Authors: Andrew Vachss
“We’ve got all the
time we need,” J.C. told him. “And nobody’s around to hear
the noise.”
G
us went in first, around the
back. When his flashlight blinked from inside the house, Kaiser took hold of a
sledgehammer in one hand and a big pry bar in the other and walked over to the
front door. J.C. was right behind him, carrying a toolbox.
I knew
they must be smashing the place to pieces inside, but I only heard a couple of
thumps every so often.
I couldn’t leave the engine running; it
isn’t good for a motor to be idling for hours. I got out some cotton rags
and sprayed cleanser on them. Then I did the windshield, the headlights, and
the wipers, just in case. I’d already hooked up a toggle switch, so we
could run without taillights if we had to.
I never looked at my watch
once, but I knew it was hours passing just by how I felt inside.
T
hey came out in a line. Gus was first, then Kaiser, then J.C. Gus and
Kaiser were carrying tools; all J.C. had was a little suitcase.
When
I saw them coming, I got out to open the doors for them. Gus turned around, so
he was facing Kaiser. He put his tools on the ground.
“Don’t get in the car, Eddie,” J.C. said.
Gus
took out a pistol. He pointed it at Kaiser’s stomach.
“There’s one behind you, too,” J.C. told him.
“Hey! What the fuck is—?”
“Open your
hands,” J.C. said. “Let everything drop.”
Kaiser did
what they told him. J.C. took out some plastic loops and tied Kaiser’s
hands behind his back.
“Walk,” J.C. said. He made a
movement with his head for me to come, too.
They marched him back into
the house. Inside, it was all wrecked. Holes in the walls, chunks of the wooden
floor pulled up, furniture all slashed, guts leaking out. There was a railroad
spike driven into the floor, deep.
They made Kaiser go over by the
spike. They told me to go get a kitchen chair. When I came back with it, they
made him sit down. Gus pulled Kaiser’s arms up, then dropped them over
the back of the chair.
“We don’t have a lot of time,”
J.C. said to Kaiser. “Where are they?”
“What are
you—?”
“Your partners,” J.C. said. “Where
are they? At the bottom of the private road? Back at our hideout?
Where?”
“You are stone motherfucking crazy,” Kaiser
said. He didn’t act scared at all.
“I am,” J.C. said,
like he was agreeing with him. “But this is just business. We need to
know how to get away from your partners. We need you to tell us.”
“This is all bullshit,” Kaiser said. “You just
don’t want to pay me my share. I fucking knew it.”
J.C. put
one hand under Kaiser’s chin, and lifted it up. He brought up his pistol,
and moved it slow in front of Kaiser’s eyes. Then he pushed the barrel
into the side of Kaiser’s neck.
J.C. held it there while Gus
wrapped more of the plastic cuffs around Kaiser’s ankles, doing it so
quickly I could hardly see his hands move. Then he made a loop out of the
plastic, so Kaiser’s ankles were chained to the spike.
Gus
stepped back a couple of feet. J.C. stepped away, too. Kaiser was staked out
solid; no way he could move from there.
“Show him,” J.C.
said to Gus.
Gus reached in his jacket and took out a fat sausage, like
you’d have for barbeque. He held it up for Kaiser to see, like he was
trying to sell it. Then he took out a coil of copper wire and cut off a piece
with a pair of pliers.
“You wrap it around like this,” Gus
said. “Couple of times, nice and tight, so it cuts off the blood
flow.” He showed Kaiser what he meant. The sausage bulged around where
the wire cut in. Three ugly little blisters, ready to pop.
“Depending on how tight you wrap it, takes as little as fifteen
minutes, to over an hour. But, eventually, the tip turns black. No blood
getting there, that’s what happens. Like the reverse of a hard-on. Or a
blowjob from a vampire.”
Gus smiled. His face stayed flabby, but
his little eyes were like shiny, hard black buttons.
“And then it
just falls off. But that’s okay—the wire’s so tight, you
don’t bleed to death. Like a tourniquet on a wound. After a while, the
next piece falls off. One piece at a time. When it’s all done, you look
just like a pussy. A pussy having her period.”
Kaiser’s
face got all wet and suety colored. He smelled ugly.
Gus took out a
pair of thin rubber gloves, like you see nurses wear in the clinic. He put them
on.
