by Lee Lamothe
“Marko, I guess, is worried about getting ripped?”
“I asked him about it, I said there’s guys out there’d who’d cook him in a pot, just to eat the bits that float off. He said he’s cool, he’s serene.”
“He means Jerry.”
“He does. I asked who provides the serenity and that’s what he said.” Preston laughed. “Jerry Kelly.”
“Another problem is getting Zoe back. What are the mechanics? How do we know that when the stuff has crossed, that they won’t thump our heads and take the dough, leave her down in Mexico?”
“I’ve got some thoughts for that. I’m pretty sure Marko won’t hurt her. I’m pretty sure that if I called his bluff that he’d just shrug and give her back, try something else. But with Jerry in there, well, who knows?” He put his hand across the table and covered hers. Her hand was cold and white; he hadn’t noticed the temperature dropping, hadn’t noticed the customers gradually vacating the patio. With the gun stuck into the back of his pants he couldn’t give her his coat. “I’ve got to make a plan, I think.”
They sat sipping at the last of their wine. Preston didn’t look at the couple across the road. He leaned his face closer to hers “Jools, we’re rolling hot. They’re all over us.”
She was smart enough not to move her head in the slightest. She lifted his hand and kissed it with cold lips. “Mmmmm.”
“I’ve got to split, stay clean.” He moved around the table and sat beside her. “Take this.” He slipped her the gun below the table top. “Don’t go home. Go to my place.”
“I need you to … Can’t you take me?”
“If they’re not on your place now, then they will be. I can dump them easier, safer, from here. This is better, Jools. I can leave ’em here. Go to my place.”
She bit her lips; her eyes were wide. “I don’t know. What if somebody …”
“You’ll have the gun, right? Just point and shoot. Or get a cab, door to door.” He slipped her his house keys. “Plug in all four cold phones from the closet. I’ll call on one of them.”
He asked the waiter where the men’s room was. Preston got up, put his coat around Julia Gurr’s shoulders, and went inside. At the back he pushed through the kitchen. The Mexican cooks rattled their pots at him and washers made reluctant way for him, chattering in his wake. The rear door was propped open with a chair to let out the kitchen heat and smells. Preston smoothly stepped over the chair and into the back alley. Without pausing he turned left toward the western side street, away from his apartment. He stepped in a black shadow and waited to determine if the cops had a team on the back of the restaurant.
A squeak in a shadow behind a junk shop turned into a scream and a fat rat dragged a small cat through a puddle of leaked greases.
When Bobby Preston didn’t return to the patio, Ray Tate told Djuna Brown they’d been burned off. “This fucking guy, this guy knows his business. That’s the second set he’s walked out of.”
He watched Julia Gurr pay the bill and get up from the table. She stood under the street light as if she didn’t want to leave it. She seemed frozen. A taxi crawled along Nicholas Street and with a jerk she flagged it. She carried Preston’s jacket, bundled, one hand inside it. She got into the back seat and leaned forward to point for the driver.
“We should nest her down, Ray,” Djuna Brown said, leaving the table and flagging a taxi. “Maybe she’s going to meet Marko. Or we get her address.”
Ray Tate followed her off the patio to the taxi. They boarded. The driver was a yawning brown man with red sleepless eyes.
“Don’t say a fucking thing,” Djuna Brown told him, flipping out her badge. “We’re cops. Follow that cab and if you lose it, we go to Homeland Security office on Dearborne. You’re in Juarez for dinner tomorrow.”
“Not a problem,” the driver said, indifferently. “No problemo. I’m from Brazil, but I’d like a free trip to Juarez. I really like Mexican food.”
“Whaaaaatever, amigo. Just don’t lose it.”
Julia Gurr’s taxi went up along Nicholas and up the next side street, rounded a block, and she got out at Bobby Preston’s house and bustled up the walk.
“That’s it,” the driver said. “Four blocks? Two bucks?” He laughed. “For this you send me to tyranny and hot peppers?”
Ray Tate floated a five dollar bill over the seat. “Keep the change, bud.”
“Fuck you.”
