by Shane Kuhn
This one here?
Lago:
Yeah.
Alice:
Oh my God. It could have broken your little heart.
Lago:
Yeah, my lucky day, I guess. She died instantly and they delivered me six weeks early.
Alice:
Oh my God. I’m so sorry.
Lago:
Me too.
Alice:
That is insane. Thank you for telling me.
Lago:
Really? Why? What’s so great about damaged goods?
Alice:
You’re not damaged goods. But now I know why you have that . . . look.
Lago:
What look?
Alice:
Most people, if they are exhausted, drunk, bored, or preoccupied, show it in their eyes. They drift, pulling their attention from one thing to another. But not you. You have eyes like a bird of prey. A hawk or something. It’s like you are always waiting for a mouse or gopher to cross your field of vision so when it happens, you’ll be ready to strike.
Lago:
I think I look like that because I feel more like the mouse or gopher waiting for the hawk.
Alice:
Paranoia. Makes sense.
Lago:
Yeah. In foster homes, you learn pretty quickly to watch your own back. I remember when I was five and some dirty old granddad came into my room in the middle of the night, reeking of whiskey. My hackles went up. Even if I didn’t know the specifics, I knew he was there to hurt me. So I hurt him.
Alice:
At five? How?
Lago:
Baseball bat. Under my bed. Wasn’t much of a player, but I always kept it handy. Made me feel somewhat safe. That night I understood why.
Alice:
What happened?
Lago:
I nearly killed him. Hit him so hard on the side of the head it broke his orbital bone and he lost an eye. Did my first tour in the junior psych ward for that one.
Alice:
I could barely pour cereal into a bowl at five.
Lago:
Your animal self takes over. You can feel it. Even though you’re small, you can feel its power. The shrinks called it rage, but I knew it was more than that. The anger was more like the fuel I could dump on the fire to make it explode when I needed it to.
Alice:
But what about being a kid?
Lago:
Next life. I’m thirsty. Want a glass of water?
Alice:
Sounds lovely. But we’re not done yet. Not by a long shot.
Lago:
Why am I not surprised?
—END TRANSCRIPT—
13
* * *
THE STAGGER STEP
It’s early Sunday morning and I just left Alice’s apartment. Yes, we conjugated our office romance. No, I’m not going to reveal any details. This isn’t Penthouse Letters, although you would probably want to buy that issue if I were a contributor. Just suffice to say I have planted the seed (terrible pun I know) that will germinate into my plan. A little postcoital confessional did the trick. I told her a sob story about my dark past, and she took the hook like a good little fish. The nice thing was that I didn’t have to lie about it. It was weird telling the truth for once. I felt vulnerable doing it, but it was also kind of exhilarating. And when I heard myself saying it, I even felt sorry for me. Up yours, Cyrano. I don’t need a circus nose to get a sympathy fuck. I have a hideous soul and that kind of ugliness is far more tragic than physical abnormalities.
I trudge up the steps to my apartment (never, ever take the elevator), about to settle into the Sunday Times, followed by an Ambien-induced coma that will rival deep-space travel cryo sleep—like in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Actually, that would have been the perfect gig for me. I could spend years in a stone quiet spaceship with a glib computer named Hal. Hal would have trusted me a lot more than Dave because I wouldn’t be such a tight ass like Dave was. As long as we played chess and I could space walk whenever I wanted, we would have been cool. I unlock all seven locks on what is now the pod bay door to my ship.
I need protein before I sleep. Alice depleted me like a litter of hungry wolf pups sucks the life out of their mother. I open the fridge and am puzzled by the odd smell of aftershave that suddenly hits my nose. I don’t wear aftershave, and if I did it would not be the noxious drugstore shit I smell. But then it all makes sense when a baseball bat hits me in the side and breaks two of my ribs like dry kindling twigs.
* * *
Rule #7: Get your shit together.
In fighter pilot training, they talk about having ice water in your veins. This is not just a bunch of nut-grabbing dude speak. Controlling the nerves wrapped around your panic button is critical to survival in combat. They call it Performance IQ. It is a proven fact that anxiety of any kind will actually lower your Performance IQ (make you more stupid), and if you really think about it, what other IQ is more important? Success is all about delivering in the moment. Anyone can be a star in practice. But how many people can nail it at game time, in the fourth quarter, in the final seconds, when it counts? Very few. You have to fight the animal brain that wants to flee. Fight or flight is bullshit. Flight is the default. Fight only happens when flight is not an option. Because fight requires a sharp, committed mind that can think ten steps ahead. The advanced level of this is being able to launch a rational, effective counterattack when you’re injured. Broken ribs tend to turn your brain to mush and motivate you to curl up into a ball and sob. Then your opponent will really give you something to cry about.
So when the second swing comes, I’m ready. I duck as the Louisville Slugger whips through the air above my head. When I come up, I double punch Babe Ruth in the sternum, knocking him about five feet back into my cool glass table. It shatters, of course. Fuck! That was my Tony Montana cocaine table. I’ve never had any strippers dance on it but I was planning to. And now, it’s . . . (Performance IQ kicks in) . . . hundreds of razor sharp, deadly weapons glittering in the morning light. Hmm.
