Shaker

by Scott Frank

  It appeared as if he would have to take every freeway in L.A. The 405 to the 101 to the 170. All these numbers. No names. He had just merged onto the 101 South and was moving through some place called Sherman Oaks, but without an oak tree in sight. This stretch of the 101 near Studio City was down to one lane, road crews out repairing the cracks and holes that had turned the freeway into an obstacle course. Roy passed what looked like a bombed-out tanker truck that had been dragged off to the shoulder. The truck was lying on its side and charred completely black. It struck Roy as odd that no one had yet towed it, things being still pretty fucked up even five days after the quake.

  He was glad he wasn’t there for the big event. He found the idea of the earth moving underneath him truly frightening. He imagined himself standing there while buildings fell all around him. Thousands of people rushing into the streets in a wild panic. He’d lived through a couple of tornadoes as a kid. But all he could remember was the family sitting in the cellar playing board games and binging on junk food while they waited for the wind to die down.

  Roy got off in North Hollywood at Laurel Canyon and looked out the window at the dark warehouses and thought there’s no way they make movies around here, the place is way too ugly. Hell, Queens was nicer than this. But then he thought, it was getting dark, and the shadow of the big quake hung over everything, so maybe he wasn’t being fair.

  He followed Laurel Canyon north and gradually the warehouses became apartment buildings. There were palm trees in front of each complex, but they were so tall you didn’t really see them, just the long trunks, the bushy heads way up high, out of sight. It seemed to Roy like every building had a FOR RENT or a VACANCY sign out front. Some looked like they were falling down. Roy stopped at a red light, checked out the building on the corner and saw that it actually was falling down. The gate was boarded up with plywood, but he could see chunks of concrete on the ground inside the courtyard. Several windows across the front were broken. A balcony had partially collapsed, but still clung to the building at a slight angle, a black Weber barbecue lay on its side, ready to fall onto the patio directly below.

  As the light changed, Roy remembered his neighbor, Rosa, telling him about how the quake was a seven something on the earthquake scale, and about the aftershocks—how some of them were like small quakes themselves.

  Forget about the studio tour.

  Just get this done, and go straight back home.

  Martin Shine lived on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Kittridge in a two-story building called the Luna Terrace Apartments. It was a small complex with the units upstairs opening onto an open walkway. To Roy’s mind, the place looked a lot like a boat, one of those old steamships with an upper and lower deck. He pulled over and leaned across the seat and had a look out the passenger window. Shine’s unit was upstairs on the far side.

  Roy continued on past, made a right onto Dehougne, and took a drive through the neighborhood.

  Other than a few collapsed chimneys, there wasn’t a lot of damage that he could see. A redwood fence had fallen over onto a driveway and someone had parked a minivan on top of it. Just drove right up onto the planked wood, not bothering to move it. Roy decided it was that kind of neighborhood, so he had to be careful where he parked the car.

  Just past the mouth of an alley he stopped at an intersection marked at the corners by four low-slung bungalows. The windows were dark in three of them, Roy just able to make out the peeling paint and brown lawns.

  There was a party going on in the fourth. A crowd of people stood out on the lawn and the front porch of the little house. Speakers were set up in the open windows and Nicky Jam blasted the neighborhood.

  The lights were bright in the bungalow and Roy could see dark bodies bobbing in the windows to the music. Behind the house was a row of taller apartment buildings and Roy recognized Martin Shine’s boatlike building among them.

  The party would be a bright, noisy landmark when it came time to find his car, a quick walk back around the corner, while, at the same time, no one would notice the plain white rental car.

  A light was on in Martin Shine’s apartment by the time Roy climbed the stairs to the second floor, Roy relieved that he wouldn’t have to hang around downstairs hiding behind some tree waiting for the man to come home. He figured, even with the walk to the car, he would be on his way back to the airport in fifteen minutes.

