“Are you going to shoot everybody in this town?” Gardocki says.
“Time will tell.” I shake out the right boot. Nothing. I unlace the second boot and pull it off.
“What the fuck are you doing? Undressing him?”
I shake out the second boot. A small piece of laminated plastic falls out into the snow. I pick it up and look at it.
“Here you go,” I say, handing the card to him.
“Karl Grohleiter,” Gardocki reads off the card. “Wisconsin State Police. Well, I’ll be damned.”
I hop out of the ditch. “Let’s get outta here. Snow’ll cover him in a couple of hours.”
We are driving back through what has become a blizzard, not talking, listening to the radio jock describe the blizzard to us. “It’s really coming down,” he tells me, as I peer out the window. I can’t see a thing because it’s really coming down. The snowstorm play-by-play is somehow comforting.
“We just killed a cop,” says Gardocki.
“Yeah,” I say.
“That’s death penalty.”
“There’s no death penalty in Wisconsin.”
“Really?” This seems to cheer him up. I’ve never understood that, why some people are so afraid of the death penalty. I’m afraid of life in prison. After I took my first job, Gardocki’s wife, I went to the library and looked up the death penalty, and was disappointed to find that Wisconsin didn’t have it.
“Anyway,” I say. “The only way it can be traced to us is by the people at the bar who saw him with us.”
“They’ll be fine,” Gardocki says. “I’ve known those guys for years. They’re good youpers.” UPers, Upper Peninsula country folk who like to drink and mind their own business. I’m not convinced.
“Let’s get a story together just in case.”
“Okay.” Gardocki is looking to me for advice now. He respects my opinion and experience in these matters, now that my judgment about Karl has proven correct. It is a good feeling, to have someone respect your input, a feeling I haven’t experienced since the factories closed. I have become an indispensable partner to the richest criminal in town.
“What was this rush job you wanted to see me about?”
Gardocki is lost in thought. He snaps out of it. “Oh, that, yeah.” He pulls a piece of paper out of his back pocket and hands it to me. “Miami. You have to be there next weekend.”
“Miami?”
“Yeah.” Gardocki is tired, distracted. The cop-shooting thing has really got to him. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
“Sure.”
The next morning, before I contact Gardocki, I go over to the convenience store to get my schedule. Tommy is behind the counter, reading some important-looking memo with the Gas’n’Go logo emblazoned across the top.
“They’re trying to sell this store,” he says. “Do you believe this shit? We’re going to get laid off
again
.”
I look at the memo. It is an invitation to prospective buyers to franchise the store. Gas’n’Go 818 is going on the auction block. The rest of the memo is corporate blather about how the loss of Brecht is a blow to all humanity, especially starving children, and how the necessary redistricting is causing the company to sell off some stores in his area. If the store isn’t sold by February first, it will be demolished.
There is a list of all the stores to be sold, and the list has two names on it: ours, and the Wolsely store, which is also in a bad neighborhood. Gas’n’Go doesn’t want any more potential executives getting bullets through their heads in our town. They’re unloading their ghetto interests.
“How much they want for the place?”
“A franchise is forty thousand.”
“Let’s buy the place. You and me.”
Tommy shrugs. “Twenty thousand each?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re going to have to lend me twenty thousand, because I can’t even pay my mortgage right now. Oh, wait, you make less than I do here and your TV just went to the pawnshop. So I’ll have to say no to that one.”
“I can get the money.”
Tommy looks at me. “How’re
you
gonna get the money, Jake?”
“I can get the money.”
“Jake, this is bullshit. Look at you, you’re stealing cigarettes, you must owe bookies what, five grand, you—”
“I’ll get the money.”
Tommy stops talking, looks at me. He takes a pack of cigarettes from the rack, stealthily, so the cameras won’t see him (though it’s doubtful they’ll send another executive down here to view the tapes) and motions for me to go outside.
We step outside, where the sun is blinding, reflecting off the night’s new-fallen snow. Cars and trucks hiss by.
“Where are you gonna get the money, Jake?”
“I can get it. By February first.”
“From Ken Gardocki? I haven’t heard you mention your gambling debt in a while. Are you doing things for Gardocki?”
“Do you want the money? Because I can get it.”
“Did you kill Gardocki’s wife?”
“Fuck, Tommy. Why would you ask me something like that?”
“Did you kill Brecht?”
