Frank still woke up at four thirty, but now instead of getting out of bed he’d wake me up, have his way with me, and let me go back to sleep while he started his day. I suspected that he also went back to sleep, but I had yet to catch him in the act.
“Je t’aime,” he mumbled. His head had fallen limply to the mattress. I could see that he’d nicked himself shaving again. I wondered whether it was from a lack of concentration, or if the blade had gotten dull. The leather strap he used to sharpen it had recently found its way out of the bathroom and into our bed.
“Am I gonna play bait again?” I asked, holding the list and loudly tapping the appropriate line of data to get his attention.
He lifted his head, blinked a few times, and closed his eyes. “I don’t know yet.”
“When do we start?”
“He’s not going anywhere,” Frank said crankily, then smiled to show that my attempt at cheering him up had worked after all. “Charlie says that he gets deliveries twice a month. Never leaves the house. There’s no rush.”
“Says you. I’ve been bored for three hours.”
Frank raised his eyebrows, letting his eyes come open again. “Did you clean the guns?”
“Yes,” I moped. I spent more time cleaning them than I did shooting them, and that was saying something. My hands were so sore from repeated firing that I could barely make fists. It was incredible that Frank could shoot single handed, when his guns weighed almost twice as much as mine and had a kick that rivaled the beatings I used to get at school. Now Frank had strong hands. “And I counted our money. Twice.”
“You should’ve joined me and Charlie,” he joked. Frank knew that I had no interest in women. I hadn’t even taken to breastfeeding. My poor mother had to bottle feed me from birth.
“Were they pretty?”
“One of them was,” he said, “but she was obviously new at it. She danced like she was in a nightclub. She actually moved to the music. That’s a mistake a lot of them make. Until they figure out that nobody’s listening.”
I smiled. Insecurity came very easily to me, but Frank had a way of reminding me just how queer he was. Nothing said homosexual like critiquing the dancing of a stripper. I could imagine him mentioning it to Charlie, “Look at her technique, it’s completely amateur, and her g-string is positively the wrong color.”
We were prime examples of the age old debate: nature versus nurture. I’d been brought up around muscle cars and crescent wrenches, and he’d been surrounded by neon lights and stilettos. In all likelihood, I should’ve been straight as an arrow, and Frank would’ve ended up as a showgirl. Yet, he was the top, if only in bed. We both knew who wore the pants in the relationship, even though they were big on me because they were his.
“Show me what you do with Charlie,” I said. “Show me what it’s like to have a handler.”
He smiled self-consciously. He still wasn’t used to anyone being so interested in what he did for a living. “Okay,” he said, rubbing his face for a second and then gesturing toward the table for me to have a seat.
We always got a room with a table and chairs. He’d once had to use a miniature ironing board to clean his arsenal, and it was so crowded with all his guns that he vowed never again. “You be me.”
I gave him my best Frank-like scowl, then put an unlit cigarette in my mouth and broodingly sat down.
“I don’t mean literally.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun. You be Charlie.”
Frank rolled his eyes. “Fine.”
“Try not to be too convincing. I don’t want to be repulsed.”
“Be good,” he said, tossing a dirty shirt over the lampshade so the room took on a seedy glow.
“Where does the naked lady stand?”
He pointed halfheartedly toward the bathroom and grabbed the envelope off the bed, hiding it in his coat before sitting down across from me. He put a cigarette between his lips, not bothering to light it, and cleared his throat. “Hey, kiddo. You look like you got laid.”
“Did he really start right in on you like that?”
“Stick to character.”
“Mind your own business,” I said grouchily. As an afterthought, I pinched my ears until the skin felt appropriately warm.
Frank smiled. “You look happy as a pig in shit, Frankie boy. What do you say you give me her number?”
“Ew!” I cringed.
He winked at me, and started impatiently tapping the envelope against my knee.
I resumed my scowl and took it from him, opening it on my lap and glancing down at the contents I’d already seen.
“Don’t look.”
“Oh, sorry,” I said, holding it back underneath the table. “When do I look?”
“After we’ve chatted for a bit. You’ll keep that as an excuse to start ignoring me when I’ve gotten too crass.”
“Can we skip to that part?”
“Sure.”
I peeked at the contents again. “Do we talk about the job?”
“A bit. I’ll tell you anything specific that you need to know about the client, who they are, what they want, that sort of thing. Shall we?”
I nodded. I’d already spoken too much to pass as Frank. And he wasn’t speaking enough to be Charlie. The old man talked almost as much as I did.
Frank instinctively looked around to make sure there was no one to overhear, then leaned closer to me across the table, turning his face away from the direction of the imaginary strippers. I tilted my ear toward him and faced the bathroom, knowing that Frank would watch for eavesdroppers while his handler filled him in.
“The client is with an organized crime syndicate based out of New Jersey. He and his brother did hard time awhile back. Your mark had ratted them out, but before they went under he faked his own death, and no one suspected him. The mark’s widow recently received a letter of apology from her un-deceased husband, confessing everything. As of three months ago he was in Witness Protection, but luckily for us the feds gave him the boot for beating a hooker half to death.”
