Pest Control

by Bill Fitzhugh

  “Thank you for that subtle response,” Mary said.

  “No sweat,” Katy said with a grin.

  “Now, where do we find some more?” Mary asked.

  “Mo-om,” Katy said, turning the one-syllable word into two. “It’s not like a department store, like crickets and beetles are on aisle four and walkingsticks are over in Appliances.”

  “Just answer the question, please.”

  “But I wanna know what you want ’em for,” Katy said.

  “Alright, if it will speed the process, I’ll tell you. We, uh, they, well, we need to replace your dad’s bugs.”

  “Why?” Katy asked. “What happened to them?”

  “That’s not really important, honey.”

  Katy thought about that for a second. “I bet it would be important if I’d done whatever it is I bet you did.” Katy’s tone indicated she recognized a double standard when she saw one. “So what’d you do?”

  “I told you, it’s not important.”

  “I’m going to tell Daaaaad,” Katy said.

  “He already knows,” Mary said. “So you can just abandon whatever little blackmail scheme you’re cooking up. Right now we just need to find some more of those bugs.”

  “Well,” Katy said as her hands lighted firmly on her hips, “technically speaking, none of them were bugs in the first place. See, true bugs are a special group of insects with itty-bitty sucking mouthparts, like Daddy’s Assassin Bugs. In other words, not all insects are bugs. Beetles and crickets and…”

  As Katy explained, with little relation to fact, her idea of the distinction between insects in general and true bugs in particular, Mary bit her tongue and listened, deciding this was her penance for taking Katy away from her father in such traumatic fashion. She also figured if Katy got to hear herself talk for long enough, she’d forget the original question and Mary would be off the hook.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  The reader board at JFK indicated the flight from Nigeria had arrived twenty minutes late. And now an extremely tall, well-dressed black man made his way through American Customs.

  The Nigerian had been to New York only once before, and his knowledge of America as a whole was rather limited, consisting solely of what he had seen on television; including a documentary on American racism produced by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, the entire Roots miniseries, several dozen episodes of The Cosby Show, and three Oprahs. So he had no idea what to expect in the country that enslaved his forebears yet revered Alex Haley and made Cosby and Oprah two of the wealthiest individuals in the country.

  Despite the fact that he was currently ranked number two on the top ten list of assassins, the Nigerian was somewhat apprehensive.

  After clearing Customs he collected his luggage and made for the door. But before he reached the cab stand, a group of noisy kids wearing “Shaq Attack” T-shirts surrounded him, pleading for his autograph. Assuming he had been mistaken for someone else, and never guessing it was fellow countryman Hakeem Olajuwon, of whom he had never heard, he quickly signed several scraps of paper and a pair of Reeboks before jumping into a cab and directing the driver to take him away as quickly as possible.

  Chapter Forty-nine

  The four towering brick smokestacks of the old Schwartz Chemical Company reached into the sky and looked to Bob like the legs of a huge overturned table.

  It was early morning and Bob was at Fifty-First Avenue and Second Street on the west edge of Queens, near where Newtown Creek branched off the East River and headed toward Calvary Cemetery. This once thriving industrial neighborhood was now in full decay, taunted nightly as it looked across a debris-choked lot over the river toward the lights of the city.

  Weeds stood proud in the cracks of the neglected sidewalks, the eastern seaboard equivalent of tumbleweed in a ghost town. The gutters were littered with ragged old work gloves and rusting spigot handles apparently dropped from trucks as they left the defunct Keystone Iron & Wire Works Company across the street.

  Bob walked down the sidewalk toward Sy’s dilapidated warehouse. He looked at the deserted three-story red brick building to his right. All the windows were broken; those on the first floor were boarded up. A small bouquet of wilted pink flowers was nailed to the plywood covering the doorway, a pathetic memorial for…what? The building? Some poor schnook who overdosed there? Another gang killing?

  Bob read recently in the Times that nearly 5,000 people were shot in New York each year. One in ten murders in the U.S. were committed here. How come ole Blue Eyes never sang about that?

