Double Switch

by T. T. Monday

“One box is enough,” I say. Again, I wait for Big Unit to shut me down. Instead, he nods and takes my card to the cash register, where he rings up the sale and rips off a neat little white receipt for me to sign. In the meantime, one of his associates has polished the gun, removed its tag, and wrapped it up in a neat quilted bag with a zipper. He hands me the gun, along with my ID.

  “That’s it?” I ask.

  “You need something else? Targets, maybe?”

  “I just thought, you know, that there was a waiting period?”

  “Not in Colorado!” the driver says.

  “No way,” says Big Unit. “Not now and not ever. It’s called the Second Amendment, and we take it real seriously here.” The other clerks in the room, who have been listening the whole time, murmur their concurrence.

  “There’s no background check?”

  “It’s done,” Big Unit says. “My colleague ran your license.”

  When we get back to the car, Keith asks if I’d like to sit up front.

  “I’m okay in the back,” I say. “But I would like to get some dinner. Do you know of anything around here?”

  “You like meat? There’s this all-you-can-eat Brazilian place around the corner. You know churrascarias? They carve it for you right at the table. Bloody as hell, just the way I like it.”

  16

  I’m not sure what it says about American society, but I feel instantly safer once I have the pistol in my hands. I had planned to stuff it in the waistband of my pants, but when I explain this to Keith at dinner, he says I’m just asking to shoot my dick off. He gives me one of the extra shoulder holsters (there are multiple) in the trunk of his car. When he drops me off at a quarter to eight, I feel safer but more confused than I did when I left the ballpark. On the one hand, I’m better prepared. On the other, I feel like the city of Denver is trying to cajole me into killing someone.

  The sun has gone down. The area is well lit from the streetlights. Keith leaves me a few blocks away so I can get my bearings before I show up for the meeting. He gives me his number and insists that I call when I’m done. I sense that he wants to stick around, that he’s worried Tiff will give him hell if anything bad happens to me. I tell him to stay close. I won’t be long.

  Although there are no other pedestrians on Forty-fourth Avenue, the street is not deserted. Trucks rumble past at a regular clip, two or three a minute. The address in question no longer has any signs on its front door. The photo on the mapping app must have been old, or else the property recently changed hands. I recognize the loading dock, wide enough for two trailers. Next to that is a man-door with the address tacked up in crooked black numerals. The lone dusty window has its blinds drawn. With nine millimeters of confidence in my armpit, I walk up to the door and knock. There is no answer.

  I check my phone and make sure that I have the right address. I do, but it’s still early, ten till eight, so I go around back. The lighting is poor in the alley, and it takes me a minute to discern which door corresponds to my building. Turns out it doesn’t matter, because all the doors are locked. I consider shooting off the knobs—that’s something I can do now!—but it feels extreme. Maybe later, I tell myself, even though I know I didn’t buy this gun to shoot doorknobs. Rifles may have other legitimate uses, but a handgun has only one: killing people.

  I return to the front of the building and cross the street. In between two loading docks I find a dark niche, where I sit down and wait. Eight o’clock comes and goes. At eight-fifteen, there’s still no activity in the warehouse. Then, finally, at eight-thirty, a black Suburban pulls up in front. A figure in loose black clothes and a black knit beanie jumps out of the passenger’s door. Something about the way he walks feels familiar. He leaps up the steps to the front door, punches in a code, and steps inside. A light goes on behind the blinds.

  Meanwhile, the driver throws the Suburban into reverse and backs up to one of the loading docks. When he’s parked, the roll door comes up. The first guy is standing there, backlit by the empty warehouse. Rusted can lights dangle from the ceiling, illuminating a whole lot of nothing. The guy on the dock taps the roof of the Suburban. The driver gets out, and together they remove a long dark bag from the back of the truck. There’s no mistaking that shape. The two men wrangle the body onto the dock with ease. They’ve obviously done this before.

  They work quickly. In under a minute, they have hauled the body inside and rolled the steel door down again. For a moment or two, I don’t move from my hiding place. Now I know what’s going on. The person who called me knew these guys would be coming here with a body around eight. He wanted me to see this. But why?

