When I arrived at the Home Depot, I walked straight to the lumber and composites department and went to work. I asked the friendly associate to help me with the big items and take them to the cashier. Then I moved on to the smaller stuff and started piling them into my shopping cart while whistling the tune from A Fistful of Dollars. I worked fast and efficiently, and before I knew it, all the boxes on my shopping list had been ticked. The clock of death was steadily approaching midnight.
I paid for the materials with a wad of cash and walked out of the store with a kind man in an orange apron. He was pushing a rusty platform cart while telling me about a yellow dog that had eaten his phone and expressing his dismay at the gluttonous grackles that defecated on his new Kia while he was hard at work. I told him that he shouldn’t park under the poplars, but he didn’t seem to hear me. Then we arrived at my van and loaded the material into its spacious belly.
After my successful pit stop at Home Depot was completed, I visited a secondhand clothing store called “Marty’s Closet.” I needed a deliveryman’s uniform and a brown baseball cap for my upcoming mission, and Marty’s was the place to go. The store had a vintage section where they sold postal uniforms, retro outfits, old mechanic shirts with name patches and other curious items like that. The owner, Marty, of all names, had started selling them first as just normal clothes, but when he realized that some crazy collectors were willing to pay a premium for the stuff, he had built a special department for the clothes and put an extra zero on the price tags. Marty had been very surprised to learn that the more he charged for the collector’s stuff the more people wanted to buy them.
I wasn’t a collector of overpriced crap, but my visit was still a great success, and I walked out of the store with a blue plastic bag that had a brown baseball cap and an old UPS delivery uniform neatly folded in it. The outfit was the last missing piece in the cruel puzzle, and I was ready to go home and start building something very, very special—something truly terrifying.
The Econoline took me back home safely, and I fetched two beers from the fridge and marveled for a couple of minutes at the beautiful metal chair I had gotten from the Depot. Then I unloaded the lumber, made sure that all the power tools were working properly, and started toiling away like an apprentice killer who wanted desperately to impress his master.
After a couple of hours of sweat, some blood, but no tears, the first item was ready. A magnificent oblong box had been born from the humble lumber and a handful of quality screws. The dimensions were dead-on, and I had managed to keep the box from becoming too heavy and clumsy. The suburban masterpiece was big enough to accommodate a grown man but still light enough to be moved by a child. It even had a few breathing holes for an exceptionally demanding customer, and the wooden beauty smelled fresh like a morning forest.
I jumped into the box enthusiastically and lay down on the wooden bottom. I looked at the bright sun above me and thought about the sleepy doves that had so warmly welcomed me to my new home. The world had still a lot of great beauty and peace in it, but I couldn’t help thinking that, once the lid was nailed tight on the box, the sun, the moon, and all the wonders of the world would be replaced by eternal darkness.
I got out and tested the strength of my creation by kicking its sides as hard as I could with my unforgiving boots. Then I took the hammer and tried to crack the lid, but nothing happened. The box was sturdy as hell, and it was clear that not even an aikido black belt could get out of it without a chainsaw attached to his legs. I was very pleased with my work and decided to name the box Larry because it was lean and resilient, just like my cousin Larry.
The box had turned out even better than I had envisioned, and I was optimistic about the remainder of the project. A good start was good for morale, and it boosted my confidence nicely. I was more than ready to move to the next item: a ringside seat for the doomed consultant.
I wiped the dust off the metal chair and bolted it deep to the Econoline’s floor with four zinc-plated grade-8 bolts. The process was a little more complicated than I had anticipated, but after crawling under the van a couple of times and drinking four more beers and a shot of rye, the chair was finally secured tightly to the floor. I sighed deeply, dropped the powerful German torque wrench on the grass, and wiped the sweat off my forehead.
