I went to wash up first, and when I returned, she was thick in sleep, breathing the deep, desperate breath of the exhausted.
I unzipped her purse. A wallet, three different lipsticks, a couple of tampons, two cell phones, and a blue sock with no mate. I put her keys back, then threw in some cash.
As an afterthought, I put in the hotel business card with the note. Life is making the best of a bad trajectory.
I grabbed the trumpet case and closed the door quietly.
On my way through the lobby, a cold worry scratched at my neck. I was being watched, tracked.
At the front door, Casper White clamped my elbow. Paler than before, he now bordered on translucent. He had the look of a panicked horse, his eyes wide and rolling about. “I’m listening.”
“For what?”
He looped his arm under mine, grabbed my thumb and wrenched it back. The pain was crippling. “Wrong answer.” We moved straight into a cab. He spoke to the driver in Icelandic. Directions. An address.
The cab slipped into traffic, heading away from the airport, where I wanted to go. Morning harassed the sky. A new day. The trumpet case was wedged between my knees. Casper kept pressure my twisted thumb. “Let up,” I said, swallowing a yawn. I was scared, but somehow—the lack of sleep, the alcohol lingering in my blood—my fear was fenced, held in check. My nerves were Teflon-coated. I’d get out of this, somehow.
“I called Higgles. He verified what I feared.” He freed my thumb. The cab decreased speed as we merged onto a roundabout. “You’re not him, my contact. You somehow—”
I popped the cab door. Fuck trying to figure out what he was talking about. The plan: escape. Hit the pavement running and don’t look back.
Casper had other ideas. He grabbed at the case and bon voyaged me with a kick, launching me head-first onto the median. Shoulder, back, then ass. An oil drum halted my cartwheel.
I wobbled to my feet, the hot taste of blood carpeting my mouth. Traffic pylons, rusty rebar, and broken wooden shipping pallets. I’d landed in the dumping grounds for the nearby construction project.
The case sat a few feet off.
“You forgot to tip the driver.” Casper. Like he teleported from the back of the cab. He rapped my ear, then took hold of my jacket collar. “Who are you?”
I coughed out a throat full of blood on his white shirt. “Wellem P. Steertal. Of Reykjavik, Iceland.”
“Wellem of Iceland is dead.”
I motioned toward the case. “Take it.”
He pecked my forehead with his fist. “I will. But first I need a name. Who set this up? Who do you work for?”
My thoughts clattered like a drawerful of dropped silverware. Traffic sped behind us, oblivious to the scene. I’d often imagined how I might die, my last moments on earth. Killed by an albino on a roundabout in Iceland wasn’t how I saw it happening.
I hacked out a name. “Higgles.”
Worry darkened his face. “Bullshit.” He leaned to me. “Tell me, then. What’s he look like?”
I answered with a double-fisted chop to his larynx.
He hissed like a pissed-off goose and staggered back.
I had an opening. A chance to grab the case and bolt. I scanned the ground for a weapon of some kind. A pipe, a piece of broken board, anything to fight with. Running wouldn’t get me far.
Casper ended my concern; he tripped on a piece of concrete, spun around in attempt to catch himself, and landed violently on a pile of loose rebar, stomach down.
He stayed down.
Cautiously, I tapped Casper with my toe.
He lolled his head upward, locking his hamster eyes on me. “Well played.” His hand tethered tight to my leg.
I kicked free.
Whelping in pain, he forced himself onto his back. A two-foot length of metal bar harpooned his chest. How was that possible? He hadn’t fallen that far or that hard. Open, shut, open. His mouth hinged like a landed fish as a sunset of red spread over his shirt. “I guess”—he chewed air—“it’s time to retire.” His blue-white fingers grasped the metal pole.
I bent down next to him, cupped his cold, sticky hands. “Leave it in,” I said, envisioning a fountain of blood arcing out the moment the bar was yanked free. “I’ll send for some help.”
His head rolled from side to side. Dark froth bubbled from the corners of his mouth. “Help me now. Ram it in.” His eyes shifted upward, looked beyond me. “If you don’t, he will.”
