by Thomas Laird
“Just get on with it.”
“No. You made me wait. There’s only me and Steven left, and I don’t like being the penultimate name on your list, Evan. It’s very rude of you to rate me so low.”
“How many women and children did you slaughter in Dia Nguc?”
“You still on that same old note, Evan? It was war, asshole. Shit happens, just like on the bumper stickers.”
“None of them matter, do they?”
“Not really,” he says. “I’d kill them again, buddy. I would’ve killed you if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, too. It’s about survival.”
“What did a bunch of civilians have to do with survival?”
“I haven’t got time to talk with you, Evan. Stand up.”
I rise from his couch. The drapes are closed tightly, so the two cops can’t witness this.
“Get on your knees.”
“No,” I tell him.
“You’re gonna die anyway, so what’s the difference to you which way it happens?”
There’s a coffee table directly in front of me. I slip my foot underneath the bottom shelf of it, and when his eyes travel down to see what I’m about to do, I fling the table up in the air at his midsection, and my motion is so abrupt that the table hits him in the abdomen and he drops the .45 automatic that he was pointing at me and I’m on him before he can recover the gun and I head-butt him as he falls onto his back. The blow stuns him momentarily, so I thrust two fingers into his right eye and he yelps as we flounder on the carpet. I thrust the same two fingers into his other eye, and now he’s covering them both with his hands and there’s blood dribbling down his cheeks.
I haul myself up to a standing position as he’s writhing and moaning on the floor. Then I kick him in the throat several times, and he lowers his hands to his neck and I hear him gasping for air, but nothing’s going into him. So I take him by his shirt and I turn him over. He’s still struggling for intake, face down now, and I reach for my bag on the carpet behind me, and I take out the .22.
“We should have let them live, Mark. If we had, I wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t be down there. You enjoyed the work too much.”
I shoot him three times in the back of the head, and then I put the gun back in my bag and I head back to the kitchen. I slide open the patio door, and the cold night air hits me in the face, and I feel alive, just at that moment, and the feeling frightens me briefly. But then I walk out and find the policeman still unconscious, and I make my way toward my parked Chevy, down the street, passing all Mark McIntosh’s one-time neighbors as I retrace my steps through all the back lawns of all the ranch houses.
*
I’m on my flight back to the West Coast on time, again, and this trip will take over four hours if the winds don’t brace us and make the flight go longer. I’m on my way to Sausalito via San Francisco, and Tommy Costello awaits me.
*
Joe Greenberg is the most un-Jewish-looking man I’ve ever seen. He looks Nordic, downright Scandinavian. Maybe a Swede or a Dane or a Norwegian, but he’ll never be mistaken for Woody Allen or Myron Cohen. He’s blonde and blue-eyed, and he’d fit right into the Aryan mold. I take a taxi from the airport in Frisco across the bridge into Sausalito, and I get dropped off in front of his condo building. He owns both of the living spaces in the condominium, and one part is his work space, and the other half is where he lives with his current mistress—he’s never been attached to any woman for longer than three months, he told me. He doesn’t trust women, he says.
“I’m a devout misogynist,” he informed me the last time he did some research for me.
He opens the door when I press the bell.
“You still alive?”
Then he motions for me to enter.
When we’re inside he points out the couch, and I take a seat. He asks me if I’d like a beer and I ask him for a soda pop, and he goes into the kitchen and retrieves a can of Pepsi for me.
“You shouldn’t be coming here anymore, Evan. You know how Costello is.”
“Everywhere. Yeah.”
He smiles, sadly.
“From now on we need to converse by telephone only. You can’t stay here long. You need to go when it gets dark in a few hours.”
“Thanks for the warm welcome.”
“You can see my predicament, Evan. I don’t know if he knows about you and me, but he’s smart enough to figure out that you and I might have had an arrangement in the past. I don’t speak of my clients to him or anybody, but Tommy’s certainly not stupid.”
