Cruz loved it.?
He went to a live peep show and watched a big black guy tool a tiny oriental girl on a table.? He bought a dollar in booth tokens, and every time the screen went down on this little act, he pumped in another token.?
Then he went and bought himself two hot dogs, fries and a Coke at Nedick's.? He stayed there a long time, watching the action out on the street.? The sex, the freedom, the crazy sparkling madness of the place - it was a revelation.
"Hey kid," a fat little bald man said one night a week later.? "I seen you hanging around here a lot.? Wanna make some money?"
"What do I have to do?"
"You look like a sharp kid.? Ever hurt anybody before?"
Cruz smiled.? "Sure."
Now, a much older man, he smiled again at the memory.
He opened his eyes and glanced around.? He liked this Mercedes.? It was a comfortable car, damn near the top of the line, and probably three years old.? Cruz hated new cars.? The new car smell made him sick to his stomach.? This car was perfect.? It didn't smell like anything and had that kind of smooth ride where the bumps in the road were like a rumor you had heard years ago.? You couldn't hear the outside at all.?
Quiet as a tomb.
The car was cruising the highways somewhere in New England.? It didn't matter where right now.? They had passed Hartford a little while back.? The kids up front were supposed to wake him up when they entered Maine.? From behind his shades, he noticed the color on the trees along the highway - reds, yellows, orange.
Cruz was tired.? He had flown in from New Orleans on about two hours sleep.? At La Guardia, he bought a small tin of Vivarin caffeine pills, crushed two up, and snorted them for breakfast.? The limo - a big Lincoln Town Car - snatched him at the airport and whisked him straight into the city.? The driver - an old Polack or Russian - gave him his next gun, his next Glock.? It came in a handsome padded traveling case that Cruz threw into a garbage can before they even left the airport.? Cruz didn't care about presentation - he planned to carry the gun, loaded, ready to pop.?
The driver also gave him the dossier for this job, sealed for Cruz's eyes only.? The same dossier was now at Cruz's feet.? He read it while the limo took him across the Tri-Borough Bridge into Manhattan, then down the FDR Drive.? He would read it again before they got to Portland.? Gave him everything he needed to know about this guy Smoke Dugan, as well as the two young guys he would ride along with on this trip.
The meeting in Manhattan had been short and sweet.? It was at a coffee shop on Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, just up from the park.? They moved around all the time, staying one step ahead of the bugs.? Big Vito and Mr. C.???
Mr. C never spoke.? Just in case the bugs were already in place.? After a lifetime on the outside, he was not going to die in prison.? He sat there wrapped in a long wool coat, his thin hair slicked back, his face old and lined and unshaven, his eyes bright, sharp and aware.? At all times, he held an unlit Havana in his liver-spotted and palsied hand.? The world had changed and now cigars were bad for you.? Mr. C would regard that cigar at the end of his fingers and sigh.?? Sometimes he nodded at something that was said.? Sometimes he managed a ghost of a smile.??
"You gonna eat?" Big Vito said.? In person, his voice sounded like gravel pouring from the back of a dump truck.? His nose was wide and flat.? It had been broken so many times, it looked like a lump of mashed potatoes.? Above it, his eyes were like twin lasers.? His eyebrows were gray.? His hair was gray shot through with white.??
Fantastic Four, getting old himself.? Cruz imagined those big stone hands choking the life out of someone.? The legend was that's how Big Vito used to do it to you.? Strangle you with his bare hands.?
"I don't know.? How's the food?"
"Would we be here if it was bad?? Come on, Cruz.? You gotta eat.? Keep up your strength."? He looked to Mr. C for confirmation.? Mr. C nodded his agreement.?
"All right, I'll eat."
Vito waved over the skirt.
Cruz looked at the menu.? He spoke in a quiet voice.? "Three eggs, scrambled.? With Swiss cheese.? Sausage.? Corned beef hash.? Black coffee."
"That's what you're gonna eat?"
"What'd you think, a fruit cup?"
"Nah, it's just, you know.? They got healthier items.? Look.? Egg whites.? Turkey bacon.? Anything you want."
