by Kim Oh
I had actually left it in my backpack, strapped to the seat of the motorcycle, when I had gone into the bank. That’d seemed smarter than carrying it with me. I don’t care how well-dressed you are, withdrawing large sums of money while packing is probably not a good idea. Unless you’ve got your panty hose pulled over your head.
“Right here.” I slung my backpack from my shoulder. “I don’t think I broke it.”
“Broke it?” Cole leaned forward to take the pack from my outstretched hand. The gun clanked heavily against the bullets rattling at the bottom. He unzipped the backpack and looked inside. “Goddamn it, Kim. It’s not a toy.”
“Well, screw you, too.” I was not only tired, I was getting irritated. “It’s not like you gave me the instruction manual with it.”
“The instruction manual begins now. Come over here.”
“And do what?”
He sighed and shook his head. “Just sit down. And watch and learn.”
I sat down on the floor beside him. There didn’t seem to be any way around it.
“All right.” Cole spread the gun and its pieces on the blanket, along with the bullets. “Here’s how you get a piece ready for business . . .”
* * *
That took hours.
By the time we were done, I might not have been able to take the .357 apart and put it back together in the dark – and I wouldn’t have won any speed trials while doing it with the lights on – but at least I wasn’t a complete embarrassment anymore.
“So are we done?”
Cole shook his head. “We haven’t even started. Now we get to the fun part.” He picked the shiny weapon up from the blanket and handed it to me. “Stand up.”
I let the gun dangle at my side. “Now what?”
“Imagine McIntyre’s standing over there.” From the mattress where Cole was sitting, he pointed to the far wall of the warehouse. “See him? Now let ’er rip.”
“What?” I looked from him to the wall and back again. “You mean shoot?”
“No, I mean run over there, and hit him in the head with it. Yeah, shoot.”
“Why?”
“Because –” Cole spoke with elaborate, condescending patience. “When you shoot somebody, that’s how you kill them. If you do it right.”
“Yeah, but . . . I’m not going to be the one who does that. You are.”
“Maybe so. But to get me to where I can do that, you’re gonna have to be there. And yeah, I appreciate all the confidence you have in me and all, but like I told you before – things could go wrong. And then I’ll need you to help me out. The only way you can do that is if you’re also carrying a piece. Even if you don’t fire it off – and believe me, I really hope you don’t. For my sake. So the only way to avoid some major screwup is for you to at least know how to handle the thing.”
I looked down at the gun in my hand. It seemed really big, heavy and intimidating. At least to me, it did.
“I can’t hit anything from here.” I looked up at him. “I’ve never –”
“Even you can hit a wall. I promise you. If not, we’re going to have to seriously rethink our plans.”
I turned and slowly raised the gun.
“Hold it with both hands,” instructed Cole. “Don’t lock your arms like that. Or you really will land on your butt.”
This was a new thing. But in some ways, it wasn’t. Because I’d been dreaming about something like this. And here it was at last.
“Like I showed you. Just squeeze . . .”
“Wait a minute.” I lowered the gun and looked back at him. “Isn’t somebody going to hear this?”
“Sweetie, in this neighborhood you could fire off a howitzer and nobody would care, long as you weren’t pointing it at them. Quit fooling around and shoot.”
I brought the gun up again in both hands, braced myself with one foot behind me, and squeezed the trigger –
“Crap!” The shot was still echoing inside the warehouse. “What the hell . . .” The gun itself had come within inches of clopping me on the forehead. My arms ached all the way back to my shoulder blades. “That sucks.”
“You’d better get used to it,” said Cole. “What did you think it was going to be like?”
“Dunno.” There was an impressive hole punched into the wall. “This is the same kind of gun you use?”
“Yeah – I never had any problem with it.”
“Well, sure. But you’re a guy. You got some weight going for you. Plus all that upper body strength. I think I need a girl’s gun.”
“I think you need to suck it up and stop whining. You’ll get used to it.”
