Slashback can-8

by Rob Thurman

  “Call me Robin. . Rob Goodman, I mean, and hello?” He spread his arms, hands flicking inward then out to cover all of what I highly suspected he thought of as his glory and magnificence. He could be a televangelist. There was the same strong self-loving vibration coming off of him that I saw in quick flashes Sunday mornings as Cal channel surfed.

  He repeated the “behold the splendor that is me” gesture, making sure I didn’t miss it. “As I said, Versace. Oil, grease, and the essence of manual labor do not come out of Versace. Ah, idea.” He fished out a wallet that was made of alligator, ostrich skin, velociraptor hide, who knew, I reflected bemused. The most exclusive of choices to be sure. “I’ll pay you fifty dollars to change it for me. You look as if you could make use of fifty dollars.” He was studying our clothing. The smile was gone now as he switched his gaze from us, stepping back on the porch to get a better look at the house that was held up by spit and the million husks of dead termites. I knew what he saw. I hadn’t lived in better, you would think I’d be used to it-accustomed-think it normal, but I didn’t. People didn’t let you. People judged. People never failed to judge.

  Poor. Worthless. Lacking.

  Goodman’s lips flattened and this time I couldn’t read the emotion behind it. “You know, you’re lucky. I’m in a hurry. Someplace I have to be. Important man, that’s me. In constant demand. Busy, busy, busy. There would be hell to pay if I’m not. . wherever. I’ll pay you five hundred dollars to change the tire.”

  Charity.

  I would rather he’d judged instead.

  I had a thing about charity. Issues. We were clothed thanks to Goodwill and the Salvation Army. Our lunches at school were free thanks to the county. Half our furniture came off someone’s curb or out of a Dumpster, but that didn’t mean I liked it even when it was anonymous and to accept it from someone standing in front of me feeling pity for me, that I hated. The humiliation burned through me to curl down deep inside like an ill-tempered cat with claws slicing into my stomach.

  I was about to refuse when Cal, who thought I was an idiot on the subject, intervened. Things were things, whether you scavenged them, bought them, or people were stupid enough to just give them to you. He had the same attitude about money. He snatched the five one-hundred-dollar bills out of Goodman’s hand and elbowed me. “Nik, go on. Change the tire.”

  He elbowed me again when I didn’t move and asked Goodman innocently, “What kind of watch is that? It’s really cool. I don’t have a watch. We’re too poor.” He drooped, a sad victim of a rapacious economy. His eyes had the bleak thousand-yard stare straight out of the pictures of children from Depression-era photos I’d seen in my history books. “I’m always late for school ’cause of it, the no watch. I miss so much class I can barely read. I’m shockingly illiterate. I’m afraid they’ll kick me out and I’ll end up living in one of those cardboard boxes on the street.” Finishing mournfully, he added with the perfect touch of wistfulness, “I wish I had a watch like that.”

  Goodman’s smile was back and as amused as ever. More so actually. It showed more brilliant white teeth than a human being should have. With that in his arsenal, he’d leave Sophia in the dust when it came to swindling a mark. “You’re shockingly articulate to be so shockingly illiterate. Nik? That’s what your brother, Cal, called you, correct? Nik, do you think you could change my tire before your brother talks me out of my watch, clothes, and future firstborn son?”

  “It doesn’t look like I have much choice.” I didn’t. Pride had to bow before money that meant college and that future I would make for us. “Naive of you to assume he wouldn’t get your car too though. And it’s Niko. Only Cal calls me Nik.” I caught the keys he tossed me and headed for the car.

  There was a noncommittal hum that said Goodman wasn’t as worried or gullible as Cal believed. “Niko and Cal. I don’t suppose you want to tell me your last name.” Cal had shown his true colors when he’d opened the door: suspicion personified in a pair of sneakers. I was more subtle at showing it, but I was the same.

  “What do you think?” I said mildly. They say what people don’t know won’t hurt them. I said what people don’t know wouldn’t hurt us. Cal’s version was what people don’t know won’t make him stab them in the foot. Three different variations and all true.

  Goodman wasn’t offended by the answer. He wasn’t offended by Cal or me in any way and wasn’t that peculiar? Particularly with what Cal was currently doing. “Fair enough,” he replied as he moved his hand and wrist above Cal’s head as small fingers had drifted with invisible stealth toward his watch. Almost invisible as Goodman saw the movement clearly.

