by Jeff Klima
“Like the car?” Andy asks, genuine. “You looked so damn cool driving around in yours that I decided I had to have one of my own—I get like that sometimes. Tom, it’s so, so damn good to finally meet you.”
“We’ve met before,” I remind him. “You gave me a good slash on my arm.” I feel a tinge of nervous energy in his presence, as if I am meeting a celebrity—someone I’ve only seen on the big movie screen and now they’re standing before me in person. I almost can’t believe it’s him.
“Water under the bridge, compadre. Now is the time to begin anew.” As he says this, he pulls a black semiautomatic pistol from his waistband and shifts it from his right hand to his left. “So, do you remember, on the phone, when I said no police?”
“Sure. But that was after I sent this one.”
Unconsciously, Andy shifts the gun back to his other hand so he can gesture with his left. “I see. Tom, can I ask why you sent the cop after me? I mean, I know I hadn’t said it then, but I feel like the ‘no cops’ rule was at least implied.”
“I think the rules changed when you killed Ivy.”
“Christ,” Stack breathes, through gritted teeth.
Andy glances to him and then at me. “Do me a favor, Tom. Just lift up your shirt and give a quick spin around for me. I’ve got a nervous feeling like you got a gun or something. Call me crazy but I trust my gut with this stuff.”
He’s got his pistol trained back on me and is close enough that I do what he says without questioning it. My gut told me he would check for the gun, and my not having it has momentarily extended my life.
Satisfied that I am who he wants me to be, he smiles. “I apologize. From here on out it is total trust. Do you know why I killed all those people, Tom? Ivy included?”
I stand silent awaiting an answer; Stack listens as well.
“Because they were detrimental. They were worthless. They were poor and filthy creatures who brought no benefit to society. What was Ivy? A bartender in a titty joint? Ooh, the world can’t live without that.”
“So you’re society’s broom?”
“And dustpan. Why not? Obviously you can’t stand on the ‘killing people is wrong’ soapbox.”
“No, but so what if the world is full of scumbags, losers, and assholes? You can’t kill them all.”
Stack groans, agonizingly, as if in agreement.
“You ever do the math on people, Tom? When I’m not doing stand-up, I’ve got nothing but free time. Coming from a wealthy family has afforded me that which is the greatest asset—time and the freedom to do what I want with it. Sometimes I learn skills to improve my capabilities as a human being, skills like lock picking or trapshooting—this morning, I was teaching myself to juggle. But sometimes, I just sit there and I think. And one day, I had the realization that if a couple has three kids and those three kids each has three kids, and each of those kids has three kids, and so on and so on, do you know how many generations it would take for there to be a thousand extra poverty-stricken fucks on this planet? Six. Six short generations. The earth isn’t getting any bigger and the renewable resources we have can’t possibly keep up with that kind of multiplying. And then you’ve got the Catholics, Tom. They don’t believe in birth control at all. So do you think they stop at three? Christ, no. Do you know how my family made its money? Condoms, Tom—we’re a condom family.”
“Love Sock,” I say, realizing.
“That’s right. Seems kind of fitting then that I carved my own niche in the family business, doesn’t it?”
“So your primary focus these days is population control? You’re not really a bad guy? You’re just a new-wave sociologist?”
“I’m loving the sarcasm right now, Tom. No, my primary focus is stand-up, because what can anybody really do these days but fucking laugh at all the misery and filth that surrounds us? Do you know how many of those people just let me into their motel rooms because I told them that I had drugs? Killing thousands of future scumbags is just my way of giving back.”
“A philanthropist as well. Why spare me then? I’m an ex-con junkie with a bullshit job and no money. You’d think I’d be the first person you’d kill, if you’re so noble.”
“Because you intrigue me. You’re smarter than the garbage that you surround yourself with. I think you get it; I think you get exactly what I’m about, and I think you like it. ‘It’s not too late to be a person of substance in this world’—that’s what my dad always tells me on the phone. Needless to say, the Condom King does not approve of stand-up comedy.”
