by Robert White
“You don’t want to do that now,” he huffed.
“Why not?”
“It’s all dirty and full of that... that green shit, bacteria big as my head.”
I left him sitting there with his mouth agape and walked through the back of the house to the back door. I heard the whine of his motor as he tried to catch up with me.
I slammed the door behind me and went to the pool. I untied one of the flaps. He was right: the surface water oozed with a green scum, and it smelled very bad; the stench of the black, stagnant water overpowering under the closed pool cover.
I hopped over the side at the shallow end. I waded through the viscous liquid from my knees to my waist while my head stretched the top of the vinyl cover. I dog-paddled to the deep end where I remembered tossing in the heavy canvas bags.
I dove under and swam to the bottom; my ears stung immediately from the sudden pressure change. I used the slimy pool side to guide me down to the murky depths and patted the vinyl bottom in all directions. Nothing. I came up and tried to remember where exactly I was when I tossed them over the side. I was sucking in air for the third dive when my treading foot kicked something. I reached down and felt the matted fur of an animal’s carcass. It could have been a raccoon that fell in. I took in another lungful of air and went down. I combed the bottom with my hands and legs against the buoyancy pulling me back up. It was like swimming in urine; my eyes burned with the pool’s supercharged acidity from years of neglect.
Then I touched something and groped along it until my fingers found it. I hauled it up. It weighed a ton. I couldn’t swing it over the side. My feet had no purchase in the slippery pool bottom. I inched my way back to the shallow end, gasping, and threw the bag over where I had entered the pool.
I went back to the place where I had found the first bag and dove in again. I did this three more times and came up empty-handed. Every muscle in my body ached and my eyes burned from the filth. I was almost blind. But I found it on the fourth try. When I climbed out after it, I lay gasping in the grass and blowing hard out of my mouth. I vomited up some bile and dirty water.
I knew Danko was watching me the entire time, from one of the tiny slats of his kitchen window. Because of his wheelchair, he was unable to get close enough to the back door steps to see what I was bringing out of his pool, but he could hear me gasping and thrashing in the water easily enough. I got up and walked to the window. On my tiptoes, I could see part of him through the shadow. His mouth hadn’t closed much. He was spluttering as if he too had taken in mouthfuls of rotten muck.
“You... you... you’re crazy, man! You’ll get sick and I’m not paying for your medical if anything-”
“That’s all right, Sergeant, stand down. I’m fully covered for these emergencies.” My ears popped like firecrackers. I looked up at his pale reflection in the window. It was hard to see his face through my bleary, reddened vision.
“May I have a glass of water to wash out my eyes?”
“Get off my property, you crazy lunatic!” he screamed.
I heard the high-pitched whine of his motor, like bees trapped in a jar, as he retreated deeper into the recesses of his house where pool-diving maniacs like me couldn’t reach him.
I gathered up the bags and walked back to the truck. The water squished out of my clothes and poured from the tiny holes at the zippered ends of the bags, failed levees for the tidal surge, but I hoped the two layers had kept the money from being completely contaminated.
As I threw them into the passenger side of the truck, I saw the curtains swishing back and forth in Danko’s living room. I had to paw my way around the truck fender to get into the driver’s side because opening my eyes for more than a couple seconds was too painful. I couldn’t waste time looking for a garden house to wash them out. The stench of rotting eggs and whatever else comprised the effluvia of Danko’s pool was enough to gag generations of maggots. I was just about to climb in when I heard a soft, feminine voice behind me.
“You’re Jack Trichaud,” she said.
I turned around and saw the grim-faced lover of Alicia Fox-Whitcomb staring at me. “Jack Trichaud, blackmailer,” she said. Her eyes were wide open. My grotesque appearance must have caught her off-guard.
“You disgusting, lying piece-of-shit,” she said.
“That’s me, for sure,” I said.
She had those tiny distended white lines around the mouth that Sarah developed whenever she was angry. My ears were still ringing but I heard a low noise like a cat growling deep in its belly.
