by Robert White
I took it downstairs and set it on the kitchen window shelf between a potted plant and an avocado seed suspended in a glass of water by toothpicks. Somehow they had survived all the commotion. I didn’t think Randall Calderone would send a second contact out in the open like Marija so soon, especially with the surveillance I was drawing, but second-guessing him was proving harder than I expected.
I took a big knife with me into the living room and cleared a place to sit in the corner with my back against the wall. I had a clear view through the open door, and both corner windows and the big picture window were minus curtains or shades so I would see anyone out there. I had booby-trapped the back door with fishing line and wind chimes. No Semtec but it would make a loud ruckus if anyone tried to come at me that way.
I pushed the junk aside and watched the insects crawling among the wrappers. The smell in the living room was acquiring strength from the onions in the discarded sandwich wrappers. Silverfish, centipedes and flies were drawn. Whenever a bug crawled too close, I tried to nail him with my butcher knife, and except for ladybugs which bring good luck, I stabbed everything within reach. I was choosing like God.
A saffron-yellow band of light came closer as time passed. I counted how many minutes it took to reach the tip of my foot and then my ankle and then my calf. By the time it reached my belt buckle, I was on the verge of sleep. The drone of the flies woke me up. I realized it was the zsss-zsss of the walkie-talkie. “That you, fuckface? That you, fucking asshole? Come in.”
I fetched it from the kitchen shelf and thumbed the send button. “Fuckface stepped out for a minute, Randall. Can I take a message?”
“Your brother wants to speak to you.”
“Jack, Jack? Come in, Jack?”
“Go ahead, Carlos.”
“Hey, you alone?”
“No cops around if that’s what you mean.”
“What’s that noise?”
“I’ve got the water running,” I said.
“Ha, following the old man, ain’t you, bro? Man, we have so much catching up to do. So many crazy times to talk about.”
“These are the crazy times, Carlos. Can you talk?”
“My main man here is watching my back. I thought I could count on my own brother for that, too. I guess I got fucked again, eh?”
He sounded high, and I wondered how much I could say that he would understand. We were good at this as kids with adults around, but that was a long time ago and a lot of water had flowed over that dam.
“How close are you?” I asked.
“Very close but, ah, you got company like from one end of the street to the other, so it’s not easy. The cops put snipers on the second floor of that house across the street. Imagine they’re watching you right now.”
“No one can see me from the back of the house,” I said. My survey out the window showed me flocks of gulls fluttering and settling like white dusting on the peaks of the coal piles and a Great Lakes Company tug leading a ship to dock. The big crane siren warbled to bring in the dockworkers. White caps rolled all the way to the horizon and waves bursting ashore broke high over the breakwall to spill their foam over the giant rocks. Way down there Monarch butterflies were beginning to assemble for their long migration south.
“I didn’t see the Jeep go by,” I said.
“Shit almighty, man, that Jeep’s too hot. Thanks to you, we had to ditch it-”
I heard Randall’s angry voice behind him. My brother said: “I ain’t telling him shit, man. Lighten up, eh?”
“So what do you want, Carlos?”
“What do I want?” He laughed. “I want the money, Jack! I... We want the money. The money, the money! The money that is mine. We want the money, you fucking-”
I heard a loud crash like a bag of rice hitting floorboards. Randall’s voice came over: “You been talking to the cops, motherfucker?”
“Of course, I have, you moron. They’ve interviewed me twice. This morning for two hours. They want me to give them the money and they want me to testify against you and Carl.”
“You’re trying to piss me off, Jack, ain’t you? It ain’t gonna work. I know you ain’t giving us up because Marija said you woulda done it by now. Let’s say we got us a Mexican stalemate.”
“A Mexican stalemate is when it’s an even match, dummy. I’ve got all the money. You’ve got cops hunting for you. They’re out there going twenty-four seven – hundreds of them from every police force and federal agency between here and the North Pole. They’re going to squeeze you into a small corner, Randall.”
“That baggage you spoke of, jackoff. One of it’s got your brother’s name on it. I will send it to you a piece at a time. You know I will do that.”
“Don’t try to engage me in debate, Randall. Stick to what you know best.”
“You motherfucking cocksucking son of a diseased whore-”
“There you go.”
“You heard me, bitch! We want the money. It’s mine! I’m sending her for it. You better have it ready or say goodbye to your brother because I’ll cut his fucking head off and stick it on a pole on my way out of town!”
“There are people watching me every second,” I said. “I can’t move.”
“I’ll gut this dope fiend on the floor like a fish in twenty-four hours. You fucking figure out how to get the money to her, smart boy, but you get it right because you got you exactly one chance.”
“Tell me where to meet her,” I said.
“She’ll call you. Keep the walkie-talkie on you, no fuckin’ cell phones.”
“Let me speak to my brother.”
“Eat shit, motherfucker!”
#9
My phone rang an hour later. I retreated back to my sunlit corner. I was in the last rounds and losing by a wide margin. No knockdowns yet, but I had nobody to help me find a way to beat my opponent.
The phone rang. I let the machine catch it.
