All the Old Bargains Read online

  A man sat down next to me. I turned to look at him. He drove a right into my solar plexus. I gasped forward, my jaw pulled down. A fire of pain radiated through my chest, crawling up my throat. I was too paralyzed to speak. A solar plexus shot not only delivers the pain, it keeps it quiet too; sealed behind the paralyzed vocal cords. My brain felt like it was on a runaway merry-go-round. I wished I could pick a sound out of the blur and mail it to my tongue. Hands patted me down, lifting out my .45. Far away down a cotton tunnel someone said I was clean. The guy who hit me was sitting on the aisle seat with my piece pointed right at me. I heard someone sliding into the seat behind me. A hand grabbed my hair and rammed my head against the edge of the seat in front of me. Stars erupted behind my eyes and it was the Fourth of July in my head.

  “All-right, asshole, I got a message for you.” The man behind me hissed in my ear. “Stop looking for trouble. Drop what you’re doin’. Got it?”

  I got my head rapped against the metal seat for that. When my head bounced back I looked for Arnie. He was gone. No one else in the theater was paying us any attention. I felt like Kitty Genovese.

  “Do you understand, shit-for-brains?” My head bounced off the seat back again. I couldn’t take much more of this. My ears were ringing. I said I understood. There was a tap on my instep. I slid my feet back under me.

  “Good. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. I think it’s time we all left.” He giggled breathlessly.

  The man next to me raised my Colt and put it under my jawbone as if to lift me out of my seat by it. I rasped out of the side of my mouth, “The guy behind you with the twelve gauge pointed at your head says no.” The man behind me never even flinched. Instead he laughed. “That’s good, shit-for-brains. I’d do the same in your shoes but there’s no one there, hee hee.”

  “Kiss your brains good-bye,” I said. The guy sitting next to me snuck a glance over his shoulder into the dark. I rolled off the edge of his gun as a silver blur arced over my head. The edge of a gun barrel had cut through the cheeks, flattened the nose and taken out several teeth of the man next to me, spurting blood all over both of us. I had rolled off the seat as Arnie had come up off the floor of the row in front of us. He swung back and leveled his giant .45 Magnum at the man behind me. The guy with the broken face moaned softly in his seat, his head lolling back. I picked up my piece and went to the guy in the seat behind me and stuck it in his ear. “Walk or die here, asshole, your choice.” It was hard not to see three of him. Wouldn’t somebody get that phone?

  He levered himself out of the chair. I stuck my gun in his ribs and followed him out. Arnie was undoing the other guy’s collar, pulling his jaw up and tilting his head back. “Come on. What’re you doing?” Arnie was still looking at the man.

  “Making sure he doesn’t choke on his blood. I’d hate to kill someone I didn’t mean to.”

  In the parking lot I frisked the guy. No ID and one .357 Magnum. I fished in the guy’s pockets for his car keys. “Which one is it?” He stonewalled. “You want to die here?”

  “Blue one, over there.” I pushed him toward his car and handed his gun to Arnie. After I unlocked the door Arnie shoved the guy in the back seat of the car and got in next to him. We left the lot and headed west.

  I looked at our guest. He was big. He had me by an inch or two and maybe twenty pounds. He was a forelock away from being totally bald and that rose from his head like a dorsal fin. A toothpick danced in the corner of his mouth like a conductor’s baton.

  “Okay, shit-for-brains, my turn to play. Who sicked you on me?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Who’s the guy with the lion head earring?”

  Nothing, just a glare.

  “Is it the chicks? He’s a chicken hawk maybe?”

  Still nothing.

  “Okay, tough guy. I ain’t gonna waste my time with you. You had your chance to talk. Now it’s your chance to die.”

  Arnie grinned at my friend. He just stared hatefully back.

  In Annandale we found an open car wash. I paid for a wash and got on the tracks. We entered the machine and were immersed in a spray of hot soapy water. A rod with long soft sponges attached to it moved over the car like a chorus line of dancing octopi. It was silent in the car, the motor was off, the windows up, just coasting on the rollers. I looked back at my friend, then at Arnie, then back at my friend. He stared impassively at us, his lips set. “Do it.”

