Since the Layoffs (7 page)

“I’ve been watching videos from the past week.”

“Yeah?”

He hits play, and there is a picture of me, behind the counter. I can’t read the date and time on the video. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“Me behind a counter?”

Brecht takes off his glasses. “Jake, I’ve watched all the videos from last week.” He looks at me, so earnest, and in his eyes I see all the knowledge of all my crimes. He has pieced it together somehow, the altered surveillance, the newspaper articles of the murder, everything. “In all those videos from last week, I don’t see a single employee wearing a smock.”

Wearing a what? That’s what this guy has been back here doing? In my relief, I offer information. “We weren’t wearing smocks until you showed up,” I tell him.

“Tommy told me you were,” he says, shaking his head.

Oh, Christ, what have I done now? I’ve gotten Tommy into trouble while trying to get myself out. He sees me still standing in the doorway. “Thanks Jake. Just get back to the front.”

Brecht finally leaves at two in the morning. While he is leaving, he puts his jacket on the counter to go back into the office to get something he has forgotten. I reach into the jacket pocket and pull out a hotel entrance card, Kellner Suites. I know where that is, about two miles away, up Route 40. I drop the card back into his pocket as he comes out of the office.

As soon as he is gone, I fall asleep. We don’t get another customer until after Tommy comes in at seven. Or maybe we did, and I just slept through it. I guess we’ll find out when we look at the video.

FIVE

I
get back to the store for my night shift at 7 p.m., and Tommy is waiting for me with my first paycheck from Gas’n’Go.

Four hundred and eighteen dollars, after taxes. That doesn’t seem like much for two weeks of non-stop work, but it’ll get my TV back from the pawnshop. Added to the eight hundred I’ve received from Ken Gardocki, I can now pay rent, turn my heat back on, maybe even look into a cheap cable package.

And things get better. Tommy, who has been demoted to clerk until he gets his shit together and learns how to run a Gas’n’Go right, needs to hire someone else for the overnight shift. Brecht has told him that I’m working too much, and becoming cranky. Brecht doesn’t know the half of it. Tommy had massively overscheduled me to do me a favor, because he knew I was broke. This idea has been nixed by Brecht. I’m not performing my customer service adequately, I’m told, and I am offered a few days off. This is perfect, as it allows me to go to New York to kill someone over the weekend.

“You can have tonight off,” Tommy tells me. This is fine with me, I’m exhausted. Then he adds, “Come back Monday night.”

Which is also perfect. I’ve got the days off I need without asking for them. But something funny is going on here. “Am I being suspended?”

“It’s not a suspension, Jake, you need a rest—”

“Fuck that guy.”

“Jake, come on. I need this job. I’ve got Mel and Jenny to worry about. This is all there is right now. You know what things are like. Besides, you
do
need a rest. Look at you. You slept most of last night. Brecht saw the video.”

“Fucking video. Jesus Christ, we’re being watched on a video. Doesn’t that piss you off? Seven bucks an hour and they’re watching us on videos? What are we, lab rats?”

Tommy is just staring at me. I sigh. Maybe he’s right. I’ve got over a thousand dollars now and I haven’t had a beer in weeks. I take my paycheck and turn to go. “Monday, I’ll be back, right? I’ll still have a job?”

Tommy nods eagerly, glad that I’m leaving without more of a fuss. “Monday. I promise.”

I go down to Tulley’s for a beer.

Like everything else in town, Tulley’s has a has-been quality to it. It is a dive bar about a mile from the factory entrance, which was packed every night up until the layoffs, but now it just looks like a bar with way too much space. The fifty-car parking lot never has more than three or four beat-up wrecks in it.

I stopped going in for a while after the layoffs, not because I had no money, but because I couldn’t stand the emptiness of it. It was the saddest reminder of what had happened to us. Each barstool and booth had a memory for me. This is where Tommy met Mel, that one is where I met Kelly. Those barstools are where Tommy, Jeff Zorda and I used to sit on Sundays and watch the Packers. Now all the booths were empty, and their emptiness revealed a truth about them. They were shoddy. The bar was shoddy, the woodwork was crap. There was really nothing attractive about any of it, except the idea that people had enjoyed themselves here for years.

“Jake? Haven’t seen you around here much lately. What you been up to?”

Big Tony Wolek is the bartender and manager, a worn, three-hundred pound drinker who took a massive pay cut when the factory closed. To make back the money he lost, he now has to work all day, every day, and he looks about done. He wheezes as he brings me my Budweiser with a glass. I haven’t been here in months, but he remembers my beer and how I like it. As he puts it down in front of me, I think, this man is going to die soon. His skin is gray, his eyes faraway and red-rimmed. He’s barely fifty years old.

“What’s up, Tony? They working you hard?”

