Bigger Than Jesus Page 12

  There’s no sound of a TV or whispered conversation or the clink of a glass. That’s good, because the stealth phase of this mission is about to end. You take the second tool out of your trench coat. You’ve had this stick since you traveled north to Havana on the Hudson.

  At first, you were worse off in some ways. You saw snow for the first time in Hudson County, New Jersey. It was colder than you imagined, but you escaped the Bug Man. You were still a scrounging kid on the streets, but you were back among Cubans and Havana on the Hudson felt comforting and familiar. You thought you’d find your mother there. That fantasy sustained you for a long time. If you had stayed in Jersey, you might have grown up to drive a guagua, but standing here in your last good suit and a thousand-dollar trench coat, it’s hard to imagine living the life of a humble bus driver. Bus drivers can’t be Batman, ninjas or James Bond and they don’t feel the comforting weight of a SIG Sauer P220 in their pocket. Well, most of them, anyway.

  You’re not big enough to run at Denny’s steel door and just burst through to toss the place, so you’re going to have to make some noise. The tool is a couple of feet of hockey stick. That’s the handle. The business end is a bicycle chain. Wrap the chain around any doorknob, use some leverage, wrench it and you’re through. The trouble is, you’re about to make all the noise you’ve been avoiding up until this moment.

  You have your gun out and ready in case Marv really is about to burst out of the mechanical room. A breach like this is really a two or three-man job to do it right. If you had your druthers, you’d have one guy watching your back and another working the chain around the knob. As long as you’re making wishes, it would be best if three guys were taking care of this while you drank mojitos in another state.

  No one tries to open the glued door to the equipment room. No one was waiting for you after all. For a moment, you’re hot with embarrassment about what a bitch you’re being about this. Then you remember your training. The paranoid soldier is the one who survives.

  You try to be quiet, but the bicycle chain clinks and clicks and scrapes on Denny’s steel door like a slow snare drum. Fuck it. If you can’t be ninja stealthy, you’ll have to opt for speed. You wrap the chain around the lock and try to open it with one hand. Nope. This is a two-handed job. You stuff the gun in your pocket (guns in belts are for stupid tough guys who shoot their testicles off in the middle of a job.) With two hands, you brace one foot against the frame of the door and haul on the hockey stick handle. The door knob comes away clean and you lean on the door.

  Shit. You push with all your weight and the door gaps at the bottom, but there’s another lock above where the knob was. You hadn’t remembered that one. So much for genius ninja. You look to the apartment across the hall: Apartment D. You step up to that door — it’s been quiet over there, too — and you run at Denny’s door. Bang! Wow, does your shoulder hurt.

  What you wouldn’t give for a SWAT team on your side: One of those battering rams for the quick entry, a sledge hammer, a couple of flashbangs and a few canisters of tear gas to plow the way would do nicely. Then you go for old faithful, the ninja stamp. You plant your feet and kick hard, your heel delivering the blow as close to the lock as you can manage. The door swings open with a bang.

  An idiot would do a textbook tuck and roll as soon as the door burst in. That’s the sort of Hollywood Beverly Hills Cop bullshit that will get you shot while you’re still trying to roll up into a crouch, still searching for a target in a dark room while your assassin sits in an easy chair with a sawn off in his hands. Tarantino got it right in Kill Bill. Uma was the most dangerous assassin in the world but bad old Bud easily bushwhacked her with a shotgun full of rock salt from the comfort of a rocking chair.

  As you were messing too long with the door, Marv or Denny could be sitting in the easy chair or on the couch or just on the floor beside the door, the sawn off in his hands already lined up with your chest. You’d hear a boom and the shotgun pellets would tear through you. The hydrostatic shockwave of the punch through your torso would blow a lot of viscera and fluid out through the hole he made. You might have a short flight through the air while you were still figuring out what happened. Then the searing pain would hit you repeatedly, pushing you into the dark.

