by Warren Court
I pointed the gun at Macintyre’s face.
“What are you going to do, Jack? Shoot Rico and me?”
“Drop your gun on the floor.”
“Hey, I got an idea. Why not just shoot Rico?”
“What?” Rico said.
Mike grabbed Rico and pushed him towards me. I fired. My shot went over Rico’s head and embedded itself in Mike’s kitchen wall. Macintyre fired. Gloria screamed. Rico slumped into my arms. I fired under Rico’s arm, hitting Macintyre. He was flung backwards into the hallway. I let Rico slide to the floor. The firing lasted two seconds. Both Macintyre and Rico were dead. I picked up a dish towel, wiped Rico’s gun down and dropped it to the floor.
Gloria was crouched down, holding her knees and weeping. After a while, she got up and, instead of running to Macintyre, she ran into my arms.
I don’t know how long I hugged her. She wept. I wept.
Finally, I said, “Come on. Snap out of it.” I straightened her up and she held her head back and flicked her hair out of her face.
“It’s over,” she said.
I breathed deeply. “I’m sorry,” I said. “For all of it.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I think I’m dead.”
“What?”
“My sailboat—it’s at the bottom of the lake. I was going to head south.”
“Hold on,” she said.
She left the kitchen and I stared down at Rico and Macintyre. I was calming down a bit. Thinking it through. It would look like Rico had shot Macintyre and then taken one in the back before expiring. This after Imelda was killed by Rico’s gun. Maybe the people investigating it would think that they’d had a falling-out and killed each other. And that I was dead. They’d obviously planted a bomb on my boat. They’d put a diver down there to see if I was still on board, but it’s not unheard of for bodies to disappear in the lake. Maybe they hoped I’d make a reappearance, like Robert Garigue. I had no such intention.
Gloria came back with a set of keys and a piece of paper. I knew instantly what it was. Wave Dancer’s proof of ownership.
“She’s still in the water. Mike never got around to hauling her out.”
“I know,” I said. She wrote her name on the transfer section of the ownership papers and back-dated it four months, then handed it and the keys to me. As I stood there looking at what she had given back to me, my Wave Dancer, she opened a kitchen cabinet and pulled out the duffel bag full of Soos’s money.
“He thought he was so clever. I knew everything.”
“What are you going to do about them?” I inclined my head at the bodies on the floor.
“They killed each other. Your name won’t come up,” Gloria said.
I felt a wave of relief. I could trust her again. I could always trust her.
“Get a good lawyer,” I said.
“I will. Take care, Jack.”
“I’ll send you a postcard.”
“No, I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
After a final hug, I left.
Chapter 50
I kept Wave Dancer at a steady two thousand RPMs and she was running under ten knots, the top speed allowed in the canal. I was in Kentucky; the weather was finally getting warmer and I had stripped down to a T-shirt and jeans. Everybody and their uncle knew of my plans to hug the coast all the way down to the Caribbean. The inland waterway that navigates down through the Eastern United States to the Mississippi seemed like a good, safe bet.
I thought back on my career, the failure of it. All the hurt I had caused, the deaths. I was a new man, though. I had a fake passport I’d picked up quick before leaving, a bag full of money and my boat. I might still make it to St. Augustine someday. But for now, I was just content to put miles under my keel. Some distance between me and Hamilton.
Ernesto had blown itself out and there had been sunny but cold skies in Ontario when I’d left. I settled back in my seat. There were sunny and warm skies where I was going.
The End
Killer Moves
Warren Court
Killer Moves
(1st edition)
Copyright © 2019 Warren Court
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form (except for brief passages for the purposes of review) without the express written consent of the author
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.
To contact the author send email to [email protected]
For Tina and Katherine
ONE
I see the old man’s rusting Jaguar XJ6 in its reserved spot and I quicken my pace across Henderson Moving and Storage’s parking lot. Jack Henderson, the old man, is in early for a Monday. Our weekly sales meeting is at nine. I’m not late – it’s one minute to nine – but if Henderson is already here it means the meeting is starting early. I am probably already late. And my numbers aren’t so hot. They’ve never been hot; lukewarm at best for a couple of months this past spring, even though I thought I was finally getting the hang of this job.
I price out moves. I come into your home, count up all your stuff, tell you how much it’s going to cost and then book the truck. Sometimes you say “yes,” but most times you say “no thanks” or “we’ll get back to you.”
During the spring I had a couple of back-to-back big moves that just fell into my lap. I remember those times – high-fives in the morning with the other guys. Laughs around the office. Rick, my manager, the old man’s youngest son and heir apparent, was even warming up to me, as much as is possible with him. He’s known as Rick the Prick.
Then the summer hit. The busiest time in the moving business and my sales dry up to a trickle. Busiest day of the year, June 30th, I book only a six-hour move. Normally we have to turn business away we’re so full. The guys on that move were happy; they got off work early ahead of the long weekend.