I studied the chair carefully, and it looked so solid that I was absolutely sure that not even an enraged mountain gorilla could move the damn thing. But I still sat on it and tried my best to break it loose by thrashing in it like a furious meth addict strapped into a restraint chair at Las Vegas county jail, but the chair didn’t move, not one bit. I got up and kicked it hard with my boots until I was absolutely convinced that it was not going to budge.
After I was done with the bolting and drilling part of the night, I took a well-deserved sip of Jim Beam and attached four pairs of handcuffs to the chair—two on each armrest and two on the front legs. Then I enclosed the whole cargo space in sheets of plastic, put the hand truck and Larry in the van, and went back to the house to get my guns.
I loaded and cleaned all the small weapons I had purchased from the tiger show and placed them carefully in the hunting bag. I left the Remingtons in the bedroom closet because I figured that they were too big and clumsy for a mission that required great precision and agility. Then I walked back to the Econoline and tossed the bag next to Larry. They looked like friends that were going to get along just fine, and I closed the door and took another sip of Mr. Beam. The Econoline was ready. It wasn’t a cargo van anymore. It was a kill room on four wheels.
I went back inside and rested in my beautiful bedroom for a couple of hours. Then I read some news online and saw that some rich guy had donated $200 million to cancer research. He was a cancer survivor himself, and he wanted to make sure that the doctors fighting the deadly disease had adequate weapons at their disposal. I thought that he was a very admirable man but couldn’t stop wondering why people always seemed to donate money to cancer research after they had gotten the disease themselves. I wanted to see someone donate money already before they got sick. That would have been something truly astonishing, but I, of course, still appreciated the $200-million man greatly because he had helped the cancer patients much more than I ever could. That was for damn sure.
I spent the rest of the evening strategizing and thinking about my upcoming mission. I went through the plan in my head for hundreds of times and double-checked that everything was absolutely perfect. Then I proceeded with the final task of the night and printed two fake dealer plates, encased them in plastic, and attached the flimsy bastards onto the Econoline. I wanted to make sure that my real license plates weren’t associated with the wicked events that were about to take place, and dealer plates were so common in my city that it was absolutely guaranteed that nobody, including the police, would pay any attention to them whatsoever.
After I was done with the lethal preparations, I decided to get a sandwich from a joint called Chicken in a Cannon. It was a superior fast-food restaurant that served the best goddamn chicken sandwiches in the entire western hemisphere. I absolutely loved the place, and the best thing was that their closest franchise was only a couple of miles from my new house. In fact, it was so close that I decided to walk there and ventilate my stuffy head in the process. I also didn’t want to put any unnecessary miles on the Econoline now that it had been prepped for murder. I was a risk taker, but I wasn’t an idiot.
The Chicken in a Cannon was half-empty, and my Chicken Supreme and a large Dr. Pepper arrived quickly. I thanked the friendly cashier and sat at a table next to a giant yellow chicken that was stuffed inside a massive cannon, ready to be catapulted into the air. Then I started eating the Chicken Supreme with a refined smile on my face. Ah, how I savored the tenderness of that perfect chicken breast. Ah, the flawlessness of an impeccable sandwich that had changed so many lives and provided so many children with warm, lifelong memories. Ah, how evident it was that the magnificent creation had been prepared with
tender love and respect for the mighty fowl and the ones who would chew it to pieces with their eager teeth. The sandwich was like a work of precious art that didn’t just nourish my eyes—it nourished my whole body—and in that carnal gallery full of fried chicken breasts and friendly cashiers in funny hats, satisfaction was absolutely 100 percent guaranteed.
