“I don’t ever touch anything,” she said, looking at Roberts like he was crazy. “And I said nothing. They had my mouth all tied up with tape. Semion showed up, took the shit off my mouth, and I said, ‘Please let me go.’ That’s it.”
“And the money?”
“It’s gone. They took it.”
Roberts stayed silent.
“Gone,” she repeated. “For real.” She closed her eyes for a moment, and violent images flooded in. Black blood on the floor, dead eyes looking at her. This too will pass, she told herself. Bring calmness into this car. Compassion, empathy, calmness. Next time, make your own goddamn team—women only.
Somewhere near Pinewood, they pulled into another gas station. Roberts searched her body for tracking devices. He touched her stomach, her legs; she felt disgusted, but she tucked in her bottom lip and nodded like he was smart, counting the days until she could be rid of him.
“They got the money?” he asked again, leaning back and looking at her. “Just like that?” He gave her a cop stare. The man seemed to believe he could tell—by simply looking at her—whether she was lying. They stood there for a moment. The parking lot radiated heat; a heavyset woman in a yellow tube top stared at them as she got into her car. Roberts’s eyes filled with tears.
He’s feeling bad because his friends just died, Jackie told herself. Put yourself in his shoes. Hold his hand and walk with him.
“We’re right back where we started,” she said. “You’ve still got the room wired up. He’ll talk soon enough.”
Roberts’s shoulders slumped. “We gotta go move their fucking bodies,” he said.
They went to a hardware store. Roberts bought a few lengths of zinc-plated chain, locks, two tarps, two rolls of duct tape, a pair of forty-five-pound dumbbells, a box cutter, some trash bags, bleach, scrub brushes, a huge pack of paper towels.
The motel room’s door was unlocked. The yellow DO NOT DISTURB sign that Jackie had put on the doorknob was still there. Roberts pulled the bodies out of the closet; they had already started to stiffen with rigor mortis. The room smelled like feces. Roberts’s face bunched up like he was crying, but no tears came out. Jackie felt strangely calm.
They laid the men on sheets, rolled them up like burritos, and wrapped them in tape. Roberts sat down on the bed, took out his phone, and used Google Maps to pick out a spot to dump the bodies. “We’ll do it there,” he said, pointing at a huge stretch of green parkland, east of Miami.
“What about all the blood?” asked Jackie.
Roberts brought out the box cutter. Bent over and breathing heavily, he cut out the stained parts of the carpet. Jackie watched him and wondered if he was beginning to crack. The room was a mess, and now the carpetless patches of the floor looked like a map of some lake district with a long canal where the men had been dragged. The blood hadn’t leaked through at least, except in the closet, where Roberts worked it over with wet towels until it was just a brown smear. He put the ruined carpet and towels into trash bags.
It wasn’t even 6:00 p.m. The sun was still up. They moved the truck first, pulling up right next to the door. Jackie’s eyes settled on the small red stains that had already started to spread like hives on the sheets as they lifted the impossibly heavy bundles and set them onto tarps. After rolling them in the tarps, and watching out the window and waiting for the area to clear of people, they carried their bundles to the truck. Even with the heat, Roberts stood there shaking like he was cold. Huge dark shadows of sweat circled his underarms. He’d gone pale.
“I’ll drive the truck. You follow me,” he said.
“Stay the speed limit,” Jackie said. “Try to calm down a little.”
They took Highway 41 toward Naples. Jackie saw signs for airboat rides, gator parks, Buffalo Tigers. They stopped a few times along the way so Roberts could throw the men’s wallets, their phone, their gun, and the bag of bloody carpet into different parts of the swamp. Finally, he chose a spot for the bodies.
It was swampland on both sides of the road. Cars kept driving past as they dragged the bodies away from the truck. Roberts looped a length of chain around each man, and then locked each bundle to one of the dumbbells. He wrapped his arms around the first man—Jackie thought it was Danzig—and walked straight out into the swamp with his shoes and pants on. About fifteen feet in, he dropped his burden. He returned and did the same with Denver Mike. The water wasn’t deep; the blue from the tarps shined out of the black water like two blue flags. It doesn’t matter, thought Jackie. The gators will eat them.
