buyer must have been shorting their end of the deal. There were dollar bills where there should have been fifties or hundreds.”
“Oh,” she said, a lot of the tension leaving her. “But that’s not your fault.”
“No,” I said. “But my guys are going to look at the take and think I fucked with it. They’re going to think I took the real money and left the dollar bills. The problem is I’m the one who had the money when the cops showed.” I twirled some of her hair between my fingers. “Thing is, we were all screwed, just none of us knew it.”
“You can’t tell them? You don’t think they’d listen?”
I shook my head. “When the doors came down in the front of the warehouse we didn’t know what was happening. I said it was cops. Powell, the asshole, looked at me and said how’d I know? Was I the one who called them? The rest of them looked at me a little funny, but I had the case and I turned and ran. Powell started in my direction but there was an explosion, not a gunshot, and he fell. I kept moving, and I heard him yell something at me as I ran.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Powell’s a dick,” I said. “He’d screw his mother for a cigarette.”
She hit my chest. “So why not keep all the money?”
I shook my head. “Then I really would be guilty of screwing my guys.”
“You think Powell called the cops?”
“Not really, but you never know. But my crew’s going to come after me now. They’re going to think I ripped them off. Doesn’t matter what I did or didn’t do.”
“But the real crook—”
I laughed again. “Honey, we’re all real crooks,” I said.
She didn’t argue.
“You working tonight? At the bar?”
It was late in the afternoon. We’d stayed in bed another hour after I’d confessed my sins, and we’d shared each other’s bodies with a lessening urgency but a deeper sense of purpose. At the end we’d managed to become Jackson and Tammy, something beyond just two bodies rutting for comfort in hard and desperate times. I was feeling an intensity I hadn’t experienced in a long time.
“I have to,” she said but I could see the muscles in her face tighten.
The thought of the package from the night before made me ask, “Is it safe?”
She went to the bathroom and returned with a large plastic comb and started to work on her hair. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Look, I know what goes on with bars. Behind the scenes, I mean.”
She didn’t say anything, just kept on with her hair.
“Your father. He runs cash through there, doesn’t he?”
Bars are still a cash business and, as such, convenient for people who need to launder bills from less convenient ventures. Declare it as bar revenue, pay taxes on it, and you make clean money from bad. Uncle Sam even gets a taste.
Tammy nodded.
“You skimming?”
Her eyes jerked to mine, then she relaxed and resumed combing.
“And he caught you.”
The teeth caught in a snarl and she pulled at it, making it worse. Finally she pulled the comb out and threw it on the bed near my feet.
“No. It was my brother.”
She told me that her father owned a string of bars across the state and that they served one real function for him. Her brothers oversaw the rest of the joints while Tammy had her own thing. “Taking a little bit is expected,” she said.
“But you took more than a little.”
She nodded. “One time.”
“Why?”
She turned her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
I left it. “Your father know?”
Her widened eyes and stiffened posture answered that question.
“But your brother…”
“He wanted the skim. Plus the rest of it. But that was already gone. Daddy might have been okay with what I took, but when you add what Marcel…”
“Why not just let Marcel tell him? Would it be so bad?”
“It’s my father. He’s always been very specific in his expectations. I went too far. But it was only supposed to be temporary.”
I thought about it while she stood there, close to crying. The urge to take her in my arms was strong but I wanted to figure this out.
“Who’d I slug? Marcel?”
She nodded. “You got back the money I gave him, the extra that was supposed to keep him from calling Daddy now, before Daddy gets back from Europe. Marcel knew he could take that money from me and there was nothing I could do about it. Daddy would believe I took it all and Marcel would deny he knew anything about it.”
I gave in to my instincts, got up from the bed, and crossed over to her. She came easily into my arms. All I wanted to do was hold her and forget about the outside. “So you’re still screwed.”
“Just like you,” she said.
She understood I didn’t want to leave her. It wasn’t just the sanctuary her little apartment provided. She gave me a warm kiss and then went out to the market, returning after ninety minutes with a collection of bagels and other convenience foods. We didn’t speak much as we spent the afternoon together. I provided support for her, and the way she leaned into me, relaxed when we were touching, I knew that she felt it all, too.
