The lesson finished before too much refining had been done and too much of the bourbon was gone, both because they were tired and because Mousey got distracted by how much of the Milky Way was visible from his living room. He sprawled across the floor and motioned for Grace to follow. She shook her head firmly.
“People with double knee replacements don’t just lie down on the floor.”
Mousey raised a flat hand above his head and then dropped it with a slap against his forehead. “I forgot! Sorry! Thanks for the lesson. Oooh, reminds me.” He sprung up quickly and rushed towards the pantry, his socks slipping against the hardwood floor a couple times. Grace pulled the plastic-topped cork out of the whiskey bottle and threw it, hitting him square in the back of the neck. Mousey skidded to a stop. “That was nice. Good arm on ya.”
Grace twirled a hand through the air, bowing without moving any other part of her body.
Mousey walked the last couple steps to the pantry and pushed open the fake wall panel. He twisted the dial to open his combination safe. Inside were three bundles of $5,000 in Canadian fifties, a .38 revolver, a quarter ounce of marijuana, an almost empty bottle of methadone, another of Dexedrine, and a half-full one of codeine cough syrup. He took the money out, stopping to look back at the mostly cleared-out safe. He looked at where the money had been, and he ran his finger over the cold surface. Then he closed the door without locking it.
When he’d been getting his money laundered, Mousey had asked the amazing Chinese accountant to give him the cash in fifties instead of hundreds because he liked the red bills, having grown bored of the homogeneity of American cash. He was into the Canadian fives, tens, twenties, and fifties; he thought the gold hundreds were a bit on the nose.
Even looking at the money, even looking right at it in his hand as he was about to give it to Grace, Mousey wouldn’t have said out loud that he felt guilty. He would have said he was guilt-full. You don’t give away stacks of cash because of how you feel. You give it away because of what you know you are.
Grace was in the middle of a very gentle sip straight from the bottle when he placed the bundles on her leg. She almost spit up when she saw them, and all three fell to the floor. The money sat there for a while, both of them looking at it, until Grace raised her eyes to Mousey’s and he winked. She stood with considerable effort, took two steps back and another conservative sip from the bottle.
“Just what the fuck is that?”
Mousey picked up the bills and laid them out side by side on the cushion Grace had just moved from. “It’s your money. For the lesson. I’m really confident about the song.” He whistled several sounds that resembled, but were not in fact, music.
“I’m not taking that. I’m not taking anything, that’s really . . . I don’t like it, Mousey. I don’t like this.”
He stayed looking at the money. “I don’t want it, I don’t need it, and it’s clean. You don’t have to worry about it. I promise it’s clean.”
“That much cash money doesn’t exist clean.”
Mousey smiled again; it was less charming this time. “I have a pension. I don’t need it, and I want to give it to you. You don’t want it, give it to charity.”
“You want rid of it, you give it to charity.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t believe in it.”
“And your pension, that’s a garage-door-opener pension, right?”
Mousey knew better than to talk or nod or move his head at all.
“Fuck you. I need the money, so no. I’m not taking nothing I need from you.”
Mousey finally looked up from the money. He pointed at her. “What’s your favourite dinosaur?”
Grace smiled. “Just when I’m ready to treat you like the asshole you is, you pull me back.” She spread her arms opera-singer wide. “I’m a brontosaurus girl, from way back. I ride for the brontosaurus.”
Mousey shook the money stack at her. “See, I already knew that, actually.”
“For real? Damn, son. If I’m forgetting telling you my favourite dinosaur, I know we’re having way too many of these dumbass conversations.”
“Nah, it was early days, forgetting is fair. See, not to brag, but I have a pretty amazing memory. I agreed with you back then, and I agree with you now. I’m a brontosaurus boy. They’re so big and so gentle.”
Grace toasted him with the bottle and took another tiny sip. “When you’re right, you’re right. But you already knew that, because you’ve got your gold star for memorizing shit.”
