Scar Tissue(8)
"Right," Sammy said. "I forgot."
"Rack ‘em," I said.
#
The rope was dark blue with green flecks. My gloves were black. Four hundred feet below, the highway was a river of light, the rush of steel a distant murmur.
My legs wrapped around the cord, but it was my arms that drove the descent. Slide, lower, slide. Slow and easy. The first apartments were dark, only my reflection staring back, a vague ghost.
On the thirty-seventh floor the ice-blue glow of a TV revealed a living room. Framed posters on primer-white walls. On the couch, a couple sat together. The man said something that made the woman laugh and fit herself more tightly under his arm.
I tried to remember the last time I'd laughed, but all I could think of was sticky sheets tangled around our calves and the hum of the air conditioner in the window.
#
If you were looking for specialized help and knew who to ask, they might tell you to talk to us. Sammy the planner, good with electronics, surveillance, computers. Dexter the point man, the finisher. Though word was old Dex had slipped lately. Gone soft, now making rent as a thief, cue the violins.
Sherry had known who to ask.
We'd arranged to meet her in the revolving bar on top of the Westin, anonymous amidst fat men auditioning trophy wives and tourists snapping pictures. The sunset skyline blazed like a funeral pyre.
I'd heard of Vincennes. Everyone had. Arms trader, drug dealer, middleman. Not the top dog, but certainly well up in the pack, and his teeth were supposed to be sharp. So his wife I'd imagined as a diamond: sparkle without softness, perfect and unreachable.
Instead I saw a frightened girl whose makeup didn't quite cover thumb-width bruises on her neck.
"Cash," she'd said. "A lot of it. It's supposed to go out the next day."
"Where?"
"I don't know. El Salvador. Afghanistan." She twisted her napkin. "I just pick up what I can. He doesn't tell me anything."
"Why?" I asked.
She looked surprised. "He doesn't really see me."
"No," I said, "why do you want us to rip off your husband?"
She looked at her plate, brushed a lock of hair behind one perfect ear.
"Sherry?" I leaned forward on my elbows. "Why not just leave?"
"Where?" She barely whispered. She looked up, reached out to touch my forearm. "I never meant to be here. I just want…" She paused. "I want to start again." Her gaze held mine, and in her eyes I saw myself reflected.
#
The thief thing was new, a way to buttress dwindling finances. We used to offer a much more specialized service.
Then I stopped killing.
In the movies, when the assassin quits, it's always because of some dramatic fuckup. A child in the line of fire. A contract who turns out to be a friend.
The truth is simpler.
Sammy and I were the most sought-after hit team working the South. We'd done Big Oil V.P.s in Dallas and Cuban drug runners in Miami. While Sammy scrambled security cameras, I'd once scraped a straightened clothes hanger through the ear of a Nashville singer planning to move to a rival record label.
We made prestige kills, big scores, and lived like it. Flash pads, beautiful cars, fast women. Nothing meant anything. Put your thumbs through the eyes of an aspiring city councilman in the Ritz bathroom, snap the blood off your hands, go finish your eggs Benedict and wait for the screaming to start. Sammy once bet a homeless guy twenty grand that he couldn't sprint across the highway and back with his eyes closed. Then shot him when he made it. Sammy never did know when to quit.
It all became routine.
Then one morning, a bright blue day like any other, I woke from a dream where I was holding a man's head in a bathtub, crimson water splashing as he struggled to break the surface. My fingers dug into his pressure points, controlling his body, and all I could think about was how huge the score was going to be, how this was the one I'd been waiting for, the one I'd always wanted. Eventually he went limp, and I shouldered the body up and over to float in the tub, which was when I realized it was me staring back at me, and smiling.
"What," Sammy had drawled when I told him, "God came by, said you were on the naughty list?"
"Sort of," I said. "I think I'm done."
Only it hadn't been religion I'd found. It had been her.
Even before I met her, I'd known she was coming.
#
Georgia heat drove a bead of sweat through the long slow run down my side. A squeal of brakes and a car horn rose from far below. I wove the rope back and forth between my legs and shook out my arms. Paused, closed my eyes. Then I bent at the waist, the rope bowing back, gripped just below my feet, and unrolled like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat, ending up hanging head-down three hundred feet over a glimmering highway.