do what I had just finished doing for peanuts and, in one case, for free. Killing people, that is.
I accepted without hesitation. My eager but unemotional “yes” must’ve nearly scared the Broker off. He told me later he was usually wary of a fast yes; he didn’t want anyone working with him who might be the type who drooled for a chance to shoot anything that breathed: madmen don’t make the world’s most reliable, efficient employees. But my lack of emotion counterbalanced any such fear Broker might’ve harbored, especially on top of the thorough researching he’d had done on me.
Why did I say yes? Why did I say yes so quickly? I guess I was hungry for the chance to do something, anything, especially a high-paying something or anything. Though I’d learned in Nam to accept life and death as meaningless, I’d also learned the importance of survival. Maybe that’s inconsistent, holding life and death void of meaning while valuing survival. All I know is it’s how I think and feel and live, so I don’t care.
I said I wouldn’t go into detail and I won’t. All I’ll say is that by the time Broker called me to the Quad Cities and tossed that airport business in my lap, I’d been doing free-lance work for him for five and a half years. And I did consider myself a free agent, even though I worked solely through Broker, since I had no doubt I could hook up with some other similar “booking agent” with no trouble. There were other Brokers around, though I didn’t know them by name. But, like Broker, they would crawl out of the plush woodwork somewhere and contact me if I wanted them to.
Some of what I did for Broker was undoubtedly mob- related, but only some of it. To the best of my knowledge Broker was not in the direct employ of the Family (or Outfit or Mafia or whatever) and did only piecework for them, assignments that were in some way inconvenient for handling through conventional Family channels. Only rarely would a hit of mine in one of the larger cities, like Chicago or Milwaukee, be mob-related, as the Family had enough help on the local payroll to handle practically anything; with the smaller-scale Family operations, in cities of less than half a million, outside help through the Broker or someone like him might be called upon. Other than that, the person who came to Broker was your run-of-the-mill, everyday average citizen who has three to seven thousand dollars handy to pay for killing someone he doesn’t like.
I had built up no particular philosophy about my work, but then I had no particular problem living with myself, so I didn’t really need one. I guess I did develop my own little handful of rationalizations to fall back on, should I need them some rainy day. One of them was that any person somebody wanted dead more than likely deserved it. But I knew that wasn’t necessarily true. A better rationalization was that this was just an extension of being a soldier and what I was doing was neither moral nor immoral, but amoral, like war.
Which is a good rationalization, but then you have to rationalize war.
What I realized at the outset as well as later was that certain people are going to want certain other people dead, and what are you going to do? Once somebody decides another somebody is going to have to die, that’s the ballgame. All that’s left are details.
Anybody I ever hit was set to go anyway. I saw to it that it happened fast and clean. It was something like working in a butcher shop, only my job pays better, the hours are shorter and there isn’t the mess.
5
Eddie Robinson said, “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?” and somebody made a noise outside the motel room, out on the balcony. I eased the volume down on the television and listened: nothing for a moment, then whoever it was knocked at the sliding glass door.
I turned off the set and checked my watch. I’d been looking at the late late show, which was just getting over anyway, and it was ten before two A.M. About right for Broker, though maybe a shade early; I’d expected him to show more like three-thirty or four, when it’d be extremely unlikely anybody’d be up and about to see him come calling.
The knocking continued, got insistent. I swigged down the last of the Coke and got up off the bed, set the empty on the dresser next to the three bottles I’d drained watching the old gangster picture, which wasn’t bad at all considering its age. That Robinson guy was a pro, you really had to respect him. But every fifteen minutes two clowns came on and pitched used cars for half an hour, and each time they came on I went out for a Coke. On my way to the door I opened my suitcase on the stand and got out the automatic and held it behind me.
I’d cleaned the gun and switched barrels on it since the afternoon; the silencer was on and clean, too.
I slid the door open a crack and the son of a bitch stuck his foot in and with it slid the glass panel hard open and came in fist-first, and it was a goddamn big fist, the mother of all fists, half-filling my face as it struck. My feet went out from under me and the automatic jumped out of my hand and tumbled under the bed-but the guy hadn’t even seen the gun. By the time he was in the door and getting his first look at me, I was on my ass.
My nose was bleeding, not broken but bleeding, and I was stunned. But I could see that the guy’s hands were empty, so I didn’t dive for the automatic under the bed. I wanted first to play the situation out, at least a few moment’s worth.
He was pretty big. Six-two, I’d say, which put him four inches over my head, and he was a solid two hundred pounds in a nicely cut tan business suit. He was around forty, or forty-five, with a college fraternity face set under iron-gray short-cropped hair that just missed being a butch. There were no lines on that face, not a one, except where his brow was crinkling over close-set gray eyes that peered out from behind-Christ, yes-dark-framed glasses. What the hell kind of material was Broker sending out, these days?
I tried to wipe the blood away from my nose with my forearm, but more flowed down to take its place, and the stuff was all over my suit. I was a mess. What was the fucking deal? Sure, I gave Broker a bad time, but this sending out strong-arms to hassle me was boon-dock thinking. I didn’t get it, I just didn’t. Broker and me understood each other, didn’t we? He knew that hard time I gave him back at the restaurant was to let him know I wouldn’t be pushed, didn’t he?
Then I realized I’d been on the floor five or ten seconds and the guy with glasses hadn’t done a damn thing. He was just standing there, brow crinkled, teeth bared, crouching like Tarzan or somebody waiting for his opponent to get up and fight like a man. Good God, was that what he was waiting for? Well, fuck him. He could come to me.
I’m no wrestler; I’m no boxer. I weigh a hundred fifty-five and I’m in good shape but nothing spectacular. I’ve never liked hand-to-hand combat, and I’ve never mastered any of its subtleties; and I don’t have a belt of any color in karate or anything else. But I have an advantage over a lot of guys bigger and stronger than me, when it comes down to a fight, and that’s my total lack of principles. When he came over to me thinking the fight was over before it started, I kicked his balls up inside him.
He started in rolling around on the floor, hands between his legs. I pulled his coat down around his shoulders and knocked him cold on the first try. I gave him a fast, thorough frisk. He was unarmed. His billfold had driver’s license, credit cards and other identification, all in the name George Swanson, supposedly from St. Paul, Minnesota.
What shit was this?
The phone rang while I was trying to figure it out I picked up the receiver and a voice said, “George?” and I recognized the voice and figured it out and started to laugh.
When I got through laughing, I set the receiver down on the nightstand, the voice squeaking, “George? George!” and hauled George Swanson out into the deserted hall, dumping him down a good ways from my door. Then I went back to the room and picked up the receiver and said, “After what I did to your husband, I don’t think he’ll be of much use to you for a day or two.”
I heard her take air in through her teeth, an angry hissing, a pissed-off snake. In my mind’s eye I could see Helen Swanson, and her thin dark naked body, as she said, “Bastard. Jesus Christ prick bastard.”
“Now, now.”
“You… you…” She sputtered on like that for a while, and there was a strange tone to her voice. Confusion? Fear? Arousal?
“What’d I do, piss you off this afternoon somehow?” I asked the phone. “Or do you do this to all of us? Sit out in your black bikini and sucker us in and then later tell old George about it, so he can play defender of woman- hood.”
“I only tell him sometimes.” Now there was a smile in her voice. It was soft. She was trying to be sexy. “I