  But then Roy heard a woman’s voice inside the apartment and his heart sank, thinking he’d now have to wait around after all, but then he recognized the voice. It belonged to Phoebe, the blonde in Friends. She had always been Roy’s favorite. He couldn’t really tell the others apart, even though he watched the show almost every night. Once, for an episode or two, he thought the brother and sister were fucking each other, but then he remembered that was just something he’d read had happened in real life.

  Anyway, Martin didn’t have company. He was watching TV.

  Roy reached back and pulled the ancient Walther PPK from his waistband. He opened the folded Ziploc taped to the barrel and took out eight of Harvey’s homemade hollowpoints—smokers or reamers or whatever Harvey called them these days—and carefully loaded the gun.

  Roy had decided to wait until the last minute, because the gun, like all of Harvey’s guns, was an antique with a fussy trigger and Roy hadn’t wanted to risk blowing his own ass off three thousand miles from home.

  He reached into his windbreaker and removed a pair of black leather gloves. He pulled them on, stood on his toes as he reached up above his head to unscrew the porch light, and then knocked on the door.

  “Would it be all right if I smoke?”

  “Sure.”

  Roy had caught Shine coming out of the john, a section of newspaper in his hand, the TV up loud so he could still hear it while he was in there, oblivious to the fact that a lot of people on the other side of the country wanted him dead. Roy walked right on in—the door was unlocked—the Walther down at his side, Roy knowing immediately he wouldn’t have to point it at the guy. Something in Martin Shine’s eyes saying, Shit. You got me.

  Roy nodded to him, “Why don’t you stand over here, Mr. Shine.” Roy wanted him in the middle of the room, away from potential trouble.

  Shine nodded back and took a step into the center of the room. He grabbed a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table and shakily thumbed a pink Bic a half dozen times before he got it lit. He stood there a moment with his eyes closed, trying to steady himself. Though, Roy thought, he’d be steady soon enough.

  Martin Shine had a round look to him, like everything was inflated below the waist. He wasn’t tall, only about five-five, with a little bit of hair capping a fleshy face, two tiny eyes magnified behind thick, rimless glasses. He wore an orange terrycloth bathrobe with wide rainbow stripes a little too cheerful for his current situation, the accountant’s belly crowning through an opening in the fake satin that ran down the middle.

  It occurred to Roy that this wasn’t Martin Shine’s bathrobe.

  “Anyone else here?”

  Shine shook his head. “She’s in Armenia. Visiting her sister.”

  Roy looked down the hall, could see a bedroom, but knew he wouldn’t find anyone who went with the bathrobe or the pink lighter back there.

  “I feel stupid just standing here,” Shine said. “Why don’t you just shoot me already, get it over with.”

  “This won’t take long.” Roy went around the room, closing the curtains, turning off all the lights, all except one. A lamp. Giving the room some mood while eliminating any shadows someone might see down on the street.

  The dim light certainly made the old furniture look better. The couch was some kind of burgundy fabric with wood arms, the kind you couldn’t ever sleep on. Looked nice, but was useless. Something Roy’s mother would have had. There was a television sitting atop a table covered with a sheet. A bowl of soup and a napkin sat there watching the sitcom. A wooden, straight-backed chair that looked about as comfortable as the couch st
ood a few feet back from the table.

  As he pulled shut the limp curtains alongside the kitchen table, Roy could see a pot on the stove, a wooden spoon sticking out of it. Roy could see the handle was broken and thought, this guy’s already gone.

  Martin Shine, watching his every move, said, “I feel like praying.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’m not even religious.”

  “Then don’t.” Roy reached into his coat and took out the silencer Harvey had given him.

  “What do guys usually do in these circumstances?”

  Roy gave the guy a look. He didn’t want to know.

  “They beg?”

  Roy had some trouble screwing the silencer onto the end of the gun. It wouldn’t thread right. Martin Shine watched him with those magnified eyes.

  “Think it’s too late for me to talk to them?”

  “You’re asking the wrong guy.”

  Harvey gave him the wrong silencer. Awesome. Roy looked around the room.