“I don’t think so . . .”
“Don’t worry,” said Cole. “There’s a trick to it. Once you figure that out, then there’s no problem.”
“Yeah?” I looked up from the gun in my hand. “What’s the trick?”
As usual, he couldn’t just tell me what I wanted to know. “When you were in school, did you do any sports?”
“Only in P.E. Like volleyball and stuff.”
“Any good at it?”
“No,” I said. “I sucked. There were always these corn-fed amazons who’d spike the ball into my face. After the first couple of bloody noses, I’d just dive for the floor.”
“See? You didn’t learn the trick back then.”
“Which is?”
“You gotta hate the other guy more than you love yourself.”
That actually made sense. It sounded like something I could do. “And that’ll help me with the gun?”
“No, but it’ll help you get in the practice you need.” Cole pointed to the wall. “Fire off another one.”
The second time wasn’t any less jarring than the first. My ears were ringing.
“Uh . . . just how good am I going to have to be at this?” I had lowered the gun. “I mean, yeah, I’ve hit a wall twice in a row, but I don’t think I’m ready to knock a fly out of the air.”
“Not an issue.” Cole dug out his lighter. “Like you said – when we go to see McIntyre, you’re not going to be the one doing the dirty work. Right? Just backup. So don’t worry about being an expert like me.” He pointed to the wall with the lit cigarette. “Fire off the rest, then we’ll reload. And you can do it again.”
“You’re kidding.” I stared at him. “This is the biggest waste of time –”
“Yeah, but –” I couldn’t keep my voice from slipping into its whining mode. “My arm hurts. And my ears are ringing . . .”
“Either you hate him enough – or you don’t.”
“All right.” I turned around and raised the gun again in both hands . . .
* * *
By the time Cole let me quit, the floor was littered with empty ammo cartons.
Plus, I’d had to go through his whole elaborate gun-cleaning ritual twice. If I’d known how much housekeeping was going to be involved, I might not have put in for this gig.
“So we’re done?” Sitting cross-legged at the end of the mattress, I dug the wads of balled-up toilet tissue out of my ears. I could see through the warehouse’s dust-clouded skylights that it had gone dark outside. “I can go home now?”
“Oh, you can go, all right.” Cole had filled up his ashtray again. “But not home.”
I laid down flat on my back, my hands outstretched, the weight of the .357 filling one. “Now what?”
“You have to go back out there. And plug that hole.”
“Hole?” My eyes went wide as I stared up at the warehouse ceiling. Something in his voice creeped me out. “What hole?”
“Pomeroy.”
“What’re you talking about?” I sat up, wrapping my arms around my knees. “We’re done with him. I took care of all that.” I pointed to the briefcase sitting against the wall. “So we could get the money.”
“That was temporary,” said Cole. “I’m talking about permanent.”
“I don’t get it. What exactly is it that needs to be taken care of? He’s just an old guy, sitting out there.”
“Correction. That’s what Pomeroy used to be. Now he’s an old guy sitting out there, who just let some young cupcake talk him into handing over his transfer account passwords. The ones that his boss McIntyre uses to move his money around. A whole bunch of which is no longer sitting in the bank where it’s supposed to be. It’s in that briefcase over there.”
“Yeah, but . . . but that was the plan . . .”
“No. That was part of the plan. Now we have to move on to another part of the plan. Or rather – you do.”
“Wait a minute. He trusted me.”
“Gosh. Guess that was a mistake.”
“But . . .” My mind was racing again. “I thought we were just going to let him be. Because he’d be scared to go tell McIntyre what he’d done. And that’d keep him quiet.”
“Sure, that might keep him quiet. It might even have kept him quiet long enough for us to do what we want to McIntyre. If you hadn’t gone down there and taken that money out of the bank. But Pomeroy still has those passwords, too. He still has access to those accounts. When he sees how much got disappeared from them, yeah, he’ll still be scared. He’ll be scared spitless that McIntyre is going to think he took that money.”
