The First Cut (2 page)

“Makes sense. He did seem unusually worked up about this one,” James said. “He told me he wanted this done today.”

Just then the pager on James’ belt started beeping. He unclipped it so he could see the number, then pulled out his cell phone and made the call. He was told to go to Evanston Memorial to pick up a kidney and take it to a hospital on the south side.

“You still got that Cutlass?” he asked Davey. He nodded. “OK. Pack a couple of things, nothing too obvious, then get the hell out of here. I get the wheels, you get your life.”

“How am I gonna get out of here?”

“If you don’t shut the fuck up and do as I say, it’ll be in a body bag, OK? Now look, the boss wants me to cap you, cut out your fuckin’ heart and bring it to him. I got an idea about how to appease him, but if you show up somewhere with your ticker still thumping away in your chest, we’re both gonna get topped, OK?”

Davey nodded again, silently, then went to his closet and started pulling things out to throw in a suitcase.

Jacko was waiting for James when he pulled up at the back door of the dry cleaners. It was after 5, so Jacko was there to let him in.

“Nice ride. When’d  you get that?”

“Today. Consider it a fringe benefit of a job well done. Don’t worry, I don’t think anyone’s gonna report it stolen.”

Jacko laughed knowingly and followed James into the back of the store. Even though the machines weren’t running, the place still reeked.

The boss was sitting behind his desk. James waited to be waved in, then set the transport cooler down.

“How’d it go?” the boss asked.

“He wasn’t happy, but as you can see, there wasn’t much he could do about it,” James said, gesturing to the cooler.

The boss opened the lid and looked in. This time he didn’t wait for Jacko, but instead pulled the bag out himself. He held it up for inspection.

“This one I’m gonna keep,” he said, his eyes narrowing to slits as his mouth clasped into a tight grin.

James was startled. “What about it being evidence?” he said. “Don’t you want me to get rid of it?”

“No, not this one,” the boss said. “This one I’m tempted to cook up and eat. I want to devour this shitheel, you understand?”

As he continued looking at the bag, his eyes widened. He turned it from side to side and poked at the organ inside with a finger.

“What the fuck’s going on, Jimmy?” he said.

“What, chief?”

“Don’t you ‘chief’ me. This doesn’t look like a heart,” he said. He set the bag on the desk and pulled it open.

“Do you believe this guy, Jacko? He brought me a fuckin’ liver or something. Thinks I’m an idiot.” The boss reached inside his jacket and Jacko did the same. James was quicker. He pulled his pistol out of the back of his waistband and put two bullets in each man before either could unholster their gun. As the boss fell, he grabbed at the edge of the desk. He pulled the bag down with him and the kidney slid out and skittered across the dusty floor.

James had just lost one job and knew he couldn’t afford to lose the other. Remembering what the transplant people had said about keeping things clean and cold, he figured the kidney was no longer any good.

He went to the desk, pulled open drawers until he found what he needed, then went over to the boss. James flipped him onto his stomach, cut away his jacket and shirt, and prepared to do a little surgery. For once he was glad for the dry cleaning fumes, hoping they’d cover the smell of what he was about to do.

“Bet that fuck Tarantino never thought of this,” he said, making the first cut.

A Wild and Crazy Night

My girlfriend freaked out when her son staggered into the living room with an arrow through his head. Me? I laughed.

The difference was that she was about 20 years younger than I was, so she’d never seen Steve Martin in anything but sappy romantic comedies. I, on the other hand, remembered when he was truly funny, back in the early days when he was “a wild and crazy guy,” playing his banjo and doing King Tut. He seemed like a coke-fueled lunatic, and the arrow through the head was a classic.

“What are you laughing at?” Tracy said to me as she rushed over to Owen. As she bent over him, she could see the strip of plastic over the top that held the two ends of the arrow to the sides of his head. “You don’t know. He could have been seriously hurt.”

“Lighten up, babe,” I said. “I just got out of the joint two weeks ago, remember? It takes more than a plastic arrow to raise my blood pressure.”