  Then my phone buzzes.

  Don’t go anywhere, reads the new text. Show’s not done yet.

  I reach into my jacket and unsnap the strap on the holster. Five minutes elapse, then ten. I hear a strange noise coming from inside the warehouse, a high-pitched mechanical whistling. It starts, then stops, then starts again. The hoods appear to be occupied for the moment, so I decide to take my chances. I hurry across the street, duck behind the parked Suburban, then creep along the loading dock. I pause before the steps leading to the front door. I realize this is crazy: the thugs could open the door—either door—and find me here.

  Then my phone buzzes again.

  Look in the window.

  The caller must be nearby. Or maybe he trained a camera on this spot? I tell myself it’s a camera, because I really don’t like the idea—the possibility—that he has a rifle scope trained on my back.

  I leap up the steps and put my face to the window. There is a small gap between the blinds and the window frame. I can’t see much, but I see enough: The driver is standing behind a piece of table-mounted power equipment. He’s Latino, clean-shaven, with a scar on his upper lip from a crudely repaired cleft palate. The machine before him is a band saw with a stainless-steel table. It’s a butcher’s saw—I’ve seen them at Safeway. He pushes what looks like a rack of ribs through the saw, and the noise changes pitch, becoming higher as the blade cuts through bone. Blood pools on the steel table and drips onto the concrete floor. Near his feet stands a blue plastic kiddie pool filled with offal. I watch as he takes the resulting cuts—the chops?—and tosses them to the other guy, who is kneeling beside a long Coleman cooler.

  Then I notice that the second guy isn’t a guy at all. It’s Enriqueta—or should I call her La Loba? Her hair is confined beneath the beanie, but the profile is definitely hers. She is intent on her work, trying to organize the chunks of meat so that they all fit into the cooler. She’s so intent, in fact, that she isn’t paying attention when her partner throws the last of the ribs, and it hits her in the face. She laughs, picks up the ribs, and chucks them back at the guy. He is not pleased and swears at her in Spanish.

  Suddenly there’s a loud bang. La Loba’s posture stiffens. For a second I watch her, confused, and then my subconscious puts it all together. The noise was mine. It was my gun. I had been fondling it, stroking it absently in its holster. When I recognized La Loba, my hand must have twitched involuntarily and pulled the trigger.

  I turn from the window and run. I tear down Forty-fourth, turn at the first corner, then run a few blocks and turn again. Eventually, the street dead-ends at a freeway embankment. I look around. I’m not being followed, for now.

  There’s a hole in the chain-link fence, and I squeeze through. Negotiating between crippled shopping carts and leaf bags full of stinking refuse, I find a place to crouch on the far side of a dusty azalea bush. I take out my phone and dial Keith. Headlights flash. I duck, burying the phone in my jacket. The car slows down but never stops. When it’s gone I lift the phone to my ear.

  “Keith—”

  “Where are you, buddy?”

  I locate a street sign and read out the block number.

  “Hang tight,” he says. “I’m five minutes away.”

  17

  The best thing about day games is that you can have a whole day’s worth of fun in the evening,
then look down at your watch and see it’s only 10:00 p.m. That’s the situation I’m in when Keith drops me off in front of Connie’s building. I called her from the car, but she didn’t pick up, which means either she’s angry at me or she’s gone to bed. I’m exhausted and probably should go back to the team hotel to catch up on sleep—tomorrow is another day game—but it’s Saturday night. I figure it’s worth a shot.

  I use the intercom to call up to Connie’s apartment. She doesn’t answer so I shoot her a text to say I’m here, that I’ll be waiting in the bar downstairs if she’s interested in making up. I decide to give her half an hour. I’ll try the buzzer again before I leave.

  The restaurant on the ground floor of her building has a retro speakeasy theme, with wood-paneled walls and cast-iron pipes hanging from the ceiling. The cocktails, which cost fifteen bucks and take fifteen minutes to make, have names like Sopwith Camel and Gin Van Landingham. At this hour, there’s a kind of shift change going on among the clientele. A few tired-looking couples linger over espresso and cake crumbs, milking the babysitter for the last few precious moments. One by one their tables turn over to the party crowd, who are not necessarily younger than the date-night parents but certainly more energetic. That or they’re well into the evening’s first eight ball.

