‘Klick’, this is the deal. Hand over all your money, your wallet with all your charge cards and ATM cards, we let you walk. Once we’ve drained your accounts tomorrow, we send everything back to you in the mail,” said Gerri.
“Otherwise, Clyde, you will become an amateur Internet star overnight,” added Jerri.
We stood there, staring, me considering. Occasionally Gerri would glance down at my fully exposed self.
I put my hand to my chin, scratched it as if deep in thought. “You know, that don’t sound half bad,” I said. “What say we sign a contract, I get one third of what you sell on the Net?”
Gerri frowned.
I held out my hands, like ‘how about this’ and took a small step or two forward. “That title’s a killer, Jerri, I do admit.”
“Hey, asshole, you get nothing if we go on the Net. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, moron,” Gerri said.
“Okay, okay…but then again, considering my performance, someone might approach me, make a sequel. You know, this might be a good deal.” Another step forward.
Gerri glanced down again, and I moved, right leg coming up, around, kicking, like a snake’s flicking tongue, and the pistol flew from his hand. Then a sliding step forward, a side kick aimed down, low, at an angle, right above his knee. There was a sharp crack and the big tree that Gerri was came crashing down.
I snatched the tape from Jerri’s hand. She blinked at me, then down at her husband on the floor. He was holding his leg, gasping, his face as pale as the rest of his beached-whale body.
I strolled over to the phone by the wet-bar, made a call to a dear friend of mine at the Fort Worth Police Department. Only late as it was, I was calling his home.
“Hey, asshole, you know what time it is?” Detective Bobby Shinn said, his usual perky self, even in the middle of the night.
“You’re not going to believe this,” I told him. “Remember the Rosses?”
“Oh great,” he said. “How many bodies this time?”
“None,” I said in shock. “You know I’m not a violent man.”
“Yeah, and Mother Teresa wasn’t really a nun.”
I told him where I was and asked he keep this quiet for now.
After I hung up I beeped Wimpy Dooley. He’d given me the number just in case we got lucky.
“You didn’t call the cops, did you?” There was a hint of panic in his voice.
“I am experienced at this kind of thing,” I told him. “I called a guy’ll keep it quiet for now. Depends on what shakes loose.”
I told him where to find me.
Even though Dooley was just two blocks over, counting his day’s receipts, Shinn beat him by a couple of minutes
EPILOGUE
Vicki sat in my lap. We were in my favorite chair, facing west, watching the sun go down. Neither of us had a book. What we had were reservations at the Worthington Restaurant, for a carriage ride afterwards, then two free nights in the Worthington’s best suite.
Well, the second best. My friend Charlie Chan owned the best one, it seemed.
“So Dooley knew it was a porno thing all along?” Vicki asked. She was like a big kitten curled on top of me. I couldn’t help but stroke her back, her long black hair.
“Yeah. Seems one of his customers opened up to him. One of the last victims right before he hired me.
“Jerri turns out had a set of wigs that’d make Cher green with envy. Colored contacts. And she wasn’t hitting just book readers,” I said.
“How come I never read any of this in the paper?”
I smiled. “Well, Shinn has a way about him. Told Gerri and Jerri they had a choice: Do time for attempted assault, blackmail of me, and illegal possession of a firearm, or he’d drop ‘em from the top of the hotel.”
Vicki stared up at me with those jade green eyes that never failed to tighten up my gut, among other things. “You’re not serious?”
“Well, it’s not exactly what he said, but they copped the plea and will serve a minimum of five for her and seven for him, before parole. Let’s just way whatever he told them, it worked.”
Vicki, still staring at me, said, “Still bothering you, what you and her did?”
“Little bit. Knowing you don’t really care that I did it, makes it easier…but the old morals, they die a slow death, sometimes,” I said.
I’d once been a very religious man. Staring too long at the worst Humankind has to offer had eventually wore me down. It was either bend, or become some kind of looney-tune bible-freak standing on the corner hailing the impending doom of civilization.
From what I’d seen, there was little left ‘civilized’ about us. When I’d worked a case where the local patriarchy of a church ended up lying in court about a client of mine to cover their pattern of adultery with the sap’s wife, that’d been the last straw.
Vicki laid her head on my shoulder, giggled. “So, she show you anything I haven’t?” she asked.
I smiled. “Nothing I’d want you to show me.”
I looked down as she looked up. Our lips met. It was a tender kiss, wet without the tongue, a promise of things to come.
Perhaps there was something civilized left in us, after all.
Klick and the Black Bitch Part One
PART ONE: TICKET TO RIDE THE CLIENT REVENGE THE COURTHOUSE THE STATION FRANKIE IDLE TIME A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY….
THE CLIENT
…that’s what my new client, Clarence McGillicutty, called his ex-wife, ‘The Black Bitch’. I studied the picture he’d handed me; the Ex-McGillicutty looked as white as me.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Mcguilicuddy said. “Why do I call her ‘black’ bitch?”
“As a matter of fact—”
He tossed a book big enough to smash an iguana onto my desk. “There’s this character in there, Inez Scull,” he said. “Almost fell out of my chair when I came across her. Biggest married whore this side of the Mississippi.”
The book was The Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry. I’d read his Lonesome Dove: Pretty good. Almost zoned me to sleep the first hundred pages, then picked up when those Water Moccasins swarmed that character in a river.
“I laughed at first, then cried,” McGillicutty said. “Damn woman ‘trots’ with just about every major character in the book…just like my Lucy did.”
I plopped the book down, making my gray metal military-auction desk hum. “Trot?”
“Yeah, you know, straddle, poke, fu—”
“Okay, okay!”
He pulled a handkerchief from his yellow blazer jacket and wiped his eyes. “Then I got this idea. I don’t know where it came from, really. There I was reading, saw this Black Bitch Inez as my Lucy, started laughing, then crying, then…. I don’t know, maybe it was the fact it was writing, you know?”
I was struggling not to ask him if he’d ever watched I Love Lucy, but managed to restrain myself. “No, don’t know where you’re going with this.”
Clarence’s eye-burning yellow blazer seemed to match his lime green trousers. White socks and tasseled brown loafers rounded