“So now you’re over here tormenting a harmless old man.”
“I can’t explain. You’ll have to trust me.”
“Trust you? Trust you? You lowlife bastard...”
Her invective went on for a while. She had a so-so cussing vocabulary. Her eyes flashed and her fists were clenched, but it was all so dreary to me right then, I just wanted to leave, go somewhere, get clean. I was an unemployed actor stumbling from the set of a bad fifties vampire movie to the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
“You’re right, you’re right, I am all of those things and worse. But right now that old man is calling the police on me and it’ll come out, you and her, your marriages will be over, so I have to go right now...”
“I hope you catch the Ebola virus, you fucker. What were you doing in that pool?”
“I’m really very sorry,” I said and climbed into the truck. I turned the key and looked at her. She stepped closer and signaled me to roll down the window. She spat into my face.
“You wait until my husband gets home, bastard. You just fucking wait,” she snarled.
“Tell Alicia, I’m sorry,” I said. I wiped spittle from my chin with my sleeve. “Tell her I never wanted her to hurt either of you. Thank her for not... talking to the police.”
“You miserable sack of dog shit. Go back into the sewer you just crawled out of. When my husband gets home, you’re going to die screaming in your blood!”
Her cursing was picking up a little but that last was too Grand Guignol for me, so I peeled out, tires squealing. A last glimpse of her in the rearview showed her giving me the finger. It was more antic farce in one week than most people would experience in a lifetime. After nine years of middle-class tranquility, this non-stop lunacy had me questioning my sanity. I caught another look at my face and was shocked by the appearance; think the before-and-after mug shots of a meth addict. My sunlit dive into Danko’s Stygian abyss had left me with bloodshot eyes, looking like a man with a diseased soul wearing its hideous image on my face.
It wasn’t any consolation, but I thought Alicia’s lover’s husband would have to get in line. First, I had to wash out my eyes and get the primordial stench off me. Even Calderone’s roofer couldn’t have smelled this bad when they dug him up.
I drove to a BP gas station and walked up to the boy behind the glass cubicle. He looked at me with wide eyes. If I had asked him for all his drawer cash, I suspect he would have forked it over with the washroom key. I got as much crud off me as possible with the industrial-strength soap and belched up a rancid gaseous bubble.
It was barely tolerable driving even with the windows down. My blurred vision had me weaving all over the road.
Watching out for cops, I managed to catch a glimpse of a pair of older SUVs, tailing me front and back in a tight box. I cursed my life, my brother, my father’s seed all the way back to the Book of Deuteronomy. I wondered what lunatic fairy had presided over my birth to give me this mixed-up life.
I joined the crawl-speed traffic on the Strip and headed toward Erieview.
No pedestrians were about but crowds were beginning to gather on the streets for the night life. I stopped in front of my cottage. I held off my desire to race into the shower. The swinging placard with the burned letters of Lake Winnipeg swayed in the gentle breeze off the open water. It was going to be a steamy hot evening, another fluke of weather this late in the year, and a full moon rising. I had no choice. If Pippin – o
r worse come to worst, Calderone with an axe in his hands – was waiting for me, what was I going to do? I was too fatalistic just then to care.
I hauled the bags out and unlocked the door – nothing but the gloomy emptiness of its space and ancient cigarette smoke.
My father taught me stillness. How to stand in a room and feel the molecules of energy tell you who was hiding inside or who had been there before you. You can tell, he said, whether they were friend or foe. He called it using the ‘dog brain.’ A person smells pizza in a nearby house, a dog’s nose can separate the cheese from the pepperoni. It’s like the ‘cancer’ scent some people give off, a whiff of putrefaction from the cells’ mortal struggle.
The scents I ferreted out were nothing compared to my body’s noxious aroma. I showered for an hour and scrubbed myself raw. Pippin would expect me to use a cell phone and use the tower pings against me in court, but I don’t own a cell phone and he couldn’t get a tap on the pay phone on Erieview this fast, or so I hoped. Raging paranoia, to me, was normal behavior in my growing-up years.