  I take a seat at the bar, where most of the drinkers are sitting in silence, swiping at their cell phones. I think of the drunks in Joey’s Big Sky, the bar where I met Mags. Hard to believe that was only a couple of days ago. This is a different crowd, to be sure, but maybe they’re not as different as you’d think. I would expect this place to be filled with young people looking for love. These folks seem interested only in their phones. Izzy tells me that at her high school the most useful distinction is not between heterosexuals and homosexuals but between those who are sexual and those who are not. The abstainers call themselves “aces,” short for “asexuals.” “Ace is the new bi,” Izzy informed me the other day on our call. The existence of these voluntarily castrated teenagers makes me sad. It reminds me of those punks who used to dye their hair gray, I guess as a fashion statement. I want to shake these kids and tell them there’s plenty of time to be gray and abstinent. When you’re young, dye your hair green and fuck your brains out—that’s what being young is for.

  Then I see someone I know at the end of the bar. It takes me a minute to place him, but only because he’s out of context. It’s Jock Marlborough, the Bay Dogs’ radio play-by-play man. Jock is about a hundred pounds overweight, most of it bunched around the middle like a biscuit wrap. He’s seated on the bar stool, his sagging flanks threatening to lap his ass; the only impediment is a blue-and-yellow Bay Dogs polo shirt. His wide, flat head is crowned by a tortured flaxen comb-over that must occupy most of his mornings. In an era where the shaved-head look has made balding nearly painless, I have never understood Marlborough’s insistence on cultivating the style of a rabbi from 1979. Sure, he’s old-fashioned—baseball announcers are all traditionalists at heart—but respecting tradition doesn’t have to mean repeating mistakes. Tiff Tate, if she were here, would be moved to take his case pro bono.

  I walk up and say hello.

  “Adcock!” There’s real surprise behind his narrow brown eyes. “You’re the last person I expected to see here.”

  “Why’s that, Jock?”

  “No reason, just that the team hotel isn’t nearby, and…well, I suppose you could say the same about me, couldn’t you?”

  His voice, I must say, is beautiful: every consonant in place, every vowel opened to its fullest potential. His dynamic range is extraordinary, moving from the dry business of earned-run averages and on-base percentages to the soaring height of his home-run call: “A high drive to deep right-center, Tucker goes back, to the track, to the waaall…Auf-wieder-SEHEN!” The last syllable cascades in pitch as the ball plunges into the crowd. This perfection is no accident. The home-run call is the trademark of a play-by-play man, and a memorable one takes years to develop. Marlborough likes to say he was born with the voice, but I tend to think that’s impossible. None of us were born with our professional skills. I was blessed with a strong and resilient left arm, but everything I know about pitching I learned through hard work and repetition. I can imagine Jock Marlborough as a teenager locked in his bedroom with a Dictaphone, narrating the muted ballgame on the grainy TV, masturbating during the commercials, a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos between his knees, rewinding the tape to scrutinize his performance. Like most people who rise to the top of their professions, he focused on his one special talent to the exclusion of other kinds of development. Jock’s voice is the finest of musical instruments, but it’s like a Stradivarius in a pasteboard case. You’d think eventually he’d start to give a shit how he looks. At any rate, you can see why he never made the jump to TV.

  I order a draft beer. Jock asks the bartender for another Canadian whiskey, neat.

  “What brings you to this part of town?” I ask.

  Jock rolls his eyes, and for the first time I notice he’s trashed. “I’m on a date, if you can believe it. There’s this app where you swipe women’s faces and it matches you up. I was supposed to meet someone named Sharon here, but she never showed.”

  “I didn’t know you were dating.”

  “New thing,” he says. “Wife asked me to leave. Said she’d moved on, tired of being married to a ship captain….” Even when he’s drunk, Jock’s pronunciation is crisp. The dropped subjects are the only tell. “No idea who he is. Guess I’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Remind me—you have kids?”

