A Living: Three Stories About Killers

by Gavin Bell

  ***

  We kept it to two drinks and walked the short distance to Zane’s place. The dark clouds had given birth to a litter of snow and the night felt like the inside of a deep freeze, a shock to the system after the relatively mild winter we’d been having back home. The beers took the edge off a little, but we turned up our collars and hurried to the warmth and security of indoors.

  Zane lived in a big old Victorian brownstone off Newbury Street. The street was lined with trees and similar buildings, and it reminded me of the nicer parts of home. As we climbed the curving staircase inside, he explained that they’d bought it twenty years ago, before the neighbourhood was fully gentrified, and that if he had to sell it, he’d make out pretty well. Something in the way he said if I had to sell it made me take notice, but I didn’t say anything for the moment.

  Elsie was in the kitchen pulling something amazing-smelling out of the oven. I suddenly realised I’d had a Starbucks biscotti and nothing else since the borderline inedible inflight meal. She was a full-figured woman, a few years younger than Zane, with greying hair and laughter lines around her green eyes. She beamed at me as we entered.

  “Pleased to meet you, Johnny.”

  “Great to meet you too,” I said, proffering a hand which was ignored in favour of another hug.

  She jerked a thumb at Zane, “I hope he brought you straight here from the airport,” she said reprovingly.

  “Of course,” Zane said with a mostly straight face.

  “I bet,” she said. “Well, I hope you two are hungry.”

  “I think I could manage something,” I said, gazing longingly at the pasta bake resting on the cooker top.

  Dinner was great, the conversation was better. Zane and Elsie had a well-honed double act, her dry wit undercutting his natural enthusiasm and verbosity. They were utterly at ease with each other, and that made you at ease in their company. They were one of those married couples that make you think settling down might not be so bad after all. That was a long time in my future, of course, if it was there at all. If the Lucy episode had proved nothing else, it was that being a career criminal; even a successful and, to date non-incarcerated one; was incompatible with a long-term relationship.

  And yet somehow Zane had managed it. From the stories he told, I thought I could understand why: he’d made out well in his early days, only being caught once. Since then he’d built up a nest egg and only took on the occasional job when he knew the risk was minimal. He was like a mature entrepreneur who’s stepped back from the nine-to-five grind, but who still keeps his hand in. Elsie knew the gist of it, but she never asked questions, and Zane never went into the details.

  After dinner, I helped Elsie clear the plates and stack the dishwasher as Zane brewed coffee. Elsie, an early riser, bid us goodnight and padded off to bed, pausing to give Zane a peck on the cheek and warn him not to keep his poor jetlagged friend up too late. I’d almost forgotten about the time difference. Dinner had given me a second wind, although I was sure I’d be asleep within seconds of my head hitting the pillow.

  As I drank my coffee, I inspected Zane’s CD collection. It was fairly small, and almost entirely outwith my tastes: there was no rock whatsoever, mostly show-tune compilations and original cast recordings.

  “Never would have picked you for a musical lover,” I said.

  “You kidding? Can’t beat a good show. Elsie and me try to make it down to New York once a year to see Cats.”

  “Any Hendrix?”

  He snorted. “Noise. Perhaps with age you’ll learn to appreciate the craft that goes into songwriting.”

  I smiled and tilted my head, signalling ‘let’s agree to differ’. I walked over to the window and looked down in the street at the cars going by and the snowflakes flying, enjoying a minute of comfortable silence. When Zane broke it, he sounded hesitant.

  “Johnny.”

  “Yes?”

  “This thing with the girl, was that the reason you came over? You said you were thinking of staying out here a while.”

  I paused for a second, realising I hadn’t given much conscious thought to the question. Zane was smiling, but it was a concerned smile.

  “Partially, maybe. I’m not on the run, if that’s what you’re asking. Haven’t pulled a job since last year in fact.”

  “Last year? I thought you had a reputation as a workaholic.”

  “Don’t you mean kleptomaniac? Just thought I might take a break for a while.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “It seems to work out okay for you,” I said.

  Zane didn’t respond to that, he just stared past me out of the window.

  “Doesn’t it?” I prompted him after a minute.

  He transferred his gaze to me, then came right out with it: “It’s all gone, Johnny. Everything. We might lose the house.”

  I was taken aback. I’d sensed that there was something he’d been holding back on, but I was surprised it was money trouble. Zane seemed too in control to fritter his assets away or get into trouble with the ponies.

  “What happened?”

  He sighed and shook his head slowly, visibly sick of thinking about it. “Elsie was married before. She had a kid when she was seventeen: Sam. He was eleven and she was long divorced by the time I met her. Sam and I never exactly saw eye to eye, but he was a good enough kid. He lived with his dad in Seattle, so we only really saw him on the holidays.

  “We barely heard from him once he went to college. Elsie was heartbroken. She never talked about it or made a big thing of it, but you could tell. He visited less and less and then it was the occasional phone call, and finally not even that.

  “Then last summer, he shows up at the door out of the blue. I almost didn’t recognise him at first. He’d lost forty pounds, had his arm in a sling. He just looked… sick.”

  “Yeah, you’ve got it,” he said, seeing the understanding in my eyes. “Drugs. Only the horse wasn’t his only problem. He’d made some bad decisions, taken out loans from some sharks, missed a couple of payments.”

  “How much?”

  Zane summoned up the words. The memory made him look pretty sick himself. “Two hundred grand. He needed it within the week or they were going to kill him. I thought I could handle it; I mean you know what it’s like, I’m not exactly a pillar of the community myself, but these guys… bad people, Johnny.” He spread his hands out helplessly. “If he’d have come to me in the first place I would have told him to stay away from those bastards, could have given him the money myself.

  “We went to meet them in a wrecking yard down in Jersey. I had the money in a bag. There were three of them; the boss was called Abraham. He was Mike Tyson big. He laughed when he saw us, asked why Sam had brought his grandpa along. I shut him up by opening the bag. I don’t think he could believe we’d come up with the dough. I think a part of him was pissed too, because it meant he didn’t have the excuse to kill Sam. Not that he really needed one, I suppose.

  “I dropped the bag in the dirt and said ‘You’re done with Sam now,’ and we walked away.” Zane stopped and shook his head at his own naivety. “Needless to say, it wasn’t done.”

  Zane slumped back in his chair. Reliving the story had utterly drained him. I didn’t need him to continue, I knew how the tale panned out from here.

  “They knew how to get hold of Sam, and they squeezed him to get to you?”

  He nodded. “What else could I do? They took everything. It was all I could do to convince them it was all I had. Elsie doesn’t know.”

  “About the money? Or…”

  “About any of it. I can’t tell her we’ve lost everything, because I’d have to tell her why. Meanwhile, she’s still using the MasterCard like old times.”

  I nodded, thinking. It was useless to suggest cooking up a story to explain the lost money, so I didn’t bother. Elsie was too sharp, and she knew Zane too well.

  “So you need a way to make some fast cash.”

  Zane was looking a
t me now, unblinking. His face was tense, a mix of shame and desperate hope.

  I grinned to show him that it was all right, that perhaps I’d never been that serious about my break anyway. “Have you got anything in mind?”

  Slowly, Zane’s face relaxed into a reciprocal grin. “Funny you should ask.”