Darwin's Nightmare

by Mike Knowles

  CHAPTER THREE

  When I left the gym, I navigated the streets in the same way that I had after leaving the restaurant. I crossed the street several times and used the bright store-front windows to see what was behind me. I moved through the city entering different stores and shops so that I could look out and see if any faces looked familiar. After two hours the exercise seemed futile — I couldn’t find a tail, and the sun was lowering into the west. I needed to rest, but I didn’t want to go back to the office — it would be an obvious place to pick me up again. I decided to leave the car there, and took a cab to Jackson Square, a downtown mall that shared its lower level with a farmers’ market. I moved out of the cab and paid quickly, using a ten for a four-dollar fare. I moved into the market and let the crowds wash over me. I followed their pull and moved with the throngs of people looking for fresh food to bring home at a price better than the supermarkets. At six in the evening, the market was perfect: there were dozens of exits and hundreds of people. It was a nightmare for tailing someone. I randomly made my way through the market until I saw a bus pull up at a stop just outside one of the exits. I walked casually out the door and on to the bus just before its doors closed.

  The bus lurched ahead and the damp musk of the people hit my senses like a sucker punch. My nose was flooded with the different smells of people and the wares they had bought at the market. I found a lone seat and sat reading a bus pamphlet and planning my way home.

  Home was a place I rarely used. It was mine in name, and had been my home for more than a dozen years. My parents had never lived there, and I had shared it with my uncle for only a handful of years.

  When I was a child, three or four times a year my parents would tell me they had to work, and it was best I stay with family. I never knew at the time what my parents did. I never thought about why they only “worked” a few weeks out of the year. I learned about it all after the day they went to work and never came back.

  During the “work” years my uncle watched over me at his house without comment or complaint. He wasn’t an unpleasant or mean man; he was just quiet. He sent me to school, made my meals, and made sure I did my homework. He also left a book for me to read, every day, on the shelf beside the door. It was my job to come home, do my homework, and then read until my uncle arrived home to make dinner. The dinner conversations about books were the only way we developed a relationship. As we ate dinner, I told him about what I had read, and he asked me questions. He taught me the first lessons in my first real education. I learned to see beneath the surface — to look at what was going on under the current.

  After a three-week stay in the fall, my uncle left me alone for a weekend. He said he had some work of his own to do and that he would be back soon. When he came back two days later, he had most of my things with him. I knew exactly what had happened when I saw him come through the door with two arms full of what I owned. My uncle told me there had been an accident, and that my parents had died on the way home to see me. It was here that the education given to me by my uncle first paid dividends. I looked through what my uncle told me; I saw all that was said in 3D. I asked questions, many questions, and all of them were the right kind: Where was the accident? Where is the funeral? How do we bring the bodies home? It was a moment I would never forget. My uncle stared at me for what felt like hours, and then the side of his mouth turned up in a cold grin. The grin scared me because of all it said, and how unable I was to decipher it. All of the questions and probing I learned from my uncle at the dinner table fell apart when I was faced with an unspeaking grin that told me I didn’t know enough.

  My uncle sat me down and told me for the first time what my parents did for work. “They took things that didn’t belong to them,” he said.

  “They were bad? Like bad guys?” I asked, and immediately I hated myself for betraying my immaturity by thinking of things in terms of cops and robbers.

  “They weren’t bad people, but they did take things. They never hurt anyone. They only took from people with a lot of money and a lot of insurance. Do you know what insurance is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So nobody ever got hurt.”

  It was my turn. My mouth turned up at the corner just like his. I mirrored the grin until he got it. “Yeah,” he said softly, looking at me. “Two people got hurt.”

  Weeks later, I got up the courage to ask my uncle the question that had been on my mind since the day he returned laden with all of my worldly possessions. “Uncle Rick, are you like my mom and dad?” I asked quietly across the dinner table. My mouth was dry with the paste of overcooked potatoes.

