Marked Man

by William Lashner

  “The mayor.”

  “That’s right. I check again through the window, careful now with a cop standing outside. Not a one of them showing.”

  “There’s a private dining room.”

  “Of course there is. I waits until the night is over and everyone has left the joint, first the mayor and the councilman, then the developer, then Bradley and his entourage. I wait for the last of the fat cats to clear and the door to be locked. I keep waiting until the waitstaff starts slipping out, one by one. It’s no real trick to find the one I’m looking for. Someone with a hop in the step, the furtive glance, the twitchy fingers, the one that can barely wait to start spending the tips. And it’s a she, and not a bad looker.”

  “Convenient.”

  “I start following, but it doesn’t take long. She heads north, turns left on Market, slips into the Continental, the upscale joint in that old diner, finds herself a place at the bar. It isn’t long afore I find myself a place next to her.”

  “What was she drinking?”

  “Blue martinis. What is that all about? Looks like antifreeze, tastes like nothing. But they gets her in a jovial enough mood. Name is Jillian. Nice girl. She’s going through a phase. A few years she’ll be back in college where she belongs.”

  “And what does sweet Jillian say?”

  “She says there’s a private dining room in the wine cellar of that restaurant, a fancy room with frescoes on the ceilings and bare tatas on the frescoes. And every Tuesday night the mayor meets with his friends to conduct private business.”

  “Making deals.”

  “It’s the way the city works, right?” says Skink. “He’s not even shy about it. Pay to play. The mayor’s always running for something, always needs a little cash for the upcoming campaign.”

  “Jillian tell you this?”

  “Jillian didn’t know the details, of course she didn’t. When she was in the room, pouring the wine, they talked only about golf and the Islands.”

  “But she knew the players.”

  “Yes she did. And it seemed every Tuesday night Bradley was there with some other money boy looking to enter the game.”

  “So Bradley Hewitt is the middleman, bringing together the mayor and the money for a nice little meal.”

  “She said our Bradley was partial to the nodino di vitello all’aglio.”

  “What the hell’s that, Phil?”

  “Veal chop in garlic.”

  “And he’s probably sawing through one right this second. Fabulous. Now all we have to do is figure how to get in, listen to what they’re saying, and get it all on tape to use it against him in court. I assume you have a plan to do just that?”

  “You assume wrong.”

  “No plan?”

  “No plan.”

  “You always have a plan.”

  “Not tonight, mate.”

  “Then what good is all this?”

  “I just thought you’d be interested.”

  “But I won’t be able to use any of this in the Theresa Wellman case.”

  “Well, maybe not directly.”

  “What are you talking about, Phil?”

  “Something else Jillian let slip. This was after the fourth martini, when she was trying quite hard not to fall off her stool.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Phil Skink stepped behind a large black SUV, and I did the same. He pointed across the street to the blue awning and quiet front entrance of an upscale, family-owned Italian joint with one of the best wine lists in the city. There was a limo parked out front and a plainclothes cop leaning against the entrance, looking at his nails.

  “I happened to mention to Jillian some sort of federal investigation I had heard tale of, and she nodded. Like she knew what I was talking about. And then she put her finger up to her pretty lips, like it was a secret.”

  “Like what was a secret?”

  “You’re a smart cookie, you figure it out.”

  I looked at Phil, looked at the restaurant and the plainclothes cop, who now was flicking a piece of lint off his lapel. I tried to put it all together, what he was getting at, and I flashed back again on pretty Jillian, her eyes lidded from drinking, leaning forward with that drunken sexiness as she puts her finger to her lips. Sssshhh, it says, that gesture. Don’t let anybody know. Know what? That someone is listening. To whom? To Jillian and Skink at the Continental? No way. The whole point of the Continental is to act so cool as to ignore everyone else.

  A car was coming from the left. As it came at us, I ducked. Skink laughed. After it passed, I scanned the street, back and forth. To our left I spied a row of cars parked nose first, facing the river. I hadn’t given it much notice when I passed it before, but this time I gave it a good scan. And there I saw it. How could I have missed it?

  A battered white van with a raw brown streak of rust on its side. A van I had seen before.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said. “Someone is listening in for us.”

  “You happen to know anyone in the Department of Justice who might give you a hand?”

  “It just so happens I might at that, except she hates my guts.”

  “Charm her, mate.”

  “I’d have better luck with a cobra,” I said, “and probably a better time, too.”

  32

  “I don’t think it’s going to happen,” I said to Rhonda Harris over drinks at a swank pickup joint on South Street.

  “That’s too bad,” she said with a rather saucy smile. “It would have been sensational.”

  “Oh, I bet it would.”

  We were sitting across from each other in a small booth upstairs at the Monaco Living Room, among swarms of the young and the beautiful looking for the quick and the nasty. It was a dark, intimate space with small tables, a mirrored dance floor, and a balcony set back from the main room for those private moments. Not my normal type of beer joint, but she had picked it, and I must say I liked the way the flame of the candle flickered in her green eyes.

  “What’s the problem?” she said. “Is there anything I can do to make it happen?”