“Tommy, Jesus …” He is staring at me with the look of a grade school teacher who feels you have done something wrong, like he is going to give me a lecture. He has just received the possibility of a second layoff in a year. He and his wife and daughter are about to lose their house and car and wind up in the street and he is worried about whether or not his best friend shot the man who was going to fire him. I find his morality suddenly ludicrous.
“Yeah, Tommy,” I snap. “I fucking shot them. I fucking shot them both. Fuck them. She was a money-grubbing cheating whore and he was just an asshole. You know what else? He was going to fire you and bring in a replacement. Because …” I realize I am screaming, but I don’t stop. “Because you didn’t put Wenke products on the TOP FUCKING SHELF.”
Tommy is staring at me still, eyes blank. He lights a cigarette, his hands shaking slightly. He is going to tell me to leave and never come back, that we’re not friends anymore, that I am never to set foot in the convenience store again.
“How much did Gardocki pay you? To shoot Corinne?”
“Five grand,” I say softly. “Five grand, but most of it went to pay my gambling debt.”
“Fuck,” says Tommy in awe, shaking his head in disbelief. He takes another drag of his cigarette. “Have you killed anyone else?”
I nod.
“Anyone I know?”
“No.”
“Wow,” he says. “That’s some weird shit.” I watch his face for signs of emotion, fury, hate, distrust. He appears to be thinking, almost detached.
“You still want to own a store with me?” I ask.
Tommy flips the cigarette out. “You’re still Jake, right? I guess it really doesn’t change that much. But I want everything in my name, in case the cops start giving us trouble.” He nervously rattles off more conditions, mostly commonsense financial advice about hiding assets. There is no moral lecture. He finishes with, “… and if you can get the money together like you say, I guess we’re partners then.”
I shake his hand. “Partners.”
He starts getting nervous again, chattering about what will happen if the police come looking for me, whether or not he could pass a lie detector test, and I put my hand on his shoulder.
“Tommy, don’t worry,” I say. “It’ll all be fine.”
Tommy has all kinds of questions for me, mostly concerning the mechanics of it, where I get the guns, if I need fake identification, et cetera. I answer the questions cheerfully. His lack of surprise is the most intriguing aspect of the whole interrogation. It’s like he knew it all along.
“Why would Gardocki pay you to kill Brecht?” Tommy asks, as if he is trying to piece things together.
“He didn’t. That was a Jake Skowran special,” I tell him. “You should have seen his personnel files on us. We were all getting it, one way or another. He was going to demote you to clerk and cut your pay.”
“Because of the Wenke products?”
“Yup.”
Tommy flips his cigarette out. “That bastard. I’ve got a wife and kid.”
“I know. It won’t be a problem anymore.”
Tommy suddenly sees the good side of being on friendly terms with someone who kills people. It’s a safe place to be. And now, with Tommy knowing everything, I realize that it’s a lot easier to get time off when your boss knows you’re a hired killer.
“I have to go to Miami this weekend,” I tell Tommy. “I’ve got some more work coming up. I’ll need some time off.”
“I’ll talk to Jughead,” Tommy says. “And see what you can do about getting some cash up front from Gardocki for the store. February first isn’t too far off.”
I’m at the Gas’n’Go for about an hour when the phone rings.
“Jake?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s Ken.”
“Hey, how are you?”
“Listen, people are following me. Cops.”
A customer comes into the convenience store and starts making himself a cup of coffee. I try to keep my voice down. I’m sure Ken is just getting paranoid because we shot a state trooper. We. I. Whatever.
“I’m sure nobody’s following you, Ken,” I say soothingly.
“Listen to me, you asshole. They’re not even trying to hide. There is an actual cop car fifty yards behind me everywhere I go. I’m calling you from a pay phone at a movie theater. It’s the only place I can go to get away from these jack-offs. There’s a plainclothes cop watching the movie with me.”
“What movie?” I ask. I’m a huge film buff. Even after all my finances dried up, I always had enough left for a film a week.
Ken ignores me. “I gotta go. I’m just telling you, I think they’re going to start picking people up soon. Make sure your shit is together and you’ve got all the answers.”
“Don’t worry,” I tell him. “They’ve got nothing.”
“They’ve got nothing,” he repeats, but he sounds worried, and glad to hear the reassuring words from me. “Got to get back to the film.” He hangs up.
I call Tommy at home. Mel answers the phone, and she is glad to hear from me, and we chat, a few aimless pleasantries about when is the next time I’m coming over for dinner. Then she puts Tommy on.
“What’s up, man?” I can hear a TV on in the background.
