Wheelman, The

Lisa’s dad kept trying to yell at her, trying to be the father—What the hell were you doing in that house? Is that your house?—but Lisa wasn’t hearing that. She kept pounding him with what she’d learned, over and over again. The guy is a murderer. He killed Andrew. He killed Mikal. He stuffed their bodies in a pipe down by the river. The guy is a murderer! He killed Andrew! He killed Mikal! He stuffed their bodies in a pipe down by the fucking river!

Eventually Lisa’s dad saw the light of reason and assembled a team. It wasn’t hard to find the pipe Lisa was talking about. There was only one major construction project down on the Delaware River. The new children’s museum. Lisa’s dad’s team took shotguns, baseball bats, and baling hooks. They didn’t need the first two items. Everybody inside the pipe was dead. They recovered six bodies before reaching mud and clay at the bottom of the pipe. Two of the faces matched a photo they were given, a black-and-white promotional photo of a band called Space Monkey Mafia. It was the bass player and the keyboard player.

The team knew the keyboard player. It was Lisa’s boyfriend, Andrew.

Andrew didn’t look too good. He had a black Bic pen sticking out of his neck. Blood had caked and dried all around it.

They called it in to Lisa’s dad, and he told them to dump all the bodies down the pipe again. No questions; just do it. So they did.

“But before you do,” Lisa’s dad said, “take the pen out of the boy’s neck. And bring it to me.”

SUNDAY P.M.

I want you all to know that I don’t take no orders.

—“BABY FACE” NELSON

Ink and Blood

WHEN LENNON WOKE UP AGAIN, HE WAS TIED TO A chair, and his throat was sore.

Other people were in the room. Which was not the room he’d fallen asleep in. The last thing he knew, he had been given a shot of painkillers. He didn’t want the doctor to give him something that would render him unconscious. “Don’t worry,” the doctor had said. “This’ll just take the edge off.”

Lennon’s vision focused a bit. He saw Katie in the corner of the room. Her hands were behind her back. She was wearing stark white lipstick, and her eyes looked puffed shut. Somebody held a gun to her head.

Now somebody slapped him in the face.

“Hi, Dillinger,” a male voice said. He had said it the correct way—Dill-ING-er. Most people thought it was dill-IN-jer, like the pistol. “Glad you could join us.”

Lennon tried to count the people in the room. Aside from his sister. He got up to five before somebody slapped him again.

“Stay with us,” said the same voice. “This is important. This concerns you, and your pregnant girlfriend there.”

Pregnant girlfriend my arse. Lennon wanted to shout it at the top of his lungs. He was tired of the charade. It was a handy charade—people assumed they were a couple, so let them think that. It made tracking them down all the more difficult. But that didn’t really matter now, did it? They were already tracked down.

“What the fuck did you give him, Dovaz? Horse tranks?”

“I gave him what he required.”

“Jesus. The guy’s a fucking zombie.”

“I’m not sure that’s entirely the fault of my medication.”

Another slap—harder this time. Lennon felt his teeth vibrate in his gums.

“You see this, Dillinger?”

Lennon focused. He saw a beefy hand holding a pen.

“You stuck this pen in a kid’s neck a few days ago. You remember that?”

The hand clenched the pen tighter. Lennon could make out the crimson glaze that still caked it. Holy Jesus. This guy had been down in the pipe.

“That kid was my daughter’s boyfriend.”

Who knows, Lennon thought. Maybe he was your daughter’s brother. It’s not right to jump to conclusions like that.

“Are you going to say something, you mute bastard?”

Lennon opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

He was going to say: “Fuck you, ya cunt.”

But he couldn’t.

“Trying to talk, ain’t ya? Well, you can’t. For real now. I know you were playing me—my daughter told me she heard you talking. Those days are over, fucker.”

Lennon tried again but felt razor blades churning around in his throat. What did that bastard do to me? he thought. His eyes snapped to the doctor—Dovaz—and saw a tiny smirk under his beard.

“Yeah, I had you fixed, Dillinger. The good doctor here was kind enough to help me out. He poured some acid down your throat there. So you’re just going to sit there and listen to me.”

Somebody else wheeled a tray into view. He was big and pasty-looking, with ugly tortoiseshell glasses and a bushy, greasy moustache hanging under his nose. Spread out on the top of the tray were all kinds of tools, surgical and otherwise—scalpels, hammers, wrenches, clamps, needles. There was dried blood on some of the tools. In the corner there was a folded-up set of leather stirrups.

“Nothing to retort? Good. You can listen up. I’ve got your girlfriend over there. Pretty soon, we’re going to move her to an undisclosed location—just like Dick Cheney. Then, a little while later, we’re going to set you free. I know, you’re saying, no way, but we are. What you’re going to do for me, Dillinger, is you’re going to rob some banks. I figure you’ll need to knock over at least one a day, because your girlfriend’s room and board is going to be $5,000 a day. I read in a book that the average bank robber can only expect between two and three grand for your average note job. That’s why I’m saying you’re going to have to rob at least one a day.”

Lennon stared at him.

“And I’ll know if you’re robbing banks or not. I read the Daily News every day—it’s delivered right to my doorstep. They cover everything. Some guy takes a piss on the side of a building, it’s in the paper the next day. So I’ll be looking for your work.”

What the fuck was this cunt talking about?

“You should probably get yourself a nickname. All the big bank robbers have them. The Bad Breath Bandit. The Zit-Face Bandit. The Bobby DeNiro Bandit. You can be the Oh Shit, I Got My Vocal Cords Burned Bandit. How’s that? But really, you should figure out something. You want to be distinctive. Anyway, after you pull down the heist, you’re going to deliver the money to this address, right here. You can keep a couple of bucks for yourself, just so you can get by. But a couple of my boys will be waiting for your delivery. You try anything, you’ll be the Pushing Up Daisies Bandit. Swear to fucking God. And your woman here? She’ll be the Girlfriend Who Had a Rusty Coat Hanger Abortion.”

Lennon decided right then to make this man die slowly. He wasn’t exactly sure of the details yet, but it didn’t matter. Once he had a goal fixed in his mind, the rest was academic.

“Yeah. See these tools here? Probably got you all nervous. Well, relax. They’re not for you. They’re for her. You fuck up, get arrested, try to fuck with us, or piss on the side of the wrong building, and we take it out on her. And the kid inside. We got all kinds of ways of pulling that little bastard of yours out. Don’t worry. It won’t survive long. She don’t look that pregnant.”

This bastard, Lennon decided, was going to die the slowest of slow deaths. The kind where you start out with a cheese grater and a blowtorch, and things escalate from there.