The Hit

by Patrick Quinlan

  Jonah had sprinted in high school. He had big legs. He took off and for an instant he remembered those days. He could almost see the crowd up in the dim rafters surrounding the old armory track. Back when Jonah ran, they used to pile up metal cots in the infield for the hundreds of homeless men who came there at night to sleep. Back then, the track was still made of wood, and any kid who fell down while jockeying during a race was guaranteed to get ripped up by splinters. Jonah never fell, though. He was too much of a beast. He thought back to the thundering hoof beats as the ancient track shook under his powerful foot strikes.

  Foerster didn’t have a chance.

  Jonah closed the gap by half before Foerster reached the building’s edge. A low brick wall marked the end. Foerster never slowed. He hopped onto the wall, launched and disappeared. Jonah was uncertain. He slowed, then came to the wall and stopped. The next building was lower and five feet across an air passage. Foerster was over there, still moving.

  Jonah leaped up onto the wall, hesitated for a second, then took the gap easily. He touched down on a gravel roof.

  They were on a row of packed-together narrow buildings.

  Foerster reached the next gap and vaulted over it. Jonah gave chase, gaining again. He felt, rather than saw, the chasm open and close below him. His eyes were on Foerster’s back. They jumped from roof to roof, dodging antennas, Jonah growing closer all the time. They reached the end of the block and Foerster turned right. He crossed to a long and wide gravel roof that was lower still. It was a pretty good jump but Foerster did it no problem and Jonah was too turned on to stop now.

  He landed in a starter’s crouch, Foerster just ahead of him, and this roof opened up like a football field. Here his legs would do their damage. He sprinted, and became aware of the handcuffs pressed hard to his ass in the back pocket of his jumpsuit. He would need them in a minute.

  Closer. Foerster two steps ahead.

  Their long shadows mingled on the gravel below them. Legs and arms pumping. Closer still. Be patient, Jonah told himself. Time it right.

  Foerster made a sound, more like a caveman grunt than a scream.

  Jonah dove and hit him waist high. He wrapped Foerster’s legs and they slid together across the roof, the tiny stones tearing the blue jumper, digging into Jonah’s flesh. Foerster scrabbled like a crab. He kicked, he scratched. Jonah looked for hand holds, but found none. Foerster slipped away.

  Again.

  Jonah nearly laughed. This fucking guy, was he worth all this?

  The answer: Oh, yeah. Jonah needed the money.

  He jumped up and continued the game. Foerster was running for the next low wall, bent over and limping now like a monkey. That tackle had hurt him – his small body took the brunt of it. Jonah pursued. Foerster reached the wall, jumped up, and then stuck his arms out like a tightrope walker crossing the gorge. Sure enough, the next roof was a big jump, fifteen feet, and Foerster walked the length of a piece of thick flat lumber about two feet wide. He reached the other side and leaped down. Jonah stopped. There was more lumber piled here, three or four big pieces.

  Another gap. Another long fall.

  Across the way, Foerster grabbed the beam and yanked it out from Jonah’s wall. He let it fall into the abyss, and it clanked and clattered all the way down to the alley below.

  ‘Heads up!’ Jonah shouted. He leaned over and watched it go, but there was nobody down there. At the bottom, in the alley, all manner of garbage was piled high. He gazed across the abyss. Foerster was there, just beyond Jonah’s reach. Maybe Foerster had known nobody was in the alley, maybe he hadn’t. What if people had been picking through there today? Foerster could have killed somebody.

  ‘Let me guess,’ Jonah said. ‘You don’t like jail too much, am I right?’

  Foerster leaned on the opposite wall, catching his breath. ‘Ever been?’

  ‘Can’t say that I’ve had the pleasure.’

  ‘Never been, but you put people in for money,’ Foerster said. ‘That makes as much sense as anything.’ He turned his back and began to walk away. Then he stopped. ‘You’re a fucking hypocrite, you know that? You and everybody like you.’

  He kept walking.

  It wasn’t over, though. Not like that.

