by Dan Taylor
But when he started to creep towards his mid-to-late sixties, he’d start to get a little forgetful, and maybe his golf swing would start to feel a little stiffer. He’d go to all the right physicians and specialists, and they’d do what they could. Maybe he’d have good periods, when it felt like old age would never catch up to him, but at some point, like when he developed arthritis in his golf grip, or his check up with his primary care physician revealed his cholesterol is off the charts, he’d realize that he’d spent all his good years working himself into an early grave. And that honeymoon period of retirement, those first couple years when he slept in until ten and ate bacon and eggs for breakfast each morning, was too little too late in his quest to make up for lost time until he would have one foot in the grave and one foot on a banana skin.
Cherry being Terry, laughed along like a good little wifey, thinking I was being ironic and that I looked too strong and healthy for that prognostication to ever come true.
And it won’t, at least for me, Blake Elvis.
What would I have said had Sandra being sitting there, not ignoring me as she played against herself in a game of backgammon?
There’s a small island off the coast of Thailand. Mu Ko Ang Thong. There’s a spot waiting for me. When I get there, I’ll have worked just enough to appreciate it, but not enough so that I feel like I should have gotten there earlier.
By day, I’ll run a small business, doing the occasional charter boat trip for game fisherman. Because a man is never truly happy when completely at rest.
I’ll never wear something as restrictive as a suit ever again, choosing instead to wear flip-flops, cargo shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt. But unlike a tourist, mine will look worn, and I’ll wear them like they belong on me. Like I earned it. Especially when one of the locals wanders past me when I’m working on my boat, waves from a distance and talks to me in the native tongue, which I’ll both understand and talk enough of to shout over that the weather’s good.
Pieces of shit like Jimmy Balbone and Peter Hammer will belong to the history of a different man. A man that didn’t hang around too long before he started afresh.
Even if Sandra doesn’t recover, I’ll take her with me, and she’ll have five Thai helpers who I’ll pay good wages to make sure she’s as comfortable as possible. By then, Sandra might experience periods of lucidity and be able to appreciate the sunset. And even when she’s going ape-shit, spitting at me, clawing at my forearms as I hold her tight, she calling me Mike, I’ll never think that the paradise we’ll live in might be better without her.
I think about these things as I cross off another day on my deserted island calendar. The day I’m crossing off is the day I make a cuckoo clock delivery to a Mrs. Margaret Hammer, apartment 5J, Drexler building, Hollywood Boulevard.
Barring some economic meltdown, I already have the cash to make my dream a reality. I’m just buying time, keeping busy, until I see either A) some progress in Sandra’s condition to make me think it might be worth keeping her in Shady Acres, where she can receive treatment, or B) no progress at all in the next couple months, which will convince me I’m just going to have to be pragmatic about the prognosis I’ve received from six different doctors.
As I sit and drink my coffee, I think about what it’ll be like to sit on the beach for the first time, until my phone starts to ring.
6.
Behind every man’s dream is someone wanting to fuck it up for him. Who’s mine?
It’s the guy who’s phoning. Retired FBI agent Bob Lamb.
When I answer, it sounds like he might have butt-dialed me, or that he’s drunk, or both, as he’s seemingly in the middle of a conversation. Like now, when the first thing he says is, “Easy work.”
“Bob? Are you talking to me?” I ask.
“Damn right I’m talking to you, Clive.”
In his retirement, Bob Lamb is using his time to obsess over the apprehending of a serial killer who evaded him when he was a lawman and who he thinks is called Clive Nuttree, an alias I used for a time.
I don’t know how he got this number, but it’s encrypted, meaning he can’t locate me using its signal, tap it, or track down my cellular phone service provider. Not that he’d get anywhere with them if he could; I, the customer, have a hard-enough time getting information out of them.
The encrypting was put in there by lowlife, Scottish technology expert and hacker Scottie McDougray, an associate of Jimmy Balbone.
