The Whale

by Lawrence Kelter

  It’s a tempting offer, wouldn’t hurt to feel it out. “Is what the strippers saw a need-to-know deal?”

  Paulie shrugs. “Eh, drugs, a few girls at the paygrade above them—of the non-English-speaking variety, of course.”

  No way. Those are the darker alleyways, and while, yeah, my career isn’t exactly sunshine and sparkles, I’m not about to go playing in that sandbox so soon after a simple gig. I push the folder back to him. “You know I don’t go back to back. All these years, and I look green to you?” I should know better to even entertain this. I bend once for Paulie, and he’ll press in harder the next time.

  “No, but you’re as prickly as a fucking rookie today.” He rolls his eyes. “I’m offering you a means of cash flow to handle your family commitments. I know keeping Liam half robot costs an arm and a leg. I’m doing you a solid here.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks.” I stand up. “Give me what I’m owed, and I’ll be on my way.”

  Paulie opens a drawer to his left and fishes out two stacks of bills. “Throwing in an extra two fifty since I’ve offended your sensibilities.” The money lands on my lap. Wrapped tight with dirty rubber bands.

  I stare down at the cash. “You got an envelope or something for me to put this in? Or do you expect me to slip this down my ass crack?”

  “On top of the extra two fifty? Jesus.” He’s busting my balls—trying his hand at easing the mood. The envelope appears next to the job folder. “You interested in this extra gig or not?” His eyebrows rise in the kind of way that always makes me nervous. He’s working an angle—I know it.

  I shake my head and squirrel the cash into the envelope. “I said no back-to-back gigs. Call me in a month or two once you got something good—something expensive.” I stand up. Charlie’s right next to me and staring daggers again.

  “I can always set you up with something meatier. Ain’t any shortage of high-priority assholes that need taking care of.” He jabs a stubby, sausage finger at me. “Payout’s twenty-five grand minimum.”

  “Nope. That’s for the younger fellas ain’t got a problem with lighting fires in paper houses.” It’s a personal policy. I’ll hit losers and nobodies—folks that won’t be missed. I can wash away that guilt quickly, for the most part. It also keeps me and Liam safe. High-priority targets like stoolie button men or disgraced criminal middle managers? No way. That kind of heat follows you home no matter how fast you run.

  “I’ll talk to you soon then. Try to look on the fucking bright side at some point.” He gets back to scribbling on papers with a pen that has a comically oversized moose head bobbing on top of it on a spring.

  “Yeah, well, shooting drunks in the head makes that tough.”

  Yeah, Charlie mutters from behind me. Something feels off, but I ignore it. I’m tired.

  I open the door and nearly step on one of the little munchkins crawling all over Paulie’s school. She looks up to me and snorts back a gallon of snot. Her eyes are wet with tears. “You’re not Mr. Paulie.” She says it coldly—I’m clearly an interloper and breaking whatever protocol she’s set out in her kid brain. Look at her shirt. Don’t recognize the gawping cartoon animal. Kid’s got lame parents.

  “He’s right in there, sweetheart.” I step aside to let her into the office. She watches me the entire time she makes her way past the threshold. That stare crawls straight up my ass and climbs my spine—too familiar—so I double-time the hell out of there.

  “Little girl…” Charlie is two steps behind. If he had breath, it would be make my neck moist.

  “That one’s too young to be yours, Charlie, try again.” I whisper.

  No answer.

  I wave to the ladies at the front desk and dodge a few dozen rug rats playing tag and tugging helium balloons around. I wait to get buzzed out and step back into daylight. Get to the car and what a surprise—a ticket. The parking meter was busted. I tear the ticket up and toss the shreds into the wind. My own personal ticker tape parade to my failings.

  Back in the car, Charlie grins.

  I get the car started. “Really? You think a ticket’s giving you one over on me? I ain’t the one with lead rattling in that empty skull.”

