“My brother gave me this a couple of years ago. Said if I was ever in a really bad spot and there was no one left to turn to, I should call this guy.”
“No one can help me.”
“My brother says this guy’s good people, but he said make sure it was my last resort because it was gonna cost me. And he said make sure the cops weren’t involved because this guy don’t like cops.”
No police… Munir reached for the slip of paper. And money? What did money matter where Barbara and Robby were concerned?
A telephone number was written on the slip. And below it, two words: Repairman Jack.
3
I’m running out of space, Jack thought as he stood in the front room of his apartment and looked for an empty spot to display his latest treasure.
His Sky King Magni Glow Writing Ring had just arrived from his connection in southeast Missouri. It contained a Mysterious Glo signaler (“Gives a strange green light! You can send blinker signals with it!”). The plastic ruby unfolded into three sections, revealing a Secret Compartment that contained a Flying Crown Brand (“For sealing messages!”); the middle section was a Detecto Scope Magnifying Glass (“For detecting fingerprints or decoding messages!”); and the outermost section was a Secret Stratospheric Pen (“Writes at any altitude, or under water, in red ink!”).
Neat. Incredibly neat. The neatest ring in Jack’s collection. Far more complex than his Buck Rogers Ring of Saturn, or his Shadow ring, or even his Kix Atomic Bomb Ring. It deserved auspicious display. But where? His front room was already jammed with neat stuff. Radio premiums, cereal give aways, comic strip tie ins – crassly commercial junk from a time before he was born. Why did he collect them? After years of accumulating his hoard, Jack still hadn’t found the answer. So he kept buying. And buying.
Old goodies and oddities littered every flat surface on the mismatched array of Victorian golden oak furniture crowding the room. Certificates proclaiming him an official member of The Shadow Society, the Doc Savage Club, the Nick Carter Club, Friends of the Phantom, the Green Hornet G J M Club, and other august organizations papered the walls.
Jack glanced at the Shmoo clock on the wall above the hutch. He had an appointment with a new customer in twenty minutes or so. No time to find a special spot for the Sky King Magni Glo Writing Ring, so he placed it next to his Captain Midnight radio decoder. He pulled a worn red windbreaker over his shirt and jeans and headed for the door.
4
Outside in the growing darkness, Jack hurried through the West Seventies, passing trendy boutiques and eateries that catered to the local yuppies and their affluent subgroup, dinks – double income, no kids. They types who were paying $9.50 for a side dish of the Upper West Side’s newest culinary rage – mashed potatoes.
The drinkers stood three deep around the bar at Julio’s. Two hundred dollar shirts and three hundred dollar sweaters were wedged next to grease monkey overalls. Julio’s had somehow managed to hang onto its old clientele despite the invasion of the Giorgio Armani and Donna Karen set. The yups and dinks had discovered Julio’s a while back. Thought it had “rugged charm,” found the bar food “authentic,” and loved its “unpretentious atmosphere.”
They drove Julio up the wall.
Julio was behind the bar, under the “Free Beer Tomorrow…” sign. Jack waved to let him know he was here. As Jack wandered the length of the bar he overheard a blond dink in a blue Ralph Lauren blazer, holding a mug of draft beer; he’d been here maybe once or twice before, and was pointing out Julio’s famous dead succulents and asparagus ferns hanging in the windows to a couple who were apparently newcomers.
“Aren’t they just fabulous?”
“Why doesn’t he just get fresh ones?” the woman beside him asked. She was sipping white wine from a smudged tumbler. She grimaced as she swallowed.
Julio made a point of stocking the sourest Chardonnay on the market.
“I think he’s making a statement,” the guy said.
“About what?”
“I haven’t the faintest. But don’t you just love them?”
Jack knew what the statement was: Callousless people go home – this is a working man’s bar. But they didn’t see it. Julio was purposely rude to them, and he’d instructed his help to follow his lead, but it didn’t work. The dinks thought it was a put on, part of the ambiance. They ate it up.
