Layla's Score

by Andy Rausch

  When they were leaving, Lefty asked the guy behind the counter how to get to Bell's.

  “Bell's Amusement Park?”

  “Yeah, that's the one.”

  “That place has been closed for a decade.”

  “You're shitting me,” said Lefty.

  “I shit you not,” said the man.

  Lefty looked over at Layla, who was on the verge of tears. He hunkered down and put his arm around her. “It's okay, Layla,” he consoled. “We'll find something else.”

  “But I wanted to ride the roller coaster.”

  “I know,” he said. “So did I.”

  Layla soon regained her composure, using a power that is uniquely that of a seven-year-old, and was suddenly in good spirits again. “So now what?”

  “You wanna go to the mall?”

  “I guess,” said Layla. “Malls are kinda boring.”

  Lefty had to agree. He'd enjoyed them when he was a kid, but since then all the stores he'd liked to go to had closed. There were no more music stores, video stores, or bookstores. The arrival of the Internet had stomped the hell out of those things, leaving them as dead as the guy who'd tried to steal Lefty's Caddy.

  They wound up going to a place called Woodland Hills Mall. They were surprised to find a working carousel inside. For a quarter a ride people could take a whirl on the thing. Lefty and Layla rode several times. She was really picky, selecting a different horse for each ride. There was a bench on the carousel, so Lefty just sat there, watching the little girl.

  There was a movie theater in the mall, so they wound up going to the movies again. This time they watched an action-comedy with Jackie Chan that had poor action and wasn't funny. Lefty hated it, but Layla loved it. When they were leaving the theater afterwards, she punched and kicked the air, pretending to be Jackie Chan.

  Unsure what they should do next, Lefty looked up popular tourist attractions on his cell phone. After that, they went to an art museum called the Philbrook. As they walked around, admiring the paintings, Layla asked questions and explained things. “This is a Kandinsky,” she explained, pointing at a painting.

  Layla's intelligence never ceased to impress Lefty. “What do you know about Kandinsky?” he asked. He'd been the one who'd shown her the art book, but he'd already forgotten most of it. But not her. Layla rarely forgot anything. Her memory was nothing short of amazing.

  “Vasily Kandinsky,” said Layla. “He was born in Moxcow.”

  “Moscow,” Lefty corrected.

  “Moscow. He was an abstract painter. He had something called the Blue Rider Period, but I don't know what that means.” She looked up at him. “What does that mean, Daddy?”

  Lefty hated revealing the things he didn't know. He wanted to be her hero and he wanted to seem smart all the time. He didn't like to show her his ignorance. “Well, periods are different times in an artist's career, where all their paintings have a similar style. I don't know what the Blue Rider Period was specifically, but that's basically what it was—a time when all his paintings looked the same.”

  “Do you think this one's from the Blue Rider Period?”

  Lefty shrugged. “I have no idea, kid.”

  When they were outside the museum and back in the car, Layla asked, “What do we do now, Daddy?”

  The time had come. “Daddy needs to talk to a man about some business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “Grown-up stuff.”

  Layla accepted this and pressed no further.

  After using the GPS on his phone to locate the residence, located on a street called East 24th Place, Lefty parked along the curb.

  “Is this where he lives?” asked Layla.

  “I think so.”

  The house was a modest little thing, the kind of place that was perfect for a single elderly man. It was neither too big nor too small. It was a well-kept, cozy-looking little blue house with a white one-car garage. Lefty sat there, listening to the Commodores sing “Easy” on the stereo. Once he got up his courage, he told Layla, “Stay here a minute. I'll be right back.”

  Layla looked up. “What if a mean man comes and takes me again?”

  “It'll be fine,” said Lefty. “The odds of that happening again are slim. And I'll be right there on the porch. I'll talk to him, and then I'll come and get you.”

  “You'll come right back?”

  “I promise.”

  “Pinky promise?”

  “Pinky promise,” said Lefty. He climbed out of the Caddy and walked up to the house.

