No Way Back

by Matthew Klein

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One day, Kopec found us. He came to us and he said, “This territory is owned by my employer, whose name I cannot say. So now you have a choice. You can work for him. Or I can kill you.” Of course we chose to work for him. You see?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Kopec gave us jobs. Maybe they were tests. To see what we could do. A delivery. A pickup. An execution. Yes? Each week Kopec came, and each week he handed me an envelope. Inside the envelope was money, and a description of the job we needed to do. Kopec never knew what was in the envelope. He just handed it to me. He was the messenger. That was all.’

  He coughs. Blood bubbles from his lips.

  ‘One day,’ he says, ‘Kopec came. The envelope was heavy. He told me to open it. Inside was a cellphone, and a gun, and a piece of paper. On the paper was my assignment. Just two words. Do you know what it said?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It said: “Shoot Kopec”. So I did. Right in the head. You see? And then the cellphone rang, and I answered, and a voice said: “Congratulations. From now on, your name is Kopec.” That is how he works. He controls everyone. He knows everything. He listens. He watches. But he stays hidden. No one knows anything about him. No one knows where he lives. Or what he looks like. Or how old he is. Or even if he’s Russian, or Armenian, or Chechen. And if you talk to him, or if you know someone who talks to him, then he will kill you. If you even say his name out loud, he will kill you. Everyone knows these rules.’

  ‘What does he want from me? Tell me what you know.’

  ‘What I know?’ he says. ‘I know nothing. My job was to watch you. To make sure your wife pleased you. To make sure that you succeeded in your business. My job was to protect Jim Thane.’

  ‘Protect me?’ I think about Stan Pontin, and the car accident, and Sandy Golden’s sudden and inexplicable decision to invest in Tao Software. And about Dom Vanderbeek, in the attic, and his necklace of purple thumbprints. ‘Why did you kill my wife?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘That was not me. Maybe it was someone else. We are not the only team. There’s always another team. That’s how he controls you. One team watching another. Watching another. Until you don’t know for sure who is who.’

  ‘Is Tom Mitchell on your team?’

  ‘Tom Mitchell?’ he says. ‘Ah, the FBI agent. No. I don’t think he works for my employer. I think he wants to find my employer. So many people do. He has made so many enemies.’

  ‘Why are you telling me all this?’

  He smiles. His empty eye sockets squint merrily. Red tears ooze from the corners. ‘Come closer and I will show you.’

  ‘Don’t, Jim,’ Amanda warns. I remain still.

  The man says: ‘I’m missing my eyes, Jim Thane. I can’t hurt you. Come closer. I will show you something. Something you will remember for the rest of your life.’

  I inch closer to him. I touch his shoulder. ‘What is it?’ I say, softly, into his ear.

  I hear his breath, laboured and ragged, and I feel the life draining from him, gathering in a pool at my feet.

  ‘My jacket,’ he whispers. His voice is very soft. Almost inaudible. ‘Reach inside.’

  I hand my gun to Amanda. She points it at his head. I reach into the man’s pocket. It feels wet.

  ‘Do you feel it?’

  There is something there – a sharp edge of paper against my finger. I remove an envelope. The corner is stained with blood. On the envelope is written: ‘To Kopec’.

  ‘I was given that,’ he says, ‘by the one who put out my eyes. First I had to read it. It was the last thing I saw. Look at it.’

  I open the envelope. Inside is a single sheet of paper, folded into thirds. A paperclip attaches a school photograph of a young girl, perhaps seven years old. She wears a blue velvet dress. Her hands are clasped in her lap. She smiles at the camera.

  ‘My daughter,’ he explains.

  I open the page attached to the photo. It is typewritten. The machine that typed it was an old manual typewriter, maybe antique. Ink is gummed between the crossbars; the letters run unevenly across the page.

  It says:

  Your last assignment. Tell Jim Thane how you were hired. Tell him about Kopec. Tell Jim Thane everything he asks. Answer all his questions. Show him this page.

  Then kill yourself. I am watching you.

  (Remember that I watch your daughter.)

  ‘You see now?’ the velociraptor whispers. ‘He knows everything. He controls everything. I think truly he is... God.’

