“They all sound big,” the Bear said, “at the talking stage.”
Catlett said, “Bear, I drive limos now and then.”
“I know that.”
“Why—’cause I like to listen, hear all about the deals and shit happening. Hear who’s hot and who’s not. What names you can take to the bank this month. Learn what studio head is on his way out ’cause he pissed on a big producer’s script. Learn who the hot agents are, what they’re packaging, who’s getting two hundred phone calls a day. Hear the agent tell the actor he’s gonna pull out the guns, kill to make the deal, gonna take no fucking prisoners. Weekends, some of the agents and producers and studio execs, they’re up in the Malibu hills playing war games with these CO2 guns. Running around in
the woods shooting paint bullets at each other. You hear what I’m saying? They talk about how they’re gonna kill to make a deal. Then they go out and play with toy guns.” Catlett grinned. “Shit, huh? You think I can’t manage with people like that? Man, I’ve done it for real.”
“I’ve played that game,” the Bear said. “It’s fun.”
“And you’ve fallen off buildings and rolled cars and been in five hundred fights—in the movies. But you don’t know what the real thing is like, do you? The ultimate deed. Shoot a man.”
“How many have you?” the Bear said, not watching Farrah now, Farrah on her own.
“What’s the difference, one on five, on ten? One and you’re blooded,” Catlett said, leaning on Ronnie’s desk. “My first time, I was eighteen years old and had gone to Bakersfield to see my mother. Got out of school, picked up an Olds Cutlass, maroon, and drove there from Detroit. This day we’re out for a ride, we stop at a gas station, my mother wanting to use the ladies’ room. The gas station man told her no migrants could use it. Then he changed his mind, said okay. She’s in there, he comes in and starts messing with her. She told me in the car, after. I drove back there, I said to the man, ‘You disrespected my mother. I’d like you to apologize to her.’ He start laughing and told us to get out. My mother was crying the whole time . . . I went back later on to have a talk with the man. He got ugly and I shot him.”
“Eighteen years old,” the Bean said. “Where’d you get the gun?”
“I had it. Brought it with me.”
“But why’d you have it?”
“I was out of school, starting to look over career possibilities.” Catlett smiled. “Way before I knew I wanted to be in the movie business.”
“You killed a man ’cause he showed your mother disrespect?”
“He dissed me too. Said I must be one of those motherfuckers he’d heard about. I did him, got on the interstate and went back to Detroit. Oh, and I took his cash. I sent it to my mother.”
“Show her,” the Bear said, “what a sweet boy you are.”
“I see her. She’s living in Delano now, has friends there she doesn’t want to leave. I bought her a house.”
GET SHORTY 197
“I imagine,” the Bear said, “not knowing any better, she’s proud of you.”
Catlett watched the Bear, rubbing his beard, look over toward the wapping-zapping sound of his child knocking jets out of the sky. A daddy proud of his little girl. It would be fun to have one of those of his own. Pick a good-looking woman with nice features and have one. Pick a woman wasn’t a tighthead. He used to say he didn’t deal in coal when he was running around with white women, but had changed his mind about that, since meeting some fine little sisters out here.
He said, “Bear? This man Chili Palmer, what you suppose he does?”
“Ten grand in his suitcase,” the Bear said, “what do you think, he’s a bank messenger?”
“He scored it at a casino, didn’t he?”
“Whether he did or not,” the Bear said, “the guy’s into some kind of hustle.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve done desk reads in this business,” the Bear said, looking over, “where somebody wants to know, say, what this executive is up to. Like if he’s about to leave with a property he hasn’t told the studio about. They want to know if he might be negotiating someplace. I look at the man’s telephone notes, play his recorder, see who’s on his Rolodex, get to know him. This guy C. Palmer has got nothing that puts him with anybody or tells what he might be doing. He’s too clean. The only thing he had written down on his note pad was ‘Raji’s, Hollywood Blvd. near Vine.’ ”
Catlett frowned. “Raji’s? Man, that’s a hard rock joint. You can tell looking at Chili Palmer he ain’t into that metal shit. I might have to look into that one.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” the Bear said. “You shoot him, you’ll never see me again.”
Catlett started frowning again. “No, man, I don’t want that on my conscience. Focking Yayo, that was different, he could’ve hurt us. And I mean both of us, right? You buried that monkey chaser you were protecting your own ass as much as mine. No, what I’m thinking . . . Bear, you listening?”
“I can hear you.”
“We got the cash out the airport and the stepped-on bag that ain’t worth shit. What I’m thinking, what if Chili Palmer went out there to pick it up?”
Catlett waited for the Bear to turn his head this way, the Bear nodding, seeing the picture.
“Yeah?”
“We even call the feds. Make that anonymous kind of phone-in tip they love to get. What would happen?”
“You’d be out a hundred and seventy grand.”
“When they bust him, haul his ass off to jail.”
“You don’t care about the money?”
“We got stuff for it, didn’t we? We’re not out nothing.”
“He’ll tell the feds he was set up.”
“I ’magine he will, but how’s he gonna put it on me? I don’t even know the man and there isn’t anybody seen us together.”
“Harry has.”
“I can talk to Harry,” Catlett said. “No, the trick will be getting Mr. Chili Palmer to go out to the airport and open that locker.”
Find some way to work that or do it clean and quick, the way Farrah was zapping jets out of the sky.
Catlett said, “Man, she’s gooood.”
The Bear said, “That’s my little ace.”
GET SHORTY 199
Ray Bones came off the Delta flight to find a young guy with more hair and gold jewelry than he needed holding a square of laundry cardboard that said MR BARBONE in black Magic Marker. The young guy’s shirt was open halfway down, his sleeves turned up twice. He said, “Mr. Bar-bone? Welcome to L.A. I’m Bobby, your driver. Mr. DePhillips asked me to extend you his best and be of help any way I can. You have a good flight?”
Bones said, “I hope you drive better than you fuckin spell. My name’s Barboni, not Bar-bone.”
Northbound from the airport on 405, Bones rode in the backseat of the Cadillac enclosed in dark glass. He commented on the traffic. “Shit, this isn’t bad. Miami, we got bumper to bumper all day long.” He asked Bobby the driver, “What’s that over there?”
“Oil wells,” Bobby said.
“They’re ugly fuckin things. You got oil wells and freeways. You got smog . . .”
“You ever wanta go to the beach,” Bobby said, “here’s the freeway you take, we’re coming to.”
“I live in Miami Beach,” Bones said, “and you want to show me a fuckin beach? The sun ever come out here, or you have this smog all the time? Jesus. Where’s downtown at? I don’t see it.”
Four-oh-five to Santa Monica Boulevard to the Beverly Hilton, Bobby telling Bones it was the home of Trader Vic’s, if he liked Chinese. Bones said he hated it. They pulled up to the hotel entrance and got out.