4

LUIS SOTO was a bad man and liked being a bad man. The badness rolled off him like a malaria sweat, a mean little rat-bastard who could walk into a bar and order a shot of Reposado Gold and everybody in the bar would figure him for a gun and a razor and an eagerness to use them.

He’d been born in Miami, and not a good part of Miami, of Cuban immigrant parents, and started his career in crime as a driver and muscle for a loan shark. He’d also burned a few buildings down for people who needed their buildings burned down, had laundered money through the Florida Indian casinos for his various bosses, had provided protection for a smuggling operation that brought Iranian turquoise in from the Bahamas. He’d spent some time robbing tourists on Miami Beach; and he’d been caught a few times, because he wasn’t the brightest.

He’d been described by a Miami detective as “our all-purpose asshole.”

His life had changed when he got in an argument in a parking lot of a chili bar in San Cristobal, Florida, and had cut the best part of the nose off a Jepsen County, Florida, sheriff’s deputy after the deputy called him “a nigger of the spic persuasion.”

The deputy had been in civilian clothing and Soto hadn’t known he was a cop, but that wouldn’t have stopped him anyway. He would have known that he was probably causing himself more trouble than the cutting was worth: but a man had his pride, and so he cut the deputy.

He was right about the trouble. He was carefully and thoroughly beaten for thirty consecutive nights in the Jepsen County jail and hadn’t been able to walk quite straight or fuck anything at all since performing that traumatic nose job. The jailers also spent some time jerking him around on the end of a dog collar, leaving him with a rough, high-pitched voice that sounded like a crow scratching on a tin roof.

When Soto got back to Miami from Jepsen County he couldn’t run or lift anything too heavy, and had finally taken up killing people for a living. He got anything between fifteen hundred and ten thousand dollars per murder, whatever the traffic would bear. His primo client was a Honduras drug cartel, his specific employer a man he knew only as “the Boss,” with a capital “B.”

The Boss would provide a succinct explanation of why the designated murderee needed to be dead and where he was, and Soto would set up the kill and carry it out. Most of the murders weren’t exactly masterworks of subterfuge: Soto would pull up to the victim’s front door, knock, and when the guy answered, fill him full of nine-millimeter jacketed hollow-points; the pistol, of course, was silenced. Not silent, but quiet enough in those neighborhoods disinclined to ask about loud, sharp noises. A day or two later, ten thousand dollars would show up in Soto’s Panama City bank account—the Panama City in the country of Panama.

A few of the kills were more complicated and also paid better. Those were the punishment murders. Soto would track the miscreant, and at an opportune moment, kidnap him, or, occasionally, her. He didn’t do the punishment himself: that was done by his partner.

—

BAD AS SOTO WAS, he was nothing like the nightmare of Charlene Kort.

Kort didn’t live her life, she suffered it. She suffered it right from the beginning. Born to a long line of white trash and being fat and greasy, she had a bad time in school from her elementary years right through two years of high school. She made it all worse with a meth habit that started in seventh grade, when her parents began cooking it.

She’d once gotten dressed up to apply for a job, and asked her tweaker father how she looked. He’d said, “Like you caught on fire and somebody stomped you out with golf shoes.” He really thought he was being funny.

With twenty-eight years of unrelieved poverty and bitterness following her like an incurable disease, she’d found her calling when she murdered an assistant manager at the Dollar Store where she was working the overnight shift as a stock girl.

The assistant manager, whose name was Dan Bird, delighted in giving her a hard time: she didn’t work fast, she didn’t work smart, she wasn’t even clean enough for the Dollar Store: “When did you last wash your hair, anyway, dirt girl? Even if you don’t respect yourself, you gotta respect the store, you hear me?”

Bird had gotten drunk and had done a late-night surprise drop-in to make sure that she was hard at work. He was running his mouth on that subject as Kort was unpacking an iron.

“You gotta work fast and you gotta work smart. You don’t do either one, do you, dirt girl? You wanna know why? You’re dumb trailer trash, white trash, trash. That’s why . . .”

He got a step too close and she clocked him with the iron, knocking him on his drunken ass. Knowing the job was all over for her anyway, she hit him several more times with the edge of the iron, until his skull started to get mushy, and took intense, absolutely sexual pleasure as she watched him shake and tremble and groan and bleed.

After a while, having thought about how much fun this was, she walked over to the hardware section and got a pair of wire cutters, a drywall saw, a hammer, and a contractor’s trash bag. She stuffed him in the bag, dragged him out to his own car, drove him down to a nearby river landing, where she sometimes went to smoke her meth, and tore him apart with her tools.

When he was dead, which took a while, his body went in the river. His car was parked behind an Adult Pleasures Outlet, and Kort walked back to the Dollar Store to clean up the bloody mess on the floor and to await the arrival of the cops.

The cops finally had come, she’d heard, but nobody talked to her, and eventually no more was said about the disappearance of Dan Bird. She’d gotten away with murder, without even trying.

Given her contacts in the world of backwoods meth feuds, her newfound skills and murderous enthusiasm were definitely marketable. Nobody knew exactly what she’d done, but the word had gotten around that Charlene Kort was the meanest bitch in North Florida, which would put her high on the list for meanest bitch worldwide.

