Pest Control

by Bill Fitzhugh

  Klaus shrugged it off until a loudmouth next to them slapped down a crisp hundred dollar bill and barked at Klaus. “Put your money where your mouth is, pal. Giants are number one.”

  Klaus calmly pulled some cash from his pocket and neatly laid eight Ben Franklins on the bar. “Let’s at least make it interesting, friend.”

  The loudmouth eyed Klaus for a moment before putting his money back in his wallet. “Yeah, well, if they weren’t down by 14 already I’d take you up on it.”

  Bob was impressed by Klaus’ display. “Wow, you make Pete Rose and Michael Jordan look like a pair of Methodist ministers.”

  “Those two have a problem,” Klaus scoffed. “I don’t.” He was deep in denial.

  Bob stared at the cash as Klaus scooped it up. That was more money than Bob had seen in quite a while. “What do you do for a living?” he asked, wishing the money was his.

  “I am a…corporate headhunter. And you?” Klaus’ line was in the water, his fishing expedition under way.

  When Bob blithely announced he was an exterminator, Klaus spewed a fine mist of gin across the bar. Bob patted Klaus on the back as he choked and sputtered.

  “You alright?” Bob asked.

  “Yes,” Klaus said. “I just swallowed the wrong way.” My god, Klaus thought, this guy is reckless. There was no telling what a loose cannon like this would do if he caught on to Klaus.

  “Yeah, so anyway, I’m an exterminator and I’m starting my own business.”

  Klaus was wary, but he still had some bait on his hook, so he continued. Would this guy just come out and admit to a stranger that he was a hired gun? “So you’re an independent contractor?”

  “Yep,” Bob said. “But right now I’m refining this special process I’m working on. It involves these insects from the order Reduviidae, that’re called…”

  “Wait,” Klaus interrupted, “you kill…insects?” Klaus assumed this was a euphemism for victims.

  “If it crawls, I’ll kill it.” Bob said proudly. “I’m starting with insects because of the naturally available predators. Someday I’d like to try the same with mammals, but I’m starting with bugs because they’re easier to hybrid,” he said, verbing the noun.

  Klaus wasn’t sure if Bob was simply having fun at his expense, speaking in extended metaphor, so he cast his line in again. “I understand that ‘line of work’ pays well.” Klaus raised an eyebrow as if it would pry the truth from Bob.

  “Truth is, I’m flat broke. I lost this one lousy job and now I’m tryin’ to come up with some start-up money to get the business going, so things are pretty tight.”

  “Hard times, huh?” Klaus said sympathetically.

  “You can say that again,” Bob replied.

  Klaus tried to interpret Bob’s words in terms of professional murder, but that didn’t work. He couldn’t tell whether this guy was speaking literally or figuratively, so he tried a new lure. “So how is this ‘business’ coming? Have you had any…contracts?”

  “Yes and no,” Bob said. “I’m doing this one job that I’ll get paid for if my idea works. If it doesn’t, I’m screwed. I’m tellin’ ya, I can’t get no relief.”

  “Yes, I know that feeling,” Klaus said warily.

  “But you wouldn’t believe some of the other stuff going on in my life lately. Some very weird shit, including this guy from France, I think his name was Marcel…”

  “Marcel?!” Klaus thought he had a nibble. “Tell me about him.”

  “Yeah, well him and a guy from the CIA, well, he says he’s with the CIA…they think I’m—” Bob looked around furtively before continuing, “—a hired killer.”

  “No,” Klaus said. He was beginning to think what he had on the line was, in fact, a guy who killed insects for a living.

  Bob laughed. “Yeah, what happened was I was out drinking one night when this buddy of mine talked me into answering this newspaper ad for an exterminator…”

  As he spoke, Bob’s napkin fell off his beer bottle. He lunged for it. Klaus reflexively went for his gun, but stopped himself when Bob whacked his head on the brass railing of the bar.

  “Yowch!” Bob rubbed his head. “Anyway, can you believe that? Me a killer?”

  “No, I can’t.” Suddenly it was all quite clear to Klaus. This guy was no more a killer than that odd American actor and film buff, Pee Wee Herman.

