by Simon Logan
He knows Kohl will see the desperation in his eyes and he doesn’t care.
“I can do that,” Nikolai says as calmly as he can manage.
“Good, I’m glad. There is a man and he has this . . . object which I would like. I need you to go to him and take it from him. Then bring it back to me. Simple enough, even for someone like you.”
The insult doesn’t register but the implications of what Kohl might be asking of Nikolai do, and for the first time he feels hesitant.
“He’ll be expecting me?”
“Not exactly, no. You might need to convince him to give it to you. You have a weapon?”
“You mean like a gun or something?”
“Yes, like a gun or something,” Kohl says and his smile falters momentarily.
“I have one somewhere, I guess.”
“You guess?” Kohl snaps. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small pistol that is scratched and buffed on one side. He gives it to Nikolai barrel first, dropping the baggy into the man’s hand at the same time.
Feeling safer now that he has the drug in his hand, Nikolai says, “I don’t want to get involved in anything heavy, you know?”
Kohl’s face hardens. “You mistake me for someone who cares.”
Nikolai is suddenly aware that the gun is pointed at him, still partially in Kohl’s hand.
“The man in question,” Kohl says, “will be taking this object to mainland later tonight.”
“The mainland?”
“But he won’t get that far with it, right?”
The bulging red goggles loom in Nikolai’s face.
“Right,” Nikolai says weakly.
“Good. His name is Januscz. And this is his address.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The place is in a nice part of town, but on the island there’s an upper limit as to how nice places get and that limit is just below slum. It’s nice in the sense that the windows are still in place and the fencing is intact. It’s nice in the sense that Nikolai has walked along the street and not had to duck out of the way of roaming groups of youths who wouldn’t think twice before engaging in a little game of junkie ball. Nice. But not really.
He’s found a low wall around the back and has jumped into the overgrown garden and has been waiting in the bushes there, trying to figure out what to do next. The gun is in his pocket and his senses are sparkling from a hit of the drug Kohl gave him. It’s something new, something different, and his body is taking time adjusting to it.
There’s a dried-out swimming pool in front of him, the cracked walls of which have been covered in tag art that bends and twists, and he has to pull himself away because he feels as if he is starting to be drawn in toward it. He jogs around it, toward the rear wall of the house. There are a set of large patio windows beyond another overgrown bush and he can see light and movement coming from within. And shouting.
He leans through the foliage of the bush, trying not to make any noise, looks in through the window. He sees a small kitchen constructed mostly from chrome that has lost all its shine and now resembles what he imagines the inside of his gun barrel to be like.
He watches for a few moments then catches a glimpse of someone striding past the door into the kitchen on the far side of the room and then a moment later another figure following quickly after. He is left with the impression of large spikes protruding from the figure’s head but that can’t be right.
The shouting continues but softens as the two go deeper into the house and Nikolai considers whether to stay at the window and hope they come back into sight, or try to follow the voices.
This is the man. This is the address.
Kohl had never mentioned anything about anyone else being there.
Shit. What now? What now?
Nikolai’s gun hand flexes. He jogs around the side of the house and comes to another lower building stuck to the side — a garage. The wall is scabbed in the same graffiti as the swimming pool and makes his head dance as he slowly makes his way around.
Voices again. Shouting.
Something crashes around inside the garage and he’s at once glad there are no windows and annoyed there aren’t. Instead he listens and the shouting gets louder, another crash.
Then silence.
One beat.
Two beats.
Three beats.
And then the sound of a gunshot.
He jumps away from the wall and finds himself staring at the gun he holds as if to reassure himself that it wasn’t his weapon that made the noise, that he hasn’t fired it by mistake with his arcade-weary index finger.
He holds still, suddenly wanting to be away from there, regretting his desperation at agreeing to what Kohl had asked of him for the minimal hit he had needed. But it’s done, it’s done now and here he is at the stranger’s house and a gun has been fired and now the door to the garage is opening noisily on the other side of the building.
He leans into the wall, holds the gun upright in his bent arm as he imagines you are meant to in situations like this.
And he hears a voice say, “Shit, shit, shit.”
Then there is the sound of the door closing again, crashing down abruptly, and he hears movement back inside the house again. He rushes along the back wall, purely on instinct, and reaches the kitchen window just in time to see the spike-headed figure flash past going in the opposite direction from before, and so he continues along the rear wall until he reaches the other side and there he waits.
He presses a nail into his mouth and chews hurriedly on it.
Just enough time passes for him to consider leaving, abandoning the whole thing and just trying to find another way to get Kohl his money, when he hears a door open toward the front of the house. He waits a few moments, listening to the footsteps, then eases his way along the passageway created by the house’s high wall and the overgrown bushes that line the next property. When he gets to the end he sees a girl with spiked hair lingering in the driveway that leads to the front door.
