Chapter 33
The Roanoke Gun Shop and Range. My favorite sleazy joint.
A semi-legitimate shop where scumbags gathered to drink coffee, shoot pistols, lie about the good old days, and sneak peeks down the shirt of the proprietor’s wife, Gabriela Weston.
Grabriela—a Hispanic woman in her fifties with the same measurements and speaking tone as the beautiful woman Gloria from Modern Family—was one of the sleazy scumbags.
She served as a hub of underworld gossip and networking, but she doted on me and Manny and we liked it.
Her husband Lefty, in his seventies, owned the place but had long since given up management to her.
It was the kind of place where the walls were cinder blocks painted white and the cork boards displayed advertisements from the nineties, the corners curled twenty years ago.
This place’s cashflow didn’t come from honest revenues.
Gabriela was working a dust mop and pushing a jumble of spent brass into the corner when we walked in.
Her toenails and fingernails were painted bright orange and they matched her loud bracelets and earrings.
The place was hushed, no guns firing in the shooting range, a couple guys with styrofoam cups watching reruns of The Andy Griffith Show in the back.
Gabriela rose up and smiled and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. When she did, her shirt inched up and her stomach looked flatter than mine.
“Look who comes my place,” she said. “It is Manny and Mackenzie, and my husband will be so jealous that he will have to kill you.”
“For what?” I said.
“Because you came here to have your way with me against my will, and fine go ahead but let’s use the cot in the back.”
Manny strode past her, around the glass counter, and picked up a cannon from the case. What looked like a cannon. But in reality it was a big, gleaming Smith & Wesson revolver with an eight-inch barrel. A heavy piece of metal nearly as long as his arm.
“Dios mio,” he said. “What is this?”
“The biggest revolver you can buy. I fired it one time and I couldn’t come into work the next day. It needs a man, not a little woman like me.”
“460?”
“No, Papi, 500 magnum. Five shot, double action.”
“For when you want to kill a buffalo,” I said, “that’s standing behind a tank.”
“It’s for sale?”
“For you? We can talk about it,” she said. Somehow everything Gabriela said sounded like sex could happen any moment.
Manny dropped a couple twenties on the counter and grabbed a box of ammo from the shelf, plus a set of thick earmuffs, and he strode with purpose into the shooting range. Moving with a gun that big was like walking and balancing a couple heavy boxes with one hand.
Gabriela set her dust mop in the corner and rested her hands on her hips and regarded me. “The beautiful sheriff who sleeps with you, she is the mayor now, and she sent you to shut me down.”
“She sleeps in my house, not with me. She’s not the mayor yet. And no she didn’t,” I said.
“Then you came here to take me shopping?”
“I need a name of a bookie.”
“Which one?”
“You tell me. I know a guy, a professor at a college, with a gambling problem. He’s low stakes, likely, but high volume.”
“Maybe he bets online? It’s legal now. Some local books closed up,” she said.
“He’s cash poor, I think, so he’d be using a bookie’s bank. He needs the credit. I bet the online places have canceled his accounts by now. Let’s say he needed a local book, but he’s not a hardcore criminal. Who would he use?”
“Low stakes? There’s only one bookie like that left. Nicky.”
“Nicky Pajamas? I thought he was in Western Virginia Regional?” I said.
She shrugged. “Only a couple weeks. The judge didn’t like the evidence and he walked.”
“Did you help with that?”
“Maybe, I do not remember, maybe if you take me shopping?”
BOOM.
Sounded like a stick of dynamite erupted in the gun range.
“Ay Cari?o, the 500 is too loud,” said Gabriela, covering her ears. “I will let him have it half price to get it out of here.”
We heard Manny laughing behind the insulated door.
“Where can I find Nicky Pajamas?” I said.
“Eh?”
“You heard me,” I said.
“No I can’t, I am deaf. Maybe if you come closer and speak the words directly into my ear, Mackenzie?”
BOOM BOOM BOOM.
“Your coffee maker looks old,” I said.
“Eh?”
“You need a new coffee maker,” I said. I withdrew a hundred dollar bill I’d brought for this purpose and I tossed it on the glass counter. “I’ll buy it for you.”
“Oh thank you, Makenzie, that is so nice and romantic of you.” She scooped it up, along with Manny’s twenties, and slipped it inside her shirt. She had pants pockets but who cared. “Nicky is upstairs. He works here but he might be deaf too.”
