Tempted by Trouble (2 page)

The dead man wasn’t dead.

Eddie Coyle dragged his end of the carpet another ten yards before he let it fall hard. While the man kicked and fought until the carpet unrolled, Eddie Coyle reached underneath his suit coat and pulled out a handgun. The man wore black socks and wingtips. Nothing else. He was naked, pale, tall, and no more than thirty years old. His wrists and mouth were wrapped in duct tape. He struggled to get free. Traffic passed by on I-94, everyone intoxicated and unaware. As another late round of fireworks put beautiful colors in the dark skies, Eddie Coyle fired three shots, each shot lighting up his face. He was a CEO who was executing his business with a calmness that was terrifying. The man collapsed, fell back onto the carpet.

Eddie Coyle regarded me, his breath fogging from his face.

He said, “No witnesses.”

I nodded.

He nodded in return.

I stood tall and firm, despite feeling that this frozen ground was about to become my grave as well.

He asked, “You ever heard of Yoido Full Gospel Church?”

“Can’t say that I have. That’s not in Detroit or Dearborn, is it?”

“It sits on Yeouido Island in Seoul, South Korea.”

“Okay.”

“It has over eight hundred thousand members.”

“You thinking about going there?”

“I can only imagine how much money they bring in every Sunday. I can’t imagine how much we could pull if we organized and hit a church that size.”

“Are we robbing a bank or are you talking about robbing a church?”

“Banks. I’m a bank man. Banks are federally insured, so no one loses in the end.”

Eddie Coyle’s attention went back to the work at hand.

Eddie Coyle said, “The body won’t smell for a while. It’s below freezing and will stay that way for at least a week. It’s cold enough to throw off the time of death by a few days. It might be weeks, maybe a couple of months before anybody finds what’s left of him.”

Another chill ran up my spine, a combination of coldness, fear, and hate.

Eddie Coyle said, “You’re almost officially one of us now.”

“Almost.”

“You just knowingly and willingly participated in a crime.”

“I guess this makes me a partner in your business.”

“You don’t get your name on the door, not just yet.”

“I stand corrected.”

“It gives me a bargaining chip in case you have other ideas. Mister Executive, so far so good. You didn’t fall apart. You didn’t freak out and run. You passed the test. You’ll need nerves of steel.”

I shivered from the cold. I knew it would have been futile to run. His brother was probably standing in the cold, waiting for me to panic and run out of the woods, his gun ready to fire.

Eddie Coyle took out a package of Marlboro Blacks, then tossed me his smoking gun.

He said, “It’s your turn to put a few bullets in one of my problems.”

“The man’s dead.”

“But he’s not dead enough, Dmytryk.”

He took out a plastic lighter and lit his cigarette, its tip glowing in the night.

Eddie Coyle smiled. “Any man who crosses me will never be dead enough.”

Again in the distance, there was an explosion and beautiful colors that lit up the skies.

I handed the gun back to Eddie Coyle. “He was your problem, not mine.”

“Be a man.”

“I am a man. And putting a bullet in a dead man won’t elevate that status.”

Moments later the sound of feet crunching the ground came toward us.

It was Eddie Coyle’s brother. He was a large man dressed in a fur coat that made him look like a bear stalking through the darkness. When he came closer I saw that he carried another rug over his shoulders. He dropped the rug and allowed it to unroll. The body of a woman rolled free and came to a stop next to the man who had been hidden inside the first rug. She was still alive.

Bishop regarded me. “You’re the new guy that my little brother is vouching for.”

His voice was thick, not as refined as Eddie Coyle’s. Bishop sounded like years in prison, drug smuggling, and everything immoral. He sounded like crime personified. He was the type of man I loathed, the type of man I’d never wanted to associate with.

I said, “I’m the new hire.”

“You look like a jerk who would do my taxes, if I ever paid taxes.”

“You look like a man I’d hit in the mouth for insulting me, if he ever insulted me intentionally.”

“Your wife said you had a chip on your shoulder.”

“My wife isn’t part of this, so I’d like to keep this between the parties involved.”

“That’s what the old wheelman said. And you see where that got him.”

