“Well, what else do we have?”
So they did it. They went to his apartment, knocked, waited, knocked … nobody answered. “He’s not home.”
“Come back later.”
“Go to church now,” Uno said.
So they found a church, Uno dropping Tres in front of the place, and then waiting for a half hour, until he came back out. As he had before, Tres came out deep in conversation with somebody not there. The most worrisome thing, Uno thought as he watched his friend coming down the sidewalk, was the possibility that whatever saint Tres was talking to would turn him against the killing. Tres said they were not that kind of saints, but how could you tell?
Tres got back in the car with that quiet, unfocused look that Uno had come to recognize, and said, “Go now. I think he’s back.”
“Why do you think that?”
“A saint told me,” Tres said.
Uno crossed himself. But when they got back, the apartment windows were still dark, and their knock went unanswered. “I think your saint, uh, has bad information,” Uno said. He didn’t want to say that the saint was full of shit.
Tres shrugged.
They had no photo of Kline, but they had a description: tall, thin, dark hair worn in an Afro. They waited another hour and a half, saw a bus pull to the corner stop, and a man of that description stepped off the bus, carrying a brown paper grocery bag.
“Here,” Uno said.
“
The man disappeared into the apartment building, and a moment later, the lights came on in his apartment.
“Let’s go,” Uno said.
Kline had brought back six packs of ramen, two large quart jars of apple cider, two packs of spaghetti, and a jar of Newman’s Own All-Natural Italian Sausage amp; Peppers pasta sauce. He put them on the kitchen counter, opened the jar of pasta sauce and dropped it in a saucepan, put it on the stove, lit a cigarette, blew smoke at his reflected image in the kitchen window, and thought about Turicek.
He’d told Turicek and Sanderson about the cops. He’d been cool about it, getting them back in an isolated hallway at the bank, in case there were monitors they didn’t know about.
“They think it might be me, but they’ve got no idea about you two, or Edie,” he said. “They think it might be me because those assholes at Polaris tried to shift the blame onto me.”
“Correctly,” Sanderson observed.
“Still a fucked-up thing to do,” Kline said. “Anyway, they may be watching. I may get another visit. I’m not going to talk to you or call you outside of work, and you better stay away from me, too. I can’t help with the gold.”
Both Turicek and Sanderson said that he’d done well, but he could see that both were sweating. He’d seen Turicek studying him, past his computer monitor, during the afternoon, and it occurred to him that if something should happen to him-call it like it is, he thought: if somebody killed him-then there would be no connecting thread between the theft at Polaris and Turicek and Sanderson.
Would Turicek be capable of killing someone?
He didn’t know. He suspected, though, from stories Turicek had told about his life in post-Soviet eastern Europe, that he’d know somebody who would not only be capable of it, but would do it for ten bucks and a pair of hubcaps.
Huh.
He got a kettle out and dropped in a package of spaghetti, blew more smoke. He could just begin to smell the sauce starting to get hot when there was a knock at the door.
He went and asked, “Who is it?” and a voice said, “Police.”
He opened it and started to say, “Hey-”
Not careful enough.
The two Mexicans blew through the door and smashed Kline back across his kitchen table, over the chairs, into the living room, and when he finally stopped rolling and twisted to look up, there was a gun in his face.
“Do not say a thing.”
Kline’s jaw worked but no sound came out. His mind was working, though: and his mind told him that these two Mexicans would find a way to get him out of his apartment, and then they’d cut him into sausages. Getting shot would be far preferable, and the only rational way out, if he couldn’t think of anything else.
The second Mexican had shut the door; he had a small backpack and took out a roll of tape, and Kline figured that if they taped him up, he was dead. He loosened his bowels as much as he could, and tightened his stomach, and cried at the Mexican over him, “I shit my pants. Oh, God, I shit my pants.”
The stench confirmed the fact; the two Mexicans were disgusted at this sign of abject cowardice, and Kline thought,
The Mexican with the tape said, “Put your hands up,” and Kline sobbed, “I shit my pants, man. I got a load in my pants…. Oh, God, I’m still shitting myself….”
The older of the two Mexicans looked around and said, “The bathroom,” and Kline thought,
“Get in the bathroom,” said the Mexican with the gun. The muzzle was four inches from Kline’s eyes, and, still sobbing, and now holding the seat of his pants, he pushed himself to his feet and hobbled toward the tiny bath. The toilet sat directly in front of the door. To the left, there was a vanity counter with an absolutely critical drawer, part of an incompetent remodel: the vanity was too big for the tiny bathroom, but had been on sale at Home Depot.
To the right of the sink, a tiny window, no bigger than Kline’s head, which might once have been intended to provide ventilation, was sealed shut with years of paint and silicone. The window looked out over the bookstore; or would have looked out, if somebody hadn’t painted the glass yellow.
To the left of the door, an old cast-iron bathtub.
Kline hobbled into the bathroom and turned and undid his belt, and dropped his pants, and the stench got worse, and Uno frowned and stepped back, but kept the gun pointing at Kline. Kline kicked off his jeans, and then his underpants, and then unrolled about ten feet of paper from the toilet paper roll, and looked down between his legs.
The Mexican looked away, not wanting to witness this, and quick as a snake, Kline kicked the door closed and pulled the drawer out of the vanity.
The open drawer blocked the door as effectively as a chain lock; Kline threw himself into the bathtub as the Mexican outside kicked the door, once, twice, and then Kline reached across with the handle of the toilet plunger and punched out the small window and began screaming for help.
He screamed, at the top of his lungs, “MURDER! THEY’RE MURDERING ME! HELP! FIRE! FIRE! THEY HAVE GUNS! MURDER!..”
The first bullets punched through the door and took out the toilet tank, and Kline dropped lower in the tub, but the tub was short, and his knees stuck up, and the Mexican, still kicking the door as Kline screamed, finally simply sprayed the bathroom with bullets, one of which went through both of Kline’s thighs and he began screaming even louder, “I’M SHOT, THEY SHOT ME, MURDER…”
Uno fired the whole magazine through the door, angling the gun around, heard the
