“I don’t usually do pro-bono work,” I said in a low voice. “Don’t tempt me to change my mind.”
He blanched and rose from his chair, mopping a new outbreak of sweat. Keeping this guy dry must be a full time job. “I beg your pardon, sir. I’m not very good at this sort of thing. I meant no offense.” He began inspecting the books I keep on my shelves to impress clients, nervously distracting himself from his faux pas, and stopped at the same one they all stop at, the one with the infamous name on the spine. He looked at me curiously.
“It’s signed by the author,” I said. “In 1925, the year it was published. It’s a first edition. He wasn’t very famous then and the book is mostly gibberish. Nobody read it, but eventually everybody bought it.”
“You’re a Nazi?”
“I’m a collector. Call it my retirement fund.”
Inevitably, his eye strayed to the shadow box beside the bookcase, with the inscribed photo of President Heston and a three-inch square of blood-stained linen.
“Is that from—?”
“Yeah. He was a bleeder.”
“You were in the room?”
“I was,” I said, not bothering to sound humble, like some of my friends did. We were badasses, knew it, and I didn’t see any point in false modesty. “Can we please return to the business at hand? Who is the victim?”
“Tell him, dear,” Blondie said with a gentle prod. “It’s all right, tell him.” After he still hesitated, however, her tone changed. The prod now was more like the one designed for cattle. “Tell him, you idiot.”
What a sweetheart.
Delvin sat back down and wrung his hands like a teenage girl overacting in a high school production of A Streetcar Named Desire. “My daughter,” he finally said. “God help me, I want you to kill my daughter.”
Blondie snorted and shook her head derisively at her pudgy husband. If she’d asked me to do it, it would have come right off her shoulders. I try not to judge my clients, but sometimes some people just rub you the wrong way, and you can’t fake it. That’s one reason I smoke, to hide any traces of when my face betrays my true feelings about a client.
Kids die all the time. Car wrecks, meningitis, freak accidents on the playground. There was a nine-year-old boy playing baseball who got struck in the chest by a pitch. He keeled over, dead. The ball wasn’t thrown hard enough to break a window, yet it struck him in just the right spot at just the right time, interrupted the electrical impulses from brain to heart, and that was that.
But hiring to have one killed is different. Sure, I’ve met children in my life who should have been killed, mostly in line at grocery stores and movie theaters. Of course, I say that in jest…mostly. Killing a kid crosses a line I’m not prepared to cross, but Dawn Delvin wasn’t technically a kid, so if Delvin wanted me to kill his adult daughter, what of it?
I had hired somebody to check these new clients out before I met with them, so I knew their whole back story. My guy found out that the client, Leonard Ackworth Delvin, was having money problems of the sort that have plagued short, dumpy men with gorgeous wives for centuries: keeping them in diamonds, fancy cars, expensive vacations, and all the trappings of the Sugar-Daddy scene. Before he reached 40, he owned a brokerage firm with 50 salesmen peddling junk bonds to people with little money and less sense. He’d made his money in bonds, but most of his assets weren’t liquid, which meant a constant juggling act between credit cards and escrow accounts to keep Blondie happy, if that was possible. This kept him in a perpetual cash crunch.
Blondie’s real name was Lila. She was the first Lila I’d ever met. She was his third wife and not the intended target’s mother. Much better looking than most third wives and certainly more expensive, she was gorgeous in a whorish kind of way, but also on the wrong side of 40 and starting to show it. As the wrinkles set in, it took more and more expensive baubles to hide them, or rather to distract people’s attention from the beginning turkey neck and lines in her forehead.
So the bills mounted while the cash dwindled. Something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be Lila Delvin’s plastic surgery schedule. The allowance money his daughter received was more than enough to cover her medical bills, or so she’d said after her fifth martini while lunching with friends at an upscale bistro. My P.I. buddy doesn’t miss much and loves lunching at expensive bistros when somebody else is paying—in this case, me. He recorded every word and had a snifter of Courvoisier XO with dessert. There’s nothing cheap, or sober, about James Holliday.
