Collaboration
Fading sunlight and tree shadows stained the grass at our feet as I walked through the park with the man I’d hired to kill me.
We stopped near a bench but did not sit, he looking at me with his not incredibly intelligent eyes, high school drop-out maybe, but curious and attentive, nearly penetrating as if he were trying to look through the back of my skull at what lay behind me. His name was Cort. He was on the small side, slight and shorter than me, with wide shoulders and a receding hairline. A lot of rings on his hairy fingers, an aura of impatience and energy swirling around him, as if everything between killings was simply unimportant filler. He didn’t look anything like I’d pictured him during our phone conversation, but who ever does? He must have been a recent quitter but wanted very badly to smoke, the way his hands kept roaming inside his pockets and his mouth twitching like his lips needed to be wrapped around a butt. I didn’t have one to offer, I gave them up about three years ago. Things will kill you.
“I’m going to do…you?” he asked again, a disbelieving smile making its way across his face without lingering on his jumpy lips, just skimming off them, momentarily parting them to show a flash of stained teeth and adding a bit of mischievous sparkle to his eyes. I had not up to now laid out my entire plan; I’d told him on the phone that I had a job for him, dropped a name his wife assured me would make him listen, told him I would pay forty grand, and he bit. Forty grand can get almost anyone out for a walk in the park.
A woman passed by on the path that crossed in front of the bench. She was pushing a stroller with a sleeping boy inside. It made me think of Linda, and Matthew. I did my best not to stare. I didn’t want Cort watching me watch them. I felt if I lost even the slightest control for the slightest second, he’d be on me.
“Yes,” I finally said as the woman and her stroller followed the bend in the walkway and went out of sight behind some bushes. Cort was staring a hole through me.
“Well, you got balls,” he said; he’d found a toothpick in a pocket and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. “Usually it’s a spouse, you know, revenge, the other’s screwing around or like that. Or to get insurance money. I’ve done old folks, their kids are set for a decent inheritance or maybe they’re tired of changing Dependz, you know what I mean.”
I nodded and even managed a grin, but Cort disgusted me and it was a huge task not to let him see that.
“The one thing I don’t do is kids. Got two of my own.” For the first time he took his eyes off me, focused them somewhere over my right shoulder. “This one lady I was doing, I rigged the car on a day she was supposed to be going to the hairdresser, middle of the day, kid in school, but the kid gets sick and she stops by the school instead of the salon…” He shrugged, not like he didn’t care but like one who accepts what he cannot control, like those little inspirational plaques say. God grant me, you know the one.
“I’m dying,” I said, as gravely as I could, and Cort shrugged again. This time it was like he didn’t care. “It could take a long time…I can’t put that on my wife. She’ll spend the rest of her life paying off the cost of my care, and not a bit of it’ll matter because I’m going to die anyway. I came up with this, while I still have a clear head…I thought it’d be best if it was over quickly, let her get the insurance money…you know…”
Maybe a cloud of suspicion swept through his hard eyes, or maybe I was just being paranoid. He asked, “Why don’t you just drive your car down an embankment?”
I wet my lips quickly, nervously. “I can’t do it myself. I thought about it, but…shit, I just can’t do it. Besides, a good investigation’ll probably find it was no accident, and then my wife gets nothing.”
His lips jumped, his hands dipped into jacket pockets. The toothpick was satisfying his oral desire; it rolled from one side of his mouth to the other as if he could turn it into a cigarette by the repetition of this movement. “How you want it?”
“Break and entry. Owner—me—wakes up, there’s a struggle, you kill me. I just ask…you know…make it quick.” I made sure that talk of orchestrating my own demise visibly shook me up. I kept glancing over my shoulder and rocking back and forth on the balls of my feet, running my hands through my hair. Stuff like that.
I was fairly proud of myself, first time up to bat, the way I handled it.
Cort spat out the toothpick and said, “You ain’t got a smoke, do you?”