  Jonah picked up the longest piece of lumber in the pile. The damn thing was heavy. He pictured ninety-pound Foerster here days before, muscling one of these things around to build that bridge, then coming back every couple of days to make sure it was still there. Jesus. The motherfucker was a boy scout. Jonah slid the lumber out over the alley, pushing down hard on his side to keep the other end up. He slid it. He slid it some more. It was too short. It fell away, banging and crashing on its trip down.

  ‘Fuck!’

  He heard laughter. He looked up and there was Foerster, leaning against the elevator shaft and smiling at him.

  Foerster pantomimed a guy checking the time. ‘I could watch this all day,’ he said. ‘But I got places to be, all right?’

  CHAPTER 2

  The hot sun made her feel sexy.

  Thirty-three year-old, bikini-clad Katie Gant reclined in a lounge chair on a massive stone terrace, floppy sun hat shielding her eyes. The terrace looked over the backyard of her giant Tudor style home in the suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina. It was a bright afternoon, and from her lounge chair she could drink in the sloping and closely manicured back lawn, the sparkling blue water of the in-ground swimming pool, even the riot of plantings tucked against the back of the house that made up her own kitchen garden, which had seen quite a bountiful harvest this year, thank you. Although her eyes were open, she saw none of these things.

  She had a lot on her mind.

  For a little while, as the perspiration beaded and slowly rolled down her skin, she imagined a shirtless young man in jeans shorts and flip-flops down there cleaning the pool. Her husband was away on business, again, and frustrated housewife Katie was trying to get that sculpted Adonis of a pool boy to climb the steps to her. She couldn’t hold the image, though, and gradually it faded and was replaced.

  She remembered a morning fishing trip with her dad when she was a little girl down in Beaufort, when at first light they flushed a heron out of the reeds by the shore. The great gangling bird flapped its huge wings and took off across the bay. It was so graceful, that bird, once it got going, gliding just a couple of feet above the water. A few minutes later, the sun came up over the saltwater flats, Dad was tying her bait, and all the world boiled down to just the two of them in a nine-foot aluminum jonboat. At that moment, she never wanted to leave. She wished that time would stop forever.

  Yet she had run away from Beaufort soon after graduation. By eighteen, the town was too small to hold her. She was confident, she was blonde, she was beautiful – everybody told her so – and she loved to talk and meet people. The world seemed to hold such promise. There was so much to do and see, and she couldn’t wait to get started. Some kids were going to college, but she knew college would always be there when she was good and ready for it. First she wanted to taste adventure.

  She moved to Washington, DC, with some vague sense that powerful people, movers and shakers, lived there. This was closer to the excitement, but somehow she always seemed to just miss out on it. Part of the problem was the jobs she could get. Secretarial jobs – she was always somebody’s secretary. One day, while working as an assistant at the law firm of Benton and Hoffman, she spent seven hours pushing the green START button on a Xerox copy machine. That morning, the machine developed a glitch. It would copy only one page at a time. She needed to make a dozen copies of a government contract that was nearly two hundred pages long. For some reason, unexplained, the job had to be done that day. And for some reason, also unexplained, they couldn’t send it out to Kinko’s or Copy Plus. So Katie did it.

  ‘Good job today, Katie,’ her boss said, and meant it.

  When the day was over, she went home to the apartment she shared with two other girls and cried. At the age of twen
ty, her employer valued her because she could stand in one place all day long and push the same button more than two thousand times in a row.

  Where was the promise? Where was the adventure?

  The copy machine debacle helped her realize she wasn’t cut out for the business world. It wasn’t just that she felt humiliated. It wasn’t that she had been treated like a machine, or part of a machine. It ran deeper than that. She saw that if she were in her boss’s position, there was no way she could demand that someone push a button two thousand times. It was a soulless, spirit crushing thing. She wanted no part of it. She was too sensitive, she felt things too deeply.

  As it turned out, she was actually an artist. When she was a child, she had loved to draw and to paint, and a life drawing class she took on eight Saturdays reminded her of this. She moved again, this time to Dewey Beach, Delaware, where there was open space, open air and open water.

