Dark Duets Part 30

WE SAT IN a local coffee shop that fortunately wasn't very crowded. Maybe it had been before we came in, but if so, it soon thinned out. The few other patrons shot menacing stares at us, but I ignored them. None of those people had anything on me, and I sure as h.e.l.l wasn't going to be intimidated by the evil gaze of a bleach-blond mother who had been ignoring her toddlers while typing into her phone. So I sat with Andrew Jackson while retro cool jazz played over the sound system and strange coffee machines belched out steam like ancient factory equipment.

"The hepat.i.tis goes away?" I asked him.

He raised a saucer full of latte and savored the scent. "Mmmm. Caramel. Yes, my friend. Health is yours for the asking. And more than that-good fortune, friends, women. People will want to help you, give you what you desire, open the doors that now block your every move. No one will want to cheat you or kill you or rob you or rape you-a little protection that might have come in handy over the past few years, I suspect."

Was that why I had been too cowardly to kill Marco? Was I feeling the effects of Marco's deal, and he'd been protected against me?

"Health is good," I said. "So's people being nice."

"Women being nice," he said with a wiggle of his eyebrows. "Girls gone wild, my friend. Wild."

I said nothing for a long time. He drank his latte and appeared content to wait.

"In the stories," I ventured, "you make a deal, and then something you didn't think of comes back to bite you on the a.s.s. People will be nice to me and luck goes my way, so how do I know a brick won't fall on my head or I won't be paralyzed in a car accident?"

"The brick won't fall," he said, "and you won't get in that car. It's a matter of chance, a matter of choice. The world operates in patterns. I can put you in a place where the patterns always work in your favor."

"What guarantee do I have?"

He appeared curious now. "What kind would you like?"

"I don't know. I just don't want to be ripped off."

"I a.s.sure you, no one's out to trick you. It's all aboveboard. If we don't keep our part of the bargain . . . if you fall victim to the wrong sort of pattern, I suppose, and experience devastating bad luck . . . then we are obligated to void the contact. You will, of course, be dead or paralyzed or otherwise unfortunate, but you'd be out of the contract. We can't keep what we take if you don't get what we promise."

"Would that be bad for you?" I asked.

He c.o.c.ked his head, like an animal hearing something not quite disturbing. "It wouldn't be good, no. But we're not here to discuss me. I see you're interested. There's no time like the present to commit."

I nodded. There was, in fact, no time like the present.

His expression brightened. "Then shall we proceed?"

"Give me twenty-four hours to think about it."

"I'm afraid I can't do that," he said sadly.

"You seem to want this deal," I told him, "so I think you can. I'll be back here, in this coffee shop, in twenty-four hours. If you don't show, we'll just say I lost out again, forever. Until the next time."

"You drive a hard bargain, my friend. A very hard bargain."

I WENT BACK to the neighborhood, the one full of people with dead eyes. I bought another cup of coffee and stood leaning against the wide of a building, breathing into the cup, letting the steam blast my face.

Those people walked past me, happy and smiling and full of life, hardly seeming to notice that they appeared dead. At least they did to me. Maybe they didn't look that way to each other. Maybe, I thought, they didn't look that way to anyone else. What if you had to say no to the deal in order to spot all the people who'd made deals of their own? The more I thought about it, the more sense that made. A beautiful woman walked past me, her face so lovely it almost hurt to see it, but she had the eyes of a corpse. How could it be that no one else was repelled? The only answer was that they didn't see it.

I did not choose her. A woman like that would be used to turning away strangers. Instead I waited for an older guy, perhaps in his fifties, out walking his little dog in its blue sweater. He seemed like the sort who enjoyed talking, so I walked up to him, my posture relaxed and unthreatening.

"Hey," I said. "Can I ask you something?"

This question appeared to be the highlight of his day. "Sure!" he boomed, his voice low and deep and cheerful.

"When you made the deal, what did the guy look like?"

He lost some of his friendliness now, and he stared at me with fear or shame or regret, I couldn't quite tell.

I raised my free hand. "Just curious. Not looking for trouble. I just kind of need to know."

"Okay," he said, nodding vigorously, like maybe he really wanted to talk about it. "He was kind of strange looking, with a big forehead."

"Like Andrew Jackson?" I asked. "The guy from the twenty-dollar bill?"

"I know who Andrew Jackson is," he said peevishly. "I teach American history. But yes, that's exactly it. I could never quite put my finger on it, but that's what he looked like. Except not."

"Except not," I agreed.

I found three more people willing to answer my question, and I got the same response. Andrew Jackson, every time. Either everyone making these deals looked like my guy, or this entire neighborhood was all serviced by a single merchant.

