I shrugged in a noncommittal way and stuck the toothbrush in my mouth. This was clearly the wrong move.
“What?” She frowned and blinked several times. “You’re not breaking up with me, are you?”
I made a noise through the mouthful of Colgate that could have been construed as “Of course not.”
“I-I told my mother about you.” She stomped her foot on the worn carpet.
I didn’t reply, continuing with the teeth brushing instead.
Rhonda moved away from the bathroom and continued dressing. She was very quick now, no time for chitchat.
I rinsed out my mouth and stared at myself in the mirror. I hadn’t worked out in months and it was starting to show. Six-three and muscular was slowly evolving into tall and heavyset, with thick in the middle not too far away.
The door slammed shut. I looked at the empty motel room, the rumpled sheets, soggy pizza boxes, and other accouterments of the transient existence, my home for the past few weeks, a constant, dingy reminder of the failures in my life.
I nodded at nothing and said, “Bye, Rhonda. See you real soon.”
At ten fifty-nine I parked the elderly Nissan Maxima I was currently driving in the employee parking lot of a sports restaurant on Northwest Highway. I got out and put on my uniform, a multicolored apron complete with a name tag (Hank Oswald) and a pin advertising this week’s specials (Long Island iced tea, pineapple-glazed chicken nuggets).
I clocked in at eleven oh-one, walked behind the bar, and checked the supply of beer in the coolers. We were getting low on Bud Light and Corona, so I made a notation on a form used to keep track of inventory.
I pulled a bag of limes and lemons out of the refrigerator, a knife and cutting board from underneath the bar.
My supervisor, a pimply-faced, pudgy guy in his early thirties named Felix, waddled up behind me, a clipboard in his hand. “Your spillage rate is high again,” he said.
“Good morning to you, too.” I sliced a lime in half.
“Up one-point-seven percent from last weekend.” He tapped a piece of paper.
“Darn it. I was going for an even two percent. Gimme another try and I’ll make it, promise.” I smiled and cut half of the limes into wedges and dropped the pieces into a shallow white tray with a lid on top.
“Nobody likes a wiseass, Oswald.” Felix put his chubby hands on his chubby hips. “Corporate keeps a close watch on these things, you know.”
I halved a lemon. Felix loved to talk about all things corporate.
“There’s a district manager position that’s gonna open up in a few weeks.” He made a note on his clipboard. “Our store’s net revenue being what it is, I’m not gonna let a flake like you mess me up.”
“You want to manage more of this?” I waved the kitchen knife at the empty bar, the big-screen television at the far end, the cheesy signs and decorations on the walls.
“I’ve got plans, Oswald.” He leaned against the bar and stared at me. “More than I can say for you, always chasing women and stuff.”
Several rebuttals came to mind, most involving the fact that Felix still lived with his parents, but I chose not to reply.
“Maybe if you didn’t comp so many drinks for all the flight attendants that come in here…” Felix’s voice trailed off as he wandered back to the kitchen.
I hit the next lemon so hard the cutting board flipped off the bar. Shaking my head, I turned around and threw the knife into the sink.
“Anger management classes not working out, huh?”
I turned toward the voice behind me. A very large man with shaggy blond hair stood on the other side of the bar, holding the board. He was wearing a pale yellow linen suit with a lavender silk shirt and had an unlit cigar stuck in his mouth.
His name was Olson, and he was at one time my closest friend. We’d gone to the edge of the world a time or two, broken bread with some very bad people and then killed them, and lived to talk about it. The last trip had been a little rough on Olson; his eye still drooped and his speech stuttered every so often from the blow to the head he received.
Because of me.
“You’re a hard cat to locate these days.” He put the board back on the bar. His movements and speech seemed more effeminate than the last time we had spoken months ago, right after he had split with his longtime life partner, a thug named Delmar.
“I’m taking a sabbatical.” I got out another knife and grabbed a lemon.
“Got a proposition for you.”
I shook my head.
“You just listen, don’t talk.” He smiled. “Tap your hand on the bar if you get confused.”
“Olson …”
“Shhh.” He held up one finger.
I sighed and slit the lemon in two.
“You remember Mike Baxter?”
I put the knife down. Mike Baxter had been in our Ranger unit during the first Gulf War. I nodded slowly.
Olson pulled a Zippo lighter out of his pocket and lit the cigar before speaking again. When there was a large cloud of blue smoke drifting toward the ceiling he said, “Mike’s dying. And he wants you to find somebody for him.”
I bit my bottom lip and frowned before shaking my head slowly. “Sorry, I’m not in the business anymore.”
“Won’t take long.”
“Nope.”
“It’s Mike Baxter, for Pete’s sake.” Olson cocked his head to one side. “Do I have to spell it out for you? Brothers in arms. Blood oath, forged in combat, yadda yadda.”
I started to reply but was cut off by Felix.
“What the heck is going on in here?” He was in the doorway leading to the kitchen, waving one hand in front of his face.
“Felix, give us a minute, will you?” I said.
“There’s no smoking in here.” He walked into the area behind the bar. “You gotta put that out now.”