  Before I understand what I have read, or what is happening, he brings out the gun he has been hiding. He sticks it in his mouth. He bites down, and I hear the clack of enamel on metal. The back of his head explodes into red mist.

  ‘No!’ I yell, too late, and my words are swallowed by the echo of the gunshot.

  I step back.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ Amanda says.

  In the distance I hear the sound of police sirens.

  ‘We have to leave,’ I say, backing away. I take Amanda’s hand, and I pull her towards the exit. But she stands there, resisting, unwilling to move, staring fixedly at the corpse.

  ‘Amanda,’ I say.

  ‘Wait.’ She takes her hand from mine and kneels down next to the dead man.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She leans over, pressing her body to his, her face nearly touching his shattered skull. She feels around inside his bloody jacket.

  ‘Amanda... ’

  The sirens grow louder. They come towards us.

  Amanda is fishing, groping in pockets, searching for something.

  ‘Found it!’ she says excitedly. She holds up what she was looking for: a plastic sandwich bag, pinched closed with a rubber band. It contains yellow crystals and a glass pipe.

  ‘Come on,’ I say.

  I pull her from the corpse, and this time she lets me, and she stands, and she sticks the bag into the front of her jeans.

  We run across the warehouse and push through the PVC curtain. We hop off the loading dock, and into the bright sun. The sirens are louder. I climb into the Honda, and Amanda runs to the passenger side.

  We drive out through the rear exit, onto the street. Two police cars are pulling into the front gate as we leave, sirens blaring, red and blue lights flashing. For a moment, I expect screeching tyres, and wild U-turns, and hot pursuit, but when I look in the rearview mirror, I see the cruisers pulling to a gentle stop in front of the loading docks.

  They ignore the Honda with the blood-spattered man and woman – or maybe they never saw it – and we speed west, cresting over a hill and out of sight.

  CHAPTER 49

  We check in at the Best Western on Daniels Parkway, which is the first hotel we find near the airport. We take a room on the third floor, overlooking the parking lot. As soon as we shut the door and double-lock it, I head for the bed, and I’m asleep in ten minutes.

  When I wake, the room is dark, and it’s night outside. I hear Amanda beside me, snoring. The digital clock on the nightstand says two a.m.

  Something is bothering me. It has been bothering me, I realize, since I walked into that meth lab and found the dead men shot execution-style, and a man with no eyes.

  ‘Amanda?’

  She stirs.

  ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘Mmm,’ she says.

  ‘Why didn’t he kill you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘At the warehouse. The man you told me about. The man with long hair. Dressed in black. He killed everyone else. But not you.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, in the darkness. A long silence. I feel her shift in the bed. She says finally: ‘You don’t trust me.’

  ‘I trust you.’

  But he didn’t kill you. He killed everyone else, and not you.

  ‘Promise?’ Amanda asks.

  And the blood on your fingers. And the Russian man who was missing his eyes.

  But I say, ‘I promise.’ Because what’s a promise between two add
icts?

  She seals this promise by climbing on top of me. She kisses me hard, slides her tongue into my mouth. She unbuckles my pants, pulls them down over my hips. She mounts me, and I’m surprised by this – surprised that she’s ready for me, and surprised that I can respond – that we are going to fuck just hours after everything that has happened, hours after seeing my dead wife Libby, who was not really named Libby, and after seeing a man with no eyes sucking on a gun.

  The sex is fast and hard: no romance today – just desperation. The moment I come, I’m disgusted by it all: by my own body – by the blood on my hands and my face; by Amanda, who – before she mounted me – pressed herself on top of a dead man who was missing his brains, in order to find his stash.

  We shower together, washing off blood and semen, which disappear down the drain like a bad dream in morning light.

  Back in the room, she kneels naked on the floor beside her jeans, which are still wet with blood, and she retrieves the plastic bag she stole from the dead man. She joins me on the bed with the stash. She drops a pinch of yellow crystal into the base of the glass pipe, and she holds a lighter underneath. The crystals vanish into white smoke. She twirls the bowl, continuing to heat it, swirling the smoke. She inhales. She smiles at me, holds out the pipe and lighter.

