MARRY, BANG, KILL

by Andrew Battershill

  “How bad?”

  She lost the straight-face game, dropped the fist, and snorted involuntarily. “Bad. Really bad.”

  “To death?”

  Joey sat up straight, turning to look at him out of one eye. “No, just short of that. So you learn.”

  Tommy laughed, waved his arms like a linesman waving off an offside goal. “Wow, that’s hard as fuck. You got it. You’re ready. You’re a threatener now. I won’t say . . . that word. Out of respect.”

  “Respect for these hammers.” She made two fists, then broke one to wipe at her hair again.

  Tommy said, “I lived in Kingston for a couple months.”

  “Really?”

  “A hundred per cent. And I’m thinking, we’re two people ten feet from the ocean who have both shopped at the President’s Choice in Kingston. We can’t afford another second not looking at this water. This natural-beauty shit.”

  Tommy immediately lifted his legs up and spun around. A sharp, residual pain shot across his bruised sternum. He sucked in a little breath, then he offered his arm to her, which she ignored as she cautiously stood, walked around, and reseated herself. The waves were breaking gently over the rocks.

  Joey started speaking a beat before she’d finished pulling a loose strand of hair out of her mouth. “Did you give yourself a splinter?”

  “No. I gave myself three splinters.”

  She supported her chin with her hand and her hand with her knee. “And you didn’t even cry. You must be tough.”

  “You must really know what you’re talking about.” He stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankle. He tilted his head back and looked up at the trees overhanging the beach behind them, now starting to get framed by the darkness. Joey reached over and gently placed a joint between his thumb and forefinger. The pad of her finger brushed against the knuckle of his thumb. It was a calm night and only the very tops of the trees moved and only slightly.

  He thanked her using his eyes and the angle of his head. Tommy lit the joint, held the smoke for as long as he could, and passed the joint back before exhaling in the general direction of Alberta. At some point the joint appeared back in his hand and they sent it back and forth for a while before it went out. Instead of relighting it, Joey stuffed the roach into a pocket of her coat-sweater, situated oddly somewhere in the middle of her ribs.

  The two of them sat there quietly together, not holding hands but with their hands close together. It was dark enough now that the ocean and the sky were indistinct, both just a stretching, softly audible darkness. And they continued not to talk, and their hands stayed a small distance apart, and their legs brushed only on the downswing of Joey’s kicks, and Tommy so, so did not want to get tortured to death by a motorcycle club.

  32

  As bad as his fact-, word-, name-, and number-retention was, Glass Jar had a freakishly mimetic spatial memory. Given any amount of time, he would not recall the name of the current Canadian prime minister, but he could remember in an instant how to reach houses in cities he’d visited once, years prior. Glass Jar was always aware of the cardinal directions and saw an expanding spiderweb of interconnecting routes to and from where he was, or wanted to go.

  Once, after a few drinks at the HBI, Glass Jar had followed the large black woman who lived on Quadra back to her house. He did it in the same way he did many things, thoughtlessly and fully assured, something unspoken and unspeakable pulling his head along, the rest of him only following. If at the end of the trip he’d ended up helping her take out the garbage and making best friends, or killed her and stolen her jewellery and microwave, he would have felt equally that it wasn’t what he’d been planning to do. That night she’d driven herself slowly home, in a legally-over-the-limit-but-not-drunk way, as Glass Jar barely contained his urge to drive his truck so fast that it merged into her car and they became one thing and their new onething drove until the horizon met the sea and they felt hugged by the cold, everywhere touch of water. He maintained a tight follow on her bumper. By the time they got to her house she’d already tried to wave him around and was shoulder-checking him constantly, definitely aware and afraid of him, and Glass Jar had enough of a sick-belly feeling that he simply sped off after she turned into her driveway.

  That night had been over a year ago, and he’d spent less than four seconds outside her house. But, in the thin, squeezing focus of his crank fix, he plotted the most efficient possible route back there, occasionally banging the fuzzy, pilled ceiling of his truck with his fist. As he went to make a slight right turn, his left arm lost motor function, he felt the wheel pulling through his loose, slipping fingers, and he let the truck inch itself slowly to the shoulder before he yanked the parking brake. He dove out of the car, shook his arm wildly from the shoulder, rolled sideways across the gravel, and ended up on his back, dragging the limp arm through the pebbles and the dirt, leaving a vague trail of blood as he reopened his dog bites.