“We don’t open for another twenty minutes.” I looked at Olson and then back at my supervisor. “He’ll be long gone by then.”
Dallas had gone the way of New York and L.A., prohibiting smoking in all the fun places like bars and restaurants. On the other hand, it was never a good idea to tell Olson he had to do anything.
“You mean this guy is here to see you?” Felix crossed his arms.
“Is that a problem?” Olson’s voice was soft, a danger sign.
“This is a place of work, Oswald. Not the homo social hour.” Felix waved one fat hand at a man who’d saved my life on numerous occasions.
“What did you say?” I eased away from the beer taps and him, aware of the anger brewing in my chest.
Olson blew a smoke ring across the bar.
Felix said, “Your friend needs to put that out before I write you up.”
“I asked you what you said. Something about a social hour.”
“Uhh…” Felix frowned, the wheels turning inside his climb-the-corporate-ladder brain.
I grabbed him by the throat and stuck the point of the kitchen knife under his right eye, barely depressing the skin.
Felix made a noise like a mewing kitten.
“I think he’s trying to talk.” Olson sat down and plopped his elbows onto the bar.
“Anything you want to say?” I squeezed a little harder.
Felix managed a nod.
I eased the pressure on his larynx.
“S-s-sorry.”
“About what?”
“W-what I said about your friend.” Felix was sweating now, beads of perspiration dotting his florid face. “I’m sorry.”
I let go and tossed the knife onto the bar.
Felix backtracked to the kitchen, one hand massaging his throat. When he got to the doorway he stopped and pointed a finger at me. “You—” A coughing fit interrupted his speech.
“Guess this means I won’t be getting a quarterly bonus, huh?” I shrugged off my apron.
“—are fired.” He was shaking now. “Out of here, before I call the police.”
I walked around the bar to wher
e my friend was still sitting, blowing smoke rings in the air. “Looks like you’ve got some free time now,” Olson said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Professor awoke Monday as the gray light of dawn seeped into his sparsely furnished room. He had only managed a few hours of sleep in the dilapidated duplex in East Dallas, his base of operations that had been rented with cash several weeks before.
Disposing of the body yesterday had proven problematic, complicated by the sudden appearance of a group of children in the alley as he was about to drive away with the corpse hidden in the back of the pickup. Hours had been lost, time that could have been better spent searching for the second contractor.
Curiously, the man he’d already eliminated had possessed no ID in his wallet nor any credit cards, only a wad of currency and a handful of business cards for his contracting company. A quick database search of the man’s name and address yielded little, and what information it did turn up was conflicting.
Could the two men have been something other than simple carpenters?
The Professor contemplated heading to the address on the card, a few dozen kilometers west of his current location. He mulled over his options, like a wizened lion circling his prey.
The address was too risky for the moment, at least without additional information, information best obtained from the site of initial contact. He would return to Plano after the scheduled check-in with his employer.
He slid out of bed and decided to run through his regular routine, a series of isometric exercises, followed by thirty minutes with a set of free weights and another half hour of jumping rope.
He performed his workout in the empty and un-air-conditioned garage behind the duplex, with the doors and windows shut. When he was finished, perspiration dripped from his body, dotting the cement floor. He smiled. Sweating forced the toxins from the system.
He returned to the kitchen and consumed a liter of spring water, followed by a small bowl of organic granola topped with unpasteurized goat’s milk he had bought from the health food store a few blocks away.
After finishing, he pulled from the pantry a large cardboard box containing dozens of vitamin bottles. Due to the time spent in the house in Plano and the toxins there, he increased his dosage of antioxidants: vitamin C, vitamin E, coenzyme CQ-10, and magnesium citrate. The capsules filled a small juice glass to the midpoint. He washed them all down with more spring water.
After putting away the vitamins, he took a quick shower and dressed in khakis, a nondescript plaid shirt, and rubber-soled moccasins. He slipped a small-framed Glock nine-millimeter in his rear pocket and a fresh switchblade in the front of his waistband, the overhang from the shirt hiding its tiny clip from anything but the closest scrutiny. The knife used yesterday had gone down a sewer grate miles away.
He left the duplex and walked to the west, passing the tidy brick bungalows that made up much of this part of the city and reminded him of the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles. Prior to his arrival, he’d learned that many people in this part of Dallas were bohemians, artists and musicians and other transient types, the perfect demographic for one wishing to blend in.
After two blocks, he headed south on Greenville Avenue, a major nightlife district in the region. The buildings on either side of the street housed clubs and restaurants, but most were closed at this hour on a Monday morning. He encountered very few people, mostly Hispanic workers performing cleaning chores.
He stopped at a pay phone in front a garishly decorated place called the Whiskey Bar and dialed a toll-free number he’d memorized weeks before. The signal went to a call center in Miami, where it was routed to another subterranean switching station somewhere in the Midwest; the Professor didn’t know where, nor did he care to.
After a few seconds, the phone on the other end was answered and the voice of his employer came on the line.
“Yes.”
“It’s me.”
“Well, hello, sugar.” The woman sounded like she’d been raised in the South somewhere, maybe Alabama, the simple sentence drawn out and languid. “How is my order coming?”