I turned, expecting to find someone there. There was no one. “Who?”
“He’ll make me talk, then kill me.” His voice wheezed like a damaged accordion. “Then he’ll find you.”
Walk away. Get free of the mess.
Casper reached out to touch my face. I slapped his hand away and was instantly disgusted with myself. The man was dying. He longed for human contact.
His breath smelled of rotting strawberries. “On three?” he pleaded.
I stood. A sourness squeezed up from my stomach. I couldn’t do it. It tore against everything I was. Up until now, my Kam Manning had been a game. A dangerous one, but still a game. Now, though…
Casper huffed out red spittle. “One.”
I stomped on the metal bar, driving it deep.
Cracking bones. A gurgling cry. Casper’s hands shot up, quivered, then dropped to the ground. Dead.
I vomited, then grabbed the trumpet case and didn’t look back.
Two hours later, airport security eyed my passport closely. Wellem P. Steertal it read. He studied my bandaged chin and blackened eye even closer. At least I’d washed my vomit off my jacket.
Security said something, pointed to my face. I forced a smile. I just murdered a man. “Bachelor party.”
I was waved through.
Sitting in the business class cabin, my ribs throbbing and my nerves chaotically firing, I forced down a whiskey and orange juice and then a second.
The attendant served me a third drink. “Are you all right?”
I sandwiched my hands between my thighs to stop them trembling. I’ve just murdered a man. “I hate flying.”
The engines revved. The plane taxied. Lift-off.
I’d gotten away, but from what or who, I didn’t know.
Flipping through the Icelandic newspaper, I came across my face on page twelve. Or, not my face, but Wellem’s.
I asked the attendant to translate the article. She skimmed the piece. “Crushed by a bus.” She pointed to a word. “Sjálfsvíg. Suicide.” Then she read further. “Or conspiracy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, a woman swore she saw a man push him into the street.” His finger settled on a line of text. “An albino.”
How Casper White’s death was described—accident or foul play—
I didn’t know. I killed him after the papers had gone to press.
◉ ◉ ◉
Only the depressed have a realistic view of themselves.
Chapter 42
A wallet with no ID, some cash, a cheap watch, and a cell phone. The Reykjavik police dumped the dead albino’s things in plastic tray. The lead detective checked the phone’s call log. One number. A Seattle area code.
On the fifth ring a man picked up. “Is it done?” he said. “Did you get the case back?”
“Yes, ’ello.” The detective’s English sucked. “I call the phone. The man who owned it. Who do I speak now?”
The line went dead. And while the detective tried calling repeatedly, no one every picked up again.
Chapter 43
I texted Higgles when I landed in Boston. WTF? The albino tried to kill me.
Did he succeed? came the reply.
I left the trumpet case in a locker at a gym near the airport, as instructed. My payment was to come later.
I went back to my place in Cincinnati
, packed my books and my clothing, and relocated some forty miles west to Krotchersville, Indiana because—why? I knew nothing about the town and had only seen its name on a road sign. It could have been anywhere, really. I wasn’t so much moving toward something as moving away from it. Cincinnati had started to become a home, a place I saw as my own. Part of me. And like Layla, I wanted the impossible, to escape the inescapable—myself.
Krotchersville, I tried convincing myself, would give me a fresh start.
What I got was raided. My second month there, I pissed off my asshole neighbor when I asked him to turn down his music. I’ve got nothing against techno, but not at 3:00 a.m. So the following night, he called the sheriff and said I was dealing drugs out of my place.
The sheriff pounded on my door at 10:00 p.m. then broke it down before I could even respond. I was tackled and cuffed, and had to lay face down my floor as his team tore my apartment apart. “Complaint from your neighbor,” I was told.
Finally, they dragged me downstairs, tossed me in the back of a cruiser. Sitting cuffed and cramped, I remained quiet, holding my breath against the stench of bum-ass and ammonia.
