by Ken Bruen
“You are a freak, buddy,” Victor said straight-faced. Then he said, “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Jesus, where’s your sense of humor?”
“I think you’re missing my whole point.” Bobby wondered why Victor never seemed to understand what the fuck he was talking about. “It wasn’t like I gave a shit what some chick thought of me – it’s just the way it is when you’re in a fucking wheelchair, you start buying into this whole being a cripple shit, know what I mean? I mean when it comes right down to it, what does anybody do with their lives? You eat, you shit, you go to sleep – I can still do all those things. I can even screw. They have medicine, all these devices. It probably would be a big pain in the ass, but I could do it. I ride the bus, I can go anywhere anybody else can go. There’s a word for what I’m talking about but I don’t know what it is.”
“You feel like people are putting you down.”
“I said a word, not a sentence.” Bobby thought, Is this guy a freaking moron or what? “It sounds like erection. Perception. It’s like everybody’s got this perception of me right off the bat. They see a big guy, late forties, wheelchair – they either feel sorry for me or they think I’m a fuckin’ freak. Kids, Jesus, they’re the fucking worst. Last winter, I go out to get a bottle of Coke when these three little kids start throwing snowballs at me. Not snow – ice. You know, like we used to throw at buses in the old days, now they throw them at people – what’s the fuckin’ world coming to? I swear to God, I was ready to go get my shotgun and blow the little fucks away. What happened to getting a little respect? The old days I’d walk down the street nobody’d come near me, but now the perception ’s changed. I’m the same guy – I can still beat the shit out of somebody if I had to – but nobody else sees it that way. You see what I’m saying?”
“I guess so,” Victor said and took a sip of milk.
Man, Bobby couldn’t get over how shitty Victor looked in that bellhop uniform. Was this really the same guy who used to dress in style, wearing snazzy pinstriped suits and shiny shoes? Yeah, he’d always had thin hair, but now he was completely bald and he looked like he might’ve lost twenty or thirty pounds since the last time Bobby had seen him, what, six years ago? There was something wrong with his voice too – it sounded hoarse and scratchy, like an old man. Bobby might not’ve even recognized him at all if he didn’t still have his dark skin and his big bent-out-of-shape nose that he’d probably broken dozens of times as a kid. Bobby could understand how a guy could lose some pounds and pack on the years, but he couldn’t see how anybody could go from armed robbery to carrying people’s luggage. Bobby might have lost his legs, but this asswipe had lost his balls.
Bobby slurped his coffee, said, “Remember the Bowery jobs?”
Victor smiling, suddenly looking young again, going back in time, said, “Those were real beauts, huh?”
“You plan a job, just the way you want it all to work out, and then boom – it goes that way, without one fucking hitch.”
“Except when that little Chink pulled the alarm and started shooting at us.”
“That wasn’t a hitch. You gotta expect shit to happen when you’re stealing jewelry. I’m talking about everything else. Getting to the car, getting on the bridge, getting to Brooklyn, switching cars in Brooklyn, getting to Queens, switching cars in Queens, and then boom – we’re on the Island, counting the fuckin’ take. Like clockwork. We did it, what, three times? All that fucking gold. Man, that was it.”
He felt a rush, just seeing it replay in his head. It was like he was there again – ten years younger, looking sharp and in shape. When he saw himself standing in the jewelry store, holding his Uzi, and then running out to the street, he could feel his legs, like in those dreams when it all seemed so real, then he’d wake up and still be a fucking cripple.
“I should never’a gone out on my own,” Victor said.
“That’s exactly what I was talking about,” Bobby said, “you can’t second-guess your life. So you fucked up, you took a fall, you’re still what, fifty, fifty-five?”
“Forty-four,” Victor said.
Thinking, Jeez, the fucking sad sack looks sixty, Bobby said, “See? Forty-four is like what twenty-four used to be. With vitamins, all the new shit with doctors, everybody’s gonna be living to a hundred soon.”