“Do you want to say anything?” she asked.
Roberts turned and looked at her like she was crazy. “No,” he said. Then, lurching forward, he seemed to change his mind. “Jesus take these men back into your paradise,” he said. “They were both good men and they’re coming home.”
“Amen,” said Jackie.
The motel they’d been staying in for the past week, the Sunny Palms Inn, was nine miles north of the one the two men had been killed in. When they finally got back to it, after their trip to the Everglades, Jackie crushed two Xanax on the dresser, cut the powder into six small lines, and sniffed the first one through a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill. Peace and calm in my heart. Roberts had bought a bottle of rum and a six-pack of Coca-Cola. He turned on the television and found the local news. They waited for a report about a motel in Overtown, but it never came. Roberts was sullen and silent. He kept refilling his soft plastic cup with rum.
Jackie, letting the Xanax do its work, realized that she’d been so focused on Semion Gurevich that she hadn’t really stopped to consider the larger situation. Her eyes shifted from the television to Roberts. She watched his torso grow and shrink with each breath. He had refused to tell her who’d hired him. You don’t know them, was all he’d said.
She thought about something Denver Mike had let slip two nights ago, drunk in their motel room: “Someone wants to skip a step in the damn fish chain.” There was a kind of logic to the statement. Semion Gurevich was clearly selling; she’d known that much right away. She’d known plenty of drug dealers. Her best guess was that whoever had hired Roberts was either buying dope from Semion or planning on stealing it. A lot of money had been spent on this little trip.
She sat there and studied Roberts and tried to decide the best way to proceed. If you want something, ask for the opposite, she told herself. She took a deep breath.
“I need to leave tomorrow,” she said. She looked at her cell phone like it showed a message urging her to come home.
Roberts glanced at her but didn’t say anything.
“You paid Harvey?” she asked.
“Yep,” said Roberts.
“Good. So you’ll give me a ride to the airport tomorrow?”
“We’re not quite done here yet,” he said.
Perfect, she thought. “Not done what?” she asked.
“I still might need you for a thing or two,” he said.
He looked at her and their eyes locked. She stared at him like she wanted to let him know that it was okay for him to want her; she was there for him. He looked away. Nothing. Gay, she thought. Definitively gay. Gay but lonely.
“How long until I go?” she asked.
“You know you don’t have to use that accent with me,” he said.
“I like my accent. It makes me feel exotic,” she said. “Fuck, you bore me sometimes.”
“Look, you owe Harvey. Harvey owes me. I’m collecting my debt. I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna need you for, but I might. I like to have my options open.”
She apologized in a way meant to make him feel guilty.
“People saw me with them,” said Roberts, changing the subject. “When their faces get up on the news, people are gonna say, ‘There was the other dude, too, the bald one. There were three of them.’”
“And the beautiful girl, don’t forget her,” said Jackie.
“You sure you saw those Chinese dudes take pictures of their phone?” asked Roberts. “Tak
ing pictures of all their calls? Their texts?”
She nodded her head. The image of the man turning Danzig’s head popped into her mind.
“Who do you think those two were calling all week long?”
“They called you.”
“They called me. Yes, they called me the minute they got here. Shit, they probably called me almost every day they were in town. ‘Where’s the liquor store?’ ‘Where’s the Mexican restaurant?’ ‘Can you bring me some cigarettes?’ So what do you think them Chinese boys wanted to do with that phone?”
“I don’t know.” said Jackie, playing dumb. “I know you don’t have a phone under your real name, though.”
“That’s not the point,” said Roberts. “The point is they know something about me. Someone gets curious enough, you never know what they can figure out with a ten-digit phone number. There are a million ways to pin a—”
Right then the phone he was holding began to vibrate. Roberts’s face went white. “I told you,” he said. The phone continued to vibrate. Jackie got off the bed and walked toward him. They both stared at the screen: Unknown Caller. She could smell rum coming off his breath. When the phone went quiet she put a hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t worry, baby.”