Inside my head, I could see the gears lining up and meshing.
“And that’s a death sentence, sweetie. For him.” Cole took a long drag from his cigarette. “He’s not going to sit out there and wait for Michael and his crew to show up. He’s going to roll over on you. That’s the only way he can save himself.”
I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t even see anything.
“For all we know,” said Cole, “your friend Pomeroy might have checked those accounts today. While we were doing our indoor gun range practice. And he’s calling up McIntyre right now.”
“You sonuvabitch.” I managed to bring him into focus. “You set me up. You knew this would happen.”
“I didn’t set you up. You did. If you couldn’t see this coming . . .” He sat back against the wall, flicking ash from his cigarette. “You got a lot to learn.”
“This is crazy. I can’t . . . I can’t do that.”
“Better you should learn now. When it’s just an old man who has to be taken care of. Then you might be ready for the tough job.”
I nodded slowly. Not thinking . . . just listening. To my own pulse.
“So . . .” I managed to say something. “What exactly . . . do I have to do . . .”
Cole reached over and took the .357 out of my hand. He flipped it open, found a fresh box of ammo, and started loading it up.
TWENTY-ONE
I just rode.
And thought.
After the accident, I had decided it was better not to do that. Better to just ride and keep my mind blank, no emotions, no words, no thoughts, no pictures. But I couldn’t do that this time. There was too much going on inside my head.
The motorcycle’s headlight gathered up the road ahead of me. Heading out of the city, the unlit highway cutting toward the river and the derelict small town. I’d know I had gotten there when I could see the big hulking shapes of the abandoned factories, the moonlight glittering on their broken windows.
There was someone else’s voice that I could hear, as I leaned over the tank, shielding my face behind the windshield. Not Cole’s voice, telling me what I had to do. It was Monica’s.
When you don’t have options . . . you do what’s left.
I knew that was true. I knew it because in this world, the one I had worked so hard to get myself into, things like that are true.
But Monica had also told me something else. That it was different for me.
Even now. Even this far along . . .
I rolled the throttle on even more as I brought the Ninja out of a swooping curve. Just a few days ago, going this fast, speeding through the night – that might’ve scared me. But not now.
The world scared me.
This world – Cole’s world – was a bad place. I’d succeeded in getting into it, becoming part of his world. And now . . .
Now I wanted out.
That was what I had decided. That was what my own voice, when I could hear it, spoke inside my head.
I wasn’t a killer. That was a joke. I knew that now. It was a joke that I’d gone along with, because it was exciting. Everybody thinks about having their boss killed. Maybe, in their wildest fantasies, even doing it themselves. Imagining what it’d be like, to kill somebody who had screwed them over the way I had been screwed. But then all of a sudden, it was going to happen! Brave Little Nerd Accountant Girl – she wasn’t going to be the one to actually pull the trigger, but she’d be there when it all went down. I’d even get to wave a real gun around, just like I knew how to use it . . .
Well, maybe I did. I did now. But I wasn’t going to.
* * *
I spotted faint light leaking between the blinds. It slipped through the letters spelling DELTA FREIGHT & STORAGE, forming thin strips on the sidewalk in front of the building.
At the curb, I leaned the Ninja onto its kickstand and pulled off my helmet. I sat it on top of the backpack strapped to the seat and walked over to the door.
I’d figured I had a good chance of catching Pomeroy, still there at his shabby office. I knew he worked late – he didn’t like returning to an empty house, so he put it off as long as possible. He’d told me that.
The door was unlocked. I pushed it open and looked inside.
“Mr. Pomeroy?”
The overhead fluorescent panel was switched off, so the only light came from the single green-shaded lamp on the desk. The old man sat there in the dim circle, making check marks on some papers.
He looked up at me. “Hello, Kim.”
I knew then. Because he wasn’t surprised to see me. Wasn’t surprised that I had come all that way to talk to him. It meant that he knew. Everything.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Pomeroy.” It was all I could think of to say. “I’m really sorry.”
