Ken liked to relax at the Mercury Café. No one there knew he was a killer. He could drop in for a coffee and a date square and sit in one of their dumpy club chairs and read the newspaper. No one would be talking business – explaining to him their beef with someone, and asking him how much it’d cost to have their beef turned into hamburger.
It was a slack day and he had time on his hands. He took out his mechanical pencil. It was a beautiful red Pentel he’d taken from an accountant who’d borrowed far more cocaine money than he’d budgeted for. He worked on a Sudoku puzzle. It was a beginner’s level because he wasn’t that good with numbers and if he got frustrated and started to hear the voices of his grade school math teacher echoing in his head, terrible things could happen.
As he worked on his puzzle, he nibbled on a date square. He patronized the Mercury Café because of their perfect date squares. If she weren’t dead, he could have believed his mother had made them. They had just the right amount of date filling, husk-free and not too sweet. They stuck together perfectly, so he could hold one in his free hand and eat it until it was gone and it wouldn’t fall apart on him. Some of these other places, you needed a whisk broom to finish the damn things.
He was sitting in his favorite chair in the back corner when a couple came in. The guy was maybe 21, 22, but looked like he’d got stuck in high school mode and couldn’t squirm out of it. He had a skateboard in one hand and a can of Red Bull in the other, tats up and down his arms and calves, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of those ridiculous baggy pants that came down to just below the knee.
There was a girl with him, she looked maybe 19 but stretching for a few years beyond, like she couldn’t wait to graduate from being a girl and turn into a beautiful young woman. She wore a sleeveless white cotton summer dress, briefly translucent as she was framed in the sunny entrance, and had a thick tangle of blonde hair that obscured her face.
They stood at the counter while the guy ordered a couple of coffees from the barrista. It was the end of the afternoon and the place was pretty busy so the good seats in the front half of the café were already taken. After they cased the joint and came to the same conclusion, they walked into the back and sat on the old sofa that was next to him.
The guy propped his skateboard against the sofa and put his feet on the coffee table. The girl sat beside him, but closer to Ken, keeping her knees together and smoothing her dress around her thighs as she settled in. Her tanned legs were the color of coffee ice cream. She carefully removed the lid from her takeout cup, took a brief sip and grimaced at the heat. She blew on the surface of the coffee and Ken noticed how pretty her lips were, pursed like that, as if she were blowing a kiss.
“Are you coming to Mom’s birthday party?” she asked the guy with her.
“I dunno. I want to go to a party in Oakville.”
“That skank you met on Facebook?” she said.
Annoying rap music erupted from somewhere inside the guy’s pants. He pulled out a cell phone and said, “Whazzup, bro?”
It turned into a long conversation, something about a girl that the caller had a hardon for, but it was apparently going nowhere fast…
Ken knew the feeling. Women didn’t dig him. It was like they had a sixth sense, they looked at his hands and knew he’d done so many bad things with them, and they couldn’t stand the thought of him touching them, and they ran away as fast he appeared on their horizon. He could write a book about unrequited love.
“Are you finished with that section of the paper?” the girl asked him.
Ken looked at her. She was looking at him. Her eyes were like emeralds with lights behind them. He was blinded, like a raccoon in the middle of the road, and a Jaguar bearing down on him. Whump. That was the sound of her tires running over his heart.
“Uh, yeah. Help yourself.”
She took the newspaper, the Entertainment section, and began to read the cover story.
Ken looked at the numbers on the Sudoku grid and couldn’t make sense of anything. His mind was like one of those paperweights that had been shaken, little snowflakes cascading down upon a landscape vaguely familiar and strange, hiding his tracks so that he wasn’t sure how he’d actually got here or how he was going to get home again.
The guy was still talking on the phone. Ken couldn’t believe how rude he was, ignoring the girl beside him. He understood from their three-line dialogue they were probably brother and sister, not boyfriend and girlfriend, but still. People with cell phones didn’t deserve to have friends, or family for that matter, if they were going to behave so badly.
Some days when Ken was in a bad mood he made lists of people he would kill for free. People who abused and abandoned their pets. Drivers who didn’t signal their turns. People who tossed litter on the sidewalks. Owners of very expensive cars who always seemed to have handicapped placards on their dashboards, but not a handicap in sight.
He looked at her again and wracked his brain for something to say. Her beauty was a frightening hurdle, like a mountain in the distance that he wanted to climb but knew that he would run out of oxygen and die before he reached its peak.
She turned the page in the newspaper, picked up her coffee, sipped it again, and her eyes drifted briefly his way.
“Would you like a date square?” he said to her, regretting it immediately. Could he have picked anything more ridiculous to say?
She looked at him and after a moment a crooked little smile appeared on her lips. “Who you calling a square?”
It took him a few seconds before he got it. Word play. She was messing with him. He liked that. His heart started pounding like a big bass drum.
“You’d never make it as a square,” he said. “Too many curves.”
“The better to roll with the punches,” she said.
“Anyone punched you,” he said, “I’d tear their arms off and club them to death with the stumps.”
“Ooh, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all day.”
