He checked his watch. Then put the gun in his left hand, his watch hand, and fiddled at his wrist with the right. Fingers so big it seemed impossible they could work such tiny knobs.
“‘Pray for us now and at the hour of our death…?’” he repeated, as his watch made a sequence of beeps. “So an hour it is.”
With that, he started the timer. 59:59. 59:58…
“God, Jesus, Mary, Saint Peter … whoever wants to step in, they’ve got one hour. They come, then hey. Maybe it’ll mean some changes for me too.”
“Thank you,” Casey whispered. “Thank you.”
The Bagman snorted and kicked a rickety little crate over for him to sit on. “Let’s see how much you’re thanking me before the hour’s up.”
Then it was just the two of them looking at each other in the cold cavern chill of the warehouse, listening to the distant sounds of mice in the walls. The Bagman feeling that reassuring alter-ego presence that seemed just out of sight, just out of reach, at times like this, when he didn’t need to hurry. Like living a dream, watching himself do things that normal people couldn’t.
He wanted to sit, too, but wouldn’t allow himself. He wasn’t a man at times like this. He was a force of nature, and forces of nature never took a seat. It was part of the image.
Everything was, really. He looked like somebody had shaved a bear and put a human head on it. Then shaved most of the head, too, but left a goatee so people would know this wasn’t completely an animal. Then — and this was the worst part — plucked out the eyes and left them in the sun for years before putting them back, until every last thing had faded from them. Everything human, everything mammal, everything reptile, until there was…
Nothing. Absolutely nothing there except the implacable wall of destiny.
A look like that didn’t come naturally for most guys. They had to cultivate it. Him, though, it was there in his first school picture.
Casey sat up straighter under the harsh mercury lamps dangling from the rafters. A youngish guy, not young young, but in the neighborhood of thirty. A full head of sandy hair, looking like he spent some money on the cut. He probably didn’t have much trouble with women. He just looked like the kind of guy who’d gotten by on natural, crooked-grin charm.
“How’s, uh … how’s the rotator cuff?” he asked.
Incredible. “You heard about that, huh?”
“It seemed pretty funny at the time.”
“Probably doesn’t seem so funny now, does it?” He waited for Casey to shake his head. “If you know about that, you must know it didn’t change anything. I just went to Plan B.”
Which pretty much killed off that line of questioning, and they were back to looking at each other in silence. Or would’ve been if Casey hadn’t started staring at the shiny worn concrete of the floor. And when it came, the Bagman was surprised it had taken this long:
“Why are they having you do this? What’s this about?”
“What makes you think I know?” the Bagman said. “You take your garbage to the curb once a week. The guy that empties it in the back of the truck, has he ever once come and asked why you don’t want it anymore?” He muscled aside reasons with a twitch of his shoulder. “I don’t know why. I don’t care. I didn’t ask and Ritchie didn’t tell me. You guys, you fuck up, and it’s not even because you’re too stupid not to, it’s because you just don’t give a shit.”
Reasons were like picking a card from a deck. How did someone like Casey MacKenna end up here? Skimmed too much, fingers got too sticky, cock ended up in the wrong hole, tongue got loose in front of the wrong person, wrong department, wrong agency, or looked like it could’ve — pick a card, any card.
“You guys fuck up in so many ways that when you’re finally called to account for it, you don’t even know what it is you’ve done.” He worked his tongue along the front of his teeth, then spat. “If you can’t keep track of it, don’t expect me to.”
At least give Casey some credit for not trying to tell him there must’ve been some kind of mistake. That it wasn’t supposed to be him. The things the Bagman had heard more times than he could count. The things he never listened to anymore. They were just sounds coming out of a mouth, the stuff before the screams and rasps and gurgles.