“My dad told me it was too late for me. That’s the last thing he ever said to me.”
“Prove him wrong.”
“Don’t—agh—listen to him, Tanner,” Stack pipes up from his place on the floor.
“See, normally I wouldn’t hurt a police officer,” Andy says, feigning sympathy to the man. “I respect them somewhat. They do a version of what I do, but their hands are tied because they are also just poor civil servants doing what they’re told to do. They are governed by the rules of a country that doesn’t quite understand itself anymore. The idealism with which the Constitution was struck didn’t anticipate this dystopian shithole, because Thomas fucking Jefferson didn’t do the fucking math. Do you get what I’m saying?”
“Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to join you.”
“Sales! I love sales! I love the idea of selling—it’s in my blood, I suppose. Sales is this sort of rhetoric where I keep pitching you ‘whys’ and you keep hitting back ‘why not’s’ until one of us runs out of reasons. So, please, tell me, why not?”
“I don’t have the motivation for the work. I’m just not that interested.”
“What does interest you?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
Stack moans again, and I wonder if he’s slipping in and out of consciousness.
“Did it ever bother you that you spent years of your life in prison for a crime that you can’t remember?”
“Yes.”
“Hypothetically speaking, of course, if you were going to do that same amount of time in prison regardless, wouldn’t you have rather felt the experience so you could decide for yourself whether it was worth it?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so what if you had the opportunity, hypothetically again, to find out—without going to prison this time—if killing suits you? I mean, experience is the stock of life, right?”
“Yeah, I’d be curious.”
“Alright then.” Andy flips the gun around in his hand to grab it by the barrel and extends it, butt first, to me. “No more hypotheticals. This is your final test—he’s wearing a bulletproof vest, so shoot this crippled fuck between the ears and finalize our partnership.”
I take the gun from him slowly, checking to see that the safety is off. It’s a wicked, boxy-looking thing with slightly rounded edges and a coarse grip. “I don’t know too much about guns,” I say, looking up at Andy, who is watching me with widened eyes—possibly a heightened sense of anticipation?
“Feels good, right? Much better to be on this side of the gun. It’s ready to go, just point and shoot. Feel free to stand as close and get as messy as you like.”
“Tom, don’t do this,” Detective Stack begs, alert now, and it’s as if he’s suddenly remembered I have a first name. He tries to wriggle, wormlike, up against the pipe, but the shattered bone fragments in his legs grind. “Ahhh! Please! You’ll get the death penalty if you do; you’ve done nothing wrong yet! Please…don’t!”
“So now I’ve done nothing wrong?” I ask, advancing toward the prone officer. “You’ve harassed me for the last several weeks. You’ve been a pest, an irritating little gnat in my ear. Andy is right about me—I don’t give a fuck about people, never have, never will. But that’s not just poor people, that’s everybody. And then, the one person I thought I did give a damn about and called for you, the police officer, to help save her, you dicked me around and took your sweet time. Now she’s dead, and
for that, I blame you.”
“Blame him, he’s the one who killed her,” Stack tries, uncertain which shoulder he should be looking past as I step over his slack legs.
“Andy is an animal, Detective…like me. We operate on instinct. He is missing that same component of sympathy that I lack. There’s a commonality between him and me that you don’t share. And again, he is right. That sympathy is a deficiency in people. There really is no need for anyone. Kill a genius and another will take his place. Andy, you’ll appreciate this: did you know that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone? Well, he beat another telephone inventor to the patent office by hours. Hours. Had Bell gotten run over by a horse and buggy on his way over to the patent office, guess what? We’d still have telephones. The same holds true for detectives.”
Stack salvages some anger from his fear. “Then my replacement will find you two and bury you!”
“And then there will just be two more of us. Another Lake and Ng, another Sample and Tanner. See how nothing matters?” I don’t need to look to know that Andy approves.
