The Hit

by Patrick Quinlan

  ‘I found him,’ Gordo said, waving the piece of paper in his hand. ‘He’s out on Staten Island. He’s at his mother’s house.’

  CHAPTER 3

  They gave Gant a bedroom, and a girl to go with it.

  The bedroom was very large, with a gigantic bed and the girl draped across it. Cool stone floors and windows facing the ocean. Evening was coming in. Peach-colored curtains billowed in the light breeze. Wide double doors gave out onto a private balcony. Someone had left him a cart on rollers with a bottle of spirits, as well as a bottle each of red and white wine. Also, there were some finger sandwiches, a pitcher of water and a bucket of ice. He barely glanced at the wines or the sandwiches. The whiskey was Glenfiddich 30-year-old Scotch, so that was good news. He poured three fingers-worth into a glass, without ice or water, and sipped it, enjoying the taste and the feel of the fire entering his belly.

  The girl was fair-skinned and young, just old enough to be out of high school. She was dressed in an electric blue sarong and a bikini top, and had a body with so many curves that it was almost an outlandish cartoon of the female form. She spoke English with a strong accent from somewhere. Her eyes were green, and while Gant stared out at the breakers marching toward land far below him, he felt those eyes on his back.

  ‘Russia?’ he said, still facing away from her.

  ‘Moldova,’ she answered.

  He shrugged. Same difference to him. Commies. They lost, we won. It took a hell of a bite out of some of us, but we did win. He turned now, and took a long look at her. Good Lord, he remembered how they used to make you think Eastern Bloc women were huge, ugly – powerlifters in the Olympics. Of course, after the collapse it turned out nothing could be further from the truth. He thought of maps and how one day the Soviet Union was this big red smear across the top of the world, and the next day there were all these little countries you never heard of there instead, places like Tajikistan, and Belarus, and Moldova. He remembered air raid sirens and how in junior high school, when the sirens sounded, the teachers used to make the kids go out in the hallway, kneel in front of the lockers, and cover their heads with their arms. Each kid had to kneel in front of his or her own locker. Gant figured that if the nukes ever came, whoever was left afterward would know him as the pile of radioactive dust on the floor at the base of locker number 126.

  Gant remembered other things as well, things that happened during his time as a soldier for the United States of America, but he pushed them aside for now. He sighed, just a little. This girl was probably too young to know the history, or even care. She didn’t know she was a trophy taken from a defeated people. Well anyway, she was here, and he was here, so he might as well put her to her intended use. To the victor go the spoils, after all.

  ‘Wine?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, please. Red, with ice.’

  He grimaced at the thought of it, but uncorked the bottle and poured it for her. She drank it fast and he poured her another. She downed it and he poured yet another. If she needed to numb up, so be it. From her perspective, this could hardly be the ideal romantic encounter. She drank about half of her third glass then put it aside on the table. She removed her top and her sarong. Her body coming free reminded Gant of wild horses galloping on a high plateau. He sipped his whiskey.

  ‘Who are you available to?’ he said.

  She stared at him, her head slightly to the side, her pretty mouth open just a bit. She didn’t understand. For a moment, Gant tried to think of another delicate way to put it, then decided he couldn’t be bothered.

  ‘Do you have to fuck everybody?’

  ‘Oh. No, only guests. You. The fat politician. People like that.’

  ‘The gunmen?’

  She shook her head. ‘Uh-uh. I stay far away from them. They are animals.’

  ‘Do you ever see a doctor?’

  ‘Every month. The old man’s doctor himself sees me.’

  He joined her on the bed. She’d been with the fat politician, and recently – Harting, Hartley, whatever his name was – that wasn’t great news, but it could have been worse. She could have been servicing the goon squad every day, too. Gant ran a hand along her leg, and soon forgot about the guards, and the good representative, and even Fielding himself. He took his time, even though he knew it was all about him, and not about her at all. Once, he looked into her face and saw that her mind was elsewhere, maybe running on that high green field with all those beautiful horses. Afterward, they lay on top of the sheets, not tangled, not even touching. Gant picked up his drink where he’d left off.

