Little Odessa

by Joseph Koenig

  “What are you doing at the house, anyway?” Kate asked.

  “Kickin’ the door. I’ve always been curious whether Walker SafeTech is as good as its advertising.”

  They saw the blond guard walking back to the sidewalk. His partner passed him and was waiting in the car when the blond opened the driver’s door and slammed it shut again. The car bolted from the curb and raced to the corner, where it slowed for a yield sign.

  “Down,” Harry said, and threw himself on Kate.

  As they huddled out of sight of the window Kate whispered, “Your hand. If you don’t move it away this second, I swear I’ll scream ‘Walker.’”

  “Don’t take it personal,” he said, and shifted his weight off her.

  They heard the tan car roar down the street, then turn and speed away. Kate pushed at Harry and both of them sat up. She pulled a hairbrush from her bag, but Harry confiscated it and dropped it on the dash. “You look beautiful,” he said. “Keep me posted again.”

  Kate said, “I don’t know how much more I can take.”

  But she was talking to herself by then. She caught herself—and looked at her watch again.

  “A minute and fifty-three seconds,” she said when he came back to the Cutlass. “How many more times do you intend to do this?”

  “Depends on the troops from Walker. These are not the brightest guys around, and as a rule they don’t have much of an attention span. What they do have are short tempers, and by now they got to be fed up with runnin’ back and forth all the time for nothin’ when they could be at the office playin’ hearts. What I’m bettin’ they do in a situation like this, they turn off the alarm at their end and write up an order for maintenance to check out the system. Which means we’ve seen the last of ’em, though you never know.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “For starters, we wait. It’s Walker’s move.” He swept his hand along the dash and gave her back her brush. As she stroked her hair, he turned on the radio.

  “Pachelbel,” he said as music filled the front seat, and Kate stared at him in amazement. “Jeez, I hate that shit. You been foolin’ with the radio.” He spun the dial deliberately and didn’t look relaxed again until he found a station at the far end of the band that played fifties oldies.

  After a while he lowered the volume and asked, “How much time?”

  Kate tilted her watch toward the radio’s greenish glow. “Ten and a half minutes.”

  “Let’s wait fifteen even. Then it’s time to go.”

  “Go home?” Kate asked hopefully. “Thank God.”

  “Go in.”

  Kate grabbed Harry’s good arm, digging her fingers into the bicep.

  “Hey,” he said. “Be careful. I only got one of these that works.”

  “You didn’t say anything about doing it today. I’m not ready for this.”

  “I can’t see a better time,” he told her. “We’ve got Walker on the run.”

  “I mean, I don’t think there ever will be a good time for me. This kind of thing, it’s too nerve-racking. It’s why I asked you.”

  Harry shook his arm free. “What you’re tryin’ to say, if I understand, is this is a scary, nasty business and if something goes wrong you could end up hurt. This is a job for someone like me, who it doesn’t matter if he gets lost up shit creek without a paddle. Right?”

  Kate opened her mouth, but no words came.

  “And I’m sayin’, if you’re not willin’ to shoulder some of the risk, I don’t see why I should put myself on the line for you.”

  “Not for me,” Kate said. “For the cocaine, for the money.”

  “I hope you’re not proud,” he said, “’cause as far as I’m concerned this is like volunteer work, my turn to give at the office. The possibilities here are not all that exciting.”

  “If you feel that way, let’s forget it.”

  “Okay with me,” Harry said. He switched off his walkie-talkie.

  Kate hesitated and then put her hand softly on his. “Please … I really do appreciate what you’re doing for me.”

  “Do you?”

  “I’m starting to,” she said. “I never met anyone like you before. I didn’t know what you were like.”

  “You’ve been around someone just like me your whole life.”

  Kate looked, at him skeptically. “Where would I—?”

  “Try the mirror,” Harry said. Then: “Now that’s straight between us, I’m goin’ in and you got to help. Everything I told you about before still goes. Only this time you have to be especially alert. You see anything out of the ordinary—”

  “I push down on this button,” she said, holding her walkie-talkie, “and let you know.”

