by Tom Wallace
“Never give it a second thought; that’s how much it bothers me,” Simon grunted. “Know what does bother me, though? You bein’ here. See, I don’t like Indians any better than I like niggers.”
“Where’s Karl?” Seneca demanded, tossing the gown onto the couch.
“You’re shit outta luck, squaw lover. I don’t know where he is, and if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Oh, you know where he is, fatman. And you’ll tell me.”
“Think so?”
“I’m positive.”
“You’re pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you, redskin?”
“Karl? Where is he? I want an answer now.”
“Check the smoke signals. Maybe they’ll tell you where to find him.”
The Indian moved forward. When he did, Simon took a step back and pulled out the Beretta.
“One more step, Cochise, and you won’t need to know where Karl is.” Simon’s voice was steady, controlled. The gun in hand gave new life to his nerves.
“It’s Seneca, remember?”
“It’s ‘Dead’ if you take another step.”
“I don’t think so, fatman. You see, if you’re going to use that thing, you really ought to take the safety off.”
“The safety is off,” Simon said. His words came fast and strong, but lacked much conviction.
“You trying to convince me or yourself?”
“I don’t need to be convinced of anything—I know I’m right.”
The Indian took two more steps forward, his dark eyes focused on Simon with blazing intensity. “But you’re not real sure, are you?”
Great droplets of sweat fell from Simon’s face. The hand holding the gun began to tremble. “I can take care of that problem,” he said. “It’s as simple as flicking this switch.”
The instant Simon turned the safety upward, the Indian made his move. Stepping forward, he grabbed the gun with his left hand, straightened Simon’s arm and lifted it upward, then hooked his right arm behind the big man’s elbow. It only took a minimum of pressure before Simon let the revolver fall to the floor. The Indian moved behind Simon, taking the big man’s arm with him. He bent the arm at the elbow and applied upward pressure. The hammerlock elicited a loud pig-like squeal from Simon. The Indian took his left hand and covered Simon’s face, plunging his forefinger and middle finger into the groaning man’s eyes. “You fool, who do you think you’re dealing with? Some rag-ass redneck clown?”
“Please, Seneca, don’t kill me,” Simon begged. “I wasn’t going to shoot you. I was scared … just protecting myself. I swear.”
“Where’s Karl?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not good enough,” the Indian said, driving his fingers deeper into Simon’s eyes.
“I swear, I swear I don’t know where he is. But I can find out. Give me two days.”
The Indian exerted more pressure on Simon’s arm. “Tell me where Karl is or I’ll tear your arm off. Then I’ll rip out your eyeballs and feed them to the fish. Think about the pain, fatman; think about the agony I can cause you.”
“Please, Seneca, I’m not lying. I don’t know where he is. I’ve never even met him. Only talked to him on the phone.”
The Indian released his grip and pushed Simon hard against the bar. Simon hit the bar, reeled to his left, and tumbled onto the couch. One of the couch’s legs gave way, causing him to roll onto the floor. He quickly righted himself and began rubbing his eyes.
“Twenty-four hours, fatman; that’s all you’ve got. You don’t find out by then, that pretty little thing upstairs will be a widow this time tomorrow.”
Simon reached for the silk nightgown, brought it to his face, and gently pressed it against his eyes.
“Got it?” The Indian stooped down and picked up the revolver. “Got it?”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it. What do you think—I’m fuckin’ deaf or something?”
“No, I think you’re an idiot.” The Indian pointed the gun at Simon. “The safety was off. You let me talk you into putting it on.”
He ejected the magazine clip, emptied the bullets into his hand, cleared the chamber, and tossed the gun onto the floor. It landed with a loud clunk.
“Twenty-four hours, fatman. No more.”
Nearly ten minutes passed before Simon was able to clear the blurriness from his vision and another ten minutes before he was able to stand. On unsteady legs, he went to the bar, picked up the phone, and began dialing. Things had to be done. Without further delay. That damn Indian had to be eliminated. He was too fuckin’ crazy to deal with.