“How old is she?”
“Nineteen,” Blondie answered, with raised eyebrows and a slight smile. “Old enough to be killed.”
“Legally, yes,” I said. I trickled smoke out of my nose to watch her reaction, but she didn’t flinch. She reminded me of a snake on the hunt. I even looked to make sure her pupils were round, not like slits on a viper.
“My precious darling doesn’t mince words,” Delvin said. “In that respect, she has an old soul.”
He reached out to caress her hair but she turned away, making me wonder where his hand had been and trying to remember if I’d shook it. I wanted to tell him that her soul was probably as old as her profession but didn’t. Cash is king, after all, and I didn’t give two shits if paying me left him cash poor. He had plenty of assets to liquidate.
I have always been able to sense danger ahead of time and known who was dangerous and who wasn’t. Until I was eight or nine, I thought everybody could do the same thing. I also thought seeing people surrounded by colors was normal, which I made the mistake of mentioning to Gloria Twendle in 7th grade and, when she told all of her friends, earned me the nickname “Crayon.”
I tried to fake liking Delvin and not only because there was no way to know how many more people he might want dead. I wanted the business, of course, and while hiring me to execute his daughter made that impossible, I could and did aim for civil. But I had also met a lot of people like Delvin, who substituted assholeness for the pain of growing up bullied. I recognized it because it was my life’s story.
“Why do you want her dead, Mr. Delvin?”
“Why do you need to know?” Blondie said in a fake-sweet-but-really-cold voice. It was the same tone used by older southern matrons when they said, “bless your heart,” but really meant “drop dead.”
Her curled lips and her upturned nose reminded me of a surprised chicken looking down its beak at me. I hoped the balloons on her chest stayed inside the minimal restraint of her low-cut black gown, because I wanted to hate her. I mean really deep down, sanctimonious, soul-satisfying hate, and I knew that if those 38 double-Ds popped out for a visit, lust would override my hate. Did I mention I love slutty women?
I crushed out my smoke. “I have to presume the nineteen-year-old target is in good physical condition and take measures accordingly. To do that, it helps to know why she’s a target. For instance, if she regularly shoots at neighbors with an AR-15, I need to know.”
The ethics of my profession are clear that judging clients is the equivalent of bringing braised kittens and puppies for a fund-raising dinner at the local animal shelter. We’re not supposed to care why you want somebody killed, only whether you can afford it or not. For some reason I kept digging away at Delvin. In the end, who cares why our customers want somebody dead? It won’t change anything. But I did want to know.
“Her name is Dawn,” he said. “Dawn Mary Delvin. You shouldn’t have any trouble; she’s quite small. My baby girl can’t weigh more than a hundred and ten pounds in a wet T-shirt.”
I wished he hadn’t mentioned a nineteen-year-old female in a wet T-shirt.
“She joined the Peace Corps right out of high school but now she’s doing something else. There’s a foundation that builds schools down in Central America. She’s there now.”
“She’s building a school?”
“Yes, but not like you’re thinking. See, the children down in those hellholes go to school in the dirt in front of somebody’s hovel, out there in the
jungle somewhere. People like my daughter help them pick up the plastic bottles thrown everywhere. Then they stuff them with trash and build walls out of them, slather on a coat of mortar, pour a concrete floor, screw on a metal roof, and they call it a school.”
“Fascinating…and what? This offends you?”
“Oh my word, no. I couldn’t be prouder of her, trying to bring civilization to those people.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, as if that made sense.
“Oh, gag,” Blondie said. I doubted that she had gagged for a long time. “The self-righteous little bitch does that shit for a cover, to make everybody think she’s little Miss Sweet and Innocent.”
“Why do you say that, Mrs. Delvin?”
“Call me Lila.”
That’s the last thing I wanted to do. “Mrs. Delvin is more professional, and a pro acts like a pro.” I said this wondering if she’d catch the double-entendre. She did, and she curled her lip again. I wanted to ask her if she was flirting or doing an Elvis imitation, but managed to keep quiet.