Victor, looking at his watch, said, “Fuck, I gotta get back to work. So what brings you around here anyway? You just wanted to shoot the shit or what?”
“No, it’s a little more important than that.” Bobby leaned forward, making sure the young guy reading the Daily News at the next table wasn’t listening. “I got a job to discuss.”
“A job we did?”
“No, a job we’re gonna do.”
Victor stared at Bobby for a few seconds, like he was trying not to laugh, then said, “Come on you’re joking, right?”
“Does this face look like it’s joking?
“What’s this, April fools? Come on, Bobby, give me a fuckin’ break, all right?”
“I’m serious, man. I came to you first because I know you’re good and I know I can trust you. But if you don’t want to hear me out I’ll go talk to somebody else.”
Bobby wanted to reach across the table and slap him, get him focused.
“All right, so tell me,” Victor said, trying not to crack up. “What’s this job?”
“I wanna knock over a liquor store,” Bobby said.
Now Victor couldn’t hold back. He started laughing, but it quickly turned into a cigarette smoker’s hack. Finally, he recovered enough to say, “A liquor store? Jesus, you’re too much, Bobby.”
Bobby still wasn’t laughing, or even smiling.
“Come on, Bobby,” Victor said in that scratchy voice. “A liquor store?”
“What’s wrong with that?” Bobby said. “That time we were shooting pool downtown what, seven, eight years ago, you said you wanted to work together again someday, right? Well, this is fuckin’ someday.”
Victor was staring at Bobby like he felt sorry for him. Bobby had seen this look a lot from strangers on the street, usually old ladies. One time an old lady asked Bobby if she could help him carry his bags home from the supermarket. Bobby wanted to fuckin’ belt her.
“You can’t walk,” Victor said. “You know that, right?”
The waitress came over with Bobby’s cherry cheesecake. Bobby took four full bites of cake then said, “So? Are you with me or not?”
“Come on, man,” Victor said. “Weren’t you just listening to me?”
“You know,” Bobby said, chewing, “the old days you would’ve jumped if I told you I had a job to pull.”
“The old days was a long fuckin’ time ago. You’re in a wheelchair and the doctor took some cancer out of my throat last year. They found a couple of spots on my liver they’re watching – they said if it spreads down there, that’s it – I’m a goner.”
Bobby stared right into Victor’s yellowish eyes. The cancer didn’t surprise him – he knew there was something wrong with the guy. He said, “You know what I do every day now? When I’m not watching the fucking lineup on TV, I’m out in Central Park, shooting pictures of the broads in bikinis. I’ve got hundreds of pictures of boobs and asses, lined up on my walls like a fucking porno museum. Now you know that’s not me, right? You know that’s not what I do.”
Bobby realized that he was talking too loud. People at other tables were looking over at him like he was crazy. Then Victor, looking at Bobby like maybe he thought he was crazy, too, said, “What’s this? You a photographer now or something?”
“Why? You want me to take some pictures of your girlfriend? I’ll make her look so good they’ll put her in Penthouse.”
“You couldn’t make my girlfriend look good,” Victor said. “To make her look good you’d have to shoot her with the fuckin’ lights out.”
Bobby and Victor stared at each other seriously for a few seconds then they both started to laugh. After a while they stopped laughing, but when they looked at e
ach other they started again. Finally, they got control of themselves. Bobby felt like it was old times again, like he and Victor were twenty-five years old, shooting the shit in some Hell’s Kitchen diner.
Victor, still smiling, said, “If you want to see some good-looking ass you should check out the whores they got workin’ in this hotel.”
Bobby knew Victor was just trying to change the subject but played along anyway, saying, “What? They got some good-looking hookers here?”
“You kiddin’ me? These chicks ain’t the needle whores they got dancin’ on the stages on Queens Boulevard, you know what I’m saying? These are some high-class models they bring in here for the insurance faggots. You know what I’m talking about – call girls, escorts.”
“Escorts, huh?” Bobby was getting a new idea. “They come here a lot?”