  “No,” was the only answer I got back at first. There was a long silence, and then the sound of chewing and swallowing. My uncle looked at me after he drank some of his milk. “Your mom and dad tried to be nice. They didn’t want to hurt people, so they robbed businesses that had money and insurance. They had good hearts.”

  “But you steal things too, right? You’re like them.”

  Anger flashed across my uncle’s face for a second. “Damn it, Will! Don’t you listen to me? They were good people. People can do the same thing, live in the same city, come from the same family. It don’t make them the same.”

  My uncle went back to eating, and for a time I did too. I had made him angry. It wasn’t talking about my parents that did it; it was asking about what he did. I ate more dry potatoes and decided to risk another question. “What do you do?”

  There was no anger this time. “Kid, what I do is worlds apart from your mom and dad. I work all over, with different people, and I don’t always do the same type of jobs. Now finish your dinner.”

  We didn’t speak about the subject again for two years. I went to school and my uncle worked long, sporadic hours. Finally, years after I had moved in permanently, I spoke up again at the dinner table. As my uncle chewed a piece of leftover pork chop, I looked him in the eye and said, “I want to work.”

  My uncle didn’t bat an eye at me or wait to swallow. “I know the guy who runs the Mac’s Milk down the road. Maybe I get can get you a job as a stock boy.”

  “I want to do what my parents did. What you do,” I said.

  My uncle put down his knife and fork and looked me in the eye. “What the fuck, boy, you think it’s the family business? Your parents weren’t Robin Hood and Maid goddamn Marian. They were criminals. They did bad things, and it got them killed.” He breathed deep in and out of his nose, and both of his hands gripped the table, his knuckles white. After a few moments he relaxed, took a drink of milk out of his glass, and spoke. “Your parents didn’t want this life for you, kid. That’s why they went after big scores with big risks. They wanted to raise you right. They wanted you to live in a house, have friends, and go to school. They wanted to be the Cleavers and you were supposed to be the Beav. But all that risk caught up with them. No one can do that work forever; it just doesn’t have longevity. No, that life isn’t for you. You need to be what they wanted you to be — a normal kid.”

  “I need to know,” was all I could get out at first, in a weak voice. “I need to know them.”

  My uncle looked at me, and his face softened almost imperceptibly. “Kid, they were your parents —”

  “No,” I interrupted, my voice gaining strength. “I didn’t know them. I didn’t know what they did, or why they did it. They never let me in on that, and now they never can. They raised me and loved me but they were never real. I need to know them. I need to know what they did. I want to work.”

  My uncle stared at me for a good long time, and just like countless times before, the corner of his mouth raised into a cold grin. The grin made me unsure of myself and what I wanted, but I held strong. I stared at the grin and said nothing; I fought every urge I had to turn away until he spoke.

  “I can’t turn you into them or what they were. They got killed for being themselves and doing what they did. The best I can do, kid, is show you what I do. You’ll see the world they lived in, but you’ll sur
vive because you’ll follow my rules. That’s the best I can do.”

  “Okay,” I said. I fought my lips but they moved on their own. I grinned at my uncle for about two seconds until his palm crashed into my cheek.

  I was on the floor when the burning in my cheek was joined by a ringing in my ears. I looked up, and my uncle stood over me. “Smiling and laughing gets left in the schoolyard. You just left that all behind when you asked for a job. You’re not going to like it and you’re probably going to hate me for it, but I’ll teach you. You’re in for a rough patch, kid. Now get up.”

  I stayed on the ground for a second and stared at the figure above me. Then I got up, watching his shoes, then shins, belt, shirt, and finally his face. I let the grin I had seen so many times before form on my face. I knew it looked like his; I had practised it enough to know. My cold grin was not startling to my uncle; if anything it startled me when it was returned in kind. I was startled for about two seconds by my uncle’s response — then his fist came into view, and the lights went out.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After several transfers, I was a few blocks from the house. I walked towards it, conscious of the sounds created by the city and the night. In the glow of the streetlights I saw eyes watching me inches from the ground, but I saw no human eyes tracking my movements. I walked through the open gate in front of the house. Junk mail had been crammed into the mailbox by several companies that already thought I could be a winner. I unlocked the door, fighting the stiffness of the old mechanism. Its age made it turn with a groan, and I hoped, as usual, that the key would not break off. Inside the air was stale. The house had no real smell to speak of, probably because the house had no tenants to speak of.

