Darwin's Nightmare (2 page)

As Julian's ice-grey eyes stared into mine they momentarily lost their congeniality, but it returned as quickly as it had vanished. He was a pro, but there were some feelings he couldn't keep completely bottled up. His hatred slipped out like steam from a pipe ready to burst. He hated me and what I did, and he could never let that go. I stood, leaving the gun in the chair, and walked to the safe. I opened it and took the bag to the door. Julian rose without any indication of discomfort, placed a stack of bills on my desk, and moved to the door.

“What is it? In the bag, I mean. Did you look inside?” Julian always seemed unsure if anyone caught his meaning so he worked hard to make himself as clear as possible; he repeated himself over and over in different words, all meaning the same thing. It was an annoying habit, but I
was sure no one told him that. I was also sure there would be a time when he wouldn't try to clarify his thoughts to me. When that happened, there would be trouble.

I opened the door, and he took the bag and walked out. He always asked the same question in some form or another. I never responded; I just held the door and let him walk. Julian knew I was a professional and that I hadn't looked in the bag. His question was a reminder that he beat me once, and that to him I was just an amateur. He used more syllables to say “fuck you” than anyone I knew.

After he was gone, I sat and watched the street again. I didn't see Julian leave — I never expected to — but I watched all the same. I thumbed through the money Julian had left on the desk; I didn't count it because I knew it would all be there. After a time I felt hungry.

I walked out the front door of the building, my own angular bulge in the back of my shirt. I walked down the street from the office, passing different windows that advertised sandwiches with more meat and less fat, some grilled, others toasted. I breezed past the advertisements until I came to a Vietnamese restaurant I frequented. The place was not a chain, and by no means a dive. The restaurant catered to Vietnamese people. Everyone who worked there and most of the people who dined there were from Vietnam. The menus were in Vietnamese with numbers and pictures for any interlopers who chose to stop in. The dining room smelled of spices and was heavy with steam from the kitchen. I took a seat in a corner of the dining room in a place where I could watch the street and the action inside. The lunch crowd was eating like it was Thanksgiving at the soup kitchen and no one looked my way — until a man stopped at the window.

He didn't slow and then stop; he stopped at the window, and put his face up to the glass. When his eyes
found me, he was startled to see me looking back at him. He regained his composure, looked around for another ten seconds, then left in a hurry. I was surprised. It seemed the amateur from the airport had amateur friends who had identified and followed me. I ordered a number fifty-eight — the chicken soup, which was so much better than it sounded, and rice. I drank the cold tap water left for me out of a small glass half full of ice and contemplated how I had been followed to the office. No one had tailed me from the airport, so they had to know who I was. My thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of two steaming plates. The soup was a dark broth, and in the centre was a piece of chicken still on the bone. The rice was light brown and smelled heavily of green onions. I stared at the food and had more of my water. I knew that the food was far too hot and that I had to wait at least five minutes before I could even try to eat it.

After I paid the bill, I left the restaurant and walked three blocks up the street to the gym. The whole way there I used store windows to look around me, and made several trips across the street to see if anyone followed, but no one did. There were no scruffy kids in tan trench coats reading newspapers under lampposts or lurking in alleys.

The gym was like a time warp back twenty or thirty years. There were no treadmills or flashy machines; there was only iron, tons of it. No one manned the front desk, and there were no trainers in neon outfits spotting out-of-shape housewives and businessmen. The place was old-school and hard-core. Just inside the front door was a sign: “Train or leave.” It wasn't the club motto, it was a command. If you weren't there to work, you weren't there at all.

I had a permanent locker at the gym, stocked with several pairs of pants, shorts, shirts, as well as a shaving kit, and a knife. I kept several places stocked like this because
I rarely went to the house I had spent my adolescence in, even though it was all mine and I was the only one living there. I showered at the gym and lived out of the office as much as possible.

