BABY FOR A PRICE: Marino Crime Family

by Kathryn Thomas

  He just shakes his head at me, seeming to say, We both know that wasn’t enough.

  “I don’t think earlier today was as one-sided as you’d like to believe, anyhow,” Hound says. “My opinion is—and I was there, you’ll remember—that you enjoyed it just as much as I did.”

  “Maybe I was faking!” I exclaim wildly, in an effort to exclaim away the truth. “You might remember where we met, Mr. Hound. It was at a place where the waitresses are trained to be the best fakers in the world.”

  The red light catches Hound’s ice-blue eyes. “And the come all over my prick. Was that fake, too?”

  I blush, lowering my gaze. “So why am I here? That’s the third time I’ve asked you now.”

  “Are you angry?”

  “I don’t have time to be angry. I’ve just worked a nine-hour shift and I have to be up at five to get in for a six o’clock start.”

  “That’s rough,” Hound says.

  “Careful,” I warn him. “It sounded like there was real compassion in your voice there.”

  “Maybe there was.” I look up to see him smiling at me openly. Then he offers me his hand. “My name is Henry Roscoe. I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced.”

  I take his hand, constantly surprised by the words coming out of his mouth. You’d expect a man like him to grunt and swear and shout. Huh, maybe I’ve got a little prejudice in me. His hand against mine brings back memories. I withdraw it before they get out of control.

  “But everybody calls me Hound,” he says.

  “Why?” I ask.

  He seems stumped by that question, squinting and looking through me into the past. “I don’t really know,” he answers. “Isn’t that odd?”

  He leans back, taking a long swig from his beer. I find I like watching these calm motions of his body, like watching the calm motions of a huge machine, a derrick pump, each of its movements solid and infinitely strong. Not at all like the erratic, face-touching, hand-worrying of other men. Maybe I should stop thinking like that. Other men. As though this mysterious stranger is already a category of his own.

  “Why you’re here.” Hound nods. “Alright. To business, then. Let me explain my situation. I’m a debt collector, as you’ve probably guessed. I work for a man named Mac who was a friend of my dad’s; my dad’s dead now.” I remember him telling Dad that his mother ran out on him, so he’s all alone. For the first time in months I find myself glad that I still have my father, at least. He seems to be about to go on, but then he shrugs, clears his throat, and says, “There’s no need to go into unnecessary detail. The point is this: I’ve saved up some cash and I’m looking for a place in the suburbs, the sort of place where real people live, where you wouldn’t look twice if there was a bookshelf on the wall and desk set up at the window overlooking the garden.”

  “I’m sure there are many places where you can put shelves up,” I say, confused by the importance he seems to place on this. His eyes went sort of dreamy when he said bookshelf. What a conundrum this giant is.

  “I want a wife with me when I go check out the houses.”

  He watches me calmly.

  It takes me a second to realize what he means. When I do, I say, “This isn’t a real proposal, is it?”

  “Depends what you mean by real.” He reaches into his jeans pocket and takes out two rings: one plain silver band and one diamond-studded band. A wedding rind and an engagement ring. “These cost real money. Here’s my proposal: you’ll be my wife as I’m looking around the houses—the realtors respond to couples, you know—and I’ll let your dad’s debts slide. I won’t drill you in every alleyway we pass, but if you find you love your husband just too damn much to resist, then don’t expect me to be some kind of gentleman.”

  The main thing I hear is dad’s debts slide. Those three words ring around my head like some kind of chant. As though my entire life has been a football game and this is the home team’s winning song, roared after touchdowns with beer swilling over the rim of red plastic cups. This is what I am, what I’ve become. Somebody working to pay off debts. When it comes down to it, I don’t really have a choice. It’s this or let Hound collect my father’s teeth in a cup for his employer. I look him up and down. He’s changed into a faded blue shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, showing a triangular scar on his forearm that looks like he was nicked by a blade.

  My heart is thudding in my chest. I try and imagine what Other Daisy is doing right now. I think of her sometimes, even though it’s immature and I should’ve grown out of it by now. When I was a girl, I would wonder if Other Daisy—who existed in some far-off land much sweeter and easier than this one—was out with friends right now instead of indoors with her ear pressed against the wall listening to Mom being sick. Now when I think of Other Daisy, she’s wearing a suit in an office doing something businesslike. But I can’t sit here pondering Other Daisy forever. Hound is waiting for an answer. And in the end, there’s no doubt of what I’m going to say. I don’t have a choice, not if I want to protect my family.

  “I’ll do it. I’ll be your fake wife.”

  Hound smiles, and then leans across and slides the rings onto my finger. The metal is cool against my skin. But it is somehow reassuring, too, even if I know it’s all playacting.

  “Now what?” I ask, expecting him to slide his hand up my leg or leap on me. I’m ready for it, hungry for it, even.

  But he rises to his feet. “Now I take you home,” he says. “You look tired.”

  “If you take me home,” I reply, standing up with him so we’re almost touching, “you’ll know where I live. I don’t know if—”

  “—your beloved husband should be allowed to know where you live?”

