The Outlaw Stinky Joe (Baer Creighton Book 4), page 4
A gash split his right cheek from below the eye to his jaw. A war wound. His flesh gaped, already turning outward, swelling from deep in the cut. Inside his mouth he pressed with his tongue and found the wall intact.
It looked like it should hurt.
“You need a doctor,” Shirley said. Her breathing had slowed.
He couldn’t no-show his meeting with Lester Toungate in an hour and a half. That’d be like abdicating. But his wound needed dressing.
Since moving in, he had yet to fill his bathroom cabinet with the necessaries. No hydrogen peroxide, nothing.
He turned to Shirley. “Medical stuff.”
“What?”
“You got peroxide? Bandages?”
“In the cabinet.” Shirley nodded to the door beside Clyde.
He opened it.
“Let me see that. You need a hospital. That looks awful.”
She rose with inspecting eyes. He pushed her back, and she sat again.
He grabbed gauze, peroxide, antibacterial ointment, and tape.
“I’m going to deal with you about that dog. You won’t like it.”
Chapter 9
Back at his house, Clyde Munsinger placed his 9mm on top of the toilet tank, pointed away from the shower. He finished another synthetic joint and, holding the last quarter inch between tweezers, dropped the roach into the commode.
He left the bathroom door open. After entering the tub, he twisted the shower head inward and kept the curtain bunched at the wall. He lowered his head under the jets and the cascading water burned the gash in his face. Woke him. Coffee would be good. The pain was good.
He wasn’t spooked. Just prudent.
Some kind of hex was going on. Beyond coincidence. He sensed synchronicity working against him. But that’s what made great men great. You take a fellow like George Patton. Clyde was a magnificent bastard like George Patton. He read his book in college. Patton would stand on the battlefield and observe the terrain from a thousand years ago—because he was there—and intuit how to win today. He had an extra sense of things and did what he had to do. Would a little dog bite rattle George Patton?
No.
Hell no.
Clyde dried his body, patted around his cheek. Squeezed a half-tube of ointment on his finger and filled the gash, top to bottom.
He wiped his hand clean on his towel and contemplated the gauze and tape.
This wound was an opportunity. You see guys with fresh white gauze, they look like GIs back from war, skulking around recuperating. Valorous, yeah. Battle ready, no.
But a guy with gaping flesh and wild eyes? Doing damage satisfies a need.
Lester Toungate would be clueless.
Clyde pulled on fresh underwear. Stopped. The synthetic cannabis had him smoothed out. He fetched his tin of Copenhagen and put a small wad in his lip. Finished dressing.
When he bought the trailer park from Betsy Peck, he already knew she’d been washing money for a silent partner. One glance at the books, and the dollars paid for services rendered, cued him to the deception.
The key was that the same businesses kept showing up. Toungate businesses.
Toungate had a tree removal service. The number of times the trailer park had trees removed, Clyde expected to look out the window and find denuded land, windswept and eroded. But trees were everywhere.
Toungate had a pavement treatment business. Betsy paid three hundred thousand dollars, over two years, to treat her pavement. But the roads in the park were one step above dirt and gravel.
Toungate had an appliance repair shop. What trailer court needed a hundred thousand dollars of oven repair, per year?
He opened the books, and the guts fell right out. There were more instances, but the obvious ones painted a clear enough picture.
Clyde reviewed the numbers. Despite the money laundering partner, the property retained tremendous investment potential. His back-of-the-envelope calculations would give him a capitalization rate of nineteen percent. If he could validate Betsy’s verbal assurances on revenues and costs, he would make bank. On a two million dollar deal, with half financed, that put him ahead $190,000 per year. Not bad pay to manage a trailer park.
If the numbers held.
He drove home with notes. Did research. Then thought of a question he wanted to ask Betsy Peck in person, to watch her eyes when she answered. Instead, he phoned her.
“Why don’t you sell the property to Toungate?”
The phone was silent.
“Hello?”
“Because I won’t.”
