Joan ignored him.
She disconnected, dialled 911.
The operator picked up on the first ring. Joan identified herself, first name and last. She tersely described her situation, gave the operator her exact location.
She reached out and adjusted the side mirror. There he was, standing directly behind the car. She was quite certain that, if she shifted into reverse gear and stepped on the gas, she could seriously injure or perhaps kill him.
She settled for consciously memorizing the man’s description. He was about six feet tall, very muscular. His pale hair was cut very short and receding at the temples. He had tiny ears and wore mirror-lensed sunglasses that, as she watched him, he removed for a second in order to massage the bridge of his button nose. His blue eyes were small and close-set. A thick silver chain hung in a shiny loop from his back pocket all the way down to the knee of his baggy black pants.
Sensing that he was being watched, Axel glanced up. He scowled at Joan, and her heart raced. He reached deep inside the Caddy’s trunk, pulled out two black-and-green tartan suitcases, one after the other. He glanced up at Joan again, bared his teeth and spun on his heel and was lost between the rows of parked cars. Joan heard running footsteps, turned and looked out the Caddy’s back window.
There he was.
Axel lifted a suitcase high over his shoulder, tossed it through the ragged gap he’d cut in the wire mesh that covered the nearest of the windows spaced around the garage. He picked up the other suitcase and hurled it into the rectangle of light. Scrambling up on the hood of a car, he hooked a leg over the windowsill and hauled himself out of the building.
Joan sat there in the Caddy, fiddling with the seatbelt. All she had to do was take her foot off the brake and let the big car slide forward, make a quick right and she’d be gone.
She powered down her window.
A police car drifted slowly past the garage’s exit, lights flashing. The cop looked right at her but apparently didn’t see her.
*
The smaller of the suitcases lay on a patch of scruffy grass directly below the window. Axel landed on it feet first, bounced awkwardly. The damn thing was stuffed so full the sides were bulging. So Jake had been right about the woman paying up, and Marty had been wrong. Marty was such a fool. The larger suitcase was twenty feet away, at the bottom of a gentle slope. Axel yanked open the Bentley’s front door. He shoved the smaller suitcase into the car and trotted briskly down the slope.
Jake stuck his nose out the open window and yelped at him to snap it up, be quick. It was good advice but Axel resented it anyway. The suitcase’s handle had been knocked off. There it was, over to his left. Should he go and get it or leave it where it was? Leave it, he decided. The suitcase was fat and very heavy. He trudged back up the slope.
Jake, peering anxiously around, saw blobs of pink and pale-blue light flicker in the blank windows of the metal-clad building behind the Bentley. He heard a dozen car doors slam shut. His heart nose-dived into his churning stomach.
Axel scampered across the grass to the Bentley. He slipped and fell, scratched at the grass stains on the knees of his pants. His pants were ruined! He plucked a lump of mud from his shoe.
Now there were blobs of pink and blue light dancing on the walls of every building Jake could see.
Axel climbed into the car. He rested the suitcase against the steering wheel and slammed the door. He turned and smiled broadly at Jake. “Za mission haff been accomplished.”
Jake said, “Get da fuck outta here, ya moron!”
“Yah!” cried Axel, beaming stupidly.
Jake said, “Da gas pedal’s onna right, Axel! Let’s roll!”
“We must haff music!” cried Axel. He turned on the radio, hit FM pre-sets until he’d tuned in the local country-and-western station. Jake had not stopped yelling at him. He peered anxiously at the smears of pink and blue on the wall of a nearby building. What did these pretty pastel colours signify? Something very bad, he feared. A black-clad ERT team scuttled across his field of vision. In the blink of an eye, they had come and gone. Axel hardly knew what to think. Had he seen a platoon of enormous ants? He pushed aside the big suitcase and cranked the radio’s volume way past sensible.
An ERT sniper loped crouching across the flat roof of a tin-walled building. Five more ERT killers sprinted in single file across a narrow span of open ground between the parking garage and adjoining building.
Jake doubted he’d have seen them if he hadn’t been looking right at them. Even then, it was a close thing. What now? He scratched his chin, and discovered a small area he’d missed with his razor.
