Eddie Coyle said, “Megachurches are nothing more than tax-free symbols of greed and power.”
“Back to talking about robbing God.”
“Megachurches are the Walmarts of the religious world, one-stop shopping, pulling members away from all of the local mom-and-pop box churches.”
“What’s the issue?”
“Capitalism and how it has infected everything that was once good.”
“Capitalism was all about big fish devouring little fish and never stopping to masticate their prey. It’s a good thing when you’re winning. When you’re losing, you see its faults.”
He nodded. “The country is devolving. The Tea Party is out there expressing their outrage over health care. If this is the outrage that comes from health care, it’s going to be crazy when immigration is brought to the table. Bad economy and racism, the fear of a new labor pool coming from beyond these shores to do jobs in an already jobless country—it will be a Molotov cocktail. It will be the Detroit race riot in ’43 and the Detroit race riot in ’67 and the Watts riot and the ’67 Newark riots and the Oklahoma race riots in every state, city, and town in America.”
I didn’t say anything else. He’d just murdered two people and was engaging in a casual conversation about churches and politics.
Eddie Coyle said, “I hope your wife feels better. When you get home, tell her I said that.”
“You don’t have to worry about my wife.”
“Understood.”
“Worrying about my wife is my responsibility.”
“Again, I apologize for crossing that unseen line.”
I tightened my jaw and held on to my fedora, a classic hat I had inherited from my father.
In my mind I was grabbing Eddie Coyle’s gun and shooting him over and over as the SUV lost control and flipped over a half dozen times. As he sped down I-94, I should have killed Eddie Coyle right then. But I had known the man for only two hours.
DESPERATION
The state of being desperate or of having the recklessness of despair.
0
Four walls closed in and I woke up wanting to scream at the universe.
Every man had a breaking point and I’d conceded to mine four seasons ago.
Before sunrise touched the iconic palm trees in California, palm trees that were not native to the region, those colorful fireworks had returned, only they were exploding behind my eyes and inside my head. I was caught in an ongoing war between stress and anxiety. The tightness in my chest slithered up to my throat, became a snake, and then I was being strangled. I gripped the edges of the sink and shut my eyes as the whole world closed in on me from every side. Head lowered, sweat ran down my neck and my body was racked with dread. Every now and then a man had to let his eyes spring a leak in order to remain sane.
I looked to my right, searched for something to focus on. I settled for the bathtub. The tub looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since Kennedy was assassinated and the toilet hadn’t been treated to any harsh cleansers since Jack Ruby took out Oswald to cover up that conspiracy.
Almost a year had gone by since that frigid night I stood on the side of I-94 with Eddie Coyle, sealing a deal with a ruthless and congenial devil.
It seemed like it was yesterday. Maybe because nothing in the world had changed.
Money was still low. I found out that in this business the money was always low.
I had thought about that cold night on the side of I-94 every day and night since then.
I had on a Hanes T-shirt and the same dark pajama bottoms I’d worn when I was married. My wife had given these to me for one of my birthdays. I looked down at my wedding ring. It was a white gold wedding band that had cost a little less than six hundred dollars on Amazon, less than a tenth of what I had paid for my wife’s wedding ring. Whenever I looked at my wedding band I thought about my wife too. I thought about Cora every day, sometimes all day long. Six months ago, without notice, my wife had walked away from our marriage, had packed up and left the way people across the country were walking away from bad mortgages. I had returned home from a business trip and everything she owned was gone. I knew that I would be the last one to find out the truth. The fool was always the last to know.
The panic attack held me prisoner and refused to set me free.
