Exit Lady Blue
J. Michael Blue

J. Michael Blue has been reading hard-boiled fiction
since his 13th Birthday. It turned him on to becoming
a writer. He has now published about 60 short stories
and 35 articles and essays in both print and on-line
journals. His work appears regularly in Blue Murder
Magazine, and Blue Murder Press published his
first novel, “Justified Crimes.” Jim lives and
works in Indiana, Michigan, Florida, and
California, most of the time following the sun.
©Copyright 2001
J. Michael Blue

Sam Markers didn’t like mornings; he hated traffic, and he
avoided exercise whenever possible. Nevertheless, on a day of
victory, Sam could endure a chauffeured seven AM tour of the
Kennedy Expressway and a brisk walk through O’Hare, as long as it
brought him his five million dollars and the news that Lady Blue
had been punished for her transgressions.
Racehorse Simmons’s plane pulled into its gate on schedule, and
the big man came out of the Jetway carrying the valise with the
false bottom. His other hand had been encased in a cast. He wasn’t
smiling, but then, Sam had never seen him smile.
“Good trip?”
Simmons nodded. “All right. Not enough food. They don’t do it
like they used to, even in First Class.”
“What happened to your hand?”
“I’ll tell you about it.”
“I hope you’ve got something good for me.”
“Yeah.”
Sam pointed up the concourse. “I have a meeting room reserved
at the Red Carpet Club and I’ve brought what I owe you.”
“Okay. We should talk first.”
The first sign of trouble. “You’ve got my money?”
“I told you when you hired me. I never come home empty.”
They moved into the stream of airport traffic, and Sam had to
grab Simmons by the arm to keep him from walking too fast. “Hey,
I’m not thirty-five anymore and I don’t spend my life in the gym.
You ex-jocks all move like you’re still trying out for a spot on a
roster.”
Simmons stopped at a food kiosk and asked for a glass of water.
He tossed a handful of pills in his mouth and washed them down.
“Your hand bothering you.”
“You’ve got no idea.”
“Well, come on. That songbird and her broken down guardian
angel ran off with my cash. He even got me to rescue the two of
them from some thieves in LA, and then they stuck my people with
a suitcase full of phone books. I want to hear your story.”
The young woman at the Red Carpet Club check-in desk
recognized Racehorse and went into a sit down mating dance for
him. Sam waved his membership card, but she focused on the big
man as though she couldn’t wait to give him anything he wanted.
“Meeting Room Three, Mr. Simmons.” Big smile and then lowered
lashes. She turned on her stool and pointed into the club, stretching
her sweater tight over her well rounded chest. “You only have it
reserved until nine’ o clock, but there’s no one on the schedule
behind you, so I wouldn’t worry if you run overtime.”
For the ten thousandth time Sam wished he were younger, taller
and better looking. He rocked up on his toes as he signed the
registration. “We’ll be done on time,” he said.
“Thanks,” Simmons said. He gave the girl a look that should have
melted her pantyhose, and then moved aside so that Sam could lead
him to their meeting room.
“I hope you made out with Diana Blue the way you made out
with that one.”
“The situations were a little different, but we did all right for a
while.”
The room had a floor to ceiling expanse of glass that faced the
outside corridor, two blank cream colored walls, and a set of dark
wood cabinets built-in beneath a framed landscape print. Sam took
a seat at the head of a six chair table. “So tell me about it. How did
you find them? How did you get my money?”
“She’s was in a town called Macuto on the coast in Venezuela. I
took an Air Viasa flight into Caracas.”
“Weren’t they together? What happened to Joshua.”
Racehorse leaned back in his chair and braced himself against the
table. “Why not let me tell it?”
Sam took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He had waited a
long while for this day. “Okay, but make sure there’s a happy
ending for me.”
A shrug from the big man. “Like I said, I flew into Caracas in the
middle of the night. You’ve never seen such a crazy, noisy place.
Looked like a damned street fair. Everybody jabbering in Spanish,
people yelling, babies crying. Whole bunch of military dudes with
machine guns. Me and the other folks off the plane hurried through
this tunnel into the terminal, and some uniformed guy takes a look 
at the address I show him and stuffs me into a cab with no meter. I
got no idea where I’m going.
“Except for the machine guns, it sounds like New York to me,”
Sam said.
