“Did I kill him? Is he dead?”
“She’s confused,” the man said desperately. “We did nothing. She had blow on head. When car skidded.”
“You didn’t kill him,” Ben said. “But you sure scared him. Now let’s discuss the videotape — because that’s what I’m really interested in.”
The man made a noise in his throat like a grunt — as if Ben had just hit him in the stomach. The woman bunched the stockings in her hand. Ben merely smiled.
They’re fresh off the boat, Sue realized. They think everyone over here runs around with a pistol — even Ben probably, who never touches one. So they carried one of their own to the meeting with Karlin and made a mess of everything.
Ben put his rump on the arm of a chair. “I won’t ask who you’re working for in Shanghai or Taipei or Hong Kong. Probably some uncle or grandfather who’s got an interest in the computer business. But I’ll tell you who I represent — a company called Aerosmith — and they want Karlin’s videotape back. And if you think I don’t know all about it, let me tell you what’s on it. It shows a programmer scrolling through a proprietary computer program and you can read every line. If your boss gets hold of it, he’ll be duplicating it and selling it all over Asia and maybe North America as well. Now you can deal with me or you can deal with the cops, but one thing you can’t do is get out of here. You’re stuck till morning.”
The man clenched and unclenched his fists. “What happens if we give back tape?”
“Well, bye and bye you’ll probably get a visit from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. But if you get on a plane quick you can even avoid that.”
At the mention of the INS their faces fell. Apparently they liked it over here — even if you did have to tote a gun. But maybe they’d even liked that part of it.
“You won’t give us money?”
“What do you think?”
“But we went to a lot of trouble! We took risks!”
“Seems to me it was Gary Karlin who took all the risks. All you did was ride around in a warm Toyota and then run it into a ditch. Now are you going to deal with me or are you going to deal with the cops?”
The woman butted in then, in Chinese, her voice rising several octaves more than was necessary. She’s giving him hell, Sue thought. Probably chewing him out for screwing everything up. Then the man appeared to give her some of it back. Ben let it go on for a while, then did some butting in of his own.
“Are you two finished yet?”
“Yes. Finished,” the woman said shortly.
There was a shoulder bag hanging from the back of a chair. The woman walked over to it and retrieved a videotape from one of the pockets. The man made that grunting noise in his throat again. Then he repeated it as she handed the tape to Ben.
Ben stood up. “This better not be a bootleg copy of Pretty Woman,” he said.
“It’s what you want. Now please, leave us alone.”
A minute later they were back out in the wind-driven snow of the parking lot.
Sue took Ben’s arm. “What if that really is a copy of Pretty Woman?”
“What the hell — I’ve never seen it. But if it’s Karlin’s tape, then Aerosmith’s going to be happy as hell to get it back.”
She shook her head. “You always manage to make a buck out of these things, Ben. Even out of a car stuck in a ditch.”
He didn’t answer, but she knew what he would have said if he had. That it wasn’t just the money, it was the fun of turning a trick on Karlin and a couple of amateur program thieves and maybe on Frank Bauer as well.
Later — much later — after the snow had stopped, in fact — she lay in bed and watched blooms of frost form on the windows. The bedroom was growing colder, but the bed itself was an oasis of warmth and she could feel Ben’s breath as it caressed the nighttime tangle of her hair. Her Ben, she thought. And held that notion as she drifted off to sleep.
Zero Tolerance
by Bill Pronzini
© 1997 by Bill Pronzini
This new story by Bill Pronzini also appears in a collection featuring his “Nameless” detective. (See Spadework; Crippen & Landru Publishers / P.O. Box 9315, Norfolk, VA 23505.) It is a mark of the author’s extraordinary talent that he has been able to develop his character in 25 years’ worth of stories and novels without ever giving him a name.
The little girl in the polka-dot playsuit was a holy terror. So was her mother. In fact, the kid wasn’t all that bad — just spoiled and rambunctious — compared to the mom-thing that had spawned her.
The whole sorry business was the mother’s fault. You couldn’t lay any blame on the child; she hadn’t been taught any better. You could lay a little of the blame on me, I suppose, but not much when you looked at it all in perspective. No, by God, the mother was the villain of the piece. An even nastier villain in some ways than the pudgy guy in the leather jacket.
It started with the little girl. She kept finding me out of all the other shoppers crowding the Safeway aisles, like some sort of pint-sized heat-seeking missile. First she charged out from behind a bin full of corn in the produce section, accidentally banged my shin with one of her cute red pumps, and then charged off without so much as an upward or backward glance. Next she showed up in the meat department, standing directly behind me when I turned with a package of ground round in my hand; I had to do a nifty juking sidestep to avoid tripping over her, but it wasn’t as nifty as it might have been because I dropped the package and the cellophane wrapping split and the right leg of my trousers took on the sudden appearance of clothing in a splatter movie. And finally there was the collision in the cat- and dog-food aisle.
I was pushing my cart near the end of the aisle, minding my own business, looking down unhappily at the hamburger-stained pant-leg when she came flying around the corner with her arms outflung at her sides — playing airplane or some damn thing. Neither of us saw each other in time; she banged into the cart with a startled yelp. Just as this happened, the mother — an attractive doe-eyed blonde in her twenties — pushed her cart around the corner. She let out a yelp of her own when the kid bounced off and flopped down on a chubby little backside. She wasn’t hurt; her face scrunched up but she didn’t cry or even whimper. But the way the mother reacted, you’d have thought her daughter had been mortally wounded. She rushed over, picked the child up, brushed her off, examined her with a probing eye, clutched her possessively, and then glared at me as if I were something she’d just found caked on the bottom of her shoe.
“What’s the matter with you?” she said accusingly. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?”
Under ordinary circumstances I would have diffused the situation by smiling, muttering a polite comment, and sidling off to continue my shopping. But the circumstances tonight were not ordinary. There was my sore shin, and my bloody pantleg, and the facts that I’d had a long, tiring day and Kerry was working late and it was my turn to do both the shopping and the cooking of dinner, and the additional fact that I have zero tolerance for parents who allow their children to run wild in supermarkets, department stores, and other public places. I managed the smile all right, a tight little one, but not the polite comment or the sidling off.
“And why don’t you curb your kid,” I said, “before she really gets hurt?”
“What?” It came out more like a squawk than a word.
“Just what I said, lady. This is the third time your daughter’s run into me—”
“How dare you!”