“Since when does he work here?”
“Since his ex-wife kicked him out. He is so gross and fat now.”
“I’ll be back,” I said, turning for the stairs.
“Take him this.” She grabbed a bag on the counter and handed it to me. “His food. I forgot and he will be hungry.”
“It’s heavy.”
“He is ugly and a giant. You go and I will see if the beautiful marshal needs help holding his revolver.”
The top level of the gun range was small, only two offices.
The walls were thin and the doors were rattling old glass.
Nicky sat at a wooden desk, his feet up.
He had four televisions going—one set to horse races, one to SportsCenter, one to CNN, and one to a cricket game in some other country.
This time of day in November, not many sports were televised.
Three computer monitors were bright and busy near his feet, one tracking cryptocurrency, one displayed incoming texts, and the other was a spreadsheet of live bets, which auto-updated from the incoming texts.
Nicky had been arrested in his twenties wearing his pajamas. He’d been forced to spend the week in jail and appear before the judge in the same outfit and he’d had the nickname since. A tall fat man, he might outweigh me by a hundred pounds.
“Nicky Pajamas,” I said. “Don’t get up.”
“Mackenzie August. I can’t. By now, my foot’s asleep.
” He grinned and wheezed with some asthma.
His hair was buzzed, making him look like a big seal with clothes on.
“Put some cheese on the weekend? Big Patriots-Broncos game. Ohio State? Vegas got the odds juiced, but no way that got’damn spread holds, not with that lame duck quarterback. ”
I tossed him the brown paper bag of food, which was greasy and I looked around for something to wipe my hands, and I found a tall stack of napkins. He pulled out three hamburgers and two containers of french fries.
“This cost me seventy dollars. I don’t know who Five Guys think the fuck they are, charging these prices,” he said, and he ate half a burger in one bite. Maybe more like a hippo than a seal.
“You know the name Rod Buchanan?” I said.
“Ooogaddrink?”
“Nicky. Finish your food. We’re trying to have a civilization.”
He chewed and swallowed and wiped his mouth with a handful of napkins. Eating caused him to sweat.
“You got a drink?”
“Do I look like I have a drink?” I said.
“Rod Buchanan?”
“Dr. Rod Buchanan, a professor.”
“Diet Pepsi from the machine downstairs,” he said. Deep breath, and he wiped his mouth again. “Then we talk about Rod Buchanan.” Another big bite. “Pleeahh.”
I jogged downstairs, debating if my son’s preschool teacher was worth this. The machine was ancient and didn’t take cards, so I raided Gabriela’s cash register and bought Nicky Pajamas TWO sodas.
BOOM. Dust filtered from the ceiling. With a gun that big, Manny didn’t have to hit his target, just get close.
I ran back upstairs and set the drinks in front of him. He cracked the top of the can with one hand and drank in thirsty gulps like he was dying.
“Good grief, Nicky.”
He lowered it and panted. “Who’s shooting the rockets?”
“Manny.”
“The marshal? Shit. Don’t tell him I’m here.”
“Rod Buchanan. Is he into you for anything big?”
Nicky grinned. It was gross. “Hell yeah baby. Twenty large and the vig is running.”
Vig, a weird bookie term for interest on gambling fees. It came from an old word, vigorish.
“Twenty,” I said and I dropped into the chair across from him. “Not as bad as I thought.”
“It’s only been two years though. You friends with that loser?” he said, his eyes on the screens. Another big bite of burger and then some fries, like packing an overly stuffed suitcase.
“No. But I care about his wife.”
“Ooofugginer?”
“I am not. She teaches at my son’s Montessori school. I need a favor, Nicky.”
“No,” he said.
“I need you to stop the interest on his debt and accept no more bets from him. Cut him off. And don’t send scary men to his house.”
He raised his hands in a show of disbelief.
One hand was pinching a burger, the other a can of Diet Pepsi.
Drinking a diet soda instead of regular soda was like Nicky trying to extinguish a volcano with a water pistol.
“Mackenzie. Do I look like a gottam idiot? Do you know how sports books work? I charge interest.”
“I know this.”
“Whaddaya think pays for the burgers? Gabriela don’t let me stay here free, you know.
Woman’s a crocodile about pennies. Don’t take more bets, my fat ass.
I got a big fish on the line and you want me to let the sucker go?
Man’s a terrible gambler. Degenerate and stupid, all his instincts are wrong.