“When we’re done, we’re leaving you here for the
cops,” J.C. said to Kaiser. “It’s up to you. If you
don’t want to go back Inside without a cock, you’ll talk before it
falls off.”
Gus unbuckled Kaiser’s belt. I turned my face
away. I knew I was going to be sick. I wanted to be outside, behind the
wheel.
“At the first turnoff!” Kaiser said. His voice was
high and thin, like a sliver of glass. “Just past that stand of white
birch. They’re going to block the road with some big rocks.”
Gus stepped away, slipped around behind Kaiser’s chair. That seemed
to calm him down.
“How many?” J.C. asked him.
“Five. There wasn’t going to be any shooting. When the retard
gets out to see what’s wrong, they’re going to swarm the car. I
told them, you’re a professional. When you see all that hardware,
you’ll just give up the money.”
“So
Eddie’s
the retard, huh?” J.C. said. “You think it
was a high-IQ move to smuggle that little cell phone in with you?”
“I … I didn’t have no choice, I swear. They’ve got
my sister. They said, if I didn’t—”
“If you
have a sister, you’ve been fucking her since she was ten. After your
father got done with her,” J.C. said. “Just thank fucking Odin or
whoever that I can’t stand a murder rap. When the cops get here, you tell
them any story you want. But if you mention any of our names, you’re a
dead man, no matter where they hide you. Understand?”
“Yes.
You don’t need to do anything to me. I wouldn’t—”
Gus stepped out from behind the chair and clamped his left hand on the side
of Kaiser’s face. His right hand flashed. There was a little thudding
sound. When Gus took his right hand away, an ice pick was sticking out of
Kaiser’s ear.
I
didn’t take us back the way we came. I
drove the car through the woods. The Jeep was perfect for that. I went real
slow and careful, until I found a dirt track and I could make some speed. We
stayed with the track until it dead-ended.
After that, we walked.
Gus had a compass. We came out of the woods before first light, and I found a
car for us in a few minutes.
I
n the morning, J.C. divided the cash
three ways. “I’ll have to put the coins out on the wire,” he
said. “Could take a while, cost us a few points, but it’s the only
way to play it safe.”
Gus didn’t say anything to that.
Neither did I. J.C. wasn’t the kind of man to cheat his partners.
J.C. went to get himself another bottle of Coke. He drinks dozens of them
every day. Ice cold, right out of the bottle.
Gus was sharpening one of
his knives. He’s got a lot of them. Keeps them like razors.
When
J.C. got back, I asked him, “How did you know?”
“About the doctor? He’s a big man. With a big mouth. A pussy
hound, like I said. Man thinks with his cock, he’s not thinking straight,
Eddie. You never want to forget that.”
“Not about the
money,” I said. “About Kaiser. How did you know he was setting us
up?”
Gus laughed out his nose, the way he does when he thinks
somebody’s being stupid.
“I
didn’t
know,” J.C. said. “It was just a bluff.”
“You
mean, you weren’t really going to let Gus … do that to
him?”
“Nah. What for?”
“To make him
tell—”
“That stuff never works,” Gus said.
“Not to get information, anyway. It’s a crapshoot. I’ve seen
guys take stuff make you toss your cookies just to
hear
about, and
never say a word. And I’ve seen them die from fear, too, before you even
get started. They go into shock, like—their hearts just stop.”
“There was always that chance,” J.C. said. “We knew he
had the phone, but we didn’t know if he ever used it. Anyway, you
can’t trust any of those fucking Nazis. A mutt like him, soon as he got
squeezed, he would have given us all up, anyway.”
J.C. took
another hit off his bottle of Coke. “Some tools, they’re only good
for one job. When you’re done, you throw them away, am I
right?”
“Sure, J.C.,” I said.
T
hat was
about a year and a half ago. The last job we did before this one. And this one,
it will be the last job we do, ever.
“This one is our
retirement score,” J.C. said. “It all comes down to the odds.
Percentages. No matter how perfect you plan, there’s always the chance of
a wild card being dealt. The wheels can always come off. You do enough jobs,
sooner or later, you’re going to get popped.”
“You
ready to go legit, Eddie?” Gus asked me.
“Sure,” I
said.
