Your Friendly Neighborhood Criminal

by Michael Van Rooy

  I feinted with my right foot and he turned a little in response. When the knife was pointed away from me I stepped forward and the presence of the grotesque blade made my stomach clench and sped me up.

  The knife was right there in front of me, a kind I hadn’t seen in years, a copy of the dumb bowie-style survival knife used by Rambo in that interminable film series. It had a blade maybe thirty centimetres long and ten wide, with razor-sharp edges along the front and top third of the rear edge, plus a whole whack of saw-edged teeth.

  A real toe-stabber, or was it toad-stabber?

  I offered my left forearm and the hockey player took the opportunity to slash at it with the blade. He was surprised when the armour in the sleeve did what it was supposed to do and the blade grated down and off. While he was adjusting his grip on the hilt, I reached out and took hold of his wrist. I could have levered him down from there and disarmed him, or used the axis to throw him, but I didn’t. I was hurrying and I twisted his wrist with both of my hands, away from me and then back, like I was wringing out a dishcloth. Both the ulna and radius bone shattered and splintered and his fingers opened and the knife fell. I changed the grip on his arm and his left fist cracked into my temple, enough to give me tunnel vision, but then the guy squeaked loudly and his second punch landed like an aunt’s kiss.

  I grabbed his elbow and separated the unbroken top half of his ulna and radula from his humerus and then his eyes went blank and he started to fall. Before he’d hit the ground I was moving towards the bed where Smiley and Sam were still struggling. I was surprised there was no shooting—maybe Sam was a real pro and didn’t shoot unless there was a target?

  As I moved forward Smiley took hold of the pistol and wrestled it to the side and she let it go. He was straddling her as she pulled a thin-bladed filleting knife from somewhere and rammed it straight up at his throat.

  “Nope.”

  Smiley sounded happy as he brought the gun back and caught the blade on the barrel to deflect it. Before she could adjust her aim he slammed the receiver down into her forehead and she was driven into unconsciousness. The guy behind me groaned and I turned to find him slumped over in the fetal position, still unconscious but with both hands touching the handle of the knife, which had fallen blade first to pin his foot to the floor. I paused and then wrenched the knife out and wrapped his foot in a towel.

  “You are a cruel man, Monty.”

  Smiley had walked over to the guy I’d kicked and poked him with the barrel of the pistol. The guy was curled up and covered in a great deal of vomit.

  He went on cheerfully, “Yes sir, a cruel, cruel man.”

  Without hurrying I picked up the man’s pistol. It was a Colt Woodsman with a silencer brazed onto the barrel. I clicked the safety off and then worked the action to seat a round.

  He stared at the bullet I’d ejected from the port and then looked down at the gun in his hand before I said, “I am not cruel. They rushed me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s not like I planned it. Really.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He stared at me for a few more seconds and then he tossed his pistol onto the bed, flipped Sam over, and tied her hands cruelly tight with shoelaces he pulled from his pocket. Then he did her feet and finally stuffed a wad of cloth into her mouth and tied it into place with another lace. The last one he held up towards me. “Need this?”

  “Nope.”

  I kept the Colt in my belt while I tied another towel around the hockey player’s foot to stop the bleeding before dumping him into the bathtub. When I picked up his friend he squeaked ultrasonically and I felt his legs shift unnaturally under my arm. For a second the pain woke him up but then his eyes closed and I put him carefully down on the bathroom floor. I gathered their wallets and threw them to Smiley.

  “All done.”

  Smiley was sitting on the second bed with the pistol in his lap and a handful of money. I tossed the knife onto the bed as well and he looked up when I said, “Here you go.”

  He marvelled at something as he examined the gun. “Look at this; a Charter Arms Explorer pistol. I’ve never seen one of these before. The magazine goes in front of the trigger like on those old German pistols and there’s a spare one in the butt.”

  I glanced at the pistol and then at mine and realized they both had home-made silencers attached permanently to the barrels.

