Bad Reputation: The Complete Collection

by Matt Hader

  “How’s it going?”

  “Hot one today, huh?” said John.

  John surveyed the new police cruiser that Jimmy was operating and added, “You drive Chargers now, huh? More power I hear.”

  Jimmy shook his head, turned the steering wheel and said, “Quit blowing off those firecrackers. We got people calling us.”

  “I didn’t do that,” John lied.

  He had actually lit three or four just a half hour before Jimmy showed up. John’s favorite pastime was lighting cherry bombs and tossing them onto the train tracks that bordered the park. He especially enjoyed doing that when a train was actually passing.

  The railroad company in question had recently taken to increasing the number of freight trains rolling down their cross-country rails. Sleepy, little Balmoral saw a 1000 percent increase in freight train traffic in the past two years.

  This never sat well with John. The trains, sometimes screaming through town every hour on the hour, would wake him up in the middle of the night. The winter months were the most awful because the sound-deadening, lush foliage of the area was laid bare. The distinctive, train rumble would travel for a mile or so through the town in the colder months.

  Jimmy said, “Get a real job,” and drove off.

  John watched as he drove away and then looked back to where Danny had made his way through the tree line, but the kid was gone.

  John hopped back onto his riding mower, replaced his earbuds and chugged his way toward his house. It was time to “re-Vike” as he called it. The sudden burst of adrenaline from breaking up the kid fight had washed all the soothing effects of the previous 500 mg of Vicodin away. He revved the mower’s engine as he headed for home.

  At the center of town, John waited on his growling riding mower for a green light at the intersection of Main Street and Balmoral Road. He daydreamed about what another hit of Vicodin would do for his afternoon, how it would make the dreariness of his existence seem hopeful and warm by comparison.

  He sat there and admired the beauty of his little burg. Balmoral was not like other suburbs in the Chicago area. It had the usual, small-town, main intersection with quaint shops and diners. There was also an old style movie theater designed by the renowned architect Alfredo Iannelo, some finer eateries, and the commuter train tracks running along the edge of downtown.

  But things changed when you got just outside the immediate area of the one square mile town.

  Many years ago, the original planners of the township wrote an ordinance that called for five-acre lots (minimum) outside of the town proper. What this ordinance accomplished was making it so John’s little village would stand alone. It was a true small town and an island among other suburbs.

  There was no suburban sprawl that butted up against and tainted the quaint, little burg. Residents were, of course, very proud of this fact. You could hear them from time to time at Dink’s Diner disparaging other nearby suburbs for their crowded ugliness.

  Because of this law, wealthy Chicago residents, many of whom were horse enthusiasts, began building estates just outside the Balmoral village limits. Soon the area became known as “Chicago’s horse country.”

  Mega malls never quite made it to the area because the picturesque, horse paddocks stopped them in their tracks. Sure, you could head ten miles south to the enormous Woodfield Mall or the up-market Arboretum at Route 59 and I90 or the Deer Park Towne Centre four miles to the east, for all of your mall-shopping needs. But where John and his neighbors lived, it was a sort of modern-day Mayberry, right there on the outskirts of the massive Chicago area.

  Another car horn shook John from his daydream, and he noticed that the light had turned green. John waved a “sorry” to the car whose driver had alerted him, and his hand stopped mid-wave. Jimmy the cop stared back at John through the windshield of his police car. John hit the accelerator, and the riding mower inched along through the intersection.

  Riding south along Balmoral Road, nearing Coleridge Avenue, John made a right and headed toward his home in the 200 block.

  About halfway down the first block, he spotted Danny crossing at the intersection of Coleridge and Lilly. The kid must have used the pedestrian cut-through, where the railroad tracks bordered the park, to get there so quickly. John tried to make the mower go faster, but there was just not enough juice left in the small Briggs & Stratton motor. He pulled the mower to the curb, shut it off and made a run after Danny.

  He caught up to the teenager about a block away at Lilly and Trussell; the young man was not happy at all to see John approaching. But he stopped walking anyway.

  “What do you want?”

  John looked the raggedly dressed kid up and down and measured his words carefully. He didn’t want to scare him off because he was truly concerned for his welfare.

  “You don’t have to talk to me, I get that. But I understand more shit about your life than you probably know.”

  With a quick, “Piss off,” Danny spun and walked away.

  Instead of following, though, John offered, “My folks weren’t there for me, either. They thought they were. At least my mom did…until she died. But they weren’t.”

  Danny stopped and without turning, flipped John the bird and kept walking.

  John added, “So, we’re cool?”

  That got a real laugh out of the retreating Danny. He stopped, turned and flipped the bird again, this time accompanied by a smirk. John’s dry humor hit its mark.

  Danny continued along his way and added, “You’re kind of a douche, man.”

  John watched as Danny turned onto Trussell and headed back toward downtown. The kid, now smiling, looked back over his shoulder as he made his way along the sidewalk and that made John happy.

