Junkies called the clump of trailers the Outlet Mall. Didn’t much matter what you were looking for, this was where you found it.
Horse was sold out of the singlewide with the green plastic roof over the porch, crystal in the one with the Trump flag hanging in the window like a curtain. Sometimes they’d bring a load of Mexican gals in and they’d work out of the old ’70s model Charger with orange trim for a hundred dollars a turn. But the girls hadn’t been there in a while from what Denny’d seen, and he came often enough to know.
Soon as he opened the front door, Jonah Rathbone reached into the couch cushions and came out with a .357 Mag that he rested on his knee like a baby. Jonah wore a pair of cutoff jeans and a faded white tank top with the words MYRTLE BEACH airbrushed fluorescent on the front. He was leaned so far back on the couch that his ass was hovering off the front of the cushion. A lanky white girl was curled on the far end of the sofa, her legs hugged to her chest inside a black T-shirt. Her eyes were haloed by shadow, barely open, and she was swaying back and forth staring at the floor, oblivious the earth was turning.
“Dang, Denny, you ever think about knocking?” Jonah swallowed hard and slicked his fingers back through the sides of his hair. The full-framed revolver rested on his knee and Denny couldn’t turn his eyes from its engraved frame. Picking the gun back up, Jonah twirled the heavy Ruger loosely by its trigger guard, the gun spinning a Tilt-A-Whirl orbit around his finger. “What sort of worthless shit you bring today?”
Denny came into the room and set his offering on a heavy iron-framed coffee table in front of the couch. He laid the shotgun down first, then stretched the sterling necklace in a straight line paralleling the barrel. “Oh, and I got this,” he said, fishing around in the pocket of his jeans for the cell phone.
“When you going to start stealing something worth having?”
“That gun’s worth a hundred and fifty dollars all day long,” Denny said. “That and that necklace and this phone, I’d say you give me at least two fifty.”
Jonah tossed the revolver casually between him and the girl. He stretched for the shotgun and looked it over in his hands, shouldered the twelve-gauge and aimed the muzzle at Denny’s belly button. After checking the barrel stamp, he set the gun back where he’d found it. “An Iver Johnson, Denny! What the fuck you want me to do with this? When you going to bring something I can sell? A Benelli, hell, a Mossberg, anything.”
“That gun and this phone, that’s easy money,” Denny said. “That’s an easy two fifty.” Every time it was the same old game: Denny trying to talk him up and Jonah trying to dicker him down. Thing about it was, Jonah held all the power. He knew Denny wasn’t going to go to a pawnshop and he knew he wasn’t leaving without the dope. Jonah reached for the necklace and checked the clasp. He shook his head, wadded the thin herringbone chain up like string, and chucked it at the girl at the end of the couch.
“What’s that, a gram of sterling?” Jonah laughed. “What the hell you want me to do with that?”
“I’ll take two hundred, but I can’t go no lower.”
“This ain’t fucking Pawn Stars,” Jonah said. “You want two hundred dollars, you can fly your ass out to Vegas and talk to Chumlee. I’ll give you a hundred cash or a bundle for one twenty-five and that’s all you’re going to get. You can take it or leave it.”
The girl on the end of the couch was rocking fast all of a sudden, biting her bottom lip. Denny couldn’t help but stare.
“You want a go at her?” Jonah asked. “I’ll give you that and two bags.”
Denny turned his eyes back to Jonah, a sly grin cutting Jonah’s scruffy cheeks. “She don’t look good,” Denny said.
“Hell, you wouldn’t know it to look at her, but you get her back in that bedroom, she’s something else. This girl’ll suck the chrome off a trailer hitch for a rail of horse.” Jonah reached across the couch and slid his hand under the girl’s ass and she gasped and jerked back from wherever her mind had taken her, and in a flash she’d snatched the revolver that lay between them and almost had it between Jonah’s eyes. Even racing, her movements were labored and sluggish, and Jonah fought for her wrist and leveraged the gun against the wall with little effort. Standing over her, he slapped her in the face. She choked each time he hit her, her bloodshot eyes glassing over with tears.
Denny didn’t move. He wanted desperately to help her, but he didn’t move. The need to fix always outweighed principle.
When Jonah had the gun, he shoved the front sight post into her forehead and she squalled and collapsed to the floor. Her legs were bare, just a pair of loose-fitting briefs beneath that T-shirt, and as she crawled for the door, Jonah booted her in the back end and she sprawled flat on her stomach. Fighting to her hands and knees, she scuttled over the stained carpet for the door and then she was gone, the door slamming closed, just Jonah and Denny left inside the tiny trailer. For a second or two, the only sound was that of the television in the corner of the room, an episode of Swamp People on the History Channel, some mush-mouthed Cajun yelling, “Choot ’em! Choot ’em!”
Jonah ran his left hand through a thin widow’s peak of hair with his eyes wide and his head canted to the side, the gun hanging loosely in his right. “Like I said, I’ll give you a hundred cash or you can take a bundle.”
Denny’s hands were clammy and he kept clenching them into fists and raking his fingernails back across his palms nervously. He wiped his open hands along the front of his pants to dry them of sweat and nodded his head.
Jonah reached into his pocket and flipped a bundle of bags onto the table before falling onto the couch. “Supposed to be some tar coming in from out West sometime next week. I’m talking brown town, buddy. California shit.”
Leaning over, Denny swiped the dope from the table, a stack of small plastic bags the size of stamps rubber-banded together, each filled with light brown powder. Denny held the bundle close to his face and ticked the corner of each bag with his finger, counting his way down the stack till he got to ten.
“You steal something worth some money and I’ll get you some fentanyl.”
“Yeah, all right,” Denny said, half-listening, his mind already someplace else.
Out on the porch, the girl sat at the bottom of the steps with her legs bent crooked beneath her as she smoked a long cigarette. Denny stood there for a minute outside the door, moths batting around the light at his back. She rocked steadily with one arm thrown over her legs, the other holding that cigarette up to her lips.
A couple scabs scurried around the trailer across the way, and down the hill through the woods, a pair of headlights shone on the house where the man who ran things counted cash without ever having to deal with the headache. Denny always felt dirty just being here, always swore this time would be the last.
With his hand in his pocket, he clenched the bundle tight in his fist. He’d come for twenty and was leaving with ten, ten days dwindling to five faster than he could cry uncle. Way he figured, his whole life weighed about as much as what he held in his hand.
Don’t take half a brain to know ten hits ain’t much at all.