  That gets him sulking good. I get the car on the road. “You did that to yourself, not me—not Paulie or his employers. Just you.”

  “I can make good,” he whispers.

  “None of you ever understand. When a guy like me shows up, it means you burned out all the chances you had.”

  He stares out the passenger window. Plunges a finger into his bullet wound and picks at it like a scab or hangnail. This is a first, a sullen ghost. Maybe this idiot was a closet philosopher or something.

  “You think I want you here with me?” I slide a cigarette from the pack I have holstered on my visor. Light it with a Zippo I keep in the center console. “The sad truth of it, Charlie, is that you’re not the first. Won’t be the last, either. At least you get to fade away.”

  Charlie’s lips move. “Please…”

  “Please yourself.” I blow a stream of smoke toward him. “Guess you’re riding with me to the hospital to visit Liam. That’ll be nice. Maybe you can meet a nice, sort of pretty coma victim—settle down. Then you can leave me the hell alone sooner than everyone else.”

  We pull up to a red light and I light a fresh cigarette with the old one. Scratch the spot between my eyes. I’ll make the hospital trip quick. Maybe pick up a bottle of something strong. Then catch a day of sleep and bad TV. That sounds about right.

  Paulie called Liam a robot and for some reason that sticks with me. I laugh. Liam was always a tough son of a bitch—he would have gotten a kick out of being called a robot or Terminator. Always loved those bullshit movies.

  “You know, what I did to you, Charlie. That was for family. That was the extreme I went to in order to stand by my blood and protect them.” I pull my foot off the brake and let the car roll forward. This light is taking forever. “Guys like you are fucking worthless. You don’t leave your family—especially a little kid. Now you’ll never amount to nothing for your daughter and she’ll remember you as some kind of shadow in her life.” I’m getting too personal. This isn’t real. I need to calm down.

  I toss my smoke out of the window. The driver next to me is staring. Oh, yeah, I’m talking to myself. I give the guy a smile and a wave. He pretends like he can see right through me. Does that little tough guy thing where you lean to the side and stroke your chin. Then he drives off. Of course, I’m distracted and the asshole behind me leans on his horn three milliseconds after the light turns green.

  In the mood for some music. I turn on the CD player and The Wolfe Tones’ “Celtic Symphony” starts. Old school rebel Irish music. Flutes and banjos and brogues. The song’s a bunch of pandering gibberish, but it gives me the warm and fuzzies nonetheless. There’s not much about my time in Ireland that ever makes me smile, so I take these moments as a small treat.

  Charlie makes a face like someone farted.

  “Deal with it.” Turn the volume all the way up. I sing along at the top of my lungs—dance along the way I used to in the pubs of Killarney and Newry. I think of half-drank pints and smoking two packs of cigarettes in a single night. Of nights with girls that never told me their names but showed me everything else about them. For all the bad, there was some good in Ireland—or at least plenty to distract me. Here, though, I have none of that. I came back to New York and life was waiting to deck me with concrete gloves.

  Out the corner of my eye, I see Charlie hold his head in his hands.

  At least that makes me smile.

  Click here to learn more about Hell Chose Me by Angel Luis Colón.

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  Twenty years ago…

  1.

  Fiona had been an honor student throughout school, a pigtailed brown-noser who aced every test and kept her hand raised in class until it went numb. “I want to win everything,” she always told her classmates, an attitude that would serve her well in adulthood—especially when she had to walk into rooms full of men with guns.

  Under different circumstances, she might have become a neurosurgeon or a business executive. Instead, she met August Leadbetter, the self-styled Che Guevara of her eighth-grade class, and the best kisser in her life until she met Bill. (Every school has a few of those revolutionaries, to balance out the brown-nosers.)

  August liked to leap on his desk and yell punk lyrics in class.

  August stood on the roof of his mother’s house on humid summer afternoons and tossed water balloons at the open sunroofs of passing cars, hoping to send a soaked and panicked driver off the road.

