Since the Layoffs (17 page)

I try slicking my hair back, and it just pops back into the messy bed-head shape it was in earlier. No point worrying about that. Hopefully I won’t be meeting too many people. I pat my pocket. Room key, check. My wallet is on the dresser. Check. Don’t want that with me. I lean over and give Sheila a kiss on the cheek. She murmurs.

Time to go kill a pilot.

Outside, it is still dark, but there is a subtle hue in the sky that indicates dawn is coming quickly. I go out onto the beach, where I can hear gulls squawking and I notice the roar of the ocean is much softer than it was last night. The ocean has moved. The tide is out.

It’s way out. The tide has pulled back at least one hundred yards. I sit down beside the motel’s air-conditioning unit and look out at the sea, realizing that there is no way I can hit anything in the water from here. Maybe if I had a brand-new rifle with a scope and a tripod, and a silencer, it would be possible. But with this piss-soaked relic from World War II, I can’t make this shot. The guy from
Saving Private Ryan
couldn’t make this shot. I lean back against the air conditioner, listening to the steady hum of its motor, thinking of an excuse to tell Ken Gardocki.

Just for practice, I hold the rifle up and look along the barrel at the sea, pointing it at a black pier far off in the distance. I get a whiff of piss. No matter how many times I wipe the stock, the urine smell seems to be permanently ingrained into the wood. I toss the rifle down. It’s not possible. Gardocki will just have to deal with it. Of course, if I come back without killing this guy, there’s not going to be any convenience store for me and Tommy, and Gardocki is going to start screaming about getting the money back that he’s laid out sending me and Sheila to Miami. I’ll be back where I started, owing a gangster money and not having any coming in. I think of things to tell him. Maybe I can tell him the pilot never showed up. Maybe he’ll believe that the pilot never went swimming at six in the morning, he changed his plans. He’ll just have to deal with it. But then what? Am I supposed to go home and sit in my icebox of an apartment and try and talk Sheila into leaving her boyfriend so she can move in with an unemployed hit man who lies to his clients about not being able to find his targets?

Then I see a figure wearing bathing shorts heading to the water.

Fuck it. I’m here. It’s worth a try. I lie down in the sand and watch the tiny figure testing the water, going into the waves. I’m getting the adrenaline rush now, and I know it is going to happen. I pick the piss-soaked rifle up and inch forward, and try to draw a bead on him.

There’s no way. He’s a mile away and he’s moving around. It’s getting light out, too. Five minutes ago I was here in almost darkness, and now I can see down the beach. In minutes, it will be full daylight, and people might wonder why I’m crawling around in the sand with a rifle. I hop up and dart fifty yards closer, fifty yards across an open beach with no cover, and I lie down again. From here, I look over and I can see the pilot’s ten-story hotel. Only one or two rooms have lights on.

He is swimming. I can see the occasional limb come up and splash down again, but the shot is still too far. The beach is still clear. I hop up again and close the distance by another fifty yards.

That’s it. I fling myself down in the sand and draw a bead again. He stops swimming momentarily, stands to catch his breath, and I fire.

BANG
.

I think the rifle has exploded in my hands and taken half my head with it. I wasn’t holding it tightly enough and the weapon has bucked and bashed against my head, so the ringing in my ears this time is partly from the noise and partly from the impact of the butt against my skull. I stick my head up to see.

I don’t see him.

God, did I get him? He’s gone! I’m about to leap up and run back to the hotel, but I decide to wait a few more seconds for some form of confirmation, maybe a glimpse of a lifeless torso rolling lazily in with the waves. Maybe from this distance I could even see streaks of blood in the water. Then I see him spring up from the breakers and shake water out of his hair.

The sonofabitch was underwater. And I missed him completely. He didn’t even hear the shot. He comes walking in from the sea and I fire again.

BANG
.

This time I’m gripping the rifle much tighter, but it still tries to jerk away from me. How could anyone ever hit anything with this piece of shit? The pilot hears that one. I see him stop and look around.

“Fuck!” I scream to myself. BANG BANG BANG BANG click. That’s it. Maybe I’m out of ammo, maybe there’s sand in this piece of shit. Either way, it’s done firing. I can still see the bastard. I haven’t even nicked him. The pilot is in the water, crouching, trying to figure out what all that shooting is about. He sees me.

He starts running toward his hotel.

