by Kim Oh
That’s what I was thinking, while I was staring into the mirror and Mavis was standing in the bathroom doorway, watching me. Plus I already was writing a little personal memo inside my head, that when it came time to send my brother Donnie to college, maybe I’d sign him up with the Marines instead, if I could convince them to take a kid in a wheelchair. No reason he couldn’t roll around with a machine gun strapped across his lap, I suppose.
“Thanks. I appreciate it.” That’s what I said to Mavis, instead of what I really felt like laying on her. “But don’t worry,” I told her. “We’re cool. And soon as everything’s all sorted out, we can talk about this some more. So don’t take this the wrong way – but I’ve got business to take care of.”
She gave me a brave little smile, which I figured was half an acknowledgment that things were a little heavy at the moment, and half some kind of weird self-satisfaction that she had succeeded in smoothing everything out with a rough character like me. Something else that going to a high-priced university apparently teaches kids, that they can run numbers on other people who don’t happen to have fancy diplomas with a lot of Latin words on them.
I figured I’d talked to her enough, plus she was getting on my nerves, and I didn’t want to risk getting all bitchy again. Let the little twit think she’d put something over on me – I pushed past her and back out to the plush main room.
“I’ll be back in a little while.” That was me talking to both Donnie and Mavis. “Nothing big going down – just prep work.” I turned my serious gaze on each one of them in turn. “But I don’t need you guys making the situation any more complicated than it already is. So just hunker down here, stay out of trouble, keep yourself amused – whatever. Don’t open the door unless you know it’s me on the other side, and I sound like everything’s cool.” I turned, then stopped and looked back at them. “Oh, and stay away from the windows.”
Donnie frowned. “Why?”
Because I said so. Something else I wanted to say, but didn’t. Actually, I was a little bit nailed by the question, since I didn’t have a solid reason. If the situation was so screwed up that my brother and his new friend risked getting blown away if they poked their noses past the curtains, then they were in pretty serious danger whether they did or not. Whoever had swiped Lynndie could come piling in here soon as I was gone, and there wouldn’t be jack I could do about it. I’d mainly said the bit about the windows because, one, that’s the sort of thing that people in the movies say when something like this is going on, and two, I figured it would impress upon them the seriousness of the situation, at least for a little while, and they wouldn’t go wandering off. I already had one person I needed to find; I didn’t need a couple more.
“Hey – I’m the expert here, remember?” Only answer I could come up with. “On people getting killed, right? We’ll talk about it later, if you’re still interested. But right now, I gotta get moving.”
With that, I was out the door. Finally.
SEVEN
You’re probably going to regard this as crappy of me to say, but I regard drunk people as wonderful. And the drunker they are, the more wonderful they become. At least to me.
Here’s why. Look at it from my point of view. In my line of work, I have to do things that most people would rather I didn’t do, including killing them if necessary. This is just how selfish people are. They’re thinking of themselves all the time, rather than of my needs. Sonsabitches.
Getting off the subject a little bit, but I wasn’t always such a sociopath. I learned to be one from Cole, who probably did start out that way. I mean, it was like congenital with him; he had a natural talent for killing people. So much so, that he could even teach a little schlunky bookkeeper like me how to do it. There’s career advice for you: if you want to get somewhere in life, you gotta hang with the people who are already good at what you want to do. And Cole was the best. I still think about him.
And if, along with the gun stuff and all the sneaking around business, he also showed me how to be a sociopath – who’s to say I wouldn’t have learned the same thing if I’d stuck with the bookkeeping? You know, if I’d worked my way up the corporate ranks, actually become a Chief Financial Officer, as I’d wanted to a long time ago. Seems like a long time, at least. You look at people like that, and they’re no prizes in the human sympathy sweepstakes. It’s not like you find the Dalai Lama, let’s say, running some big multinational conglomerate.
So really, the only difference between me and those other sociopaths, the ones wearing the suits and ties and with the big corner offices and the company jets, is that I just kill people one at a time. Oh, and I don’t get paid as much. That part sucks.
Anyway, back to my fondness for drunks. It’s a professional thing, not something personal. Personally, I find them obnoxious. Especially when they figure they can hit on you – the drunk guys, I mean. I haven’t had the experience yet of some female drunk wanting to climb on top of me. Should I be offended by that? Maybe they’re choosier – of course, everybody’s choosier than some male drunk – and I just don’t make the cut. Or maybe it’s just because when girls get drunk, they just want to drape themselves over the karaoke machine and stumble through those drippy Jewel and Tracy Chapman songs. I don’t know; just another one of life’s mysteries, I guess.
Cole had warned me that I wouldn’t be getting a lot of action, of any variety, as long as I was in this line of work. Kind of a screwed world when even bookkeepers have a better shot at love.
Sorry, off track again. None of this kind of stuff was going through my head as I went down in the elevator from the fancy suite where I’d just left my little brother and Mavis.