Owen, just seven years old, rolled his eyes at his over-protective mother as she pulled the arrow off of his head, threw a wide, conspiratorial smile my direction and ran back to his room.

I’d brought some burgers and fries over to their apartment for us to eat, wanting a quiet night watching TV. She came back and sat down next to me, picked up her beer and tried to snuggle in to pick up where we’d left off. I’d lost the mood, however; this was the latest in a long string of reminders that I was way out of my comfort zone here. When I went in for armed robbery eight years ago, I was already a criminal in his late 30s with a lengthy record of convictions for some petty and not-so-petty crimes. Tracy would have been in high school at the time, not yet knocked up by her boyfriend, her life still full of promise. Now she was a single mother who was willing to overlook the fact that I was a parolee because I would at least be a male presence in Owen’s life. We met the day I was sprung; chitchat in the food court at the mall where I had stopped to get some new clothes had turned into what was starting to feel like a boyfriend-girlfriend thing.

I tried to stay distant, particularly from the boy, because I knew the odds of my staying out of prison were slim; the odds of my staying alive maybe slimmer. I had no real skills and couldn’t even get an interview at the McDonald’s where I’d picked up dinner thanks to my record.

Meanwhile, my real work was to track down the guys I’d done my last job with to see if I could squeeze my share of the take out of them. Either way, I knew my stay in Tracy’s life would probably be short. A few laughs were all I could reasonably expect.

The laughs weren’t coming tonight, so I lied about getting up early the next day to look for work and stood to leave.

“Well, you seemed to think this thing was so funny, so why don’t you take it with you?” Tracy said, handing me the arrow. “I don’t want it in my house.”

I clipped it to my head, bugged out my eyes and let my tongue hang out of my mouth, stumbling toward the door.

“You’re terrible!” she said, pushing me out.

***

“What the fuck?”

I furrowed my brow at the kid behind the counter at the gas station as I handed over two twenties.

“What’s your problem?” I asked.

He pointed at my head. “Why do you have an arrow through your head?”

“For God’s sake, it’s a prop. You know, ‘I’m a wild and ca-razy guy!’?” I said, pulling it off my head. I had forgotten I still had it on.

The kid just shrugged while he rang me up; I began to wonder if anyone still remembered Steve Martin, and felt really old. I grabbed my 40 of Old Style from the counter and walked out. My cell phone started ringing as I headed over to my car.

“Yeah,” I said after I had flipped it open.

“So, the rumors are true,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “Lenny has paid his debt to society.”

“Who is this? What do you want?”

“I’m just someone who represents someone who appreciates the fact that you did your time quietly, that’s all. I understand you’ve been making inquiries.”

“I just want to reconnect and see if I can get my share,” I said, leaning now against my car. “I need a stake, and I know there was plenty from that last job to go around.”

“Of course. Why don’t we get together? We can discuss your situation. Why don’t you hop back in your car and drive out to the old packing plant on Cedar. Do you remember where that is?”

“Sure,” I said. “We’re doing this now?”

“Why not? Let’s get it taken care of,” said the voice. “I know that’s a little out of the way, but you’re not the only one looking for this money, and we don’t want to draw too much attention.”

I got back in the car and started driving. The packing plant had been closed since before I went away, and numerous attempts by various elected officials to turn it into a park or a casino or whatever the flavor of the moment was had failed. It was mostly a place for kids to go throw rocks or shoot pellet guns. Or, for cons to meet.

As I pulled through the broken gate and into the darkened complex of buildings, I thought about what the man had said: “Why don’t you hop back in your car?” How could he tell that I wasn’t in the car unless they were watching me? And if they were watching me, then this has been no idle attempt to reach me. I was being set up.

I thought about going back to Tracy’s, or just driving away somewhere, but I was already here and so were they, I was sure. I might as well see where this went. I dimmed the lights and pulled around to the front of one of the buildings so my car would be cloaked in shadows, popped out the bulb in the overhead light and quietly opened the door. I slipped out, left the door open and made my way around behind the building.