Bobby Preston kept up rent on a safe house he almost never used any longer, a furnished room and bath in a corner of a divided-up former factory owned by the wife of a bank robber who was doing harsh time. He liked the aging beauty queen, a former hatcheck at a nightclub, who painted decades off her face with an endless supply of emollients and powders.
He stretched out on a worn sofa and forced his mind still and into the variations. Julia and Zoe had to be put into perspective. He couldn’t let himself think about Zoe the human daughter or about his feelings for Julia Gurr the human former wife. Zoe was a commodity now to be traded for money; Julia Gurr was a tool and a resource.
He wasn’t a fan of Zen or any other Asian persuasion, but he concentrated in a subtractive mystical way, stripping away elements and emotions. Money was matter. It was at this place at this time, and it had to be at that other place at that other time. The problem was how to make it cross space, undetected. The mechanics of figuring out the exchange of his daughter would come into focus once the steps were in place, and he just had to walk down them without tripping. It would be necessary to get Marko to bring Zoe into proximity of the money, to make an exchange that saw everybody walking away satisfied. But that was for later.
His mind became a magnet of shifting elements and eventually all the disparate little parts, the boiling of the dough, doing the runs through the border, recovering his daughter, and maybe fixing things up with Julia Gurr, arranged themselves. Marko and Jerry Kelly, and Pavo the Colombian backend, all of them lost form as sources of fear or danger. They were all just entities, particles of matter, motes.
In the morning he had it.
As long as Marko and Jerry Kelly had Julia and Zoe to control him with, he couldn’t operate freely. Eliminating that was key.
On his last trip to Canada, he’d arrived early in Toronto to pick up a pig train at a hotel near the city hall. He wandered. A stocky statue of Winston Churchill loomed near the sidewalk where Bobby Preston ate a hotdog waiting for the pickup time.
In front of Winston Churchill an old bum screamed abuse.
But old stoic Winston couldn’t hear him.
Winston was a deaf rock.
The bum raved; Winston just loomed back at him.
Bobby Preston awoke, laughing.
The Winston Churchill variation.
Chapter 15
In Marko Markowitz’s temporary stash pad, Jerry Kelly drank cognac from a beer stein, cheerfully watching elegant Marko on the other side of a splintered coffee table sip from a pretentious snifter. He had somewhere he wanted to take Marko, a step on a little journey.
They were in the unfinished basement apartment of a bungalow on the edge of Smoketown. The stash pad met Marko’s business needs. It was detached, and had an attached garage into which a vehicle could be driven with access directly into the home without going outside. It was on a dead-end street to expose any drive-by surveillance. It had an electricity meter mounted on the outside wall to keep the reader from requiring access to the basement.
The first floor was rented by a middle-aged couple, a tall lean retired Rider who limped from shotgun pellets in his left leg, and a retired hooker who had a wicked scar carved into her right cheek, giving her a slightly droopy eye that marred an otherwise perfect face. They had two mean little boys who were the terrors of the neighbourhood, and a pit bull.
Sipping his cognac, Markowitz was pleased with the day. Things were finally moving. He beamed fondly upon Jerry Kelly.
Nobody, including Marko, knew anything about Jerry’s past. He showed up one da
y, a former Rider looking for work. He was suddenly just there, in Markowitz’s life. No one had been to his apartment; no one had spent a social moment with him. There was no context to Jerry, just rumours. Marko had hooked up with him when his previous henchman vanished one night and Jerry Kelly, looking like a schoolteacher, appeared at a drop site with the henchman’s sawn-off shotgun, offering his services. When Markowitz questioned him, Jerry Kelly shrugged. “Dunno, Mr. Marko. Guy comes up to me on the street, gives me this thing, and says come to this address, help a pal out. Said he was leaving town.”
That had amused Marko.
With Jerry Kelly in for the long haul, the cognac in his hand and a dreamy look on his face, Markowitz got cozy and probed for an oral history, a Jerry Kelly soliloquy that might contain a nugget of biodata. “Jerry? Tell me about life. I been missing out. Was life hard?”
