Old School (10 page)

No, this wasn’t no Marriott – and he bet if you went to that Marriott fuck’s house, the guy in the oil paintings in the lobby of all his hotels, that guy’d have one of them twenty-head, walk-in steam-shower deals, probably used more water than a carwash, baby seals dropping dead by the boat load every time he lathered up. So this place, it was no Marriott. So what? Had a real shower. Also, try checking into a Marriott with just cash and no ID these days. Time was cash was king. Hotel, plane tickets, go anywhere you wanted to if you had a grand in your wallet, people’d just take your money and call you sir. Now, you want a bed for the night, you got some pimple-faced geek all up in your business, won’t give you a damn key unless he can find you in a computer somewhere. Miller’d spent the last thirty-five years staying out of computers.

Knock on the door. Miller opened it. Kid from downstairs, had his cleaning. Miller said thanks, gave the kid a five on top of the twenty for the two suits, had that feeling again where his own voice sounded a little funny in his head because he hardly ever talked to anyone anymore, wondered what that said about your life choices, you’re 72 years old, you’re in some pissant hotel in Wichita, been three days since you said a word to another human being and when you finally open your goddamn mouth, you’re talking to a stranger.

Miller hung out the do not disturb sign and set the locks on the door, got a pair of the surgical gloves out of his two-suiter and opened the briefcase. Discipline. Never touch the gun case or anything in it without the gloves on. Prints were bad enough, but anymore you breathe in the same room as your piece, they might pull some DNA off of it, or some other CSI voodoo crap. Computers, cops in lab coats, tracking chips in every freakin’ thing. Whole goddamn world was going to hell.

The .22 would be plenty. This wasn’t any long-range deal. And this was his custom baby – smooth-bore barrel, so no ballistics; hand-loaded low-charge rounds because he’d have the muzzle right up on the target’s skull when he pulled the trigger. Just needed to punch a hole, let that bit of lead in the cranium to bounce around. Three or four rounds and it’s brain jelly time. With the light charge and the silencer, it wasn’t much louder than a fart.

His gut was stabbing at him. Gall bladder again maybe. Just what he fucking needed. Then a bigger stab, and all of a sudden he was pouring sweat, his vision clouding up, and then he was on his back, on the floor, feeling like somebody’d parked a deuce and a half on his chest. Had to snort a little laugh. So it was gonna be like that, was it? Three hard tours in the deep suck back in Nam, three decades playing serious hardball in a league where a bad at bat meant you went home in a box, and he was going out with a blown ticker in a low-rent hotel. Thought about the room. Gun case, that was going to raise some eyebrows, and the silencers, those were probably illegal, but they couldn’t match the ballistics to anything, metallurgy on the bullets wouldn’t tell them shit because he always bought a new box after every job. So they could surmise whatever the fuck they wanted, but they couldn’t really hang anything on his corpse. Didn’t know why that mattered to him, but it did.

Wanted to say something all of a sudden, listen to his own voice one last time, but couldn’t think of anything to say. Seemed like, if you were dying, if these were your last words, if you were gonna say something, then it ought to be something that mattered, and he couldn’t think of one goddamn thing.

Movement, out of the corner of his eye, under the desk. He turned his head. A roach, coming out from under the baseboard, eyeballing him. The do not disturb out, the locks set, room paid up through the week, it was gonna be a few days at least before they found him, but the fucking roach, place like this, if there was one, then there were a million. They’d find him.

Another stab in the gut, and this one meant business. Check out time. Roach moving closer, a couple of his buddies edging out after him. Cowboy movies, you got the vultures circling. Miller got roaches. Seemed about right. Circle of life, or as close to that Disney bullshit as he was going to manage. Circle of life. That seemed to fit. Miller tried to say that, but he couldn’t get the air.

The Afterlife

A taste of the eternal. Or infernal.

Vera Luce Alla Sua Fonta

“That worth anything?” Aquila nodded toward the painting on the east wall. Targets he worked with were pretty high end, so sometimes on a job, if something said money to him, he’d grab it. Put the cops off, get them thinking robbery gone wrong.

