New Title 1 Read online

  “Fuck you, old man.”

  I’d hoped he might be different. I keep hoping one of them will possess a sense of self-preservation. But no, he’s like the rest. Probably been scrapping since childhood, punched and kicked, sliced a few times. Maybe his father used him as a punching bag and he’s thinking I know pain, tasted it, not afraid to taste it again.

  He doesn’t know pain. None of them do; not really. But I teach them.

  I take a straight razor from my toolbag and cut the kid’s shirt off. A rockstar body: underfed and sparrow-chested, arms so thin and skin nearly translucent. He wouldn’t look out of place at a Nazi internment camp. Some animal, a wolf or fox, is tattooed over his heart. I hook my fingers inside his waistband to get some separation between denim and flesh, carefully slicing through his jeans and boxers.

  “You gonna blow me, old man? This give you a thrill, you fucking flamer?”

  I say, “Joey look pasty to you, Phil?”

  “Fucker looks like he spent the night spooning with Dracula.”

  “So he could do with some color?”

  “I’d say so.”

  The first Outfit job I pulled was on a sawbones named Dr. Joseph Weinstock. Doc Joe was selling prescription blanks to the Outfit: tablets of one-hundred blanks that runners would forge signatures on and offload at twenty, thirty bucks a pop. The speed freaks and nodders loved it and the scam netted Doc Joe a couple thou a month. But he got greedy and jacked the price. The Outfit balked. Doc Joe threatened to take his business to the Eastside. Bad move. They called me in.

  A doctor’s hands are his dinner ticket; something happens to his digits and he might as well burn his shingle because his practice is toast. By the time I walked into the soundproofed room, Doc Joe’s fingers had been spread and u-clamped to a table. His mouth was duct-taped, nose smeared across half his face; would’ve looked just like strawberry jam if not for the white humps of cartilage.

  “Put him out of business,” Marco Sorbetti said.

  Using a DeWalt variable-speed drill, I bored pinprick holes through Doc Joe’s fingernails, tracing the milky rim of each cuticle. Then I filled an insulin needle with carbolic acid and injected it into the tender flesh under the enamel. There was this violent fizzling, like when baking soda and vinegar react, followed by the rank smell of emulsified flesh. Doc Joe’s fingers withered, then blackened. It was like watching matchsticks burn down. He broke most of them spasming against the u-clamps. The Outfit was duly impressed. Now I’m their Answer.

  I uncap the bottle of Coppertone and slather coconut-scented oil over Joey’s chest and arms until his body gleams like a shellacked egg.

  “This what you like, you fucking old faggot? Greasing dudes up?”

  “Yes,” I say softly. “This is how old faggots like me get off.”

  I crack the tanning bed open. Eight rows of ultraviolet bulbs reflect their heat on my skin. Phil uncuffs Joey and leads him over. The kid’s smiling.

  “Hey, I could use a tan. Bronze me up and I’ll be off to Fantasy Island. Hey, boss—de plane, de plane!”

  Phil sits Joey on the lip of the tanning bed. I kneel and look into his eyes. I need to make him realize who he is dealing with. I’m not a monster, not exactly, but I do not care about him and he needs to understand this. He needs to know I will hurt him mercilessly until he tells me what I need to know. If he does not, I’ll watch him die.

  “One more time: where’s the truck?”

  The kid yawns. “Let me catch some rays, old man.”

  Sometimes I think that if everyone did what’s best for them, my occupation would become redundant. But it is my experience that people rarely act in their own best interests.

  I lay Joey down, then close the lid and lock it with a pair of Swedge padlocks. The kid’s singing “California Dreaming” by the Mama’s & the Papas. Nice voice.

  Phil produces a deck of Bikes and we play a few rounds of nickel poker. I’m left holding aces and queens when he trumps me with a full house; then he matches fives on the last card to beat my ace-high. Cards are a great way to kill time; Crosshairs and I used to play in the jungles of Vietnam until he lost his poker face.

