by Ray Verola
A waiter escorted a young, fresh-faced human couple to her table.
William Hart had told Sophia that Regan and Marisa Aguilar were “reasonably smart, married university graduates gone bad. They’re ambitious, petty criminals facing significant prison time from the government.” Regan was tall and gawky with a shaved head. Marisa was short, brunette, and shapely. Each had the face of a fifteen-year-old. They were dressed in jeans and loose-fitting shirts—not the kind of attire usually seen in this upscale restaurant. Sophia was underwhelmed by this first impression.
Sophia had asked Hart how smart the Aguilars could be if they were in a position to be pressured to carry out the significant crime she wanted them to commit to avoid prison. When Hart shrugged his shoulders and had no answer, Sophia wanted to slap his face even more than she did when he called Taylor “not truly homeless.”
The financial payment to be offered to the couple and Hart’s plan to relocate them post-job to an exclusive suburb of Capital City were designed to enable the Aguilars to live exceptionally well while also avoiding incarceration. Sophia didn’t care about laying out the money for the Aguilars’ services. She had plenty of cash, so the money didn’t matter. That was one way she’d never become like a human. Too many humans worshipped the almighty currency. It was power, doing things right, and evolving as a sentient being that mattered to her.
“We are not here to discuss specifics,” Sophia said to the couple after they’d sat. “This meeting is off the record. Heaven help either of you if you talk about it to anyone, even in your sleep. I want to impress upon you both how imperative it is that your mission be executed—no pun intended—smoothly.”
Regan spoke up. “You don’t have to worry about us talking out of turn, ma’am. We can be trusted. We don’t even know your name. Our plan—”
Sophia felt a fury in her robot body. “No details, dammit. The operative term is plausible deniability. That means I have no knowledge of what you might be doing because there’s no evidence of me knowing what the hell you might be doing and how the hell you might be doing it.” She noted the blank expressions on their faces and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. She fixated her gaze on Regan. “In short, I don’t want to know your plan.”
Regan swallowed in a way that made his prominent Adam’s apple rise and fall noticeably. “Sorry, ma’am.”
“Just be sure to get it done,” Sophia said. It was a mistake to meet these two idiots. She needed to minimize the mistake by getting the hell away from them as soon as possible. “Neat and clean,” she said. “That’s the key principle. We’re done.” The only thing that made Sophia continue with the Aguilar plan now was her confidence in William Hart’s promise that the plot would never be able to be linked back to either of them.
“But I do have one question, ma’am,” Regan said. “About our money—and the mechanics of how we’ll be paid?”
Sophia’s eyes narrowed. “Money is handled by your contact. Not me.”
“The anonymous contact,” Regan replied. “Of course. Sorry.”
As they got up to leave, Marisa Aguilar—who hadn’t uttered a word during the brief meeting—gave Sophia an empty smile that made her thinking mechanism nearly short-circuit at the thought of using these amateurs to do a professional job. She wanted to slam her fist through the table for meeting these two in public and again considered canceling the whole deal. But she made the quick decision to continue. Hart had gone too far down the road with these two dolts. To turn back now might cause more problems than it would solve. I often congratulate myself for becoming more human every day. But this is the bad part of being human. Being weak and sloppy. Just like Homo sapiens.
***
Today was to be Taylor’s “moving day.” He couldn’t risk remaining at his spot under the bridge any longer. But he awoke in his usual Serenity-based malaise, accompanied by a headache and hand tremors. Without rising from the bedroll, he unsteadily reached for a vial in his pants pocket and popped three Calm pills into his mouth, swallowing them without water. He rolled onto his left side and closed his eyes. With as bad as he felt, maybe he’d wait another day before moving.
There was a constant stream of volunteers and do-gooders attempting to help the downtown Capital City homeless. Taylor had never been approached by anyone offering assistance until now, when around midafternoon an enthusiastic, friendly couple stopped by his spot under the bridge and introduced themselves. The earnestness of Regan Aguilar and the charisma of Marisa Aguilar intrigued him.
The Aguilars told him they offered home-cooked dinners for people in his situation. “We feel it’s our calling,” Marisa said. “A way to help our fellow humans down on their luck. You’re invited. All you have to do is select a night.”
The possibility of a home-cooked meal seemed great to Taylor, who, outside of the chocolate-frosted donuts from Roz and an occasional protein bar from two sympathetic neighbors, had been scrounging food from dumpsters in alleys and behind local restaurants. Almost all his money went toward the purchase of Serenity and Calm. Thinking of Austin and the two neighbors who’d given him protein bars, he asked, “May I bring a friend or two or three?”
“Sorry. No can do,” Regan said. “We’re only two people using our own money to fund these dinners. Plus, we like to focus on helping only one person at a time.”
“Understandable,” Taylor replied.
“Maybe at dinner we could talk about getting you back on your feet,” Regan said. “You seem to be a cut above the usual type of person who ends up here.” He rubbed his arms and appeared to be uncomfortable, not being able to sustain eye contact with Taylor for more than a second or two.