Simon continued to rub his eyes, listened to the phone ring, and waited. After half a dozen rings, he heard the cell phone click on.
“Hello.”
“Karl?”
“Jesus God, did you see that?”
“Yeah, I saw.”
“The look, did you see the look in his eyes?”
“I saw, I saw. The little dink bastard never knew what was happening.”
“No, not him, not the dink. The captain. Did you see his eyes while he was wasting the little motherfucker?”
“No, I wasn‘t watching his eyes. “
“They were cold, like a cobra. Like a wild animal. Scary, man. I‘m tellin you, it was spooky.”
“Forget his eyes, man, did you see that dink’s head tumble into the river? It hit the water so hard it bounced. “
“Look at the captain now. “
“Yeah, he‘s out there, man, out there in that killer‘s zone.”
“First kill, sir?”
“Forget it, man, he‘s too far out there to hear you. I saw one other guy with that look, and he sometimes didn‘t come back for hours. He‘d stand there, like the captain is now, lookin’ down at the victim‘s body, studying it, you know, like he was sizing it up, analyzing it. It‘s almost like he was lookin’ for ways to kill more swiftly, more efficiently.”
“You can’t kill more swiftly or efficiently than he just did.”
“No, you‘re wrong. Guys like him make killing a game, something personal. They‘re always lookin’ to find ways to streamline it, to execute it perfectly. A ‘masterpiece kill’—that‘s what they call it.”
“First kill, sir?”
“I‘m tellin’ you to forget it. He‘s not hearing you.”
“Sir, sir.““Sir, sir.”
Collins’s eyes snapped open.
“Sir, would you please fasten your seat belt? We’ll be landing in Evansville in ten minutes.”
Collins smiled at the flight attendant, yanked his seat to the upright position, and clasped the seat belt buckle together. His head ached; his mouth was as dry as a sand dune. He stared out the window, hypnotized by the setting sun and dreamy from his own fatigue. Closing his eyes, he listened as the plane’s engines groaned their familiar, monotonous tune.
Seconds later he found himself once again poised on the banks of that muddy river in Nam, kneeling next to a headless corpse, hearing from a distance the whispered voice calling out to him, hearing again—how many times, now?—that singular question, “First kill, sir?” as it pierced the darkness and hung suspended, waiting for an answer.
But he hadn’t answered, not then, not ever. He didn’t need to. The answer was in the question.
Every kill is a first kill.
The plane’s rough landing jarred him awake, mercifully retrieving him from the river’s edge, from a past littered with the bones of countless dead, drenched in a sea of blood. This return, he knew, would be brief, a stopover. The past summoned him, and before this journey was finished, he would have to find that river of blood once again. Find it and embrace it.
Assassins are only given a one-way ticket.
The killing never ends, does it, my boy? It just goes on and on.
An hour later, Collins stood in a small strip mall parking lot, staring at the front of a red brick building with a large tinted front window. On the window, written in gold letters trimmed in black, was the name of
the man he’d come to see.
SNAKE’S POOL HALL
&
GRILL
The interior was exactly what Collins expected: heavy with atmosphere, smoke filled, dark, and dingy. A dining area to the left, consisting of a grill, counter, and five stools. Two booths, both empty, next to the big window. Like a hundred pool rooms he’d been in over the years. Standing there, he half-expected Willie Mosconi or Minnesota Fats to tap his shoulder and challenge him to a game of straight pool.
A tall, thin, fortyish-year-old woman sat in a chair behind the counter, talking to a balding man wearing an Evansville Aces baseball cap. She smiled at Collins. “What can I do for you, stranger?” Her voice was deep, rusty. “We’ve got the best homemade bean soup in the tri-state area. I know because I made it. Like some?”
“Nothing, thank you,” answered Collins.
The smoky playing area was spacious enough to accommodate five Brunswick tables, one snooker table, two old-fashioned pinball machines and a jukebox, out of which The Righteous Brothers belted “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.”