I got very emotional when I savored my treasured Supreme, and a memory of a terrible nightmare, unexpectedly, surfaced from the murky depths of my mind. I had seen that cruel vision a long time ago at my grandfather’s log cabin in Halifax, and in that mother of all night terrors, my favorite Chicken in a Cannon had run out of Chicken Supremes, and I was pushed out in the cold parking lot with just a small Dr. Pepper and a tiny white packet of pepper in my trembling hands. Tears were flowing down my cheeks uncontrollably, and I curled into a fetal position on the dirty asphalt and started convulsing violently, unsure if I would even survive. I woke up screaming that night, my sweat was cold, and it smelled like fear. I was so afraid because the Chicken Supreme was something that I simply couldn’t live without. It was such an amazingly wonderful sandwich that I always held it gently in my hands like a precious diamond for a solemn moment before I sank my teeth into it. It was a full-blown spiritual event and an ode to the incredible ingenuity of the human species and our ability to create true wonders of the world when we really wanted to. It was the ultimate accolade in that rare workshop where mankind successfully cooperated with nature and produced something truly revolutionary. The sandwich wasn’t better than sex between two tanned, oily bodies under the balmy sky of midnight Ibiza, but it was better than masturbating with a half boner next to my sleeping wife.
I was almost done with my dinner when a young family of four sat at the table next to me. They had ordered a lot of delicious food and wonderful drinks, and the children looked happy and excited. The parents were very good-looking, and it was obvious that the young father had been a star athlete in college. The mother was beautiful, too, and her body would have made a group of self-conscious eighteen-year-olds turn green with jealousy. The kids were well dressed, and the group looked like they belonged on the cover of a parenting magazine. There was, however, just one problem: it was clear that the stone-faced couple hated each other. Their eyes never met, and they only talked to their children. The young, muscular father was probably regretting his marriage because he knew deep inside him that he could still walk into any bar in town and find a pretty girl to sleep with. He could still destroy ten shots of tequila and be the star of the party. The mother probably thought that it was so unfair that she had to stay home all the time with the kids, especially since she had always been told that she was smart and talented. They both seemed to think that there was so much more to life than what they had, but, unfortunately, they were wrong. That was it for them, and the sooner they realized that, the happier they would be. At least that was my humble take on it. But perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps I was just a nosy old bastard with nothing else to do than come up with theories about other people’s lives.
After getting my chicken fix for the evening, I walked back home and started my nightly routines. I drank two beers, brushed my teeth, and took a quick shower. Then I turned the lights off and went to bed. I fell asleep immediately, even if I knew that something unusual was going to happen in less than twenty-four hours—I was going to kidnap a vicious man-beast and kill him dead. Kill him dead!
The next morning, I woke up and felt nothing. No anticipation, no stress, no fear, no sweaty hands, no empathy, no remorse, no nothing. It was evident that I had finally transformed into a semipsychopath—a torch of death devoid of any emotion. I just wanted to put the filthy consultant into the Econoline and get the damn thing over with.
The day dragged on slowly like a drunken snail, and I tried my best to kill the hours that were awfully reluctant to die. I flipped the TV channels like an idiot, but nothing interesting was on. I even watched the weather channel for half an hour, but all they were talking about was some freakish weather system that was moving erratically in the eastern Atlantic. I was bored to death and couldn’t even leave the house because the van was all prepped and ready to pick up a midnight passenger. I desperately wanted the harvest moon to arrive and cast its eternal light on the shiny blade of my twisted righteousness.
The clock finally hit 7:00 p.m., and it was time to go. I put the deliveryman’s uniform on and jumped into the Econoline. I slapped my right cheek hard, pulled the baseball cap down low on my murderous skull, and drove to the address that Ramses had shown me. I parked the van under a large maidenhair tree near the consultant’s house and double-checked that I was in the right place. I did that even if there was no doubt in my mind that it was the target’s home I was staring at with my bloodshot eyes. It was the biggest house on the street, and it smelled like money.
It was already dark outside, and the Econoline was almost invisible under the shadowy cover of the yellowing tree. The evening sky was overcast, and a light drizzle made the windshield sweat like a nervous juvenile delinquent about to commit his first pharmacy robbery. There wasn’t a soul on the street, and I knew that the stars had been perfectly aligned for my mission. It was time to put the gloves on and go to work.
