by Marcus Sakey
I threw myself into the work, and the result was the following. This was the first story where I played with a format that has become one of my standards for short stories: brief blocks of text that leap around in time and setting, each contributing to the larger tale.
It also afforded me the opportunity to write the line "Snap the blood off your hands, go finish your eggs Benedict, and wait for the screaming to start."
I love my job.
As Breathing
With forty stories of empty air swimming beneath your feet, the constellations are close and cold.
I had a steady grip and the wet sound of Sammy's exhales in my ear. I had a ladybug crawling on my fingers and the taste of copper in my mouth.
A mile south, a radio tower rose from the Atlanta skyline. Its red beacon, dying and reborn in slow pulses, reminded me of Sherry, the easy rhythm of her breathing, breasts rising and falling in a beam of dusty sunlight. She'd slept against me as though the world was without fear, each inhale carrying the certainty of the next, and I'd stared with my neck craned sideways and never wanted to turn away.
The ladybug moved off my fingers onto the railing, and I looked at it, and at the balcony that only my heels touched.
"Go," Sammy said, his voice through the earpiece thin and sharp as broken glass, and I stepped off the ledge into the stars.
#
We'd been shooting pool in a midtown dive on the second floor of a strip mall, afternoon heat warping the world outside the windows, Cuervo warping the one within. With his head for angles, Sammy should have been a good player, but wasn't. I'd been in that automatic zone where I let my body do the work, nerves and reflexes functioning unencumbered, cue sliding smooth and sure, dropping ball after ball. Forty bucks a game and I was up two hundred, but Sammy never did know when to quit.
"I don't like it," I said, and kissed the two into the corner.
He held his tequila to the sunlight like he was checking purity.
"An apartment that swank, the guards will have experience. Could be ex-cops." I lined up on the six. "Cameras. Keycards."
Sammy shrugged in that way he does, and poured the drink back. "Why not meet with her anyway, see what she's got to say?"
The trick was not to think. The cue moves, the ball drops. Natural as breathing. "Guy like Vincennes, he'll have security of his own. Bodyguards inside, bodyguards in the hallway."
"Nothing you can't handle." Sammy set his glass on the table upside-down.
"I don't do that anymore." I popped in the eight, and straightened.
"Right," Sammy said. "I forgot."
"Rack ‘em," I said.
#
The rope was dark blue with green flecks. My gloves were black. Four hundred feet below, the highway was a river of light, the rush of steel a distant murmur.
My legs wrapped around the cord, but it was my arms that drove the descent. Slide, lower, slide. Slow and easy. The first apartments were dark, only my reflection staring back, a vague ghost.
On the thirty-seventh floor the ice-blue glow of a TV revealed a living room. Framed posters on primer-white walls. On the couch, a couple sat together. The man said something that made the woman laugh and fit herself more tightly under his arm.
I tried to remember the last time I'd laughed, but all I could think of was sticky sheets tangled around our calves and the hum of the air conditioner in the window.
#
If you were looking for specialized help and knew who to ask, they might tell you to talk to us. Sammy the planner, good with electronics, surveillance, computers. Dexter the point man, the finisher. Though word was old Dex had slipped lately. Gone soft, now making rent as a thief, cue the violins.
Sherry had known who to ask.
We'd arranged to meet her in the revolving bar on top of the Westin, anonymous amidst fat men auditioning trophy wives and tourists snapping pictures. The sunset skyline blazed like a funeral pyre.
I'd heard of Vincennes. Everyone had. Arms trader, drug dealer, middleman. Not the top dog, but certainly well up in the pack, and his teeth were supposed to be sharp. So his wife I'd imagined as a diamond: sparkle without softness, perfect and unreachable.
Instead I saw a frightened girl whose makeup didn't quite cover thumb-width bruises on her neck.
"Cash," she'd said. "A lot of it. It's supposed to go out the next day."
"Where?"
"I don't know. El Salvador. Afghanistan." She twisted her napkin. "I just pick up what I can. He doesn't tell me anything."
"Why?" I asked.
She looked surprised. "He doesn't really see me."
"No," I said, "why do you want us to rip off your husband?"
She looked at her plate, brushed a lock of hair behind one perfect ear.
"Sherry?" I leaned forward on my elbows. "Why not just leave?"
"Where?" She barely whispered. She looked up, reached out to touch my forearm. "I never meant to be here. I just want…" She paused. "I want to start again." Her gaze held mine, and in her eyes I saw myself reflected.
#
The thief thing was new, a way to buttress dwindling finances. We used to offer a much more specialized service.
Then I stopped killing.
In the movies, when the assassin quits, it's always because of some dramatic fuckup. A child in the line of fire. A contract who turns out to be a friend.
The truth is simpler.
Sammy and I were the most sought-after hit team working the South. We'd done Big Oil V.P.s in Dallas and Cuban drug runners in Miami. While Sammy scrambled security cameras, I'd once scraped a straightened clothes hanger through the ear of a Nashville singer planning to move to a rival record label.
