nerves. Bad nerves made him sick to his stomach. He closed his eyes, trying to control his breathing, trying to control the tingling in his head, hands and feet – trying to find his center. Street sounds came to him. He could hear the rumble of the elevated subway line over on Jerome Avenue. Closer, children shouted about a block away. Salsa played on a boombox.
The car he sat in was a tiny Honda Civic hatchback parked on a quiet side street. The car had rolled off the line cherry red twenty years before, stock, with an AM radio, windows that rolled up and down by hand and not even so much as air conditioning for the New York summers. Now it was mostly red with one blue quarter panel, rust beginning to eat through everything. The dashboard was caked in grime. The odometer claimed a quarter of a million miles.
Gordon Lamb, the Honda’s master, sat behind the wheel and pored through the papers on his lap. Even with the seat pushed way back, there wasn’t much room because of his belly and legs. He had a two-day beard and his hair stood up as if he had forgotten to shower that day. Jonah called him Gordo, short for El Gordo, a nickname coined by a funny Dominican whore Gordo had spent the night with years before. She had trouble with the whole name Gordon, so she dropped the n. It was perfect. In Spanish, El Gordo meant “the fat one.”
He and Gordo made an odd couple, maybe. Jonah: a slim, muscular, well-dressed black man – cafe au lait because of his white father – who made the ladies swoon, and Gordo: a big, heavyset bear of a white man who you might mistake for a lumberjack.
‘The name’s Foerster,’ Gordo said. ‘Davis Foerster.’ He spelled it aloud and shuffled some paper around. ‘Also known as Mark Foster. Also known as Foster Davidson.’
Jonah glanced out the window. From the looks of it, from the smell of it, Jonah guessed that garbage pickup in this neighborhood had happened two or three weeks before. Along the edge of the sidewalk, in the shadows of the apartment buildings, overflowing garbage bags were piled high. Assorted kitchen scraps and other trash were strewn all over the street and sidewalk. Bomzhies, junkies, and scavengers of all types came and ripped open the plastic bags, looking for food or anything of value to put in their old supermarket shopping carts and trundle home. As Jonah watched, a large rat crossed the street, well-fed, in no hurry, moving from one mountain of trash to the next.
Meanwhile, Gordo launched into the story as if he hadn’t told it half a dozen times before. ‘Foerster’s the perfect scumbag. Been up to petty shit since he was a teenager, but somewhere in there started getting serious. Cops wanted him for questioning on a year-old forcible entry and rape. A man fitting his description knocked on a 75-year-old woman’s apartment door late one night, forced his way in, pushed her down and raped her. Took about five hundred in cash she had laying around the place. Case remains unsolved, but looks a lot like two earlier ones where the old ladies got killed.’
Jonah took another deep breath, letting Gordo’s words wash over him.
‘In any case,’ Gordo continued, ‘two weeks ago, Foerster lands in their laps. He gets picked up on a breaking and entering and attempted rape. Cops want to roll him up on the old lady case. They figure if they can break him on the one where they still have the victim alive, maybe they can break him on the other two. But all of this coincides with the latest general amnesty for nonviolent prisoners. The city swings wide the cell doors, and lets five thousand inmates – mostly drug offenders – walk. At that moment, there are two men with very similar names on Riker’s Island. One is called Davis Foster. One is called Davis Foerster. True to form, they let the wrong one go. Foerster gets off a prison bus in Queens and disappears. Too late, the city realizes its mistake, and quietly issues a $50,000 reward for his capture, hoping to get him back inside before the newspapers realize they did the bad thing again and released another maniac by mistake. Tough for a cash-strapped city, but good for people like us.’
Gordo raised an eyebrow.
‘Most interesting thing? A little bird told me the FBI contacted the city cops about this guy two days after he walked. The feds also want to talk to him, and they’re not saying why. He’s not officially wanted, mind you. They just want to ask him a few questions.’
Gordo dropped the paper he was holding into his lap.
‘All that said, who are you to him?’
Jonah gestured at the jumpsuit he wore. The name Jake was stenciled in white across his right breast. The jumper felt too small for his chest and round shoulders, and wearing it made him feel silly. He was too pretty to pass as an exterminator.
‘I’m the guy who’s here to kill his roaches,’ he said.
They went through the drill every time. The skip’s name, his description, the layout of the place, how they were going to nail him. They had gone over it the night before on the phone, but one more time never hurt. Gordo liked to be thorough, and if it meant they made the collar, then Jonah didn’t mind.
Gordo moved two photocopied maps to the top of the heap. One was a building floor plan, the other a zoning map of the neighborhood. Jonah leaned over to get a better look.
‘Okay,’ Gordo said. ‘This is the apartment, 5C, rented by the so-called Mark Foster. It’s a studio, right? And you can see the fire escape is outside this window, which is in the kitchen and dining room area. If you flush him out that window,’ he switched to the neighborhood map, ‘then you can see over here that he has to come down to this alley.’ He looked up and peered down the street. He pointed to an opening between Foerster’s building and the boarded-up building next door. ‘Which is that alley right there. And that’s where I’ll be standing.’
‘What if he goes to the roof?’ Jonah said.
‘If he goes anywhere other than the alley, you call me on the walkie-talkie,’ Gordo said. ‘But he won’t. His first reaction will be to get down to the alley and disappear. Also, his building is free standing and he probably knows it. It’s gotta be fifteen feet across to the next roof, maybe more. So he’ll figure if he goes to his roof, he’s trapped up there.’
Gordo closed the file and placed it on the back seat.
‘But once he commits to going for the alley, then he’s really screwed.’
‘What if he has a gun?’
Gordo shook his head. ‘Not his M.O. In his entire life, he’s never once been picked up with a gun.’
‘Easy pickin’s, then,’ Jonah said.
‘Cake,’ Gordo said. ‘Twenty five thousand dollars each for a ten-minute gig.’
Inside his apartment, Davis Foerster slumped and smoked a Camel while he pulled the stuffing out of a gash in the upholstery of his easy chair. A bottle of beer was propped against his crotch. His feet rested on the worn parquet floor. The walls around him were bare except near the light switch, where years of hands had smudged the area almost black.
The bruises around Foerster’s eyes had faded. His hair was growing back over the scar that had run across his scalp like a railroad. The middle and ring fingers of his left hand were still wrapped in a dirty plaster cast that extended down to his wrist. Only his thumb, pointer and pinky were free.
He blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling and stared at the thirteen-inch color TV on the stand in front of him.
No cable, and the reception in this building was so bad, he only got one channel clearly. There’d been rolling brownouts all day, and when the power finally came back on, he was treated to the spectacle of an afternoon talk show with a bunch of fatties lined up on stage, all of them sitting and blathering about how it felt to lose a hundred pounds and change their lives. The host was a cheerful woman who America had watched rollercoaster from fat to skinny to fat and then skinny again. She’d tried all the fad diets, and had worked out with all the trendiest workout gurus. So this weight thing was a topic close to her heart.
The camera panned the studio audience. Housewives with tears in their eyes. A couple of the saps even had handkerchiefs out. A person weighs five hundred pounds, Foerster thought, loses a hundred, and still weighs four hundred. How does that change their life?
‘That really touches me,’ the host said to one of the porkers.
‘Fuck you,’ Foerster said.
Foerster didn’t need to lose weight. If anything, he needed to gain some. Get some size to him for the next time he got in a tangle. With a little more size, he maybe wouldn’t have ended up in the joint again.
Another smoke ring, a little one chasing through a big one.