“I’d say you wouldn’t do it, Tanner, that you don’t have it in you, but clearly you do,” Stack says, fuming. “So pull the trigger already. Make mine the second life you take.”
“I’m going to, but I want to be really close when I do.” I bend down over the helpless man, the gun pushing against his skull, and I feel a wad of folded paper in my back pocket pressing against my thigh. It is the note from Mrs. Kelly, splattered with Harold’s blood, forgiving me against all reason for the death of her daughter. As Harold said, it is a soul on paper—possibly my soul. So strange, that I would feel it right at this second. It’s coincidences like this that cause lost men to find God.
But those men are fools.
I pull the trigger.
Chapter 28
The sudden gasp of shocked air from Stack coincides with a click from the gun’s hammer dropping on the firing pin in an empty chamber. I retract the weapon from the cop’s head and turn to face Andy, who is grinning from ear to ear.
“You fucking rock star!” he congratulates me, enthused. He then pulls out a full clip of bullets from his back pocket, which he tosses over and I catch. “The fucking test was whether you’d cave and try and kill me instead, or even if you’d have the nuts to pull the trigger at all, but you knocked that fucking test out of the ballpark! Fuck, man!” He paces in uncontrollable delight. “We’re going to carve this country up, you and me—oops—you gotta pull back the slide and hit that button there, the one on the side,” he instructs as I fumble to eject the dummy clip and replace it with the full one. “It’s a pistol.”
I do, and the empty drops from the bottom of the gun, clattering to the floor. I slide the new clip in, smacking the bottom to force it in when I encounter resistance.
“Oh, goddamnit, goddamnit,” Stack curses from the ground, now fully terrorized. I tug on the slide and the top of the gun ratchets forward, pulling a bullet up into the chamber. Stack makes a noise like a whine through gritted teeth.
“Locked and loaded,” Andy cheers. “Now—grease that pig for real.”
I look back down at Stack, who is emotionally spent, and then at the radiating figure of Andy with his red hair and shit-eating grin. He who believes that we will be partners. This is the problem with fanatics: they always want way more than you’re willing to give them.
Before Andy has a chance to make sense of my movements, I point the pistol at him and pull the trigger three times in rapid succession. This time the gun reacts, convulsing violently in my hand as each concussive burst explodes from it in accordance with the movements from my finger. Why three times? Why fucking not?
Blood spits outward from the holes in Andy’s chest and stomach, and though my grouping isn’t great, they’ll do the trick. Guess he’s not wearing a bulletproof vest. Sternum-to-lungs for two of them, and the other one hits down by his belly button, and into his small intestine. Andy gasps as his punctured lungs refuse to give him air, and drops. I expect it will take him a few minutes to die from the blood invading his vitals—but I don’t want to wait that long.
“You were right,” I admit as I stand over him now with the gun pointing down at his face. “Killing does suit me.” I pull the trigger once more and the bullet blasts into his face and out the back, flattening into the concrete below, spraying a vibrant mist of crimson into a sort of halo around his head.
“Tanner?” Stack asks, coming back to his senses. “Tanner, are you there?”
“I’m here,” I confirm, bending to reach into Andy’s pocket for the keys to Stack’s handcuffs. “Thank you,” he says simply, his reddened face drenched in sweat. When I’ve got him free from his restraints and flipped around so that he can sit propped up against the pipe and rub at his damaged wrists, he asks me, “How did you know the gun wasn’t loaded?”
“I could tell by its weight,” I lie.
“So you…agh…got him to trust you by pretending like you were actually going to kill me—that’s pretty smooth operating.”