  They say no death is ever instantaneous and the best anyone can hope for is to die in their sleep. The odds of a guy like you dying in your sleep are just about nil, unless you get the ordnance in Denny’s stash so you can get the key back from Jimmy Lima. Panama Bob’s skim might be the ticket to you dying peacefully in your sleep some day far off, surrounded by children and grandchildren and Lily, old but still somehow beautiful, holding your hand as a nurse pumps up the drugs.

  Maybe it will be Propofol, the same shit that let Michael Jackson go in his sleep. You’ll go out high and dreaming sweetly instead of gut shot and dying in the doorway of a shitty basement apartment in Washington Heights. The pain and loss will be pushed away by the best drug cocktails that American pharmaceutical companies can supply. Marco was wrong. Baseball isn’t the pinnacle of the American Dream. Escaping life painlessly on clean, white sheets is the ultimate goal.

  There’s no sound from Denny’s apartment. Even the mechanical room’s hum has gone away. The air feels alive and electric. You aren’t just listening with your ears. You reach out with sensors in your skin. You tingle and crackle with life as your heart slams against your ribs.

  A smart ninja would take a walk now and come back later. Maybe you could wait by the stairs and see if you can make the other assassin the idiot. Let him pop his empty head out around the corner of the door frame to get it shot off. A smart ninja would make whoever’s in there chase you out into the hall where the odds are even and you’re the guy lying on the floor in wait, presenting a small target in the darkened hallway.

  But the sad truth is, you don’t consider any of those smarter choices in the moment. Your adrenal glands are kicking out adrenaline and testosterone is seething through your bloodstream.

  You slip to the floor on your left shoulder and peek in from the bottom of the open door, your SIG out in front of you. You can’t see a thing in there.

  Denny’s little apartment is as dark as the inside of an ass and smells almost as good. You’ve been here but you never stayed long. Denny complained the building’s water was always too cold so he rarely took showers. You told Denny as sweetly as possible that he gave big sweaty guys a bad name. As you drove around with him and made your rounds for Jimmy and Bob, you rolled down the windows, even in January.

  Marv or Denny could still be in there, waiting for you to do something manly and stupid. Then, smart ninja inspiration strikes and you pick up the fallen doorknob. You had an evil DI who pranked a tank crew with a dummy grenade once. The tank driver pissed his pants and another guy came out a hatch so fast he banged his head and knocked himself cold.

  You toss the doorknob into Denny’s dark apartment. It clanks satisfactorily. “Grenade!”

  Nothing. No one is waiting to kill you. Marv must have gone home. You laugh. You even giggle. You reach in the open door and find the light switch. No one is sitting on the couch with a shotgun levelled at your chest. The La-Z-Boy chair is pointed at the television, but neither Denny nor Marv is in it, cradling a machine gun. Getting shot at and almost getting killed has you jumpy and more paranoid than ever, but everything’s fine.

  Then you stiffen as the cold muzzle comes to rest behind your ear. You aren’t a smart ninja. You weren’t nearly paranoid enough.

  You drop your gun and it hits the floor with a disheartening clunk. It would be embarrassing if it had gone off and shot you through the head, but only briefly. Such a clumsy death would be quite a relief compared to the alternatives that await you. You turn slowly to face the reaper and there’s Marv with his precious Tech 9 pointed at your head.

  Behind him, the door to Apartment D is open. Behind that, you see the body of a woman on the floor. Marv’s been waiting for you so long and so patiently, the b
lood’s drying on the dead woman’s floor. A housefly lands on the dead woman’s face and drinks deep. Her head sits in the pool of blood. Her eyes are open. Her look is accusing. Her face, drenched red from her vicious head wound, is a chilling combination of I’m not really surprised and You’re next, you prideful idiot, you useless tool. You’re no better than your father.

  THE GAMBLER

  “The little Cuban,” Marv says. “You’re ten feet of trouble in a 5’9” sack of shit.”

  Your eyes are still fixed on the dead woman’s face. “You didn’t have to do that, Marv. What did she ever do to you? She was a civilian.”

  “Collateral damage,” he says.

  “I never liked that term. It’s jargon. It’s a term made up by bureaucrats and press secretaries to cover up killing innocent people. You and me, we’re not innocent, but that lady was. When Denny was sick last Christmas, she brought him baked beans and gave him an ice pack for the fever. He told me. Her name was…was Mrs. D. Denny could never remember her name but it began with a D and she was from apartment D so that’s how Denny remembered that much.”