Outside, the drug-sniffing dogs milled about, waiting for their orders.
“You’re fucked, William,” the sheriff said.
“Wellem,” I corrected. “Wellem P. Steertal.” I’d gotten an Indiana driver’s license in Wellem’s name, which was easy enough. I took his passport, the lease on my apartment—which I’d set up in his name—an electric bill, and a library card to the DMV. They issued me an ID, no questions asked.
The sheriff stared at the license he had in his hand, then glared hard at me. “What kind of name is Wellem?” I thought of asking him the same thing about his. His tag read MZTET. I’d seen the name on lawn signs around town. Re-Elect Mztet for Sheriff. It was like he’d been handed a name before it was finished. “Well, Wellem,” he said, “there’s enough evidence on you to put you away for a while.”
He was right. Somewhere there was enough evidence to put me away. Fortunately, they didn’t have any of it. They’d rifle through my closet of dirty clothes, my empty refrigerator, my stack of books. They’d find nothing incriminating. I slept there, little more. I was trying to live the simple life in Krotchersville. It wasn’t hard. The three things the town was known for—growing corn, shooting hoops, and smoking crystal meth—didn’t interest me. There wasn’t much else going on, which was perfect. Exactly what I needed to clear my head, shake off the constant, low-level worry that had wrapped itself around me.
Since Reykjavik, since I’d murdered Casper, crippling panic attacks would shrivel my lungs to the size of sun-dried tomatoes. Fear would wire through my blood and my throat would twist shut. I felt garroted; I couldn’t breath. So when I settled in Krotchersville, I launched into a Zen phase. I read the books, meditated, and tried my hardest to ingest shitty situations and spit out something clean, something pure.
That was why I took the apartment. I didn’t like it. It felt off. The floor layout was forced, like it had once been a studio but had been built out into a two-bedroom. The corners appeared suddenly, the rooms were oddly small and claustrophobic. The ceiling hovered low. The space was cold. Daylight never found its way in.
It was exactly what I needed.
Discomfort isn’t always a bad thing. It can be a teacher. Though what it teaches, I’ve yet to determine.
My landlord I liked. Xavier Yolando Zapitos, or XYZ as he insisted on being called. I liked him because there was no reason for me to like him. He wasn’t so much a slumlord as a caricature of slumlord. It was a game for him; he wanted to see what he could get away with and for how long. Building’s boiler broken? It doesn’t really get cold until December. Mice? At least they aren’t rats. Faucet leaking? At least you have running water.
When he showed me the apartment, XYZ promised a fresh paint job, and to fix the hole in the living room wall, the bedroom door that was half off the hinge, and the toilet that didn’t flush.
I signed the lease and paid three months’ rent in advance in cash. I wouldn’t see him again. He wouldn’t fix a thing. He wouldn’t ever think of me again, his head filled with too many other worries. Which was what I wanted, to be left alone.
Not being noticed is an unappreciated luxury.
But now I was anything but, the star at the center of a scene.
The minutes clicked past. Ten, fifteen, forty. One of the cops came out of the building, held up his hands and shook his head. They had nothing.
A reporter showed up, asked for a statement from Mztet. His attitude shifted from cockiness to concern. “Not now,” he said, nervously. Elections were this year. If today’s bust was big enough, a few kilos of coke or the uncovering of a gun-running ring, then it would blaze a path to another four years for him. If it was a bust for one joint, that’d be fine too. But having seen his challenger’s campaign flyers accusing Mztet of wasting taxpayers money and doing an all-around shitty job as Sheriff, I could understand why Mztet couldn’t turn up empty-handed. He’d be mocked right out of his job. “Wellem,” he said, “I’m a hardass with compassion. You help me and maybe I can help you.”
I wanted to talk. He’d gotten the wrong guy, I was innocent—at least innocent of this crime. But it was the wrong time, wrong audience.
I don’t know why I craved credibility, but I did. I guess we all do. We want the small lies of our small lives to be real. “I love you.” “Truth be told.” “No, you don’t look fat.” When you get down to it, we’re animals built on deception, on smoke and mirrors. But we still want to be seen as trustworthy.
