MARRY, BANG, KILL

by Andrew Battershill

  “Charming.”

  “You’re charmed. Gimme your girly fingernails, I’ma bite ’em.”

  “First off” — he slapped her hand sharply away from his — “they’re not girly, they’re princely. Princes are men . . . or boys. Secondly, you can’t bite my fingernails until you tell me why you want to bite my fingernails.”

  “So you’re saying I can bite your fingernails?”

  “And you’re saying you’ll tell.”

  She pointed at him with one finger and touched her nose with a finger on the other hand in a show of coordination Mousey would have thought impossible for her at that particular moment. “Okay. You’ll be disappointed, it’s not a story. I just like the feeling of it, especially other people’s nails. I’ll bite my own, but a foreign nail has this sweet, chunky quality to it. Three other people have let me do it.”

  Mousey nodded evenly then raised his fingers to her mouth and waited patiently, occasionally looking out the window or shrugging at passersby as Greta bit off each of his fingernails in turn.

  When she was done, she drained her drink and looked at the nails she’d lined up on the bar. She was still holding his hand firmly, a proper Korean-nail-salon grip, and for the first time, Mousey looked at her hand. It was a nice hand: short, clipped, polished nails; slim, dexterous-looking fingers; and that lonely, lovely bloom of a slide-action scar on the webbing of her thumb, like a hitman sent to a Gulf Island might have.

  “Thanks, Mousey. That did me good. That was perfect. I’m gonna call it a night. I got a crash room at this hotel before I even started drinking, because I’m a genius. And you live in some other place, and you’ll sleep there tonight. Sincerely, though” — she reached over and put her hand on top of his — “thanks for the nails. They were wonderful. Catch you on the flip.” Then she hopped off the barstool and walked down the corridor to the guest rooms. Shoulder holster subtle but bulging like crazy once you thought to look for it.

  Mousey examined his somewhat raw and tingly fingertips. The bartender used his eyebrows and the angle of his head to ask if Mousey needed a refill, and Mousey dropped a hand to cover the glass.

  “That was a new one for me, Joe.”

  “My name’s Keith, Mousey.” The bartender snatched the glass out from under his hand. “And that was a new one for all of us.”

  37

  As he often did after having had too much to drink, Mousey woke up early, feeling alert and ready for the day. He popped up almost spryly before realizing that his feet were sore and maybe even a little swollen from his long, rocky beach walk home the night before. Mousey floated through his clear, almost colourless house, made some coffee, drank it, grabbed his gun and spare ammo from the safe, and wobbled to the door. He walked to his car, stopping briefly to watch the small family of deer who inhabited his property hop on seeming straight legs in seemingly perfect unison into the trees.

  Driving over to Grace’s, he muttered, still in a floating state that moved between half-drunk and wholly hungover, about how much smoother things would be going if he’d just figured everything out when he was supposed to. If he’d cased the hitman the first time she had been standing two feet away from him, strapped with two guns. If he’d thought, as he had arriving home blind-tired-drunk, to follow up on that one random thing Tommy and Mike and Tommy’s file had all specifically mentioned, with one very simple records search. That thing being Tommy skipping bail on his mother — G., as in Grace, Marlo, née Simmons. How easy his life would still be right this second if he’d only been paying attention, or working, or putting anything at all together when it would have been useful.

  Seeing the splintered door frame of Grace’s cottage from the top of the driveway, Mousey reversed immediately and parked his car beside the road. He pulled his gun, checked the mechanism, and took one of those very deep, very measured breaths that are never quite deep enough.

  On his way down the driveway, moving in short, sprinted increments between cover, he thought about nothing other than the layout of Grace’s house and the order in which it would be safest to clear the rooms. When he was within sight, he angled himself towards the far side of the house. He splayed backwards against the wall then moved in a slow crouch to the window. He did a quick check of the bathroom, which was empty with the door closed. He moved swiftly to the kitchen, but the window was too high for him, so he hurried around, hopped the porch as quietly as he could, and once more flattened himself against the wall to look through the living room window.

