The Trashman

by William Alan Webb

  “Bonney said he just stood there, so stunned he forgot to shoot, wondering what the hell made his target crunch through flesh, blood, and bone, ignoring mortal agony, to bite off two fingers. The man fell to his knees, sobbing in pain, but Bonney couldn’t shoot him without knowing why he’d done it. Rocking back and forth on his knees, holding the spurting fingers upward in his right hand, the man finally answered Bonney’s question.

  “I’ve always hated those fingers, the guy said. He didn’t want to die with them still attached to his body. Bonney figured he was doing the man a favor and shot him eight times.”

  “Did that really happen?” Dawn said.

  I’d wondered the same thing. “He swears it did.”

  Which was relevant because I was under a death sentence and fully capable of all kinds of weirdness, much of it lethal. Anything in the cause of keeping me breathing seemed like a good idea, be it deception, theft, or murder, but, like the finger-eater, what I actually did left weird in a cloud of dust as I floored the gas pedal toward bizarre: for reasons unknown to me at the time, I quit smoking, stopped drinking alcohol and started eating healthy foods. Then, as if that didn’t already qualify me for a guest slot with the daytime talk show pop-psychologist, Dr. Bill, I discovered the resort had a fully equipped gym and went back to working out. The worst part was that since the resort was all-inclusive, I didn’t even save money on booze and expensive meals.

  None of it made sense. I was an avowed hedonist. Working out to stay in shape was one thing: light weight training, an elliptical machine, martial arts, I’d done all of those off and on for years, but why now? A resting pulse rate of 60, and blood pressure of 110 over 70, wouldn’t help much if a high velocity slug shattered my skull, ripped through my brain, and blew out a golf ball-sized chunk of bone and brains as it exited my head. The best prospect I could hope for in that scenario was for some doctor to comment, “If he wasn’t in such good shape to begin with, we couldn’t keep him on life support for the next fifty years.” Not that I would know it if he did say that. Yet there I was doing squats and pushups and riding the stationary bike until I was wetter than if I’d taken a walk in a Jamaican thunderstorm, and I had no idea why.

  That wasn’t the only thing that didn’t add up. I didn’t know why I was still alive. Our mutually assured destruction shouldn’t have held for more than a few days. Shooters can’t just stand around not getting paid, however much they might like their surroundings, and LEI should have figured a way around my legal hocus pocus.

  My feelings for Dawn also began to change, an emotional evolution I recognized as it happened but couldn’t explain. Not that love can be explained, but was that how I really felt? The warnings whispering in the locked closets of my mind grew louder.

  We still lay next to each other every day at the beach. I still liked seeing her bikini bottom disappear into her swaying ass cheeks when she walked, and whenever she ran in the surf every heterosexual and lesbian eye on the beach stared, hypnotized. Her voice still sounded like wind chimes to my ears and I was still consciously aware of how dangerous she was. And yet…and yet, and yet, and yet. Each day I grew to love her more and trust her less.

  “Got a cigarette?” she said about a month after we arrived at the resort. She’d been playing volleyball and her chest heaved as she stretched out in the beach recliner next to mine. “Mine are up in the room.”

  “Sorry, Angel, I quit, remember?”

  “Why would you do that?”

  We’d had this same conversation a dozen times. “I don’t know…emphysema, COPD, lung cancer, throat cancer, a dozen other cancers. Quitting seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “And now?”

  I shrugged. “It still seems like a good idea.” Which it did. Yet how could it? Why wasn’t I dead yet? That’s when I got the first inkling that all wasn’t as it seemed. Why did it seem like a good idea?

  “No booze either?”

  “Nope.”

  “And again, why?”

  “Calories, sugar, cirrhosis…all that good stuff,” I said. The words came out of my mouth, but they didn’t sound like me.

  “Same with the rabbit food?”

  “Yep.”

  Dawn thought about it for a few seconds and then nodded. “Sure, I get it.” I didn’t want to admit my ignorance, so I gave her thumbs up. “You’re giving up everything that makes life worth living so when the end comes it doesn’t seem so bad.”