I set the dampest of the money packets out to dry all over the room. Most of the binding wrappers had come loose so the money was in scattered denominations. I scrubbed my hands with cleanser after touching the bills; this money would remain foul-smelling for a long time.
I shoved the rest of it back into the canvas bags and looped them together with a rope I took from Rick’s truck. The cottage across the small alley from me was having a pool dug out. I tied one end off with a clove hitch to a piece of rebar sticking out of the hole and dropped the bags over the edge into a wind-stunted bush growing out of the cliff.
#16
The strip was jammed with people and noise. Mostly the younger crowd beginning to reclaim the night spots for drinking and cruising for sex. I had twenty minutes to kill before the exchange. I tried to keep my mind empty and passive.
The walkie-talkie stuck out of my windbreaker pocket. I could have had a hundred agents trailing me. Pippin had to be out there somewhere. I was walking around under the eyes and claws of a lot of cats waiting to spring, but I was more like the cheese than the mouse, the bait to bring Calderone out of the shadows. I knew without Pippin telling me, whatever snafu had landed him in Youngstown, this capture would launch him into a plum assignment in his choice of field offices. He had no other reason to let me walk around except for that.
Once in a while the old man would trot out a bible quote, too: ‘Pride goeth before destruction. A haughty spirit before a fall.’ Beware your own pride, Agent Pippin, I thought as I walked along, just another middle-aged tourist on the Strip. In the foreground of my thoughts was how Calderone was going to come at me. Rick’s truck had a few heavy tools lying in the bed, but I dismissed that as foolish. Bringing anything short of a howitzer would be a mistake. Calderone wouldn’t let himself get trapped at the money drop, when he knew I’d come trailing FBI agents like a string of picnic ants. Pippin, as SAC of this op, could have called out dozens of agents to have this town thoroughly combed – every rock on the beach and every tree in the state park north of here. The papers said less each day as the news of the crime faded from the headlines.
Finally, I gathered up the shreds of my courage and headed toward Little Minnesota. A couple runaways were soliciting change, a come-on for a different kind of transaction if you were a single male walking alone. But neither of the girls bothered me as I crossed the street to the arcade.
I walked down the length of the sidewalk next to the arcade and felt the heat rising from my neck. A few more feet would determine whether Stevie and her friend had managed it...
I turned the corner. I spotted it at once: big and green and topped up with some real garbage bags for effect. My legs almost buckled with relief. I had just enough time to get back to the cottage for Marija’s call.
I reached Erieview when I heard the outside phone ringing. My watch said I was on time, but she was calling three minutes early.
I reached it a few seconds after the last ring.
“That was the last tenth ring,” she said. “If you hadn’t picked up, I was going to hang up, and your brother would start arriving in tomorrow’s mail – a different piece every day.”
“You don’t have to threaten me, Marija,” I said. “I’m cooperating.”
“The next part is real important, Jack.”
“Just tell me what I need to know,” I said but my hand was shaking on the receiver.
“All right, you’re upset. I can understand that.”
“Your empathy astonishes me. Get to it.”
“This is all up to you now. If you make any mistakes – if you deviate from one instruction I am going to give you by even a fraction – your brother’s life is over. Take longer than each task allows for, and he dies.”
“Before you give me what you call these tasks, tell me one thing.”
“You don’t have much time for this...”
“Just tell me-”
“Jack, shut up. There’s nothing left to do but obey.”
And that’s when I was convinced I was going to be killed. I imagined my father assessing the situation coldly. That’s what he would have recommended standing in Randall’s shoes.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said.
She made me repeat things. It was meticulously detailed. I think my father would have approved.
“You’ve given me a lot to remember,” I said.
“You can handle it,” she cooed, “especially the inside parts. We’re watching you. Maybe not every second, but you won’t know when we’re not.”
