The Killing Game (2 page)

“Be a buck-eighty-seven,” I said.

She pressed a button on her phone and opened a brown leather purse. Though the woman had looked fine from afar, up close I saw hair days from a washing. Half-moons of grit under chewed fingernails. Pupils so dilated I couldn’t discern an eye color. I was moving my hand toward the weapon in the small of my back, beneath my uniform jacket, when I heard a shotgun rack behind me.

“Move and you’re dead,” a male voice said.

I froze as the woman across the counter pulled a black automatic from her purse. I knew the model: cheap Eastern-European manufacture with a trigger-pull so congenitally light it might fire if a mouse sneezed in the parking lot.

“Open the register,” she said, pointing the weapon at my throat. “Now.”

I nodded acquiescence and started tapping keys on the machine.

“Hold on,” the voice behind me whispered. “Some asshole comin’ in the door.”

I looked up and saw Ham Neck returning, straight-arming the door open. “You gave me the wrong goddamn cigarettes,” he snarled, waving the pack. “I told you menthol.”

The woman slid her purse up to cover the pistol and stepped to the side. The guy at my back whispered, “Get the fucker gone or you’re dead.” The gunman slipped to the end of the counter and I grimaced. It was the guy in the dirty denim jacket I’d noticed not five minutes ago. He must have waited in the restroom until the woman’s cell-phone signal told him the store was empty of customers.

My first job was getting the big buffoon out the door. I grabbed as many packs of smokes as I could hold, threw them Ham Neck’s way, one bouncing off his chin.

“They’re free,” I said. “Compensation for my mistake. Sorry. Goodbye.”

“You trying to be a wise-ass?”

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “My mistake. Please, take your smokes and go.”

But Ham Neck was one of those guys who look for slights. He strode toward me, one hand in a fist, the other thrust out and showing me the finger.

“Throw stuff at me? I oughta kick your goddamn—”

The man at the end of the counter whipped up a sawed-off twelve-gauge and fired. It sounded like a cannon. Ham Neck’s finger and hand disappeared in a red mist. He fell to the floor screaming, arterial blood spurting from his stump. The woman pulled the Czech weapon for the kill-shot. I stepped between them.

“I can open the safe,” I said, hands in the air. “There’s maybe three hundred bucks in the register. There’s at least six grand in the safe.”

She looked to Shotgun Man and he must have assented. Her eyes were unhinged, one fixed on me, the other on some hellish inner vision.

“Do it,” she said.

I nodded down at the moaning Ham Neck. “I gotta fix his arm.”

“I’ll kill you.”

“It’ll cost you over six thousand dollars.”

Her knuckles whitened on the gun, the chemicals in her head about to reach full boil.

“I can cut the lights and close down,” I reasoned. “We’ll be alone.”

Her eyes flicked to Shotgun Man. He thought about how many drugs six grand would buy and followed me to a panel behind the counter. I turned off every light outside and inside, leaving the glow from the coolers. Ham Neck was rolled in a ball and grunting as his stump painted the floor red. I could feel my gun against my back, but had two weapons trained on my head. No way to pull my piece.

I yanked a bungee cord from a display and snapped a tourniquet around Ham Neck’s forearm. He was slipping into shock.
Move them to the front
, the voice in my head said. I spun and walked to the front door.

“Stop right there.” The woman pointed the pistol at my forehead. It was shaking in her hand like a trapped bird.

“I have to lock the door,” I said, pulling my car keys. “The safe won’t open unless the front door is locked. You ever hear of an entry-securified safe before?”

The invention worked and she gestured me forward with the twitching muzzle of the nine.

“Wait,” Shotgun Man said. “Someone’s outside.”

A big square black guy in a Hawaiian shirt had parked beside the air pump and was kneeling by the front tire of a dark sedan. He looked unsteady and kept dropping the air hose.

“Just some drunk putting air in his tires,” I said, slipping my truck key into the lock and jiggling. I moved my hand back like I’d locked the door. Then pulled it open. “It’s bent,” I said, making a big deal of wiggling the door. “Some old lady banged her car into the door last week.” I did the key-jiggle again. Opened the door.

“GET IT DONE!” the woman screamed.

I turned to Shotgun Man. “If we both pull from the inside I can slide the bolt.”

He set the sawn-off on the counter and came to stand beside me. He smelled like an outhouse.