  I raided the kitchen looking for unspoiled food and found very little to choose from. I found crackers and an old jar of peanut butter that had given up its oil to the surface. I stirred the peanut butter with a knife and ate it with the crackers while I cleaned my Glock. When I finished with the Glock, I pulled my spare piece, a SIG Sauer 9 mm, from a compartment under the floorboards, and cleaned that as well. The amateurs I had met hadn’t seemed like the fighting type, but then again they didn’t seem like the type that would be able to find me, either. I decided I wouldn’t let them surprise me again.

  The next morning I used two buses and a cab to get me back to the office by nine. The Glock was in a holster at the small of my back; I placed the SIG in a holster taped to the underside of the desktop. I made a cup of tea and rolled my chair to the window to read the paper. Between stories, I glanced at the street below, looking for things that stood out. After I had read a story about local rezoning, I looked down to see a car pull up in front of the building. Three men got out of the car; each was dressed in a trench coat and sunglasses. The car screeched away once the three were clear, its tires spinning until smoke poured out. The car disappeared around a corner amidst the screams of pedestrians and the horns of other motorists.

  These guys were absolutely unbelievable. I pulled the gun from the holster at my back and racked a round into the chamber. I put the Glock, safety off, in my lap, and waited.

  In two minutes, there was a knock at the office door. I didn’t move. Thirty seconds passed, and I saw a face pressed to the frosted glass. Another knock. I put my hand on the gun in my lap and yelled, “Just a minute, I’m in the john.”

  Another ten seconds passed and then the door opened slowly. The first one through eyed my grin with amazement. He stood inside the doorway staring at me until I waved him in, saying, “Come on inside.” He was regular height with black hair that stood up in the front. The hair was sloppy over the ears, and I imagined it had been some months since he had a haircut. His nose was pointed like a beak, and his face was unshaven. A belly created a bulge under the buttoned trench coat he wore. The other two men tried to enter together, the larger finally managing to squeeze through first. He was bigger than chubby, but not yet obese. He had close-cropped red hair with a goatee to match, and on his left hand skin cream had dried crusty white. The third guy was tall, well over six feet, rail-thin, with a ponytail tied loose. He had circular John Lennon style glasses on a small pointed nose, and an Adam’s apple that protruded from his neck. I presumed that the one who entered first was the leader, because he was the one to speak first — unsurely, but first.

  “Uh . . .” he said.

  I cut him off. “There’s no name on the door, and no office number, so I know you don’t want anything honest. Just spit out what you really came here for.”

  The three men shared a look, and then it started. The two at the back pulled at their coats and began to produce guns. The whole process took several seconds because of the time the stubborn snaps on their coats took to open. I could have shot all three using either gun, but I let it play out. Two guns, big ones, were aimed at my face. On the right side of two guns, the talker lost all of his nervousness and began to question me.

  “Where the fuck is the bag, you motherfucker? I’ll kill your ass dead if you don’t talk, fucker!”

  Amateurs always thought hard-asses spoke like that. I played along. “What bag?”

  “You know exactly what bag. The one you took off Nicky at the airport.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said calmly. “You must have me confused with someone else.”

  The leader fumbled under his coat, brought out a piece of paper, and slammed it onto the desk. I stared at it while the sweat from his palm dried off the surface of the glossy paper. It was a picture of me leaving the airport with the bag. The image was grainy, but it was me. The photo had several numbers in each corner, as though the shot came from a security camera. This was the first time I was impressed. They had a watcher, someone I didn’t see, use the airport security cameras to get a shot of me coming from the bathroom.