The Professor waited while a bus rattled by. He tried not to breathe in the diesel exhaust.
“Are you there?”
“Yes.” The Professor tried to imagine what she looked like. A southern belle with eyes that sparkled when she laughed but displayed little emotion otherwise. “Everything is progressing as planned.”
“Progressing?” she said. “I was expecting fulfillment.”
“That will be this week.” The Professor’s brow grew damp, not from the heat.
“Of course,” the woman said. “That’s what we ordered, right?”
“I don’t like to check in like this.” The Professor mopped his brow with his sleeve as a police car glided down the street.
The woman sighed. “We’re paying the bill, sugar.”
“I need to go.”
“All right, then …” Her voice drifted away, as if she were talking to someone else in the room with her. “Hold on a sec, okay?”
The Professor blinked sweat out of his eyes. Another police unit idled down the street.
“New info.” She came back on the line.
“Yes?”
“No more contact with the subject until you hear from me.”
“What?” The Professor was incredulous. “What about surveillance?”
“There are issues that you are not aware of.” The woman’s voice had lost a little of its southern charm.
“I thought you understood. I don’t work this way.” The Professor tried not to sound too incredulous.
“You came highly recommended,” the woman said. “It would be a shame to report back otherwise.”
The Professor started to reply but realized she had hung up. He placed the phone back on the cradle and walked away, planning the most covert method to get to Plano in the next few hours.
CHAPTER EIGHT
We headed south on Interstate 35 in Olson’s new four-door Maserati, toward where Mike Baxter lay dying at the Dallas VA Hospital. I asked about the Jaguar he’d been driving the last time we were together. Olson laughed and said he’d done several very lucrative deals in the past few months. Something about a couple of thousand North Korean AK-47s and a guy from Florida. I didn’t ask anything else.
I had left the elderly Maxima in the parking lot of my place of former employment. The title wasn’t in my name, and the chassis had almost rusted away; Felix could have it as a parting gift.
The freeway ran past the glass-and-steel skyline of Dallas. The Texas School Book Depository, made infamous by my namesake, was briefly visible as we drove by American Airlines Center and the new W Hotel tower. The county jail was on the other side of the highway, existing in an uneasy symbiosis with the rest of the city.
After another couple of miles the Maserati crossed the bridge leading into South Dallas, forty feet above the Trinity River, a thin stream of muddy water that divided the city into two separate but unequal halves. The downtown glitz, the sports arena, and most of the wealth resided north of the river. The south half was populated by people in the lower income brackets, immigrants legal and otherwise, and those that preyed on the recent arrivals—the grifting class, as I liked to think of them.
The Dallas VA was on South Lancaster, a gleaming brick building more than a little incongruous with its surroundings: check-cashing liquor stores, tiny bodegas offering phone cards to Mexico, and used car lots.
Olson pulled in at an angle at the far end of visitor parking, taking up two spots. Before he got out of the car, he pulled a Colt Commander from behind his hip and placed it in the console.
“Sometimes they have the metal detectors set up.” He pushed the driver’s door shut, chirped the alarm. “You carrying?”
I shook my head. “Haven’t touched a gun in months.”
“Used to be you wouldn’t go to the bathroom without a Browning Hi-Power strapped somewhere.”
“Times change.
” I headed toward the front entrance, a solid quarter of a mile away.
The long sidewalk leading to the hospital was like a concrete river filled with former servicemen of all ages and colors, with varying degrees of mobility.
The farthest away from the facility were the youngest, vets from the latest Middle East conflict. Most were in wheelchairs and were missing limbs. I nodded a hello to a young Hispanic man who was probably not yet old enough to drink. He’d sacrificed a lot for Uncle Sam, including two legs, one arm, and any chance of ever sleeping without dreaming of the utter obscenity that is the battlefield.
The next group was roughly my age, clustered on either side of forty, soldiers and sailors from the era of the first Gulf War. Not many missing limbs among these, but I knew all too well they suffered from the dream also.
The last group was huddled around the entrance, one big mass of older, smoking men, IV bottles and catheter bags perilously attached to wheelchairs. These were the vets who had served in Vietnam and Korea, a paunchy, gray-haired, hollow-eyed mass of humanity waiting for the final quarter to end. A few of the oldest ones had no doubt served in World War II.
I smiled and nodded where appropriate and stepped inside the building into a three-story atrium. More men in wheelchairs and medical personnel in scrubs, moving slowly across the polished granite floor.
“Depressing, isn’t it?” Olson stood beside me.
“Where are we going?” I wanted in and out as fast as possible.
“Fifth floor.” Olson headed toward a bank of elevators. “Oncology.”
After a long wait, we boarded an elevator, following several men in wheelchairs. The man closest to me had an uncontrollable tremor in his left arm.
At the fifth floor we got off, Olson leading the way to the nurses’ station. The air was heavy with bleach and cleansers that tried but failed to cover the sickly odor of decay. He had a whispered conversation with a stern-looking woman in navy blue scrubs before turning my way and pointing to a partially opened door across the hall.
“Let’s go.” He walked into the room, and I followed.
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