Get Shorty: A Novel

“I get to keep the ten in the laundry bag,” Chili said.

Bones had to think about that one.

“Look,” Chili said, “I was gonna pay you the eight I owe you out of the ten. See, but now you tell me I don’t have to. So . . .”

“So I take two out of it and we’re square,” Bones said. “How’s that?”

“Sounds good to me,” Chili said.

He looked up the number for the Drug Enforcement Administration in the phone book, dialed it and told the woman who answered he wanted to speak to the agent in charge. She asked what it was in regard to and he said a locker out at the airport, full of money.

A male voice came on saying, “Who’s speaking, please?”

“I can’t tell you,” Chili said, “it’s an anonymous call.”

The male voice said, “Are you the same anonymous asshole called last night?”

“No, this’s a different one,” Chili said. “Have you looked in that locker, C—oh-one-eight?”

There was a pause on the line.

“You’re helping us out,” the male voice said. “I’d like to know who this is.”

“I bet you would,” Chili said. “You want to chat or you want me to tell you who to look for? The guy’s on his way out right now.”

This DEA agent wouldn’t give up. He said, “You know there’s a reward for information that leads to a conviction. That’s why I have to know who this is.”

“I’ll get my reward in heaven,” Chili said. “The guy you want has a bullet scar in his head and is wearing gray shoes. You can’t miss him.”

24

“This was Warren’s office,” Karen said, “before he was shipped off to Publicity. Warren Hurst, I think I mentioned him to you.”

“Beth’s Room,” Chili said, sitting across from Karen at her big oak desk. “The one that said if you did it your way they wouldn’t have a movie.”

“You remember that.”

She said it with that nice look in her eyes she had been using on him lately. Interested, letting him know she liked him. The only difference today, she had on glasses, round ones with thin black frames. She was telling him now the office decor was pre-Warren, he hadn’t been here long enough to redecorate; that it wouldn’t be bad in a men’s club, but she wasn’t going to touch it. “Not till I see if I get a vote here.”

Chili said, “You don’t fool around.”

“What, taking the job? Why not?”

Karen’s shoulders moved in the beige silk blouse, the little ninety-pounder behind the big executive desk.

“I think I’ll be good at it if they let me. Look at the scripts.”

She picked up one from a stack of about ten and moved it to another part of the desk.

“Elaine says all of them have spin in varying degrees. That means they’re supposed to be good.”

She picked up another one. “Beth’s Room, still under consideration.”

She picked up another and laid it down again.

“Elaine wants to know what I think.”

“Tell her the truth.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I got an idea spinning around.”

“You told me about it.”

As he said, “It’s getting better,” Karen’s phone buzzed.

She picked it up. “Yeah?” Said, “Tell him I’ll call him back,” and looked at Chili as she hung up. “Harry. That’s the third time today.”

Chili said, “I have to call him too, tell him what happened.”

And Karen said, “That’s right, you were going out to the airport,” her expression changing, her eyes losing that nice glow as they became serious. She took off her glasses as he told her about the DEA guys and hunched her shoulders leaning on the desk, looking right at him but maybe picturing it too, the scene. That was the feeling he had. He finished the part at the airport and she said, “You really did that?” sounding amazed. “So the money’s still there?” He had to tell her about Bones then, and she listened to that part, every word of it, without blinking her eyes. When he finished she sat back in her chair for a moment thinking, still looking at him, then came forward again asking about Bones, who he was. So Chili had to take her all the way back to Vesuvio’s and the leather coat.

GET SHORTY 247

This time when he finished Karen said, “He’ll tell the DEA guys you set it up. Won’t he?”

“If they get him,” Chili said. “Yeah, Bones’ll try to put it on me. If they come around looking and I get hauled in, I say I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

“But they saw you there today,” Karen said, “at the airport.”

“Yeah, well, they’d still have to prove I put the money in the locker and there’s no way they can do that, ’cause I didn’t. I never touched that locker. If I see I’m in too deep I can always give ’em Catlett. But I don’t want to go through all that right now. Even if I didn’t have to post a bond it would be annoying, the way they keep after you asking questions. So I checked out of the Marquis. Now I have to find another place.”

She was giving him that amazed look again. “You’re serious.”

“Yeah, I tried the Chateau Marmont, see if I could get Jean Harlow’s room, but they’re full up. One thing I did, not knowing any better at the time, I told the DEA guys I was with ZigZag. They didn’t write it down, so they might not remember it, and I didn’t have a card to give them. But if they do, they’ll look up Harry, try to find me that way.”

“What Harry will have trouble accepting,” Karen said, “you didn’t get the money, not that you could go to jail.”

“Yeah, I’ll have to explain it to him. Once Bones found the key, the way his one-track mind works it was out of my hands. I had to let it happen.”

“I’d like to have seen that,” Karen said. She pushed out of her leather chair, came around the desk in a black skirt a few inches above her knees and leaned against the edge of the desk, close, looking down at him. He thought for a moment she was going to touch his face. She said, “I’ll bet you have scars . . .”

“A few.”

“I like your hair.”

“That’s another story I could tell you sometime.”

She said, “Why don’t you hide out at my house?”

“Sleep in the maid’s room?”

She said, “We’ll work something out.”

There was a certain look about the Mexican gardener that made Harry think of one of his maniacs: the little gnomelike one in Grotesque Three who took over after the original hideously disfigured maniac was burned to death in Grotesque Two and the picture went on to gross twenty million worldwide. The Mexican gardener coming this way across the lawn was bowlegged. Maybe that was it. Grotesque Three did almost eight million, which still wasn’t bad. Or it was—of course, it was the shears the guy was carrying, the way he held them in front of him with both hands. The gnomelike maniac had used shears a lot.

Harry was on Karen’s patio. Out here now as he kept moving, waiting for the phone to ring. Harry nodded to the Mexican approaching with the shears, wishing he’d point them down. “How are you?”

“Miss Flores isn’ home.”

“I know that,” Harry said.

“She’s at work.”

“I know where she is,” Harry said, “and she knows I’m here. It’s okay, I’m a good friend of hers. We’re amigos.”