Mickey Finn Volume 2, page 20
“How much is there?” I asked.
“Daddy would know. He always knows.”
She poured me a beer without my asking, counted out the amount Marcel was after, and put the bills in a series of plastic grocery bags. The gym bag still looked to be about half full.
The door of the bar opened and a short man walked in, brown hair, scruffy haircut, round glasses, dirty olive-green jacket. He stopped when he saw me, then came on slowly.
“’Evening,” he said.
I nodded and turned back to my beer as Tammy whisked the money below the bar.
“Mind if I join you?”
“Bar’s open,” I said.
He sat two stools away and told Tammy he’d take a bourbon, rocks, any brand.
“Early, isn’t it?”
I didn’t take his point. I didn’t care what he wanted, and I didn’t want to talk about it anyway. For an answer I jerked my head and didn’t look at him. Maybe he’d take the hint.
Tammy set a glass in front of him and he slid a ten-dollar bill toward her. He took a sip from his glass and made a sound like he was about to say something. Then he quickly brought his hand to his jacket pocket. I tensed and started to turn but he pulled out a cell phone with one hand, holding the other toward me, telling me it was okay, it was just his phone.
I felt like an idiot, but I saw that Tammy had been just as jumpy. The little man moved down to the other end of the bar, then back toward the door, as he said, “Hey, Mom,” into the phone.
Tammy’s hand came over the bar and gripped mine. “We’re like to explode. I’m going to have a drink.” She took out a glass and poured herself some whiskey. “You want one of these?”
I said, “Sure,” as the little guy finished his call. He was holding the phone almost at arm’s length, as though his vision were poor, and he was trying to make out the screen. He held out his other hand, too, index finger extended, waiting to kill the call. He brought a finger down upon the hang-up button but coughed as he pushed it, then made a show of wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
The phone disappeared back into his pocket and he returned to his seat and his half-finished drink. “Bad throat,” he said, tilting the glass back. “I need this.”
I said nothing. Tammy kept her eyes on him as he told her he’d see her later, rapped the bar with his knuckles, and left.
“You know that guy?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
“You should call your brother.”
There were a dozen or so people in the place when Marcel arrived. He wasn’t alone. The guy he’d brought with him was huge and had a nose that had been flattened more times than a bishop’s collar. Tammy whispered his name as the two of them stopped just inside the door and looked around.
Tammy didn’t move. I got the feeling Marcel wanted her to come to him but she didn’t move. He walked to the bar while his bodyguard stayed where he was.
“Give it up,” Marcel said to his sister.
Tammy hesitated, glanced at me. I tensed. As Marcel followed her gaze she looked past me at the booths in the corner and let her eyes linger.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Well?”
Her hand was under the counter as the door opened again. My gut turned over.
It was Powell. From my crew.
Powell.
I don’t know whether Tammy saw me blanch or she’d been planning on going for the gun all along, but she came up with a pistol-grip sawed-off and put a ragged hole through her brother before he had a chance to blink. Marcel’s man brought out his own handgun when there was another explosion. The big man went down, suddenly limp, the back of his skull blown away.
Powell.
My old crew was coming at me and all I could think of was protecting Tammy. I reached for the shotgun but she pushed me away, hard. I didn’t understand. I turned from the bar and Powell shot me in the stomach. I went down where I was, the room spinning red.
Tammy dropped down next to me. Maybe she’d come over the bar. She thrust the shotgun at me and backed away.
Powell.
I pumped a shell into the action as I felt my hands go numb. I pulled the trigger with Powell standing over me.
Nothing happened.
Powell laughed and kicked me hard in the leg. Then he held his hand out toward Tammy, who took it as she rose.
I saw the duffel slung over her shoulder. She gave me a sad look as she walked away. It was everything we’d shared the past twenty-four hours: her tanned skin, the lines about her forehead and face, and I could swear the scent of her skin and lotion floated down to where I lay. She pursed her lips into a pout as she walked into the black-dotted mist at the edge of my vision.
Tammy had known I’d be her answer. Her father would find the second safe open and the money gone, one of his sons killed, possibly by me. Tammy had disappeared with Powell, knowing that the hint of a deeper conspiracy just might buy her some time to escape, get out of her situation.
Later, in the hospital, I wondered where she had gone, though I knew I’d never be with her again. That little man with the phone, he hadn’t been talking to anyone, he’d been setting up so he could take my picture, coughing to cover the sound of the electronic shutter. He’d have sent it to Powell who would have been waiting. For me, for the money, for the girl.
Powell and Tammy had set me up.
They hadn’t told me yet if I’d live. I don’t think they had any idea, but I knew. It was confirmed when I heard the door open and a nurse tell someone that visiting hours would be over very soon.
Not soon enough, I thought.
Back to TOC
Motel at the End of the World: Tuesday Afternoon
Trey R. Barker
I can remember her face.
Sweat tickles my face.
His, too.