XYZ appeared in the lights of the cruiser, his hands to his head as he paced back and forth, panicked. He didn’t want attention any more than I did. Attention came with questions, and questions led to more questions. XYZ was not a man of answers.
Closing my eyes, I gathered my mind and tried forcing myself into the still, quiet space I’d been trying to reach with the stupid apartment, my deliberate self-denial. That place I knew nothing about.
I found myself laughing. Their systems would turn up nothing on Wellem P. Steertal. INS might find that the name belonged to a man now dead, though I doubted it. And I doubted Mztet would ever seek INS’s assistance. He didn’t seem the kind of guy to admit he needed help.
Mrztet shifted to face me. “You find this funny?”
I quieted, shook my head. “Okay, listen. If I offer information—”
I broke off.
Mztet dropped his voice. “I’m going to be honest with you: talk straight with me and maybe—maybe—I can soften your situation.” He had no intention of “softening my situation.” He was like XYZ that way. All empty promises.
XYZ circled the scene, his face flush with fret.
I said to Mztet, “Have you checked under the floorboards in the bedroom and the kitchen?”
Mztet eyes sparked with excitement. “That’s where you hid the stash?”
“There’s no stash. I told you that.”
He called a deputy over. “Get some crowbars, start pulling up the flooring.”
“And in the walls behind the shower,” I said, knowing they’d gut the place.
Before he hauled himself out of the cruiser to join the hunt, he flashed me a vicious grin. “Someone has just fucked themself proper.”
By noon the next day, I had packed my few belongings and caught a flight south.
By evening, my lips were dusted with powdered sugar from the beignets I ate in the French Quarter. Four miles away was Tulane University, my number two college pick.
◉ ◉ ◉
When people say “to be honest with you,” I take it to mean that they typically aren’t. That the act of being honest is something so uncommon for them that they feel compelled to acknowledge the oddity.
Chapter 44
I’d been in New Orleans less than a week
when a package arrived at my hotel. A new SIM card and payment for the Iceland job. I’d stopped wondering or worrying how he found me.
Book 7. Thursday, Higgles’ text read. Macao Thunder by Chet Tyson Miller. Published by Scepter Press, 1962, pure pulp trash. Fun trash, mind you, but trash all the same.
The gist of the book: an alcoholic advertising man heads to Macao, Brazil, to lock down a big account. Add a nubile girl, a dead body, a tropical storm, and a laundry bag full of money and, voilà, you have a thriller.
I prayed that the adventure Higgles had in mind would be less thrilling.
I bought a coach-class ticket on TAM Airlines and learned firsthand the difference been a nonstop and a direct flight. I had a direct flight to Rio, which meant we stopped in Miami and sat on the tarmac for nearly an hour.
In Rio I quickly cleared customs, then hopped on another flight to Macao.
I landed Wednesday night, wrinkled, constipated, and hungover from breathing airplane air for far too long. I cabbed it to a semi-cheap hotel, checked in under the name Clement Martin, then fell into a sleep that left me even more exhausted when I woke.
Thursday, I sat around the hotel room watching Ugly Betty dubbed in Portuguese and waited for Higgles to contact me.
My mind clouded with thoughts of Sarah. What if I had settled with her? What if I’d married her, built a life? She could have been my why. But I guess I was frightened I would end up like my folks, shackled to a relationship that I couldn’t figure a way to free myself from. They’d shown me that marriages were contracts, agreements, business deals. One party promises to provide X while the other offers Y in return. Love, at least for them, was a negotiable point.
I couldn’t settle and still keep Kam Manning. Each time I had to leave I’d have to lie. And lies have a way of taking on a life their own, tripping you up.
I stopped my stewing over “what if” when Higgles hit me with a text. Hard Rock, it read. Second floor, northside slots.
In the hotel lobby, I asked the front desk clerk to call me a cab to take me to the Hard Rock Café.
Where Night Stops Page 13