by Kim Oh
Goddamn terrorists – that’s how much they’ve screwed it up for everybody. It’s always hardworking regular people like me who get harassed, just because we’re trying to go about our business and not bother anybody. And don’t even get me started about that whole business of having to take off your shoes to get through the scanners – I’ve just about decided that all those airport security operations are run by a bunch of pervy foot fetishists. Or shills for the pedicure industry.
Anyway, the upshot of all that is it’s just about impossible for your average Joe Blow hitman to get from one place to another with his equipment, unless he can drive there and his boss is willing to reimburse him for mileage. It’s not often that a gig like that comes along.
So basically, this run-of-the-mill professional killer gets to his destination, and the first order of business is to get hold of the things he needs to take care of whatever job he’s been sent out on. And unless he’s been given a whole lot more leisurely schedule than I’ve ever been handed, he doesn’t have time to go through the background checks and all the other hoops you have to jump through at the local neighborhood gun shop. Or the guy just isn’t able to get through the checks without setting off the sort of red flags that would have every enforcement agent in the state coming down on his ass. Damn computerized record-keeping they’ve got now. So he’s got to get hold of a piece, or a couple of pieces, plus the ammo for them, all quickly and quietly. Thus the grocers, as they’ve become known in the circles I hang out in.
I’m not talking about somebody like the sleazy gun dealer you see in that old Scorsese movie Taxi Driver, the one with all the lethal hardware he carries around in a briefcase and comes up to your cockroach paradise of a NYC apartment to sell. Yeah, there still are guys like that, but I wouldn’t touch any of them with the proverbial ten-foot pole. The mere fact that this freelance dealer had a customer list that included whack jobs like the one De Niro played in the movie, that should have tipped you off he wasn’t exactly trustworthy. Professionals like me and Elton, we’re only going to do business with somebody who’s been checked out by other pros, not some hopped-up freak who’s going to turn over to the cops his entire sales log, complete with names and numbers, soon as he gets his butt in a jam. You know, it’s like what people say about building contractors, like the guy who comes out to install your air-conditioning: the good ones all know each other.
As to why the kind of people you want to deal with, when you’re looking to get yourself armed and ready to do business as soon as you’ve arrived in a new town, why they’ve come to be called grocers – I’m not exactly sure. And when I asked Elton about it, he couldn’t tell me, either. Maybe some of them actually started out in grocery stores – organized crime types always have been big in any city’s produce district, probably because of all those trucks going back and forth; perfect for when you need to move some less-than-legal merchandise.
But that’s not important. What matters is that there’s a network of these grocers, as we call them – all around the world, wherever you go. Okay, maybe not Antarctica, but then again, hitmen don’t often get an assignment to take down some penguin who’s crossed the wrong people. Solid, reputable dealers – well, reputable with us – who have what you need, when you need it, and who you know will keep their mouths shut about your business. Mainly because they don’t ask questions to begin with. Because they don’t have to check you out – when you show up on their doorstep, even if they’ve never seen you before, they know you’re cool with them. The right people have vouched for your credentials. One of these grocers could sell you a truckload of rocket launchers and not have to worry about the feds springing up behind you like jack-in-the-boxes with handcuffs and indictments.
So that’s who I was going to see – a grocer named Alonzo – as I made my way through this dinky little South American town. In my pocket I had the info Elton had given me, when I’d been on the phone with him. My shoulder bag was light and empty, but it wouldn’t be for long.
Once I got away from the hotel and the tourist zone around it, the town quickly got shabbier. Lots of unfinished buildings, with rusting rebar sticking out of the raw concrete walls, brown weeds nearly taller than me choking the lots behind the sagging chain-link fences. They looked like bad ideas, ones the locals had given up on after the first half-hearted motivation. The sidewalks – when there were any – were pitted and crumbling, pocked with trash-filled moon craters. Loops of electrical wire and utility cables dangled under the pink-tiled eaves, fastened in place with bent nails. Every few blocks, there would be an incongruous mansion, as though it had been beamed down from some much more upscale planet, with vivid green landscaping behind ornate wrought-iron gates and high walls topped with broken glass and triple strands of wire with little plastic labels that said PELIGRO! on them. Slinking, mopey dogs ignored me as I walked by them, as though they didn’t even have the energy to bark.
The kids were cute, though – and a lot of them, too. Practically the Platonic ideal of cuteness, the little boys with those fuzzy burr haircuts and the girls with braids thick as my wrists, and all of them with those big brown eyes like my brother Donnie had when he was real little. Except his had been – of course – more Asian-looking. But he’d always been pretty serious, even when he was a baby, as though he’d known right from the beginning that the two of us were going to have a rough row to hoe. These kids down here played with a furious laughing intensity, right out in the middle of the street, running around after scuffed-up soccer balls and falling down and bouncing right back up – but without that demonic screeching you hear in playgrounds back in the US. Maybe they were just so happy, they didn’t know how poor they were. Something to think about.
