Catch and Release Paperback

by Lawrence Block

  * * *

  If he really wanted it. If he thought he could still do it.

  His coffee cup was empty. Lost in reverie, he’d drunk it without realizing it. He’d been looking out the window, but had he registered what had passed through his field of vision? Maybe the man he’d been waiting for—

  No, speak of the devil. There he was now.

  Colliard took a bill from his wallet, put it back. Ten dollars was too much, she’d remember him. Five was more than enough.

  Besides, he didn’t need to throw money around these days.

  He put a five on the table top. Outside, the man he’d been waiting for was standing at the parking garage two doors down the street, waiting for them to bring his car down. He’d probably called ahead and wouldn’t have long to wait. Colliard, parked at the curb, would have to get moving if he didn’t want to lose him.

  He stayed where he was. An attendant got out of a bright blue Subaru and held the door for Colliard’s quarry. A bill changed hands—a dollar? A five? A ten? Colliard watched as the car pulled away and was gone.

  He returned the five-dollar bill to his wallet, managed to catch the waitress’s eye. He wasn’t really hungry, but he decided to order something. You had to eat, didn’t you?

  * * *

  If he really wanted it, if he thought he could still do it. Because, Sully had told him, people change. Even when they stay the same, they change.

  “Like the film. He had to go back to South-Central, you know? The Ivy League clothes and the Ivy League friends suited him well enough, but he had the street in him, and he had to go back to it.” An appraising glance. “But, see, it didn’t work for him, did it? Harvard, Princeton, wherever it was, it changed him. Was it Dartmouth? Never mind, doesn’t matter. Lost his edge, didn’t he? Lost whatever it was that keeps you alive on the street. Lost it, and that’s what got him killed. Not going back all by itself, but going back and not fitting in there anymore. That’s what got him killed.” A quick smile. “Of course, it’s only a film, isn’t it? Some story somebody made up. Wouldn’t want to read too much into it, but it’s something to think about, don’t you think?”

  * * *

  Colliard had never been in a street gang. They hadn’t had Bloods or Crips in the small city where he grew up, although he understood that they had them now. They’d had other gangs, ethnic in composition, raising a fair amount of hell, but Colliard had never gone near them. His family was lower middle class, just managing to hang on in a marginal suburb. Mortie Colliard was out of high school and bagging groceries at Safeway before he fell in with bad companions. The bad companions introduced him to Sully, and Sully found him things to do that paid better than bagging groceries.

  “Paper or plastic, ma’am?” Life was simpler then, living in a room in his mother’s house, getting by on minimum wage. He couldn’t live like that now, but even if he could, who’d hire him? At his age?

  At first what he did for Sully wasn’t much more complex than putting boxes of Tide in grocery bags and loading them in the trunk of some lady’s Toyota. But Sully was adept at finding the right person for the job, and when he got to know Colliard he spotted something—or the absence of something. And Sully sent him across town with a man everybody called Wheezy, though Colliard never knew why. Wheezy pointed out a man behind the counter in a hardware store, and the following afternoon Colliard returned on his own to the hardware store, examined power tools until another customer finished his business and left, and then approached the counter, took out the revolver Sully had provided, and shot the man twice in the chest and, after he’d fallen, once more in the head. He wiped his prints from the gun, dropped it beside the corpse, and went home. On the way he stopped for pizza, and had three slices with pepperoni and extra cheese. Drank a large Coke. Back home he watched TV for a while and then went to bed at his usual time. Slept fine, woke up refreshed.

  Nothing to it.

  * * *

  Back in the day, before he’d improved himself and risen in the world, before the college courses and the first corporate job, Colliard would have timed things differently. He’d have been out of the diner before his quarry appeared, and would have been within a few feet of him when the attendant brought his car down. Even as the fellow was applying the brakes, Colliard would have put the brakes on the car’s owner, drawing the .22 automatic, pulling the trigger twice, and quitting the scene before anyone knew quite what had happened.

  Instead, all he did was sit there watching.

  People change, don’t they? Even when they stay the same, they change.

  He’d ordered a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich. It came with french fries, and he asked the waitress to make them very well done. “Crisp and brown,” she said, when she set the plate before him. “Some more coffee?”

  He shook his head, told her to make it a Coke. She said they had Pepsi, and he assured her Pepsi was fine.

  Like old times, he thought. Grilled cheese and bacon was close enough to pizza, and Pepsi was close enough to Coke. But shooting somebody and watching passively while he drove away, well, there was a fairly substantial difference there.

  He had a fair appetite, and the food was good. The cheese had a toasty tang, the fries were the way he liked them, and if she’d simply passed off the Pepsi as Coke he’d never have known the difference.

  So it was a good enough meal. And if it seemed to him that the long ago pizza had pleased him more, well, maybe it had, but you couldn’t blame the food for that. There were other factors.