“See, after we agreed about the brontosauri, you went home and diddled around on the piano or whatever, and I researched the hell out of those dinos. And guess what?”
“I’m grown. I don’t guess.”
“They’re not a real thing.”
“My son was in elementary; I saw the homework, Brontosaurus is real, man.”
“They’re just little apatosaurs. And those fellas might even have had feathers.”
Grace shrugged. “Names are whatever. They still roamed, eating grass and harming nobody, correct?”
“Correct.”
“So I still love ’em. What’s your point?”
He flipped the money packet onto the couch next to him. “It’s a tough world out there for dinosaurs. And the gentle ones deserve more” — Mousey winced — “than the other ones.”
Grace sat back down beside Mousey, putting him between her and the money. She grabbed his hand and held it. “Just promise me this is safe money. You can’t tell me about jail murders and then make me go to jail. It’s mean.”
“I promise. For real. I promise. Plus, and don’t take this the wrong way, I think you’d be a momma. Get a couple sweet young things in your stable; it’s not a bad life. I know this gal, she’s doing some time up in Logan now — ”
Grace squeezed his hand to stop him. Then she laid her other hand flat. Mousey put the bills in it. “I’m too drunk to drive or hear the rest of you talking. You got a guest room in this greenhouse?”
“Bed’s made and everything. Don’t say I’m not thoughtful.”
“I wouldn’t say that about you, my friend. That’s one of the ones I wouldn’t say.”
Grace flapped the cash at him, and Mousey recoiled theatrically, flipping himself all the way over the back of the couch and hitting his head on the floor. They both laughed.
“Think that’ll hurt tomorrow?”
“I think everything will hurt tomorrow.” He stood and his vision went black for a quick second from the head rush.
Grace hauled herself up and started towards the stairs. “When you’re right, you’re right.”
His vision cleared and he wiped his dry face with his dry hand. “What about the rest of the time?”
Grace didn’t turn around; all she did was snort, wave the last of his dirty money at him, and turn the corner.
6 Victoria, British Columbia
As the wails of the sirens slowly died down, and the shuffling and slams of people coming home from work dissipated into the occasional shuffles and slams of people coming home from the bar or the gym after work, Tommy Marlo stared with watery, unseeing eyes at his floor.
In his mental rerunning of the situation, Tommy had become fixated on the sound of the bump on his hood as he’d floored the car past the two club members at the gas station. He’d been face down across the seats with his eyes closed at that exact moment, and now he imagined the guy bouncing over the roof in the way people who have been killed by a stupid, reckless driver would bump over the roof of a car.
Having never killed anyone before, and being completely sure that the hand he hadn’t even hurt with the hood of his car was an entire person he’d killed, Tommy felt a kind of bottomless guilt that he had never before imagined.
Asking Tommy what it felt like to be a murderer on the run from the most dangerous criminal motorcycle gang in history would have been like asking how it felt to be fifteen on his fifteenth birthday. You never have
an answer to give, but you do feel differently. It’s just too soon to explain how.
Being a murderer on the run from the most dangerous criminal motorcycle gang in history felt like arms and legs and breathing. It felt like nothing at all.
Although it seemed so long ago, Tommy could remember how he’d felt that morning. Tired, sad, worried, annoyed by little things, and, as was usual for him, a little bit hopeful. Now Tommy was sitting on his sagging pullout bed, feeling nothing, in the way that arms and legs and breathing are nothing. He looked up from his floor to the indistinct blur of his closed curtains. Finally, he stood and put in his contacts, then he flaked the long, dried patch of blood off his face with a fingernail.
Since coming to Victoria three months prior, Tommy had been on a haphazard self-improvement kick, which had mostly consisted of doing sit-ups and push-ups sporadically and buying a peel-off word-of-the-day calendar to improve his vocabulary. As his eyes reluctantly dragged themselves back into focus, he saw the calendar. It was over a month behind. Tommy slumped into his desk seat and without looking peeled three days off, letting them scatter themselves across the desk.
