Sal pulled her computer from her pack, set it on the bar and clicked a couple of keys. “Something I want you to see.” She turned the screen so he could read.
It was a two-year-old story in The Daily Iowan. The headline read “IU Frat Raises Record Amount for Charity.” There was a photo of two boys standing in front of a bank with heavy looking duffel bags hanging from both shoulders. The bank was the First National on East Washington Street, the one where Turner dropped the deposits off after closing every night, about two blocks away.
He looked up at Sal, who was watching him read. “Yeah, so?”
“Same fraternity.”
Sure enough, the two boys in the photo wore the same three symbols across their chest he’d seen on Jimmy and Sean.
“They throw this party every year, second weekend of October,” Sal said, staring at the screen. “They charge five bucks a head, run it all weekend. Then Monday morning they drive the cash down to the bank. That was two years ago. Fifteen thousand. Last year was close to seventeen.”
He turned the computer back and straightened up. “What’s the charity?”
She snorted. “The last few years, they’ve been giving the funds to the fraternity. The national organization, you know? But it’s earmarked for a rehab to their house. Some charity, huh?”
“And?”
She shrugged. “Just thought you’d be interested.” She put her computer away, slid off the stool and left the bar.
He watched her go feeling vaguely insulted. It wasn’t that she took him for a criminal, it was that she assumed he was small-time, someone interested in ripping off college boys in broad daylight for pocket money. Sheesh. He told himself to forget it, but when Jason came in at six to work the bar, Turner asked him about Sal.
“Tattoo on her arm?”
“That’s the one.”
Jason nodded. “Yeah, what about her?”
“She come in here a lot?”
“Every week or two, always alone.”
“She a student?”
Jason shrugged. “What else?”
Turner took the receipts out to Ray, who was healing up well enough to be growing bored and assured Turner he’d be back in two weeks.
“You going to stay on?” Ray asked. “I can’t give you the same hours, but you could keep the room. I kind of like knowing someone’s there at night.”
Turner shook his head. “I’ve got somewhere to be,” he lied. He wasn’t a man for routines.
That week Jimmy came into the bar almost every night, nursing a beer and glaring at Turner but making no moves. Turner figured he would either start a fight or he wouldn’t, and he didn’t worry about it, other than to make sure the boy wasn’t dragging off another loaded college girl. Ray considered that kind of thing trouble, both for the bar and the town, and the day he’d hired Turner, he’d passed the baton to him casually, as if Turner were part of some law-abiding brotherhood. “It’s going to happen, this much drinking, but don’t let it happen here, right?”
Turner, who’d always been strictly live-and-let-live, had nodded, just as casual, and now he felt a duty to watch over the customers, as if he were running a drunken daycare. It was a new role for him, and one he would be glad to abandon. He also kept an eye out for Sal, but she didn’t come back. Early Thursday evening Turner spotted Jimmy once again sitting near the door, working his way through a pitcher, fiddling with his phone, but this time he was alone. He walked up to the bar around ten.
“We need to get something straight.” Jimmy puffed out his chest. “Out back.”
Turner nodded and led Jimmy out the back door, glad to finally deal with the kid in his own way. He should have thought about it a little harder.
Just as he stepped over the threshold, Turner felt a heavy blow to his back that threw him into the alley, and then hands grabbed him from both sides and hauled him up against the brick wall. Jimmy must have recruited from the football team, because both of his buddies were of the immense, no-neck variety, and they had no trouble holding onto Turner. Jimmy threw a big, slow round-house punch at Turner’s face, like a Hollywood cowboy, and at the last second Turner jerked his head to the side.
Jimmy’s fist hit bricks and made a loud crunch. “Fuck!” he howled, holding his wrist with his other hand. “Fuckfuckfuck! He moved! You let him move! He broke my fucking hand!”
While the two tanks were distracted, Turner launched a kick at a knee, but the angle was wrong. He missed and hit the guy’s calf, merely annoying him. Turner took a hard punch to the stomach and when he bent over, another blow to the kidneys, and then he was on cement, face down, and kicks were coming at him from all sides. He covered his head and curled against the blows, listening to the grunts of effort above him and thinking he was lucky they were wearing athletic shoes and not work boots.