  * * *

  If he’d followed the guy, if he’d set out after him, then what? Maybe he’d have aborted the mission somewhere along the way, turned left when the blue Subaru turned right. Maybe he’d have been able to tail him all the way into his driveway and gun him down before he got his front door unlocked. Or maybe he’d have stuck the gun in the man’s face only to have his finger freeze on the trigger, or—

  Endless scenarios. Too many ways it could go wrong, all of them possible because what was not possible was for him to know how much he had in fact changed, and whether he could still do this.

  Go up to a stranger, some man who’d done Colliard no harm. Point a gun, pull a trigger, go home and wash your hands. Eat some pizza, watch TV.

  He’d stayed in his seat just now because he couldn’t go ahead and write the first chapter until he could see his way through to the ending. Because if it turned out that he couldn’t do it, that he was done with that stage in life and couldn’t go back to it—well, that was not a discovery he wanted to make with a gun in his hand and his eyes locked with those of the man he was suddenly unable to kill.

  All that could do was get him in trouble. With the law, if its minions showed up while he stood there, paralyzed, incapable even of fleeing the scene. Or, if he somehow got away clean, with Sully, for having put the quarry on notice, thus turning him from an easy to a hard target. He finished his sandwich, finished his fries, finished his Pepsi. And left the waitress a very good tip, because he’d taken up a lot of her time, and because his failure wasn’t her fault. And, finally, because it didn’t matter anymore if she remembered him.

  * * *

  It was past nine when he got home. He’d told his wife he wouldn’t be home for dinner, but she’d made a casserole and offered to warm it up for him. They were eating out less since his business failed, and she’d surprised him by blossoming as a good cook. Nothing fancy, but good simple dishes.

  She’d be a good mother, he was confident of that. That hadn’t been on his mind when he married her. He chose her because she’d be a good companion, an attractive and personable partner in social situations. And now they were going to have a baby, and she was going to be a good mother.

  “We can live in a trailer,” she’d said, when the hedge fund turned out to be a Ponzi scam, when it was clear that the money was irretrievably gone. “I don’t care where we live, or how we live. We’re two people who love each other. We’ll get by.”

 
But of course she cared, and of course he cared, and they couldn’t swap this house for a double-wide, surrounded by the kind of neighbors who wound up flunking sobriety tests on Cops. They loved each other, but how long would they go on loving each other in a trailer park?

  He said he’d have the casserole for tomorrow’s lunch. He’d had an interview, he told her, and it was promising, with a decent prospect of some case-by-case consulting work. The hours would be irregular and the work off the books, but he’d be well paid. If he got the work.

  She said she’d keep her fingers crossed.

  * * *

  He slept late, and when he did get up she’d already left for a doctor’s appointment. He found the casserole in the refrigerator and nuked a helping in the microwave. It was spicy, and not his usual breakfast fare, but he ate it with good appetite. The coffee she’d made was still hot, and he drank two cups.

  He’d slept soundly, and any dreams he’d had were gone and forgotten when he opened his eyes. But he’d gone to sleep with a question, and now the answer was miraculously there.

  He got in his car, drove for an hour and a half.

  * * *

  The town he’d picked was one he’d been to only a handful of times, and not at all in at least ten years. At first glance it looked the same, but then it hadn’t changed much since before he was born. It had been a mill town, and the industry moved south after the Second World War, and the local economy had settled into a permanent state of depression. There were changes over the years—strip malls thrown up, a drive-in theater torn down—but the town went on, always a decade or two behind the curve.

  There was still a Main Street, and there were still shops on it, but it seemed to Colliard that there were more vacant storefronts than he remembered. A sign of the times? Or just the next phase in the continuing decline of the place?

  But what did it matter? He wasn’t looking to start a business, and if he did he wouldn’t start it here. He hadn’t been here in years, and in an hour he’d be gone, and it would be more years before he returned. If he ever came back at all.

  Oddly, there were places he recognized. The drugstore on the corner of Main and Edward. The sporting goods store diagonally across the street. The little shop halfway up the block—Mulleavy’s, the sign announced. He remembered the name, but had long since forgotten what it was Mulleavy sold, if he’d ever known in the first place.

  Two doors down from Mulleavy’s was a hardware store. He noted it, unable to recall it from a previous visit, and he thought of another hardware store, and that made the decision for him. He circled the block, parked right in front of the hardware store. There were plenty of empty parking spaces, right there on Main Street, and that told you pretty much all you needed to know about the town, and what it was like to be in business there.

  Be doing the man a favor.

  He stood out front for a moment, checked out the fly-specked merchandise in the front window. The shops on either side were vacant, and the For Rent signs in their windows looked as though they’d been there forever. Colliard drew a breath, let it out, opened the door.

  No customers, and no one else either, not for the moment. Then a man in his sixties, balding, round-shouldered, emerged from the back in response to the little bell that had announced Colliard’s entrance.

  “Hello there,” he said brightly. “We get that rain yet?”

  Were they going to talk about the weather? No, the hell with that.

  Colliard drew the gun, watched the man’s eyes widen behind his glasses. He shot him three times in the chest and once behind the ear.

  Wipe the gun and drop it? What, and then go looking for another one?

  He put it in his pocket and left.