  Arnie waited a second and then pulled the hammer back.

  “Okay. Okay. I’ll talk. Sweet Jesus, don’t kill me.”

  “All right. Who sent you?”

  “I don’t know. I got a phone call. Some guy said you were causing trouble looking for some guy. He didn’t use no names. He told me to scare you off. He didn’t care how.”

  “How much were you paid?”

  “Five hundred up front. Another five if you got the message.”

  “How’d you get the money?”

  “It was in my mailbox the next day. Cash. Five C notes.”

  “Who was the other schmuck with you?”

  “My brother.”

  “You do this kind of work often?”

  “Jesus man. It weren’t personal. Just a job. I mean, Christ, I been laid off two months. Construction’s really hurtin’.”

  The Reagonomics of evil. When the cost of living goes up, the price of dying comes down. If my head didn’t hurt so much holding it still, I think I’d have jumped over the seat and beaten the shit out of him. “Okay, sport. You’ve been such a big help, let’s go for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. What’s your name?”

  He looked at me weakly. “Chuck Campbell.”

  “And your brother’s?”

  “Steve. Steve Campbell.”

  “Very good. Now how do we know this whole fairy tale is true?”

  “Man, I wouldn’t shit you. You could kill me.”

  “That’s right. So if this guy contacts you again I’ll know about it, right, Chuckie baby?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Whatever you say.”

  We left the car wash and drove in silence for a while. Then I stopped at a phone booth on Braddock Road. I looked up Campbell, Charles in the phone book and called the number. His wife said yes, Chuck and his brother would both be interested in a job. And yes, it had been tough being laid off so long, and yes, heavy equipment operators were the first to go. I thanked her for her time, hung up and got back in the car.

  “Nice woman, your wife, Mr. Campbell. Let’s keep her that way, shall we?”

  Chuck’s head bobbed rapidly. I turned back to the road and started the engine. Twenty minutes later we were back at the movie house. I took the keys out and turned to Campbell. “One last thing. The five hundred, fork it over.”

  He stared at me in disbelief. “Chuck, please let’s not make it hard on yourself. It’s just bad policy to let other people profit at my expense.”

  He looked at Arnie and saw no help there. Reaching into his jacket he came out with a money clip. I took the five hundred out and gave the clip to him. As I got out of the car I stuck my head back in and tossed Chuck his keys. As he reached down for them I punched him right in the nose. He fell back moaning on the seat.

  “Oh yeah, Chuck. Remember, it’s nothing personal, just a job.”

  Blood was running between his fingers. Good. I rubbed my forehead. It was feeling better already.

  Chapter 12

  I got into Arnie’s car. He turned the motor over and said, “What now?”

  “We pay a visit to a girl with loose lips, amigo.”

  Arnie gunned it down Duke Street over the Telegraph Road overpass then down Kings Highway to Route 1. We pulled into a gas station and I called the Watering Hole. After two rings a whiny voice said “The Hole. Yeah?”

  “Listen, is Jackie there?”

  “Nah, she just went off.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  “Nah. Waddaya want?”

  “Listen, I got her outfit fixed
up, the leather one. She wanted to try it out, I just want to drop it by for her.”

  “All right. Lemme ask a minute.”

  I stood in the phone booth, looking at the shredded book. I was getting parboiled in the heat, cooked in my own juices.

  The whine returned. “She was in the lounge talking to some guy. She’ll be back in about fifteen, twenty minutes. You could leave it at the desk.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  I pushed back the glass door and wiped my brow. I wished to hell I favored an ankle piece, this coat was killing me. I slid back in the car with Arnie.

  He looked at me expectantly. “Well?”

  “She’s not on stage. She was in the bar. She ain’t now but she’ll be back.”

  “What do you think?” Arnie went for the ignition.

