Monkey in the Middle (6 page)

Initially disheartened to find the mark alive in any sense of the word, Carter now believes that his thrust was accurate. His mistake was in not removing the knife. The blade had intersected the descending aorta, as it was meant to do, but the blade also acted as a plug, limiting blood loss. Not totally, of course, but the paramedics must have detected faint signs of life when they arrived. Enough life to justify shoving a tube down the mark's throat and needles into his arms, to deliver fluids sufficient to maintain his blood pressure, to force oxygen into his lungs. Carter is familiar with battlefield medicine. He's only glad the medics didn't arrive sooner. If there was any hope of recovery, no matter how long term, he'd never get paid.

Carter leaves the computer running while he chows down a bowl of cereal topped with a slightly overripe banana. This is the last banana of a bunch he purchased five days before and Carter is happy to eat it. Usually, he has to throw the last banana out. Carter dislikes waste as much as he loves precision. To him, they're opposite sides of the same coin.

Thorpe has not replied by the time Carter finishes washing the dishes and Carter turns off the computer before heading out to the gym. He's not crazy about the gym. Too many people. But Carter's pretty much a fitness fanatic. When he crossed the African continent a couple of years ago, a sack of diamonds strapped to the inside of his thigh, fitness saved him. He'd been one small step ahead of the men he and his partner stole the diamonds from, the men who stole them from somebody else, who stole them from somebody else.

In Sierra Leone, theft was a train with a caboose, the natives who worked the mines. No more than slaves, they toiled at the point of a gun, barely fed, knee-deep in muck from sunrise to sunset. On occasion, the boy soldiers mowed them down for the fun of it.

Maybe, Carter decides as he steps on to a treadmill and starts it up, the diamonds are owned by the earth. Maybe the trouble starts when they're stolen from the earth, one thief chasing another until the polished stones finally rest on some rich whore's cleavage. Until the ultimate responsibility rests on the shoulders of the ultimate thief.

There's a muted, hi-def TV set on the mirrored wall in front of the treadmills, exercise bikes and stair climbers, tuned to the Jerry Springer Show. Carter watches for a moment, then steps up the pace. Predictably, he's disgusted. A morbidly obese white woman confronting a morbidly obese Latina over a morbidly obese love interest. Their words run across the face of the monitor.

Yeah, ya bleep, I bleeped your bleeping boyfriend
.

I'll kill you, you bleeping bleeper.

The combatants continue the debate for another thirty seconds before Jerry introduces a second male, this one short and squat, his hair greasy enough to ignite. His name is Jeff and he struts on to the raised platform.

Yeah, ya bleep
, he tells the first male,
I bleeped your girlfriend and she begged for more
.

Then they're all fighting, the girls and the boys, revealing their essential mediocrity with each clumsy punch, each round-house, open-handed slap. Carter decides that he could slaughter the lot, even without a weapon, in under a minute. And he'd be more than happy to perform the task.

After a moment, Jerry's muscle-bound crew pulls the combatants apart. The short man with the greasy hair is bleeding from a long scratch beneath his ear. The morbidly-obese white woman has had her wig yanked away, revealing a head of thin yellow hair that barely covers her scalp. They really shout at each other now, the bleeps overlapping, the subtitles barely able to keep up.

Carter turns his head away. In the course of his short life, he's witnessed unspeakable savagery without flinching. Worse, he's committed acts so awful that he thinks himself past even the hope of redemption. But for all the blood, Carter has never willingly surrendered his dignity. Nor did the most hapless of his victims, the boy soldiers who barely understood the concept of profit and loss. Sure, they begged. They screamed and cried and shit their pants, too. That didn't make them less than human, not in Carter's eyes. Not like these degraded fools.

Carter imagines the obese Latina, years from now, playing the tape for her grandchildren.
See, I was on television. I was famous once. Admire me.

‘Jerry, he motivates me.'

The voice comes from Carter's left and he turns to discover a stunning young blonde. The blonde wears a spandex body suit, blue and red, the colors at a diagonal, so that arms and opposite legs match.

‘Pardon?' he says.