  * * *

  The first thing he did was get out of town. There’d been no one around to hear the shots, and it might be an hour before anyone entered the store. The dead man was on the floor behind the counter, where he couldn’t be seen from the street. So there was no rush to quit the scene, but Colliard wanted to be away from there all the same.

  He drove well within the speed limit, knowing that a routine traffic stop was more to be feared than that someone would actually come looking for him. He had the murder weapon in his pocket, and a paraffin test would establish that he’d fired a gun recently. But they wouldn’t know that unless he found a way to call attention to himself, and this was something he’d long ago learned to avoid.

  He drove for a while, and when he stopped for a cup of coffee he picked a diner quite like the one with the nice waitress and the tasty sandwich and fries. All he had was coffee, and he took his time drinking it, letting himself sink into the reality of the present moment.

  He went over it all in his mind. And he tried to take his own emotional temperature, tried to determine how he felt.

  As far as he could tell, he didn’t feel a thing.

  No, that wasn’t entirely true. There was something he felt, something hovering on the edge of thought, visible only out of the corner of his eyes. And what was it?

  Took him a moment, but he figured out what it was. It was relief.

  He took out his cell phone, thought for a moment, put it back in his pocket. The diner had a pay phone, and he spent a couple of quarters and placed a call. The girl who answered put Sully on the phone, and Colliard said, “That order you placed the other day, I wanted to tell you I’ll be able to fill it tomorrow.”

  “You sure of that, are you?”

  “It might take an extra day.”

  “A day one way or the other doesn’t matter. The question is do you have the goods for the transaction.”

  “I do.”

  “It seems to me,” Sully said, “that it’s a hard question to answer ahead of the event, if you take my meaning.”

  “I know it for a fact,” Colliard said. “What I did, I went and took inventory.”

  “You took inventory.”

  “Checked the shelves myself.”

  * * *

  He finished his coffee, and stayed at the table long enough to make another phone call. He used his cell phone for this one, there was no reason not to, and called his own home. The first three rings went unanswered. Then his wife picked up just before the phone went to Voice Mail.

  He asked how it went at the doctor’s office, and was pleased to learn that everything went well, that the baby’s heartbeat was strong and distinct, that all systems were go. “He said I’m going to be a perfectly wonderful mother,” she reported.

  “Well, I could have told you that.”

  “You sound—”

  “What?”

  “Better,” she said. “Stronger. More upbeat.”

  “I’m going to be a perfectly wonderful father.”

  “Oh, you are, you are. I’m just happy you’re in such good spirits.”

  “It must have been the casserole. I had some for breakfast.”

  “Not cold?”

  “No, I microwaved it.”

  “And it was good?”

  “Better than good.”

  “Not too spicy? So early in the day?”

  “It got me off to a good start.”

  “And it’s been a good day,” she said. “That much I can hear in your voice. Did you—”

  “I got the job. Well, case by case, the way I said, but they’re going to be giving me work.”

  “That’s wonderful, honey.”

  “It may take a while to get back where we were, but we’re finally pointed in the right direction again, you know?”

  “We’ll be fine.”

  “Damn right we will. And we’ll be able to keep the house. I know you had your heart set on a trailer, but—”

  “I’ll get over it. What time will you be home? I should really get dinner started.”

  “Let’s go out.”

  “Really?”

  “Nothing fancy,” he said. “I was thinking along the lines of pizza and a Coke.”

  WITHOUT A BODY

  What’s
going on?

  I’m in my own house minding my own business, and he motions me over. That Manny, whatever his name is, but one thing I’m sure of is it’s not Manny. And that Eva of his, her name’s not Eva.

  Is she even his mother? She’s old enough to be his mother, but the way they act, the way they look at each other, you’d think they were something else. Let me put it this way, it’s not something I want to say.

  He calls me over, this Manny, like you’d signal for a waitress. In here, he says. Something you should see, he says. Stand here, he says. And there’s this plastic sheet spread on the carpet, like the painters put down.

  I ask him what’s this, what’s it doing here. Just wait a minute, he says, and he takes this thing out of his pocket, and I’m starting to ask him what it is, and he’s saying something, who knows what, and he reaches out with the thing and before I can move he touches my neck with it, and the next thing I know I’m up in the air.

  Will somebody please tell me what is going on?

  I am up in the air. I am floating. One minute I’ve got both feet on the floor and the next minute I’m up at the ceiling, and...

  Oh.

  I’m both places. I’m up here, but I’m down there, too. Lying down, on this plastic sheet on the floor. That’s my body down there, but up here is—what?

  Me. Me, myself. Irene Silverman, the same person, no different, but without a body. It’s down there. I’m up here.

  It. I.

  What am I, dead?

  I must be dead. I don’t know what he touched me with, but it was like sticking your finger in a light socket. It gave me such a shock that it shocked me right out of my body. Like being struck by lightning, and I’m dead, and there’s my body down there.

  No, wait a minute. I’m not dead. I’m out of my body, I’m here and it’s there, but it’s still alive. I could go back into my body and sit up and walk and talk.

  When I’m ready.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  It’s her, the mother.

  “Go ahead, honey. Finish what you started.”