  The place was trashed, the couch flipped over, piano bench having spewed its contents onto the floor. He took three deep breaths and made a preliminary plan. The living room was empty, so the first priority was to clear the other rooms. Fortunately, there was only the first floor (including closets), and the basement. While clearing, he knew he would also be checking the places where (if she was still there and alive) Grace would be sitting or lying. Because he was alone, he would have to finish clearing the house before helping her or checking her vitals if he found her incapacitated.

  Mousey moved through the front door silently, checking the far-right corner of the room before swinging around into it and doing a visual survey of the living room. He peeked through to the kitchen and saw Grace lying face down on the floor. He had a few seconds’ indecision about whether to head left to her or right to clear the bedroom.

  He broke right, opening the door, scanning the room, and clearing the closet. He kicked the bed askance and ran back to the living room. He flattened against the door frame before moving quickly to the kitchen, grabbing a kitchen chair off the floor and jamming it under the door handle to the basement, and running to Grace’s body on the floor.

  The first thing he saw was the small pool of blood under her head. It wasn’t enough blood. He knelt next to her, and as he went to check her pulse, she stirred slightly and started to roll over.

  In sharper times, Mousey almost certainly would have left her to check the basement. In the present, he stopped her rolling, dropped his gun to the floor and tried to reassure her as he asked her a series of basic diagnostic questions. After she’d answered enough for him to be confident it was safe, he pulled a chair up for her to sit in, and then helped pull her to sit. He hugged her very hard and emitted one loud sob. She didn’t hug back.

  38

  Tommy had awoken that morning disoriented by the tent but feeling, for the first time since he’d seen Bitch Face and her easy laptop, blank in a pleasant and actually neutral sort of way, rather than blank-in-an-absence-of-what-should-make-people-happy-or-sad-or-a-part-of-the-world-at-all sort of way.

  He was standing on one of the rocks he’d used as a seat the night before, sipping a Pepsi and looking over the tops of the trees in the distance and admiring a little bit of the Pacific Ocean, when he heard what he hoped was Mousey’s car pulling up. For the first time since he’d opened Bitch Face’s easy laptop, Tommy wasn’t terrified by a sound he couldn’t see but curious to see what the sound was. He’d hoped correctly, and he waved at Mousey’s car with one hand and toasted with the can in the other.

  Generally, Tommy’s grip on reality stayed pretty relaxed until the early afternoon. He’d never had a straight job, and none of the crooked ones start on the right side of lunch. So when Mousey grabbed Tommy around the waist, hustled him into the car, and threw his bag and anything that wasn’t in the bag loose into the back seat and peeled backwards out of the spot, these events all seemed, just as many things that had happened to Tommy at ten a.m., like things that might or might not be happening.

  He hadn’t even seen his mom sitting in the front seat, shaking and rocking back and forth and holding a bloody hand over her ear. Tommy went to speak and didn’t make a sound. He reached over the seat and got as close to hugging his mom as he could, putting a hand on each of her shoulders, and she used the hand that wasn’t bloody and holding her ear to squeeze Tommy’s, and she even leaned her head over to try to kiss his hand, missing and getting her own instead.<
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  Mousey, who usually looked a little sleepy and a little stoned and a little bored and a little amused, was gripping the wheel so hard his forearms quivered, his face looking bloodless and drained, shoulder-checking obsessively, speeding and taking every weird side road until Tommy lost track of where they were. And the more things that only might be happening to him happened, the more Tommy relaxed back into the smooth shove of time going just one way.

  39

  Greta woke up groaning. She raised herself immediately to her knees before sagging forward and allowing her face to mush itself pleasantly into the give of the too-soft bed.

  Her phone had stayed on the pillow next to her head, so she was able to reach it without moving anything other than her arm. She stopped the brutal assault of her ironic-favourite Tyga song by answering. Darillo didn’t say hello, he just started talking.