Two twenty-somethings were at the front table playing nine ball for fifty bucks a game. Collins watched the taller of the two miss an easy shot on the seven, leaving his opponent with a simple run out.
“Shit, how could I miss a shot like that?” the man asked, looking at Collins. “That was a gimme.”
Because you‘re a lousy pool player; That‘s why. Collins shrugged, moved past the front table, easing his way toward a group of four men sitting in a circle a few feet past the jukebox. Two of the men, both wearing solemn expressions, were lost in a game of chess. One of the players, the one whose chair leaned against the wall, was the man Collins had come to see.
Grady Wilson.
The Snake.
Without realizing it, Collins wiped his watering eyes with the back of his hands. He wasn’t sure if the tears were caused by the heavy smoke or by his old friend’s appearance. What he did know was that he suddenly felt very sad, depressed.
He also felt betrayed by his memory.
In Collins’s mental scrapbook, Snake was tall and wiry, with the sinewy, defined muscles of a well-conditioned athlete in his prime. Snake had been considered the best pure athlete in that first class. He lacked Seneca’s brute strength and great agility, or Deke’s quickness, or Cardinal’s brains, but in the overall analysis, taking everything into consideration, Snake was judged the best all-around athlete.
Not anymore.
In no way did this man resemble that once-great athlete. Snake had changed—drastically. And in ways not measured strictly by years, by the passing of time. It was something else. He was a stranger now, someone Collins had never seen before and likely wouldn’t have recognized under other circumstances.
Snake was only a shell of what he once was, a skeletal outline covered by a layer of skin stretched so tight it looked ready to snap. His bony shoulders, once wide as goal posts, sagged forward, pitiful victims of gravity’s relentless forces. His gray-speckled hair, pulled tight into a ponytail, fell to the middle of his back. His eyes, once wild and filled with life, were deep and dark-circled. His face was mostly hidden by a thick, bushy beard. But most striking of all was his weight, which couldn’t have been much in excess of a hundred pounds.
He looked like a biblical prophet or a concentration camp survivor.
“I believe that’s what is known as checkmate,” Snake declared to the man sitting across from him.
His opponent studied the board carefully for several seconds, removed his cap, scratched his head, then said, “Yeah, kinda looks that way.”
“That’s another sawski you owe me.”
The man dug into his pocket, pulled out a ten, and slapped it into Snake’s palm.
“Nice doing business with you,” Snake said. He took a long pull from a bottle of Smithwick’s. “Come back anytime. I’m always here.”
As the group began to disperse, Snake stuffed the bill into his shirt pocket, peered up, saw Collins, looked back down, then quickly glanced up again. It took another look before recognition hit. Smiling, he stood and walked slowly toward Collins. It was, Collins thought, a very sad smile.
“Goddamn, I can’t believe it. Cain. What brings you to this crummy part of the world?”
“You.”
“Well, damn, that’s great … terrific. Hell, I never expected to see you again.”
“Here I am.”
“No shit. Here you are … a ghost from the past.”
The two men hugged, stepped back, and stared awkwardly at each other for nearly a minute. Collins finally broke the silence. “You have a place where we can talk? In private?”
Snake’s expression turned serious. “Sure, sure, right this way. My office in the back. Ain’t much, but it’ll do.”
Snake’s assessment of the office as “ain’t much” was more than modest. In fact, the office was large, cool, and surprisingly clean. And judging from the casino-like furnishings that filled the room, this was probably where the big profits were raked in. A card table surrounded by six chairs sat in the center of the room. To the left stood a craps table. In the right corner were two slot machines.
Collins sat in one of the chairs, picked up a deck of cards, cut the deck with one hand, and turned over the top card. It was the ace of hearts.
“Looks like this is where the real action takes place,” he said.
“It’s the money room.”
“You run a high-stakes game here?” Collins asked.
“Too big for me; that’s for sure. I just let ‘em play, then take my cut off the top. Straight ten percent. They’re pretty big high rollers, so I do okay.”
“I don’t see a license, so this has to be illegal.”
