by Robert White
I slowed my pace. When I reached the southern edge of the bridge abutment over the highways, I broke into a sprint. I stripped and tossed my shirt and pants as far as I could fling them under the bridge and made it to the bottom without a neck-breaking headfirst fall down the steep grassy hillside.
Forks of lightning speared the western sky. I counted twelve cars before I saw her coming, and when she pulled over to pick me up, the timing was perfect to the second. The road surface glistened with a greasy film; the light rain created a slick crud. She found a gap between a couple eighteen-wheelers and slid into it with the overworked engine of her Mazda screaming in protest.
The air brakes and horn blast of the truck in the passing lane expressed his displeasure at our sudden appearance in front of his grill. When he beamed his brights, the interior of the car lit up like a high-school stage play. I suggested she might mollify him by dropping back, but she raised a finger to the rearview mirror and provoked another crescendo from his horn.
“Stevie, I don’t need any more enemies than I’ve got,” I said.
“That motherfucker,” she said.
“This is the exit,” I said.
“That motherfucker,” she said with an icier calm than before.
“Let it go. This is the exit, Stevie. You have to turn around right here.”
Despite the banal message on my machine, Marija was giving me no leeway. If I was a minute late, I could expect her to be gone. She knew she was hot now, and nobody was under the cops’ radar. She had suckered me from the very beginning, this woman. I played into her hands and licked crumbs from them. She came on Doris Day in a poodle skirt and bobbysocks, but she had a black heart beneath that Frederick’s of Hollywood teddy. Any Northtown redneck would have been a greater challenge than I had proved. I couldn’t blame Sarah’s dumping me and wounded pride, either.
Stevie was good. She had a feather touch with her vehicle and timed the traffic lights for green all the way down 531 through Jefferson to the curve leading to the Strip. She pulled in to the Oak Room parking lot on time. She killed her headlamps and extracted the tiny overhead bulb from her shirt pocket and showed it to me.
“Now can I join the secret agent club?” She added a wink.
“Be in the parking lot in fifteen,” I said.
“Lighten up, Jack, for shit’s sake.”
I slipped out of the dark car while it was still moving; she accelerated between a pair of parked cars. The Strip was almost deserted. Up ahead, under the lights at Little Minnesota, I saw a few rain-soaked girls cadging change. The rain kept falling and my black windbreaker was slick from brushing up against the overgrown sumac poking through fence holes by the time I opened the back doors of the Oak Room.
She was there alone with a couple drinks in front of her. She matched me in black: black Levi’s, black knit sweater top, and black boots. Her breasts took up so much of the fabric that she exposed a crescent of white belly flesh when she leaned forward to scoop quarters off the bar.
I sat down and set the drink waiting for me aside. I used several cocktail napkins to wipe the rain from my face.
“I had a brother back home,” she said.
“I don’t give a shit about your brother.”
“You’re upset, aren’t you?”
“Upset? Why no, Marija. Should I be?”
“Randall said you’re not like him, your brother. You’d overpower me if you had the chance.”
“We’re here to talk about the money for my brother,” I said.
“Drink first. Take the chill off. It’s a Seven-and-Seven.”
“Do you know how I’d like to warm up, Marija?” I gave her a lewd grin.
“How, Jack? Tell me.” She grazed the backs of my hands with her long pink fingernails. My hair was still dripping wet.
“I’d like to open you up from your neck to your navel and stick my cold hands inside your loose, warm guts.”
“You’re brave when he isn’t around,” she said. She tried to withdraw her hand from my grip.
“Is he close?” I squeezed hard.
“Oh, you like giving me pain,” she leaned closer. “You want to hurt me.”
“I want you to kill you, but first I want proof you have my brother.” I released her hand; she didn’t look at it as she pulled it back.
“A first means there’s a second, Jack.”
“We’ll get to that later.”
“Who says you’re making the decisions now?”
I started to stand up but she reached a hand out to stop me.
“Sit down. Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “Here’s what we expect you to do.”
She placed a folded square of paper in front of me. I picked it up and looked at it without unfolding it. I dropped it in her drink.
“You heard what I said, Marija. Proof first.”
“Proof of life? Like the movies, huh?”
“You and Calderone can say goodbye to the money. I’ll blow one-third on a Lamborghini, and I’ll stick the rest in the trunk before I drive it down to West Virginia and push it over a cliff.”
Her stare lasered me like a cop pulling over a drunk driver.
“Look at this,” she said. She had it tucked into the waistband of her jeans. I watched it ride up to expose a good portion of thong as she braced herself against the back of booth to pull it out. It was a white wash cloth folded over several times. A broken rust-colored line stained one side like snow withdrawing from a peak. I unwrapped it a fold at a time and looked at its torn edge. Carlos’ earring was still attached to the lobe – a silver number fourteen.
“Don’t get crazy, Jack,” she said. “Randall wanted to bring you an eyeball, but I talked him out of it.”
I looked at her.
