by K. W. Jeter
“Figure it out, sweetheart. What’s even the point of having a girl on the squad, when she looks like you? Not like you’re exactly hot, is it?”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.” Foley brought his crotchety, wrinkled face close to mine. “You look like a twelve-year-old boy wearing a wig. And if I wanted a twelve-year-old boy, I’d get one off the streets. In this town, they’re practically giving ’em away.”
That pissed me off. I might not have been star quality, but I figured I had at least a little something going on. Especially compared to the little schlunk I’d been when I was doing all that bookkeeping stuff. Right after I had started killing people, I’d gone up nearly a whole cup size. They might’ve still been mini-hoots, but they were more than the mosquito bites I’d had before. Granted, maybe it had been all the upper-body exercise I’d been getting – those handguns and automatic rifles can weigh a lot, when you’re toting them around on a daily basis – but still. If there were some hormone deficiency going on around here, it was more likely on the part of this dried-up old prune rather than mine.
“Okay. That tears it, buddy.” I set my beer back down after taking a long pull from it. “If I’m going to be working with you, it’s on the condition that you don’t even talk to me. Actually, don’t even think about me.”
“Who says you’re going to be working with us?” Foley got even more heated. “Because that must be some kind of a joke. It’s got to be. Falcon’s just dicking with us. I mean, look at you.”
“I thought you didn’t care to.”
“No, I mean look at you. What do you weigh? You’d have to be carrying a ten-pound bag of rice to break a hundred.”
“Watch it –”
“If you fired off anything bigger than a cap gun, you’d land on your ass.”
Actually, I had been tossed on my butt by a weapon’s recoil, but I wasn’t going to let him know about that. And it’d been a heavy-duty assault rifle. And I’d slipped in the mud I’d been standing in. This had been back when Cole was getting me ready for the new, more lethal stage of my life.
“Tell you what.” I had already knocked back half my beer, but it wasn’t improving my mood any. “You and me and what I’ve got here in my backpack, we’ll all go outside to the alley. And we’ll see which one of us falls down first.”
“Bring it, sister –”
“Will you two shut up?” Curt swung his gaze from one to the other of us. “Or do you just want everybody in the world to know about our business?”
Elton, the younger and cracker-ish guy, was sitting next to me. He leaned closer. “Pay him no mind, miss.” He nodded toward Foley. “He’s just upset.”
“Damn straight I’m upset.” Foley glowered behind his own beer. “This is bullshit.”
“You’re entitled to your opinion,” Curt said quietly. “But now we’ve heard it.”
“It’s just frickin’ crazy!” Foley wouldn’t let go. “We’ll be lucky if we all don’t get killed!”
“If it doesn’t work,” said Curt, “then it doesn’t work. But just give her a chance.”
Elton looked over at Foley. “You gave me a chance, buddy.”
“You, we already knew about!” Foley yanked open his shirt collar, revealing a pale scar across his collar bone. “That’s from you, pal.”
Elton shrugged. “Just doing my job.”
“Yeah,” said Foley, “and that’s why when Curt said he was gonna recruit you out of that bunch that was running around upstate, I said no problem. Because I knew you could do the job. You’d done it on me. At least with bringing you on the crew, I was pretty sure you wouldn’t be firing back at me anymore.”
I looked around the table, ending up with the only one who hadn’t chimed in yet.
“So. Earl –”
He lowered his beer and gazed back at me.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” He didn’t look happy. “Seems kinda strange. I mean . . . a woman doing this kind of job.”
“I’ve done it before.”
“It just doesn’t seem right.” Earl shook his head. “But if it’s what Mr. Falcon wants . . .”
“Damn,” muttered Foley.
“Hey.” Elton kept his easy rural cool going. “Like the man says. Give her a chance.”
“I don’t think you understand.” Foley’s voice was even uglier when he went low with it. “Because there’s things you don’t know. We gave her a chance once before. Why there was a slot for you on the crew was because she messed up. Big time.”