  “Mistakes. I’m about a half a foot from sea level, and the sun’s about a half a minute from coming over a mountain with more trees on it than I have hairs on my head, and I’m sober, and I have a daughter who teaches me about emojis and memes and climate change, and if you’d asked me twenty-one years ago if my life could ever be this good, I would have shit in your mouth on purpose. And all I’m thinking about is pliers and fingers and broken teeth. Clocks that tick your sneaky cunt-time down in mistakes instead of minutes.” He took a psychopathically long pause. “The sun just came over the top of the mountain, and even though I’ve lived with this sun and these mountains a few feet above the water on ground that’s ready to split apart any second my whole life, I can still tell it’s beautiful. And what am I thinking about? Tick, tock, grow a cock. Why so slow? You should have been sprinting for three days, and you’ve been jogging for two. Mistakes. I am coming as soon as they let me loose, and when I’m loose, honey, I am loose. Better finesse this thing fast.”

  He hung up, which saved Greta from having to look at the screen of her phone to hang it up. She threw the phone blindly towards the top of the bed, where it made two thick, wooden bounces. She did not look up to see what it had hit.

  Greta allowed her weight to fall backwards and pulled herself (and her reluctant, reluctant eyes) painfully into the morning light, which blasted unfettered through her windows.

  The hitman limped (in the way one limps when any part of one’s body other than a leg hurts) to the bathroom, took a white-knuckle hold of the sides of her sink, and looked at herself reversed.

  “Listen, Drunkself. I’ve given you a lot of shit. Over the years, a lot of shit. And I hate you a little bit even right now, I do.” She released her hold on the sink and stood straight. “But no matter how much I hate you right now, I have to thank you, Drunkself. Thank you for existing and, in your own crazy way, getting me out of this. Thank you, Drunkself, for all the money you found me last night, and all the time you saved me. Thank you Drunkself, for trading tons of really bad real headaches for this one shitty headache right now. Thank you, Drunkself, for how scared you are of hot showers and sleep and Aspirin and how good you are at happening upon random idiots sitting all alone in random tents in the middle of bunches of giant trees on a rock in the ocean. Thank you, Drunkself, for being a good-time drunkself, and not a crying drunkself. Thank you, Drunkself, for always leaving, and always coming back.”

  Having scared the last of her drunkself away with a shower, a change of clothes, and a scalding black coffee, Greta drove to the large beachside campground at Rebecca Spit slightly less recklessly than was her usual style.

  Sometimes Greta liked to pretend that her body had no perceptible shape, that she was really just eyeballs and eardrums perceiving their way across the ground. When these moods struck her, she made use of a large, somewhat sack-like beige shirt with an image of a man and a dog hunting ducks on it. Greta stopped the car and pulled the shirt out from her body to look at it. The man was not definitely hunting ducks, the ducks were a thing she’d always assumed. Looking at it now, given the colour scheme and all, it occurred to her that even the sky, on this shirt, was assumed.

  Greta spoke to the man at the campground’s check-in and did a good job of letting him explain to her where Mousey had set Marlo up in the campground and how important it was for her to remember these sorts of details, without gutting him or reacting any way at all aside from smiling and thanking him and calling herself stupid. On the way back to her car she cracked eight knuckles in two vicious motions.

  From Greta’s very limited viewing experience, hitmen in movies usually cracked their necks from side to side to show that they were pent up and not to be messed with and barely containing their rage and so forth. She’d seen it a few times in the few times she’d watched her profession represented onscreen. She liked the move and had decided to pick it up for herself. Unfortunately for Greta, the hitmen in movies, and probably in real life too, hadn’t obsessively read dozens of articles about how sitting will one day melt our spines and turn us into bulging, hunchy monsters and stayed on an intense Pilates Reformer kick for the last year and a half, as she had. So the tough-looking neck snap was just not there for her, as compact and pliable as all the discs in her spine still were, so she was stuck with the full-hand finger pop, which wouldn’t intimidate anyone, but felt crunchy and relaxing. She shook both hands out, first as a group and then individually, then she closed both hands theatrically and mentally prepared herself to kill Marlo, Mousey, and anyone who might see her do those things.