  He looked at the girl and her sad face. An artist could make a painting of her – Tragic Girl. Gant was nothing if not curious – he could attribute his success to several factors, including luck, but certainly one of the factors was that he had a voracious appetite for knowing things.

  ‘OK Moldova, how did you wind up here?’

  She polished off the last of her wine, then stood on unsteady legs and fixed herself another one. ‘I was poor, but men always liked me from the time I am young.’ She shrugged, probably at the self-evident truth of her statement. ‘I was dancer in club. A woman came to my village and told me about good jobs abroad. I could be cleaner in hotel, or work as hostess. I sign up, pay some money, and they bring me here. I owe more money, of course. And so maybe I can never leave.’

  Gant thought maybe the whiskey, combined with the travel and his tiredness, had given him a buzz. He wasn’t sure he had the girl’s responsibilities down pat just yet. ‘Do you also clean up around here?’ he said.

  She gave him a baleful look. ‘Island women come and clean. They have to be searched every time they come. I don’t know how to clean. I fuck instead.’

  ‘Do you hate it?’

  ‘It bores me. I fuck, I eat, and I watch the satellite TV from America. Stupid reality shows, people shouting at each other, and then crying, and giving hugs. We read The Great Gatsby in school in Moldova. It is the best story. I owned a poster of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I hung this on the wall in my room. The great American writer. But they don’t show these things on the TV. The greatness is over. I think all Americans must be stupid now.’

  She was on to something, but Gant didn’t want to get into it. What to do or say about an entire nation of overweight, lazy people so addled by junk television and junk food and prescription drugs that they had only recently begun to notice they were systematically lied to, and robbed blind and left to sink in quicksand? Only now, long after the cheese had been moved, were some of the mice starting to wake up to that fact.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least you probably don’t have to fuck all that much. I mean, there can’t be that many guests.’

  ‘Howe. The assistant. I have to fuck him, too.’

  Gant felt a knife twist in his heart. He didn’t even have to examine the feeling – it was a visceral response. ‘I wish you had mentioned that earlier. I don’t like Howe.’

  ‘I don’t, either.’

  ‘Is there anything you do like about this place?’

  She didn’t hesitate. ‘The view.’

  Gant nodded. ‘It’s a great view. Anything else?’

  It took her a moment to come up with something more. ‘Howe’s wife and daughter live on the grounds here in guest house, so I never have to spend whole night with him.’

  The conversation made Gant sleepy. He lay back with his glass propped on his chest and closed his eyes. He could sip his Scotch with only the slightest movement of his hand and his chin. His mind drifted from its moorings and began to scan through the past, settling here and there on various memories. It was a pleasant sensation. He smiled.

  Gant was nobody to mess with.

  It was back in Philadelphia where Gant wished he could still be. Young again, cruising the mean streets. Not the Philadelphia of Market and Broad Street, the corporate towers, not the place the rich yuppies had once commuted to from the suburbs, not the weekday morning traffic jam brought to you by BMW and Mercedes and Lexus. Gant’s p
art of town was North Philadelphia. It was the drug deals going down in the shadows of burnt-out row houses. It was the homeless men sleeping under highway overpasses. It was the emaciated crack whores plying their trade in the alleys and vacant lots. It was chalk outlines on bloody sidewalks. It was booming hip-hop from tricked-out lowriders and the night he caught two carjackers single-handed.

  He savored that night like he savored fine whiskey.

  1990, or thereabouts – a long time ago now. A couple of gangbangers took a new Toyota at gunpoint near the bombed-out Amtrak station, but they didn’t know there was an infant in the back seat. The daddy lost his car OK, but went hysterical when he realized he lost his baby too. It became a wild all units call. The bad boys broke a hundred miles an hour on the wide lanes of North Broad, hung a turn and disappeared like smoke. Gant in an unmarked car heard it on the radio and made a guess. He was four blocks away. He roared the wrong way down a one-way, headlights off through the low-slung housing projects, engine screaming and here came a car burning up the street toward him. He guessed again – it had to be them. He hit the flashers and jammed the brakes, skidding sideways, blocking the whole street.

