The Stakes

by Ben Sanders

  He did remember, but he didn’t answer.

  Lucy said, “I called the cops twice on him now, they don’t seem to take me seriously. But read my lips”—it didn’t make sense on the phone, but Miles got the point—“I’m dying of emphysema, and I got a killer outside my house in a white Buick.”

  He couldn’t say no to that.

  He’d been seconded to a BAND task force that month—Brooklyn Anti-Narcotics Drive—which meant he’d spent the last three weeks driving confiscated cars, looking for drugs. He logged out a gray Dodge Challenger and drove up to Lucy’s place in Queens. She lived on a street of detached clapboard houses in Astoria, on a block that had been gentrified since his last visit. He saw a lot of fresh paint and swing sets. There were more windows with flower boxes than steel grilles now.

  He could see Lucy’s place coming up on the left. It was a former crack house she’d inherited from her old boss, a strip-joint owner called Manny Lyons. The house was looking okay now the addicts had moved on. Lucy had given it some paint, a shade of yellow that was vibrant but not quite to Miles’s taste, and she’d taken the bars off the windows. There were cars parked almost solid on both sides, but the Buick stood out, bright white and brand-new, the latest Verano model.

  The Dodge had smoked windows, and a stereo almost as bassy as its V-8. Miles turned on FM radio and cranked the volume up, figured he was doing a fine job of looking like a gangbanger on the prowl. He eased off the gas a touch, cruised past the Buick doing fifteen miles an hour, and saw that sure enough, there was an L.A. hit man named Jack Deen sitting in the driver’s seat.

  He didn’t get a long look, but Jack had the kind of features you didn’t need to see twice. Black hair in a short ponytail, so taut it seemed to yank his whole face back, the zit-pocked cheekbones pointing right at you. He had shades on, flashy silver Ray-Bans that only made him more conspicuous.

  Miles kept going for a couple of blocks, pulled over where he could still watch the Buick in his side mirror. He took out his cell phone and called Lucy.

  He said, “Yeah. You’ve got a guy watching your house.”

  “Are you going to shoot him?”

  “He has to shoot first, is the problem.”

  “But you recognize him, right? He used to come by Manny’s.”

  “Mmm.”

  “So who is he?”

  Miles said, “I don’t know,” figuring a lie was safest. Better than saying a hit man had flown out from California and appeared to be lining her up.

  She said, “So what are you going to do?”

  “Sit and watch him watching you. Don’t let anyone in, unless it’s me.”

  “How will I know it’s you?”

  Miles said, “I’ll whistle ‘Yankee Doodle’ in D major.”

  It was after four in the afternoon. He sat there another fifty minutes, watching Jack Deen watching the house, and when the Buick finally started up and moved off the curb, Miles followed.

  They headed east out to Flushing, and Jack pulled in at a motel, a place called OTE by virtue of misfired neon. There was an auto repair place next door, and a diner opposite. Miles watched the Buick go around the building to the rear lot, and then he parked around the corner on the next block.

  BAND undercover duty always meant nice equipment. In the trunk, he had a black duffel with about fifty pounds of ballistics gear: Glocks, an MP5K, two-hundred-odd rounds of nine-mil ammunition, a Kevlar vest, even combat boots in case things got dangerous underfoot.

  He pulled the shoelace out of one of the boots and walked back around the corner toward the motel. He was almost at the parking lot when Jack Deen came out the front door by reception, the man only fifteen feet away but not clocking him. Miles let him cross the street and started down the little vehicle lane toward the rear lot, and when he glanced back Jack was stepping in the front door of the diner.

  The lot was at two-thirds capacity, no one around except a guy by a Camry fussing with a suitcase, trying to collapse the telescopic handle. Miles tied a little slipknot in the middle of the shoelace as he walked to the Buick, held the cord at each end to keep it taut, and slid it carefully down behind the window frame of the driver’s door. He eased the loop down over the lock button, tugged the slipknot closed, and then raised the string again to unlock the door. Twenty seconds, all up.