He was an old man. He should’ve retired years ago, headed for Vegas or Palm Springs. Or even Reno. The smallest little city on earth.
He’d known what he should do. Why hadn’t he done it?
Lack of foresight, imagination. Laziness, inertia. He had twenty reasons and each was as good — or bad — as the next.
Jake could hear more ERT guys off to his left, chattering like geese as they prepared to do him in. A patrol car eased into view. A loudhailer squawked. Jake screamed at Axel to turn down the radio. A bald cop with an old-fashioned handlebar moustache advised the occupants of the Bentley — that would be Jake and Axel — to exit the vehicle with their hands on their heads.
Jake sat there in the backseat, huddled and small, an old man whose life had taken a sudden turn for the worse. Axel was staring at him, waiting to be told what to do.
Jake said, “Get outta da car, Axel, an open da fuckin’ door for me.”
Axel said, “Okay, Jake. I do it now.” He climbed out of the Bentley, and was buffeted by an angry, conflicting babble of incomprehensible voices. What a racket! He opened Jake’s door. He offered Jake his hand.
As Jake exited the vehicle, Axel glimpsed the black bulk of the cellphone clutched in Jake’s fist, and thought for a scrotum-tightening moment that it was a gun. Wasn’t it likely that the ERTs, who were fifty yards away and blind drunk on adrenaline, would make the same mistake?
Axel snatched the phone out of Jake’s hand. He turned to face the cop with the loudhailer. He extended his arm, offering the cop a clear view of the cellphone, showing him that he had nothing to fear but onerous long-distance toll charges.
They were in shade, and there was a strong breeze coming in from the harbour. Jake was cold. He muttered, “Fuck dis bullshit!” and turned his back on Axel and climbed back inside the Bentley.
Up on the roof of the tin-walled building, the ERT sniper moved the index finger of his right hand one-eighth of an inch to the west.
Axel dropped the cellphone. He heard a wet, splattering sound that reminded him of a sudden rainstorm, as bullet fragments and myriad small and large chunks of his heart impacted against the Bentley's gleaming sheet-metal flank.
He waited for the sound of the shot, but it never came. He dropped to his knees, sagged backwards against a gleaming chrome hubcap. His chunky blond head lolled forward. His chin bumped against his collarbone.
Jake flinched at the sound of the shot. The side window turned smeary pink. He said, “Wha da fuck?”
Axel toppled sideways across the grass, limp and graceless as a two-hundred-pound sack of spuds. The blue had faded from his eyes. His tongue drooped. He tasted grass, and mud, and a warm liquid that was wet and salty. His pale face was no more than six inches from the convex, brilliantly polished chrome surface of the hubcap. He stared hard at his reflection.
Who could that ugly fellow be? he wondered, as he died.
In a moment there were cops swarming all over the car, hands clutching at Jake from all directions.
Axel was nothing but a dead punk, but Jake was known to them all. He was yanked out of the Bentley. His wrinkled old face was mashed against the steaming, viscous glass. He sniffed up the smell of Axel’s blood, tasted of Axel’s heart. He gagged, as a sour lump that might have been his soul welled up inside him and was caught like a sharpened stick in his throat. Somebody trie
d to break his arm just for the fun of it. Stiff fingers poked at him. Somebody took his wallet. Somebody else took his comb. His cigar was yanked right out of his mouth. His solid gold, diamond-encrusted lighter vanished into a bottomless pocket. His Rolex was stripped off his wrist. His flesh burned, where his diamond rings had been ripped from his fingers.
Somebody violently goosed him, and he jumped.
The cops howled with glee.
He looked down at Axel.
He’d seen a lot of dead guys, in his time. Guys that had been killed with large-and small-calibre handguns, rifles, sawed-off shotguns, a flare gun, a black powder muzzleloader. He’d watched guys die of suffocation, the murder weapon a plastic bag stolen from the produce department of the local supermarket. He’d known guys that had been meathooked, axed, stabbed with knives that were sharp, dull, pitted, rusty. He’d watched while a guy tied to a bale of hay was slowly cut in half with a scythe, seen another guy burn to death in a bathtub full of diesel fuel.
None of those guys were any deader than Axel.
Some of the guys he murdered had been close pals. Most of them were just guys. He’d hated or feared a select few of them so deeply it still gave him a migraine just thinking about it.