I changed into old unwashed sweats, locked all my things in my locker, and made my way to the brightly lit workout floor. The room was well lit because it was a windowless box hidden deep in the concrete. It had a musty smell, like old shoes, which had developed over the past decade. There were only a handful of people there, not one of them talking over the loud thundering music. No one acknowledged my presence; they just kept on lifting. The majority of the people in the gym weren't large by bodybuilding standards. The men here didn't lift to look good — they lifted for strength. These men were like ants. They easily moved twice their body weight with just arms and legs. I found a spot and got ready to dead lift. I spent half an hour moving weight off the floor to my waist and back down again. Once I finished, I moved the bar and weights around and devoted my time to the clean and jerk. The gym was full of cops, firemen, and people like me. All of us worked here to be better. There was an unspoken truce in the gym. Everyone knew what everybody else was outside the doors, but inside the walls of the gym it didn't matter. It wasn't uncommon for cops to spot career lowlifes while they pushed hundreds of pounds above their necks. Letting the weight fall would have saved blood, sweat, and countless hours of manpower, but no weights ever crushed anyone's throat. The gym was time off the battlefield. Time off that everyone was grateful for.

It had been more than a decade since I was first shoved in the door by my uncle. He dragged me to the gym and told me if I wanted to work in the adult world with him I had to be able to pull my own weight. No one would work
on a job with a kid in his late teens who looked like a target for any bully wanting to kick sand in his face. Since that day, I had never stopped coming. I trained every day; it was that or go home to the empty house I hated so much.

After the workout I showered, staying long under the spray, letting the heat wash away the stiffness. Once I was back in my street clothes, I sat on the bench and began to consider my situation. I did a job and was paid. The only hang-up was that the owners of the bag had found me; that face in the restaurant window could only be a tail. I had a few options: I could lay low; I could call my employer; or I could handle it myself. I wasn't going to run, and I was pretty sure my employer wouldn't give a shit, so I decided to handle it. That brought on another set of questions — how to do just that? Do I nab one of the amateur trackers or do I wait for their move? The narrow bench began to dig into my ass, so I made a decision. I would go about my business and wait to be followed again.

When I left the gym, I navigated the streets in the same way that I had after leaving the restaurant. I crossed the street several times and used the bright store-front windows to see what was behind me. I moved through the city entering different stores and shops so that I could look out and see if any faces looked familiar. After two hours the exercise seemed futile — I couldn't find a tail, and the sun was lowering into the west. I needed to rest, but I didn't want to go back to the office — it would be an obvious place to pick me up again. I decided to leave the car there, and took a cab to Jackson Square, a downtown mall that shared its lower level with a farmers' market. I moved out of the cab and paid quickly, using a ten for a four-dollar fare. I moved into the market and let the crowds wash over me. I followed their pull and moved with the throngs of people looking for fresh food to bring home at a price better than the supermarkets. At six in the evening, the market was perfect: there were dozens of exits and hundreds of people. It was a nightmare for tailing
someone. I randomly made my way through the market until I saw a bus pull up at a stop just outside one of the exits. I walked casually out the door and on to the bus just before its doors closed.

The bus lurched ahead and the damp musk of the people hit my senses like a sucker punch. My nose was flooded with the different smells of people and the wares they had bought at the market. I found a lone seat and sat reading a bus pamphlet and planning my way home.

Home was a place I rarely used. It was mine in name, and had been my home for more than a dozen years. My parents had never lived there, and I had shared it with my uncle for only a handful of years.

When I was a child, three or four times a year my parents would tell me they had to work, and it was best I stay with family. I never knew at the time what my parents did. I never thought about why they only “worked” a few weeks out of the year. I learned about it all after the day they went to work and never came back.

During the “work” years my uncle watched over me at his house without comment or complaint. He wasn't an unpleasant or mean man; he was just quiet. He sent me to school, made my meals, and made sure I did my homework. He also left a book for me to read, every day, on the shelf beside the door. It was my job to come home, do my homework, and then read until my uncle arrived home to make dinner. The dinner conversations about books were the only way we developed a relationship. As we ate dinner, I told him about what I had read, and he asked me questions. He taught me the first lessons in my first real education. I learned to see beneath the surface — to look at what was going on under the current.

