Free Crashed by Timothy Hallinan

of
happy
being extortionists and loan sharks. It’s what they know, you know? Break a kneecap, steal a Porsche. Go home early and kiss the little woman. Or the little man, I guess. It’s part of their identity, like former presidents. What are they going to do when they can’t dial the red phone any more? These guys feel the same way, on a lesser scale, probably.”
    “Feels big to them, though,” Louie the Lost said.
    “To make it worse for her, she’s the first woman to run the operation. They already didn’t like it, and now here she is, saying, okay everybody, time to join the chamber of commerce.”
    “And then there’s her dad,” Louie said. “He was a popular guy. Some guys would like to do her just for that.”
    “I think that cuts both ways. Yeah, they liked the old man. But they’ve got to figure, if she’s icy enough to gun down Pops, she’s not going to be real slow about taking out anybody who gets out of line. Do you know about the dog collar?”
    Louie’s eyes went into soft-focus. “Ohh, man, I knew a chick once, wore a black leather—”
    “It’s red,” I interrupted. “Bright red, impossible to miss. And it’s got three tags, solid gold, hanging off it.”
    With some reluctance, Louie let the memory pass. “Tags?”
    “Three tags, three names. To hear her tell it, each of them is someone she aced personally. They jingle when she walks. So I think she’s maybe overcompensating a little, but it’s a pretty clear message:
I’m a girl, but don’t get silly
.”
    Louie eyed the cigar, now shorter than his thumb, with what looked like profound regret. I thought for a moment he was going to kiss it goodbye. But then he smashed it flat in the pumpkin-colored salad bowl he was using as an ashtray, leaned tothe window, and pulled back the greasy curtain an inch to peer outside. The bright red on-off neon sign that said SNOR-MOR hit his face, making him look intermittently demonic.
    “Your company. They’re still out there.”
    “And likely to stay, until we do something about them.”
    Louie let the curtain drop. “Did you like her?”
    “Like her?” I pushed my chair back, took the salad bowl into the tiny bathroom, and flushed the corpse of Louie’s cigar. When I came back in, he was doing that finicky little trim thing to one end of a new one. “She’s not someone you like or don’t like. She’s Mount Rushmore with hair. She doesn’t do anything on the spur of the moment. You get the feeling that people have been studying her for reactions for so long that she practiced a bunch of them in front of a mirror, so nobody will bury her prematurely. I think she’s got a body temperature in the low sixties.”
    “On the other hand,” Louie said.
    “On the other hand, what?”
    He pulled out his lighter, a miniature silver propane tank, and flicked it, producing a blue flame an inch long and as sharp as a needle. “If there wasn’t something on the other hand, you wouldn’t of got up and gone in the bathroom.”
    “On the other hand, she’s trying to do something that could get her killed. Maybe will get her killed, in spite of all the show she puts on. And, you know, it’s not a bad thing to try to do. The guys are going to bitch about it, and maybe try to cap her, but their wives and kids—sorry, or husbands and kids—are going to breathe a lot easier knowing that their significant other isn’t going to wind up doing fifteen to twenty pumping iron behind razor wire and getting ugly tattoos.”
    “I guess,” Louie said. “Gonna be a lot duller, though.”
    “And she’s doing what she can to avoid getting capped. She’s living behind metal gates, surrounded by a bunch of try-me guys wearing Valentino Kevlar. Her car’s been bulletproofed. But shecan’t control what’s going on around the movie, and she’s made it the big symbol of the transformation. That’s what she calls it, the transformation. Also, she’s smart, and I like smart. After she gave me the