I did not choose her. A woman like that would be used to turning away strangers. Instead I waited for an older guy, perhaps in his fifties, out walking his little dog in its blue sweater. He seemed like the sort who enjoyed talking, so I walked up to him, my posture relaxed and unthreatening.
“Hey,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
This question appeared to be the highlight of his day. “Sure!” he boomed, his voice low and deep and cheerful.
“When you made the deal, what did the guy look like?”
He lost some of his friendliness now, and he stared at me with fear or shame or regret, I couldn’t quite tell.
I raised my free hand. “Just curious. Not looking for trouble. I just kind of need to know.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding vigorously, like maybe he really wanted to talk about it. “He was kind of strange looking, with a big forehead.”
“Like Andrew Jackson?” I asked. “The guy from the twenty-dollar bill?”
“I know who Andrew Jackson is,” he said peevishly. “I teach American history. But yes, that’s exactly it. I could never quite put my finger on it, but that’s what he looked like. Except not.”
“Except not,” I agreed.
I found three more people willing to answer my question, and I got the same response. Andrew Jackson, every time. Either everyone making these deals looked like my guy, or this entire neighborhood was all serviced by a single merchant.
So much the better.
THAT NIGHT I went out. I wanted to enjoy myself before everything changed. I drank a lot of whiskey and paid for a woman, but I didn’t particularly enjoy either. The next morning I told myself it was better to have made the effort.
It was just after eight in the morning when I rang the doorbell. I rang it three times and then knocked. Then I pounded. Finally I heard feet on hardwood, and then an awkward hand fiddling with locks. He didn’t ask who it was. Why should he have to? No one ever meant him any harm.
He answered the door in his bathrobe open to his waist. He was in great shape, but his face looked like shit—red eyes, unshaven, puffy.
“Rough night, Marco?” I asked.
His face contorted in confusion and then he got it. He remembered. He opened his arms and drew me into a hug.
WE SAT IN his beautiful kitchen, at the table in the nook, away from his own hissing and puffing espresso machine on the marble island. Natural light poured in from the windows. Marco ran a hand through his mussed hair and sipped from his mug, leaving a momentary foam mustache. I passed on the coffee. I didn’t need any more caffeine.
We spent half an hour on bullshit. He told me about his life, his job as a consultant, whatever the fuck that was—even he didn’t really seem to know. It was just some kind of high-paying boondoggle that had fallen into his lap. He told me about his fiancée, who was not the woman I’d seen the other day. That was someone else, a little thing on the side that didn’t mean a whole lot, but sure was fun. And then, after all this wonderful conversation, the topic turned to me.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am about how things went down. Teddy and I never forgot how much we owe you for keeping quiet.”
“It’s what any one of us would have done,” I said. “I just had bad luck.”
He opened his mouth, and I was sure he was going to say—In this world, you make your own luck—but he thought better of it. Bright boy.
Instead, he said, “Still, I totally owe you.”
Maybe he forgot that I received the same offer he did. Maybe he never knew, and the business about him calling me a pussy had been pure bullshit. Whatever the reason, he didn’t tell me about the deal, and I didn’t bring it up.
After hearing more about how much he owed me, I finally decided to put it to the test.
“I hate to ask,” I said, “but the truth is, I’m kind of in trouble. Some guys I knew from inside are trying to shake me down. I could use something to get them off my case.”
“Something?” he asked. His face went dark. He loved telling me how much he owed me, but maybe he didn’t like so much actually following up on it.
“I need a gun, Marco, and it’s kind of hard for an ex-con to get one. You always had a few pieces stashed away. I can’t believe you’ve changed that much.”
“I don’t know,” he said, his eyes drifting toward the window. He gazed at his watchless wrist and considered the busy morning ahead. “It’s getting kind of late and—”
“I’m not going to shoot anyone,” I said, rushing to get the words out, earnest and nervous. “I just want to let them know they can’t push me around.”