  They plowed into a parked sedan, heavy metal crunch at high speed. He leaped out ahead of them, a gun in each hand, running crazy on fear and adrenaline. One move, one funny twitch, and he would kill them both.

  ‘Freeze motherfuckers! Out of the car! Down on the ground!’

  He had guessed right both times. Back-up units showed a minute later, and Gant already had both suspects cuffed and in custody. The baby was fine, still strapped into the child restraint, goggling at all the curious onlookers.

  Gant felt his heart beating at the memory. It was one of his favorites. He imagined pro athletes had memories like that – moments when, either through luck or experience or a little of both, they did everything right and for a brief time were unbeatable.

  He opened his eyes and the girl had climbed on top of him again. He welcomed her there. It went on between them for a long while, and at some point he slept. When he woke, she was on the terrace, nude in the night air, leaning against the stone railing and smoking a cigarette. A bright quarter moon hung low in the dark sky. When she finished her cigarette, she pitched the butt out into the night then came back inside. She saw Gant was awake.

  ‘You work for him, right?’ she said.

  ‘I work for myself. He’s a client of mine.’

  ‘So you work for him.’

  Gant nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I hear things, from the cleaning ladies. They’re going to kill him. The islanders. They think he wants to starve them to death, so they want to kill him first.’

  ‘He doesn’t want to starve them,’ Gant said. ‘Believe me.’

  ‘I don’t care. I hope they get him. He’s a terrible, evil man. He can send me away from here anytime he wants. One day, after he’s used me up enough, and my youth is gone, he’ll sell me to somebody worse and they’ll make me a whore on the street.’

  ‘Who told you that? Howe?’

  ‘You don’t listen. I said the cleaning ladies.’

  Gant reached over and poured himself another sip of whiskey. ‘You know what? It’s a strange world. You never know what’s going to happen next. If I were you, I guess I wouldn’t worry about things so much. And I’d stop listening to the cleaning ladies.’

  ***

  Waves of pleasure rolled through Katie’s body, one after another after another. She was on her stomach, her face in the pillow, her free hand gripping the bedsheet, pulling it loose from the mattress. She was a rich lady, on a weekend trip to a fancy desert spa. She had gone in for a hot oil massage, but when she was on the table, it turned out that three men, three masseuses, would work on her. They turned down the lights in the room, and she couldn’t see their faces. At first they just rubbed her down, but soon they were saying things to her, things that embarrassed her. Then they were doing… things… to her, things she had never done before. She couldn’t protest. She didn’t want to.

  It went on and on, and she went with it, higher and higher. She arched her back, eyes squeezed shut. At long last, one final, intense shudder went through her, and she collapsed onto the bed.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said, and no one was there to hear it. She felt her heartbeat slowing down, her breathing coming deeper and slower. She opened her eyes. It was dark. The digital clock on the bedside table told her it was 3:15 in the morning.

  The high was fading, and thoughts began to intrude, as they always did. In fact they rushed in, like cascading water. The thoughts were never good.

  She was a failure. It was amazing to think of herself this way. An outsider might say that she had many of the things people wanted from life – she was attractive, she was rich, she lived in this big house, and she was still young. But she had wanted, and still wanted, so much more. From her own perspective, her life was empty. She had failed at nearly everything.

  She was a failed artist.

  That was one of her greatest failures. She had been a working artist in various media, trying different things, for close to ten years. She thought – no, she knew – that she was good at it. Back in Dewey Beach, and since they moved down here to Charleston, she’d taken part in numerous shows. And in all that time, she’d sold only three paintings, for a grand total of less than $2,000. Even worse, she suspected that Tyler had secretly bought the paintings through intermediaries. When she confronted him, he denied it, but that didn’t mean anything. That little conversation had taken place nearly two years ago – she hadn’t sold a painting since then.