I made a face without meaning to. I knew Frank must’ve seen me break character, but he didn’t say anything.
“The guy’s living in a desert fortress ten miles outside of town. He knows what’ll happen to him if anyone finds him alive and well, and he’s scared shitless. You’ll have a hard time getting in there, Frankie boy. But that’s what the client wants. Think you can handle it?”
“Of course I can handle it,” I said brusquely, knowing that getting defensive would’ve been his reaction.
Frank smiled. “Good. Tell him who sent you. Make him regret squealing.” Then he waved toward the bathroom. “You got any cash on you, kiddo? I’m broke.”
“Did you give him money?”
“Yes,” he said, reaching back and pulling the shirt off the lamp. The room was still seedy, but I was so used to seeing the level of squalor by now that I hardly noticed.
“Is that how it normally goes?” I asked, taking the damp cigarette out of my mouth and letting it roll his way. I knew this was an abbreviated, G-rated version. There would’ve been dirty jokes that Frank wouldn’t repeat to me unless he didn’t understand them, and plenty of time spent ogling.
“More or less,” he said. “Sometimes he gets it into his head that a particular job is dangerous, and he’ll tell me to be careful.”
“Did he say it this time?” I asked, trying not to let the thought concern me. I didn’t want him to change his mind about letting me do the hit. I’d hate to think how it would affect our sex life if he made me stay home.
“As a matter of fact he did,” he said, giving me a look like he knew exactly what I was thinking, and would take me by force if necessary. Not that I could refuse him if my life depended on it. “We’ll check out the fortress tonight, and I’ll decide how to play it. If anything I can disable him for you.”
I smiled. He was right; I did always get my way.
Frank smiled back, then gave me a slightly pitying look. “You
should see your hair.”
The mark lived pretty far off the beaten path, ten acres of barren land among hundreds that no one would want, lit up by several generators with enough electricity to run a third world country. Giant orbs of light were suspended across house and yard like flies caught in a spider web on cables as thick as my arm, illuminating the night from every direction and effectively chasing away the stars in the sky as if we were in the middle of Manhattan instead of the desert. All the windows were painted over, and there was a towering fence strung with razor wire encompassing the property, a mechanized gate with an intercom the only indication it wasn’t walled up permanently. From what I could see with the scope of Frank’s rifle, at least two man-eating dogs guarded the place. They were bigger than I was.
It was a fortress all right. If I’d stumbled upon it without knowing who lived there, I would’ve thought it was a prison reserved for the most dangerous criminals in the Southwest. One thing was for certain. If it was a prison, it would’ve been easier to get inside.
“What do you think?” he asked. He’d let me have the scope after giving the house a thorough search, and was now scowling into the darkness.
“We can ring his doorbell and ask to borrow a cup of sugar,” I said. My mom used to be notorious for doing that sort of thing, lugging me around the trailer park with her recipe book, getting ingredients for dinner one door at a time. It wasn’t as if we were that poor; she just wasn’t very good at planning ahead, and tended to have a pot boiling on the stove before realizing she had nothing to put in it.
Frank ignored my comment, which was in fact lippy, and got out of the car. We’d parked about a mile away from the mark’s home, inching along slowly from the main road like we had four flat tires, using the full moon to guide us instead of turning on the headlights.
I walked by his side as we headed closer to the house, not daring to look directly at it as if it was a solar eclipse, my eyes straining to adjust to the contrast like seeing a pinprick of daylight at the end of a long, dark tunnel.
His footsteps were as silent as a child tiptoeing across plush carpet on Christmas morning. I weighed a good fifty pounds less than him, and mine went crunch, crunch, smoosh.
“I think I just stepped on a lizard.”
“Shh,” he whispered, then crouched down and picked up a rock. I hadn’t even seen him put on his leather gloves. His paranoia over fingerprints knew no bounds.
We walked a little closer and he launched the rock toward the house, scanning the yard with the scope to his eye. Two alert canine heads turned in unison at the sound we couldn’t hear, and they ran toward it, filling the night with vicious barking.
Frank quickly grabbed my arm and pulled me close to the ground, his body slightly in front of mine. Shielding me.
I watched them sniff the dirt from behind Frank’s shoulder, clinging to his shirt to keep him from moving further into my line of sight. They soon lost interest and wandered away to smell something else. I wasn’t sure whether his experiment was a success or not, but I didn’t open my mouth to ask. In all probability we’d crouch here the rest of the night. He looked deep in thought.
“He was watching,” Frank said. He pointed toward one of the windows, and handed me back the scope. There was a slight scraping away of the dark paint at the bottom left hand corner. I never would’ve caught it, but now that he’d brought it to my attention, I could see faint movement through the crack.
What was the point of having an alarm system if you ignored it? He couldn’t possibly see what they were barking at from behind an inch of dusty glass. Even if he had a scope like us, the lights would distort his view of anything past the fence.
Frank pulled me to my feet, setting his hand briefly over my mouth, a silent instruction to keep quiet until we got back to the car.
“He didn’t come out to investigate,” I said as soon as the car was in sight. This was our in, and I wanted him to know that I’d picked up on it.