  “You got it.” He opened the door.

  “One more thing.” Kate leaned close and Harry thought she was going to wish him luck with a kiss. Instead she tapped her fingernail against his walkie-talkie. “Turn your radio on.”

  She fine-tuned the rearview mirror as she monitored his progress along the fence. Then she slipped off her watch and put it on the dash. Every thirty seconds or so she stared at the mirror again, feeling more tense each time she saw only the empty street. Suddenly it was unbearably close inside the car and she rolled down the windows. Her face was drenched with sweat, the black dress clinging to her body. He had been gone less than five minutes.

  Ninety seconds more went by before she opened the door and swung her legs outside. She felt more comfortable like that until she realized that the dome light was attracting biting insects and, no doubt, the attention of some of the neighbors. She dropped the scanner and the walkie-talkie in her bag and went out, drawn toward the big house.

  As she squinted into the darkness her heart caught in her mouth and she had to go to the bathroom more urgently than she could ever remember. Squeezing between a garbage truck and the curb a block away was a tan car with gold trim. She grabbed for the walkie-talkie, but it was dead. She swatted the plastic case against her hand and brought the mouthpiece to her lips again. “They’re back,” she said, and waited for his reply.

  And waited …What was his damn name? “Harry?”

  “What?” Above a brittle crackling that reminded her of a boardwalk fire she could barely make out his voice. “Who’s back?”

  “The guards. I see their car.”

  “Shit,” he said so loud they would have done as well using tin cans connected by a string.

  “They’ll be here any second.”

  “Take the car around the block and pick me up behind the house.” He was talking so fast she wasn’t sure she heard him right. “You can drive, can’t you?”

  “A … a little.”

  “Fuck, why didn’t you say something before? Never mind. Drive around the house a little. I’ll be waiting in back.”

  “Did you get the …?”

  If he answered, she didn’t catch it. She was racing back to the Cutlass, looking over her shoulder as the tan car threaded the needle and then came to a skidding stop for a black tomcat chasing a calico across the street. Something stung her ankle and she heard the clatter of coins on the sidewalk like tinny rain. Without looking down she pinched her bag shut under her elbow.

  She dropped onto the driver’s seat and threw the Cutlass into gear, stepping hard on the gas. The engine coughed and the idiot lights fluttered and she lifted her foot, waiting two agonizing seconds before putting it down again. As she steered into the street the side mirror framed the tan Chevrolet gliding to a halt and the guards tumbling out behind drawn guns.

  Ignoring two red lights, she turned onto a street where blue spruce trees were all the rage. Beside a Tudor mansion that was the mirror image of Nicholas’s place she saw a three-story Japanese villa with a green tile roof. Her eyes swept the empty yard between the houses, and then she was digging in her bag for the walkie-talkie when she spotted Harry doubled over a suitcase that must have weighed a ton. She reached across the seat and opened the passenger door and helped him swing the
leather bag into the back.

  “Let me drive,” he barked.

  They jumped outside, crossing in front of the car in a naked reverse, and then the Cutlass leapt into the street before she could pull both feet in. Harry killed the lights and they ran as dark and silent as a submarine toward a flashing red signal.

  “How do we get out of here?” he asked.

  Kate looked around blankly. “I don’t know. I’ve never been on this street before.”

  “Great.”

  They raced four blocks to a desolate boulevard which seemed to slice diagonally through the circular grid. Harry flicked on his lights and followed the beam past a sign that proclaimed LEAVING FOREST HILLS GARDENS, veering right for a police car riding the center stripe in the direction from which they had come. He slowed outside a neighborhood tavern and warmed himself in the neon glow.

  “Woooeee,” Harry yelled, grabbing Kate by the shoulder and pulling her close. She held herself rigidly and his kiss landed beside her mouth. When he let go, she bobbed upright like a child’s punching bag. “You can charge that against my end,” he said.