  “I think she’s a semi-pro and she’s turning a quick one out of the bar before she splits. Maybe it’s the first of the night. I think she’s upstairs. Let’s go pay her a call. If she’s working upstairs, we’ll go up the fire escape and look for her. There are only two floors upstairs. All the rooms are off the corridor.” I knew the place all too well.

  Arnie nodded and we drove past the motel up an adjoining street to its rear. The Watering Hole was a three story box with a topless bar on the first floor and the rapid turnover rooms upstairs. The place was a firetrap; no sprinkler system, no fire doors. The paint was peeling. There were piles of garbage in the halls. The rooms were very elegant: no TVs, no phones, no linens, no lamps, no chairs. Just a bed with stained sheets, a dilapidated dresser, a moldy shower and toilet, cracked linoleum and constant drips. They were honest rooms though. There were no Bibles. The cops know that it’s a “trick motel” but they don’t touch it. In the past fourteen years plenty of high school kids had celebrated graduation in its rooms.

  We pulled up in back, parked and walked back down the street. Then we went through a hole in the fence to the back of the lot next to the Dempsey dumpster. The fire escape was pulled up. I jumped up and grabbed the end. It swung down. Arnie climbed up after me. We went to the second floor and tried the door. It was locked on the outside. Great. A nice place to fry. We went up to the third floor. The door there opened. Standing in the hall we each took one side and moved from door to door, listening for love. Arnie stopped at the second door. Then he moved away. I crossed the hall to him and he said, “Snoring.”

  We went down to the second floor and began to work our way back toward the rear. Midway back on the left side, I stopped. Inside the bed sang and people were gasping in harmony.

  I pulled out my gun and Arnie did the same. I knew from previous sorties that the bed would most likely be against the far wall. I reached down and tried the handle. Locked. I picked it with a credit card. Arnie and I glanced at each other and nodded. The groaning increased as did the bed’s bouncing cacophony. I turned the handle and opened the door slightly. Jackie was heels to heaven, hard at work. On top of her was a chubby guy with thin, longish hair and an adolescent’s corrugated complexion. He was beginning to jerk spasmodically, so his ride was about to end. Jackie was lying back, moaning “ooh, baby,” her eyes closed, probably doing a cost-benefit analysis on the latest fifteen minutes of her life. I was disappointed. She was about as discriminating as a light socket. If you could get it up, you could get it in. I pulled up alongside her consort and stuck my gun in his ear. He pulled his head back like it had been burned and stared at the .45’s snout. He whimpered, “Oh Jesus.” Jackie’s eyes lit up but before she could scream Arnie stuck his gun in her face. She moved her eyes up his arm and didn’t like what she saw.

  I told him, “This is a no-parking zone. Now I want you to back out and go stand in the shower with the water on high and your head under it. What you don’t know might save your life.”

  He backed out and off the bed. He was maybe nineteen years old, a soft, pimply, dirty kid who was gonna mess himself if he didn’t hurry. He hopped to the bathroom holding his peter. As I turned back to Jackie Arnie went to the bathroom to keep an eye on her friend. Jackie had lowered her legs and pulled the covers up over her tits. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her, never moving the gun from a line right between her eyes. “You know, Jackie, we have a problem. You see, you tried to feed me to the sharks. Now that’s what any little fishy would do. I don’t blame you but the problem is I ate the sharks and now I’m gonna take a bite out of you. I want to know where the guy with the lion head earring is?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, her voice going soft and childlike. An appeal to my decency. My head throbbed.

  “Look, cunt, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. My friend here would love to be every bad dream you’ve ever had. I let him have you and you’ll end up looking like a tray of cold cuts and I’ll still get what I want. The easy way is you tell me now and then you get dressed and packed and leave town right away because they’ll know who talked.” I watched her calculate her chances. She wasn’t brave and she didn’t have any power. It was just a question of who was going to swat her.

  She stared at me, trying to read my face. Would I kill her anyway? Would I really kill her? Which way was out? I met her eyes and tried to see her as a bug. It worked.

  “All right, all right, damn it. The guy works for Monte Panczak.” She spit the words out as if trying to put some distance between herself and them.