  Marv digs the Tech 9’s muzzle into your sternum and you step back. In the movies, the hero grabs for the gun or kicks it out of the gunner’s fist. That’s stupid. Try anything fancy and Marv will tighten up. He might not even mean to shoot you — yet — but that won’t be much comfort as you bleed out on Denny’s dirty rug. Hand-to-hand combat is for when both guys’ guns are empty. Even then, it’s much better to fight just long enough to go find more ammo and reload.

  Time to go into lying and negotiation mode. “Can we talk, or,” you nod at his gun, “is this going to be a short conversation?”

  Marv gestures with the gun and you sit in the La-Z-boy.

  “I can’t wait to tell the guys about you throwing that doorknob and pretending it was a grenade. Hilarious, man.”

  “You saw that, huh?”

  “All through the peephole.”

  “It’ll be a good story. You want to hear another?”

  Marv doesn’t miss a beat. “Are you going to tell me about where the key to Panama Bob’s skim is or are you going to give me that same bullshit story about how Bob was into some crazy counterfeiting scheme with Freejack Jack?”

  You blink. “I was going to try the bullshit story about counterfeiting, actually.”

  Marv smiles wider, like the corners of his mouth might get caught up in his ears. “Yeah, see that worked great on Pete. One, because you can sell a story, and two, because Pete’s greed is bigger than his brains. That’s saying something because Pete’s pretty smart. But I worked for Bob. I knew about the skim, but he slipped us enough, Harv and me, that we could keep our traps shut.”

  You settle into the chair. It’s best not to look too freaked out with Marv waving the gun your way. If he is going to shoot, you may as well go out acting cool. You’re genuinely afraid the doorknob as hand grenade story might be your legacy. You’ve got a lot to live down. Sure, you looked like an idiot, but you’d have been a genius if the ploy had flushed out a bushwhacker.

  Keeping the Tech 9 on you, Marv walks backwards and closes Mrs. D’s door. When he comes back in, he closes Denny’s door and paces back and forth. “How about I tell you a story for a change?”

  You shrug. It might give you some time to say a few Hail Marys. “Sure.”

  “Once upon a time there was a traveling poker game. Different place every week. High rollers. Sometimes in the back of a restaurant, all night long. Sometimes at somebody’s house in the suburbs, out among the civilians with their barbecues and 2.5 kids and picket fences. Could be anywhere, but this one night, it’s in the back of Con Carnies. You know this story? It’s an oldie but a goodie.”

  You shake your head, hoping it’s a good long story because you’ve just discovered you can’t remember a single phrase beyond “Hail Mary, full of grace.”

  “One of the guys who works in the back of Carnies? He was a dishwasher. He overheard the boss talk about how these underworld types were coming in after midnight for a high stakes poker night. There’s going to be thousands of dollars on the table. Maybe a hundred thousand. Maybe even more. And this little dishwasher starts getting ideas. He starts to think about how his life sucks and if he had that kind of money…if he made one bold move? Well, he wouldn’t be a dishwasher anymore, would he? Maybe he could take his girl and escape to Miami, huh?”

  Sweat trickles down your neck while jagged ice turns in your stomach.

  “This dishwasher gets big ideas about himself. He gets a plan together. He figured if he could crash that poker game, he could steal all that money and he’d get away free. They’re a bunch of bad dudes around that table, but there’s one good thing about robbing bad dudes. They can’t very well call the cops, can they? He figures, with that kind of money, he can disappear far enough down a hole, he won’t get tracked down. It sounds like a good plan, doesn’t it? Does it remind you of anyone, Jesus, you stupid fuck?”

  “No, but keep talking. You’re exciting me. Sexually.”