  Sam was planning on killing someone in this room. Silencers are unreliable and unwieldy, there’s no other reason to use them. And she’d brought two silenced guns and a knife into the room when a shotgun would have been much safer.

  The question was, was Smiley in on it. I looked at him and said, “What now?”

  “We wait for Sam to wake up.”

  “Right,” I said conversationally. “I don’t want to clean this up, do you?”

  “Not really.”

  “I mean, she started it.”

  He nodded in thought; he’d picked up the pistol and dumped the magazine and worked the slide to clear it.

  “It’s a nice piece. Ever use one?”

  I didn’t take it but I looked it over when he held it out. “Nope.”

  He put the pistol back on the bed and we both waited for a little while before I spoke. “I guess no one noticed the fight?”

  “I guess. It’s kind of loud downstairs, though.”

  “Well, I thought so. Here, you do that pistol and I’ll do this one.”

  “Do what?”

  He looked quizzical as I filled the small garbage pail from the bathroom with water and brought it in. And he opened his mouth in protest when I swept all the ammo in.

  “Hey!”

  I stared at him. “Right now the cops walk in and they find us with guns and we each end up with six years in stir. Give us five minutes to wreck the trigger mechanisms and all we can be caught with is toys.”

  “Right.” He started to work on the gun and borrowed the knife from me for the fine work of gouging and smashing the internal sears. As he worked I went on. “We just went from assault and attempted murder with prohibited weapons down to assault and attempted murder. We just shaved three years off both our sentences. If the cops walk in.”

  Smiley did his job. When he was done we counted the money and found we had sixty bucks and some change from the pockets of Sam and the guy with the sore pelvis, and 500 bucks from the pockets of the guy with the knife. Smiley separated the money into two piles and offered me one. “Here you go.” He held a bundle of bills in one hand. “Two hundred and eighty bucks and change.”

  I took the money.

  Sam was waking up and I went over to take her gag out. Unconscious people often throw up. If they have a gag in place they suffocate, and that would have made me a murderer. I didn’t want her to die, so I took the gag out and splashed a glass of cold water in her face. “Rise and shine, sunshine.”

  She looked blearily around. Getting knocked out in real life is not like in the movies; you don’t wake up spry. You lose memories, you lose the ability to rationally plan, you get, pardon the expression, fucked up.

  “Oh, my head.” Her voice was small, weak, trembling, until Smiley leaned down into her face.

  “Remember me, hon?”

  She inhaled massive quantities of air but before she could scream I punched her hard in the belly and all the air came out along with a lot of spit and a bit of her last meal. I hated hitting a woman, even one who had tried to kill me—scratch that, I didn’t really like hitting anyone. But I wanted her to know I was serious.

  “No yelling.” I said it mildly and her eyes went from me to Smiley and some kind of alertness came into her eyes and she asked in a hoarse voice, “What do you want?”

  Smiley’s voice was cold. “Your biz. Now, and this is the big question, what do you want?”

  Her eyes narrowed and her breathing became faster. “To live.”

  Smiley had picked up the big-ass Rambo knife and ran a finger along the edge and winced. “Not very sharp.
” He said it conversationally and then smiled back at Sam, “You can live. Keep your mouth shut, drop everything and walk away.”

  She exhaled and smiled. “Okay, I drop all this, never think of you again, and forget all this shit. I can do that. For me this is all over.”

  “Great. Then I don’t have to kill you. One more thing though …”

  “What?”

  “You have to clean all this up. It’s your penalty.”

  She winced but I didn’t react at all and he kept on, “Your friends are in the bathroom and need a lot of medical help. I don’t want to have this come back to me, do you understand? If it does then I’ll feel obliged to come back for you, with, what’s the term, oh yeah, malicious intentions. And then there will be hair on the walls and blood on the floor. So are we cool, hon?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. And my friend here,” Smiley gestured at me, “he’s with me. Do you understand?”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “I’m not really believing you but you think about it, hon. There is no place you can go where I can’t find you. If I want to find you. So whatever happened before, that doesn’t matter now. Our deal is off.”