Cruz put the menu down.? "I think I'll stick with what I said."
The girl went away.
"We read the paper today," Vito went on without preamble.? "You know, got the box scores.? Checked everything out."
"Yeah?? What do you think?"
"Good.? We're happy the home team won."
Mr. C. nodded, licked his lips, gave his cigar a long look.
"Very pleased," Vito said.?
"Good," Cruz said.? "I want everybody to be happy."
"Everybody is."
There was a pause.? "You looked at what we left you?? The driver gave it to you?"
"Yeah.? Not sure I get it, but..."
"What's to get?? It's in plain English, right?"
"Oh yeah, that's not it.? It just seems like, maybe a little lightweight.? Retrieval isn't my thing.? I'm usually in, how do you want to call it, disposal."
"It ain't lightweight.? You let us worry about the thinking end of it.? You just make it happen."? Vito wrote something on a napkin and passed it across to Cruz.? 63 and Lex.? Black Mercedes.? Massachusetts plates.?
"I'll make it happen," Cruz said.
The girl was coming with the food.? The two men got up to leave.? "Enjoy your breakfast."
"You guys ain't gonna stay?"
"You know, we got business.? Never ends."
Cruz looked at the breakfast.? It made his stomach turn.
Mr. C eyed him closely.?
"Hey Cruz," Vito said.? "How ya feeling?"
"All right."
"You know, because you look like shit.? We worry about you.? Maybe you need some time away, like down in the islands.? Maybe when things slow down a little."
"Yeah," Cruz said.? "That sounds good."? He dug into the food.?
Now, in the Mercedes, he watched the two young men up front with some interest.?
The dossier at his feet included information about both these two kids.? The driver was a big muscle guy, wore a leather cap and black sunglasses.? The other one was skinny and missing three fingers on his right hand.? Jesus, who were they hiring nowadays?? Cruz was wary of the whole thing.? He had worked on his own for years, and now they gave him this babysitting job, with these kids to drive him.? He didn't like it.
The one in the passenger seat was Ray "Fingers" Pachonka.? He had lost those fingers playing with explosives.? Lucky to be alive after a fuck-up like that.?
The driver was Roland Moss.? Late twentysomething.? Former bouncer, former legbreaker.? Barely two years in the murder business, and he had been in on a dozen hits.?
Roland is strong as an ox.? He likes to hurt people.? Likes to make them talk.
That's what the dossier said.
Cruz watched them carefully, mostly because he didn't trust them.? Cruz had learned early on that it was best not to trust anybody, especially young men who believed themselves to be on the rise.? He had learned this from himself.
He listened in to their conversation for a moment.
"So they sent us to do this jigaboo one time," the skinny one, Fingers, said.? He spoke rapid fire, like a machine gun, or the heartbeat of a rabbit.? Bippity, bippity, bippity.? "The guy had ripped somebody off.? I don't remember the details.? Different job, same bullshit.? Right?"?
"Yeah," said the big one, Roland Moss.? The guy could be a pro wrestler, Cruz thought.? His broad shoulders extended past the edges of his bucket seat.? His neck was a trunk line, his head sitting perched on top like a pomegranate.? The muscles in his neck stood out and flexed like cables.
"They sent us to Gary fucking Indiana, just outside Chicago."? Fingers paused, seemingly for effect.? "I mean we fucking drove out there
.? Me and Sticks.? You know Sticks? Little guy, smokes a lot.? Pissed off, always wants to cut somebody.? Somebody doesn't signal in the car ahead of him, he wants to cut the guy.? You know him, right?"
Moss nodded.? He spoke slowly, like syrup pouring from a bottle.? "Yeah, I know him.? Did a couple jobs with him.? Saw him cut a man's eyes out once."? He sounded like he was giving it a taste of the South.? The dossier said he was from New Jersey.
