Roachkiller and Other Stories (12 page)

The front doors opened. People got in. The car started moving. From behind him, Bianco heard the engine of his truck rev up, then move.

The SUV stopped. He heard his truck behind him screech then make a turn. Whoever was driving it had a lead foot. Then the engine faded, like it was going inside a building.

Shit like this happened all the time, he knew. Last year robbers held a FedEx guy for twelve hours. The year before that they shot and killed a UPS driver during a robbery attempt. That’s why the company had been hiring security guards to ride with some drivers—but only for bad neighborhoods, and Williamsburg wasn’t considered a bad neighborhood anymore. Now he was probably going to end up on the news. He could see his wife shaking her finger at him now. It was going to be a merry fucking Christmas.

Bianco could’ve signaled the company with his DIAD, which had a wireless connection. He had reached for it as soon as he’d seen the second guy with a mask and a gun. But it wasn’t by his side, where it usually was. James must’ve had it, from the last delivery.

The UPS office wouldn’t be looking for him till way later, when they’d see he hadn’t made a delivery in hours, or the owner of that electronics store called the office to bitch about his shipment.

Then he remembered—his cell phone. Did he leave it on the dash? He leaned back. He felt its pressure on his left hip. It was under his shirt, which he could never stand to tuck in.

He slid forward, giving his big hands room, pulled up his shirt, got the phone, flipped it open.

“Frank, what are you doing?” It was James. Bianco wondered why they didn’t gag him, too? What kind of robbers are these?

Bianco felt around the keypad and punched in 911. If he got through, all he had to do was leave it on and they would find them, soon enough. Before these bastards emptied his truck, he hoped.

“I can’t let you do that, Frank,” someone said.

James lifted the bag off of Bianco’s face.

“I can’t let you do that,” James said, grabbing the phone. He had no bag or duct tape anywhere on him. Bianco cursed into the duct tape across his mouth.

“Oh, shit. Did you make a call?” James said, checking the phone’s dialed calls. “Oh, shit. Did it go through?”

Bianco leaned forward, trying to head-butt James. Instead, he butted the passenger-side headrest, but the bulk of his body had tackled the younger man, almost to the floor.

“What the fuck are you doing?” James said, stumbling to right himself.

Bianco realized he’d be able to kick if he slid back, so he did. He kicked James in the chest, then in the stomach. Then he realized with more room he could stomp.

But James slid loose and back, quickly, against the other side of the SUV.

“Shit,” James yelled. “You can’t kick a man when you have boots on!”

*  *  *

James popped out of the SUV and stumbled on the ground, dropping Bianco’s cell phone. He got up, but then felt wobbly and stumbled again. He took a deep breath and, half crouching, ran across the warehouse. “Guys! Guys! Guys!”

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Hamilton’s shaded face peeked out from behind the stack of packages he was carrying.

“He called 911,” James said. “The driver called 911.”

Ryan came out from inside the truck. “What’s going on?”

“What the fuck?” said Aaron, who was loading up the second SUV. “Ryan, I thought you took his phone!”

“I thought you did.”

The four of them said, “Fuck!”

“We gotta get moving,” Hamilton said.

They ran up the ramp. “James, gimme the keys to the car,” Hamilton said.

James stopped. “I thought you had the keys.”

*  *  *

With the bag off, Bianco saw he was inside the SUV, parked outside of an old warehouse, facing the river. No one was around. In the SUV, he saw a seat buckle he could use to wedge off the duct tape. He had to turn his body around, but he got it. Only someone with a telescope on Manhattan maybe could have seen him in there, peeling the duct tape off his hands and face. He ripped a long strip of skin off his lower lip. He sucked on it, tasted blood.

Outside the SUV, a concrete driveway led into the belly of what looked like an abandoned warehouse. Where they’d taken his truck probably. Icy rain began to fall. He heard it pelting the roof of the car.

He figured he could just run out of there, call the cops from some pay phone. But these fellas might catch up on him. He was strong, but not fast—that was thirty pounds ago. Then he looked down and saw the car keys in the ignition. Now he could easily get to a phone. Or—

Bianco stepped on the gas. These assholes. For the first time, he saw their faces without masks on. Hipsters. Yuppies. Robber yuppies. It didn’t make sense.