Fishes like that make me rich. The hell are we talking about, man. ”
“Don’t cancel his debt. He’ll pay it,” I said.
“Not if I can’t send guys to remind him, he won’t.”
“Send them to his office. Not his house.”
“Cause you’re banging his old lady,” he said.
“Nope.”
“You are. Aren’t you still married to that hot piece of blonde ass?”
“Although all those words are true, let’s use her name. Otherwise I’ll feed you the next burger as a suppository.”
He grinned a french fry grin. “Yuck man. You’re into some weird shit.”
“Cancel Rod’s juice. And don’t take his calls.”
“You’ll pay his debt?”
“Hell no,” I said. “He will. Cut him off.”
“Gimme one reason.”
“I won’t tell Manny you’re up here,” I said.
“And?”
“And what do you want?”
“Marcus is sending guys to Big Mouth, sending money money money,” he said and he stopped to belch. “I want the work back.”
Big Mouth Bob. One of the other important sports books in town. I didn’t know how he got the name.
“You piss off Marcus?” I said.
“He’s a baby. Big Black bald baby.”
“What happened?”
“I took some bets from his son,” he said. “After he told me not to.”
“And?”
“And I made a crack about his wife being hot ass.” He laughed.
Like the disposal of a sink would. “See? Jokes are no big deal. Maybe I used some racial terms, whatever. How’s he scared of words?
Since then, he’s sending all the money to Big Mouth.
I know Marcus is sweet on you, so he’ll listen.
I’m telling you, man, these Black guys are conservative as hell, no matter what they say. ”
The stairs leading up to our level groaned and a giant Middle Eastern man walked in. Six and a half feet tall, former nose tackle for Virginia Tech. Strong as an ox. He saw me and said, “Oh shoot.”
“Daryush, you’re muscling for Pajamas?” I said.
“He’s got the best money in town right now. Plus I owe him fifteen.” Daryush’s eyes flickered to Nicky. “We good?”
“Yeah yeah we’re good.” Nicky waved the question off with a burger. “Not like you would stand up to Mackenzie anyway. You only beat up skinny shits.”
“You quit working for Rahim,” I said.
If Daryush and I got into a fight, a fair fight, I wouldn’t win.
Not many guys I thought that about. He nodded at me.
“Rahim moved outta town after you and the marshal tried to burn him alive. That was a night, huh? He fired me. Had to, him burning in that car. I was quitting anyway.” Daryush walked like a refrigerator would to the corner and he sat in a wide cushioned chair and he picked up a novel.
“Getting bored. Might move to New York.”
“Daryush is an upgrade,” I told Nicky.
“Hell yeah. Last guy was soft. One of those Columbians act like he’s tough but he wasn’t. Daryush at least shows up on time some days.”
“Okay Nicky, I’ll talk to Marcus about sending gamblers your way again. No promises but I’ll try,” I said. “Deal?”
“Plus. One more thing,” he said.
“What?”
“I don’t know yet.” A grin and a cackle. His noises, ugh. “One more thing in the future, baby. I want you to owe me a favor. I want the great Mackenzie August in my debt. Daryush is our witness. You owe me big.”
“I don’t owe you big. I owe you about ten grand of interest worth,” I said. “If you kill Buchanan’s vig, don’t take more bets off him, and keep Daryush away from his house.”
BOOM.
“Alright fine, you asshole, deal. He calls or texts several times a day. I’ll let him know.”
“Don’t send him to Big Mouth,” I said.
“I don’t send Big Mouth shit.”
I stood and shot them both with my finger. “See you round, Pajamas. Daryush.”
“Tell your wife I said whaddap,” he called.
Back downstairs, some of the old-timers had stood from their chairs to watch Manny toy with the 500 magnum in the shooting range. Gabriela came back through the door, fanning herself.
“Ay, that man and his pistol, I can’t help myself,” she said. “I read his minutes online.”
“His what?” I said.
“Manny’s Minutes. It’s an email and a website. Edgar’s son makes it.”
“Elijah? I thought he was making a website about me,” I said.
“I do not know, but I read Manny’s opinion of the movie about Tom Cruise’s men and now I need to watch it.”
“A Few Good Men,” I said.
“Me and my husband will watch it in the hot tub tonight and drink champagne and—”
BOOM.
She closed her eyes. “I may let him have the gun for free.”
“No don’t,” I said. “I don’t think our house is big enough.”