I jumped out of the van and walked to the cargo door. I pulled the hand truck out with eager hands and left it standing outside the door. Then I jumped into the van and pushed Larry carefully on the truck’s nose plate. The wooden man settled firmly on the truck’s strong frame, and I closed the door and started pushing the glorious delivery toward the consultant’s house like I didn’t have a care in the world.
The house was absolutely beautiful, and I really liked the architecture. It was made of natural stone, and it looked like an old Scottish manor house. The landscaping was stylish and elegant, too, and there was a lighted fountain in the middle of the front lawn spewing magical purple water high into the air. I estimated that the place was worth at least a couple of million—at least. That didn’t surprise me, though. I wouldn’t have expected anything less from a bona fide sociopath. They were a somewhat murderous bunch, sure, but they had a knack for making money.
I arrived at the front door and rang the doorbell with steady fingers. If I was nervous or scared, I didn’t know it. I operated like a robot that had been programmed to kidnap a wicked man and put him in an oblong box. Or maybe I operated like a man who believed that everyone else had turned into robots, I wasn’t sure, but one thing was still absolutely guaranteed: I was going to remove the disgusting consultant from his house and send him to hell.
After about twenty seconds of silence, I heard deep coughing and saw the consultant’s silhouette through the textured glass door. The shadow grew larger with each step the doomed man took, and he soon pulled the door wide open, still coughing, and looked at my ugly face with annoyed eyes.
There he was, the mighty consultant, standing in front of me in a blue dress shirt that had his initials sewn on the cuffs in gold letters. The man had no pants or shoes on, just red satin underwear and a pair of black socks pulled high up on his tanned legs. He looked relaxed, and a little tipsy, too. I almost felt sorry to interrupt his perfect evening in a house where solitude was, no doubt, a rare and valued commodity. It was, after all, his private evening in his own home—a home that was far, far away from his disgusting in-laws.
“What is it?” the consultant said to me coarsely after subduing his cough with sheer willpower. His face complemented the mounting irritation echoing in his voice perfectly, and he looked like a man whose much-anticipated masturbation session had been cut short by a cruel intruder in a brown baseball cap.
“You have a delivery, sir. I need you to sign this, please,” I said cheerfully and handed him a fake delivery document that I had printed from the Internet.
“Isn’t it a little late for a delivery?” he asked without looking at the paper.
“Yes, sir, it is. But I was here already earlier today, and no one answered the door. My boss sai
d that I should make one more attempt because this is a very special delivery, and we really want you to get the parcel today. There is something expensive in the box, a gift of some kind.”
“Sheesh, it’s probably from one of my clients,” the consultant said with a sigh that was meant to conceal his smug contentment about the gift. “OK, come in. You can leave the box there,” he said and pointed at a wood-paneled home office just off the front door.
“Thank you, sir,” I said and pushed Larry deep into the office. Then I took a golden pen from my pocket and handed it to the consultant and said, “If you could sign next to the X, please.”
When the consultant leaned down to sign the document, I looked at his dark hair that was now only inches away from my nose. It was a gorgeous man-mane, and I genuinely admired its health and the natural thickness that the gene Gods had so generously blessed him with. The masterpiece even smelled like paradise, and it was obvious that someone with very skillful hands and some dangerously sharp scissors trimmed it at least once a week. I didn’t want to admit it, but it was absolutely undeniable that the hair was never going to leave the lucky man. The only problem was, however, that the consultant only had a couple of hours left to enjoy it.
I took one final sniff of the crowning glory and pressed the stun gun hard against his neck. Then I pushed the little red button on the top of the handle with my right thumb, and the Cheetah bit the consultant viciously with its electric teeth. The big man started shaking uncontrollably, and he hit the ground like a crumbling tower of shit. I could feel the impact under my feet when his skull smashed violently on the hardwood floor. That was the moment when things turned real, and I knew that I had crossed the Rubicon and entered the real danger zone.
The Sapphire Express Page 11
