The Hit
Patrick Quinlan
Patrick Quinlan
The Hit
3 November: On the Water
Earlier that night a man’s brains had been blown out.
The bullet passed through his forehead and blasted apart the back of his skull in a spray of blood and bone.
Now, clumps of hair and scalp were drying to the wall. His corpse sloshed in ten inches of water at the base of that wall. The corpse, the wall and the water were inside the main cabin of the Sea Dog, a derelict houseboat fighting a hurricane more than a mile out from land.
Above the boat, torrential rain and wind tore open the sky. Below, angry swells threatened to capsize her. She was forty feet long, fourteen feet wide and shaped like a floating shoebox. Smashed windows ran along her length like haunted eyes. A six-foot deck protruded like a fat lip at her stern. She was driven before the squalls of the hurricane like a refugee before the gun butts of the storm troopers.
Back inside, the low ceiling gave her main cabin the feel of a cave. The cabin was smashed, blown apart, with chunks of furniture, shards of glass and the remnants of a marine radio floating in the water. Worse, the dead man was not alone.
Other corpses floated in the room. Here was a naked man, face down with his head smashed in. Here was a large woman in a nightgown, on her back with a pair of scissors plunged into her chest. Both people were dead, yes, but both were moving and sliding like seaweed with the surges of the ocean. Worse even than the bodies, were the pieces of other bodies torn apart in the explosions.
Only one person remained alive on the boat.
He stood knee deep in seawater. He clung to the metal support near the center of the cabin. Sometime in the past, the pole had been welded there to make up for the Sea Dog’s compromised integrity. But the man who gripped it knew nothing of this. He stood, his left arm thrust through a bright yellow life vest. His shirt was red with blood, so wet that it stuck to his torso.
I’m the survivor, he thought.
He stared down at himself, soaking in the blood’s pattern. It reminded him of the Rorschach blots shown to mental patients. Like those blots, this blood took shape and told a story, a story the survivor knew. He had seen the man die. In his mind, he watched him die again and again. The memory elicited a sound from him now, a grunt of horror, of which he was not even aware.
He snapped alert. He could save the luxury of remorse for another time and place. He was on a boat, it was going down, and if he didn’t do something soon, he was going down with it.
As if to amplify this, another boomer hit the side of the boat. The survivor felt the wave coming and braced for it. It sucked the craft back into its maw. Right before it came there was silence, no movement, no wind, no rain, just a shadow looming on the wall before him and a feeling of emptiness and terrible anticipation in his soul.
When it hit, he lost his grip on the pole and pitched forward. He went down, dunking himself, head banging against the floor. Everything slowed and went dark, and he thought the boat had rolled over. Then he came up gasping.
The Sea Dog remained aright. She was two feet deep in water now. The bodies floated about the cabin like big rubber dolls.
He clutched the life vest to his chest.
He picked himself up and lurched out through the galley. He stumbled out through the gaping hole in the wall to the deck. The Yorkshire terrier was out here, eyes bright and alive. It had belonged to someone who lived on the boat. Now it belonged to no one. The dog yapped at him from its perch on the bench bolted to the deck. Its tan coat was soaked and matted and its festive red bow was pulled askew. Its body shivered with the fear that comes easily to small dogs, and its teeth were bared as if to attack. But its tail wagged in greeting.
‘Hey Versace,’ the man said. ‘Hey buddy.’
Maybe they were a team, he and that dog.
He stopped to consider this idea. Meanwhile the boat surged forward and the rain beat down. Far away, he caught a glimpse of the lights from land. It seemed as if he could almost touch them.
That’s where he was headed. Land. He imagined the streets of the town there, shops boarded up, the few remaining people hiding in their guesthouses. Maybe one bar was still open, the local crazies in there drinking and laughing and playing darts while the stoplight outside swung in the wind and the storm bore in.