Jack stepped over the length of rope that closed off the back half of the seating area and dropped into his usual booth in the darkened rear. As Julio came out from behind the bar, the blond dink flagged him down.
“Can we get a table back there?”
“No,” Julio said.
The muscular little man brushed by him and nodded to Jack on his way to assuming the welcoming committee post by the front door.
Jack pulled an iPod from his jacket pocket and set up a pair of lightweight headsets while he mentally reviewed the two phone calls that had led to this meet. The first had been on the answering machine he kept in a deserted office on Tenth Avenue. He’d called it from a pay booth this morning and heard someone named Munir Habib explaining in a tight, barely accented voice that he needed help. Needed it bad. He explained how he’d got the number. He didn’t know what Jack could do for him but he was desperate. He gave his phone number and said he’d be waiting. “Please save my family!” he’d said.
Jack then made a couple of calls on his own. Mr. Habib’s provenance checked out so Jack had called him back. From the few details he’d allowed Habib to give over the phone, Jack had determined that the man was indeed a potential customer. He’d set up a meet in Julio’s.
A short, fortyish man stepped through Julio’s front door and looked around uncertainly. His light camel hair sport coat was badly wrinkled, like he’d slept on it. He had milk chocolate skin, a square face, and bright eyes as black as the stiff, straight hair on his head. Julio spoke to him, they exchanged a few words, then Julio smiled and shook his hand. He led him back toward Jack, patting him on the back, treating him like a relative. Close up, the guy looked halfway to zombie. Even if he weren’t, he wouldn’t have a clue that he’d just been expertly frisked. Julio indicated the seat opposite Jack and gave a quick O K behind his back as the newcomer seated himself.
When Julio got back to the bar, the blond guy in the blazer stopped him again.
“How come they get to sit over there and we don’t?”
Julio swung on him and got in his face. He was a good head shorter than the blond guy but he was thickly muscled and had that air of barely restrained violence. It wasn’t an act. Julio was feeling mean these days.
“You ask me one more time about those tables, man, and you outta here. You hear me? You out and you never come back!”
As Julio strutted away, the blond guy turned to his companions, grinning.
“I just love this place.”
Jack turned his attention to his own customer. He extended his hand.
“I’m Jack.”
“Munir Habib.” His palm was cold and sweaty. “Are you the one who…?”
“That’s me.”
A few beats of silence, then, “I was expecting…”
“You and everybody else.” They all arrived expecting someone bigger, someone darker, someone meaner looking. “But this is the guy you get. You’ve got the down payment on you?”
Munir glanced around furtively. “Yes. It is a lot to carry around in cash.”
“It’s safe here. Keep it for now. I haven’t decided yet whether we’ll be doing business. What’s the story?”
“As I told you on the phone, my wife and son have been kidnapped and are being held hostage.”
A kidnap. One of Jack’s rules was to avoid kidnappings. They were the latest crime fad in the city these days, usually over drugs. They attracted feds and Jack had less use for Feds than he had for local cops. But this Munir guy had sworn he hadn’t called the cops. Said he was too scared by the kidnapper’s threats. Jack didn’t know if he could believe him.
&nb
sp; “Why call me instead of the cops?”
Munir reached inside his jacket and pulled out some Polaroids. His hand trembled as he passed them over.
“This is why.”
The first showed an attractive blond woman, thirty or so, dressed in a white blouse and a dark skirt, gagged and bound to a chair in front of a blank, unpainted wall. A red plastic funnel had been inserted through the gag into her mouth. A can of Drano lay propped in her lap. Her eyes held Jack for a moment – pale blue and utterly terrified. Caution: Contains lye was block printed across the bottom of the photo.
Jack grimaced and looked at the second photo. At first he wasn’t sure what he was looking at, like one of those pictures you get when the camera accidentally goes off in your hand. A big meat cleaver took up most of the frame, but the rest was –
He repressed a gasp when he recognized the bare lower belly of a little boy, his hairless pubes, his little penis laid out on the chopping block, the cleaver next to it, ominously close.