“Listen, dude,” I tell him in a low voice. “Ken Gardocki just called me. The cops are watching him pretty close, and probably me, too. I might need you to relay messages to him, if we need to communicate.”
I can hear Tommy making a face, and I know the face. It’s the face he makes about anything remotely worrisome, a late delivery, a performance review, the request to be a part of a hired killing. “Okay,” he says doubtfully.
“Later, man.”
“Later.”
I hang up. The customer is waiting with his coffee, looking at me. I wonder if he is a cop. I take his dollar, and watch him get back into a beat-up white pickup with some roofing company’s logo on the side. There are ladders on the truck, and there appears to be real roofing equipment in the back. I’ve seen him before. He’s a roofer. I breathe a little easier as he drives off.
But this is how I have to look at people now.
A
nd the next day, it starts.
There is a knock on the door. “Mister Skowran?”
It’s ten in the morning. I have just fallen asleep after spending all night at the convenience store. The first few knocks I just pretend I can’t hear, then I hear a police radio from a parked car in the street, and I know what’s going on right away. I act sleepier than I feel as I blunder over to the door. “Who is it?” I ask grumpily.
“Mister Skowran, open the door, please.”
I make a big show of opening the door, and four men barge in, two of them local cops and two of them plainclothes. A fifth and sixth follow.
“What the hell is going on?” I protest, knowing exactly what is going on. “I was just going to bed.”
The first man through the door hands me a piece of paper. “We have a warrant to search your apartment. Could you sign here please, that you have read and understand the terms of the warrant?” He hands me a pen.
“Search it for what?” I make a show of rubbing sleep out of my eyes.
“We’d like you to come down to the station and answer a few questions,” he tells me.
“What’s this about?”
“Please read the warrant.”
The cops walk past me and move off to various parts of my apartment, one going into the kitchen, one in the bedroom, one to the bathroom. They come back.
“There’s no one else here,” one says.
“No shit,” I say. “I could have told you that.”
“Start the search in the bedroom,” the big plainclothes officer says. “Mister Skowran, please put some clothes on and come down to the station with us.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Not yet,” he says.
“So I don’t have to go?”
“I’d advise it,” he says. “I can have these guys search nice or search nasty. If you want to make a big show, we’ll tear your place to bits. It’s up to you.”
“All right, all right. Jesus,” I mutter, irritated, and walk back to my bedroom with a uniformed cop, who is going to watch me put my pants on. I reach for some jeans lying on the floor, and he takes them from me, and feels the pockets, to see if I have a weapon concealed in them anywhere. He hands them back to me.
“What’re you guys looking for?” I ask, still pretending to be mystified.
“It’s in the warrant, sir,” says the cop. I hate when people call me sir when what they really mean is “Fuckface.” You can tell by their attitude. “Sir” used to be a word to connote respect, but these people sneer it. Bouncers and cops do this a lot.
“Don’t call me sir, I work for a living,” I tell him. He watches me quietly as I put my watch on.
I turn to face him. “Want my hands behind my back, to cuff me?”
“You’re not under arrest, sir,” he says.
“Fuckface.” I push by him and go out the door with the detective.
In the back of the police car, I look out the window as I see my town go by. Snow drips off broken mailboxes at the end of unpaved drive-ways. A few houses are boarded up, houses which just a year ago were thriving, kids playing on the lawn. A traffic light has fallen into the street near what used to be a busy intersection. It will still be there a week from now.
I think about what is going on, and I know that I am in command. They’ve got nothing. If they had anything, they’d arrest me. There’s nothing in my apartment to link me to anything, so they can search around all they want. I wonder if Sheila is down at the police station, or if it is her day off. Perhaps after the interrogation I’ll ask her to lunch. Or maybe I’ll just go back to bed.
This time, the cops are ready to interrogate me and they have an interrogation room set up, awaiting me. No waiting around now. I see Detective Martz, big and burly in his pressed white shirt, and I nod hello to him as I sit in The Chair, and he ignores my pleasantry. He opens a folder as two other detectives sit on either side of him.
It starts quickly.
Martz throws me a picture of Karl. “Do you know this man?”
“Yeah. This is Karl.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you know him?”
“From around.”
“Around what?” asks Martz.
“Did you guys hang out? Were you friends?” asks another detective.
“When was the last time you saw him?” asks the third. So this is how it’s going to be. The Question Barrage Technique. I’ve seen too many TV shows, documentaries about police work, mostly on the Discovery Channel before they took my cable away, to find anything they do surprising. I look calmly from one to the other.
