by Travis Hill
Contents
Title
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Author's Note
ONE LAST JOB
By Travis Hill
Copyright 2013
SMASHWORDS EDITION
Cover Art by: Heather Senter
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
CHAPTER 1
I got out of the car and headed straight for the man on the other side of the gas pump island. He didn’t see me coming, obliviously pumping gas into his Toyota Celica. I rounded the pump and with a quick movement, I pulled out a silenced 9mm pistol and pointed it at Mr. Toyota’s head. He looked up at me just in time to see a small puff come from the end of the pistol’s muzzle. A short, barely-muffled cracking sound accompanied it, along with a wet thunk from a portion of Mr. Toyota’s face as it collapsed and blew out of the back of his head. This mess, and possibly the bullet, collided with the rear window, creating a small starring pattern streaked with blood and brains.
I gave a nervous look towards the front of the convenience store before I turned around and walked in what I hoped was a casual manner back to my beat-up 1982 Honda Prelude. I dropped the gun in Tanya’s lap as I got in the driver’s side, started the car, put it in gear, and tried not to burn every last molecule of rubber off the already-bald tires getting the hell out of there. She quickly worked the gun over with alcohol and an old white t-shirt, leaving no traces of Billy Jensen and Tanya Tanner. About three miles down Highway 182, we turned south onto the freeway. My little Honda finally got up to freeway speeds, and we rode in silence, as silent as an ’82 Prelude with almost three hundred thousand miles can be at seventy-five miles per hour.
My heart began to race in my chest. At the same time, it felt like someone dropped an acid bomb in my stomach. Spots were forming before my eyes, and I felt myself starting to black out from being unable to breathe.
“Keep it together, Billy!” Tanya yelled at me as the car began to drift.
She pinched me until I screamed in pain. The Honda veered over the center line, but I quickly regained control and brought it back into the right lane, the suffocating feeling dissipating slowly. I looked over at her once I was sure I was going to be okay. Tears were streaming from her eyes, causing her mascara and pancake to become mudslides. She could fix it later, but I don’t think either of us could fix what I’d just done.
I reached over to touch her arm reassuringly, but she flinched away, and began to sob loudly.
“You fucking KILLED him!” she screeched, her voice rising to a pitch that could shatter glass as well as eardrums. “Killed him killed him killed him killed him!” I began to wonder if she was going to pop like I almost did. I put my eyes back on the road, waiting to see if her hysteria would pass.
“Fucking killed him,” she finally cried softly, rolling down her window.
A deep barrow pit lined the freeway on her side for what looked to be another mile or so. We both checked mirrors, and seeing no one behind us, she threw the gun, still wrapped in the t-shirt, as hard as she could.
She finally did pop once her window was rolled back up. A great flood of tears and blubbers and moans soaked my shoulder as her face crashed into it, her right arm searching through my seat belt to latch on to my side.
“I’m sorry, baby,” I soothed, even though I was still feeling like I was outside of my own body, in shock. “I had to. You know I had to. You know it.”
I stroked her hair with one hand while trying to keep the Honda steady on the road. My legs were pins and needles and soft gel all at once. It felt like the gas pedal was too hard to keep pressed down. I had to keep glancing at the speedometer to make sure I wasn’t going thirty, or a hundred, and attracting the wrong kind of attention.
“Do you think we’ll be free now?” she asked, barely audible from the folds of my shirt, the rumble of the Honda attempting to drown her out.
“Yeah, I did what he asked, all the way,” I reassured her. “That was the deal.”
I was lying of course. There’s just no way a guy like Alexi Nikolayev Petrovski, Pasha Bear to his friends, was going to let fish like us go. Normally she was as realistic about life as me, but watching me shoot a man in the face tends to shatter the walls of what had been real for your whole life up to that point.
“What do we do now?” she asked, sitting back in her seat, fussing with her hair. She’d pull out the makeup any moment and start repairing the damage her tears had caused.
“Just keep driving for a while, until we need gas. Then I’ll call.”
“What will he say?”
“How the hell should I know? He’ll probably have one of his thugs, one of the more intelligent ones, talk to me, tell me what we have to do next.”
“You just said we would be free!” she wailed.
“I know, I know. I meant what we’d have to do, you know, like, ‘go to Mexico and never set foot into Texas again’ or some shit like that, that’s all I meant.”
“We’ll have to live in Mexico?”
“Jesus Christ, I don’t know what he’ll say, okay? I’m just sayin’ he’ll probably say some shit about our debt is cleared, and don’t let him or his boys see us ever again.”
She shifted in her seat again, staring straight ahead through the windshield while curling her hair around her fingers absently. Soon enough, she pulled out her little makeup bag, fished out the small, round mirror, and cursed under her breath at what was reflected back at her.
“Gawd…I look like a zombie,” she baited, feigning disgust.
“A pretty ugly one, for sure,” I agreed, not looking at her.
