Buffalo Jump (7 page)

“All right. Keep me posted. And thanks.”

“Don’t thank me, Ryan. It’s the right thing to do.”

“I meant for the wine and cheese. You did a nice little thing on short notice.”

R
icky Messina was soaking his right hand in a big glass bowl filled with ice cubes. His left held a heavy glass tumbler filled with Johnnie Walker Black. He was leaning back in his leather recliner, curdled with frustration, waiting for the phone to ring. If it was a local call, it would be the sourpuss bitch downtown, telling him to expect a call from the man in Toronto. If it was the three-ring long-distance signal, it would be the man himself.

Ricky knew he was going to have to eat a certain amount of shit over what had happened and that was all right. Even if none of it had been his fault, he considered himself a professional and a solid management prospect. He accepted that with greater responsibilities came greater accountability. He’d bow and scrape enough to ensure continued employment and good health.

Everything had gone so smoothly at first. Ricky found out everything there was to find out from Kevin Masilek and was just starting to have fun when someone started ringing the bell. Ricky ignored it but the bell kept ringing. Then there was a phone call, then the front doorbell again, whoever it was not getting the message, not going away. Ricky abandoned the knife routine he’d pictured in his head and stuck Kevin straight
through the eye, deep into the brain. He threaded a suppressor onto his High Standard Victor, wanting to whip open the front door and shoot the shit out of whoever had ruined his day, bullets hitting them like sharp, deadly punches. Then came a knock at the back door and Ricky almost jumped out of his coat. He said
fuck it
and stood by the front door with his ear pressed to the wood until he was satisfied no one was outside, opened it, looked around and slipped out. He eased the door shut and walked to his car as slowly as his adrenaline-charged core would allow. He pulled out of his parking spot quickly but quietly, doing nothing to attract the attention of other drivers. He was sure he hadn’t been seen. He drove half a block, checking his rear-view all the way, then parked in the first available space and waited for someone to run screaming out of the house. Only no one had. So he’d gone around the block and parked again where he could watch the house. Follow anyone who came out.

The pain in Ricky’s hand was radiating out of the meaty part below the pinky. The tendons of the pinky and ring finger couldn’t be seen for the bluish swelling around them. One bad punch, that’s all, after Kevin admitted how much money he’d skimmed. Kevin ducked and Ricky’s right hand slammed the back of the chair the miserable fuck was tied to. That’s when Ricky taped Kevin’s mouth and stuck him the first time, using a boning knife from Kevin’s own drawer, watching his eyes widen like some kind of scared pack animal. His mouth strained against the tape but it was past time for words. Past time for money. It was duct tape time. Knife time.

Poor Kevin was on Ricky’s dance card.

Ricky had always liked knives. He had been killing with them since he was eight or nine, starting with frogs in a creek that ran between boulders on a wooded lot in Bethany, where he had grown up, east of Buffalo and north of Attica Correctional Facility. He’d throw his penknife at big bullfrogs,
try to pin them to the dirt where they sat. He killed a mouse that got caught in a trap his dad had set in the mudroom, where you always heard them scurrying around in the walls. The mouse tried to fend Ricky off with its ridiculous little paws until he cut them off.

The first time he killed a cat, he didn’t mean to. He was playing with it and it scratched him pretty badly. Okay, maybe he had been a little rough but that was no cause to rake him like that. He stuck the cat through the throat with a switchblade an older cousin had brought back from a trip to Mexico. Ricky loved the sound the blade made as it flicked out of the side. Later he learned that stilettos made better work tools because the blade comes straight out of the tip. Palm it, get up close to someone, and
snick,
there’s a blade at their throat. Their groin. Their eye.

While he respected guns for their utility in work situations, and knew how to care for and use them, he didn’t have the same feeling for them that he had for knives. Knives were quiet. They didn’t send neighbours running to the phone. They were easy to get, easy to hide, and the penalties for carrying them were mild compared to guns. Knives didn’t shatter windows or kill pedestrians if you missed. They didn’t have serial numbers, require ammo or cost a grand on the street.

And he could play with a knife. He could cut a man plenty of times before he killed him, as long as he had a working gag. How could a gun compare to that? A gun put you off at a distance. A knife brought contact and intimacy. It invited you to dance.

