Blood on Their Hands

by Lawrence Block

  They’d lived on the fourth floor, so the trip out the bedroom window was a good start on Lee’s new career. She was going to work high-rise construction.

  It was hard in the beginning. But even with minimum age requirements, unions, the requests for references, there was always someone willing to pay cash under the table for cheap labor—especially if it was good cheap labor.

  Lee was a competent carpenter by the time she turned seventeen. Now, three years later, she could do finish custom work as good as most, but here she nailed together wood forms for concrete pours. Working on a Rubin Construction high-rise apartment building, Lee was right where she wanted to be. She could do this work in her sleep, but she considered this particular job to be the pinnacle of her career.

  Tomorrow, construction started on the final phase, the fourteenth floor. Tomorrow was the future, and Luke was Lee’s man for that.

  Lee was tied to Mo by birth and to Brett Rubin by fate, but she selected Luke. Lots of guys worked concrete pours, but Luke was experienced, and he wasn’t young. He had a long gray ponytail and just the hint of a limp. Lee heard he’d seen “hard action” in Nam, but Luke never said anything about it.

  Lee could understand that. She figured she’d seen hard action practically every single day of her life.

  Luke was a good choice. His eyes, banked with the dim but unmistakable glow of suppressed desire, tracked Lee from the beginning. She could feel it with her finely-honed survival instincts, just like she’d learned to feel the beginnings of a drug deal going down.

  Lee liked the fact that Luke wasn’t crude and he didn’t push it. He even acted as if he wanted to get to know her a little before throwing down.

  “Lanky Lee,” he named her at lunch break the very first day. “How come you ain’t got one of those fancy names, you know, like all the other sisters? I never met a black woman named Lee. How ’bout you guys? Don’t sound natural, does it?” Then the others started in, trying to top each other.

  Lee ate her sandwich, kept to herself. The conversation was good-natured—still, there were things about names that Lee would never tell anyone.

  Lee’s brother was named Moses.

  Lee didn’t remember hearing anyone call him Moses, not until that one day in court, and Moses wasn’t near as bad as Ma’DeLisha.

  Ma’DeLisha, shit.

  Their crackhead mother must have been trying for some stupid foreign sound, or else she was too coked up to spell Madonna. The woman probably never sobered up long enough to realize that it came out “Mad-a-Leesha” whenever any well-intentioned person tried to sound it out.

  Lee defined her own name the first time she was old enough to fill out a form on her own.

  Even if Luke didn’t know the whole story, he liked Lee’s name just fine. He liked to say it as he kissed her when they got drinks after work.

  Lee knew exactly what Luke wanted, but Lee wanted something in return. Mutual needs should be made clear, even if not spoken out loud too quickly.

  “Luke, would you do me a favor sometime?” Lee decided it was okay to ask the first time he took her home, when he halfway knew, and she knew for sure, that she wouldn’t be spending the night.

  “What kind of favor?” he asked, feathering kisses down her neck as he unbuttoned her shirt.

  “Make something disappear for me.”

  That got his attention. Luke lifted his head, distracted from liberating Lee’s breasts. “You mean make someone disappear?” His eyes narrowed. He might think with his dick like the rest of them, but he wasn’t stupid.

  “Of course not, you silly man.”

  Luke sat up all the way now, ignoring Lee’s gaping shirt. “Don’t talk to me like that, Lee. It doesn’t even sound like you. Tell me what you want—tell me right out.”

  Lee lay on her back, looking straight up at him, making her eyes as wide as possible. “Be cool. I’m talking ’bout a little thing.” She showed him with her hands. “It happens all the time. Someone throws something in a concrete pour, and it’s gone for-ev-er.” She strung out the last word.

  He wasn’t convinced. “Looks like the size of a gun, what you’re showing me.”

  Lee put her arms around his neck. “I wouldn’t never ask you to do nothing like that.”

  “A knife then?”

  Now it was time to be insulted. Lee sat up, pulled her shirt together. Hell, she clamped it together, like maybe it would never come open again.

