"What's your street address?"
So I left there. It wasn't that far away. The traffic running thin, I made good time. The left turn I made gave my eyebrow a puzzled arch. The pea gravel lane paralleled the
Potomac River
until I met the orange tube lights that embroidered the marina sign. "WE DO NOT ALLOW OVERBOARD DISCHARGE," it read, in part. That seemed like a good green idea to me.
The security gate sat ajar, and no rent-a-cop doddered out to interfere with my entering. The coupé's headlights streamed their luminous cones on the bank of steel mailboxes as my tires crunched over more pea gravel lane. So, Icie and Victor did their feuding while afloat on a house boat. I was more of a landlubber. Catching the brackish whiffs, I shoehorned the coupé in between a parked van and pickup truck, no gun rack but the beer window was open. My hand probed my glove compartment.
The untraceable .22 was my tool. Hollow-points were included. I dug in further without finding any of the brains I must've lost. My head shook.
What bedevils you, Zane
? For a crummy fifteen bucks, I took on a lady stranger's personal woes, and it didn't make a lick of sense to me except my riled up righteousness was behind it.
My tread scuffed over the pea gravel. The ice machines whirred on, but the washerette and cantina were closed. I heard the spring peepers trilling on their flutes from the cattail reeds on this side of the moored dinghies. If I lived here and got tired of Victor, the mean lush for a neighbor, it was a cinch to weigh anchor and chug downriver to dock elsewhere. But married to him, it wasn't as simple to sever relations.
The floating aluminum pier I stepped onto extended out between the house boats tethered to each side. What did the insurance, taxes, and depreciation run on one of these babies? The pity was I couldn't swim if I toppled off. The river tides sloshed under me, and the blocky house boats, all lights out this late, rocked in their slips. One dock mate had posted a plastic owl on their porch to scare off the crap-dropping gulls. My steps were ginger ones over the clangy aluminum. Counting, I ticked off the slip numbers to reach the one Icie had given me as theirs.
I skirted a tricycle left on the pier. The house boat's bright windows suggested Victor was still hard at lubing his liver. I didn't trip over the electric cord used to power his TV or radio I heard making an undulating noise. My glances up and down the semi-dark pier saw no human shapes watching me.
I froze in my tracks. The .22 in my grasp felt useless as a strand of dental floss. "
Victor makes two of you.
" I jostled my shoulders, tossing off the yoke of fear, but it didn't shed as easy as that. The gangplank descended from the pier where I stepped onto their house boat's teak porch.
I'd no game plan in mind, just to run this on the fly. I swallowed, no spit. The laugh track came from Victor's TV. I figured him for a NASCAR fan before I visualized me in his cedar-paneled den, finding him zonked out in the tweed recliner. My aim was deliberate:
pop-pop,
and then I was gone from here.
My hand molded to the slick brass doorknob. It rotated, and I sidled indoors. Icie had fixed greasy fish and cabbage for Victor's dinner. The jacked out .22 led me down a short corridor. The spongy patio carpet absorbed each step. My trigger finger slicked the .22's polished steel to blip out the two death slugs before the booze-crazed Victor could jump up and tear off my head. Once clearing the entrance into his den, I halted. My eyes blinked at what I saw.
"Stand down. False alarm."
Victor had no more surly drunk left in him. Not when he swayed with the house boat's tidal fluctuations on the end of a 15-foot stretch of laundry rope. The last time I'd seen this, it had involved a pantyhose noose. The big lug had snapped his neck and strangled to death. The tidy den—only his empty bourbon fifth trashed it—reeked of ripe shit where he'd stained the seat of his pants. The straight-back chair he'd used to step off into eternity lay overturned on the floor.
Okay, why did I see this? I pondered. Alcohol made Victor a bastard, and the bastards didn't go gently into that good night. They were too busy roaring at life. I used the remote and put off the plasma TV that I'd intended to take along and hurl into the river to complete my faking the scene as a theft. My growing suspicion pointed to Icie as the one who'd pulled up on the laundry rope biting into Victor's meaty neck. Earlier this evening he'd stormed onto the house boat, snarling his obscenities, and his fists trouncing her once too often.
At last after enough booze consumption, he blacked out, and her ultimate revenge fantasy came to fruition. She snugged the noose around his throat like a cravat and flipped the loose end up over the ceiling beam deft as a cowgirl twirling her lasso. Adrenaline supplied her the brawn to hoist and then tie off his 200+ pound body. Afterward, she neatened up the den a little. She phoned for a cab, clambered inside it, and debarked at her oasis bar.
But then why did she let me come here? Clearly I wasn't slated to be the Good Samaritan to find this and report it to 911. I knew chronic boozers like Victor sank to the lowest dregs of depression. The suicides of Bradford and Nella had established that harsh fact in my experience. Maybe Victor couldn't bear to live with his stinking self anymore, got fortified by his liquid courage, and cashed out his chips. At any rate, he spared me the trouble and did Icie a rare nicety.
My eyes gravitated to the bourbon fifth. A rolled up scrap of paper lay inside it. I went over, retrieved the bourbon fifth, and shook it. The rolled up paper slid through its neck and lip. The paper gave me Victor's last missive. His scraggly penmanship suggested he'd been halfway sloshed and in a black mood right up until the end.
ICIE, MY DARLING ~
SOON I'LL END IT. OH JOY, RIGHT. I'VE
GOT NO REGRETS. I LOVED YOU AS BEST
I EVER COULD. YOU'VE KNOWN IT, TOO.
