“For ten thousand dollars.”
“Right.”
“Like he loaned you the money.”
“Right.” She toyed with her empty glass. “But he didn’t. Oh, he’s got the paper I signed, and he’s got a canceled check made out to me and deposited to my account. But it wasn’t a loan. He gave me the money and I used it to pay for a cruise the two of us took.”
“Where? The Caribbean?”
“The Far East. We flew into Singapore and cruised down to Bali.”
“That sounds pretty exotic.”
“I guess it was,” she said. “This was while things were still good between us, or as good as they ever were.”
“This paper you signed,” he prompted.
“Something with taxes. So he could write it off, don’t ask me how. Look, all the time we lived together I paid my own way. We split expenses right down the middle. The cruise was something else, it was on him. If he wanted me to sign a piece of paper so the government would pick up part of the tab—”
“Why not?”
“Exactly. And now he says it’s a debt, and I should pay it, and I got a letter from his lawyer. Can you believe it? A letter from a lawyer?”
“He’s not going to sue you.”
“Who knows? That’s what the lawyer letter says he’s going to do.”
He frowned. “He goes into court and you start testifying about a tax dodge—”
“But how can I, if I was a party to it?”
“Still, the idea of him suing you after you were living with him. Usually it’s the other way around, isn’t it? They got a word for it.”
“Palimony.”
“That’s it, palimony. You’re not trying for any, are you?”
“Are you kidding? I said I paid my own way.”
“That’s right, you said that.”
“I paid my own way before I met him, the son of a bitch, and I paid my own way while I was with him, and I’ll go on paying my own way now that I’m rid of him. The last time I took money from a man was when my Uncle Ralph lent me bus fare to New York when I was eighteen years old. He didn’t call it a loan, and he sure as hell didn’t give me a piece of paper to sign, but I paid him back all the same. I saved up the money and sent him a money order. I didn’t even have a bank account. I got a money order at the post office and sent it to him.”
“That’s when you came here? When you were eighteen?”
“Fresh out of high school,” she said. “And I’ve been on my own ever since, and paying my own way. I would have paid my own way to Singapore, as far as that goes, but that wasn’t the deal. It was supposed to be a present. And he wants me to pay my way and his way, he wants the whole ten thousand plus interest, and—”
“He’s looking to charge you interest?”
“Well, the note I signed. Ten thousand dollars plus interest at the rate of eight percent per annum.”
“Interest,” he said.
“He’s pissed off,” she said, “that I wanted to end the relationship. That’s what this is about.”
“I figured.”
“And what I figured,” she said, “is if a couple of the right sort of people had a talk with him, maybe he would change his mind.”
“And that’s what brings you here.”
She nodded, toying with her empty glass. He pointed to the glass, raised his eyebrows questioningly. She nodded again, and he raised a hand, and caught the waiter’s eye, and signaled for another round.
They were silent until the drinks came. Then he said, “A couple of boys could talk to him.”
“That would be great. What would it cost me?”
“Five hundred dollars would do it.”
“Well, that sounds good to me.”
“The thing is, when you say talk, it’ll have to be more than talk. You want to make an impression, situation like this, the implication is either he goes along with it or something physical is going to happen. Now, if you want to give that impression, you have to get physical at the beginning.”
“So he knows you mean it?”
“So he’s scared,” he said. “Because otherwise what he gets is angry. Not right away, two tough-looking guys push him against a wall and tell him what he’s gotta do. That makes him a little scared right away, but then they don’t get physical and he goes home, and he starts to think about it, and he gets angry.”
“I can see how that might happen.”
“But if he gets knocked around a little the first time, enough so he’s gonna feel it for the next four, five days, he’s too scared to get angry. That’s what you want.”
“Okay.”
He sipped his drink, looked at her over the brim. His eyes were appraising her, assessing her. “There’s things I need to know about the guy.”
“Like?”
“Like what kind of shape is he in?”
“He could stand to lose twenty pounds, but other than that he’s okay.”
“No heart condition, nothing like that?”
“No.”
“He work out?”
“He belongs to a gym,” she said, “and he went four times a week for the first month after he joined, and now if he goes twice a month it’s a lot.”
“Like everybody,” he said. “That’s how the gyms stay in business. If all their paid-up members showed up, you couldn’t get in the door.”
“You work out,” she said.
“Well, yeah,” he said. “Weights, mostly, a few times a week. I got in the habit. I won’t tell you where I got in the habit.”
“And I won’t ask,” she said, “but I could probably guess.”
“You probably could,” he said, grinning. He looked like a little boy for an instant, and then the grin faded and he was back to business.
“Martial arts,” he said. “He ever get into any of that?”
“No.”
“You’re sure? Not lately, but maybe before the two of you started keeping company?”
“He never said anything,” she said, “and he would. It’s the kind of thing he’d brag about.”
“Does he carry?”
“Carry?”
“A gun.”
“God, no.”
“You know this for a fact?”
“He doesn’t even own a gun.”
“Same question. Do you know this for a fact?”
She considered it. “Well, how would you know something like that for a fact? I mean, you could know for a fact that a person did own a gun, but how would you know that he didn’t? I can say this much — I lived with him for three years and there was never anything I saw or heard that gave me the slightest reason to think he might own a gun. Until you asked the question just now it never entered my mind, and my guess is it never entered his mind, either.”
“You’d be surprised how many people own guns,” he said.
“I probably would.”
“Sometimes it feels like half the country walks around strapped. There’s more carrying than there are carry permits. A guy doesn’t have a permit, he’s likely to keep it to himself that he’s carrying, or that he even owns a gun in the first place.”
“I’m pretty sure he doesn’t own a gun, let alone carry one.”
“And you’re probably right,” he said, “but the thing is you never know. What you got to prepare for is he might have a gun, and he might be carrying it.”
She nodded, uncertain.
“Here’s what I’ve got to ask you,” he said. “What you got to ask yourself, and come up with an answer. How far are you prepared for this to go?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“We already said it’s gonna be physical. Manhandling him, and a couple of shots he’ll feel for the better part of a week. Work the rib cage, say.”
“All right.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s great, if that’s how it goes. But you got to recognize it could go farther.”