by Kim Oh
I had done as I was told, slipping the gun into my backpack. When I slung the pack’s strap over my shoulder, I could feel the weight pulling me to one side, as though the earth’s gravity had a new claim on me.
“What if I hurt myself with it?” He’d already raised that possibility.
“Try not to,” Cole said dryly.
“No, seriously.”
“Then we’ll have learned something about you. That’s progress, too.”
Just strapping the backpack, with the gun inside it, onto the motorcycle’s seat had been a new experience. I had worked my way out of the district by the wharves, then cruised carefully along the streets leading home, knowing the whole time that it was sitting back there behind me, like a coiled-hard snake.
“How’d it go?”
That was Donnie, hoping that my first day on my new job had gone well.
“It was fine,” I said. “Just fine. Lot of stuff to get up to speed on, though.”
“Wow.” His nose wrinkled, and he actually scooted his wheelchair back a couple of feet. “You really smell like smoke.”
I bent my head down and took a whiff from the front of my shirt. He was right.
“Yeah, well – that’s what comes with working at places like that.” I had told him before where I was going to look for a job. “The customers smoke, employees smoke – it’s their world, and you’re just in it.”
I took a shower, to get the tobacco stink out. It was starting to make me nauseous as well. I could see that hanging around with Cole was definitely going to come with some negative side effects. I brought the backpack, complete with its heavy contents, with me into the tiny bathroom. I didn’t want Donnie snooping around and finding the gun.
Two run-throughs with the shampoo were needed before I could stand myself. Toweling my hair dry, I regarded myself in the little mirror above the sink. I wasn’t sure if the girl looking back at me was different or not. From what I’d been before. There was a way to find out, though.
The bathroom was so small that my backpack was right there on the tiled floor, next to my bare feet. I squatted down, unzipped the pack, and took out the big shining gun that Cole had given me.
Just holding it put my head in another strange space. I was pretty sure that having a boyfriend would’ve felt different – I wasn’t that weirded out by the gun – but then again, how would I know? Not like I had much – or any – experience along those lines.
It wasn’t the first time that I’d thought that girls like me have to take what we can get.
I stood up in front of the sink, dropped my towel, and inspected the result. The mirror was so small that the only way I could see myself and the gun at the same time was to bring it up close to my face. I was being careful – I set my finger on the trigger, but kept the gun pointed up at the bathroom ceiling. Just in case. I couldn’t remember whether Cole had said anything about it being loaded or not, when he had given it to me.
With my other hand, I combed my hair down in front of my shoulder. That and the gun produced an interesting effect. Both inside and outside of me. Now I knew it was a different girl looking back from the mirror. This one wasn’t a little nerdy accountant type, scared of her own shadow. This one was . . . different.
I looked down at myself. Even there. When you’re as small as I’ve been my whole life, it’s not like you’re ever going to be packing around Dolly Parton-sized equipment. But there was something going on, that hadn’t been before. I figured it must’ve been some hormonal response, though I wouldn’t have expected it to kick in this soon.
Either that, or having the gun made me stand up straighter. Putting ’em out there, so to speak.
All this must’ve distracted me. Plus, giving something complicated as a gun to an inexperienced somebody like me – might as well hand a Lego set to a chimpanzee. Chances are good that pieces are going to go flying.
Which is what happened. Somehow, without trying to, my thumb poked a latch on the .357’s gleaming flank, some major piece of it swung open, then there were bright, brassily gleaming bullets clattering on the bathroom tiles.
The bottom of my gut dropped a little, too. The thing actually had been loaded the whole time I was fooling around with it. What an idiot.
“Kimmie!” Donnie shouted from his bedroom. In a place this tiny, that was close enough for him to hear all the noise going on around me. Which included the thunk of me dropping the gun, as though it were a snake that had suddenly woken up in my hands. “What’re you doing in there?”
“Nothing –” Down on my knees, I prodded the gun into my backpack, where I should’ve left it to begin with. “Don’t worry about it.” I scooped up the bullets and threw them in. If Cole was going to show me how to work this thing, he could start with the basics tomorrow. “Just . . . trying something new.” I stood up and grabbed my bathrobe from the hook on the bathroom door. “That’s all.”
“Sounded like more than that.” He gave me another one of those looks when I came out.
“New calculator.” I snugged the robe’s belt tighter around my waist. “For my new job. I was putting the batteries in, and I dropped them.”
I don’t know if I convinced him. But at least he didn’t say anything more about it.
* * *
Next morning’s session with Cole was shorter. Much shorter.
That was because we talked about money.
“We’re going to need some,” he told me. “A lot, actually.”
“Wait a minute.” When I had arrived at the warehouse, I had pulled the same chair from the wobbly table back over to the mattress. I was sitting on it backward, my arms laid across the top. “I said I was going to pay you – but there’s a limit. You’ve got your reasons for wanting to kill McIntyre – and I’ve got my reasons for wanting to see that happen. That’s got to be a big part of why we’re doing all this.”