My father was always big on phone numbers. He used to test us by asking us to commit five different phone numbers plus area codes and foreign exchange numbers to memory. He’d leave us alone in a dark closet, and then he’d come back in fifteen minutes. He told us to repeat the numbers while screaming in our faces. You couldn’t leave the closet until you had all the numbers committed to memory. I spent a lot of sleepless nights in that closet until fatigue and slaps replaced the old man’s barking in my ear. Carlos rarely missed. He had a photographic memory. I’d come staggering out at dawn, bleary-eyed and brain-fatigued, and almost fall asleep at the breakfast table while he’d eat his cereal and mock me for being a thick-headed imbecile. My father would be sitting right there across from him lurking behind the newspapers as if all was normal in a normal household.
I called Marija’s phone outside her cabin.
She picked up on the eighth ring. “Hello.”
“Don’t say anything,” I said. “Remember where you sat in the booth?”
“Yes, shall I meet you at the same time?”
“An hour later, and take the next booth over, if you don’t mind. I still have splinters from the oak benches in that room.”
Crude but she’d understand. I needed a few minutes alone with her before they could set up.
#10
It was time to arrange transportation. I dialed Rick’s number and got Tinker.
“Hello, Jack, did you want Rick?”
“Yes, Tink, I hope it’s no trouble.”
“I never got to say I was sorry, Jack, about the job and everything,” she said.
‘Everything,’ I supposed, was Sarah. Although the four of us met at their place for barbecue and drinks a few times socially, we weren’t close. Rick’s obnoxious personality dictated that. I liked Tinker but she had more mood swings than a cat. She was also badly spoiled by Augie and reckless when she was drunk. Sarah was shooting pool in the house with Rick one night early this summer; she and I sat on the patio sipping Sea Breezes when she raised up her top. Her breasts were cup-sized with wrinkled areolas
and nipples. Before she married Rick, she broke up a marriage in some wife-swapping scenario according to Sarah’s gossip.
“No need to apologize at all,” I said. “I was hoping Rick would be able to give me a reference for a job I have lined up.”
“That’s wonderful, Jack. I’m sure he’d be glad to. Here he is,” she said and handed the phone to him. There was a long hiatus while husband and wife stuff went on and finally I heard Rick’s exasperated snarl: “Christ, what do you want from me now, Trichaud?”
“Rick, I need to borrow the truck tonight.”
“You want to bor- Do you have any idea... do you know some fucking FBI agent was asking-”
“Rickie, before you blow out a blood vessel in your tiny brain, listen to me. This isn’t a request. If that truck isn’t out in front of your house by the time I get there, I’m coming in for an intense conversation with Tinker. You will be shitting blood for a week because her old man will start pounding on your kidneys.”
“You’re not fucking human, Trichaud. You’re not human. What kind of man does that to a friend? I broke bread with you in my house.”
“Twenty minutes,” I said.
I called a cabbie and got a different driver. She was a chunky woman in a butch haircut and wore her sleeves rolled so high up her thick arms I saw the bottom half of a valentine tattoo with an arrow through the center. It read Cinda-Lin Forever, but it had been crudely done in a wavering black script and was faded.
I gave her the address and she asked me a few questions about some streets in that area.
“Don’t get too many calls to that side of town,” she said.
“How’s Cinda-Lin?” I said.
“Who?”
I pointed at the tattoo.
“Shee-it, man, I dumped that bitch ten years ago. She was my first old lady when I got out of Marysville.”
She told how she lured her ex-husband out of a bar with a story about his ailing mother and then gut-shot him with an over-and-under.
“Was he abusive?”
“Hell no,” she laughed. “I used to whip up on him every day. Man was a goddamn pussy but he had this wang was about a yard long.”
“So why did you leave him?”
She turned around and showed me a set of stained dentures. “That was it, see? A mile of dick but no balls.”
She found it hilarious that the then-governor let a whole bunch of women out when he left office – all for killing spouses. “We was abused, see?” She laughed again, cheered by the memory of life’s amazing turnabouts.
When she dropped me off, I overtipped her by twenty dollars. “Like, who you want me to kill, man?” she said. But when she saw my face, the laugh died.
“I’m tempted but no thanks,” I said. “My name is Jack. Nice to meet you, and thanks for the ride. Maybe I’ll ask for you next time.”
She said, “You got any more like you where you’re at, buddy?”
My old man used to say that cab drivers were priceless sources of information and useful contacts. Don’t be a snob, he said to us. Use the little people around you the way you use objects close at hand in a street fight. His favorite example was to drive your opponent’s back into a streetlamp if it had a sharp end so you could blow his back out or, with luck, sever his spinal cord. He read the classics (I never believed him) but he liked to quote a favorite Roman maxim: Homo hominis lupus est. ‘Man is a wolf to man.’
#11
I took the truck and drove the speed limit to Jefferson-on-the-Lake. Once or twice, I thought I saw headlights loom up behind me and then drop back. Traffic was heavy once I turned the last curve and followed the flow into the main strip. This was the last big holiday of the summer, the weekend the heist was supposed to have gone down.
