D. Noble didn't like my choice. "That's great, Tommy Mack, but only if you're looking at short-range work."
I nodded. "Exactly. This is close up and personal. That's the only way you can beat these bastards."
"My sawed-offs are good to go," said Danny.
"Did a gunsmith crop them off?" I asked.
"They're safe to fire," replied Danny, annoyed by my questioning her firearms expertise. "Can you use three bulletproof vests with some extra ammo?"
"You stole the words out of my mouth," I said. "Set us up."
The smug D. Noble couldn't quit leering over at me. "I told you
she
was solid, didn't I? I always come through and make good."
"Sure you did, D. Noble," I said. "Just like you told me that you'd handle it all."
"I killed for you, Gwen. Killed, you hear me. A man is dead. I chased him, slipping and sliding like a walrus over the skating rink and popped him, two caps in the brain. Blood spattered every which way over the ice. The clean up was a mess."
I'd asked for this meeting with Gwen Ogg. She upped her eyes—those baby blues coked into opaque orbs—to me. "What's the big stress? That's what you do, Tommy Mack. That's why you get up in the morning. That's why you breathe the air."
Why didn't she come out and accuse me of not having any scruples or principles, of being a cold-blooded robot programmed to kill on command? "For money as a professional, yeah, I do. But I never killed out of expedient revenge. Yours was the first, and that gives it a stink that doesn't scrub off."
"Oh, lighten up, Tommy Mack. You got sex out of it."
I laughed. "Sex in exchange for killing a man. Sounds a little insubstantial to me."
"Then just mark it down as a favor to me."
My eyes left her deranged pair and skittered along the aisle of oak racks displaying the video boxes. The fusty shop specialized in selling, trading, and renting old movies in its jumbled confines that could’ve used some better light. The "Going Out of Biz! Prices Slashed! All Must Go!" posters taped to the front glass underscored the flicks’ waning popularity. A scruffy pair of movie buffs browsed on the next aisle. This place hadn't been my idea. Gwen had selected it to guard her privacy. Nobody had tailed me, and I hoped she’d been as wily in making her way here.
"My problem with favors is they tend to pile up without getting repaid," I said.
"I'll give you a boost if you get into a tight spot with my uncle. That's worth a lot to you."
"Your Uncle Watson and I are
simpatico
where I do my job, and he's a content
jefe
."
Picking up a video box off the oak rack, she laughed, not at its lurid poster art—a she-kitten heaving with cleavage galore—but at my apparent naïveté. "Don't trust Uncle Watson."
"He's done okay by me."
"Quit being such a babe in the woods. He's a gangster and capo. Enough said."
"Not all of us can be angels strumming our golden harps."
"Sarcasm is a flimsy shield to hide behind from the truth."
"Ditto for making generalizations, so give me a specific. Has he ever double crossed Rita or you?"
"Nothing that was so flagrant."
"You're not too distrustful of him to refuse accepting his largesse. You snap up his money and spend it like it's going out of style."
"True enough, but I also know the marionette strings are attached to us, and he just hasn't jerked ours yet."
I sanded my tongue across my dry lips. Listening to her disrespectful rip of her benefactor and my boss was a first. But blood always ran thicker, and she had to know some deviant stuff. Only she wouldn't cross the line and fink on him. I didn't blame her there. He'd trace it back to its source, and I'd be the lucky recipient ordered to take care of her. The late Copperthite had dropped a scary disclosure on me. "Do you know of his little, blue book?"
She blanched as the blood flushed below her collarbone before her forced chuckle. "Rita and I often joke that he keeps one on each of us, but it's really no joke."
"What does he jot down in it?"
"Some shady stuff we've done for the outfit that lands you in jail. I've heard him say its 'his leverage'."
Hearing the term "leverage" used tied my stomach in knots. "Has he leaned on you guys?"
"After all this time, you still don't get it. He takes the long view. Today or tomorrow isn't as important as what he sees useful somewhere down the pike. But the day will come when he makes a demand. You'll do as he wishes, or he throws you to the dark suits. That's a death warrant. I know he's capable of this because I've seen him vent his spleen."
"At least you can always pull the rip cord."
Her gruesome laugh chilled me. "Their tentacles stretch out to everywhere. Are you ready to test how far you have to flee to the ends of the earth before they drop the contract taken out on you?"
I pictured the string of airports—provincial and cosmopolitan—I'd schlepped through to rein in the footloose rats who thumbed their noses at the outfit’s rules. My life was defined by pocketing the kill fee, or cruising the clouds, or crashing in motels, or digesting greasy chow, or shadowing the marks, or aligning my steel sights on their skulls, or flexing my trigger finger, or jetting out of that town. "Their tentacles don't amaze me. Who gets the little, blue book and takes over the rackets after he dies? He's getting up there in years now."
She returned the video box to its rightful spot on the oak rack. "All I know is it's something that’s out of our hands."
"Will his boss in
Baltimore
pave the transition?"
"I have every certainty he will. Your role probably won't alter, but Rita and I will be left frozen on the outside."
"You'll be the lucky ones."
"Yeah, I feel so lucky I could bust a gut. Let's consider this topic closed."
"Whatever you say, Gwen."