She stands amongst high, rain-dampened grass and pieces of long-abandoned building materials, turns back and forth from the house to the end of the driveway and the street beyond. She’s got something in her hand and at first Nikolai thinks it might be a weapon, the gun responsible for the shot fired minutes before, then he sees it more clearly.
The girl turns again, again.
This is the object. A vial. I need you to bring me this vial.
And she holds up her hand, considers the object she holds, the glass tube.
And then she is gone, walking briskly down the driveway and out onto the quiet street outside and Nikolai swears to himself.
Kohl had said it would be easy. Just go to the house, find the man, and get the vial. Go to the house, find the man, and get the vial.
Go to the house.
Check.
Find the man.
Check. The other figure he had glimpsed through the window must have been Januscz.
Get the vial.
Simple.
Simple.
Simple.
Get the vial.
So Nikolai jogs down the driveway after the girl.
He watches her until she disappears over the rise in the street then runs to his car and starts the motor. He drives as calmly and normally as he can manage, trying not to make it look as if he is following her, keeping his eyes straight ahead as he passes her. Pulls onto a side street farther up, waits again until she passes, drives on past her again and thankfully there is other traffic around in which he can hide.
He does this for almost ten minutes and it begins to rain and she quickens her pace and finally she dashes into a crappy-looking diner set back from the street and adjacent to a gas station. He parks outside, thinking she might have just been getting out of the rain but quickly grows nervous.
It doesn’t feel safe or right to be sitting motionless in his car so he gets out, the gun still in his pocket, walks into the diner.
He looks around at
the booths inside but doesn’t see the girl and panics momentarily, thinking perhaps she had known she had been followed and already slipped out the bathroom window or some secret back entrance.
She might still be in the toilets.
Or she might already be half a mile away.
Gone. With the vial.
Shit.
He continues to the service counter and sits down because it seems like the thing to do. A waitress is wiping the surface before him.
Perhaps he’ll go and check out the toilets.
And then he looks up and there she is, the woman, staring back at him through the little window on the other side of the service area, the great spikes of her hair beginning to droop under the weight of the rainwater.
“Be with you in a minute,” she says to him.
He nods, panic washing over him and then leaving just as quickly.
She doesn’t know.
She doesn’t know.
Okay, so what now?
“What can I get you?”
And it’s her and she’s right in front of him, wearing an apron now. He brushes hair from his swollen eye as he looks up.
“Coffee,” he mumbles. “Black. Six sugars.”
And she pours him a cup and then hands him the sugar bowl.
“Knock yourself out,” she says distractedly, looking around the diner instead of at him. She begins to wipe the counter but isn’t paying attention to that either. He thinks about using the payphone in the corner to call Kohl, ask him what to do next. Would he know who the girl was? And why she had shot the mule?
This was too much for him, too big. He wanted a simple deal, money for drugs, not this shit. Not this.
And what had she done with the vial?
He imagines himself taking out the gun, pressing it to her forehead and demanding the vial. And then he thinks about pulling the trigger but he stops himself, realizes it just feels too wrong.
And he thinks that he knows her from somewhere, somewhere completely out of context.
He looks at the phone again. Kohl.
Where was the vial?
What had she done with it?
Had she already slipped it to the other waitress? Was she just one part in a chain of transfers? Phone. The phone.
Kohl.
He chews his nails. Fuck.
He hasn’t asked for any of this.
And he’s just about to get up and phone Kohl when the girl, she comes up to him and she says, “I need your help.”
CHAPTER SIX
So he’s sitting in the car, engine running, in some part of the city that he’s not familiar with, waiting for the girl, Katja, to come back out. His fingers rattle against the steering wheel and one more time he’s certain that she’s fucking him over somehow.
He is trusting that her story about getting off the island is for real and he’s trying not to think about why she might have picked him to help her. He thinks about her when she was up on stage the previous week, glittering with sweat, not so much playing her guitar as physically abusing it, the little tube in her neck like a piece of strangely decadent jewellery.
He hears something farther down the street, looks in the rearview mirror and wonders if he is expecting to find Kohl standing there. He could still just take the vial from Katja, he wouldn’t need to hurt her. He doesn’t want to hurt her. But then what? Take it to Kohl, get the money for another hit and a few days later he will be back to where he is now.
Then what?
He’s never put as much thought as most into getting off the island because there was no reason to think that things would be any different on the mainland. It would just be another dealer, another type of drug. Another hit, another comedown. His life was cyclical anyway, what did it matter whether he couldn’t get off the island?
But now, apparently, something matters. Something is giving him enough reason to want to break the pattern.
Katja.
What the fuck was she doing in that building anyway? he’s just about to get out and go find out when he sees her coming out of the building, her guitar slung across her back like a Kalashnikov.