Their parents watched me go by with a complete lack of interest. They went on doing their laundry in plastic tubs, or just sitting on rickety wooden chairs with their arms folded across their chests and a passive disdain for the rest of the world on their high-cheekboned indio faces. There probably had been a bunch of things that had happened around here, that had drilled into them the wisdom of not poking into strangers’ business.
I finally arrived at my destination, a little storefront – and I mean little, not much wider than my arms stretched out – with a hand-painted wooden sign above the door that read TIENDA MARIA AUGUSTA, plus one of those ubiquitous sheet-metal Coca-Cola advertisements. Or that’s what would’ve been above the door if there’d been one. Like most of the poky tiendas I’d passed by, its front was taken up with a metal grille running from ground to roof, with an opening in the middle just big enough to pass your money through and get whatever you purchased handed to you. Through the grille, looking into the dark interior of the tienda – maybe just a single bare lightbulb dangling on a frayed wire – you could see the rows of wooden shelves, crammed with huge soda bottles and cans with unfamiliar labels, one-liter boxes of UHT-treated milk, that plasticky-tasting white stuff that lasts forever, or at least doesn’t get any worse even if you don’t refrigerate it. There was weird-looking candy the color of lit neon tubing, and stalks of bananas so bruised that it seemed they must’ve been fighting with each other. On a narrow counter along one side were bowls filled with rectangles of some kind of homemade caramel thing, toffee-colored, with a squadron of flies lazily circling over the cling film covering them.
I looked over my shoulder before I went up to the place. I was pretty sure I hadn’t been followed out here; if the hotel had been staked out by whoever it was that had started all this trouble for me, my evasive maneuvers seemed to have gotten me safely past them. But I didn’t want any of the little kids running around to see any of the transaction that was going to take place between me and the tienda’s proprietor. Better they should go at least a bit longer without knowing that even this part of the world they lived in had ugly things like this in it.
Leaning my face close to the grille, I scanned for anybody inside. “Hello –” That wasn’t right; I tried again. “Uh, buenas tardes.” Th
at much I remembered from the phrase book I’d leafed through on the flight down here, but after that my mind went blank. “Anybody –”
“Uno momento.” A man’s voice called from way in the shadowed back of the tienda. A much younger-looking guy than I was expecting, wearing a bright yellow fútbol jersey and cheap Ray-Ban knockoffs pushed up onto his slicked hair, snaked past the crowded shelves. The thin, rust-specked metal bars separated the two of us as he smiled and nodded. “Good thing I speak English better than you speak Spanish.”
“Yeah, lucky for me.” I didn’t like the smirk on his face, but then, I wouldn’t have liked it on anyone else’s, either. “You lived in the States?”
Another nod. “Twelve years in Asheville, North Carolina. Froze my butt off. You Elton’s friend?”
My turn to nod. A dirty-faced toddler with one finger in her mouth bumped against me. I shooed her off before turning back to the guy. “He called you?”
“I got a call, yeah. Not from him. Somebody else with the message.” He fished a set of keys from his jeans pocket and unfastened a clunky padlock, then pulled back a creaking section of the grille. “Come on in.”
“You’re Alonzo?” I surveyed the cramped space as he refastened the door. Its top edge was so low I’d had to duck to get under it.
“Naw.” He pocketed the keys. “That was my uncle.” With a tilt of his head, he indicated a framed photo on one of the walls’ few vacant spaces, with a solemn, jowly face scowling from it. “We buried him a couple of months ago. That’s why I came home. Family business, you know? Least until I can stick one of my other cousins with it.”
That should’ve been my first clue. Maybe my guard was down, because I’d been steered here by Elton, who I’d basically trust with my life. Actually, I have done that – I mean, trusted him that much.
“Okay.” I gave a nod. “Sorry about your uncle –”
“Eh.” A shrug. “He was in his eighties.”
“Even so.” I slung my bag from my shoulder. “But I’m in kind of a hurry. You’ve got something for me?”
“Oh, yeah. I heard you were in the middle of some job.” He stepped toward the rear of the tienda. “Come on back.”
That part wasn’t suspicious. Pretty much standard procedure to pick up your merchandise someplace private, where even the snoopy little kids couldn’t see.
I followed him. He pushed open a flimsy wooden door, reached in, and pulled on the chain for another dangling lightbulb. “Got everything you need, ready to go.”
Some kind of a store room – I stood in the middle of it, surrounded by plastic-wrapped cases of beer and soda, huge five-liter containers of cooking oil, stacked up vegetable cans, all of that. Shadows shifted behind the tienda’s stock as the lightbulb swung back and forth.
He closed the store room door behind himself. “Don’t see a lot of Chinese girls around here –”
Crap. Soon as he said that, I knew what was coming next.
