Stick Read online

  Stick turned to walk away.

  “Wait a minute,” Chucky said. “Wait just a goddamn minute there. I asked you a question. You’re walking around my place like somebody invited you in—you see anything you like?”

  Kyle watched the man stand awkwardly for a moment, as though he didn’t know what to do with his hands or didn’t know how to answer. Though his expression, staring at Chucky, seemed at ease. It caught her by surprise when he stepped into the doorway. He looked around the living room, taking his time. He looked directly at her.

  Then looked at Chucky again. He said, “No, I guess I don’t,” and walked away.

  Chucky turned to Kyle. “You believe it? Jesus Christ.” He started for the balcony but turned again, doing his pivot step, and said, “The hell with it. I’ll get it straightened out.”

  Kyle said, “You don’t know him?”

  “I never saw him before in my life.” Moving again. “We’re having a time here getting down to business.” He turned to her, rubbing her hands together. “You don’t want a drink, huh?”

  Kyle shook her head. “No, but go ahead.”

  “You see why I get ulcers, people walking in. I don’t mean as a habit, but I tell you, I get involved now and again with some weird folks,” Chucky said. “Did Barry—you mentioned he’s a client of yours—did he tell you much about me?”

  “He said, ‘Wait till you meet him,’ “ Kyle said, “and gave me that sidelong look over his glasses with his eyebrows raised.”

  “I can see him,” Chucky said. “Well, the gist of it is, I got funds looking to go to work and I don’t know where to put ’em. Not only because I don’t read The Wall Street Journal, but like I mentioned not having Blue Cross­Blue Shield, people don’t know how to act you say you deal in cash. You get away from condos, which I’m sick to death of, getting jacked around by the developers, having to discount my dough—I don’t even like condominiums, I don’t know what I’m doing living in one.” He paused. “But it’s safe up here, you know it? It’s pretty safe, usually.”

  Kyle said, “You don’t have to bare your soul. In fact, I would just as soon you didn’t.”

  “Anyway, what’s my goal, the American dream,” Chucky said. “What else? Put money in some gimmick everybody has to have, get rich and retire. No more worries, no more looking over your shoulder. So the boys in the dark-blue three-piece suits come up here, the wingtips, I start talking, they start pulling at their little ties. I think I ever showed them the actual funds, emptied out the suitcases and the ice coolers, piled it all on the table, they’d strangle to death.”

  Kyle was nodding, trying to be objective about it and discovering that she was accepting Chucky’s problem without too much trouble. It surprised her that she felt no aversion. But then money was simply money. It had no intrinsic moral value. It passed from hand to hand . . . and a one-hundred-dollar bill in Miami today could be in Minneapolis tomorrow, one of a thousand others just like it buying a Bridgeport milling machine.

  She touched her throat. “Well, I’m not wearing a necktie.”

  Chucky looked at her with a gleam. “No, you’re not, are you?”

  “I’ll tell you right now though,” Kyle said, “I don’t do laundry.”

  Chucky grinned. “That’s cute. But how does it help me?”

  “Well, I don’t see why I couldn’t advise you,” Kyle said. “Get you into an equity situation that looks promising. I’ve got several. Barry bought into a beautiful little company in Dayton last month. They make instrumentation to measure analog and digital signals.”

  “I see high-tech in my future,” Chucky said. “Computers. That’s where I understand it’s at.” He saw Kyle staring at him, waiting. “I read. You think I’m not up on all this shit?”

  “By the time you read in Time magazine about a trend,” Kyle said, “it’s over. That’s when you sell short if you’re going to do any trading at all. Don’t worry, I’ll find you something. If they want your investment bad enough you can deliver it in one-dollar bills in a wheelbarrow. So don’t worry about that either . . . As long as you pay my fees by check. Can we agree to that?”

  “No problem,” Chucky said. “Boy, you’re fun, you know it? You’re so girlish and yet . . .” His expression began to change, the gleam becoming smug. “It’s not going to bother your, let’s say, your propriety any, doing business with me?”

  “You have a lawyer, don’t you?”

  “You kidding? I got a law firm.”

  “And they charge you fees.”