We made prestige kills, big scores, and lived like it. Flash pads, beautiful cars, fast women. Nothing meant anything. Put your thumbs through the eyes of an aspiring city councilman in the Ritz bathroom, snap the blood off your hands, go finish your eggs Benedict and wait for the screaming to start. Sammy once bet a homeless guy twenty grand that he couldn't sprint across the highway and back with his eyes closed. Then shot him when he made it. Sammy never did know when to quit.
It all became routine.
Then one morning, a bright blue day like any other, I woke from a dream where I was holding a man's head in a bathtub, crimson water splashing as he struggled to break the surface. My fingers dug into his pressure points, controlling his body, and all I could think about was how huge the score was going to be, how this was the one I'd been waiting for, the one I'd always wanted. Eventually he went limp, and I shouldered the body up and over to float in the tub, which was when I realized it was me staring back at me, and smiling.
"What," Sammy had drawled when I told him, "God came by, said you were on the naughty list?"
"Sort of," I said. "I think I'm done."
Only it hadn't been religion I'd found. It had been her.
Even before I met her, I'd known she was coming.
#
Georgia heat drove a bead of sweat through the long slow run down my side. A squeal of brakes and a car horn rose from far below. I wove the rope back and forth between my legs and shook out my arms. Paused, closed my eyes. Then I bent at the waist, the rope bowing back, gripped just below my feet, and unrolled like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat, ending up hanging head-down three hundred feet over a glimmering highway.
And just above Vincennes's balcony.
"One in the living room." The earpiece stripped the bass from his voice. We'd rented a penthouse with good sight lines two blocks away, and I pictured Sammy peering through the fifty-mag telescope, thin fingers rolling a silver dollar back and forth. "Strapped. A second piece on the table." He described the layout of the room, like I hadn't spent a dozen hours staring at it through the same scope. "Give me a second," he said, and I heard the tones of him dialing. "Okay. You're a go."
I loosened my thighs, tendons banging like steel cables, and eased down the rope, friction and aching leg muscles all that kept me f
rom tumbling into darkness. My arms stretched, fingertips filling with blood. One foot. Two. Three.
At five, I touched the railing, identical to our own ten floors above. Through the patio door, I could hear the phone ringing, Sammy making the call.
I slid over the railing and onto the balcony. Rolled my neck, allowed myself a memory of Sherry drinking two-hundred-dollar wine out of a plastic cup and smiling, smiling at me, and then I eased the glass door open and slipped inside.
#
There were stories about Vincennes. None of them good. One popular fave was about a lieutenant the FBI had twisted. This was a guy who'd been with Vincennes for years, been at his wedding. Two of the lieutenant's own soldiers scooped him up, dumped the wire he wore, and ran a switch on the Marta trains to lose the feds.
Then they took the poor bastard to meet Vincennes in a warehouse on the west side. Rumor had it they kept him alive for almost three days, though I wouldn't call it much of a life.
"You know he'll come after us." Sammy put his arms behind his head, his feet up on the edge of the roof. He'd bought the building cheap, a former meat packing plant southwest of downtown, and had been trying to find a buyer to turn it into lofts for yuppies. Always playing angles. "The cash we're taking, it won't be enough to cripple him."
"I know." I started to speak, stopped, words caught in my throat like fishhooks. Tried again, choked them out. "I'll take care of him."
"You mean we're back in biz?" Sammy's voice quick and eager.
"No," I said. A million reflected city lights burned in the sweat on my beer bottle.
"Huh?"
I took a last swallow. "I'm done killing."
Behind the building, a train blew a lonely whistle, the rattling of wheels on tracks a pulse to the night.
"But you'll do him?"
"Just Vincennes." I threw the bottle overhand, the dark glass whirring away. A faint clank rose from the scrub near the tracks. "Not the guards, not anybody else. Then I'm done for good."
He pursed his lips. "Tell me something, partner." He looked over, eyes bland. "Why him?"
Because she'd asked. Laying in my arms, my skin still sticky with her. She'd asked me to kill him and then never kill again, and it had been like it was me speaking. "He doesn't deserve to live."
Sammy shrugged. "Who does?"
"Vincennes is the last," I said.
#
After the darkness outside, the living room was garish. Schoolroom bright. No shadows, no cover.
Ten feet away a bodyguard stood with his back to me and a nine-millimeter SIG-Sauer P226 strapped in a quick-release shoulder holster.
"Who called you?" he said into the phone, the cord stretched out from the wall.
I lifted my right foot, set it down slow. Then my left. Didn't concentrate on the motion, didn't concentrate on the man. Didn't concentrate at all, actually. Just let nerves and reflexes take over. Like playing pool.
"Yeah, well, you got the wrong place." The man paused. "Yes, I'm fucking sure. There's nothing wrong with our plumbing."
When I was two steps away, the floor creaked.
He whirled, reaching for his piece. The phone was still in his hand as I speared his neck, rigid fingers slamming into his carotid artery where it branched, and then he was falling.
The phone hit the carpet with a muffled thump. The bodyguard I caught. Pressure point knockouts don't last, but a chokehold will.
I ran the list in my head. Two guards in the lobby downstairs. Two in the exterior hallway, but if they'd've heard anything, I'd already be dead. And this one outside the bedroom, now flat on the carpet.
