“Parking tickets,” I say quickly. “I’ve been having a hell of a time with ’em.”
She smiles knowingly as she looks at her beer. “That would be the Admin Building across the street,” she says.
That’s the second time I’ve been busted in the same lie, I realize. I laugh. She knows I’ve done something and she likes watching me wriggle around. Blame Ken Gardocki, my brain suddenly says.
“Do you know a guy named Ken Gardocki?” I ask.
“Yeah. I dated him.”
Wow. This is news. How small is this town? I’m left speechless by this piece of information, as well as noticing an opportunity to change the subject. “You dated Ken Gardocki?”
“Yeah.” She shrugs. “About ten years ago, for maybe a month. Just after his wife died. I felt sorry for him.” She realizes this has had more effect on me than she intended, and she downplays it with a wave of her hand. “No big deal,” she says. “So … were you dealing drugs for Gardocki?”
“Oh, hell no,” I say quickly, but am subtly aware, even as I deny it, that the opposite answer would have had a beneficial effect as a device to impress her. She likes bad boys, I realize suddenly. “I try to stay out of the drug scene these days,” I say, downplaying my denial. “I stick more with the gambling side of things.”
She nods. She knows of Gardocki’s business practices. “So what do you do? You a leg breaker?” She takes a swig of beer and looks at me directly, the hard direct stare that so aroused me last time I met her here.
I’m going to go along with this, while trying to tell as few actual lies as possible. What could be more intriguing to a girl who likes bad boys than meeting an enforcer for a local mobster? “Leg breaking isn’t my thing,” I tell her. “Usually I just discuss. Act as his spokesman-on-the-street.” There, I’ve made myself sound like the intellectual, caring mobster that all women want.
“So you don’t actually beat people up?”
I don’t want to disappoint her with another denial, so I switch the subject. “Let’s talk about you,” I say, and this attempt to change the subject seems to have charmed her all the more. If I’m trying to wriggle away from a conversation, then there must be a reason for the wriggling. I’ve created a sense of mystery about myself while admitting to nothing. Maybe I do beat people up, maybe not. Good move, Jake.
“What about me?” She leans back and starts to remove her black leather jacket, and I notice large, firm breasts being pointed forward as she shrugs the jacket off. I try to look subtly, and am probably not as subtle as I think. She knows where my attention is and I have the idea she is slowing the whole jacket removal process down for my benefit. She hangs the jacket over the back of her chair and shakes out her hair, then looks at me.
“Do you have to work tomorrow?” I ask.
“No. I’m off until Tuesday. I have to take my cat to the vet, though.” She is still looking at me intensely, as if trying to read all kinds of information. Am I violent, unpredictable, kind? What do I want from her? Love, sex, passion, someone to dominate and abuse?
“Do you want to go to Miami for the weekend?”
She laughs. I can’t believe I just blurted that out, feel some need to take it back, apologize for being so forward, but before I can say anything else, she says, “I’d love to go to Miami for the weekend. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
I realize she thinks that it was just a fantasy question. “It would be nice,” I say. And then, to bring her around to the idea that it’s not a joke, I add, “I actually have an extra ticket.”
“You’re serious?” She looks more curious than alarmed. To my surprise, she seems to be thinking about it, or perhaps she’s just looking for a way out. “I don’t even know you,” she says.
“It’d be a perfect opportunity for us to get to know each other.” Oooh, smooth. I like that. But it was too smooth. She seems to have lost interest in the conversation. She glances over at the darts game.
“I’m supposed to be playing darts,” she says. “I’ve missed almost the whole game. They’re going to be mad.”
“How come you were late?”
She turns back to me and tells me a quick story about her ailing cat, who apparently had vomited all over her apartment. But she has become restless now, the flirtation has stopped. “So I have to take my cat to the vet,” she finishes. “I’m sorry, I won’t be able to act as your cover while you go on a drug run for Ken Gardocki.” She hops out of her chair.
“This has nothing to do with drugs,” I say as she walks away. “I told you … I don’t do that. It’s just a vacation.”
But she goes over to her darts partners. She doesn’t look back. “That went well,” Tony says. “Another beer?”
“Nah.” I pay my tab and get up to leave.
“Hey,” Tony calls after me. “Don’t give up. You never know.”
“Fuck it.”
On the way home, I think about things.
Mel is still a possibility, but I don’t want to bother with it. I’ve been without a woman for too long to realistically expect myself to push her away if she makes any advance at all, and I don’t want my partnership with Tommy to be soured from the beginning by the notion that I’ve fucked his wife. Sheila’s a goner. Maybe Denise, from the debt-collection service? I get mail from them. They’re located in Buffalo, New York. Who needs a weekend in Miami this time of year more than those people? Maybe I could promise to pay my debts in full, plus late fees and interest charges, if she came to Miami with me and let me bang her like a Turkish sailor on a three-day pass in an Asian port.