“Yep, a definite criminal enterprise.”
“How do you avoid the law?”
“The D.A. has a serious love affair with the dice.”
Collins laid the cards on the table. “You look like shit, Snake. What’s going on?”
Snake sighed and looked away. His eyes were hollow, distant. “Can’t you guess? Smart guy like you ought to know.”
“I’m not that smart. Tell me.”
“Junk, man.”
“What kind of junk?”
“What kind? Coke, heroin, meth, pills. You name it, I’ve done it.”
“How long?”
“Man, I’ve been fighting the monkey man for years. Hell, practically ever since we got home. He’s tough, man. Always there, waiting. Some days I wake up and say, ‘Okay, Snake, today’s the day. You’re gonna whip that bastard. You can do it.’ And I will whip him for a while. Then something happens, or I’ll have a dream, or flash on some memory, something like that, and here comes the monkey again. The laughin’ motherfuckin’ monkey. Believe me, Cain, he’s one heavy, persistent bastard.”
“Have you tried to get help?”
“Help? Man, there’s not enough help in the world to rid me of my nightmares. You’re bound to have them, too. There’s no way you can’t. I mean, look at all the shit we did. We were savages, beasts, mercenaries fighting our own private war, keeping our own personal body count. Hell, what we did had nothing to do with Vietnam, or our country, or any of that American flag shit they talked about. You know that. Keepin’ our country free? Free from what? Those scrawny dinks in pajamas? What the hell were they gonna do to us? Come over here and rape our mothers? Fightin’ the tidal wave of Communism? Man, we wouldn’t know a commie if we were introduced to one. What we did wasn’t about patriotism or Communism; it was about killing. That’s it, pure and simple. Killing. And, man, we were wild, crazy, and ruthless, and there’s no other fuckin’ way to describe it.
“Then … boom! We come home one day and it’s over. Finished, just like that. The fun and games are called off, the body-count scorecards torn up and thrown away. What are you left with after that? Besides the nightmares? And the bloodstains on your hands? Nothing; that’s what. What comes after the killing?
How do you match the high you get when you chop off a man’s head? Or cut off his ears to keep as souvenirs? Where do you find that kind of rush again? You don’t. It’s not possible. So you turn to something else. For me, that something was dope.” Snake leaned forward, his elbows on the table. Tears streamed down his sunken cheeks.
He continued, “Remember how you used to talk about ‘the look’? About how a successful assassin had to have it or else he couldn’t make the grade? Eyes of the predator, isn’t that what you called it? Well, one day you wake up, look into the mirror, and realize the person looking back at you doesn’t have it anymore. It’s gone, history, just like the war. Then it hits you that you’re really nothing more than a cold-blooded murderer, that killing is what you’ve been trained to do, and that those skills, your body count, mean nothing in the real world. That’s when you understand it was all just a game run by politicians and businessmen, and that we were the fools who played the game for them.
“Crazy, man, it’s all so fuckin’ absurd. And look what it did to the players. None of us ever married. We have no family, no real friends, no close attachments of any depth. We’re adrift, man, adrift on a sea of blood and bodies and bad memories. It’s no fun, man. No fun at all.” Snake paused, held out his right arm, opened and closed his fist. He stared at it absently for nearly a minute before he spoke again.
“You’re the only one who came out of the shit okay. Know why? Because you were a natural, a born killer, just like your namesake. Whoever christened you Cain knew exactly what he was doing. The perfect name for the perfect assassin. The ability to kill was God’s gift to you. Some irony, huh? Did you know I used to say a prayer before every mission? I did. And it wasn’t a prayer for safe deliverance, or even for forgiveness. I prayed I could kill like you did. You know why I prayed for that? Because your kills were humane. So swift, so sudden, without pain. You were the best, Cain, the absolute top-of-the-line assassin. Compared to you, the rest of us were rank amateurs. Only Seneca could even dare to dream the dream of Cain. You were something, man, really something.” Snake fell silent, his haunted eyes glassy, tired, wet with tears.