  “Don’t be mad,” Luke told her.

  “’Course I’m mad. I ask one little favor. What you think—I’m humping some gangbanger, asking you to lose a weapon so my homeboy don’t do no time?” Lee used to talk another way. Now she talked like this.

  Luke closed his eyes a moment, as though she’d unearthed some unpleasant memory.

  ‘‘This thing you’re talking about, is it gonna have blood on it?”

  “No.” Lee looked straight at him, making the one word short, clipped. It hung in the air between them.

  “Let me think on it,” Luke said after a while. It was good he didn’t ask any more questions, because Lee had no more to tell him. We still on for drinks after work Friday?”

  “I’ll think on it while you thinking on the other.”

  For better or for worse, the cards were on the table now. Lee had planned to play this hand for years; she could wait to see if Luke was in or out. Turned out, Lee didn’t have to wait much longer before she discovered something that tipped the tables in her favor.

  The next day, at the end of lunch break, a lead-footed mason tripped over Luke’s lunch box, sending everything tumbling out. Lee helped gather up the stuff without thinking, not listening to Luke tell her he didn’t need any help.

  There was a small black plastic vial spilled out with the sandwich wrappings and orange peels. Kind of like slow motion, maybe like it was meant to happen that way, the top came off and two capsules rolled out.

  Lee didn’t need to complete any high school health class to recognize the AIDS drug AZT. She had her hand over the pills practically before they’d seen the light of day. She picked them up, put them back in the vial, screwed the top down tight.

  Everyone else gone, Luke still squatted there on his heels, looking at her. “Guess that rips it, huh, Lanky Lee?”

  “Not for me, Slick.”

  He stared at her. “You’re crazy, girl.”

  “I don’t much count on being around in ten years, know what I mean?”

  Luke looked at Lee another long moment, considering. “Guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”

  “You do that, Slick.” And so the deal was sealed, then and there, without any more discussion, even before the third floor was started. Then Lee could turn her attention to other things.

  Security at a construction site was always relative. The goal was to pay the least money possible to prevent pilfering and theft. Security was also supposed to keep kids from screwing around after hours and falling off something, allowing some fancy attorney to claim big bucks for negligence.

  But any way you looked at it, guys working security at construction sites weren’t exactly the same ones you’d hire at a bank.

  Job safety was a different issue, but still, the bottom line was limiting liability, because liability always translated into big dollars lost. A violation of OSHA regulations could mean hefty penalties. Unlike site security, job safety didn’t depend on how many people were hired to walk around. Job safety was threefold: required procedures, proper equipment, and redundant systems.

  The construction elevator was an example of a redundant system. It had two mechanisms to prevent it from falling. After all, a construction elevator carried human cargo, which society sometimes deemed to be more precious than supplies and equipment hoisted by a flatbed lift.

  Even it if hadn’t been against OSHA regulations to ride a flatbed lift, Lee would have loved construction elevators for themselves. A construction elevator was even better than those fancy glass-enclosed ones inside ri
tzy hotel lobbies. On a construction elevator, one could not only see out, one could feel the air whistle past.

  A construction elevator somewhat resembled the scaffolding to which it was attached. Its mechanical system was exposed, not hidden by an acoustical ceiling piping out elevator music. One could watch the cable wind and unwind around the reel, the reel held in place by one elegant, slender metallic pin.

  The backup system consisted of four connectors, one at each corner of the square floor piece. These were secured to the scaffolding before anyone stepped on or off the elevator. These were heavy-duty connectors that could keep the elevator in place all by themselves, independent of any cable connection system.

  Lee had studied construction elevators from the very first time she ever walked onto a high-rise site. She was particularly fascinated by the pin—that one, single bit of essential metal. Thin, cylindrical, and less than a foot in length, it called to her. The little part of the pin that protruded from its setting practically sang out to her.

  The pin was held in place by two things, the fitting and the load resulting from the weight of the elevator. Lee had thought about both. She’d also thought about site security and the gala event scheduled to celebrate the feet that the top floor, the fourteenth one, was now under construction.