  He leans close to me. I close my eyes, expecting—wanting—him to kiss me. But then I hear the curtains rustle. I open my eyes to find him waiting outside the booth, holding the curtains aside.

  His car is an army-green jeep with one of those big tires on the back, the windows tinted night-black. I climb into the passenger seat and instead of my bum finding soft cushion, I’m sitting on something hard and jagged. I pick it up and find it’s a copy of Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. To find a book like this—one I was studying in my last year in high school, before I dropped out—in a car like this, which belongs to a man like this, is such a shock I drop the book into my lap.

  “Something wrong?” Hound asks, as he starts the car, driving us smoothly through the streets, all of which are bathed in the light of the setting sun.

  I pick up the book again. He grins. “Oh, that. Much prefer Yates to Dickens, I’ve gotta say. For one thing Yates doesn’t make me pick up a dictionary every two seconds—just every four.”

  “You’re a conundrum,” I tell him, echoing my thoughts from earlier. A conundrum of a giant. That could be the title to a children’s book, I think: The Conundrum of Hound the Giant.

  “I never finished it,” I say. “I started it, once…I never learned what happened to…what are their names? April and Hank?”

  “Frank.” Hound gestures at the book. There’s something out-of-place in that: his giant paw gesturing at this sleek hardback. “Have that one. I’m done with it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He shrugs. “Why not?”

  I tuck it into my handbag. Then we’re walking up the steps to my apartment building, me fumbling in the bag for the keys, Hound waiting at my shoulder. When I finally get the keys into the lock, the door open, and I’m standing in the hallway and he’s standing just outside, I expect that now, finally, he’ll kiss me. My body is alive to the idea, aching memories of our animal fucking in the alleyway coming back to me. The book presses through my handbag into my thigh, and I find myself thankful that we’ll have a bed this time.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he says, strolling back toward his jeep.

  It’s probably for the best.

  I lie on my bed and stare up at the darkening ceiling, where a patch of chipping paint perfectly catches the changi
ng colors of the world outside. Yes, it’s probably for the best. But if my mind is relieved, my body isn’t, and by the time the ceiling has turned the color of a fading bruise my hand is snaking down between my legs.

  Chapter Six

  Hound

  As I drive over to Mac’s bar, I think about the lie I just told, and try and decide whether or not I’m worried about it. The truth is, I don’t have the ability to erase Dean’s debts, not really, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do anything to help them; that doesn’t mean I can’t buy them some time. If it’s not my decision whether or not Dean has to pay off all his debts, I can try and smooth-talk Mac out of collecting his teeth right away. The only thing is to think of something persuasive to say. I drive slowly, thinking about my father. He always knew what to say, always had the right words, was always able to talk his way out of a jam. Except one night when…But I won’t dwell on that. I’ve never understood what someone gains by dwelling on the bad things that happened to them. I want to try and think of something clever about past losses, maybe something from one of my books, but I’m head-tired and body-tired and want to get this business with Mac out of the way.

  Under my tiredness, I’m floating on a cloud, floating high above all this petty shit. For a long time I’ve been thinking about getting a place in the suburbs, or maybe further, maybe way further, maybe somewhere so far away I can completely reinvent myself, stop being Hound the Hitter and start being…being what? Hound the Librarian? I laugh gruffly. I don’t know, but something else, something less violent. And Daisy—she’s like something out of a dream. Even if I didn’t get to drill into her again, that sweet peachy ass and those tits and those moans and that face, a face to chase you into your dreams, even if I didn’t get all of that, I’d still be obsessing about her. There’s something cute about the way she looks around all nervous and shy, all the while with lust in her eyes she can’t hide. I think of myself walking around a nice, solid, calm house with Daisy on my arm, the realtor saying to her husband or his wife later that day, “They were such a nice couple.” I’m ashamed by these dreams as I pull into the parking lot of Mac’s bar, which is a dingy one-room drinking den and a front for Mac’s bigger, more lucrative businesses. Dreams like these don’t belong in places like Mac’s bar, which doesn’t even have a name since it blew away in the wind a couple of years ago and nobody through to replace it.

  No, dreams like beautiful women and nice houses and a life where violence isn’t the beginning and the end don’t belong here. I stop outside the bar, squeezing the steering wheel and taking a few deep breaths. I have to forget all that shit now. All that other-life shit. I have to be the Hound everyone in Mac’s bar knows, the Hound who some of the men respect, and still more fear.

  When I step from the car, I leave my dreams on the driver’s seat, and by the time I push through the rickety, squeaking door I can hardly remember what those dreams were. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. The bar is empty apart from Nora, the one-armed barmaid who worked here even before Mac owned the place, worked here in the Depression as far as anybody can work out. She’s the oldest person I’ve ever seen, with wrinkles stacked upon wrinkles, and her stump moves skillfully across the bar, wiping it down with a rag wrapped around the place where her elbow used to be. I nod to her and then go into the backroom, where Mac will be, with his files and phone calls.

  I knock. A booming voice calls, “Come. In.”