I checked my watch.
“Start walking,” she said.
#17
My first stop was the Oak Room, where I sat at the bar for thirteen minutes precisely. I ordered and drank a sidecar. My next stop was the Sunken Bar. It was on the same side of the street but it was back the way I had come about five-hundred yards. The same thing: order a certain mixed drink. Leave at precisely a quarter after the hour. Cross the street and enter the Cove, which was a bar for the younger crowd.
I had a hard time attracting any of the three bartenders because of my age. The music was loud, new wave, irksome. The bartender didn’t know how to make a sidecar so I ordered a dry martini. That also sent a pained expression across his face. I asked him what he could make with Jack Daniels. “Shot-and-beer,” he said. I was down to five minutes.
On the way with my drink, he stopped to chat with a girl at the other end of the long bar, and I lost more time. I threw a five down, bolted the drink, and was off my stool running before he could finish asking me if I wanted another.
This wasn’t about checking for tails. It was about getting me shitfaced so I’d be too docile to put up any resistance. I had one more bar to hit at the end of the Strip. I was feeling the effects of blitz drinking by the time I opened the door of Rita’s and walked into the soggy gloom, the booze was making me dizzy and my skin tingled. I had less than twenty minutes to get there and down a couple beers.
The bartender was the same one I had seen the first time with the gold-loop pirate earring. When I ordered two beers, he popped the tops on two Budweiser cans and slid one to me. I had the first one halfway down, when he slid a shot in front of me. I saw him holding a bottle of by the neck.
“Johnny Walker Red,” he said. He set a red plastic cup in front of me.
“I don’t want that,” I said.
“I was told to give it to you by a woman friend of yours. She said you’d try to refuse but you’d understand. All one to me, man.”
“I’ll double whatever she gave you to say I drank it,” I said and started to fumble for my wallet.
“One hundred,” he said and waited for me to put up.
I couldn’t afford it, and he muttered “bullshitter” and walked off.
It was a double shot and I was already light-headed and oozing sweat. I threw it back and waited for it to hit bottom. I looked at
the beer and checked my watch. I had three minutes and twenty-two seconds to get this down. I had to be at the pay phone on the corner of Little Minnesota. I took it down in three swallows and waited for it to settle in there with the hard booze. I had been drunk on boilermakers once before. It was a mistake I told myself I’d never repeat. I was trying to will myself into shape for the next beer when my arm was jostled by someone sitting next to me.
“Like another beer, Jack?” Marija said.
“No, thanks. I’m good.” You evil cunt, I thought.
My fingers twitched at the thought of grabbing her by her blonde hair and smashing her lovely face into the bar hard enough to leave teeth embedded in the wood.
She waved the bartender over and set a fifty on the counter. “One more for the road for my friend – same thing,” she said. He brought me a beer and another red cup topped up with amber liquid.
“What happened to your eyes?” she asked. “They’re all puffy.”
“I’ve been crying,” I said. Looking at that cup, I almost did cry. “I’m not going to be much good to you if I’m passed out in some gutter.”
“I want you,” she said slowly, “to do exactly what I told you to do or you’ll never see-”
I drank the shot and chased it in one long swallow with the beer. It burned like acid.
“Keep the walkie-talkie on,” she said and got off the stool. I now had less than a minute and thirteen seconds to get to that pay phone.
She threw something in my lap.
I watched her go. I took the last money I had in my wallet – the last I had to my name – and I set it on the bar. Where I was going, money wasn’t going to be useful.
When I came out of that cave-like dark into the mellow light of late afternoon, I reeled from the shock. I was literally blind for long seconds. My legs were out of sync with my brain, which was a broken gimbal trying to box the compass.
I leaned too far forward and then too far backward. Finally, I was able to open one eye and then the other against the light. I remember colliding with people. I remember being cussed at for a “drunk” and a “jerk.” Some fraternity boys grabbed me and spun me around for a little sport but I broke free into a dog-trot.