Tempted by Trouble (12 page)

I picked up the gun and went to her, stood over her with the gun pointed at her head.

For a long while I looked at Jackie. A woman who knowingly slept with a married man who was a thief of the worst kind. And I was no better than the company I’d been keeping. I’d become one of them.

It took minutes, but I calmed down, straightened my suit coat, and regained control of myself. I wiped the gun down, then put it on the dresser.

“See you in Georgia, Jackie. I’ll see you when we get to everybody’s savior.”

I packed my duffel bag, took everything I had brought with me on this unprofitable trip, and left the unkempt hideout as fast as I could. I used my remote and started my car before I left the building. The remote upgrade had been added last year. When I made it to my Buick Wildcat, it was warmed up and ready to leave. My wife and I had owned two brand-new vehicles three years back. She had driven a Cadillac and I’d had an Expedition. Now both were gone. All we had was a car my old man had left behind, a 1969 Buick Wildcat, a four-door hardtop that was green inside and out. My wife called the car old. I chose to call it classic. My Buick was forty-three hundred pounds of U.S. history that had a cracked dashboard and crank windows to go with its three-hundred-sixty-horsepower engine and twenty-five-gallon tank. I loaded my Wildcat and took to the road, mixed in with hundreds of new cars built in other countries.

I took to the dangerous streets of L.A. with between five and six thousand dollars smoldering inside my suit pocket. I had a little money of my own. Soon that would be gone.

Out of habit, I checked the time on my pocket watch, then I reached to adjust my fedora, but it wasn’t on my head. My father’s prized fedora was no longer in my possession. It felt as if my brain swelled, doubled in size, and pressed against my skull.

After I had driven about seven miles, I was back in the area where things had gone wrong. The Crenshaw strip, Baldwin Hills, everything I had witnessed that morning owned a new face. I drove through the Wells Fargo parking lot, a parking lot that now felt haunted, maybe some sort of Valhalla for Sammy, and I parked where I had parked that morning. I took the same spot, as if I were trying to do the day over again. I sat there in the dark, sirens humming in the distance, an occasional car pulling up and the driver or passenger running to withdraw money from the ATM. I tortured myself, let this morning’s tragedy replay in my mind a dozen times. Rick felt betrayed, that last look in his eye. I had failed him.

I clenched my jaw, wiped away a few burning tears, and left the same abrupt way I had done this morning, sped down Santa Rosalia until I made it to where I’d had the accident. The wrecked Chevy was gone. That made my heart accelerate. It was just a matter of time.

We could only be betrayed by the people we trusted.

Instead of taking the freeway east, I turned around and went back to the safe house.

I hustled back upstairs and grabbed everything that had belonged to Rick and Sammy and carried it to my Buick. One by one, I dragged their Samsonite tombstones to the car and tossed them inside the trunk with my traveling bags. Then I did the same with Jackie’s carry-on luggage. I shook Jackie awake, then dragged her to the bathroom and threw cold water on her face until she was able to open her eyes. After that I waited for her to empty her bladder before I did my best to help her get dressed. I dragged her drunken frame down a set of concrete stairs and loaded her dead weight in the backseat of my car. When I opened the door, the side of her head banged the metal door frame as she fell back across the backseat. I had to go to the other side of the car and grab her arms in order to drag her body inside. After that effort, I grabbed some covers I had in the trunk, blankets I carried in case my car broke down in the cold, then propped her up in the corner behind me and covered her up the best I could.

She was a dead man’s mistress. She wasn’t my friend. She was the type of person I had no love for, but I couldn’t abandon her the way my wife had abandoned me.

She was part of the team.

As I took to the streets, I wondered if I could’ve saved Rick. I wondered if I could’ve made it to him and pulled him inside the car. That action would’ve changed everything that had happened after.