The elevator had three walls of that gold-mottled mirror stuff that’s supposed to make a place seem expensive, but really just looks like something you’d find in a third-rate motel in Reno, Nevada. I’ve been to exactly that motel – it was a job, somebody paid me to go, otherwise I wouldn’t have – so I know what I’m talking about, at least this time. Riding this one down to a much fancier hotel lobby, I found a patch of mirror relatively free of that glittering acne-like stuff, and leaned forward to check my scalp, to make sure I hadn’t started bleeding again. Poking a couple of fingers just above my hairline made me wince, the spot where I’d gotten whacked still tender and all, but at least nothing red was trickling out. I took it as a good sign. I like to keep all the damage on the inside, where it doesn’t show.
I dug my sunglasses out of my shoulder bag and put them on as I crossed the lobby’s patterned carpet, past the giant round table in the center, pointless except to hold a vase that would’ve been big enough to hide me, but instead contained a miniature jungle of tropical flowers, birds-of-paradise, and that spiky orange Martian-looking stuff I can never remember the name of; that sort of thing. Around the table’s circular polished edge was a carefully fanned-out row of some Spanish-language newspaper, and copies of the International Herald Tribune. They were all crisp and untouched, the party crowd filling the hotel not exactly being into anything too literate, even when they were back home at university and supposedly attending classes. Hey, when your parents are forking out that much for tuition, the school will do hand puppets to get you through the material, if it has to.
When the automatic glass doors at the far end of the lobby whispered open, the sunlight pouring in was like an assault. Maybe not as bad as the real one I’d recently suffered, but still enough to make me wince behind the dark lenses of my glasses. Tearing up a bit, I walked out to the hotel pool area, practically blind.
Which I could smell, weirdly, even if I couldn’t see it for the moment. You operate in the dark as much as I’ve had to – I mean the literal dark, as in lights out – then maybe you develop your other senses a little bit more. Right now, I could take a deep, lung-filling inhale, and then be able to sort through the olfactory layers of the landscaping greenery surrounding the pool, over-chlorinated water heated up by the sun beating on it, that funny sidewalk-after-r
ain smell from the water evaporating from where it had been splashed onto the surrounding concrete decks, all mingling with the hot asphalt and diesel fumes that came drifting over the hotel property’s high walls. Seriously, that’s one of the ways you know you’re in South America – everywhere you go, even in the posh areas, they’ve got buses that bark out black fumes like smoldering tires in a landfill pit. Blow your nose, and your Kleenex resembles a coal miner’s lung biopsy. I didn’t care how ritzy expensive this place might be – I was ready to fly back to the First World.
Not that anybody else around me seemed to feel the same way. They were obviously enjoying being here. As my shaded eyes adjusted to the glare, I could see where that other scent, fainter but sharper at the same time, was coming from. The aroma of post-adolescent pheromones, all that unleashed testosterone and its female equivalent, exuded by the happy splashers in the hotel pool. Or pools, actually – I could see now, through the dark tint of my sunglasses, that there was more than one, a whole complex of palm-shaded, tile-lined, blue depths and shallows.
Anyway, the sexy subliminal scent marked our future ruling class at play. Acting like kids, and why not? What did they have to ever worry about? Right now, if any of them got whanged on the head, it probably would be from falling over while blitzed. That was the other smell I could pick up on, of too much beer in red plastic cups, and poolside Jäger shots, and taller, skinnier drinks fruited up to mask the industrial-level alcohol content.
Oh, and not surprisingly, there was another smell in the mix, more acrid and nose-wrinkling. Given how early in the day the partying started, it was only to be expected that several of America’s finest young scholars had already upchucked in the landscaping. And then gone right on partying, the occasional hurl just a road-bump on the way to complete blotto unconsciousness.
I sound bitter about this, don’t I? I know I do. These people weren’t much younger than me, and while they had been sliding through life on mommy and daddy’s greased nickel, I’d had to be hard at work, killing people? How fair is that?
Then again, as I stood at the edge of the hotel pool complex and watched other people’s fun, I really didn’t feel envious at all – or at least after a minute or so, I didn’t. If missing out on parties like this also meant missing out on the obligatory hook-ups that came later – I was cool with that. Instead of having some hungover but still drunk frat guy banging away at me, I’d be just as happy – more so, actually – with a pack of cotton swabs and the non-drinkable type of alcohol, cleaning a couple of my guns while watching some Nature Channel documentary on TV. That’s just the kind of quiet life I lead when I’m not on the job.
There was some kind of canopied bandstand set up at the end of the pool farthest away from the hotel building. A trio was grinding out by-the-numbers reggae, the heavy bass blowing out the stacked amplifiers’ woofers. They probably weren’t any worse than what you’d hear nowadays in Kingston, but the singer’s dreads looked fake to me, as though he kept them in a box when he was doing wedding gigs at whatever country club might be in a town like this.
The booty music was hitting its mark, though. Squinting behind my shades, I could see that as well. Lot of frolicking grab-ass going on out there, both in and out of the water. Falling into the pool, climbing back out of it, all those suntanned and well-toned bodies churning the place to a froth, the guys in those baggy, knee-length boxer trunks, the sorority girls in their skimpy, cheek-peeker outfits . . . just stupid kids, having stupid fun.