“That was then.” My gaze was even colder as I looked back at him. “This is now. Okay?”
“Yeah? What makes it different?”
“I’ve gotten in a lot more practice.”
“Oh, yeah. Very impressive.” One corner of Foley’s lip curled. “Practice doesn’t cut it, sweetheart. This is for real.”
“Lay off,” said Curt. “She had that gig out in Albany. Working for Moretti.”
“What, swatting flies?” Foley turned back to me. “This isn’t some front operation out in the boondocks. This is the big leagues. You’d better understand that. You screw up here, you won’t get sent down to the farm team again. Except in a box.” He brought his voice quiet again. “That’s a promise.”
I glared back at him, but didn’t say anything. I just lifted my beer, finished it off, then set it down.
“Give it up,” said Curt. “It’s a done deal.”
He slid out of the booth, followed by Earl and Elton. I watched them head out of the place, back onto the wintry street beyond the door. Then I turned back toward Foley sitting across from me.
“See you in the batting cages,” I said. I got up and walked out. The whole way, I could feel his gaze digging hard between my shoulder blades.
* * *
Outside the lounge, with the neon palm tree sign fizzing above my head, I leaned forward at the curb, hands against my knees. I was glad that the others had already left, so they didn’t see me hurl. The contents of my gut sent steam rising from the frozen slush in the gutter, as I wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my jacket.
Down at the end of the block, where I’d left my motorcycle under a burnt-out streetlight, I leaned back against its seat. The only thing that went through my mind was, What the hell have I gotten myself into?
* * *
When I got home, I was glad that my brother Donnie was already asleep. I switched off the TV, then half-carried, half-dragged him to the other room and put him to bed.
I sat at the kitchenette table in the dark, gazing out the window at the night street and wondering about this whole mess I had managed to step in.
I shouldn’t have taken this job. I knew that. When Falcon had gotten hold of me and offered it, I should’ve just turned him down. Should’ve just walked . . .
But I needed it. Really bad. As in gotta-pay-the-rent bad. And taking care of my younger brother.
Getting into killing people really hadn’t changed my life very much. The money part of it still sucked. I had really been hoping that there were going to be bigger paydays than the ones I’d had so far. And more of them.
I supposed that was all my own fault. I was deep into that bleak late-night mood when everything in the whole frickin’ world was my fault. I slouched down in the chair and dived head-first into feeling like crap.
That Foley guy was right. I’d screwed up. I’d been given a chance, a sweet one, and I’d blown it. Big time. Right after Cole and I had managed to take care of that sonuvabitch McIntyre, I should’ve hung it up. Maintained my amateur killing status, rather than attempting to turn pro. How many girls my age even get to kill one person? As much as they’d all like to? But no, that wasn’t enough for little bad-ass Kim. I had to go around thinking that I was God’s gift to the murdering profession, like I had some natural gift for it. When actually, I had been hand-carried along by that lethal psychopath Cole.
God, I missed him.
I could’ve
used him now.
It’d been at Cole’s funeral service – yes, even psycho killers get those – that I’d been approached by Curt. Who I didn’t know from Adam, as the saying goes. But he knew me. Or at least, he knew about me.
Apparently, he and Cole had been buddies. As much as people in this line of work can be friends, they were. They’d worked together, a long time ago, before Cole had gone freelance and Curt had hooked up with Falcone’s operations. Curt had been the older of the two; had even taught Cole a few things. But what neither one of them had ever learned, was how to do anything other than kill people.
I guess everybody has to go with their natural talents.
Cole must’ve told him about me. And what he and I had been up to then. Just some late-night phone conversation, two old buddies shooting the breeze, catching up with each other. Or maybe – and this is what I liked to think sometimes, whenever I’d be feeling lonely and scared and sorry for myself – Cole had called him up, specifically to tell him about me. Because Cole had known somehow that he wasn’t going to make it. That he wasn’t going to be around after he and I got done with the job we were doing together. Or maybe he didn’t want to be, given that he was all crippled and stuff. So he’d known that I would need somebody else to hook up with, after he was gone. If I was going to stay in this line of work, that is.