  “Very funny.”

  “Where’s the scanner?” he asked, feeling for it on the seat. “We better find out what the cops are up to.”

  “It’s in my bag. I … I had to step out for a moment.”

  Harry turned to look at her with eyes that were crevasses beneath beetling brows.

  “Watch the road,” she said. She opened her purse and put the scanner on the dashboard. “Did you get the electric parts?”

  “Shhhh.”

  The woman with the machine-gun delivery was ordering additional police units to Forest Gardens. “… report of burglary in progress.”

  Harry slapped his hand against the wheel and laughed. “Getaway in progress is more like it.”

  “The electric parts …? Do you have them?”

  Too much tension went into Harry’s smile and then it fell apart. “No,” he said. “I didn’t see anything looked like that. No coke either. What I did find was a shitload of cash money and a pretty nice U.S. coin collection and some miniature portrait paintings I don’t know the first thing about except they got to be worth a bundle ’cause the women in ’em are all ugly as sin and I got to live with ’em one year minimum ’cause they’re too hot to move now.”

  Kate turned to stare out the window, but not before Harry saw tears in her eyes.

  “We split this up,” he said, “you can buy all the electric parts you want, open your own store.”

  “You didn’t even look.”

  “Hell, you don’t know for sure they’re there. Be happy we made out as good as we did.”

  “But you said you’d get them.”

  “This is not a racket where there are guarantees.” His tone was edgy, but with no anger in it. “I didn’t know the layout and I couldn’t chance turnin’ on any lights. There’s a Gardall SC1130 safe in the bedroom. It’s a big mother, a fire safe, with plated interlocking bolts that extend into heavy-gauge prime steel walls and a key lock with a re-locking device. The damn thing weighs more than half a ton and he’s not afraid to keep it out in plain sight. I didn’t go near it. The electric parts could be inside, they’re as valuable as you think, but you need an A-bomb to get in.”

  “Don’t say that word.”

  They rode in silence to the West Side and Harry stopped for a light and said, “I don’t see what you’re givin’ me the hairy eyeball for. Maybe you didn’t get everything you wanted, but you did all right. What am I apologizing for? You did great. I was any of your other fine friends, the crappy end of the stick’d be slippin’ through your fingers already. With me, at least you get your half.”

  “Keep it,” Kate said. “Without the rest, the money doesn’t do me much good.”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  “No, I mean it.”

  “You mean it ’cause it’s the end of a rough day. In the morning you wake up with nothin’ again, you look in the mirror you’re gonna have to ask, ‘Did I really fuck up so bad?’ No,” he said. “A deal is a deal. Half’s yours.”

  He parked near the brownstone and pulled the bag out of the back, lugged it up the stoop while Kate waited with the door open, her eyes moving all over the quiet street. He went in ahead of her and carried it over the broken stairs, then dropped it on the bed and threw himself beside it pressing his cheek against the cool leather.

  “It’s a nice piece of merchandise,” he said when she came into the room. “You don’t mind, it’s part of my half.”

  Kate pulled one leg under her and sat on the edge of the Barcalounger as Harry snapped open the bag. He removed six small paintings that could have been of the same pinch-faced woman in a yellow sunbonnet, but weren’t.

  “I don’t have much of a track record movin’ artwork,” he said, “but it’s a cinch you have less, so I’ll take these. You don’t know a fence that owes you a favor, you end up with maybe ten percent of what they should go for.”

  He spread the paintings over the bed, and then dug inside the suitcase for a book the size of a looseleaf binder bound in blue leather and three more like it. “This is the coin collection …”

  He looked up. Kate was leaning back, not paying attention to him. “It’s hard to say where half of this begins,” he said. “You wouldn’t know what to do with ’em anyway, so I’m gonna hang onto the coins and the pictures. You get to keep most of the cash, though.” He slipped a brown envelope held together with a string tie out of his shirt and dumped four stacks of bank notes on the mattress.