One of them shot at the windshield. He disappeared under the SUV. Bianco kept his foot on the gas.

He spotted James right away. Bianco’s little helper was limping along, headed for a concrete column. James froze when he saw the truck and put his two hands together in front of him, almost like he was praying.

Merry Christmas,
Bianco thought.
This one is mine.

*  *  *

James remembered later that he kind of expected it. The SUV barreling down the ramp. Ryan was the slowest. They all turned as soon as they saw the van, and James knew that thump he heard was Ryan.

James ran. He could see his breath in a cloud in front of him. He veered off to the right, but the SUV was right behind him. The driver was aiming for him.

“I thought we were friends,” he said.

Unsynchronicity

People like to talk about coincidence. Fate. Synchronicity. Happy accidents. A purposeful cosmic syncing up of two seemingly unrelated events resulting in good times, good times.
You think about calling  your bff and just when you’re about to tap in the numbers, she calls you!
Ta-da!

But I like to talk about unsynchronicity:
Unfate. Nondestiny. Cosmic happenings that miss each other by a mile. Events that conspire toward unhappy accidents.

Here I was in not the kind of place I thought I’d end up. A too-well-lit yuppie bar near Grand Central. Fake memorabilia on the wall. Like anybody here even knows Roberto Clemente. You know Roberto Clemente, right? A buffet selection of buffalo wings and macaroni. Homely waitress.

She took my order for another Bombay gin martini then took forever to walk away.

It’s not like I was in any hurry. I enjoyed observing the late lunch crowd. Two businessmen red-faced and whispering. One of them might even be a client. In the corner a pair of tourists chewed on cheeseburgers like cows on cud. Openmouthed, vacant-eyed. A brassy MILF at the bar picked up a french fry and bit it in half. Lucky french fry.

You ever see a dead body? I hate dead bodies.

The afternoon light was fading. My cheap martini glass was empty. The bartender had a trimmed goatee and took all the time in the world to make my drink.

I hate goatees.

Only later—how much later I couldn’t tell you—I came out of my gin-fueled reverie and realized they were gone. The waitress. The bartender. The MILF.

That’s when I saw the siren lights reflected on the wall.

A man obsesses over a foreign film he’s heard about and is desperate to see. He goes to a dozen video stores in one day. And the last store, the store where he finally gives up his search, the movie is right behind the last video he touches in disgust. Unsynchronicity.

(Could be the man leaves his family immediately after that.)

Two childhood friends who haven’t seen each other for years both vacation in the same small town in Maine and visit the same bookstore on the same afternoon. But ten minutes apart. One lingers by the cookbooks, the other by the erotica. They both leave after spending exactly an hour there but never run into each other, and in fact never get to see each other again. Unsynchronicity.

(Well, maybe one of them did see the other and just ducked out.)

A high school sophomore is treated to some plum pudding for the first time in his life by the head cheerleader. Let’s call her Beth. Two years later at a kegger, he craves some of that plum pudding but can’t find it, until someone says pudding can be had in their parents’ room upstairs, and lo and behold there is Beth, ready to serve. A summer later, the man visits the cheerleader’s dorm, once again craving plum pudding. He remembered the earlier incidents and feels that only Beth can make the pudding just right. But at that moment, across town, a sweat-covered Beth is giving the captain of the lacrosse team a good serving of pudding. Unsynchronicity.

(You know I’m not talking about pudding, right?)

I am living with my old college roommate Balboul, and we are living well. Balboul works for an investment bank near Wall Street. I am doing marketing for the best new Web site ever. Ever! Which shall go unnamed.

Then Balboul meets this hooker. An escort. Through an agency on a matchbook. Eriola. Hot Russian brunette, pimples, boxing glove lips. And who, at least if you ask her, looks eerily exactly like Angelina Jolie.

He starts seeing her quite often.

I am very happy at the best new Web site ever when my boss—who wore a goatee—sits us all down in the conference room one day and says that the best new Web site ever is making no money. We veer off the Information Superhighway and into the traffic pole of unemployment.