  “Up front, a retainer . . . Yeah, I see what you mean.” Chucky grinned, still with that smugness. “So I won’t worry any about your personal ethics.” He winked. “Just kidding.”

  Kyle said, “Good, and I won’t worry about your drug habit.” She gave him her nice-girl smile. “And I’m not kidding.”

  * * *

  Lionel came in with the suitcase and laid it on the desk. It seemed to Stick like a ceremony: all of them standing around waiting, Rainy taking the suitcase now, bringing it down to his side and hefting it. “Tested by a four-hundred-pound gorilla,” Chucky said, “so we know she won’t come apart on you.”

  Rainy was grinning. “You always say that.”

  Stick waited, nothing to do. Lionel was looking at him with a sleepy expression, heavy features slack. Rainy had said Lionel’s name was Oliva, a Cuban; all the guys, he said, that worked for Chucky were Cuban. He had five or six of them hanging around this place, some others when he needed them. Stick tried staring back at Lionel, not giving it much, and Lionel held on for about five seconds before looking away. Chucky had hardly looked at him at all since coming in from the living room, alone. The girl must have left. She had seemed out of place here. She looked like a social worker with money, if there was such a thing as that. Or a tennis pro. She had looked at him: she had those eyes that knew things but didn’t tell you what she was feeling.

  Rainy was saying, “I was thinking we should have a gun. One of us.”

  It took Stick by surprise. He wanted to get Rainy’s eye and shake his head at him. But maybe he didn’t have to. Chucky was saying, “You tell me you’re bringing Bozo here with you ’cause there’s nothing to it, he’s going for the ride. So what do you need a gun for?”

  Rainy said, “You always give me one before. Like Brinks, man, for just in case. Why is it different this one?”

  Chucky said, “You want the job? You want the job, get outta here . . . Lionel?”

  Lionel went over to the door and stood waiting to see them out as Rainy said, “How about the pay? Five grand you said.”

  “We’ll take care of that tomorrow,” Chucky said. “I’ll be here, you know I’m going to be here . . . Now go on, get out . . .”

  Chucky punched out a number on his phone system, walked over to the hat-tree and set the “Crested Beaut” model over his eyes. When Moke’s voice came on, Chucky said:

  “Delivery’s on its way.”

  Silence.

  “You hear me?”

  “I ain’t deaf, am I?”

  Just dumb, Chucky thought. He said, “For the other part of the deal, instead of Rainy, how about you take the bozo that’s with him? You think you could do that?”

  “It don’t matter none to me,” Moke’s voice said.

  Chucky said, “Hey, partner? See you tomorrow.”

  Moke was starting to work for him already and didn’t even know it.

  5

  RAINY, BEHIND THE WHEEL OF the Chevy van, would glance at Stick as he spoke and from Stick back to the four lanes of freeway and the red taillights moving in the dark.

  “The way I understand it, Chucky owes the money because it was his fault Nestor Soto had to put up a bond, the two-hundred thousand, to get one of his guys out. Then when the guy left and went to Colombia it was okay with Nestor because he say Chucky has to pay him. See, Chucky knew a guy from New York or some place he thought was a good guy. He see him in the Mutiny, different places, he knows the guy is
buying product, right? Now this guy tells Chucky he wants to make a big buy—I don’t know how many kilos, man—I’m talking about coke. So Chucky is thinking okay, no problem. He’ll broker the deal, put the guy in touch with Nestor Soto and make about five-ten percent from the guy, everybody’s happy, right? Except what do you know, this guy from New York, man, he turns out he’s a deep narc, man, from the BNDD. Sure, he put it together, they raid this place Nestor has down in Homestead on the canal, kill one of his guys, bust the other one—that’s the two-hundred-thousand bond—take all his shit, man, and Nestor believe Chucky put the stuff on him. What else is he going to think? Nestor is crazy anyway. Sometime they call him El Chaco, from some wild place where he was born. El Chaco. He believe in santería, man, like voodoo. He start free-basing, he kill these animals as a sacrifice, with a knife. It can scare the shit out of you, you see something like that. Chucky explain it to him, no, man, he was surprised as Nestor the guy was a narc. He say, ask anybody at the Mutiny, they tell you. Nestor, he finally say okay, but Chucky has to pay him for the bond, you know, that Nestor lost.”