So much the better.

THAT NIGHT I went out. I wanted to enjoy myself before everything changed. I drank a lot of whiskey and paid for a woman, but I didn't particularly enjoy either. The next morning I told myself it was better to have made the effort.

It was just after eight in the morning when I rang the doorbell. I rang it three times and then knocked. Then I pounded. Finally I heard feet on hardwood, and then an awkward hand fiddling with locks. He didn't ask who it was. Why should he have to? No one ever meant him any harm.

He answered the door in his bathrobe open to his waist. He was in great shape, but his face looked like s.h.i.t-red eyes, unshaven, puffy.

"Rough night, Marco?" I asked.

His face contorted in confusion and then he got it. He remembered. He opened his arms and drew me into a hug.

WE SAT IN his beautiful kitchen, at the table in the nook, away from his own hissing and puffing espresso machine on the marble island. Natural light poured in from the windows. Marco ran a hand through his mussed hair and sipped from his mug, leaving a momentary foam mustache. I pa.s.sed on the coffee. I didn't need any more caffeine.

We spent half an hour on bulls.h.i.t. He told me about his life, his job as a consultant, whatever the f.u.c.k that was-even he didn't really seem to know. It was just some kind of high-paying boondoggle that had fallen into his lap. He told me about his fiancee, who was not the woman I'd seen the other day. That was someone else, a little thing on the side that didn't mean a whole lot, but sure was fun. And then, after all this wonderful conversation, the topic turned to me.

"I can't tell you how sorry I am about how things went down. Teddy and I never forgot how much we owe you for keeping quiet."

"It's what any one of us would have done," I said. "I just had bad luck."

He opened his mouth, and I was sure he was going to say-In this world, you make your own luck-but he thought better of it. Bright boy.

Instead, he said, "Still, I totally owe you."

Maybe he forgot that I received the same offer he did. Maybe he never knew, and the business about him calling me a p.u.s.s.y had been pure bulls.h.i.t. Whatever the reason, he didn't tell me about the deal, and I didn't bring it up.

After hearing more about how much he owed me, I finally decided to put it to the test.

"I hate to ask," I said, "but the truth is, I'm kind of in trouble. Some guys I knew from inside are trying to shake me down. I could use something to get them off my case."

"Something?" he asked. His face went dark. He loved telling me how much he owed me, but maybe he didn't like so much actually following up on it.

"I need a gun, Marco, and it's kind of hard for an ex-con to get one. You always had a few pieces stashed away. I can't believe you've changed that much."

"I don't know," he said, his eyes drifting toward the window. He gazed at his watchless wrist and considered the busy morning ahead. "It's getting kind of late and-"

"I'm not going to shoot anyone," I said, rushing to get the words out, earnest and nervous. "I just want to let them know they can't push me around."

He sipped his drink, thinking. Now he looked at the wall clock.

"You know what, forget it," I said, my voice easy and apologetic, my palms flying up. "I had no right to ask. You dodged a bullet all those years ago, and I shouldn't have asked for you to tempt fate now that you're clean." I pushed back my chair.

If I had tried to lay a guilt trip on him, he'd have left me high and dry, but this worked like a charm.

"Hold on," he said, and he got up, pressing a hand on my shoulder to set me back down. He went upstairs and came down a few minutes later with a Glock. Nice piece. Nine millimeter, seventeen-round magazine. It felt good in my hand.

"Sweet," I said, as I weighed it in my palm. I then held it and pointed it toward an imaginary target.

Marco smiled nervously. "Just be sure you don't kill anyone with it," he said.

"Not a living soul," I a.s.sured him.

Something shifted in his face, and he knew. He understood everything.

That instant, less than a full second, hung between us, and the years and experiences and fortunes that separated us collapsed. It was just me and just Marco, old friends. Marco, a good guy, the kind of guy who always attracted good fortune and favors-even before he made his deal. Marco, who walked when I went to jail.

I fired the gun into his forehead. Blood sprayed out the back of his head against the window, a brilliant blossom around the spiderweb of cracked gla.s.s.

I hadn't wanted to hurt him. Andrew Jackson had been right about that. I hadn't wanted to do anything that might have done him harm. But I knew that what I was doing was helping him.

"You're welcome," I said to Marco's corpse.

Sixteen rounds left. I headed outside to make the most of them.

I WISH I could say it made me feel different. I wish I could say that when I sat in the coffee shop, staring at the cream dancing slowly with the coffee in my cup, I felt like a man on the run, fraught with paranoia, expecting danger from every corner, to hear the air fill with silence and have SWAT officers descend in a coordinated onrush.

