by Andrew Post
“You can skip the foreplay with him,” he said, winking his right eye closed as a string of smoke from his cigarette drifted up into it. It did not help him look any less loopy. “There’s some tools inside the cooler. A couple pairs of plyers, a few brand-new scalpels, a digital thermometer, a burner phone, and a box of latex gloves. The client will text you the drop location on the burner, morning of day seven, like I said. You might have to run out for some dry ice. Just send me the receipt and I’ll reimburse you.”
“What the hell am I going to need dry ice for?”
“Christ, you ask a lot of questions.” He looked over his shoulder, then the other. “The dry ice is for what you take out of him, at the end – as I’ve already stated. Get the gum out of your ears. It’s got to stay down around ten degrees. And if you can, try to wring at least a liter out of him. What’s with the face?”
“The client wants his blood,” she said, “and that doesn’t strike you as odd?”
“Kid, listen. We’re the only outfit I’m aware of that’s willing to even entertain the notion of special requests. So, frankly, we should be surprised something strange as this hasn’t landed in our inbox before now.”
“But what do they want it for? Isn’t that kind of fucked-up?”
“Fucked-up is a unit of measure completely reliant on perspective. If we were to analyze yours, for example, like going to town a guy for a week straight’s peachy keen but you draw the line at poking him with a tiny, little needle? Maybe you’re what’s fucked-up. Ever think about that?”
She had. “All I mean is, what do you think they want it for?” Brenda said, trying to make it sound like she was amused by this, intrigued, when really this was some seriously oddball shit and she wanted no part in it.
“It doesn’t matter what they want it for.” His abused voice box did not allow him to whisper very well. “And while we’re on the subject of fucked-up, do you think what went down in Orlando might meet the criteria?”
Brenda made sure to get in, “What was on the work order is what I did.”
He laughed and like the rest of him, it too was worse now – she could hear the clotted malfunction of his lungs, gunk rattling around inside. Adopting a surprisingly spot-on German accent, he simpered, “Hazt mercy, I vas just following ze orders zat vere given zu me.”
Brenda sighed. “Fine. Got it.”
“You know I don’t like chewing people out, kid. Neither am I a big fan of being made to play the asshole. Both of which you’re making me do right now. So I’d appreciate being given credit for not bringing up the matter of the hostess.”
“I had to. She saw my face.” Brenda had been ready with that.
“The whole goddamn restaurant must’ve seen your face.”
“Eyewitnesses. There were no cameras. I checked.”
Eyes half-lidded, he smiled, pleased with himself. “Not to be a dick, but you do realize you just proved my point, right?”
“She got a good look, though. So I made a creative decision.” She heard her Southie accent becoming more pronounced as it did when she got irritated. “What happened happened. She’s not going to talk.”
“No, I’d say you sure certainly saw to that.” His gaze flicked from her left eye to her right and back again. “What’d she do? Throw some shade at you? Remark upon your choice in footwear in a way you didn’t find was particularly nice?”
“What do you want me to say here? I’m sorry? Because if you want me to say I’m sorry, I’ll say I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Felix. I’m so very fucking sorry. Happy?”
He blinked at her. “I’m starting to see what Merritt was talking about.”
Nice try. Though Brenda was admittedly mildly interested in what that fat piece of shit was saying about her behind her back, she refused to ask Felix to elaborate. “Thought you said you hadn’t spoken to him in a while.”
“I haven’t. This must’ve been two or three years back. And boy howdy had he formed some strong opinions about you, girl. Yowza.”
She still wasn’t biting.
“I don’t want you to say you’re sorry, kid. I don’t. Me, I don’t care what you do on a job. Demand a fella stab his own grandma in the throat and stick his honey-dipper in the gash? I say far out, sauerkraut. Make the mark jump rope with their dog’s large intestine? Bee’s knees, Cochise. Run a bus full of orphans off the road directly into an active volcano? Out of sight, Vegemite. Skin a nun alive? Dig it, Gidget. Make a knocked-up broad cut her bun out of the oven, whip up some fetus noodle casserole, and have her down two helpings of it? I say right on, Sirhan Sirhan. Point being: perpetrate all the out-there zaniness upon the world that your whacky little heart craves, have at it, because as far as I’m concerned so long as what’s on the work order gets done and all special requests are satisfactorily met, there’s no human way I could possibly give less of a shit about the extracurriculars you opt to assign yourself.” He paused to catch his breath, one finger raised. “But, on occasion, and I’m not saying this happens often, but sometimes going off script will ruffle a client’s feathers. Once in a blue moon, a client who might’ve presented themselves as hardcore will plonk themselves down in front of the morning news in the cold light of day, see that someone whom they did not ask to get put down got put down anyway, and from there they’ll get it in their melon that they’re liable by proxy for the death of a, quote, ‘innocent’ person. Which bothers them, the dears. Then, what follows is me getting placed in the uncomfortable position where I – not you – have to spend hours on the horn with them going, ‘Pretty please with sugar on top do not let your guilty conscience make you go to the feds.’ And I don’t like doing that. Why? Because I can think of a whole fucking rainbow of ways I’d prefer to spend the very limited me-time I get.”
