Your Friendly Neighborhood Criminal (19 page)

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Authors: Michael van Rooy

BOOK: Your Friendly Neighborhood Criminal
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“Right.” He started to work on the gun and borrowed the knife from me for the fine work of gouging and smashing the internal sears. As he worked I went on. “We just went from assault and attempted murder with prohibited weapons down to assault and attempted murder. We just shaved three years off both our sentences. If the cops walk in.”
Smiley did his job. When he was done we counted the money and found we had sixty bucks and some change from the pockets of Sam and the guy with the sore pelvis, and 500 bucks from the pockets of the guy with the knife. Smiley separated the money into two piles and offered me one. “Here you go.” He held a bundle of bills in one hand. “Two hundred and eighty bucks and change.”
I took the money.
Sam was waking up and I went over to take her gag out. Unconscious people often throw up. If they have a gag in place they suffocate, and that would have made me a murderer. I didn’t want her to die, so I took the gag out and splashed a glass of cold water in her face. “Rise and shine, sunshine.”
She looked blearily around. Getting knocked out in real life is not like in the movies; you don’t wake up spry. You
lose memories, you lose the ability to rationally plan, you get, pardon the expression, fucked up.
“Oh, my head.” Her voice was small, weak, trembling, until Smiley leaned down into her face.
“Remember me, hon?”
She inhaled massive quantities of air but before she could scream I punched her hard in the belly and all the air came out along with a lot of spit and a bit of her last meal. I hated hitting a woman, even one who had tried to kill me—scratch that, I didn’t really like hitting anyone. But I wanted her to know I was serious.
“No yelling.” I said it mildly and her eyes went from me to Smiley and some kind of alertness came into her eyes and she asked in a hoarse voice, “What do you want?”
Smiley’s voice was cold. “Your biz. Now, and this is the big question, what do
you
want?”
Her eyes narrowed and her breathing became faster. “To live.”
Smiley had picked up the big-ass Rambo knife and ran a finger along the edge and winced. “Not very sharp.” He said it conversationally and then smiled back at Sam, “You can live. Keep your mouth shut, drop everything and walk away.”
She exhaled and smiled. “Okay, I drop all this, never think of you again, and forget all this shit. I can do that. For me this is all over.”
“Great. Then I don’t have to kill you. One more thing though …”
“What?”
“You have to clean all this up. It’s your penalty.”
She winced but I didn’t react at all and he kept on, “Your friends are in the bathroom and need a lot of medical help. I don’t want to have this come back to me, do you understand?
If it does then I’ll feel obliged to come back for you, with, what’s the term, oh yeah, malicious intentions. And then there will be hair on the walls and blood on the floor. So are we cool, hon?”
“Sure.”
“Good. And my friend here,” Smiley gestured at me, “he’s with me. Do you understand?”
“Sure, sure.”
“I’m not really believing you but you think about it, hon. There is no place you can go where I can’t find you. If I want to find you. So whatever happened before, that doesn’t matter now. Our deal is off.”
He cut the shoelaces around her wrists and ankles and stood up. He held the knife in one hand and the sheath in the other and bounced them up and down idly, weighing them, and finally he sheathed the knife and tossed it on the floor where Sam could reach it. She watched him and lay there practising deep breathing while Smiley stared at her as though daring her to say something, anything.
And then we walked out the door and locked it behind us.
O
utside we walked far away through residential areas and industrial parks until we found another hotel. There we got the front desk to order us a cab. While we were waiting for the cab, I turned to Smiley. “You were conning me?”
“Yes.”
I thought about it. “Sam hired you to blindside me?”
“Yes. For cash and a cut, her description of the route told me it would be plenty.”
“But now there’s enough on the table for you to take her out?”
“Yes. I’d rather work with you. I trust you.”
I ignored that. “So you never had any intention of going straight?”
“Maybe a little. I wanted to see.”
“’Kay. Don’t tell Claire.”
His face split in a grin. “Did I have you fooled at all?”
“Yep. You did.”
Back home Smiley went into his room without saying a
word and I went upstairs to Claire. On the way I turned on the monitors on the stairs and at each window. She had lit several candles and made the bed, alerted, I supposed, by the dog.
“Rough day at the office?”
She was beautiful, wearing a black flannel bathrobe. I’d mocked her for the fabric when I’d bought it years before but she’d stuck to her guns, insisting that flannel was the fabric of love, warm and comforting. Claire came over and helped me take off my clothes but I kept my mouth shut.
She whispered, “How was it?”
“Bad.” I leaned into her. “You were right—Smiley’s conning us. Sorry.”
She pushed me onto the bed and stood there fingering the tear in my jacket sleeve where the knife had missed my flesh and cut the fabric.
She said loudly, “I see.”
She collapsed slowly and gracefully onto her knees beside me and touched my fingers and forehead. “Looks painful.”
She kissed me and then straddled me. “Don’t move.”
The robe slipped off her shoulders and fell onto my legs, and she began to move, slowly and carefully. Even though I was tired, bone tired, what she was doing worked and in time, in time everything fell away and vanished.
 
