The hitman chain-smoked organic cigarettes, read a somewhat spewily written small-press crime novel, and drank ginger root tea from a thermos as she staked out Tommy Marlo’s apartment, waiting for the whole street to go to sleep.
Around four o’clock in the morning, Greta slipped out of the car, walking slowly in a loose, upright posture towards the apartment. She picked Tommy Marlo’s lock in less than forty seconds.
Greta had killed twenty-one people, and when she was twelve years old her family had been driving home from camping, and she’d looked out the window at the exact perfect second to see a golden retriever disappear under the wheels of a pickup truck and spit back out headless with its neck now wider than its body. Tommy’s apartment was still, by a good margin, the saddest thing she’d ever seen.
For starters it was an airless third-floor studio next to the garbage chute. Even a pretty good decorator would have had trouble, and Marlo obviously thought feng shui was a dish you ordered for takeout. The bathroom was so small they put the sink in the main room, almost hanging over a double mattress about as thick as a slice of cheese. Marlo’d triggered the ink packs and left the green slime all over the floor and sink, a thick trail leading into the shower, which was stained fluorescent. Looking at the spatter, she guessed he’d taken the ink pack straight to the face, gotten confused and remembered the shower late.
The closet was empty, so he’d obviously split. Dyed green like that, most of the cash he’d stolen was about as useful as an asshole to a jellyfish. Marlo had been around the block, he’d know better than to try to buy a plane ticket with cash the day after an armed robbery, so Greta figured he either had a hot car or was hitchhiking. Greta tossed the place for receipts or relevant documents and didn’t find anything; Marlo wasn’t a conscientious tax guy. All told, it took Greta an hour. She did a quick double-check, scanned for her own hairs, and left. She backed out the door, hoping to shut it as quietly as possible. Having pretty strong natural instincts, she sensed the landlord’s presence without seeing or hearing him. She turned around smiling.
He was an older guy, late fifties, janitor-skinny, holding a bucket of water in one hand and a long, ratty-looking cleaning tool in the other. The old guy looked like he’d been scared for a second. His whole body relaxed when he saw Greta’s breasts, or, more accurately, that she was a person with breasts. She made an embarrassed expression cross her face, then held a finger over her lips. The old man smiled and nodded at her a bit sympathetically, knowing Marlo. He looked at her as a man who’d seen thousands of mistakes from a distance and judged almost none of them.
Greta stayed in the doorway and made a show of searching through her fanny pack. The landlord kept coming, he got to the trash chute and put the bucket down, dipping the tool in, and then he reached up to open the chute. He leaned in, and before he had time to scrub one wall, Greta had already closed the distance and stabbed him twice in the lungs. The garbage chute banged closed, and she heard the wet sponge-on-a-stick bang down the sides towards the bottom. In one motion she’d covered his mouth and nose and started dragging him into Marlo’s apartment, staring with a distant aesthetic admiration at the bright red trail he left across the filthy hallway floor. Dust bunnies oblivious, playing in a field of blood.
8
Having grown up in Victoria, Tommy knew exactly how necessary it was to bring a raincoat with him as he hitchhiked up island. But — as was happening more and more, lately — the things he knew were smart to do had very little impact on the things he ended up doing.
As most people would expect, spending his early childhood as half of one of the approximately 750-and-a-half black people in Victoria, British Columbia, had been alienating and confusing in a medium-mild sort of way for Tommy. Not the kind of thing you think about every day, but something that’s always bubbling near the surface, turning up in ambiguous interactions that stick in your mind for months on end. As fewer people might expect, spending his early teen years as half of one of the approximately 750-and-a-half black people in Victoria, British Columbia, had been, initially, awesome.
Because Tommy’s mother coached the choir to Nationals every year, Tommy had started attending a private high school in grade nine on scholarship. And here, instead of being a normal kid who occasionally elicited a weird, quickly hushed reaction from people, he became a straight-up celebrity.