“That’s all right. Things happen. People make bad decisions . . . all the time.” A sad little smile appeared on his face. “I just wish . . . that when things had gone wrong for you . . . that you’d come out sooner and talked to me. Maybe I could’ve helped.” He shook his head. “You didn’t have to do all this other stuff.”
“I know.” My voice was quiet and small. “I know that now.”
“It’s a real mess,” he said. “You shouldn’t have done it. But I’ll talk to McIntyre. He and I are old friends. We go back a long ways. I’ll talk to him . . . and things will get sorted out. Don’t worry about it.”
That was what I was hoping to hear. I was going to get a break. The kind that killers don’t get. The kind that foolish little girls, who get in way over their heads, sometimes get. If they’re lucky, and if people – the ones who really own this world, like McIntyre – are kind to them. That was the most I could hope for. If I could just get that tiny bit, then maybe my brother and I would be okay. We could huddle down in our little corner of the world, just the two of us. And if we didn’t bother anyone, anyone who really mattered, then maybe we’d be all right. Even if just for a little while.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, Kim, I’m sure.” He pushed his chair back and got to his feet. “Come here. It’s okay.”
I stepped toward him as he smiled and spread his arms wide for a hug.
When the flat of his hand struck me across the face, I wasn’t ready for it.
Pomeroy might’ve been an old man, but he was still strong. Strong enough to send me flying. I hit the floor and skidded, one shoulder and the back of my head bumping against a file cabinet.
“You stupid little . . .!” He towered over me, his panting breath straining the suspenders over his gut. “Could’ve gotten me killed!”
His shouting voice seemed to come from miles distant. The room tilted around me, and I could taste the wet salt of blood in my mouth.
“Think you were so smart!” His shoe drew back, then kic
ked me in the ribs. I gasped as I rolled onto my side, blindly scrabbling at the floor to get away from him. The next kick hit me in the back, sending a white bolt up my spine. “Think you could come out here and make a fool outta me – oh yeah, you think you’re so cute. Think all you have to do is look at me and smile. That’ll do it for an old bastard like me, huh?” Another kick as I tried to crawl toward the door. “And then I’d give you those passwords, everything you asked me for, and I’d take the hit for it – huh? That was your bright plan, wasn’t it? Well, you planned wrong, sweetheart.”
He reached down and picked me up by the front of my jacket. His face, inches from mine, was mottled a furious red as my feet dangled above the floor.
“You said . . .” I struggled to get the words past my bloodied tongue. “Everything . . . would be all right . . .”
“Oh yeah. It’ll be all right – for me.” Pomeroy’s sneer curled sharper. “Soon as I call up McIntyre and tell him what happened out here. Soon as I tell him what you tried to pull over on us. And when he sees what I’ve done to you – what I’m about to do – he’ll know I was as mad about it as he’ll be when I tell him.”
“I can . . . get the money back . . .”
“Really?” Pomeroy’s eyes narrowed as he peered at me. “That’s not what Cole said.”
All of a sudden, the room seemed bigger. As though the walls had fallen away, the roof peeling back to reveal the stars.
“Cole?” I could feel blood trickling down my chin as I raised my face toward the old man. “What . . . about him . . .”
“He’s the one who called me,” said Pomeroy. “We’re old friends, the two of us. He did some good work down here once, for both me and McIntyre. I don’t know how he found out about your little scheme, but I’m glad he did.”
Ugly shapes were forming inside my head. With long, jagged shadows.
“This’ll do him a lot of good, too.” Pomeroy gave a slow nod, savoring what he saw in my eyes. “It’s always good to do somebody like McIntyre a favor. Especially a big one like this. Maybe he’ll find some kind of job for Cole, something he can do the way he is now. People like McIntyre can be really grateful.”
“You’re wrong . . . that’s not . . . what happened . . .”
