“Oh, this is too much.” Phil unbuttons his Soprani blazer and reaches for his piece, thinking about a mercy-killing. “This cannot be.”
“No,” I say quietly. “In a minute.”
I kneel beside the kid. His face, what remains of it, is bloated and pocked with suppurating boils leaking pus of a shade I’d previously regarded as impossible for a human body to produce. I ask the same question I asked two hours ago, when there was still a chance the kid might’ve walked away breathing.
“Where is the truck.?”
“Ungh…ungh…uhhh…”
“Just tell me, kid. I’ll make the whole world go away.”
“U…u…u…sto…Storage…”
I turn to Phil. “U-Storage?”
“Yeah.” Phil’s skin is the color of unripe bananas. “Long-term storage joint down on the Hudson.”
“We need anything else?”
“No. Christ, no.”
With a strength I didn’t think he possessed, the kid heaves himself up. A noise like wet leather tearing as the skin of his back and arms, which has melted to the glass, disconnects from his body. He makes a mewling noise, a strangled kitten, and I’m now staring at the flayed panorama of his back, these long red highways of sinew, glistening pockets of fat, a steaming landscape of tendon-knitted muscle that looks a little like rolled roast beef with the stark-white constellation of his vertebrae poking through at even intervals. He squawks and topples out of the unit. The flesh of his chest and legs and feet and head stays in the bed and now I’m staring at this mass of bloody meat squirming on the clear plastic tarp, this thrashing creature that was recently an arrogant boy. The veins of his throat resemble bluish tubes and strands of hair are plastered to the gummy redness of his face but there is only blackness, pitch blackness, at his pupils and mouth.
Phil moans and staggers back until his ass hits the doorknob. This he takes as an omen and clears out. Now it’s just me and the flayed red thing on the floor.
And for some reason I wonder what might happen if I were to take this new, stripped-down version of Joey, and place him back in the tanning bed. Would he give birth to yet another, slightly smaller, slightly more agonized, slightly less human version of himself? How many layers does he possess? I think of a Russian doll, one inside another, smaller and smaller, until you reach the true center. And it bothers me, on a remote level, that only a nagging sense of professionalism prevents me from peeling Joey down to his very core.
Instead, I produce a silenced .22 Kirikkale from my toolbag. The desperate skinless thing struggles as I wrap a trash bag around its head and drill two slugs through the black plastic. The body spasms. Soupy red matter spills from the bag-holes. I roll the body up in the tarp. The plastic turns opaque with steam.
Phil waits with Joe in the reception area.
“You leave a mess?” Joe asks.
“A little bit. It’s rolled up in the tarp.”
Joe cocks a thumb at his partner. “What happened to my man here? Looks like he ate a boatload of bad clams.”
“You okay?” I ask.
“Sure,” Phil says, nodding a little too emphatically. “I—I seen worse.”
Joe cocks an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he says, but quietly and staring out at the street. “Yeah, sure.”
Joe pulls an envelope from the desk drawer and hands it over. “Want to count it?”
“No need.”
Joe smiles. “Be seeing you, Answer.”
“Catch you on the flipside, Joe. Take care, Phil.”
Phil doesn’t say goodbye. His eyes don’t leave the street.
I drive back to the hack rack. The dispatcher gives me a sour look—only ten bucks to show for a five-hour shift—but it only takes a sawbuck to turn his frown upside-down. My apartment’s two blocks away. Walking home, I buy a warm pretzel from a street vendor, enjoying the salt and hot mustard. The sky is darkening and it looks like snow on the horizon. The slate-gray cloudbanks remind me of a recurring dream in which skulls rain down from the sky like hailstones, millions of gleaming skulls covering me in a clattering drift of smooth bone and teeth. What’s most puzzling is that the dream does not disturb me, as I imagine it would most people. I often close my eyes hoping, with a sort of desperate longing, that it will come to me as I sleep.
There’s an envelope in my mailbox with no return address.
A brief letter. A first-class airline ticket to Toronto, Canada.
An unsigned check for fifty thousand dollars.
— | — | —
Jerome “Oddy” Grant—Tragic Hero
Washington, DC.
November 30th, 1987. 12:05 p.m.
