Silent Night

by L T Vargus

  “You really think he won’t see me?” Vince asked. “I feel exposed.”

  Between the tools and grease rags on the shelf beside him, Frank could see the top of the big mook’s head over the dirty, bowing top of the old deep freeze. Gelled hair poked up in little spikes, emphasizing rather than hiding where Vince was starting to thin.

  “You’re fine,” Frank said. The spike of adrenaline left over from breaking into the garage made his words come out harsher than he meant them. More of a snap than a reassurance. To make Vince feel better, he added, “Nobody really looks around when they drive into their garage, not unless they just moved there. Ten to one he wheels in on his phone, doesn’t even slow down to make sure he’s not scraping the passenger side of his car off.”

  “Still feels exposed.”

  “What is that, your word of the day? You got the solid object to hide behind, you cry baby. Meanwhile, I’m over here behind a shelf. You ever seen a shelf, Vince? Your only cover is about three-quarter-inch wide, and they’re spaced two feet apart. If anybody’s exposed here, it’s me.”

  Vince muttered something that might have been an agreement. Or at least not more of an argument.

  Good. Because at his age, and with his knees, Frank wasn’t crouching anywhere. The younger hitman got the shitty position, and the more experienced one got the stand-up spot. Seniority. Same as any business.

  With the complaints out of the way, they settled in to wait. Hard to say how long it would take. They hadn’t been following this guy, didn’t know his routine, and the boss hadn’t given them a timeframe or anything, so it was just good, old-fashioned patience now.

  Frank rested his spine against the stud. As long as this fucker didn’t pull a stunt like staying overnight at a girlfriend’s house or something, this wouldn’t be so bad. He could maybe even get a couple minutes of meditation in. He’d been trying meditation every now and then since he heard about it on the morning talk show a week ago. Supposedly doing it every day for years cured this old crunchy granola chick of her arthritis, so now she was teaching everybody to do it. Frank didn’t buy into that, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to shell out cash for her instructional video, but meditating was also supposed to give you more energy and help clean out your mind of all the toxins and stress that built up from your day. He could use that. So he just did the simple sound bite version Ol’ Crunchy had shown the talk show anchors.

  He shut his eyes and focused on his breathing, counting as he inhaled and exhaled. Inhale the positive energy, exhale the negative.

  “Frankie.”

  He scowled. “What?”

  “How does Cialis know when to work?”

  “What?”

  “How does it know when to give you a boner?” Vince asked. “Viagra, you take it and, boom, boner town. But the commercials for Cialis say—”

  “Hang on, hang on. You need Viagra?”

  “What? No. Everybody tries it.”

  “I haven’t. I don’t have nothing wrong down there.”

  “Me neither,” Vince insisted. “It was just for fun. Aria got it for me. We popped a couple with some Red Bull and vodka. It’s fun.”

  “That hooker took Viagra, too?”

  “Don’t talk about her like that, Frankie. She was a dancer.”

  “Sounds like she was a he,” Frank muttered.

  Vince must not have heard it, though. “So anyway, Viagra works as soon as you take it, but the commercials for Cialis all say like, ‘Do it when you’re ready’ or ‘the time is right’ or something. How does it know when the time is right? How doesn’t it just give you a hard-on for the whole day?”

  “Am I a doctor?” Frank said. “How am I supposed to know?”

  “Well, I figured, since you’re older…”

  Frank rolled his eyes. “This again. I told you, fifty—”

  With a sudden bang that made him jump, the garage door’s rubber seal came unstuck from the frozen concrete and started whirring upward on its track. Cold wind gusted in. Frank flattened himself against the wall, ignoring the insulation now, trying to smash himself down to the smallest he could be. Exposed. Vince had it right, he felt exposed. Thank God the big ape had the sense to shut up. Frank didn’t want to lean over to see whether Vince had scrunched down, but Frank assumed he probably had. Even animals had some sense.