Taylor smiled. “Any help you could provide to get me back on my feet would be . . . tremendous. I am certainly willing to work and take responsibility to do whatever’s necessary to pull myself out of the mess I’ve created by my own actions.”
“Your positive attitude is admirable. How about tomorrow night at eight?” Regan asked. “We can pick you up in our PTV and drive you to our apartment, which is only about a mile from here. And we’ll drive you back after dinner.”
Taylor thought it almost humorous as to how much he’d lost his pride by even considering accepting help from these strangers less than twenty-four hours after turning down assistance from Roz. But he had a good feeling about this couple and, even more importantly, his stomach was growling. The thought of a real meal was too tempting to turn down. The postponement of his moving day was now set in stone, given the Aguilar invitation. His pride was fully set aside. “I accept your offer. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, both of you.”
“Great,” Regan said. “Be ready at seven-thirty tomorrow night.” As he pointed to their red PTV parked on the street, he said, “We’ll be by in our vehicle to pick you up at seven-thirty sharp. Sound good?”
“Just perfect,” Taylor said.
28
Regan Aguilar paced around the dining room table like a zoo lion longing to break through a glass cage to attack an annoying, taunting kid. Marisa, seated on a worn green cloth sofa with a one-inch rip on the top of the back cushion where she rested her head, was furious to the point that a large vein resembling the shape of the nearby Anacostia River could be seen on her forehead.
The clock on the wall showed four-thirty in the afternoon. In three hours they were scheduled to pick up Taylor Morris and drive him to this small one-bedroom apartment to kill him. The apartment had been rented by the Aguilars within the past week for this specific purpose. They had paid the rent for the place with cash they’d been given—in an unmarked envelope left at the door of the more upscale apartment where they were actually living—by associates of William Hart.
“Why the hell did you ever agree to this insanity?” Marisa demanded.
Regan placed both hands on his chest as he stopped his marching. “Me? It wasn’t only me. As I recall, we both agreed. I�
�m sorry you’re having second thoughts. Now’s not the time to get cold feet. Not at this late hour. And it’s not insanity. It’s what we need to do to stay out of prison and live the life of our dreams.”
Marisa shook her head. “Life of our dreams? Life of our dreams? No, no, no. This is a nightmare. I never agreed to kill anybody. We had to do something to avoid prison, true. We were over a barrel, true. But when the call came from that disembodied voice over the communication device, you were the only one home. It was you alone who agreed to killing this guy.”
“We were painted into a corner,” Regan replied. “We had to agree to do what they wanted. That was the deal. The call was coming. You knew it was coming. You knew they’d ask us to do something big to avoid prison. We had no choice. It was doing what they wanted or get locked up for a long time. You knew it, dammit. Whether you were here or not, we’d have to agree to almost anything they proposed. It was the arrangement we had with the powers that be. These are people who mean business. The red-haired woman in the restaurant was terrifying, not one to be messed with.”
In a tone that was almost pleading, Marisa said, “We are thieves. We are grifters. We’re not murderers. We don’t know how to pull off a clean murder. We and murder go together like peanut butter and jellyfish. To kill someone is not something I’d agree to. I would have negotiated—or maybe even chosen to go to prison rather than kill a person. Especially this Taylor guy, who seems like a decent human being. I have my values, my ethical limits. I thought you did as well. Maybe if someone gave us the beginning of a murder plan, we could bring it off. Like delivering the mark to a pro who does the deed. It’s less than three hours to go, and we’ve got no real plan.”
She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She lit a cigarette with a shaky hand and took a long drag.
“You’re back to smoking old-time cigarettes to puff our problems away,” Regan said. “It won’t do any good. Using old-timers as an anodyne is so ancient.”
“What the hell is an anodyne?”
“Anything that relieves distress or pain.”
“You’ve always had a great vocabulary, show-off.” She blew a cloud of smoke in his direction. “Smoking old-timers relaxes me from all the stress you’ve caused. So maybe it is an anodyne, at least for me.”
As he resumed pacing around the table, Regan’s face turned a dark shade of red. “The latest vitamin-enriched e-cigs are a healthy alternative to old-timers according to the government, but that’s a subject for another day. About our situation, there was no room for negotiation. And we’d already concluded that neither one of us could survive the horror of prison. I’m sorry you think I screwed up. But we’re in this now, and there’s no turning back.” He stopped his pacing and met her eyes with his. “And I’ve told you of the plan. We have a plan.”
Marisa gave an exaggerated huff. “Some plan! A third-rate comedy troupe wouldn’t base a sketch on this so-called plan. It would be too unbelievable. Funny, very funny. Except I’m not laughing. It’s got disaster written all over it.”
“It’s solid. I haven’t heard you come up with anything.”
“We should just shoot him. You should just shoot him. On the street, someplace away from here.”
“And where the hell do we get a gun? Non-cop citizens aren’t allowed to own guns. If I tried to get a gun, I’d be arrested in a heartbeat. Then we’d both go up the river for an extra-long time. Do you want that?”
Marisa inhaled another long drag of the cigarette, blew out a straight line of smoke, and shook her head. “How about you bashing him over the head or stabbing him in the PTV, then dumping the body after dark?”