I haven’t really slept for twenty years. I lie down, yes, but I don’t sleep. I’m watching the door, the window, then back to the door. There’s always something within reach: maybe a baseball bat, or a knife. I sleep with a gun under my pillow, another under my mattress, another in the drawer next to the bed. I get up at half-hour intervals to walk my perimeter. Every half hour on the dot. It’s like that until the sun comes up. Then I can sleep for an hour or two.
“Got your walking sticks, son?”
My man Deacon hefts a pair of Webley Mark 6 hand-cannons capable of coldcocking a rhino. “Cocked, locked, and ready to rock, boss.”
The Chevy van is faded kelly green, the sides painted with red letters spelling out FLOWERS BY ALGERNON. It idles across the street from a building with the words KEYBANK WASHINGTON spelled out in two-foot-high brass letters. The van is not filled with flowers, by Algernon or anyone else. It’s jam-packed with five gun-toting brothers who’ve robbed close to thirty banks in fifteen states over the past five years.
We got my man Tiny, but that name’s a misnomer because he’s three-hundred pounds of chocolate thunder toting a Mossburg pump. We got Deacon, ex-Marine Corps demolitions expert. We got Dade, a solid soldier and strong-arm expert who’s gotten a bit squirrelly these last few jobs. We got Malik the wheelman, a cat who makes this Chevy walk and talk. Last we got yours truly, Oddy, old hand and unquestioned leader.
I say, “Suit up.”
We don masks. Tiny, Deacon, Dade, Malik, and Oddy become Michael, Jermaine, Tito, Jackie, and Marlon: The Jackson Five. The latex mask reeks of stale sweat and adrenaline. The smell is narcotic, the only thing reminding me I’m alive.
“In and out in two,” I say. “Any more and we’ll be rubbing elbows with Dirty City’s finest.”
“Maybe I want to bag a few piggies,” Dade says, oinking. “Soo-wee! Soo-wee!”
Squeezed around the cherrywood stock of a Kalashnikov assault rifle, I notice Dade’s hands are trembling. Is it fear or anticipation or plain old batshit-craziness? Can’t tell. Not an encouraging sign.
“In and out in two,” I repeat. “No fuss, no muss.”
Malik pulls a smooth U-turn across the boulevard and stops ten feet from the bank entrance. I pop the rear doors and we fan out, walking four abreast, a bad-ass chorus line waiting for the music to start. And the music does start, somewhere inside my head, and the song is “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets.
One-two-three o’clock, four o’clock ROCK…
I lead them through the revolving doors, Deacon and Tiny flanking, Dade pulling up the rear. The bank foyer is warm and faintly pine-scented, either from the disinfectant the cleaning staff uses or the massive Christmas tree erected beside the teller wickets.
A pair of pasty rent-a-cops lean against alabaster pillars, half-asleep. Five customers wait in line and three are being served; they’re either old or female or both, not a cowboy amongst them. Three tellers, young and WASPish, two chicks and a fellow. Mr. Branch Manager sits off to the side, his office hemmed by red velvet ropes.
Tiny taps one of the rent-a-cops with the barrel of his shotgun. The drowsy son of a bitch stares up at one towering mountain of Tito Jackson and hands over his revolver rickety-tick. Dade disarms the second guard.
Five-six-seven o’clo
ck, eight o’clock ROCK…
Tiny hustles the first guard over to join the second and withdraws to cover the entrance. Twenty-five seconds gone. So far everything’s clockwork. Deacon springboards the counter, Webley drawn. The customers scream and the tellers pale. Deacon hands one of them a pillowcase and points to the cash drawers.
“Everybody be cool,” I say. “Zip your lips and sit your asses down and everything’s gonna be everything.”
Twenty-four ass-cheeks hit the floor. I come around Mr. Branch Manager’s desk, grab him by his tie—a Goofy-playing-golf motif—and jerk him to his feet.
“What’s your name?”
“P-Puh-Paul.”
“Okay, Paul, let me shake it down: you’re going to take me back to the vault and fill this bag with twenties and fifties. You tuned in on my wavelength, cupcake?”
“Y-y-yes.”