  Greta did not even have to get out of her car to see the empty two-litre of cider beside the sloppily assembled tent. She walked straightforwardly up to the site, her handgun dangling in a relaxed fashion behind her right knee-pit. She toed open the tent and swiftly brought her gun to bear on a little bit of empty space, coloured blue by the sun through the tent walls. The hitman smiled in a not strictly disappointed way as she ducked smoothly into the tent and took a quick look around. Then she dropped to sit on the empty, unzipped sleeping bag. She smiled in a directly excited way as she used the barrel of her gun to pick up the empty cigarette pack and toss it back to sit on the top of her head, then she picked up the matchbox that had been next to it.

  She sparked a match and blew it out, for the smell.

  40

  As often happens when everyone has many important and sad and useful and loving things to say, Mousey, Grace, and Tommy rode in complete silence to the mouth of the Heriot Ridge hiking trail. Every gentle but outsized bump of rock had its full impact as the small wheezes and jolts of Mousey’s suspension echoed through the quiet car.

  They had stayed, Tommy with his face mashed into the back of the headrest, Grace death-gripping his hand and her ear, which was definitely blown out. Reaching the beach entrance, Mousey stopped short, lurching everyone forward and back. As he’d so often had to and hoped never to do again, Mousey broke the silence and imposed some firmly worded conditions on the traumatized single-parent family riding in his car. “Okay. I’m going to give you guys a minute, but then I have to take Grace to the ferry. Tommy, I’m going to leave you here, give you a place to go, and you’re going to wait for me there. You’re really going to wait, and stay the whole time. Okay?” Nobody moved or said anything. “All right, just get out of the car when you’re ready.”

  Mousey was not a person who generally respected privacy. It was, after a life of witnessing, enacting, and being subject to thousands of harsher and deeper violations, not a concept for which he could muster much energy. So it wasn’t out of respect or friendship or obligation that he spent the length of Tommy and Grace’s conversation sitting by the side of the road, staring at the flat grass that would soon collect enough water to be a ditch, instead of watching the car and trying to pick up whatever information he could about Grace and Tommy’s relationship.

  The detective didn’t really have time to think about what the young man he’d brutalized with a tree branch would say about him to his mother, who had herself been assaulted by the detective’s drug dealer, or what his friend, who knew him only as
a burnout, would say to her son, who knew him as a person he needed to trust to live. He didn’t have the time, because once again, there were too many practicalities to think about. Too many plans to make and too many pieces, who were also full, entire human beings, to move around the giant, petty game board of a life-and-death situation that boiled down, finally, to nothing more than a little money and some bad reputations that could only really get a little worse. The grass just sitting there, green and living and still always growing, without even trying. Without even knowing what trying was.

  Mousey enjoyed the familiar, cracky-paranoid buzz of thinking, of focusing wholly on just the facts that came from short, terrifying seconds, the facts that came from quick decisions that nobody really felt they’d made. He didn’t think it had been that long when he heard the back door of his car open and close, and he waited through each of Tommy’s slow, ginger steps on the gravel of the road.

  “Has anyone ever told you how loud your footsteps are, Tommy?”

  Marlo’s throat caught like a jailhouse door. “Never told me, no, but people have let me know. You’re going to get my mom out of town.”

  “Yessir.”

  “This is my fault, right? This has got something to do with me.”

  “Nope. Not at all. Nothing on you. This was about some money I gave your mom. A robbery.”

  “I don’t believe you, Mousey. This is about my money.”

  “That is a thing that you are entitled to think. But I’m only going to say the one thing. Meth-head robberies, they happen. I’m saying that one thing, and I’m your only real shot to get out of here alive. As long as you believe that, we’ll be all right.”

  Mousey rolled onto a knee, looked up at Marlo’s appropriately cry-swollen eyes, and without standing all the way up gave Tommy thorough instructions about how far down the beach to wait for him, and how silently to walk.