wail rose from the dark upstairs. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!”
ALL those months Pooley had been silent, pretending to be resigned inside himself, he had really been watching, studying, understanding the motivations of our Pete. Taking his beatings in silence, letting me take mine, but watching, waiting. Twice he had overheard Pete in Mrs. Cox’s room, pouring out his penitence to her mindless eyes. Twice he had heard Pete begging for forgiveness, only to increase his savagery two hours later. So Pooley began to figure out that Pete needed her there to continue doing what he did to us. He needed someone who wouldn’t judge him, but would sit passively and let him forgive himself so he could do it again. While I trained, trying to make my body stronger so I could one day fight back, Pooley cracked a mirror in the back bathroom, sharpened a shard on the side of the bedroom headboard, and waited. When Pete came home early and found me getting stronger, he knew he could wait no longer.
The police picked us up before we had gone a mile. We were indicted for killing Mrs. Cox, and my descriptions of our treatment seemed to fall on deaf ears. I had a petty-crime juvenile record in my past, and Pooley was done talking to adults for a long time. I can’t say I blamed him; he saved my life, after all. Nor was I surprised when we were convicted. But because of some of the oddities that came out of Pete’s mouth when he talked cryptically to the judge about swift, painful discipline—lending some credence to what I had said about our treatment—we were tried as juveniles and sent upstate to finish out our youth.
SO Pooley was the first assassin I had known. When I decided to begin this life professionally—or you might say it was decided for me—he was a natural to be my middleman, though he wasn’t my first.
CHAPTER 3
POOLEY agrees the coincidence surrounding my father is too odd to let pass without some digging. Since I need to head west without delay, he’ll handle the shovel for me. We agree to speak again when I call next week from the road.
My rule is eight weeks out. I will not agree to complete a job in less than that time, and, as such, have turned down quite a few assignments, even when offers for more money have been dangled like grapes. I can flawlessly plan and execute a job in less time; of that, I have no doubt. But assassinating a target takes psychological preparation, and shortchanging yourself in that area can lead to debilitation long after the mark is in the grave.
I open the folder again and this time, study the contents without flinching. He will be traveling by bus, a “whistle-stop” tour crisscrossing the country, culminating in Los Angeles at the Democratic National Convention. His path is strategically haphazard, planned randomness, with stops in most of the major television markets surrounding battleground states and enough small towns peppered in so that no economic demographic will feel slighted. Three thousand miles and a million handshakes in eight weeks. I will follow the same route, and will wait for him in the Midwest, allowing him to catch up, before I follow him the rest of the way to California.
The next morning, a rental car is parked out on my street with no paperwork to sign, no instructions to receive, the keys on the floorboard under the steering column. A beige car, a sedan, with nothing to distinguish it from the millions of other cars sprawling across American highways at any given time. With only a small duffel tossed in the backseat and a larger case lodged in the trunk, I head west, the sun at my back.
When I pull over to eat lunch at a small roadside dinette with the provocative name Sue’s No. 2, I am approached by a prostitute. I had grabbed a booth in the back of the restaurant in order to avoid contact with the local denizens of this somewheretown, but this girl could care less where I sat. She honed in on me as soon as the bells jingled on the door.
She is dressed in a skirt that stops well above her knees and a white halter that exposes the baby fat around her middle. Her hair is stringy blond with burgundy roots and hangs away from her head like a web. She possesses a crooked nose but an uncommonly pretty mouth with perfectly straight teeth. Her eyes are sharp and intelligent.
“Hey there, mon frer,” she says, plopping down in the seat across from me. My guess is she cannot weigh more than a hundred pounds nor be older than seventeen.
I don’t say anything, and she proceeds, unfazed.
“Here’s what I’m thinking. I got dropped off in this shithole town, and I need a lift outta here.” This comes out between smacks of bright purple gum and the smell of grapes left too long on the vine. “So I’m prepared to grant you favors in exchange for a lift.”
“A lift where?”
“Wherever it is you’re headed.”
“What kind of favors?”
She drops her chin and looks at me from the tops of her eyes like I don’t have the sense God gave me. Just then, the waitress approaches. The girl waits for me to order, and before the waitress can disappear, I find myself asking her if she’s hungry.
“Fuckin’ starvin’, man.”
The waitress takes an order for steak and eggs and hashbrowns and bacon if they have any left over from breakfast. Oh, and some orange juice and some milk and that’ll be it. The girl’s eyes are merry now; there is a break in the storm clouds. I don’t normally talk to people, but it’s been an abnormal week and those merry eyes stir something inside me I thought wasn’t there.
“How’d you get here?”
“This nut-rubber wanted some company for his ride over to Boston. He wanted me to jerk him along the way.” Hand gestures for emphasis. “I gave him what he asked for and when we pulled over here to get something to eat, he split as soon as I stepped out of the car.” Matter-of-factly, as though she were telling me about her day at school. “Stiffed me, too, the bastard. It’s gettin’ to where there’s not any honest people around.”
“How old are you?”
“I lost track.”
I swear she’s seventeen. “What’s the last age you remember being?”
“Let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk about—”
But she’s interrupted by the food. We both eat in silence; I because I enjoy it, she because she can’t get the breakfast into her mouth fast enough. The food is flying up to her face like a power shovel at full steam, and she is as unembarrassed as a hog at a trough. She devours all of hers, and when I proffer half of my plate, she attacks it.
After I’ve left money for the tab, she asks, “So how about that ride?”
“What do you think?”
Smiling now with those beautiful ivory teeth, she puts one finger in her mouth. “I think I’ve got a pretty good shot at taggin’ along with you.”
SHE’S asleep in the passenger seat, and I am pissed. Pissed I let my guard down, pissed I’ve committed a cardinal sin, pissed I’ve ignored every professional instinct in my ken to allow her to share this car with me. I can still kill her, can still pull the car down one of these farm-to-market roads, roll the tires against some deserted brush, and pop, pop, dump the body where it won’t be found for weeks. She won’t be missed, that’s certain. Except, goddammit, people saw us at the diner, the waitress, the old man in coveralls at the counter, the couple in the booth at the far end of the joint. They saw her lock in on me, and they saw us leave together, and they saw us get into my beige sedan. People noticed. They noticed, goddammit. What is happening to me?
Bad luck. The name at the top of the page was bad luck, and now picking up this girl-whore is as black bad as it can get. My stomach is queasy with the blackness.
I must be slipping.