Paul is young and handsome, early thirties. Probably got a wall full of diplomas in a suburban brownstone, drives a Lincoln or a low-end Beamer, trophy wife and a kid away at boarding school. And now he’s face-to-face with a posse of heavily-armed, highly-skilled Soultrain motherfuckers; poor Paul’s living out every WASP’s worst nightmare, live and in blinding Technicolor.
We’re gonna ROCK…
Paul is working on the vault combination when I hear this awful cracking sound. I poke my head into the lobby to see one of the rent-a-cops clutching his hands to his face, blood geysering between his fingers. Dade stands over him, rifle butt dripping red.
“The fuck you doing?” Tiny says.
“Uncle salty here called me a nigger,” says Dade.
Dade’s lying. Guard’s so piss-scared he wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful.
“I don’t give a diddlyfuck what he’s jawing,” I yell over. “Square your shit away.”
AROUND…
Meanwhile Deacon’s emptied the cash drawers. He conducts the tellers and customers over to the vault, where they will remain locked while we make our getaway. Paul forks stacks of twenties into a Hefty Bag as fast as his trembling fingers can manage.
“Bring the guards in,” I say.
“You heard the man,” Dade hollers at the guards. “Move your asses!”
The unharmed guard complies but the other one, he of the busted face, doesn’t move. So Dade seizes a handful of hair and drags the man, thrashing and wailing, across the tiles. Tiny breaks from position to intercept.
“The fuck you doing?”
“Following orders,” Dade says. His eyes read like a grim weather forecast: storm clouds gathering.
Tiny says, “Gonna kill him.”
“Fucker called me a nigger! The fuck would you do?”
THE CLOCK…
They’re chest-to-chest, Dade glaring up at Tiny. Forgotten behind them, the injured guard raises his pantleg and grabs something black and snub-nosed from a cheater holster. He has the hammer cocked and a bead drawn before I holler:
“Gun!”
KRA-THACK is the sound the pistol makes and ka-chunk is the sound the bullet makes flattening against Tiny’s forehead. The peak of his skull shears off and his eyes roll back in their sockets. His finger spasms on the shotgun’s trigger and the sound is deafening as buckshot tears his feet to shreds but it doesn’t matter because he’s dead, dead on his feet, dead on his stumps, fucking dead.
Dade swivels, AK riding his hip, and opens fire. The Kalishnakov kicks and the rent-a-cop’s face disintegrates in a cloud of red.
…TONIGHT!
Screams fill the vault. Most of these folks have never heard gunshots before and they’re thinking WWIII has broken out in the foyer. I grab the Hefty Bag from Paul. Deacon smashes the emergency phone and slams the vault’s door on thirteen very relieved faces.
Dade inserts another banana clip and racks the AK’s bolt. His Converse hightops are coated in blood and chunks of someone, Tiny, rent-a-cop, I don’t know who the fuck. He’s Section-8, and maybe he’s been that way for a while now. I should’ve seen he wasn’t wired tight but I didn’t and now we’re wading through a bloodbath.
“Time to go,” I say through gritted teeth.
The sidewalk is mercifully deserted. Maybe, just maybe, we’re going to clear this tits-up. But no: we’re halfway between the bank and the van when a police cruiser fishtails around the corner at Elm and Prescott.
Deacon drops into a shooter’s stance and snaps off six shots. The first flattens the cruiser’s front right tire, the third flattens the left, four, five and six punch through the grille. The cruiser skids to a standstill, steam boiling up from under the hood.
Perfect. The cruiser’s disabled and nobody’s hurt.
Dade erases all that.
He opens up with the Kalishnikov, sweeping the barrel side-to-side like a kid pissing in a snow bank. The cruiser’s windshield implodes and the frame rocks—actually rocks back and forth, like a ragtop on Lover’s Lane—as copperjackets tear through it. And I can make out two bodies jitterbugging in the front seat: maybe young cops, maybe old cops, maybe single cops, maybe married cops, but the only certainty is that they’re dead cops, dead as disco, and the mindlessness of their deaths sickens me. Then the cruiser explodes, erupting into a furious flaming scrapheap that rains charred metal and smoking flesh onto the cold November tarmac.