Now and again, Bob likes to phone up and have a chat. This time he sounds extra drunk.
“Now’s not a good time, Bob. I’d love to talk but I’m on vacation,” I say.
“Yeah, well, where are you?”
“A beach in England, Bob.”
“Nice try. I know you wouldn’t vacation in no beach in England.”
“I am, and it’s surprisingly warm.”
“I’m close, you know.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“The fuck you don’t, Nuttree. Remember Hank Waterton, the guy you whacked in Goosetown, Florida?”
“Never heard of the place.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a place, smart guy. His neighbor, Guy something or other, he says he saw a delivery man come to Hank’s door that day, carrying a… wait for it.”
I wait for it, for what seems like a minute.
Then he says, “A cuckoo clock!”
“What’s a cuckoo clock?”
Bob shouts down the phone, then calms enough to order himself another whisky from the bar he’s at. I hear the barman trying to refuse him, probably on account of Bob seemingly randomly shouting the word cuckoo clock.
On the occasions I play dumb, which is on each occasion, Bob doesn’t appreciate it.
When he comes back on the line, he says, “You know what one is.”
“Sincerely, I don’t. Is that like a wristwatch, but tied around a cuckoo’s neck?”
He sighs. “I catch you, and I will, I’ll wrap my hands around your neck and strangle the last breath out of you. You won’t do any time, Cuckoo. It’s too good for you.”
“Bob, I know we’ve been friends for a couple years, but I sense you’re being a tad hostile. That’s British English for a slight amount. I’m really picking up the lingo while I’m over here.”
“Yeah, then what’s the capital of England?”
I level with him. “What would my knowledge or lack of knowledge about England’s geography prove, Bob?”
“London, smart guy. That’s the capital. I knew you weren’t over there.”
“Tell me more about these cuckoo clocks.”
“Just say it, God damn it. Say you’re not on vacation.”
“I’m not on vacation.”
“Aha! I knew it.”
“Oops, my sandy toes were crossed, Bob. Sorry.”
He sighs again, and then I hear him slurp down some of his whisky, afterwards chewing on an ice cube right next to the mouthpiece. Then he says, “You know what really eats away at me at night, Clive.”
“I don’t, Bob.”
“How’s a killer like you—meticulous, whip smart, never leaves a shred of evidence—how’s a killer like that be so dumb to leave his calling card at every crime scene? That’s what I’ve never been able to get my head around all these years.”
I pause a moment, then say, “These cuckoo clocks, do they come in different shapes and sizes? If they’re as good as your obsession with them suggests, I think I might have a spot in my living room for one.”
7.
The rest of the conversation goes as usual. Bob gets so pissed he becomes unintelligible apart from the odd curse word, I diplomatically suggest that’s not the way old buddies speak to one another, and then Bob tries his usual spiel. That of telling me one of his sources in the FBI knows for a fact I’ll be delivering a cuckoo clock on the day he’s phoning, and when and where I’ll be delivering it.
My response this time?
“Do these cuckoo clocks tell the t
ime in different cities, like those rows of clocks in banks?”
Bob was clearly trying to put the heebie-jeebies into me, in some vain attempt to stop me from going through with it, if I just so happened to have a job lined up for today.
Bob’s a hoot, especially when considering the logic of it. If he did know, then would he provide me, the person he’s identified as being a serial killer, with that information, thus letting me evade the FBI’s slippery grip yet again?
Even Bob, as drunk as he was, knows better than that.
Why is Bob, because of his lack of physical evidence, clutching at straws every time he phones?
I’m meticulous when it comes to preparing for deliveries.
After I’ve finished my coffee, I shower, dry myself off really well with a freshly washed towel, and then apply a generous amount of wet-look hair gel to my hair, and part it on the side. Then I shave every single hair off my body apart from my eyebrows, head hair, eyelashes, and a tuft of hair in my nether regions that’s a pain to get to. With my body hairless, I apply a layer of industrial strength antiperspirant to the whole of my body. When that’s dry, I apply an invisible layer of glue to my eyebrows, ensuring each hair sticks to at least one other, just in case one of those hairs is at the end of its telogen phase and is pushed out by the new hair growing underneath it while I’m in Margaret Hammer’s building or apartment.