I’m almost at the door into the office and I step in a pothole and get a soaker. Nice. That’ll help me when I have to go do an estimate at the home of some millionaire’s lakeshore mansion later on today. My wet sock, soiled with dirt and motor oil, on their white Persian rugs will help throw that sale right in the shitter. Laura, our customer service manager, will probably get a call about it. Sending a bum like that out to see them – why, they never…
I rush past Laura’s desk with just a nod. She’s on the phone and gives me a grimace, knows I’m in trouble. She’s British, with sexy long black hair. Dark-rimmed glasses. Normally I would stop and flirt with her, but not today. I pause at the door of the conference room, straighten my tie, take a deep breath, open the door and dive in.
“It should help us with cross-border orders. I checked with PMJ. They got it rolled out last year.”
That’s Darryl Henderson doing the talking, Jack’s oldest son. Friendly. Natural salesman. But there’s something missing there. Not leadership material. Darryl gives me an eye and a wink as he’s speaking. I’m no Louis Vuitton or Ralph Lauren myself, but Darryl dresses like a circus clown. Pea soup–coloured jacket and purple pants. A garish tie. I’m surprised he doesn’t have a flower on his lapel that shoots water. He has a seventies-style bushy moustache and his hair is slicked back. Darryl must have his mother’s genes; his hair is thick, shiny, and brown. Like his momma’s bush, one of the other sales guys cracked the other day. Sent us into hysterics. His father is in a mid-comb-over gesture that involves him bringing his big meaty farmer’s hand up over his bald head and moving twenty remaining strands of silver white hair to the other side of his dome. Go bald, Jack; revel in it. Bald is in.
Everyone is in their seat. Mine is at the other end of the table, pressed into the corner. There’s no slipping in late here. I don’t offer an apology. I’m not late; it is nine exactly. The old man would focus on me if I apologized. He might drill down and find out why I was late.
“
Don’t you take this job seriously?” I can hear him now. He’s never been late for work in his life, etcetera, etcetera. I could come back with “I’m not late. It’s nine on the dot.” But that would only fuel the attack on me. Might even mean the old man would get to my numbers first and lambaste me in front of everyone. So far, he’s held off on doing that. I’m still technically on their one-year probation plan. But I’ve seen him do it many times to the other seasoned vets of the Henderson sales team in my short time here.
I slink past and plop into my chair. Leave my raincoat on and put my briefcase down by my side. My giant businessman briefcase. Gift from the Leombrunis, friends of the family, last Christmas just before I started with Henderson. It was shiny and black with clean beige cloth on the inside and it smelled of leather. The locks shone like jewels, and it seemed enormous when I put my day planner and calculator in it. I added an assortment of nice pens I’d picked up over the years and some crappy throwaway ones. I set the combination to 007 – very cool.
But now, like my career at Henderson Moving and Storage, the shine is off the locks. The leather smell is gone, replaced by the stink of the mouldy cheese sandwich I left in it for a week when I was on vacation. The day planner is filled and a little thick from when I got it wet one day. The pages expanded; now it looks lived in. Not professional at all.
Darryl continues his discussion on the new moving software our national carrier recommended Henderson install. The old man finally caved and took a crowbar to his bank account and splurged on the software package. They put it on one lousy computer, and they put that computer on my desk up on the second floor. I have to teach these old farts how to use it, their reasoning being that I’m the youngest member, not even thirty, and in possession of some measure of computer skills.
I picked up on the software quickly; it’s dead easy to use. You plug in the pickup location and destination, add a bunch of moving codes, and it calculates the cost of the move and tariffs and a bunch of other stuff. You hit print and you get a hard copy to take to the client to sign.
I look at Mr. Henderson. He glances only briefly at me, the latecomer, the disturber of his mojo, but that quick stare is enough to freeze my bones and make me swallow hard. Everyone else is relaxed, sitting back doodling on pads. I sit forward in my chair, feigning interest, hoping Darryl talks the entire meeting away and keeps his dad off my back.
On the other side of Jack is Rick, the younger son, as I said, the heir apparent to the throne of the Henderson Moving and Storage empire. He is staring lasers at me, and when I give in finally and let them bore into me for a few seconds he slowly nods and turns his gaze back to his older brother. Rick’s suit hangs off him like a wrinkled cape. He’s lost thirty-two pounds, he’ll tell you, even if you’re not interested.
“Got to get to the gym. That’s important. More important than anything else.” Yeah, fuck off already, fatso used-to-be. At least Rick can put together a good colour combination. He has blonde hair but it’s starting to thin. I imagine his old man had that ’do as well. You’re going to lose yours, Ricky, my boy. Just look to your right and see your future.
Darryl finishes off with the virtues of the new software. Jack Henderson just grunts. He barely listened and doesn’t understand. Nothing you can tell old man Henderson about moving. His life story, which is the story of the company, is printed on a series of huge plaques in the lobby. Touched up black and white photos of the first moving truck. Then the small fleet, followed by ones of the new office building and finally the crane lifting the Henderson Moving van onto the roof, where it sits to this day. I secretly hope for it to come crashing through both floors one day and kill all of us in this meeting. At least it’s gotta take out Rick. Darryl can live.
