Shorts - Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down (15 page)

“It’s done,” said the accountant.

“It go down like you wanted?” said Junior.

A breeze stirred the grass around the edges of the quicksand. “Pretty much.”

“Nothing’s going to come back at us?”

“No.” The accountant watched a muddy bubble pop. “Not a thing.”

“I can’t abide thieves,” said Junior. “I need to be able to trust the people work for me.”

The accountant studied a couple of iridescent green dragon-flies hovering over the surface of the water.

“Never understood why you don’t just do things the
easy
way,” said Junior.

The accountant pulled the leaf Sean had used out of his fly, zipped up his pants.

“Where’s the fun in that?” He snapped the phone shut and started back toward his house.

When he’s not practicing law, Joe Hartlaub is a highly respected book reviewer, so he’s no stranger to what makes a good thriller come to life. “Crossed Double” shows how sharp dialogue can make you feel like you’re not just reading a story but also eavesdropping on the two people at the table next to you in a restaurant.

The characters in “Crossed Double” might be made of questionable moral fiber but they are not without their own code of honor, as a father tries to explain to his wayward son. You could say that this story is a parent lecturing a child about right and wrong, but this is a thriller, so make that
wrong
and wrong.

C.T.
is unhappy.

He shouldn’t be. He has time on his hands, money in the bank and pussy on the side. He has breakfast—coffee, cream, fried egg sandwich, cheese and sausage on a toasted bagel, crunchy but not dark, if you would be so kind—sitting in front of him at Lisa’s, his favorite diner in Columbus. His son, Andy, is sitting across from him, and it’s still like looking in a mirror, even though a quarter-century separates them. All should be well, except for the story that Andy is telling him. C.T. has to keep his hands on the table to keep from smacking the stupid out of the kid, which, C.T. thinks, would take about three weeks once he started. Eight years out of high school and still fucking up like a three-year-old.

Andy is telling C.T. that he borrowed money from Kozee, who is a whack-job. Everyone knows it. He’s a DLR—Doesn’t Look Right—and only a wet brain or someone fresh off of a Greyhound bus would ever do business with him. Even the girls who troll the Ohio State North Campus bars, with their tramp-
stamps and thongs showing and who shave once a week whether they need to or not, find Kozee a little too outside of the box for what they have in mind.

Kozee fills a doorway wide and high, all muscle, bald head, cold blue eyes, veins running up and down his arms like one of those transparency pictures in a medical school textbook. He looks like he’s waiting to catch a ride from one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Any one will do. He gives off a primal odor of trouble, of danger, of death, a long and slow one devised especially for you. The Greenbrier Project boys, who cruise the Washington Beach grid with impunity and occasionally venture into the Glen Echo maze, step off when they see him shamble ’round the way. There are a hundred stories about Kozee, told in alleys that run behind no-name bars on East Fifth, on street corners in Hawaiian Point, in doorways of shabby apartments in those sections of the Short North where the gentrification begun twenty years ago hasn’t quite reached.

And Andy borrowed money from this guy, even after hearing how Kozee had gotten into the unsecured loan business. A Mex named Jeffe had been running the corner action on Fourth and Eleventh. Kozee had started hanging around and Jeffe, having missed the memo about Kozee, got into his face about it being bad for business, having a crazy-looking, fucked-up white boy hanging around, scaring business away. Kozee hadn’t said a word, just head-butted the silly beaner, breaking his nose, and then biting it off like it was a Tootsie Roll or something, spitting it back on him more or less in place. One of Jeffe’s crew tried to help him up, but Kozee said to stay away from him, just let him roll around screaming in the parking lot, let Jeffe figure out if that was good or bad for business. Kozee was back on the corner the next day, not saying it but everybody knew: it was his corner now. Wasn’t anyone there that was gonna argue with him, least of all Jeffe.

So nobody is fucking with Kozee. He is, as they say, shitting behind the tall cotton. Kozee is like a mutual fund; he’s involved in enough different enterprises so that if one dries up another usually picks up. Kozee took up a loan-sharking operation a few weeks ago when the mayor of Columbus, a high yellow with movie-star looks and the requisite ability to look competent without having a clue, declared a hapless war on drugs. So Kozee drops drugs and starts lending money at an interest rate that makes Chase Visa look like a benevolent enterprise. You don’t want to be late with Kozee. He doesn’t hire some bitch to call you every day and inquire about your payment. He breaks your door down and beats your ass. And this is the guy Andy goes to for a loan.

Andy’s thing with Kozee, however, is only part of the elephant pissing on C.T.’s morning. Andy’s stupidity isn’t limited to a business transaction with a psycho; no, Andy’s wires are crossed worse than that, as becomes evident when Andy starts talking about Rakkim.