Oh shit. I hop up, still carrying the useless rifle. It’s a foot race now. He’s slowed down by the surf, I’m slowed down by the sand. It’s too far, I’m not going to get him. I run in toward the sea, where the sand has been smoothed out by the tide, and I get more speed. Holy God, he’s going to get away. Fuck fuck fuck …

He trips on something.

He goes down, splashing wildly as he tries to right himself, then falls again. I close the distance quickly. He gets up, sees me coming at him full tilt, then turns and bounds back further into the sea.

He’s going to try to swim away from me. Where’s he going to go, England? I’m close enough now to hear him yelling to himself as he thrashes, jumping up into each breaker. If he gets into deep water, he could hide, I realize. I splash out after him, still holding the rifle, the water waist-deep now. My shoes and socks are like concrete.

A wave comes in and nearly knocks me down. When I look around, he is gone.

Damn.

I stumble out a few more feet, drop the rifle into the water and reach into my back pocket for the bayonet. The thing is really nothing more than a sharpened spike with a very heavy metal end where it is supposed to attach to the rifle. It would be a good club, because the spike has no blade, so you can actually hold it and hit with the weighted end. I look around as the tide goes out. Nothing. He’s staying underwater.

Two can play that game. Another wave comes in and I drop to my knees and go under, the salty water filling my mouth and burning my eyes. Still holding the bayonet, I wriggle toward the spot where I last saw him. Nothing.

Frantically, I look toward the beach, expecting to see him streaking across the sand to the hotel. Nothing. That’s good, at least, he’s still in the water. It is daylight now. Way down the beach I can see a figure jogging towards us, with two dogs. I low-crawl along in the surf, alligator-like, keeping nothing but my head above the water and my hands walking along pebbly ground. I’m cutting my hands to bits as I walk on them, my knuckles dragging across seashells and debris.

The tide is going out, dragging me away from the shoreline, exposing me. It exposes him too. I see the bastard.

He raises his head slightly out of the water, not even five feet away, and I hear him gasping for air, trying to keep his desperate breaths quiet. He is facing the hotel, and he turns and looks frantically around. He doesn’t see me because he’s looking for someone standing straight up, not bothering to check the surf around him. He tries to push through the surf towards the beach, convinced he’s lost me. I think not. In my alligator crawl, I’m much quicker. The tide, crashing into the beach, carries me right into him. I’m on him in a second.

His head starts to turn. The heavy end of the bayonet thunks down on his head. He still moves toward the hotel, but more slowly now. His legs are giving out. I bring back my arm and thunk him again, this time with all the strength I have. I hear the skull cracking. His legs buckle and he goes down into the waves.

Grabbing his limp arm, I start pulling him back into the surf. I’m gripping his arm tightly as I pull him through one set of breakers after another. The jogger with the two dogs is coming up on me, a hundred yards and closing. I keep pulling the pilot out into the waves, farther, farther. I push his body down and stand on him while I take off my shirt. The jogger runs past, and I wave. He doesn’t wave back. Guess he didn’t see me after all.

I pull the pilot out another ten or fifteen yards, and it suddenly occurs to me that I’m swimming with a bleeding body in waters where there have been recent shark attacks. I let him go, give him a push toward England, hoping a giant shark will come out of nowhere and devour the evidence, or a strong tide will whisk him off to Liverpool.

The body pops right to the surface and bobs around. I drop the bayonet and start swimming back in.

When I reach the water’s edge, I walk out slowly.

I grab the bedspread I have left by the air conditioner, shake it out, put it back on the bed the second I return to the hotel room. Then I hop in the shower. I scrub every piece of sand and sea residue off me, condition my hair. Then I get back into bed with Sheila and pull the covers over myself. She stirs.

“Where’d you go?” she mumbles sleepily.

“I just took a shower.”

“Mmmmph.” She rolls over and puts her hand on my chest.

I look at my watch. Six forty-five. The whole thing has taken less than an hour.

“I thought I heard the door open,” Sheila says.

“Nah.”

Her eyes open and I can see her looking at me, and I prepare for her to start calling me a liar, demanding explanations. She is going to say something, something final, something devastating. She is awake now. “You still want to go parasailing today?” she asks.

“Sure.”

She smiles. Her eyes close again, and in a few minutes, she is breathing steady and solid, the relaxed breaths of someone lost in a pleasant dream.