TEN
Full-on grapple, his arm coming tight around my shoulder and pulling me around to press me against his chest. I could smell his breath and the testosterone surge rushing through his bloodstream. For about one second, total –
Because that was about how long it took for me to bring my knee up hard into his crotch. He went down, doubled-over and yowling in pain.
I don’t have any kind of fancy martial arts training – I basically rely on the hardware to get what I want done – but I do have a few useful moves, some that Elton showed me when we were just hanging out together, a couple others that are just instinctive. You don’t have to be Bruce Lee to know that when some moron’s face is heading below his belt buckle, all it takes is another knee brought up quick – or the same one – for you to put him in an expanded world of hurt. I grabbed both his shoulders to balance myself and did exactly that, with satisfying results. His nose exploded into a blossom of red blood and I threw him back against the store room shelves.
There probably hadn’t been that much fight in him to begin with, but whatever there had been seemed obviously gone as he slid to the floor, a forearm pressed against his bleeding face.
I stepped forward and gave him a kick to the ribs, not to do any real damage, but just to reinforce the message that I wasn’t to be messed with.
Which he was apparently still too stupid to get. He actually snarled and lurched upward, tackling me around the legs. But I could see him and was able to brace myself. I reached over his head and grabbed the top shelf behind him. They weren’t fastened to the wall – the whole rickety section toppled over, with the cans and bottles crashing onto the guy’s back, flattening him face-down on the floor.
I’d taken a fast move back to avoid all that, but now I stepped forward and gave him another kick, this time to the side of the head. He moaned, the blood from his nose mingling with the contents of a couple broken ketchup bottles.
“So –” Squatting down on my haunches, I poked him with a forefinger. “Can we talk now? Without all the action-movie dramatics?”
He managed to raise his head far enough to give a quick nod. “Sí. Just don’t –”
“Relax. I’m not going to do anything.” I straightened back up and looked down at him. “I came here for a reason, and it wasn’t to get all physical with you. Fighting or the other thing. Do you have what I want, or not?”
Another nod, with little red dots spattering on the floor, and he pointed to a paper bag in the corner of the store room. “Over there –”
I went over and picked up the bag. There were two of those liter UHT cartons in it, but they were heavier than if they’d just had milk in them. Plus I could squeeze the sides of the cartons and make out the hard, solid shapes of the contents. That was all I needed to know – I opened my shoulder bag and carefully placed the cartons inside.
“Okay, jack.” I slung the bag back into place.
“It’s not Jack,” he said sullenly. The front of his shirt was bright red with the blood still trickling flow from his nose. He’d pulled himself into a sitting position against another wall. “My name’s Umberto.”
“Fine. Umberto, then.” I didn’t want to insult him any more than I’d already had to. “Let me give you some ground rules, since you seem to be new to this business.”
Arms folded across his knees, he regarded me with caution, ready to duck if I let fly again.
“A grocer – that’s what you are now, right? You know that’s what it’s called?”
He nodded.
“Okay, maybe your uncle didn’t have a chance to tell you this before he died, but a real grocer doesn’t pull some idiot stunt like that.” My left knee cap ached a bit, from where I’d brought it into his face. It was going to be a long walk back to the hotel. “How smart do you think something like that is? Somebody comes here to pick up stuff like this –” I tugged on the strap of the bag, heavy now. “They’re probably not going to be pushovers, are they?”
“Sí, but . . .” Umberto mulled it over. “Here, in our country, women don’t do this sort of thing.”
“You mean, nice women don’t.”
He managed a shrug. “No kind of women do. Nice or not.”
“So I suppose if somebody like me shows up, you get a free shot? Think again, pal.” I gave a slow shake of my head. “This is the twenty-first century – you need to get up to speed with that. If you don’t, then you’ll really get into trouble. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. If you want to keep on being a grocer – you know, providing this kind of merchandise to people who are looking for it – then you gotta keep your reputation up. That’s how your uncle lived to the age he did, without getting knocked off along the way. You get found out for being a jerk – and yeah, that includes hitting on your customers – then people will figure you can’t be trusted. And I’m talking dangerous people. And they won’t just stop doing business with you. They’ll put you in the ground, just to make sure you won’t talk about the business you might already have done with them. You understa
nd?”
Apparently he did. Obviously something he’d never thought about – he paled beneath the blood on his face.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m giving you a break on this. Not because I’m given to cutting the young and stupid a lot of slack, but because I don’t plan on ever coming back to this dump. I’m scratching this whole country off my bucket list. Soon as I wrap up this job I’m on, then I’m outta here. Your next customer, though, might not be as cool about it as I’m being.”
He nodded again. All this impromptu education had sunk in.
“Give me the keys.” I held out my hand. “If I have to reach into your pockets to get them, it’ll be even less of a pleasant experience for you than it will be for me.”