Maybe not.
Then there’s Kelly. If I called her and told her to pack her things for the weekend, she’d think it was some kind of desperate attempt to reconcile, not a desperate attempt to get an accomplice who’d make me less suspicious come my next homicide interrogation. Besides, I spent eight years with her, eight years based on trust. I couldn’t very well put her in that situation, despite how angry her abandonment made me. Maybe one day I’ll open that letter she sent me.
When Gardocki mentioned that it would be easy for me to find a woman at short notice, I think he had some fantasy notion of my life. Maybe he imagined that a laid-off factory employee just spent his whole time going to parties and meeting people, turning his endless free time into a chance to pursue social engagements. Retirement may well be like that for him. But there’s a psychological toll which he didn’t take into account. If your company tells you you’re not wanted, you assume nobody wants you. Despite my endless free time, I found myself withdrawing from people, not even willing to make eye contact with the librarian when I checked out books. I turned down social invitations so frequently that I stopped getting them. And I know I’m not the only one.
Being a hired killer was just so much easier when I could do it alone.
I
’m picking up my CDs, which the cops have thrown all over the floor despite their promise to “search nice” if I didn’t cause a scene, when the phone rings. It is Gardocki, calling from a pay phone. I’d asked Tommy to call him to tell him to call me, though after thinking about it, I really should just have called him myself. It’s legal for me to talk to Gardocki.
“Meet me at the place,” he says, and hangs up.
The Place? Is that a new restaurant? His codes are good. Good enough to fool the people who are expected to understand them. But I figure he means the bar where Karl used to drive me, so I hop in my car and drive forty-five minutes into the woods to find out it is closed and the parking lot is empty. Where else could “The Place” be? That restaurant where he bought me an Italian meal ages ago, the day he told me about the plan to kill Corinne? God, that’s over an hour in the other direction. I’m running low on gas, so when I get back into town I swing by the convenience store to fill up.
Tommy is there. “Where the hell you been?” he asks when I walk in to pay for the gas.
“Why?”
“Ken Gardocki was here for over an hour, waiting for you. He went back to his office.” So the Gas’n’Go was “The Place.” What’s the point of that? How silly has this whole code-word thing become? The Gas’n’Go is where I work. The cops know where I work. If Gardocki wants to have a secret meeting with me, how secret would it be if we do it in broad daylight at my job? And if it doesn’t need to be secret, why not just say “I’ll meet you at the convenience store?” The cops know that Ken Gardocki and I spend time together, for whatever reason. This is like wiping your fingerprints off something you own.
“What’s the matter with him?” I ask.
“He was asking me that about you.”
“He thinks there’s something wrong with both of us for wanting to own this store.”
Tommy looks apprehensive. “Do you really think he’ll lend us the money?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Tommy’s cheeks are flushed with enthusiasm, and his smile is shining. It’s not an expression I see often around here. Over a crappy little convenience store. But we found a way out. We are going to survive.
“He mentioned something about wanting to send Mel down to Miami with you,” Tommy says, opening the register and counting change. “I told him she’d love it. But I’d have to close the store to look after Jenny, so I don’t see how we could do it.”
This is getting too weird. Tommy is willing to let me take his wife to a romantic vacation spot so that I can kill someone. But it isn’t concern over his wife’s fidelity that is holding him back, or morality. It’s his inability to find a sitter.
“Tell Gardocki to mind his own business,” I say. “I think I’m just going to go by myself. That’s what I wanted to tell him.”
“He’s in his office. Tell him yourself.”
I drive up to Gardocki’s office, where he is alarmed to see me. He puts his forefinger over his lips as if to shush me, then madly scribbles something on a piece of paper and hands it to me. THIS OFFICE MIGHT BE BUGGED.
I write something and hand the paper back. NO WOMAN FOR MIAMI.
He rolls his eyes, looks at me and shrugs, as if to say, “What’s the matter with you?”
He scribbles I ASKED TOMMY ABOUT HIS WIFE. SHE’LL GO.
DON’T WANT TO.
FUCK, JAKE. IT’S BUSINESS. YOU HAVE TO.
RATHER GO ALONE.
NO NO NO. A lot of head of head-shaking accompanies this one.
MAYBE NEXT MONTH. NEED TIME.
ALREADY BOUGHT TICKETS. NON-REFUNDABLE. TOMMY’S WIFE. Underlined about three times. He doesn’t even know Mel’s name, but he smiles as he adds SHE’S NOT BAD LOOKING.
