Koop didn’t understand his fascination with Jensen. Didn’t understand why he was compelled to watch her, to get close to her. To hurry his daily rounds to meet her after work…
He finished liquidating the jewelry he’d taken from Jensen’s apartment in a bar on the I-494 strip in Bloomington, selling the engagement ring and the wedding band to a guy who dressed and talked like an actor playing a pro athlete: a tan, a golf shirt, capped teeth, and a gold chain around his thick neck. But he knew stones, and the smile was gone from his eyes when he looked at them. He gave Koop $1,300. The total take from the apartment pushed $6,000, not counting the belt. It never occurred to Koop to feel a connection between the jewelry and the woman who’d caught his heart. The jewelry was his, not hers.
He left the Bloomington strip and idled back into Minneapolis, killing time behind the wheel, eventually turning east, to an Arby’s on St. Paul’s east side. He’d called the moving man who’d given him the map of Jensen’s apartment, and arranged to meet. Koop was both early and late for the meetings, arriving a half hour early, watching the meeting spot from a distance. When his man arrived, alone, on time, he’d watch for another ten minutes before going in. He’d never had a contact turn on him. He didn’t want it to happen, either.
The moving man arrived a few minutes early, hurried straight into the Arby’s. The way he moved gave Koop some confidence that everything was okay: there was no tentativeness, no looking around. He carried a notebook in his hand. Koop waited five more minutes, watching, then went in. The guy was sitting in a booth with a cup of coffee, a young guy, looked like a college kid. Koop nodded at him, stopped for a cup of coffee himself, paid the girl behind the counter, and slid into the booth. “How’re you doing?”
“It’s been a while,” the guy said.
“Yeah, well…” Koop handed him a Holiday Inn brochure. The guy took it and looked inside.
“Thanks,” he said. “You must’ve done okay.”
Koop shrugged. He wasn’t much for chitchat. “Got anything else?”
“Yeah. A good one.” The guy pushed the notebook at him. “I was pissing my pants waiting for you to call. We was moving some stuff into this house on Upper St. Dennis in St. Paul, you know where that is?”
“Up the hill off West Seventh,” Koop said, pulling in the notebook. “Some nice houses up there. A little riffraff, too.”
“This a nice house, man.” The guy’s head was bobbing. ” Nice. There was a guy from a safe company there. They’d just set a big fuckin’ safe in concrete, down in the basement, in a corner of a closet. I seen it myself.”
“I don’t do safes…” The notebook was too thick. Koop opened it and found a key impression in dried putty. He’d shown the guy how to do it. The impression was crisp, clean.
“Wait a minute, for Christ’s sakes,” the guy said, holding up his hands. “So when he was talking to the safe guy, he was walking around with this piece of paper in his hand. When they finished, he came up and asked how long we were gonna be, ‘cause he wanted to take a shower and shave, ‘cause he was going out. We said we’d be a while yet, and he went up and took a shower in the bathroom. The bathroom off his bedroom. We were working right down the hall, my buddy was settin’ up a guest bed. So I stepped down the hall and looked into his bedroom. I could hear the shower going, and I saw this paper laying on the dresser with his billfold and watch, and I just took the chance, man. I zipped over and looked at it, and it was the fuckin’ combination. How about that, huh? I wrote it down. And listen, you know what this guy does? This guy runs half the automatic car washes in the Twin Cities. And he was braggin’ to us about going out to Vegas all the time. I bet that fuckin’ safe is stuffed.”
“How about his family?” This sounded better; Koop would rather steal money than anything.
“He’s divorced. Kids live with his old lady.”
“The key’s good?”
“Yeah, but, uh… There’s a security system on the door. I don’t know nothing about that.”
Koop looked at the man for a minute, then nodded. “I’ll think about it.”
“I could use some cash, get out of this fuckin’ place,” the guy said. “My parole’s up in September. Maybe go to Vegas myself.”
“I’ll get back,” Koop said.
He finished his drink, picked up the notebook, nodded to the guy, and walked out. As he pulled out of the parking lot, he glanced at his watch. Sara should be getting off…
Koop had killed his mother.
