VIC hadn’t kept it all to himself. His father knew, so all bets were off. The secret was out. And I suppose, even in my mid-twenties, I wish the story had remained a secret. It’s funny how embarrassments suffered at any age stay with you. Weaknesses at twelve remain etched in your memory at twenty or twenty-two and maybe they shape you. Maybe they shape your personality, dictate your personal growth. I don’t know for sure, but I still feel the shame.
In junior high, Justin Cramer and Mike Stowe would have been voted most likely to do a life sentence. For any number of reasons. Many of us thought they should go right from seventh grade to jail and stay there at least until we all graduated from high school. Didn’t happen. Should have.
The two psychos were rumored to have raped a couple of cheerleaders, beaten a teacher for a bad grade, broken into a dozen homes in our school district, and spent a weekend doing $20 thousand worth of damage to our school. If you’re saying to yourself, “These were seventh-grade kids?” the answer is yes. But seventh-grade kids who had flunked at least once and were physically bigger than most high school juniors.
Size and audacity may have been two of the reasons that Vic Maitlin was drawn to Cramer and Stowe. Since he was at the top of the pile, I always suspected he was looking beyond. Two guys with the size and reputation of these two may have intrigued him. Whatever the reason, he hung with them but never was tainted with their reputation.
“Well, the good thing is that Angel didn’t kill the guy.” James kept his eyes on the road, but his mind was obviously on our situation. “I couldn’t think of anything else for a while. We need to find Angel and tell him.”
“The bad thing is, Angel didn’t kill the guy. At least it would have been one less bad guy to deal with.” I rolled down the window and let the warm, humid night air blow through the cab.
“Skip, you don’t mean that.”
“No.”
“First he wants us to find Vic, now he wants us to go away.”
“Yeah. Well, things change.”
“You gonna tell me about Vic Maitlin saving your life?”
I stared out the window, watching the expensive real estate roll by. Strip malls, concrete, palm trees, and more orange tile roofs. “No.”
“What?”
“Maybe it’s not as serious as Fuentes made it sound.”
“Hey, pard. Tell me.”
I said nothing. A buried secret doesn’t just come shooting to the surface. I knew James well enough to know the subject wasn’t going away.
“What about the rest of it. Do you believe Fuentes?”
“It’s a damned good story if he made it up.” I tended to take people at face value and Fuentes was believable. He also had a lot to lose.
Three minutes of silence passed. We were both engrossed in our own thoughts.
“And what about Vic? Was he one of the bodies in the fire?”
“God, I hope not.” My cell phone went off. “Hello.”
“Skip. You could have called. I’m a little frantic right now.”
I’d like to think it was the shock of the story and the two Cuban guys showing up at the front gate that caused me to forget to call Em, but some of it is that I’m a self-absorbed asshole. I know my faults. Most of them.
“Em, I am sorry. Really. Listen, Angel didn’t kill the Cuban. Big Mouth showed up tonight with his arm in a sling. At least we think it was him.”
“Oh, my God. Are you all right?”
“It’s a long story. It has to do with-” It was going to be a long explanation. Forty some years of Cuban history, a short course in business and being an entrepreneur, a crash course in Caribbean real estate, and a lesson in modern warfare. I didn’t want to do it on the phone. Besides, the minutes cost money. “I’ll give you a full accounting tomorrow. Everything is all right for now.”
“Skip, we’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”
“I’ve got calls in the morning, but how about we meet for lunch?”
She paused.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m not feeling that good right now.”
“Em, what’s wrong?” She was strong, never weak. I don’t know that I’d ever seen her really sick.
“A little sick to my stomach.”
“Are you taking anything?”
“No. Nerves I guess. I’ll be all right. Dutch treat tomorrow?”
“No. Fuentes paid us the rest of the money. Actually $3,000. My treat.”
She smiled over the phone. I could tell. “Don’t forget, partner, a third of that is mine.” She hung up.
“I’m going to turn off up ahead and get some oil,” James said. “That light is flickering. All we need to do is throw a rod.”
“Do you know what that means, throw a rod?”
He looked at me with a sneer. “No.”