“What’s that mean?”
“None of your damn business. Plain enough?”
“Well, if you expect to sell the property, especially encumbered by ... a relationship ... you’ll need to answer some questions.”
“How about I say, he’s a son of a bitch, and if I could shoot him, I would? That good enough?”
“Did you two always have a bad rapport?”
“We’re not talking about this over the phone.”
“I’ll come back up. You understand. I need more facts.”
“Fine. Whatever.”
The next day he drove back to Flagstaff and brought Betsy a cardboard cup of coffee from Starbucks. She nodded toward the counter. She never tasted the coffee.
“I need you to tell me how you and Toungate work together. Money laundering is a crime.”
She looked at the wall. Seemed older than seventy-nine.
“You understand,” Clyde said. “Right? I can’t sink my inheritance into this place, plus another million in loans, without understanding the deals you’ve made. Not me. No investor. In fact, no legitimate investor will buy this place. They’ll find the flaws in your bookkeeping faster than I did. That only leaves the idiots—and there aren’t many with two million bucks lying around—or someone like me. A little flexible. Maybe.”
“I was stupid to think I could get out of this mess.”
“Well if you want out, why not sell to Toungate? He’d be happy to buy. In business they call the move vertical integration.”
She huffed.
He did a trick he learned on television. He put his hand on hers. Raised his brows and partly frowned. “What’s the real story, Betsy?”
You can trust me.
She pressed her eyes with her other hand, and tears irrigated her cheeks. She blinked. Eased her hand from under his.
“My boy used to run with his boy. Toungate’s boy. Hellion stuff. Then Toungate brought his boy into the operation. Drugs. And all that evil nasty stuff. Then he hired my son. And my son didn’t last as long as his.”
“What happened?”
“He was stuck in the neck. Shanked.”
“What?”
“And face. In prison.”
“Toungate was responsible?”
She shrugged. “My boy was going to MIT. Had smarts. But Lester Toungate showed him the easy money.”
“Well, if you hated him, why did you launder money for him?”
“Because when my son was working for him, he told me if I wanted to keep Joey safe, I better do what he said. He gave me the money. I paid him for the services. Wrote it off my taxes. It was great for taxes.”
“So to be clear. Lester Toungate—none of the Toungates—have any ownership interest in the property?”
“No. This is an LLC. All mine.”
“I can work with that. But I need to study the property’s numbers in detail. I need to make copies of this.” He nodded at the paper spread on the desk, her ledger, receipts. “I need to analyze the cash flow and find if it’ll support the financing I’ll need. Is that good?”
She agreed. He took the paper to a Kinkos, Made a full duplicate.
Then, when he saw her a week later: “So here’s the deal, Betsy. You’re going to sell this place to me for five hundred thousand.”
Her eyes ghosted over. Her mouth opened.
“You’ll take half a million for two reasons. First, no financing company in the world is going to lend money based off your books. They’re corrupt, top to bottom. You’re supposed to keep fake ledgers. But you’d need to go back and fudge numbers for years, to create the records they’d ask for. You can’t do it. Not you. I don’t think I could.”
“And let’s say I could ...” She wiggled a pencil between thumb and forefinger. “What’s the other reason?”
“You let me make copies.”
“So?”
“Let’s say I turn them over to the FBI. Or— the Secret Service actually handles money fraud. Or is it the Treasury? They have a top secret group too. I met a girl in Phoenix, works for them. Rachel. Anyway, one of those agencies would be interested. I should have looked that up before coming back with my offer, I admit. But who I give the evidence to doesn’t matter.”
“What matters?”
“Looking in my eyes, you see damn well I’ll show them what you’ve done.”
She looked in his eyes.
She placed her pencil on the desk. Her chin drifted lower until her hair hung at the sides of her face. “Okay.”
Victory. Over a seventy-nine year old woman, he was hardly going to take a lap around the trailer court. But besting her felt good. Real good.
A sign of what was to come.