  Outside, a black Cadillac lumbered slowly up the street. It came to a stop next to Bob’s hapless Pinto. The doors opened spilling Miguel’s three hardened killers onto the asphalt, their guns in hand. They looked the Pinto over, then scanned the street for Bob.

  One of the killers barked something in Spanish causing the others to get back in the car. They drove slowly up the street.

  Inside, Bob continued commiserating with his new friend. “The whole thing might even be funny if Mary and Katy hadn’t sort of…left me.”

  “Who are they?” Klaus asked, unaware that he was growing fond of Bob after his second martini.

  “My wife and daughter,” Bob said. He pulled out his wallet and showed Klaus their picture. “How about you, Kurt, you married? Got any kids?”

  Klaus hesitated before answering. “No. I have no one.” He looked at his drink before continuing. “Your wife, why did she leave?”

  “Well, I can’t really blame her, I guess. Mary got kinda pissed off ’cause I didn’t use poison.”

  “Poison?” Klaus was embarrassed that he perhaps had reached a premature conclusion. Now, plied with three beers, this man was beginning to talk about poisons. Maybe he was a killer after all.

  “Yeah,” Bob continued, “she wanted me to use poison on the French guy’s job.”

  “A job for Marcel?” This was it, Klaus thought, Bob had slipped.

  “No, no…Ahn-ree,” Bob pronounced sarcastically. “I contracted to do his restaurant. I tried my first hybrid there instead of using poison like I promised Mary and, well, the place turned into a darn cockroach convention and Ahn-ree took his money back and Mary took Katy upstate to her mom’s.”

  Nope, Klaus thought, he’s back to the bug talk again.

  Bob continued, “See, Mary’s been edgy ‘cause we’ve been broke so long. Since she lost her bank job, we’ve been two paychecks away from total disaster. So she was doing double shifts…she’s a waitress…” Bob’s voice trailed off as he lost interest in the story. He took another suck on his bottle.

  “So life is a little hard right now?” Klaus asked.

  “Yeah,” Bob said, his optimism returning with every swallow. “But ya know, things may be turning around. I just got a big contract with this real estate guy; four buildings, well, there were four, there’re only three now. One of them sort of, I don’t know, it imploded. I don’t know what the hell happened with that. Anyway, I got three more buildings and three more hybrid strains to try. If one of ’em works, I’ll be set.”

  “Life is a lot of ‘ifs,’ isn’t it?” Klaus took one last sip from his martini and stood, certain that Bob wasn’t a threat to his career. “Well, my friend, it has been a long day. I must be going. I hope things go better for you.”

  They shook hands and their eyes met. There was some male bonding, but it wasn’t too messy.

  “Yeah, you too,” Bob said just before he burped. “Listen, Kurt, thanks again. For the beers and for listening to all my yammering. I appreciate it.”

  Klaus wished Bob good luck, then left.

  Bob drained his beer, then, noticing that Klaus hadn’t finished his martini, he killed it too.

  Between the male bonding and the alcohol, Bob felt giddy. As he stood to leave, Bob looked at the television and saw the Giants kick a game-winning field goal with 33seconds left on the clock. As the loudmouth grumbled something about missing his chance to make an easy $800, Bob rolled out to his car, prob
ably blowing about a .2 on the breathalyzer. Lacking at the moment a friend who wouldn’t let a friend drive drunk, Bob slid in behind the wheel of his potentially explosive Pinto and drove off not thinking about what would happen if he were hit from behind.

  He had just turned onto Spring Street when the black Cadillac with Miguel’s three killers pulled up next to him. Bob kept his eyes on the road until he heard the Cadillac’s horn blowing. He saw the three swarthy killers, their guns leveled.

  Assuming it was simply an attempted robbery, Bob signaled the men with the index finger of his right hand, indicating “Hang on half a second.”

  Steering with his left hand, Bob reached into his back pocket with his right, pulled out his wallet, and showed the men that it was empty. He shrugged his shoulders and mouthed “Sorry.” He continued driving.