  “Not good enough. That’s like saying he works for the government. Where does he work? What does he do for Monte?” I let my face soften, as much for myself as her.

  “You know Rowdy’s down on Route 1?” I nodded. “Well, he works there. He does a little of everything. Tends the bar. Keeps the books. You know—arranges things.”

  “What else do you know about him? His name, where he lives, friends, everything.”

  “Uh, his name’s Tony, Tony Julian. Uh, he lives off Route 1 somewhere, Hybla Valley maybe. Listen, I never got it on with him or nothing. I don’t know where he lives.”

  “What’s his work schedule?”

  “I don’t know. He just seems to drop in and out when he feels like it. Takes a lot of calls at the bar.”

  “Who do you see him with? Any friends in particular? A girlfriend?”

  “No, he’s friends with everybody. No, no girlfriend. He scores with lots of chicks. Anything he wants, he’s real cool.” The scorn in her voice burned through her words.

  “What would he want with a thirteen-year-old girl then?” I said it as if it were a fact asking for embellishment, not a question to be rejected.

  “How would I know?” she bleated.

  “Because I asked you about him and then two muscle heads tried to dance on my face. You told someone I was interested in this schmuck and somebody doesn’t want anyone interested in him. I know he’s got a thirteen-year-old girl with him. Now one last time the easy way, what for?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, honest. And I didn’t tell anyone anything about you. That’s the god’s-honest truth.”

  She flicked a look at Arnie who shook his head sadly. “Okay, okay. Jesus you gotta help me if I tell you this. I mean, they’ll kill me.”

  “All right. I said I would. Just tell me about this guy.”

  “Okay. Tony works for Monte Panczak. I told you that. Well, Monte runs a lot of things: the topless bars around Fort Belvoir and a lot of outcall massage parlors. That stuff just fronts for a lot of hooking. He’s got a whole string of girls working for him. Well, Tony kind of, you know, recruits for him. He looks for girls hanging out on Route 1—chicks who need the money—and he gets them started.”

  “Are they running a ring of little kids?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t know she was thirteen. Christ, some of these kids grow up so fast you can’t tell.” She sounded genuinely rueful. Perhaps the competition was getting to her.

  “No, he’d find out. Kiddie fucking is about the only thing people still frown on. They’d find out. It’s too big a risk to take stupidly.”
Where would they work a girl like this? Off a phone joint, of course. Keep her off the streets. “How many outcall places does Panczak run?”

  “I don’t know. Six or seven in Alexandria and here.”

  She was starting to run down. The adrenaline surge that came with talking to me was starting to wear off. I had to decide whether threats or kindness would be more effective in keeping her tongue wagging. I reached over to the pack of cigarettes on the nightstand, shook one out, gave it to her and lit it for her. She took a shuddering breath and slowly blew out the smoke. Her hand was trembling and she bunched the covers in front of her.

  “Arnie, go out to the phone booth in the hall and get the phone book.”

  He nodded and left.

  Jackie looked at me. “Would he really cut me? I mean, Jesus, I’ve tried to help. You said you wouldn’t hurt me, right? I mean, I’ll do anything you want.” She let the covers drop and held her breasts up to me. “I’ll do both of you. Any way you like. Just please don’t hurt me.” She started to cry and buried her face in her hands.

  I ran my hand through my hair. What the hell am I doing here? I thought. I handed her back the covers.

  “You’re doing fine and if you keep that up you’ll walk out of here in one piece. We’ll never tell who gave us the information. But I’d suggest you relocate real soon. Oh, by the way, yes, he would do it and no, he wouldn’t think twice about it.” That was a lie but one I still wanted her to believe. Just as I’d wanted Chuck Campbell to believe that Arnie would have shot him in the car wash.

  Arnie returned and threw the book on the bed, complete with its snapped security chain. I flipped it open to massage parlors and said, “Okay, which ones are Panczak’s?” I gave her a pen to check them. While she did that I opened her purse and fished around for her wallet. She had no ID with her. She finished and looked up at me. “Does he use any of these as a specialty shop?”