  Twenty minutes later the car was ready to go and so should’ve been Goodman, but he lingered several minutes talking about nothing whatsoever but making it somehow fascinating like con men do before he finally squared his shoulders as if he had an unpleasant task ahead of him. He was reluctant, I realized, to leave. He didn’t want to go. Someone not wanting to leave us, there was a first.

  That was definitely Cal talking, I thought with fond exasperation.

  “Here’s my card.” He handed it to me. “If the two of you make it to the Big Apple in the next eight or so years and need a job, look me up. It’s rare that I don’t have some sort of business going. I’m an entrepreneurial soul. I can always use the help.”

  “You’re not a car salesman?” I asked, surprised. With the Jaguar, the suit, and the whole Goodman experience, snake-oil mouth included, I’d finally mentally labeled him with that.

  “Cars?” He gave an intrigued quirk of his lips. “I haven’t done that yet. It’s a thought.”

  I tucked the card in my pocket. “Eight years is a long time. You’ll forget all about this.”

  He climbed behind the wheel of the Jaguar and flashed a wicked, knowing grin. “Eight years is nothing and I never forget anything I don’t want to.” He took a last look at our shack of a house and went solemn as quickly as if a switch had been flipped. “Life gives hard lessons to mold brave boys into great men.” Eyes remaining grave, he gave one last smile. “Tell your brother to take good care of the watch.”

  Now I did smile. “It’ll be pawned before your car makes it off the block.”

  He laughed. “Tell him to at least get three thousand for it. I paid ten.” Then he was gone, the roar of the car’s engine the only thing left. It hung in the air, a predator’s lazy howl, even after the Jaguar disappeared from view. Strange guy. Nice enough, but. . strange. Strange to be giving when I knew his kind were more into taking. Strange with the “I know you” and playing it off as if we reminded him of friends “gone but yet to come”? I knew an accidental truth when I heard it. He had thought he knew Cal and I’d seen and heard that same bloom of recognition with me. Strange that he’d want to help us years from now when most would forget us before they made it a mile down the road, because people generally weren’t like that. People helped themselves and their own. Anything else would be as strange as Rob Goodman himself.

  I pulled his card out of my pocket and bent the thick creamy stock between thumb and forefinger. It had been a strange experience altogether. It couldn’t have been much stranger, if I thought about it.

  “What a nut job,” Cal proclaimed as he moved up beside me, holding up the watch to admire it in the afternoon sun.

  “Maybe.” I didn’t necessarily agree, but as for Goodman’s good-natured ways and his willingness to throw money around like beads at Mardi Gras: things that seemed too good to be true always were. Decision made, I let the card flutter from my hand into the garbage can at the curb.

  If there was anything we didn’t need more of in our lives, it was strange.

  I picked up the lid Cal had left lying carelessly on the ground beside the can as always and wedged it in place. It was trash day Monday. That meant that I’d have to get up early, around three a.m. that morning, to make sure Junior didn’t have Kithser’s body stuffed in his own garbage can. Cal would insist.

  The things
you did for little brothers.

  7

  Cal

  Present Day

  The things you did for big brothers.

  I gave a philosophical-a big word Nik had taught me-sigh as I tossed the man in the Dumpster face-first. Catching his kicking feet as he bellowed in rage, I snapped, “Stop dicking around. I’m trying to do a good thing here and that’s not a big hobby of mine.”

  If anything, the flailing of the feet doubled. It wasn’t as if I could hear what he had to say if he was choking on garbage anyway. I grabbed an ankle and yanked him back out to dump him on the cracked asphalt of the alley. Landing on his ass, he snarled and tried to scramble backward. “Hey, asshole, cut it out.” I pulled my Desert Eagle from its holster under my jacket and pointed it at him. “That?” I nodded at the garbage container. “Wrong place. This?” I glanced at my watch. “Wrong time. Me?” My lips curled, then bared teeth in a wolfish grin. “Totally wrong fucking guy to mess with. Now stop moving and answer my damn questions.”