That got a giggle from her. She turned her head coyly at me, reached out with her left hand and gripped my knee. If she’d done that five minutes ago, we might have crashed. I had only just barely got my rubbery legs under control. I looked down at her hand, then over to her attempt at being demure. I could see the dirty thoughts racing across her face, and felt myself trying to respond. Once I made the call, we could at least enjoy a few more nights to explore those dirty thoughts before whatever came next.
CHAPTER 2
Twenty minutes later the orange glow of the fuel light alerted me it was time to exit the freeway. I chose the Chevron out of the four gas stations that anchored each corner of the freeway overpass. Tanya had fixed her face back to its original, pristine, painted-on quality, even darkening up the violet eye shadow more than before. I always liked it when she put it on thick like that. She looked like she came straight out of the trailer park or truck stop, but so what? It wasn’t too far from the truth for both of us. It didn’t make her any less attractive.
I pulled up to the pumps furthest from the cashier’s window, though it wouldn’t do much good if the cops came this way later and decided to look at any security camera tapes the station might have recorded. Tanya went in to pay for the gas while I headed to the pay phone near the vacuums. I fished a few quarters out of my front pocket, dropped them in the slot, and dialed Petrovski’s number. A feminine but mechanical voice informed me that I needed to deposit another two dollars and fifty cents to complete the call. Petrovski would probably be able to trace the call, but I’d rather not have to owe him six points on a ten dollar collect call. On top of whatever else the commie bastard wanted from us next.
Tanya emerged from paying the cashier and strutted towards the car. I wished she wouldn’t walk like that right now. That hip-swaying shit always catches man-attention, and most gas station cashiers were men. Even lady cashiers might notice too m
uch because of that sway, telling the cops that there was a slutty little strumpet strutting her shit in here just two hours ago, Officer Friendly. She fumbled with the gas cap, then the pump itself, while I waited for the other end of the line to connect.
“Petrovski’s office,” a husky, very Russian voice said.
“It’s Billy,” I said, turning away from watching her pump gas to read some of the graffiti etched into the metal sides of the phone bank.
For a good time call 555-9873
A sticker that said Mean People Suck!
with
Nice People Swallow!
etched under it, and assorted others were available for my literary pleasure.
“Da. Hold.” That was probably the only other word this jughead knew in English. I heard the phone click, and then Petrovski’s voice was in my ear.
“Well done, comrade,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was pissed or pleased, but it didn’t really matter. “You are on news right now even!”
Well, if that made him happy I guess. “Cameras?” I asked, not really afraid at this point, no matter what was going to happen next. A life of serving this Russian pig, or a life of serving some giant black man or white supremacist in prison before one of Petrovski’s lackeys nailed me with a shiv in the chow line…what a choice.
“Nyet comrade. No description either. You are pro, no?” He chuckled a little at his own joke. I wanted to get to the point quickly.
“So we are clear? With you I mean.” I asked.
“Well, comrade, that’s just the thing I wanted to talk to you about.”
My guts clenched up. I knew it would go down like this. You can never get out from under men like Petrovski. I could only imagine what our next ‘task’ would be, and for what debt I might still owe him that needed repaying…or risk getting hunted down and made an example of with a trademarked Solntsevskaya hit.
“What’s the debt this time, Alexi? Tanya ‘borrowed’ some heroin? I only paid off the interest on the points of the loan, not the loan itself?”
“Comrade Billy!” he cried out in his greatest Uncle Russian Bear voice. “I’m hurt!”
“I’m sure,” I said back into the phone.
“I’m hurt that you would forget your little promise from the club,” he said in a much more serious voice.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
I knew it. I fucking knew it. A man like Petrovski never forgets a shame, an insult, a question of his manhood. Men like Petrovski can have everything they want, and what they can’t have, they steal or destroy.
“I’m afraid Jesus isn’t around to do this job for me, or for you.”
“What do you want?”
“You are still near desert, yes?” he asked, almost casually.
“No, not really,” I lied. “Closer to cornfields.”
“Billy!” Petrovski laughed. “If only you weren’t in the south of Texas, I could believe that. Take care of this quickly Billy, for your sake.”
My body filled with ice at the click from his end, the phone dead in my hand. Dead like I now felt inside. Why the hell did she have to say some shit like that to him at the club that night? Couldn’t she just have given him what he wanted? I’d have hated her for it of course, but at least we’d still have each other. She could have just fucked him and I’d have understood…you don’t refuse a monster like Petrovski.
I don’t even think Tanya was his type. What I do think, is that she was my type, which made Petrovski instantly want her for no other reason. Men like that have to show men like me that we can never be what they are, never have what they own, that we will always be slaves, and they our masters.
I slammed the phone back onto the latch as hard as I could, digging out a good chunk of flesh off my fingers in the process. I headed back to the car, trying to think of what to do from here. I loved her more than anyone else I’d ever been with. We could run away to Mexico, but Mexico would only give us a short window of extra time. Mexico, Brazil, France, Afghanistan, it didn’t matter where we ran to. Solntsevskaya was global, and no place was safe. Hell, they could probably find us on the fucking moon if we went there.