  Got his poker face torn off is more accurate, I suppose.

  Ten minutes pass. I check on the kid. He’s lobster-red but the pain hasn’t registered on his nervous system yet. “Close the lid,” he says. “Getting comfy.”

  I press my finger to his flesh. It leaves a dime-sized spot of whiteness. “Listen to me,” I say. “Phil and I are going to lunch. When we get back, I guarantee you’ll tell us where the truck is. So why don’t you spill now, before I have to scrape you out of this thing with a spatula.”

  “Bring me back a meatball sub, why don’t ya?”

  I close and lock the lid.

  We choose Honey’s, a chicken-and-pizza joint three blocks east. We sit at a bar strung with winking Christmas lights underneath a banner that reads HAVE A MERRY HO-HO-HONEY’S CHRISTMAS and order a jug of Schlitz.

  Phil says, “So what’s this wiseass gonna look like when we get back?”

  I sip my beer, considering. “Well, once I put a hotdog into one of those turbo-model tanning beds. One hour cooked it. Two hours and it looked like beefy jerky. Three, shoe leather. After four it was pretty much ashes.”

  “Je-sus,” Phil says. “Kid gonna be able to spill?”

  “He’ll talk.”

  By the time we finish our drinks and walk back to Sunchasers, nearly two hours have passed. Joe waves his hand in front of his face as we enter.

  “Roasting a pig back there, Answer?”

  “Something like that.”

  The odor intensifies as we get closer: a sickly-sweet mingling of cooked meat, blood, coconut. Phil covers his nose and mouth with an embroidered handkerchief.

  “Smells like a fucking glue factory.”

  Blood seeps between the seams of the tanning bed, thin runners that look a little like warm tar. Feeble scratching noises coming from inside.

  I unlock the lid and open it. The kid is in rough shape.

  His body is stoplight red, except for the odd patch charred black. Joey is…steaming. It rises off him in savory plumes, as from the surface of a hot bath.

  In his agony he opened his eyes. The ultraviolet light has blinded him: his eyes are completely bloodshot, the eyes of an albino. He thrashes mindlessly as I unplug the unit. His flesh is loose, more of a sheath than a part of him. It jiggles like the membrane that forms on unstirred soup.

  “Christ,” Phil says, staring at the writhing thing. “They sell these things? People lie in them…willingly?”

  The kid holds his hand out to me like a frightened boy who’s lost his mother. He is trying to say something but his lips are melted black, tongue a swollen bulb in his mouth. I take his hand and there is a moist tearing sound as the flesh of his fingers and wrist comes off, all in one piece, like a wash-glove. Underneath are long ropes of muscle and knobs of whiteness where his knuckles are exposed, the yellow half-moons of his fingernails. The shed skin is warm in my hand, slack and slippery.

  “Oh, this is too much.” Phil unbuttons his Soprani blazer and reaches for his piece, thinking about a mercy-killing. “This cannot be.”

  “No,” I say quietly. “In a minute.”

  I kneel beside the kid. His face, what remains of it, is bloated and pocked with suppurating boils leaking pus of a shade I’d previously regarded as impossible for a human body to produce. I ask the same question I asked two hours ago, when there was still a chance the kid might’ve walked away breathing.

  “Where is the truck.?”

  “Ungh…ungh…uhhh…”

  “Just tell me, kid. I’ll make the whole world go away.”

  “U…u…u…sto…Storage…”

  I turn to Phil. “U-Storage?”

  “Yeah.” Phil’s skin is the color of unripe bananas. “Long-term storage joint down on the Hudson.”

  “We need anything else?”

  “No. Chris
t, no.”