“Hey! What are you doing! Stop!” Jason yelled from the doorway.
The kicks abruptly halted, and the three boys fled.
“Holy shit, are you okay?” Jason bent over him. “You want me to call an ambulance? You want the police?”
Turner pushed himself to his hands and knees and rocked there for a moment, trying to assess the damage. “No cops. No ambulance.”
“Are you sure? Your face is scraped up and—”
“I’m sure. Help me up.”
Turner pissed pink and moved like an old man for a couple of days, but the only lasting injury was to his pride. He’d been stupid to figure Jimmy would take him on alone. Jimmy couldn’t even pick up a girl without a posse. Turner should have spotted that ambush a mile away. Living in a cornfield surrounded by college kids was making him sloppy, turning him into an amateur. So now he’d had a wake-up call: being unarmed and twenty years his junior didn’t automatically make the little fuckers harmless. The only thing that gave him any comfort was thinking about the damage he’d done to Jimmy’s hand. The kid wasn’t going to be throwing any balls for a while. Still, Turner wasn’t sure that was punishment enough, and he found himself thinking about the photo Sal had showed him. He bought an oversized hoodie and a pair of sunglasses from the campus store and jogged in the early mornings, before the bar opened, thinking it over and checking on things. He took a long drive one night and found a dark house among the cornfields with a shotgun in the front closet. By Saturday night he was ready.
Sunday at three thirty in the morning he cleared his clothes out of Ray’s room, put nylon cable ties in his pocket, walked to his car and drove toward campus, parking a block from the frat house. A steady rain fell and wind ripped through the leaves of the big trees. He tied a handkerchief around his neck to pull over his face at the last minute, then got out, pulled on his raincoat, and walked to the house with the shotgun tucked along his side. It was dead quiet, not a soul in sight.
Turner moved slowly around the house. The window on the first floor was open, just as it had been the last time he looked. A light was on in the back of the house, but the rest of the windows up and down were dark. He moved to the back door, an old wooden door with a sagging frame and cheese for a lock. He unlocked it quietly with a credit card and then stood in the rain listening for movement. Nothing. He pulled the hanky over his nose and had pushed the door open a few inches when a voice came from inside the house.
“Hey, who the fuck are you?” Turner froze. How had he been spotted? He looked right, left, ahead, behind, above. Nobody. Then rapid footsteps pounded around the first floor. Someone being chased. Hell, someone else must have broken into the house, coming in on his job, to take his money.
He moved through the back door. The narrow space was full of discarded kegs and it took a few seconds to squeeze through to the second door, which opened onto a brightly lit kitchen filled with the yeasty funk of stale beer. The kitchen door stood open, revealing a dining room. He stood with the door from the mudroom open a few inches and listened. It sounded like a herd but was probably three or four people.
Shit. He should bail. Instead, he raised the shotgun and waited,
watching through the door into the dining room. After a moment a short boy in a glittery full-face mask and a too-large hooded sweatshirt came tearing past him and through the kitchen. Behind him ran a big guy, huffing and puffing. “He’s in the kitchen!” he called, and then Turner swung the barrel of the shotgun and he was down.
A loud crash came from the other end of the kitchen and Turner stepped out in time to see a boy falling onto his back in a puddle of spilled beer. Hundreds of bottles clanked and rolled on the floor—beer bottles, wine bottles, liquor bottles. At some point during the weekend they must have run out of kegs.
The kid was trying to get off the slick linoleum floor when he locked eyes with Turner. Turner pointed the shotgun at his head and he froze. The little guy in the mask stepped back into the kitchen and stopped, facing Turner. For a moment nobody moved. Someone heavy stomped down the front stairs.
“What the fuck are you clowns doing in here? I’m trying to—”A grumpy moose with a bad case of bed hair stormed into the kitchen, took one look at his two friends on the floor and Turner with the shotgun, and grabbed the kid in the mask. He yanked the little guy in front of him, making an effective shield.