  Shine said, “Maybe we should call them right now.”

  “I don’t think they’d listen to you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They never do.” Roy walked over and grabbed a pillow from the couch, a little satiny orange square that would cave in, you ever actually laid your head on it, but fine for Roy’s purposes.

  “You know why they want this done?”

  “You’re gonna tell on them or something.”

  “That the reason they gave you?”

  “They don’t give me their reasons,” Roy said, staring at the pillow. “They don’t have to.”

  “They gotta tell you something.”

  “They tell me where to find you,” was all Roy said.

  “It’s because I used to work for Johnny DiMarzio.”

  “Who?”

  “Come on. You never heard of Johnny D?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Well, take my word for it, he was big. I started out as his bookkeeper, worked my way up.”

  His way up to what? Roy wondered, looking around the shitty little apartment, thinking about the broken spoon.

  Roy may not have known this Johnny D, but he could picture him and a bunch of other guys posing for pictures in front of trucks, or standing around on golf courses leaning on their putters or sitting in red leather booths smoking cigars, drinking wine out of short glasses. These tough guys, their whole lives, they’ve never even been out of whatever neighborhood they grew up in. Eating at the same table at the same dark restaurant every day, then later wondering how the fuck the FBI was able to wiretap them so easily.

  They were all the same.

  Roy never understood them.

  “Mr. Shine,” he said. “Why don’t you come on over here, kneel down on the floor for me.” Roy looking right at him now, the man standing there, shaking all over in his brightly colored robe.

  “It’s as good as done, right? Nothing I can do?”

  Roy shook his head. “Come on.”

  “Where you gonna do it? The mouth?”

  “Back of the head,” Roy said, keeping his voice low, calm like a doctor with a nice bedside manner. “You won’t even see it coming. Won’t even feel it. It’ll all be over in a second.” Roy thought he would have made a good doctor.

  “Just one?”

  Roy didn’t want to say “That’s all it’s gonna take,” wig the guy out any more than he already was. He thought about telling him about the old days, not so long ago, they’d do six shots: one to each ear, one to the mouth, one under the chin, two to wherever else they could fit a bullet. Maybe tell him how these days, with the stuff Harvey made in his basement, you don’t have to shoot a guy so many times. One does the trick just fine. But all Roy said was “That’s all.”

  Martin Shine nodded, came over to him now, looked Roy in the eye.

  “I’m not gonna beg you.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  Shine got down on his knees, looked back and watched as Roy wrapped the orange pillow around the gun.

  “But you should know I got a safe, right here in the apartment.”

  “Turn around, Mr. Shine.”

  “There’s over two million in there. Money I skimmed from Johnny D. It’s all yours.”

  “Turn around.”

  “What I’m thinking, I give you the money and you walk out of here, forget what you came here for.”

  “I do that,” Roy said, “and someone’s going to come looking for me next time.” He gestured with the gun. “Now turn around or I’ll shoot you in the face.”

  “I’ll tell you the combination.”

  Roy lowered the gun an inch and asked, “What’s to prevent me from shooting you and then taking the money anyway?”

  “You don’t know where the safe is.” And now Shine turned slightly, talking to Roy’s legs as he said, “It’s fuckin’ ingenious where I hid it. You’ll never find it.”

  “Mr. Shine—”

  “The combination is nine-twelve-fifty-two, same as my birthday.”

  “You were born in 1952?”

  “Yeah, I know, I don’t look that old.”

  “I was thinking you’ve lived a good life.”

  Shine looked all the way up at Roy now, all hope drained from his face.

  Roy told him once more to turn around. Then added, “Please.”

  “It’s all right with you, I remember this prayer from when I was a kid. I’m just gonna say it.”