“I wasn’t talking about getting paid.” Cole had set the overflowing ashtray on his stomach, as though it were a bowl of Cheerios. The rate at which he went through a pack of cigarettes these days, it probably made more sense than rolling to one side on the mattress to reach for the ashtray. “But there are expenses involved in an operation like this. Major expenses.”
“Like what?”
“Excuse me – but is there some doubt in your mind about this? There shouldn’t be. I’m the expert on the subject, remember? You came to me.”
“I’m just asking.” My hair swung forward, along the side of my face, as I shook my head. I hadn’t pulled it into my usual skinned-back ponytail when I had gotten ready this morning. I had left it loose. “You don’t have to jump down my throat.”
“Fine,” said Cole. “As long as we understand each other. You can consider this as part of your education.”
“Lay it on me.”
“Okay – we’re talking about a hard target here. McIntyre, specifically. But the same rules apply, no matter who the target is. You think all that money you used to pay me, back when we were both working for McIntyre, you think that was all pure profit or something?”
I shrugged. “Never thought about it.”
“You think about it now. Think about the expenses involved. There’s the weaponry –”
“Don’t we have that already?” I had set the clanking backpack down beside the chair.
“There’re more things we’re going to need besides the guns. There’s all kinds of gear we’ll have to have, if I’m going to get a fix on this guy – and get past his security systems, and his bodyguards, and everything else.”
“You mean that bullethead Michael? That’s who you’re worried about?”
Cole leveled his hard gaze at me. “Tell you what,” he said after a moment. “I guess I underestimated you. You seem to have already figured it all out. What do you need me for? Go ahead and take the gun I gave you, go on over there and blow McIntyre away yourself, then come back here and tell me how it went. I’d really like to hear it.”
“All right, al
l right. I’m sorry. You’re in charge.”
That seemed to mollify him. At least for a while. To myself, I was starting to think that this was going to be a long course of instruction.
“So. Equipment.” With a freshly lit cigarette, he gestured around the space. “How much of that do you see here?”
“I don’t know.” I obediently looked around, then back to him. “How much am I supposed to be seeing?”
“More than what’s here. If I’d known you were going to be popping around here with this bright idea of you hiring me, then me going over and doing in our old boss – believe me, I wouldn’t have sold off some of the pieces I did. Because some of that stuff would come in handy now.”
I had no idea what he was talking about – at least in terms of specifics. What kind of equipment did he have before? Could’ve been remote-controlled Predator drones, for all I knew. I was just the one who’d written the checks that paid for it all.
“Okay,” I said. “So we need to get stuff.”
“Now we’re making progress, sweetie. That’s why I was talking money. We need it.”
That, at least, there was nothing new about. Story of my life.
“How much are you talking about?”
Cole looked me straight in the eye. “How much you got?”
“Hm.” I gave a slow nod. “I think you’re the one who’s getting a little off the mark now. You might be seriously overestimating the kind of savings account a girl would be able to scrape together, when she’s been working for a tightwad like McIntyre.”
“Not talking about your savings account. Not that I think you got one. I’m talking about the money you told me about, that you stole from him.”
“I didn’t steal it –”
“It’s his money,” said Cole. “And you’ve got it. Believe me, he’s going to consider that as stolen. But you already know that. It’s why you came to see me.”
“Yeah, but –”
I shut up on my own. What I had been going to say was, But that’s the money we’re living on. I hadn’t set it aside – or any of it – to be used for this new project of having him kill McIntyre.
I had to think about this. Which was hard to do while Cole was keeping his narrow-eyed gaze on me.
Say I spent all the money we had, the money in the envelope hidden in the bedroom closet, just handed it over to Cole to get the equipment he said he needed. And everything worked, and he killed McIntyre the way I wanted him to – then what? I supposed that if I didn’t have McIntyre to worry about anymore, him and his crew, Michael and the other security types – then I could go out and get a regular job. Then maybe I could pay off what I’d then owe to Cole, for him killing McIntyre, on the installment plan. God only knew what the finance charges on something like that would be. It’d probably be like buying a car, with the interest mounting up to more than the principal.
Of course, even getting to that point was a big maybe – depending mainly on my being able to get a job, any kind of job, when all of this was over. And that would depend, I supposed, on how much potential employers knew about my recent past. Probably better to clam up about hiring someone to kill my old boss and just go back to being Little Nerd Accountant Girl. Well, maybe I wouldn’t go back to the ponytail and the schlub outfits. But a colorful past that included getting people killed was probably best kept to myself. I was pretty convinced that wouldn’t look good on the resume.
And what if they didn’t work out? Our plans, that is. What if all the money in the envelope got spent for the equipment Cole said he needed – bazookas, nuclear submarines, whatever – and he didn’t pull it off? And McIntyre was still alive? And, as Cole had hypothesized, seriously pissed? Maybe that hadn’t been just talk coming from Cole; maybe he really was concerned about that. It would be just like McIntyre to get all cranked about a couple of ex-employees trying to kill him. Then the money would be gone, with Donnie and me in worse shape than before, unable to scrape up even Greyhound bus fare if we decided to make a run for it. All we’d be able to do would be to sit in our apartment and wait for Michael’s knock on the door. Without even being able to go out to the corner store and pick up another carton of ice cream to tide us over.