  I know I shouldn’t, not with everything that has just happened. But I tell myself that I will stop soon. Just not yet. Just not today.

  I flick the lighter, heat the black cinders stuck to the glass. I inhale. It tastes like burnt smoke, like cold winter, and then I feel the surge of pleasure, the relaxation and calm and happiness.

  A few minutes later, we’re having sex again, and this time I don’t feel disgusted. We do it for hours, thinking about nothing except fucking, until we’re interrupted by the sound of a cellphone ringing.

  It takes me a moment to find the phone – it was in my pants – and then to remember where I am, and then to collect myself enough to finally answer. ‘Hello?’ I say, trying to sound normal, which is getting increasingly difficult, day by day, hour by hour.

  ‘I’m here, Jimmy,’ a voice says. And then I remember: I’m running from an Eastern gangster, and from someone who claims to be from the FBI; and my wife is dead – my wife who wasn’t really named Libby.

  The voice at the other end of the phone is anchored in reality, and it tugs me back – I was floating away – and it belongs to Gordon Kramer, the only person left in the world that I trust. That he is also the man to whom I have made a solemn promise never to use again, is an irony that even I recognize – even in this addled state – even as I stare at the glass pipe on the floor nearby.

  ‘Gordon?’

  ‘You all right, Jimmy? Did I wake you?’

  ‘No.’

  Behind me, Amanda touches my shoulder. I turn to her, covering the mouthpiece of the phone, and whisper, ‘A friend.’

  ‘I’m at the airport,’ Gordon says. ‘Come and get me. We’ll rent a car, and we’ll get the hell out of here.’

  ‘He killed Libby, Gordon.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Ghol Gedrosian. He killed Libby.’

  Silence. Then, he says softly: ‘Fuck, Jimmy. I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.’

  ‘She was working for him this whole time. Her name wasn’t Libby. She was... someone else.’

  A long silence as he considers. This is normally the moment when Gordon should growl into the phone: ‘Are you fucking using again, Jimmy? Because you sound crazy!’ – but this time, oddly, he says nothing. I hear his breathing. Finally he speaks, and his voice is more gentle than I can remember it ever being. ‘Just come to the airport,’ he says softly. He gives me the flight number. ‘Meet me at baggage. We’ll figure this out together.’

  ‘I’m near,’ I say. ‘I’ll be just a few minutes.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting.’

  When I hang up, Amanda asks, ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘We?’ I say. ‘We are not going anywhere.’ This comes out sounding mean and suspicious – which I didn’t intend – and so I add, ‘I’m going alone. It’ll be safer. I’ll bring him back here.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘His name is Gordon. He’s my friend. We can trust him.’ I look around the room. ‘Do me a favour, though. Make the bed. And hide the crank. He’s my sponsor.’

  CHAPTER 50

  I roll the cuffs of my pants, to hide the blood. I move quickly through the hotel lobby, so that no one can get a good look at me. But it’s early morning, and the lobby is empty, except for the night clerk, who doesn’t seem to notice anything unusual about a man with bloodshot eyes and pants stained dark. He has seen worse, apparently.

  I grab a stale croissant on my way out, part of the courtesy continental breakfast that my fifty-nine bucks bought. My jaws work on it mechanically.

  The complimentary airport shuttle waits outside, beneath an awning. When I board, the driver looks up from his newspaper, vaguely annoyed.

  We wait together in the van. It is hot. I am the only passenger. Apparently the driver has been instructed not to make the trip to the airport until more than one rider boards. He studies his newspaper with grim concentration, reviewing the world news carefully, as if preparing for an appearance on the Sunday-morning talk shows.

  Five minutes pass, then ten, and when I finally suggest we ought to be going, he mutters something under his breath and pulls the door closed. The van rumbles onto Daniels Parkway.

  It’s two miles to the Southwest Florida International Airport, and it takes only a few minutes to get there. It’s a grandly named place for so small an airport. I hop off the van, and ten steps later I’m already in the Departures Area. A quick trip down an escalator brings me to Baggage Claim.