He killed his first man at eighteen. After all the frogs, the mice, the cats, the friendly little mutt he’d come across in the Bethany woods, he had to do a person. He had to know what it felt like. He bought a grey lightweight raincoat at a thrift store, matched it with an old cap and runners, and set out looking for a vagrant or drifter no one would miss. He walked around
under an elevated section of the New York State Thruway for hours, carrying a bottle of cheap sherry in a brown paper bag, waiting for full dark, watching, scouting, noting who hung in groups and who kept to themselves. What they were drinking, how much and how fast. Who was big and who was small. Who had cuts and bruises on their faces from losing past fights. Who had them on their hands from winning.

Near midnight he found his man: a loner, about sixty, shuffling slowly along in boots that had no laces, heavy duffle bags weighing down both shoulders. The sole of the right boot flapped as he walked. Ricky stayed well back of him, swigging from the bottle every now and then, spitting most of it back down the bottle neck. He wanted to look like he was drinking but didn’t want to be drunk. Whatever happened, he wanted to remember every second.

Men gathered near pillars supporting the expressway, finding what shelter they could from the wind. Ricky saw shapes huddled under thin grey blankets that looked like they’d been stolen from shelters. Empty mickeys and bottles were strewn in the dirt, along with malt liquor cans and plastic rings from six-packs.

The old loner was a hundred yards ahead, kneeling against a fence that kept people off the Thruway, making up a little bed of discarded newspaper and cardboard. Then he sat and took a foam container out of a plastic bag and began shoving some kind of Italian food in his mouth with filthy fingers. Ricky gagged. This isn’t even a man, he told himself. It’s an animal, no different from the cats, the dog, even the brainless mouse he had dismembered. It eats like an animal. It smells like an animal. The closer Ricky got to this thing, the ranker its smell became, a mix of piss, puke, tomato sauce, more puke, tobacco and God knew what else.

Ricky let the paper bag slip down off his bottle as he walked past, and let his gait become more unsteady. If the guy
was anything short of blind, he’d see a natural mark—a moonfaced kid looking drunk and vulnerable—with a nearly full bottle in his hand. If that didn’t get someone’s darker nature fired up, they plain didn’t have one.

Ricky Messina’s father was Sicilian but his mother was from the north and he had her colouring: dark blond hair and green eyes. His face was so round that kids used to call him Moon Face and Mooney before he gained some size and built it up hard in gymnasiums inside and outside prison. To this day people who didn’t know Ricky might look at his open face and think him pleasant. That suited Ricky just fine.

As Ricky stumbled along the fence, trying to look drunk, like he was barely keeping his balance, he heard footsteps fall in behind him, heard the flapping of a leather sole against the ground. Ricky let go of the fence and reached in for his knife: not a stiletto back then, but a steel hunting knife bought secondhand at a surplus store. The bottle in one hand, the knife in the other, Ricky leaned back against the fence. He felt ready. He kept his eyes half closed as if passing out, but through lowered lids he watched the animal approach, hefting a chunk of concrete in one filthy hand. Ricky had learned patience killing animals; he waited until the bum raised the rock to bring down on Ricky’s head and stepped deftly aside. The bum’s hand came smacking down on a fence rail and he dropped the rock with a hoarse lupine cry.

Ricky spun the bum around, the bum older than he’d looked from a distance, closer to seventy than sixty. His beard was grey except around the mouth, where nicotine had stained it orange. One eye was covered by a filmy cataract. “Drink?” Ricky asked, and smashed the bottle across his face. The bum howled again, louder, but Ricky knew no one would care. Breaking glass means nothing but bad news to drunks.

Ricky then made his only mistake of the night: he stuck the man in the throat. Arterial blood sprayed Ricky from forehead to sternum. Blood in his face, in his eyes, God, on his lips and in his
mouth, seething with the animal’s vile germs. AIDS, Hep C, TB, they all flashed through Ricky’s mind as he pulled the knife out of the man and shoved him to the ground. In thirteen years since that night, Ricky had never made that mistake again. If he needed to kill quickly, he did it from behind. If he had time, he knew where to put the knife so it neither sprayed nor killed too quickly.