"Do you want to go to my room and split a joint with a blow chaser?" Her hand snaked down between us and groped my swelling manhood. "I'll show you my latest etchings."
Wincing, I stepped off. "I better take a rain check. Some things I need to get done tonight require a clear head."
"Are you off to kill somebody?"
"Nothing job-wise. This is personal stuff."
"How can you manage to live with yourself after doing Uncle Watson's bloody bidding?"
"Can you say compartmentalize?"
"What an extraordinary person it must take to accomplish what you do."
"It's actually just my profession, but I didn't get paid for doing your job. That sucks."
"I'll just have to owe you a big one. If Uncle Watson ever knew I paid you, I'd get into hot water."
"So would I."
"Then we'd be smart to keep our mouths shut."
"I guess so then," I said before I ushered us for the door, but not before I bought a few DVDs of the rarer film noirs featuring black actors, including Canada Lee, Frances E. Williams, Mauri Lynn, and Juano Hernandez. I felt as if I was starring in my own film noir, the end still unreeling, but I still saw more light than darkness shining ahead.
L
ater that same night while I relaxed watching the Canada Lee DVD at my split-level, I got beeped and summoned to Mr. Ogg's bungalow. We sat in opposite chairs in his front room. He'd adjusted the dimmer switch to cast us in deeper shadows where we'd just finished dining on the Chinese takeout using chopsticks. Now we came to the business at hand.
"You rang?" I said.
"Yeah, I did. This isn't easy for me to say, but it's like this, Tommy Mack. My two nieces are doping again. I can tell it's so because they talk and act goofy." Furious, he quirked his thin lips. "I don't like it, and I won't put up with it, and I have the last say."
"Always."
"Today I gave them my final counsel. Clean up your act, sisters, or else. If I could quit my doping cold turkey, they can swing it, too."
"I see."
"If they don't shape up, they're out of here."
"Is that a bad thing? It might teach them to be independent, young ladies. That's an asset to get you through the cruel world."
"No, Tommy Mack. The meaning is out of here as in
permanently
."
"That's stating it with no room for doubt."
"Exactly, and I don't issue my threats lightly. If and when I give you the hit sign, I want you set to go and don't be handing me any touchy-feely crap about it, either."
The man's glacier for a heart froze the blood in my veins. "Am I the right man? Are you depending on me to go whack your two nieces?"
His aviator sunshades tilted at me. "I don't see why not. Is it too much for you to handle? Should I pay McCoy to do it?"
By now I detested my rival, McCoy the enforcer in
Baltimore
, who'd called me "that killer nigger." That N-slur grated on me as much as he was a sloppy amateur, giving our profession a bad name. My headshake was stiff. "No-no, I got you covered."
"I'll pay the going rate, half before and the balance on the backend. Just make it look convincing. Nothing jury-rigged. No loose ends. I don't want to wake up one morning to the homicide cops or the feds snooping in my jockstrap."
I nodded. "What if just one, say, Gwen is using while Rita stays clean? Do I pop just the rotten half?"
"Nope. Peas in a pod. If one screws the pooch, then both will say adios. That's the only fair way to do it."
I nodded and lied. "I can see a logic in that."
"Don't sound so glum and downbeat, Tommy Mack. They're poised, young ladies who'll do anything I ask, especially when it's the right thing."
"Yes sir."
"By the way, are you a doper, Tommy Mack? You hep cats like to mingle pot and pills in with your jazz. The jazz clubs swinging downtown contained enough reefer smoke to make a Fu Manchu movie."
"Not this cool cat, sir," I said. "You've got to keep your mind lucid in my hazardous livelihood."
"Attaboy." He removed the aviator sunshades and polished them on a silk handkerchief. Startled, I'd never before seen his eyes. They held little color, just the unfeeling dull gray as a pair of ice cubes. He felt the intensity of my stare and brayed out a laugh. "My eyeballs chill you speechless, eh, Tommy Mack?"
"I didn't notice them so much."
"My other four senses are far keener than yours."
"Good for you."
"In fact, put me and you in a pitch black room, and I can sniff out where the hot pussy is faster than you ever will."
"Uh-huh."
"I can hear the doubt creeping into your voice, so I'll have to prove it. I'll make a call, get a girl—black, red, yellow, or white, it makes no difference to me—over here, and we'll arrange it in the back." He fitted the aviator sunshades back on his beaky nose and raised his cell phone. "Care to make it interesting?"
"I'd rather not, sir."
"You put up the fee for your next job, but if I can't beat you, then I double your fee. What do you say?"
"Just leave your lady be. I'm out of here," I said, standing up. I wasn't having any part of his warped sex fantasies. Enough of Mr. Ogg was enough.
"The wager always stands," he called to me.
I scrambled out of there and drove back to the split-level, my mind's eye still roving to each nook and cranny found in his bungalow. Where did he squirrel away that little, blue book documenting my hit jobs? My best conjecture put it in his safe deposit box along with the murder pieces that I'd used to carry out his orders while I was also fashioning the knots to my hangman's noose. Now if I could only keep my neck out of its tightening loop I'd get through this okay.
"S
weetheart, how could you start the party without Esquire?"
I didn't lie to him. "D. Noble is back in town."