Shotgun Man looked to the woman. “He makes one wrong move, blow out his brains.”

“On the count of three,” I said. “Pull hard and I’ll set the lock.”

Shotgun Man gripped the door handle. I slid my key into the lock and shot a glance at the drunk at the pump. He was leaning against his vehicle and scratching his belly, apparently exhausted by his labors.

“One!” I said, loudly, taking a deep breath.

“Two!”

On three, I dove to the floor as glass exploded everywhere. Shotgun Man seemed to pirouette in slow motion, then hit the ground beside me. A half-beat later the woman’s body slammed the floor as well, half her skull gone. There was nothing to be done for either of them, but if there had been, I probably wouldn’t have done it.

Two cop cruisers skidded into the lot. The black guy was standing beside the car with a gun in his hand, smoke drifting from the muzzle. He spoke into a small transceiver in his palm. “
Looks like your clerking career is over, Carson
,” the voice in my head said. “
You OK?
”

I waved, pulled the tiny WiFi speaker from my ear, and ran to check on Ham Neck.

The waitress brought Ema her breakfast and Gregory stared at the plate of unspeakable monstrosities. He hid his revulsion behind
Happy #3
as the waitress smiled and backed away. Chewing food formed a bolus, a clot of spit and snot and food churned by the tongue and squeezed down the throat like a rat wriggling through a python. The bolus caused the stomach to squirm and convulse as chemicals reduced the lump to a suppurating goo. This reeking sludge was pumped past the pyloric valve and into the intestines, where it turned into unspeakable filth that decayed inside you for days.

“Are you all right, dear?” Ema asked as the server arrived with Gregory’s toast and salad. Grains and green vegetables were easiest to digest.

“Why?” he said.

Ema cocked her head, teased-out blonde curls bouncing on the shoulder of her pale and frilly summer frock.

“You looked deep in thought.”

Gregory pushed his plate of half-eaten toast aside. “Exactly, Ema, I was thinking. Until you interrupted.”

“I’m sorry,” Ema apologized. “Was it about work?”

“What else?” he lied. “I’ve put in forty hours already this week.” Another lie.

Ema forked up a gooey lump of poultry ovum. “I’m glad to see you so absorbed in life, dear. Plus you’re looking less thin and frail.”

Gregory’s eyes narrowed.
Frail? I’ve never looked frail.
Ema’s constant sniping about his pallor and thinness had driven Gregory to a health club membership four months back, but the stink of bodies turned his stomach and the music hurt his head. That’s when he’d invested in a top-of-the-line Bowflex home gym. He could run through a full workout in under a half hour and practice his faces at the same time.

He said, “I’ve been exercising.”

“Wonderful!” Ema chirped. “How often do you work out? Do you have a specific regimen?”

“Not really.”

“Do you exercise to a DVD or anything like that?”

“No.”

“You should drop in on Dr Szekely. She’d love to see how you—”

“Your nattering is driving me mad, Ema.”

Ema swallowed hard, looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice breaking. “I only want for you to—”

“I’m teasing, dear,” Gregory said. “Can’t you tell by now when I’m teasing?”

“Sometimes you look, I don’t know … serious, I guess. Even when you’re teasing.”

“If you can’t tell whether I’m teasing, then I’m teasing.”

“I love you so much,” Ema said. “I want you to be healthy and strong.”

“I
am
healthy, Ema,” Gregory said. “I just said I’ve been working out. Didn’t you listen?”

Ema’s eyes fell to her lap, telling Gregory he’d failed to keep all the anger from his voice. He sighed internally and reached for his sister’s plump fingertips, feeling microbes crawl from her flesh to his. But the gesture –
I Love You and I’m Sorry
– was important. Gregory found his most sincere face –
This is the Best Insurance You Can Buy
– and looked Ema in her green eyes.

“I’m so glad I have you,” he said. “So very happy.” He followed with three beats of
I Have a Powerful New Detergent.

A newly buoyant Ema carried the conversation for twenty minutes, Gregory’s contributions being murmurs of assent and smiling in all the right places. He averted his eyes when a fork moved toward Ema’s mouth, looking instead at the ubiquitous pendant hanging from her neck, a shimmering pearlescent orb the size of a robin’s egg, folk craft from Eastern Europe. She had other baubles on her wrists, jangly things. The woman spent her life watching shopping channels and soap operas and police shows. Gregory had started wishing she’d get a full-time job or some kind of hobby.

