An Ordinary Decent Criminal (12 page)

“You know . . .”

He squared his shoulders and undid the clasp on the case. He was using his right hand with his left to hold the case and it was on his left hip, which meant he’d draw it across his body before he could use it. That gave me possibilities, which made me smile widely.

“. . . I could show you how to wear a Colombian Necktie. It’d look good on you. First I cut your throat, just a little, right under your chin. Then I pull your tongue out really hard until it sticks all the way down the outside of your throat. You don’t bleed to death, you suffocate. It’s been a while since I’ve done it but we can try, it’ll come back to me.”

He froze and broke and the next thing I knew, he had jumped into his truck and taken off, so I turned and went back to loading the boxes into the shop. Frank watched me from the front for a while and then came back to see how I was doing.

“What’s wrong?”

“Hurt my back a while ago. I’ve got to take it slow, hope you don’t mind.”

Frank scratched his nose some more and thought about it. He was holding a big fiberglass-and-aluminum bow painted in camouflage colors. There were big pulleys at both ends of the arms and the line went back and forth over and over again. He changed the subject.

“You ever shoot?” Frank looked at me down the arm of the bow.

I answered, “Bows? No.”

“You should, it’s very relaxing. Peaceful, even.”

I put down the last box and stretched to loosen my back. “Is it hard?”

“Not at all. Take this one. It’s got a fifty-pound pull but you only hold twenty-five at the apex. It’s legal for deer, elk, bear, anything you can find in Canada or the States. With one arrow you can take a rabbit, change the arrowhead and you can put a two-inch-wide hole right through the chest of a grizzly, change the arrow again and you can take fish. Bows are versatile, which guns ain’t.”

“Well . . .”

I picked up the last packing case from the truck.

“Let me put this stuff away and we’ll talk.”

Frank added. “And shoot.”

“Long as it’s free.”

“First time always is.”

I kept working. First taste is always free in both worlds.

Claire held me at arm’s length when I got back home that afternoon and sniffed the air loudly on either side of my head.

“Ye gods, sweat, I do believe the boy has sweated.”

Any retort I might have made was silenced when she thrust an odiferous Fred into my arms and turned to walk back towards the kitchen.

“This is not fair! Fred’s crapped himself.”

Fred nodded in serious agreement and tried to throw himself to the floor. After I changed him, I went upstairs for a shower, carefully putting the baby gate into place in Fred’s room and locking it despite his squalls of outrage. I had to raise my voice to be heard downstairs over the baby.

“I’m showering!”

Claire came up and idly dusted flour off the front of her sweatshirt.

“You have no idea how glad I am. Dinner will be in ten minutes.”

Upstairs the taps ran cold, then hot, then warm and finally they stuttered along at that temperature for just long enough. I changed
into a pair of black dress pants cut down to shorts and a sleeveless white dress shirt and then came down to find the dining room lit by candles, with Fred dozing in his high chair.

“Monsieur.” Claire made a broad gesture with her arm and showed me to my seat at the rickety old card table we were using since the cops had taken away our dining room table. God knows why. Probably to test it for blood or other crucial evidence. This despite the fact they had at least two confessions, both of them mine, plus whatever other theories they might have come up with. From past experience I knew we might maybe get the damn table back in a year. That was a big maybe and odds were we’d never see it again unless we visited a cop’s house or went to a police auction.

I sat down and Claire brought out a cracked and chipped blue china plate, holding it at the bottom with the towel. On it was a very large, very bloody piece of meat with numerous score marks across it and a great number of peppercorns floating in a blood sauce. Beside the meat was a single baked potato steaming in a jacket of aluminum foil, and beside that was a small cup full of spinach with vinegar already added.

Claire gave a truly regal nod and wink and I burst out, “You are trying to kill me. Do you remember what the doctor said? ‘No meat, maybe just a little chicken.’ Help, help, my wife’s trying to kill me!”

I picked up a mismatched steak knife and fork and prodded the meat, only to have Claire pull the plate away.

“Well, if you don’t want it . . .”

When I growled at her, she put the food down and went to get her own. By the time she came back, I was on the fourth bite.

“Oh, God! This is better than sex.”

She looked at me and arched an eyebrow so I covered. “Um, er, with anyone but the present company, of course.”

She put real butter, chives, and sour cream on her potato, and then passed them.

“Good. Nice recovery. I guess my mama was wrong. You can be taught.”

I ate some more. “Not to look a gift cow in the mouth, my sweet, but this is hardly welfare dining.”

She waved a small chunk of meat in the air and I saw Renfield follow it with his muzzle while a thin line of drool broke free from his lower lip and fell to the floor.

“This, my virtuous little ex-con, is a reward. While you were out sweating and doing God knows what (although I do hope it was legal), I took a message. Apparently your charm has managed to convince one Steven Marquez to hire you to work in his convenience store. You start tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. sharp.”

I went over and gave her a kiss on the cheek, which she accepted as her due. On my way back I stole a tiny bite of her steak and she waited until I was sitting before continuing. “As for the steak, it was cheap, cheap, cheap. No one knows how to cut meat any more and no one actually likes to eat it, either, and so this poor little well-marbled steak sat there naked and battered for three days past its due date until only I could see the essential goodness within.”

She cut off a nice-sized bite and examined it. “So I got it, nicely rotted, for a song.”

She ate and I felt my stomach churn. Claire’s father had been a butcher with his own shop in Banff and she had learned from him while growing up. If she said the meat was good, then it was good, so I took another bite and she went on. “Tell me about your day.”

So I did and frankly it was kind of boring but she listened and she asked questions and we talked. After a while we spent some good time staring into each other’s eyes and eating in an easy silence that filled the whole house. Outside it became darker and cooler and quieter.