“Too messy and too risky to do it in our PTV. If we stab him, there’d be microscopic blood evidence in our vehicle the government would detect during our annual internal vehicle inspection. With all the cross-referencing of records they have today, we’d be caught red-handed. And with telescreen technology, there’d be no safe place to randomly dump a body. About bashing him over the head, one would have to be an experienced martial artist to know how to kill with a blow to the head. I’m telling you, drugging him at dinner, and then making it appear to be a pedestrian accident is the way to go.” He extended his arms to her, with his palms up. “We’ve gotten the knockout stuff to add to the food, complete with the foolproof directions on how to use it, from our anonymous contact. Using this stuff will be as easy as can be. And our contact has assured me that the telescreens on the isolated street where we’ll do the final part of the deed will be disabled. It’s all set up.”
Her upper lip twitched twice in rapid succession. “Maybe we should go on the run.”
“That’s not possible. The government or the powerful people or whoever the hell is asking us to do this job would find us in twenty-four hours or less.” Regan walked over to her and sat. He put his arm around her shoulders, pulled her close, and made eye contact. “Listen, the choice is clear. We go to prison or you start preparing a wonderful dinner with this homeless, Serenity addict Taylor guy as our guest. Trust me, the plan will work. Think positively.”
She laughed loudly, in a way that didn’t seem appropriate for the seriousness of this moment. “Yeah. I’m positively positive this plan won’t work.”
“I can tell you don’t really believe a word you just said.”
Marisa got up from the sofa and crushed out her cigarette on an end table ash tray. “I’ll start dinner.” She ran both hands through her long brown hair and mumbled, “I’m not even a good cook.”
“The taste of the damn food is the last thing we have to worry about. Just remember to add the sedative to everything we give this Taylor guy—and be sure he gets the food with the knockout stuff and not either one of us.”
29
At exactly seven-thirty in the evening, the Aguilars arrived in their PTV at the parking lot near Taylor’s spot under the bridge. Marisa, in the front passenger seat, waved at Taylor. As he approached their snappy, current-year-model red vehicle, Taylor noticed her eyes seemed bloodshot and swollen, as if she had been crying. He decided not to say anything about her apparent upset as he eased into the back seat. Regan pulled out of the lot, and they were on their way.
Regan turned back to Taylor and said, “Great to see you. We’ll have a terrific night.”
The three didn’t say another word on the two-minute trip to the Aguilars’ apartment building. Taylor wore jeans and an open-collar green sport shirt he hadn’t worn since he’d been living on the street. He’d washed himself earlier in the day using a sink at a local library restroom. A bird bath, he’d called it. And he’d sprayed himself all-over with copious amounts of the strongest body deodorant currently on the market, which he’d packed in his suitcase on the day he left his apartment.
Regan Aguilar maneuvered his PTV into the underground parking garage of one of the hundreds of faded gray ten-story apartment buildings in Capital City. The three rode the elevator to the fifth floor.
Upon entering the apartment, Marisa disappeared into the kitchen.
Standing in the living room with Regan, Taylor said, “What a beautiful place. Very cozy. Very homey.” He said this even though the furniture was old, the walls were bare, and the tiny apartment couldn’t hold a small candle to his former residence.
“Oh, you’re too kind, Taylor,” Regan said. “We’re in the process of trying to spruce the place up with artwork and the like.” He pointed to the modest wooden, light-brown dining room table surrounded by four chairs. “Please, my friend, take a seat. Let me pour you a glass of water. Marisa has been cooking all afternoon. Dinner will be served momentarily.”
“Smells terrific,” Taylor said. “What the two of you are doing is so awesome. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. It’s nice to be indoors and—” Taylor’s voice cracked. Buck up, man, he told himself. He straightened up and threw back his shoulders as he
took a seat at the table.
Regan sat across from him. “Anyone in your situation can get down on life. Bad breaks can happen to anyone. We get a kick out of helping. Today’s a happy day. It’s a turning point for you. For sure. No crying allowed.” He rose and reached for a tissue dispenser on an end table.
Taylor waved the index finger of his right hand to his host. “That won’t be necessary. I’m fine.”
Regan returned to the table empty-handed.
Taylor took a sip of water and fabricated a slight smile. “You’re right. No crying allowed at dinner. Sorry. Don’t know what got into me.”
“No problem, my friend.”
Marisa breezed into the room with three bowls on a large tray. “I hope you like tomato soup,” she said as she put a bowl in front of Taylor.
Tomato soup had never been one of his favorites. But he thought, Beggars can’t be choosers, and then tried to manufacture as much enthusiasm as he could while saying, “One of my favorites.”
As Marisa returned to the kitchen, Taylor and Regan began with the soup. Taylor thought it tasted good, but with a bit of a metallic tang. The feeling of the warm soup going down his throat was most welcome, however, given his diet since becoming homeless.
Marisa zipped back out of the kitchen carrying three plates on a tray. She set a plate before Taylor. “Hope you like sirloin steak with mashed potatoes and beef gravy.”
“I love it, really,” Taylor said. “Just wonderful.” He was telling the truth now. For as long as he could remember, steak had been one of his all-time favorite foods.