He pulled off at a gas station and got out of the cab. Hundreds of black bugs swarmed around the yellow glow from the light fixtures above the gas pumps. Catching a glimpse of a car in my peripheral vision, I spun around. No rear window. It must have pulled in behind us. I thought it was blue and big and the brief look I got made me think it might be the Buick.
James sauntered out of the garishly lighted gas station/carryout with a can of oil in his hand, popped the hood, and proceeded to drain the contents into the engine. I got out and looked behind us. No Buick.
We got back in and James pulled back out onto I-95.
“I think that man has problems we can’t imagine. He doesn’t know where his son is, only that he’s been injured. He can’t be honest with his investors because if he tells them the truth the people behind Cafe Cubana will send his son home in a body bag.”
I looked out the side mirror and saw lights coming up behind us. Traffic was light, but this guy was hell-bent for leather, pulling alongside of us on the outside line. James glanced over and hit the brakes hard.
My mother harped on wearing a seat belt. Every time I left the house-“Don’t forget to wear your seat belt!” I didn’t pay a lot of attention to my mother. I bounced from the seat and cracked my chin on the dashboard as James skidded to a stop on the berm.
“What the hell was that all about? What?” I rubbed my chin, gingerly feeling what was going to be a nasty bruise. “Damn it, James.”
“Son of a bitch had a gun aimed at my head and I swear he fired it, Skip. It was our big-mouthed buddy in the Buick. That’s about as close to death as I think I’ve come.”
Up ahead, a pair of brake lights came on and the car swerved onto the berm. I sat there rubbing my chin as the car ahead shifted into reverse and hit the gas. The big automobile was barreling backward, the rear end swerving back and forth like a fish’s tail.
“Jesus! He’s going to ram the truck.”
“I think it’s us he wants to ram, James. The truck just happens to be in the way.” I was shouting and not sure why.
James stepped on the gas and we pulled out onto the highway. We passed the blue demon going forty-five miles an hour. The Buick braked again and reversed motion, chasing us at an alarming speed.
“James, we can’t outrun that son of a bitch.”
“I know.”
“Bump him.”
“What?” James shrieked.
Now the Buick was three car lengths back, and with my window down I could hear the roar of its engine.
“Bump him!”
“What about the truck.”
“Fuck the truck. Think about our lives.” Now I knew why I was shouting.
The big blue machine came whining up to the driver’s side and when I leaned forward and looked out James’s window, I could see Big Mouth taunting us with the gun. With his good hand he waived the pistol as they pulled even.
James jerked the steering wheel hard. He grimaced as he gave it a vicious twist to the left and for a moment I thought the truck was going to go over. Then I heard the crunch of metal-on-metal.
The crunch, then the shrill scraping sound and sparks flew from the friction. James hung in there, straightening the wheel then spinning it again, pounding the car next to us, again, and again. Finally he spun it to the right and straightened it out one last time, punching the accelerator and heading down the highway.
“What?” I was still screaming and I couldn’t see a damn thing. My side mirror showed nothing and with no rear window-which was the reason we were in this situation-I had no idea what had happened.
“Don’t talk to me about it, Skip. I don’t even want to discuss it until I see how much damage I just did to the truck.”
We pulled over two exits later and got out in a deserted shopping center parking lot. Surprisingly, the body damage wasn’t terrible. Oh, it was crumpled in spots and the dark blue from the Buick streaked across the white body like war paint, but with my limited knowledge of bodywork, I figured it could be fixed for minimal dollars. I was certain all three of us would have to put money from our profits into the repairs.
James kept pacing, looking at the side and saying, “Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn.”
“We’ll get it fixed. You saved our lives, man.”
“You were right, Skip. Angel should have blown Big Mouth’s punk ass away. These guys are bad news.”
“Where are they?”
“The last time I hit them, their car rolled. Last thing I saw, it was upside down. It will take a tow truck to get them out of the median.”
“Well, we’re still in one piece.”
“Skip, what the hell do they want with us? Do we know something? Do they think we still have the mail. Shit, they know we were visiting Fuentes. They must assume we gave him the mail.”
“But we didn’t give him all of the mail, did we?”
He gave me a funny look. “How the hell would they know that?”
I walked back, surveying the truck all the way to the rear. “Hey, pal. Check this out.”
He walked back and ran his finger over the hole. “Son of a bitch. They did shoot at us. What the hell do we do now? What do we do now?”