I mope around the apartment for a while. Get high a lot. Balboul likes to join me when he comes home from work. And then he comes home early. And then he stops leaving the house.

So Eriola ends up supporting us. For which we are grateful. We snort coke, play video games—once for seventy-six hours in a row.

I knew it was a lot to expect a quality martini in a bar like this. But, anyway, after the fifth one it didn’t matter. Except I could still smell the cheap cologne.

I am thinking I’m set to start looking for work, but then—

One day Eriola comes home early, before dawn. The people at her agency, they get busted. She is screaming, crying. Balboul has to take her to their room and fuck her four times before she calms down.

In the afternoon, when they emerge, he looks beat but she is beaming. She has an idea, she says. She is good at her job. She wants to keep doing her job. She still has her client list but she needs someone to organize it for her and to watch over her.

She asks Balboul.

Balboul asks me if it’s a good idea.

“You’d be her pimp,” I tell him.

“A pimp is a black dude in a purple suit,” he says. “I’ll be her manager.”

“Once a business major, always a business major,” I say.

But then Balboul asks me to buy condoms in bulk. Then to get Eriola’s dry cleaning. Then to balance the books.

At first, I do it for the side cash they throw me. But soon it is obvious I am a full partner.

I minored in philosophy. Does it show at all?

Then one day Eriola brings home a friend: Culona. Who also wants to be an escort. She has a rear end the size of an adult Rottweiler. She is from the Bronx but can do dead-on French, Jamaican, and English accents.

Balboul and I talk.

“You see that ass?” he says.

“Hard to miss it,” I say.

“So we tell her to fuck off?”

“Some men like a bigger caboose.”

“Niche marketing!”

“Exactamente,”
I say. “Better yet, her
fake accents give me an idea.”

Since the bar was empty, I lit a cigarette. My hands stank of bad cologne.

Our boutique escort service is born. We interview clients at length to find out exactly what they are looking for—a celebrity, a Bohemian, a librarian, a relative. We find more girls who can act, can do accents, and have faces and bodies that can be dressed and made up to cater to any taste. We work hard at it, and make shitloads. Much of which Balboul continues to shove up his nostrils. He is making a perfect bead toward the Powdery Death. But something much worse happens.

He and Eriola find Jesus.

She stops dying her hair.

He grows a goatee.

So I have the business all to myself. And I like it. With a stable of twenty girls, the business almost runs itself. Everything goes smoothly for months.

You never forget your first corpse.™

I trademarked that. That’s mine. You can’t use it.

My cell phone rings in the middle of my brunch at a four-star restaurant, which shall go unnamed, and I take a taxi to a five-star hotel, which shall also go unnamed.

Suite 774. That’s where I get to see my first dead body. Mr. Stikmij, a diplomat from the Netherlands. He is on the floor, on his back. He does not look peaceful. He is cold and feels like wax, not flesh. His face is purple. A rope is wrapped tightly around his neck and his ankles. Only one of his hands is free.

Almeja, dressed to look like a famous tennis player, is screaming and crying.

“Tell me what happened.”

Hyperventilating, she tells me: “He wanted me to pose, while he . . . he . . .”

“While he choked, double-time. I got it.”

In an alternate reality I was a middle manager with a wife and three kids living on Long Island. I commuted to work each day. I liked to barbecue. I enjoyed domestic beer. I grew facial hair.

Fuck alternate reality.

I feel sweaty and cold. My stomach has a big, fat, freezing, dirty imaginary spike in it. I am going to get her a drink from the minibar before I think better of it.

“Get me his wallet,” I tell Almeja.

It is on the bedstand, next to her payment. “And leave the money. Wait—take half of it. But put the rest in his wallet.”

More screaming. More crying.

“Calm down. Go to your happy place.”

I turn on the flat-screen TV, then take Mr. Stikmij’s credit card and order three hours of hard-core porn. He is approximately facing the set, so it seems right.

“Pick up all your stuff, Almeja. The racket, too. Stand in the center of the room and stay there.”

Using my best silk handkerchief I wipe down every surface, the desk, the TV set, the doorknobs. It takes me an hour. Almeja stays very still, good girl.