“What did you do to Rob?” he said, staring at the guy at Turner’s feet. “You killed Rob!”
Turner looked down at the body at his feet and nudged it with the toe of his boot. The chest rose and fell. Turner shrugged. It wouldn’t hurt them to think one of their buddies was already dead.
The moose stood flat-footed and staring, his jaw jutting in a caricature of stubborn. He obviously thought they were in a standoff, thought the kid in the mask was with Turner. He pointed the shotgun and pumped in a chamber. KaChik!
The big guy turned to stone. The little guy stomped on his instep, swung a fist to his groin and danced away, stepping briskly through the bottles and sliding behind Turner. It reminded him of Sal’s moves the night on the street when he’d been saving her. Fuck. The little guy wasn’t a guy. It was Sal. Of course. Fucking Sal.
“Down on the floor,” he said to the moose in the doorway, “on your belly. Any fast moves, you’ll be shitting from ten extra assholes.”
The boy lowered himself to his knees and then stretched out on the floor, head to head with his beer-soaked buddy, his face still contorted in pain. For a second Turner considered telling Sal to get down as well, but he couldn’t leave her to get caught. For one thing, she’d no doubt recognized him.
Turner listened to the house again, waiting for noise above or footsteps on the stairs. Nothing. The crashing bottles had been very loud and it was the wrong time of day for noise. He needed to get out of there before they had cops to deal with.
He handed Sal the cable ties in his coat pocket. “Tie ‘em up. Ankles and wrists.” He aimed at the one she’d just punched in the nuts. “Any moves from any of you, I’ll shoot out his knee.”
She scampered around in silence, efficiently binding all three boys. When she’d finished, Turner walked over to the moose and stood directly above him. “Where’s the money?”
He shook his head. “We can’t get at the money. It’s in a safe.”
Sal snorted and leaned over him. “So what’s in the bags then?” she said. “Dirty laundry?” Turner glared at her. She shouldn’t be letting them hear her voice.
“Bags?” the kid said, opening his eyes wide in an unconvincing attempt to look puzzled.
Sal waved her arm. “In the front hall. Your buddies tripped over them when they were chasing me around the house.”
Turner got dishcloths out of a drawer and gagged all three of them.
Sal collected their phones and started fooling with one. Turner turned to go get the money and Sal knelt near kid number two, the one who’d fallen in the puddle of beer. She pulled off his gag and held a wicked looking folding knife at his throat.
“Where is she?” she said, her voice harsh.
He grunted and she leaned closer. “I’m going to cut your balls off if you don’t answer me in three seconds. Where the fuck is she?”
“In the basement,” he said, his voice high. “With Jimmy.”
“What’s going on?” Turner said. “I’m getting out of here.”
Sal turned and moved out of the kitchen as if she hadn’t heard him.
Turner retied the kid’s gag. He should have fucking known better. When you get the sense a job is about to go south, you bail. That’s the rule. No matter how invested you are, you don’t fight it out. You don’t try to prove anything. You just melt into the streets and get away. Otherwise you find yourself sharing a tiny room with a stupid, ugly mutt and your shower with a lot more of them. He thought about stepping out the back door and running for his car. It was the smart thing to do. To hell with these corn fed college kids.
He listened for any sound upstairs or on the streets. Then he sighed and moved to the front of the house, picking his way through an impressive chaos. Two bookcases were knocked over, a case of fire fighter memorabilia was scattered, a large framed photo shattered and on the floor along with a couple of pennants and one large flag, and a wooden chair was on its side. Maybe the destruction occurred during the recent chase, or maybe it was standard frat party devastation. Who knew? He stepped around the mess and found the bags near the front door, four blue canvas duffels ready for the trip to the bank. He carried them to the open window in the dining room, checked for movement outside and dropped the bags one by one onto the lawn.
