goddamned shopkeeper.
Some old Lynyrd Skynyrd was blasting when I walked into the noisy bar, my entrance seeming to cramp everybody’s style. Except for the dead man singing on the juke, most all the patrons stopped what they were doing. If my cop vibe revealed itself a bit on my first two visits here, it was fairly screaming this time. I blended in like Neil Diamond at a hip hop show. I might just as well have yelled Fore! and asked to play through. Actually, if not for all the hostile facial expressions, I would have gotten a kick out of it. But I walked through the crowd as my namesake through the Red Sea and straight up to Tina at the corner of the bar. As I passed, the sea filled in behind me and the noise started back up.
“You again,” she said, pressing her hand to the flap on her throat.
“Is there someplace we can talk?”
“Sure. Come… on. Butchie, keep an eye… on things.”
I followed Tina into the back room and down the stairs into her office. It might have been a biker bar on the upper level, but down here it looked like any other basement office. It was a business. There were bills to pay, a payroll to meet, and taxes to evade.
“So,” she said.
“Crank.”
“What about… him?”
“I need to find him.”
I didn’t wait for her to ask why or to do the Bribe-me-first Cha-cha. I took out a roll of money and explained to her why I needed to find him.
“He’s that important… to you… to find, huh?”
I shook my head yes.
“Put your money… away,” she said, closing the door behind her, “and… fuck me.”
I didn’t have to say what. My face said it for me.
“You heard… me.” Tina unbuckled her belt, unhitched her leather pants, and made a show of slowly undoing her zipper. She reached up with her free hand. “You don’t even have to… look at… me. I’ll bend over or… you can shut the… lights.”
I didn’t flinch. My father-in-law and I had played a game of chicken that lasted two decades. If I hadn’t flinched for him, I wasn’t going to for Tina Martell. I’d also learned that chicken was a two-team sport and that it worked both ways.
“You know, Tina, I didn’t think you were ugly till right now,” I said, starting for the office door. “I can find out what I need to know without Crank. But remember this, anything happens to my family because it took longer than it had to, I’ll come back and burn this shithole down.”
She stopped tugging on her zipper. “Once, I coulda had any man… I wanted. I did and… women too… sometimes. Now look at… me. I can’t even suck-”
I kissed her hard on the mouth, running my hand through her shortcut hair. She didn’t exactly resist, but she didn’t quite melt either. She stepped back after a moment.
“You must really… need Crank,” she said, looking anywhere but at me.
“Yeah, I do.”
“A cabin back in the woods… off Dunbar Road and… Limehouse Creek Way in Craterskill.”
“By the lake?”
She nodded. “Be careful… out there.”
Before I left, I stuck my head back into the office. “No one’s ever accused me of doing things I didn’t want to.”
Strolling into Henry’s Hog was one thing. Driving up on a meth lab out in the woods in the middle of the night was something else. The cop vibe at the roadhouse earned me a few nasty stares. Here, nasty stares would be the very least of my worries. Meth was big business and these guys didn’t fuck around. Shooting first and asking questions later was what they did with their friends. In my case, the questions would come after they had chopped me up and fed me to the local porcine population. As I rolled down Dunbar to the gravel road that was Limestone Creek Way, I thought that I might have asked Tina’s advice on how to approach Crank without getting a shotgun stuck up my ass. It was a wee bit late for that now.
I had three options, none of them any good, but some more dangerous than others. I could have left my car where it was and tried to work my way through the woods to the cabin on foot. That was my ‘if ’ option: If I was twenty pounds lighter… If I was twenty years younger… If my knees worked… Even then, I’m not sure I would have tried it. The woods around the cabin were probably full of eyes and ears and booby traps. Call me a worrier, but I didn’t much feel like stepping into a steel trap or wire snare. I could have tried to sneak up on one of the lookouts and have my. 38 convince him to take me to Crank. Again, I wasn’t sure I could pull it off nor did I want to create any more ill will than my unexpected visit was apt to generate. I needed Crank’s help, not his animosity. I went with option three. I restarted my car, put on the brights, rolled down my windows, blasted the radio, and headed straight for the cabin. I might be accused of stupidity, but nobody was going to accuse me of trying to sneak up on anyone.
That was all well and good until the front end of my car plowed into a log placed across Limestone. I didn’t hit it hard enough to have the air bag deploy, but the seat belt tightened up and gave me a pretty good jolt. Before my head had fully cleared, someone reached out of the darkness and stuck a cold hunk of metal into my neck just under my jaw.
“Shut the car off, asshole. Put your hands on the back of your head, and get out easy,” the man said, slowly pulling back the car door and guiding me with the end of his sawed-off. I still couldn’t quite make him out, but the rifle caught enough light for me to see. “Walk. That way. Slow.” He indicated which way with the gun barrel and moved it from my neck to my back.
If I had ever been more frightened, I couldn’t remember when. I’d been involved in a few shootings, but they had just sort of happened. One minute there wasn’t shooting and the next minute there was. The first time happened up in the Cat-skills. I was in the room when a crooked town cop blew the head off his fellow blackmailer. The next time was a setup. I’d been lured to a meeting at a shuttered Miami Beach hotel during the Moira Heaton/Steven Brightman investigation. When I showed, an ex-U.S. marshal named Barto tried to kill me. I fired back. I think I hit him, but didn’t stick around to make sure. Then there was the shooting at Crispo’s bar in Red Hook when Carmella’s partner was killed and she took that bullet in her shoulder. At Frankie Motta’s house in Mill Basin, there were a few minutes of calm before the old mob capo and his former henchmen shot each other.
Being marched to your own execution was more than a little bit different. The string was going out of my legs and I didn’t think I had the strength to walk much further. A thousand things to say went through my head, but my mouth just didn’t seem capable of forming any words. On the other hand, the little voice, the one that never leaves me, had no trouble with words. “Be a man. Don’t beg. Don’t shit your pants. Be a man.”
I was so angry at myself for worrying not about my family, but about how I would look to strangers when they blew the back of my head off, that I nearly turned around and charged the guy holding the shotgun on me. Given another few seconds, I think that’s just what I would have done. Luckily, I didn’t get a chance to find out.
“Pull his car off the road. I’ll take it from here,” someone said, stepping out of the darkness in front of me.
“Crank, is that you?” I said, my voice cracking.
“That was awfully fucking stupid, coming up here like that. Good thing Tina called ahead.”
“Good thing,” I agreed.
“Come on inside.”
The cabin in the woods was just that, a cabin in the woods. There was a stone fireplace, a futon, a TV, a stereo, a small kitchen with a table and chairs, a bathroom, and not much else. There wasn’t any lab equipment that I could see and I hadn’t spotted any chemical drums on the walk up. Crank followed my eyes and smiled.
“We don’t cook the shit here, man. Biker don’t equate to moron, you know.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Tina says you wanna talk, so talk. You wanna beer?”
“Sure.”