Like injecting yourself with more of whatever’s whittled you down to an itchy, haunted-eyed scarecrow? “I’ll stick to the script,” she said.
“Besides, can’t imagine you’d want people to start comparing you to Merritt.”
Was he trying to piss her off?
Without looking away from her, Felix lit a fresh smoke off the butt of the previous and flicked the spent one away to puff into sparks.
“Not to beat a dead horse,” he said, “but on the drive out here, I heard – or more accurately, I was subjected to hearing – that girl’s mother reading that shitty poem no less than six separate times. Six fucking times. Six. They won’t stop running it. Every station, every single time they cut to a news break: ‘The salty gale spirits me back to my tropical home, where the palm sadly leans and the seagull doth only moan.’ Sounds like something Jimmy Buffett would’ve written with a gun in his mouth and now I’ve got that garbage stuck in my brain forever.” He used his cigarette’s filter to tap some frantic Morse on his temple. “And for that, I doth have you to thank.”
“I think you’ve more than made your point. Won’t happen again.”
“Good. Glad to hear it. One last thing and after this, I promise I’ll be done,” he said. “Had a lot of time to think, it’s a long drive from Chicago.” He moved his bent cigarette like he was using it to conduct the creaky instrument of his own words. “Fucked-up is relative. Eye of the beholder. And, present company very much included – still, no offense meant when I say this – but ain’t none of us saints. Client wants the mark’s blood to serve as a proof of purchase? We deliver the mark’s blood as a proof of purchase. The who, what, why-for, and how’s-come-that ain’t none of our beeswax. No questions asked.”
Though it sounded like there was going to be more, Felix took a voracious suck from his cigarette, like he’d pulled in along with the tar the sudden need to adjust his tone one notch closer to chipper. “I should probably hit the bricks but hey, thanks for coming out, Brenda. I mean that. I know it’s tough being away from the family this close to the desert wizard’s birthday, so please know that I really do appreciate it.”
She blinked through her whiplash. “Sure.”
“I’m really happy we could work something out with the client to get you out here earlier. I’m sure you are too. But, listen,” he said, leaning forward to pat her on the arm, which she had to consciously keep herself from shirking back from, less than eager for this new Felix’s touch, “if I don’t get a chance to talk to you before then, I hope you, Steve, and the girls all have a really, really nice Christmas.”
And with that, he got in the Escalade and left. She watched his taillights slip over the curve of the parking garage’s damp floor and fall from sight, leaving her there, alone with her inability to shake the feeling that there might’ve been a threat buried in that fond farewell of his.
While she’d been cutting through the night somewhere over Indiana, she’d reviewed how she’d decided to take a good chunk of time off after this work order, but now that she was here, where it was to be done, and she had seen Felix, she thought her time off might end up being much longer than just a week. As much as she used to imagine what it’d look like when she finally made the decision to quit – she and Felix would meet somewhere for a nice dinner and spend the night recalling the good times and have a few laughs, a few drinks, an amicable parting of business friends – in the end, she had to remind herself, it was just work and neither of them truly owed anything to the other. So, if their split had to be a graceless puttering-out, which seemed to be the case, it wasn’t anything to be sad about. Like everything, this too had to fall apart sometime.
* * *
The Escalade roared into the night, weaving and dodging around traffic apparently only the driver could see. Left-turn signal blinking away for no discernible reason, the vehicle jumped across two lanes and then came back again, never settling in one for long as if evading a pursuing cloud of angry hornets. Sparks flashed as the vehicle wandered over onto the road’s shoulder and left some paint on the guard rail before lurching back across the white line. The few other drivers out tonight who were having to share the road with this maniac gave the luxury sport utility vehicle a wide berth. Good thinking. One side, ye slow pokes, the king of the road doth approach.
Doth. What a weird word. Doth.
Inside, Felix Eberhardt had the news going, and even though the fucking thing had happened years ago they were still theorizing about what had caused the implosion. The classic go-to was that it’d been China’s fault. No need to elaborate. The host was in total agreement. Yes, yes, absolutely, it was all China’s doing. Then it was the turn for one guest on the panel to have her go, who was there promoting her book, This American Hemorrhage: How the Implosion Really Happened. Her position was that the implosion did not come suddenly and it certainly was not the machinations of any foreign power, green with jealousy, wanting to take the United States down a peg, but rather the implosion came from within – and it could’ve been easily avoided if anyone with the influence had bothered to try. Clearly that wasn’t how it went. The host didn’t ask her to expand on this claim, the author volunteered:
“Because so many corporate mergers were allowed to come to pass without any oversight,” she suggested, “every antitrust no-man getting paid to look the other way and congresspeople with skin in the game via investments or unwritten you-wash-my-hand agreements with CEOs they shared a tee-time with, what you used to expect to receive at the word monopoly would now only produce a collective shrug. And it was that reprehensible self-serving mindset that opened the door – and held it wide – for ultra-corporations to start charging whatever they damn well pleased for their goods and services that it didn’t matter how low quality they were because they’d absorbed all competition to position themselves as the only game in town, just how they like it. Meanwhile, because all concerned parties who stood to benefit didn’t want to rock the boat raising a fuss on the behalf of anyone being cheated who was not them, the billionaires signing off on these decisions could also say it was perfectly acceptable to not increase the wages of their ever-growing employee pool in tandem with their unchecked growth. Share the wealth they explicitly did not. And because that type of greed remained unimpeded in any way for so long, as more ultra-corps started copying each other’s homework, billion-dollar multinational juggernauts like Mega Deluxo, among other bad actors, began benefitting from this slow bleed that while it’d allow money to get pulled upward, little – if any – would precipitate back down. And the implosion itself was just that unsustainable money-siphoning hitting its breaking point when the disparity between the upper and middle class had been forced so wide that the middle class crushed the former lower class out of the picture completely, into joining the widespread homelessness we see on every street in every city across the country today. How did this happen? I’ll tell you. Because there simply are no more arteries left to tap that they haven’t already made collapse. Everyone who could be bled dry has been bled dry. Those who sign the checks think that means they get to be the ones who dictate the plot, but if you buy my book – now available in hardcover at all fine retailers – you will learn the truth.”