Sal returned from the basement, but she wasn’t alone. She was propping up a blond girl in jeans and a tiny top who was about two-thirds asleep. Turner glared at Sal. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I can’t leave her here.”
He wanted to smack her and then kick his own ass for not bailing a moment ago. Sal had just created a fucking witness. Why not take photos, print it in the local paper?
“What are you going to do, carry her home?”
Sal shook her head and leaned toward him. “That’s my car,” she whispered, pointing to a gray Ford ten feet from the window.
“Go out the back door with the girl.” He jabbed his thumb at the door. “Take off the mask before you step outside. Go to the car and get her in the back. Then pop the trunk and start the engine.” Sal nodded, her eyes glittering through the mask holes, and then moved through the kitchen, speaking softly to the girl she was half supporting, half dragging. Turner watched them move to the car, two slender females who could be drunk or tired. That would look okay if anyone was watching. Sal walked to the front of the car and set something on the ground, in front of a tire, then got in on the driver’s side. When he heard the engine turn over, he squeezed past the kegs and out the back door and quickly moved the bags to the trunk. He closed the trunk quietly, slid into the front seat, and gave Sal directions to his parked car.
When she pulled up to his car, he turned to her. “What did you put in front of the tire?”
“Their phones,” she said, as if it should have been obvious.
He nodded. “Follow me out of town and we’ll figure how to split the take.” He wasn’t going to give her half, not the way things had worked out, but maybe she should get something. It was only fair; the job was her idea.
“Why not here?” she said.
He shook his head, picked up the shotgun and got out of the car.
He drove on empty roads for about thirty miles, becoming less tense with every mile he put between him and the town. He decided the night was going to make a funny story some day, though he’d probably tell it with someone else as the bumbling, dimwitted hero. Maybe this whole thing hadn’t been about getting sloppy so much as bored and restless. Wherever he went next, he needed to find work. The kind he was good at.
Turner pulled onto the shoulder. The rain had let up but the corn was swaying and rustling, rows and rows of restless shadows in the dark morning. The land was flat. They’d be able to spot a car coming for miles. He climbed into the front seat of Sal’s car and turned to face her. “You climb thr
ough the window?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Interesting approach.”
“Hey, they were sitting in the kitchen,” she said. “They saw me the second I dropped through that window. What could I do? And who stacks bottles in a doorway?”
He laughed.
“Fuck those were noisy!” she said.
He pointed at the back seat. “What about our witness? She going to talk about seeing me there?”
“She never got a good look at you without the mask. And believe me, the last thing she’s going to do is talk about her night.”
He nodded and looked over his shoulder. The girl was an inert lump under Sal’s coat. Maybe she wouldn’t remember him. He turned back to Sal, who was grinning like she’d just heard a joke.
“What’s so funny?”
“Down in the basement? Jimmy was there, asleep and naked.” She waved her phone. “I got photos. A little time on Photoshop, he’s going to have a half-inch dick.”
Turner smiled. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. “Probably ought to get rid of the mask,” he said.
She shrugged. “They gave out a couple thousand of them at a Mardi Gras party last year.”
He nodded. She had a natural talent. Too bad he wasn’t looking for a partner. “I figure I’ll leave you one bag, take three.”
“You can have it all.”
He didn’t trust people who didn’t take their share. It was unprofessional. But then, this whole job was unprofessional as hell. “Why’d you do it, you don’t want the money?”
“Those guys … I hate those guys. They hurt a friend of mine. And … this girl?” She waved her hand at the sleeping girl in the back seat. “They had pictures of her. It’s never enough to rape someone. They have to shame her after.”
Turner thought about Sal sitting alone in the bar, pretending to be drunker than she was. Maybe she’d had a plan and when he thought he was saving her, he’d screwed it up. Maybe she’d been carrying that folding knife.
“Is this enough?” he asked.
Sal shook her head. “Nah, no way. This is just the beginning. I’ll post the pics of Jimmy, then spread it around he was bragging about the money, see if I can get him blamed for this. And I’ve got some other stuff planned.”
Kzine Issue 14 Page 9