It was my third episode since I started working with a crew that robbed banks. Last night while I slept on the forty-year-old sofa, I tossed and turned and was unable to get comfortable. Not because of the flashing neon lights and the activity that was going on in Koreatown and the apartments around me. I never slept well during the two or three days before a bank job. Last night, no matter how hard I tried to rest, I’d tossed and turned on the old sofa out front. As soon as I had jerked awake, surges of heat trampled across my neck like a trail of anger and sorrow, and then those flames had made their way to my eyes and I battled with tears. I never shed tears as a boy. But when I was a boy there wasn’t much to cry about. As a boy I never had the stress that came with being a man. Every man carried an invisible load. Henrick and Zibba had been the best father and mother a boy could ask for. Bits and pieces of the dream had stayed with me. I’d dreamed I was back home in Detroit.
In my dream I was falling from the seventy-second floor of the Renaissance Center, the Detroit River and Windsor in the distance.
This morning I shivered like I was naked on that frozen tundra in Motor City. I cooked every day to relieve stress, but I never ate much. I’d lost my appetite two seasons ago. I was twenty pounds lighter than I had been a year ago. For half a year, sleep has evaded me. I was up and down most nights. And when I looked in the mirror I saw a man who had a six-inch knife in the middle of his skull.
On the other side of the bathroom wall, the bed rocked as they sang hallelujahs and called out to the man above. There was no escaping their maddening sounds. My team and I were sequestered inside a one-bedroom safe house that was no more than 120 square feet of claustrophobia. The bathroom and bedroom shared a wall and the open area was the living room and kitchen, both so small that they reminded me of when I was in college and living in the cramped dorms my freshman year.
I threw cold water on my face and tried to control my trembling and shortness of breath.
It was Friday morning, payday for the part of the nation that still possessed gainful employment. Friday morning before noon was the most popular day of the week for bank robberies.
Always on a Friday.
When I stepped out of the stale bathroom, I saw the bedroom door was ajar, open about the width of my hand. That was wide enough for me to see Sammy Luis Sanchez. He was on a shopworn twin-size bed and his face was between his mistress’s legs. The lights were off, the apartment was dark, but red and yellow lighting flashed in from their bedroom window. A neon sign that stayed on all night blinked across their bodies, allowing staccato glimpses of what looked like a psychotropic hallucination before sunrise. She was on her back, a shadow with her wrists tied to the metal bedpost; his necktie had been over her eyes as a mask. But the necktie had slipped away. His mistress saw me. She saw me and I knew she was gazing at me while Sammy held her legs and gave her his tongue. She stared at me, then closed her eyes and moaned for Sammy, begged him to come get on top of her, begged him to put it inside.
I backed away and crept toward the kitchen, opened and closed my hands, tried to strangle the invisible demon that had a hold on me.
I stepped over the silhouettes of my luggage and the board games we had left scattered in the cramped living room. The apartment made a Motel 6 look like the Charles Forte presidential suite at the Lowry Hotel in Manchester. My duffel bag rested at the end of a Knoll Charles Pfister sofa that had been made in the seventies. Beer cans littered the counter, along with empty wineglasses, a couple bottles of Smirnoff vodka, and two ashtrays that were overflowing with cigarette butts. Even in the dark, the place looked and smelled like a dump, but the darkness that came before sunrise hid some of its imperfections. The lingeri
ng scents from the dinners I’d cooked over the last week didn’t mask the mustiness.
Rick Bielshowsky was sleeping in the middle of the floor with the plaid covers pulled over his head. I opened the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of water. Jackie became louder. When I headed back to the bathroom, I paused in front of the bedroom door again. Sammy was on top of Jackie and she had her legs hooked around his ankles. Jackie’s eyes stayed with mine. I frowned at her, held eye contact until I closed the bedroom door. I closed the door hard enough to let them know I was irritated.
I went back inside the bathroom, splashed water on my face, and ignored their moans.