On my hands, I wear typical workman’s gloves. I have pairs of bespoke ones with no ventilation holes. Unlike a temp at a building site’s pair, mine fit like a glove should, ensuring my trigger finger can without problem or delay gain access to the trigger of my Beretta, which has an increased-diameter trigger guard compared to regular versions of the weapon.
On my feet, I’ll wear tread-less shoes which I’ll put on in the delivery truck just before I enter her building. To make up for the lack of grip provided by a tread, the soles are made of the same type of rubber on the surface of table tennis rackets. The last thing you want to happen is to slip at the point of discharging the weapon into your target, non-fatally wounding him or her. People who have been winged or scalped or had their ear blown off tend to make a little noise.
Again, the shoes are bespoke, as no person in their right mind would want to wear a pair that only lasts a day and a half of average use.
There’s no such thing as a non-fiber-shedding cloth. Believe me, I’ve googled it. The next best thing is rayon, the type of material used to line suits, upholster furniture, and make bingo-hall blouses. I won’t be wearing a blouse or be dressing as a chaise lounge, but I will be wearing a regular-looking workman’s overalls made of rayon cloth, but treated so that it looks like the sort of hard-wearing material some regular Joe would wear on any day of any delivery job.
I have a row of these in my walk-in wardrobe, like Batsuits. To the naked eye, they’re identical. But I know better than to enter various targets’ apartment buildings, homes, and bathrooms, or anywhere else I have a job, wearing the exact same fibers. Each one-piece is comprised of varying thicknesses of fiber—ranging from ten to fifty microns. I also vary the coarseness of the fibers, making each overall unique, at least when examined under a high-powered microscope.
Walk into someone’s home carrying a cuckoo clock and wearing a pristine, never-been-worn workman’s overalls, and your more observant target may smell a rat. If I were younger, I might look like a temp, or like it’s my first day on the job, but I’m not, which calls for signs of use, such as crinkles, stains, and the odd shiny patch from when my wife, tired from raising her regular Joe’s two children, left the iron on a little too long.
The right stain and how it’s applied are essential too. Sawdust and wood splinters would be the obvious embellishment, but they’re loose. Can’t work with them. People trust the smell of motor oil. It doesn’t make sense that a guy delivering a cuckoo clock would have such stains on his overalls, but I find the smell it lends the garment has an air of authenticity. Each stain is acquired ‘accidentally,’ which means at night I go out and crawl under other people’s cars, spend a few minutes twisting, prodding, and handling oil-covered surfaces, as to get their motor oil on my garments, not my own, which has its own unique composition. This may seem pedantic, or at worst risky, behavior, but go and get your favorite shirt, and apply a motor oil stain to it. That stain will look like when you take your kid home from kindergarten and look at the painting or drawing he has with him to find that certain areas of the art have obviously been applied by an adult. Which is to say if I were to do the same thing, just splash some oil on there, it would have the same contrived look.
This could result in a skeptical target, which is a difficult target.
Good old navy blue is the workman’s favorite color. This, not by accident, is the color I wear.
Parked in a warehouse on some part of brownfield land outside of town is my delivery truck. I drive my car there, and park inside. Stored in a hidden recess in the floor is my Beretta. There’s also a Smith and Wesson M&P Series semi-auto pistol. They’re known to have accuracy issues, and it’s not my weapon of choice. But despite this model’s potential accuracy issue, it’s one of the most common pistols used in the States.
I take it into my mini sound-proof firing range and fire off rounds into various surfaces: a dry wall, behind which is concrete; a plate of BoneSim 1800 series, a material which provides similar toughness, hardness, density, and mechanical properties as human cortical bone; and various hard and soft wood types.