If they followed pattern, there was just Vincennes to go. One final murder, one last chunk of me disappearing.
And then I could watch her sleep for the rest of my life, and never dream again.
#
It took two weeks and most of our remaining capital to prepare.
Sammy gathered intel. He worked all his angles, from the kid at the planning office who ran photocopies for a C-note to hacking the apartment's wireless network from a coffeeshop across the street.
The strategy was his idea. Instead of circumventing building security, we co-opted it. Rented an apartment ten stories above our target, using a passport I bought in the back room of a Ponce de Leon pawnshop. The building piped the lobby video cameras in with the cable TV, and I spent days logging everyone who passed.
One time I saw Vincennes half-dragging Sherry through the foyer, his fingers leaving marks on her pale arms, and put my fist through the drywall.
#
Darkness poured in the windows when I killed the living room overheads. If Vincennes was paying attention, he might notice the glow under the door go out, but it was better than stepping in with bright light at my back.
I put a gloved hand on the knob. Took a breath. Sammy was quiet in my ear, a good sign. If things looked off, he'd be squawking.
I opened the door. Nothing moved. I flowed inside, a shadow in dim light.
As I eased the door closed, it occurred to me that this was his sometimes-bedroom. Which meant it was her sometimes-bedroom too.
My hate rose like stinking black sewage.
Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, the skyline blazed. The red beacon on the radio tower died and was reborn. City light spilled in to trace silhouettes. A desk big enough to suggest Vincennes was compensating for something. Two doors on the far wall, both closed. According to the floor plans Sammy had scored, the far one was a closet, the near a bath.
The sleigh bed was beside the window, and I could barely make out the shape of Vincennes asleep in it.
I moved on the balls of my feet, alert to every motion. He didn't so much as twitch. When I made the edge of the mattress, I lifted one of the pillows, a heavy down thing soft as falling snow. Reviewed the moves in my head: straddle Vincennes with a knee on either shoulder, use the pillow to silence his shouts and a knife-hand blow to crush his trachea. Count two hundred after the struggling stopped, get the cash, and we were clear.
I was leaning forward when the lights flickered on.
#
The motel curtains were faded plaid, the carpet dotted by cigarette burns, but the dusty sunlight through the window was holy. Outside, the breeze tossed the trees, leaves rustling, and she sighed as I slipped inside her, sighed and wrapped her arms around my neck and whispered my name, William, not Dex or Dexter or even Billy, William, two soft syllables that melted in the heat of her breath in my ear.
#
Behind me, someone spoke, but I didn't hear a word.
It wasn't Vincennes in the bed.
Sherry's face was blue. Her body was bruised. Her amber eyes were empty.
The voice behind me spoke again, and I turned.
Larry Vincennes stood in the bathroom doorway. He wore a paisley dressing robe and a contemptuous smile, held a 0.50-caliber Magnum Desert Eagle in his right hand. The pistol looked enormous in his delicate fingers.
We stared at each other for a long moment.
"Why is she naked?" My voice like rusted metal.
Vincennes smiled. "Gave her to the boys." Then he raised the gun, the dark barrel wide enough to crawl into and fall asleep forever.
I hurled the pillow as I lunged, and the roar of the Desert Eagle was a cloud of goose-down filling the room and glass from the window falling in sparkling sheets. My eyes caught every detail, the tangents of a thousand drifting feathers, the way Vincennes's robe flapped open to expose a gold necklace laying against his skinny chest, the play of his muscles as he struggled to recover from the recoil, realizing only now that his cannon was way too much weapon to fire one-handed, and I drank the panic in his eyes as he understood he wouldn't make it, and then I snapped his neck as automatic as breathing.
When the guards raced in from the hallway, I held the Desert Eagle in both hands. Squeezed once. Squeezed twice.
#
I wasn't surprised to find Sammy gone when I made it back to the penthouse
.
Sammy. Always playing angles. If I was determined to quit the game over some woman, why shouldn't he make a buck on it? And if that got her raped and beaten to death, well, can't make an omelet, right?
His abandoned cigarette still smoldered in the ashtray, and I stubbed it out and stepped onto the balcony. The red light on the radio tower flared and died, flared and died, and I stood holding the gun and thinking of a patch of dusty sunlight and the hum of air conditioning.
He's gone, but Sammy never did know when to quit. I'll find him. Because he forgot one thing.
I only stopped for her.
It's like shooting pool. The cue moves, the ball drops.
Natural as breathing.
In his excellent book On Writing, Stephen King assigns his readers a task: open a new document, and, without thinking too much, begin a story. He provides a starting point, sets a minimum word count, and then sends you off to discover as you go.
I chose not to stick to the topic, but I tried the exercise, and to my stunned surprise, a story did begin to emerge, a twisted little tale of love and dependence. It was actually the very first I finished once I made the decision to leave my job and try to make it as a writer. (I’d finished plenty when I was younger, but they were all lousy.)
However, though the experiment was a clever one, the resulting story didn’t quite work. It had the bones, but not the heart, and without that, you got no pulse. So I put it aside and moved on.