“Let’s go one at a time,” I say politely.
They all start asking me questions again. They have taken my request as a sign that their Question Barrage has me rattled, so they’re going to keep it up until I explode in a fit of rage and truth.
Yes! Yes! I killed Karl! He’s in a ditch somewhere off Route 27! Just stop with the simultaneous questions!
I shake my head and stare at them. I look at Martz.
“I know him from around the neighborhood,” I tell him. I focus on Martz and only Martz, and imagine I can’t hear or see the other two detectives.
All three of them ask me some more questions, but I focus only on Martz, who asks, “Do you know a man named Ken Gardocki?”
“Of course I know him,” I say.
“Why of course?”
I shrug. Why of course? Did I give something away? “I’ve known him for years,” I say.
“Do you know about his business practices?” Martz asks. The other detectives have become quiet. This is Technique Number Two, pretending they’re primarily interested in someone else in the hopes that I’ll become more forthcoming. People are more willing to open up when discussing a third party. Thank you, Discovery Channel’s
The Prosecutors.
“I’ve heard rumors.”
“Are you aware he runs a gambling operation?”
I smile, laugh even. They assume that it is from relief, that I am finally understanding this is not about any of the murders I have committed, but about small-time stuff, in the hopes that I will open up more. “I sure am,” I nod.
“Have you ever placed a bet with Mr. Gardocki?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Are you aware that gambling is illegal in the state of Wisconsin?”
“Yes,” I say.
“So you’re admitting to a felony,” says Martz.
“It’s only illegal if you get paid money,” I say. “We were doing it for points.”
“Points?” Martz looks at me long and hard, the Intimidating Stare I’ve seen on
The New Detectives
. “What do you win when you’ve got enough ‘points?’” He says the last word with disdain, as if it’s the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard.
“A mountain bike,” I say.
I’m making this up as I go along now, just enjoying myself. Why am I here? Yes, okay, I’ve shot some people. But is this really the top priority of the local government right now, that they can afford all this manpower, to try to find a reason to put me in a cage and feed me for the rest of my life? They made me an animal, and now they want to treat me like one?
Martz realizes this line of questioning is going nowhere. He plucks a single sheet of paper out of a file. “Mr. Skowran, did you ever place a bet on a game between the Buffalo Bills and the New York Jets?”
“I’ve bet on a lot of games. I would imagine I did.”
“Who won that game?”
“Are you kidding? I need a date. I can’t remember every game I ever bet on.”
Martz sits back, looking victorious. “I would think you’d remember that game,” he says slowly. “Because you won five thousand, eight hundred … points.” He throws me the piece of paper, which is one of Ken Gardocki’s betting sheets. On it is written “JSK (which I assume is Gardocki’s code-name for me) BUF-NYJ-out 5,800.” It could mean anything. Okay, though, I won’t argue this. They’ve obviously cracked Gardocki’s betting codes.
“Surely that’s enough points for your mountain bike,” Martz says. “And you don’t remember who won? You don’t remember the game that won you your mountain bike?”
I start to say something. The momentum is slipping over to Martz. He’s good. They don’t mention on
The FBI Files
how much all these psychological tricks wear on you over time. That’s why these interrogations go on for hours, and this is just the first few minutes. This is going to be a long day.
Martz interrupts me. “I know if I won fifty-eight hundred …
points
… I’d remember everything about the game that won me that money. I’d remember every pass, every third down play. Unless, of course, there wasn’t really a bet. Unless of course, someone
gave
me the money to do them a favor, like say, kill his wife.”
Wow. These guys have figured out a lot. The betting sheet thing hasn’t tripped them up a bit. There is a silence in the room.
“The Jets won,” I say finally. “24-21. A field goal in the final three minutes, which they had to kick twice because the first one was called back on a penalty. Testaverde went 12 of 19 for 233 yards, two TDs and no interceptions.” I have done my homework. “I can go quarter by quarter, if you’d like.”
This goes on and on. They spring one thing on me after another. They know Brecht and Corinne Gardocki were shot with the same gun. They know Brecht was my boss. They know Corinne Gardocki was the wife of a man to whom I owed a lot of money. They know Karl knew me. They know he’s disappeared. But I dance. Because basically, they don’t
know
anything. All they’ve done is draw a lot of astute conclusions and they have absolutely no evidence to back any of it up. I sure do look guilty on paper, but they haven’t got enough to charge me or they’d just do it.
