We were out on the street and I steered us in the direction of Tap-A-Keg before Sammy and I resumed our conversation.
‘Wouldn’t you refer to what we’ve just done as a caper?’ he asked me, half-seriously. ‘You know, when you tell people about it.’
‘I think I’d call it more of an operation,’ I said. ‘It was so well organized.’
‘You want something run right,’ he said, ‘get a stage manager.’
I didn’t disagree. I just kept walking. And we ended up just where I wanted to: in front of Tap-A-Keg.
‘Buy you a drink?’ I asked Sammy.
‘I thought you had a hangover,’ he said.
‘Hair of the dog, Sammy,’ I said. ‘Or maybe you know the great old blues song “What’s the Use of Getting Sober If You’re Just Gonna Get Drunk Again.”’
He nodded. ‘I know it well. Sang it once or twice in a club in Brooklyn. Man, they hated me.’
I opened the door to the bar. ‘I’m sure they didn’t hate you.’
But when Sammy and I stepped into the bar we were greeted with something like our worst nightmare.
There, at the bar, with Nan the understudy, sat Tanner Brookmeyer. Otherwise, the place was deserted.
Tanner had a gun in his hand, and that hand was on the bar. And on that bar, in front of Nan, there were ten or twelve long lines of cocaine. Nan was crying. Tanner was wild.
‘Hey!’ he greeted us. ‘Look who it is!’
Nan looked at us and sobbed.
‘We’re playing cocaine roulette!’ Tanner shouted. ‘Two of these lines are from the batch that Nan gave to Emory. The rest are clean. Relatively clean. I mean, sure, there’s baby laxative and maybe a little talcum, but it’s cleaner than a lot of the stuff you get on the street. My point is two of the lines are unbelievably bad news. And to tell you the truth, I don’t exactly remember which ones. But Nan, here, is gonna play our game, aren’t you, Nan?’
He waved the gun in front of Nan’s face.
‘Tanner.’ Sammy shook his head. ‘What are you doing? Look at the poor kid.’
Tanner didn’t look. He just went right on talking.
‘The poor kid has acquired quite the drug habit.’ He grinned; it wasn’t a pretty sight.
‘Whose fault is that?’ Sammy asked, inching his way toward the unhappy couple.
‘Fault?’ Tanner exploded. ‘Fault? She’s made a career out of not working, hanging out in this toilet, and snorting my coke!’
He looked around the bar, shaking his head, obviously disgusted by his surroundings.
‘Where are your friends?’ I asked Nan. ‘The regulars.’
‘Oh, I got rid of them,’ Tanner said. ‘And the bartender. Gave them the day off. Which brings us to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: what the hell are you two doing here? Did you follow me, Foggy? I mean, I’m not complaining. I get a kind of a two birds/one stone situation, I guess. A little bit of good luck, right?’
I was moving toward the bar like Sammy was, barely perceptibly.
‘I’ve been here before,’ I said. ‘I just came in to buy Sammy a drink. He’s still recovering from the last time you shot him. Remember that?’
‘Oh, that’s not the last time I’m going to shoot Sammy Cohen,’ he said, and he stood up.
He stood up so fast, in fact, that his bar stool went flying out behind him and Nan screamed.
That made Sammy grab his gun; it made me duck.
‘You don’t kill easy,’ Tanner shouted, ‘but I know you can get all the way dead somehow!’
And he fired a three-shot burst.
I was below the line of fire, hidden behind the side of the bar. Sammy just stood there firing his Python. Nan was on some kind of loop, screaming and gasping and screaming again.
I edged my way around the corner of the bar, pulled my ankle pistol and shot at Tanner’s legs. One bullet ripped through his calf and he howled.
Nan took that moment to run. Still screaming, she headed for the door.
Tanner shot at her. She kept running. I couldn’t tell if she’d been hit, but she fell silent. Maybe she saw salvation just outside the door and had a moment of focus.
It didn’t matter. Tanner fired again and she tumbled forward on to the floor, two feet from the door, groaning, out of steam, and probably bleeding.
‘Tanner!’ I yelled. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m settling every score!’ he told me, top volume. ‘Soon as I’m done here, I’m headed for Brooklyn; finish it with Shayna!’
I could actually hear the cocaine in his voice: high-pitched, frantic, insensate.
When a demon like that has a hold of a person, reason goes out the window. It was clear that Tanner would not be swayed by words, and it was possible that bullets wouldn’t work either.
Sammy had come to the same conclusion and was edging toward Tanner with his gun firing shot after shot.
I knew a couple of the bullets hit Tanner; I could hear him grunt when they did. But they didn’t seem to stop him.
‘He’s wearing a vest, Sammy,’ I announced.
‘That’s right!’ Tanner laughed. ‘I’ve got a vest!’
‘But he’s not wearing it around his head,’ I suggested. ‘And I already got him in the leg.’
I saw Sammy take aim out of the corner of my eye. He fired, but Tanner was bobbing and weaving like a fighter, and the bullets zipped by his head.
Tanner was backing away, then, toward what looked like the storage room of the bar.
‘Hang on, Sammy,’ I said. ‘Where’s Tanner gonna go at this point? And we have to look after Nan.’
Sammy glanced backward, saw Nan on the floor. She wasn’t moving.
Tanner picked up his pace and made it to the storage-room door at the back corner of the bar.
Sammy reloaded in a split-second and kept firing.
I got over to Nan. She was breathing funny.
‘The storage room lets out on a loading dock in the alley out back of here,’ she said weakly.
‘Alley?’ Sammy panicked. ‘He’s getting away!’
‘No, Sammy. Think about this!’
What I meant was that Sammy had already taken all of Tanner’s support out from under him, and we could just leave him to rot. But Sammy got a different message.
‘Right!’ He headed for the door. ‘Get him out in the alley. Less conspicuous. Good thinking.’
And he was gone.
‘I think I got shot,’ Nan mumbled. ‘In my side.’
I didn’t see blood. What I saw was a contorted flip-flop.
‘You have a pain in your side?’ I began.
‘Like a knife,’ she moaned.
‘Could it be a cramp or something?’ I went on. ‘Because I think you tripped on your flip-flop and fell over.’
She rolled and stared up at me. ‘You’re that guy.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m that guy. And aside from having the crap scared out of you, I think you’re OK. Maybe you should consider laying off the coke for a while, though.’
‘Oh.’ She thought about it. ‘Yeah. Probably so. Good idea.’
I got her to her feet.
‘If I’m not shot,’ she said vaguely, ‘I’d like to go home.’
‘How did you and Tanner come to be here?’ I asked. ‘It’s a very odd coincidence.’
‘He came to my apartment,’ she said. ‘He was wild. He said he had some free coke for me. But he scared me, so I told him there were people waiting for me here, at the bar. I said they’d come looking for me if I didn’t show. So he dragged me out of my place, and we came here. But he was just as scary to everyone here as he was to me. They objected to everything about him. The bartender picked up the phone. Tanner shot the phone. Most of the guys ran out then. Tanner told the bartender to take off and shot at him. To tell you the truth, I don’t believe Tanner was thinking straight.’
‘Yeah, you’re not all that coherent yourself,’ I told her. ‘Don’t go home. Go somewhere else, somewhere Tanner wouldn’t know about. Just in case Sammy and I don’t catch up with him, OK?’
She seemed to understand. She nodded, anyway.
And then she limped out the door without another word.