  “Here goes nothing,” he said, knocking on the door. It took a minute, but a grizzled man of about seventy finally answered. He had the same irritable disposition a lot of old men had. “Yeah?” he asked in a gruff voice.

  “Are you Brooks Barker?”

  The man's eyes narrowed. “Who wants to know?”

  “My name's Lefty. Spook Collins was my dad.”

  The old man looked at him, sizing him up. “Spook Collins was your old man?”

  “He was.”

  “Well, hell,” Brooks said. “Why didn't you say so? Come on in.” He looked out at the Caddy. “Who you got out there with you?”

  “That's my little girl, Layla. Can she come in?”

  Brooks said, “Well, she can't stay out in the car all day. Bring her in. I'll fix her some ice cream.”

  Three

  Brooks Barker

  Brooks Barker, by nature, was not an overly-friendly person, but he was trying his damnedest. As Layla sat at a dining room table in the next room with her headphones on, alternating her attention between the Neapolitan ice cream and her tablet, the two men spoke.

  “How'd you end up with a name like Lefty?” asked Brooks. “You left-handed?”

  “I'm sure there's a story there, but I don't know it. And no, I'm not left-handed.”

  “But it's a nickname, right? Not your birth name?”

  “No, my real name is Markaveous.”

  Brooks made a disapproving face. “I'd stick with Lefty.” He thought for a minute and then asked, “Spook is gone then?”

  “A few years back.”

  “How'd he go?”

  “Cancer. Had it in his lungs. Musta been the smoking.”

  Brooks nodded. “The man did enjoy his Pall Malls. I'd swear he loved them more than he loved pussy, and that's saying something because Spook Collins lived for pussy.”

  Lefty grinned. “I'd probably be more inclined to appreciate that fact if it hadn't been for the amount of cheating he did on my mom. God only knows how many brothers and sisters I got running around out there that I've never even met.”

  “Did he go fast?”

  “No, he didn't,” said Lefty. “He lingered for a couple years. It was bad. Real bad. The man wasted away. He'd always been a big man, but there at the end he weighed less than a hundred pounds. At the end he just stayed there in the hospital. They wouldn't let him go home. He was so doped up he didn't know if he was coming or going, but you know what? The pain was so strong, so intense, even with all those meds, he would scream out in pain. He kept trying to pull out his catheter and his IV. The pain was making him crazy and he would try to fight the nurses. It was a terrible thing to watch him reduced to that. But I sat there with him, day in and day out, as much as I possibly could. I watched him die just a little bit at a time. It was rough. It was really hard on him.”

  “And your mother?” asked Brooks.

  “She bailed a few years before that. I guess she'd had enough of his shit. My pops wasn't always the easiest man to be around. He was mean when he was in the best of moods, and the best of moods didn't occur often. And he drank way too much.”

  “Rum and Coke?” asked Brooks.

  “To the very end. I'm surprised they weren't pumping that shit through his IV.”

  Brooks chuckled. “Your old man was a pain in the ass. That's what he was. I'd like to say otherwise, but I can't.”

  “You guys didn't talk for a lot of years. Can I ask what
happened? He never would say. Was it a woman?”

  Brooks looked at him. “I guess you could say this was about a woman, but not the way you think. It was Dixie, my ex-wife. Her and Spook, they were like oil and water, only in their case the oil was on fire. You ever see that shit, where there's oil in the water and they light it on fire? Well, that's how it was with those two. They couldn't see eye to eye on anything. And that wasn't all Spook's fault. That woman was as tough as they come. I mean, she was really tough. Sometimes she would get mad at me and I wouldn't even know she was mad until she hit me in the head with a pot or a pan—whatever she could get ahold of.”

  Lefty chuckled. “She might have been tough, but my dad had a problem with women in general. He didn't think much of them, and he didn't like them telling him what to do.”

  “Yeah, that was him alright.”

  “But you know, he thought the world of you.”

  Brooks was visibly surprised. “He said that?”