  He cut the shoelaces around her wrists and ankles and stood up. He held the knife in one hand and the sheath in the other and bounced them up and down idly, weighing them, and finally he sheathed the knife and tossed it on the floor where Sam could reach it. She watched him and lay there practising deep breathing while Smiley stared at her as though daring her to say something, anything.

  And then we walked out the door and locked it behind us.

  #34

  Outside we walked far away through residential areas and industrial parks until we found another hotel. There we got the front desk to order us a cab. While we were waiting for the cab, I turned to Smiley. “You were conning me?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought about it. “Sam hired you to blindside me?”

  “Yes. For cash and a cut, her description of the route told me it would be plenty.”

  “But now there’s enough on the table for you to take her out?”

  “Yes. I’d rather work with you. I trust you.”

  I ignored that. “So you never had any intention of going straight?”

  “Maybe a little. I wanted to see.”

  “’Kay. Don’t tell Claire.”

  His face split in a grin. “Did I have you fooled at all?”

  “Yep. You did.”

  Back home Smiley went into his room without saying a word and I went upstairs to Claire. On the way I turned on the monitors on the stairs and at each window. She had lit several candles and made the bed, alerted, I supposed, by the dog.

  “Rough day at the office?”

  She was beautiful, wearing a black flannel bathrobe. I’d mocked her for the fabric when I’d bought it years before but she’d stuck to her guns, insisting that flannel was the fabric of love, warm and comforting. Claire came over and helped me take off my clothes but I kept my mouth shut.

  She whispered, “How was it?”

  “Bad.” I leaned into her. “You were right—Smiley’s conning us. Sorry.”

  She pushed me onto the bed and stood there fingering the tear in my jacket sleeve where the knife had missed my flesh and cut the fabric.

  She said loudly, “I see.”

  She collapsed slowly and gracefully onto her knees beside me and touched my fingers and forehead. “Looks painful.”

  She kissed me and then straddled me. “Don’t move.”

  The robe slipped off her shoulders and fell onto my legs, and she began to move, slowly and carefully. Even though I was tired, bone tired, what she was doing worked and in time, in time everything fell away and vanished.

  She whispered into my ear, “Wake up.”

  I whispered back, “I was not asleep, I was thinking. Sometimes I snore when I think.”

  She kissed me again and adjusted her weight until she covered the whole right side of my body. The candles had made the room warm and she had made it sweet and that was enough.

  “No sleeping yet. I want to talk.”

  By rolling my head a little to the side I could talk into her cheek, no way Smiley could hear, and I said, “You mean talk ’bout your feelings?”

  “No…”

  “Because I have the book ready …”

  It was an imaginary book I’d written with her help. titled The Big Book of Relationships. Very popular with imaginary couples all around the unreal world, a necessity, one might say.

  “Page 32: No, of course I still respect you.”

  She giggled and there is something very special about a beautiful woman’s giggle. If you hear it, you know you are doing something right.

  “Page 53: And how do you feel about that?”

  She leaned up on one elbow and for a moment Sam popped into my head, fearless and mean. But Claire wasn’t Sam and the resemblance was fleeting and lame at best.

  “Can you be serious?”

  “Page 89: No one’s ever made me feel that way before. All done, the book is closed.”

  “Cool. Funny. I’ll give you an E for effort. I want to talk about our house guest.”

  “’Kay.”

  “What happened?”

  “He set me up with Sam and her crew and then betrayed them. He was supposed to lure me into a small room and then they’d take me down. Either that or maybe he’s SISO.”