“I’ll leave as soon as it gets dark. I need papers. I need a new ID. Driver’s license, social security, credit card, the whole damn thing. I’ll pay you cash right now. Just don’t let Tommy know you got it directly off the carcass of his brother, Willy.”
“That’s more information than I needed,” Greenberg says. “I can get you a new set in two, three days. You’ll have to wait. You have two thousand in cash with you?”
I hand him two of the three thousand-dollar bills I kept from the premature passing of Willy Costello.
“I should give a shit that this is blood money, Evan, but you know me. Business is business… I was sorry to hear about the woman and the baby, the fetus, whatever. Willy Costello was always a vicious little animal.”
I nod at him.
“Don’t go after Tommy. It’s not possible. You can’t get to him. It’s not like those soldiers you did. They were alone, by themselves. Tommy’s got an army, and you know it. There’s no way in or out of that goddamned fortress he lives in, so don’t throw your life away.”
“I don’t have a life, Joe. Willy took it away from me.”
“Find another woman. I always do.” He grins lamely. “All this killing,” Greenberg laments, “it’s bad for the profit margin. It’s hell on expense, Evan. Go take my papers in a couple days and vanish. You did it once before.”
He gave me the Roberts ID when I landed the job for the Costellos.
“You can’t see me now.” I smile at him. “I’ve already disappeared. Like Houdini. I’ll call you in three days. Have the stuff by then, all right?”
I stand up.
“I’ll call a cab for you,” he says.
“No, I’ll walk it until I find a bus or something. It’s dark now, so I’ll make it. Remember, I’ll call you in three days. I can’t stay out there for long, right? Tommy’s vast armada will be sweeping the high seas for me.”
He lets me out his front door, and then I hear a female voice call out his name, and Joe tells her to shut the hell up, he can hear her fine.
I find a bus stop four blocks from Greenberg’s condo, and it traverses the bridge back into San Francisco. I get off downtown, and I find a no-name hotel for $50 a night, and I throw my bag on the bed and I fall asleep immediately. Black hits my inner eyes as I hit the mattress, and I get scared before I conk out because it feels like I’m already dead.
*
I spend the three days I have to wait for Greenberg’s new papers for me inside the hotel. There’s a TV, and they have a gift shop in the lobby where I buy a couple of paperbacks to make the time pass. Mostly I have those daymares and nightmares about Li and the way I found her after Willy shot her. I recall her dead eyes and her still chest. I also have dreams, when I doze off, that I’m still in Dia Nguc, and that I’ll remain there forever, on my back clutching the new aperture that VC gifted me with in the firefight. I dream of the helicopter flight to the medical hootch, and I see the red-headed nurse who tried to soothe me with soft words that I heard in some drugged-up mist. But I keep getting transported back to that crossroads in Quang Tri Province in 1972. It seems like light years away, but it was only 1972.
I don’t venture out of the hotel for those three days because I don’t want to make it easy on Tommy Costello. I’m hoping he’s still looking for me behind every closed door he opens. I hope he has bad dreams about me hounding him straight to hell, that it keeps him up at night, so he finds himself at
three o’clock in the morning twenty-four hours a day in the underworld I’ve constructed, just for him.
I’ve got to survive to get within a gunshot of Tommy Costello. He deserves worse than a single headshot round. He deserves far worse than I can give him, and I know there’s no judgment coming from a higher being, like the one the drunks in AA believe in, but that single pop to his melon is the best I can hope to do.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sausalito, 1985
I let my hair grow long, and I change the color to auburn red, and I begin to fit in better with the denizens of the Bay Area. If I stayed with the GI cut, I would’ve been making it easier for Tommy Costello and his legion of goons to spot me. So I’m staying out of San Francisco, for the time being. Every hour that passes is time for Tommy to anticipate our meeting. Maybe he feels confident with all his pistoleros walking point for him in Frisco, but there has to be a way of meeting up with him one on one. I’m going to go to the city by the Bay once I change my appearance a little bit more, and I’m going to tail him for a while and see what his habits are. He’s got to relax at some point, and I’ll be there to cap him at the base of the skull. He deserves a death far more painful, but I’ll likely have only the one shot to get him and finish him. I know the odds are still stacked against me, but I have nothing else left to do in my short, unhappy life.