“Compelling, isn’t it?” Voland, from behind his desk. “But the painting’s provenance is not established. The artist is named Sammael. An unknown, I’m afraid. This work is a self-portrait entitled Vera Luce Alla Sua Fonte.”

“Looks old.” What Aquila knew about art, old meant money. Looked at the painting again. To him, art was just stuff you turned into cash, but this thing, it got to him. This thing, he wanted.

“Very old. There is a family connection to the artist. Vanity, I suppose. I may be the only Sammael collector in the world. I could work to establish a market, but . . .” a little shug, a little smile. Aquila got it. It’s not like this Voland fuck needed the money. And the family thing, he looked back at the painting again. Yeah. He could see that. Definitely.

Weird job. First off, Voland wasn’t tied in to anybody. Not the Italians, not the Columbians, not the Russians. Nobody’d even heard of the fuck. Then it turns out this guy is rich. Not like mob boss rich, but like Bill Gates rich. But nobody knew where the money came from. So that’s weird. But the real weird was this – the guy had put the hit out on himself.

And he’d asked for Aquila by name. Said he’d never settled for anything but the best and he had no reason to start doing so now. Said Aquila should approach it like he did any job, scout the target, learn the territory. He’d sent the plane tickets, provided the villa outside Sienna, a new Audi A8 in the garage, said Aquila could consider it a vacation if he liked.

And Aquila liked. Been three weeks. Had some great meals, and it turns out when you’re in a ten-grand-a-week villa and driving eighty grand worth of car around, the local girls get real accommodating. Then he got the note. Expensive paper, like parchment. Please join me at Ten O’Clock this evening to conclude our business. Voland.

“Now, if you were thinking of taking some art . . .”

Aquila opened his mouth to interrupt. What this guy was paying, Aquila didn’t need to supplement the deal. He might grab something, but, Jesus, no need to insult the guy. Voland cut him off.

“Mr. Aquila, please. There is no need to protest. I’m well aware of your MO. I was just going to suggest the Bosch. Well known, of course, so you would have to use your contacts to find a private buyer, but even with the discount associated with such transactions, it would fetch quite a sum.”

The Bosch. Voland had pointed it out on the way in. Hell, Aquila guessed, demons tormenting people, one of them cranking what looked like a giant corkscrew up some guy’s ass. Come to think of it, that other painting, the Samuel or whatever, that had a religious vibe, too. The whole place did.

“That Bosch thing looked like hell,” Aquila said.

“Literally or figuratively?”

“Both. Why you wanna look at that every day?”

“A moral compass, perhaps? Bosch meant for it to prick one’s conscience. To remind us we had turned from the obedient service of God and had forfeited the grace of his love. It illustrates the torments that await the damned.”

Aquila’s mind flashed to that day when he was 12. Just finished the altar boy gig at the 6:00 a.m. mass, him in the sacristy, pulling the cassock over his head, and suddenly Father Murphy is there, and he’s got his cock out, and he’s shoving Aquila to his knees, and Aquila is doing what he’s told ‘cause the guy’s a fucking priest and . . .

“I figure whatever torments we got coming, they happen here,” Aquila said.

“You reject God then? You are not a believer?”

“Reject makes it sound like the guy’s standing here and I’m telling him to fuck off. He ain’t here. What are we talking about this for anyway? You know what I do. You expecting a priest? You need last rights or some schmuck in a dress to corn hole you on your way out, you got the wrong guy.”

Voland gave a thin smile. “Just delaying things I suppose. There is much about life one will miss.” Voland placed a pistol on the desk. “The Pistole Parabellum 1908,” Voland said. “The Luger, in the vernacular. The toggle-lock design.”

“Always heard they were unreliable.”

“Yes. A short load in one of the rounds and the recoil mechanism would jam. Not much tolerance for dirt. A perfect instrument too refined for an imperfect world. None of that sloppy compromise that makes an AK-47 such an ugly, human weapon.”

Aquila picked up the pistol. It was sexy as hell. This and that Samuel painting, that’s what he was taking. Fuck that Bosch devil shit. Voland smiling at him. The guy was a weird old fuck, not how you ought to look when you’re going to die. And then Aquila felt himself putting the gun to his own temple.