  Claire didn’t smile at the word. A cousin of hers had once gotten into bad company down in Los Angeles and we’d gone down to support the family while everything worked its way through the system. At one point her cousin had read the parole officer’s report backwards and thought they’d said SISO in brackets by her name. It had taken me three days to track down that they’d written 5150. This was police and health code for “dangerous and disturbed.” Which she had been, but we’d finally managed to sort everything out and had left the city of angels with nothing permanent but a few scars and a new word for our dictionary.

  I kept talking and thinking. “I think he just took Sam off the board.”

  She stood up and put the robe back on before drinking from a bottle of tap water she’d left by the window. “Good. Where does that leave us?”

  “Worried. It leaves us worried.”

  “Okay.”

  “Smiley said he kind of tried to go straight. I’ve never seen him unsure, it’s like he’s not sure how to play it. It’s like he’s keeping everything as an option.”

  She made a guess that sounded right. “Maybe he saw what you have and wants it. Cons like structure, they pretend they don’t but they do.”

  “Even me?”

  She ankled over and kissed me before going back to the window. “Even you. You replaced the chaos of crime and the order of jail with this.” She gestured. “All this and me and Fred and Renfield and Thor. Maybe he wants something like this.”

  Then she said wonderingly, “So, where does that leave us?”

  I moved over and kissed her neck. “In a room, all alone, almost naked.”

  She was mischievous. “Wanna get completely naked?”

  “Yes. Yes I would. That would be nice.”

  Claire was outraged. “Nice?”

  “Nice. Yes, nice, that’s the right word, nice.”

  “I’ll show you nice!”

  And it was. And she did.

  #35

  The next night Claire took Smiley out to paint the town red. He intention was to keep him busy and develop her own reading of what he was and what he wanted. She proposed that he come with her and then she’d introduce him to nice girls. I asked him why he wanted to meet nice girls and he looked lost before finally answering, “I guess because I’ve never known any. Does that make sense?”

  I told him it didn’t make any sense. Both of them asked if I wanted to come but I turned them down. I told them I wanted to stay home and wait.

  And search Smiley’s room.

  I had told Claire abo
ut my plans. She had agreed and patted my head. “So I get to be the Judas goat?”

  “What’s that?”

  She explained, “That’s the goat you stake out to distract the tiger before you shoot it.”

  “Aha. Okay, yep. Practise bleating.”

  “Baaaaa.”

  “Actually, that’s kind of sexy.”

  “You are a sick man. Later.”

  They left, and after mouse and dog and son were all tucked away in their beds I took a coffee upstairs and thought some more, sitting on the futon on the floor in the dark and waiting. One thing being a bad guy teaches you is patience; you spend a lot of time waiting for things to start or for conditions to be right. You wait for banks to open, for jewelry stores to unload their vaults, for meth to cook, for grass to ripen, for boats and planes and couriers to arrive. And when things go wrong you wait for the cops and for security guards, you wait for lawyers and judges, you wait for doctors and nurses, you wait for cell doors to open and close.

  You wait in the quiet of hotel rooms, and in the reek of alleys. You wait in loud bars and in windswept forests. You wait by rivers and by freeways. You wait with guns in your pockets and knives taped to your extremities. You wait with cold cash, or hot credit cards, or jewelry, or drugs. You wait in the sun and in the dark and in all the seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter, and the extra season, jail, which only cons know, the non-season season. So you either become good at the waiting or you quit the biz and go legit.

  Claire had agreed to come back in four hours. I could wait while Claire and Smiley looked for nice girls. I could do it standing on my head. With an arm tied behind my back. With a grin.

  I called Marie but she told me she had seen nothing and that everything was still going fine, just fine. And that made me a little nervous. Was Sam actually keeping her word?

  After I’d hung up I listened to the night around me through the open window. The sounds of night birds, pigeons and such, cars passing, fast far away and slowly near by. I heard sirens in the distance getting closer, then farther, laughter and dogs barking, conversations and arguments. Wind in the trees, and, once or twice, the sounds of cats fighting or making little cats.