He sipped his drink, thinking. Now he looked at the wall clock.
“You know what, forget it,” I said, my voice easy and apologetic, my palms flying up. “I had no right to ask. You dodged a bullet all those years ago, and I shouldn’t have asked for you to tempt fate now that you’re clean.” I pushed back my chair.
If I had tried to lay a guilt trip on him, he’d have left me high and dry, but this worked like a charm.
“Hold on,” he said, and he got up, pressing a hand on my shoulder to set me back down. He went upstairs and came down a few minutes later with a Glock. Nice piece. Nine millimeter, seventeen-round magazine. It felt good in my hand.
“Sweet,” I said, as I weighed it in my palm. I then held it and pointed it toward an imaginary target.
Marco smiled nervously. “Just be sure you don’t kill anyone with it,” he said.
“Not a living soul,” I assured him.
Something shifted in his face, and he knew. He understood everything.
That instant, less than a full second, hung between us, and the years and experiences and fortunes that separated us collapsed. It was just me and just Marco, old friends. Marco, a good guy, the kind of guy who always attracted good fortune and favors—even before he made his deal. Marco, who walked when I went to jail.
I fired the gun into his forehead. Blood sprayed out the back of his head against the window, a brilliant blossom around the spiderweb of cracked glass.
I hadn’t wanted to hurt him. Andrew Jackson had been right about that. I hadn’t wanted to do anything that might have done him harm. But I knew that what I was doing was helping him.
“You’re welcome,” I said to Marco’s corpse.
Sixteen rounds left. I headed outside to make the most of them.
I WISH I could say it made me feel different. I wish I could say that when I sat in the coffee shop, staring at the cream dancing slowly with the coffee in my cup, I felt like a man on the run, fraught with paranoia, expecting danger from every corner, to hear the air fill with silence and have SWAT officers descend in a coordinated onrush.
But no. I watched the happy couples and young parents stand in line, fussing and chatting, and I felt exactly the same as I had the day I left prison.
I lifted my coffee cup to my lips, but my hand expected the grip of a Glock, and the kick of a firing pin, and when I drank, my nose expected not coffee but the perfume of cordite.
I shut my eyes, and drank. It was like it was all still happening.
. . . A housewife stands in the doorway of her apartment, shouting to her husband that they’re six minutes late already. When she sees me, she frowns, curious, and that curious frown never leaves her face as I lift the Glock and point it at her cheek. . .
. . . The teen boy and his girlfriend leap to their feet when I kick in the door, the black sheet of her hair withdrawing from his crotch to reveal a half-flaccid penis dangling from the front of his boxers, and the boy raises his hands to me and screams but the gun is already going off. . .
. . . The old history teacher grumbles as he tries to fix a plastic bag around his hand while his dog yaps mindlessly at me, standing mere feet away. I don’t wait for him to look up. The left collarbone of his thick vest spews stuffing, followed shortly by blood. He shouts, slightly outraged, and falls to the ground on his side. His dog shrieks, rears up, tries to bound at m
e, but the old man’s hand holds fast. When he sees me, he blinks and says, “Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness,” and I take aim again. . .
I swallowed. I put the coffee cup back down and opened my eyes, expecting to see police converging on the coffee shop.
But there were no police. Only him, the curious vagrant with a striking likeness to Andrew Jackson. He was staring at me through the window with a look of slight betrayal. He opened the door and walked in to sit before me.
He stared at me as I sipped my coffee. I did not meet his eyes.
“So,” he said. “It was you?”
I didn’t answer.
“Of course it was you,” he said. “Who else?”
“Who else,” I echoed.
“Why?” He sounded genuinely shocked. “Why would you do this? Why?”
I looked around the coffee shop, sullen, and did not answer.
“Ten people,” he said. “Ten of my people. I . . . I told them they would live happy lives.”
“I guess maybe I wanted to see if the bullets would bounce off them. To see how charmed their lives really were. Or maybe I thought they’d be better off this way.”