  “He used to tell me all the time that if I ever needed a hitter to go out on a job with me, I should go to Tulsa and find Brooks Barker,” said Lefty. “He said you were the best hitter he ever saw. He said he was good, better than good even, but he said you were the best. When he spoke of you, he always spoke with reverence, like he was talking about Jesus himself.”

  “The part about him telling you to come to Tulsa to find me,” said Brooks. “Is that why you're here now?”

  “It is,” said Lefty. “But this isn't just any job. This is the mother of all jobs. In fact, this is mother of the mother of the mother of all jobs. The job to end all jobs. It's the opportunity of a lifetime, the kind of job you either take or you spend the rest of your life regretting not taking.”

  Brooks raised his mug, taking a sip of his whiskey-infused coffee. “I don't do that stuff anymore. I'm not a hitter anymore. I'm retired from all that.”

  “I knew you were gonna say that.”

  “That's how it is,” said Brooks. “Killing's a young man's game.”

  “It doesn't have to be,” said Lefty. “What if you could make one last score? Enough to get straight for the rest of your life?”

  “There's a cliché. 'One last score.' You know how many movies there are about criminals trying to make one last score? There's more movies like that than there are grains of sand in the Sahara. And you know what? That one last score stuff is silly. It's a pipe dream that never works out for anybody. There's only two ways a man ever makes one last score—he either dies or he gets locked up. That's it. There ain't no happy endings in this life, kid.”

  “This job's different. This is the big one.”

  “How much are we talkin' about?”

  “Two million.”

  Brooks stared at him in disbelief. “Two million dollars? For one fucking guy?”

  “For one fucking guy.”

  “Why's it so damned high? This guy musta really done something to piss off someone important.”

  “It appears so,” said Lefty. “This is why you never piss off rich people.”

  “Words to live by,” said Brooks. “So you're in the life now? Like your old man?”

  “I guess you could say I went into the family business.”

  “Why would you do that? I can see you're a bright kid, had other options. Why would you wanna pick up a gun and do all this?”

  “The work just appealed to me,” said Lefty. “My father would tell me these stories about hits you guys used to do, different jobs he'd pulled, marks he'd killed. It just appealed to me. The money is good. I don't have a college degree. I tried, but I never could get past college algebra. I took that motherfucker three times, and it got the best of me every time. Without a degree, there isn't much I'm qualified to do, and certainly nothing that pays what a hitter makes. And I don't wanna settle for some rinky-dink no-pay job. I'm not flipping burgers for a living.”

  “So you actually like this line of work?”

  “The answer should be no,” said Lefty. “I'm fully aware of that. But having said that, I don't mind it. In fact, I actually kinda like it. It's perverse, I guess, but it gives me a rush, killing someone. And there aren't a lot of other jobs like that. Here you can kill somebody and not feel like you're doing something immoral.”

  “You don't think it's immoral, killing someone?”

  “Of course it's immoral,” said Lefty. “But not in the way it is for someone like Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy. They're just out hacking up people like firewood, and maybe eatin' 'em with A-1 sauce or whatever. But not us. Not a hitter. That's not what we do. We're like the soldier in the Marines who goes off to Vietnam and kills gooks in the war. He's just doing his job. He's got nothing against those people. It's just business. It's what he does, so he does it. And at the end of each day, he gets to go home and look at himself in the mirror and not hate what he sees there.”

  “Do you like what you see when you look in the mirror?” asked Brooks.

  “Nobody's perfect. Maybe Jesus if you believe in that kind of thing, which I don't. But I'm not perfect. Not me, not you. I do my best. I take care of that little girl in there, and I put my best foot forward and try to be the best person I can be.”

  Brooks grinned. “A good person who just happens to murder people.”

  “You asked me why I liked the job? The hours are good and the pay is great. I barely work at all, and I got a nice house and a brand new Cadillac. Me and the little one always got food on our table and I can afford to pay the spic kid who lives next door to come over and mow the yard every week. I'm living the goddamn American dream. I had to kill a few people to get there, but that's the price of admission.”