“Think what you want of me, Mr. Steed, you will anyway. But my husband is a good man who’s blinded to the snarling mongrel hiding behind his daughter’s oh-so-innocent blue eyes and white teeth. She’s trying to have me killed because she wants daddy’s money all for herself. She’s a monster.”
As she spoke, Mr. Delvin tinkered with his phone, found what he sought, and held it for me to see. It was a photo of a young woman with a bright smile and sunshine in her hair. She was holding a butterfly in her palm and appeared to be giggling. Those were the things I was supposed to focus on. Instead, I focused on what was behind the butterfly.
I kept a professional mask on my face but inwardly felt like a real creep. If Helen of Troy looked even half as good as Dawn Delvin, it was no wonder all of Greece spent a decade killing each other over her. She was a wholesome, innocent goddess. Those bright blue eyes in a face the color of fine china under a mane of curly black hair had no doubt broken more than one heart during high school, because after five seconds she was breaking mine. This was gonna be like killing the Easter Bunny.
Chapter 2
“I’ll take the job,” I said.
Just Jim, what I called that P.I. buddy of mine, the sot named James Holliday, ran down her known associates and exact whereabouts, but I had to wait until July 4th to get the info. For reasons I’ll never understand, Holliday only worked on holidays. Jim was kind of weird.
In the meantime, I discovered that Dawn was part of the travel club that arranged the trips to build the schools. I joined it and learned the exact details of where she was and how long she’d be there. Murder in America was legal but could get messy, what with belligerent friends and family wanting revenge, not to mention authorities who wanted to make a federal case out of every killing, legal or otherwise. Contracts were confidential, and that often made things worse. Vengeance seekers could only guess who paid for the hit, which was tragic for those involved, but great for business.
Even when family or friends were not an issue, any time I could kill someone in a third world country instead of the USA, I jumped at the chance. Put a few hundred dollars in the right hands and the police would write it off as “bitten by a bushmaster” or “eaten by a jaguar” or, if there were witnesses, “executed by a drug cartel.” I preferred paying the cash to spending hours filling out paperwork.
Since I was expensing everything to Mr. Delvin, I flew first-class to Guatemala City and took a room at the Superior Continental. Actually, room doesn’t do it justice. It was a 1,700-square-foot-condominium on the top floor with its own infinity pool, butler and chef, and a menu of dinner partners for the evening if I was so inclined.
I was.
I awoke late the next morning, alone. Apparently my cuddle-bunny rental time ran out. The butler, a portly guy named Emil, handed me some vile elixir he said would cure my hangover. He was wrong, but it did empty my stomach. I suspect he knew it would do that.
By mid-afternoon, I’d endured hours of teeth-rattling jolts over what the locals called a road. That emptied the rest of my stomach. I thought of it as a Darwinian exercise designed to weed out the weak from the strong, or maybe a stunt to drum up clients for a local shaman doing chiropractic adjustments on the side.
We arrived at a clearing with a bunch of houses made from palm tree logs, cardboard, and rusty, corrugated metal. I say houses, but that’s generous; they were shacks. Back home we called them blight. The muddy ground showed marks of having been recently raked and there was no garbage anywhere, which I found highly suspicious. If Americans have spread anything across the globe, it’s garbage.
I still couldn’t figure out why I was in Guatemala, of all places, but then I’ve never understood rich people’s guilt at being rich. I mean, I knew why I was there: to kill Dawn Delvin. But why was she here? Guilt was the only answer I could come up with. I wanted to be rich and knew if I ever made it, I wouldn’t feel guilty about it for one second.
By all rights Dawn Delvin should have been on a beach somewhere letting condensation from her champagne flute drip onto the exposed skin between her breasts as she soaked up the sun like a pit viper on a rock. It wasn’t her fault that poor people were poor, and, aside from a few individuals, she couldn’t do much about it. Still, having a lot of money seemed to make her feel guilty, so she reacted like a Hollywood star pimping out the social issue du jour during an interview on the back deck of a yacht moored at Cannes. It made no sense. If guilt made all the rich people stop going to the places rich people go, then the employees who worked there wouldn’t be able to feed their families. And then they would live in blighted huts in the middle of some God-forsaken jungle and hope the guilt-ridden rich people would return to build a school out of their garbage.
