“I’m working on that,” I say, shivering.
“I don’t give a shit about your credit,” Gardocki says. “You’re missing the point. I’ll take care of everything, hotel reservations and all that shit, and this way it doesn’t look funny. You can’t do it because of your credit cards. They know we know each other. But if there’s no cover story for you being down there, the dead pilot looks extra fishy, especially if they tie him to Corinne.”
His argument makes sense. I do need a woman. I’m going to have to ask one. My new line of work is forcing me out of the hermit-like existence, out of the cocoon I have wrapped around myself since the layoffs. I’m going to have to ask a woman out on a three-day date, and so far I haven’t even got a woman who I know will go out with me for an evening.
“Ken, honestly, I don’t know any women. I haven’t been socializing a lot lately.”
Gardocki gives me a cold look. “What’s the matter with you? Just get a woman. It’s fucking Miami, three days in a three-star hotel. Anyone you ask’ll say yes. Take someone married, I don’t give a shit.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out an envelope full of money and hands it to me. “Spend some of this on her first, warm her up.”
Out on the lake, the sun is going down and Gardocki and I are sitting in deck chairs pretending we are ice fishing, getting good and drunk. I pull the tab off another six pack and hand him a beer. He has been describing how I’m going to do the job, and this time I don’t think his plan is very good.
“It’s only about two hundred yards,” Gardocki tells me. “It’ll be easy.”
“I’ve never fired a rifle, Ken. Did you see
Saving Private Ryan
? I don’t think being a sniper looked all that easy.”
He shrugs. “That was a war movie. People were trying to kill him. This is just you, sitting on a roof, drawing a bead on an unsuspecting guy.” He’s already convinced this is going to be a cinch, that I just need to boost my confidence and get on with it, like asking out a woman. “It’ll be six a.m. He’ll be in the water, and there won’t be anyone else around. He goes for a swim in the sea every time he’s in Miami, at six. Hell, you can miss a few times. The farther out he is when you get him, the better off you’ll be. Maybe an undertow will get his body and they won’t find him for days, and they’ll think he drowned.”
“Then they’ll notice half his head is missing …”
Gardocki laughs. “Maybe they’ll think a shark took it.”
Gardocki laughs because he thinks I am invincible, that the minute I set my mind to do this, it’ll be a great success. I’ve done right by him so far, killed his wife, protected him from Karl, all without getting us in trouble. Not any trouble which can guarantee a conviction, at any rate. He thinks I have some magical gift, when in fact, it has been mostly luck. My crimes to date have been free of witnesses. But now Gardocki thinks that I have mad hit-man skills, that any method of murder he came up with would just be a breeze for me. As if he could knowingly hand me a garrote, a knife, a Claymore mine, and I would set to work with skills I’ve been concealing for all those years when I was disguising myself as a loading dock manager. The fact is, once I get away from the old pistol-from-two-yards-away method that I’ve perfected, I have no idea what I’m doing.
“Give it a try,” he says. He has a satisfied look in his eye, and I know that he really wants this man to die this way. Being shot by a paid sniper while going for a swim is the type of death a man of power orders. It is a political assassination, a covert hit. It just seems like a bunch of bullshit to me. Dead is dead.
“She was going to kill me, Jake,” Gardocki says, as he gazes across the frozen lake. “Corinne and that pilot, they had a plan. She was going to kill me and move to Florida. They’d even picked out a house, in Miami.”
“Come on, Ken. How do you know that?”
“I’d read her e-mails. I used to pretend that I didn’t know how to use a computer, and I didn’t want to learn. I’d never even turn the thing on. She felt safe e-mailing the guy. I’m a bookie, for Chris-sake, I use a computer all the time. I can practically program one. So one day, I got a hold of her password and read some of her e-mails. They were coded, sure, but it wasn’t difficult to see it was about killing me. Sometimes it wasn’t even coded. They were going to make it look like a burglar did it one night when I was home, after I got back from Denver.”
“Jesus,” I say. I try to imagine what it must be like to find out your wife of ten years is planning to kill you, imagine Gardocki’s shock as he opened the files on her computer, his expression as he read each word and put together their significance. “That’s gotta suck.”
Gardocki shrugs. “Hey, I married a stripper twenty years younger than me. You gotta be careful. You know something, though?”