“Didn’t look like no New York. An hour’s ride through the
blackest night you ever saw, mountains, trees, and an empty six
lane highway. It was like some weird David Lynch movie. Pretty
soon, I’m hauling my bags into the lobby of the Paradisio Macuto
Resort, staring at a picture of Diana Blue on the marquee of hotel
supper club.”
“She sang there?”
“Under the name Lady Bee.”
“You see her then?”
“Not that night. Everything had closed up. The next day I scout
around, find out she lives in a cabana at the resort, keeps a big
locked box in the security office and almost never leaves the
grounds.
“About noon I see her laying in the shade by one of the hotel
pools wearing a silver thong bikini. She’s alone, readin’ and sippin’
and lookin’ fine as ever. I tried to talk to her, but she wasn’t buying
any big black ex-pro football stars from the states that day. One
thing clear from the start though, is that every cop who comes in
the place and every security guard on the hotel payroll looks out for
her. She’s got lots of friends who look mean and carry guns.”
“And no sign of the bass player.”
“I’m coming to that. For three nights I went to the hotel lounge
and listened. She’s still got great chops. Had a little piano, drum duo
backing her, signing all the tunes she used to sing around here. I
keep trying to get her to meet me, sending notes and flowers,
buying drinks, and finally on the third night, she comes to my
table.”
“‘Why are you hassling me,’ she says. I tell her I’m hustlin’ not
hasslin’, and that I’m crazy about her singing. We start to talk and
before you know it, I’m the semi-famous, former athlete,
businessman down from LA, who’s set to buy her dinner the next
night. She remembers seeing me play, but she says she’s got no
idea what I do for a living now. ‘I’ll fill you in,’ I tell her.
“You weren’t down there to vacation or to get a date,” Sam said.
“I sent you after my money.”
Racehorse gave his employer a blank stare. “You think I should’ve
gone in there with a piece in my hand? Hammer pulled back, finger
on the trigger? Maybe I could have smacked her, or chopped off
one of her ears. Think that would have helped?”
“Remember who you’re talking to, Schwarz,” Sam said quietly.
“I apologize. I mean no disrespect, but I’m not some hothead
amateur, going to mess this up, lose your money, embarrass you.” 
A long pause. “Okay. I hear your pointWhat happened next?”
“We meet the next night in the dining room and we have a
couple drinks. She’s off for the evening so we don’t hurry. A bottle
of wine with dinner, some knee and hand touching, a little flirting,
and when she’s nice and loose and relaxed, I say to her, ‘You want
to know how I found you?’
“She says, ‘Why? What do you mean?’
“I say, ‘The bass player, Joshua. He told me,’ and all of the color
drains out of her face. ‘I found him in Toronto,’ I say to her, ‘in a
club off Yonge street. He didn’t want to talk, and after I beat on him
for a couple hours I saw that he didn’t have the money and he
wasn’t going to give you up to save his sorry ass, so I made him a
bargain. ‘I’m going to find her,’ I told him, ‘just like I found you, but
if you tell me where she is I promise you I won’t kill her, and if you
don’t tell me where she is, I promise you she’ll be dead within a
month.’”
“Sam coughed. “Was that true? You found the bass man and told
him that, and he believed you?”
“Hell yes, he believed me. I gave him my word and you and him
and everybody who knows about me know that I don’t go back on
what I say.”
“But I told you,…”
“You told me you wanted your five million and you wanted it
fast. I figured I could put a hurt on that girl but leave her alive, and
get your money home right away, or I could screw around for three
more weeks looking for her on my own. Seemed like a good deal
to me. Anyway, he told me where she was staying, and then I
explained to him that I still had to hurt him bad, to make things
right for what he’d done. ‘You won’t be playing that big fiddle so
well from now on,’ I said, and I put his fretting hand in a dresser
drawer. He screamed like a woman and pissed on himself when I
stomped it shut.”
“Good.”
“Hated to do it. The man could really play.”
Sam waved impatiently. “What happened next with her?”
“When I told her all this, she shook her head and said, ‘Poor
Joshua. He’s tried so hard to look out for me.’
“I told her ‘I want the money’, and she said, ‘Probably so, it’s a lot
of money.’ She said she would have shared it with Josh, but he got
angry when he found out she gave a bag full of phone books to
your people. Insisted he’d given his word and that she should have
honored it. He wouldn’t go with her after that. Went off to Canada
on his own.’”
“So the bass man didn’t know about the double-cross,” Sam said.
“She screwed me on her own.”
“She said she figured she’d been through enough shit, she 
deserved to keep the cash, but now that I’d come along, there was
no reason we couldn’t spend it together.”