The clique of hottest girls in grades eleven and twelve loved rap and basketball and the far-off idea of black guys. So as his friends from middle school struggled through a first term of white-boy pimples and wet dreams, Tommy, in just a couple months, had been passed between three impossibly attractive young women in button-down shirts and kilts rolled up at the waist to show more of their thighs.
They were wild girls with a lot of money, and so Tommy had also started smoking weed with them, and then started doing coke with them, and then, because the girls would get nervous, started carrying their money and picking up the coke for them and making friends with the low-level dealers who would always want to talk to him and drive around with him and dap him up and sing along, every “nigga” included, to Three 6 Mafia songs.
But the thing about celebrities is that they’re also commodities. Even as a fourteen-year-old, Tommy had had an inkling of just what he was to these girls, which was a gift. They loved him, but they loved him the way they loved the Mini Coopers their fathers had given them after they’d passed their road tests. And that love is small and sincere and present, until they crumple the fender.
They were older than Tommy, older and more confident and more soft and more lovely than anyone he’d known until then, but they were still very young. And they were brave, but brave in the way a buffalo is brave, because their whole lives are so strong and sturdy and slow their brains can’t even process predators. So when Jasmine and Sam got caught pounding lines while they skipped chapel, and the locker search turned up two balls of coke and seven pills of ecstasy, they’d learned suddenly and in a panic that they had a lot, and that losing any of what they had would hurt way more than keeping it felt good. So they’d snitched on Tommy, and because they were the beautiful daughters of commodities traders and he was, still, half of one of the 750-and-a-half black people in Victoria, British Columbia, he’d been expelled and told by five consecutive fat men in short-sleeved dress shirts that he was lucky not to go to jail, and Jasmine and Sam had gone to rehab, and then Dartmouth.
The world these girls had showed him had stayed fun for a while, but it had not stayed awesome. Tommy had credibility with drug dealers, and he still had an appeal to all the girls who wanted their lives to feel like a music video for about the length of a music video, but those girls weren’t rich girls anymore, and the drugs stayed the same price. And his mom was still there, hearing the smoky shred of his vocal chords, her patience draining and the space it left filling with rage. So he’d started scamming college kids who wanted to buy down on the corner of Douglas and Yates.
After he’d put together a little stake, he decided to go in on a half ounce of blow with his girlfriend. Heading back to her car after the pickup, he was stopped by two uniformed cops and asked why he was in a hurry and what was in his bag. And he said I’m not, and my gym stuff. And the older cop had smirked and said oh yeah you’re going to the Y to shoot hoops? And Tommy had taken a little toot picking up the blow so he was riding an edge, feeling a little sharp and a little quick and a little bit sick of being half of one of the 750-and-a-half black people in Victoria, British Columbia, and he’d said no, fuckhead, I’m going to Pilates. And then there was the side of the building pressed on his face, and then there was air and free space and enough time to start to run, and then there was the sidewalk pressed on his face and about fifty thousand volts of Taser in every part of his body at once, and then there was another expulsion, a youth magistrate, another nineteen consecutive thick dudes in sweaty short-sleeved dress shirts telling him he was lucky not to go to juvie. And then there was his mom, not patient anymore, not m
ad anymore, just empty, just drained, saying do what you like, Tommy, it’s on you, I’m done. Just done.
Tommy decided that if done was a thing he and his mother were letting each other be, then he was about done with about every part of being half of one of the 750 and a half black people in Victoria, British Columbia, and the only part of it he changed was the being in Victoria, British Columbia, part.
And now he was back, and the light drizzle had started, as it always will, at the exact point at which Tommy was too far from his home and too close to the bus stop to turn around. Even right then, Tommy felt what he knew was coming: a long, slow soak that just settled over you, and that you didn’t understand the depth of until you caught yourself shivering. And even knowing what was coming, he stayed at the stop, waiting fifteen minutes for the bus that came every sixteen minutes.