Casey MacKenna went back to praying, silently now — head bowed and lips moving, the whole nine yards. Easy to do here, and it wasn’t purely the circumstances. The warehouse looked more like a church than a lot of actual churches did nowadays. Giant old brick monstrosity, a century old if it was a day, built back when people cared how something looked, when they took pride in it. It was about more than function with them then. It was about style, too. Huge arched doorways at the loading bays, skinny arched windows higher up to let in sunlight and moonlight — as good a place as any for a man to find out if he actually had a maker to meet.
The Bagman could feel the weight of the hour building. All those minutes accumulating on his wrist and rolling off onto Casey’s shoulders, it was a wonder the kid could keep himself up off the floor.
“How’s the time looking?” Casey asked.
He checked. “Thirty-four minutes.”
“Gone? Or left?”
His face was a skull carved on a mountainside. “Thirty-four.”
“What do you want?” Casey asked. “I can pay you.” He had to know how much good this was going to do, but couldn’t help himself. “If you don’t want money there must be something else. Everybody wants something. Everybody wants something they haven’t told anybody about. I can be the guy that gets it, or does it, or finds it, whatever it is. What do you want?”
“How about you shut the fuck up and quit boring me. I’d like that.”
Casey shifted on his crate, moving like he weighed 600 pounds, 500 of it desperation.
“You don’t know the first thing about me, or what I want,” the Bagman said. Gun in his right hand, he started ticking off fingers on the left, one by one. “I’ve got a wife. Got a son. A daughter. Three things I care about. They’re all I care about. That keeps it simple.”
He’d always figured that guys like Casey, the yappy little beta-dogs, had it in their heads that he spent his off-hours in a cage somewhere, a cave, hibernating until he was needed. They couldn’t connect their truth of him with the other side, the family man mask. They couldn’t picture him tying shoelaces and grilling hamburgers in the summer.
Just like they couldn’t relate to the terrible, tricky balance of it. The razor’s edge he had to walk. Only the things you cared about could make you feel fear, and when you kept such a short list, they embodied all the fear in your world. And his family, they didn’t have a clue what he did. No idea. But someday they’d find out. The families always did. Worlds would collide and they’d learn the truth and their lives would collapse. It was the only day he dreaded.
“If that’s all you care about,” Casey said, “then what’s it matter if you let me go?”
“Four things, then. I give my word, I care about keeping it.” His eyes narrowed at this loser and his sad attempts at an exit strategy. “You don’t think I’ve heard all this before? Anything you can imagine, I’ve had it offered to me. Not just money. Some of you lowlifes, you’re ready to give up your wives, your girlfriends, your sisters, your mothers. Some guys, their own little girls, even. They’ve got such sewers for minds they think a little girl is something I’d want.” Sometimes he couldn’t believe the world they lived in. “Those are the ones that really get me. They’re the ones that make this almost fun.”
Casey hunkered in thought for a moment, then said, in a glum voice, “Reminds me of a song. One of those creepy old folk songs, all death and shipwrecks, you know the kind? It’s about some poor bastard waiting at the gallows.” With a miles-away look in his eye, he sang. “‘Hangman, hangman, wait a little while; I think I see my sister coming, riding many a mile…�
�”
Figured. Some things never changed. A song about a guy pimping out his sister.
“How’s it end?” the Bagman asked. “It can’t have been good.”
“Nah.” Casey shook his head. “The hangman, he pockets all the bribes from the guy’s brother and his friends, fucks the guy’s sister, then hangs him anyway. He’s laughing while he does it.”
The Bagman nodded. “Sure. It’s what he does. What he is.”
Casey squirmed, eyes like a trapped rabbit’s, inching closer to the unraveling point. “I’ve got no chance here with you, do I?”
“With me? No, you never did. But it’s not me that’s the variable here. Your divine intervention, that’s what we’re waiting for.”
“Go on, then! Kill me and be done with it, why don’t you,” Casey told him, sick of the waiting. “You’ve got nothing better to do than wait around here? Just get this over with!”