After about two hours, a fourth detective comes in and whispers in Martz’ ear for a few seconds. Martz looks at me, and I get a brief chill. They’ve found something. Maybe Karl’s body.
Martz leans back. Stares at me thoughtfully. Technique number … What number are we up to now? It’s got to be in the low thirties. The longer he stares, the less alarmed I feel. He’s dragging it out too long.
“You had seventy-two hundred in cash in your apartment,” he says.
“Yes,” I say quickly. “That’s my money.”
“That’s a lot of cash, isn’t it?”
“It’s quite a bit,” I say cheerfully. It suddenly occurs to me that they are going to take it. Fuck. Now I’m broke again.
“Where did you get it?’
“I earned it, back when I was at the factory.”
“You had all this money, yet you let them repo your car? You let them cut off your cable?” He pushes copies of my credit card bills towards me. “You never paid a credit card bill?”
“Is it illegal to not pay your bills? Is that why I’m here?” Martz stares at me. For two more hours this goes on. For two more hours, I dance.
I go home, and my place is ransacked. The cops have torn everything apart. I thought they were going to search “nice.” Isn’t that what I was promised? I’ve got hours upon hours of clean-up ahead of me. Being a hired killer has its down side.
I curl up in bed, the adrenaline from the interrogation wearing off. I was good. I didn’t crack. I didn’t slip. I have a talent here.
I finally get some sleep, after a hard day’s work.
* * *
“Jake,” Ken Gardocki tells me as I pull a six-pack from the cooler in the back of his SUV. “I want you to kill the guy who fucked my wife.”
“Sure, dude. No problem.” I tear a beer out of the six-pack and hand it to him as we head out onto the ice with our deck chairs. “Where and when?”
It has been two days since the interrogation, since the cops stole my money for “evidence.” I had to go over and see Gardocki to see if he could provide me with living expenses for the next few days. I thought he would be horrified to see me in his office, go off on a paranoid rant about “them watching us,” but when he opened the door he just smiled and welcomed me in. He gave me three hundred-dollar bills and suggested we go fishing out on Bear Lake.
The cops had a warrant for Gardocki, too, and apart from a mention of a mountain bike, our stories had matched perfectly. They had interrogated us at the same time, had trashed his office just like they did my apartment. But Gardocki, with years of criminal ventures under his belt, had squirreled his money away somewhere else. When I told him about the confiscation of my newfound wealth, he just waved his hand and made a face as if to say, “I hate when that happens.”
“Miami,” Gardocki says as he kneels down and starts chipping away at the ice. We are several hundred yards away from the ice shack, where there is a hole already drilled in the ice, but Gardocki isn’t going anywhere near it because he is afraid of bugging devices. We don’t talk about anything in his office, in his car, in any building he frequents, not even the Bar in the Middle of Nowhere. Especially not there. Gardocki had been fishing in that shack a few weeks ago, so now we stand outside on the ice, and he cuts a new hole.
“I hear Miami’s nice this time of year,” I say.
“I think it would be best if you brought someone with you,” he says. “You know, like a girl.”
“A girl?”
“Yeah. You know a girl, don’t you?”
“I know a few. I’m not sure any of them want to go to Miami with me.”
Gardocki laughs. “Just ask nice. You’re a good-looking guy. Free plane ticket, a couple of days in the sun. Who’d say no to that?”
Who’d say no? Lots of people. I’ve hardly had an hour’s worth of conversation with women since Kelly left. My anger at the layoffs and my anger at Kelly’s almost clinical, immediate abandonment of me merged into a single fury at the world, at women, relationships, procreation, the survival of the species. I didn’t care about anything, anyone. The hit-man career has relieved some of the anger, and I’m feeling some interest again. But I hardly want to be asking anyone to fly off to Miami with me for days on end. I’m hardly sure if I even want to spend three days with anyone.
“I think I’d be better off by myself,” I tell Gardocki.
“Are you nuts? They’re watching everything you do. They’re watching me. They’re going to trace the plane ticket, and realize I bought it. Then they’re going to see you went to Miami on your own, stayed three days, and some guy in a hotel died when you were there. Jesus, Jake, they’ve got enough circumstantial evidence as it is. You can’t keep making mountain-bike jokes to these guys forever, they’re serious.” He pauses. “But if you had a woman there, it wouldn’t be so circumstantial, would it? You could just say I lent you guys money to go down there for a vacation, because your credit’s bad right now.”