“What?”
“She was a terrible stripper.” Gardocki laughs at the memory. “Man, that girl couldn’t dance for shit. That was why I liked her, because she just didn’t seem to belong there.” His eyes glaze over a little and he finishes his beer, throws the empty can on the ice and we watch it skid for a while, then come to a stop. “You did me a real favor, Jake. You did a good job. That was a great service you did me.” He pats his leg awkwardly, not wanting to suffer a spell of beer-induced emotion, which I feel coming on. They should make beer commercials about conversations like this. Show a logo saying “To Good Friends” and then show Gardocki, thanking me so sincerely for killing his wife in a timely and professional manner, as he takes another swig and then holds the beer up to the camera.
“But my point is,” he says, suddenly aware he is getting emotional. “I want this fucker’s brains blown out while he is taking a dip in the sea. Sound good?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
I do take advantage of the situation, though.
While Gardocki is getting lit up, and I am starting to feel a nice rush myself, I bring up the subject of him lending me and Tommy the money to buy the Gas’n’Go. I squeeze it in at just the right time, between the gratitude and the planning of the actual killing, when the sincere compliments have not yet worn off.
“What the fuck you guys want to buy that dinky little place for?” he laughs.
“It’s not so dinky. It grosses about a hundred eighty thousand a year. After stock and wages, that’ll leave about thirty grand each for Tommy and me.”
“Thirty grand a year ain’t much,” he says. “How’re you guys going to pay me back forty grand out of sixty grand? That means you’ll only make ten grand a year each the first year.”
Gardocki is, was and always will be a businessman. “We’ll only owe you thirty grand, because you’re giving me ten to do this guy in Miami. Do we have to pay you back everything the first year?” I can be a businessman, too, when I have to. The price for the Miami killing has never been discussed.
“That’s normally the way I do it,” he says. He shakes his head. “I don’t like to lend money like that. That’s a lot of money.”
Dammit, what happened to the I-love-you-Jake phase we were just entering? I guess he wasn’t as drunk or as sincere as I thought. There is something shaming about asking for money, and now I can’t even look at him anymore. I stare down at my feet as Gardocki opens a bag of sunflower seeds and starts popping them in his mouth, then spitting the hulls onto the ice.
“Tell you what, though,” he says. “Why don’t you two get a business loan from the bank, and I’ll co-sign.”
I brighten up immediately. “You would?” I haven’t heard that much hope in my own voice in months. It spreads through my whole body, giving me energy I didn’t know was there anymore, making me want to jump up and sing. I sit upright in my deck chair and ask again. “You really would?”
“Sure,” Gardocki nods. “You’d have to make the payments on time, though, or it’d be my ass.”
“We’ll make the payments,” I tell him. I start babbling about how I’ll never miss a payment, about how they used to call me Reliable Jake or some shit like that when I was working at the factory, about how I’m obviously used to living on next to nothing, thanks to the layoffs. I’m like an economic cockroach, I can survive anything. Gardocki isn’t listening. He’s chuckling.
“Convenience store,” he says, shaking his head. “What the fuck’s the matter with you two guys?”
Tulley’s is hopping. There are at least twenty people inside, twenty-one if you count Tony Wolek, who is running around, gray-faced, popping the tops of beers as fast as he can pull them out of the coolers. He sees me come in and plops a beer down in front of me without looking at me, then gets back to the “crowd.” It used to be like this every night, but Tony is out of practice.
“Nice crowd you got here tonight,” I tell him when he gets a calm moment.
“Darts tournament finals,” he says.
I get right to the point. “Do you know a girl named Sheila who plays in that tournament? She’s a cop, works downtown.”
“She’s not a cop,” Tony tells me. “She works for the police department but she doesn’t carry a gun.” Tony has all the info on everyone, like the shoeshine guy in an old detective novel. He knows why I’m asking, too. “She lives with her boyfriend,” he tells me.
“Things good between ’em?”
Tony smiles, an expression I haven’t seen from him in some time. “What’re you planning, Jake?” Some more people come up to the bar and Tony runs off, makes some drinks. Then he comes back and says, “I don’t think so.”
