Knockout (13 page)

ATHENS, ATHENS

V
ic's bulletproof vest is draped over the motel chair. It's thinly layered Kevlar, slate colored, perfect for the summer months. It has extra cargo pockets for ammo and energy drinks. It's awesome. I want to put it on and get shot in the chest over and over and never fucking die.

My bulletproof vest is puke green and doesn't have storage space. My ex-wife, Autumn, bought it at an army surplus store last Christmas, two months before she left me. The price tag is still on it—$299.00 plus tax. It feels bulky, which means it won't stop shit.

Vic sprays his vest with Lysol and pats it down with a hand towel. I don't clean mine, no matter how pitted-out or gin-soaked it gets.

“You can't get sweat out of Kevlar,” Vic warns. “It burrows into the fibers and then you smell like beef jerky forever.”

Vic and I are working in Athens, Georgia. We're in Greektown, which the locals refer to as Athens, Athens. We're subcontracting
for the DEA, surveilling a smuggler named Santo Kristoff. We're doing the grunt work for the Feds, tapping phones and manning wires, staking out Kristoff in a Ford Econoline van with the words “Passmore Electrical” written on the side. We're the B squad, sent in to see if there's any glory the real agents might want to swoop in and steal.

Our employer, Kromberg Security Solutions, hasn't exactly rolled out the red carpet for this job. We're bunking in a shithole called the Acropolis Lodge. It's grasshopper season and the Acropolis is infested. They're hopping around everywhere, sliding around in the bathtub, entombed in the cubes we get from the ice machine. A couple of nights ago I woke up to find one of them bedding down in the warmth of my pubes.

At least the Acropolis has a pool. I go swimming a lot because I've found the pool is a good place to cry. I'm usually alone down there, but if anyone stops by while I'm bawling about Autumn, I dive underwater. When I come up for air I rub my eyes and say, “Damn they sure use a lot of chlorine in this motherfucker!”

Vic does some crunches on the carpet, then some knuckle push-ups. I flop down on the bed, unbuckle my belt. A grasshopper lands on my nightstand and I crush it under a coffee cup.

“You skimp on your house, you skimp on your car, you eat smack ramen every meal for the rest of your life,” Vic lectures, “but you do not, under any circumstances, skimp on your body armor.”

Vic's flat bellied. I've got the beginnings of a gut. It's already big enough that my bulletproof vest feels like a corset. I can't zip it over my belly unless I take a deep breath in.

When Vic steps into the shower, I scratch at the waistband of Autumn's panties that I'm wearing under my jeans. They're cotton, black and boring, not frilly or lacy. They're panties Autumn normally wore to the grocery store or to the doctor. They're comfortable and they breathe well. Before Autumn left,
I asked her for a pair to help remind me of her when I was out on the road. I should've realized something was deeply wrong with our relationship when she gave me these, but I didn't.

T
he grasshoppers throw their reedy bodies off the walls while Vic and I try to sleep. I've pleaded with corporate to move us to another hotel. I've held my phone out and let the accountants listen to the grasshoppers' constant chirping. Instead of moving us, corporate sends us earplugs, mosquito nets, two cans of Raid.

“Hope for a cold snap,” Spiros, the manager of the Acropolis, says. “Pray there's a late frost that kills the bastards.”

I don't blame Spiros. He's like us, he's not the owner, he's the help. He lives in a tiny room behind his office, sleeps on a pullout couch. He's going out of his mind too. A few days ago I saw him trying to chase the grasshoppers out of his room with a torch made from a magazine.

The pool is usually empty in the mornings, but today I find a girl curled up on one of the chaise lounges. She's young, early twenties. Her legs are covered up by a satin jacket from Ari's King of Clubs, the strip club down the street. When I dive into the pool, she opens her eyes.

“What time is it?” she asks.

“Too damn early,” I say.

The girl has a wide mouth I want to be generous, but probably isn't. She slides off her cutoffs to reveal bikini bottoms and then she drops into the pool. She swims a few laps then hops out and towels herself off. I'm probably never going to see her again unless I say something to her right now.

“You just swam in my tears,” I blurt out.

I can tell she's probably used to men blurting out strange things in her presence. She stares at me for a bit, gathers herself, her face slowly tightening into a smile.

“Sometimes I come here to rinse off the drunken stares of hundreds of horny men,” she tells me before she grabs her stuff and hightails it to her car.

O
ur ops center is down the street from the Acropolis, in a renovated shoe factory. Whenever the air conditioning kicks on it smells like leather and glue. I complained about this to corporate, told them the chemical smell gives us migraines, makes us dizzy. Instead of finding us new office space, they sent us some pine-scented air fresheners and a box of Dramamine.

“Nothing new on the wire,” Foot Nose yells out to Vic and I when we walk in. “Quiet as shit.”

Foot Nose looks like a fetus; he can't grow a proper stakeout beard. The hair on his face is patchy, mostly coming in around his cheeks. He's been working overnights this week, twelve hours straight, fueled by Red Bull and Hot Cheetos. Right now his forehead is so oily I can almost see my reflection in it.

Grimace sits on a metal folding chair, puking into a garbage can. Grimace is pushing sixty, pear shaped, too old for this shit. Every time I walk by his computer, instead of clicking off porn, he clicks off pictures of beachfront time-shares.

“Take a sick day, vodka tits,” Foot Nose yells over to him.

Grimace responds to him by puking again. His puke is green and leafy and it smells like when you stick a shovel into the wet ground and flip over the dirt underneath. He's told me if it was up to him, he would've retired long ago. It's not. He's dragging three divorces behind him. He's got a kid in college, one in diapers. He's going to be working until he's eighty.