This room, the “security” office, sweats me like my prison cell did. Ten feet to a side, walls painted institutional white but faded to gray with stains and streaks of nicotine-yellow. It houses the motel’s low-end surveillance cameras that, sure as shit, somehow fell off the back of a delivery truck. There’s a cheap computer and extra hard drives stacked up like the motel’s whores in the wee hours, waiting on a room or a dark corner of the hallway.
Small, tight, claustrophobic.
Just like the cell. The walls are exactly the same, except that the nicotine stains have been traded for dried piss in the corners, the stink of men’s shit slathered to the underside of the metal toilet seat and the edge of the metal mirror, and probably on the lip of the faucet.
The video skips across the monitor, herky-jerky, people moving in and out. “The hell am I watching for?” I call to the front desk.
The day manager, Magpie, chuckles. “A fight or something. Two nights ago, maybe?”
“Anybody dead?”
A snort. “Maybe Consuela’s girls can check the rooms and hallways?”
“And the roof.”
“Found Dylan up there again this morning,” Magpie says. “Gonna fall off, Dude. Can you fix that door or something?”
Dylan is a good kid, maybe ten years old, but saddled with the weight of a junkie daddy who regularly goes hands-on. They’ve lived at the motel for just about a month. “Maybe the fight is someone tuning Daddy up again?”
“We could be so lucky. Let that fucker fall off the roof.”
“Found him jerking off in the hallway yesterday. All tweaked up, yelling at Dylan…who was at school, by the way. Wasn’t even there.”
With the video on fast-forward, everyone moves quickly; in and out of the lobby, up and down the stairs. The door opens, slow even in fast time, and various members of our geriatric community teeter in and out. One of them yells at Dylan’s daddy. He flips them off.
I’m janitorial, a shirt that says Arnie over one tit and Janitor over the other. Arnie was the previous janitor, knifed in the basement. They washed the blood out, mostly, and hung the shirt on a doorknob until I came along.
In another life I was a copper. That was before I was called out in the middle of a night off that was resplendent with three women, booze, pills, and rough sex that, when the women were later threatened with jail, suddenly became unlawful restraint and sexual assault.
The itch is at me again, blazing through my left eye. Thought I had it beat for today. Thought last night’s stomping was good and hard. No skin-pop bruises on my arms, though. It had been a stomping by the bird—a fifth of Old Crow. So much Old Crow that I couldn’t even remember what time it was when someone knocked on my door. I hadn’t answered, being both drunk and off duty.
Trying to stomp not just the itch, but the memory.
I can remember her face. His, too. Siblings holding hands.
I push stop on the playback and go into the main office. The lobby opens up from the front desk and right now it’s full. The walking dead. The walking dying. The dispossessed and hopeless. Those for whom our joint with holes in the walls and curled and stained linoleum that I can’t fix fast enough is a step up. Half the lights in the lobby are dark but the sun limps in.
Magpie stares at me. “Itching?”
“You can tell?”
“Eyes are red,” he says. “Left one is scrunched up. Like a cheap-ass Clint Eastwood.”
Sighing, I plop on his desk, shove the real-time monitor of every door, the roof, and three angles in the parking lot outta the way with my ass. “I am a cheap-ass Clint Eastwood, you can believe that.”
Laughing, Magpie points at the real-time monitor. “Believe that, chump.”
Someone is at my wreck of a car. They move from the right rear tire to the left, then go for the street. A tall guy, beard, a limp slowing him down.
I dash to the rear parking lot, then to the empty street. Guy is gone and all I have is a car on four flat tires.
“Son of a bitch.” I bang a fist against the car’s roof.
The lot and street, shimmering beneath the heat’s oppression, are empty except for the industrial smoke. The motel is trapped by industry; chemical and light manufacturing. Smoke and chemical tang, amplified by the heat, are part of my life now. I wipe my forehead with Arnie’s shirt, leave a wet smudge across his faded blood. The air is toast-dry, like my face is desiccating.
I head indoors, the itch is in both eyes now, like a third-world shithole disease.
When the elevator door groans open, I ride up a floor. Just a quick stop in my room, spend a few minutes cooling the itch, then back to reviewing video for whatever Magpie thinks happened.
Just a quick stop.
A quick pop.
I’m clean.
Mostly.
A quick pop.
Warm, fuzzy edges.
So another quick pop; what can it hurt?
Second pop puts me back in that hallway.
Gammy dead on the floor, most of her in the hallway. Grampy dead mostly in the kitchen. Sonny Boy and his two kids in the basement bedroom below us.
Two doors into the basement, one window out. All three covered by the Special Response Team cops, huddled over their rifles and scopes, hats backward, gloves fingerless.
Command post is a block away, but I don’t do my Talk-Talk from there. Too far away and out of touch. So I’m in the kitchen. Basement bedroom below me but offset. Didn’t want to be directly above in case he shoots.
We’ve been talking for three hours, his eight-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son absolutely silent in the background, and finally, he’s getting tired.
Expressing no remorse for killing his ex-wife.
Expressing some remorse for killing his parents.
Expressing extreme love for his children.