  The car rumbled into the garage without any hesitation, something knocking in the engine as it shut down. Frank twisted the rope end of the lawnmower cord around his left hand and squeezed the hard-plastic T of the pull start end in his right. His heart was thudding in his chest, and his breath was trying to come fast and loud, but he went back to counting it out like with meditation, forcing it to slow. Then the overhead door was whirring back down, making all the clunks and creaks it had before in reverse. The car door still hadn’t opened.

  Had the guy seen them? Maybe got a feeling something wasn’t quite right? Would he run?

  Frank tilted his head forward a fraction, looking between a bag of rock salt and a Dremel box.

  The guy was hunched over his phone, smiling at something. He scrolled a little, laughed, then started zinging his finger around the screen, either playing a game or doing that one-touch typing Frank hated.

  This could take a while. Frank glanced over toward Vince’s hiding spot. Hopefully, the knucklehead wouldn’t get impatient. It’d be too easy for their guy to crank the car back on and ram his way out of the garage if he saw them too early.

  But Vince didn’t move, and the guy didn’t look up from his phone, even when he finally climbed out of the car. He was doing the finger-typing again, this time with one thumb, as he reached for the door to the house.

  Frank made his move, eyes on the target’s shoulders and the back of his neck. The lawnmower cord was warm in his hands. Body heat. His fingers clamped down around it.

  Vince stood up from behind the deep freeze, gun on the target. The guy let out a wet little gasp.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Vince said. “Put the phone down.”

  He didn’t have time to set the phone down, but that didn’t matter. The order was mostly to keep targets from looking behind them. A distraction. Dinner and a show. While the target’s brain was working that out, Frank’s whipped the cord up and over the guy’s head and wrapped it around his neck. This guy was a little too tall for Frank to get decent leverage, so he twisted and pulled him backward, jamming his knee into the lower back until the guy’s feet came out from under him. Then Frank was able to put a foot on his back right between the shoulder blades and really stretch out the cord.

  It took a while. Seemed even longer with the guy struggling, trying to swipe a hand behind him and claw at the cord. It was buried deep in the folds of his neck, though. No danger of him getting a finger under there. Vince kept a gun on him just in case.

  From behind, Frank was able to watch the back of the guy’s neck and jowls go red, then purple, then finally an ashy gray. He’d seen similar jobs from Vince’s angle, knew the eyes would be bulging like hard-boiled eggs trying to leap out of the skull and onto the concrete right about then. His arms were shaking, fingers and biceps cramping, but he didn’t let up on the pressure. The target was still struggling, albeit weakly, even with the gray skin.

  Even after the guy went still and the head lolled forward, Frank kept up the pressure for a long while. With a strangling, you had to be sure.

  Finally, Frank let the body slump forward to the floor, the lawnmower cord unwinding and sliding through his fingers. His arms felt like they weighed a ton each, two dead stalks coming out of the trunk of him, his hands twisted into claws like they were still clamped around the ligature. The muscles in his wrists and shoulders jumped and twitched with little aftershocks.

  He and Vince stood over the body a minute. Silent. Staring down. Frank had the notion the guy might suddenly get up and take a run at them. Or at least twitch a leg. But nothing moved. All was still.

  Just fine with Frank. After al
l that, he didn’t mind admitting that he was a little winded. It took it out of you, strangling a guy. He was happy to rest for a minute before they moved the corpse.

  “So, this guy’s one of them,” Vince said, disgust twisting his face into a scowl.

  “What are you talking about?” Frank swiped sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket. “Them who?”

  “Those sick fucks out of Kansas City. Sex trafficking kids and whatever the hell. Pedo bears.”

  Frank shrugged. “Don’t know. Don’t care. And neither should you. We get the orders, we do the job, we get paid. The rest is for someone else to fucking worry about.”

  “All I’m saying is he deserves it, right?” Vince said. “You dick with little kids, you got this or worse coming to you. If anything, we shoulda torched his scrotum a good long while before we offed him. Give his sack that nice char like a roasted poblano pepper.” Vince’s eyes got a faraway look in them. “You put it right in the flame, get those blackened shriveling spots going until they cover the outside. That’s the sweet spot. Not everybody can do that without just burning a hole in it, you know. It takes attention to detail.”

