“We got ours, girl. He ain’t gonna tell us; he knows I’ll kill him if he does. We got ours, and we can trade you again.”
“Daddy’s too cheap to pay more. We could have twice as much, Sugar. We could go away and be together and just forget about Daddy.”
“Sugar, don’t talk nonsense. We got plenty, your papa’s got plenty more, and I ain’t able to talk so good in this state you got me in. You wanta...”
The head disappeared again; Miller went back to moaning. I wondered where Evans was and watched Stensland move his bound wrists against the grate. The kidnapper-killer’s ecstacy was reaching a crescendo when I saw my partner, inside the pad, tiptoeing over to the entranceway. He was just a few feet in back of Stensland when the G-man got his hands free and ripped the tape from his mouth. He went flush at the pain, and I followed his eyes to a .45 automatic on the armrest beside Miller’s right hand.
Pawing at his leg restraints, racing against the Okie’s release, Stensland banged his elbow on the grate. Miller jerked out of heaven and aimed the .45 at him just as I wedged my gun through the window crack. He fired at the fed; I fired at him; Davis emptied his piece at the chair. There must have been a dozen explosions, and then it was all over except for Jane Mackenzie Viatel’s record-length scream.
A shitload of Hollywood division black-and-whites showed up, and the meat wagon removed Miller Treadwell and Special Agent Norris Stensland, D.O.A. A detective lieutenant told Davis and me he wanted a full report before he contacted the feds. We kept the Viertel girl in handcuffs on genera! principles, and when the commotion wound down and the crowd of rubberneckers dispersed, we braced her on the front lawn of the courtyard.
Unlocking her cuffs, I said, “Come clean on the money. What happened? Where’s the dough Miller was talking about?”
Jane Viertel, backlighted by a street lamp, rubbed her wrists. “The money was in two packages. When it got crazy, they were dropped. Miller and Leroy got one, and it ripped open. The FBI man dropped his and Leroy ran with me, then Miller took off. The FBI man took Harwell to his car, then came back and grabbed the last package so Harwell wouldn’t know he had it. But Miller saw him. He had some loose bills he picked up, and he hid the rest of the money from Leroy. Miller and Leroy gave the loose money to these dreadful slobs to hide us out, and Leroy thought that was all there was. Then Miller and I got cozy, and he told me there was forty thousand for us.”
I looked at the girl, nineteen-year-old pulchritude with whorehouse smarts. “Where’s Miller’s money?”
Jane watched Davis lovingly eye the Auburn speedster. “Why should I tell you? You’d just give it back to that cheapskate father of mine.”
“He paid a hundred grand to save your life.”
The girl shrugged and lit a cigarette. “He probably used the interest from Mother’s trust fund. What’s wrong with fatso? Is he queer for cars or something?”
Davis walked over to us. “She needs a complete paint strip, new paint job, new upholstery and some whitewalls. Then she’s a peach.” Winking at Jane Viertel, he said, “What’s your goal in life, Sweetheart? Pussywhipping killers?”
Jane smiled, walked to the car, and unscrewed the gas cap. She dropped in her cigarette and started running. Davis and I hit the ground and ate grass. The gas tank exploded and the car went up in flames. The girl stood up and curtsied, then walked to us and said, “Miller’s money was in the trunk. Too had. Daddy. Maybe you can tell Mother it’s a tax write-off.”
I recuffed Jane Viertel; the flames sent flickers of light over Davis Evans’s bereaved face. He stuck his hands in his pockets, pulled them out empty, and said to me, “You got a couple dimes, partner? AX6-400’s a toll call. I need me a peach like a mother dog.”
Flotsam and Jetsam
John Lutz
John Lutz is the winner of the 1985 Edgar Award for the best short story of the year. He has published some two hundred stories in his twenty years as a professional writer and eight novels, the most recent of which is Tropical Heat (Henry Holt and Company, 1986).
Commenting on “Flotsam and Jetsam,” Mr. Lutz says he has long been intrigued by alcoholism as a subject for fiction, and he believes that the illness alcoholics suffer would be better understood if it were more often explored by creative writers. He is intrigued by the way alcohol affects memory, as he demonstrates in the following story.
When a customer hefted a grease-spotted box of glazed-to-go and cracked, “You’d make more money selling these by the pound,” Danny didn’t smile his customary good-business grimace to hide the hurt.
After the customer had left and Nudger was the only one other than Danny in Danny’s Donuts, Nudger sipped his horrendous coffee and studied Danny over the stained rim of the Styrofoam cup. Danny, who resembled a scrawny basset hound, had larger, deeper, and darker circles than usual beneath his sad brown eyes, and the lines on his drooping features appeared longer and more defined. Something was gnawing on him. If this kept up, he would go from basset hound to bloodhound, a less lovable breed.
“What’s bothering you, Danny?” Nudger asked, partly to make conversation, partly to divert Danny’s attention from the fact that he hadn’t been able to get down more than half of the Dunker Delite Danny had bestowed upon him for breakfast.
Danny sighed, then removed the grayish towel he kept tucked in his belt and flicked some crumbs off the stainless steel counter. “Friend of mine died,” he said.
Nudger grunted and nodded, surreptitiously folding his napkin to conceal the half-carcass of the doughnut before him when Danny glanced away. “Natural death or accidental?”
“He died in a fall,” Danny said, “off a wagon.”
“Old friend?”
Danny tucked the towel back beneath his belt and nodded. “We went back over twenty years. Then we wound up in AA together.”
“That kind of wagon,” Nudger said. He knew that Danny had been a member of Alcoholics Anonymous for the past seven years, and in that time hadn’t touched alcohol. The organization had convinced Danny, finally and forever, that he would always be an alcoholic and the best he could do was to be one who never drank alcohol. If Danny had a religion, it was AA. And the organization had done more for him than religion had done for most people.
“Artie Akron hadn’t touched a drop of liquor for five years, Nudge,” Danny said, leaning on the counter with both elbows. “Then they find him last night down on North Broadway with his head bashed in and his wallet missing. They say he had a point twenty-eight alcohol content in what was left of his blood.”
“It happens that way sometimes,” Nudger said. “Some punk probably rolled him for his money and hit him too hard.” He wondered, was Danny only mourning his old friend, or was he also considering that the same kind of fate might someday be his own? It was a tough life for those who’d inherited the wrong genes and a thirst for alcohol. “You’ll make it okay, Danny,” Nudger said.
Danny glanced over at him and smiled sadly; he knew what Nudger had been thinking and appreciated the concern. “You want another doughnut, Nudge?”
“Er, no, thanks, I’m full, I’d better get upstairs and do some work.” Nudger’s office was on the second floor of the old brick building, directly above the doughnut shop.
Danny picked up Nudger’s cup and ran some more gritty dark coffee into it from the big steel urn. “One for the road, Nudge.”
Nudger thanked him, carefully picked up his wadded napkin as if it were empty, and tossed it into the plastic-lined trash can by the window counter on his way out. The napkin-wrapped doughnut struck the can’s bottom like a piece of stone sculpture.