  She consoled herself. Maybe she wasn’t commercial, but so what? Or maybe she just wasn’t a saleswoman. She knew that selling yourself was a big part of success, but she just wasn’t that person.

  She had also failed at love. The man she had finally married, she realized now, was like a more distant version of her father. Capable, supremely confident and in charge, very good-looking in a distinguished, hair-graying-at-the-sides sort of way. A man who, like her father, made a lot of money. A man who people worked for and looked to for leadership. A man who knew what to do.

  But he was cold and unemotional. He was distant, and increasingly so. It seemed that he no longer cared what she did. It seemed that all he’d ever really wanted her for was to show her off – a trophy wife – and to make a baby with her. A son. Which was yet another way that she had failed. There wasn’t going to be a baby.

  And that led to the final failure, ironically the one thing she had always succeeded at, had always been confident about. She had always prided herself on being great in bed, a wonderful lover. Of being able to make a man feel like a man, while at the same time feeling like a woman, incredibly so, and loving to feel that way. She knew she had a beautiful body. She’d had some amazing sex in her life, and some amazing men. She could have powerful orgasms, over and over again, for as long as her man’s stamina could hold out. She’d read about all the problems women sometimes had in bed, she’d read about them in magazines like Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle, and yet these were problems she’d never experienced, not until this past year.

  After she’d lost the baby for the second time, Tyler had become ever more distant and consumed in his work. He didn’t want to talk about the options available to them – weird science, he called it. He didn’t want to talk about anything anymore. He took no interest in what she did. It was like they were two roommates in this lovely spacious home they shared, nearly strangers. They almost never had sex, and when they did – four months ago was the most recent time – it was perfunctory, a formality, maybe just a physical release for Tyler, but not for Katie. Katie needed more than a twenty minute session every four months to get a release.

  In recent months, a funny thing had occurred to her – maybe she could take a lover. Of course she wouldn’t do anything to risk the marriage, but Tyler was away a lot. If it were the right person, someone who was discreet, and who wouldn’t get too attached, it wa
s just possible that she could do it. At first, she pushed the thought away, was almost embarrassed by it, even though no one could possibly know she was thinking it. But after a while, she would return to it, again and again, and it began to fuel her fantasies. Her marriage had turned barren, and she needed physical intimacy. Everybody did, but perhaps her more than most. It was a simple equation after all.

  An ever funnier thing was how, now that she had an emotional and physical distance from him, she began to see Tyler clearly for the first time. She realized that when Tyler had given her everything she needed, emotionally and physically, along with all the creature comforts that went with being his wife, she had never really looked at him with a critical eye. She had let him be the sugar daddy. Was she really that self-serving, that immature? It seemed now that she was.

  But now that was she was looking at him with a clear eye, it turned out she didn’t like what she saw. It was as if she had suddenly awakened from a long and deep sleep. About the only source of income he had that she knew about for sure was his pension from the Philadelphia Police Department. Other than that, Tyler was secretive. Certainly, he was some kind of a security contractor. His pension wasn’t paying for this house in a gated, secure community, for the two cars they drove, for the black market gasoline, for the swimming pool they had put in, for the big dinner parties they sometimes threw, for his personal trainer, and for all the rest.

  But what kind of security did he provide? He was gone a lot, but where did he go? He would disappear in the middle of the night sometimes, a car picking him up outside at the front curb. He would leave only a short note on the kitchen table, and then return a day or two days or a week later. It made her curious.

  He had only brief telephone conversations in the house, and not very often. Tyler seemed to have plenty of workers and subcontractors, but the only one he allowed to come to the house was the big, grinning redneck named Vernon. Vernon had a hook nose and a huge jaw and tended to wear a Caterpillar baseball cap and T-shirts with the sleeves cut off, all the better to show off his massive, tattooed shoulders and arms. He had laughing eyes that seemed to size you up and find you wanting. Vernon struck Katie more as hired muscle than as some kind of security operative.