The Woman Who Married a Bear by John Straley Page A

spare my feelings but you don’t have to refer to her in the past tense around me, Sy. I want anything you’ve got on the Victors or on Walt or De De Robbins. And I’ll be by early tomorrow.”
    â€œWhatever. I might not be in until late.”
    â€œThen your office will be a mess when you do get in.”
    He spread his hands out and shrugged his shoulders. The woman with the blue blazer was drumming her fingers on the bar and studying the casing on the Taiwanese oak bar clock. Sy pushed away from our table.
    â€œSee ya.”
    He walked over to the woman and as I was on my way to the door I heard him ask her if he hadn’t seen her in one of the local theater productions, telling her she was terrific before she could answer.
    I had a cheap room upstairs. Cheap because it faced the street and the bathroom was down the hall. The carpets smelled like mildew and cigarette smoke. No phone, no TV, but lots of cute fake antiques and a sink that didn’t work just like it didn’t work during the days of ’98.
    I walked up the stairs. In the shadows of the first landing a young couple was sitting on a rickety love seat staring deeply into each other’s eyes. As I padded up to the third floor I heard the woman saying urgently, “And I don’t want to complicate your life either, but I’m so …”
    As I rounded the third landing I took out the key to my room, checked the number, and turned left. Then I heard the unmistakable metallic click of the hammer being pulled back on a large-caliber handgun. I saw a shadow in a doorway move and I felt a pipe nudging my skull.
    I turned around slowly and saw Emanuel Marco smiling at me from behind a Smith & Wesson .44 magnum. His greasy black hair framed his face, and he smiled like a stray dog with a burr in his mouth.
    â€œNice gun, Manny, but I think you’ve been watching too much TV.”
    â€œHey, Cecil, I forgot to mention that I took the guy up on his offer.”
    I took a step toward him, slowly. “There have been several mistakes made here, Emanuel. First, why would somebody trust you to do a contract murder, because they must know that I’ll give you ten thousand dollars to tell me who hired you. You know I can get it from my sister.”
    I took another small step.
    â€œNice try, man, but I don’t even know who it is. I just talked to the guy on the phone, and picked up half the money in a garbage can. I get half after. Anyway, anyone who pays to have you killed would pay to have me killed if I screwed them over. And besides, he offered me ten thousand.”
    Now his back was against the wall. The gun was at my throat.
    â€œGood negotiating. You think they’re really going to give you the rest? What are you going to do when they stiff you, go to the Better Business Bureau?”
    I took another step forward and now I was too close for him to point the gun at my throat. He had to point it at my chest.
    He’d watched enough TV to know that if he fired that cannon off in the hall he would have a hard time sliding out of the hotel on little cat feet. He had one chipped tooth in front, and as he looked at me from behind the gun he poked his tongue through the gap in a nervous twitch. Emanuel had a lot invested in his identity as a small-time criminal, and I knew he was a little nervous about his new role as a killer.
    â€œBack the fuck up, man!” He jabbed me in the chest.
    I took one more step forward and I was close enough to smell peppermint schnapps on his breath. The .44 was pointed at my stomach.
    â€œThe second mistake, Emanuel, is that you’re a fuck-up and wouldn’t know how to kill somebody if they were in an iron lung.”
    I lunged forward and brought my left hand around the barrel and my right down toward the hammer. I stretched the web of my right hand, the flesh between my thumb and index finger, and wedged it under the hammer just as Emanuel pulled the trigger. The