These are the kind of meditations you get when your head’s in a bad place. I finally wound up at the point where I figured that if Cole took his shot at McIntyre and he didn’t pull it off, it’d be better if both of us got ourselves snuffed right there on the spot. Better than just waiting around for it, at least.
Either way, handing the envelope of money over to Cole, that amounted to serious doubling-down on this whole project, as some casino blackjack player might describe it. But there wouldn’t be another hand dealt without doing that.
Which meant that I had to make a decision.
“All right,” I said. Cole watched me as I got up from the chair. “I’ll be back in a little bit.”
* * *
I lucked out. Donnie was asleep when I got back to the apartment, even though it was the middle of the day.
Standing as quiet as I could in the darkened bedroom, I looked down at him on the bed. Sometimes things didn’t go well during the night – sometimes the meds didn’t work, sometimes other stuff – and then he didn’t get any sleep and neither did I. At least he could make up for it during the day.
I went over to the closet and dug out the envelope from under the sweaters.
“Kimmie – what’re you doing?”
His eyes were open when I turned around.
“Nothing.” One of the sweaters had fallen to the floor. I retrieved it and used it to hide the envelope. I held the sweater up. “It got cold outside, so I had to come back for this. That’s all.”
He nodded drowsily, his eyelids already slipping down. He laid his head back on the pillow.
That was a long ride back to Cole’s place. At every block, I could’ve turned the motorcycle around.
But I didn’t.
* * *
“What’s this?”
“What does it look like?” I still had my helmet in one hand. I hadn’t strapped it to the seat the way I usually did. I’d dropped the backpack to the floor as soon as I had taken out the envelope. “It’s money.”
Cole should’ve been the accountant. It had taken him just a few seconds to riff through the bills and count them all up.
“No, it’s not.” His gaze locked on mine. “This is chump change.”
A cold knot, increasingly familiar, formed again in my gut. “What do you mean?”
“God, sweetie, did you get screwed –” He shook his head wonderingly as he gazed at me. “This is what you managed to lift off McIntyre?” In one hand, Cole flapped the envelope and its contents back and forth. “What a joke. This is just about enough to piss him off – then again, if you’d swiped a nickel off him, that would’ve been enough. But it’s not enough for me to kill him with.” He tossed the envelope on top of the blanket covering his legs. “Not by a long shot.”
I knew he was right. I felt sick. It had been a lot of money by the standards of the Little Nerd Accountant Girl – the one who was still inside me – but not in the real world. I didn’t know.
I just didn’t know what killing someone cost. I’d never done it before.
“So what do we do now?”
Cole didn’t answer. He just kept watching me.
“Guess we don’t do anything.” My voice had dwindled down to a whisper again. “I guess . . . I was just dreaming. That’s all . . .”
He looked away for a moment, then back to me. His expression was different then.
Maybe he was afraid I’d start crying. When you’ve got your heart set on having somebody killed, it’s a real disappointment when you find out it’s not going to happen.
“Okay,” he said at last. “Don’t worry about it.” He picked up the envelope, gave its contents another glance, then tucked it beside himself. “This’ll get us started.”
“But . . . what about the rest? That we
need?”
“Let me think about it.” He leaned back against the wall behind him and studied the smoke he exhaled up toward the ceiling. “There’s always a way. Just . . . gotta find it . . .”
EIGHTEEN
When I went over the next day, Cole told me the plan he’d come up with. To get more money.
“You gotta be kidding.” I stared at him, appalled. “That won’t work.”
“Actually, it will.” He brushed cigarette ash from the front of his T-shirt. “It wouldn’t work for anybody else, but you’ve got a shot at it.”
“This is crazy.” The wooden chair creaked under me as I rocked back in it. “You’re out of your mind.”
“Maybe.” He seemed to have heard that sort of comment before. “You have a better plan?”
That was the real problem. I didn’t.
“All right,” I said. “When do you want me to go do this?”
“Today would be good.”
* * *
I hadn’t ridden the motorcycle out of the city before. Out in the country – I could see why people like doing that. Zipping in and out of city traffic is cool enough, but you’re always one driver on his cell phone away from death. I’d already taken one header on the pavement and wasn’t looking forward to the next one. So getting out of town, to someplace where I could lean over the tank and roll on the throttle without worrying about landing under the wheels of some Escalade – that was nice.
If I hadn’t been on my way to dig myself even farther into this mess, it would’ve been even nicer.
At least I hadn’t had to go home and pull on my business-lady outfit. I had been able to leave straight from the warehouse, there by the wharves, wearing the jeans-and-jacket gear I already had on. The only change I made was to pull my hair back the way I used to wear it, when I had been Little Nerd Accountant Girl.
An hour or so later, I was slowing the bike down at the outskirts of a little town on the river. A little town now; there had been a time not long ago when it had been bigger. Now the factories were all shut down, every window broken out, the empty employee parking lots filled with weeds sprouting up through cracks in the asphalt, yellowed newspapers fraying against the sagging chain-link fences. The downtown area was all boarded-up storefronts, except for the Salvation Army thrift shop and the package liquor stores on opposite street corners.