  On a site this size, there were lots of potential hiding places, and Lee knew most of them. She left her lunch box in one. She bought a sandwich for lunch that day—it wasn’t possible to eat black tights, a black T-shirt, a fine-gauge drill, some industrial lubricant, and a roll of the thinnest, strongest transparent fishing line she could find.

  Lee lagged behind when everyone else knocked off work and hid. She waited for night to fall, then put on the black clothes. Maybe this was a redundant safety system itself considering the color of her skin.

  Heights held no fear for Lee. She shimmied up the scaffolding by the elevator and went to work on the pin.

  She drilled a hole through the end that protruded out of the fitting, the end that had called out to her for so long. Then Lee tied the fishing line through the hole. Next, she worked some lubricant in and around as much as she could. The trickiest part was unwinding the thin filament of fishing line now attached to the pin, making sure it wasn’t caught up on anything anywhere before she hid the spool.

  Lee put everything else back in her lunch box and took it with her when she slipped away. The security crew didn’t make a single round the whole time Lee was busy at work—maybe there was something really good on TV. Lee thought about checking that out when she got home, but she forgot and went to bed.

  There was a festive air everywhere on site the next day, not that the construction workers would be a part of any celebration. Lee kept a close eye on the proceedings while she made up work for herself near the elevator and the roll of fishing line.

  Finally, the man who mattered arrived.

  Brett Rubin, his father, their attorney, the mayor, some sleek dark-haired woman, and two reporters rode up together to the fourteenth floor. Speeches were made, applause followed, champagne flowed. For the most part though, the construction crew just kept on working.

  When the celebration ended, Artie ran the elevator, taking guests down. That was too bad; Lee genuinely liked Artie. She bent down, picked up the spool of fishing line from behind a box of nails.

  Brett Rubin, his girlfriend, and the attorney stepped onto the elevator together. Lee didn’t think anyone was watching her, but it wouldn’t matter now. Holding the spool over her head, the line between the pin and her hands was almost level. Lee pulled as hard as she could.

  The pin slid out smooth, fast. It hit a few places and clanked some as Lee pulled it to her, but no one noticed. Everyone watched the guests of honor, still glad-handing each other before leaving the party.

  Lee cut the line and stuffed the spool in her jeans, allowing herself the luxury of briefly fondling the pin she held in her hands. She was already walking away when the corner connectors were disengaged.

  She’d worried about that.

  If the connectors came off one at a time, it would become apparent that the elevator was no longer secured by the cable and pin. But people were eager to help, so the four safety devices were disengaged pretty much at the same time.

  Lee reached Luke just before the construction elevator fell fourteen floors. She handed him the pin in one fluid gesture. Just as smoothly, Luke dropped it into wet concrete pouring out from a mixer, and the pin became part of a bearing wall in a Rubin Construction high-rise apartment building.

  Lee gaped, open-mouthed, just like everyone else, when people started screaming.

  “You said it wouldn’t have blood on it.” Luke spoke directly into Lee’s ear, over the din of death. He wiped his hands as though he’d touched something dirty, a gesture not seen often on a construction site.

  “Did you look at it?” she asked him before she walked away. “Wasn’t no blood on it no how.”

  Three days later, cops, OSHA inspectors, and the elevator manufacturer were still trying to sort it all out. Lee met Luke for drinks after work.

  “I guess you got him,” Luke said, looking at his beer.

  “Got who?” Lee asked.

  “After all that went down, I did some thinking. Then I did some studying up on you. I guess you got Brett Rubin Jr. good, and then some.”

  Things didn’t surprise Lee very often, but this did.

  “Rubin Jr.?” she asked. “He was just along for the ride. It was the attorney I wanted.”

  Luke looked up from his beer then. “I don’t think we should see each other anymore,” he said. He stood up, walked away.

  Lee shrugged. “Have a nice rest of your life,” she called after him.