The Bagman checked his watch, calm as a man waiting for a train. “No. No, I said an hour, so that’s what it’s gonna be. What if, you know, God checked in a few seconds ago, thought He had time. ‘That idiot there, he’s got eighteen minutes to go, so first I’ll drop by Tokyo, there’s these people there that have only got two minutes left.’ Then God comes back and finds out I’ve done you early. What am I supposed to tell Him then?”
Pleased with himself for that one. Maybe that’s why he’d let MacKenna have an hour. It was better than TV. It was predictable enough that he knew the ending, but it was the getting there that had all the laughs.
“Do you believe in Him?” Casey asked. “God, I mean.”
“I used to. They raised me to. They didn’t live it, especially my old man. My dad, he was a real heavy-handed sonofabitch. But they raised me to.” His mouth barely moved while he spoke, like the words didn’t want to emerge. “Now? Now I don’t guess I do.”
“What changed?”
“Nothing. Nothing changed. Not a fucking thing.” He scowled at his hands. Clean, nails trimmed neatly, with a milky sheen to them. To look at them, you’d never have any idea how much blood was on them. “I’m the best argument against God that I know. If there’s a God, what good is He if he lets somebody like me walk around?”
There was a part of him that missed it, kind of: the time before he really knew who he was, what he could do, the things he could do and not feel, when he could still believe.
“You don’t think I’ve heard the prayers before? Guys in your position? Half the ones who know it’s coming and have the time, it’s the same thing out of them. Same words, only the voices change. The other half, most of them look like they’re trying to remember the words. I never saw one of them come close to getting an answer. Unless the answer’s always no. And if it’s always no, we’re back to what good is He?” The Bagman heaved a thoughtful sigh. “So if I gotta believe in anything, I’d say I believe in the finality of situations. I believe in death.”
And surely, by now, death had to believe in him, too. Two-way street, there.
“What’s going to happen to me? After?” Casey asked. “What are you going to do with—?”
“There’s not gonna be a funeral, if that’s what you’re getting at.” He pointed toward one end of the warehouse, where a wide roll-up door hid in the shadows. “I’ve got a barrel of acid waiting.”
That was it. That broke him, Casey going boneless, face beginning to contort with that snuffle-snort crying you’d see out of the picked-on kids on school playgrounds.
“I like to experiment with different ways of getting rid of bodies,” he said. “Some guys, they never stop trying to come up with ways to make their car run smoother. Or make a hotter barbecue sauce. Me … this is what I’ve got.”
Casey slid off the crate, pooling to the floor and starting to sob. Getting to that puppet stage they did sometimes, like none of their joints were connected anymore. The longer it went on, the stronger the Bagman felt a conviction that once tonight’s job was finished, he was going to have to drive around a good long time before he went home again. He took nothing home, ever. The last thing he wanted was to bring any residue of this shit past the front door. His wife, his son and daughter … he only wanted to show them the good things in life. Never this side of it.
I shouldn’t have done this, he thought, before he could squash it. Shouldn’t have done it this way. This was … a cruel thing to do.
Which had to be the most absurd thought ever to cross his mind. He’d fed a man alive to a pack of dogs and filmed it — that wasn’t cruel? But that wasn’t the same. Pain was just pain. It either stopped, or got so bad you couldn’t feel it anymore. Or it went all the way and everything stopped. He’d never had a problem with any of it. It was just work, the kind of work that few could even tolerate, let alone make an art of it.
So why was this different?
He puzzled on it awhile, as he watched Casey struggle to his knees and plant his elbows on the crate and clasp his hands and tip his face to the skinny arched windows, seeking the night sky, the blackness and the cold light of autumn stars.
Maybe that was it: Pain was a transitory thing, but this was shoving a man’s face straight into the void. Showing him how nothing and no one cared, making him wallow in the freezing truth of the emptiness at his end.
And then…? Just the damnedest thing. Casey’s hands broke their clasp and he lowered his gaze and seemed to follow something across the floor. Nothing there, though. The Bagman prided himself on good night vision.
“I thought we were alone,” Casey said, not much more than a whisper.
“We are,” the Bagman said. “After another couple minutes, I’m gonna be more alone.”