Okay. He hadn’t called the cops.
Jack handed back the photos.
“How much do they want?”
“I don’t believe it is a ‘they.’ I think it is a ‘he.’ And he does not seem to want money. At least not yet.”
“He’s a psycho?”
“I think so. He seems to hate Arabs – all Arabs – and has picked on me.” Munir’s features suddenly constricted into a tight knot as his voice cracked. “Why me?”
Jack realized how close this guy was to tumbling over the edge. He didn’t want him to start blubbering here.
“Easy, guy,” he said softly. “Easy.”
Munir rubbed his hands over his face, and when next he looked at Jack, his features were blotchy but composed.
“Yes. I must remain calm. I must not lose control. For Barbara. And Robby.”
Jack had a nightmare flash of Gia and Vicky in the hands of some of the psychos he’d had to deal with and knew at that moment he was going to be working with Munir. The guy was okay.
“An Arab hater. One of Kahane’s old crew, maybe?”
“No. Not a Jew. At least not that I can tell. He keeps referring to a brother who was killed in the Trade Towers. I’ve told him that I’m an American citizen just like him. But he says I’m from Saudi Arabia, and Saudis brought down the Towers and an Arab’s an Arab as far as he’s concerned.”
“Start at the beginning,” Jack said. “Any hint that this was coming?”
“Nothing. Everything has been going normally.”
“How about someone from the old country.”
“I have no ‘old country.’ I’ve spent more of my life in America than in Saudi Arabia. My father was on long term assignment here with Saud Petroleum. I grew up in New York. I was in college here when he was transferred back. I spent two months in the land of my birth and realized that my homeland was here. I made my Hajj, then returned to New York. I finished school and became a citizen.”
“Still could be someone from over there behind it. I mean, your wife doesn’t look like she’s from that part of the world.”
“Barbara was born and raised in Westchester.”
“Couldn’t marrying someone like that drive one of these fundamentalists–”
“No. Absolutely not.” Munir’s face hardened. Absolute conviction steeled his voice. “An Arab would never do what this man has done to me.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“He made me… he made me eat…” The rest of the sentence seemed to be lodged in Munir’s throat. “…pork. And made me drink alcohol with it. Pork!”
Jack almost laughed. Munir was most assuredly a Moslem. But still, what was the big deal? Jack could think of things a whole lot worse he could have been forced to do.
“What’d you have to do – eat a ham on rye?”
“No. Ribs. He told me to go to a certain restaurant on Forty seventh Street last Friday at noon and buy what he called ‘a rack of baby back ribs.’ Then he wanted me to stand outside on the sidewalk to eat them and wash them down with a bottle of beer.”
“Did you?”
Munir bowed his head. “Yes.”
Jack was tempted to ask if he liked the taste but stifled the question. Some folks took this stuff very seriously. He’d never been able to fathom how otherwise intelligent people allowed their dietary habits to be controlled by something written in book hundreds or thousands of years ago by someone who didn’t have indoor plumbing. But then he didn’t understand a lot of things about a lot of people. He freely admitted that. And what they ate or didn’t eat, for whatever reasons, was the least of those mysteries.
“So you ate pork and drank a beer to save your wife and child. Nobody’s going to call out the death squads for that. Or are they?”
“He made me choose between Allah and my family,” Munir said. “Forgive me, but I chose my family.”
“I doubt if Allah or any sane person would forgive you if you hadn’t.”
“But don’t you see? He made me do it at noon on Friday.”
“So?”
“That is when I should have been in my mosque, praying. It is one of the five duties. No follower of Islam would make a fellow believer do that. He is not an Arab, I tell you. You need only listen to the tape to know that.”
“Okay. We’ll get to the tape in a minute. Munir had told Jack that he’d been using his answering machine to record the nut’s calls since yesterday. “Okay. So he’s not an Arab. What about enemies? Got any?”
“No. We lead a quiet life. I run the auditing department at Saud Petrol. I have no enemies. Not many friends to speak of. We keep very much to ourselves.”
