Free The Carrier by Preston Lang

staircases.”
    Inez was working on the problem, but
she didn’t seem too concerned about the result. Did she not get
that Tony might want to hurt her too? Or did she have some plan of
her own?
    “ Have you ever brought him
here, to this apartment?” Duane asked. “Is he familiar with the
building.”
    “ He’s familiar with it,
like—he knows there are stairs and then a door you got to open
before you come into my apartment.”
    “ You got anything to hit him
with?”
    “ Don’t you got your little
baton?”
    “ Something
bigger?”
    “ You went Derek Jeter on
that guy’s knee back in the bar.”
    “ Derek Jeter? Is he still
alive?”
    Duane had found that the
baton was a good weapon to carry around in the who-knows-what-can-happen world, but
you could hit someone with it and not end the discussion. That
wasn’t the worst thing in a bar fight, but it was a bad way to go
when the other guy had a gun.
    “ I want something a little
heavier,” he said.
    Inez spread out her arms; she was
still naked.
    “ Anything you see you can
use. I got a frying pan, a toilet duck, some adobo.”
    “ What’s adobo?”
    “ You never cook a chicken
for yourself?”
    Duane lifted up the
mattress.
    “ I need to take your bed
apart,” he said.
    “ You’ll buy me a new
one?”
    “ A better one.”
    He kicked a solid metal slat out of
the support and swung it.
    “ You think that’s better
than your pipe?”
    “ Yes.”
    “ A gangster like you doesn’t
have a gun?” she asked.
    “ I’m not a
gangster.”
    “ Okay.”
    “ Why, you have a gun?” Duane
asked.
    “ No.”
    But her answer was odd. The cool
customer just gave something away. Why? Was she showing
off?
    “ Hold on—you’ve got a gun in
here?” he asked.
    “ No.”
    “ Because that would make
things a whole lot easier.”
    “ I don’t got a gun. Check
the place. I already said you can use whatever you find. Just stay
out my panty drawer.”
    “ Because that’s where you
keep your gun?”
    “ No, that’s where I keep the
panties. And you let a man play with your panties on his own, he
starts to get weird.”
    Trying to distract him with talk of
panties—not going to work.
    “ Why do you have a
gun?”
    “ I don’t.”
    He believed there was a gun in the
apartment, but it was probably better to do the job with blunt
force. Guns were loud. She handed him the pizza menu.
    “ It’s your show,” she
said.
    He picked up the phone.
    “ What do you want?” he
asked.
    “ What do you
mean?”
    “ On your pizza.”
    “ I’m not hungry, pendejo .”
    “ Half mushroom?”
    Duane waited until she’d closed the
door before dialing. They made him give his address and phone
number before he could even start to order. Then there was some
trouble with half mushroom. The menu offered half toppings, but the
kid on the phone wouldn’t do it—late night rules.
    “ Fine, whole mushroom. But
let me tell you something, Spiderman, there better be beau-coup
mushroom on this pizza.”
    Inez walked back into the room and
giggled.
    “ Why you call him
Spiderman?” she asked.
    “ Because he was acting like
a prick.”
    “ But Spiderman is a great
hero.”
    “ No, he isn’t.”
    Duane was now fully dressed—shoes and
jacket. She fussed with the collar of his shirt.
    “ You have to decide if it’s
up or down. And the answer can’t be up. So make sure your collar
stays down.”
    He let her fiddle with his shirt, but
he wasn’t sure he liked it. It was one thing to go to bed with a
girl you don’t trust, but playing little domestic games was another
thing entirely.
    “ You like mushroom?” he
asked.
    “ No. I don’t eat
fungus.”
    The staircase was set back about
twenty feet from the front door. There was a landing in the middle
of the first flight that turned back in the opposite direction,
hidden from the lobby. Duane waited there, just a few steps up from
that landing. He was actually looking forward to it now: taking a
full swing on the head of