It didn’t faze him, as Casey’s gaze seemed to track something moving closer, out of the shadows and into the light. Casey glanced back at him, confused and something worse. “You don’t see that?”
Of course he didn’t. Just a lame try at mind games and desperate theatrics. Casey stared up at nothing, nothing coming closer, nothing standing in front of him now, and the immensity of the nothing pressing him to the floor again. Too bad it was his time to go. He would’ve had a great future as a senile old man.
“Fuck me, it’s real…?” Casey quavered to the empty space in front of him, half-question, half-statement.
This was what he wanted his last words to be? Play-acting? Seemed like a wasted opportunity, but then, it was coming at the end of a wasted life.
Casey whirled toward him. “Can’t you see that?” he shouted, eyes wide and full of things the Bagman had rarely seen in the eyes of the soon-to-be-dead. Terror, sure, but this time it reached into the territory of awe. “It’s the hangman! From the song. The way I always pictured him.”
Empty space. It couldn’t be anything except empty space. Or maybe…
“Maybe it’s Death,” the Bagman said.
It wouldn’t be the first time. He’d done a guy years ago who swore he’d seen Death waiting in the shadows, a painted lover beckoning like the Whore of Babylon. Another guy who swore there was a surgeon picking his teeth with a scalpel. He’d always figured it was just the hallucination that guys like them got instead of tunnels and white lights.
Casey glanced back at him as his fear turned inside-out, into a crazed hopeful grin. “Then I wonder which of us He’s here for.”
What a thing to say. Real, though? The Bagman wanted not to believe it. There was no reason to believe. He ordered himself not to. Yet … the doubt was there. The possibility. Like with the crew guys lower down the food chain furthering his legend, it was always easy to believe the worst.
And that smell gathering in the still, chilled air. Like earth and mold, fungus and rot. Was that his imagination too, this guy’s delusions turning contagious—
Dee-dee-deet. Dee-dee-deet.
The Bagman let his watch cheep a couple
more times, then jabbed the alarm off. With the next deep breath, the spell was broken. Damn right this had been wrong, all kinds of wrong.
“It’s that time,” he said.
He stepped forward, the gun leading the way, Casey MacKenna scrambling backwards in a jittery crabwalk. He scuttled one way, then another, away from the line of fire, sure, but half the time his gaze darted to the empty space at his side, and he didn’t want to go that way, either, his panicked scrabble guided by the seen and unseen alike.
The Bagman fired once, twice, saw sparks fly off the concrete floor, missing by millimeters but still, he was missing, even though he was nearly on top of the guy. A third shot, and Casey dodged again, yelping in fright the whole time, and it was amazing — this was some real Matrix shit. The Bagman had never seen it, but heard it could get this way when life was on the line. He’d heard of people who’d survived a brush with death come away swearing that their senses were so heightened they could hear the lug nuts on a passing truck, swishing through the air.
He barreled forward, determined not to waste another bullet until he could pin this slippery asshole in one spot for half a second. Was that too much to ask for? Then, of all the stupid-lucky things, one of Casey’s flailing feet caught him square on the knee. All that bulk was intimidating, but it worked against him now. The knee bent wrong with a white-hot pop and he knew he’d be limping for days. He pressed on anyway, lurching forward and stamping down with one cinderblock shoe to hold Casey in place, leaning hard across his collarbone and up onto his throat.
One more muzzle flash, then blood.
Pain, too, Jesus God, more searing pain — how he’d managed to do this, he’d never know, but half the end of his shoe was missing. Then, too, he’d heard of golfers missing six-inch putts.
The Bagman hopped away on one foot before he went down hard and clumsy on the concrete, smooth as glass by a century of wear. From this new vantage point, he watched Casey MacKenna choke and bleed out, all spasms and denial now, bits of shoe leather and bone chips sticking out of his neck, as breath and life spewed from the same ragged hole. He watched without blinking, until it was over.
Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper Page 25