The road continued into the jungle on the far side of the village; two water-filled ruts in a dirt path. I heard the noises of construction mixed with squeals that might have been goats being tortured, but it turned out to be little kids chasing each other through the snake-infested undergrowth. I spotted a wiry guy among them and recognized him from a photo. He was the tour guide from the travel club. He spotted me and opened his arms to give me a hug and almost got a bullet between the eyes for his trouble. With rigid self-control I endured his clingy embrace. His nametag read Walter. He smelled like a night club men’s room on Sunday morning. Walter’s color was green.
“We’re delighted you could make it!” he exclaimed, wiping his forehead on his sleeve as if it would make a difference in the river of sweat pouring down his face. “Unfortunately, you missed collecting the bottles and stuffing them with trash, but we’re about to chicken wire them in place, and that’s the fun part, anyway.”
Against my better judgment, I shook his hand. I feared it would be like feeding a stray dog which would then follow you home and sleep on your doorstep until you let him inside to pee on your rug. I knew because I had an affinity for stray dogs, kindred spirits and all that. After some well-spoken lies on my part, I got down to business.
“A friend of mine said his daughter was on this trip.”
“Oh? What’s her name?”
“Dawn Delvin.”
“Oh! Dawn…”
No man in the history of men ever put more adoration into two words. My instincts screamed at me that something else was at work here, something complex and convoluted and dangerous, but I couldn’t tell what.
“Is she here?”
“Well…” This time Walter took a better look at me, as if deciding whether to answer my question or not. I could have saved him the trouble. One way or another, he’d tell me, if I didn’t find her on my own first. “She’s… over there. Helping the children untangle to chicken wire.”
“Thanks,” I said and turned away. Walter didn’t like me, his body language made that clear. As I walked away he might as well as have had Superman’s heat vision, that’s how hot his eyes felt on my back. Or maybe I was just feeling shafts of sunlight through the jungle canopy. E
ither way, if Walter had had a Walther aimed at my back, I’d have known it.
The humidity was so thick, it was like swimming to where Dawn stood. I’d read that it rained for twenty minutes every hour. Not a sprinkle, a driving torrent, the clouds would pass and then the sun baked you like a meat loaf. Afterward, all the rainwater evaporated until the saturated air couldn’t hold any more and it rained again. Aside from the weather, you had the swarming flies and mosquitoes, the fire ants and centipedes, the reek of rotting vegetation so much like an open sewer, and snakes like the Fer-de-Lance, which probably wouldn’t kill you but your leg might rot off, and the bushmaster that probably would kill you. Beside those things, I loved the Guatemalan jungle.
Then I saw her. Dawn Delvin was everything I’d hoped she wasn’t. She was cute, perky, and young enough to still think she could save the world. She carried herself like a gymnast. At first glance, she looked like a seventh grader, until I saw how she filled out her tight shorts and tighter T-shirt. I hate clichés, but in this case, it fit: my heart leapt into my throat. I could almost feel the dopamine and norenephrine flood my body.
Then, somewhere in the soup of hormones, my alarms went off, warning me of danger. Along with the colors, I had this ability my entire life, a sort of fuzzy premonition that moved around in my mind’s eye as shadows and out of focus apparitions screamed at me to heed an imminent threat. Now it happened again, there in the middle of the Guatemalan jungle, and I had no idea why.
Venomous creatures were my first thought, maybe one of the country’s eighteen venomous snakes, or a fiddleback spider, or even a jaguar. Instinctively, I touched the grip of my Sig Sauer P320 with the LEI logo engraved on the slide, but no dangers appeared that I could see. Walter wore a confused expression, like when you speak baby-talk to a chocolate lab. Dawn didn’t seem to notice. The village children hovered around her, darting in and out to touch her in some game I didn’t understand. One little girl was too slow and Dawn grabbed her and hugged her and they both started giggling.
The Trashman Page 2