The reality is, well, it doesn’t matter what the reality is. I don’t think I can explain to Stack that the gun wasn’t loaded because I wouldn’t have loaded it either. Doing so would force me to admit that maybe Andy and I are closer in spirit than I’d like. In the grand scheme of things, I don’t care whether Stack lives or dies—I’m not wired that way. But he didn’t deserve to die today—not over this. Today, a little luck was on his side. In the end, the bad guy is dead, the cop gets to live to be a cop another day, and all the rest is just details. As we sit quietly, waiting for the LAPD, the ambulance, and the coroner to arrive, I feel the vibrating pulse of my phone against my leg. I look. It’s not the service, but it’s also not a number I recognize. Don’t answer it, my brain commands as the cell phone continues to pulse. There is no one left that I want to hear from, least of all a wrong number or someone trying to sell me on a new long-distance carrier. I hesitate another second, glancing over to reassure myself that Andy is still, in fact, lying dead in front of me. He is. Finally, curiosity gets the better of me and I answer.
“Tom.”
“Tom!” the female voice exclaims, exploding my name in a cacophony of emotions.
“Ivy?” I exclaim, too confused to contain my own emotional swell. Stack, even in his wounded delirium, perks up and takes notice, his surprised expression a mirror of my own.
“Thank goodness you’re okay,” Ivy sobs into the phone with a gasping, airless exclamation of relief. “Andy! He’s going to be looking for you. He—”
I cut her off. “Andy’s dead,” I tell her reassuringly. “He’s dead.”
“Oh…” she says, coughing once, sharply. “That’s great news!”
“How are you alive?” I can’t help but question, indifferent to how morbid the question might seem.
Classic Ivy, though, she doesn’t notice. “My car—Andy tried to burn me alive. I came to…everything was on fire,” she explains in short bursts, clearly having inhaled a lot of smoke. “I couldn’t get out the front, so I crawled underneath all the burning stuff and was able to get out through the trunk. My coat hanger…and the trash. My trash! In my backseat! It saved my life.” I feel like she is beaming now, through the phone.
“I can’t believe it,” I sputter.
“I can’t believe you’re okay,” she says. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“You? I thought I’d lost you,” I say, still not fully feeling like I deserve to believe in this reality.
“You’d better thank your lucky tarot cards that I’m a slob.”
“I do!”
“I borrowed this paramedic’s cell phone…I was so scared…I want to see you…in person.”
“I want to see you too.” And as I say the words, I know I actually mean them. It feels weird, but not in a bad way—right, even.
“No more fights, Tom…ever.”
“Oh, there will be fights, Ivy. Years and years of fighting…and about the stupid
est stuff too.”
I set the phone on the ground and tilt my head back to rest against the concrete wall in exhausted disbelief. I didn’t know I was capable of experiencing disbelief anymore.
Stack looks over at me and gives a simple, sober nod. I know the look—it means we’re square. We’re not going to be friends, but we’re also not going to be enemies. No, whatever happens from here on out, our past interactions don’t count.
Lolling my head up to look at the soot-covered ceiling and the rays of oppressive, miserable sunlight heat leeching in, I smile.
Maybe this city isn’t so goddamn rotten after all? I dare to think.
Nah, that’s pushing it.
For Phil and Judy Belvill.
They made a hell of a kid together.
Acknowledgments
A very special thanks to my smart-as-hell agent, Ann Collette, and my awesome editor, Dana Isaacson—should you ever find yourself in a room with one of these two people, get to know them immediately. Also a big thank-you to Deborah Dwyer, who got stuck with the undoubtedly obnoxious job of having to fine-tune my prose. Just so you know I know, Deborah: redheads and freckles aren’t ugly at all.
And since I’m apparently dispensing acknowledgments like they’re Halloween candy, I have to give a huge shout-out to Philip Middlemiss at Eureka High—the best and worst teacher I ever had. Kids, if you are lucky enough to take his classes, make sure you listen to every damn word he says, because he is intelligent. And then, because he is so, so jaded, do just the opposite of everything he says. This will give you a fighting chance at being successful in this world. In all seriousness, though, you couldn’t ask for a finer sculptor of an already twisted mind than him. Thanks.