  It was a party town on the Atlantic Ocean, and she partied right along with it. On summer weekends, it seemed like half of the mid-Atlantic region descended on the beaches. She worked as a waitress, first at a bar and grill, then at a seafood place, then at a steak house. Sweating through the menial jobs didn’t bother her anymore. She was having fun.

  All night keg parties at rented waterfront townhouses always seemed to end at dawn with eight or ten people nude in the surf. Katie was always one of them. Riding through town in late summer on the back of some guy’s motorcycle, high on pot, the sun sinking in hues of red and orange and gold. Steamy lovemaking sessions on the beach, in the outdoor shower, on the back porch, on sandy sheets, with all sorts of guys. A sun-bleached surfer one summer. An artist, like herself, who came to paint the fall foliage one November, and who stayed through until the following April. A married fireman from Philadelphia who shared a ramshackle house with five other firemen, and who came to town every two weeks. Her first and only black man, a retired football player named Ray.

  Ray had spent three years on the Kansas City Chiefs without ever getting into a regular season game. The way he saw it, he made all that money and didn’t get hurt, and that made sense to Katie. She broke it off with him when he tried to get her into a menage a trois with a hard-bodied black woman he brought over from Baltimore.

  ‘Come on, baby,’ Ray said. ‘Look at that sexy thing over there. You know she looks good.’ The woman leaned against the living room wall in Katie’s small apartment. She had long braids and high cheekbones and tight buns. She looked damn good in a bikini. She had a body to envy, and her big brown eyes said she knew it. Her presence, and the question at hand, made it loud and clear that Ray was already sleeping with her.

  ‘Fuck you, Ray. No means no. It’s just not my thing.’

  Ray held Katie’s face in both hands. He had soft hands for such a strong man. ‘Let her taste you then. I guarantee she drives you wild. She wants to do it. Ain’t that right, Bevie?’

  ‘Mmmm-hmmm. She look good to me.’ Bevie had a gap between her two front teeth. She said it meant she was sweet down below.

  ‘Tell you what, Ray. Both of you. Out of my house.’

  But she felt sad and empty when he was gone. Even now, years later, he was still her image of the ideal physical man. She wasn’t tall, but she had a lot of body – she reminded herself of Marilyn Monroe. Ray was so big and strong he made her feel like a small and delicate flower. It was a beautiful feeling, while it lasted.

  After Ray, she spent fall and winter collecting unemployment checks and walking the empty beach. When she looked in the mirror, she caught the first glimpses of something she had thought she would never see. Age. She was twenty-seven. Her skin had seen too much sun. Her body had seen too much alcohol and maybe too many lovers. She counted them and the number only came to twenty-one, less than the number of years she had been alive. She had come close with quite a few others, so close that she almost counted them, but didn’t. Twenty-one had received the gift, she decided. Still, it was more than she’d like. For the first time, she considered that she would like to be a virgin again.

  The next one, she thought. I’ll take it slow and I’ll love him, and he’ll be the one I marry. It’ll all be innocent and like new.

  Almost a year later, the next one was Tyler Gant. Handsome, fit and tough – in those days Tyler was every inch the newly retired cop. It had been good for a while with him, good enough to get married. He had taken care of her like no man before him – he was the first man who really had the means to do it. But things between them had turned dark and cold, and now their marriage, their love, was like a dead thing lying at the bottom of that pool on the rolling lawn below her.

  ***

  The heat hit him like a blast from a furnace.

  When the airplane door opened, Tyler Gant stepped from the sleek corporate jet into bright sunshine. He wore a suit of summer linen, and the air conditioning on the plane had let him forget how hot it would be here on the island. He climbed down the narrow steps of the plane to the airstrip’s tarmac, which shimmered in the heat. The black tar almost looked like it was bubbling. Gant was the only passenger disembarking from what had probably been designed as an eight- or ten-seater, but was laid out more like somebody’s living room. He’d sat in a barcalounger reading the New York Times for the whole two and a half hour flight. Bad news from everywhere – modern civilization was falling apart and there didn’t seem to be a damned thing anybody could do about it.