  This little interrogation was going down in broad daylight, but in this part of town, the fact I was holding a gun on a steroid-popping, greasy-haired semi-brain-dead shithead wasn’t going to raise an eyebrow. If I got any reaction at all from a passerby, it’d probably be a thumbs-up and an offer to help dispose of the body for half the take. This guy had nowhere to go and nothing he could do.

  Too bad he was too stupid to know that.

  He propelled himself to his feet and charged me, fists swinging. They were big fists. He was a big man, but being big doesn’t mean you can fight. You’re only as good as the last ass you kicked. From the looks of him in motion that had been either a hundred-pound starved druggie or a five-pound ankle-biting pooch.

  I could’ve ducked under his wild swing easy enough, but that meant his momentum would carry him toward the street. I’d have to chase him and while it would be a short chase as he was no better a runner than a fighter, I wasn’t in the mood.

  I’d been at this for hours, since the whorehouse pussycat had confirmed it was Jack peeling people like bananas. Nik had obtained a list of the victims from the Internet and split it between us. We didn’t know if Jack thought all humans were wicked or there was an actual reason he was choosing particular victims. Nik was hoping for the latter. Catching a killer with a pattern would be a helluva lot easier than assuming every single human in NYC was fair game. We had skills, but bodyguarding millions of people nightly wasn’t one of them.

  That led me here to this particular piece of crap. There are some nuggets of info about the victims that news articles miss. You had to do it the old-fashioned way-talk to the friends and family. This was the first one I’d tracked down and I didn’t know if his sister had been Jacko’s definition of wicked, but her brother was covered head to toe in it. He was a bad, bad boy. I’d gone to the address Niko had traced from the victim’s name, talked with the half-blind and wholly pissy grandma. She’d assumed I was a “customer” and told me Big Mike was at his regular spot. I’d been curious enough to ask how she’d known I wasn’t a cop. Her cackled laughter had followed me down the three flights of tenement stairs.

  When the half blind knew what you were and what you weren’t, maybe it was time to stop calling it an identity crisis and just go with identity.

  Big Mike was still coming for me with all the speed of a nearly dead, morbidly obese cow and I stepped to one side, extended my arm and clotheslined him. His neck hit my arm with a meaty thud and he was back down. I stood over him as he gasped for breath, his face turning faintly blue. I bent over and nudged him in the ribs with the silencer on my gun. “You know I train every day thanks to an anal-retentive brother? Nah, I know you don’t, but I’m telling you. I could’ve broken your neck. I could’ve hit your nose and driven bone splinters up into what passes for your tiny brain. I could’ve kicked your testicles so far up into your body that you sneezed them out. But I didn’t. I took you down with a move I saw on WWF, you pathetic sack of shit. Here’s some advice: get a new job.”

  Big Mike’s current job was drug dealer and occasional leg-breaker for anyone who needed that sort of thing. I glanced at my gun, snorted, and put it away. I’d planned on using it only for the fear factor, but I didn’t even need it for that. I slapped the man’s violet-colored cheek lightly. “This is how it’s going to go, Mikey. When you can breathe again. . if you can breathe again, you’re going to tell me about your sister. What did she do before she was killed? What was she into? Was she like you or was she innocent?” After seeing Big Mike and his grandma, I was on the fence.

  Nobody knew better than I did: sometimes genes do tell.

  “Hooker,” I said over the steaming plate of Chinese. “Sixteen and new to the trade. That’s probably why it didn’t make the news.” Sixteen and a prostitute. I hadn’t blamed her genes for that. I had blamed her brother though and thoroughly enough that the world’s most dedicated plastic surgeon would pin up a picture of Frankenstein’s monster to aim for as the best possible outcome.

  I’d always known I was lucky when it came to brothers, but sometimes I forgot others didn’t have that. It had been the one thing in my life I’d not once had to question and because of that might be my only true blind spot.

  I stabbed at the orange chicken with my fork. I’d decided years ago that if you hadn’t grown up with them in your hand, then chopsticks were for posers. The fact that I hadn’t been able to learn to use them was coincidence. “Thanks,” I added.

  Niko, who could do that catch-a-fly-with-chopsticks thing and therefore not a poser, tipped his head slightly to one side. “For what?”