  “Forfeited,” Stick said.

  “Yeah, forfeit. The court don’t give it back. So that’s it, man, in the suitcase. He always say that, Chucky? About the gorilla.” Rainy grinned. “Oh, man . . .”

  “Why’d he pick you?”

  “What, to take it? He ask me.”

  “He’s got all those guys—why didn’t he send one of them with it?”

  “I tell him I need a job, some money. So . . .”

  Stick thought about it, trying to accept Chucky doing Rainy a favor. “What’s he on?”

  Rainy glanced over. “Who, Chucky? ‘Ludes, man. You can tell, uh? How he moves?”

  “Like he’s walking in mud,” Stick said.

  Following 95 through Miami, Stick couldn’t believe all the cement that had been poured since he was last here, when he was married and living here . . . He had begun thinking about his former wife, Mary Lou, when Rainy had to brake hard in traffic not watching his lane, and Stick felt his bucket seat slide forward and had to plant his feet. His wife’s Camaro had had a seat like that. He would adjust it, there, but it would break loose within a few days and give them something to discuss when his wife wasn’t complaining about the hot weather, about not seeing her friends, about her mother driving her crazy . . . till they moved back to Detroit and she began complaining about the cold, busing, about the colored taking over the shopping malls. Now she was back here again, Stick believed, because she missed bitching about her mother. They were a great pair, with their mouths turned down and set that way for all time. He hoped it wouldn’t hurt his little girl, always hearing the negative side of things. His little girl’s name was Katy. She had sent him handmade birthday and Father’s Day cards, her school pictures some years, and twenty letters during the time he was in prison; more than half of them written when she was twelve. He’d call tomorrow . . . get a present for her.

  They left the freeway and after that Stick didn’t know where they were, somewhere in South Miami; all the streets, up-down and across were numbers. Finally Rainy turned a corner at Southwest Seventy-Third Street and pulled up in front of a place with a sign that said Neon Leon’s. They had to meet a guy here, Rainy said, who would tell them where to go. A guy name Moke.

  Stick said, “Why don’t you give him the bag? Get it over with.”

  “I have to give it to Nestor Soto or his father-in-law, a guy name Avilanosa, nobody else,” Rainy said. “Nestor don’t advertise, I have to find out where he is . . . Lock your door.”

  Stick watched Rainy go into the place—a lounge or a restaurant, it looked new, whatever it was, flashy. Neon Leon’s. Hot shit. Places like this and Wolfgang’s made Stick tired thinking about them. He was getting old. Getting on and nothing to show for it. He’d earned five dollars a week in Jackson as a clerk-porter in the Guidance Center office, filing, mopping floors, cleaning toilets, and managed to come out with 680 dollars. A hundred and a half to get to Florida; a week paid in advance at the Hotel Bon-Aire on South Beach . . . he had about three hundred left. He’d go as high as a grand from Rainy for sitting here in the dark guarding Chucky’s suitcase with almost a quarter of a million in it. Christ . . .

  Moke came out, let go of the door and Rainy had to catch it. Stick watched him approach this side of the van as Rainy came around and got back in.

  “He’s going with us.”

  When Stick opened the door Moke said to him, gesturing with his head, hair to his shoulders, “Get in the back.” He seemed stoned, half asleep, holding his left arm, the elbow, pressed in. He had on an old worn-out leather jacket zipped partway up, nothing under it but bare skin. Stick would bet he had a couple of tattoos on him somewhere, crude, threatening artwork.

  “I got to get out,” Stick said, “before you get in, don’t I?” Wanting him to move back.

  Moke said, “I guess if you’re stupid.”

  Rainy was patting the inner side of his seat. “Through here, man. Just come through here.”

  Stick edged around between the seats to the rear compartment, hearing Moke say, “Where’d you find him at?” in that lazy, know-it-all tone so familiar, a twang of pure ignorance.

  Moke climbed in and slammed the door. Then looked around at Stick. “Let me have the suitcase. Make sure you assholes aren’t pulling any shit here.”

  The compartment bare, Stick was about to sit on the case. He got it up in front of him, kneeling on the carpet, and thought about shoving it hard into Moke’s face. He could feel his heart beating.