He turned to Versace again, just as another roller smashed the side of the boat. The man went down, almost over the side and into the sea. He clung to the deck like a rat as the water washed back over the side. Versace was above him now. The Yorkie barked madly, yap yap yap. The man could barely hear it. He was cheek to cheek with the deck, his hands pressed flat as though the pressure itself would hold him there.
There was nothing to consider. The dog was on its own.
The man pulled himself up onto the bench. Versace tried to climb in his lap, but he pushed the dog away. He peeled off his shirt and pitched it into the water. He yanked on the life vest and cinched it tight. It took him precious seconds figuring out how to tighten the vest.
Another wave hit the boat. The old beast took it hard and again nearly rolled, tossing the man like a rag. He couldn’t stay a moment longer. He feared the water, but the boat was going to break up, sooner rather than later. Maybe a wave would cut it in half. Maybe it would dash itself on a reef, or on some rocky headland. Either way, it was going to the bottom of the sea and taking its unholy cargo with it. He wanted to be gone before that happened.
The time had come.
He stood and tottered to the edge of the platform. The sea roiled and raged just below him, water slopping over the deck. He checked the life vest one last time. He pulled all the straps as tight as he could, taking a deep breath at the same time.
Behind him Versace yapped once more, as if to say goodbye.
The man closed his eyes and let the ocean take him.
CHAPTER 1
Jonah Maxwell felt like shit.
‘What’s this bastard’s name again?’ he said.
It was an overcast day in the Bronx, and he sat in the passenger seat of a parked car, once again about to tangle with a dangerous fugitive. He was sweating even with the window down, and just the slightest nip of cool air reminded him it was already late October.
It was supposed to be an election year and this would normally be the climax of it, but they’d canceled the election a month ago after the Vice President got blown up in his car. The President himself had gone underground, mouthing TV platitudes to the rudderless nation from a bunker under a mountain somewhere out west. The talking heads chattered about the government rescheduling the election for a date in the spring, or maybe next fall. Or maybe never, Jonah figured.
Didn’t matter, anyway – we might not make it to next spring. The doomsday chorus, growing louder every day, was calling for the end of the world just before Christmas, which was the abrupt stopping point of the ancient Mayan calendar. About six weeks from now. The Mayans had watched the stars move for thousands of years, and had projected those movements well into the future. For some reason, they decided that the stars would stop moving on the twenty-first day of this coming December.
Jonah sighed. The end of the entire world. He could almost believe it was true, and it did nothing to calm his nerves. Bad nerves made him sick to his stomach. He closed his eyes, trying to control his breathing, trying to control the tingling in his head, hands and feet – trying to find his center. Street sounds came to him. He could hear the rumble of the elevated subway line over on Jerome Avenue. Closer, children shouted about a block away. Salsa played on a boombox.
The car he sat in was a tiny Honda Civic hatchback parked on a quiet side street. The car had rolled off the line cherry red twenty years before, stock, with an
AM radio, windows that rolled up and down by hand and not even so much as air conditioning for the New York summers. Now it was mostly red with one blue quarter panel, rust beginning to eat through everything. The dashboard was caked in grime. The odometer claimed a quarter of a million miles.
Gordon Lamb, the Honda’s master, sat behind the wheel and pored through the papers on his lap. Even with the seat pushed way back, there wasn’t much room because of his belly and legs. He had a two-day beard and his hair stood up as if he had forgotten to shower that day. Jonah called him Gordo, short for El Gordo, a nickname coined by a funny Dominican whore Gordo had spent the night with years before. She had trouble with the whole name Gordon, so she dropped the n. It was perfect. In Spanish, El Gordo meant “the fat one.”
He and Gordo made an odd couple, maybe. Jonah: a slim, muscular, well-dressed black man – cafe au lait because of his white father – who made the ladies swoon, and Gordo: a big, heavyset bear of a white man who you might mistake for a lumberjack.
‘The name’s Foerster,’ Gordo said. ‘Davis Foerster.’ He spelled it aloud and shuffled some paper around. ‘Also known as Mark Foster. Also known as Foster Davidson.’