*
I’m running out of money, and even Greenberg isn’t loose and friendly enough to float my bills for any extended time. He could still drop a dime on me and collect some hefty cash from Tommy, but I know the blonde-haired Jew likes Costello only a little more than I do. He does business with him, but that’s as far as it goes. Tommy Costello has more enemies than just me, but his other adversaries fear him enough to leave him be.
Money is always the problem. The cash I lifted from Willy is nearly depleted, so the next thought I have is to locate a source that’ll sustain me until I can kill the man who ordered the job on me—and the hit that killed two innocent bystanders, Li and the living fetus inside her.
My interest in Steven James is on the wane because I know my pursuit of Tommy Costello is likely to be as successful as a kamikaze pilot trying to hit one of our destroyers or flat tops in World War II. If I can squeeze one off at him before the hail of lead finds me, I’ll call it square, but I’m not coming out of this firefight alive, and as I said before, I don’t much give a shit. Eating and keeping this roof over my head—a one-bedroom apartment in the not-so-nice section of Sausalito—is on my short-term list of things to do. Then there’s money to pay off Greenberg for my new ID, which has me becoming Matthew Carson. I still owe my Jewish confederate over a thousand bucks because the two thousand didn’t cover the final tab. Seems crime is becoming more expensive all the time.
The bright idea of hitting Tommy Costello’s banks in San Francisco arrives in my head, and I’m thinking it is yet another way to torment him. Nothing hurts the Italians more than someone stealing their money. At heart, they’re primarily thieves. Murder, for most of them, is simply a necessary evil. They’d rather rob you than deal with the messes that killings entail.
Tommy is, of course, heavily into drug trafficking, and I came across a couple of the locations where he distributes cocaine and various other illegal pharmaceuticals which have always been popular to the freak types in San Fran, but coke and the rest have filtered out into the mainstream, as everybody knows, and the business in drugs is monster-sized. Like the safe cracker said, you go where the money is.
*
My hair is nearly shoulder length and auburn red, and I’m wearing a bandana on my forehead, and I’m sporting ragged-ass, bleached-out blue jeans that I never thought I’d ever see covering my bottom half, and my basketball shoes have holes in the side and my little toes on either side are close to popping out of the shoes. I look like the people who spat on us at the airports a little over a decade ago. The .22 is stuck in my back waistband, and I wear a sleeveless blue shirt that flops outside my pants and helps to cover the piece.
This is going to be a hit and run, and I emphasize the word run in my head because I have to be in and out in under two minutes. Tommy has armed hirelings in front and at the back of the bank—it’s an old storefront that used to be a bodega before the chain coffee shops began to take over in the Wharf area. The cops are bought here, and no one jacks with the guys in the drug salon because a lot of police are paying their kids’ college tuition with the money that comes from looking the other way.
The guy at the door sits behind a locked entry. It’s not like you can walk right in and make a coke order. You have to knock, and when I do the door cracks open and the greaseball who guards the front side looks me over. I can see the bulge under his jacket. It’s cool in Frisco today, but not cold enough for anything other than a light jacket. It’s January, so we’re in the middle of an unusual heat wave.
“Yeah?” he mutters.
“Pedro sent me.”
“Who the hell’s Pedro?”
I send my right foot to his balls, and I’ve caught him by surprise. Down he goes, and when he hits the floor, I stomp him twice more on the back of his head, and then I relieve him of his piece. The four drone-women who are packing the nickel bags behind the partition pop their heads around the partition that blocks me from seeing them at first, and when they see the Italian face down on the tiles, all four screech, which sends the gunman in the back heading straight at me. I slam the door shut behind me, and when I see the new arrival rushing me with a sawn-off shotgun aimed at my midsection, I pull the trigger on my new .38 three times and I catch him in the stomach twice and in the throat once, and he flops. The blood starts to pool beneath him in a few seconds, and the four worker-drone Mexican women start to howl once more.