Tanya smiled at me, stretching, making sure her breasts poked at the air in front of her, then wiggled her ass a little as she hung up the hose before getting back into the Honda. I got in and we drove back to the freeway entrance. Instead of hitting the on-ramp, I went under the overpass and headed through the little hamlet that inevitably builds up around freeway interchanges out in Bumfuck Egypt.
“No freeway?” she asked.
“Change of plans. He wants us to head out to a safe house and pick up the money.” I said, not looking at her.
“Money?”
“Yeah, he said it was a bonus for taking care of things properly, something to start a new life with. But we can never come back east of the Rockies, or he’ll kill us both.” I answered.
“How much money?”
“Shit, I don’t know, Tanya. I didn’t want to ask. He just said to do it and we were finished, and I want to be finished. I’m tired of this shit.”
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry Billy. I’m just scared, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to sleep again after seeing that man’s head explode all over his car.”
I put my hand on her leg, gave her the ‘Billy the Quarterback’ grin, and said, “You’ll be able to sleep just fine after I take care of that virus in you.”
“Will you cure me?” she asked with a sly smile of her own, grabbing my hand and moving it closer to her sweet spot.
“I promise,” I said, hoping my voice didn’t crack. “You’ll be cured forever.”
CHAPTER 3
We drove in silence for another hour, until I saw the place off to the right. I kept trying to figure some way out of this mess, but it always kept coming back to Petrovski. One day someone would make him pay. It probably wouldn’t be me, but karma was a bitch in the end. Guys like Petrovski always ended up bleeding out in the street or some café booth, witnesses silent, newspapers dropping giant headlines like “Mobster Gunned Down!” or the ever-catchy but moronic “No Glasnost for Petrovski!”
I turned off the road onto the gravel trail that led up to what looked, upon closer inspection, to be a burned-out farmhouse and burned-out barn. The Honda rattled and shook more than normal as I drove down the washboard road. She had stopped filing her nails as soon as we turned onto the gravel trail, but still looked bored. Maybe the money wasn’t important to her, or maybe she’d already forgotten we were supposed to pick up money. I loved her more than I’ve ever loved a woman before, but she wasn’t always the brightest tooth in the smile.
The Honda ground to a stop between what was left of the barn and the house.
“Come on, help me find it,” I said, turning off the car and opening my door.
She got out of the car and waited for me to lead. I pointed at the opening to the barn, and we walked in together, holding hands like the high school sweethearts we were. I spotted the jumbled pile of blackened beams in the far corner. I headed straight for them with a purpose. Letting go of her hand, I peered into the pile, studying it.
After a few seconds, I said, “A-ha!” and then turned around and walked back towards the entrance.
“Where are you going?” she asked, looking indecisive as to whether to wait or follow me.
“Right back,” I called over my shoulder. “Got to get a damn crowbar to move those beams.”
She flipped her hair and turned back to study the beams. Once back at the car, I reached in and grabbed the keys out of the ignition and went around to the trunk. The instant my key turned in the lock, I felt the tears come, hot and gritty. I stood there for a few seconds, trying my best to burn them out with internal rage. Petrovski. Petrovski would pay one day. When I felt like I was in control again, I reached into the trunk and grabbed the little tire iron that always comes in these import cars, like all Americans have tiny fuckin’ hands.
I felt the emotional jolt of a h
appy memory flood into my brain. A year ago I was cursing my mobile phone, when Tanya had piped up and asked if the reason all computers and electronics were made in China was because Asians had such tiny little hands. When I just stared at her, she plowed right on ahead and asked if I thought it was the reason they could get all those little circuits packed into such small devices?
I remembered laughing so hard that I literally fell on the floor, and how she got so angry because she was being perfectly serious. That made me laugh even harder, until sharp pains in my stomach forced me to gasp in between guffaws. She eventually joined in, and we ended up rolling around naked for a couple hours after that. We weren’t going to be laughing and rolling around tonight, I thought, closing the trunk lid before walking back into the barn.
“Billy? I don’t see anything in this pile at all. You sure this is where he said the money is supposed to be?” She wasn’t even looking back at me, poor girl. Better this way.
“Yeah, hon, he said it was going to be right there,” I said, raising the tire iron over my head.
Author’s Note(s)
First of all, thank you very much for reading this short story. This story was written a few years ago when I took a great Creative Writing course at the College of Southern Idaho. My professor, Priscilla Bingham, turned into my mentor, and encouraged me to pursue my dream of being a full-time author.
Fast forward a few years, with this new self-publishing thing, and here we both are, you reading, me writing. I’ve thought about revisiting Billy Jensen’s world quite a few times, but for one reason or another I have never quite been able to make my way down to the south of Texas to meet up with him again to see what other stories he has in him. One day…we’ll meet again.
I’d like to thank my wife Carly, as always, because without her, I’d probably be homeless and eating wet cardboard. She, like Ms. Bingham, encouraged me to pursue this dream. Hopefully I make both of them proud.