I snatch the piece of paper from him and ball it up, throw it on his desk, shaking my head furiously. “NO!” I yell and storm out. I expect him to follow me and start yelling, but I get into my car to drive off and I notice the door to his office is still closed. He understands. He knows I’m right about this. He can take the damned money for the tickets out of my payment, if he likes, but I’m not putting myself in a situation where I might fuck my best friend’s wife.
I get home and there is a strange car in my driveway. Shit! The cops have come back to dump my CDs everywhere again. I look at the car, and realize it is too old to be a cop car, and I see Sheila standing at my front door. She is writing a note.
“Hey,” she says, crumpling the note and putting it in her pocket.
“Hey, how are you?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“What’s up?”
“I’ve been thinking.” That voice again. I’d marry her for the voice alone. Deep, sexy and confident.
“About what?”
“You still want me to go to Miami?”
I try to be Cool Jake, but I find myself breaking into a smile. “Hell, yeah. You wanna go?”
She steps back, slightly intimidated by my enthusiasm. “Listen, Jake,” she says. “All I want is a vacation. I know you’re doing some stuff for Gardocki, and I don’t care what it is, but I’m not putting any drugs in my suitcase or stuff like that. I just want to get out of here for a few days.”
“No problem.”
“And we get separate rooms in the hotel.”
“No. Can’t do that.” Shit. “If you go, we have to share a room.” What kind of girlfriend can I claim she is if we have separate rooms? “Separate beds is fine. Hell, if there’s only one bed, I’ll sleep on the floor, I don’t care.” Actually, I do care, but business is business. She already knows she’s being used as cover, so I don’t have to sweet-talk her. I need to stop thinking about getting laid for a second and concentrate on the job at hand. “It’ll be great,” I tell her. “The flight’s tomorrow at nine thirty. I promise to be a perfect gentleman.”
She gives this some thought. “You can’t tell anyone from here that I’m going with you. I live with someone.”
“I know. That’s no problem, either.”
“You know?”
I shrug.
“What’s going on with you? Did you do, like, a background check on me?”
“No. I asked Tony at the bar.”
She gives this some thought. “That’s okay,” she says finally. “I asked him about you, too.”
“Really? What’d he say about me?”
Now it’s her turn to shrug. She looks at me intently. “You’re not going to put drugs in my suitcase?”
I laugh. “I told you, I don’t do that. I don’t have anything to do with drugs.”
She doesn’t look convinced. With a wary expression, she gets back in her car.
“Hey,” I call after her. “How’s your cat?”
She waves the question off and screeches off out of the drive-way, spraying snow against my legs. I run up the stairs, almost giddy with excitement, and call Gardocki.
“The problem is solved,” I tell him.
I know he is dying of curiosity, but all he can say is “Good.” He hangs up. Yeeeehaaaaaa! I’m one happy hit man.
During the flight down, Sheila is quiet, careful not to be too flirtatious, worried about giving me the wrong idea. She orders a beer on the plane even though it is only ten in the morning. Maybe flying is making her nervous. Maybe I’m making her nervous. Maybe she drinks at ten in the morning all the time.
“I didn’t tell my boyfriend about this trip,” she says, staring at the back of the seat in front of her.
What am I supposed to say to that? Why is she telling me this? Does she want to talk about her boyfriend? “What’s he like?” I ask.
“He’s okay.”
Not exactly a ringing endorsement. She keeps staring at the seat cover like she’s expecting a vision of Jesus to appear in it. I hope she relaxes a little when we get there. Right now, I can just feel the anxiety radiating from her, can almost hear her telling herself this wasn’t such a good idea.
“When we get to the hotel, I have to go run an errand,” I tell her. “You can go for a swim or something, then we can go out to dinner, if you’d like.”
“Okay.” Still staring at the seat cover.
“Great, then.”
“This is weird,” she says. She turns to me. “Do you think this is weird?”
“No. Why, because you only just met me?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not weird.”
This seems to cheer her up. “You don’t think so?”
“No.”
“I think it’s weird.”
She’s lying to her boyfriend about flying off to Miami with someone she doesn’t know, to act as his cover while he commits a crime of some kind. What’s weird about that? Happens all the time. All I know is, I’m having a good time. This is a hell of a lot more fun than sitting in my snow-bound apartment waiting for the mailman to bring me unemployment checks. I take her hand. “Thanks for coming down,” I say. “I appreciate it.”
She takes her eyes off the seat cover and looks at me (finally). She takes her hand back and says nothing.