Maybe he’d known I wouldn’t have a choice about that, either. Like I said – you have to go with your natural talents.
However it had come about, the upshot of it was that I saw this old guy there at Cole’s funeral service. And I knew he was watching me. Which had me a little antsy, though I was pretty successful at not showing it. That was one of the first things I had learned about this line of work – all your emotions, you take them out and put them in a bottle, then leave the bottle on a shelf at home when you go out. When you come home, after a long day maybe killing people, you can open up the bottle – if you want to. There were plenty of guys doing this stuff, I knew, who wound up never unscrewing that particular lid again. Just easier that way.
“Your name Kim?” He’d come up to me outside, after the service was over. He had thinning gray hair and a nubbly tweed suit that might’ve fit him better a few years ago, before he’d started to dwindle a little bit.
“Who’s asking?” For all I’d known, he might’ve been a cop.
“I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t been a friend of Cole’s.”
“He knew all sorts of people.” I’d started walking over to my motorcycle, parked at the curb in front of the funeral parlor. “They weren’t all people I want to know.”
“In case you change your mind –” He’d taken a business card out of his wallet and held it out to me. “Give me a call. Like to talk with you.”
Not sure why, but I’d stepped back and taken the card from him, then stood there looking at it as he’d turned and walked away.
Two days later, I called Curt. Sitting in my crummy apartment, with my cell phone in one hand and the card he’d given me on the table in front of me.
A week later, I was up in Albany, working for one of Falcon’s branch operations there. That made a long commute for me. I had to be on the bike by 5:00 a.m., just to get up there when the rest of the security crew was drinking their coffee. And jobs like that don’t have regular quitting hours – plenty of times, I’d be dragging my ass back into the apartment after midnight. After 2:00 a.m., even. Which gave me just about enough time to eat whatever dinner Donnie had fixed for me, collapse on the couch for a couple hours, then stumble into the shower to do it all over again. But at least I’d been keeping the rent and the rest of the bills covered. So who was I to complain? Plenty of people working themselves into the ground these days – and those are the lucky ones.
Three months later, I was screwed. As in I had screwed up.
Or at least I took the hit for it. Somebody had to. And since I had been the new guy on the crew up in Albany, that would be me. One of Curt’s crew, the guys working right around Falcon, had come up to oversee a takeover operation on a little outfit hustling protection on the restaurants and clubs on the east side of town. If they’d just been content with the low end of the 25/75 cut that had all been worked out between them and Falcon, nobody would’ve touched them. But they’d gotten greedy and had started to skim from the gross receipts. When you do that, and you’re hooked up with somebody like Falcon, you might as well have tattooed a bull’s-eye on your forehead. Curt’s guy had been named Andriessen – I only got to talk to him a couple of times, but he seemed nice enough. Model of efficiency, though. He was only up there in Albany with us for a few days before the takeover was completed. Which meant that there were four dead bodies on the ground, and the revenue stream now went straight to Falcon. As a former accountant, I appreciated the simplicity of that arrangement.
The only problem was that one of the dead bodies was Andriessen’s. There’d been a crossfire situation, lasting all of about ten seconds, and somehow I got blamed for not covering him. Or not covering him enough – either way, he took a round right through his throat. The other security guys I’d been working with got their stories straight – and I was out of a job.
It could’ve been worse. They let me walk. Sometimes, when things go wrong, they don’t do that.
I’d figured that was the end of my ever working for Falcon again, in any of his operations. Yeah, the hours sucked – and maybe my being totally exhausted had been at least part of the reason that things had gone wrong up in Albany – but the pay had been decent. Or decent enough. Better than zero at any rate, which was what I’d had coming in while I scrounged around for some other paying gig.