“You . . . you don’t understand what you’ve done!” he hissed. “You don’t understand how you’ve hurt things!”
“Did I fuck your sales quota? Is that it?”
“You’ve ruined me,” he whispered. He looked like he was on the verge of tears. “You’ve destroyed me.”
“I guess your firm must be pretty pissed at you. I can’t say you get a lot of my sympathy. After all, I just voided a lot of contracts. Set a lot of souls free.” I smiled. “You know, there was a guy I met in prison who’d spent almost his whole life in solitary.”
“They’ll . . . They’ll eat me alive for this . . .”
“I only saw him once,” I continued, “for about a week, before he wound up going back—back to that empty cell, all by himself. He’d spent years in there, they told me. And it was all his fault, you know? Because this guy, whenever they let him out, he always went wild on everybody. A huge guy, and he’d just pummel anyone he could get his hands on, beat them to shit. Maybe a week or two would go by before he did it again—the calm before the storm—but then he’d be raging like an elephant, hurling chairs and desks over stairways, breaking glass with his fists . . .”
He buried his face in his hands.
“And I asked him, while I had the chance—why do you do it? What’s the point? I was terrified to ask, you see, because I thought he’d kill me—but he didn’t. He thought about it, and he just laughed. It was a nasty kind of laugh. And he said, ‘We only got a handful of choices. Figure I’ll use mine to spit in their goddamn eyes.’ And it didn’t make a lot of sense to me then, but yesterday, it did.”
The vagrant slowly looked up at me. His face drained of expression, then turned to rage. “You did this all . . . for spite?”
“Spite’s all you’ve allowed me. It’s all I have left. You and the world, you take away my choices, bit by bit, until the only ones I’ve got left are the ones that destroy me. But I guess you never thought I could take you with me.”
“I’ll . . . I’ll ruin you,” said the man. He snapped his fingers. “The police will come and they’ll take you away, back to your rotten little cell! And you’ll die there, you’ll die coughing and fouling yourself as your body eats itself alive!”
I shrugged. “Out here, I’d be in a cell, too. A little block of life you’d have arranged for me. I don’t much see the difference. Except with your cell, I’d never have made a choice.”
“You would have chosen to be happy!”
“I would have chosen to allow you to make me happy. Which isn’t the same. But here’s the thing—having done what I did, and having made the choice I made . . .” I took another sip of coffee, knowing it’d almost certainly be the last I’d be getting for a while. “ . . . I am happy as shit.” And I grinned at him.
The man fumed for a second. Then he spat in my face, a thick, warm blob, turned around, and stormed out, cursing.
I laughed. I laughed long and hard as I wiped his spit away. I was still laughing when I heard the sirens.
Amuse-Bouche
Amber Benson and Jeffrey J. Mariotte
The first thing is my head. It’s pounding. I wish briefly that my heart would stop, because with every pulse of blood (I can hear it in my ears, like cars passing on a nearby highway) the pain blooms, then starts to fade, but comes back again before it goes away altogether.
Then I realize that I’m thinking about the pounding, that realization dawning so slowly that at that first moment, when I wanted my heart to simply cease pumping blood, I wasn’t yet awake. Because now I am, and the pain is so much worse that I’m certain, for a few instants, I’m going to puke. I’m lying on my back, and that’s going to be bad, so I roll over onto my side.
Or try to.
That’s when I discover the collar ringing my neck and the straps around my wrists. When I try to turn, the leather of the collar catches my throat. I choke a little, which cranks up the volume on the headache, so I roll back to where I was. Test my hands. A few inches of give, but not much.
Now I’m awake enough to think, What the fuck?
Wherever I am, it’s dark. I’m on a table or a platform of some kind, a theory based mostly on the distance to the ceiling—not as far as if I was on the floor. Plus, when I try to look around, I see things, objects I can’t quite make out, lower than me.
I have awakened in some strange places—usually the wrong guy’s bed—but never in quite this sort of situation.