Clyde would use the same technique on Lester Toungate, and who knew what empire he’d steal for a story.
Dressed, his wet hair combed straight back, cheek gaping and shiny with ointment, Clyde studied his 9mm. He removed the magazine and locked the slide. Replaced the bloody shell from his pocket in the magazine and examined his empty gun. Turned it over in his hand, registered the weight of it.
The joint did a good job of easing the constricted feeling—but it was fading.
Unlike Betsy Peck, Lester Toungate wasn’t a seventy-nine year old woman.
If he was in his seventies, they were a damn hard seventy years.
After Clyde bought the mobile home resort, he waited and, four days after moving in, Lester showed up to have a conversation. They stood awkward, like a boy and girl who liked flirting, but not each other. Their words were code, with neither sure what the other meant.
Clyde thought an old timer in the drug business, by this late stage of the game, would favor blunt speech and action. But Lester Toungate appeared more intent on communicating with his rocky eyes than his fumbling words.
Finally Clyde said, “Look, I bought the place knowing what Betsy was doing, and I expected to take her place. By my numbers, she’s been moving about seven hundred a year for you. I plan to do some renovating, and I can clean a hell of a lot more than seven hundred. Is that what you want?”
Lester had said nothing. studied the floor with narrow eyes and a brow that seemed plowed for seed. He left, and Clyde wondered at his ease of motion. Some old guys build barns, run marathons—right up to the day they don’t. Lester was such a man.
Clyde didn’t see him again for three weeks.
He had a spare magazine somewhere, but the odds of needing it were small. Clyde thumbed the slide release and the pistol jumped in his hand. He pulled the trigger to dry fire it, but the trigger wouldn’t move. He thought a moment before he realized it wouldn’t release without the magazine in it.
He loaded the 9 and placed it in his butt holster. Glanced at his watch. Stepped to the bathroom to drain his bladder, and stopped in front of the mirror.
“You are some con artist.”
Chapter 10
Joe bolted from the trailer court with strength restored. Milk fat and beef broth in his belly combined with blood on his snout roused a furious hunger. The force had slumbered while his body had been dying. But now, stomach enzymes dissolved fats and shipped calories to his cells. His vast un-satedness stirred. He desired more blood. More fat. Provoked by a hope of survival, appetite roared with life-saving bellicosity.
He would use his new energy to find more before the winter resumed and death again advanced.
Joe stopped and turned his head backward to the place he’d escaped. The female and the man with the pistol. Such devices were not foreign to him. The man who farted cabbage carried one. Though he never pointed it toward him, Joe knew the danger. The gun blasted fire and exploded with noise. The percussion deafened him, and tickled his whiskers. And every animal around the fight ring died.
He saw it again during the vast weeks confined to the vehicle, while trees gave way to plain, and plain to mountain. It was an instrument of death. When the man at the trailer brought it out and pointed, Joe had responded.
At the edge of the court, he looked into the woods and instead aimed his nose into a gust. The air carried the intoxicating odor of charred meat. Burned soybeans and other human intoxicants. Bread and sugar. The olfactory ensemble dizzied him. A car passed. Blasted its horn. Joe leaped to the cover roadside trees, and loped toward the smell.
After a few hundred yards, he wriggled under a large clump of beargrass. Across the road, a fast food restaurant lured people with neon signs. He closed his eyes. The overpowering goodness of the aroma washed through him.
Joe opened his eyes. A car drove out of the parking lot. As headlights splashed over him, Joe detected motion behind their glare. The car entered the street, and a skinny man marched away from the restaurant, carrying a sizable black bag. He recalled the giant woman at the trailer court—her bag had ice cream and fish sticks, among other miracles. Joe’s stomach tickled. His legs tightened. He studied the surrounding terrain.
The man walked deeper in the parking lot, away from Joe, toward a square structure. Three sides were solid blocks but the front was chain link.