NINE

I
’m back at the convenience store. I have to work the next seven days, because Tommy has been working non stop as a result of my traveling, and needs some time off. I’m rearranging a potato chip display, putting all the Wenke products on the bottom shelf. I’d put them in the storage shed if there was room. I see Ken Gardocki pull up, fill his SUV with gas. He’s driving his own car. Times are tough for everyone. I guess with Karl out of the picture, there’s a job opening around here for a chauffeur.

Gardocki isn’t smiling when he comes into the Gas’n’Go. He makes himself a soda, then comes to the counter, pulls a pack of cigarettes from the counter display and asks, “So, what happened, Jake?”

I’m surprised by his expression. “Everything went well,” I say softly, cheerfully. Loudly, I add, “That’s three fifty for the smokes, ninety-nine cents for the soda, and twenty-six dollars for the gas.” I ring it up and give him the total.

He gives me the money. “Jerry Grzanka called me. He said you never picked up the rifle.”

I squint at him. “What the hell’s he talking about? I picked it up.”

Gardocki sips his soda, looking at me across the top of his straw, a hard, studying look. “Why,” he asks, “do you suppose, that Gerald Grzanka, a man I have known all my life, would tell me that you didn’t?”

“You’ve known that guy all your life?” Despite my certainty that no one will ever come down to look at our security tapes again, I keep glancing at them nervously. There’s something intimidating about being videotaped, about the knowledge that your every action is being recorded for posterity. It forces you to be honest, but it also forces you into a mentality of submission. Maybe that’s why Gas’n’Go likes it, so it can turn all the men and women who work there into so many lab rats. “Let’s go outside,” I say.

“Why?” Gardocki doesn’t budge. He turns and faces a video camera and yells at it, “WHY THE FUCK DO YOU SUPPOSE MY LIFE-LONG FRIEND GERALD GRZANKA LIED TO ME?” Then he stares into the camera, as if waiting for an answer.

Okay, this is odd. Now I’m going to have to erase this tape. What’s even odder is that Gardocki is asking a legitimate question.

Ken is staring at me. “Ken,” I say very softly, in an attempt to lower the decibel level of the conversation. “I don’t know what’s going on. Why don’t we go outside?”

“SO YOU’RE TELLING ME THAT YOU KILLED THE PILOT,” Gardocki yells at the camera.

“WILL YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP!” I explode, as a mother and young daughter walk into the store, stare at us, then walk out. “Great, that’s a customer you just cost me.” I’m already acting like the store is mine. “Look, I don’t know what this dipshit is telling you, but—”

“He is not a dipshit, sonny,” Gardocki hisses. “I trust that man with my life. And if he tells me you didn’t pick up the rifle, you didn’t pick up the rifle.”

“I picked up the rifle,” I tell him.

Gardocki backs away from the counter, holding his cigarettes and his soda, shaking his head in disgust. “We were in Vietnam together,” he says. “You’re going to tell me that a guy I went to Vietnam with—”

“That kid wasn’t even twenty years old,” I say.

Gardocki stops. He stares at me. “What?”

“Jerry Grzanka. That little pot-smoking freak. He wasn’t even twenty years old. He gave me a goddamned rifle that he’d been using to prop his toilet tank lid open. It was a piss-soaked piece of crap from World War II and I couldn’t hit a damned thing with it,” I rant. “What the hell kind of crackpot idea did you come up with, anyway? Who do you think I am, Lee Harvey Fucking Oswald? You nearly got me killed, you sonofabitch. Do you have any idea how close that guy came to getting away? I had to chase him—”

“Twenty years old?” asks Gardocki.

I am breathless. “Something like that. I didn’t ask.”

“Was he a heavy kid? With, you know, sandy hair?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s Jerry’s son.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I worked with his dad for a year or two, on the loading docks. I remember him. Big guy, funny mustache.”

Gardocki is thinking hard now. “So you got a rifle from Grzanka’s son.”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you get the rifle from the old man?”

“Jesus, Ken, I went to the address you gave me and asked for a guy named Gerald. That’s what you told me to do.”

“I meant Gerald, not Jerry. Jerry Junior’s an idiot.”

“No shit.”

Gardocki starts laughing. He steps up to the counter again. “Shit, Jake, I must have given you his old address. It’s some beat-up house he lets his son live in.” Gardocki shakes his head at his own forgetfulness. “He moved a few years ago.”

I nod. I’m still a little upset about how quickly Gardocki turned on me.

“Jake, Grzanka had a nice rifle for you. A real beaut. It cost me two grand. Had a scope and everything.”