Eddie Coyle said, “Dmytryk is motivated and will fit in with Rick and Sammy.”

Bishop asked, “You ever been employed in this line of work?”

“That’s none of your concern. Eddie Coyle is the one I report to.”

Eddie Coyle hunched his shoulders and turned to walk away. I followed Eddie Coyle, my wingtips crunching over ice and frozen grass as we headed back toward the interstate.

We left Bishop behind. Halfway to the interstate, behind us, a gun fired three rapid shots.

Those celebratory explosions sent a chill up my spine.

When we climbed back inside the SUV, Eddie Coyle turned his lights on and put the Cadillac in drive, pulled away, and said, “No witnesses left behind. That’s my number-one rule. No witnesses.”

“Even the woman.”

“Breasts or balls, penis or poontang, spook, Jew, or wetback, a witness is a witness.”

The message was clear.

Eddie Coyle said, “Megachurches are nothing more than tax-free symbols of greed and power.”

“Back to talking about robbing God.”

“Megachurches are the Walmarts of the religious world, one-stop shopping, pulling members away from all of the local mom-and-pop box churches.”

“What’s the issue?”

“Capitalism and how it has infected everything that was once good.”

“Capitalism was all about big fish devouring little fish and never stopping to masticate their prey. It’s a good thing when you’re winning. When you’re losing, you see its faults.”

He nodded. “The country is devolving. The Tea Party is out there expressing their outrage over health care. If this is the outrage that comes from health care, it’s going to be crazy when immigration is brought to the table. Bad economy and racism, the fear of a new labor pool coming from beyond these shores to do jobs in an already jobless country—it will be a Molotov cocktail. It will be the Detroit race riot in ’43 and the Detroit race riot in ’67 and the Watts riot and the ’67 Newark riots and the Oklahoma race riots in every state, city, and town in America.”

I didn’t say anything else. He’d just murdered two people and was engaging in a casual conversation about churches and politics.

Eddie Coyle said, “I hope your wife feels better. When you get home, tell her I said that.”

“You don’t have to worry about my wife.”

“Understood.”

“Worrying about my wife is my responsibility.”

“Again, I apologize for crossing that unseen line.”

I tightened my jaw and held on to my fedora, a classic hat I had inherited from my father.

In my mind I was grabbing Eddie Coyle’s gun and shooting him over and over as the SUV lost control and flipped over a half dozen times. As he sped down I-94, I should have killed Eddie Coyle right then. But I had known the man for only two hours.

The state of being desperate or of having the recklessness of despair.

Four walls closed in
and I woke up wanting to scream at the universe.

Every man had a breaking point and I’d conceded to mine four seasons ago.

Before sunrise touched the iconic palm trees in California, palm trees that were not native to the region, those colorful fireworks had returned, only they were exploding behind my eyes and inside my head. I was caught in an ongoing war between stress and anxiety. The tightness in my chest slithered up to my throat, became a snake, and then I was being strangled. I gripped the edges of the sink and shut my eyes as the whole world closed in on me from every side. Head lowered, sweat ran down my neck and my body was racked with dread. Every now and then a man had to let his eyes spring a leak in order to remain sane.

I looked to my right, searched for something to focus on. I settled for the bathtub. The tub looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since Kennedy was assassinated and the toilet hadn’t been treated to any harsh cleansers since Jack Ruby took out Oswald to cover up that conspiracy.

Almost a year had gone by since that frigid night I stood on the side of I-94 with Eddie Coyle, sealing a deal with a ruthless and congenial devil.

It seemed like it was yesterday. Maybe because nothing in the world had changed.

Money was still low. I found out that in this business the money was always low.

I had thought about that cold night on the side of I-94 every day and night since then.

I had on a Hanes T-shirt and the same dark pajama bottoms I’d worn when I was married. My wife had given these to me for one of my birthdays. I looked down at my wedding ring. It was a white gold wedding band that had cost a little less than six hundred dollars on Amazon, less than a tenth of what I had paid for my wife’s wedding ring. Whenever I looked at my wedding band I thought about my wife too. I thought about Cora every day, sometimes all day long. Six months ago, without notice, my wife had walked away from our marriage, had packed up and left the way people across the country were walking away from bad mortgages. I had returned home from a business trip and everything she owned was gone. I knew that I would be the last one to find out the truth. The fool was always the last to know.