  I shrugged as the loud chatter in the tiny restaurant ramped up another notch. There were cockroaches in the bathroom big enough to take a plunger to the toilet themselves if it stopped up, but nobody cared. The food, whether it had an antenna or two in it or not, was too good. “Just for doing the brother thing.” And doing it in a way many brothers couldn’t be bothered to. “What’d you find out?”

  “Thief and rapist.” He went for a square of tofu that shivered the same as a tiny cube of vomit-flavored Jell-O would. I grimaced and savored my chicken all the more. “I believe we have our pattern. Jack is targeting those with what some would consider to be wicked behavior and with no leniency for the unwilling, those who are actually victims.”

  I frowned, not completely convinced. “But that doesn’t explain you. I mean, I get why Jack would want me if I were human. I’m a killer.”

  “And you think I’m not?” Niko raised his eyebrows.

  I waved my fork, dismissing the words. “You’re lethal as hell, I know, but you kill in self-defense or in defense of others. You drip nobility instead of sweat. You’re Buddha, Jesus, Mother Teresa, and the Easter Bunny rolled into one. You shouldn’t be on Jack’s Naughty versus Nice list.”

  “You forget Cherish.” His eyes were clear. He had killed Promise’s daughter, but he didn’t feel guilt over it. I would have known if he did. Damn good thing too. He had not a single reason to feel blame over her.

  “She had the supernatural living version of a nuclear bomb and planned on using it. Hell, you saved the world, Nik. If that’s not the definition of noble I don’t know what is.”

  “She did, that’s true, but that’s not why I killed her. I killed her for revenge. For what I thought she’d done to you. For what she did do to me. And while she did fight, it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been unarmed. I would’ve killed her all the same.” Matter-of-fact. He made no apologies.

  I understood, and I was glad he did as well. Cherish hadn’t been a person. She’d been a swirling void of sociopathic lies and murder. Whatever made a person or a paien what they were. . their soul if souls existed in that way. . she didn’t have. She killed, manipulated, and then psychically brainwashed anyone who got in her way with visions so terrible they were capable of driving you mad. Niko hadn’t killed her. He’d exterminated her. She’d had far less worth than one of those bathroom cockroaches and
far less purpose on this earth.

  Not to mention she was a serious bitch.

  “Wish you’d let me come. Grabbed some popcorn and cheered from the sidelines. But whether you think that makes you a killer or not”-and it didn’t-“Jack couldn’t know about that. He just hit town. His victims now are obvious, right? He can see them spreading all that wicked far and wide. We haven’t had a job in weeks. You haven’t had to put anyone or anything down. There’s nothing I can think of that would have him all over you. You should be innocent in his beady, psychotic eyes.”

  Niko passed me his fortune cookie-a tradition long-standing since the very first time we’d had Chinese food. “It makes no difference. In fact, if he continues to come after me, it would be convenient. Knowing his victims are on the shadier side of the law, moral and otherwise, doesn’t make him much easier to locate. There are still too many. There are over ten thousand prostitutes alone in the city. There’s certainly no way to shadow them all. And when you factor in thieves and rapists and murderers, whatever else Jack considers wicked, it’s impossible. There simply is no way to track him down coming from that angle. But him coming to us, that is useful.”

  “Would be useful if we knew how to kill him or even touch the bastard. I can’t do to Jack what I did to the peymakilir, not unless we’re far, damn far away from him. The explosion would send those spikes of stone or crystal, whatever the fuck, that covers him flying. That’s the kind of shrapnel you can’t avoid or live through.”

  Suddenly the shadow of one righteously pissed off brother was looming over me. He hadn’t moved, the sun hadn’t shifted its rays through the front window-how he managed to loom, I didn’t know, but he did.

  Unblinking eyes fixed on me and stayed. As far as Niko was concerned, the restaurant had disappeared. It was him and me and I was screwed. “Yes,” he said softly and the word was worse for that unsettling softness. On Niko it was the pause and stillness the split second before a copperhead struck and pumped your veins with venom. Nik was my brother and he loved me, but that meant he’d do anything to keep me alive. Sometimes with me that took tough love-and a lot of it. “The peymakilir. I was saving this for home, but now that you’ve brought it up. There is absolutely no excuse for what you did to that creature, Cal, and you know it. I know you think you need to practice to face Grimm and you’re most likely right, but that was not practice. That was reality.”