  “Not everything,” I said, grinning to hide my shock. Was she right?

  “Oh, right…sex. So, take your pick,” she said, sweeping her arm to indicate the entire beach. There were at least 50 women within sight. “Any of them will strip naked where they stand, all you’ve gotta do is smile.”

  “It’s not them I want.”

  “You need to adjust your sarcasm meter.”

  “I got it. I just stay focused on the main objective.”

  “Then you’re playing the wrong cards.”

  “Yeah? I’m holding a flush.”

  “Not a royal flush?”

  I pursed my lips. “No need. Are you raising me?”

  “If I’m not I’m losing my touch.”

  She wasn’t losing her touch. I crossed my legs to hide the evidence.

  “Call.”

  “Full house, sixes over nines.”

  “Which are you, a six or a nine?”

  Dawn stood and faced me. Her bikini bottom looked every bit as sexy from the front as it did from the back. “I’m the joker in the middle,” she said, and walked off, waggling fingers over her shoulder.

  The Shooters hanging around waiting to kill one of us were probably happy at not having to stretch the tax laws to write off a beach vacation, since Dawn and I were legitimate targets. But little by little some of the faces disappeared. After the first month, most were gone. One of the ones still left was the aforementioned William Bonney, who explained the others couldn’t afford to stand around getting drunk and not earning any commissions.

  “Kill people, get paid,” he explained. “Don’t kill people, don’t get paid.”

  I’d heard a similar slogan somewhere else but couldn’t remember where. It made perfect sense, too, and yet… And yet there was that damned voice in my head telling me there was more to it than I was seeing.

  Urban rumors notwithstanding, high payout contracts weren’t all that common, and the same few Shooters tended to get the vast majority of those that did come along; you get what you pay for, and people are willing to pay for a quality kill. I was in the top 15 percent of earners, but guys like Mad Mok earned four or five times what I did. And he was long gone by that point.

  Yet a few hung around, and the longer it went on, the more I began to suspect something was in play beyond what we knew. Those were the Shooters who showed up to hit me since LEI wanted me dead and weren’t shy about paying megabucks to get it done, or for the contracts Dawn and I signed to have each other killed. But a full month later, both of us were still above ground. Mutually assured destruction only went so far to explain that. With so many Shooters involved, and so much alcohol being consumed, you’d have thought somebody would have set off the chain reaction by now.

  One morning, just after sunrise, having already done an hour’s workout, I hit the breakfast buffet to beat the rush. I wanted to wear my gray and black shorts, but I couldn’t find them, so I wore pink swim trunks with purple sharks on them. Faint traces of cinnamon lingered in the air.

  The on-duty chef at the omelets and eggs benedict station didn’t have anybody to cook for yet, so I didn’t feel bad ordering my omelet without yolks. I felt bad about eating it that way, but not ordering it. For fillings, I had fresh tomato, chives, and jerked chicken. My only indulgence were two fried plantains, which might have been the best thing I’d ever eaten anywhere in my entire life. Nobody made them better than the Jamaicans, with lots of butter and brown sugar. The extra half hour on the treadmill was worth it.

  Tables and chairs fille
d a cobblestone patio extending far out toward the surf, which was where I liked to sit. Although built on Jamaica’s north coast, the resort faced east, sitting in a small inlet near Orascabessa Bay, east of Ocho Rios and very close to Goldeneye, the estate Ian Fleming bought after World War Two and where he wrote the James Bond novels. Eating breakfast there allowed for a perfect view of the sun rising over the Caribbean. I envied Fleming waking up every morning in paradise.

  Streaks of pink clouds hurried west in an otherwise clear azure sky. Light breezes ruffled my longer-than-usual hair and cooled the perfectly brewed cup of Blue Mountain coffee. I couldn’t get enough of it. It might as well have been liquid heroin.

