Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (39 page)

She was always assured it was a matter of cutbacks, not her performance. Last hired, first fired. Simple as that.

She’d been making the rounds. Nobody was hiring. So that at the moment she was jobless, with two months’ rent and utilities in the bank and if she didn’t find something soon she was going to have to eat this apple core off the canvas.

It’s Sunday, she thought. You can’t do a damn thing about it now.

So make the art. Later, call your mother.

Get on with it. All of it.

She drew a line, smudged it lightly with her finger. A link of chain sprung suddenly into focus on the canvas. She drew another.

FOUR

What the hell are you doing?
he thought.

It was two in the morning. He was standing outside across the street from her apartment. He could see the light burning through the second-floor living room window. Either she was still awake or she’d fallen asleep and left it on but to leave it on was very unlike her.

She was awake.

He could walk up the steps, ring the bell.

No he couldn’t.

He had no right to. It would be tantamount to harrassment.

And standing out here was tantamount to stalking.

So what the hell are you doing, David?

A glimpse, he thought. That’s all. A glimpse of somebody you love through a brownstone window. What the hell is wrong with that?

Everything. It’s crazy, desperate. It’s pathetic. You’re not Romeo and she’s not Juliet. Go the hell home.

Don’t want to.

Your wife is waiting.

By now she’ll be fast asleep.

You’ve had too much to drink again.

So? What else is new?

Go home.

A cab cruised past him going west. Northwest was the direction of his apartment. The cab’s sign was lit. He could have flagged it down. A simple wave of the hand. He didn’t.

He needed something. He wanted to
feel something
.

Now what the hell does that mean?

59th was quiet. No breeze. Nobody on the street but him. There was traffic heading south on 9th half a block away but not here and even on 9th the traffic was light, he could barely hear it hissing by.

So here he was, alone. Staring up at a living-room window and afraid to look away or even to blink for fear that if he did it would be exactly that moment she’d choose to appear and not any other moment and not again, afraid of the perversity of incident and chance, perhaps because it was precisely incident and chance that had got him here in the first place. She a new bartender, he a regular. Quickly becoming friends, far more slowly becoming lovers—two years before that happened—not until a casual date that left them alone in a crowded noisy new dance club they found not to their liking at all, waiting for two other friends to return from the bar so they could get the hell out of
there, a single slightly boozy hug turning to a surprisingly lovely kiss and then more and more and before they knew it two more years had gone by and love had trapped them as surely incident and chance could trap anyone.

The window blurred over.

He wiped his eyes.

He was aware of sirens in the distance, somewhere around Times Square.

The window blurred again.

Were the sirens doing this? some fucking
ambulance
making him cry? Somebody else’s distress? Some stranger’s? It was possible. These days anything was.

But that was too damn ridiculous even for him and no, he saw what it was now, literally saw it in that way that the mind imposes an image it chooses over the eyes so that what the eyes see in the natural world disappears for a moment, unable to compete, utterly sterile compared to the image the brain mandates. He saw it, vividly, sobbed once because he knew that in the natural world he might never see it again and certainly not the way he did now, directed so wholly at him—her open happy smile—and turned and started home.

FIVE

The composite on the nightly news was not great.

They’d got the nose right and the chin mostly but the forehead was way too high and the eyes were completely wrong because the eyes in the composite were bland, they held nothing, while his were full of. . . .

. . .
what?

Something. He didn’t bother trying to go there.

They were off on the numbers too. They had him down for around fifteen, twenty jobs this year. He had to laugh. The number was more like thirty, thirty-five. Roughly one every week and a half. He figured that by the end of his own personal fiscal year which began and ended on his
birthday just before Christmas he’d take in fifty, maybe sixty grand. Not as much as if you were robbing banks but bars were a whole lot safer. Bars were vulnerable.

For one thing you didn’t work in daylight except to cruise for likely joints to hit. You didn’t have much in the way of surveillance cameras to worry about. And you didn’t have some retired cop with an attitude, some asshole armed guard willing and stupid enough to start blazing away at you.

It was a pretty rare bartender who was willing to die for the till and his tips.

That guy last week, though. That asshole actually
chasing
him.

He thought he’d put the fear of God in him. Especially that last hard whack on the head. He guessed there had to be a first time for everything.

Usually the getaway was simple. You headed for the nearest subway, didn’t matter where you went once you were on it. If there was a bus handy you caught that. You got off and had a beer or two at another bar far away and then you went on home.

They’d worried out loud on the news about his gun. Some police lieutenant mouthing off. Said that seeing as he
had
a gun, sooner or later he was going to use it. That was bullshit. His weapons were surprise and fear. The gun was only window-dressing. Loaded window-dressing but window-dressing all the same.

Then they tried to link him up to a wider trend. All very ominous. Seems that shootings in the City were up 24% over the same month last year—the figure spiked by the thinned ranks of the NYPD who were now on anthrax, security and ground zero duty since World Trade Center instead of manning street crime.

Again, bullshit. He wasn’t part of any goddamn trend. He just did what he always did.

Plain old-fashioned armed robbery.

He sat on the sofa and sipped his beer. The composite
didn’t worry him. Except for the eyes he was blessed with one of those more or less
basic
faces, a kind of no-frills face, one that set off no bells and whistles in anybody.
Acceptable
—that was how he liked to think about it. Acceptable enough so that guys had no reason either to fear him, be impressed or intimidated by him or even to remember him for that matter. Acceptable enough to women so that he got himself some pussy now and then. Not a hard face and not soft. No scars, no dimples, no cleft palates or cleft chins.