  August also pushed little red pills. And Fiona was the experimental type, if you pressured her hard enough.

  “Oh, come on,” August said one afternoon, unzipping his pin-studded backpack to reveal his stash, most of it stolen from his mom’s medicine cabinet. “It’ll be fun. The world goes into slow motion. It’s the only way to survive math class.”

  They stood behind the equipment shed at the far end of the football field, safe from prying eyes. Fiona extended a hand, fear prickling her belly—or maybe it was excitement. The pill in her palm seemed very large. She asked: “What if I overdose?”

  “You only overdose if you mix drugs,” August shot back. “Come on, it’ll relax you. Exams are making you all stressed out.”

  Figuring you only live once (carpe diem, as her Latin teacher always said), Fiona popped that little bundle of chemicals in her mouth and swallowed, her throat clicking…

  …and felt rain on her face.

  The smell of the ocean filled her skull.

  Opened her eyes—had she closed them?

  She saw gray sky, black pines. She lay on something rough and cold. A dim roar filled her ears: the blood in her veins, amplified to superhuman decibels by whatever the fuck August had given her. No, wrong: the sound came from outside of her. Holy crap, she thought. Where am I?

  She turned her head and saw a maroon station wagon barreling toward her.

  Her confused brain burned two precious seconds wondering if the car was an illusion (the “drug talking,” as the characters in novels always put it) and she was “tripping out” or whatever. Her hammering heart said no, she was a real person on a real road with a real mom-mobile about to squish her flat.

  She thrashed, and her body flopped across the yellow line as the honking station wagon screeched to a stop three feet away. The driver’s door opened, and a middle-aged lady with a pinched face burst out. Through the windshield Fiona saw a young kid staring at her slack-jawed, shocked. You and me both, she wanted to tell him. You and me both.

  When she got back, she planned on murdering August in as painful a way as possible. Dunking him in a piranha tank seemed like just the thing. Or skewering him with a red-hot poker.

  The lady yelled: “Are you okay?”

  Fiona opened her mouth to speak and emitted only the softest of gurgles.

  “Oh my God,” the lady continued. “Are you on drugs?”

  Fiona grunted like a bullfrog. Her legs and arms refused to peel from the pavement, no matter how hard she tensed her muscles. The lady hovered over her, and Fiona’s roving eyes settled on something that sent a shivery bolt of fear through her gut: the station wagon’s license plate.

  It read: Delaware.

  And Fiona had popped that pill in the great state of New Jersey.

  Fear dumped enough adrenaline into her bloodstream to reactivate her knees. She stood on quaking legs, brushing away the lady’s hand. Another car hummed to a stop behind the station wagon. Fiona could see something bulky on its roof, like a ski rack.

  No, those were bubble lights, because it was a friggin’ police car.

  Well, today was going nowhere but up.

  “This girl’s on drugs,” the lady yelled at the bored cop with a porn-star moustache who climbed out of the cruiser, his hand on his service pistol. As he hip-strutted toward them, Fiona pictured her parents’ faces hard with disappointment, the school principal wagging a finger in her face, her science-club friends whispering behind her back. No top school would accept a girl with an arrest record. And getting a good job? Forget about it.

  August had set her whole life on fire.

  “What’s your name, girl?” the cop asked, halting five feet away.

  Keep up the zombie act, Fiona told herself. Make them think you’re not a threat. Letting her chin droop to her collar, she shuffled a few steps to the left, trying to clear a little space between her and the adults.

  “Kids these days,” the lady continued. “I mean, it’s not like we didn’t have controlled substances in our day, officer, but from what I hear they’re getting into now…”

  The cop swiveled toward Mom of the Year, to better absorb her nuanced assessment of the nation’s drug problem, and Fiona saw her chance. She sprinted for the cruiser, the cop shouting at her to stop, reaching for her—too late. She slammed the door and locked it before he could grab the handle. The keys were in the ignition, thank God.