  “Well, it seems like I’ve been found, but you’re late — the bag’s gone.”

  “We know that, fucker! We want it back.”

  I filed the fact that they knew the bag was gone away in my brain, along with the name of the guy at the airport, which they had let slip. “Can’t help you. The bag’s been picked up,” I said.

  “By who?”

  I knew something they didn’t. It felt good to score a point against them after they had shown up knowing about me and the transfer of the bag. “You don’t want to know. They wanted the bag. They got it. You candy-asses couldn’t hang with them, so let it go. You lost the bag, but you’re alive.”

  “Candy-asses, candy-asses, you fuck . . . fuck. I’ll show you.” The words sputtered out of his mouth as he twisted around to the fat one behind him. He wrestled the gun out of the fat man’s hand and aimed it at my head from three feet away. His hands were shaking with rage, but at that range it didn’t really matter; he could hit me no matter how much the barrel trembled. He held the gun with two hands and used both of his thumbs to pull back the hammer. I fought all the urges of fear and stared into his eyes. Time began to stretch; seconds felt like minutes, but everything snapped back when the skinny gunman with the Lennon glasses spoke up.

  “Relax, Mike, we need this guy alive,” he said.

  Mike took a few seconds, and then pulled the gun away and gave it back to the heavier of the two men.

  “We found you, you fuck. We know who you are. We want the bag back and if we don’t get it, we’ll get you,” Mike said.

  “I told you the deal is done. I’m a middleman, nothing more.”

  “You have a day. Let’s go,” Mike said, and the three of them turned their backs and left. Mike went first, followed by skinny, then fat. They took turns this time so no one got stuck. I sat there thinking about how they had turned their backs on me. I could have pulled out a gun from anywhere and shot them dead, but the amateurs didn’t know that. One question rolled through my mind: how did these amateurs do such a pro job of finding me?

  I sat in my chair and stared straight ahead. My whole lower body was damp with sweat. I spent twenty seconds like that, then I turned to the win
dow. After a minute, I saw the three get into the black sedan they arrived in. As soon as they were in, the car peeled out from in front of the building. From the height and angle of my window, I only managed to make out an “H” on the far left of the plate, but I knew the vehicle: it was an Audi. The shape had been imperfectly copied by several American and Japanese automakers, but there was no mistaking the look of a real Audi sedan. I went to my desk and pulled a pad and pen from the second drawer on the left. I wrote down the information I had so far: the bagman named Nicky, descriptions of Mike and his two friends, the make of the car, and the “H” I saw on the licence plate. I tore the sheet from the pad, and stashed the information in a locked file cabinet with my paid bills.

  I sat back in the chair and considered my options, which weren’t many. The bag wasn’t coming back willingly, so I could either try to find my new friends or wait for them to come to me again. I knew nothing about the bag or the people I took it from. I needed to know what I was up against before I made a move. In the end, I decided to make a call to the boss. Maybe he would give me an idea about who was on to me. I picked up the cell phone and dialled the same unlisted number I had called yesterday. It was the number for a restaurant, which it was, among other things. I waited, listening to the ringing tones. Promptly after the second chime, the phone was answered.

  “Yeah?”

  “I need an audience with the man,” I said.

  “I think you have the wrong number. This is a restaurant.”

  “Just tell him I delivered his bag and I just realized that there’s some other luggage that needs to be dealt with.” I didn’t wait for the guy on the other end to hang up first because I knew it was coming. The message would be automatically passed on and the right people would know what it meant. I figured I had some time before my question was answered, so I made a run to the deli at the corner. I picked up four large crusty rolls along with slices of pastrami, salami, corned beef, and turkey. I also got milk, a couple of deli pickles, and three pickled eggs. I took the food up to the office and set it in the small fridge I had in the corner. I pulled a book from a desk drawer and began to read with my feet on the windowsill.