The composite didn’t work. His face was far too mutable.

The hair you could cut or color. For the line of forehead, a hat or a baseball cap. You could change the eyes with colored contact lenses or no-scrip glasses or just by trimming down your eyebrows a bit. Or darkening them with eyebrow pencil.

He thought eyebrows were seriously underrated.

You wanted to avoid a good tan. A good tan was memorable to New Yorkers, who were used to pallor. You made the mistake getting of a tan, you powdered it. Physique was changeable as the goddamn weather. You’re on the tall side like he was? five-eleven? So you’re stoop-shouldered now and then. You flex the knees. Build? Baggy sweaters or business clothes one time, jeans and teeshirt the next.

Backpack on one job, shopping bag or briefcase on another.

He finished the beer and frowned at New York One. New York One was supposed to be about New York City, wasn’t it? But now they were going on and on about the fucking anthrax again. If it wasn’t the anthrax it was the fucking war in Afghanistan or else the fucking World Trade Center. Who cared if some senator’s assistant or postal clerk got anthrax—inhaled, cutaneous, or shot up the ass? Who cared if the towelheads took out skyscrapers?

He strictly worked ground-floor.

They ended with some puff piece about this guy who had to be the most politically correct asshole on the face
of the earth—some Westchester dentist who was offering to buy up all the neighborhood kids’ Halloween candy so they didn’t rot their teeth. Fuck their teeth. He turned the damn thing off and got up and tossed the beercan into the sink.

Time to get.

In the bathroom shaving he glanced down at his various toiletry items and got a really great idea.

“You’re lucky,” the bartender said. “I was just about to tell my friend here last call. What’ll it be?”

“Miller, thanks.”

“Miller coming up.”

The barkeep’s
friend
probably didn’t know him from Adam. His
friend
looked to have been on a long night’s pub crawl and only one step up from blue-collar, if that, while this was clearly a kids’ bar, Barrow and Hudson, pool table and concert posters,
Sweet Home Alabama
on the jukebox and the bartender not much more than a kid himself. Wirerim glasses, rosy cheeks, spiked hair, good strong build under the teeshirt. Irish maybe.

“Gettin’ cold out there?”

The kid poured a half glass of Miller into the beer mug and set it down in front of him.

“Nah. Good breeze, though.”

The barkeep took his twenty to the register. The guy next to him downed his beer and mumbled thanks and slid off the barstool and tapped his dollar fifty with his forefinger. He was tipping the bartender one fifty. Big spender. He put his hands in his pockets and headed for the door. Which meant that this was going very nicely indeed.

“G’night. Thank you, sir. You take care now.”

The barkeep put his change in front of him. Scooped up his tip and dropped it in the bucket.

He slipped on the surgical gloves.

“
You
take care,” he said.

“S’cuse me?”

They said that a lot.
You take care
. You said it back to them, it threw them off balance. Maybe even started to worry them right then and there.

But this kid was only puzzled.

He slid the .45 out from behind his sport jacket. Rested it flat on the bar pointed at the barkeep’s trim flat belly.

“I said
you
take care. Now, listen real carefully and you’ll get to go home tonight to your girlfriend. Let’s say I’m an old college buddy of yours and I’m closing up with you, so you do what you do every night, only I’m here. That’s how I want you to act. I’m just here having a drink. You lock the door and hit the lights outside and you dim the ones in here. Only difference is after that you go to the register and instead of counting it you empty it into this bag.”

He handed the Big Brown Bag from Bloomie’s across the counter.

“Open it and put it on the floor. That’s it. Very good. Now go about your business. And don’t even think about opening that door. I know you really want to but see, it takes too long to open it, throw it back and then go through. You’ll be dead by the time you hit the sidewalk, believe me. They’ve already got me down twice for Murder One”—
it was a lie but it always worked
—“so it doesn’t mean a thing to me one way or the other. I’m a very good shot, though. So it would mean a lot to you.”

For emphasis he clicked off the safety.

He could smell it then, that faint ammonia smell or something like ammonia. Bleach maybe. Fear-sweat coming off the guy. Fear cleansing the guy, pouring through the fat and skin all the way up from the organs, the organs unwilling to cease their function, unwilling to give up the pulse.

He put the gun between his legs and swivelled on the stool smiling as the guy moved on shaky legs out from behind the bar and fished his keys out of his pocket, locked
the door, put them back in his pocket and reached behind a tall brown sad potted cactus and flicked off the outside lights.

“The dimmer’s over here, okay?”

The guy was pointing across the room to another half-dead fern or something.

“Why shouldn’t it be okay? I trust you. What’s your name?”

The guy hesitated. Like he didn’t want to say. Like it was getting personal.

“Robert . . . Bob.”

“Bob or Robert?”

“Bob.”

“Okay, Bob. Let’s dim the lights.”

He watched him cross the room, not even daring to glance out through the plate-glass window, afraid that even that much might get him shot. Good.

It was always amazing to him. Within minutes—seconds—you could get a guy performing for you like a trained seal. Half the time, like now, you didn’t even have to ask.

“You should water your fucking plants, Bob. Know that?”

He nodded, reached up and dimmed the lights.

“Okay, Bob, let’s get to the good stuff.”