Fingers nodded.? "Yeah, that's him.? Sticks.? Crazy as a fucking loon.? So we drive out there, me and him.? And Gary Indiana is like, nothing you ever seen before.? Everybody is gone, except some jigs that couldn't make it in Shy-town.? All the buildings are empty.? Or just plain gone.? A wasteland.? So we find the jig, drive him around for a while.? He's all acting cool, like his life is worth something.? Like he thinks we drove all this way just to, I don't know, shoot the shit or something.? He has this gym bag with him?? He has a fucking Tec-9 in there."
"Piece of shit," Moss drawled.
"All right, a Tec-9.? It's a piece of shit.? But I mean this jig has it in the gym bag, and he has a forty round clip in it, and then he has this custom twelve dozen round drum magazine, you should've seen the fucking thing.? Like something out of the movies.? He says he has the thing modified for full auto, and this big drum to attach to it.? Can you imagine this guy running around, spraying bullets everywhere?? No wonder all these little kids get shot in these jig neighborhoods.? You got these guys running around, think they're fucking Rambo.? Am I right?"??
"I never saw a gun like that," Moss said.
"You wouldn't see one.? Only a crazy person would have one.? So anyway, we bring him to this abandoned building, right?? We take him upstairs.? Now he's not as cool, he's starting to get the message.? We bust him up a little.? Then, you know Sticks, he starts to cut the guy up.? It's all right, but it's a lot of blood and shit now.? The jig is crying and all this, half his face coming off.? Sticks cut the jig's lips off, you know what I mean?? The guy's teeth are like out to here."
Fingers held his hand out about a foot in front of his face.? He laughed, an uncertain sound.? "I don't know about Sticks, man.? He should've been a butcher or some shit.? He gives me the fucking creeps, to be honest."?
"And the guy never pulled the gun?" Moss said.
"Yeah.? He never pulled it.? He never got anywhere near it.? A hundred and forty four rounds.? A lot of good it did him, right?? So finally, I take over from Sticks and I'm just like let's do this shit and get out of here.? So I take the jig and I tell him, you know, that's it, man.? You're done.? He's grateful by then.? He just wants the whole thing over with.? They got these floor to ceiling windows and they're all busted out.? So I send him out the window.? We're about six stories up, right?? By now, it's full on dark.? And I send him down into a vacant lot down there.? I mean, the whole city's a vacant lot.? The guy didn't scream or anything.? He just sailed down there in total silence.
"So here's my point.? We go downstairs to the street, and it's like, let's check it out, let's make sure this guy is dead.? We go around back and here's the jig.? He's laying there and the whole top of his head is broken off.? You know what I mean?? I mean, he hit the pavement and the top of his head broke off - right above the eyes.? He was like a stewpot with the lid off.? His eyes were open and I thought for a second he was looking right at me - I thought he was gonna say something.? And his brain had come out and was sitting there on the ground.? So I'm just standing there looking at this brain, and the jig with his eyes open is laying there like he's awake.? And the brain - it was like a bowl of Jello.? You know, when you turn the Jello upside down and it comes out all in one piece?? It was like that.? Like a toy.? It was fucking perfect.
"So what does Sticks say?? He's like, let's take the brain."?
"He wants to take the brain," Moss said.? He laughed, a short, deep bark.? "That sounds about right for Sticks."
Fingers nodded.? "Yeah, he wants the brain.? I'm like, you got to be fucking kidding me.? Is this a joke?? He wants to take it for a souvenir.? Thinks he'll put it in his refrigerator or maybe pickle it.? And he starts getting adamant about it.? I'm like, man, I am not driving twelve fucking hours to New York with a brain in the car.? You want the brain, call a cab."
Cruz had had enough of their conversation.?
He slipped the music back on his ears and picked the dossier off the floor.? He started to read about Smoke Dugan again, but then changed his mind.? Instead, he gazed out the window and watched the passing trees.?
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* * *
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Pamela jogged the Back Cove trail.?
It was three and a half miles of dirt track around the Cove.? On a cool fall day like today, the trail was packed with joggers, walkers - some with baby strollers, and bicyclists.? It was high tide and the Cove shimmered blue with the skyline of the city in the distance.? Out on the water, two wind surfers raced back and forth.?