“Your brother doesn’t give two shits about you,” she said. “He was in Buffalo before he stopped off to get high. The fool called Randall and asked him if he could come back. Can you believe? Like a bitch whimpering to be taken back by his pimp. He thought the money would smooth things over. You should have heard Randall on the phone sweet-talking him. By the way, he said he hated you and he wanted to help us kill you.”
“Maybe... maybe he’s got his reasons,” I said.
“He’s supposed to be so smart, your brother, huh? They let him have computers. That’s how he came up with the idea to find a woman bank manager.”
“Find the weakness,” I mumbled. I was reeling from what she had said about my brother’s hatred.
“Carl said your father used to make you sleep without bed sheets in winter and kept the window open. He said it was to toughen you up.”
Her words stung. “My father believed it would come in handy if we ever found ourselves floundering in a lifeboat,” I said.
“It didn’t work on your little brother very well, did it? He turned into a little sissy in prison. When Randall told me about him, I was the one who told him to cultivate him, even though it made him sick to his stomach – so perverted-”
I slapped her hard across the face. The sound it made stopped all conversation in the bar. The bartender began wiping down the bar closer to us. I looked at him. Marija waved him off. She fixed me with a look; her features were composed and she had a bloody smile; she dabbed her lips with a napkin.
“I knew it, Jack. You like hurting women, too,” she said.
She took a swallow of her drink to wash down the blood in her mouth. Her bottom teeth were still rimed with a bloody smear. We were less than a foot apart with my brother’s ear in a wash cloth between us like a gauntlet.
“Randall said you fight like a girl. He said you couldn’t break an egg,” she mocked.
“Tell me what you want,” I said.
“When I was fourteen, four boys from Dubrovnik lured me into a house. They held me down and raped me. Because I fought them, they turned me over and sodomized me to teach me a lesson. It took me ten years to get to each one but I did it.”
“And you imply I have problems with the opposite sex?�
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“So what kind of freak are you, big brother? Let me guess. I see you more as the type to break into a woman’s house to sniff her panties,” she said.
I had done that once in Montreal. I had done other things I didn’t want to think about...
Her eyes lit up. “You like to watch. You liked watching Randall fuck me.”
Her red mouth had a Halloween look.
“Deny it, Jack,” she said.
“Second condition,” I said and looked away from her. My voice was husky. The couple closest to us was stealing looks our way. Our conversation was unusual, even for bar talk. “We make the exchange here.”
“Not here,” she said. “My cabin down the street.”
“I’m not going to be that stupid twice,” I said.
“Yes, you are, Jack. How hard would it be for me to drop a package in the mail on my way out of town – say, a package addressed to your FBI agent – a package containing a gun used in a murder with your prints all over it?”
“They know the gunshot was postmortem,” I said.
“Think about it, hero. Do you need one more piece of evidence linking you to everything?”
“Cela ne fait rien,” I said. Something my father mumbled to himself around the apartment after my mother died. I remembered it after all these years: It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter...
“I’ll have the money but not on me,” I said. “When my brother walks away, you can have it. The deal includes the gun.”
She smiled. “The gun’s my insurance. Besides, a girl never knows when she might need protection.”
She looked at me for a reaction. “You must think we’re stupid like these cops letting you run around. Wait two minutes and then leave by the front door,” she said. She scooped up the ear like so much loose change.
“So long, Peeping Tom,” she said.
“Au revoir, you bitch,” I said to her but she was too far away to hear and she knew full well I was mesmerized by the lovely movement of her backside. The old man would not have approved of showing weakness like that.
I watched her stop at the doorway and put a plastic scarf around her blonde head and walk out. I put a ten on the bar and fetched the note out of my drink with two fingers. I wasn’t planning on waiting.
Stevie was slumped against the window on her side. She had a small hole in the left side of her head and a much larger one where the slug exited. I didn’t see it there, but the fist-sized chunk of brain matter on the headrest and the bone fragments on the dashboard and steering wheel made further looking unnecessary. I patted down her pockets and looked under the body in case the gun with my prints was lying there.
Calderone would have used a silencer. She was probably counting it when the barrel was put to her temple. Her jaw was slack. Loose bills lay scattered in her lap. She had plenty of money now to pay the ferryman her way across the black river.
I heard a siren’s wail coming from opposite ends of the strip. No matter how tough I had tried to come across inside, I was being given the same message in the parking lot: I was her monkey. She was the organ grinder.
#35
“Camera’s off, Jack,” Pippin said. Cops turn off cameras as often as Amish women invite lap dancers to their sewing bees. They can lie; the Supreme Court said so.
I let out a deep sigh and looked down at my hands. I twisted them around. The old man would have called it overkill, but I was so tired I wasn’t acting anymore. My father lived in a time before ‘deniable plausibility’ became a catchphrase but the words rang in my head like a temple gong. They broke me down, I looked the part. I told them about meeting Marija in the bar and my brother’s ear on the table. I even mentioned the blackmail about the gun.
“So how did your prints get on the gun, Jack?” Pippin asked me softly. His facial expression said he was my friend, my father confessor. He practically tingled with concern. We are in this thing together, it said.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I was drunk – I remember passing out at my house. Maybe somebody came upstairs and, you know, put the gun into my hand while I was knocked out.”