“A silencer?”

“I don’t know about a silencer,” he says, “but it came apart, and fit into a briefcase, like you wanted. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

I nod. “It would have been nice.”

“So how’d you kill this guy, then?” Gardocki is still laughing.

“I had to chase him up and down the beach with a bayonet.”

Gardocki is guffawing now. “A bayonet,” he roars, and I glance nervously toward the video camera. I’m going to have to
burn
this tape, but Gardocki’s laughter is almost contagious, and I find myself chuckling as I recount blazing away at the pilot with my piss-soaked, sand-clogged rifle, to no avail, then splashing around after him in the waves, pretending to be an alligator. The alligator detail brings Gardocki to tears.

He wipes his eyes. “Oh, Jake, you’re a crazy sonofabitch,” he says. “How about the girl? You get any?”

I nod quickly, not wanting to bring Sheila into it.

“Give her the high hard one, eh?” he laughs, but I don’t laugh back, and he picks up on it quickly. “Serious, eh?”

“I dunno. We’ll see.”

“Well, good for you.” He nods at me, but I feel he is genuinely happy for me, and I find it almost touching. “Anyway, come by my office tomorrow. Got some money for you, maybe a little more work.”

A little more work? How many people does Gardocki need killed? I’d assumed the pilot job might be the end of it. I’m back on my feet now, I have some cash, I’ve got the possibility of a woman, I’m not as angry as I was before. I’m losing the fire in the belly that got me to where I am. My problems are disappearing right before my eyes, and if it’s all the same to Gardocki, I’d really rather not murder anyone else for a while.

“Sure, Ken,” I say cautiously. “Talk to you tomorrow.”

He laughs as he walks out. “Ya crazy bastard,” he says as the door closes behind him.

I go back into the security room and take the tape out, pop in another one. I am about to throw the tape in the dumpster when I have my latest paranoid thought … what if someone went through the dumpster and found it? That alone could get me convicted. I break the plastic and pull out the videotape, then get a steel bucket from the back. When no one is around, I go out to the gas pumps and squirt a tiny amount of gasoline into the bucket, then, later in the shift, take the mess out behind the dumpster and toss a lit cigarette in the bucket. WHOOSH. One less problem.

I suddenly realize there is a security camera out by the pumps, so now there is a tape of me burning the tape.

This is a lot like being a loading dock manager. There’s the tireless checking and re-checking, the necessary attention to detail. The factory trained me for this. As I drop the second tape in the bucket, leaving the VCR temporarily empty, I think to myself that all I did was put the skills to a different use. That’s what they get for taking my job away.

I get home that night and there are three messages from Sheila. She’s been thinking about me. I can’t call her back because her trucker boyfriend is home, so I just listen to the messages over and over again, enjoying the sound of her voice. Between her messages there’s another message, from Tommy, asking where the hell I put some keys. I figure he found them or he would have called every ten minutes. So while listening to Sheila’s message three or four times, to figure if I missed anything, I also have to listen to Tommy bitch at me over and over. Finally I figure I’m just acting like a high school kid and I erase them all.

I step outside to get something from my car, and when I come back, I have a new message. Dammit! I was only gone three minutes, and that was probably the last time Sheila is going to call tonight. I hit the play button on the machine.

I know you killed Corinne Gardocki,
says a man’s muffled voice.
I know all about it. I want ten grand and I won’t go to the cops.

So much for my troubles melting away.

I know you killed Corinne Gardocki
says the tape, and Gardocki keeps hitting Rewind and listening to it.
I know you killed Corinne Gardocki … I know you killed Corinne Gardocki … I know you killed Corinne Gardocki.

We are standing out in a field, which is where Gardocki likes to talk business. A different field each time, just in case the cops start bugging a field. I think he’s getting a little carried away with the security measures, but better safe than sorry.

“Jesus, Ken, will you stop that?” The voice is starting to give me the willies. Gardocki is nodding wisely as he listens to each replay of the tape. He ignores me. I
know you killed Corinne Gardocki. I know you killed …

“Listen to this,” he says cheerfully. He pulls a tape from the console in between the seats of his SUV and takes mine out.
I know you killed your wife
, says the same voice. Ken replays it over and over with an evil smile.
I know you killed your wife … I know you killed your wife … I know ….

“It’s the same person,” I say.

“Yeah.” He is grinning. “Except it’s not the same thing at all.”