Jonah glanced out the window. From the looks of it, from the smell of it, Jonah guessed that garbage pickup in this neighborhood had happened two or three weeks before. Along the edge of the sidewalk, in the shadows of the apartment buildings, overflowing garbage bags were piled high. Assorted kitchen scraps and other trash were strewn all over the street and sidewalk. Bomzhies, junkies, and scavengers of all types came and ripped open the plastic bags, looking for food or anything of value to put in their old supermarket shopping carts and trundle home. As Jonah watched, a large rat crossed the street, well-fed, in no hurry, moving from one mountain of trash to the next.
Meanwhile, Gordo launched into the story as if he hadn’t told it half a dozen times before. ‘Foerster’s the perfect scumbag. Been up to petty shit since he was a teenager, but somewhere in there started getting serious. Cops wanted him for questioning on a year-old forcible entry and rape. A man fitting his description knocked on a 75-year-old woman’s apartment door late one night, forced his way in, pushed her down and raped her. Took about five hundred in cash she had laying around the place. Case remains unsolved, but looks a lot like two earlier ones where the old ladies got killed.’
Jonah took another deep breath, letting Gordo’s words wash over him.
‘In any case,’ Gordo continued, ‘two weeks ago, Foerster lands in their laps. He gets picked up on a breaking and entering and attempted rape. Cops want to roll him up on the old lady case. They figure if they can break him on the one where they still have the victim alive, maybe they can break him on the other two. But all of this coincides with the latest general amnesty for nonviolent prisoners. The city swings wide the cell doors, and lets five thousand inmates – mostly drug offenders – walk. At that moment, there are two men with very similar names on Riker’s Island. One is called Davis Foster. One is called Davis Foerster. True to form, they let the wrong one go. Foerster gets off a prison bus in Queens and disappears. Too late, the city realizes its mistake, and quietly issues a $50,000 reward for his capture, hoping to get him back inside before the newspapers realize they did the bad thing again and released another maniac by mistake. Tough for a cash-strapped city, but good for people like us.’
Gordo raised an eyebrow.
‘Most interesting thing? A little bird told me the FBI contacted the city cops about this guy two days after he walked. The feds also want to talk to him, and they’re not saying why. He’s not officially wanted, mind you. They just want to ask him a few questions.’
Gordo dropped the paper he was holding into his lap.
‘All that said, who are you to him?’
Jonah gestured at the jumpsuit he wore. The name Jake was stenciled in white across his right breast. The jumper felt too small for his chest and round shoulders, and wearing it made him feel silly. He was too pretty to pass as an exterminator.
‘I’m the guy who’s here to kill his roaches,’ he said.
They went through the drill every time. The skip’s name, his description, the layout of the place, how they were going to nail him. They had gone over it the night before on the phone, but one more time never hurt. Gordo liked to be thorough, and if it meant they made the collar, then Jonah didn’t mind.
Gordo moved two photocopied maps to the top of the heap. One was a building floor plan, the other a zoning map of the neighborhood. Jonah leaned over to get a better look.
‘Okay,’ Gordo said. ‘This is the apartment, 5C, rented by the so-called Mark Foster. It’s a studio, right? And you can see the fire escape is outside this window, which is in the kitchen and dining room area. If you flush him out that window,’ he switched to the neighborhood map, ‘then you can see over here that he has to come down to this alley.’ He looked up and peered down the street. He pointed to an opening between Foerster’s building and the boarded-up building next door. ‘Which is that alley right there. And that’s where I’ll be standing.’
‘What if he goes to the roof?’ Jonah said.
‘If he goes anywhere other than the alley, you call me on the walkie-talkie,’ Gordo said. ‘But he won’t. His first reaction will be to get down to the alley and disappear. Also, his building is free standing and he probably knows it. It’s gotta be fifteen feet across to the next roof, maybe more. So he’ll figure if he goes to his roof, he’s trapped up there.’
Gordo closed the file and placed it on the back seat.
