Free Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard Page A

it’s pretty funny, this drycleaner taking an airline. He’d swear he wouldn’t tell a soul, but I know he would. So why put him in that position?”
    â€œBut you still have Ray Bones to think about.”
    Chili moved his shoulders. The deep-set eyes didn’t change.
    â€œYou gonna pay him?”
    â€œMaybe, when I get around to it.”
    â€œWhat if he comes looking for you?”
    â€œIt’s possible. The guy’s got a one-track mind.”
    â€œHave you been involved in any shootings since Ray Bones?”
    Chili’s eyes moved and he seemed to be thinking about it or trying to remember, looking off for a moment.
    â€œWell, there was one time, it was when me and Tommy were running a club in South Miami, a guy came in looking for another guy, not me, but I was in the way.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œNothing. He shot the guy and left.”
    Now Harry paused. Chili Palmer had been sent to him from heaven, no question about it.
    â€œYou were running a club?”
    â€œBelonged to Momo. We had entertainment, different groups’d come in; catering mostly to the younger crowd.”
    Harry had the next question ready.
    â€œYou pack a gun?”
    Chili hesitated. “Not really.”
    â€œWhat does that mean?”
    â€œNot ordinarily. Maybe a few times I have.”
    â€œYou ever been arrested?”
    â€œI’ve been picked up a few times. They’d try to get me on loan-sharking or a RICO violation—you know what I mean? Being in what they call a racketeering kind of activity, but I was never convicted, I’m clean.”
    â€œRacketeering, that covers a lot of ground, doesn’t it?”
    â€œWhat do you want to know?”
    Harry hesitated. He wasn’t sure.
    â€œWhy don’t you get to the point, Harry? You want me to do something for you, right?”

8
    Here was a man had made forty-nine movies and named a bunch of them earlier, when he was making coffee. Chili remembered having seen quite a few. The one about the roaches—guy turns on the kitchen light, Christ, there’s a fuckin roach in there as big as he is. He had seen some of the Grotesque movies, about the escaped wacko who’d been in a fire and was pissed off about it. The one about the giant ticks trying to take over the earth. The one about all the people in this town getting scalped by an Indian who’d been dead over a hundred years, Hairraiser . . . Forty-nine movies and he looked more like a guy drove a delivery truck or came to fix your air-conditioning when it quit, a guy with a tool kit. When he’d gone over to the range to get the coffee in his shirt and underwear showing his white legs, skinny for a fat guy, he looked like he should be in detox at a booze treatment center. Chili had seen loan customers in this shape, ones that had given up. Harry’s mind seemed to be working okay, except all of a sudden he wasn’t as talkative as before.
    â€œTell me what you’re thinking, Harry.”
    Maybe he didn’t know how to say it without sounding like a dummy.
    â€œOkay, you want me to help you out in some way,” Chili said. “How do I know—outside of your asking me questions here like it’s a job interview. I happened to mention—we were in the other room—I said when I came out here I talked to some people and you kept saying ‘What people?’ having a fit. You remember that? Well, they were a couple lawyers I was put in touch with. I told you I talked to Tommy Carlo . . .”
    Harry was listening but making a face, trying to understand everything at once.
    â€œWhat’s he got to do with it?”
    â€œI go to your apartment, your office on Sunset, ZigZag Productions, you’re not either place and nobody knows where you are. So I call Tommy, now in tight with Jimmy Cap, and ask him, see if he can get me a name out here, somebody that knows somebody in the movie