Later, I wondered about it. Wondered about what I would be if I
wasn’t a getaway man anymore.
“
N
obody’s going
home after this one,” J.C. had told us. “Nobody’s going back
to tie up any loose ends. Nobody’s going back to say goodbye. Everything
you want to take, you bring with you, all right?”
That was why
Vonda was with us. Vonda is J.C.’s woman. She’s been with him a
long time, I think.
Gus didn’t bring anybody with him. Me,
neither.
When I moved out, I didn’t just sneak away in the middle
of the night. That wouldn’t be good at all—it’s the kind of
thing people talk about. I told some of the guys who hung around the garage
that I was pulling up stakes, heading for California. Guys who like cars are
always talking about doing that. I’ll bet folks who spend a few winters
out here talk about it, too.
I didn’t have a phone in the house
where I lived, but there was one in the garage. A pay phone.
I figured
I didn’t have to do anything about that phone, but I did use it to cancel
my electricity. The propane man would just see I had moved when he came out
next.
One of the reasons J.C. picked this cabin is because of the barn.
It’s in sorry shape. Probably hasn’t been painted in fifty years.
There’s even big holes in the roof. But it’s got good electricity
running out to it, and there’s enough space for all the cars.
J.C. has a brand new Ford Explorer. A blue one, with a trailer hitch for
towing his boat.
“After this, I’m a retired businessman,
Eddie,” he said when he showed the whole rig to me. “This setup,
it’s perfect camouflage. Cops expect outlaws to move fast—only a
civilian would be driving a rig like this.”
Gus had a white
Cadillac.
My car wasn’t a new one like theirs. Mine was a 1955
Thunderbird. I hadn’t been planning to put it on the road so soon, but
when J.C. said this was the last job, and we couldn’t go home after it, I
hurried up and got my car ready to travel. The interior’s not finished,
and I haven’t painted it yet, but it runs beautiful.
T
he
Thunderbird was the only thing I wouldn’t have been able to leave behind.
I’ve had it for a long time. I still think about the way I got it,
sometimes, because nothing like that had ever happened to me before.
The old lady who had the car for sale told me it was out in her garage, and
I should go look at it for myself. It was jammed tight against the back wall,
covered with a dusty tarp. There wasn’t any overhead light in the garage,
but the sun came in the open door enough for me to see what I was doing.
I only got the tarp a little way up before I saw what it was. When I peeled
it off completely, I could see the Thunderbird had been sitting there a long
time. The tires were all flat, the rubber on the windshield wipers was so dry
it crumbled in my fingers, and there was orange peel on the rocker panels and
around the headlights. The chrome was all pitted, and the floor of the trunk
was rusted right through.
It wasn’t locked. The interior
wasn’t so bad; but the seats had some ripped seams, and the dashboard had
cracks in it.
The key was in the ignition, but I didn’t try to
start it up. It looked like nobody had in a real long time.
I put the
tarp back on and closed up the garage. When I got back to the front door, it
opened, like the lady had been waiting for me.
“Well, young
man?” she said.
“It’s a real nice car,
ma’am,” I told her. “But I couldn’t afford to buy
it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you know
what that car is, ma’am?”
“I most certainly do. It
was my husband’s car, Lord rest his soul, and it was his pride and joy.
He was a minister, my husband. He used to call that car his little sin, because
he loved it so. Kept it polished like a gemstone.
“When
we’d go for a ride in that car, we knew people would be talking. A
minister in a car like that, and a bright red one to boot! Certain as winter,
some old nasty-mouths would be saying that’s Satan’s own color. But
Hiram always said, his judge was the Lord, and he wouldn’t answer to
anybody else.”
“Yes, ma’am. But, I mean, do you know
what it’s worth?”
“Well, there was another man come
here a week or so ago, he allowed he could let me have a thousand dollars for
it.”
“That’s a Thunderbird, ma’am. A ’55.
I could tell by the taillights. And I’ll bet it’s all original,
too, just like it came from the factory.”
“Oh, it is
certainly not,” she said. “It is in terrible condition, I’m
sure. My husband’s been gone, it’ll be ten years this spring, and I
haven’t so much as washed it.”
“No, ma’am, I
mean, it’s not changed from when it was new. It has the same motor and
the same transmission and—”