If that was true – and Jack had learned the hard way over the years never to take what the customer said at face value – then Munir was indeed the victim of a psycho. And Jack hated dealing with psychos. They didn’t follow the rules. They tended to have their own queer logic. Anything could happen. Anything.
“All right. Let’s start at the beginning. When did you first realize something was wrong?”
“When I came home from work Thursday night and found our apartment empty. I checked the answering machine and heard a distorted voice telling me that he had my wife and son and that they’d be fine if I did as I was told and didn’t go to the police. And if I had any thought of going to the police in spite of what he’d said, I should look on the dresser in our bedroom. The photographs were there.” Munir rubbed a hand across his eyes. “I sat up all night waiting for the phone to ring. He finally called me Friday morning.”
“And told you that you had to eat pork.”
Munir nodded. “He would tell me nothing about Barbara and Robby except that they were alive and well and were hoping I wouldn’t ‘screw up.’ I did as I was told, then hurried home and tried to vomit it up. He called and said I’d ‘done good.’ He said he’d call me again to tell me the next trick he was going to make me do. He said he was going to ‘put me through the wringer but good.’ “
“What was the next trick?”
“I was to steal a woman’s pocketbook in broad daylight, knock her down, and run with it. And I was not to get caught. He said the photos I had were ‘Before.’ If I was caught, he would send me ‘After.’“
“So you became a purse snatcher for a day. A successful one, I gather.”
Munir lowered his head. “I’m so ashamed… that poor woman.” His features hardened. “And then he sent the other photo.”
“Yeah? Let’s see it.”
Munir suddenly seemed flustered. “It’s – it’s at home.”
He was lying. Why?
“Bull. Let me see it.”
“No. I’d rather you didn’t–”
“I need to know everything if I’m going to help you.” Jack thrust out his hand. “Give.”
With obvious reluctance, Munir reached into his coat and passed across another still. Jack immediately understood his reluctance.
He saw the same blond woman from the first photo, only
this time she was nude, tied spread eagle on a mattress, her dark pubic triangle toward the camera, her eyes bright with tears of humiliation; an equally naked dark haired boy crouched in terror next to her.
And I thought she was a natural blonde was written across the bottom.
Jack’s jaw began to ache from clenching it closed. He handed back the photo.
“And what about yesterday?”
“I had to urinate in the street before the Imperial Theater at a quarter to three in the afternoon.”
“Swell,” Jack said, shaking his head. “Sunday matinee time.”
“Correct. But I would do it all again if it would free Barbara and Robby.”
“You might have to do worse. In fact, I’m sure you’re going to have to do worse. I think this guy’s looking for your limit. He wants to see how far he can push you, wants to see how far you’ll go.”
“But where will it end?”
“Maybe with you killing somebody.”
“Him? Gladly! I–”
“No. Somebody else. A stranger. Or worse – somebody you know.”
Munir blanched. “No. Surely you can’t be…” His voice trailed off.
“Why not? He’s got you by the balls. That sort of power can make a well man sick and a sick man sicker.” He watched Munir’s face, the dismay tugging at his features as he stared at the tabletop. “What’ll you do?”
A pause while Munir returned from somewhere far away. “What?”
“When the time comes. When he says you’ve got to choose between the lives of your wife and son, and the life of someone else. What’ll you do?”
Munir didn’t flinch. “Do the killing, of course.”
“And the next innocent victim? And the one after that, and the one after that? When do you say enough, no more, finis?”
Munir flinched. “I… I don’t know.”
Tough question. Jack wondered how he’d answer if Gia and Vicky were captives. How many innocent people would die before he stopped? What was the magic number? Jack hoped he never had to find out. The Son of Sam might end up looking like a piker.
“Let’s hear that tape.”
Munir pulled a cassette out of side pocket and slid it across. Jack slipped it into the Walkman. Maybe listening to this creep would help him get a read on him.
Quick Fixes: Tales of Repairman Jack Page 14