  “Two girls grown up and flown away. Always preferred their mother. No sympathy for old Dad, not that I deserved any. Missed their whole lives, practically. And for what, a golden mike and a pat on the ass? I’ll be honest with you, Adcock, I’m not sure it’s been worth the sacrifice.”

  The Hall of Fame inducts one or two announcers every year, and Jock’s name is regularly mentioned as a candidate. He’ll get the nod soon. The Hall of Fame. He’s being too hard on himself.

  “You’ve given them a good life. The girls went to college, right?”

  “Stanford.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Summa cum laude, ex officio, ad nauseam.”

  “Well, you had a big role in that, even if you weren’t always there to see it happen.”

  It feels good to say these things, though I’m not sure who I’m reassuring, Jock or myself.

  The bartender arrives with Jock’s whiskey, and he clutches the tumbler in his stubby fingers. “Don’t know about you, Adcock, but the death of our friend Magnusson has me twisted up inside. There but for the grace of God, et cetera.” He raises his glass. “A toast to Erik Magnusson, premature explorer of the land we will one day call home, maybe sooner than we think.”

  We clink and drink. “How well did you know Magnusson?” I ask.

  “We kept in touch,” Jock says. “Decent guy. Uncommonly decent, if you know what I mean. Didn’t deserve that business with his wife. She wanted everything. He never went into too much detail, but I know he was struggling financially. I offered to loan him some cash.”

  “Did he accept?”

  “He said he’d think about it.” Jock pauses. “But then this happened.”

  We observe another moment of silence, and then Jock grunts. “Why does anyone get married? We all know how it turns out. Hey!”—he says brightly, as if realizing only now who he’s been talking to—“You have experience with this!”

  For a moment I think he means divorce. But he’s talking about my side work, the matrimonial investigations I’m known for. “I know a little.”

  “Going on thirty years I’ve been doing this job, and suddenly, now, my wife is sick of it? I have no proof that she’s fooling around, but, you know, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck…I think that’s Shakespeare, by the way.”

  “Is it?”

  “You can help me.”

  “Jock, I’m sorry, but my plate is full
right now.”

  “Any chance of persuading you to work overtime?” Jock’s eyes are bloodshot, his old-man brow knotted together like a golden retriever’s. I see a man chewed up by this game, a man who accomplished exactly what he set out to do, only to discover that it wasn’t worth the price he paid. I don’t have the time or the mental space to take on another case, but how can I turn him down?

  “I’ll need your home address,” I say, “and whatever you can tell me about your wife—any hobbies, clubs, professional organizations.”

  “Professional organizations?”

  “When a wife takes a man on the side, it’s almost always somebody she knows in another context. Women don’t generally sleep with strangers.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “It’s not supposed to make you feel anything, it’s just the truth.”

  “Beauty is truth,” he says, “truth beauty.”

  “That’s Keats.”

  “Adcock!”

  “I’m dating a librarian. I’m surrounded by books.”

  “Lucky you. My wife is a real estate agent. I’m surrounded by assholes!”

  18

  When I finally get back to the team hotel, it’s one-thirty in the morning. Jock felt it was only right to give Sharon till closing, so I left him at the bar. It’s been an evening of disappointments. Connie never answered her door. The only trigger getting pulled tonight belongs to my new Glock, and that was an accident. Luckily, the fallout from my error is minimal: a dime-sized hole through the back panel of my jacket and a powder burn on the lining. As Plaxico Burress will tell you, carrying a piece is no easy feat, especially if you want to look cool. All night I’ve been worried that it would go off again, so I’ve tried to keep my right elbow six inches off my hip. I must have looked like a gimp on the barstool.

  I open the door to my room, and cold air pours into the hall. I turn on the light and try to remember the location of the thermostat. I turned it up last night, but the maid must have reset it to the industry-standard “meat locker” setting. As I’m looking for the controller, my phone rings. I’m hoping it’s Connie, but it turns out to be my daughter. I try not to sound disappointed.