The panic attack held me prisoner and refused to set me free.

It was my third episode since I started working with a crew that robbed banks. Last night while I slept on the forty-year-old sofa, I tossed and turned and was unable to get comfortable. Not because of the flashing neon lights and the activity that was going on in Koreatown and the apartments around me. I never slept well during the two or three days before a bank job. Last night, no matter how hard I tried to rest, I’d tossed and turned on the old sofa out front. As soon as I had jerked awake, surges of heat trampled across my neck like a trail of anger and sorrow, and then those flames had made their way to my eyes and I battled with tears. I never shed tears as a boy. But when I was a boy there wasn’t much to cry about. As a boy I never had the stress that came with being a man. Every man carried an invisible load. Henrick and Zibba had been the best father and mother a boy could ask for. Bits and pieces of the dream had stayed with me. I’d dreamed I was back home in Detroit.

In my dream I was falling from the seventy-second floor of the Renaissance Center, the Detroit River and Windsor in the distance.

This morning I shivered like I was naked on that frozen tundra in Motor City. I cooked every day to relieve stress, but I never ate much. I’d lost my appetite two seasons ago. I was twenty pounds lighter than I had been a year ago. For half a year, sleep has evaded me. I was up and down most nights. And when I looked in the mirror I saw a man who had a six-inch knife in the middle of his skull.

On the other side of the bathroom wall, the bed rocked as they sang hallelujahs and called out to the man above. There was no escaping their maddening sounds. My team and I were sequestered inside a one-bedroom safe house that was no more than 120 square feet of claustrophobia. The bathroom and bedroom shared a wall and the open area was the living room and kitchen, both so small that they reminded me of when I was in college and living in the cramped dorms my freshman year.

I threw cold water on my face and tried to control my trembling and shortness of breath.

It was Friday morning, payday for the part of the nation that still possessed gainful employment. Friday morning before noon was the most popular day of the week for bank robberies.

Always on a Friday.

When I stepped out of the stale bathroom, I saw the bedroom door was ajar, open about the width of my hand. That was wide enough for me to see Sammy Luis Sanchez. He was on a shopworn twin-size bed and his face was between his mistress’s legs. The lights were off, the apartment was dark, but red and yellow lighting flashed in from their bedroom window. A neon sign that stayed on all night blinked across their bodies, allowing staccato glimpses of what looked like a psychotropic hallucination before sunrise. She was on her back, a shadow with her wrists tied to the metal bedpost; his necktie had been over her eyes as a mask. But the necktie had slipped away. His mistress saw me. She saw me and I knew she was gazing at me while Sammy held her legs and gave her his tongue. She stared at me, then closed her eyes and moaned for Sammy, begged him to come get on top of her, begged him to put it inside.

I backed away and crept toward the kitchen, opened and closed my hands, tried to strangle the invisible demon that had a hold on me.

I stepped over the silhouettes of my luggage and the board games we had left scattered in the cramped living room. The apartment made a Motel 6 look like the Charles Forte presidential suite at the Lowry Hotel in Manchester. My duffel bag rested at the end of a Knoll Charles Pfister sofa that had been made in the seventies. Beer cans littered the counter, along with empty wineglasses, a couple bottles of Smirnoff vodka, and two ashtrays that were overflowing with cigarette butts. Even in the dark, the place looked and smelled like a dump, but the darkness that came before sunrise hid some of its imperfections. The lingering scents from the dinners I’d cooked over the last week didn’t mask the mustiness.

Rick Bielshowsky was sleeping in the middle of the floor with the plaid covers pulled over his head. I opened the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of water. Jackie became louder. When I headed back to the bathroom, I paused in front of the bedroom door again. Sammy was on top of Jackie and she had her legs hooked around his ankles. Jackie’s eyes stayed with mine. I frowned at her, held eye contact until I closed the bedroom door. I closed the door hard enough to let them know I was irritated.