Walking around the outside of the buildings, I was careful to stay in the shadows. I was coming around the corner of the main part of the complex at the back of the property when I saw them. Two young goons, each with a pistol held to the side of his leg, watching around the corner back toward the street. They always sent new guys to do the dirty work, convincing them they had to make their bones before they could really start earning. I heard the crackle of what sounded like a walkie talkie.

“You see him yet?” I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like the guy from the phone.

“Nope. But we’ll whack him when we do.”

Great. A couple of kids brought up on “The Sopranos” and “Goodfellas.” Maybe I had a chance.

“So, what’d this mook do?” said the one whose voice I didn’t recognize.

“He stood up tall is what he did. But now he’s asking questions, and questions mean trouble. Coulda been a hero, now he’s a loose end. Let that be a lesson.”

I slipped back around the corner of the building and weighed my options. I’d somehow driven into the plant without them seeing me, but knew I wouldn’t be so lucky if I tried to leave. There was a 10-foot chainlink fence around the perimeter of the property, and I’d make enough noise to draw their fire long before I dragged my 45-year-old ass over the top. I could wait them out, but they’d eventually see the car and bring enough guys to flush me out.

Sticking a hand in each of my pockets, I took inventory: I had my cell phone – which I took a moment to set to vibrate – a handful of ketchup packets from the burger joint and Owen’s plastic arrow. Back in the car was the 40 of beer and nothing else. Not exactly the tools you’d pick to help get out of a jam. I hadn’t been out long enough to pick up a piece, and I’d bought the car used the week before and knew there wasn’t even a tire iron in the trunk.

I slipped back to the car, made sure no one was watching and leaned in to pull the beer bottle from the passenger seat. I crawled back into the shadows and tried to think of a plan. I remembered something the guy on the phone had said: Other people were after the money, too. That was hard to believe eight years after the fact, but as long as they believed it, I could use it to my advantage.

I poured out half of the beer from the bottle a few feet from the open driver’s side door of my car, then pulled out my phone and dialed 911. I told the operator there had been a shooting at the plant, then hung up and headed back toward the men.

Four buildings made up the plant, with steel catwalks between them. There were no lights, but a three-quarter moon cast a little light and even more shadows, which I knew would help. The buildings were set up in a quad, with the goons standing behind the two buildings at the back, watching the road that came down in between them. I stepped lightly over to the point in the middle of all four buildings, just 30 yards or so away from them. I knew I had only one chance to make this work.

Still out of their line of sight, I grabbed the half-full bottle by the neck and tossed it high and hard toward the catwalk above the men. Not waiting for it to make contact, I ran back toward my car. The bottle hit the steel beams, making a tremendous racket of shattering glass and clanging metal.

“Shit!” yelled one of the men a second later. “I been hit!”

“Somebody else is here,” yelled the other one. “Get down!”

When I got to the car, I slammed the door shut, then opened and closed it twice more, hoping the goons would think there were several people on the grounds. Then, I prepped myself and lay down with my head in the pool of spilled beer.

A few seconds later I heard footsteps approach.

“Holy fuck! Somebody took that guy out with a crossbow!”

“Where are they?” said the other guy. “Get down behind the car!”

I laid still, the arrow affixed to my head and ketchup oozing from around each side and onto the ground. I had hoped the whole thing would look real enough in the moonlight to buy me some time.

It did. I heard sirens in the distance, and for the first time in my life the cops were coming to help me rather than arrest me. I hoped.

“Let’s bolt,” said one of the young cons. “We’ll just tell ’em somebody took care of him for us.”

I heard their shoes kick up gravel as they ran out of the gate and down the street. A car started and pulled away as the sirens got closer. I got up, pulled off the arrow, started to wipe the ketchup away from my head and prayed that the cop who responded would be an old guy with a sense of humor.

Dog Days of Summer

Janice and I were just getting into bed when I remembered I still had Lenny’s body in my trunk. You’d think you wouldn’t forget something like that, but it had been a long day.