  I was halfway through the omelet when Dawn joined me, wearing her usual as-close-to-nothing bikini as the resort management would allow. Personally, I’d have been fine if she just took it off. But my fork stopped halfway to my mouth when I saw she wasn’t alone. With her was a lanky musclehead who looked twelve or eighteen, all bouncy and happy and energetic, like a chocolate lab puppy who just chewed up your best pair of sneakers except you don’t know it yet. I’d seen him before. It was the guy with no aura sitting near us the first time we had lunch together. He didn’t have one now, either.

  I’ve never felt guilty about being jealous, so despising a potential rival for Dawn’s affection was perfectly within character. It’s not the emotion of jealousy that matters anyway, it’s showing the emotion and acting on it that indicate weakness. Even as my face warmed with the blood of anger, that tiny part of my brain kept whispering warnings. Why was I jealous? I’d never even kissed the woman! It was like those lucid moments you have during a bender, you know you’re drunk, you know you’re making a fool of yourself, but you can’t help stepping in your friend’s flower bed and losing your shoe. I wish I could say I’d only done that once.

  “Steed, this is Jeff Quantrill,” Dawn said.

  A blond ponytail whipped around the guy’s face as he extended his hand, and that’s when something happened that made me wonder if I had accidentally dropped acid. Imagine watching a movie where one frame was switched out with a completely different image. When the guy’s hand neared mine, for a millisecond, my mind registered a change from the long fingers of a tall man’s hand to a shimmering yellow-green paw with six claws covered in scales.

  Instead of shaking it, which gave hitmen like me the chance to grab a hand and hold it, I simply stared at the hand until he drew it back. The guy looked like I’d pissed on his foot.

  “You rude asshole,” Dawn said.

  She grabbed the back of the chair opposite me and leaned in close so I could see her scowl. But I was focused lower on her body, and if she said anything I didn’t hear it. She must have, though, because Quantrill waved her to stop.

  “C’mon Dawn, it’s all right, we interrupted the man’s breakfast.”

  Maybe it was me imagining things, but I thought I heard a note of condescension, the way teenagers speak to their parents… and to be fair I was about fifteen years older than both of them, or maybe closer to twenty.

  “You’re right, Jeff,” she said, straightening. “We wouldn’t want him to get off schedule or anything.”

  “Sir, if you have time later,” Quantrill said, “I’ve got something important to ask you in private.”

  I needed no innate warning sense to spot the danger there. If I’d been a dog, every hackle on my back would have been raised in alarm, accompanied by growls and lots of drooling saliva. Such a statement so obviously reeked of a trap as to be a cliché. Yet, once again, the impression of a panting lab puppy came to my mind.

  I nodded and wiped my mouth. With a final slurp of coffee, I stood up and grabbed the knife and fork off the table, holding them out of sight.

  “Lay on, McDuff.”

  “Now, sir?”

  “Why not?”

  “Great.”

  “I’m proud of you, Steed,” Dawn said.

  “Uh-huh. Where did you two meet?”

  “At the disco last night,” Quantrill said, leading us around the pool, past the restaurant, into a large plaza with a fountain. Six walking-paths led off from that central spot like the spokes of a wheel, wide enough for golf carts but not cars. Shops lined one of the paths, with alleys between them to the places that resorts don’t want seen, like laundries, dumpsters, and garages for storing landscaping supplies.

  “You mean this morning, don’t you?” Dawn said with a giggle.

  “How did my name come up?”

  Quantrill glanced around and touched his ear, looking less and less like a dog wanting a belly rub every second. I followed him anyway, knowing that he was up to no good, but compelled to follow by my instincts. Engage the enemy when you’re ready, even if they chose the ground. So rather than fight it, I decided to wait for his play and reverse the tables. Which was the moment I spotted a dark figure slipping out of sight around a corner. Quantrill wasn’t facing me and didn’t see me spot his accomplice.

  “I heard you might be at a resort on this part of the north coast and I came looking for you to deliver the message. I asked Dawn if she knew you, she said yes, and here we are.”