  “He was usin’ this for pin money,” Harry said as he counted hundred-dollar bills. “It was sittin’ in the top drawer of his desk. It comes to … thirteen K. As you were sayin’, a fair night’s work. I take four K off the top and the balance is yours. Now what do you say?”

  Kate straightened her leg and crossed it over the other one. Then she uncrossed it. As if it was an effort, she said, “Thank—”

  “Don’t mention it.” Harry shaped the money into two neat piles and pushed the taller one toward her. When she didn’t reach for it, he asked, “You’re not gonna count it?”

  “I trust you.”

  “It’s part of your problem. You better check my math.”

  Kate fanned the bills, then fanned them again. “I get only eight thousand.”

  “What did I tell you?” he asked, looking pleased with himself. He cut ten bills from his pile and dropped them on hers. “You didn’t say how much coke you need, but you can buy weight with nine K. You want to be smart, you’ll do some yourself. It’s not what I would advise most people, but you don’t let it get out of hand, it’s just medicine. You won’t feel so down.”

  “I can’t get excited about this,” she said, gesturing at the money as though it were contagious, “not without the electric parts.”

  “Maybe you can buy them, too.”

  “They’re very rare. Those were the only ones that are available, I’m sure.”

  “Still, the nine K makes a nice consolation prize.” Like talking to the wall, for all the response it produced. Then: “We should see each other again sometime.”

  She shook her head.

  “Another job I’m talkin’ about. You hear of anything, you let me know first.”

  Kate forced a smile.

  “Sure I can’t interest you in supper? What’s it, it’s close to midnight. You got to be starved.”

  Kate stopped forcing and the smile went away.

  “You say so.” He opened the suitcase again and fit the coin albums in the corners, stacked the paintings carefully in the center. He returned his share of the cash to the brown envelope and put it inside too. He shut the lid halfway and then looked around the room. “Something I’m forgettin’,” he said.

  “The police scanner. It’s still in the car.”

  “And this.” He unhooked his walkie-talkie from his belt. “Where’s yours?”

  “In my purse.”

  “Let’s
have it. Last thing we need is for you to put it out with the garbage.”

  Kate reached for her bag and looked inside.

  “The wrong people get their hands on it, electric parts are the least of your troubles,” he said. “You don’t have any troubles.”

  “Why?”

  “What’s the diff? Let me have it.”

  “I don’t see it,” she said. “It must be in the car. But I could swear I put it in my purse.”

  “Don’t swear. Just get it.”

  “I’ll be back in a second,” Kate told him, and ran downstairs. But nearly ten minutes went by before she came back to the bedroom looking pale and tentative.

  “I thought you’d skipped to Rio without me,” Harry said.

  Kate didn’t laugh. “I was sure it was there.” She brought her purse to the bed and turned it upside down. “I … I don’t know where it is,” she said as she sorted feverishly through her things. “I must have dropped it somewhere.”

  Harry watched her until his color matched hers. Then he opened the suitcase and removed five bills from the brown envelope. He peeled off five more from her share and pushed the thousand to the middle of the bed.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Headstones,” he said.

  13

  NICHOLAS SAID, “YOU CAN never find a cop when you need one.”

  Bucyk laughed uneasily. “I was out in Pennsylvania, for the special bear season. My whole life I always wanted to shoot a bear. My lousy brother buys a share in a cabin in the Poconos, just like that God strikes him dumb. Margie, that’s his second ex, wants to know why the support payment’s late again, or do I think it’d be better if she has to ask a judge. So I do a little digging and track him down around Shohola, and the big sport invites me out a couple days if I promise I never found him.”

  Leaving Bucyk in the living room, Nicholas climbed the stone steps. He smoothed his glossy hair against the flat of his hand. “On my time you don’t shoot anything unless I tell you to.”

  “I didn’t.” Bucyk lowered his eyes, but kept them on Nicholas. “What did you need to see me about?”