When it came, the knock on the door was shockingly loud and I jumped in my seat. Renfield barked twice and looked around as
though wondering where the noise had come from. Claire looked at me bleakly and lifted a mouthful of spinach to her lips. “Ignore it.”

Her voice was dead. Premonition? Fear? Knowledge? The knock was not repeated, although I waited. Finally I stood up and picked up the crowbar I’d put in the umbrella stand.

“I just got to know.”

I stood to one side and gently pushed open the door with the straight edge of the bar, but there was no one there. Claire had come up behind me and held the bayonet behind her back as she stayed near the front window.

“What’s there?” she asked.

My voice cracked as I answered. “A bottle of whiskey and a shot glass.”

My knuckles were white on the crowbar as I leaned down and picked up the note. In pencil on the sheet of foolscap was the command “DRINK ME.”

I crumpled the note, then thought better of it and smoothed it out before handing it to Claire, who read it without comment. I looked up and down the street and saw nothing and when I spoke again my fury was under control.

“Someone has a nasty sense of humor.”

The bottle gurgled as I picked it up and I held it up to the light so I could see the dark browns, the almost-reds of the liquor within.

“Sam? Just let it go.”

Claire was talking fast and nervous. It wasn’t that easy to just dump the stuff. A failed dancer in an after-hours club had introduced me to Jack Daniel’s Kentucky Bourbon and vice versa.

I’d been sixteen and I’d drunk it pretty much all the time for most of my life. I’d drunk it to wash down cocaine residue and to smooth acid paranoia. I’d drunk it first thing in the morning and the last thing in the evening. I’d drunk it from the hollow just above a pretty girl’s ass and out of the bottle and just about every other way there was. I’d drunk it straight with a gun in my other hand while an imaginative
young woman did expensive things to my partner after robbing a jewelry store. I’d choked it down as a veterinary hospital dropout had dug police-issue buckshot out of my hip. For me it had been a sign of the times.

“Yep, someone has a very nasty sense of humor.” My voice broke as I looked at the bottle and then I shuddered and threw it high into the air. My rage carried it far out to smash into shards on the road in front of the house, where the lights from the streetlights glinted on the glass and the liquor and made a kaleidoscope of rainbows appear.

Claire took my arm as I shut the door. “Let’s go finish dinner.”

She led me to the table and on the way I put the crowbar where it belonged. I thought about neighbors and cops and bad guys and good guys and tried to think past the alcohol.

“The booze. It could be any one of a hundred people.”

She sat me down at my spot and went back to hers before speaking pensively. “True. Well, whoever it is, I guess we’ll have to deal with him or her or them, right?”

I looked at her and smiled and then she went on.

“But let’s do it honestly, honestly and gently. I like having you here on the outside looking in instead of vice versa.”

Pressure. I could feel it building, coming from all sides and increasing. Popping my eardrums, bruising my skin, distorting my life. Claire smiled at me and I smiled back.

But pressure from where? From whom? The classic bits of information needed were who, what, where, when, and why, but all I needed was who. Then I could stop it. Fuck the rest.

Claire raised her glass of water and I raised mine and we toasted each other.

That night I slept badly. The memories of the liquor had swallowed me and were unwilling to let go. Finally I woke up before five and went down to the kitchen. I got out some scrap paper and started to put phone numbers and addresses to all the names I’d remembered
from the hospital. It didn’t take long until there was a list of people and titles, and beside each name was listed a TV station or a newspaper or a radio station.

When I was done, I leaned back and waited for dawn.

Marquez was a thin man with brown hair, brown skin, and brown eyes, and it was 6:55 when he drove up to the front of his store and parked just to the left of the main doors. I was standing there with my suit on and an overcoat jacket draped over one arm and trying to look casual. The store behind me was a brick-fronted, single-storey building with too many big windows and heavy bars across most of them. Where there weren’t bars, there were signs and advertisements and pictures of snack foods like Astro Bars, Bubble Tea, and Musk Ox jerky.

Okay, I was kidding about the jerky, but still.

Marquez locked the doors of his Cadillac Eldorado and then turned to face me. “Sam Parker?”

I took two steps forward and smiled to show my teeth as he reached out to shake my hand.

“Yes. You’re Mr. Marquez?”

Marquez ignored the proffered hand and stared at me like he was trying to memorize something. I wondered what he was seeing, pale skin drawn tight like I’d been sick for a long time, but, overall, pretty
big. Was he wondering about whether he should keep looking for staff? I was wearing my best and only loser suit, which made me stand out in the neighborhood, and I was probably a lot older than anyone else who had applied for the job. Those were probably pluses. Finally he made up his mind who he was and nodded.

“Yes, I’m Marquez, come in.”

The doors were of thick Plexiglas reinforced with alarm wires and the display windows had bars on the inside as well. He caught me looking at the security arrangements and chuckled.

“Not a lot of crime ’round here, if that’s what you’re thinking. I bought the building from the city, they’d taken possession of it after a gang was caught smuggling booze and cigarettes out of here. The gang had made the place into a fortress and the cops busted it up good when they came knocking so I got it for a song. And a lot of renovations.”

Inside Marquez gestured at the walls and racks of equipment. “I’ll be honest, we sell mostly crap. Fried pork rinds, nachos, dips, chocolate milk, overly carbonated drinks, cigarettes, dirty magazines, things like that.”

He motioned for me to walk ahead of him to where the cash register sat in an island formed by a wide linoleum counter. “For example, we are the only store in a ten-block radius that sells
Hustler
. I’m not sure if that’s a good claim to fame.”