  Bob began reworking the lyrics to “New York, New York,” to accommodate this reality as he continued down the sidewalk with his boxes marked “Assassins, Strain Four.”

  This was the Thread-Legged/Bloodsucking Conenose cross, the most vicious and voracious of the hybrids. They unhesitatingly cannibalized their own kind when other food sources were unavailable. They were small sharks with elbowed antennae, rarely sleeping; they were perpetual-motion eating machines.

  Their kills were savage, bloody frenzies involving unnecessary dismemberment of their prey before pumping in their digesting enzyme and draining them of their fluids. Bob had a good feeling about this strain and felt the industrial setting fit their killing style.

  At Sy’s old warehouse, Bob found Walter, the security guard, sitting in a folding chair reading the paper. They had met a week earlier when Bob dropped by to survey the place.

  Walter was a wizened old coot of 88 years who had a bad palsy, a large handgun, and a hat that swallowed his head. He wore a hearing aid but was unaware that the batteries had run down, so you had to yell when you spoke to him.

  Preoccupied with the task at hand, Bob forgot about Walter’s hearing situation and was thus operating under the mistaken assumption that the guard had heard him coming. “Hey, Walter,” he said.

  Startled and confused, Walter dropped his paper and fumbled for his gun before he realized it was Bob. “Oh, Bruce, yeah, it’s just you. You shouldn’t sneak up on me like that, I’ve got an itchy trigger finger, you know. Why, back in World War One, or was it Two? I get them confused…” His voice trailed off for a moment as he tried to remember. “Anyway, how are ya?”

  After an exchange of pleasantries, Walter returned to his paper and Bob moved on to do his work, drilling hole after hole, creating perfectly round portals for his Strain Four Assassins.

  Hours later Bob watched with fatherly pride as the clear tube reached from the final bug box into the wall space. A stream of mutant bugs marched down the plastic gangway until the box was almost empty. Bob thumped the bottom of the box and one last bug scooted down the tube. He quickly patched the hole, then stood and brushed his hands, satisfied his job was complete.

  Walter was on routine patrol when Bob came up on him from behind. “See ya, Walter,” Bob said loudly.

  Walter looked as if he might have a stroke, but the resilient old guard recovered from the surprise, rolled slowly through his mental Rolodex, and replied, “Alright, Bart, have a good night.”

  Bob was exhausted after his day crawling around on his knees, drilling and feeding and patching the walls, and yelling at Walter during their frequent conversations as the security guard patrolled the place. All Bob wanted at this moment was a place to sit as he rode the subway home.

  Chapter Fifty

  The lanky guy was tired of sitting, so the first thing he did when he set foot in the Port Authority Bus Terminal was to stretch his six–feet–four inches as if he’d spent the last two and a half days on a bus from Oklahoma. Which, in fact, was exactly what he had done.

  He checked his cowboy hat to see that the rim was crisp and the fold was just so, then he snugged it back onto his greasy head. His shirt and belt were pure rodeo; somewhere between Dwight Yoakam and the Marlboro man. His belt buckle was in fact a hard-won rodeo trophy
, a commemorative for having survived eight and a half distorted seconds of hell on a Brahman bull named Butt Pucker, a bull who had earned his name.

  It hadn’t taken the Cowboy long to realize that rodeo riding didn’t pay well relative to the job, so he looked for other, better-paying work and soon found it as a hired killer.

  The Cowboy had left home when he was fifteen, driven away by his parents’ poverty and abuse, and had spent his youth riding herds on the fringe of the Black Kettle National Grasslands and the few remaining stretches of the Chisholm Trail. Most of the men who did that sort of work were antisocial types who had problems with authority figures. At any rate, it was there, with a friend from the dwindling Kiowa Apache tribe, that he learned to shoot straight and chew tobacco.

  The few people who knew him called him the Cowboy, and they never crossed him because he was pure mean.