C.T. knows Rakkim, a big guy, an underachiever in his midthirties who for seven years has been delivering pizza for Midnight Crisis, a twenty-four-hour North Campus pizza joint. Midnight Crisis has been described as “employing the unemployable since 1993,” and “unemployable” certainly applies to Rakkim, who up until a couple of months ago was a quiet guy who walked around oblivious, as if listening to an iPod through headphones or something, except that he doesn’t own an iPod. The only time that C.T. had seen him at all animated was in the Midnight Crisis party room at Rakkim’s thirtieth birthday party, which featured cake, liquor and a red-headed hooker from a High Street strip club, who gave Rakkim a lap dance and a blow job while those assembled, including the woman’s husband, howled in beery approval.

According to Andy, however, Rakkim has been acting like a
little bitch for the last few months. Some third-string Ohio State tailback had given Rakkim shit about paying for a large pepperoni and slapped him across the face. Rakkim, totally out of character, had jacked the guy’s jaw, breaking it. All of a sudden, Rakkim becomes a legend in his own mind, acting out. Among other things—and this, according to Andy, is the cause of his instant problem—Rakkim hasn’t paid for a nickel bag that Jeff had fronted for him the month before.

C.T. remembers Jeff from when Andy was in high school, a quiet kid who wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful. According to Andy, Rakkim has no complaints with Jeff about the quality of the bag or shorting on the weight; Andy solemnly assures C.T. that Jeff would never do such a thing. Andy is pretending to be oblivious to the eye fuck that C.T. is giving him across the table at him. C.T. wondering,
how do you know this?
Now, Andy says, Rakkim just won’t pay Jeff, or return his phone calls, he’s just ignoring Jeff, blowing him off.

Jeff, according to Andy, is not a big-time dealer. Like a lot of the Washington Beach guys who deal small and local, he sells only to his friends with just enough markup for his own stash and to make his rent and lights. It’s a fragile street economics model that collapses if someone in the chain doesn’t come through. And Rakkim didn’t come through.

What has C.T. ready to play Whack-A-Mole with his son’s head in Lisa’s is that Andy has interjected himself into this mess. A couple of months ago Jeff, for whom budgeting is a science on the order of quantum physics, had been short for his rent. Andy, being a bro, and not wanting Jeff to interrupt his dealing, had slid a few Benjamins to Jeff. Now Jeff is telling Andy that since Rakkim had stiffed Jeff, Jeff had to stiff Andy. The result was that Andy was short, so…

“I went up to see Kozee,” Andy says. C.T. is looking at Andy across the dining table as if he was a turd floating in C.T.’s coffee.
Lisa’s Café is quiet, only the two of them as customers, C.T. listening to this utter bullshit and torn between fatherly love and disgust. He begins mentally ticking off the various problems here—the borrowing of money, the drug involvement, the total fucking stupidity he is hearing come out of his son’s mouth—and shakes his head as he looks out of the front window.

Traffic on Indianola is quiet this early in the morning, and the sun is out, promising the first decent day after months of a bitterly cold and depressingly gray winter. C.T. had his breakfast sandwich cut into neat little squares and it’s now gone, though he cannot remember having eaten any of it. He is, as is his custom, dressed all in black, mock turtleneck and pants, shoes and socks, hat and leather coat. He sticks out at Lisa’s like a stiff prick at a county fair. He can tell that the owner of the restaurant, a gray-haired hippie who hasn’t changed his spectacles or his jeans since George McGovern ran for president, isn’t sure whether he likes C.T. and Andy coming here or not, their hood ambience not fitting in with the “peace, love and brotherhood” vibe of the place. They sit and mind their own business and never raise their voices, so fuck him, and besides, what is the guy going to say, don’t come here anymore, you’re scaring away my Nader For President traffic? For just a minute, C.T. wishes he was somewhere else, on a hotel balcony overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, lying on a chaise lounge and reading a novel while two twentysomethings in bikinis flip a coin to see who will give him warm head first.

C.T. shakes his head and looks at his son. “You remember Brando’s first line in
The Godfather,
Andy?” C.T. says, looking at him over the top of his coffee cup. Andy shakes his head, says no. C.T. widens his cheeks by grimacing, then does a more than passable Don Corleone, asking Andy, “Why didn’t you come to me first, instead of going to a stranger?”

Andy laughs, still amazed, at twenty-five, at his dad’s talent
for mimicry. It’s an uncomfortable question, however, and C.T. is serious. Andy shakes his head again. “I wanted to get this one done on my own. I can’t keep coming to you all of the time.”