But no. I watched the happy couples and young parents stand in line, fussing and chatting, and I felt exactly the same as I had the day I left prison.

I lifted my coffee cup to my lips, but my hand expected the grip of a Glock, and the kick of a firing pin, and when I drank, my nose expected not coffee but the perfume of cordite.

I shut my eyes, and drank. It was like it was all still happening.

. . . A housewife stands in the doorway of her apartment, shouting to her husband that they're six minutes late already. When she sees me, she frowns, curious, and that curious frown never leaves her face as I lift the Glock and point it at her cheek. . .

. . . The teen boy and his girlfriend leap to their feet when I kick in the door, the black sheet of her hair withdrawing from his crotch to reveal a half-flaccid p.e.n.i.s dangling from the front of his boxers, and the boy raises his hands to me and screams but the gun is already going off. . .

. . . The old history teacher grumbles as he tries to fix a plastic bag around his hand while his dog yaps mindlessly at me, standing mere feet away. I don't wait for him to look up. The left collarbone of his thick vest spews stuffing, followed shortly by blood. He shouts, slightly outraged, and falls to the ground on his side. His dog shrieks, rears up, tries to bound at me, but the old man's hand holds fast. When he sees me, he blinks and says, "Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness," and I take aim again. . .

I swallowed. I put the coffee cup back down and opened my eyes, expecting to see police converging on the coffee shop.

But there were no police. Only him, the curious vagrant with a striking likeness to Andrew Jackson. He was staring at me through the window with a look of slight betrayal. He opened the door and walked in to sit before me.

He stared at me as I sipped my coffee. I did not meet his eyes.

"So," he said. "It was you?"

I didn't answer.

"Of course it was you," he said. "Who else?"

"Who else," I echoed.

"Why?" He sounded genuinely shocked. "Why would you do this? Why?"

I looked around the coffee shop, sullen, and did not answer.

"Ten people," he said. "Ten of my people. I . . . I told them they would live happy lives."

"I guess maybe I wanted to see if the bullets would bounce off them. To see how charmed their lives really were. Or maybe I thought they'd be better off this way."

"You . . . you don't understand what you've done!" he hissed. "You don't understand how you've hurt things!"

"Did I f.u.c.k your sales quota? Is that it?"

"You've ruined me," he whispered. He looked like he was on the verge of tears. "You've destroyed me."

"I guess your firm must be pretty p.i.s.sed at you. I can't say you get a lot of my sympathy. After all, I just voided a lot of contracts. Set a lot of souls free." I smiled. "You know, there was a guy I met in prison who'd spent almost his whole life in solitary."

"They'll . . . They'll eat me alive for this . . ."

"I only saw him once," I continued, "for about a week, before he wound up going back-back to that empty cell, all by himself. He'd spent years in there, they told me. And it was all his fault, you know? Because this guy, whenever they let him out, he always went wild on everybody. A huge guy, and he'd just pummel anyone he could get his hands on, beat them to s.h.i.t. Maybe a week or two would go by before he did it again-the calm before the storm-but then he'd be raging like an elephant, hurling chairs and desks over stairways, breaking gla.s.s with his fists . . ."

He buried his face in his hands.

"And I asked him, while I had the chance-why do you do it? What's the point? I was terrified to ask, you see, because I thought he'd kill me-but he didn't. He thought about it, and he just laughed. It was a nasty kind of laugh. And he said, 'We only got a handful of choices. Figure I'll use mine to spit in their G.o.dd.a.m.n eyes.' And it didn't make a lot of sense to me then, but yesterday, it did."

The vagrant slowly looked up at me. His face drained of expression, then turned to rage. "You did this all . . . for spite?"

"Spite's all you've allowed me. It's all I have left. You and the world, you take away my choices, bit by bit, until the only ones I've got left are the ones that destroy me. But I guess you never thought I could take you with me."

"I'll . . . I'll ruin you," said the man. He snapped his fingers. "The police will come and they'll take you away, back to your rotten little cell! And you'll die there, you'll die coughing and fouling yourself as your body eats itself alive!"

I shrugged. "Out here, I'd be in a cell, too. A little block of life you'd have arranged for me. I don't much see the difference. Except with your cell, I'd never have made a choice."

"You would have chosen to be happy!"

"I would have chosen to allow you to make me happy. Which isn't the same. But here's the thing-having done what I did, and having made the choice I made . . ." I took another sip of coffee, knowing it'd almost certainly be the last I'd be getting for a while. " . . . I am happy as s.h.i.t." And I grinned at him.

The man fumed for a second. Then he spat in my face, a thick, warm blob, turned around, and stormed out, cursing.