Spooker

by Dean Ing

  And of course that horse's ass, Lowery, had to spoil it all. Andy had borne the "Candy Andy"

  humiliation like the stoic he was, staying out of Lowery's way, bottling his hatred, letting it settle and mature.

  Nor had Andy decanted the bottle when Hoss Lowery turned his attention toward Linda Seibouldt. If that was what Linda wanted, no doubt she had her reasons.

  It was at the end of basketball season, when Lowery changed his mind again, that Linda's obvious misery had blown the cork from Andy Soriano's bottle. The coarse jokes, the newly minted "Dirty Dottie"

  nickname, all the little indignities Hoss Lowery was known for, had finally focused on a target to draw Andy's revenge.

  The planning of it had taken much longer than the doing. Andy had known about the ruined cabin and its nearby mine shaft for years, one of his discoveries during solitary wanderings in the Sierra foothills. He had even mentioned it to Mom, who proved to have no interest in it. Once the decision was made, his first step was to check the cabin again, finding everything still more decrepit after added years of neglect. When he stood again before that yawning hole half-hidden by shrubs, Steele Lowery became no longer the schoolyard nemesis, but a client: Andy's first.

  Resolved to say nothing to Mom until his own client was history, he had used some of her tricks. Old gloves, hat, and canvas deck shoes - sometimes you had to make footprints, Mom always said, but you didn't have to sign them - bought at Goodwill in Clovis; a realistic Hong Kong copy of a Rolex worn briefly and consulted so that Hoss Lowery could not fail to notice it; a single admission to Hoss - nothing more - that Andy had found "an old cashbox" in a most unlikely place. Andy's roll of tattered bills, shown to Lowery, as if reluctantly, had done the rest. No one had ever accused Andy Soriano of being a big spender.

  Hoss Lowery's methods of persuasion had always been heavily larded with coercion. Rough good humor with rougher jostling, murmured teasing while looming over the smaller youth, promises of goodfellowship if Andy would "give" - information, of course. A more thoughtful youth would have grown suspicious, or soon lost interest. Young Steele Lowery was made of somewhat different stuff. He seemed totally incapable of imagining that he might be in danger from a smaller youth - until the last.

  After a day or so of the game, Andy had let himself be swayed to the point of a promise: to reveal the source of his wealth, but only to his new pal. After all, Andy had smiled his most innocent smile, how many ways did Hoss want to split the loot?

  With his El Camino pickup and his princely allowance, Lowery needed another boy's treasure like a carp needed more bones. But once his curiosity was aroused, he took the bait - -as Andy knew he would.

  And on a Saturday afternoon in April, ten days after the most recent rain, Andy clamped a paper sack full of his Goodwill items in his bike's book rack and pedaled to his rendezvous, a roadside picnic table two miles from the cabin. Despite their agreement, there was always the chance that Hoss Lowery would bring a crony, perhaps Ken Kirk. In that case, he would have to cancel the operation. He arrived a half-hour early, as he intended, and checked his equipment carefully.

  With his bike hidden and the deck shoes on, Andy had watched Lowery arrive alone; watched him fret and fiddle with his car stereo, and fret some more, and only when Hoss Lowery started up the El Camino again Andy trotted into sight, panting for effect.

  So how the fuck come, Hoss wondered aloud, exaggerating wildly, Andy made him wait a half-hour?

  Checking out the area, Andy replied, "We hike from here." How far? "About as long as you've been waiting." Grumbling, Lowery had locked the El Camino and pocketed his keys. Then the two had set off along foothill animal trails, Andy trotting tirelessly in the lead. Presently he withdrew a medical inhaler from his windbreaker pocket and, without pausing, raised it to his mouth. Then a burst of speed that forced Lowery to make up his deficit. Andy had been building his stamina with solitary runs in the hills, and it was working. The inhaler, clearing the alveoli in his lungs, was a distinct boost.

  "You oughta go - out for track," Lowery had called a moment later. Andy had only grunted. And, some minutes later: "Hold up."

  Andy had stopped to see Lowery, chest heaving, a new respect in his face as he walked the few steps to Andy. A lopsided smile before, "Andy-candy, you dickin' with me? I caught sight of the readjust a couple hundred yards over there," he said, jerking a thumb to his right.