The car Gardocki has rented for me is an old Nissan Sentra, the cheap bastard. The people at the airport rental office just shake their heads when I tell them it is supposed to be a Chrysler Sebring convertible. I only know they have such a convertible because I saw it through the fence on my way in from the arrival gate, and I figure I’ll try having a shot at pretending Gardocki made a mistake. On the flight down I’ve imagined Sheila and myself soaring along a coastal highway in a convertible, the wind blowing through her hair. Stupid. A bunch of rental agents all gather around me and start asking me questions about how such a mistake could possibly have happened, and I realize that I have just committed the ultimate hitman sin: I’ve made people notice me. A good hired killer, like a good baseball umpire, needs to make sure he fades into the woodwork.
“It says mini-compact,” the man behind the counter says with the nervous tone of someone who doesn’t want his credibility questioned.
“Can you upgrade it?”
“We’d need to have authorization from the person whose name is on the credit card,” he says. “A Mr. Ken Gar … Gar ….”
“Gardocki, yeah.” I can tell this guy has had this conversation before. Apparently, a lot of businessmen come down here with fantasies of wind blowing through their hair and then realize their bosses are cheap bastards. “I can give you cash for the difference,” I tell him.
“We can’t do that,” he says, almost alarmed, shaking his head, as if I’ve threatened to steal the Sebring. His fear and nervousness and obsession with paperwork are making me annoyed.
“Why the hell not?”
He looks flustered, then runs back into an office and comes out with an even more ferrety-looking guy, who I assume is his manager. “That’s the car that was reserved for you,” the manager says. “That’s all we have right now.” He walks back into his office.
That was pretty rude, I’m thinking to myself. Sheila comes up behind me and puts her hand gently on my back. “What’s going on?” she asks.
“I want to rent a Sebring, and they won’t let me,” I tell her.
“It’s not that we won’t let you,” says the counter guy. “It’s just that we don’t have it right now.” He looks at Sheila and says soothingly, “If you come back tomorrow, I can arrange for you to have it at the same price.”
She smiles at him and thanks him, and puts her arm around me. “Let’s come back here tomorrow,” she says. I know damned well that the Sebring isn’t going anywhere today, that the counter guy just doesn’t like me and he’s fucking with me because he can. I remember doing things like that to people who were rude to me when I was managing the dock. “Oh, no sir, we can’t get those track replacement tabs out to you today … If I put a rush on it, I can have it to you by Thursday,” as I sat with my feet up on a crate of track replacement tabs, while a truck driver going to this guy’s store was about to leave. That’s what you got for screaming “fuck” at me earlier in the conversation. Perhaps next time he’d have more manners. I can tell this guy feels the same way. Doesn’t like my attitude. I had forgotten that important lesson. But a flirtatious smile from Sheila has defused him, and an arm around me has defused me. She’s good.
The little bastard hands me my paperwork without looking at me. Sheila smiles at him again and thanks him.
“You have a nice day,” he says to her, as if I’m not there.
The car’s muffler is about to fall off, and it makes more noise than a motorcycle as I pull into the hotel parking lot. We are right on the beach, but we are NEXT DOOR to the hotel where the pilot is staying, I realize. Gardocki is going to tell me that it is better, if anyone investigates, not to have our names on the same hotel register, though now that I can see both hotels, I realize that economic concerns might have entered into his thinking.
The pilot’s hotel, the Ambassador, is a soaring ten-story affair that looks like new construction. My hotel is a dinky little two-story shit hole. It looks like it was picked up, in one piece, from a plot of land across from a truck stop in Oklahoma and dropped here right on the Miami beachfront. Judging by the giant neon sign, the place is apparently called
Vacancy
, a status which is immediately understandable.
Sheila isn’t disappointed, which makes me like her all the more. She’s just happy to be out of Wisconsin, away from snow, happy to be near a beach in the sunshine. The old car, the crappy hotel, it’s fine. “I wasn’t planning to spend much time here anyway,” she chirps. “And we’re only fifty feet from the water.”
More like five hundred, but I get the point. I guess in my fantasy world, I’d forgotten that I was actually here on business, to do a job. I’d imagined I was a jet-setting millionaire spiriting away to a vacation spot with his lover. Reality check: Sheila isn’t my lover, and only agreed to accompany me on the condition that she not become my lover, and I’m supposed to kill a guy staying at the hotel next door and then get the hell out of Dodge. I guess several months of loneliness and financial deprivation have taken their toll.
But we’re here. It’s time to get businesslike again. We check in, and I look around. Two double beds. That’s good, I don’t have to sleep on the floor. We drop the baggage off in the room, which has a strong moldy odor to it, and I tell Sheila she’s free to go and sunbathe for a few hours, which was exactly what she had planned. I have some errands to run. She nods, and disappears into the bathroom to change.
I go off to get my sniper rifle.