Big Trouble (4 page)

“Bruce, I talked to a lawyer about your concept, and he says we could get into real trouble with . . .”

“‘GET HAMMERED WITH HAMMERHEAD!'” shouted the Client From Hell, pounding a pudgy Rolexed fist on Eliot's desk. “That's the concept!”

He stood up and spread his fat arms apart, to help Eliot visualize it. “You have a guy in a boat with a girl, she's in a bikini, she has big tits, they're on a boat, and they're getting hammered! With Hammerhead! The feeling of this ad is, somebody's gonna get laid! In the background swimming around is a shark! The girl has REALLY big tits! It's PERFECT! I give you this perfect concept, and you give me ugly! Listen, if you think I'm paying for this shit, forget it, because I'm not paying for ugly. I can get ugly for free.”

You already
are
ugly, Eliot thought. What he said was: “OK, let me try to . . .”

“Don't tell me
try.
Don't
try.
I hate the word
try. Try
is for
losers,
” said the Client From Hell, who got his entire philosophy of life from Nike commercials. “Lemme tell you something.” He was tapping his finger on Eliot's desk (his
fingernails
were fat). “You are
not
the only ad agency in this town.”

I am the only ad agency in this town who is so far behind on his alimony that he will tolerate a moron of your magnitude, thought Eliot.

“OK, Bruce,” he said.

“I wanna see it TOMORROW,” said the Client From Hell.

I could get a gun by tomorrow, thought Eliot. With those hollow-point bullets.

“OK, Bruce,” he said.

The phone rang. Eliot picked it up.

“Eliot Arnold,” he said.

“I need to borrow your car tonight,” said Matt, who was Eliot's son and seventeen years old, which meant that he was usually too busy to say hello.

“Hello, Nigel!” said Eliot. “How're things in London? Can you hold for a moment?”

“Nigel?” said Matt.

“Bruce,” Eliot said to the Client From Hell, “I need to take this call from a client in London about . . .”

“I wanna see it tomorrow, and it better be
right,
” said the Client From Hell, banging open Eliot's door, walking out, not closing the door. From the hall—from right outside the next-door office of the certified public accountant who complained whenever Eliot played his stereo—he shouted: “AND SHE BETTER HAVE BIG TITS!”

“Thanks for coming by, Bruce!” Eliot called to the empty doorway. “I think we're almost there!” To the phone he said: “Matt?”

“Who better have big tits?” asked Matt.

“Nobody,” said Eliot.

“Who's Nigel?” asked Matt.

“Nobody,”said Eliot. “I made Nigel up so my client wouldn't think I was interrupting a meeting for personal business.”

“Was that the beer moron?”

“Yes.”

“Whyn't you just dump him?” asked Matt.

“Matt,” Eliot said, “do you have any idea where money comes . . .”

“So,” said Matt, who was not about to waste valuable non-school time listening to a lecture he'd already heard, “can I borrow your car tonight?”

“What for?” asked Eliot.

“Me and Andrew have to kill a girl,” said Matt.

“OK,” said Eliot, “but I want the car back at my apartment by ten-thirty, and I want you to promise to drive . . .”

“OK thanks, Dad,” said Matt, hanging up, a busy man.

“. . . carefully,” said Eliot, into the silent phone.

WHEN she finished cleaning up after dinner, Nina went back to her room—it was called the “maid's quarters,” but it was just a little room with a tiny bathroom—and locked the door. She'd started locking it about three months earlier, when Mr. Herk had walked in on her. Nina was getting undressed, down to her bra and panties. Mr. Herk had not knocked; he'd just opened the door and come in.

He was holding a glass of red wine. Nina snatched her robe from the bed and held it in front of herself.

“It's OK, Nina,” he said. “I just wondered if you'd like a little wine. You work so hard.”

Nina knew he didn't care how hard she worked. She knew what he wanted, because of the way he looked at her sometimes, especially when he was drinking. He liked to come into the kitchen when she was there alone and stand a little too close to her, not saying anything, just looking at her.

Holding the robe close to herself, she said, “No, thank you, Mr. Herk. I am very tired.”

He closed the door behind him and moved toward her. “You just need to relax,” he said. He put his hand on her bare shoulder and let it slide toward her breast. His hand was wet with sweat.

Nina ducked from his hand and stepped backward, toward the bathroom.

“Mr. Herk,” she said, “I don't think Mrs. Anna will like to know you are here.”

His face turned hard. “She's asleep,” he said. “And
I'm
not gonna tell her I was here.
You're
not gonna tell her, either, are you, Nina?”

No, she was not. He was the boss of the house, and she was the maid, and she wasn't in this country legally, and she had nowhere else to go.

“Excuse me,” said Nina, and she turned and stepped into the bathroom, quickly closing the door and pressing the lock button.

The doorknob rattled as Mr. Herk tried it.

“Nina,” he said, “come out.”

Nina stared at the doorknob, not breathing. She could feel his sweat on her, where he had touched her.