After a three-week stay in the fall, my uncle left me alone for a weekend. He said he had some work of his
own to do and that he would be back soon. When he came back two days later, he had most of my things with him. I knew exactly what had happened when I saw him come through the door with two arms full of what I owned. My uncle told me there had been an accident, and that my parents had died on the way home to see me. It was here that the education given to me by my uncle first paid dividends. I looked through what my uncle told me; I saw all that was said in 3
D
. I asked questions, many questions, and all of them were the right kind: Where was the accident? Where is the funeral? How do we bring the bodies home? It was a moment I would never forget. My uncle stared at me for what felt like hours, and then the side of his mouth turned up in a cold grin. The grin scared me because of all it said, and how unable I was to decipher it. All of the questions and probing I learned from my uncle at the dinner table fell apart when I was faced with an unspeaking grin that told me I didn't know enough.

My uncle sat me down and told me for the first time what my parents did for work. “They took things that didn't belong to them,” he said.

“They were bad? Like bad guys?” I asked, and immediately I hated myself for betraying my immaturity by thinking of things in terms of cops and robbers.

“They weren't bad people, but they did take things. They never hurt anyone. They only took from people with a lot of money and a lot of insurance. Do you know what insurance is?”

“Yeah.”

“So nobody ever got hurt.”

It was my turn. My mouth turned up at the corner just like his. I mirrored the grin until he got it. “Yeah,” he said softly, looking at me. “Two people got hurt.”

Weeks later, I got up the courage to ask my uncle the
question that had been on my mind since the day he returned laden with all of my worldly possessions. “Uncle Rick, are you like my mom and dad?” I asked quietly across the dinner table. My mouth was dry with the paste of overcooked potatoes.

“No,” was the only answer I got back at first. There was a long silence, and then the sound of chewing and swallowing. My uncle looked at me after he drank some of his milk. “Your mom and dad tried to be nice. They didn't want to hurt people, so they robbed businesses that had money and insurance. They had good hearts.”

“But you steal things too, right? You're like them.”

Anger flashed across my uncle's face for a second. “Damn it, Will! Don't you listen to me? They were good people. People can do the same thing, live in the same city, come from the same family. It don't make them the same.”

My uncle went back to eating, and for a time I did too. I had made him angry. It wasn't talking about my parents that did it; it was asking about what he did. I ate more dry potatoes and decided to risk another question. “What do you do?”

There was no anger this time. “Kid, what I do is worlds apart from your mom and dad. I work all over, with different people, and I don't always do the same type of jobs. Now finish your dinner.”

We didn't speak about the subject again for two years. I went to school and my uncle worked long, sporadic hours. Finally, years after I had moved in permanently, I spoke up again at the dinner table. As my uncle chewed a piece of leftover pork chop, I looked him in the eye and said, “I want to work.”

My uncle didn't bat an eye at me or wait to swallow. “I know the guy who runs the Mac's Milk down the road. Maybe I get can get you a job as a stock boy.”

“I want to do what my parents did. What you do,” I said.

My uncle put down his knife and fork and looked me in the eye. “What the fuck, boy, you think it's the family business? Your parents weren't Robin Hood and Maid goddamn Marian. They were criminals. They did bad things, and it got them killed.” He breathed deep in and out of his nose, and both of his hands gripped the table, his knuckles white. After a few moments he relaxed, took a drink of milk out of his glass, and spoke. “Your parents didn't want this life for you, kid. That's why they went after big scores with big risks. They wanted to raise you right. They wanted you to live in a house, have friends, and go to school. They wanted to be the Cleavers and you were supposed to be the Beav. But all that risk caught up with them. No one can do that work forever; it just doesn't have longevity. No, that life isn't for you. You need to be what they wanted you to be — a normal kid.”