NOW I'M FLYING OFF TO A BAR WHERE
THE BOURBON FLOWS AS HONEY FROM
A HIVE. TO THEE, I BEQUEATH ALL MY
WORDLY GOODS, FOREMOST BEING THE
BIG ASS MORTGAGE ON THIS LEAKY TUB.
MY FINAL WISHES ASK FOR CREMATION.
CAN YOU DO THAT W/O SCREWING IT UP?
I GUESS WE'LL HAVE TO WAIT AND SEE.
LATER,
VICTOR
Before now, I'd never seen a genuine suicide note, but I had news for Victor. The hereafter didn't offer any bars where the bourbon poured in the liberal shots he'd envisioned. I sighed. This calamity was Icie's to take care of, not mine. So, I bowed out and wiped my prints off every surface I’d touched. I strolled up the gangplank, moseyed down the floating aluminum pier, and reached the coupé. Maybe I whistled my way past the washerette and cantina.
My departure was the usual one. Any eyewitness just observed another Jimmy Six-Pack driving off and minding his own affairs. At the turn off the pea gravel to the blacktop road, I left traveling in the opposite way I'd arrived. Icie could keep her damn sawbuck, my final payment. We'd concluded our business the moment I walked out of the bar where we'd met.
To this day, I couldn't decide if Icie had strung up Victor and staged his suicide scene. But the probability she had staged it before long instigated the far-reaching consequences that rocked my own life. I began to entertain big time doubts about my birth parents' deaths so long ago in
Champagne
's Folly,
Texas
. Had they actually been suicides?
S
o, Mr. Ogg had fetched reinforcements. That stark realization blew me away as I threaded us through the Capital Beltway's roller derby of night traffic. The extra dark suits he'd called in from the
Baltimore
outfit showed how my value as a corpse had gone up. D. Noble had found online that Detective Sergeant Bang also wanted a piece of me, creating a double whammy. All at once, I was a popular man around D.C., a new celebrity status I didn't relish.
"Esquire doesn't pick up," said D. Noble.
"Voice mail?"
"I left him a message to get back to me."
"He probably doesn't want to disturb Hermes who's been sick."
"Uh, home slice, have you got a death wish?"
"Maybe I do."
"Well, bully for you but Danny and I don't. Do you mind backing off the hammer?"
I eased up on the accelerator pedal, curbing our speed to a sluggish seventy. "Happier?"
D. Noble nodded.
Danny pulled herself up, huddled behind our bucket seats, and spoke to me. "What exactly was your relationship to Gwen?"
"She was Mr. Ogg's youngest niece," I replied. "I saw her a few times at his place, and we spoke once or maybe twice."
"Uh-uh. There was more to it than just that. Didn't you also have feelings for her?"
"I liked her, and let's leave it at that."
"Let's not, home slice. If there was more, tell us everything. Our asses are on the line here the same as yours is."
"This one time I killed for her. A diplomat's son got her pregnant, and he bragged about it. She felt humiliated, called me, and I did my thing. End of him and story."
"Did she pay you?" asked D. Noble.
"Not a penny. I did it as a personal favor to her."
"She owed you then."
I grunted. "Her killer framing me for her murder is some repayment."
"Wow. That's radical," said Danny. "Do people really hire you to kill for them? Are you a hit man for sure?"
"Does knowing it blow you away?" I asked her.
"Well, I don't meet a hit man every day," she replied.
"What if Tommy Mack is?" said D. Noble in my defense. "His hits are always done on the crack merchants and alley pimps. Good riddance. The world is a better place without them in it."
"I'm not sitting here to judge Tommy Mack, or what he does," said Danny.
"Have you ever shot at more than a cardboard target on the firing range?" asked D. Noble.
His direct question didn't ruffle her as she used a matter-of-fact tone. "I did a stretch downstate. Without going into the gory details, I can say that blood was shed during the commission of the crime."
"But did you do the spilling?" asked D. Noble.
She laughed with such chilling horror it shut up D. Noble for the moment.
"After this is done, I'm getting out of the business," I told them.
"It's like blood in, blood out with the outfit," said D. Noble. "So how do you plan to pull off that amazing feat?"
"Very carefully," I replied. "But you just watch me do it before I leave town."
"Where are you going?" asked D. Noble.
"Away," I relied, vaguely.
"Then I'll go for another five years before I hear anything from you again."
"I'll do my damnedest to get in touch, but staying incognito is how I’ll survive."
"Do the bastards ever cancel their old grudges?"
I shrugged. "Time going by must wear them down to forget you."
"Everybody deserves a second chance at happiness," said Danny.
"Not only that but Tommy Mack has a game plan, ain't it so?"
Again I shrugged, only slighter. "I'm as ready as I'll ever be."
"México." D. Noble smiled with a confident nod. "That's where I'd retire abroad. The señoritas hot as jalapeño peppers can school even the worldly D. Noble in some new tricks—"
"D. Noble, we're in mixed company," I said.
"My ears are hardly burning," said Danny. "My advice is a little different. Be more original. México is too obvious, just as
Canada
is. They'll look there first for you.
Bermuda
is pleasant but not far enough away. I know the
Caribbean
is hot as a pig iron furnace in the summer.
Australia
or
New Zealand
sounds good to me, but that's only based on the alluring tales I've heard about them."
"I've taken some time to fine-tune my plan," I said.