Before every job we all stayed in the same space, remained interdigitated until the money had been divided. That was part of the ritual. Maybe it kept us from having a snitch. Or fostered camaraderie, like soldiers before a big mission. Whatever the reason, it kept us safe. Maybe it made us more like family than thieves. We’d sat up and planned and ate and watched DVDs. We always watched the same DVDs. Snatch. Reservoir Dogs. Two Hands. Boogie Nights. Raising Arizona. Pulp Fiction. Heat. Dog Day Afternoon. Inside Man. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Everything we watched kept us attached to the realities of a grubby, violent, and dangerous world. I took a deep breath. The last of the panic attack, the last of the stress, hadn’t abated, and the claws of anxiety were raking their fingernails up and down my spine in a way that let me know that it would return. I rubbed the last of the dampness away from my eyes.
When I stepped out of the bathroom, Rick was sitting up, yawning and rubbing his eyes. He looked like JFK Jr. with blond hair. His hair was naturally black, but he bought dye and colored his mane for each job. It was red for the last job. And now with the blond hair, he thought he looked like a California-born movie star and all he needed was Angelina Jolie at his side. He frowned and tsked as he used his thumb to motion at the hallelujahs coming from the bedroom, then he shook his head.
I shrugged and moved on toward the kitchen. “Second night in a row. All night long.”
“Sammy must be on Viagra, Enzyte, a handful of L-arginine, and two cans of Red Bull.”
“Probably.”
Rick turned the television to CNN. Northside United Methodist Church had been robbed. Someone had stolen the safe and gotten away with one hundred grand.
Rick whistled, shook his head, and said, “Geesh.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s an inside job.”
“Has to be.”
Rick moved from the floor to the sofa, where I had slept, and pulled the coffee table closer. He took his gun out, a .38, then opened a kit and started cleaning his weapon. I went into the kitchen and looked over my diagrams, the streets of L.A., the primary getaway route highlighted in yellow. I took my executive suit out of the closet, pulled on my slacks, did the same with a fresh Hanes undershirt, then pulled on a starched and crisp white oxford shirt. After I put my cuff links on, I took a deep breath and leaned against the counter and listened to the broadcast on CNN. Newscasters used faux concern to talk about the high unemployment rate, but the words that stuck with me were the fact that 40 percent of the unemployed had been out of work for over two years.
I asked Rick, “Did you ever tell me how you ended up in the bank withdrawal business?”
“Thought I already bored you with that long story. I know I bored Sammy with it a dozen times.”
“Not that I remember. I’m not one to ask a lot of personal questions. But I’ll tell you this, and this you already know. What a man tells me, this is the end of the line. So far as whatever conversation we have, or have ever had, the buck stops here.”
“I had a business.” Rick said that and looked out at the city, his lips turned down, as if heaviness was rising from his heart to his mouth. “It was an import and export business. Long story short, my business partner died all of a sudden. Heart attack and he hadn’t made it to age thirty-five. Over two dozen creditors sued me. Not to mention the fact that my business partner had failed to pay the taxes on the business for three years. Between Uncle Sam and the creditors, the phone never stopped ringing. I was in over my head. I had a family to feed.”
“So you did what you had to do.”
“Did what I had to do. After I cashed in my stocks at a huge loss, I understood how people become homeless. I’d come here to Los Angeles and gone to meet with this guy who ran some cons. Guy named Scamz. I went to this pool hall to meet him, only to find out he had been killed the night before. Sammy had come here for the same thing. We put our heads together. So there you have it.”
“You met Eddie Coyle along the way.”
“Yeah. We met him along the way. Right after he had been kicked off the police force for taking bribes. He was working with his brother, this guy nicknamed Bishop, and they were hitting banks down south. We linked up with them and ran a four-man crew for a few jobs. Had a lot of fun.”
“Robbing banks, a vocation that can get you up to twenty years behind bars, is fun?”
“Was being facetious. I never really cared for Eddie Coyle and thought less of his brother. But Eddie Coyle handles his business.”
My mind drifted back to that night I’d stood in the cold on I-94. I said, “That he does.”
“We can’t all like who we work for, or work with, but so long as at the end of the day the checks clear and the bills are paid. . . . The bottom line is all that matters.”
“That’s what Eddie Coyle told me.”