He’d killed her with a long, slender switchblade he’d found in a pawnshop in Seoul, Korea, where he’d been with the Army. When he’d gotten back to the States, he’d spent a long weekend hitchhiking from Fort Polk to Hannibal, Missouri, for the sole purpose of ripping her.
And he’d done that. He’d banged on the door and she’d opened it, a Camel glued to her lip. She’d asked, “What the fuck do you want?” and he’d said, “This.” Then he’d stepped up into the trailer and she’d stepped back, and he’d stuck the knife in just about her belly button, and ripped up, right up through her breastbone. She’d opened her mouth to scream. Nothing came out but blood.
Koop had touched nothing, seen nobody. He’d grown up in Hannibal, just like Huck Finn, but he hadn’t been any kind of Huck. He’d just been a dumb-shit kid who never knew his father, and whose mother gave blow jobs for money after she got off work at the bar. On a busy night she might have four or five drunks stop by, banging on the aluminum door, sucking them, spitting in the sink next to his bedroom, spitting and gargling salt-and-soda, half the night gone. She’d drag him downtown, respectable eyes tearing at them, women in thigh-length skirts and tweedy jackets, pitying, disdaining. “Bitches; bitches ain’t no better’n me, you better believe it,” his mother said. But she was lying, and Koop knew that for sure. They were better than his mother, these women in their suits and hats and clack-clack high heels…
He’d been back at Fort Polk, sitting on his bunk reading Black Belt magazine, when the battalion sergeant-major came by. He’d said, “Koop, I got some bad news. Your mother was found dead.”
And Koop had said, “Yeah?” and turned the page.
When Koop had been in Korea, he’d learned from the hookers outside the base that he had a problem with sex. Nothing worked right. He’d get turned on thinking about it, but then the time would come… and nothing would happen.
Until, in his anger, he smacked one of the women. Hit her in the forehead with a fist, knocked her flat. Things started to work.
He’d killed a woman in New Orleans. He thought of the murder as an accident: he was pounding on her, getting worked up, and suddenly she wasn’t fighting back, and her head was flopping a little too loosely. That’d scared him. They had the death penalty in Louisiana, and no qualms about using it. He’d run back to Fort Polk, and was astonished when nothing happened. Nothing. Not even a story in the newspaper, not that he could find.
That’s when he’d gotten the idea about killing his mother. Nothing complicated. Just do it.
After the Army, he’d spent a year working on the Mississippi, a barge hand. He’d eventually gotten off in St. Paul, drifted through a series of crappy jobs, finally got smart and used his veteran’s preference for something a little better. A year after that, he’d picked up a woman at a Minneapolis bookstore. He’d gone for a lifter’s calendar and the woman had come to him. He’d recognized her immediately: she had the wool suit and the clack-clack high heels. She’d asked him something about exercise; he couldn’t remember what, it’d obviously been a pickup…
He hadn’t thought to take her off, but he had, and that had been better than pounding on hookers. There had been a quality to the woman, the nylons and the careful makeup, the well-rounded sentences. She was one of those women so distinctly better than his mother.
And they were everywhere. Some were too smart and tough to be taken. He stayed away from that kind. But there were also the tentative ones, awkward, afraid: not of death or pain or an
ything else so dramatic, but of simple loneliness. He found them in a Des Moines art gallery and in a Madison bookstore and a Thunder Bay record shop, a little older, drinking white wine, dressed carefully in cheerful colors, their hair done to hide the gray, their smiles constant, flitting, as though they were sparrows looking for a place to perch.
Koop gave them a place to perch. They were never so much wary as anxious to do the right thing…
Koop picked up Jensen when she left her office, escorted her to a Cub supermarket. Followed her inside, watching her move, her breasts shifting under her blouse, her legs, so well-muscled; the way she brushed the hair out of her eyes.
Her progress through the produce section was a sensual lesson in itself. Jensen prowled through it like a hunting cat, squeezing this, sniffing at those, poking at the others. She bought bing cherries and oranges and lemons, fat white mushrooms and celery, apples and English walnuts, grapes both green and red, and garlic. She made a brilliant salad.