  Roy waited, one hand holding the gun while the other held the orange pillow tightly around the barrel as Shine turned, closed his eyes, and began reciting in a whisper: Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee…

  That was about as far as he got when Roy shot him, a split second before he was ready. Harvey’s fucking heirloom with its old pins and springs. It didn’t matter, though. Roy watched as Shine fell forward onto his elbows and then waited, expecting him to crumple the rest of the way, but Shine remained in this bent position, looking like those men in Iraq or Iran Roy had seen on TV, rocking back and forth, praying. Except those guys weren’t dripping blood and whatever else all over the carpet.

  Roy looked up. The soup actually smelled good. And he was tired. Part of him wanted to lie on that bony couch and sleep for an hour or two. That’s the way it always was, once Roy finished one of his errands he wanted to go right home, have some dinner, go to bed.

  He’d been running errands going on twelve years now. Harvey and his wife, Rita, taking phone calls, sending Roy out to work for people he didn’t know, though some he’d heard of. In that time, Roy’s errands had consisted of everything from moving furniture to bouncing at a club to bill collecting, bartending at a christening to, once in a while, shooting people in the head.

  Not at all like the days when Albert ran it, they would be killing people all of the time, hardly ever moving furniture or pouring drinks. Back then, Roy sometimes wondered if they were even getting paid for it.

  Roy once saw this famous actor play a “hitman” on a TV show. He was this stone killer who wore nice clothes, had all this electronic shit, and was paid in gold bricks or something. Roy had never seen a guy like that in all his life. Not even Albert, who was as stone cold a killer as he’d known. There was a time Albert would have killed someone for a steak dinner and a slice of pie. Roy and Albert killed a lot of people back then. They did a lot of things back then. Most of it, in and around Kansas City in the eighties and early nineties. The town, mobwise, even then, was already finished, ceding control to places like Chicago, New York, and Miami.

  Roy and the old couple, Harvey and Rita, were the only ones left. They brought Roy to New York when he was barely twenty-five and set him up running “errands” now and again for some heavy people in Brooklyn. As a rule, they didn’t trust him with anything too complicated, on account of they didn’t think Roy was all that bright. Outside of Albert, not many people did.

  As another rule, Roy never left New York. He didn’t li
ke to be far from home. Especially at night. He wanted to be in his chair, watching TV, preferably baseball. Martin Shine was an unusual gig for him. Traveling all that way. But the Cardinals, Roy’s favorite team, were coming to town to play the Dodgers in a week, and Roy figured that maybe he would stick around, go see The Kid, his favorite player, pitch in person.

  Roy spent the bulk of his time installing alarms for Harvey’s security company. Roy enjoyed the work and, for a while, thought he might one day even be a full-time electrician until one afternoon in the backyard, over Arnold Palmers, Harvey told him the union was run by fuckers and that Roy didn’t want to deal with that.

  “Stay with me,” he said. “I’ll take care of you. You don’t need a union. You don’t need anybody but me.”

  Same bullshit Albert used to say.

  It was too late now anyway, make that kind of change, so why even think about it?

  —

  Roy picked up the spent shell casing from the carpet, then opened the breech on the gun and ejected the round inside. Safety or no safety, Roy was taking no chances.

  He put the gun, the casing, and the round in his jacket pocket and then walked down the hall into the back bedroom. Shine’s clothes from the day were laid out on the black silk bedspread. Roy looked at them, the beiges and browns giving off a vibe as sad as the man who wore them, and went into the closet. He studied Shine’s wardrobe, then stepped to the pole and slid the hangers all to one side so that he could get a look at Martin Shine’s safe, ingeniously hidden in the closet behind the Hawaiian shirts.

  Shine hadn’t lied about the combination. Roy got it open on the first try. Inside he found a nickel-plated .45 in a holster duct-taped to the inside wall, placed there so that Shine could easily pull it, should someone happen to be standing behind him holding a gun to his head. An extra clip sat atop a passport and a coffee-stained insurance policy.

  As Roy expected, there was no cash.

  He left the door to the safe open, just to make the cops think burglary if they were lazy, and then walked back into the living room, where he turned off the light, started for the front door, then paused beside the dead man, who was somehow still kneeling in the dark.