  With a strength I didn’t think he possessed, the kid heaves himself up. A noise like wet leather tearing as the skin of his back and arms, which has melted to the glass, disconnects from his body. He makes a mewling noise, a strangled kitten, and I’m now staring at the flayed panorama of his back, these long red highways of sinew, glistening pockets of fat, a steaming landscape of tendon-knitted muscle that looks a little like rolled roast beef with the stark-white constellation of his vertebrae poking through at even intervals. He squawks and topples out of the unit. The flesh of his chest and legs and feet and head stays in the bed and now I’m staring at this mass of bloody meat squirming on the clear plastic tarp, this thrashing creature that was recently an arrogant boy. The veins of his throat resemble bluish tubes and strands of hair are plastered to the gummy redness of his face but there is only blackness, pitch blackness, at his pupils and mouth.

  Phil moans and staggers back until his ass hits the doorknob. This he takes as an omen and clears out. Now it’s just me and the flayed red thing on the floor.

  And for some reason I wonder what might happen if I were to take this new, stripped-down version of Joey, and place him back in the tanning bed. Would he give birth to yet another, slightly smaller, slightly more agonized, slightly less human version of himself? How many layers does he possess? I think of a Russian doll, one inside another, smaller and smaller, until you reach the true center. And it bothers me, on a remote level, that only a nagging sense of professionalism prevents me from peeling Joey down to his very core.

  Instead, I produce a silenced .22 Kirikkale from my toolbag. The desperate skinless thing struggles as I wrap a trash bag around its head and drill two slugs through the black plastic. The body spasms. Soupy red matter spills from the bag-holes. I roll the body up in the tarp. The plastic turns opaque with steam.

  Phil waits with Joe in the reception area.

  “You leave a mess?” Joe asks.

  “A little bit. It’s rolled up in the tarp.”

  Joe cocks a thumb at his partner. “What happened to my man here? Looks like he ate a boatload of bad clams.”

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “Sure,” Phil says, nodding a little too emphatically. “I—I seen worse.”

  Joe cocks an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” he says, but quietly and staring out at the street. “Yeah, sure.”

  Joe pulls an envelope from the desk drawer and hands it over. “Want to count it?”

  “No need.”

  Joe smiles. “Be seeing you, Answer.”

  “Catch you on the flipside, Joe. Take care, Phil.”

  Phil doesn’t say goodbye. His eyes don’t leave the street.

  I drive back to the hack rack. The dispatcher gives me a sour look—only ten bucks to show for a five-hour shift—but it only takes a sawbuck to turn his frown upside-down. My apartment’s two blocks away. Walking home, I buy a warm pretzel from a street vendor, enjoying the salt and hot mustard. The sky is darkening and it looks like snow on the horizon. The slate-gray cloudbanks remind me of a recurring dream in which skulls rain down from the sky like hailstones, millions of gleaming skulls covering me in a clattering drift of smooth bone and teeth. What’s most puzzling is that the dream does not disturb me, as I imagine it would most people. I often close my eyes hoping, with a sort of desperate longing, that it will come to me as I sleep.

  There’s an envelope in my mailbox with no return address.

  A brief letter. A first-class airline ticket to Toronto, Canada.

  An unsigned check for fifty thousand dollars.

  — | — | —

  Jerome “Oddy” Grant—Tragic Hero

  Washington, DC.

  November 30th, 1987. 12:05 p.m.

  I haven’t really slept for twenty years. I lie down, yes, but I don’t sleep. I’m watching the door, the window, then back to the door. There’s always something within reach: maybe a baseball bat, or a knife. I sleep with a gun under my pillow, another under my mattress, another in the drawer next to the bed. I get up at half-hour intervals to walk my perimeter. Every half hour on the dot. It’s like that until the sun comes up. Then I can sleep for an hour or two.

  “Got your walking sticks, son?”

  My man Deacon hefts a pair of Webley Mark 6 hand-cannons capable of coldcocking a rhino. “Cocked, locked, and ready to rock, boss.”

  The Chevy van is faded kelly green, the sides painted with red letters spelling out FLOWERS BY ALGERNON. It idles across the street from a building with the words KEYBANK WASHINGTON spelled out in two-foot-high brass letters. The van is not filled with flowers, by Algernon or anyone else. It’s jam-packed with five gun-toting brothers who’ve robbed close to thirty banks in fifteen states over the past five years.