  The horn chirped briefly, pissed off that he’d gained access without the key remote, but the noise shut off when he got in and locked the doors again. The guy with the suitcase glanced at him and then went back to his fiddling.

  Miles checked the glove compartment. Jack had tourist brochures, a rental agreement for the car, and a folded sheaf of online booking printouts, all neatly clipped together. He’d been sloppy with precautions. Everything was on the same credit card in the name of Jackson Deen. He’d flown in four days ago. His flight back to L.A. was tomorrow night, a 12:00 A.M. red-eye. He’d been so lax with his papers, Miles thought he’d find a picture of Lucy, maybe a note saying, Clip her, Jack. There was nothing that damning, though. The last page was a Major League booking: Yankees vs. Orioles, 1:05 P.M. tomorrow.

  The Toyota Camry started up and drove past. Miles saw the suitcase on the backseat, handle still extended. He got out and locked the Buick and walked out to the curb. The diner had windows full-width on the street-facing side, and he could see Jack Deen sitting over to the right, in the corner booth, working hard on something with his cutlery. Miles waited for a break in the traffic and then started across the street, made it to the other side before he changed his mind about how to handle things.

  He would’ve enjoyed it actually, sitting down opposite the killer from L.A., maybe drink a coffee while the hit man finished his eggs, whatever he was having. They could run through old cases Miles knew—various people found dead by gunshot while Jack was in town, witnesses who fingered Deen for killings and then ended up deep-sixed themselves. So Miles could run that down for him, let the dead have their moment, and then tell Jack the game was up. He could see the whole thing: Jack’s flat expression as he sat listening, no lights on behind his eyes, at least nothing on the human wavelength.

  And that was partly why he walked away from it: remembering the fact that some of these guys represent a whole new species. But that Yankees booking had snagged in his head, so it was baseball, really, that clinched the ruling. There was no point talking sense with a guy who planned to see a ballgame once he’d killed a woman. He could picture Jack in the stands, in the sun with a hot dog, clean conscience and kissing sauce off his fingers, and he thought: Why the hell try to save him? Surely the quickest route to fairness was to let things unfold as Jack planned. At least up to a point.

  It was after six in the evening when he showed up back at Lucy’s. She answered the door holding an oxygen tank on a little two-wheeled trolley, and she had a transparent plastic mask dangling around her neck. She looked good though, despite the gear. She’d be late thirties now, Miles thought, but she still seemed trim and lithe. She had on tight blue jeans and a wool sweater, cuffs pushed back to show off lean forearms. She let the door go and put a hand on her hip, letting him see its curve, and the nice line all the way down her side. If it weren’t for the air tank, he’d say time was treating her just fine.

  She said, “I wondered if I’d see you again.”

  He spread his hands slightly, let them fall.

  She said, “I’m trying to imitate that guy from No Country for Old Men. You know the one with the stun gun on the air tank?” She had brownish hair cut shoulder-length and combed behind her ears, a few loose strands hanging forward, giving it character.

  Miles said, “You’re better-looking.”

  “Yeah. I’m working on getting uglier.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that.

  She lifted the mask and had a hit of oxygen. “So you figured out I’m not talking bullshit?” Her voice sounded nasally through plastic.

  He came inside and closed the door. “You’ve definitely got a watcher.
He’s at a motel out in Flushing.”

  Still with the mask on, she said, “Did you deal with him?”

  “I haven’t shot him and thrown him in a river yet.”

  It was a weird reunion—their only meeting in years, and the first talking point was a thug.

  Miles said, “He’s flying home tomorrow. He’ll visit tonight, or you won’t see him at all.”

  She kept her eyes on him, waiting to hear what he was going to do about it.

  Miles said, “I’ll hang around here, wait for him to show up.”

  He thought he sounded pretty mild, but she was still watching him, as if he might come clean, tell her things were dire. But he held his silence and stood there looking pleasant.

  She said, “Maybe we should have coffee. You okay with instant?”