  Privately, Andy decided this was only a ploy to take a breather. "It's a tumbledown cabin near the road.

  You want us to be seen on the way? Is there anybody around here who doesn't know you on sight? I don't know whose cabin it is, Hoss. If you want to, sure; we'll take the easy way. But we're nearly there anyhow. I just didn't want to take any chances, with so much money and all." And Andy used the inhaler again, pretending to revel in the dry, dusty taste of it. This time Lowery could not fail to notice, but said only,

  "Smart little fuck."

  You know it, stupid big fuck, Andy had thought at him, and grinned. And a moment later, they had trotted on again at the same pace. At last, they could see the squat bulk of the cabin. Andy, first into the clearing, held the inhaler near his mouth and triggered its contents, breathing heavily but not as deeply as Lowery, who put his hands on hips and puffed, studying the decayed roof.

  Smiling grimly, perhaps in triumph at keeping up, Lowery managed to say, "This better - be good."

  "I guarantee it," said Andy, smiling back, and pocketed the inhaler which was no larger than a roll of quarters, set into a plastic mouthpiece. His fingers closed around the second inhaler in his pocket, the one with its plastic mouthpiece carefully ground away to admit a different thumb trigger. "You should open up your lungs a little, Hoss. Like I do."

  "What is that shit, anyway?" Lowery asked, hands still on hips.

  "Alupent," said Andy, showing the second inhaler with its carefully installed pressure cartridge that had never been intended for a medical inhaler. "Doctor calls it a bronchodilator. Just clears out the passages."

  They were standing twenty feet from the mine shaft.

  "Some kind of - drug, right?"

  "No, more like aspirin," said Andy, and let himself laugh at the larger youth. "It's how guys with asthma can be big-time jocks. But if you want to stand around gasping like a pussy, go ahead," he said.

  A sudden glare from Lowery. "Gimme," he said.

  "Open wide and breathe in," said Andy, and Lowery did so, and Andy brought up the little device and, from a distance of six inches, sprayed Mace directly into Steele Lowery's open mouth. Unlike Alupent, a cartridge full of malonitrile is not designed to stop with a measured dose - not as long as its thumb trigger is depressed.

  He kept the spray directed into Lowery's face as the big youth slammed his own body backward with a single hoarse cry, arms flailing, falling into the leafy carpet with almost no further sound from his throat; his head, elbows, and heels drumming in fitful thuds against the ground. Andy, two paces away, made even less noise, watching analytically.

  A whistling, tortured intake of breath said that Lowery was making his usual fight of it as he lay on his back, eyes streaming now, face livid. His mouth worked, but no words emerged as Andy leaned forward to use the spray once again. The violent writhing became weaker as Andy watched; yet somehow the client managed to roll onto hands and knees, facing the turf.

  Andy thought that his client could probably see through those tears. He hoped so. Without hesitation, Andy drew the piece of raw potato from his pants pocket, took the single-edged razor blade from it, and knelt to one side of the client. With his knees clamped against the client's trembling arm to keep it steady, one hand buried in the unruly hair to position the client's head, he felt expertly for the carotid artery to one side of the larynx. It was Andy's conceit to avoid any marks on bony tissues because the larynx, Mom had told him, was easily damaged. Then he pressed very deeply and slowly, drawing the bright blade an inch toward the client's shoulder.

  Andy w
as met with two surprises. First, that the spurting gush of blood did not make his client leap or stiffen, though its crimson spatter was audible against the leaves; and second, he had sprayed so much malonitrile into the client's unsuspecting face that, like an invisible halo, the stuff was beginning to affect Andy himself.

  Andy thrust away, scrambling to safety on hands and knees. His hands were stinging a bit. He embedded the razor blade in its primitive sheath again and rubbed his hands briskly with leaves and dirt, blinking. No one had told him that a spray of Mace or its analogs could be this potent.

  He removed his windbreaker and walked to a clearing to let the breeze bathe his face, blinking furiously, able to see the client in tree shadow only as a sprawled figure that was no longer trying to crawl.