  “Come on, wing. I need this wing, I need two wings. I need two wings to be me. To be who I am, in the sky. Who I really am in the sky, I need the wing. I need you, wing, to work.”

  He took two good hammer-fists to the arm, scraped it in the dirt a little more, and then gradually got to feeling as if the feeling was coming back. Glass Jar stood, gingerly made a fist, and kept the wing moving as he walked back to the truck, trying to remember where he’d put his pipe.

  33

  Constable Mike Richmond had already spent a pretty decent portion of the time he had left to pursue Marlo pulled over to the side of the road, digging the heels of his hands between his eyes and crying. It was the weeping of a person unused to tears: a hard, eye-swelling sob, born more out of frustration and the pre-emptive knowledge of rejection than actual sadness. It was self-pity, tempered in no degree whatsoever with irony.

  There was no part of Mike that could laugh his failure off, no part of him that could rationalize the ways in which, at least, he would have avoided hurting others or himself, no part of him able to open the umbrella of perspective against the steady downpour of his anticipated disappointment.

  Richmond came out of his crying spell feeling soothed, purged at the very least, and he started the car back up. The calm, sonorous voice of Buddhist stock tips boomed immediately from the speakers behind him.

  “There is no safe ground on the path to enlightenment. The path is the taking away of ground. That’s all the path ever was: a slow, hard losing. A losing, not a loss. Thinking there was a you and being wrong, if wrong were a thing you could be if you tried. If you tried. If there was a you. If, if, if, if. Ffffffffffffffffffffff. Now, let’s turn this perspective to currency trading in the smaller Eastern markets . . .”

  Once he thought of it, Mike immediately began beating himself up for not thinking of it earlier. The key was Glass Jar. It had started, for Mike, with Glass Jar, and one way or another it would end with Glass Jar. He’d gotten the information from Glass Jar and immediately run from and ignored him. Glass Jar had talked, he’d talked to Mike, and he’d probably talked to someone else. It stood to reason that if he kept an eye on Glass Jar, he’d get something out of it. A club member, maybe the hitter. If anyone was coming to the island, they’d check in on Glass Jar, make sure he didn’t get out of line, maybe have him run an errand. It was a long shot, but it was also his best shot. The only problem was the one Mousey had told him about: he was alone. He couldn’t waste time watching the shack just in case some club-hired hitter stopped by for a chat, and he couldn’t watch the shack for that long at a time anyway.

  And of course, the answer had also been given to him, accidentally, by Mousey. Mike was, as Mousey had pointed out, a cop without anyone’s help, trying to mess around with a life-and-death situation in his spare time. But he was a cop with access to equipment, and without the supervision of a competent, engaged, or in any way organized superior. Reubens had literally no idea how to use the digital surveillance equipment they had at the station. They’d never had to break it out,
and if they ever did, Mike could wipe it or postdate a formal requisition, no problem.

  The only thing that didn’t go smoothly about putting the camera in Glass Jar’s house was that Mike stepped ankle-deep in a puddle of spilled oil in Glass Jar’s driveway/lawn. As a result, Mike’d had to sit down, take off his shoes, and roll the slick pant-leg up against and into his considerable leg hair. He’d had to watch his step very carefully after that; there was a weird amount of broken glass on Glass Jar’s front lawn.

  But Mike was growing better at managing his expectations and disappointments, and he couldn’t really have asked for better: Glass Jar was out of the house, and there was a perfect, vaguely inconspicuous tree from which the front door, living room window, and driveway were all in range of the camera.

  Mike drove home barefoot but proud of himself, proud of the chances he was starting to take, the things he was starting to realize. He was giving in to the fluidity of the situation, and he was doing all he could: taking away a little bit of ground at a time.

  34

  How weak and slow and sad.