  She wouldn’t let him help her. She sat him down in the living room and talked to him from the kitchen, no issue with her volume. She said she got the diagnosis a year ago, the week after her thirty-seventh birthday. The doctor told her that was young even for a heavy smoker. She figured it must have been secondhand fumes that helped it along, working in the backroom for Manny, having to wave a hand to cut a path through the fog. Miles sat watching the street, waiting for Jack to show up again, and Lucy went on telling him about lungs, how the healthy types consist of dense tissue, but emphysema lungs get broken down, start looking fibrous and stringy, kind of like chewing gum if you stretched it apart. The thinner it gets, the less air you take in, and you obviously reach the point where you can’t breathe at all, and in other words you’re dead.

  The exposition was getting louder as she made her way back down the hall, and she was in the room again on that last phrase, framed in the door tugging the air trolley and carrying a mug with the other hand as she said “dead.”

  Miles worried they were going morbid too early. He said, “You look like you’re coping okay.”

  “Yeah, I guess. They don’t know how fast or slow it’ll progress. I might stay like this forever, or I might have no lungs left in ten years.”

  “How long have you had the tank?”

  “Couple months. It’s a prevention thing. I breathe all right, but it just takes the edge off if I’m on my feet all day. Apparently if you go around not getting enough air, it makes your arteries thicken up, gives you high blood pressure. So then you’ve got heart disease and stroke to worry about, too. Or that’s the doctor’s theory, anyway.”

  She grinned, like the information was more entertainment than prognosis, set the drink down for him on a coffee table.

  She said, “Give me a sec, I’ll grab the other one.”

  “I can get it.”

  “No, stay there.” She was at the door before he was half out of his seat. At least she didn’t seem inhibited at all.

  Once she was back in the room, he said, “You know why you’d be targeted?”

  “No, but I could guess.” She smiled and said, “Old informants must get murdered all the time.”

  Miles said, “You got somewhere you can stay for a night?”

  She sat down heavily and sighed into the mask, fogging the plastic. “What do you think?”

  “I can put you in a hotel.”

  She shook her head. “No thanks.” She held his gaze, making sure he knew she meant it. She said, “I used to get crackheads showing up, wondering if this place is still in business. Had a couple wanted to come inside, actually. First guy I had, he kicked the shit out of the door, actually broke the lock so it was just the chain keeping it shut. Didn’t think I had time to reach the phone, but I had the vacuum cleaner right there in the hall, took the end piece off it, so it was just the steel tube, held it up like this.” She mimed holding a shotgun, raising it to her shoulder. “Pushed the end of it out the gap in the door, guy backed up so fast he tripped on the step. I got a real one, now. Next guy tried coming in, I didn’t have to say a word.”

  She adjusted a valve on the top of the tank, and Miles told her he had to make a call.

  He used the phone in her kitchen and called Wynn Stanton in his office.

  Miles said, “It’s me. Can you send someone around to my place for the night, just to answer the phone? I need to show a call being put through. The apartment, I mean.”

  “What’re you up to?”

  “Hopefully nothing.”

  Stanton said, “Oh, God. Yeah, all right. You got Netflix there? I can send Kenny.”

  Back in the living room he found Lucy on her feet again waiting for him, the tank trolley beside her and the frame tethered gently by curled fingers, the way you might take a child by the hand.

  She raised the mask. “You going to shoot him when he shows up?”

  Miles said, “Hopefully not.”

  She said, “But you’re making up alibis just in case.”

  “It’s not an alibi. But it’s better if it looks like I wasn’t waiting for him all night. Premeditation’s not a nice word.”

  “More heroic if people think you dashed here in your PJs, clocked him in the nick of time?”

  Miles said, “Something like that.”

  They ordered takeout pizza for dinner and had it delivered. Lucy went upstairs around eight thirty, and Miles stayed in the living room and watched the street. He’d moved a chair to a far corner so he was well back from the window, and he left a reading lamp on so he could still make out the space.

  Jack Deen’s rented Buick Verano showed up a little before ten thirty, and reclaimed the space it had used earlier. Miles had brought the cordless phone through from the kitchen. Watching the street, he dialed his apartment landline. Kenny answered, TV noise in the background—the terse, formal cadence of an old film, that bygone era of black and white.