  After quitting the rodeo circuit, the Cowboy’s first job earned him $1,000 for killing a rancher in Montana who stubbornly refused to give up some mineral rights he owned. Soon after that a frustrated grad student at Oklahoma State approached him about killing his adviser, who had ferreted out some plagiarism in the student’s thesis on animal husbandry. Eight hundred dollars later Oklahoma State was looking for a new professor who could explain the differences between a Brown Swiss and a Red Poll.

  The Cowboy spent a few years in the bush leagues killing cheating husbands and over-insured wives before getting his big break. A friend of a friend knew a man willing to pay $10,000 for the murder of one Anthony “Artichoke Bottom” Puttanesca, a big wheel in Vegas who had crossed one too many lines.

  Two days after he heard about it, the Cowboy went to Vegas, marched into Mr. Puttanesca’s office, put a twelve-gauge sawed-off shotgun in his mouth, and repainted the walls with Mr. Puttanesca’s brain.

  Based largely on that contract, the Cowboy had hurtled up the charts and was now considered by many to be the sixth best killer for hire in the world. Most of the old pros figured him for a flash in the pan, a one-hit wonder. They felt he lacked the subtlety and sophistication necessary to go the long road.

  But the Cowboy didn’t pay attention to what other people thought. He felt he had found his calling. A few days ago, in fact, he had received a sign confirming just that.

  He was drinking a beer in a honky-tonk in Anadarko, Oklahoma. The owner of the bar had just hooked up a satellite dish and was trying to tune in a Three Stooges marathon on TBS when he came across the CNN news bite of Miguel Riviera offering ten million dollars for the head of the Exterminator. The Cowboy knew a good deal when he saw one, so he bought a bus ticket and headed east.

  He wandered into the Port Authority gift shop and bought a street map and a pouch of Red Man. On his way out, a blue satin Mets jacket caught his eye. He liked the way it felt when he rubbed it between his fingers, but when he saw the price tag, he shook his head and moved on. He didn’t have that kind of money, not to spend on a jacket, at least not yet.

  Despite the fact that nearly $200,000 of his hard-earned pay was hidden in a cramped, insect-infested cave in Badlands National Park, South Dakota, the Cowboy was still tighter than a pair of size four panties on Rosanne.

  He asked a passerby to show him, on his newly acquired map, where he was and which way was north. Once he had his bearings, the Cowboy thanked the stranger and exited onto Forty-Second Street with grim determination in his eyes and a wad of tobacco resting between his cheek and gums.

  Unsure of how he was going to find his target in this big city, the Cowboy figured he’d get a motel room and make a plan.

  A little farther down Forty-Second Street toward Ninth Avenue was the dingy gray three-story brick Elk Motel. The Cowboy looked up to the third floor and saw a man leaning out his window, buck naked and gazing nonchalantly down the street. The Cowboy stared at the man, somewhat unnerved, as the man’s impressive penis swayed in the breeze. What the hell kind of city was this? he wondered.

  It was then that the Cowboy noticed he had become aroused while staring at the naked man; the bulge in his jeans betraying him. This upset the Cowboy a great deal and sent him hurrying back toward Eighth Avenue, looking for somewhere else to spend the night.

  About halfway between Eighty and Ninth Avenues, a couple of predators spotted the Cowboy and stopped to engage him in some conversation, intending to separate him from what they figured was his vacation money. One of the punks was wearing a satin Mets jacket like the one the Cowboy had admired moments earlier. The other punk spoke to the Cowboy like he had just fallen off a turnip truck, kidding him in the way city folks tended to kid visitors from the hinterlands.

  The one thing the Cowboy hated more than anything else was being treated like he was stupid, so he smiled at the two and admired the jacket, playing the role he knew they had in mind.

  “Listen, hoss,” one of the toughs said, “I know where a good-looking bronco-buster like you can get some of that fine New York pussy you’ve no doubt heard about. Girls who’ll do things to you you’ve never dreamed of.”

  “Isssat right?” the Cowboy asked.

  “You bet,” the tough said. “All you need is a little cash.”