  “Not really. We just don’t think it’s quite the right time for Charlie to talk.”

  “Who doesn’t think that? Charlie?”

  “I haven’t been in direct contact with my client lately.”

  “So it’s someone else calling the shots.”

  “In a way, yes. You want another round?”

  She was drinking Cosmopolitans, which was very cosmopolitan of her. I was drinking my usual Sea Breeze, which was not. I spun my finger at the beautiful black-clad waitress, asking for another round. Truth was, if I wasn’t falling in love with Rhonda Harris, I would have been falling in love with the waitress.

  “Doesn’t Charlie himself have a say?” she said. “Some people are thrilled to see their names in the newspaper.”

  “Really?” I said. “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “I could get your picture in the article along with his.”

  “My good side?”

  “Is there a bad one?”

  “Now I know you’ll say anything to get the interview.”

  “Busted. Are you going to give Charlie a chance to make up his own mind?”

  “When the time’s right, maybe.” I lifted up my drink and snatched what was left of it just as the waitress came with our next round. They were quick with the drinks at the Monaco Living Room. I smiled like a buffoon at the waitress. She ignored me.

  “Do you like being a lawyer, Victor?” said Rhonda as she swirled her rose-colored drink.

  “Lawyers rank in job dissatisfaction second only to proctologists.”

  “Well, then,” she said. “I guess things could always be worse.”

  “But the rubber gloves are so cool, don’t you think? That’s why everyone uses them now. Lunch ladies, cops. Remember the good old days when dentists stuck their hands in your mouth after just a quick wash?”

  “Do we have to talk about dentists?”

  “So let�
��s talk about another despised profession, newspaper reporters.”

  “Are we despised?”

  “Oh, yes. More than lawyers, even.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “The things I’ve heard. Do you like writing?”

  “Not writing, really. That’s the chore at the end of the chase. But I’m a very goal-oriented person and my job fits right in with that. When I need to find a story or get an interview, I usually find a way. Sometimes I ambush the target, sometimes I use my charm.”

  “Like now.”

  “I’m trying, although it doesn’t seem to be swaying you much.”

  “Try harder.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” She dropped her hand casually on my forearm, looked at me straight with her captivating eyes. “But either way, Victor, know that I will get it done. I’ll find Charlie, with or without you, because it is what I do.”

  “Take it easy, Rhonda. It’s just a story.”

  “It’s more than that, Victor. People aren’t adjectives. You can think of yourself as kind and sweet and funny, but how you think of yourself doesn’t mean a thing. People are verbs.”

  “What verb are you?”

  “I eliminate. Distractions, obstacles, impediments to my success. I’m someone who gets what she’s after, no matter who or what gets in the way.”

  “My God, you sound ruthless.”

  “Does it excite you, Victor?”

  “Oddly, yes. You seem so sure of things. No doubts?”

  “What’s the point of doubt? You make a decision, go down a certain road, and there you are. You can whine and dither, or you can keep going and get it done. I’m not sure how I ended up here, but I’m not backtracking. Pick a path, do your job with neither fear nor hesitation, that’s the only way I know.”

  “So if you never let anything get in your way, how come you’re still just a stringer?”

  “I started late, switched careers in midstream.”

  “What did you do before?”

  “Animal control.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. Dogs and cats. Ferrets and snakes and squirrels. Lots of squirrels. You’d be surprised how dangerous they can be.”

  “Squirrels?”

  “After alcohol and lawyers, they’re the number one health threat in America.”

  “Really?”

  “No, but don’t ever mess with an angry squirrel.”

  “I bet you looked hot in your uniform.”

  “I still have it.”

  “Yowza.”

  “So what verb are you, Victor?”

  “I question, I suppose. I trust uncertainty. I’ve found out that whenever I’m sure of something, I’m dead wrong.”

  “What are you sure about right now?”

  “That you talk tougher than you really are.”

  She pursed her lips, sipped her drink. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “You’re not so tough?”

  “No, that’s not it,” she said, leaning close enough so I could smell the triple sec on her breath. “You’re right about being dead wrong.”

  33

  Later that night she lay naked beneath me, facedown on the bed. I was naked atop her, my thumbs gently kneading the taut muscles of her back and neck. She was purring like a lioness stretched out in the noonday sun, I was vibrating like a hyena over a freshly felled giraffe. But it was not mere animal lust that was driving me, though I freely admit to lusting like an animal. No, I was filled with some sharp emotion as I stroked and massaged.

  I leaned down, kissed the knife’s edge of her clavicle. She reached up with her hand to rub the nape of my neck. I nuzzled her earlobe and with my tongue flicked lightly the flesh beneath it.

  I have heard tell that the capacity to love is a sign of mental health, which meant, I suppose, that I was just then the healthiest man in the city, mentally wise at least, seeing as I was falling in love with every woman I laid my gaze upon. I pined for them, I felt lost without them, I was sure that each of them, the woman beneath me being no exception, could save my life.

  I kissed her again. Her bracelets jangled lightly as she rubbed my neck harder than before. I wasn’t even sure who she was, really, in her soul, but the raw emotion she coaxed out of me with every purr and every touch cut like a jagged shiv through my heart.

