The bar had nine other inhabitants, including the bulky bartender. Lance didn’t recognize any of them. Siggy Petron would have sent out the word looking for the face I wore, but I didn’t plan to spend long in that bar or the city for that matter.
“You got the key?” I asked, still looking out across the gloom of the bar.
“Your hair is different,” she said. “Red and curly.”
“You have the most beautiful skin I have ever seen, Lana,” I, and most of my cohorts, remarked.
There must have been power behind the words because, unbidden, her lips parted and she took in a quick breath. My golden executioner was looking at me, trying to see if I was who I said I was, when the compliment threw her off.
“Are you comin’ on to me, Lance?”
“Death fascinates all living things.”
“You see?” she said. “The Lance I knew never said things like that.”
“The Lance you knew liked to lick the little brown mole on your left labial lip.”
I realized that she had been tense because she relaxed at those words. Her shoulders let down a quarter inch, and a smile that any Renaissance master would have appreciated appeared.
“Would you like to do that again?”
“That position would leave the whole top of my head exposed.”
“You don’t have to worry about that.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“Because I know now that I was wrong to try and kill you,” she said.
“Because it didn’t work?”
“No, it’s four years later and I’m still alive. You could have gone after revenge or turned me over to Mr. P anytime you wanted.”
“Do you have the key?”
“I’ll give it to you outside.”
I considered pretending that I was nervous, asking her to go in the alley instead, that I didn’t want her pulling a gun on me. This last notion reminded me of a need I had.
“Okay,” I said. “But give me your purse.”
There was a red handbag sitting on the green-and-white marble bar. It matched her dress perfectly.
“Can I get you anything?” the lethargic bartender asked. He was looking at my face as if it was familiar but he hadn’t placed it — yet.
Without looking directly at him, I took a twenty from my wallet and placed it on the bar. I took Lana’s handbag with the same hand and said, “No thanks. I’m just here to meet the lady. You can keep the change.”
I stood up and Lana did, too. She could have complained, but I didn’t know about the big man in the backseat of her car. Maybe she’d say that we could go to her house and get reacquainted with her pet mole. Maybe she’d cut her losses and have him kill me right off.
When we got to her big western car, she saw the error in her logic, if not her ways, through the shattered back window. She made to run, but I grabbed her arm.
“Think carefully, Miss Santini,” Jack Strong said, “because any sound you make will be your last.”
I opened the passenger side door and ushered her in and over to the driver’s seat. When she was behind the wheel and I was settled next to her, I opened the red bag.
There was a small.25 caliber pistol inside, chrome with a red handle. Lana was the luster of gold, but she loved rubies.
“Pedro!” she said.
“He’s not listening, but I don’t blame you for the try.”
“Is he dead?”
“No.”
I rummaged through the little bag for a while and then looked up. Lana was beautiful. So what if she wanted me dead? I was already pretty much dead to the world. I could die one more time again in her arms.
I was about to drift off into a morass of individual desires and disgusts, but I reined these digressions in.
“Where’s the key, Lana?”
“I don’t have it.”
“Not only do you have it, it is on your person.”
“Why would say that?”
“Because you plan for every exigency,” some overeducated soul in my entourage offered. “And you were worried that maybe you’d fail to kill me again.”
“I wasn’t going to kill you.”
“Where’s the key?”
Suddenly, without my cognition, Lance came out of nowhere and, taking Lana’s pistol in my left hand, he cocked back the hammer and pressed the muzzle against her temple. I didn’t know that I was left-handed. I didn’t realize what Lance had been planning.
“You killed me, bitch!”
“Don’t! Please, don’t!” Her right shoulder went way up with this new threat.
In the background of my mind, a struggle had broken out. Murderers and the murdered called for vengeance. God-fearing souls begged for forgiveness. The cacophony of mental cries in anguish and rage was almost deafening. But I couldn’t hear the words because Lance was trying to pull the trigger and I was doing my utmost to stop him.
I got the upper hand because there was a hierarchy that I, more or less, controlled. The hand holding the gun belonged to me, unless I lost focus. But once I rededicated my mind to constrain physical motion, Lance was displaced.
When he understood that he could not kill her immediately, he started to talk.
“You killed me, Lana, and now I’m gonna do that to you. You took away the sun and rain and good whiskey. I was ready to run with you, and you just shot me like dog.”
A memory of Bernard “Berry” Richards came up before the bellicose assembly in my mind. He was wearing dark clothes drenched in glistening blood. He was begging for his life, but Lance did not heed him. Lance killed his brother and moved on without even a prayer.
Lana, for her part, chose silence as her plea. She looked into the eyes of the many, and they relented, granting her a reprieve.
They did, but I didn’t.
When Lance tried to put the pistol down, I held it in place.
“The key,” I said. “You hand it to me of your own free will, and I will send you on your way. Don’t, and I will shoot you and take it off your corpse.”
A minute went by. My hand began to cramp, but I kept from shooting.
Lana reached down and took off a scarlet pump. Therein, taped along the arch, was the key to her survival.
Lance was crying again.
I smiled and put down the gun.
Across the street, I saw a familiar black van.
“Put it down on the dash and get out,” I said.
“You’re not taking my car.”
“Au contraire.”
“What about Pedro?”
“He’ll be safer with me than with you.”
“Can I at least have my purse?”
I took a hundred-dollar bill from my pocket and handed it to her.
“Take a taxi back home and wait there for forty-eight hours. Don’t go anywhere or talk to anyone. I’ll send you the bag in a couple of days. Do what I say and righteous retribution will be denied.”
“How did you survive?” she asked.
“What did you do with the body?” It was a question I had almost forgotten to ask in the distress of the moment. After all, I barely averted a murder and maybe made six hundred thousand dollars in moments.
“I called the Moving Man, Ed Coffers.”
“You drugged me and shot me in the back.”
“Through the heart just like you always said. You used to say that a shot like that would make cops think that it was an amateur job.”
“But you turned me over to Ed. Nobody ever finds the bodies he gets.”
“Doesn’t hurt to be on the safe side.”
“The safe side of murder,” I said. “That’d be good title for a novel.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Get out.”
She opened the driver’s side door and was about to get out. Then she turned. I put a hand over the pistol, just to be on the safe side, but she didn’t pose a threat.
“It wasn’t Ed who came,” she said.
“No?”
“It was this black guy who called himself Winters. I asked him why he was there when I called the number I had for Ed. He said that Ed had started a national concern and did his service through franchises all over the country.”