  We got my man Tiny, but that name’s a misnomer because he’s three-hundred pounds of chocolate thunder toting a Mossburg pump. We got Deacon, ex-Marine Corps demolitions expert. We got Dade, a solid soldier and strong-arm expert who’s gotten a bit squirrelly these last few jobs. We got Malik the wheelman, a cat who makes this Chevy walk and talk. Last we got yours truly, Oddy, old hand and unquestioned leader.

  I say, “Suit up.”

  We don masks. Tiny, Deacon, Dade, Malik, and Oddy become Michael, Jermaine, Tito, Jackie, and Marlon: The Jackson Five. The latex mask reeks of stale sweat and adrenaline. The smell is narcotic, the only thing reminding me I’m alive.

  “In and out in two,” I say. “Any more and we’ll be rubbing elbows with Dirty City’s finest.”

  “Maybe I want to bag a few piggies,” Dade says, oinking. “Soo-wee! Soo-wee!”

  Squeezed around the cherrywood stock of a Kalashnikov assault rifle, I notice Dade’s hands are trembling. Is it fear or anticipation or plain old batshit-craziness? Can’t tell. Not an encouraging sign.

  “In and out in two,” I repeat. “No fuss, no muss.”

  Malik pulls a smooth U-turn across the boulevard and stops ten feet from the bank entrance. I pop the rear doors and we fan out, walking four abreast, a bad-ass chorus line waiting for the music to start. And the music does start, somewhere inside my head, and the song is “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets.

  One-two-three o’clock, four o’clock ROCK…

  I lead them through the revolving doors, Deacon and Tiny flanking, Dade pulling up the rear. The bank foyer is warm and faintly pine-scented, either from the disinfectant the cleaning staff uses or the massive Christmas tree erected beside the teller wickets.

  A pair of pasty rent-a-cops lean against alabaster pillars, half-asleep. Five customers wait in line and three are being served; they’re either old or female or both, not a cowboy amongst them. Three tellers, young and WASPish, two chicks and a fellow. Mr. Branch Manager sits off to the side, his office hemmed by red velvet ropes.

  Tiny taps one of the rent-a-cops with the barrel of his shotgun. The drowsy son of a bitch stares up at one towering mountain of Tito Jackson and hands over his revolver rickety-tick. Dade disarms the second guard.

  Five-six-seven o’clock, eight o’clock ROCK…

  Tiny hustles the first guard over to join the second and withdraws to cover the entrance. Twenty-five seconds gone. So far everything’s clockwork. Deacon springboards the counter, Webley drawn. The customers scream and the tellers pale. Deacon hands one of them a pillowcase and points to the cash drawers.

  “Everybody be cool,” I say. “Zip your lips and sit your asses down and everything’s gonna be everything.”

  Twenty-four ass-cheeks hit the floor. I come around Mr. Branch Manager’s desk, grab him by his tie—a Goofy-playing-golf motif—and jerk him to his feet.

  “What’s your name?”

  “P-Puh-Paul.”

  “Okay, Paul, let me shake it down: you’re going to take me back to the vault and fill this bag with twenties and fifties. You tuned in on my wavelength, cupcake?”

  “Y-y-yes.”

  Paul is young and handsome, early thirties. Probab
ly got a wall full of diplomas in a suburban brownstone, drives a Lincoln or a low-end Beamer, trophy wife and a kid away at boarding school. And now he’s face-to-face with a posse of heavily-armed, highly-skilled Soultrain motherfuckers; poor Paul’s living out every WASP’s worst nightmare, live and in blinding Technicolor.

  We’re gonna ROCK…

  Paul is working on the vault combination when I hear this awful cracking sound. I poke my head into the lobby to see one of the rent-a-cops clutching his hands to his face, blood geysering between his fingers. Dade stands over him, rifle butt dripping red.