She whispered into my ear, “Wake up.”
I whispered back, “I was not asleep, I was thinking. Sometimes I snore when I think.”
She kissed me again and adjusted her weight until she covered the whole right side of my body. The candles had made the room warm and she had made it sweet and that was enough.
“No sleeping yet. I want to talk.”
By rolling my head a little to the side I could talk into her cheek, no way Smiley could hear, and I said, “You mean talk ’bout your feelings?”
“No…”
“Because I have the book ready …”
It was an imaginary book I’d written with her help. titled
The Big Book of Relationships
. Very popular with imaginary couples all around the unreal world, a necessity, one might say.
“Page 32: No, of course I still respect you.”
She giggled and there is something very special about a beautiful woman’s giggle. If you hear it, you know you are doing something right.
“Page 53: And how do you feel about that?”
She leaned up on one elbow and for a moment Sam popped into my head, fearless and mean. But Claire wasn’t Sam and the resemblance was fleeting and lame at best.
“Can you be serious?”
“Page 89: No one’s ever made me feel that way before. All done, the book is closed.”
“Cool. Funny. I’ll give you an E for effort. I want to talk about our house guest.”
“’Kay.”
“What happened?”
“He set me up with Sam and her crew and then betrayed them. He was supposed to lure me into a small room and then they’d take me down. Either that or maybe he’s SISO.”
Claire didn’t smile at the word. A cousin of hers had once gotten into bad company down in Los Angeles and we’d gone down to support the family while everything worked its way through the system. At one point her cousin had read the parole officer’s report backwards and thought they’d said SISO
in brackets by her name. It had taken me three days to track down that they’d written 5150. This was police and health code for “dangerous and disturbed.” Which she had been, but we’d finally managed to sort everything out and had left the city of angels with nothing permanent but a few scars and a new word for our dictionary.
I kept talking and thinking. “I think he just took Sam off the board.”
She stood up and put the robe back on before drinking from a bottle of tap water she’d left by the window. “Good. Where does that leave us?”
“Worried. It leaves us worried.”
“Okay.”
“Smiley said he kind of tried to go straight. I’ve never seen him unsure, it’s like he’s not sure how to play it. It’s like he’s keeping everything as an option.”
She made a guess that sounded right. “Maybe he saw what you have and wants it. Cons like structure, they pretend they don’t but they do.”
“Even me?”
She ankled over and kissed me before going back to the window. “Even you. You replaced the chaos of crime and the order of jail with this.” She gestured. “All this and me and Fred and Renfield and Thor. Maybe he wants something like this.”
Then she said wonderingly, “So, where does that leave us?”
I moved over and kissed her neck. “In a room, all alone, almost naked.”
She was mischievous. “Wanna get completely naked?”
“Yes. Yes I would. That would be nice.”
Claire was outraged. “Nice?”
“Nice. Yes, nice, that’s the right word, nice.”
“I’ll show you nice!”
And it was. And she did.
T
he next night Claire took Smiley out to paint the town red. He intention was to keep him busy and develop her own reading of what he was and what he wanted. She proposed that he come with her and then she’d introduce him to nice girls. I asked him why he wanted to meet nice girls and he looked lost before finally answering, “I guess because I’ve never known any. Does that make sense?”
I told him it didn’t make any sense. Both of them asked if I wanted to come but I turned them down. I told them I wanted to stay home and wait.
And search Smiley’s room.
I had told Claire about my plans. She had agreed and patted my head. “So I get to be the Judas goat?”
“What’s that?”
She explained, “That’s the goat you stake out to distract the tiger before you shoot it.”
“Aha. Okay, yep. Practise bleating.”
“Baaaaa.”
“Actually, that’s kind of sexy.”
“You are a sick man. Later.”
They left, and after mouse and dog and son were all tucked away in their beds I took a coffee upstairs and thought some more, sitting on the futon on the floor in the dark and waiting. One thing being a bad guy teaches you is patience; you spend a lot of time waiting for things to start or for conditions to be right. You wait for banks to open, for jewelry stores to unload their vaults, for meth to cook, for grass to ripen, for boats and planes and couriers to arrive. And when things go wrong you wait for the cops and for security guards, you wait for lawyers and judges, you wait for doctors and nurses, you wait for cell doors to open and close.
You wait in the quiet of hotel rooms, and in the reek of alleys. You wait in loud bars and in windswept forests. You wait by rivers and by freeways. You wait with guns in your pockets and knives taped to your extremities. You wait with cold cash, or hot credit cards, or jewelry, or drugs. You wait in the sun and in the dark and in all the seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter, and the extra season, jail, which only cons know, the non-season season. So you either become good at the waiting or you quit the biz and go legit.
Claire had agreed to come back in four hours. I could wait while Claire and Smiley looked for nice girls. I could do it standing on my head. With an arm tied behind my back. With a grin.
I called Marie but she told me she had seen nothing and that everything was still going fine, just fine. And that made me a little nervous. Was Sam actually keeping her word?
After I’d hung up I listened to the night around me through the open window. The sounds of night birds, pigeons and such, cars passing, fast far away and slowly near by. I heard
sirens in the distance getting closer, then farther, laughter and dogs barking, conversations and arguments. Wind in the trees, and, once or twice, the sounds of cats fighting or making little cats.
I breathed the night air and smelled all sorts of interesting things. Car exhaust and the perfumed hot air from someone’s nearby dryer. I smelled dust and a vague tang from grass recently cut, and even the richness of dog shit and damp, turned earth. In time I smelled cigarette smoke and woodsmoke from a fireplace or one of those outdoor firepits I lusted after secretly. These were the smells that came to me as I waited.
After a long time I went downstairs and tossed Smiley’s room.
In the closet a floorboard had been pulled up and the nails cut flat so it looked normal, and in the space underneath I found an old-fashioned English Enfield revolver in .38 calibre with a one-inch barrel. Beside the gun was an ancient cardboard box with forty-four soft lead-nosed bullets; the other six rounds were in the gun itself.
There was also a Ziploc baggie holding an assortment of pills. I held them up to the light and catalogued them: 2-mg Rohypnol pills marked ROCHE, crystals of crack cocaine that looked like macadamia nuts, even some old-style yellow jacket and Dexedrine amphetamines.
I smiled to myself and took the bullets into the kitchen, where I used a pair of needle-nosed pliers wrapped with duct tape to empty each cartridge of its grey-and-black load of powder down the drain. When I was done I re-seated the bullets in the cases and twisted the hammer spring a little until it would never work again. Then I put everything back where it belonged.
Eventually I fell asleep. Claire and Smiley coming home
didn’t wake me at all, which shows how honest I was getting. I just slept and dreamt complicated dreams of cowboys and river gamblers, six-guns and dynamite, gold coins and paper money. I dreamt of horses and mesas and half-naked men and women drinking beer and listening to fast music in wooden houses with a wind blowing outside and keening through cracks in the planks. There were thieves in my dreams and bankers, whores and dudes, sheriffs and marshalls, red-coated Mounties and blue-coated cavalry, bad guys and good guys, Indians wearing feather headdresses and Chinese workers in pig tails and straw hats.
And then it all segued into another kind of dream, full of forests and rivers, plains and fields. The whole dream was full of animals, deer and rabbits and squirrels and prairie chickens and wolves and bears and wild pigs. But as the dream went on I realized that I was either hunting them or they were hunting me. And in either case it was all perfectly fine by us all. When I woke up all the dream animals and men stayed with me for a surprisingly long time.
 