I slam my hand down on the AK’s barrel. Dade stares at me with empty eyes.
“Take me home, Oddy,” he whispers. “Take me home.”
“Yeah, Dade,” I say. “Yeah, okay.”
We pile into the van and pull away, leaving four funerals in our wake. I stare out the window at the flaming scalps of radial tire and charred metal and remember…
…The Magnificent Seven on Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol eighty klicks east of Saigon, walking a trail overlooking the South China Sea. Intel had reported the NVA was offloading three boatloads of weapons in a Mekong bay. Zippo scouted ahead and found the drop point as night fell.
We moved in. It was about ten o’clock at night. We saw people unloading long boxes we assumed were rifles. I gave the order to open up on them.
I remember the sound of wood splintering and things exploding and, like a deep-space transmission, screaming. People were running around the decks like headless chickens. A man was on fire, body an oily tower of red and black flame, and he grabbed someone else and soon they were both ablaze, fire pouring out of their mouths like flame-swallowers at the circus. I remember a man raising what could have been a rifle or a fishing pole, remember pulling the trigger and watching his face collapse into itself in a red spray, remember his features the split-second before the slug destroyed them, their flatly elegant symmetry.
Swift, silent, deadly.
Daylight came, and we discovered that we had killed a lot of fishermen and children. Intel had fucked up. I got on the blower to command. I was screaming into the handset while Tripwire knelt with this kid’s body in his lap, a body with no head, and I was saying: “We got a royal fuck-up here, Colonel. Dead kids and dead fishermen and not one gun on board.”
The Colonel said: “Don’t worry. It’ll spin, Sergeant. We got body count.”
So I turned to my unit and said, “Don’t worry about it. Everything’s fine,” because that’s what I was getting from upstairs. But we had dead bodies draining over bullet-riddled gunnels, bodies of children and eels and monkfish baking together in the bank’s red sands so everything was most definitely not fine, top brass could spin that motherfucker to the moon but the stink was going to linger.
They gave us all the Combat Infantry Badge for that action. There was an award ceremony, the seven of us standing on a makeshift platform with medals stuck on our chests for killing innocent civilians. I knew in my heart it was wrong. But we were at war and different rules applied…
…Malik cuts onto the freeway before turning back on us like an exasperated parent and asking, “What the fuck happened in there?”
“Dade happened,” Deacon says. “Dade happened all over that motherfucker.�
�
“Where’s Tiny?”
“Dead,” I say. “Got his shit scattered by some rent-a-cop packing a pistol should’ve been taken off him three seconds after we cleared the front doors—”
“Don’t you fucking pin Tiny’s death on me—”
“That guard was your cover!” Deacon shouts at Dade. “Why the hell didn’t you pat him down? Armed robbery 101, motherfuck!”
Malik pulls into the fast lane. Five or six squad cars, sirens wailing, speed by in the opposite lane. Between us, spilled across the van’s floor panels, are stacks and stacks of bills.
“And what about the cops?” Deacon continues. “Why’d you kill them?”
“Shitcan the questions,” I say. “Not here, not now. People are dead, Tiny is dead, and all we can do is deal.” To Dade: “This is the end of the line for you. No more jobs. Take your cut and run, son. Find some sunny somewhere and square your shit away.”
“I’m okay, boss,” Dade says.
“No, Dade,” I say, placing a hand on his shoulder, feeling him shiver. “You’re not okay. You need help. I wish I could help you myself, but I can’t.”
“My shit’s hardwired, Oddy. I’m watertight.”
“You’re fucking bugshit,” Deacon spits. “Killing people for no goddamn reason.”
“Say that again.” Dade’s voice is barely audible above the wind whistling through the van’s seams. “Just one…more…time.”
“What the fuck’s going on back there?” Malik asks.
“Not a goddamn thing,” I say. “Everything’s cool and the gang, isn’t that right?”
But Deacon blows any good vibes out of the water when he says, “You heard me: you’re bugshit. Section-fucking-8.”
“Take that back,” Dade whispers. “Take it back or I’ll shoot you in the face.”
Deacon leans forward until his face is inches from Dade’s. “Go…fuck.”
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