  CHAPTER 4

  The back of the house on Coleridge wasn’t as nearly egg-stained as the front. An errant egg or two launched from the sidewalk out front made its way over to the backside of the roof, but not many. John figured that the brave souls who egged the front didn’t quite have the cajones to step into the rear yard to even out their handiwork.

  The dilapidated, detached garage at his house was occupied by a powder blue 1979 Chevy station wagon and a slew of half ripped apart mechanical projects. There was a push mower with the motor missing, a gutted, old toaster oven, and a few, crappy computers in various stages of dismemberment.

  Upon further inspection, though, one could see that they weren’t fix-it projects at all, but the beginnings of junk-based sculptures. John had been tinkering with bits and pieces of the metal components of the discarded refuse and making them into foot-high renditions of a singular person sitting in a chair. They all sort of looked the same, a man sitting alone looking off in the distance. There were actually five finished pieces, all about the same size each produced from soldering pieces of metal together.

  Above the sculpture projects, inside a wall-mounted cabinet, sat the 9mm pistol and a stack of plastic, baby face masks that John had purchased at a costume store in a strip mall.

  John rode the mower into the open spot next to the station wagon and shut it down. He dismounted and entered his house.

  The inside of the Coleridge house hadn’t seen a design team since the late 80’s. Neon, sage green, desaturated maroon, and a country apple and rooster motif that his mother deemed “classy,” ruled the day. The place was tiny, consisting of a living room, kitchen, one bathroom and two bedrooms.

  Everywhere you looked, apples and roosters fought it out for your attention. Mary was especially fond of wallpaper borders high on the wall where they met the ceilings. The particle board and honey-finished, veneer furniture was the cheap icing on the apple and rooster motif cake.

  It wasn’t that John couldn’t afford to update the house. He had the money. The cash in the bank didn’t come from pulling off robberies, either.


  After his father, Bernie, rag dolled face-first into the backyard, John inherited not only the free and clear home itself, but also a life insurance policy worth $500,000. That was quite a sum for a 23-year-old man to possess. John was stunned to learn that his older brother didn’t want any portion of the house or the insurance money. He truly wanted nothing to do with anything Mary and Bernie possessed, and that included John.

  At 23, John may have been a tad antisocial, but he wasn’t stupid. He quickly taught himself how to play the stock market in the boom years of the 1990’s. He was a very aggressive player in the market, turning that initial $500,000 into what John deemed a “tidy sum” over the course of ten years.

  Like his town of Balmoral, John had lost some worth during the downward spiral of the late 2000’s, but he also had diversified by that time, making sure his investments weren’t exposed to be weighted into any one space. He was not afraid to completely pull funds and place them into less risky bonds and CDs when necessary.

  While most were losing their asses, John was down only 3.5 percent across his investment portfolio - quite a feat for the “Goth all grown-up.”

  Right now, though, the 37-year-old John Caul was preparing some scrambled eggs in the kitchen, while being eyeballed by one-dimensional roosters and flipping through the Yellow Pages. He was allowing his fingers to do the initial legwork for his next side job.

  CHAPTER 5

  The dark green Saturn with the “Coexist” bumper sticker parked at the low-rent apartment complex next to the closed pizza place was perfect.

  It was 2 a.m. and the streetlights of the apartment complex weren’t in operating order. That was the cherry on top. Saturn’s steering columns were easy to crack for some reason. Maybe it was the imported materials that GM used. John wasn’t sure, but he was happy to see the Saturn parked only one-half mile away from his next intended target which was a busy diner called the Athenian near the intersection of Route 12 and Dundee Road in nearby Paladin. Or maybe it was in Arlington Heights. All the suburbs blended together in this area.

  It really didn’t matter because John knew from scouting the restaurant for the past few hours that it was open 24 hours a day and that business was brisk. Best of all, he’d not seen one Paladin (or Arlington Heights or whatever) cop car pull into the lot.

  Most everyone knows that cops have their favorite places to eat. One cop tells the next, and so on and so forth and soon enough, the establishment has a reputation as a “cop place.”

  The Athenian was not a cop place for one simple reason: Jason, the burly, Greek, immigrant owner, who felt at home working the night shift, didn’t like to serve his food for free. And uniformed police officers are especially fond of free food.

  Jason enjoyed working the night shift from time to time since those were the hours that he was used to keeping when he was a young man growing up in Alimos, Greece. He was also stoked that it was a Saturday night.

  From time to time, especially when a drunken customer got out of hand, it gave him a reason to use the skill set he had acquired in his former career as muscle for a low-level, Greek crime boss named Akakios.

  Although obviously Greek, the crime boss Akakios had a flair for all things French. He constantly went on and on about being reincarnated from French aristocracy or some bullshit. He mostly wore frilly French-made suits and silk socks. In the mid-80’s, he went all “Miami Vice” with his French attire, looking as much as he possibly could like a 280-pound version of Crockett.

  Akakios’ crew didn’t believe a word of the Frenchie crap he spewed, but they played along with the boss because he paid well. He also had a penchant for killing anyone who pissed him off, which was more often than his victims were fond of.