You’re going to laugh at this, but I grab two oven mitts hanging next to my stove and snatch up a couple of thick glass daggers courtesy of my former kickass coffee table. People grab glass shards with their bare hands all the time in movies and use them as weapons, right? Yes, in movies. But in real life that is like trying to fight with a knife that has points on both ends. You will not only shred your hand, but you will also certainly cut the flexor tendons that work like that little rubber band in a windup balsa airplane. Snap those and your hand becomes a limp, useless flipper that can’t even pick up a penny. Babe Ruth gets up quickly, trusty bat in hand, and I see his face.
Motherfucker.
It’s Hartman, the intern drill sergeant at Bendini, Lambert & Locke. I guess when he said he was going to skull fuck me, he wasn’t kidding.
“What the fuck are you doing in my apartment?”
His sweat-soaked head is covered in tiny cuts oozing blood. I can even see one small shard stuck in his pasty scalp.
“Taking out the trash.”
“That sounds like a line from a shitload of really bad movies.”
He takes a swing and I sidestep him, bullfighter style, and punch a hole in his gut, just below the sternum. The key to “edge fighting” is to open up a large blood vessel, like the aorta or inferior vena cava, with the smallest puncture wound possible. That way, it’s almost impossible to stop the bleeding without opening the wound more and suturing the vessel and that, for obvious reasons, is not a viable option.
I can tell I have not hit anything of value on Hartman because he doesn’t do the stagger step. A sudden drop in blood pressure, due to a sudden loss of blood, followed by the body releasing a truckload of fight-or-flight adrenaline causes the stagger step. The legs buckle slightly, kind of like when a drunk takes that first step off the bar at closing time. Unfortunately, Hartman seems unfazed by the four-inch puncture wound that probably trashed half his spleen. That
is the sign of a professional with fighter pilot experience. In other words, the only person I would expect to react the same way is me. Now my head is swimming with scenarios. Who the fuck is Hartman, really?
“Who the fuck are you?” I inquire.
“The real question is, asshole, who the fuck are you?”
“I’m just the intern.” I grin.
“I guess your girlfriend will tell me if I take off enough of her skin.”
“Don’t you fucking—”
Whack. He shoots the end of the bat straight at me so the end of the barrel hits me square in the diaphragm, just above my navel. I lose my air instantly. It was a nice move. First he hit me with a statement he knew would catch me off guard. Clearly, if I don’t kill him, he’s going to go kill Alice. So in the nanosecond it took me to process that fact, he took his shot. And he knew exactly where to hit me so I would be briefly incapacitated. This motherfucker is good. Whack! Lower leg. Down I go. I land on my side and feel a sharp pain in my leg. Nice. I just impaled myself with my own weapon. Not part of the edge-fighting playbook. Then he goes for the kill swing, aiming for my temple—the weakest part of the skull and home of the middle meningeal artery, a vessel just itching to burst and cause a fatal brain bleed. Pure instinct makes me roll quickly to the side so he misses and smashes the barrel into the floor. Like Jeter’s Louisville Slugger, the bat snaps in half at the label. I promptly grab a piece and impale his foot with the jagged end.
“Motherfucker!”
My sentiments exactly.
Any injury to the top of the foot is excruciating. Hartman may be well trained and all that, but even he is momentarily focused on the agony that is now shooting up his lower leg into his groin.
I roll, looking for a weapon and feel the sharp pain in my hip again. I reach down, find the thick piece of glass embedded in my hip muscle, and yank it out quickly. Hartman is coming down on me, bringing the fight to the floor—where all fights end up—and I punch the piece of glass into the space between his ribs, pulling it out quickly. I hear the telltale hiss of the sucking chest wound, or tension pneumothorax, and know that I have punctured his right lung. This is a tough one, even for a fighter pilot. The lung quickly collapses and the heart goes apeshit trying to compensate for the sudden loss of half the oxygenated blood in the panic-stricken body. Stagger step, anyone?
He sticks his finger in the hole. Nice. It might save his life if I weren’t going to kill him anyway. But kudos to him for knowing the right triage move. I wrench his free arm behind his back, flip him onto his chest, and land on his back full force with my knee. He loses a few teeth on my hardwood floor and lies there moaning. It’s the moan of defeat but defeat with honor. I don’t begrudge him the opportunity to bitch about the pain I just inflicted.
“I’m going to ask you one more time. Who are you?” I say quietly.
“Or what? You’re going to kill me?”
He starts laughing, sputtering blood on the floor. Then I start laughing. We’re both dying laughing because fighter pilots don’t talk when they’re caught behind enemy lines. I shouldn’t have even asked but push it anyway just for fun.
“Who do you work for?”
An explosion of laughter from both of us, followed by horrific coughing.
“Stop, you’re killing me,” he bellows.
Now I almost want to let him live. Clearly, he’s not the tough-talking dipshit G.I. Joe wannabe he was pretending to be at Bendini. He’s a professional. And all professionals deserve respect.