  But even in my besotted state, I knew I couldn’t be feeling true love so indiscriminately. No, what was flooding my blood that night, along with the lust, was a potent cocktail of fear and desperation, of loneliness and need, of a pathetic yearning for the merest breath of salvation. What I was searching for, in my deepest soul, was someone to pull me out of a bottomless hole whose dimensions I couldn’t fathom.

  I nibbled her flesh. Her fingernails dug into my scalp with a lovely pain.

  Yet even as I recognized the fallacy of my emotions, I couldn’t give up the hope that maybe, just maybe, this woman, this one, here, now, not womanhood in general but this specific woman in particular, could actually be my savior. The others might have been counterfeit totems to a false hope, but maybe this one, here, was actually the true answer to my questing heart.

  Suddenly she arched her back, lifted her torso out of the bed, bent her legs back and locked them around my own, like a breaststroker doing a scissor kick. I felt myself being pulled under.

  “Wait,” I said. “What are you doing? Whoa. Whoooa.”

  She was laughing as we fell into a rhythm, and I started laughing, too. My God, maybe it was the real thing, maybe I had found it after all.

  You are the one, no you, no no you are the one, beneath me, right now, you.

  “Right there,” she said. “That feels good. Oh, yes.”

  I wanted to kiss her just then, not on the shoulder or on the back of the neck but on her mouth, hard and clean, as we gazed at each other eye to eye.

  I slid down and out, rose onto my knees, reached under her arm, gently spun her around until I was staring with a longing heart straight into the face of Sheila the Realtor.

  I AM AS appalled writing this as you must be reading it. But there is a simple explanation. Really.

  So I was drinking with Rhonda Harris upstairs at the Monaco Living Room, feeling the love, so to speak, and hoping that things might actually lead somewhere with someone this time, when she glanced at her watch and leaped out of her seat. “Got to go,” she said.

  “Really?” I said, trying to keep my crest from falling.

  “Sorry, Victor.”

  “I was thinking maybe dinner. Maybe Italian.”

  “Can’t. Not tonight at least. Will you talk to Charlie for me, please?”

  “I guess.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” I said, like a puppy.

  I was sitting forlornly, alone with my drink, when the pretty young waitress brought another round that I had optimistically ordered a few moments before.

  “She coming back?” she said, indicating Rhonda’s spot.

  “Not tonight,” I said.

  “Too bad,” said the waitress, cleaning Rhonda’s side of the table. She was lean and athletic, with long black hair and big eyes. “I guess you won’t be needing the Cosmo, then,” she said. She had a fresh rosy complexion that said soy milk and yoga. I didn’t know about the soy milk, but I could learn yoga.

  “Since the drink’s already ordered,” I said, “you want to join me?”

  “Can’t. Against the rules.”

  “When do you get off?”

  “December,” she said.

  I lifted up my new Sea Breeze. “Merry Christmas.”

  By then I was a little too comfortable in my seat and couldn’t quite face going home to my ruined apartment to flop down on my ruined couch and spend another night watching the reception flicker on my cableless portable television. So I reached for the phone in my jacket pocket. I was going to call Beth, whom I hadn’t spent enough time with lately, or maybe Skink, who could cheerfully turn
the evening in a more sinister direction, or anyone in the directory who could provide a little company. But with my phone I inadvertently pulled out a card that had been sitting in the same pocket. Sheila the Realtor’s card. And I remembered the way her eyes had shone when she told me to give her a call.

  So I did.

  And I’ll say this for her, she was all business, was Sheila the Realtor, and she knew how to close the deal.

  “I’M SO glad you called,” she said after, as we lay in bed together while she smoked. She used her cupped left hand as an ashtray. “This was such an unexpected treat. Want a cigarette?”

  “No thank you,” I said. “I’m nauseated enough already from the sex and the drinking.”

  “I smoke to keep thin.”

  “I throw up,” I said.

  “I do that, too. So who is Chantal?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The name on your tattoo. Is she your girlfriend?”

  I looked down at the heart on my chest. “Not really.”

  “An old girlfriend, then?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Not too old, since it looks fresh enough. What do you do when you tattoo a lover’s name on your chest and then you break up?”

  “Look for someone with the same name.”

  “Sort of limits your options.”

  “Maybe that’s why I don’t get out much.”

  “They can remove tattoos with lasers now. You can lose the tattoo and have a peel all at once.”

  “Convenient,” I said.

  “It’s important to keep your facial skin fresh. Your partner Beth made an offer on that house.”

  “Are the sellers going to accept?”

  “I think so. It’s lower than they want, but the place has been vacant for a while now. She’s getting a tremendous deal.”

  “Yeah, what’s up with that? Why has the house been vacant for so long?”

  “Ghosts,” she said.

  “No, seriously.”

  “I’m perfectly serious. There was a suicide there. It was about fifty years ago, but the most recent tenants complained about strange noises and creaking floorboards before they moved out in a panic. They’ve had a hard time finding a buyer since.”