“If you could turn to the left just a bit, please,” Voland said. “I’d rather you didn’t sully the painting.”

And Aquila knew, and knew if he could believe, just believe, that it was still not too late, and he tried to remember the prayer from when he was a kid, the one the priest had made them say together after . . . well, just after. The Act of Contrition. But his finger was already squeezing the trigger. How did that prayer start? “Oh my God . . .”

The Luger finished the prayer.

The Blood of the Lamb

Lorna spat on the floor of the barn and considered the mangy creature Dell had brought back.

“Ain’t no lamb,” she said. “Just a dried-up old ewe.” She gave Dell that look, the one that said he weren’t right, not with her, not with the Lord.

“I know, Mama. But the man said t’aint the time of year for no lamb. Says we a month late at least.”

“This thing look a month old to you? This old girl, she got curdle in her teats older than a month. Man tells you you be a month late, then you tell the man you give me the closest thing to a lamb you got. You don’t let him shuck off some poor creature too wormy for mutton and two mangy to even shear.” That look again, those dark eyes locked on his. Only time her eyes was scarier was when the prophecy come over her.

“I’m sorry Mama. I’ll head back up to Elsworth . . .”

“Too late for that,” Lorna said. The old boards in the barn wall shuddered, a blast of wind, cold after the summer day’s heat, blowing dirt through the cracks, kicking up bits of hay from the floor. “The Angel of the Lord, he’s coming again.”

***

The twisters had whittled away at the homestead for the last month. Took Dell’s trailer the first time, him having to move back into the house with Mama. Next time, the chicken coop, killed every one of the hens. Then the hog shed. The farm hit with three twisters in as many weeks, now another storm blowing up, Mama always knowing when it was coming, even though they didn’t have no TV, no radio. Windows for Satan, Mama called them, open doors that let the Devil in.

After the hog shed, she took to prayin’ all day, the way she did when she needed the prophecy to come over her, when she needed some alone time with the Lord. Always scared Dell when she done it, way she’d quit eatin’, quit sleepin’, not even wash up none or change, just take to that rocker on the front porch, starin’ all empty-eyed out to the west, chair rockin’ slow, ‘till the Lord done had his say. Two days she rocked, and the Lord had his say that morning, Mama popping up out of the chair, goin’ on part in tongues like she tended to when the prophecy finally come, tellin’ him they was like the Israelites under the heel of Pharaoh, telling him they needed to be washed in the blood of the lamb if they wanted this pestilence to pass them by. And she sent him off to Elsworth with the last cash money she had, told him to buy them a lamb.

***

Dell was scared as hell now. “The Lord will know we meant good, Mama. He’ll know we tried. We can still wash in the blood of this lamb here, and the Lord will know we done our best.”

She snatched a length of scrap from the shelf and turned on the boy, snapping the wood hard against his side. “Blasphemer! You got Satan in your mouth boy! The fires of hell is full to roarin’ with the crackling souls of back-sliders like you who meant good, who say they tried!” She smacked Dell again, the wood cracking against his head, a piece of it flying across the barn. The clouds opened, the first fat, heavy drops smacking onto the metal roof of the barn.

Dell started to speak, then stopped as he saw his Mama drop to the floor, her eyes wide and fixed, her body contorting and shaking, her mouth moving, her voice speaking the tongues. Finally, she was still, and she rose, and she embraced her son.

“We are saved. Even in our inequity, the Lord in his mercy has delivered us.”

***

He’d seen the old homestead down off Moriah Road before, but the look of the place told him right off they weren’t prospects. Less than a hundred acres in corn, used to be an old pig shed down there, but it looks like maybe the last twister took that. Wasn’t gonna sell any crop insurance here. But the house looked sturdy enough, and he could see the door to a storm shelter on the east side. The way the weather was coming in, there wasn’t any place else to go. He nosed his F-150 down the rutted drive, saw an old woman standing in the door to the barn. Get her down in the cellar and ride this out. Crazy fucking month, one twister after another, all ripping through this same chunk of the state, like God had painted a bull’s eye on somebody.

***