Maybe I had been the weak link. Maybe I had been incompetent. If I had moved the car closer to the door about one minute and thirty seconds into the job, then, regardless of the fact that Sammy was wounded, they could’ve made it to the car and fallen into the backseat before the guard had staggered out the door. But then the money bag would’ve exploded inside the car and left that red dye all over the inside of the windows. It would’ve blinded us all and whoever didn’t die would’ve been shackled within five minutes. I searched for another way I could’ve saved the men who had called me their brother. Tears fell and my hands trembled. I had been traumatized. Seeing Sammy’s head blown open was like a bad dream that I couldn’t shake. I despised this world and every living being on this planet. Behind my eyelids, I saw the opportunistic people jumping over Sammy and Rick, no regard for the dead or the dying, chasing dye-stained money as it flew away like confetti. Beneath smog-covered skies that were devoid of any real humidity, I had watched the world lose its humanity.

My meeting was on the seventy-second floor at Coach Insignia, a bar that had a panoramic view of Detroit, the Detroit River, and Canada. That was where the man called Eddie Coyle was waiting. I found him seated at the swank bar, his eyes moving from the television to the well-dressed women as they exited the elevator and sashayed into the dimly lit area. Some wore open-toed high heels and short dresses. Those women were with men who wore Rolexes as symbols of success. The wives of executives wore the same brand of watch to symbolize they had latched onto the paychecks of wealthy men. I took a breath and reassured my battered ego that one day my wife and I would belong to that club, the one for people who had access to wealth and were given all the love that money could buy, people who had Panglossian temperaments and lived inside a gold-lined bubble where all was the best in this best of all possible worlds.

I took off my wool coat, then removed my fedora. Eddie Coyle had on a dark suit and tie. He was clean shaven and looked like he was trying to pass himself off as a businessman, but he had the face of a laborer. In a room filled with gastronomes with deep pockets, he was eating pretzels, drinking a glass of red wine, and reading a book. He looked up from his book, saw me watching him, evaluating him, and put the wine down as I snaked through the crowd. The bar was stocked with over eight hundred wines, but after we shook hands I ordered a Hennessy and Coke. Eddie Coyle ordered another glass of wine. On this floor and the one below everyone was beatific and dressed in expensive clothing, mostly tuxedos and gowns. On the seventy-second floor of the Ren Center the world wasn’t in turmoil. People ate exquisite meals and drank the best wines like they were Roman gods.

My wife had told me that the man was from Rome, so I greeted him in Italian, said good evening, and then apologized for keeping him waiting. It had been a long time since I’d had a conversation in Italian, and part of me looked forward to that aspect of the evening. I asked him if he’d been waiting long. He looked confused and had no idea what I had said.

He moved his book to the side and said, “In English. This is America, so, if you don’t mind, please speak in English.”

“My wife said that you’re from Rome.”

He laughed. “I’m from the Rome in Georgia, not the one in Italy.”

I asked, “What’s the book you’re reading?”

He slid it toward me. It was a nonfiction number titled
The Myth of Male Power.

I said, “I’ve never heard of that book.”

“This is my bible.”

I nodded. “You’re from the other Rome. I’ve never heard of Rome, Georgia.”

“It’s near Atlanta. Ever been there? To Atlanta?”

“Outside of a layover at Hartsfield, never been. How is that city?”

“Atlanta is nice, used to be nicer twenty years ago, but now it’s on the verge of becoming another Paris. The people in France said that Paris was the city of love, but you should see their ghettos. I was there for a month. I wasn’t impressed. Their ghettos are worse than the ones over here. Worse than the ones here in Detroit, if you ask me. And now, since Katrina washed its lovely canaille and destitute and drug dealers into Atlanta, it’s become the same with Atlanta. I’ll never live in the city. I own property there, but I’ll never live in Fulton County. I’m stuck renting my properties to fags, jigs, and wetbacks.”

“Before you go any farther, being the type of man I am, a man who says what is on his mind, I have to tell you that I protest the use of racial slurs and I’m not a fan of the disease known as bigotry.”

“Common language in parts of the South.”

“Understood. But despite the commonality of your colorful language, this isn’t the South. And the way I see it, minus the revisionist history, if you’re neither indigenous Mexican nor Native American, regardless of how you ended up in the country, voluntarily or otherwise, you’re the ancestor of an immigrant.”