  Frank shrugged again, not sure whether Vince was fantasizing about the pepper or the scrotum at that point.

  “Maybe let’s just move him.”

  Chapter 38

  The wind was screaming over the lake, but Ellen Sandrick could hardly hear it over the noisy, drunken crowd and the MCs for the event yelling out corporate sponsors over the music pumping from the speakers. She could sure as crap feel it, though. Even with all these people be-bopping around Navy Pier, drinking and waiting for the fireworks to start, the cold knife of air somehow managed to cut through to her. She knew she shouldn’t have dressed up. She’d told her sister that it was going to be cold, but Emery insisted.

  “I haven’t had a night out in six months, Elle. I’m going to dress like I’m not a stay-at-home mom, and you’re going to dress like you’re not a programmer who never has to leave her house, or I’m going to complain the whole time, even worse than my kids would, which I know you hate because Brian showed me the bratty kids in that one game named after Kai and Iris.”

  Ellen had to admit that the sequined bomber jacket and the faux leather pants looked hot as heck on her. She’d even gotten a couple appreciative glances from guys in the crowd. But she was freezing. She would one hundred percent rather be warm and toasty than sexy, no matter what Emery said. If she escaped this icy hell without hypothermia, it was strictly long underwear, fuzzy pajama pants, and coveralls for her until at least June.

  At least the sky was pretty. You couldn’t see the stars for all the lights, and the clouds were shrouded in that weird orange-gray nimbus Chicago gave off at night, but it lit up the fat snowflakes swirling overhead like millions of slowly fading sparks. None of the flakes made it down to her. Probably something to do with all the heat coming off the crowd. But Ellen imagined they were drifting up along the roads and buildings.

  Beside her, a blue-white light came on.

  “I don’t think I told them about the formula,” Emery said.

  “Put your phone down, Em,” Ellen said without looking.

  “Brian won’t read the directions on the can,” her sister argued. “Then Tay will end up constipated — or worse, with diarrhea — and you know babies can’t—”

  “This is your warning.” Ellen breathed out a long breath of white and watched the wind snatch it away. “If you don’t put your phone away, I’m going to throw it in the lake.”

  “I just want to make sure he gets the ratio of formula to water right,” Emery argued.

  Ellen tilted her head back down, smiling even though she hated to give up the night sky for all the noisy, frantic celebration from people just like them, trying for a few hours to forget the stress and mundanity of real life.

  “Brian’s been a dad as long as you’ve been a mom,” she said. “He’s not incompetent. You’re just a helicopter parent who can’t stand to give up control for five seconds.”

  Emery’s perfectly made-up face twisted toward anger for a second, and she opened her mouth, but Ellen didn’t apologize or let her get a word in edgewise. Her sister needed to get out of her head for one second and enjoy this awful, freezing, crazy night. She forged ahead before Emery could say anything.

  “You look freaking beautiful, Em.” She flicked one of her sister’s heavily sprayed ringlets so that it bounced against her cheek. “Like a glam girl out for a night on the town, partying and breaking hearts. Look at me. I’m wearing real clothes, not PJs. You don’t have baby puke on anything you’re wearing. I don’t have Cheeto crumbs on my shirt. Don’t waste this.”

  A cloud of steam huffed out of Emery’s mouth and nose, seeming to take her defensiveness and worry with it.

  “You goober.” Emery grabbed Ellen around the neck and dragged her close. “Didn’t I say you would look good in those pants?”

  The MCs were talking about how close midnight was, how the new year was almost here.

  “You were right.” Ellen had to yell to be heard over them. “I feel like a frozen sausage squeezed into a too-small casing, but at least I look good, right?”

  Emery cackled. “You’re nuts. Should we get drunk? Do you think?”