‘But once he commits to going for the alley, then he’s really screwed.’
‘What if he has a gun?’
Gordo shook his head. ‘Not his M.O. In his entire life, he’s never once been picked up with a gun.’
‘Easy pickin’s, then,’ Jonah said.
‘Cake,’ Gordo said. ‘Twenty five thousand dollars each for a ten-minute gig.’
***
Inside his apartment, Davis Foerster slumped and smoked a Camel while he pulled the stuffing out of a gash in the upholstery of his easy chair. A bottle of beer was propped against his crotch. His feet rested on the worn parquet floor. The walls around him were bare except near the light switch, where years of hands had smudged the area almost black.
The bruises around Foerster’s eyes had faded. His hair was growing back over the scar that had run across his scalp like a railroad. The middle and ring fingers of his left hand were still wrapped in a dirty plaster cast that extended down to his wrist. Only his thumb, pointer and pinky were free.
He blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling and stared at the thirteen-inch color TV on the stand in front of him.
No cable, and the reception in this building was so bad, he only got one channel clearly. There’d been rolling brownouts all day, and when the power finally came back on, he was treated to the spectacle of an afternoon talk show with a bunch of fatties lined up on stage, all of them sitting and blathering about how it felt to lose a hundred pounds and change their lives. The host was a cheerful woman who America had watched rollercoaster from fat to skinny to fat and then skinny again. She’d tried all the fad diets, and had worked out with all the trendiest workout gurus. So this weight thing was a topic close to her heart.
The camera panned the studio audience. Housewives with tears in their eyes. A couple of the saps even had handkerchiefs out. A person weighs five hundred pounds, Foerster thought, loses a hundred, and still weighs four hundred. How does that change their life?
‘That really touches me,’ the host said to one of the porkers.
‘Fuck you,’ Foerster said.
Foerster didn’t need to lose weight. If anything, he needed to gain some. Get some size to him for the next time he got in a tangle. With a little more size, he maybe wouldn’t have ended up in the joint again.
Another smoke ring, a little one chasing through a big one.
His mind wandered, back to the most recent fall he’d taken. He h
ad climbed through a window this time. Windows were the easiest, especially a couple of floors up. On hot nights, people left them open. All the way, a crack, it didn’t matter. He just picked an open one along a fire escape and climbed up there. He slipped inside and stood in the living room.
Pretty nice furniture in there. Somebody in the place was still working. He remembered hearing a car go by outside – cop car? No other sounds. The good stuff was usually in the bedroom, top dresser drawer in most places. Cash, maybe some gold. The place had wall to wall carpet, which was good – his feet would make no sound. He followed a short hallway. He passed a narrow door. It looked like a closet. Another closed door, maybe the bathroom. A sharp left turn and here was the bedroom. There was a sleeping form alone on the double bed. Foerster allowed himself another silent inhale and exhale, watching and listening. He could tell by the size and shape of the body, and by the hair sticking up from under the blanket. It was a woman.
That was better than money.
He went for her, of course. It was a stupid play and he knew it as he stood over her. But she aroused him and it clouded his thinking. Women didn’t always arouse him, and he had to take the opportunities when they presented themselves. He slid into bed with her, working on his zipper. She made a sort of welcoming sound, like a sigh. It should have tipped him off. In her sleep, she thought he was somebody else, somebody who was supposed to be there.
It didn’t tip him off, though. It got him excited instead.
Later, the cops were happy to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. The husband got up in the middle of the night, went in the bathroom and fell asleep on the can with the door shut. When Foerster grabbed the wife, she gasped, then screamed, and hubby woke up. The big boy came storming in and found Foerster on top of his lady. The next thing Foerster knew, the storm broke loose. Hubby let Foerster have it with a wind-up clock, a lamp, a glass candle holder, a metal magazine rack. They went around and around the room, the wife still screaming, the whole building waking up, Foerster trying to escape, trying to get his zipper closed while the husband clubbed him with everything in reach.
The Hit Page 1