So imagine my surprise when I got another phone call. From Mr. Falcon himself. When the big guy calls, you gotta jump on it. Maybe he hadn’t totally bought the explanation he’d been given about what happened to his guy Andriessen. And really, it didn’t matter what his reasons were. When you’re the boss, you don’t have to have reasons – what you say, goes. So yay for me.
Sitting in the dark, at the little kitchenette table, gazing out at the night street below . . . I was thinking that maybe it wasn’t so wonderful after all. These old guys I was going to be working with – I was going to have to watch my back around them. Especially that Foley character. He was a big hit of wrinkled-up bad news. And in this line of work, with all the guns and every other piece of lethal equipment – if somebody didn’t like you, there were all sorts of accidents that could just happen. Sure, he might get chewed out afterward, maybe even fired the way it’d happened to me up in Albany – but I’d be dead.
That was something I was trying to avoid.
I got up from the table, went over, and lay down on the couch, without bothering to undress. Maybe if I’d gone into the kitchenette and stuck my head in the freezer, the stuff inside it would’ve let me go to sleep.
I closed my eyes, but nothing happened. Which was too bad – I had the feeling there were going to be a lot of long days ahead of me.
FIVE
Curt probably wasn’t in any better mood the next morning.
Not after a meeting like that one at the Diamondhead Lounge the night before. He’d probably been hoping that the other guys would welcome the latest crew member without one of them actually threatening to kill me.
He was behind the wheel of the Chevy as it followed that gunboat Lincoln up the curving driveway of Falcon’s mansion. The black iron gates, with their security cameras mounted on top, swung shut behind him.
Leaving the Chevy parked in the drive, Curt mounted the wide steps up to the front door. The rest of the crew, including me, had already piled out of the Lincoln and were waiting for him there. Another security camera, up by the fanlight windows, swiveled in his direction as he rang the bell, then stepped back and waited. After a moment, the door’s deadbolt lock clicked, and he pushed it open. We followed him in.
“Earl –” Mrs. Falcon came down the sweeping central stairs as we stood right inside the
foyer. He was the first one she recognized. “I’m so glad to see you.”
“Good to see you, too, ma’am.”
“It’s been too long.” She took his hand. “I mean that.”
Actually, he and the rest of the crew had probably been out there just a couple of days before. But it wasn’t something worth correcting the boss’s wife about.
“And Curt –” She used both hands to take his.
“Hello, Mrs. Falcon.”
“Please,” she said. “It’s Fal-cone-ee.” A smile and a shake of the head. “Honestly – I don’t know where he comes up with these things.”
None of us said anything as we all glanced over at her husband. He was standing just a few yards away, over in the bowling alley-sized living room. He looked a little irritated, but didn’t say any more than we did. He turned and walked over to the wet bar and started fixing himself a drink.
Mrs. Falcon’s smile disappeared as she held on to Curt’s hand. “I heard about Heinz. I’m so sorry.”
A little nod was his only reply.
She dropped his hand and turned toward me.
“It’s . . .” You could just about see her searching through her memory. “Kathy, isn’t it?”
“Kim, actually.”
“Yes, of course. It’s good to see you again, too.”
I’d never met her before her in my life.
But I’d met women just like her. You might have, as well. A lot of the time, they’re really sweet, the way rich women can be. They’re not all bitchy the way you see on TV. But they’re usually a bit on the alcoholic side. Not like crazy, hit-the-bottom alcoholic, but just the sort of nicely befuddled way you get to be when you have a chauffeur to take you wherever you want to go, plus plenty of other people to make sure you’re okay. Crap, if I had that kind of money, I’d probably drink my breakfast, too. Plus – for women married to somebody like Falcon – it probably helped them to not think about where all the money came from. That way, you can stay a nice person.
“How have you been, Kelly?”
“Busy,” I said. “You know how it is.”