“I understand,” C.T. says. It takes an effort for him to keep his voice level. “But the last guy you want to have anything to do with is Kozee. You know how when you step in dogshit when you’re wearing cross-trainers, and it stays in the cracks forever, and you need a knife to dig it out but there’s always some left? That’s what dealing with Kozee is like.” He takes another sip of coffee. “But I don’t get why this was your problem. It was Jeff’s problem. And Jeff is now
your
problem. He borrowed the money from you. But he’s got money now, and you don’t. He still has money for dope, he hasn’t been evicted or anything, he’s not an orphan, and I saw him last night in the Surly Girl, trying to pick up what I think was a woman, who, regardless, was out of his league. So he’s got money. Your money.”

C.T. watches Andy sip on his soft drink—how can anyone drink that shit at 7:00 a.m., it’s beyond him—and waits for what’s next. Andy hasn’t changed since he was ten years old. When he gets caught in the juices of his own lies, he’ll slough deeper into the stew until he’s neck-high in his own bullshit.

Andy surprises him, though, coming at it from another direction. “How do you know?” he asks. Andy should know better, having heard enough stories about his dad—hell, he saw enough of them happening while he was growing up—that he’s aware that little happens on the north and east sides of town that his dad doesn’t know about. But he has to ask.

“How do you know?” he asks again.

C.T. ignores the question long enough to take a last sip of coffee, wondering how anyone—even an old hippie—outside of a police precinct house can fuck up a cup of Folgers. He motions for the check.

“How about,” he says, as he pulls a twenty out of his pocket to pay the bill, “I’ll show you.”

Jeff opens his eyes and he is looking up a big tube. The tube is hard metal, because when he starts to jump up he hits his forehead on it, and, considering all of the alcohol he drank the night before at the Surly Girl, his head doesn’t need any more aggravation. Aggravation is what he has, though. He’s got two guys in his bedroom, locked door notwithstanding, both of them wearing ski masks. Jeff starts to jump out of bed but his forward progress is impeded by the barrel of the gun that is now pressed up against his left eye. “Good morning, Starshine,” says the guy holding a gun, the guy nearest his bed, the guy wearing a gray ski mask and a blue peacoat. Jeff opens his mouth to scream but only a strangled little rasp comes out before the gun barrel is jammed between his teeth and down his throat. The guy with the gun says, “Wudda wudda” in a singsong voice and wags his finger from side to side, which for some reason scares Jeff more than the gun. “The only thing I want to hear out of you is information, my friend. Where are your Benjamins? No screams, no bullshit, no excuses, just where they are and we’ll be down the road.” Jeff feels the gun barrel ease out of his mouth so he can talk, but it’s still pointed at him, pressed directly against his forehead, hard. His eyes are crossing trying to look at it. He feels his bladder let loose under the covers, first it’s warm and then almost immediately cold, and he’s embarrassed, though the two guys don’t seem to notice. Jeff tries to scream, but his throat constricts and he can’t manage much more than a hysterical whisper. “The back of the closet! On the floor! There’s a suitcase full of dirty underwear! It’s in there!”

Gray keeps his eyes on Jeff but jerks his head at the other guy, the one wearing a black ski mask, and nods toward the closet. Black steps over to the walk-in and begins digging through the
mess on the floor and finds the suitcase. He opens it up and hesitates for a second. He doesn’t want to stick his hand into the underwear, which is so filthy that it’s almost twitching, but he does anyway and after rooting through it for a couple of seconds he pulls out a thick wad of bills, folded over with a rubber band around it. He doesn’t say anything, just takes it over and holds it in front of Gray’s line of vision. Gray sticks his chin out and nods, and Black peels off ten bills, making sure that they’re not going to walk out of there with a Michigan roll.

Jeff is terrified. He looks like Linda Blair in
The Exorcist,
sweating and his eyes all wild. His head is pinned to the bed by the gun but his body is twitching uncontrollably. That money is promised to some nasty folks, and if it turns up missing Jeff will be better off being shot. The situation puts him next door to stupid, and that’s why, almost before he knows that he’s doing it, he grabs for the gun, trying to shove it away as he sits up, thinking that somehow the two guys will be distracted enough that he can get away. He hears a shout and then for just an instant the pain in his head gets a thousand times worse and then it all goes black.

“Fuck me,” C.T. says, leaning back in the driver’s seat of his car, Andy next to him. They’re parked out toward the street in a medical building parking lot off of Cleveland Avenue in Westerville, just a couple of guys who look like they’re waiting for a wife or a girlfriend getting an MRI or Pap smear or some fucking thing. Two ski masks—one gray, one black—are sitting on the console between them. “Fuck me. Who would have figured Jeff for Captain America?”

“Yeah, well Captain America died last year, and Jeff is still alive,” Andy says. “You think he’s awake yet?”