  There are only four carousels. Gordon Kramer stands at the last one, on the far side of the room. He’s forty yards away, talking to someone on his cellphone – he hasn’t noticed me yet. I feel relief the moment I see his etched-stone face and his brutally-short military haircut. There is something real and solid and familiar about him. He’s not a friend, exactly – I did use that term with Amanda, but it wasn’t true. A friend is someone you don’t care about disappointing. I do care when I let Gordon down.

  Which is why I so often find myself caring about him – because my life is an endless stream of failure, a Nile River of Fiasco, ebbing and flowing with annual monotony. Yet Gordon Kramer wades fearlessly in to save me, knee-deep, year after year.

  Imagine having a father that you love, and then imagine that your father knows your abject self, the basest truth about who you are, and what you do, and how you think; and then you’ll understand why I love Gordon Kramer. Because even though he knows my shameful secrets, I have not yet managed to drive him away. Not yet.

  ‘Gordon!’ I call.

  He turns. His eyes twinkle. But he doesn’t smile. He never smiles. He says something into his cellphone, presses a button, and puts it away. He walks to me.

  ‘Jimmy,’ he says, his voice gruff but warm. Just hearing that voice, in person, beside me, tells me that I am safe. Gordon is strong and smart and tough. He is a San Jose cop and an ex-marine. He has killed men with his bare hands, has battled alcohol, has faced down demons of his own. Every battle he accepts, he wins. Ghol Gedrosian is no match for Gordon Kramer. Of that, I am certain.

  ‘You’re alive,’ he says, in typical Gordon style, sounding not very pleased.

  I put an arm around his back. We hug.

  ‘You have a bag?’ I ask.

  ‘Just this,’ he says. He picks up an old aluminium-sided Samsonite, with machine-tooled ridges that look as if they were carved by a lathe – more toolbox than overnight bag.

  ‘When did you land?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, right before I called you,’ he says. But he seems distracted. His eyes are scanning the room behind me, ever vigilant for threat. We start walking towards the sign that says ‘Ground Transportation’.

  ‘Do you have a car?’ he asks.


  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. I have a limo out front. It’s already arranged. It’ll take us to Miami. I know a cop there. A good guy. Ex-marine. He’s clean, Jimmy. We can trust him. He knows all about this Gedrosian character. He can help.’

  ‘That’s great, Gordon,’ I say. I am relieved – glad to share my burden at last, glad to let someone else handle things from now on. Gordon has already begun to solve problems. ‘Before we go, I just need to pick up my friend. She’s at the hotel where I stayed last night.’

  ‘Sure, Jimmy,’ he says agreeably.

  Gordon’s last words strike me as peculiarly accommodating – very un-Gordon-like, in fact – that he doesn’t ask me who the friend is, or why we have to pick her up. He must be exhausted from the red-eye. He’s losing his edge: not questioning me about who I’m associating with, or what I’m doing in a hotel room, or why my eyes are bloodshot, and why my pants cuffs are rolled so high, and so clearly stained ochre.

  We pass a baggage carousel – the only one in the terminal with its belt spinning – and the sign above it indicates that the bags just arrived from Dallas.

  ‘You fly through Dallas?’ I ask Gordon, mostly to fill the silence as we walk, but also because it occurs to me that Gordon’s carousel was not spinning, and that there was no ‘Arriving From’ sign above the carousel where I found him.

  ‘Straight from SFO,’ he says. ‘Eight hours. What a goddamned trip.’ Out of the corner of my eye I see him look at me quickly, as if he just said something wrong, and wants to detect if my expression changed. But I keep my eyes fixed straight ahead, my face addled and stupid-looking – not a hard thing for me to pull off, given all the practice.

  We step out of the terminal, into the sunlight. The air feels hotter now than I remember it being when I entered the terminal, just minutes ago. As if on cue, a black limousine pulls up alongside us. The driver, wearing a dark suit and chauffeur’s cap, gets out of the car and quickly circles towards me and Gordon.

  ‘Hello,’ Gordon says to the driver.

  The driver doesn’t speak. He just nods and opens the back door for us. I notice he doesn’t offer to take Gordon’s metal suitcase, either. That’s what limousine drivers do, usually – isn’t it? – they offer to take your case? Not this one, though.