I had it set up like this: I used a fake name and half the money Cort’s wife advanced to me (the other half as down payment to Cort, which I’d slipped him as we left the park; he asked, as I knew he would, “How do I get the other half, you’re dead?” and I told him, “It’ll be in my nightstand drawer, left hand side,” covering all bases) to rent out a furnished house about ten miles outside the city. I lied to Linda, told her I had a late job interview, took a five o’clock bus, and arrived hours early. I sat in the dark, so many thoughts running through my head my brain throbbed.
Mostly I kept seeing Linda, and the kids. The way Allison smiled at me from her crib before I’d left, Matthew saying I love you, Daddy, the feel of Linda’s cheek against my lips. I swore over and over to the darkness that if I got through this, this would be it. I already had it figured out: I’d take the money and head out west, tell Linda I got a temporary but well-paying job, I’d send her a little every month for six, maybe eight months, then tell her the position had gone permanent and I’d move them out there. By then I was sure I would have found work, I’d tell her the company I had been working for went belly up but now I had this new job, and she’d never know.
Cort did everything the way he was supposed to do it.
When I came out of the shadows he spun with the knife in his hand, and I could see the startled, puzzled look in his not so incredibly intelligent eyes, eyes that dropped from my face to my knife, which was even bigger than his. I suppose there was some Freudian thing there. I gutted him from neck to nuts.
“Nice,” Rachel Cort said, like a woman looking over new drapes, stepping around her husband’s viscera spread out over the carpet. She looked more beautiful than the times I’d seen her before, blouse open down to there, skirt up to here, hair that spun crazily onto her shoulders. I think what drew me most, even from the beginning and even though I never entertained any thoughts of her that way (or at least tried not to), was her eyes. She had eyes that had seen a lot but were still sexy in their weariness.
It had been too easy, despite my being so nervous I’d nearly dropped the knife at the most crucial moment, I was shaking so bad. “I thought he was the best.”
“He thought he was.” She looked down at him, her face as expressionless as a lump of pizza dough. I wondered how she’d gotten involved with him, a mystery that increased after I’d met the guy. He certainly wasn’t much to look at, a personality to match, and worst of all he worked behind a phony textile business to operate as a hired killer. Christ, she had two kids by him, had stuck with him for eleven years. Why? The money, I guessed. No matter its source, money’s the best glue I know to keep two people together, and the lack of it the swiftest way to drive them apart. Linda and I had rocked on some pretty rough waters in the past year or so.
Mrs. Cort said, “I think someday you might be the best.”
She gave me the money—a nice fat wad of it that I had to split between my two front pockets—and a kiss on the cheek, sliding them across my stubble and coming around toward my mouth. I turned away. She stepped back, a little puzzled but eyeing me hungrily all the same, even jutting her breasts out. I realized then the depth of hatred she’d held for her husband, that my triumph over him had gotten her this horny, and that she was willing to screw me right here in the same room covered in his blood. Though she was certainly tempting I found myself thinking of Linda, of Allison’s baby-grin, the way Matthew looked just like me. I imagined it may have been like this when she met Cort; maybe he’d had a contract on her former husband or boyfriend, and she had gotten the hots for him even as her love lay bleeding at their feet. It’s like serial killers getting love letters in their prison cells, or cult leaders charming the women in their congregation into their beds.
“You really were convincing,” she said, running her tongue on her lower lip. “He told me all about you the other night, said he couldn’t believe that a guy would set up his own murder. Talked about you dying and all that.” She took a step toward me again and I backed up. “It was all I could do not to laugh in his face. I mean, the way it worked just the way we set it up. We made quite a team…” She was nearly on top of me now.