“No picnic, I got to admit, Marko. You know, once upon a time,” Jerry Kelly said, sneaking a surprisingly boyish look at Marko, “back when we were battling with the Devils, remember the Devs? Eight guys, three broads, four bikes between ’em all, Not our kind of folks. Anyway, they got me one day out on the Badlands, doing my rounds, and they took me to the garage of their clubhouse and they tuned me up. They ripped off my vest with my colours, pissed on them, burned them. And then they see my tattoo, the club colours across my back. So one of the chicks goes, ‘Hey, I got an idea.’ And she goes out and gets a cheese grater, one of those aluminum box things? You rub a block of cheese on it, for sprinkling. Does a good efficient job on cheese, but not so good on the tat.”
“Ooo. This sounds not good, Jer’.” Markowitz made a sad smile, warming to the evening. “This definitely isn’t gonna end well.”
“Well, I’m not much into cheese anymore. So, anyway, they want to find my stash. They do a little grating, take a break for some beers. Come back. Grate. Someone pisses on me, where they’d grated. I’m in handcuffs, face down. I’m thinking, This is bad. Can’t get worse than this.” He shook his head at his own naivety. “I was younger then, Marko, and my imagination hadn’t fully developed. I growed since, my horizons expanded.”
“As have us all, Jer’. Cycle of life, right?”
“Exactly. They get bored with the grating, and someone says, ‘Hey, let’s get Dagger in here. Dagger’s a fun friend.’”
“Big guy, Jer’? Old Dagger’s a big black guy with a big hard-on and a taste for little white guys?” Markowitz affected a sympathetic shiver, but he had to smile. “Been there man. Bummer.”
“I wish. Dagger, Marko, was a Doberman.”
“Yikes. It gets worster and worster, Jer’. Am I gonna like this part?” Markowitz was having a good time making mental images. “This is like a really bad cartoon.”
“Might help to turn off the sound, then, at this point, Marko. Didn’t help me, though. I’m the guy face down with no back left. And, to boot, you got the Dobe waiting in the wings.”
“Dobe’s a problem, I can see that. Definitely.” Markowitz made a bright face of admiration. “But, you’re resourceful, right? Resourceful Jerry Kelly.”
“Yep. They decide to put me in the grease pit with this Doberman, have some Roman sport. ‘Faggots,’ I told them. ‘I’ll fuck that dog’s ass, you uncuff my hands.’ I’m not a big guy and I guess they thought, well, why not? Let the little guy fight back, it’ll take longer for Dagger to do his dirty deed. So they uncuff me. And pal Dagger gets thrown in the pit with me and away we go. A tough situation I found myself in, let me tell you, Marko.”
“You won, I guess?”
“Check this.” Jerry Kelly pulled up his left shirtsleeve showing ripping scars top and bottom in the shape of wide jaws. “I got a plan. Tough to do, even if you know what you’re doing. So, I waited on him and when he came I fed him the arm. Trick is to get your arm way back there where the teeth are dullest, put your other forearm behind his neck and do this —”
Jerry Kelly made a quick powerful movement, rotating his arms “— and you snap his neck. Didn’t quite work out.”
“Timing, right?” Markowitz nodded with sage wisdom. “It’s all in the timing. I’ve heard that widely said about an assortment of things.”
“If you say so. Anyway, he got his choppers in, the nice sharp ones up the front and sides that do the most damage. The spectators are loving this shit, sitting up there on the edges of the pit, laughing, burbling beer. I’m dragging this fucker around the pit, trying to shake him off, slipping on the grease, can’t get balance to maybe start kicking the cunt to death, and Dagger’s having the time of his life. Playtime with Uncle Jerry.”
“Not looking good for Jerry, now, I guess.” Marko couldn’t help laughing. A lot of the time Jerry Kelly put him on guard, but sometimes he was an amusing raconteur. “Unco Jewwy make a boo-boo. I guess you’re a little, what, scared? now.”
Jerry Kelly started laughing, too, remembering. He wished he liked Marko. He didn’t have many friends who’d survived the Jerry Kelly friendship experience. “Well, no, I wasn’t scared, but if I can get out of there I can outrun them all because I’ll be the only one of us not surfing in a wet brown wave.”
Marko reflected upon this as he was sipping and began laughing. He double swallowed his cognac, tears coming to his eyes. Jerry Kelly moved beside him and pounded on his back. “Not so tasty, coming out the nose backwards, eh?”