Winsome Gaping Nightwitch.
Tommy felt no need to read the rest of the card for the definition of winsome. His eyes and brain were tired, so he satisfied himself with a phonetic knowledge of the word. For the first time in a couple hours, he used his mouth to make a sound on purpose.
“Winsome Gaping Night Witch. Winsome. Gaping. Nightwitch. Night. Witch. Gaping. Gaping. Gaping.”
Talking perked Tommy up a little and snapped him partially out of his trance. He spun his chair around and rose gingerly, remembering his bruised ribs (or really his body at all) for the first time since he’d left the gas station. He reached into his pocket and, after almost bisecting his finger, lifted his hunting knife out. Tommy had no idea how the knife could have ended up there. He specifically remembered leaving it out on the passenger seat. Tommy shrugged off this miracle, now equally numb to the joys of the uncertain and unlikely. Using the knife, he cut the cord on the first bag of money, peeked in, and nodded glumly at more money than he’d ever seen in one place before. He didn’t bother to count it, but he eyeballed it at about fifty grand. He let the floppy top of the bag drop back down and moved on to the second bag.
The second his hand entered the bag Tommy’s entire sensory world once again exploded, this time into a suffocating world of scalding green dye. He whirled away, coughing and ineffectually grabbing at his eyes, which really just pushed more dye below his eyelids and knocked his glasses to the ground. He fell to the floor and used his hands to guide himself to the sink beside his bed (his bathroom was just a toilet and shower). He vomited green dye into the sink and splashed ineffectually at his eyes.
Using the wall and bathroom floor to guide him, he flopped over the edge of his bathtub and through the mildew-highlighted plastic shower curtain, pulling it down with him into the tub. He got the water running and let it soak across his head and face. The shower curtain was wrapped around him, gathering pockets of diluted green ink and water and spilling them as Tommy contorted and continued to mash at his eyes. Eventually, his eyes settled into a lighter, more passive burning, and he stopped thrashing, letting the water soak his shaved head, forming small streams down his face and into his shirt.
Tommy laughed, choked on some water, and finally pulled his head out from under the faucet. He propped himself up on one elbow, like a movie cowboy around a movie campfire, and looked down at the drain and the watery ink sliding past him and into it. He started singing, with perfect pitch and a confident, trained voice.
“Winsome gaping night witch / Winsome gaping night witch / I will find you / I will find you / I will find you / and then you’ll know / and it’ll go to show / a whole lot of nothing at allllllll. Winsooooommmmme gaping / I missed you before we met / and I’m getting awful wet / and I hope you miss you / too.”
Tommy wept for a long time into the blanketing context of water.
7
Greta was picking up Sergei outside of the Spaghetti Factory he owned. He was a very short, very wide man with a very full beard. He always wore a suit with no tie and expensive runners that he hoped would pass, at first glance, for dress shoes. He’d had set Greta up with a short-notice find-and-kill gig, some idiot named Tommy Marlo who’d knocked off a stash of stolen money from the club, and she needed a face-to-face with Sergei to talk it out.
Sergei waved and hustled around the back of the car with an unlikely, compact agility before opening the door and coming to rest gently in the passenger seat.
“Hello, my dear!” He spoke with a pleasingly heavy accent. Greta reached over and shook his hand before shoulder-checking past him and pulling into the empty street. “So you wish to speak with your elder. It is business?”
“’Fraid so, sweet knees. This job is hot. I don’t want it.”
He rubbed his beard. “You feel you have a choice?”
“Serge, what’s the point in having you . . . hang on.” The car was coming up to a very stale yellow left-turn signal. Greta sped up and hit the turn wide, screeching across the intersection immediately after the light changed. Sergei gripped the armrest tightly, digging his nails into the leather.
“Jesus, woman!”