He felt nothing for Axel.
A fat bald guy was taking pictures. Unauthorized pictures. He crawled inside the Bentley and clicked off a couple more shots through the gore-streaked window. Jake snarled at him. The guy kept firing away.
A detective knelt down beside Axel, checked for a pulse.
A good-looking female cop flopped the largest of the suitcases down on the Bentley’s hood. She worked the zipper, peered inside. Jake studied her face.
She reached inside, placed several bulky stacks of bills on the trunk and then said something to the detective who’d knelt by Axel. A good-looking guy. Her partner. Jake noted the spark in his eye. Partner in more ways than one, maybe.
The woman spun the suitcase around so Jake could see inside. There were enough newspapers in there to wrap a whole lotta fish.
Jake said, “So, who da fuck’re you?”
Parker introduced herself, and Willows.
Jake said, “I dunno what dis’s all about. Ya dinks squibbed Axel. My chauffeur I imported alia way from East Germany. For what? Packin’ a hot cellphone? He’s got his air-brakes licence, can drive da big rigs, eighteen-wheelers. Dat’s a talent! And you assholes pot him like he’s a fuckin’ mallard.”
Parker said, “Where’s Harold?”
“Who?”
“Harold Wismer. Where’ve you got him stashed, Jake?”
“I dunno know what da fuck yer talkin’ about, if anyt’ing.”
“His wife has received a number of telephone calls, demanding a five-million-dollar ransom. She packs two large suitcases full of newspapers and a little seed money, and delivers them to you. Why?”
Jake said, “I wanna talk at my lawyer.”
Willows said, “Sure thing, Jake. But where’s Harold?”
“Harold who?” said Jake. He glared evilly at a muscular, cheap-suited cop with short blond hair who had just accepted a light from another cop, who flicked the wheel of Jake’s diamond-encrusted lighter and touched the flame to one of Jake’s twenty-dollar Cuban cigars. Jake blinked, clearing his eyes. A dozen or more cops were standing around, smoking his cigars. Talking and laughing, having a good time. They’d cleaned out his humidor, the fucks. He watched, slack-jawed, as the fat photographer flicked mud off his cellular and casually punched in a twelve-digit number. A moment passed. The fatty’s face lit up, his mouth moved. Who was the rotten fuck talkin’ to? Twelve fuckin’ digits was about as long distance as long distance could get.
Jake told himself to be calm. It wasn’t even his phone. But theft of services was theft of services. He’d get Axel ... No, Axel was dead. Okay, he’d get Steve ... Come to think of it, where in hell was Steve? Gone. Okay, he’d get Axel ... No, not Axel ... Marty?
He decided it was time to hire some new help. There was no end of ambitious, just-barely-bright-enough guys out there, seeking employment. Steve and Axel types by the bushel-basketful.
The photographer sensed that he was being watched. He caught Jake’s eye, smiled, waggled his stolen cigar. Jake thought he resembled a five-eighths-scale Winston Churchill. He said, “Hey, you! C’mere!”
The guy tried to wave him off.
Jake said, “I wanna buy a buncha dem pictures ya took a me. Whacha fuckin’ name, anyways?”
The guy kept talking into the phone as he fumbled for his wallet. Jake had seen fatter wallets, but not many. A card was extracted. Jake took it. The guy’s name was Mel Dutton. He told Jake to call him any time.
Jake said he’d appreciate it.
A bullet, scythe, plastic bag? Live burial? Jake decided that, as soon as he was clear of the cops, he’d get two or three of his newly hired domestics to pound Dutton’s brains to mush, while another thug took souvenir Polaroids.
Like his fuckin’ daddy used to tell him, irony was a dish best tasted cold.
45
Ozzie sat up.
The splintered ends of his broken ribs gouged his lungs. A chainsaw’s whirling blade sliced into his skull. The stand of cedar and fir trees on the far side of the driveway were suddenly clearcut, and toppled sideways into the sky.
The lake tilted at a sharp angle. Acres of green water sloshed across the warped horizon.
Fluffy white clouds plummeted like stones.
A small brown bird flew vertically into the earth.
The log house spun like a top.