And there’s someone with her.
Nikolai’s heart rate begins to increase, he brushes his hair from his eye and touches the gun just to make sure it’s there. Something is going on. This is it, this is the betrayal.
Kohl had set him up or she’d fed him the line about getting off the island just so he would bring her there and leave him outside waiting for her while she called on the man who would be his assassin, and now they were going to kill him and that would be that and . . .
They’re walking away from him.
Toward another parked car farther up the street and it is black but patched with white blocks as if someone has vandalized it and the words have been painted over.
He notices Katja glance back at him surreptitiously. She’s cuffed.
She’s fucking cuffed.
Hands clenching on the wheel, on the gun. The engine still running.
Get out. Get out.
He’s lost track of what was going on, become consumed by the night’s events. Kohl and Katja and the vial and Januscz the courier. The dead courier. The gun, the guitar, the man in black that leads her to his car. Rain and soggy liberty spikes, punk music echoing in his head.
He finds himself unable to move as the man’s car is started and Katja is still in the back, still cuffed. Were there others after the vial? Where were they taking her? Or was this just another part of some elaborate show designed to torment and punish him? His thoughts blossomed at the idea of some extensive plot involving the chemical gangs and their couriers and girlfriends and waitresses and just about everybody on the island, all knowing what was going on, playing with him, toying with him.
He ducks into his seat as the car sweeps past him and doesn’t catch another glimpse of Katja though he tries to, wants to see the expression on her face, if she is still playing a part or whatever. And the car turns when it reaches the end of the road, is gone.
Shit.
Katja was gone, the vial was gone.
Kohl was still around, however. Waiting for the vial.
Waiting for Nikolai.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Back at his apartment, pacing from one end of the room to the other, listening to the sounds of the rolling demo from the games cabinet, trying to think of what to do next.
He had to get to the vial, had to get it. Had to help Katja. Or maybe it would be easier if he just took it and gave it to Kohl and fuck any thoughts about eloping with her to the mainland and those ideas he’s been having about how maybe when they get to the other side they won’t just go their separate ways but maybe she doesn’t even have the vial any more, maybe she’s dead, maybe she’s fucking dead like Januscz, like stone-cold concrete, on the floor of some anonymous garage.
He presses his hands into his face, accidentally squeezes the bruising over his eye and yelps in pain, and there’s a little bit of blood there. He goes to the bathroom and checks himself in the mirror, sees that he’s split a welt that had formed at the top of his cheek. It looks like another eye, blinking at him as he wipes at it.
He opens a cabinet, searches for some iodine but instead his eyes settle on something else. It’s a small cardboard box filled with old, crusted tubes. Vials.
Something he’d bought from a friend several months before, there had been a shot of some chemical in each one and though he normally never touched liquids, he’d been desperate at the time. He recalled how they tasted like stale lemons and how the only real affect they’d had on him was to irritate his bowels for a week.
He didn’t even know where they came from.
He takes out one of the vials, rinses it under a quick blast of cold water and there’s a watermark of some kind there, a little symbol that’s only visible when the light hits it in a certain way.
This could work, he tells himself. How would Kohl even know?
He looks around for something
to pour into the receptacle. Rejects old mouthwash because it’s bright blue but then he hadn’t gotten a good enough look at the stuff before to know what colour it was meant to be. Clear? Probably it would be clear. Or is that too obvious? doesn’t know, doesn’t know.
He glances at the toilet beside him.
A minute later and the vial is filled and he’s shoving a stopper in it. He washes his hands to get the last of the urine off, holds the vial up to the light.
Should it be that colour? Surely that can’t be healthy. Stupid, stupid idea. There would be no way Kohl would fall for it, no way.
And now the phone is ringing.
The phone is ringing.
The fucking phone is ringing.
“Shit.”
He turns off the tap, shoves the vial into his pocket, goes back through into the main room. He stares down at the phone as if he will be able to sense who is calling if he can just concentrate hard enough.
It could be Kohl.
It could be Katja.
Or it could be someone else entirely.
It’s still ringing and he’s chewing on a nail.
But Katja didn’t have his number, how could she? Maybe she knew it already, maybe she really has been setting him up and she was going to warn him there was someone coming to get him, to finish him off for trying to steal the vial in the first place or maybe they thought he had Januscz or Katja had . . .
“Hello.”
And he’s picked up the phone just to make it stop ringing.
“You have the vial?”
Kohl. Fucking Kohl.
“Yes,” Nikolai answers without thinking about it.
“Good. Wait for me there. I’m on my way.”
And Nikolai begins to say something but the other man has already hung up. He drops the phone without putting it back on its cradle, strides to the front door, stops.
Has to get out of there.
Get away.
Fuck all this, fuck all of it, all he wanted was a single lousy hit, he never asked for any of this.