“Yeah, well…I…um, give me a minute…” She was close enough for me to feel the material of her blouse on my arm. I retreated down the short hall to the bathroom. There, with the door closed, I pressed cold water on my face. I stared at myself in the mirror, surprised at the odd absence of self-loathing. I saw only a desperate, unemployed insurance salesman who had lost his confidence along with his job (not even re-reading Tom Hopkins and Anthony Robbins could get the old fire going again), a man who couldn’t find another job, didn’t have any skills to speak of, a poor soul whose state checks had run out over a year ago. Two mouths to feed, a wife to support, a mortgage not paid in months. The kids had holes in their Keds. A dinner menu of pasta, soup, or grilled cheese sandwiches. Disconnection warnings from the phone company. Double and triple utility bills. When a buddy of mine had told me about Rachel Cort in a bar one night, a woman who wanted her husband knocked off for thirty thousand dollars, I took her phone number.
So I’d killed a lowlife, a man responsible for dozens of deaths, two children he’d admitted to. I couldn’t find it in me to feel bad about him. Rachel Cort coming on to me had been utterly expected; flattering, yes, but not something I wanted to get mixed up in. Unexpected because it had been up to now all business, her supplying personal background only as it pertained to her reasons for hiring me: that she couldn’t take his lifestyle anymore, that she was sure he was seeing other women and might run off and leave her nothing, was afraid from things he’d hinted at that he would kill her if she ever took his kids away, might kill her anyway with all she knew (”My God, I know where a dozen bodies are buried,” she’d said once, as if that fact had at that moment just dawned on her). I hadn’t thought she’d ever make moves toward me, but—
From the other side of the house, Rachel Cort screamed.
I burst out of the bathroom, down the hall to the room I’d left her in. She was still there, not standing but lying on the floor, a knife sticking out from between the breasts she’d only moments ago been brushing against me.
Her killer, standing over her, looked up as I entered the room, and I found myself staring at a pale, shaken face beneath a tangle of sweaty curls that I could hardly recognize as my wife.
I cried out her name at the same time she voiced mine. We stood in the semi-darkness like gunslingers in a draw. She looked from Cort to me, from me to Cort, from Rachel to Cort, and I said with numb humor, “My interview didn’t go too well.”
The hybrid of a sob and a laugh got caught in her throat, and once she managed to spit it out she crossed the room and threw herself at me. I took her out of the there, moved her to the bedroom down the hall where I held her while she sat mutely, tears running on her face. A few times she ran out of my arms to vomit in the toilet, I following to rub her back until she was dry-heaving. Later, once the sobs faded and there was nothing left to throw up, she spoke.
“My God, Jack,” she said, muffled against my shoulder. “What have we done?”
I crushed her against me and pressed my face in her hair. I said, “What we had to do to survive,” strands of her hair getting between my lips. She seemed to accept that; I saw it all in her eyes. The rejections, the dead-end interviews, the self-doubt, all the resumes sent out and never acknowledged. Matthew’s feet stuck in sneakers two sizes too small, Allison’s hunger cries in the middle of the night.
We’d tell our stories later: me being hired by Rachel, Linda coincidentally being paid by Cort’s mistress after half-seriously answering an obscure ad she came across on the Internet, how she’d followed Rachel here. For now I simply held her.
On the way to the car she’d left parked around the block, I said, “Hey, who’s watching the kids?”
“My mother.”
I groaned. “Now there’s a woman I could kn—”
“Don’t you dare say it, Jack,” she warned, pinching my arm.
We laughed, maybe a bit too loud it being four in the morning, and her hand found mine. We looked like young kids in love, strolling along in the moonlight. The night was thick and starless, the blood on us hardly discernible in the blackness.
After a half-block of silence, she said, “I don’t feel bad. Not even guilty. It’s weird. I just keep…I keep thinking about the money. I mean, it’s good. It’s really good, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s really good.” I slipped my free hand into my pocket to touch the thick wad of cash. That, and Linda’s take, would buy a lot of Keds, a lot of groceries, a couple years off the mortgage. All in a night’s work.
Linda squeezed my hand. I squeezed hers back.
By the time we reached the car I was thinking: Rachel Cort wasn’t totally right. I didn’t think I was going to be the best in the business someday.
I glanced at Linda as she unlocked the driver’s side door and I thought that both of us were.