“I work all the time now. Have to, to pay the bills.”

“I know the feeling.”

“What are you doing now? You got a job?”

“Gas’n’Go.”

“Yeah?” He looks intrigued by the idea of a career change. “The pay good?”

“You gotta be kidding. Five seventy-five to start. They’re hiring, though.”

He thinks about it for a second, shakes his head. “I can probably do better here. Not much better,” he adds quickly, because he thinks he has insulted me, “but better.”

I laugh. Oh, yeah, and did I mention I kill people for money now? Big Tony would probably want that job. Get him off his poor, tired feet for a while, get a decent sum of cash for once. My silence about the killing job is not so much from a sense of self-preservation as from a desire to guard it against the hordes who might take it from me. “Things are tough all over,” I say.

“Amen to that.” He takes my five. I tell him to keep the change. He looks surprised, and I realize I might have made a mistake, signaled my newfound wealth to anyone in the room. But he just nods gratefully. I was always a good tipper.

I’m on my seventh or eighth when Jeff Zorda comes in and sits next to me. The news is on, more stuff about hospital closings.

Jeff sits down next to me. “What’s going on, man? How’s the Gas ’em Up?”

“Gas’n’Go. It’s fine. How’s cable stealing coming along?”

“Slowly but surely. If you weren’t such a straight arrow, I’d ask you to partner up with me.”

I smile. “Straight arrow? Is that what I am?”

“Yeah. Straight-Arrow Jake. All the loading dock managers used to fix their sheets, take a bribe for extra stuff now and then. You never did.”

This is news to me. None of the distributors ever asked me for extra stuff or even offered a bribe. Maybe I had a reputation, and they just stayed away from me. I am strangely flattered by this notion of a Moral Jake which others have formed.

Jeff is staring at the TV. They are doing a piece on the unsolved murder of Corinne Gardocki, showing an old photo of her, smiling innocently. She was a beautiful woman. The killing, according to the reporter, has terrorized the neighborhood. A shocked old woman talks about how terrorized she feels now that one of her neighbors has been killed.

“Ken Gardocki paid someone to kill her,” Jeff says, almost conversationally.

I snort, concealing my shock. “Ken? Come on.”

“No, he did, I’m sure.”

“That was just a Peeping Tom,” I argue, wondering where he got his information.

“About two weeks before someone shot her, Ken asked me to do it.” Jeff sips his beer and grins. “Guess the next guy took him up on it.”

I feel the blood drain from my face. I thought I was Ken’s first choice. He told me it had to be me, he just knew it. How many other people had he been through before he got to me?

“Why’d you say no?” I try to act jovial. “What’d he offer you?”

“Offered me ten grand,” Zorda said. “Why’d I say no? What, are you kidding? I’m not going to kill people for money. I mean, maybe a little small-time shit here and there, but I went to church when I was a kid. I was raised right.”

This is how right Zorda was raised. He took a volunteer job with the ambulance company after the layoffs, he tells me later in the evening, so he would get access to the homes of the sick and dying. When old people who lived alone were taken to the hospital and admitted, he would go back to their apartments or houses the next day and ransack them. He would take credit cards, pills, anything of value. Apparently, in church, when they were telling him it was wrong to kill, they okayed this.

I am back home, drunk and furious. I want to call Ken Gardocki and scream at him, but I know I can’t contact him. Why in God’s name would he try to hire Zorda before me? I’m smarter than that fuck, and I’m more trustworthy. Straight-Arrow Jake, isn’t that what they used to call me? Maybe that was it, because Ken thought I was too much of a straight arrow to even consider the offer. Yeah, that had to be it. Still, next time I see him, he’s going to hear about it.

And why did Zorda get offered twice as much money? Does Ken think Jeff’s a sharper businessman than me? What the hell’s going on? I am too pissed off to think straight. It’s almost midnight. I grab the gun from the closet, pull on my gloves, grab some rags and two shopping bags and a small pillow, and head out into the cold.

The Kellner Suites is a three-mile walk. It’s snowing again, but just a light dusting, not enough to keep cars off the road but enough to make everything seem quiet on the side streets. Cars pass me and I wonder who is in them, whether or not they have noticed me. Someone called in about me throwing rags into the creek last time, so people are watching. They watch everything, all the time. There are always eyes. The trick is to make them not notice you. I walk without any stride, try to make nothing memorable about myself, just a guy shuffling along the road on his way to nowhere important.

When I see the sign for Kellner Suites off to the side of the highway, I stoop down amid some trees to wrap the rags around my feet. Then I pull the plastic shopping bags over the rags and tie them to my ankles. I don’t want the mud on my boots. There are different types of mud, and some scientist in some lab would be able to match the mud from the Kellner Suites parking lot to my boots, and that would be it for this career. The shopping bags make a noise, though, crinkling and rustling every time I take a step. Have to do something about that for next time. Maybe get some canvas bags, and then throw them away. I’m sure not buying new boots every time. These took months to break in.