  Mac is almost as large as me, around six-ten, and just as wide. The difference is he wears a sharp grey suit with glimmering cufflinks and an expression of perpetual seriousness, which I’ve never been able to manage. His fingernails are scrupulously clean. His hair is grey and thick, mostly covering the fading Swastika tattoo he got when he was younger than me and in prison. Only two edges poke out, making it look like two strands of hair plastered to his forehead.

  Standing at his shoulders are his goons, Ripper and Hitter, ginger-haired twins who are always gripping bone-colored knuckle-dusters, and who always seem eager to use them. The only difference between the twins is that Ripper’s nose is bent out of shape from where he broke it in a bar fight, and Hitter has a scar just above his eyebrows. They’re as still as the desk and the safe and the shelf, pieces of furniture, never moving unless Mac asks them to.

  “Sit down.”

  I take a seat. I’ve always respected Mac, even if he’s never given me what I once wanted: some kind of pale phantom of Dad. When Dad died, Mac took me in and kept me on the road Dad set me on, giving me a job and skulls to crack, and once upon a time I thought that the more skulls I cracked, the more likely it would be that Mac would clap me on the back and call me “son”. Even if that day never came, I still respect him. He was once a collector himself, and now he spends his days sorting money and giving orders. A solid man, with a solid, hard face, the wrinkles making it look somehow harder, like an old rock, not infirm at all. But Mac never took the next step; he never got out completely, like I want to…No, leave that in the car. Let it die here. It can’t live here. There’s no sun here.

  “Any news on Dunham?” he says, after writing something on a piece of paper.

  Luckily, I’ve never once failed Mac, so I have a bit of leeway when it comes to stuff like this. “I used my contact at the bank to look into his finances.” This part is true. The next isn’t. “He found some cash in an offshore account, waiting to be released. I found Dean and shook him down, gave him a couple of cracked ribs.” This is good because anybody following Dean won’t be able to tell if he’s hurt his ribs or not. “He’s going to get our cash, soon, and if he doesn’t I’ll take care of him myself.”

  Mac just nods. “Okay.” I’m about to stand up when he lifts his forefinger, his gold ring glinting in the light of a single bulb. “We’re not done. I have a job for you.”

  He gives me the details: he needs information from a man about where another man is hiding, he needs the information tonight, and he doesn’t care if the man is killed or not.

  Then he looks at me for the first time, instead of down at his papers or his money, and I’m sure I see Ripper and Hitter smile together, as though they know this is some kind of testing moment, as though they know that Mac is making sure I’ve still got the steel for this. I understand, after the business with Dean, but it still stirs some of the Old-Hound anger, the anger which would make me leap across the room and smash their skulls together until nothing remained but ginger-haired paste. I swallow the rage, and wait for Mac to speak.

  “This won’t be a problem, will it?” he says, the two prongs of his Swastika shifting as his eyebrows rise in a paternal smile.

  “No,” I reply. “Of course it won’t. I’ll text you the address.”

  “Text one of the burner numbers.”

  Ripper reaches into his pocket and hands me a folded up piece of paper. “Should work,” he grunts.

  “Alright. Expect it soon.”

  I leave the office, nod to one-armed Nora, and return to my jeep. My mind starts straying to places it shouldn’t as I drive toward this man’s apartment, like what his mom’s name is and what he does in his spare time. What TV shows he likes. If he prefers soccer or football. But then I kill all that. I’m not Henry, I have to remember; Henry Roscoe, the name which appears on my online course login page, doesn’t exist here. Only Hound exists.

  I’ve been doing this for so long that getting a hold of the man is no problem. I just press a buzzer to an apartment which isn’t his, tell the nice lady that I live on the first floor and I’m stuck out of the building, and then stroll up to the seventh floor to where the apartment is. Then I knock on the door and say, “Hey, man, I’ve got this whole spare pizza, they gave me one by accident. You hungry? I know this is a little strange…” I hear the guy shifting around as he approaches the door.

  After that, I don’t really let myself think about what’s happening. I tie the man to a chair and stuff a rag in his mouth and only take the rag out when he promises not to scream. Then the q
uestioning starts, the repeated question: “Where is your friend? Where is he hiding? Where is your friend…” I use the man’s kitchen knife and go to work on him when he won’t answer, but I let my body go into autopilot, my hands knowing how to handle the blade without my mind having to intervene. My mind is romping faraway, in a place where me and this new Daisy girl are hugging by a fireside reading some book which looks ludicrously small in my bear hands. As the man screams, I imagine, instead, that Daisy is crying out in delight. When he begins to whimper, it’s Daisy, giggling into my ear. For a woman I just met, she’s a sanctuary unlike anything I’ve ever retreated to before. By the time the bloody business is done and I have the address, and the man is bleeding and crying and blood coats my hand like grime from a dirty pond, I’m hardly aware of my surroundings.

  I leave the apartment, drive my jeep to an empty parking lot in a ghostly part of town, and then send the text. After that, I just sit there for a long time, until the blood has dried under my fingernails and my mind and my body are one thing once again. When that happens, it’s tempting to start thinking about what I just did. When I can feel, really feel, the blood tugging on the hairs of my arms with each movement, it’s tempting to close my eyes and contemplate the pain I just caused.