Kort moved on from hammers and drywall—though the extra-large side-cutters still had a place in her tool bag—when she discovered the wonderful world of electricity, and all those battery-powered Japanese saws and drills and nail-drivers. Her redneck employers called her “the queen of home-improvement tools.”

Then one day, two years after she killed Dan Bird, her employers hooked her up with Soto, who had contacts sideways across the Gulf of Mexico, where all the money was. Soto killed people, which was a valuable skill, but combined with Kort’s interest in the pain of other people, they made an even more valuable team.

That, despite the fact that they’d hated each other at first sight, the gimpy Cuban and the overweight white-trash girl. Soto didn’t like Kort any more than anyone else had, and Kort sensed that from the first moment she got in his car.

—

ON THIS OCCASION, they met in Panama City, the one in North Florida, at Alegra’s Fine Pizza and Pasta, a place with checkered-plastic tablecloths, plastic baskets of supermarket rolls, and frozen pizza and pasta lightly heated in microwave ovens; they got a booth with a view of the building across the alley.

“It’s complicated,” Soto told Kort. “This is punishment, but we also gotta get some information. We can’t cut them up and leave.”

“What’s the deal?” Kort asked. Soto’s head bobbed and turned constantly, checking the environment, maybe looking for strange guns. He reminded Kort of a bobble-head doll with a mean streak.

“Somebody robbed the Boss’s bank,” Soto said. “He wants the money back, and he wants the robbers punished. If we get the money back, we get a quarter-million each. If we don’t get the money back, but punish these guys, we get twenty grand each.”

“So it’s mostly about the money.”

“Always is,” Soto said.

“I’d like a quarter-mil,” Kort said. She thought about it, and asked, “What if we can’t find him and we get nothing back?”

“Then we get nothing. But they pick up all the expenses.”

“They know who robbed them?” Kort asked, as she sucked down a Mexican Coca-Cola.

“The College-Sounding Guy says it’s probably a man named Garvin Poole. He’s a holdup man and killer. The cops have been looking for him for ten years,” Soto said. “Problem is, nobody knows where Poole’s at. They do know he’s probably got his girlfriend with him. Her name is Dora Box.”

“How are we gonna find them?” Kort asked. “We’re not the cops.”

“The College-Sounding Guy is going to help out. He’s in all the cop files. The thing is, Poole can’t be found, but his relatives are out there like sittin’ ducks. That’s where you come in.”

Kort nodded and said, “Okay. Gonna have to think about it. Maybe read up some.”

“Read up? What’s to read up about?” He didn’t quite sneer at the idea.

“On the other jobs, the Boss just wanted somebody hurt bad, so the word would get around. We didn’t care when the sucker died. If we need to get some information out of somebody, I’m gonna have to be more careful. Stretch it out.”

“Makes you kinda hot, doesn’t it? Thinking about it?” Soto said. “You ever been laid?”

“Fuck you,” Kort said. She sucked the last of the Coke out of the bottle, pulled the straw out and crumpled it in her fist, pushed it back in the bottle. She didn’t know why she did that, but always had. “When do we get the names?”

“Anytime now. The College-Sounding Guy says he has to do some research. Shouldn’t take long. Go rent a car, I’ll let you know. Oughta be ready to roll tonight.”

—

THE COLLEGE-SOUNDING GUY was a computer hacker also employed by the Boss, and who had valuable entrée to almost any police files, and lots of other files as well. He’d gotten a half dozen fake IDs for both Kort and Soto, and credit cards that actually worked for two months. The amounts they paid for his services were fairly small—a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars each time, which made Kort think that he might have a lot of accounts.

They had a phone number for him and nothing else. Kort imagined him sitting in his mother’s basement, lots of shadows around, surrounded by Orange Crush bottles and sacks of Cheetos. In real life, when they called, he was usually listening to soft-rock music, like Genesis, or somebody.

When they called the Boss, on the other hand, there was no sound but the Boss’s baritone voice, and a very faint electronic twittering.

Kort didn’t mind talking to the College-Sounding Guy, because he had a workaday voice and casual attitude: pay me the money and I’ll get you the information. The Boss, on the other hand, was remote and disembodied, and extremely courteous, and for that reason, mysterious and threatening.

—

KORT AND SOTO left the restaurant separately, Soto going first. They’d rent cars for the job, although the cars they rented wouldn’t be used on the job—they’d rent a different set of cars for that. Lots of cars meant lots of ways out, if the shit hit the fan.

Kort got hers at the airport, drove to her apartment, forty minutes away, threw everything out of the refrigerator but some bottles of water, took the garbage around back to a dumpster. That done, she watched a couple of hours of television and was getting into a Friends rerun when Soto called.

“We’re going to Tennessee. I’ll see you there tomorrow night, in Nashville. About an eight-hour drive. You get a car?”

“Yes.”

“The College-Sounding Guy made reservations for you at the Best Western at the Nashville airport, under the Sally Thomas name.”

“I’ll call you when I get in,” Kort said.

She rang off and went to her computer: time to do a little research. Soto had been right about one thing: thinking about the job did get her a little hot.