The next morning the memories of my dream kept me in a fine mood for dealing with my wife and our guest discussing the women they had met the night before. Claire’s acting was impressive. “… she was the one with the open shirt so you could see her belly, do you think?”
Smiley snorted. “Sure. And she was a real blonde too.”
They laughed and made coffee and toast and eggs while I sat on the floor and kept an eye on Fred, who was under the kitchen table rattling pots.
Claire asked, “How many of what kind of eggs?”
When I realized the question was aimed at me I answered that two sunny side up would be good and went back to
watching the baby under the table. He was becoming more … intelligent? Not quite the right word, he was becoming more … capable of planning. I rescued the pots and let Fred wrestle with the dog while I ate, sitting there under the table and watching Claire and Smiley. It was a strange sensation, that, to be reduced to the size of a child and watch the adults do their adult things.
“So, do you think she’ll call?”
“Nope. But I’ve been wrong before.”
There was flippancy, an intimacy that hadn’t been there before. I felt jealous so I asked, “Did you meet anyone nice?”
Smiley grinned. “They were all nice. Some liked the way I looked and others liked my history.”
“You told them the truth?”
“Yep. A couple of them were turned off and walked away but most thought it was cool.” Claire nodded and added, “I kept him away from the nasty ladies. He met secretaries and office workers.”
“And how did he do?”
She answered, “The boy ended up with a pocketful of seven-digit combinations.”
“In English?”
“Phone numbers. They thought he was cool and hot, he danced, he laughed, he bought drinks and he was so not a player.”
I had to ask, “What’s a player?”
Smiley wrinkled his brow and answered, “A guy who just wants the notch. Not the girl, just what she’s sitting on.”
They both laughed and I finished my food. “So you’re trying to say you don’t want the notch?”
They helped me to my feet and he slapped me on the back. “I want the whole damn thing. I always do.”

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