“Every fucking night.”
“Yeah? And you’re the bellhop here, right? I guess that means you take people up to their rooms.”
“Why?” Victor asked.
Bobby smiled, said, “Tell me something else. Can you get me some room keys?”
Six
She’s a looker, yeah, probably. Jimmy’s not known to pass on a piece. It’s what got him into a fix more’n once, a looker. If you’re asking because you’re interested, remember what she’s doing with you before you fall in love.
CHARLIE STELLA, Cheapskates
Max was in the Modell’s sneaker section, trying on a pair of Nike running shoes. He liked the way they fit, but there was no way he was buying them. They were on sale for seventy-nine bucks, but Max never paid discount for anything. Nah, he’d rather go to some classy store on Madison Avenue to get them, even if it cost him double.
As he was trying on another pair, Max sensed movement next to him. He noticed that the briefcase he had put down next to him – with the ten thousand dollars, the extra set of keys to the apartment, and the code to the alarm with instructions – was gone. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw Popeye, wearing the leather jacket with the hole in it, walking away down the aisle at a normal pace, heading toward the stairs.
Suddenly, Max realized that Deirdre was dead – there was no turning back. Even if he wanted to call off the murder, he couldn’t. He still had the phone number where he’d reached Popeye, but there had been a lot of background noise, and he’d had a feeling Popeye was at a pay phone somewhere. No, it was definitely over. By six P.M. Deirdre would be gone forever.
Max doubted that he’d miss her very much, but this wasn’t his fault. Deirdre was the one who’d changed, not him.
Max had met Deirdre in 1982 at a Jewish singles weekend at the Concord hotel in the Catskill Mountains. Back then, Deirdre was an upbeat, outgoing, friendly, big-chested girl from Huntington, Long Island. Max was living alone in a studio apartment on the Upper West Side, working as a twenty-four-thousand-dollar-a-year mainframe computer technician, and he decided that Deirdre was the best thing that had ever happened to him. After a few months of dating, he took her out for drinks at the bar at the Mansfield Hotel on Forty-fourth Street. It was a classy place, lots of books in the lounge, made Max feel well-read. Paula, the little blond barmaid, brought him his third screwdriver. He could see Paula understood he was a guy of wealth and fame, like the Stones song, what the hell was the title? Then Max, feeling nice and lit, thought, What the fuck? and popped the question to Deirdre. Six months later he was kissing her under the huppa at a synagogue in Huntington. They had a few happy years together – reasonably happy, anyway – living in a one-bedroom walk-up on West Seventy-seventh Street. Then Max left his job to start his own company. As his business started to take off, their relationship went downhill. They moved out of the walk-up, into a doorman building on the Upper East Side, and Deirdre slowly turned into the wife from hell.
She was constantly critical, angry, and depressed, and spent his money faster than it came in. But it wasn’t the money that bothered Max so much as her personality. So, okay, it was the money too but, hey, that wasn’t the main thing. It got to the point where Max couldn’t stand spending more than a few minutes with her at a time. She was always starting arguments, telling Max that he was the cause of all her misery, that if she hadn’t married him she would have been happy. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Then she started having mental problems. Manic-depressive, they called it, but Max had a simpler name – nasty bitch. Sometimes she was depressed, staying in bed all day, which Max actually didn’t mind so much. But other times she was hyper – on the phone all the time or out shopping with his credit cards or picking fights with him. Max paid thousands of dollars for her to see the best shrinks in the city. They put her on lithium, which helped, but sometimes she stopped taking her medication. Max was convinced that on some sick level Deirdre enjoyed the torture she was putting him through. She was actually happy when she made him feel like shit.
Max tried to work things out peacefully. He went with Deirdre to a marriage counselor, but spending an entire hour cursing at each other didn’t exactly help.
Finally, Max suggested divorce, but Deirdre said, “You know I’ll never divorce you. I’m religious.”