“Shut up!” I beller at them, and when I point the downed greaser’s .38 at them, they follow orders, like good hive members.
“I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here for the money.”
I know where they keep it. It’s in a cabinet in the back. I’ve been here before with Willy Costello, and I know Tommy’s arrogance doesn’t require a safe. He’s too secure in the knowledge that anyone dumb enough to boost him won’t survive twelve hours on the street before he finds the thief, and then he and his associates will begin doing a rearrangement of finger and toe joints with their tool of choice, the ball peen hammer.
I make for the money cabinet after I dutifully show the four women the .38 once again.
“Sit on the floor,” I warn them.
They all four take a seat, in a cross-legged fashion. It appears they’ve already learned to assume the position.
I get to the cabinet and open it, and it’s like a field trip to a bank vault. The cash is stacked in hundreds and fifties and twenties. I yank out the black trash bag I had stuffed in my front waistband.
Then a blow from behind slams me into the wooden face of the cabinet, and the force relieves me of the half-filled trash bag of cash and of the .38 I took from the asshole at the front.
I recover and spin about, and one of the senoritas is in a karate stance, and the other three are on their feet and are staring at me with lethal Arctic eyes. I suppose all four of them might be black belts with the way my luck is currently headed.
I rip the .22 from my back waistband and I shoot the kung fu bitch twice in the forehead, and she stands in abject surprise for a moment before she collapses to the floor. The other three give out a brief shriek, and I motion for them to take a seat again.
“I’ll kill the rest of you,” I warn them.
They sit on their hands, literally.
I’m a little wobbly, but I go back to stuffing twenties and fifties and hundreds in my black plastic sack. When I can find no more room for the bills in the garbage sack, I close the top with the ready-made red ties at the top.
“If you stick your heads out that front door, I’ll put some new holes in them. You hear me?”
The three dark-skinned Mexican women nod. Appare
ntly, they speak English. It never occurred to me that Spanish might be their first language. Looks like Tommy made sure his hired help all speak the native tongue.
I lift the black purse and I move hurriedly to the front entry. This has all taken more than my planned two minutes.
I walk down Hermitage Street, and I look back a few times, but I don’t see those three remaining mestizo babes emerging from the storefront.
The first cab I see, I hail, and he stops with a slight squeal of his tires, and then my bag and I are inside and headed for the Golden Gate Bridge and Sausalito on the other side.
*
I get out of the taxi a good four blocks before the location of my apartment building. I don’t need a cabbie with a great memory helping the Costellos locate me here in Sausalito. A four-block separation is good enough to make a sighting of the guy with the red hair and the bandana fairly unlikely, although I’m certain they’ll come looking anyway.
When I get up in the second-floor flat where I crash, I immediately count the proceeds. I’m not happy I had to shoot the woman. She was just an employee, but perhaps she thought Tommy would reward her for capturing a bandit, and little did she know how happy Costello would have been if she’d knocked me cold and waited until the Italian cavalry arrived and then found out who it was she helped nab. But I couldn’t have the other three coming for me en masse. So I had to frighten them off. It beats having to waste the quartet.
The count stands at $86,000 and change. That should keep me in peanut butter and bread for a while, and I can pay off Greenberg, too. He’s a good guy, but I don’t want him to become itchy and start figuring out how much I’m worth to Tommy Costello.
I shear off my long hair, and then I shave my skull to the flesh. My head feels naked, and the light from the bulb reflects off the top of my head a little. I’m going to grow a mustache first, and then when the hair on top grows back, I’ll sprout a full beard. I’m thinking of all the variations of change I can use to hide inside my own body, and the list is very finite. There’s only so much I can do to change my appearance before repetition catches up with me along with Costello.