We’re now at ten after nine.
“Okay,” Rick says. “Let’s go through the numbers.” Some sales meeting. It’s just a public vetting of how everyone is doing. Rick starts to his left with Kevin Bartemew, longest-serving salesman with the company, in his twenty-fifth year. He’s funny; I get along great with him. He took me out on a few calls when I got into that slump.
Rick reads out Kevin’s tally for September, this being the first of October. Kevin has good numbers. Repeat customers. Referrals. That’s what it’s all about in this business, Rick says. He says that and follows it with that tired adage, “You don’t sell a guy one car. You sell him five cars over ten years.” or something like that.
“Thing is, people don’t move like they buy cars,” I once said to him when we were driving to a meeting with a corporate client. A meeting I set up and finessed, and a meeting he blew sky-high with his arrogance. I followed up my statement with, “My parents have been in their house, same house, for thirty years. Still got probably ten years to go on it.” I could see Rick’s knuckles go white. To hell with it; I was hung over and reeking of booze and at that point I didn’t give a damn.
“Have a mint,” was all he said, so I took it and shut up.
After Kevin’s report comes John Palomine. “Hey, Johnny, you’re a pal o’ mine. You know that?” I always say.
“Hey, Gustav, go fuck yo’ mudder,” is the usual retort. He always calls me Gustav for some reason; it’s our little way of saying we like each other.
Great guy, John. Good salesman. Lots of referrals coming in, like a river. Italian guy, old school. Always joking, “There’s no mafia. What are you, crazy?”
Come on, Johnny. Tell us about all the guys you whacked before you decided to go straight. How many bodies you get Henderson Moving and Storage to dispose of, hey? They’re probably still in storage, rotting away.
“As long as the guys who put ’em there pay their bill, who cares?” John would say, and we’d laugh.
John’s numbers are good. He’s been at it ten years. His son comes by sometimes; he’s freaking gorgeous. Should be a model or actor. He drives a truck. Every time he comes by, Laura and the rest of the girls just happen to have business on the sales floor and they come up. Laura won’t flirt with me for a week after John’s son drops by. I’m not ugly. Just a kid, though.
When I think about taking Laura down, I can hear my father saying, “Don’t piss in your own bath water.” But what if I’m on the way out of the bath? With my numbers and my probation coming to an end, I’m sure to get my walking papers. I could at least get a mercy shag out of Laura the day I get let go.
This fantasy keeps me going and prevents me from just up and quitting, which is what old Ricky Boy would like. Would Laura still want to bang me if I just quit? Maybe if I told the Crown Prince off in front of everyone. Can’t do that, though; they’re tightwads and if I quit, I won’t get my severance.
Rick makes his way through all of the salesmen’s numbers and finally gets to me. I sink a little lower in my chair. Rick looks at the numbers and says nothing. The old man is twirling his pen. Darryl has a smirk on his face that I can’t read. The other salesmen are checking their watches or looking in their day planners or staring out the windows.
Rick looks up and reads off my numbers. “Six.” Six moves last month. Not a complete washout. Managed to get at least one a week.
“These need to be improved,” Rick says. I swallow again and nod. “You started with us, when?”
“Last November,” I say, and it gets caught in my throat. I cough and repeat, “Last November, Rick.” Rick nods. Message received. I have one month left, but even if I pull in numbers like Kevin’s – he did twenty in September, including nine internationals – they’re still going to get rid of me.
“I’m spending a lot of time on the phone, though, getting those corporate leads,” I tell him. “We have a meeting this week with AIC Mutual Funds. Remember we moved the VP of HR for them this summer? I called her and she’s going to meet with us.” “Us” just hangs there. God, why can’t I go to these corporate sits on my own?
“’Cause they don’t trust you,” John would say, meaning Darryl and Rick. “You might blow it. If these corporate things ever pan out
, they’re just going to take them over anyway.”
They hired me because of my corporate sales background. A background I greatly embellished on my resume, sweetened with a killer job interview with Darryl last fall. I knocked his socks off with my tales of the advertising world and business building and customer relationships. I was as calm as a cucumber in that meeting. Just the one interview. If Rick had interviewed me, I doubt I would have been able to crack that icy veneer.
They hired me to call up companies; I did have a knack for cold-calling and persistence, and getting myself in the door. What they didn’t say was that I would also be bringing along Ricky Boy for the ride, to ensure that whatever leads I garnered would get the full Henderson story and Ricky’s amazing sales capability.
I had done that plus gone out on all the sits at people’s homes. I was an estimator. Price out their moves across town or across the country, even a few overseas.
Rick moves off me, throws it back over to Jack Henderson, who has some other stuff that doesn’t interest me. He finishes the meeting off with a quote from Dale Carnegie, his personal hero; People like people who help them like themselves. He glares at me again briefly as he picks up his papers and leaves. We’ve all learned not to make a move until after he’s gone.
After he leaves, we all stand up, except Rick.