  The Cowboy said that sounded like his kind of fun, so he followed the toughs down an alley where the door to this pleasure palace was supposed to be located. No one paid any attention to the screams or the muffled pops that came from the alley—after all, it was probably just some kids playing with a handgun, or perhaps a pro-life activist murdering another physician.

  A minute later, the Cowboy emerged from the darkness wiping tobacco spittle onto the sleeve of his new satin Mets jacket.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  The Flushing local was squeezed tight with piggish businessmen scuttling home after committing the grotesque hustle of commerce all day. Others, desperate to make their mortgage payments, ate speed and headed to grim night jobs. Those already defeated by the process stared blankly ahead, dreaming of TV and alcohol as they headed back to dismal apartments with the drained look that washed the faces of those pummeled stupid by the numbing effect of relentlessly dull work.

  Bob shuffled through this cheery-looking subway crowd looking for a place to sit. Ahead he glimpsed an empty seat and a moment later he discovered why; the seat was next to the lunatic he had encountered before.

  Bob named him Norman, as in Bates, and it appeared Norman rode the subway day and night, waiting for someone to try to rob him or to do anything that might, however unreasonably, justify his gunning them down. That way he would get his name in the paper and, more importantly, get his face on TV and that, he felt certain, would make his mother proud. After all, that damned Andy Warhol had promised everyone 15 minutes of fame and all Norman wanted was what was coming to him. And if fame wasn’t going to find him, he was damn sure going to find fame.

  Norman saw Bob coveting the empty seat. He eased his jacket back just enough to reveal the butt of a cheap pistol. Norman’s chapped and crusty lips split painfully as they peeled back into a deranged grin.

  After a peek into Norman’s bloodshot eyes—pink windows to a demented soul—Bob decided standing would be a good character builder. He continued past Norman until he found an unused stanchion that he could call his own.

  Not wanting to risk eye contact, Bob scanned the advertisements and public service messages overhead. There was one for treatment of acute depression that he considered briefly. Another touted a hotline for abused bi-sexual children of elderly alcoholics. A third offered a helping hand to co-dependent transsexual coke addicts, while a fourth tried to catch the eyes of asexual runaways with attention deficit disorder. Even while trying to lose himself in the dream world of advertising, Bob couldn’t escape reminders of why he wanted out of New York.

  Chapter Fifty-two

  The stunning woman stepping from the cab on Park Avenue was pretty enough to make a priest stop thinking
about altar boys. In fact, it had been said that Chantalle could make a bench of bishops piss on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

  Her close-cropped brown hair looked pampered and European and her mouth, while soft and erotic, looked capable of suck-starting a Harley. Her body appeared to be the result of a phenomenal gene pool or years of Olympian workouts or both. It was surprising then to see her beeline into the confectionery store.

  She was unmoved by the sickeningly sweet smell of chocolates and toffees that burdened the air. She swept past the rows of marzipan and carob fudge as if they were digits sloughed off by multi-colored lepers. The rum candies and the Mexican orange drops begged for attention, but she ignored them.

  Chantalle knew exactly what she wanted and she wasted no time in getting it. She stepped to the glass counter and gave close inspection to a tray of exquisite white chocolate truffles, only three of which passed muster.

  She had the clerk place the three perfect confections into a small box padded with white tissues and she departed as deliberately as she had come. Chantalle wanted the ten million dollars more than anything except perhaps the notoriety of being the assassin who killed the man known as the Exterminator.

  Chapter Fifty-three

  The lights from the bugquariums lent their purplish glow to the room, comforting all present. Bob sat in his creaking swivel chair making detailed notes about the day’s work.

  The crickets were chirping again in the wall spaces, but Bob was too busy to care.

  After hours of annotation, Bob closed the notebook and stretched, tilting backwards in his chair and extending his arms far enough to knock a bottle off one of the crowded shelves. It was one of a matching set of six Bob had bought at an estate sale—old-fashioned atomizers with elegant tubes leading to squeezy balloons covered in gold lamé, and once used to mist rare liquid fragrances onto the alabaster skin of pampered women.