“Fine. Then how did you make me?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
“What are you, seven years old?”
“You’re in over your head, you know? Way fucking over.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
He thinks us kibitzing for a moment is distracting me from seeing him take his finger out of his sucking chest wound and reach for a holdout .22 strapped to his ankle.
“Here, let me get that for you,” I say politely.
I grab the gun, throw a pillow over his back, and fire two rounds into the pillow. Love those .22s. Very quiet and efficient. And when I see that he was using ammo similar to mine, I’m glad I didn’t shoot him in the head. That would have been very disrespectful, like something a Chinese prison camp executioner would do. Plus, I’m not cleaning up Humpty Dumpty’s broken egg all over my cherrywood floors. So my relaxing Sunday turned into a brutal first aid session for myself, and an eight-hour ordeal of, you guessed it, putting Hartman’s faceless, fingerless corpse into six trash bags and dissolving them in a vat of sulfuric acid in some nameless New Jersey chemical plant.
14
* * *
YOU HAVE NO ONE TO BLAME BUT YOURSELF
By around nine o’clock that night, I’m sitting in a truck stop diner outside Trenton, drinking coffee and pondering my next move. Going back to my apartment is out. Guys like Hartman don’t work alone. When people with money want someone dead, they stay true to that commitment until it happens or they end up dead themselves. Speaking of which, I can’t wait to bring the hammer down on the asshole who tried to put a button on me. He is going to have a serious headache when I get through with him and he’ll probably end up hot tubbing in the acid bath without the benefit of being dead.
But that will have to wait. For now, Bob needs to bring me in. I call the office.
“What is it, John?”
“I need to come in.”
“How soon can you get here?”
“Thirty minutes.”
He hangs up. I steal a motorcycle some dumbass left at the gas pump while he went inside to buy a bag of Corn Nuts. As I ride, I’m thinking of scenarios to explain this fine mess. First scenario—Bendini is definitely our target and Hartman is the muscle protecting Bendini and his interests. In that case, I am supremely fucked, because Hartman may be dead, but Bendini isn’t, and if he wants me greased, he’ll just send some more mechanics. But, of course, that is the least of my worries in this scenario because if I’m blown, then Bob might just decide on forced early retirement.
Second scenario—Bendini is our guy and Hartman works for one of his customers. Customer places a plumber at the firm to make sure nothing clogs the information pipeline. Guy sees me and somehow knows I’m a pro, so he goes to whack me to protect his customer’s interests.
In scenario number one, I am a dead man because my internship at the firm is over and Bob tends to tie up all loose ends associated with unfinished business. In scenario number two, I am in the clear with Bendini but need to watch my back even more than usual. I guess there is always the third scenario—Bob wants me dead.
When I arrive at the office, Bob stokes the flames of my paranoia by stationing half a dozen heavily armed goons in his reception area. After we go over the gory details of the Hartman thing, he finally acknowledges my distrust of him based on the goon squad presence.
“John, if I wanted you dead, I’d kill you myself.”
“Anything less would be an insult.”
“I don’t have any intel yet, so you’ll have to stay here until I can figure out what the deal is.”
He turns to go, but he isn’t finished.
“I’m curious, John. How the hell do you think he made you?”
“No idea.”
“Sometimes even the best can slip.”
“I follow your protocols to the letter. Always have.”
He looks me in the eye, searching for a “tell” associated with lying.
“Please, Bob, you trained me to lie perfectly.”
“My gut tells me you’re not being honest, John. Not completely.”
“Maybe you need to eat something.”
“There’s the attitude again.”
“You want to blame me for this? Go ahead.”
“Okay. First of all, you couldn’t have followed my protocols to the letter or they wouldn’t have tracked you without you knowing it. Second, you shared the same office with another professiona
l for weeks and you never even suspected him. Finally, you failed to get any intel from him before you shut him down. So tell me, who the hell else should I blame?”
“I see your point,” I acquiesce.
I act like I’ve been humbled by Bob’s diatribe because I desperately need some sleep. Vanity and pride are Bob’s weaknesses, and when you feign submission to what he believes is his superior intellect, you trigger both. It makes him soften his edge a bit and revert to his mentor persona, the one that has been “nurturing” me since I was recruited.
“Use my shower. I’ll have someone bring in food.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’ll eat it anyway.”
“Okay.”
“Let me see your wound dressings.”
I take off my shirt and pants and show him—big gash on my hip that I stitched myself. Several minor cuts with butterfly bandages, etc.
“Not satisfied with the hip laceration. Starting to look inflamed. We’ll get that recleaned and stapled. And I’m going to put you on Clindamycin for infection. Just to be on the safe side.”
“Thanks, Bob.”
If he had a heart it would melt.
“Get some rest. We’ll work this out.”
The warm and fuzzy feeling I got from Bob in that moment went away quickly when, after I showered and had to endure the reopening, cleaning, and stapling of my wound, he locked me in one of the empty offices and left the storm troopers outside all night. He told me they were there for my own protection, but I knew why they were there. Cleanup crew. If I’m blown at Bendini, I get swept back under the rug where Bob found me.
15
* * *