Talking with Tony when his bar is busy is always like this, three-minute time delays between the questions and the answers, and now I’ve forgotten what the question was. I was watching the highlights of the Red Wings game. Then I remember I’d been asking about Sheila, and whether she was getting along with her boyfriend.
“He’s a big guy,” Tony warns me.
And I’m a murdering maniac. At least, according to Ken Gardocki.
Tony leans on the bar and looks me straight in the eye. “He’s a truck driver,” he tells me. “He’s away all the time. She’s pissed about that, thinking about moving out. She also thinks he cheats on her when he’s on the road. A little while back she got some kind of infection from him.”
“Jesus, what’ve you got, surveillance equipment set up in their bedroom?”
Tony smiles again, shrugs. “She was in here about two weeks ago with her girlfriends. One of ’em had a birthday. They were here all night. You hear stuff.”
I wonder how much he’s heard from me. Have I ever said anything while I was sitting at the bar that I wouldn’t want the world to know? Up until recently, I didn’t have any secrets at all.
“And,” Tony says, as if saving the most important detail for last, “He’s a shitty tipper.”
I’m in. Tony, at least, is on my side.
I watch the Red Wings highlights so many times I start to feel like I went to the game. Sheila’s darts team is getting pasted, but she is nowhere around. They’re playing without her. I wonder what could possibly be keeping her from an all-important, crucial event like this. An argument with her boyfriend? A broken-down car? Emergency cop business? I down another beer and consider calling it a night. A few more of these and I won’t be able to pronounce Miami, let alone ask someone to accompany me there.
I start thinking about back-up possibilities. Tommy could lend me Mel for the weekend. I don’t know how happy he’d be about that, but hey, he wants a convenience store as much as I do. I’d have to promise to keep my hands off her, of course, but the real promising would have to be Mel’s. I’ve heard things about her over the years. No proof of anything, just rumor, but I’m sure there is something to it. She gives me long looks sometimes when I’m over at Tommy’s house, leans over a little too far in loose-fitting shirts when she’s handing me a beer. I was always willing to let it go because Tommy is my best friend, but guys like Zorda, you never know. I start distracting myself with thoughts of what she looks like naked, what kind of noises she’d make as I fucked her senseless in a Miami hotel room with the windows open and a gentle breeze rustling the hotel drapes. Screams? No … My guess is she’s lived too many years with a small child in the house to be a screamer any more. Muffled gasps, more like, deep throaty moans which …
“Hi.” I feel a hand on my back and jerk backwards. I hold onto my beer but manage to throw half of it onto my shirt. Even as I’m doing this, I recognize Sheila’s perfume and raspy voice, and before the last of the beer has even splashed into my chest I’ve already asked myself about a dozen questions. What does the light touch on my back mean? Why does she come over and say hi to me before going over and talking to her darts team?
“Aaaah,” she yells, laughing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.” She takes the seat next to me and grabs me a bar napkin, and before I can take it from her, she starts wiping my shirt. I tighten my chest muscles to make sure it feels firm, and I have an immediate idea that she’s noticed that vain effort. I lean in a little to get a nice whiff of whatever she is wearing, a nice, subtle perfume. I can feel the cold from the outside on her skin and jacket, and it is exhilarating, sexy. She doesn’t lean back.
“I’m sorry,” she says again in her raspy voice, giving my chest a final wipe. Tony comes over and puts two beers down in front of us, my usual Budweiser and a local Milwaukee brew for her.
“That’s on this guy,” Tony says pointing to me. Good ole Tony, trying to help me out here.
“No, Tony,” she says. “Put them on me. I just made him spill it.”
“Thanks,” I say.
She laughs again. “So,” she asks, her voice still full of fun. “What’d you do?”
“What did I do?”
“Yeah. Why’d the cops want to talk to you?”
“Oh, yeah, that.” I remember now that the last time I saw her was when Detective Martz was leading me away for questioning. I am momentarily stuck for an explanation. I’ve worked out everything necessary to say to the police when questioned, but those answers don’t wash in a personal context. To the cops, I’d say, “Nothing … I did absolutely nothing.” But to a girl I want to date, I need something else. Treating an innocent question like a police interrogation probably isn’t going to get me very far with this woman, and I want to keep the conversation moving smoothly. Admitting to several killings will probably stop the conversation dead in its tracks, as will telling her to mind her own business. I need something middle-of-the-road.