It was thinner than rooster soup. Pippin nodded to a second female agent taking notes. She wrote as if she had just heard the formula to convert water to gasoline.
They cut me loose at quarter to six. The lump of grease in my belly was pretty much dispersed or congealed throughout my nether regions by then to make me feel uniformly miserable. Despite the bloat, my pants were now so loose that I had to take my belt down to the last hole to keep them up.
Pippin walked me to the door.
“Was all that really necessary, Trichaud? All that sob-story jibber-jabber-”
“How long is he good for?” I interjected.
“Oh, he’ll buzz me about sixteen times tonight wanting to know if we’re doing the right thing by not following through on the warrant. Let’s say, for your sake, if you’re not waiting for me in the lobby at nine tonight, all bets are off,” Pippin said.
“Thanks, Forzell.”
“Thank me when it’s over, gunner,” he said. He pointed his finger gun at me and blew away the imaginary smoke.
The deputy who dropped me off at the motel didn’t leave. He followed me up in the elevator and stood outside my door while I unlocked it. He didn’t return my good night.
I went around the room collecting the articles I had secreted in various places. Desert-camo backpack, gloves, nylon rope. They found the items I had left for them in the vents and other places they were likely to check first. Nothing that would add up to anything but a red herring. I secreted everything into my clothing about me.
The red light on my phone blinked on and off. It was Sarah.
“I don’t want to leave a message,” she said. “I want to know why you gave me that thing.” She meant the Guardian Angel, which had a sticky red label across the back that said ‘nonlethal device.’ I was glad I hadn’t been there to answer the phone because I had nothing more than my intuition to explain it.
I threw the curtains aside and opened the windows. The drop was twenty feet to a grassy verge that would break my fall, worst case, but that would simply put me in front of the headlights of the surveillance car. I needed to get to the roof to have any chance.
The jump across my balcony to the next one was just five feet. I looked out over the lot and took in the surveillance teams below. The leap would land me on the railing, and I had a feeling that I was going to end up with a broken neck like some drunken college kid on spring break. I had to snag one of the overhanging faux beams that stuck out from the roof at intervals for whatever the esthetic effect these lent to architecture that was mindlessly utilitarian – a rectangle with a couple smaller squares fore and aft.
I had a stomach-churning fear the beam would turn out to be hollow plaster tubing and explode in my hands and I’d go into the dirt below like a dart or land on the cement balcony of the floor below me. The thin aluminum railing wasn’t much for stability, either, and I would need to extend my hands high above my head when I jumped.
I jumped and my grip on the beam was nothing short of cadaveric. I waited for my body to stop swinging like a pendulum for the final move. Below me, I heard car doors slam, men’s shouts, and feet running across the parking lot. They were sitting in their cars too long, watching my little Cirque de Soleil stunt, and this was going to get them reamed by Pippin.
When I was still enough, I swung my foot up high and hard to clear the lip of the roof. My shoe caught in the middle of my instep but slipped from the tarred roof. I hadn’t expected that. Now I was hanging straight down and weaker for the effort.
I sucked in my breath and swung my legs again – this time I overshot and my heel bounced a couple of times along the edge and then slid off with the same result except that my upper body and my arms were now quivering from strain.
The third swing did it. I made it perfect and kept the momentum to roll my weight up and over the beam. I lay gasping on the roof while my
lungs recovered. I was in such weakened condition from fatigue that my legs and arms continued to twitch. I lay there wheezing like a ninety-year-old man with asthma. My mind drifted to a time I had taken Carlos with me on one of my jaunts in Montreal – a stupid thing but I was vain of my prowess and roofs were my strong suit. I had Carlos in an overlapping handhold and was hoisting him up from a third-story landing at the very moment a security guard passed directly below us. I held Carlos above his head; my hands locked around his in a vise grip. I remembered staring at the glowing orange tip of his cigarette and focusing on that, watching it shrink until he finally stubbed it out against the side of the building. When I pulled Carlos up to me, his face was white. We never spoke about that escapade of amateur terror, but my muscles had stored it in memory.
I forced myself to get up. I couldn’t run well because my leg muscles were shaking. I made it to the opposite side of the roof from where Pippin’s agents spotted me.
I removed the rope and gloves. I made a slipknot and threw the end of the rope over a beam projecting out from the end of the building. The leather gloves were thick but not exactly the kind Delta soldiers used to repel out of Black Hawks. I had no idea if this was going to work right, but I made my second leap of faith off the building and within seconds I was plummeting in a controlled fall toward the grass below. My hands began to heat up from the sizzling friction burn but it didn’t get unbearable until I was just a few feet from the ground.
All of this from balcony through the swing upward to the roof to the rope trick didn’t consume more than a few minutes, but if I was spotted by Pippin’s men now it would all have been for nothing. They had to be tearing around the upper floor looking for a way to the roof. I scrambled up the grassy verge and crawled over the guardrail. In seconds I was in a fast trot across the street where I ran along the culvert and made a beeline for the gas station.