Worries about them getting through life without too many psychic scars. Worries about them getting an education, a good job, a good spouse. Wants them to live their fullest lives.
Says he wants to be done with all this.
I breathe easy. His words are future continuous tense, which means he wants to stay alive.
I stumble into the office. Magpie watches afternoon soaps. “What am I looking for?”
Concern is tattooed on his face. “You didn’t find it?” He speaks in abstract terms, demons writ large, rather than specific to the video I’d been reviewing. “You were three hours fighting those two demons, dude.”
Yet I still see their faces.
I punch up the video. The picture, always small and scratchy, totters to life. I hit fast-forward to try to lose the demons in my job.
The barricaded subject was seven years ago, the trial six. Then my thirty-seven months in stir. Upon release, I climbed into a bottle and eventually spilled out here, and every hour of every day, I see their faces.
His and hers…matching grimaces.
On screen, people move in and out of the lobby, up and down the hallways. I move, too, in and out of rooms, constantly to the payment drop box. People frequently sign their Social Security checks over to the hotel so they can exist here uninterrupted.
People in…people out.
This is visual proof of how my then-wife said I’d end up. Served me divorce papers as the bailiff hooked me up after the verdict and said I’d die lonely in some flophouse.
Well, I’m in a flophouse, I’m probably dying, but I’m sure as shit not lonely.
’Cause I can see their faces. And I hear them at night.
I cry and my eyes itch and my whole life is just people in and people out.
But then, in the video, there’s a tall man. He limps into the lobby and talks to Magpie. After they talk, he looks toward the elevator, holds up two fingers. Magpie nods, then shakes his head and waves his hands. He’s not there, Magpie’s body language says.
I know that limp.
“Who’s this guy?” I freeze the image.
Magpie hauls himself out of the chair and into the office. Hits play, then watches it again. “Said he was a friend of yours. Wanted to see you. I told him you weren’t in.”
“You told him my apartment?”
“Said he was your friend. Used to work with you. Showed me a badge and everything.” Magpie looks pained. “Did I fuck up? Who is it?”
I clap him on the shoulder. “Nah. We’re good.”
When he leaves, I heave painfully. Everything inside me is suddenly unmoored.
Officer Timothy Roberts.
As Magpie shouts at me, “I’m’a go grab a sammich,” I squeeze my fingers so hard I’m afraid they’ll break. I sweat. My vision narrows and I can’t hear anything.
Unlike my ex-wife, Officer Timmy sat through my whole trial.
Last row of the gallery, crutches at his side. I turned my chair half around so I could keep him in my peripheral vision…in case he jumped the gallery rail to get to me.
I punch in a date and time and the computer gives me the video from last night. I don’t know when I’d heard the knock on my door, so I hit play and start from midnight.
At 2:47 a.m. by the computer clock, I see him.
He comes through the lobby and goes straight to the elevator. The elevator camera and elevator landing camera don’t work so the next time I see him is when he limps down the hallway. Steps over two near-death junkies and avoids a pool of piss two doors down from mine.
He knocks hard. When he gets no answer, he limps away.
Just like I watched him limp away from my car.
Just like I watched him limp away from my trial.
Franny Trevino is forty-two, unemployed, not particularly successful. Exactly who you’d think would kill family members and take his children hostage, demanding a muddied list of random things.
Because this wasn’t about getting something for his children. This wasn’t transactional.
This was emotional.
I gingerly talk him through the surrender process. I don’t call it that. Surrender is a loaded word for some men. Triggers their need to have the swingingest dicks. So I stay away from that, talk generally about “when it’s over,” “when we’re done here.” It’s all the right words and at the right time but none of it feels right in my mouth. Too many words, or too complicated, or something.
Says he wants to be done but I’m stepping on him, not letting him talk.
Says again he wants to be done.
My head hurts and I’m sweating and maybe I’m not hearing clearly. I always worry about negotiations and people dying. Wearing a badge is tough, low-grade PTSD 24/7, but these calls are everything we do amped up times ten; jazzed with three-phase high voltage electricity.
But this isn’t just negotiation-worry. This is also women and pills, freaky sex, and booze worry.
Franny is a control fiend. Wants to be large and in charge all the time, and fuck him I got time for this? I was enjoying my night and he decided to psycho-Rambo all over his parents and ex-wife and kids?
When did he start yelling at me and what the fuck dude and we go back and forth about letting the kids go and I ask him what the fuck he’s doing is he going to kill them like he did everyone else and he screams that I don’t understand he’s agitated all to be damned and I yell back that I understand perfectly well this is just another bullshit argument that probably started over goddamned fucking pancakes or some shit and he’s wasting everybody’s time and it’s goddamned good and well time to fucking surrender like a man and—
It’s a screwup. I know it instantly.
I try to walk it back but can’t. Done is done.
He’s suddenly at one of the doors. Standing behind his children, human shields, popping rounds at the cops. One officer goes down quick, his head a thick, chunky red mist. SRT boys hesitate, unsure. Can’t shoot because of the kids.