  “Heh. Smart mouth on a dumb guy. Grenade!” Marv laughs and then settles in, his eyes never leaving yours. “The little dishwasher realizes he should probably have some muscle. Bad dudes carrying big cash will be armed, for sure. They might even have bodyguards in the room to complicate things. He knows he’s got to go in hard, but he can’t bring himself to get anybody else in on the scheme because more guys means more mouths to talk and more mouths to feed afterward. He doesn’t want to split the cash up. That would screw up the point of his gamble.”

  “Right.”

  “Which reminds me, did you even check on Denny after you threw him into that hole? Or did you just leave him to die? Pretty cold way to treat a partner.”

  “Did Denny tell you why he ended up in the hole?”

  Marv pauses. “That’s kind of the point of my story, Jesus. You screwed yourself by betraying Denny, by being so greedy you didn’t want to share the skim with anybody.”

  You shrug. “The way I see it, he betrayed me. He did try to kill me and he gave me this mug.” You gesture to your face.

  “Denny says different.”

  You now have confirmation: Denny is alive. Not surprisingly, in Denny’s version of the story, he wasn’t giving up that he was sleeping with Jimmy’s wife. Interesting. You think you can use that, but then Marv tells you the rest and that little burning hope is extinguished.

  “The little dishwasher gets an idea that he should go in hard with a machine gun. That’s a good instinct, but his trouble is, he’s still a dishwasher. He doesn’t know anything. Where’s he going to find a machine gun on a few hours’ notice? But, he figures, this is the Bronx. If you can’t scare up some serious hardware in the Bronx, it’s not the Bronx, right? So he asks his buddies and phone calls are made but the best anybody can do is to give him a double-barrelled twelve gauge. You want an M-16? Come back tomorrow. You want an Uzi? Sure, but not till next week. Plus, all that didn’t matter because, like I said, he’s a dishwasher. He can’t afford to pay for major ordnance. He’s only got enough scratch for the shotgun and he’s lucky it’s not a little squirrel gun.”

  Denny said you knocked him into the pit so he couldn’t be in on the skim. Does Pete know this isn’t about fake bills, yet? He must, if Marv knows. In which case, you’re screwed twice. Again.

  “Hey! Am I boring you? Can I shoot you now?”

  “Nah, I’m riveted. Shoot me at the end.”

  “Agreed. Where was I?”

  “Dishwasher with a twelve gauge. Big dreams. Gets the money. Escapes. Lives happily ever after because that’s how all mob stories end.”

  “Heh. I’m going to almost miss you.”

  But Marv won’t miss with that Tech 9.

  “Dishwasher with a twelve gauge comes into the room hard. He’s all hyped up. The underworld types are appropriately surprised anyone could be so galactically dumb that he thinks he can rob them and not end up with his nuts getting roasted for b
reakfast. Still, for a whole minute there, the little guy is large and in charge, as we used to say back in the day. He rushes in and bodyguards are there, but he owns them and this little guy gets that first charge of power. Probably the first charge he had since he discovered his own dick. He jumps up on the poker table and screams, ‘All you motherfuckers put your dough on the table!’ And just to emphasize his point, he lets go with the scattergun and puts a hole in the ceiling. Clearly, the little dishwasher is bone crazy.”

  “Clearly.”

  “So these wise guys mutter and scowl, but they pony up and start putting wads of cash on the table. Wads of it, man. More money than the dishwasher has seen in his tiny life. He gets all excited. About then, the guy realizes he doesn’t have anything to put all the money in. A pillowcase or a big garbage bag would have done the job easy, but he didn’t think it through. There’s all this money for the taking, if only he can get out the door.”

  “What’s he do? Talk slow. I’m getting horny.”

  Marv gives a genuine smile. “You may not like how I punctuate the period when I say ‘The End’. Anyway, the little guy is screaming for somebody to give him something to put all the money in. And the gangsters around the table? They really can’t help it. This guy is screaming and jumping around and one of them laughs a little. It’s just obvious it’s amateur hour. The guy doesn’t know what he’s doing. Nobody’s brought a bag to the back of the restaurant. There’s no briefcase full of cash. What did the guy expect? Amateurs always think they’re going to bulldog their way in and figure it out once they’re in there. It’s crazy time. The theft doesn’t begin and end with getting a gun. You gotta have a brain behind the trigger.”