While I type in my log data from yesterday's run sheets, I occasionally glance over at Grimace. He lies down on the floor, pulls his knees to his chest, moans.

“Retire already, you assface-looking mofo,” Vic says, chucking a soda can at his head.

T
his morning Vic and I park the surveillance van outside Kristoff's warehouse. We've bugged his house, hacked his email, tapped his landline and his cell. The DEA keeps assuring us Kristoff's a huge player in the Southern drug trade, that he's smuggling guns up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Unfortunately for us most of his phone calls are with his wife, Lani. The DEA wants us to parse their words for code, but there's no code there. They're talking like a married couple talks.
We're out of toilet paper, we're out of milk. Can you pick up my blood pressure medicine at the pharmacy? Should we drive over to the mall this weekend and pick up that daybed we've been thinking about?
These are conversations I used to have with Autumn. There's no code here, the words only mean what they mean.

The headphones in the van reek of barbeque sauce. While I listen to Kristoff gab with his wife, I can't help but wonder what Autumn talks about with her new boyfriend, Randall. Randall's a personal trainer, so maybe the two of them talk about his rock-hard abs. Or maybe after they have tantric sex they discuss the aerobic benefits of tantric sex. Or maybe they talk about sweet things, like how many kids they're going to have or how goddamn long it took them to find each other and how sad and lonely they were before they met.

Before I left the motel this morning, I stuck Autumn's panties in my jacket pocket. I pull them out and wipe my brow with them, just to see if Vic notices. He doesn't notice the first couple of times, but the third time he catches me.

“Are those panties?” he asks.

“Huh?” I say. “What?”

“Lemme see those,” Vic says.

I push them back into my jacket pocket, but Vic wrestles them out.

“Whose are these?” he asks.

“I stole them,” I say.

“You stole them?”

“I stole them. Right out of the dryer at a laundromat.”

Vic stretches them taut and then flicks them out the window onto Kristoff's lawn. I jump out of the van and scoop them up.

“What's the matter with you?” Vic asks. “You steal a pair of panties and that's the pair you steal?”

T
his morning Vic borrows a fan from Spiros. He unscrews the safety grate from the back of it. He sets the fan on high and flicks grasshoppers into it. My bulletproof vest is crumpled on the floor nearby, getting pelted with bug shreds.

“This can save your life,” Vic says, picking it up and tossing it at me. “Have some fucking respect.”

I brush it off. Out the window, I see the girl from the other morning sunning herself down by the pool. The last time I was here her hair was brown, but now it's dark red. I do fifty push-ups, put on my swimsuit, and head down there.

“Here for your morning cry?” she asks after I walk through the gate.

“You here to wash off your men?” I ask.

I swim a couple laps while she sits in the sun. Before she goes, she sets a card by the side of the pool. It's a coupon for Ari's, two bucks off a beer or a buck off a mixed drink.

“If you come to see me dance,” she says, “then the next morning you could swim in both your tears and your glances.”

I
go into the bathroom at the ops center to wash the grease of my face. Grimace is in there already, standing in front of the mirror,
pulling down the skin under his left eye. There's fresh puke in the garbage can. This round is black and sludgy.

“You ever gonna get that checked out?” I ask.

“What for?” Grimace says. “I've always had a weak stomach.”

“That seems like more than a weak stomach,” I say.

“If you knew me,” Grimace tells me, “you'd know this is standard procedure.”

I glance inside the garbage can. What came out of Grimace looks like something that should not come out of a human being. It looks like something that might spill out of a chassis.

“Abrodabo called again today,” he tells me. “Sounded like he was calling from a golf course.”

Abrodabo is our supervisor. He was hands-off for the first few weeks of our operation, but he's tightening the screws more lately, checking in hourly, pushing us hard to find dirt on Kristoff.

“What did you tell him?” I ask.

“I told him Kristoff's a pro,” Grimace says. “I said we'd be lucky to get him for jaywalking.”

F
oot Nose and I partner up today. We drive to Kristoff's house and use the parabola mic to listen to him chat with his wife about her bunions.

“Are you going to get the surgery?” he asks.

“It's gonna hurt,” she says. “And then there's the limping. I'll be limping around the whole summer. Who wants to be limping all summer?”

“You're limping now,” Kristoff says. “Maybe this makes it better? Maybe after two months you don't limp anymore for the rest of your life.”

When you get divorced you're supposed to be able to throw yourself into your work. You're supposed to be able to disappear into the long hours and forget what ails you. Unfortunately this
job is too lonely, too introspective, too full of shitty fast food for me to do that at all.

“How much longer you think we're stuck here?” Foot Nose asks.

There are rumors that Kromberg's profits are down this quarter, scuttlebutt that our CEO just cashed in his stock options, chatter that the DEA won't be renewing our contract. Vic and Foot Nose are paranoid, sure that we're all about to get canned. Both of them are sending out feelers, but I can't summon that kind of energy yet.

“I miss my girlfriend,” Foot Nose tells me. “I miss her titties.”

He opens his wallet and shows me a picture of her. It's a grainy photo. She's naked in it, these big floppy tits hanging down nearly past her stomach. Her tits are secondary to the sadness I see in her eyes. I've been duped again, that's what she's thinking.

“What do you want from me here?” I ask.

“You say she's pretty,” Foot Nose says. “And then I say thanks.”

“Fine,” I say. “She's a total knockout.”

“Isn't she though?” Foot Nose says.

I rub the binocular calluses on my nose as I watch Kristoff massage his wife's shoulders. He and his wife have made it through the tricky parts of marriage, the years when there are options, when temptations can pop up from anywhere. Foot Nose pokes me in the ribs.

“What now?” I ask.

“When I fall in love,” Foot Nose says, snatching the picture of his girlfriend out of my hand. “I stay in love.”