“How did you find me?” she asked, once again lying against my side.
“You mean the bar?”
She nodded.
“Dumb luck.” I thought about it. “When we left the warehouse I didn’t know where to go. I dropped the money at our spot and took off.”
“What would have happened if those other guys had caught you there?”
I kissed the side of her head.
“And then you found me.” She said it in a way that made it sound like good news.
“Yours was the only bar on this side of town. What else would be open? I had to get off the street and there you were.”
“What would you have done if I hadn’t been there?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I had a thought about breaking into a store, something like that, but I didn’t want to risk any alarms.” Her body gave off a noticeable amount of heat, more so than most people, I thought. Like it was imperfectly stored energy, trapped in her skin, that was slowly oozing out. The warmth carried her smell, a combination of lotion and oils, up to my nostrils and I breathed her in deeply. “It’s just good you were there.”
She moved away from me, turned to face me. “Is it?” she asked. “Really?”
I knew she was talking about the consequences of her family problems. “We’ll figure it out,” I said. I got up to use the bathroom, told her I’d be right back. That was when Marcel came in.
I heard the door open with a bang and jumped to my feet. My hand was on the bathroom doorknob when I heard Tammy yell her brother’s name.
That stopped me. I tried to make out what they were saying but I couldn’t get all the words. It was clear he was after more money, but Tammy seemed to give as good as she got. She didn’t sound fearful, at least not at that point, so I stayed where I was. I knew if I went out there Marcel might recognize me, and everything could change in an instant. If Marcel had a gun, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything anyway. So I waited.
The front door slammed again, and I rushed out to find Tammy, tears tumbling down her cheeks. She looked up and ran to me.
“I hate that bastard!” she said, snarling.
“I couldn’t get it all. What did he say?”
She used part of my shirt to dry her eyes. The intimate gesture made me want to protect her even more. “He accused me of sending someone to rob him last night. I told him he was crazy. I don’t think he even cares. He just wants the money back. And more. Now he wants more.”
I led her back to the bed and we settled down and faced each other. “Can you get it?”
She blinked. “You want me to give it to him? My father…”
“No, no.” I shook my head. “If there’s more, we could take it. We could run, go somewhere…”
Her laugh was unexpected. “There’s no running,” she said. “Not for me. You don’t know my father. He’s everywhere.” Tammy wiped her eyes and looked into mine. “But I’ll do it. With you. It’s just…it’s just…”
“What?”
“It won’t work.”
We sat there together in her living room, her two hands in mine, until she found her resolve. “I’ll have to give him the money.”
“But—”
“There’s a second safe. In the bar. It’s separate from the main one, the one we use for normal business. The second one is where Daddy’s money goes.”
“Two safes?”
She nodded, lines creasing her forehead as she considered. “If someone robs the place, anything like that, the first safe is there, in the office. But Daddy says no one thinks of a second safe. So that’s the important one.”
That made sense. I’d been part of a few things where we took out a safe; I’d never thought there could be more than one. “Pay Marcel,” I said. “We’ll take the rest and run. Unless you think your father will understand. Stick up for you over your brother.”
She shook her head. “He’ll never understand.” Tammy brushed her hair back from her face with her fingers. “You know what will happen if they find us? Because they probably will.”
I nodded. “I know. Maybe we’ll get lucky, make a new start.”
“What about—what about the guys that are after you?”
“They’re not as bad as your father, they don’t have the reach. If we can get a jump, I won’t worry about them.”
Dark was falling as we made our way to the bar, my arm around her shoulders, hers around my waist. I wore a baseball cap Tammy’d had in her closet and kept my head down during the six-block walk. Everything seemed fine when she unlocked the door and we went inside. She’d called Marcel and told him she could pay him tonight. Everything was happening so fast, but that was the only way it could. I was exhausted as I sat at the empty bar while Tammy went down to the basement. When she came back it was with a gym bag full of money.