‘I use Jerry for inspiration.' The girl smiles, exposing a set of brilliant porcelain veneers. ‘See, they're everything I don't want to be. The whole bunch. Jerry, too.'

Carter believes he's being hit on, and not for the first time at this gym. Though there's nothing memorable about his face, Carter's not a bad-looking man. True, his eyes are a little too close together, his mouth on the narrow side, his chin somewhat soft. But nothing major. Just a regular guy, until you looked into his eyes.

Carter's eyes are blue and flat. They're as dead as his soul and he knows it. But the girl isn't looking into his eyes. She's glancing, from time to time, at his body. Fully clothed, Carter may not impress, may even appear harmless, but now his flesh ripples over his skeleton as he paces off a six-minute mile, his thighs and calves especially.

‘How long does it take?' Carter asks.

‘Before what?'

‘Before you internalize the lesson and switch to another show.'

The woman looks at him for a moment, her face reddening, then turns away. She's insulted, obviously, though Carter meant no offense. He was just curious. But Carter tends to say the wrong thing. All that time alone before Janie saved him? He never learned the rules. Never learned the subtleties of give and take.

His workout concluded, Carter hops on the 19A bus running along Twenty-First Street into Long Island City. He exits at Thirty-Eighth Avenue and walks three blocks to a rented garage where he picks up his van. From there, he heads into Manhattan, via the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, to his final destination, the Cabrini Nursing Center. Carter's in a good mood, and so is Janie, whose eyes sparkle when he enters her room at eleven thirty. The nurses have Janie sitting in a recliner and Carter settles on the edge of her bed.

‘I have to work late tonight, so I took the morning off,' he explains.

Blink.

‘Everything going all right?'

Blink.

Carter leans closer. He smiles. ‘Are you stoned? Did you get morphine this morning?'

Blink.

‘I thought as much.' Carter wishes his mock-frown could draw a smile he can only imagine. The joke is that Janie was as straight as they come before her illness, an anti-drug zealot. ‘I met a girl this morning. At the gym.'

Carter continues, embellishing freely as he describes Jerry Springer's repugnant guests. In this version, the girl on the treadmill next to him defends the show. Carter's problem, she explains, is that he takes the mayhem, most of which is staged, way too seriously.

‘Do you know what I finally said to her?'

Blink, blink.

‘I told her that some men are born without souls and that some have their souls burned away. But what kind of man – or woman, for that matter – uses his soul for toilet paper? Janie, the girl was a real knockout, but I blew any chance I had right there. She thought I was talking about her.'

Blink.

Carter grins. ‘OK, I admit it. I probably was talking about her. But if degradation amuses her . . . I mean, what's the point? We're not goin' anywhere.'

Blink.

Another smile from Carter. His propensity for driving women away has been an issue since he was an adolescent. ‘You want me to read for a while?'

Blink.

Carter takes the bible from a drawer and opens it to Proverbs. He begins where he left off on the night before.

‘The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made anything from the beginning. I was set up from eternity, and of old before the earth was made. The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived, neither had the fountains of waters as yet sprung out. The mountains had not yet been established; before the hills I was brought forth. He had not yet made the earth, nor the rivers, nor the poles of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was present; when he enclosed the depths; when he established the sky above, and poised the fountains of waters; when he compassed the sea with its bounds, and set a law to the waters that they should not pass their limits; when he balanced the foundations of the earth. I was with him forming all things.'

Carter shakes his head. There are times when the desire to retrieve his life overwhelms him. When he wishes there was a redo button in his brain like the one on his computer. Janie was too young to care for him when their mother died. So the state, in its wisdom, shipped him off to the Abernathys' farm. Foster parents, that's what the social worker called David and Lucille. But the Abernathys were managers, not parents. Middle-aged, their lives were guided solely by profit and loss. This was as true of Carter as it was of the corn in their fields, or the pigs or the chickens. The Abernathys received a check each month from the Indiana Department of Human Services for $212. 65. Every expense was weighed against that sum, the food on his plate, his shoes and socks, the laundry detergent to clean his clothes, the oil burned to heat his room. Lest he rip his clothes in play, or even soil them, Carter was confined to the home after school. Lest he wear out his shoes, he was required to go barefoot indoors. And when the social worker paid a visit every month or so, he was compelled to express gratitude for the Abernathys' largesse.