  Moke took the suitcase, laid it on his lap and fooled with the clasps until he got the top half raised. Rainy glanced out the side windows, then switched on the interior light. Stick raised up on his knees. He saw neat rows of banded one-hundred-dollar bills filling the suitcase. Moke picked up one of the packets and riffled through it, picked up another one, raising it to his ear and did it again. “Yep, it’s all there.” Rainy started to laugh. Moke half-turned to put dull eyes on Stick.

  “The fuck you looking at?”

  Rainy said, “Hey, where we suppose to go, man? Let’s get the show on the road.”

  Stick got a good look at those sleepy eyes before Moke straightened around again, told Rainy to go on over to 87th Avenue and head south.

  He could still feel his heart beating.

  What he had to do was tell himself, keep telling himself, he had nothing to do with this, he was along for the ride. Take a moment to think, realize where he was now and not just react to things.

  That guy he had read about last winter, the one who wrote the book inside and they got him a parole, that guy hadn’t stopped to think. Maybe the other guy, the guy working in the luncheonette who told him there was no place for customers to go to the bathroom there, the health department or something didn’t allow it, maybe he had said the wrong thing and the guy just out had felt his heart beating. That was understandable. But out here you didn’t use a knife on somebody who said you couldn’t take a leak. Inside you would have pissed on the guy. But outside—he shouldn’t have even had the knife on him. He shouldn’t have been out to begin with after they knew he had killed inside and didn’t think anything of human life and after he had spent all that time in the hole. They could’ve read the guy’s book and known they shouldn’t ever let a guy like that out. It was so different out . . . All the lights, for one thing, all the headlights and streetlights, the neon lights, all other people’s lights that had nothing to do with you. But inside you all lived together in the same fluorescent light or lights in metal cages without shades. You were in the same kind of light together all the time. If a guy like Moke ever gave you that look or tried to lean on you various ways, everybody was watching and you better back him off or else sew up your asshole because if you gave the guy the first inch he’d take the rest any time he wanted.

  You were lucky in there, Stick began to think. Jesus, you were lucky. You know it?

  He had backed
some of them off, the hot-shit guys in the wool-knit caps, but he wouldn’t have backed them off the whole seven years if he hadn’t been lucky and found a six-four, 240-pound soul-buddy by the name of DeJohn Holmes. One moment thinking he was going to die against that cement wall. The next moment DeJohn’s face grinning, showing him glints of gold and a pink tongue, DeJohn saying, “Man, you my frien’. Don’t you know that?” Stick shaking his head, still thinking he was going to die, and DeJohn saying, “Man, I hear you the one did the motherfucker put me in here. Tell me your pleasure, you want weed, you want shit, tell me what you want . . .”

  Moke had been saying, “Turn here, hang a left the next corner,” saying, “I got a Two-eighty Z’d put this fucker on the trailer in reverse.” Saying, “About a Hunnert and fifteenth. It’s before you get down to Montgomery . . .”

  Now he said, “Past the school.”

  “I don’t know where in the hell I’m at,” Rainy said.

  “Go on around the other side . . . Yeah, see the drive? In there.”

  Rainy said, “We going to school? I think it’s closed.”

  They moved along the side of the old building, a playground or athletic field extending off to their left.

  “Park along here,” Moke said, “facing out. Turn your engine off.”

  “I can’t see nothing,” Rainy said.

  They sat in silence.

  “You got any weed?” Rainy said.

  Moke didn’t answer him.

  “How about some music?” Rainy said. Then said, “Here comes somebody. Man, I hope it ain’t cops.”

  Stick kneeled up. He saw headlights coming across the field toward them, creeping, coming out of darkness. In the beams now he saw a baseball diamond.

  Moke said, “Pop your lights on and off . . . I said off, asshole!”

  Stick remained quiet, watching as the headlights came to a stop maybe fifty or sixty feet away, along the third base line. The headlights went off. Then came on again glaring, switched to high beam.

  Moke said, “Okay, get out,” and watched as Rainy opened his door and stepped down. Moke shoved the suitcase at him. “Wait now. I want this boy to take it over,” glancing around at Stick.