“They must bark constantly. He’s used to it. Too many false alarms. But they didn’t keep it up. There’s no telling how they’ll react if they see something worth attacking.”
“Like us?”
“Like you,” he said. “The dogs look thin. I’ll bet I can walk right up to the house with the proper enticement. Train them to shut up until you get close enough. We don’t want to give him time to think about it. He needs to see you, react emotionally, and come out to help. For that you have to be right at the gate.”
“How long will it take to train them?”
“Not long,” he said with a smile. “We’ll bill Charlie’s clients for doggie biscuits.”
We went to a pet store first thing the following morning, and Frank picked out a bunch of dog treats with an enthusiasm I rarely saw in him outside of bed or books. He said that his partner before me had been an old, disfigured mutt that he’d purchased off a homeless man for a cheeseburger. He’d trained her to squat on his mark’s front lawn, so he could look innocent while he stood and watched their house. But then Charlie found out and called him crazy, so he gave her away to a good home and didn’t speak to him for nine months.
Frank took a shower and changed into clean clothes before going out that night, trying to smell as little like me as possible. He didn’t want the dogs to get confused when I came stumbling by the house, pretending to be injured. But it turned out that the dogs weren’t treated very well by their owner, and Frank’s presence became welcome almost immediately. He stayed with them from sundown to sunup, feeding them treats through the fence and teaching them to sit. He probably could’ve gotten them to attack our mark if he felt like it.
My responsibility while he was away was to put together a costume worthy of an Academy Award, and make sure my acting skills were equally up to par. With the amount of television I watched, it wasn’t difficult to pull something together.
I bought a light colored shirt and washed Frank’s car with it, then found a pair of old torn jeans at a thrift store and added some new holes. Next came the need for road rash, so I tracked down the parking lot in the most desperate need of being repaved, and played around in a pothole so deep it could’ve fit the late Walter Jones. A few drops of food coloring and some corn syrup in an empty Coke bottle, mixed with a couple handfuls of loose asphalt and an expertly placed Q-Tip, and I looked so bad I felt sorry for myself.
Frank actually paled when he saw me in full makeup, which was the best compliment he could’ve ever given me. My expert job as a special FX artist left him without a doubt in his mind that our mark would fall for it.
We drove out to the desert together, parking where we had before. But we didn’t get out of the car. “Are you nervous?” he asked.
“A little,” I said, playing with one of the holes in my pants. I was less nervous than I’d been on the previous hit, but it was a different kind of anxiety. We’d gone over everything that could possibly go wrong with the Goldman job. This one had way more unknowns. We didn’t know whether he’d come out or let me come in, we had no idea what kinds of weapons he had in the house, and on top of that, if he called an ambulance the whole ruse would be worthless.
“I have a good feeling about this job,” he said reassuringly.
I nodded. He would be out of sight, though still close enough to hit our mark without having to use his sniper rifle. I also had my gun, hidden in the deep pockets of my baggy jeans, but I wasn’t to use it until our man was down.
Frank headed off to get in position while I touched up my makeup. Our mark had a camera screen on his intercom, we’d seen it. Even if it was in black and white, he would’ve had to feel something when he saw me. I looked like I’d gotten run over by a tank.
I walked until the dogs were in sight, watching me tensely for Frank’s command of “sic ‘em,” then I took off one shoe and dropped it to the dirt. Frank would remember to pick it up if I didn’t. “Okay,” I said to myself, “make him proud.”
The harsh lights all over the yard made
my faux injuries look ghastly, and I found that all the preparation I’d done to coerce the tears from my eyes was pointless. It didn’t take thinking of my parents or of Frank leaving me, all it took was my determination to get him a good shot and I was bawling like a baby.
I could imagine his face, smiling, maybe even laughing, watching me limp and cry like I was actually hurt.
The dogs had been released from their verbal restraints and were going nuts, jumping at the fence and barking their heads off as I approached the intercom. I pressed it a few times, using my palm instead of the tip of my finger and getting my face as close as possible without touching it.
“You’re trespassing,” came a voice from the other end. His side of the screen wasn’t on. I couldn’t see him.
“Please,” I stuttered, “I need help. I got…I got hit by a car…on the road. Please.” I sniffled, snot and red corn syrup dripping down my face. I knew it was going to stain my skin. I already had pink spots in my hair from it.
There was a loud whistle, and the dogs went running toward the house. I started swaying, trying to keep my head from being an easy target in case he wanted to shoot at me. The night was eerily still now that the dogs had finally shut up.
“Mister?” I asked the intercom.
“I’m coming.”
I let go of the button, looking toward the front door. The gate started opening first with a mechanical whir and the crunch sound of small wheels traveling over dirt, then Michael Brown, formerly Michael Bianchi, stepped out of his house.
He’d changed a lot since the wedding photo Charlie had provided. His hairline had receded nearly to the back of his head, the mustache was gone, and his belly protruded over his pants like his internal organs were trying to escape. There was a handgun down the front of his pants.
Frank shot him twice in the abdomen, and he stumbled backward through the open door, landing with a slight bounce in his hallway.
Chance Assassin: A Story of Love, Luck, and Murder Page 23