  “Obviously,” Ellen said even though she wasn’t planning to have any. She didn’t like driving in the snow when she’d been drinking, even when she was just a little buzzed. But Emery had always been one of those people who needed permission to let go and have a good time. “I’m buying. Where’s the booze?”

  “They’re selling armbands over by the Beer Garden,” Emery said, pointing back the way they’d come.

  “Let’s do it.”

  Ellen grabbed her sister’s hand and started pulling her through the crowd.

  Chapter 39

  He stalked through the crowd at Navy Pier, walking among the teeming mass of sheep, squeezing through the tight spaces. The hem of his duster fluttered in the stiff lake wind, slapping against his calves, but he’d buttoned it to the waist and tied the belt pretty good. It wasn’t going to flap open and show off the party favor he had tucked in there. Not before he was ready.

  A woman’s laugh jangled especially close to his ear, and he narrowly stepped aside before she and her friends bulldozed him on their way past. Everybody here was drunk or halfway there, ready to ooh and aah at some fireworks at the stroke of midnight. Colorful explosions to ring in the new year. The sheep loved the distraction. Let them think they were seeing something special, and they would go about their petty lives for another year, head down, shuffling along.

  This year, he would really show them something to remember.

  The crowd ebbed and flowed around him, sometimes packing in tight so that he had to squeeze sideways, and other times leaving him plenty of room to glide past like the grim reaper.

  Some dumb whore dancing with a drink in each hand backed into him, and the sudden pressure pushed him back a step into someone else. For a second, they were all pressed together, sandwiched there with their coats grating on each other, making that high-pitched zipper sound you got from scraping your fingernail across tent material.

  His stomach lurched at the sound. The memory was too close. He flashed back to his bathroom, clawing at the flesh-wall while young him relived the worst moments of his life, the relief and horror of peeling his face away, like shedding that past self, throwing it away.

  “The fuck off me,” the dickbrain behind him snapped.

  A shove sent him and the drunk bitch stumbling away.

  Red filled his vision, and he almost went for the rifle right then. Teach that fucker just who he was dealing with. Show them all.

  But the boom of electronically enhanced voices broke through his rage. Some local morning radio idiots and a brain dead celebrity chef who were MC-ing this event. With near frantic cheer, they warned everybody that the stroke of midnight was almost there, then started rattling off corporate spons
ors, as if the Children’s Museum and Miller Lite and Toyota were the gods who had deigned to bring around another year. Time itself reduced to another gift the corporations bestowed upon us.

  The herd’s corporate sponsors were no gods to him. His were older gods, angry gods. They demanded sacrifice. They wanted to ring in the new year with a blood ritual.

  Midnight. He nodded to himself. That was his time to shine, to bring out his party favor. He could feel it tucked in his coat. Angular metal pressed into his frame. Itching for him to put his hands on it, to pull and squeeze it.

  Soon. He just needed a better vantage point. He hadn’t picked one out ahead of time. Not tonight. Figured he would get down in the crowd and see what felt right. Be spontaneous. Live in the moment.

  He kept moving through the throng until he found a corner he liked near Beer Garden Grove, where they’d set up an outdoor watering hole to keep the sheep docile and stupid, and exactly as expected, the sheep had gathered, grouped into patient lines, waiting for their plastic cups of piss to numb their brains further.

  Yes, this was the place. From here, he would be able to mow down everyone standing along the dividers and take a major swath right out of the middle of the dancing morons. A 360-degree sweep of death.

  “Alriiiiight, par-tay pee-pull!” one of the MCs was screaming, mashing buttons on his sound pad and setting off air horns and other annoying noises to get everybody’s attention. “We’re thirty seconds off the stroke of the new year, so grab your honey and not your money, and get ready for the first kiss of the new decade!”

  A smile touched the shooter’s chapped lips, predatory and hungry, and he started unbuttoning his coat.

  * * *

  In spite of the icy breeze, sweat formed on his upper lip and wet the pits of his shirt under his coat. His heart thrummed in his chest, ten or twelve beats per second it felt like, full-on excitement induced tachycardia.