He rode all the way to the end of the line, waiting through a driver change and a random stop where they kept the driver but changed the number on the front of the bus. He hoped for his hoodie to dry, which, being thickly knit hemp, it would in another nine to twelve hours.
The driver turned off the bus without saying anything and waited for Tommy to rouse himself and wrestle his huge, misshapen bag onto his shoulder (he wasn’t a good packer). Tommy spoke for the first time in what felt like a long time and thanked the driver in a weak, phlegmy voice, and the driver grunted in response.
Tommy figured that the Greyhound bus, while comfortable and not illegal, was probably being watched and staked out by both the club and the cops, and that hitchhiking, while cold and dangerous and definitely illegal, was off the grid and impossible to watch from a parked cop car or blank-panel gang-murder van and was therefore the best of his bad options.
Tommy hadn’t hitchhiked in a couple years, but it’s not exactly a skill you lose, or really a skill at all. He waited patiently in the wide shoulder of the road he’d selected, just far enough away from the Langford Superstore to avoid the big crowds, but close enough to get a decent runoff of cars driven by lonely people.
He was there for just over an hour before two girls using a cardboard box as an umbrella walked up to the hitching spot. He smiled and waved at them, pointed at their box, and said: “Jealous.” The girls laughed more than was reasonable, walked all the way up to him and nervously rushed through asking him if he’d been waiting long and what his name was and if he had any K or molly to sell. Both of them were wearing thick flannel work shirts unbuttoned and tied so that their pierced bellies showed. One of the piercings was a stylized spike with a purple plastic diamond as the cap. The other was in the shape of a very thin dolphin.
Kaylie and Rodha gave their ages as eighteen, which Tommy pegged as a couple years bloated. The girls were hitching up to a camp-out party in Duncan. Out of concern, Tommy asked them if they were meeting anyone up there, which set off an invitation to the party and some flirting from Kaylie that made him feel like he was watching an SPCA commercial. Tommy pretended that he might hit up the party then gave the girls some advice about buying safe party drugs that bored them and sent them both into their phones.
Tommy finally flagged down a nice car driven by a pretty middle-aged woman in a high school soccer sweater. He dropped his bag and rushed over.
“Are you with these girls?”
Tommy reached across the plane of her open window and gratefully touched her arm, which felt like a huge mistake even as it was happening. “No, no. It’s good that you’re thinking like that, about their safety, I mean. They need a ride, I do too, but I’m . . . separate. They’re not with me. But, like, myself too, I’ve been out here . . .” He’d shot his arm back to his side a while ago, and now found himself with it suspended oddly, his elbow up by his head. This was not going well.
The woman looked at Tommy suspiciously, which, he reflected sadly, actually probably meant she was a kind and ethical person who worried more about teenage girls trying to hitch than the adult male dirtbags standing near them. “I only have room for two. One of my seatbelts is broken.”
“Oh, that’s fine. Five seatbelts, right? So four of us, one for each . . .” Tommy paused and had a little, defeated smile for himself. Maybe hitchhiking is a skill you can lose. “One for each of us.”
“Um, no. I meant two are broken. That’s what I meant. I only have room for three people total. So I’ll take just you or I’ll take the girls. I’m not taking you with the girls.”
Tommy nodded and looked back at the girls, who were moving slowly towards the car, hugged together under the cardboard. “Uh, I get it. I get it. I’ll, uh . . . I’ll wait it out. Just, shit, they’re better off riding with a woman than some random creepy-ass trucker, right?”
The driver smiled at him and raised her eyes in a way that made Tommy realize he’d been leaning over her car in a not strictly socially appropriate way. He took a couple drifting steps back. “That’s what I think too. I hope you catch a lift.”
“I will. Thanks for stopping.” The girls arrived and Tommy opened the back door and held it for them with a jokey sweep of the arm. The girls piled in, laughing and not looking at him.