When the phone rang, it was a long-distance signal: the man himself calling from Canada. Ricky let it ring once while he drained his Scotch; again while he prepared himself. Let the man vent, he told himself. Don’t take any bait. There’s too much keeping us together. He won’t blow you out of the water.

He answered it right after the third ring and didn’t speak again for three minutes.

Ricky had been listening to a terrific book-on-tape in the car lately:
The Manager Inside Me.
He thought it could really help a forward thinker like him define his goals more precisely and hack and slash his way toward them. While the man in Toronto was tearing strips off him every which way, Ricky stayed calm and detached.
The Manager Inside Me
had a chapter on that very subject, “Accepting Constructive Criticism.”

The man fed Ricky more shit than he ordinarily cared to swallow, but nothing truly damaging was said, and keeping
The Manager Inside Me
in mind helped: the shit still tasted like shit, but it went down easier somehow. When the rant finally wound down, Ricky calmly responded point by point. First, a brief strategic assessment of their situation to show he’d weighed both the risks and opportunities. Then a review of their agreed-upon business objectives. Finally, his plan to break new ground where the earth had been scorched.

To Ricky’s relief, the man agreed to everything. Yes, he warned Ricky that the time for mistakes was past but, before hanging up, complimented him on his strategic approach to damage control.

Man, Ricky loved that tape.

I
know I’m in Israel but it looks like downtown Toronto. I’m with the Bar Kochba Infantry, patrolling the corner of Yonge and Dundas outside the Eaton Centre, where a busker in a sleeveless black denim vest drums on overturned food tubs and draws a funked-up head-bobbing crowd. I’m in desert cammies, cradling my Mikutzrar—a short-barrelled M-16 customized for urban combat—scanning the crowd for anyone whose clothing looks too bulky, too heavy for the heat.

Roni Galil, my sergeant, is next to me, asking for a smoke. I tell him I quit—he knows I quit, he listened to me whine about it long enough—then realize he means a joint, not a cigarette. I put my gun down on the sidewalk. I snap open a film case filled with a premixed batch of ground-up blond Lebanese hash and Marlboro tobacco that we always had good to go. I twist up a joint, but as I’m lighting it, a child in soccer shorts and tank top approaches. He has dark curly hair and looks just like his mother, which I somehow know even though she isn’t there. While I tousle the boy’s hair he picks up my M-16 and passes it back to someone in the crowd who passes it to someone else. When Roni takes the joint from me, I realize my weapon is gone. I have only my sidearm—not even the Sig Sauer they give to officers, just a standard 9-millimetre Beretta.

I want my M-gun back. I punch the boy hard in the face. His nose breaks and he gags as blood streams into his throat. I push my way through the crowd but everyone starts pushing back, kicking at my feet, trying to knock them out from under me. If I go down I’ll never get up again, they’ll fucking kick me to death. I plant my legs and clutch at their clothing, bunch it in my fists like a man trying to keep his head above water. I call for Roni but he’s sharing the joint with people around him. He can’t hear me. He’s not even offering it to me, the shit. No one can hear me now, not above the screaming—my screaming and the screams of the mob and the boy with the broken nose.

The exact circumstances of my Israel dreams are never the same. Sometimes we’re in a narrow alley and a torrent of water comes rushing at us, sucking us down in a vortex. Or a herd of camels thunders around a corner, egged on by small boys with sticks, nasty smelly animals with bony joints and deadly hooves that can split a man’s head in two. In one dream, people in apartments overlooking the alley started throwing appliances at us, everything from fans and toasters to full-size ovens, fridges, washers and dryers. Whatever details might be different, it’s always Roni Galil and me, trapped in a bad place with bad things happening all around.

It was 5:24 a.m. when I woke with the dream still in my mind. I knew I’d never get back to sleep and turned on the radio, looking for something, anything, to sweep away the image of the bloodied child. I caught a few West Coast baseball scores, then a news update. The heat wave was still the top story. Several related deaths had been reported, including a ninety-three-year-old woman whose power had been cut off for non-payment, leaving her without so much as a fan. Ontario Hydro spin doctors would have to take a break from defending their lucrative consulting contracts to deal with that one.