  “I killed my fair share, I guess.”

  Lefty laughed. “You killed more than that. You put a whole bunch of people in the ground. You probably coulda filled an entire cemetery. You're a goddamn legend, Brooks.”

  “I suppose so,” said Brooks. “But all that's over now.”

  “But you miss it. I can hear it in your voice.”

  “So where is this job, anyway?”

  “It's in Detroit.”

  “Detroit?” asked Brooks, the disdain clear in his voice. “Goddamn place is like Beirut, only not as nice. It's a fucking eyesore. It wasn't really all that great to start with, before the GM plant shut down. But now, after that, it's one big crack-infested shithole. Hiroshima, the day after they dropped the bomb, looked better than fucking Detroit.”

  “Maybe,” said Lefty. “But I think I can stand it for a day or so if I'm getting a million dollars to be there.”

  Brooks nodded. “Yeah, that's an awful lot of money.”

  “So you'll do it?”

  “I'm considering it. And you know, I haven't killed anybody in a long time. It wouldn't hurt me to get another notch or two on my belt.”

  “When was the last time you killed somebody?”

  Brooks looked off into space for a moment, trying to remember. “I suppose it was eight or nine years ago. Some peckerhead cut me off in traffic and flipped me the bird. It takes a lot to piss me off, but that sonofabitch did it. I'm not a bad guy, but there's no call for that. Lots of people piss me off, from the kid that throws my newspaper in the bushes to the dickhead that doesn't use his turn signal. But I don't shoot 'em. You can't just go around shootin' folks willy-nilly. It takes a certain kind of asshole for me to shoot 'em.”

  “And he was the kind,” said Lefty.

  Brooks nodded. “When I chased him down and stopped him, he probably could have apologized and talked his way out of it. Like I said, I'm not a bad guy. But no, he didn't do that. He said things about my mother. He called her a whore, said something about dicks in her ass. My mother's been in her grave for a long, long time, so I didn't like that. If Spook ever told you anything about me, I'm sure he told you that I don't fuck around like that.”

  “So you shot the guy?”

  “In the face. Then I tossed him into the dumpster behind Blockbuster.”

  “Then what?�
��

  “Then I went home,” said Brooks.

  “Did you lose any sleep?”

  “Not one goddamn wink. You know why? Some motherfuckers got it coming. That's just the way it is, kid. He just pushed my buttons on the wrong day at the wrong time. I think about it now, it could have gone different on a different day. Who can say? But I did it. I shot the guy, and I don't feel one way or another about it.”

  “You ever think about the mark's family when you do a job?” asked Lefty. “You know, the guy's wife and kids, that kind of stuff?”

  “When you're doing what we do, you can't allow yourself to think like that. When you start to see the mark as a human being, it becomes harder to do your job. What about you? Do you think about those things?”

  “Sometimes. I try not to, but the thoughts do pop into my head.”

  “You gotta avoid that. It's not healthy.”

  “Thing is, one time I shot a guy and his wife. I don't know who the guy was, what he'd done. You know, it's not our job to know those things. We just pull the trigger. But the man and wife, they were taking a shower. I didn't even know she was in there until the moment of truth.”

  “So you shot her?”

  “I had no choice,” said Lefty. “But then, when I was leaving, I heard a little girl crying in the next room.”

  “A little girl?”

  “She was only about two. And thanks to me, she didn't have any parents. Her mommy and daddy had gone on to receive their great reward. So there was just her, alone in the world.”

  Brooks thought about it. Then he looked at Layla. Then he looked back at Lefty.

  Lefty nodded. “Wasn't nothing else I could do. I wasn't gonna leave her there.”

  “So you took her home and raised her as your own.”

  “I did.”

  “Damn, kid. You're really something.”

  “That good or bad?” asked Lefty.

  “I'm not sure yet.” Brooks sat there quietly for a moment before saying, “Sell me on this job. I mean, I know you want the money, but why? What are you gonna do with your share?”