“The little bitch.”
Racehorse almost smiled, his lips turned north at the corners and
he ran his tongue over his teeth. “I leaned across that dining room
table and kissed that woman on the mouth, and told her I was
willing to think about sharing, especially if she was part of the deal.
“‘Most folks tell me I look pretty good,’ she said, ‘but I promise
you I’m a whole lot more than you can see. I can make you forget
about Chicago and Sam and all the women you’ve found so fresh
and fine.’
“After that we danced for a while and took a walk on top of a
rock wall by the ocean, and when I had her clothes about half off
and she had me running my engine on the red line, she pulled me
back to her cabana.”
“Sounds like she could have pulled you by your schwantz by
then,” Sam said.
“I figured the money had to be in her room or in the security
office. Either way I would get the cash or her key that night and the
next day, I’d gather everything up, spank her some, and head for
home.”
“But that’s not what happened, is it?”
“Not quite. Her place sat off by itself behind some tennis courts. I
stripped her naked when we got to the door and she led me
inside.”
“And it was a trap.”
“Joshua clubbed me in the head while I was grabbing for her, and
I woke up with my hands and feet hooked behind my back and
around my neck. I had somebody’s dirty socks in my mouth.”
“I thought you weren’t some amateur, going to mess this up for
me,” Sam said.
Racehorse lifted his hand. “Wait,” he said. “I’m not finished.”
He reached for a pitcher of water in the center of the table and
poured himself a drink. “I wake up on the floor tied like a hog.
That beautiful white skinned woman has put on a nightgown you
could see right through, and she’s draped all over that man who’s
black enough to be my brother and old enough to be her daddy
I hear her say, ‘I’m never going to let you get away from me
again, Josh. Give the money back or keep it, I don’t care.’ She
planted a kiss in his ear that made my toes curl.”
Sam banged his fist on the table. “Cut the bullshit,” he said. “What
happened?”
Racehorse nodded. “Joshua, looks at me and he could have been
looking at a bug. ‘You think I was going to let you come down here
and beat on this girl?’ he said. ‘Here’s the deal. We can tear up
Diana’s clothes some, put a few bruises on her, and then shoot you 
and she can call some friendly cops to come and clean up the
garbage that tried to rape her.’ He let me think about that for a
minute and then he says, ‘We can do that or you can take a suitcase
I packed with three and a half mill of Sam’s money and head on
back to Chicago.’”
“That’s what you got for me? Three and a half million?”
“When he took the gag out of my mouth I tell him it won’t solve
anything, because you’ll just send someone else to get the rest of
the cash, and he tells me he doesn’t think so. ‘Some of the money is
already gone, spent on getting this far,’ he says, ‘and the million and
change that’s left will cost a whole bunch more than that for Sam
to recover. I figure, he’ll know it’s time to stop,’ Joshua says. ‘It’ll be
cheapest to just let us go. He can tell everybody in the world
whatever he wants. They’ll never hear different from us.’”
“So you brought me half a loaf,” Sam said.
“It’s a lot more than half.”
“And that crazy old jazz man gets to keep the rest of my money
and have a big laugh on me.”
“He ain’t laughing. With only one good hand, he’s lost his music,
and he can never come home again.”
“Is that what happened to you? He returned the favor.”
“He put the sock back in my mouth and crushed my fist with the
flat side of a hammer. Said he thought I’d have trouble doing my
work now too. Said it made us even.”
“Did it?” Sam pushed himself away from the table and rose to
stare through the glass wall. “What do you think I should do?”
“They won’t be easy to find again, and he’ll kill a lot of people
before anyone gets to that girl. If he shows up at State and Madison,
I’ll shoot him for you for nothing, but otherwise, I’d let it go.”
“After a while, you keep sending more people, you can start to
look foolish.”
“And you won’t find many better at this kind of thing than me,”
Racehorse said.
“Maybe so, unless there’s a woman in the deal. You can’t seem to
concentrate on business with a woman involved.”
“I should been watching closer. I’ll give you that, but she is
special.”
Sam shrugged. Doesn’t matter. I won’t use you again, but it’s over,
and as far as we’re concerned, you did this errand for me and you
got me everything I asked for.”
“Okay.”
“Isn’t that the way it happened?”
“That’s how I’ll remember it.”
“Good. See that you do. And make certain
you spread the word. I don’t want to hear
anyone singing some ballad about the high
living ways of Joshua and sweet Lady
Blue.”