“Cocksucker.” Marko, still laughing, coughed and wiped the tears from his face. “Fuck, that burns.”
Jerry Kelly went back to his seat and poured them both some more cognac. “Anyway, Dagger goes to get a better chomp and at this point I’m about to let him have my entire fucking body, if he lets my head walk out alive. He goes for a better hold and I rip myself free. Here he comes again and this time I hold it up here –” he held his right arm up above his forehead, “and he comes whipping up after it. Last second I take the arm away, drop to my knees and when he goes over me I grab each of his back legs, one in each hand, and I go like this –” here he made a fast motion, pulling his hands far apart, ripping the dog’s legs apart like a wishbone. He made a credible sound of a dog in pain. “Yip yip yip. Not liking this part so much. I start in on kicking him to death and two of the Devs jump down in the pit. One guy, he’s easy, he goes to his dog and I fuck him up fast. The other guy gives me a bit of trouble, but I get him from behind and grab his bag with one hand and claw my fingers of the other into his eyes. Now we got a game. ‘I’ll take his eyes, rip his fucking nuts off, you don’t back off.’ Pussies, they do, and I get out of there.”
“An adventure that might have turned bad. But you survived.”
“I did, Marko. But there’s a point to this tale of canine sport.” Jerry Kelly took a short black cigarillo from a tin box, dipped one end into his cognac, and lit the other and went to work on Marko. “They were after my stash. Like today, you flying off with old Presto. Only one guy knows where the money is stacked up, and that guy is you. What,” he said, swirling the cognac under his nose, “what, God forbid, if something bad happened up there while you’re flying through the clear blue sky? Where are we all, then? A chunk of that dough is gonna be mine, right? Some is guys that I brought in, nice solid guys, they got a bit in there, too. Guys who’d miss both you and the dough, but mostly, I’m ashamed to admit, they’d miss the dough. And after they got through mourning your passing they’d be looking around for someone they might ask, someone close to you, like, who might, maybe, could have an idea. Even if he didn’t, he’d have to convince them that he didn’t. Cognac up the nose and a Doberman clamped on your nuts, well, that’d just be the handshake.”
Marko affected to mull this over, sucking his lips and staring off into space. “Yeah,” he said, sadly. “I never thought of it like that, never riddled what would happen, you know, something bad happened. I never thought of the dangers to my buddies. Call me selfish.” He hung his head, then he brightened. “But, hey, we’re going to be out of this shit, another few days. We got the Presto and the P
resto’s variations working. All you got to do is keep me alive until then, then everybody’s happy, everybody’s got their dough out, and things are running smooth again.” He made an exaggerated frown: “I know, I know. A couple of days. A lot can happen in a couple of days. Fuck, we’ve made a lot of stuff, mostly bad stuff, happen less’n that. But we made it through, right? So, all you got to do is be real careful for a while, be careful for yourself, and be careful for me.”
“Could be dangerous, though.”
Marko raised his hands. “What can I do? I’ll tell you what: every time I go up in the plane, I’ll keep an eye out. I see some seagull giving me the mojo eye I’ll come right home, mom. I promise.”
Jerry Kelly wagged his finger at Markowitz. “You’ll go to bed without dinner, Marko, you misbehave and lose that dough.”
Marko spotted an opening inside Jerry Kelly’s companionship and approached it slowly. First he poured them fresh shots, then dipped and lit his own cigarillo. Wreathed in smoke, he asked, “That happen to you a lot, Jer’? Mom send you to bed, no dinner? You have a bed? You have a mom?”
“Me? A mom? Sure. Fuck, Marko, whaddayathink? I was raised by wolves or something? I had a mom, a pop, a dog, and all that stuff. Not rich we weren’t, but not poor either. Hardworking middle-class folk. You one of those guys, thinks folks just appear out of nowhere? Nobody bounced them on their knee when they was babies? Hitler had a mom, for Christ’s sakes, Marko. Goo-goo, Adolfie, a chuck-a-luck under the chin, don’t you be killing a whole bunch of Jews when you grow up. A sickly boy, he was, but look how far he went in life. Went his own way.”