The car started pulling away and Tommy waved. Kaylie blew him a kiss, and flashed him one cup of a very normal blue bra, which was a thing he hadn’t wanted her to do. He’d just wanted to let the girls know he didn’t mind giving up the ride, and that he didn’t mind as a real person, not just as somebody who hoped someday to put his dick in or around them. He’d wanted to tell them that even in the sketchiest scenes — like hitchhiking with a fugitive who would have mugged them if he hadn’t had $55,000 in his backpack — girls like them could still find people who would cut them a break for honest reasons. He’d wanted to tell them that he hoped they’d only let people put their dicks in or around them when they (Kaylie and Rodha) thought it would be fun. He’d wanted to tell them they could think of favours and good breaks the way Tommy himself thought of them: as just a part of life, a small uneven counterpoint to all the bad randomness they were already used to, not as things they always had to earn or buy with one cup of a very normal blue bra.
But from the side of the road you can’t always convey thoughts that long and that sadly won. You can just wave and accept whatever soundless thing the person does back, and hope you both understand each other better than you can show right then with just your arm and the look on your face and the way you hold your body upright against the slow drizzle of rain soaking you through with only persistence and the whole sky and time.
9
Marlo had not left a big paper trail, which was to say that there was literally nothing written down in his entire apartment. There also hadn’t been any pens. But it had only taken Greta one short trawl of the Dark Web to find Marlo’s guy in Victoria, a small-time fence and hacker, and a big-league prog-rock and television-file pirate, named Bill in real life and Jumanji87 on 4chan.
Or that was the way it seemed. Sitting in her car outside Bill’s Fernwood condo building, Greta had to acknowledge that there was a very small chance that Bill wasn’t the only person selling credit card information and old-ass stolen laptops in Victoria, British Columbia. But she had weighed even that almost infinitesimal possibility before she brought her paintbrushes and giant bottle of what looked exactly like, and could even actually be, human blood into this poor guy’s cheap condo.
It wasn’t so much that Greta was nervous but more that she was protective of her own image and pride. You bring a bottle of something that definitely could be blood into a guy’s house, paint an original and not terrible picture on his wall, and it sends a very strong message, communicates your intent. You do the same to some torrenter who happens to have gotten his hand on some used computers, and then you just look like a ditz. A weird, psycho ditz, which is one kind of ditz that nobody likes.
Greta opened the sack and took a last look at the bottle of what could even actually be human blood, which was sweating in the heat. The hitman closed the bag and, as she often did, spoke to herself as if
the other self was sitting on the hood of her car and could hear through glass. “Commit. The idea’s the idea.”
The actual home invasion couldn’t have gone any better. Bill was out of the apartment, his hallway was empty, and his lock was easy. To top it all off, he was extremely well organized, all his stolen laptops arranged in a long, wheeled file folder. Marlo’s laptop wasn’t there, as she’d figured. Even he had to know what he had. There was also a ton of medical-grade marijuana lying around, and after considering deeply and finally dismissing the idea of stealing Bill’s Volcano, Greta pocketed three individually packaged joints of Sativa before she settled into thinking about where to paint the blood portrait.
The best spot would probably have been the dingy, tight hallway between the front door and the two bedrooms in the back (it had a claustrophobic feel that she thought would really work to highlight the intensity of the colour palette), but she had to make sure he got all the way inside so she could contain him in the apartment. So she settled for the living room wall. The living room had good light, the wall primed with a pale single coat of beige paint. The room was a bit too spacious for her liking, but it did have a bank of computers and a bunch of fans buzzing and a huge, stained couch that was collapsing in on itself, all of which would, hopefully, help to give Bill the claustrophobic, night-terror feeling she was hoping for.
The living room would be a fine spot for the mural.
There is no way to be brought into the world of contract killing that is more or less usual than any other.
Four years prior, Greta had graduated with a master’s degree in art history from a prestigious US university. And for the six years it had taken her to go through her university education, she was considered a successful young woman, having gotten her degrees from schools people had heard of. Then, all at once, she became just a young woman with $41,000 of student debt, no employable skills, and no desire to do a PhD.
MARRY, BANG, KILL Page 5