Max nearly laughed out loud, thinking, Yeah, if religion means tormenting a good man for eternity – wasn’t that a Catholic thing? Deirdre was raised Orthodox Jewish, but she never went to temple or celebrated holidays – she didn’t even fast on Yom Kippur, for Christ’s sake. She was more atheist than Jewish and, besides, Orthodox Jews got divorces all the time. This was obviously just more bullshit Deirdre was using to try to prolong his agony.
When things got so bad Max couldn’t stand living in the same house with Deirdre anymore, he considered moving out, separating. But he didn’t see why he had to be the one to go. It was his house, he’d busted his balls to pay for it. If anyone went it should be her.
The situation seemed hopeless. Max knew that even if he could convince her to get a divorce, he’d be fucked. They had no pre-nup and Deirdre would take him to town in a settlement. She’d never worked a day in her life and they didn’t have kids; Max didn’t see why she deserved a cent of his money. But he knew a judge, especially a female judge, wouldn’t see it that way. Deirdre would get away with the townhouse, the Porsche, and at least half the money, and Max was ready to stick out the rest of his life being miserable before he let that happen. He’d worked too hard for what he had and there was no way in hell he was gonna let some lazy cow steal it out from under him.
Then Max went on Viagra and everything changed.
Max had thought he was starting to lose interest in sex, maybe even becoming impotent, but then he took Viagra and it worked miracles. Like a horny teenager, he started thinking about sex constantly. Whenever he passed a good-looking woman on the street he found himself imagining what she looked like naked. He bought sex magazines and ripped out the centerfolds, taking them into the bathroom at work and at home. He rented porn videos and nights and weekends he locked himself in the den of his townhouse and watched them. It was like he couldn’t get enough of breasts. It got so bad he never saw women’s faces because he couldn’t raise his eyes past their chests.
Around this time Angela interviewed for a job at the company. As soon as Max saw her, he knew he had to have her. She was young, she had that whole Irish accent thing going on, and holy shit, the tits on her.
What surprised him was, entirely apart from what her body did for him, he liked being with her. She’d come out with some Irish-ism like, Where’s me coffee, and he felt something swell up inside him. They never fought. She always laughed at his jokes and never bitched at him about the way he dressed or whatever. Max couldn’t help dreaming about how great it would be if Deirdre was gone and Angela took her place. He could listen to that lilt his whole goddamn life. Hell, things worked out right, he’d bring her on a honeymoon to Ireland, maybe take her to a U2 concert. She seemed to like that Bono. Max was more into the classical-type stuff. He’d worked at it anyway, bought the whole package of Teach Yourself the Classics. He still
didn’t understand what the hell it was all about, didn’t even know the difference between an alto and a concerto, but he could fake it. He loved to bore the losers at the office, going on about his favorite arias.
When the murder idea came up, it seemed like a big joke. At first anyway. But the more Max and Angela talked about it the more it seemed like the only logical solution. He had offered Deirdre ways out, but she didn’t want to take them, so what was the alternative? He was proud of himself, actually, for holding out for so long. A lot of guys who went through all the bullshit that he’d gone through wouldn’t have had half his patience – they would have hired someone to knock Deirdre off a long time ago.
Outside Modell’s, Max decided to walk back to his office instead of taking a cab. It was a great day – sunny, about seventy – and Forty-second Street near Grand Central Station was jammed with shoppers and businesspeople on their lunch breaks. Max felt cool, strutting along Fifth Avenue with his suit jacket slung over his shoulder, calling clients on his Blackberry.
When he arrived back at the office, Angela was sitting at her desk outside Max’s door, eating a salad out of a plastic container.
Like it was any other normal afternoon, Max said, “Any messages?” and Angela said, “Not a one. How’d your meeting go?”
“Hard to say,” Max said. “You confirmed that appointment for me with Jack Haywood tonight, though, didn’t you?”
“Sure did.”
“Terrific.”
He felt his voice had the right mix of boss and mellow. Like he’d once heard a young temp say about some guy, He had it going on.