  Once a car passed, unseen but terrifyingly near. After five minutes or so, Andy's vision and the tightness in his chest had returned virtually to normal. This was old, familiar business now, but without Mom to help.

  And to criticize.

  He found the client rag-limp, no pulse or heartbeat, pupils fixed, fingernails more gray-white than cyanotic blue. It seemed he could have painted the cabin with all that blood, but little of it had stained the body. No matter. Andy fished the El Camino's keys from a pocket, then rolled the client by hips and shoulders, not leaning close enough to risk the remnants of that spray again, pleased to note that no deep scuff marks marred the leaves or turf. He pushed the legs into the shaft, then let the rest follow toward that deep blackness in a swift tumbling slide. His fake Rolex told him he had plenty of time before dusk. It certainly would never do to be seen driving that playboy's pickup in daylight; too many people knew it for Lowery's, and probably knew he never let anyone else drive it.

  Andy spent some of the time with a short length of one-by-six board from the cabin, gently raking a cover of leaves and fallen twigs over the bloody ground. Then he shoved leaves and debris into the mine shaft. It might be true that no one else had visited the cabin for years, but, his training insisted, that was no proof it wouldn't be checked out when Steele Lowery was missed. When he could no longer detect any telltales except for the always-dependable biting flies, Andy put the board back and surveyed the area with a practiced eye. Why he sat down in the sunlight, then, suddenly overwhelmed with a fit of sobbing, Andy could not say; maybe a reaction to the spray, he told himself. He was thankful that Mom hadn't seen him fall apart that way. Clients, she would have reminded him, are not people.

  Andy took his time walking back, avoiding the trails this time. He discarded the razor blade under one heavy stone, the Mace cartridge under another, a half-mile distant. He did not approach the El Camino until dusk. Wearing the gloves and hat, he placed his bike in the El Camino's carpeted cargo bed, listening for traffic, ready to duck from sight. Then he drove the vehicle to a gravel turnout near Auberry Road, where Hoss Lowery often left it when carousing with other jocks.

  Andy could not remember ever moving with such speed as when he locked the El Camino and lifted his bike to the pavement with hysterical strength, keys in his pocket. He rode a hundred yards on pavement before he saw lights approaching and darted up a gravel road, terribly aware that he must not be identified this near to the car.

  He was not seen. Andy exchanged the canvas deck shoes for his sneakers, tossed the canvas shoes far into a small culvert, and wiped the keys down before dropping them into a crevice in a rock pile near the culvert. Then he pedaled on in gathering April darkness, still nervously alert until he turned onto the reservation road. Mom was angry at his tardiness until he asked her to sit down, told her he had completed a relationship with a client, and waited for his punishment.

  She had questioned him closely for nearly an hour, neither praising nor berating him, in the manner of a tutor interested in the project of some prized student. Finally she had smiled and nodded, making him promise not to do it again without her help. She had not beaten him then, nor ever again.

  She had, in fact, taken him to DiCicco's for a celebratory dinner that night. He had never forgotten, from that day to this, her little joke after urging him to have the expensive veal scaloppine. It was the only correct choice, she told him as he ate: veal, she reminded him, is beef butchered very young. He had kept from throwing it up by thinking about other things, knowing that Mom's judgment rested on his reaction.

  He was to learn how fully she approved of his work when she laid out her plans for that long-haired Frenchman - the name, among so many, escaped Andy for the moment. It was Romana's decision to use the mine shaft again, Andy's to try his hand as a wigmaker. The scalp had come away rather easily, but - from a client only two hours dead - messily. Andy had made a number of wrong initial assumptions about the craft; found that the scalp was an unnecessary complication to be discarded. After that, he snipped hair that looked useful and kept it; first for practice, eventually for Mom's operations as he learned the secrets of the professional wigmaker.

  Though synthetic wigs of acrylic fiber were available commercially, the finest stuff was real, some of the best taken from obedient Belgian nuns whose long tresses brought a premium because they had not been ruined over the years by widely advertised chemical insults. Men did not pay so much attention to advertising, so their hair tended to be similarly healthy and supple. Natural hair could be woven into the interstices of a skinlike cloth cap by machine wefting, but the special equipment posed problems. Andy did his research and settled on the old way, hand-wefting two or three strands at a time with a needle like a fine crochet hook. It still took him forty hours to hand-tie a wig, and additional time to style it, pinned over a canvas form. Mom had teased him about his career as a hair stylist. But that did not stop her from using the wigs.