  Greta watched the huge, clumsy, incompetent rookie cop place surveillance equipment on his snitch’s property. She had suspected he wouldn’t be a problem when she’d first seen him slumping around the police station, taking ages to get the equipment ready, and he’d confirmed his utter floundering with this move. Glass Jar had told him more than he even knew, and the kid’s only move was to double back and watch Glass Jar. Weak, sad, not a problem. He even looked like he’d been crying, but it was possible that was just the general puffiness that so often accompanies mediocrity.

  The rookie even walked back to his car without shoes on, because real, actual, watching-a-person-through-your-windshield-and-planning-or-at-least-deeply-considering-their-death life has nothing but disdain for subtle imagery. Barefoot Baby Cop Slumps Home to Wait for Irrelevant Surveillance Footage was not a great, nor even a passable painting; it wouldn’t hang in a gallery, but it sure was realist.

  So on the one hand, she knew that the Quadra cops were, after all, no threat, which was a weight off her mind. On the other hand, she had wasted her entire first day on the island and was no closer to Marlo. Her plans were, as yet, vague but would probably involve staking out the Simmons house. She would sit outside a retired singing teacher’s cabin, working the job her career was riding on (and, with Darillo waiting and hating and being a psycho in the wings, maybe her life more than her career), depending only on chance. Greta sneered once more at the young cop as he drove away to go twiddle his thumbs somewhere.

  Having just thought about the move in such derisive terms, she resisted the urge to twiddle her own thumbs as she thought about what to do next. The hitman liked it best when a decisive action was available to her. That decisive action could be a subtle thing, to wait or to flee, or to take a minute and get more details, but she would do it steadily and confidently and smoothly, because that’s who she was now. A person who did real things in the real world to real people, as if life itself were a sport for which she had trained. But there was no decisive action here, no matter how subtle or how guns-blazingly overt. She thought about calling Sergei then flipped her head down and sent him an upbeat, if somewhat terse, text. She thought about heading to the Simmons house, staking it out for the night, but she hadn’t brought her night vision stuff with her, and the chances of Marlo rolling over at dusk, carless, felt small.

  The smart play was to go back to her hotel, drink a valerian root tea, and sleep the sleep of surgeons. She would wake up steady-handed and steady-headed and ready to pull a forty-eight-hour stakeout and triple banger if need be. That was the smart play, and now, with Darillo on her and Sergei already losing confidence, was the time for smart plays, more than it had maybe ever been.

  The hitman stayed an extra while in her car, staring at the forest through the shabby windows that went right through Glass Jar’s shack, which was a bit like staring at a beautiful statue that somebody had framed with rubble.

  Her pensive moment was interrupted when she ran her knuckle down the outside of her throat and sensed rather than felt the long, oddly dark hair that had, like a shocking number had recently, somehow sprouted all alone in the middle of her neck. She barely even grew arm hair; now this? One dark hair at a time, always on her throat; this was life now? With her right hand, Greta twisted the hair out and drummed a jerky, nervous tune on her steering wheel, then her thigh, and then her left hand. And then she started the car.

  The hitman was going to get very drunk.

  35

  There was a thin slice of the spectrum between sobriety and full-on amphetamine toxicity in which Glass Jar felt confident enough to approach another person while he was carrying a gun. Sitting with his car door open, staring at a small bald patch of forest a few feet away, Glass Jar reached his sweet spot. This pipe was just about done, but there was no reason not to blow it out and get one last good smoke out of it.

  From somewhere, Glass Jar heard beautiful singing that he couldn’t imagine imagining. He closed his eyes and listened to the tiny, dissipating pieces of song his ears could catch. Glass Jar wrapped his sickly, trembling fingers around the gun’s barrel, pointing it, as one unschooled in the basics of firearm safety, at his chest.

  “Money. Money. Get the money. Keep the wing moving. Soar. Get to Argentina alone. Spit on a rain cloud. Money. You are grown. And you handle yourself, no matter what.” He opened his eyes so wide that the lids became forgettable. He spoke into the canted rear-view cutting diagonally through his image. “All you need to handle is you, everything else is just pebbles on the road. They go where they go. You handle you.”