“How are the kitties?” Ema asked, returning to a recent topic, a population of stray cats in Gregory’s neighborhood.

“Still howling all night. It’s breeding season.”

Ema paused in chewing, the fork poised beside her mouth. “A friend of mine had a problem with stray cats. She caught them in what’s called a humane trap and—”

“What the hell is a humane trap?”

“It’s like a box made of wire mesh. The cat goes in and a door springs shut. Then off to the shelter.”

“I’ll consider it,” Gregory said, thinking a shotgun would be easier.

Ema’s fat breasts wobbled below the pendant as she turned to wave for the check, the ritual over for another few days. Ema picked up her purse, a beaded concoction the size of a bowler’s bag. Gregory watched her pudgy pink fingers scrabble for her wallet.

“It’s my turn to pick up the check, right, dear?” she said, staring into the junkyard of her purse.

“I’ll get it, Ema.”
I don’t have twenty minutes for you to find your wallet.
Though both had money from their inheritance, Gregory made additional money writing code for a company specializing in industrial controls. Ema had a part-time income doodling out chatty little women-directed newsletters for an HMO and insurance firm, and Gregory figured she did it while watching television.

The pair stood and Ema hugged Gregory so tight he smelled her body odor beneath the cloying perfume. After kissing his cheek – Gregory hiding the grimace – Ema waddled out to the parking lot.

Gregory went to the restroom and washed his hands for two minutes before opening the door with his elbow and striding toward the entrance. An elderly woman pushed the front door open and he jumped past her, drawing a sharp glance for the incivility, but he’d not had to touch anything.

On scene at the C-store until three a.m., I spent Sunday in busywork trying to push the attempted robbery from my mind. Sometimes it even worked for a couple minutes. When Monday arrived, I slept till nine, then walked the hundred paces from my stilt-standing home to the Dauphin Island beach, interrupting a flock of gulls and sending them into the cloudless sky.

I ran the sugar-white strand for three miles and returned, launching into the Gulf and swimming a leisurely down-and-back mile. Then I had breakfast on my deck – cheese grits and andouille sausage wrapped in a plate-sized flour tortilla, a grittito, in my parlance – and drank a pot of industrial-strength coffee with chicory. I felt steady again, Saturday night’s memories fading away. I climbed into a beater truck painted gray with a roller, and headed thirty miles north to Mobile, Alabama.

Almost summer, the coastal heat was nearing typical blast-furnace intensity, so walking into the chilled air of the Mobile Police Department felt delicious. Several colleagues called out as I walked the hall to the stairs.

“
Hey, Carson, I need a bag of pretzels.
”

“
Ryder
…
now that I know you moonlight at a C-store, how’s about bringing in the Krispy Kremes?
”

“
Yo, CR
…
I need fifteen bucks on pump three.
”

They were congratulating me, but being cops wouldn’t use those words. The accolades were in their grins. Or the thumbs up after the joke. I climbed the steps to the homicide department. Harry was on paid leave for three days, standard procedure for a cop involved in a killing.

“Carson!” a voice called. My supervisor, Lieutenant Tom Mason, stood at his office door, lean as a teenager though in his mid-fifties, wearing his cream Stetson and cowboy boots. Tom hailed from piney-woods Bama, but he always looked straight from a cattle drive across the plains. I banked in his direction.

“Chief Baggs wants to see you, Carson.”

I winced. “Why?”

“Probably something to do with last night. Make nice, Carson,” Tom said pointedly. “He’s the chief, right?”

I went upstairs to a hushed and carpeted row of offices inhabited by the brass hats of the department, crossing the floor with the same thought I get in funeral parlors:
Where’s the nearest exit?

Chief Baggs’s personal assistant sat at a desk outside the closed door of his corner office. Though Darlene Combs was only in her late thirties, she’d already buried two husbands, one a suicide, the other OD-ing at a Jimmy Buffett concert. Her green eyes always seemed as irritated as her hair was red. I studied her outfit: a blue skirt hiked high to display plump thighs she thought slender; a white silk blouse a size too small, to highlight a pair of odes to silicone; and an Evan Picone jacket, to show she didn’t have to wear the big box knock-offs worn by the women on the lower floors.