Koop was in the cereals. He kept poking his head around the corner, looking at her. She never saw him, but he was so intent that he didn’t see the stock kid until the kid was right on top of him.
“Can I help you?” The kid used a tone he might have used on a ten-year-old shoplifter.
Koop jumped. “What?” He was flustered. He had a cart with a package of beef jerky and a jar of dill pickles.
“What’re you looking for?” The kid had a junior-cop attitude; and he was burly, too-white, with pimples, crew cut, and small pig-eyes.
“I’m not looking. I’m thinking,” Koop said.
“Okay. Just asking,” the kid said. But when he moved away, he went only ten feet and began rearranging boxes of cornflakes, ostentatiously watching Koop.
Sara, at the very moment that the kid asked his first question, decided she’d gotten enough produce. A moment later, as the kid went to work in the cornflakes, she came around the corner. Koop turned away from her, but she glanced up at his face. Did he see the smallest of wrinkles? He turned his back and pushed his cart out of the aisle. The fact is, she might have seen him twenty times, if she’d ever scanned the third layer of people around her, if she’d noticed the guy on the bench on the next sidewalk over as she jogged. Had she remembered him? Was that why her forehead had wrinkled? The kid had seen him watching her. Would he say anything?
Koop thought about abandoning his cart, but decided that would be worse than hanging on. He pushed it to the express lane, bought a newspaper, paid, and went on to the parking lot. While he was waiting to pay, he saw the kid step out of an aisle, his fists on his hips, watching. A wave of hate washed over him. He’d get the little fucker, get him in the parking lot, rip his fucking face off… Koop closed his eyes, controlling it, controlling himself. When he fantasized, the adrenaline started rolling through his blood, and he almost had to break something.
But the kid just wasn’t worth it. Asshole…
He left the supermarket parking lot, looking for the kid in his rearview mirror, but the kid had apparently gone back to work. Good enough-but he wouldn’t be going back there. Out of the lot, he pulled into a street-side parking space and waited. Twenty minutes later, Jensen came by.
His true love…
Koop loved to watch her when she was moving. He loved her on the streets, where he could see her legs and ass, liked to see her body contorting as she leaned or bent or stooped; liked to watch her tits bobbling when she went for a run around the lake. Really liked that.
He was aflame.
Monday was a warm night, moths batting against the park lights. Jensen finished her run and disappeared inside. Koop was stricken with what might have been grief, to see her go like that. He stood outside, watching the door. Would she be back out? His eyes rolled up the building. He knew her window, had known from the first night… The light came on.
He sighed and turned away. Across the street, a man fumbled for keys, opened the lobby door to his apartment building, walked through, then used his key to unlock the inner door. Koop’s eyes drifted upward. The top floor was just about even with Jensen’s.
With a growing tingle of excitement, he counted floors. And crashed. The roof would be below her window, he thought. He wouldn’t be able to see inside. But it was worth checking. He crossed the street, moving quickly, stepped into the apartment lobby. Two hundred apartments, each with a call button. He slapped a hundred of them: somebody would be expecting a visitor. The intercom scratched at him, but at the same moment the door lock buzzed, and he pushed through, leaving behind the voice on the intercom: “Who’s there? Who’s there?”
This would work twice, but he couldn’t count on it more often than that. He turned the corner to the elevators, rode to the top. Nobody in the hall. The Exit sign was far down to the left. He walked down to the Exit sign, opened the door, stepped through it. A flight of steps went down to the left, and two more went up to the right, to a gray metal door. A small black-and-white sign on the door said, “Roof Access-Room Key Necessary to Unlock and to Re-enter.”
“Shit.” He pulled at the door. Nothing. Good lock.
He turned to the steps, thinking to start back down. Then thought: Wait. Did the window at the end of the hall look out at Jensen’s building?
It did.
Koop stood in the window, looking up, and a bare two stories above, Sara Jensen came to the window in a robe and looked down. Koop stepped back, but she was looking at the street and hadn’t noticed him in the semidark window. She had a drink in her hand. She took a sip and stepped away, out of sight.
Jesus. A little higher, and he’d be virtually in her living room. She never pulled the drapes. Never… Koop was aflame. A match; a killer.