  He lost his balance getting out of the truck. As he moved to stand straight, he caught himself wishing for his plan to work. He smacked himself abruptly in the forehead with the gun, opening a small, instantly swollen cut. A thin line of blood ran down his face and off the tip of his nose. “If wishes were fishes, they’d live in the sky. And they’d die real fast there.”

  Incautiously dropping the gun at his feet, Glass Jar removed his shirt, throwing it to the side. He picked the gun back up, and on legs that felt like bubbles of air he ran to the door, threw it open and entered the house. The Marlo mom stopped singing as soon as he was in, but she didn’t move from the music stand. She put a hand up, like she wanted to use a crosswalk. Glass Jar charged towards her and skidded as he tried to stop; the mud caked into his boots had filled the tread flat, and he tripped over the ottoman. He looked up at the woman, and quakingly levelled the gun at her stomach.

  Then there was just fast breathing for a long time that was really just a few seconds. Glass Jar hoisted himself up, walked towards her, and slammed his gun hand into her belly. The other wing had gone sleepy again. She dropped to the ground and, he was pretty sure, pissed herself. He loomed in close to her.

  “You want to know what I’m thinking, right? You want my brain. You want it. I’ll tell you if you ask me, but I won’t ask you to ask.” Glass Jar slanted his face into a harsh, Juvenalian satire of a wink. He pressed the barrel of the gun as deeply into her arm as he could, until she yelped a little. He felt sad that the barrel wasn’t cold steel anymore, that he’d handled it too much, that he never got to make anyone feel the exact way he wanted them to feel.

  “What are you thinking? What do you want?” She spewed snot and barely got the sound out. But Glass Jar was feeling generous and answered anyway.

  “Goldfish.” His mouth felt heavy and uncoordinated. He leapt back from her and slapped his own face quite hard. “Final answer, Alex Trebek. What is Goldfish? It’s not a real Jeopardy! answer, though, because nobody asked by telling me the answer.”

  “I don’t have any goldfish.”

  She started to go a bit slack and looked straight out in front of her, and Glass Jar stood back up and kicked her in the shin. “Wake up. I want the money.” Glass Jar saw her eyes panic as the rest of her slumped further towards the ground. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me.”

  He wasn’t even looking at the woman anymore, waving the gun where he thought she was, and he imagined her not moving.

  “I don’t. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  Good cop/bad cop is not a made-up thing. It had been tried, and had worked, on Glass Jar himself. And in this world, Glass Jar knew, sometimes you have to be both. Like water. Freeze cold, thaw into someone’s desperate and thirsty mouth. All that. “You think I don’t like you, but I do. I like you fine. Lots of things. Your hair is too tough to care about the wind. I like that. I should tell you. I should tell you that your voice sounds just like the radio, in the same kinda way the ocean sounds like a glass of water. Glug. Glug. I should tell you now.”

  She was staring straight at the ground, or maybe at her own fat legs. Glass Jar spun his limp arm in a wide arc, hitting her across the face with the tips of his fingers, which for the first time in a few minutes felt something, even if it was only the pinchy sting of numbness. He grabbed her by the top of the hair and tried to drag her to the kitchen, but she was too heavy and he only toppled her over, like a traffic cone grazed by a tire. “Crawl! Crawl! Crawl! Crawl!” She listened, which made Glass Jar feel pretty good and like he was in charge.

  Her crawl was like none he’d ever seen. She didn’t seem to want to put her knees straight on the ground, her legs spread a bit apart, and she just pulled herself along, the fleshy inside part of her knees moving like a cloth over the clean hardwood floor. It made Glass Jar sad again. She reached the kitchen, and collapsed in the middle of the floor. He thought he’d give her a minute.

  Over the course of the half hour it had taken him to get from his television to Grace’s house, the lines Glass Jar had drawn between the money-stash robbery and Grace as Tommy Marlo’s mother had frayed. He’d mostly forgotten about Marlo, but he’d kept securely in his mind the idea that there was a lot of money in the house. He went straight for the freezer, using his already numb hand to roughly dump the contents on the floor.