“And as you will see, if you come on board, most of my associates are minorities. Whether they came here through Ellis Island or arrived on slave ships, that don’t matter to me. So if you’re implying that I’m racist, you’re wrong. And the colorful language my associates use is twice as creative as mine. This isn’t corporate America. Where you’re going has nothing to do with white collars. We don’t have to be politically correct. We’re not forced to lie. We speak our minds and let the chips fall where they may.”

“I wanted you to know where I stood.” I said, “So, you’re not keen on the populace in the city of Atlanta.”

“I’d raise a family in a zoo before I let them live in Atlanta. Rome has history and values. And they have the right kind of parades.”

My eyes went to the restaurant, taking in its architecture. Most of the hard hats and steel toes who had slaved their callused fingers to the bone building the half-a-billion-dollar edifice had ended up on the unemployment line. I saw Caesars standing tall across the river, its red marquee beckoning the down-and-out Americans to come into Canada and gamble away what they had left of their dignity.

I scowled at Windsor. That was where Eddie Coyle had taken my wife and bought her a fur coat.

He said, “Tell me a little about yourself, Dmytryk.”

“What did my wife tell you?”

“Your wife said that you needed the money. That’s about it.”

I sipped my liquor and smiled. “You were with her a long time. Almost twenty-four hours.”

“We were busy with business.”

I nodded. “Well, next time you plan on keeping my wife overnight, make sure you invite me.”

“Understood.”

“And sending her home as drunk as she was, that doesn’t sit well with me.”

“She did that own her own. She’s an adult. Still, I apologize for returning your wife to you in such a state.”

I nodded. “Again, tell me what she told you about our situation.”

“She told me she used to earn almost a hundred thousand a year operating heavy machinery and then she was laid off. Six months later the same had happened to you.”

“Yeah, it was a one-two punch.”

“And after she was let go, she moved from part-time job to part-time job until she ended up being a waitress at a gentlemen’s club. She saw how much money the girls were making onstage, then gathered her nerves, went behind your back, and danced so your bills and mortgage could get paid.”

“We were making it.”

“Barely.”

“But we were making it.”

“I’m just repeating what she told me, that’s all.”

“I apologize for my hostility.” I nodded. “She lowered her standards out of necessity. She’s a better woman than that. I didn’t know at first, but I found out weeks later. A high school friend had gone to the club and had seen my wife dancing, then he sent me an embarrassing message on Facebook. He’d taken her to the private room and seen my wife in a way only a husband should.”

I paused right there because Eddie Coyle had seen my wife in the same state of undress.

“I hated it and she knew I hated it. I cursed and protested; things turned very ugly between us, but in the end, I didn’t protest strong enough. The money. We’d been out of work long enough. We were destitute. That money has forced me to compromise my values.”

“You’re feeling powerless.”

His words hit me deep. It took me a moment, but I nodded. “You could say we all are. Everything we do is an attempt to gain or create power. Or to restore some sort of balance.”

He nodded. “How did a smart guy like you end up here, if you don’t mind me asking?”

I told him that for me, this was the back end of four years in college and one in grad school. Work had stolen all of my time, money had become spotty, so I didn’t finish grad school, and that remained a thorn in my side. I’d deferred my dreams and my white-collar career had tanked within a few years. That was eight years ago, and like a shark that had been flipped over, I’d been unable to turn myself back right.

He asked, “What happened to the white-collar job?”

“Budget cuts. Corporate restructuring. Me and about a thousand were let go the same day. Attorneys were taking minimum-wage jobs in Motown, doing their best to not lose their homes and failing. The unemployment line was filled with people with more education than I have, and it still is to this day.”

“Why didn’t you leave and go to someplace that had a little more sun?”

“By then I had a mortgage, car note, other bills. I did what I had to do to stay afloat. I followed the footsteps of my old man and his old man, put my tail between my legs, and went scampering to the blue-collar and unionized sect. I ended up working on the line. Maybe I would’ve left after that, but I met this girl on the line and one thing led to another. Marriage has a way of keeping a man where he is.”