He needed a key. Not sometime. He needed one now.
He’d picked up his philosophy at Stillwater: power comes out of the barrel of a gun; or from a club, or a fist. Take care of number one. The tough live, the weak die. When you die, you go into a hole: end of story. No harps, no heavenly choir. No hellfire. Koop resonated with this line of thought. It fit so well with everything he’d experienced in life.
He went back to his truck for equipment, not thinking very much, not on the surface. When he needed something-anything-that thing became his: the people who had it were keeping it from him. He had the right to take it.
Koop was proud of his truck. It might have belonged to anyone. But it didn’t. It belonged to him, and it was special.
He didn’t carry much in the back, in the topper: a toolbox, a couple of bags of Salt ‘N Sand left over from winter, a spade, a set of snow tires, a tow rope that had been in the truck when he bought it. And a few lengths of rusty concrete reinforcement rod-the kind of thing you might find lying in the dirt around a construction site, which was, in fact, where he had found it. The kind of thing a workingman would have back there.
Most of the stuff was simply a disguise for the big Sears toolbox. That’s where the action was. The top tray contained a few light screwdrivers, pliers, a ratchet set, a half-dozen Sucrets cans full of a variety of wood screws, and other small items. The bottom compartment held a two-pound hammer, a cold chisel, two files, a hacksaw, a short pry-bar, a pair of work gloves, and a can of glazier’s putty. What looked like an ordinary toolbox was, in fact, a decent set of burglary tools.
He put the gloves in his jacket pocket, took out the glazier’s putty, dumped the screws from one of the Sucrets cans into an empty compartment in the top tray, and scooped a gob of putty into the Sucrets tin. He smoothed the putty with his thumb, closed the tin, and dropped it into his pocket.
Then he selected a piece of re-rod. A nice eighteen-inch length, easy to hide and long enough to swing.
He still wasn’t thinking much: The room key was his. This asshole-some asshole-was keeping it from him. That made him angry. Really angry. Righteously angry. Koop began to fume, thinking about it-his fuckin’ key-and headed back to the apartment building.
He walked down to the apartment entrance, pulling on the wo
rk gloves, the re-rod up his jacket sleeve. Nobody around. He stepped into the lobby, pushed up the glass panel on the inset ceiling light, and used the re-rod to crack both fluorescent tubes. Now in the dark, he dropped the panel back in place and returned to the truck. He left the driver’s-side door open an inch and waited.
And waited some more. Not much happening.
The passenger seat was what made the truck special. He’d gotten some work done in an Iowa machine shop: a steel box, slightly shallower but a bit longer and wider than a cigar box, had been welded under the seat. The original floor was the lid of the box, and from below, the bottom of the box looked like the floor of the passenger compartment. To open the box, you turned the right front seat support once to the right, and the lid popped up. There was enough room for any amount of jewelry or cash… Or cocaine.
Half the people in Stillwater were there because they’d been caught in a traffic stop and had the cocaine/stolen stereo/gun on the backseat. Not Koop.
He watched the door for a while longer, then popped the lid on the box, pulled out the eight-ball, pinched it, put it back. Just a little nose, just enough to sharpen him up.
Two mature arborvitae stood on either side of the apartment’s concrete stoop, like sentinels. Koop liked that: the trees cut the vision lines from either side. To see into the outer lobby, you had to be standing almost straight out from the building.
A couple came down the walk, the man jingling his keys. They went inside, and Koop waited. A woman was next, alone, and Koop perked up. But she was walking straight down the sidewalk, distracted, and not until the last minute did she swerve in toward the building. She would have been perfect, but she hadn’t given him time to move. She disappeared inside.
Two men, holding hands, came down the walk. No. Two or three minutes later, they were followed by a guy so big that Koop decided not to risk it.
Then Jim Flory turned the corner, his keys already in his hand. Flory scratched himself at his left sideburn and mumbled something, talking to himself, distracted. He was five-ten and slender. Koop pushed open the car door and slipped out, started down the sidewalk. Flory turned in at the building, fumbled through his keys, pulled open the outer door, went inside.
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