Pamela was an avid jogger.? She jogged here often, stealing glances at the men who passed.? The Back Cove trail was a veritable smorgasbord of fit people out getting their exercise.? She noticed the women, too.? The women in their tight spandex shorts and halter tops.? The sexy women with whom she could never compete.?
She in her sweat pants and layered t-shirts.?
God, what was wrong with her?? As long as could remember, she had always been this way.? Shy, retiring, tongue-tied with people she did not know.? But she was good looking.? At least she thought she was and Lola always told her she was.? But she was twenty-nine years old, and more than three years had passed since she had been alone.? She thought of her last boyfriend - Thomas - bookish, thin, with glasses.? He was smart and had an off-beat, self-deprecating sense of humor.? He was a student at the University of Maine law school, and when he graduated, he asked her to marry him.?
She said no.
Things were good with Thomas, and she thought long and hard about becoming his wife.? But in the end, he wasn't her type.? At least, he wasn't the type she imagined was hers.? And she was not the quiet suburban wife of Thomas the corporate lawyer.? She recalled the last time they had made love, right before he left town for Providence, Rhode Island.? He had cried, and so had she, and they had stopped halfway through.? It made her think of the old joke - if I'd known the last time was really going to be the last time??
Why could she never seem to find a man?
She was bookish, certainly, just like Thomas.? From the earliest age, she had been more interested in reading books and watching movies than in dealing with people.? Life seemed so boring sometimes, and the lives lived in books, well, they seemed so exciting.? She had grown up in Newmarket, New Hampshire, a town where the big excitement was the freight trains passing through town - so close to her family's backyard that Pamela often thought of jumping aboard as the open cars passed - and summers on the nearby Seacoast beaches.? In the evenings, she and her brother would often play Scrabble or Monopoly with her mom and dad.? It was a normal, stable life.? And for Pamela, from the time she was a little girl, the real excitement - and maybe the only deep enjoyment - came from escaping into the stories.? The Nancy Drew mysteries.? Encyclopedia Brown.? A little later, The Lord of the Rings.? And of course, the movies: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and The Never Ending Story.
She envied Lola.? She loved her like a sister, but there was also the sting of envy.? Could you imagine?? Lola had grown up in a Chicago housing project - a slum where drug deals went down on street corners, where gunfire sounded at night, where men murdered each other in the hallways.? Just last week, two men tried to rape her, she beat them both at once, and now she acted like it never happened.? Pamela could never do that, would never want something similar to happen to her, and yet, there was something about it that enticed her.
She remembered how as a girl, she would imagine herself as a pirate.? Not as a woman who hung around with pirates, but as an actual pirate herself, sailing the high seas, attacking and plundering other ships, making people walk the plank.
?
She would give anything to live a life of swashbuckling adventure.? She should have become a cop, or a spy, or an ambulance driver - not a librarian who half the time felt afraid to meet the eyes of library patrons.
Face it, her life was boring.? It was an endless string of days, each fading into the next, her youth passing away fruitlessly.? The lives of the library patrons were boring, too.? She watched them.? She saw the emptiness in their eyes, the longing for escape, the unfulfilled wishing for something, anything, to happen.? Even the homeless people - she had once held a romantic notion that the life of a homeless person might be exciting.? But they came into the library by the dozens during the cold weather.? They slumped in chairs and dozed.? They leafed through magazines for hours on end.? Some of them simply sat and stared into space.? The homeless people led boring lives.
Adventure.? That's what she longed for, what she had always longed for.? To be in danger.? To survive on the edge.? And to take a lover, a dark and handsome stranger - yes, just like in the books - a desperate man with rippling muscles, yes and long hair and a fire in his belly.? A savage, passionate man.? Yes.?
She finished her run at the parking lot.? She was sweaty, out of breath, and felt exhilarated as always.? It was a nice day, and it was good to get these negative thoughts out of her system.? She consoled herself as she stretched on the grass near her peppy little car, a Volkswagen Golf.?
Someday, she thought, it will happen.? I will be like Lola.? And I'll lead a life of adventure just like the one she has lead.
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