Greta evened out the car and gunned it towards the next light. She laughed and punched Sergei in the arm. “You’re such an old ninny. I know the suggestion light was red, but that’s in the past now. We only have so much time in this world, Serge. Don’t spend it worrying about things you can’t control, like dying in a car crash because of my reckless driving. I’ve crashed three cars and I died less than one times.”
“And once more we see there are reasons you are em-ployed as you are, and reasons why I am but a humble chain-restaurant owner. My heart is open to all things and thus is fragile. Drop me at this corner.” Sergei didn’t speak in buildings he owned, so the meetings were always in cars, or restaurants, or alleys. Greta liked that, never having been a huge Spaghetti Factory fan in the first place.
Greta pulled over and spun to look at him. “You think I’m going to do this hot mess of a gig?”
“Carton of loveliness, there are some things I think, and I do so tremblingly and with uncertainty, but there are also other things. Things I know. This is an other thing.”
Greta nodded. “Why don’t they put their guys on it? I’m expensive.”
“As one does, they appreciate finesse. They have a man at his apartment for the rest of this day, in the unlikely event that he returns to it. You start tonight. You are to search the apartment in the hopes of finding what a policeman’s mind would call evidence of his whereabouts, and what an artist’s mind would dub ‘the goods.’” It really was a very thick and beautiful Russian accent.
“No, I don’t. We both know this Marlo kid rabbited already. I don’t start shit tonight, except maybe this needlework project I’ve been thinking about . . .”
“Three times your usual money is not enough for you?”
“They’re giving you that?”
“A portion from my own pocket, dearest.” Greta cocked an eyebrow. Sergei looked to have changed species and swallowed a domestic bird whole. “There are favours I wish owed to me. Also, if I may be so bold as to inquire: needlepoint?”
“It’s for an ironic gift.”
“Ah. Of course.”
Greta twisted her ring, a long oval plate with a Jan van Calcar woodcut on it. “Fuck. Fine. I’ll take Marlo. From the pocket, hey? You really want this one, hey, Mr. Spaghetti?”
Sergei was already out of the door and putting on sunglasses. He paused a second then looked straight at the sun. “If I had been twenty years younger and we had both used the same alphabet from birth, our love would have burned hotter than this gorgeous star which sustains us, and lasted for twice as long.”
Greta spent the afternoon cooking dinner and preparing reheatable meals for the week, then she exercised and did some myofascial
-release stretching with a foam roller.
Late in the afternoon the hitman leaned out her window to take a picture of a garbage can lid that had somehow ended up in the branches of the tree across the street from her house. The photo did not capture the way the branch swayed and trembled in the wind, and it did not convey the thin, high-pitched trembling metal sound that Greta imagined as she looked at it, but it was a technically competent photograph. She had effectively framed the lid between the branches holding up the power line hanging above and in this way managed to suggest the fleeting, subdued awe that had hit her after she’d caught sight of the object out of the corner of her eye.
She pulled up to the apartment complex, catching the biker’s eye on her first circle of the block and then sliding smoothly into his spot as he pulled out. The moron was still wearing a bandana. No leather jacket, just a jewellery-store-robbery hoodie that suggested, fully and precisely, the full patch cut he wasn’t wearing. Subtle as a Baptist church service.
Although contract murder was her business, there were a number of aspects of this particular contract murder with which Greta was unfamiliar, and of which she was wary. The job was less simple, less “here’s an address now go squelch a human soul” than she preferred. The involvement of a truly terrifying, surprisingly sloppy criminal motorcycle gang worried her from a logistical standpoint. Then, on top of all the complications, there was the potential of having to find, restrain, and maybe lightly torture Tommy Marlo.
Since her particular brand of malevolence was of a negative, as opposed to an actively sadistic, type, characterized more by the absence of standard human feelings for the people she hurt than a delight in their pain, the prospect of finding, restraining, and maybe lightly torturing Tommy Marlo troubled Greta in a distantly revolting sort of way, the way the idea of cleaning up day-old vomit would trouble her.
MARRY, BANG, KILL Page 4