The sundeck tilted across all points of the compass.
A smoking fuse burnt down to nothing and Ozzie’s head exploded in a fiery halo of flesh and bone. He sat there, hands clasping his pounding head as if to contain the powerful forces within, that threatened to burst his skull at the seams, and splatter his brains and all his low ambitions across the cedar boards.
From inside the house came the bumpety-bump of the brass headboard on the stairs.
The Ruger lay on the deck, halfway to the closed French doors. The muzzle was pointing directly at him. He began to crawl on his hands and knees across the deck. His ribs moved like the keys of a honky-tonk piano that had fallen off the back of a high-speed pickup truck. Splinters of bone ripped into his tender flesh. He whimpered.
A hinge creaked.
He squinted at the blank rectangular mouth of the open doorway. Harold cursed as he dragged the gleaming brass head-board out of the house. His face twisted as the thing sagged away from him, and he lost his balance and fell. The headboard clattered on the sundeck. Golden shafts of light were reflected off the metal and into the heavens. Harold got himself straightened out. He struggled to his feet. He looked awful. Terminally haggard. A middle-aged man teetering on the brink of instant antiquity. Clearly the cold Pop Tarts and lukewarm root beer he’d been guzzling for the past three days had not agreed with him.
Harold looked like a man who believed that his girlfriend had abandoned him for good reason.
Harold looked like a man who believed his wife had abandoned him for even better reasons.
Harold looked like a man who’d lost everything and missed every bit of it, and was determined to get it back right this minute, or die trying.
Hacking and spitting, Ozzie crawled slowly across the sun-warmed planks towards the Ruger.
He hooked his fingertips into the narrow space between two planks. He hauled himself forward another six inches.
Harold slung the brass headboard over his shoulder and staggered directly towards him, making noises that would shame a wild boar.
Ozzie’s fingers grazed the muzzle of the gun just as Harold kicked him in the face. Retching, Ozzie fell back.
Harold bent and picked up the Ruger. His face was bloody. His knees and elbows were bloody. His Jockeys needed a wash.
Ozzie saw the look in Harold’s eyes and knew his time had come. Well, fuck it. Live fast, die young. He plucked the handc
uff key out of his pants pocket, shoved the key into his mouth. He swallowed.
Harold’s face blossomed red as any rose.
Ozzie said, “Joan laughed in my face. Said she wouldn’t pay a dime to save your ass. First and only time I spoke to her, she said she had a boyfriend named Steve, they were gonna buy a couple of one-way tickets to paradise.” Ozzie worked up a nasty smile. “Look at it this way, Harold — at least you got what you deserved.”
Harold’s face fell apart like a cheap jigsaw puzzle. He lifted the pistol and, apparently, shot himself between the eyes and fell straight back, collapsed limp as a threadbare rug across the brass headboard. The thunder of the shot rumbled across the lake. A cloud of pale smoke drifted in the air.
Ozzie stared at the soles of Harold’s dirty feet for the better part of a minute, then spat the handcuff key into the palm of his hand.
The key was dry as dust.
He nearly fainted as he pried the pistol out of Harold’s clawed fingers. Harold oozed blood. His hair smoked. The bullet had cut a vertical furrow in his broad forehead. He lay there, attracting flies.
Ozzie staggered back into the house. He gathered himself, and shut and locked the French doors.
Melanie was watching television. He yelled at her to turn the damn thing off and then snapped off a shot that struck the Sony square between the shoulder blades. Thick chunks of glass bounced on the carpet. A line of evil-smelling purple smoke clawed its way out of the Sony’s guts and wandered towards the cathedral ceiling.
Melanie still wouldn’t look at him.
He heard the truck pull up beside the house. A moment later Dean came sidling into the house. He sniffed the air, frowned. His boots crunched glass. He glanced down, startled.
Ozzie said, “How’d it go?”
“Good,” said Dean. His forehead rumpled. He took note of the smoking television and the way Melanie sat rigidly in the La-Z-Boy. He finally noticed the pistol in Ozzie’s hand.
He looked past Ozzie, at the body lying on the sundeck. Harold chose that moment to sit up. His face was a mask of blood. He slowly raised his arm. He pointed accusingly at Dean.
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