  Four men in khakis and loose fitting, short-sleeved shirts waited for Gant at the bottom of the steps. They all wore wraparound sunglasses. They all had big shoulders and forearms. Their faces were nearly identical – stone-faced and expressionless. He guessed they all had guns in their waistbands. Hired help.

  They didn’t ask him how his flight was. They didn’t offer him a glass of iced tea. They directed him to a corrugated tin shack near the side of the runway. They entered with him and one of them directed him to remove his clothes. The shack was nothing more than one room with a couple of chairs and a desk. It had a dirt floor.

  Gant took everything off, right down to his BVDs. As he did so, he handed the articles of clothing to the men, each one pawing through his pockets, feeling the linings of his jacket and slacks, looking for hidden compartments in his shoes. They found nothing – no weapons, no wires, no nada. Gant stood barefoot in the middle of the room, his toes gripping loose dirt, the men hovering around him. They eyed his slim and muscular body, only a flicker here and there betraying the thought – this man is sixty years old? Barely concealed menace came off them in waves.

  ‘You guys want to do a cavity search?’ he said.

  One of the men smiled. ‘We trust you, Gant. You’re one of the good guys.’ He gestured at Gant’s clothes hanging on the back of the chair and draped on the table. ‘Get dressed,’ he said, and the four gorillas stepped outside.

  Gant put his suit back on, but there was no mirror to check his look. He made a Windsor knot without benefit of his reflection, the knowledge where it always had been – in his hands. He came out of the shack and a white Lincoln Town Car was now waiting for him. A black SUV was parked in front of it, and another black SUV brought up the rear. Energy crisis, what energy crisis? The commercial airline industry had disintegrated, and Fielding sent a plane to pick up one person. In the United States, fuel riots were a weekly event, but here Fielding sent a motorcade of gas-guzzlers out to the airport. Maybe it was all designed for show – here on fantasy island money and resources were not an issue. Maybe none of it was really true, a Potemkin stage play put on for Gant’s benefit. One of Gant’s guiding principles was not to trust first impressions – often enough, things were not what they seemed.

  He climbed into the back seat of the Lincoln. A man sat in there, thin with round wire-frame glasses, nattily attired in a gray three-piece suit, sandy hair brushed back from his face. He extended a bony hand from a thin, fragile-looking arm. The arm could have been a loose thread at the end of his sleeve. Gant shook the hand, and the grip was f
irm enough. As Gant settled in, the little convoy rolled out. In fact it drove right down the middle of the runway toward a high chain link fence at the far end – the exit. The limo driver was a dark shadow on the far side of a smoked glass partition.

  ‘Mr Gant?’ the man said. ‘I’m Elliott Howe, Mr Fielding’s personal assistant. How was your flight?’

  ‘Smooth,’ Gant said. ‘No complaints.’

  ‘Would you care for a drink?’

  ‘Not at the moment. Thanks.’

  ‘Mr Fielding is eager to meet with you.’

  ‘That’s good news. I see he trusts I don’t have a bomb planted up my ass.’

  Gant wasn’t one to suck up oxygen making small-talk, and he didn’t like having happy gas blown his way – especially not three minutes after a strip-search.

  The car motored along a narrow, winding concrete highway lined with palm trees and dense undergrowth. Their little motorcade seemed to be the only cars on the road. Gant didn’t bother to look closely at the trees and other plants for what he knew he’d find. The island flora were sick – the rainy season was already lurching towards its end, and for the second year in a row it had barely rained at all. The climate patterns had changed here, abruptly and without calling the weatherman for permission.

  Even in good times, many local people had been poor. A steady trickle of tourism had kept the island alive. Now the tourists were mostly gone. They had evaporated along with the gasoline and the good corporate jobs and the Wall Street funny money. With no rain, the meager crops the folks here had planted to save themselves were dried out and dead. There was trouble in paradise. Poverty was bad enough, and sustained drought made it worse, but events were quickly moving to the next level. The island government – dominated and manipulated for many years by the man Gant was about to see – had collapsed. People were going hungry. Roaming gangs of men, armed with machetes, had seized some of the land and homes of the wealthy.