Joe backed from under the beargrass and angled across the road. At the edge of the pavement, he wove between the trunks of cottonwood and aspen. The man dragged open the gate far enough to squeeze through, and chucked his cargo to the top of the dumpster. The bag rolled off. The man again tossed it, and again it fell. Now he leaned against the block wall, his body hidden, and lit a cigarette. The glow illuminated metal on his lip and nose.
Crouched behind a boulder, Joe watched. The scent of smoke arrived, mingled with meat and bread and ketchup. Humans were gods of intoxication. Even fresh blood from a wriggling rabbit couldn’t come close to the narcotic attraction of human food.
Another car entered the parking lot and, after pausing a short while, rolled around the side. The man tossed his cigarette and stepped on it. He returned to the building.
Joe stalked forward. The man had left the gate ajar.
Joe grabbed the plastic with his teeth and backed toward the aperture. In the wood, he’d shred the bag and devour its contents. But the puncture released an intoxicating, meaty perfume.
Joe became rash.
Fish. Hamburger. Oils and proteins and sugars. He jerked and the plastic tore. He rooted through the debris, pawed boxes that fell open with the barest pressure. He gagged down their contents, burger after burger. Sometimes paper. All still warm and delicious. His mind swam in the high. It was like when he discovered the stinky man in the cave, who’d left a bag of burgers beside his wood-rotting contraption.
A memory from a different life. From a different dog.
The gate crashed closed.
Joe spun, thumped his rear against the dumpster.
The man stood on the other side of the link fence with another black bag in hand. He reached and a latch fell in place. The man put his face close to the mesh.
“You a pit? C’mere, you.”
Joe stared. His heart thudded. He shrank backward into the gap between dumpster and cement block wall.
The man pulled a lighted instrument from his pocket and a moment later said, “Hey, yeah. It’s me. You still lookin’ pit bulls?”
Joe growled, almost inaudible.
“‘Cause I got one trapped. He was in the trash. Hardee’s. Yeah he’s big—for a pit. White. Mostly. I don’t know. No collar—listen, I don’t have time to hang and convince you. Want him or not?”
The man closed and pocketed the device. Left.
Joe pressed his nose to the tiny gap between cement block wall and wire gate. Pushed forward, but though it gave a little, the ultimate resistance was firm.
He wriggled, turned the other direction. He circled the dumpster and, at the back, stepped through cold water. Returned to the front. He sat. Pawed at the fence.
Joe ate another cheeseburger, this time nosing aside the bun.
Metal grated on blacktop. Joe looked. The man walked from a car with the trunk lid open and light on. He dragged a chain on the pavement. His stride carried purpose. His head set level.
Joe shrank from the fence.
“All right. You go easy, I go easy. But you make this hard, I’ll beat you to death. You got it?”
The man looped the chain and wrapped the ends around his hand for a solid grip. He opened the gate. Held his arm high and back.
Joe retreated.
“C’mere.”
Joe hunkered. Growled.
The man raised his arm and hurled downward. Behind him, the chain swung out, up and around, and with unseen speed the heavy links smashed into Joe’s shoulder and lowered head. The impact moved through him. His hide stung but the pain inside was intolerable.
As the man dragged back the chain and readied his arm for another swing, Joe clawed forward and leaped. His paws reached the man first, but he relaxed, allowing his teeth to deliver the brunt of his weight. As the man shrieked and fell backward, the gate yielded and Joe rode him to the pavement. He slashed at his attacker’s neck, felt the spurt of blood that signaled victory. The man’s shrieks became garbled.
Joe bounded across the lot and swerved to miss a pair of lights rushing toward him. At the ditch across the road, he jumped over the bank and darted into tree cover.
Chapter 11
Lester and his son Paul Toungate waited beside Lester’s truck. Headlights approached. Lester said, “Now.”
Paul eased around the bed, ducked.
They met on Road 2310, after the right turn from 231, a short scoot past Rogers Lake. Both roads had been closed for winter and were now reopened. The area attracted eagles, pronghorn, mule deer, and black bear. Wading birds and the famous leopard frog.