Then I dig the slugs out with a rubber-tipped instrument and place them in separate Ziploc bags.
I’m a crack shot, but I don’t want to seem like one to the crime scene analysts. Preferably, I want to shoot Margaret head-on, not execution style. I want the hit to look unprofessional, like some string-limbed junkie came in off the street, found his way into the Drexler apartment building, and just so happened to find Margaret Hammer’s door unlocked.
He caught her browsing her DVD or book collection, stood there looking at her a second, as surprised about seeing her as she was him. He wiped snot from his nose, and then reached for his weapon. I’ll finish the job with the first slug, but our thief-come-killer won’t. He pressed the trigger a fraction too late, sent one into the dry wall behind her. Second shot was just as inaccurate. He sent it into the bookshelf. Silly him.
Third one, my first, is a killer. Through the throat. Messy angle. The work of someone who can’t hold a gun steady, never mind a hired gun. There’s no more vulnerable place on the human body apart from the head. Mortality rate for gunshot wounds to the head is ninety percent. The throat is on heels of that, up in the 80s. If I miss the spine, I’ll hit one of the carotid arteries, which supply blood to the brain. Best way to kill the brain without targeting it execution style is to go for the throat.
Not even a medic on standby at the crime scene would have a reasonable chance of saving her if the blood flow to her brain is sub sixty percent.
Not gonna happen.
Targeting the throat also has one major advantage, even over the head. Margaret Hammer won’t be able to scream.
Bob was right to question my leaving of the cuckoo clock at each crime scene. Even to Bob, who has been following my career for a good seven few years, hasn’t worked it out.
As mentioned, the cuckoo clock helps me get in the apartment building or go up the target’s house without raising suspicion. But there’s more to it than that.
The cuckoo clock is my leverage over my client. I briefed Peter Hammer yesterday on what to say to the cops when they ask, inevitably, about the presence of the cuckoo clock in the home. He’s to say she mentioned it a couple weeks ago, said she was getting it delivered a couple days before I visit her.
He backs out of our arrangement, decides he wants to take me down without incriminating himself, which is the way they tend to do it, instead of confessing to the whole arrangement, then I’ll threaten to take him down with me, using the cuckoo clock—for which he has paid, with his credit
card, no less—to incriminate him.
Clients tend to rethink their guilt when they start thinking about all that time they’ll have to think about what they did when they’re in prison for the rest of their lives. Conspiracy to kill… He may as well have pulled the trigger himself, for all the good it’ll do him in front of a judge.
He keeps his mouth shut, eyewitnesses may have seen it delivered that day, but they could just as well have seen it being delivered another day. The shock of your neighbor having been killed makes eyewitnesses notoriously unreliable.
Suddenly the guy wearing the blue overalls, some regular Joe who’s around six feet tall, hair slicked into a side parting, and whose appearance was mostly covered up by the cuckoo clock, is no longer a person of interest.
Only to crazy Bob Lamb, the drunk who phones the various homicide units from time to time, spouting the same certifiable shit he said to me. They have a name for the Bobs of this world at the FBI, the guys who could never fully quit the job: Inspector Zimmer Frame.
I bought over a hundred cuckoo clocks ten years ago, and have stored them here ever since. I’m down to fifty-seven. Ten more and all they’ll be good for is collecting dust.
Maybe I’ll send one to Bob when I’m done with all this. As a memento. Bob would like that.
I move one into the van using a hand truck, taking the delivery van’s elevator platform up to the storage area.
Then I secure it with some bungee cords.
And then I’m good to go.
8.
Okay Deliveries. That’s the logo painted on the side of my delivery truck.
I find a space about fifty yards from the Drexler apartment building. I pay for an hour at the meter, and then get out and smoke a cigarette. I don’t smoke, at least I haven’t for the last six years, but before each job, I wait outside the target’s home, and smoke a cigarette right down to the butt.