  Jesus Christ, could this guy be any more transparent?

  “I’m intrigued,” I said.

  Approaching the street of shops, I told my feet to stop…but they kept walking instead. Consciously, while I tried to turn the other way, run, or even fall down, even as danger alarms rang my brain like Paul Revere screaming in the last Massachusetts night, my feet kept moving. I couldn’t even slow them down.

  “Hey, Dawn, wait here?” Quantrill said, not bothering to turn his head. Trailing both of us, she complied.

  “It’s for your own good, Steed.”

  What did that mean?

  He turned down an alley and I followed on his heels, not because I chose to but because something compelled me. I had no volition of my own. Nor could I turn my head, so when two figures slipped in behind me, I felt more than saw them.

  That early in the morning, deep shadows still lay in the narrow, fifty-foot-long alley. Once out of Dawn’s earshot, Quantrill called over his shoulder, “Those won’t do you any good.”

  “What won’t?”

  “Those utensils in your hands,” he said.

  Oh shit.

  Halfway down he stopped, turned, and nothing was ever the same again.

  I’d never felt true terror before, but I did then. If anything, Quantrill’s face had become more cherubic, but the rest of him could have been chasing pretty girls in a 1950s B-monster movie. He still wore the tropical swim trunks, the ones called baggies or doggies down at the beach, with flip-flops and a sleeveless T-shirt, but from the neck down the skin wasn’t lightly sunburned pink anymore. Instead, thick overlapping green scales with yellow leopard-like dots acted as armor from the neck down. Between his eyes was a single red line with a cross at the top.

  My adrenal glands pumped every drop of cortisol and adrenaline into my veins as the fight or flight response tried to push me into fleeing, but all I could do was shake like I was tied up and couldn’t get free. It was like drinking ten energy drinks and trying to stand still. Quantrill’s smile revealed double rows of sharp teeth. Those didn’t scare me nearly as much as the long poniard he pulled out of a flap of skin on the top of his right thigh.

  Run dumbass! My brain screamed at me, but I still couldn’t move! Mentally, I pushed against something that felt like a locked door. The footfalls of two large men stopped a few paces to my rear.

  “You get one chance,” the thing known as Quantrill said. “I represent someone who wishes to speak to you about potential employment. If you come quietly, you don’t get hurt, and you might get rich.”

  I had no clue what was going on, aside from it possibly being a delusion. That I’d been doped went without saying, but why?

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I think you know the answer.”

  “Why hallucinogens and not a tranquilizer?”

>   That confused him for a moment. “You have not been drugged, Mr. Steed. Not by me.”

  “Then by whom?”

  “Your time is up. Come or not, live or die?”

  “What are you?” I said, knowing that if somebody had gone to this much trouble to kidnap me, their muscle wouldn’t kill me that fast. “You smell like a fish.”

  He didn’t rise to the bait. “Is that a yes or a no?”

  “What about Dawn, was she in on this?”

  “She’s a useful idiot. This is your last chance, or I’ll assume your answer is ‘no.’”

  I was stalling. As I spoke, I pushed and strained against whatever bonds held me in check, all the while knowing my life was probably measured in seconds, and then…something gave way, just a little bit, but I felt it like a crack in a sheet of ice. First my right hand moved, then my left, and suddenly I was free of whatever was holding me in place.

  He didn’t hesitate. Quantrill snarled as he lunged at me. He was deadly fast, much faster than I had been a month ago. But all that clean living saved my life now, paring down my reaction time to milliseconds. Point first, the blade slid past my abdomen, missing by an inch. Momentum left his neck within my reach. I was still holding the knife and fork, so I spread my arms wide and jammed the metal utensils into the sides of his neck so hard that the knife slipped out of my hand from the force. They had no effect, and then a backhand hit me in the stomach and I reeled against the wall. It was like getting run over by a moderately speeding Audi. My back hit the bricks and I fell to my knees, gagging.

  Thwit, thwit.

  I knew that sound but couldn’t catch my breath to take advantage.