“Goddamn—I should’ve given it to you,” said Roberts. “They already know you’re in this, you get on—”
The phone began to vibrate again. “Answer it,” he said, pushing the thing toward her.
She took it from him. “Hello?” she said.
A woman’s accented voice on the other end answered: “Who’s this?”
Jackie stepped away from Roberts, moving toward the window as though to look outside. “Can I help you?” she said.
“Put him on,” said the woman’s voice.
Roberts appeared to be in a state of panic. His head shook back and forth when Jackie looked at him.
“He will only speak to you,” she said, “if he knows who is calling.”
“Tell him it’s Gloria.”
“Last name?”
“Last name is Cunt. C-U-N-T. Put him on the phone.”
Jackie smiled. She liked this woman. “Right away,” she said.
She touched the speaker icon on his phone before she handed it to Roberts. “Gloria,” she whispered.
“Hello?” he said.
“Everything good?” came the voice over the speaker.
Roberts winced, looked at the phone, switched it off speaker, and spoke into it. “Yeah, it’s fine. Who? Nah, just a prostitute I’m going to beat with my belt when I hang up.”
Jackie pointed at her own chest, raised her eyebrows. Roberts waved her away.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ll see,” he said. “I’ll let you know. It might take some time, okay? Patience. Long game. Of course.” He hung up.
“You didn’t tell her about me?” Jackie asked.
“Why would I do that?”
“Is she your wife?” Jackie knew she wasn’t, but sometimes she asked questions just to see how a man responded.
“Shit,” he said, wiping at his forehead. He checked the phone, made sure it was off, and shook his head.
That was all she needed to see. She flopped back on the bed, feeling like she was finally on to something good.
“Are you lonely?” she asked Roberts the next night. “Not in a sexual way, but in a normal lonely kind of way?”
He stared at her. They were sitting in the motel room, Roberts at the desk, Jackie on the bed.
“Come on,” he said, waving her away. “I don’t want to do all this shit.”
“I’m saying, just in a friendly way. I get lonely all the time, you know? I need to see people, be around people, just for dancing, talking. Otherwise, blah, what am I doing? Why am I here?” She paused for a moment, then asked, “Why are you keeping me here?”
“Because—and I’ll tell you one more time—you owe Harvey. Harvey owes me. So, in a sense—and I’m not saying this as an antifeminist thing, so don’t get all—but in a sense, I own you. And I may need you. I may very well still need your ass for something.”
“I could fly back if you need me.”
“Yeah, right.”
The truth was she could leave at any time. She had her identification cards, credit cards. She came and went as she pleased, though she’d spent most of her days sunbathing by the kidney-shaped pool just outside the room. The worst that could happen was that Harvey would claim her debt wasn’t erased.
Roberts had just returned from Semion Gurevich’s apartment building. He had parked outside, just as he had the night before, and culled bursts of data sent via radio wave from the transmitters they’d hidden in the apartment’s smoke detectors. It took him less than an hour to download a day’s worth of recorded audio. The pictures Jackie had taken on her very first visit had allowed Roberts to plan exactly where he was going to place his little bugs. They were, as he liked to say, top-of-the-line NSA-level devices. Denver Mike had accompanied him to do the job. Danzig had stayed out front and watched the building, ready to call at the first sign of trouble. Roberts and Denver Mike had entered the building through the front door. Both men wore baseball hats, and kept their heads down. They checked in at the front desk. The doorman called up to Semion’s apartment, and Jackie—Semion of course was unconscious at that point—had told the doorman to send them up. On the way in, Denver Mike carried a large bag that held two two-liter soda bottles that had been filled with pig’s blood; on the way out, the bag—sagging heavily between the two men—carried Jackie.
Now, back in the motel room, Roberts was done talking. He turned back to his computer, raised his headphones, and continued to listen to the day’s recordings. Sound waves played across his screen like electrocardiographs of Semion Gurevich’s heart.
“What’s he saying?” Jackie asked.