  Miles said, “This is Miles.”

  Kenny said, “Ha. I’m watching your Netflix.”

  “Just stay on the line for me.”

  Miles counted to twenty-five in his head and then said, “Thanks, Kenny. You can go home now.”

  He hung up quietly and sat watching the road, Jack Deen invisible behind his windshield. It took him fifty minutes to finally emerge. No working streetlights on this stretch, and Miles could only see the shape of him as he climbed out of the car. Not a sound as he closed his door. There was a party farther up the street, a few guys hanging out in a garage with a boom box, and he watched Jack spend a minute checking them out, motionless beside his car with his head slightly cocked. The odd shout was audible, but no one sounded sober. Drunk was safe, as far as witness statements went. No one cares for plastered oaths.

  He saw Jack cross the street, coming at him on a diagonal, an easy stride in silhouette, nothing in the shadow man’s hand yet. Miles sat waiting, raised his gun when he heard Jack on the wooden step outside. A light tread, soft and measured. He wasn’t hyped with adrenaline, but then neither was Miles. All afternoon, he’d seen this as the end point, some variation of guns-by-night. Now he couldn’t change it: a convergence of Jack’s doing. He just had to sit and wait for it to happen.

  The hit man reached the door: fake church bells tolling as he pressed the button.

  Miles sat waiting with his gun raised. Jack would’ve had an easy job if she’d just opened up for him. Give her two on the step and then be on his way, tomorrow’s ballgame to enjoy. Miles heard him try the door: a click, a pause, and then a creak like some demented birdcall.

  He heard the tongue tap gently on the catch and then Jack’s feet on the hallway carpet. Silence, no motion. Maybe he was trying to seek out held breaths. He had the stairs ahead of him, but the light in the living room would be beckoning, too. He’d want to clear the ground floor first.

  Miles watched him step into the living room, tracked him with the gun midway across the room, and said, “Hey, Jack.”

  He didn’t jump or seem to get a fright. He just stopped and faced him square.

  He said, “Huh. I remember you.” Casual—like this wasn’t life and death. He had a gray suit on over a white shirt, open at the ne
ck, probably wanting to look like a killer with good taste.

  Miles said, “People always leave their door open for you?”

  Jack said, “Where’s Lucy?” Which seemed like an odd note for a hit man to touch: too personal. Miles thought he’d be asking for the girl.

  Miles said, “I kind of hoped you’d come in packing heat so I’d have an excuse to drill you. But here you are, walk in empty-handed.”

  Jack didn’t answer.

  Miles said, “So are you gonna go for it, or what?”

  Jack said, “You got the wrong end of this.”

  There was a creak in the corridor outside, and they both looked over at the noise, Lucy standing there with no mask, no tank, but with a shotgun up at shoulder level.

  They both shouted, “Wait,” and Jack managed to raise a hand before Lucy pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  Shit, what a mess.

  The guy was on his back, limbs spread and kinked, like a bad impression of a swastika. His coat had ridden up, but Miles couldn’t see a weapon. There’d be something in his belt, at his spine. Shoulder rigs were too obvious.

  Lucy moved in for a look as well, shotgun still raised and steady. She said, “Jesus, I killed him. I can’t believe it.”

  She’d done a good job, too: Jack’s chest was pulped. The bloodstain on the carpet was three feet across, and inching wider. Miles checked his pulse, but Jack was genuinely gone. The room smelled of gun smoke, and the hit man’s freshly loosened bowel.

  Lucy said, “Jeez, he stinks. I’ll call nine-one-one—”

  “No, wait a second.”

  He checked each ankle. No holster. Just keys in his pockets. He tried the coat. It was a two-button piece, wool by the feel of it, probably tailored. Maybe Jack had splashed out. Christ, no weapon though.

  He slid a hand beneath the guy and found his belt.

  No fucking gun.

  The rush kicked in, that cold feeling of a drop into a crisis. His ringing ears made it worse, like his brain couldn’t cope—every neuron humming at its limit.