“Nina,” he said, louder, “this is
my
house, and you work for
me
, and I want you to come out
now
.”

Nina stared at the doorknob.

“Bitch,” he said.

Nina heard glass breaking, then the hallway door banging open. She waited some more, then opened the bathroom door. There was a dark red stain in the middle of her white bedspread, where he had poured out the wine. He had smashed the glass on her floor. She cut her foot cleaning up.

The next day, when she served him his coffee, with Mrs. Anna there, he acted as though nothing had happened. But she still saw him looking at her. And she kept her door locked. She did not like Mr. Herk, but she needed to keep this job. She needed to make enough money to pay a lawyer so she could become legal, and then to bring her mother and her brother to the United States.

And there were things she liked about working here. The house was like a castle, and Mrs. Anna was very nice, very pretty. Nina could not understand why Mr. Herk could be so mean to such a woman. Nina had heard him yell at her, calling her bad names, making her cry. Nina thought that sometimes he hit her.

Mrs. Anna was nice to Nina. So was her daughter, Jenny, although she mostly stayed in her room, always on the phone, always listening to her music, which sounded to Nina like angry people shouting. She couldn't imagine why anybody would want to listen to shouting.

Nina listened to flute music from her country, on cassette tapes that she played on a Fisher-Price tape player that had been Jenny's when she was a little girl. At night, Nina would open her window (she didn't like air-conditioning) and lie on her bed with the lights off, letting her mind float on the music. It made her feel less lonely.

Across the yard, in his tree, listening to Nina's music, Puggy felt less lonely, too.

MATT picked up Andrew at 8:40.

“Where's the gun?” asked Andrew.

“In the trunk,” said Matt. “I love this song.” He cranked the volume all the way up on the stereo, which was playing “Sex Pootie,” by a band called the Seminal Fluids. The lyrics were:

And so on.

“What's a sex pootie?” asked Andrew.

“What do you
think
it is?” asked Matt, scornfully, although in truth he wasn't sure what a sex pootie was, either. To change the subject, he said: “This sound system
sucks
.” Matt had great contempt for any sound system that was not loud enough to stun cattle.

“Why'd your dad buy a Kia?” asked Andrew.

“ 'Cause he's a dork,” explained Matt.

Andrew nodded understandingly. His dad was a dork, too. It seemed like
everybody's
dad was a dork. It amazed Matt and Andrew that their generation had turned out so cool.

“I just hope Jenny doesn't see this car,” said Matt.

Jenny was the girl they were going to kill. Matt thought she was hot. She was in his biology class at Southeast High School, and he'd spent many classroom hours looking at her while pretending to look at diagrams of the pancreas and other organs. He'd tried to think of some way to talk to her, but he never came up with anything feasible. But now that he was going to kill her, he figured that would break the ice.

Matt had been assigned to kill Jenny by Evan Hanratty, a Southeast High student who had organized that year's edition of Killer. Killer was a game that surfaced every year at various high schools; it had been vehemently condemned and strictly banned by the school authorities, so it was very popular with the students.

There were various versions of the game, but basically it worked this way: You paid the organizer some money (at Matt's school, it was ten dollars to become a player). The organizer then gave you, in secret, the name of another person in the game; your goal was to kill that person. At the same time, you became the target of some other unknown person, who would be stalking you.

At a given time, the game officially started, and the killing began. After each round, the survivors were given new targets; the game repeated until the last surviving killer collected a cash prize from the organizer.

The killing was done with squirt guns. For the kill to be legal, you had to squirt your victim in the presence of one witness—but
only
one witness. This meant that you couldn't get your target at school or in a public place like the mall; you had to work by ambush, usually at the victim's home.

Some kids got their parents involved. A kid would get his mom to drive him over to the target's house; then he'd hide in the bushes while the mom, looking innocent, would ring the bell and ask if the target was home. When the target came to the door, the killer would leap out of the bushes, squirt gun blazing.

Matt and his friends thought it was way unmanly to use your mom to kill somebody. They preferred the night ambush, operating under the cover of darkness, when you had the element of surprise, plus the element of (you never know) possibly seeing the target naked.

Matt parked his dad's Kia two streets away from Jenny's house. He opened his trunk and got out his gun, a SquirtMaster Model 9000, top of the line, $33.95 at Toys “R” Us. It looked like a real assault weapon and held a gallon of water; it could accurately shoot a stream of water fifty feet.

Matt and Andrew loped through the humid night to Jenny's driveway. They encountered nobody but mosquitoes; this was an expensive Coconut Grove neighborhood, whose residents stayed inside their compounds at night.

Jenny's house was big, but surrounded by trees and barely visible from the street. There was a six-foot masonry wall around the property, and the driveway was blocked by a motorized steel gate. Next to the gate was an intercom speaker.

“What's the plan?” whispered Andrew. “You wanna ring the buzzer?”

“Nah,” said Matt. “What'm I gonna say? ‘Hi! It's Matt Arnold, here to kill Jenny.' We gotta go over the wall.”