Okay, so maybe I was a little jealous. You have to remember that I’ve been fun-deprived in my life. I’ve been looking after my brother Donnie, one way or another, since forever. And the killing people thing? You might think so, but it’s not really fun. It’s all work for me.
Which I had to get busy on, instead of just standing here, trying not to think about all the sunshiny stuff I was missing out on.
I headed over to the little round tables, shaded by bright-colored umbrellas, surrounded by those aluminum chairs wrapped in plastic webbing, that make you feel like your butt’s in a nest of twangy rubber bands. Nobody was over there except for a couple of frat types, passed out face-down on some folding lounges. They probably wouldn’t have noticed me coming around, even if they had been conscious. The music had kicked up a notch, at the far end of the pool area, and that’s where all the action and the wet bare skin was happening. A couple of hotel security, in short-sleeved uniforms and clip-on ties, were watching all that going on, and not watching me.
Which was fine as far as I was concerned, but it wouldn’t have mattered if the guards had thrown a glance my way. What I was doing, or about to do, I’d already done often enough before I’d gotten smooth at it. Practically invisible, even – I still could turn on that mousy little accountant thing from way back, so as to fade completely from other people’s notice. It’s useful for times like this.
My shoulder bag was already zipped open as I walked by the tables. Usually, the bag hangs heavier, because it would have some kind of major piece of armament in it, down at the bottom, below the tube of lip gloss and the packet of tissues. The absence of a gun was something I was working on remedying.
I’d already spotted what I was looking for, from over by the lobby’s automatic doors. Not a gun, but a smartphone sitting on one of the tables, in the middle of the empty and half-empty cerveza bottles and plastic cups. A nice white Samsung Galaxy – just like the one in my shoulder bag, in fact. There’s a practical tip for you: always have whatever other people are most likely to have. Don’t go in for crazy off-brands and weird devices, even if they’re better – or cheaper, or even better and cheaper at the same time – than what your average person buys. That way, when you go to swap with them, they won’t know it’s happened until too late. So if it hadn’t been the little Samsung, I would’ve had an iPhone, I suppose; you see plenty of those around.
Took me about two seconds to make the switch, and I didn’t even break stride as I passed by the comatose frat guys. With my shoulder bag pulled around in front, so the security guards couldn’t see, I fished out my smartphone, swiped my hand across the drink-strewn table, dropping the phone and picking up its twin, all in one smooth motion. As I continued walking, I held the white Samsung up to my ear, pretending I’d just gotten a call. I kept walking, and nobody said a thing.
And that’s what I like about drunk people. Or at least what I find useful about them. They just don’t notice when stuff happens around them. Which is great when you’re as into not getting noticed as I am, especially when I’m working. It didn’t matter whether the smartphone I’d just snagged belonged to one of the drunk guys snoring through their beer overload, or had been left on the little round table by one of the college bimbos intently partying in the pool next to the bandstand. It was mine now. The identical one I’d left behind, I’d already bricked that with a suicide app that my clever brother Donnie had installed. It was just a sleek plastic-and-glass paperweight now. Whoever picked it up next, figuring it was their phone, would be jabbing their forefinger at the glossy screen with zero luck.
I smiled at the security guards as I walked by them, dropping the smartphone into my shoulder bag and heading back into the hotel lobby.
“Here you go.” I handed it off to Donnie when I got back up to the suite. He barely even glanced at it, just leaned over the chrome arm of his wheelchair and fished through his laptop bag for whatever connector he needed.
“Did you steal that?” Mavis’s voice had a certain accusing tone.
Which I shrugged off. “That’s kind of a harsh word,” I said. I didn’t know whether she had gotten swifter on the uptake than when I’d first met her, or maybe she had watched from the balcony as I had gone about my business down below at the pool area. “I don’t consider it stealing, if it’s something I really, really need. Like to keep us all from getting killed.”
“Don’t argue with her.” Donnie didn’t look around at us, but just started tapping on the keyboard in front o
f him. “She does this kinda stuff all the time.”
Mavis didn’t heed his advice. “If you just needed to make a call –” She fished her own phone – some brand I didn’t recognize, sheathed in a pink Power Puff Girls case – from her bag. “You could’ve used mine.”
“Right.” I gave a nod. “But maybe a phone that I’m sure other people haven’t tapped in on – maybe that would be better for the kind of conversation I have to have now.”
“They can do that?” She looked dubiously at the pink rectangle in her hand.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “It’s only really bad people who can do it. So you don’t need to worry about your friends listening in.”
“Got it.” Donnie disconnected the Samsung from the skinny white cable plugged into his laptop and tossed it to me. “I used your birthday for the new password. Might want to change that if you plan on using it for a while.”
“Thanks.” I turned and headed for the suite’s hallway. “But there’s just one call I have to make right now.”