  The killers looked at one another as Bob drove on, unshaken. A moment later, just past Broadway the Black Caddy screamed past Bob doing sixty. About 50 yards ahead of him the Cadillac did a 180-degree spin and stopped in the middle of the street, its high-beams nearly blinding him.

  The only thing Bob could think of was carjacking, but he couldn’t imagine why three guys in a nice Cadillac would want his old Pinto. After all these years, Bob figured he had to accept that almost anything could happen in this city. Still, he was surprised when the killers piled out of their car and leveled their guns at him as they approached. He was flat scared witless when he saw the brilliant muzzle flashes and felt the flying glass as his window shattered.

  “Holy shit!” Bob yelled as he hit the brakes and dove for the floorboard. This didn’t make any sense. Carjackers, Bob understood, tended to remove the driver before shooting. This seemed more like a direct, if mysterious, attempt on his life. He thought about praying, but where would he start?

  “Uh, dear God, it looks like I’m just about toast here. If this car doesn’t blow up first, I imagine one of these bullets is eventually going to hit me and could I make a reservation or do I need to contact St. Peter directly?”

  That didn’t seem very pious, so he crossed himself and said, “Mary, Katy…I love you.”

  Bob then heard three muffled pops in rapid succession, followed by silence.

  For a moment, all Bob could hear was air hissing out of one of his tires and a man yelling from a second story window something about if they don’t stop making all that goddamn noise down there, he was going to come down and show them a real gun.

  Bob peeked up cautiously through what had once been his windshield. He saw no one, so he slowly got out of his car, surprised that it hadn’t blown up in the hail of gunfire. Bob was too shaken to consider that what the killers had failed to do with their guns, they could have easily accomplished by rear-ending him in the Pinto.

  Bob saw the gunmen lying in the street, dead and bleeding from similarly located holes in their foreheads. From the size of the wounds and the way the skin was peeled back, Bob knew he was looking at exit wounds, which meant they had been shot from behind.

  Before he could examine the wounds further, the sound of leather on asphalt made him look up. Bob squinted and saw the figure of a man striding toward him, passing through steam from a sewer grate and backlit by the high beams of the Cadillac’s headlights. The man carried a gun.

  Bob didn’t know whether to shit or go fishing so he froze, then fell to his knees, figuring he was about to die for reasons he did not understand.

  “Please, please don’t kill me,” Bob pleaded. “I don’t know what’s going on, but please…” His supplication fizzled out.

  Bob covered his head with his hands in the same futile gesture made by many who thought they were about to be killed. The man stopped directly in front of Bob.

  “You really are just an exterminator, aren’t you?”

  Bob recognized the voice and peeked up through his hands. “Kurt? Is that you?”

  Klaus helped Bob to his feet. “My name is Klaus. I am also an exterminator.”

  The full meaning of Klaus’ words did not hit Bob right away. Klaus changed the subject too quickly, saying that they had to get out of there before the police arrived. Bob replied that there probably wouldn’t be any police for at least half an hour, assuming anyone had even called in the disturbance in the first place.

  Klaus insisted they flee the scene until Bob told him about the Kitty Genovese case where 38 people witnessed the slow and grisly murder of a woman involving three separate attacks over a 30-minute period. Despite her pleas for help, Bob explained to the bemused assassin, none of the 38 New Yorkers had done anything to stop the attack; in fact, none even bothered to pick up the phone to call the police.

  Klaus wondered how Bob, or any decent human for that matter, could live in such a city. But instead of delving into that, Klaus took advantage of the situation and dealt with the messy details lying in the street. They changed Bob’s flat and Klaus explained why he was in New York and why he had followed Bob into the bar. He also explained what had happened to the building that had imploded in front of Bob’s eyes.

  “Let me get this straight,” Bob said as he tightened the last lug nut. “You came here to kill me because you thought I was going to put you out of the assassination business?”

  Klaus nodded. Bob stopped and thought about that for a moment. “I’d like another drink.”

  “I think we should get out of Manhattan first.”