Ten thousand people would come through this street in the next thirty-six hours; most would walk the street or sit and people-watch, eat cotton candy and pizza or sidewalk shish kebab; a few would drink too much in the bars and get into scraps. A lot of sex would happen in a short time without a lot of romantic prelude. Some of it would be illicit, some of it your garden-variety infidelities. I headed for the place where most of the illegal sex would commence.
Fleas bite harder in September when they sense the beginning of cold weather. It’s the same thing with hookers at Jefferson-on-the-Lake. The older ones, especially the ones with meth addiction, get more aggressive in pursuit of the dollar, and it’s all the tiny, ill-trained police force can do to keep fellatio from being performed on drunks in plain view of the out-of-towners strolling the side streets with their children. Labor Day signals the end of the season, the last chance for a good time.
I knew it would be crowded and I was right. I hadn’t been down Little Minnesota since last summer when Sarah and I drove through.
Maybe Marija put me in mind of it, but I had forgotten until now. She was a teenager, probably a runaway, standing alone on the corner and unusual only because she had that white-blonde hair of translucent blondes; her Lycra miniskirt went up to her buttocks. Sarah asked me if I’d like to have her, and I laughed. “That wasn’t a test question,” she told me. I recalled the look on her face: she was serious. “Both of us,” she said. “Tonight.” I let the moment pass and soon she was gone in the rearview mirror. When Sarah was riding me that night, she looked into my eyes but I knew she was thinking about that girl.
#12
I drove back to Northtown and stopped at a plaza where I ate at a Chinese restaurant. The young woman who ran it saw me come in and spoke some Chinese to her husband at the stove; she didn’t wait for my order. I never ordered anything else. Just across from the Main Moon past a weed-strewn lot was another small plaza almost entirely deserted except for a new business agency which had a lurid green-and-yellow neon sign advertising the words Cash Advance. Things were so bad in Northtown even the topless bar had gone out of business. While my dinner was being prepared, I walked over to the pay phone and called the cabbie’s number. I left a message for her with the dispatcher and said where I would be.
I was cracking open my fortune cookie when she walked in. It said that I was ‘well-liked’ and had ‘many friends.’
“You called me for a cab,” she said.
“Have a fortune cookie,” I said. “Would you like something to eat?”
“Naw, I’m on the clock, man. So you need a ride or what?”
“I’ll pay for your time,” I said and lifted my left hand to show her the three twenties curled beneath it.
“In that case I wouldn’t mind a bowl of that chicken soup and some of that there egg foo yung you’re eating.”
“It’s egg drop soup and shrimp lo mein.”
“Egg drop, whatever,” she said. “All the same to me, man.”
“Have a seat,” I said.
“I’ll radio my dispatcher, say I’m on lunch break.”
She must have carried over the convict’s habit of eating close to the plate. Calderone ate like that, a dog with its face into the bowl. I drank some green tea and waited for her.
“Man alive, that was fuckin’ tasty,” she said. “I’d love me a fuckin’ cigarette right now.”
“I’ll pay and meet you in the cab,” I said.
The cab reeked of smoke but it was doubtful anybody would think of complaining to the company behind her back. Stevie – that was her name – carried an aura of good-natured menace.
“Here’s a fifty for your trouble, Stevie. Tell your dispatcher whatever you want about the fare.”
“Don’t worry, I will,” she said and tucked the bill into her shirt pocket. “But you didn’t call me over here because you just had a sudden urge to buy me Chinese, did you?”
“I’ve got a proposal for you,” I said. “It might sound a little bizarre and I won’t answer any questions about it. You just need to know I’ll pay well. If you decline, there’s a hundred for your trouble. If you want the job, it’s worth a thousand more to me.”
“Jesus wheezus, lay it on me, dude,” sh
e said. “For that much, I’ll go down on a dead cop.”
I told her what I wanted done, and she looked at me with a squint. She asked me a lot of questions, but they were the right kinds of questions.
“I can manage the one part easy enough,” she said and nodded her head slowly, thinking about it. “Fuckin’ town’s got ’em all over the fuckin’ place. Nobody’ll miss one. Getting it there at the time you want it? Well, shit, that’s the problem,” she said. “But you say you can’t tell me where?”
“Not yet but soon.”
“You ain’t giving me much to work with.”
“One thousand dollars,” I said.
“Look, I’m gonna need me a partner and a flatbed or something,” she said. “Cost you another five for the welder.”
That would take the last of my reserve cash down to four hundred and some change. It was cutting it close, but my options were limited.
“Five,” I said. “Half now.” I counted out the money and gave it to her to count.
“Here’s a number if you have to call me. Ring twice, hang up and call again. Two rings. I’ll dial you right back at your company number, but I don’t know how long that number’s going to be good.”
“No, use my cell,” she said and scribbled a number for me. She handed it to me and I handed it right back.
“What’s the matter?”
“I have it,” I said.
“You’re one strange mo’fucker, Jack,” she said with that squint heavy smokers develop.
“I’ve been told that a lot lately,” I said.
#13
I wasn’t surprised to see Agent Pippin sitting on my porch when I got back to the house. “Door’s open, Agent Pippin,” I said. “Come on in.”