I go back into the trees at the edge of the parking lot and look for Brecht’s car. I’ve noticed, since my hit-man career began, that almost every building has a little nook or cranny where you can effectively hide. There are so many deserted buildings and crumbling facades around here now that this town is particularly blessed with such hiding places. Once again, I find the darkened treeline to be the best concealment. I don’t see Brecht’s car anywhere. Working late again, perhaps training his new hire. I crouch as a car pulls into the well-lit parking lot and drives up to the room. Not Brecht. There is some giggling as a young couple get out and go into one of the other bottom floor rooms.

This is going to be a problem, I realize. Chances are, Brecht will park right up against the well-lit building. With so many spaces available next to the door, why would he park back against the darkened treeline? No, he’s going to park in the light, which means I’m going to have to wait in the light. Or run all the way across the lit parking lot with crinkly bags on my feet, shoot him, and then run back the same way, which would be begging for witnesses.

Brecht pulls into the parking lot, and parks right up against the building.

I step forward into the light of the parking lot and freeze there. Dammit. There’s nothing I can do. If I started running toward him now, and shot him in his car, it would be too risky. What if he heard me running? Then …

Brecht opens the car door quickly and darts up to his room, leaving the engine running and the car door open. He uses his entry card on the lock and darts inside his hotel room. For a panicked second I think he has seen me, has figured out exactly what I’m doing there, and is running inside. But he leaves the hotel-room door open, too. I realize what is happening right away.

Brecht needed to take a piss.

Or a shit maybe. Who knows. That convenience store food’ll do it to you. At any rate, I’m running, streaking across the parking lot, maybe forty yards. I do the distance in under ten seconds, taking care not to slip on the ice and snow, my shopping bagged feet crinkling madly. I get up to Brecht’s door, and push it open. I can hear the unmistakable sound of a urine stream. He grunts a little. Then I hear a toilet flush.

I close the motel room door and wait for him to come out of the bathroom.

Brecht walks out of the bathroom still zipping up his fly. He is looking down, but notices me in the room pointing a gun at him and he freezes.

“What are you
doing
?”

Bang!

Bits of pillow fly everywhere. DAMMIT! The pillow didn’t help worth a damn. My ears are ringing again. Don’t use that pillow trick they always show on cop shows. All you do is destroy a perfectly good pillow. I notice also how much smoke is released by a single gunshot. It’s like a bomb went off in here. Last time I shot someone I was outside. I got the smell, but the smoke just wafted away and I never noticed it.

Brecht is lying on the ground, his head by the little refrigerator. His glasses have been knocked askew by the fall. His eyes are closed. If he’s not dead, he’s doing a good impression of someone who is.

There is a good amount of blood on the wall behind us, but nothing has touched me. Pillow flakes are settling all around the silent room. I look at him for a few seconds, thinking deep, philosophical thoughts about him now versus him ten seconds ago, the only difference being those few ounces of lead that have passed through his head, changing everything. Then my hearing starts to return, and I hear the car’s engine running outside.

I open the motel room door. But for his running engine, it is complete silence out in the parking lot, no one around. I close the door softly behind me, shut his car off, leaving the keys in the ignition. I see his briefcase on the passenger seat, take it, shut the door and walk off.

Okay, that was stupid. Every time I kill someone, I do something stupid. Last time I kept the gun, this time I steal a briefcase. Why’d I do that? I am walking back out onto the highway with a gun that has killed two people and a dog, and I have a briefcase. If a cop pulled over and started asking me questions about what I’m doing walking around at two in the morning with a briefcase, I’d be completely screwed. I’ve got to get rid of this shit, but where? I need a place to hide and settle down.

I cross the highway and on the other side is the back of an abandoned discount strip mall. There are dumpsters everywhere. Too perfect. The first place cops would look for stuff to be dumped. I take the bags off my feet, and the rags, and throw those into a dumpster. Just rags and bags, nothing too incriminating. I notice my boots are clean, no mud at all. Very nice. Then, leaning by the dumpster, I decide to open the briefcase.

Inside are a lot of files, pens, calculators and … a girlie mag he took from the store. It is called
Juggs and Leggs
. I flip through it. By porn standards, this one is on the low end, the girls worn out ex-strippers and the paper quality barely above newspaper. Why would Brecht, who obviously had access to
Playboy
or
Penthouse
, go so low? Was this his thing, worn out ex-strippers pulling their pussy lips apart for a black-and-white gynecological exam? Guess so. To each his own. Into the dumpster with it. Everything else goes back in the briefcase.