  As the cop pulled his baton from his belt, readying to smash the window, Fiona keyed the engine to life and pushed the column-shift and hit the gas, barreling down the road in reverse. The cop’s baton smacked the hood as she passed. She giggled. It was like something out of a movie.

  Now to deal with the problem at hand: escaping. She was tall for her age and had no problem seeing through the windshield. Her lifetime experience behind the wheel amounted to driving a pickup on the backroads of her cousin’s farm, but she had watched enough action movies over the years to absorb how stuntmen executed a turnaround at speed, and it seemed simple enough. A hundred yards down the road, she stood on the brakes and spun the wheel, the view out the windows blurring, the cruiser tilting hard as it skidded onto the shoulder. Her heart froze. You’ve lost it, you idiot. You’re going to crash.

  But the cruiser bounced back to pavement, facing in the right direction. In the rearview mirror, the shrinking cop yelled into the radio on his shoulder, no doubt calling backup. Beside him, Mother of the Year clutched her jaw, swaying from foot to foot.

  At least he didn’t shoot at me, Fiona thought. The only thing worse than getting kicked out of school for drugs is a bullet to the head.

  She accelerated to ninety, trying to put as much distance as possible between her and…what? They would scramble a fleet of cop cars to hunt her down, from all directions. Helicopters overhead, armed with snipers and spotlights, as the radio waves crackled with her name and description. So long as she stayed in this vehicle, nowhere was safe. You need a big parking lot. Like a mall or something. Dump the vehicle, call your father, and hide. At least you feel fine. Imagine if that pill had messed up your ability to walk.

  Even as her brain puzzled over logistics, she found herself laughing uncontrollably. This was fun.

  Three miles later, the road widened into four lanes, and the forest on either side of the road gave way to endless concrete: a sea of parking lots around the glittering island of a mega-mall. Some Dark God was protecting her. She steered the cruiser into the first open space she saw, locked it, and ran toward the mall, avoiding the front doors in favor of the loading docks in the rear.

  Her joy at finding an ancient payphone on the mall’s third floor curdled when she tapped her hip and realized, for the first time since waking up on the road, that her cute Paul Frank monkey wallet was missing. Had that little shit August taken it?

  Across from the payphone was an Irish pub, packed with hungry shoppers. Through the windows, she saw a family stand to leave, the father dropping a few bills and quarters in tip money o
n the table. Guilt squeezed her throat as she entered the pub and scooped up the change, ducking out the door before a waiter noticed. How long until the cops swept through the mall, on the hunt for a teenage carjacker?

  “Get in the ladies’ room,” her father told her over the phone, once she explained everything that had happened. “In a stall. Wait. Don’t leave for anybody or anything. I’ll get there in exactly three hours from this moment, after it’s dark. What’s the back of the mall like?”

  She wiped a tear from her cheek. “Like you’d expect. There’s like the place where trucks come in, some dumpsters, stuff like that.”

  “I’ll be by the dumpsters. You know the car.”

  “Okay, Daddy. I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just get through it.”

  Her father was waiting where he promised. He still had his work beard, which made him look a bit like a young Fidel Castro. I guess it helps him blend in, Fiona thought. Wherever he’s been going lately, it gives him a serious suntan. His sleeves had slid away from his wrists, revealing small cuts and a few nasty bruises.

  When she slid into the front seat, he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. She opened the rear door, and he said: “No. The trunk.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “I’m sorry about what happened, but that’s a pretty messed-up punishment.”

  “How else am I getting you past any cops?” he said.

  But there were no checkpoints. Cocooned in the warm darkness of the trunk, Fiona contemplated her wild day. Sure, it was a rush to score a hundred-ten on a test (she always went for the extra credit) or show off her math skills in front of the class, but that was nothing compared to the high-octane thrill of ripping off a police cruiser and taking it on a high-speed chase. The fear just added to the excitement. For the first time in her life, She wondered: who am I really?