  And in a bit of false advertising on his parents’ part, the name Akakios meant “not evil” in Greek. When Akakios was whacked by one of his competitors as he was banging a 19-year-old imported French prostitute on his 65th birthday, the younger version of Jason saw the writing on the wall. He had several family members in the Chicago area and decided to move stateside.

  Now 50 and sporting a frame of 5’ 10” and 240 pounds of fat-covered muscle, Jason was a barrel-chested, pussy cat – at least until he was provoked.

  He knew all about the Baby Face Robber as the media had dubbed John. Jason was impressed by the crook’s prowess, pulling off armed robberies all in the same 15-mile radius without getting caught or even having a decent description of him relayed to the public. Simple in its design, the plastic, baby face mask was that good at hiding the user’s identity.

  Jason watched the news on the TV positioned behind the counter, smiled, and thought, “This guy would be a rich man in Greece, with their willy-nilly police protection and corruption. They’d never catch him.”

  But the Paladin version of Jason had a business to protect.

  With Paladin’s finest avoiding his restaurant since he lacked the cop charity gene, he had, just the week before, gone to the Sebela’s sporting goods store in Hoffman Estates and purchased a military-style, short barreled 12 gauge, pump-action shotgun. It sat, loaded and ready to go, in the corner of his cramped restaurant office.

  John left his Chevy wagon parked a block from where he had snagged the Saturn. As he pulled into the Athenian’s parking lot, surveying the clientele in the booths along the windows and the few patrons sitting at the long counter, he noticed one, simple fact. The vast majority of the 12 or so customers inside seemed drunk. It was Saturday, but that could be trouble if one of the drunks decided to use their beer muscles to be a hero.

  There was work to do, and a Fourth of July celebration to save, so he moved forward with his plan.

  Idling the Saturn with its lights off next to the dark, green-colored dumpster where it would blend in, John made his way to the front door with the mask on top of his head, secured by the thin, elastic strap. He scanned for any visible security cameras and saw none. In three, precise moves, he pulled the mask down over his face, extracted the 9mm from his waistband, and yanked the door open.

  Jason saw it coming, too, but he froze.

  He was more accustomed to the hand-to-hand violence of his youthful, Greece muscle days, or with the occasional, unruly customer here at the Athenian, just not the gun-toting sort. The 9mm threw him off his game just long enough for John to get the advantage.

  John swung the 9mm, aiming directly at Jason’s nose, and stepped in close but not near enough so that the burly Greek could grab the pistol.

  “All the cash in a to-go box. Now.”

  The drunk man at the counter closest to John, with a forkful of blueberry pancakes hovering near his quivering mouth, looked confused. When his alcohol-soaked synapses finally grasped the situation, he puked on the floor.

  John said, “Shit. Hurry up!”

  Jason eyed his office door where the shotgun sat all snug in the corner.

  John said, “Who’s back there?”

  Jason shook his head and said in broken English, “Not no one.”

  Something was boiling up in Jason, though, a feeling he hadn’t had in about 25 years. It was the overwhelming sensation that he needed to hurt someone. John noticed the sea change in Jason’s demeanor and backed up a step.

  When Jason didn’t grab a to-go box, and he didn’t open the register, and he didn’t comply by filling said to-go box with the proceeds from the brimming register, John did something he’d not done in any of the other robberies.

  He fired a shot into the ceiling.

  All the other patrons hit the floor, screaming and crying, and begging for their lives. Instantly, without prompting, they even started tossing their wallets and wads of cash out into the open area of the restaurant floor. Even the skinny waitress tossed her wadded roll of tip money into the growing pile.

  John said, “I don’t want your money. I want his.”
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  The gunshot didn’t frighten Jason at all. It only made him madder.

  He grabbed the paper money from the register, slapped it into a to-go box and said, “You think you’re Dillinger or some shit, huh?”

  “Keep filling it.”

  John noticed that the spent 9mm cartridge was lying on the floor next to the drunk man’s ear.

  “Give me that.”

  But the drunk man didn’t understand what John was asking.

  “The shell casing.”

  “Don’t shoot me, dude. Please…”

  John motioned for him to hurry, and the drunk man fumbled around trying to grasp the 9mm shell casing. He finally grabbed hold and handed it up to John.

  Jason’s eyes bore into John.

  He said, “I find you, you know. I’ve done this sort of thing, you know. I do it to you. Not scared of you one bit.”

  “Come on, come on.”

  “I take that baby face off and kill you. Slowly.”

  John believed him.

  Jason finished filling the to-go box, snapped it closed and slid it across the counter. John grabbed it up and made his exit.

  Outside the Athenian, as casually as he could, John strolled to the idling Saturn, opened the door, and happened to turn back toward the street. Jason charged from the front doors of his business, shotgun in hand. John scrambled to get inside the vehicle and put it in gear. Jason wracked a round into the 12 gauge shotgun and took aim, but John was already peeling away. Just as the Saturn passed within 20 feet of Jason, he pulled the trigger, but nothing happened.

  He had forgotten to take the safety off.

  “Pidiksu! Pidiksu!” (Greek for “Fuck you!”)