It was then the host cut in with a nervous laugh and said, “We’ll be right back after these messages from our corporate overlords. Sponsors. I meant sponsors.”
All right, so maybe the host didn’t actually misspeak like that, but he might as well have.
Cut to a high-energy Mega Deluxo spokesperson talking about how if you don’t take advantage of their Christmas deals you just might ‘end up out in the cold this holiday season’.
Since none of that meant much to Felix, seeing how financially well-positioned he was, he turned to an oldies station. He drummed on the steering wheel along with Roy Orbison’s ‘Working for the Man’. He used his knee to steer so he could have his hands free for some air guitar but with a throat seared from decades of mistreatment he couldn’t quite hit those warbling, angelic notes the same as Roy, but Felix sure gave it the old college try.
He took a deep pull from his flask and returned it to the cup holder and showed himself his pink teeth in the rearview mirror and ran his tongue across them like a windshield wiper until they were the standard smoker’s yellow again.
His phone hummed. A one-word text from Friend Two. When?
Using his knee to steer again, he began composing a reply, giving the wheel small corrections whenever the Escalade would drift over onto the rumble strip. In one week, he told Friend Two, we’re going to be so deep in the stuff you’re going to need a ducking kayak.
Goddamn autocorrect.
Friend Two responded at once. I’m going to hold you to that.
I doth expect nothing less, Felix replied and tossed his phone bouncing into the passenger seat.
He looked up and had only a half second to swerve around the eighteen-wheeler before accordioning his vehicle against the back of it. He brought the Escalade around, nearly flipped her, and floored it to pass the truck and get himself back up to his preferred traveling rate of a clean one hundo American miles per the hour. He mashed the button to lower a window, and even though he doubted he was heard having already gotten such a lead on them, loudly suggested, “Learn to drive, asshole!”
See, the old Felix would’ve been startled by almost rear-ending a semitruck while going that fast with no seat belt on – to the point that the old Felix may’ve even needed to find a restroom pronto to shake some lumps out of his skivvies. But not anymore. No, sir. He felt like a million bucks, a bulletproof million bucks. Things were looking up and in a week’s time, they were going to be looking even better. Oh, what a time to be on the good side of the dirt.
He grabbed up his flask again and went to throw back another slug of the mondo but it only gave him a couple drops – the congealing, bitter last sips. Sad face. All right, so maybe not everything was coming up Felix. The floodgates needed to be broken open and soon. But all the meetings and miles he’d put on the Escalade tonight had seen to that busines
s, standing those many, many dominos on end in perfect lines. Now to kick back and watch the supply make itself from a good, safe distance far from the whizzing of bullets and cracking of skulls.
Swishing it around, he savored what, sadly, would have to be his last taste for a while. He was confident he could be patient – mostly. Think of it this way, he told himself, it might even be fun to let your tolerance erode a little so the next swig you down it’ll kick like a goddamn horse. You know, like it used to. Like it did that first time.
Chapter Eight
The Greyhound pulled into a truck stop outside Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and Mel was glad for the chance to stand up for a while. It was one of those truck stops that are almost like a mini town unto themselves. Dozens of gas pumps. A giftshop. A place to sink a quarter and wash not only the crust off your eighteen-wheeler but yourself too, if you wanted to chance catching athlete’s foot in one of their rentable showers. A combination Pizza Hut-Taco Bell. Cigarettes and chewing tobacco sold at the lowest prices allowed by the state, a bright orange sign declared.
Under the falling snow, Mel tried to recall some yoga poses Dani had taught her and smoked a cigarette and repeatedly told herself that it didn’t itch inside her cast as much as it felt like it did. Even if it was probably only ten degrees out, she didn’t want to follow everybody inside. Right now, she needed fresh air, some time alone, a minute to feel like a human being again not a package being delivered. They still had quite a ways to go until Minneapolis and while she didn’t want to be on the bus anymore, she wasn’t that enthused about her destination either. A one-woman limbo that traveled with her wherever she went. Everywhere sucked. Not even home held any appeal. There was no one there.