“It’s just TV,” said Roberts. “The man watches a lot of fucking TV.”
It wasn’t until the next night that Roberts sat up a little straighter. Jackie turned her eyes from the television to watch him rewind and listen to something again. He did this a few more times, then opened up a spreadsheet so he could fill in a few little boxes: TIME STAMP, SOURCE, CONTENT OF CONVERSATION. Semion had finally spoken.
“What is it?” she asked.
He turned, looked at her, clearly excited. “It’s what God put me on this planet to do.”
He stood up, unplugged the computer, and brought it into the bathroom with him. It was the first time he’d ever done that. She heard him begin to pee, loudly.
She reached into her pocket, pulled out a paper bindle, and poured the contents—three crushed Xanax—into his can of Coke. It wasn’t a lot, but he didn’t pop pills and she figured it would do the job. She swirled the can. He stopped peeing, started, stopped again. The toilet flushed.
“Go walk around the block,” he said, when he’d come back out. “I gotta make a private call.”
She left, not even trying to stay by the door to listen. It didn’t matter. She’d get what she wanted in the next few hours.
“I’ll take you to the airport tomorrow,” he said when she came back.
“Finally,” she said. “No lie, I’m gonna miss this trip. Best two-week vacation I’ve had.”
“Twelve days,” he said, bending over and taking out a double stack of hundred-dollar bills. “Eighteen thousand.”
“What about the travel days?”
“I didn’t say I’d pay you for that,” he said, anger creeping into his voice.
“Shit, you take me here twelve days. I do all the work, get you into his house. You never even could’ve gotten in there without me!” She paused, waited a beat, continued. “I fucked him, you know that? You think I wanted to? I do all the heavy lifting, all the hard work. I still only make fifty cents to your dollar.”
He didn’t reply. She took the money and started counting it, pretending to be both upset with him and concerned with her payment. Roberts went back to the desk and sat down
. She watched him sip his drink and refill it. Then he put his headphones back on.
He stayed awake longer than she expected. It was ten minutes after two in the morning when he slumped over on the bed, his computer sliding off his belly. She pulled his shoes off, studying his face, watching his chest rise and fall. Satisfied, she eased the computer from his hands. She set it next to him and sat watching him for another full minute. Then she brought his laptop to the bathroom and entered the passcode she’d caught him typing the day before.
On the desktop were the photos she’d taken of Semion’s apartment. She clicked on one of them and was briefly transported back to that night. Then she closed it and clicked on the other files until she found the spreadsheet. Her eyes scanned the time stamps. She stepped back into the main room, checked on Roberts, confirmed he was still sleeping, and grabbed the headphones off the desk.
Back in the bathroom, she opened the latest audio file. After forwarding through most of it, she listened and heard what sounded like a physical confrontation. She could hear what sounded like a muffled gunshot, a loud thud, someone falling to the ground. Groaning. Two more suppressed shots. Then other men coming into the room. A voice said, “Move his fucking body to the shower. Moisey, Moisey, Moisey. No, no, come here Misha. Shh …” She heard Chinese words, things being moved around, and then the first voice again, speaking in Hebrew. She realized it must have been Isaak.
“So what?” he said. “It’s fucking two hundred kilos, man! The bitch in San Francisco will buy the whole thing.” Another voice said something, and Isaak replied, “So, you move here and we fucking split it eighty-twenty. You’ll be rich. Retire in two years. Misha, don’t be so fucking negative.” She felt sick. Had they just killed Semion Gurevich? She pictured kissing him, hugging him, his warm body, his breath in her ear. A drop of sweat dripped from her armpit and slid down her side. He was alive, and now he’s dead. She almost cried, and then immediately stopped.
She stepped back into the bedroom and set the computer next to Roberts. He continued to sleep. She grabbed his phone from the desk, took it to the bathroom, swiped it open, unlocked it, and looked at his call history. He had called Gloria that evening, just after he’d asked Jackie to take a walk. Jackie entered the number into her own phone and saved it. You never know what you can figure out with a ten-digit phone number.
Every Man a Menace Page 18