I am not, I must add, fond of it.
It’s hot in here too. I stink of sweat and maybe pee. So rank, anyway, that I can’t smell anything else around me. Not fond of that, either, but there you go.
“Hello?” Someone had to have put me here. I didn’t do this to myself. If that someone is still around—although I can’t see or hear anyone—then he or she (no, he, without question) can undo it. And right now, that’s the most important thing. “Hey, where are you? What is up with this shit? Hello, whoever you are!”
Nobody answers, and panic bubbles up inside me like coffee in my grandmother’s old percolator. She always made terrible coffee, weak and a little sour. But when I was a kid, I liked to watch it dance into the little clear well in the lid, and I’m trying to think about things I like because it lets me, for almost a second at a time, not think about the reality of what I’m doing here and how I got here and who did this and for fuck’s sake why, why, and what’s next?
And then it doesn’t work anymore.
The panic hits and I’m sobbing and my nose is running, my eyes overflowing with hot tears, and I’m saying something, or trying to, but it’s not coming out right. It’s sort of hey untie me let me out of here what’s the fucking idea if this is supposed to be all fun and games or something you have failed miserably, but it comes out in a blubbering burst of word stew that even I’m a little embarrassed by. Which, given my situation, is, I know. Stupid.
Not my first encounter with stupid, though.
Was it stupid to walk into that bar last night? A place I’ve never been, a block off Sunset. Should have been safe enough, right? It was crowded, and loud, and I’d had this argument with Jen and just needed to be away from everything for a while, have a drink, chill. Was it stupid to drink on an empty stomach?
I can’t remember anything after that. In the bar, I recall a guy hitting on me and me shooting him down, and then that other one, more persistent. Pushy. A little familiar, maybe, like I’d seen him around the neighborhood. He had dark hair, kind of curly but oily, so it clung to his scalp, and a prominent beak of a nose, and this gap between his front teeth big enough that I could sometimes see his tongue through it, like a fat, pink worm trying to escape a cage. He had a sort of spoiled-meat odor about him. I remember telling him, no thanks, and then getting up and going to the bathroom. When I came out, he wasn’t sitting there anymore. And aft
er . . .
After that, nothing. Blank.
Then here. The head, the darkness, the straps holding me in place. The panic.
Which is starting to come back when I hear a voice—his voice, as distinct as that spoiled-meat stink he wore—coming out of the dark. I freeze but miss the words, lost under my own sobbing. A moment later, he speaks again. “I was just wondering, do you know what human myoglobin is?”
I PRESS THE button on the remote control and, through the monitor, the iris of the camera becomes my eye. I can already tell that the actress I chose for the part is working out splendidly. She is a real method actor, her fear palpable even from the control room.
There are seven cameras set up around the studio, the angles chosen to capture every nuance of her performance. As I watch her work, I find I cannot tear my gaze away.
Technologically speaking, I am a fan of the Canon 7D––I find it to be a very filmic digital camera with the right lenses, and a lot more forgiving than the more expensive 5D model. For a long time, I chose to shoot on film, but dealing with Super 16 became so cumbersome (I’ve never been willing to let anyone else process my dailies––I’m a bit of a perfectionist) that I finally gave it up in favor of the more streamlined digital video format. Besides, I am in exalted company. All the modern greats are working in this new medium: Soderbergh, Cameron, Rodriguez. Who am I to be a film snob when the directors I most admire are leading the charge in this bold new world?
I always edit my own material. Always. Over the years, I’ve found I have a real knack for the subtlety of the subject matter. I believe in anyone else’s hands my films would seem exploitative. Tarantino is always being maligned for this, and, thankfully, with my skill and the forgiving nature of my audience, I have so far escaped this negative label.
For me, the pleasure of the filmmaking process is twofold: the actual filming is by far the highlight of the adventure, but the splicing together of raw footage, the crafting of an Oscar-worthy performance, is an almost orgasmic feeling that words cannot express.
Dark Duets Page 27
