Chapter 1
The chalk board outside the Coochi Goo Gentleman’s Club in Shinbone Alaska read, “Pitchers of Beer – Buy One, Get One.” As it was designed to, it caused the bouncer, plenty of trouble. Unfortunately, I was the bouncer.
“What’s the problem?”
“The bartender’s trying to charge me for a second pitcher of beer and it says, ‘buy one get one’.”
“Well, you bought one and you got one, didn’t you?”
The customer gave me a dopey look. “Yeah?”
“What you’re looking for is ‘buy one get two.’ This is a bar, not a soup kitchen. If you don’t like it, get the eff out.”
As the Coochi Goo was the only strip club in Shinbone, inevitably they stayed.
After one of these encounters T.J. Beczak approached me surreptitiously and asked, “Didn’t you tell me once you were a hit man?”
I was tired of Beczak. He was the first person I’d met on the boat coming to Alaska. Though he initially impressed me with his dough, now Beczak bored the crap out of me.
“What of it?” I said. It was only a matter of minutes before another of these nimrods thought the sign entitled them to a free pitcher. I was tired of that routine, too.
Beczak sighed. When I met him he was this lanky, arrogant nitwit from Jersey, dressed from the L.L. Bean catalog. He thought he was a millionaire because his parents had money. Nine months in Alaska had played havoc with his ego. He grew a black beard that made him look like a minor character in a Popeye cartoon, and bought a fishing boat. Then he “fell in love” with a stripper named Nichole Houlihan. To his misfortune, so did every other dude in Shinbone. Nichole, for her part, was no more real than Betty Boop.
“I was just wondering what you charge?” He sounded like a patient asking a doctor what his co-pay would be.
I put a hand on his shoulder and spoke confidentially to him. “T.J.,” I said, “I don’t do women.”
Beczak’s brown eyes widened. They always looked kind of Manson-like. “Oh, no,” he said. “It’s a guy.”
“If it’s a normal guy, twenty grand,” I told him. “If it’s someone famous or difficult… you know. It’s by the job.”
“What about me?” He asked sadly.
“What about you?” I said. I guessed he was drunk.
“Am I a normal guy?”
“You mean you want to pay me to whack you?” I said starting to laugh. “You know, T.J., get the eff out of here. You’ve had enough.”
“I can get you twenty grand in cash first thing in the morning,” he said resolutely.
When I got into this racket I never thought I’d need to be a shrink. “Look, T.J.” I said. “We went over this before you proposed to Nichole. You’ve got to listen to me. I grew up around these kinds of broads.”
T.J. set his mouth in a straight line and concentrated on what I was saying.
“You know I had Nichole the first night we came in here. She went for the muscle and the meat and the gold jewelry. But Nichole has a plan. She isn’t going to get what she needs from me. We parted friends. You and Eddie and Tony never got that.”
“I know,” Beczak said, dejected.
“You say you do, but you don’t” I told him. “You’re ready to kill yourself over a stripper? Look, some of these chicks are going to be doing this until they’re thirty and then they’ll go to a town further north and continue doing it at a dingier joint. Nichole saves her pennies and she hocks the rings you morons buy her and in two years she’s going to be down at Tulane studying medicine, tuition paid in full. Nicole is smarter than you. That’s why you want to own her.”
The Manson eyes flared at me. “She is not smarter than me,” he said angrily.
I took my friendly hand away and held his gaze. I could break him like a toothpick and he knew it.
“I’ll give you twenty grand in cash tomorrow,” he said and stalked into the cold Alaska night in his blue, down vest.