  Bob agreed. He started the bullet-riddled Pinto and led Klaus to the Queens-Midtown tunnel. They emerged on the other side of the East River and ended up at a mom-and-pop liquor store near the water on Kent Avenue. They ducked in to grab a bottle and found Mom and Pop behind the counter.

  Though normally a martini man, Klaus refused to drink warm gin, so he ordered a bottle of Glenlivet. That suited Bob just fine. But as Pop reached for the whiskey, the door opened and two vicious punks with tattooed lips and cheap handguns slipped inside.

  Punk one was heard to say, “Freeze or you’re all fuckin’ dead!” He said it with verve.

  The second punk hurdled the counter and pistol-whipped Pop, exposing his cheekbone, and sending him face first into a stack of boxes. Mom went to his aid and got smacked by the first punk, drawing blood from the corner of her withered mouth. She tasted her blood, clinging to her beaten husband as one of the punks emptied the cash register.

  By this point, Klaus had seen enough. He stepped up to the larger of the two shits.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Klaus informed the lowlife. The scumbag looked at Klaus incredulously before putting his gun smack on Klaus’ lips.

  “Open wide for chunky, asshole!” The punk turned to his partner and laughed. And that was his mistake.

  In that moment—a split second really—Klaus disarmed the little shit, grabbed his greasy hair, and fractured his skull on a cooler.

  The other nitwit reacted with his gun, but not fast enough. Klaus drew his own gun and put two rounds through the middle of the punk’s wrist. The witless cretin screamed hysterically and stared at his bloody arm.

  “Oh, shit! Sonofabitch! Goddammit!” he yelped. “What’d you do that for? Oh, shit that hurts like a motherfucker!”

  Klaus approached the bleeding punk and spoke softly. “You have a serious injury. You will need to remain calm until help arrives.” With that, Klaus rocketed the butt of his hand into the punk’s nose, knocking him out colder than a good martini. Klaus asked Mom and Pop if they were alright.

  They were shaken but okay.

  “Good, now about that whiskey.”

  Mom offered the scotch on the house, which Klaus graciously accepted. Then he had an afterthought. “Could I bother you for two lottery tickets?”

  After calling 911, Bob and Klaus walked to a spot on the water across from East River Park and Manhattan’s skyline. There they sat and drank in the warm whiskey and the gamy f
ragrance of the river.

  It had been quite a night, even by a professional killer’s standards, so Klaus tried to calm Bob by telling him harrowing tales of some of his near-death experiences.

  There was the time Klaus found himself in Juarez, in the rain, pursuing a chargé d’affaires from the German embassy who had absconded with some computer disks of a sensitive nature. Naturally Klaus got his man, but not before having a close encounter with a small, fast-moving piece of lead. The bullet had peeled some skin from Klaus’ head and revealed the sphenoid bone of his skull.

  “Look,” Klaus said, lifting the hair on that side of his head. “There is still a small scar.” Bob saw the small white line of raised tissue and whistled. Wow.

  Klaus dismissed the experience with a wave of his hand. He started telling Bob about a uniquely complex assignment he once undertook involving the execution of the head of a secret police force in the Philippines, when, suddenly, without warning, the conversation took a completely unexpected left turn.

  Before either of them knew what had happened, they were knee-deep in bullshit—faulty memories leading the way—as they recounted imaginary punches thrown during the famous “Thrilla in Manilla,” a discussion that soon gave way to the age-old argument of who was the best heavyweight ever.

  “It was definitely Muhammad Ali. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” Bob said, as any good entomologist might.

  Klaus begged to differ, “No. Iron Mike Tyson. In three.”

  “Three to five’s more like it,” Bob joked. “Besides, Ali had the reach, the speed. Ali in eight.”

  “Tyson,” Klaus reminded Bob, “is also quick, and he has more power. The most savage punch in boxing history. I won a lot of money betting on Iron Mike.”

  “Yeah, but he had no defense.”

  “What? He had the best defense money could buy,” Klaus said with a nod and a wink. “What was his name? Dershowitz? It’s just that he had so little to work with.”

  “Good point,” Bob said. “Now on the other hand, Marciano.”