“Why not?”

“Because you have a listed telephone number. I don’t. Only one person knows my number who also knows you.”

I think for a minute. “Jeff Zorda?”

“Bingo.” Gardocki laughs. “That was the job I wanted to talk to you about. I was going to play you my tape, then you brought your own, and that kind of cinched the deal. I thought it was Zorda, but I wasn’t sure until I heard yours.”

“You want me to kill Zorda?” There have been times when I thought I’d like to kill Zorda, but that was back before actually killing people was such a reality. You can’t just go and kill people you’ve worked with, watched football games with, drunk beers with. People who do that aren’t right in the head. “Why don’t I just go and have a talk with him?”

Gardocki is looking at me, clearly amused. He seems to be in good spirits today. The unveiling of his blackmailer is a real mood enhancer. “You’re tired of this, aren’t you?”

I see understanding in his eyes. He knows people. It’s the quality I always liked about him, back when I hardly knew him and used to place bar bets at his table before the Packers games. “A little bit. Yeah.”

“Gettin’ laid did it.” Gardocki shakes his head. “Remember what I told you, about men with women? You get a single guy, you’re on much better ground. It’s only a few more rolls in the hay and you’re telling her everything.”

“I wouldn’t do that.” But he doesn’t believe me. He’s giving me the same look he was giving me in the convenience store when he thought I was lying about the pilot. Lately, I’ve begun wondering how much Gardocki trusts me. Admittedly, it’s a stressful situation, us both having to trust each other completely, but that thing with the pilot unnerved me a little. And him screaming at the video cameras was just no way for a self-respecting career criminal to behave. It occurs to me, for a second, that I might be better at this than he is, more suited for it psychologically. “I don’t want to do it anymore because I’ve got it out of my system,” I say. “My life isn’t destroyed anymore. I’m putting the pieces back together.”

Gardocki looks at me, and I think he knows that I was just thinking I could do his job, be the town’s head criminal, better than him. He has that way of looking through you, like he understands everything that makes you tick. He’s better than the cops. Maybe, if I ever decided to run the crime in this town, I’d need to learn a look like that. But I don’t want to run the crime here. I want to run a convenience store, and have a woman to come home to.

“Pop this bastard,” Gardocki says.

“I’ll talk to him.”

“Pop him. Kill him. Waste him. Dump his fucking body in a lime pit somewhere.”

“Lime pit?”

“Then pour gasoline on him and grind up his skull. No dental records. Nothing.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“Listen to the tape, Jake.” He flips on the tape recorder again, and plays me Zorda’s greatest hit.
I know you killed your wife… I know you killed your wife
.

“I’ll talk to him.”

Gardocki tosses the tape recorder back in the SUV and pulls out a brown leather pouch. He hands it to me. “Take a gun just in case the conversation doesn’t go so good.”

I shrug. It’s sound advice.

I’m supposed to go over to Zorda’s place and kill him, or talk to him, whichever is most convenient, but what I really want to do is go over to the police building and drop in on Sheila and ask her to lunch. I’ve hardly seen her since we got back from Miami, and we’re always missing each other with the phone calls. Her boyfriend is going out on the road again tonight, so I’ll be free to call after about nine o’clock, and perhaps I should swing by the grocery store to get something for dinner for her. I’m not a bad cook. Maybe I should go by the florist and pick up a rose. I bet that fat bastard she lives with hasn’t given her a rose in some time, if ever. I’ll need for this Zorda thing to go quickly, whatever the outcome, because the florist will probably close at five and it’s almost three now.

As I pull onto Zorda’s street, I think about Sheila’s boyfriend. I wonder how much trouble he’s going to cause when she tries to leave him for me. Of course, there’s the obvious solution. I could “run into him” at one of his truck stops and leave him in a dumpster, making the whole problem moot. But that’s the Jake that needs to disappear now. I’m trying to work myself away from the habit of shooting people who make my life hard. I have the possibility of rebuilding something, here. What kind of husband, father and small-business owner regularly offs people? No, I’m going to have to talk to him, reason with him. Maybe he, Sheila and I can have a talk someplace. That’ll be a miserable evening. I pull up outside Zorda’s apartment and unzip the leather pouch, let the weight of the pistol fall into my hand. I look at it, the weight comforting, the chrome plating giving me a sense of glamour and power. Dammit, the truckstop-dumpster idea is just so tempting. Sheila would never have to know.