  Andy could afford to smile about it now, as he heard a soft fluttering buzz overhead five minutes after his own arrival. He knew that sound well, a small high-performance engine fitted with an outsized muffler that robbed the Chamois of a few horsepower while making it very stealthy. The rearmost of the engines would be idling because its thrust line was low, urging a slight nose-up attitude that could let the Chamois float too far during landing. The forward engine, with its high thrust line, provided a slight nose-down moment. You didn't want it floating with only 200 yards of runway. Mom had drilled him on that, having sensed this eccentricity in the craft from her first flights on dusky evenings. Mom's the master, he thought, admiring, envying. He knew it was not good to allow those thoughts to fuse into something darker.

  He saw the Chamois waft overhead and circle to its final approach, settling very slowly onto the gravel drive. Mom would have her infrared goggles on for this, the most crucial moment of flight. She cut the ignition an instant after touchdown, and with both props stilled, the loudest sound as she passed Andy was the brief passionate squeaks of disc brakes. She let inertia carry her near the converted garage before applying the brakes for a full stop and exiting through the flimsy door beneath the dark slab of wing.

  With only a few words of greeting, Romana toggled the automatic garage door and let Andy help her turn the Chamois by hand, adjusting the nose wheel with precision, shoving the gossamer craft tail-first into its lair. These moments were crucial, too; every second during the hangaring process was a moment of vulnerability. Her attention to detail was astonishing. Andy had found his Mom. scrubbing scuff marks made by those little tires from the driveway, one moonlit night.

  Once the automatic door was secured, they entered The Place by the side door as usual, Mom ducking to check the tiny red eye of her silent alarm which was buried in the hinge framing, visible only if your eye was four feet above the steps, and if you knew the right angle to spot it.

  Andy had lived in this house through most of his childhood and knew the routines intimately. Mom had brought the mail and newspaper from her mailbox at the reservation center before her flight, and now they awaited her scrutiny on the kitchen pass-through; she had previously loaded Mr. Coffee and now started its processing in passing; Andy withdrew
two cups from the cupboard and set them out. He knew that she would light a Pall Mall just before filling her cup, take a couple of drags, and flick a tiny bit of ash into her coffee before dousing the cigarette. An old habit borrowed from Russians, she had told him once; its bitter tang was a taste Andy had never been able to acquire.

  While Mr. Coffee gurgled and spat, she separated her mail, fully half of it going directly into the burn sack without opening. She looked up. "You're humming," she said.

  "Was I? Sorry." Andy parked his rump on a kitchen stool and pulled the Zippo from his pocket, toying with it, smiling to himself. "Enjoy the flight?"

  "Not much. Spotted the white Volvo in Orangevale about a quarter to seven, but I already had the address from the license tag; just off Hazel Avenue. Where would I be without good street maps?" Head shake. "It's too far to the Sacramento area for practical air surveillance, without a bigger fuel tank. I had to idle the forward engine while I circled, or get back on fumes."

  "Then why fly?"

  She smirked. "Polaroids of the neighborhood, of course."

  "Mm." Of course. Sooner or later she would need a spot from which to park and bug the house, and the Polaroids might help. They could also be useful in planning a takedown.

  Presently the coffeemaker gasped its last. As she pulled a Pall Mall from its pack, he tried his Zippo. It needed several flicks. "It should work every time," she said, inhaling.

  "It does," he said, and winked. He pulled off the lighter's outer canister and teased the felt pad away, pulling the tiny assembly out by its flimsy wrap. "Your tracker subamp, ma'am," he said, placing it on the Formica.

  "Wellll," she said, putting down the slender catalogs, suddenly focused on something he had brought her.

  He thought she was beautiful when she smiled like that. If he'd had a tail, he would have been thumping it against the stool. She looked up and smiled for him, and his heart melted. "How long now?"