  It shouldn’t be so difficult to find something to put into those AZT capsules Luke kept so secret. It wasn’t as though people on construction sites carried locking lunch boxes.

  And the higher and mightier they came, the harder they fell.

  Red Meat

  Elaine Viets

  Ashley had a body to die for, and I should know. I’m on death row because of her.

  You want to know the funny thing?

  My wife bought me Ashley. For a birthday present.

  I was turning sixty that July, and I could feel the cold wind at my neck. I wasn’t bad-looking for my age. I still had all my hair. But that semi-permanent twenty pounds of lard around my gut had turned into thirty. I had chicken skin on the insides of my elbows, like an old geezer. And women didn’t give me appraising looks anymore.

  Not that I need to look at other women. My Francie had kept her figure just fine. She was ten years younger than me, and worked out with a personal trainer. Recently, people had started asking if Francie was my daughter. I’d laughed it off, but it bothered me. I told Francie maybe she should dye her hair gray so she’d look her age. She said, “Maybe you should lose thirty pounds, Jake, so you’d look your age.”

  I’d thought about going to the gym. We had a good one, right here on Sunnysea Beach, Florida, owned by a former pro linebacker. I’d see Jamal Wellington our running on the sand. You know those fake-heroic chests guys strap on so they look like gladiators? Jamal had a real chest like that, and arms and legs to match.

  Francie and I had a beachfront condo about a mile from Jamal’s Jym, but beach life makes you lazy. I never got around to walking down there. I’d think about joining the gym, but I’d always lie back down until the fitness fit passed. Instead, I’d pop another brew and watch another movie. I had a state-of-the-art entertainment system with five clickers (Francie put the clickers in a basket so I wouldn’t leave them lying around).

  Now that I was retired, I had time to catch up on my movies. I’d been comparing the classic Bond films starring Sean Connery to the later ones with Roger Moore. In my opinion, Connery was the one true Bond. Moore looked like a Sears shirt model.

  When Francie came home from work that night, I said, “You can’t trust movie critics. This so-called
critic says For Your Eyes Only is a superior piece of escapism.”

  I don’t know what you need to escape,” snapped Francie, slamming her briefcase down on the kitchen table.

  I could tell Francie was peeved, so I put down my beer and took her to the Beachside Bar for dinner. I thought she’d be happy she didn’t have to cook. Instead she glared at me when I mopped up my steak gravy with my butter bread. She got testy when I downed my third martini. By the time I ordered key lime pie with extra whipped cream, Francie was steaming. She didn’t say anything, but the air around her got dense and crackly, like she was generating her own personal thunderstorm.

  Francie’s bad mood was gone by my sixtieth birthday, two days later. She smiled and slipped on her silky leopard-print robe I like so much.

  “Happy Birthday, Tiger,” she said, handing me a ribbon-wrapped box. “I got you a twenty-three-year-old blonde for your birthday.”

  “I like my fifty-year-old brunette,” I said, patting her rump.

  I opened the present. Inside was a gift card. It said I should meet my personal trainer, Ashley, at Jamal’s Jym at 2 p.m. today for my first workout.

  “Ashley? What kind of name is that?” I snorted. “She probably looks like a Russian Olympic gymnast. I bet she shaves more than I do.” Then I shut up. I realized I was grumping like a sixty-year-old.

  “Wait and see,” said Francie, smiling.

  I walked down to the gym that broiling July afternoon, feeling sorry for myself. I felt like I was walking barefoot across a hot stove. Sweat ran off me like rainforest waterfalls.

  I couldn’t believe my own wife had bought me a personal trainer to make me sweat more. I passed the WaterEdge condo building, its units hidden behind hurricane shutters. Those people had the sense to leave south Florida in July. I was stuck here with a bearded woman trainer.

  At Jamal’s Jym, I presented my gift card to a young guy named Barry. He wore only black gym shorts and running shoes. I wished he would put on more clothes. The guy’s bare stomach was so flat you could bounce quarters on it. His muscles rippled when he typed in my name in the computer.