Eventually, four years later, when she turned eighteen, Janie came for her brother. Too late, of course, way too late, but she did come.

Carter looks up to find his sister asleep. Just as well, for he has things to do. He stands, approaches her chair, bends over to bestow a kiss on her forehead. She did come, he tells himself. She might have abandoned me, but she came.

‘Bye, honey. See ya tomorrow.'

Nine

C
arter drives back to Astoria and parks the van on Thirty-First Street beneath the el. As plain as Carter on the outside, the van's interior has been impressively tricked out. There's no bling, of course. A metal floor running from the front seat to the back doors, a pair of sliding windows toward the rear, empty boxes stacked one atop the other. The van is designed not to push buttons, especially those of cops. Your paperwork's in order, here's your ticket, so long.

Carter slips off a panel on the driver's side of the van to reveal a number of weapons, among them a sniper rifle he first used in Iraq, an XM25. Little more than a customized version of the M14, standard issue before Vietnam, the XM25 is a semi-automatic weapon and not prized by sharpshooters. Bolt-action is all the rage now, one shot, then reload. But Carter's willing to sacrifice a little accuracy for the fifty-round magazine he jams into the gun's underbelly. Sniping is all about stealth, the basic idea to shoot without being seen, a goal Carter embraces wholeheartedly. But ideas are not realities and goals are only goals, so Carter is prepared to exercise plan B if the shit hits the fan. He's prepared to shoot his way out.

Carter arranges the boxes in two stacks, separated by a single box just high enough to support the rifle's biped. His line of sight, through an open rear window, is of the far side of the street to a distance of approximately 300 meters.

Carter is wearing a navy-blue jacket over a black turtle-neck sweater and thin black gloves. He completes this outfit by donning a nylon ski mask, also black. Finally, he peers through the rifle's Unerti 10X scope. The front door of Sweet's Bar and Grill jumps into view, disappears as an oncoming truck goes by, appears again just as suddenly.

Traffic, a hazard for which Carter, who's conducted several practice runs, is prepared. He can see oncoming vehicles, at least until he sights down on a target, but not vehicles coming from behind him. These he has to hear.

Carter likes a challenge, likes overcoming obstacles, and he's reached the point when he can differentiate between busses and large trucks, SUVs and sedans by the hum of their tires on the asphalt and the pitch of their engines. More importantly, he's learned to gauge the speed of these vehicles well enough to estimate the number of seconds before they intersect his line of sight. Except, of course, when a train passes overhead.

While he waits for a target to appear, Carter tracks the vehicles on both sides of the road. Patience is another aspect of the sniper's art, like stealth. You acquire a position first, then you make yourself invisible until a target presents itself. Your goal is to maintain focus, no matter how long it takes. But Carter's mind soon begins to drift.

More slippage.

Eventually, Carter's thoughts settle on Montgomery Thorpe, who claimed, when he and Carter first met, to be an Australian educated at Sandhurst, Britain's Royal Military Academy. Carter was initially skeptical, as well he should have been. The mercenary scene was chock full of braggarts and blowhards. But then one night, as they ripped through the countryside in an armored Humvee, Thorpe delivered an extremely detailed monologue on Roman military tactics and how they were eventually overcome by far more primitive societies.

‘Throughout history,' he concluded, ‘every advance in weaponry, tactics and strategy has resulted in the formation of a successful counter. The trick is to be nimble.' As the months went by, Thorpe occasionally added to this bottom line by analyzing the collapse of other great militaries, the Ottomans in the near east, Napoleon in Europe, the Ashanti in Africa.

They were in Iraq, Carter and Thorpe, when these lectures took place, working for Coldstream Military Operations. Their little mercenary band had devolved into a virtual hit squad by then. Worse still, they no longer knew who they worked for. A Russian oligarch, as one rumor had it? Or a Saudi oil prince? Or the CIA? Or what was left of the KGB? Or the Chinese? All Carter knew was that the money was good, twice what Halliburton's people got. All Carter knew was that when he finally went home, he wouldn't be sporting empty pockets.