“That’s what Eddie Coyle told us all.” Rick checked his watch. “I noticed that you’re cooking a lot, but you’re not eating much.”
“I eat when I’m hungry.”
“Stress will put you in the ground.”
“Nothing I can’t handle. Stress is nothing new, not in my world.”
“You’re a real good guy, Dmytryk. Real good guy. Now, Sammy, don’t get me wrong, he’s my buddy, and I love and trust the man, but he’s not worth a bowl of muddy cornflakes. But you, you’re a real good guy. Maybe you don’t belong here in this hustle.”
I smiled. “But I’m here. Therefore, here must be where I belong.”
He smiled in kind. “You going back to the Midwest after this job?”
“Yeah. I’m going back home.”
“Why?”
I searched for a lie, but the truth came out. I said, “My wife might come back.”
It was his turn to pause and become deadly serious. “You heard from her?”
“Not as of yet.”
He pushed his lips up into a thin smile. “When did you say she disappeared?”
“After that job we did in Pasadena, Texas.”
“That Wells Fargo on Spencer Highway was about six months ago.”
“About, give or take a few hours.”
“We’re taking bets that you killed her.”
I laughed a little. “Put me down for twenty. I’m betting I killed her too. I killed her and blocked it out of my mind. Better yet, put me down for forty.”
He laughed for a moment, then rubbed his chin and became serious.
I smiled. “You okay, Rick?”
“So things were bad between you and the wife.”
“We had ugly moments.”
“Rihanna-and-Chris Brown ugly?”
“Mine wasn’t like that. But things were said. We both did things that left us with a lot of collateral damage. Losing jobs, a lot of psychological changes come with that.”
“I went through that with my wife too.”
I said, “Losing your job is like having your identity stolen, like having what defined you run through a paper shredder. After a while the despair gets you, and it gets you good.”
Rick nodded. “Yup.”
“Financial problems led to stress.”
“Me and my wife had it bad for a few years.”
“Stress led to desperation and that spiraled into depression.”
Rick nodded. “So, your wife was depressed.”
“Me too. I was depressed t
oo.”
“I bet.”
“Cora wasn’t working a real job and my part-time gigs didn’t do much more than cover the mortgage and put food in the refrigerator.”
“She left you right after we did that job in Texas.”
“Maybe Cora had wanted to leave before she vanished, but she couldn’t afford to leave.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Dmytryk. You did what you could to make it work.”
I nodded. “So did she.”
Rick paused. “It’s been half a year, Dmytryk. She hasn’t reached out to you. Your address is the same. She’s moved on. So maybe you should just let the wife go.”
“Would you let your wife go? Would you, Rick?”
“Well, we have three kids. Like it or not, when you have kids, it’s a different ball game.”
“Married is married, kids or not.”
He yawned. “You said that the jobs in Detroit are gone and not coming back, at least not the same jobs.”
“I did.”
“Some women are like those jobs. Gone and not coming back.”
The reality of his words put cracks in my wall of denial, added a hundred fissures to my heart. We sat on those words for a moment. I knew that Rick meant well. I respected his every word. As we paused, moans seeped into the room. Then the bed rocked and Jackie sang.
Rick motioned toward the bedroom. “Sammy is killing Jackie in there.”
I smiled. “Like I said, we all kill what we love. We kill what we hate too.”
Rick yawned again. “You all cleaned up?”
“I showered last night. Didn’t want to hog the bathroom this morning.”
“You’re not going to shave?”
“I never shave before a job. Always shave after.”
“Right, right. Your ritual.”
“You could say that. Some people wear the same socks. I refuse to shave.”
“We all have rituals. I clean my gun before every job. I’ve never had to use it, don’t plan on ever using it, but I still clean it and carry it. Sammy, well, he’s doing his pregame ritual right now. He’s been through more women than I can count. They’re all disposable to him. As disposable as used condoms.”
Tempted by Trouble Page 2