“Did I…? Oh, I’m sorry. I thought I was only thinking it. Sometimes things slip out.”
“Yes, I know. It’s like that motherfucking Tourette’s Syndrome. Don’t you just hate when that happens?”
“Don’t get me started. There are so many things to hate.”
“You know what pisses me off?” she said. “Take a walk along Avenue Road, see how so many handicapped people seem to drive a BMW, a Mercedes or a Porsche. I’d like to line up the doctors who signed those permits and run over their legs with a bulldozer.”
Ken couldn’t believe his ears. It was both shocking and exciting to hear someone who thought so much like him. He stood up, but he wasn’t sure whether he should walk or run away. The last time he’d expressed an attraction for a woman, she’d called 911.
“Would you like something? Date square, chocolate brownie, macadamia nut cookie…?”
“What? I thought you were asking me for a date. Now who’s square?”
He stared down at her. Was she still messing with him? This was worse than Sudoku. The numbers didn’t add up. She was beautiful and innocent, and he was a beast with homicidal hands. What kind of children would they have?
Ken looked from her to the other end of the sofa, where the guy was now curled up like a pretzel, still on the phone. “I wouldn’t have said something like that, not when you’re with someone.”
She made a dismissive wave. “My idiot brother?” She looked at her watch. “We were supposed to catch up, on account of we haven’t seen each other, for like a month, but he’s been on the phone all this time and now my break’s over and I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Where’s that?”
“The Gap on the next block.”
She stood up, made the universal thumb-and-pinkie signal to her brother. Call me, asshole. And walked out.
Ken followed her into the sunlight. Briefly, it was like something out of a movie, where the earthlings step out of the spaceship and the new world is all bright and shiny and marvelous and they know somehow everything’s going to be all right.
He saw it too late to warn her. Some idiot had left a juice bottle lying on the second step. She slipped on it and would have taken a header onto the sidewalk if Ken hadn’t reached out with reptilian reflex and grabbed her bicep in his hand. He held her steady until she was on the sidewalk.
“Oh my God, your hands are so amazingly strong.” She looked up at him with gratitude. “And warm.”
“Thank you.”
“You can let go now.”
“Sorry.” His mother had always said, you find what you want in life, you hold onto it tight and never let it go. He wondered about that sometimes, and why she hadn’t held onto her own life, instead of spiraling down the drain in a swirl of cheap wine.
“I’ve got to get back to work.” She pointed down the street.
“What’s your name?”
“Barb.”
“I’m Ken.”
“Barbie and Ken.” She smiled. “My friends are going to rip me a new one over that.”
It took him a few moments before he got it. Was she making fun of him? He looked at her, still standing there, smiling with teeth from a dental ad, waiting for him to say something clever…
“What time do you get off work?”
“Six.”
“Would you like to go to dinner with me?”
“Only if you’ve got a lot of money, because I am really hungry. Not to mention, thirsty.”
“I have money.” It had been a good month. He’d killed two guys and he had another one to do this afternoon, although he wouldn’t get paid until tomorrow.
“If you’ve got the money, honey, I got the time.”
Ken had to control himself from having a nostalgic meltdown right then and there. His mother used to sing that song when he was a kid, and waltz him off his feet around the kitchen in their shitty little two-bedroom apartment, until he got too big for her and she got too drunk to dance.
Ken looked at his watch. “How about if I meet you right back here when you get off work?”
“Deal.” She offered her hand.
Reluctantly, he shook hands with her, feeling her little palm swallowed up inside his big paw. Her hand was very warm and slightly moist, like a burrito that had just come out of the microwave.
“Okay, I’ll see you later.”
“You know, maybe I shouldn’t say this,” she said, “but you have awesome hands. They give me the shivers, you know, in a nice way.”
“I get that a lot,” he lied, and he knew by the way she laughed that she knew he was full of it and she didn’t care. She waved bye and headed off toward the Gap.
He turned and walked away. He gritted his teeth, telling himself not to get all mushy and look back at her. He started to hum a tune to himself, observing the debate going on between his ears. There was the old Ken who insisted she’d stand him up and he’d never see her again, and there was the new Ken who believed he’d see her for dinner tonight, and then who knows what could happen…
He walked back to his car, a 14-year-old white Volvo – solid, dependable and unremarkable, very much like himself. He got inside and drove across town to Danforth Avenue where he parked on Logan in the heart of Greektown. It was wall-to-wall restaurants and bars and cafés for half a dozen blocks along this stretch. It was a warm and sunny September afternoon and there were lots of people on the terraces. He found the restaurant he wanted and went inside and saw the guy sitting there with a couple of friends. He was wearing a yellow shirt that stuck out like a banana in a haystack. Perfect.
Ken checked his watch and walked back to his car. He knew the guy had to be somewhere else at five o’clock, and he’d have to leave soon. But if Ken had his way, he wouldn’t get far.
He got back inside his Volvo and opened the glove compartment to take out a pair of flesh-colored latex gloves. He pulled them on and then reached under his seat to take out the gun. It was a .22-caliber Comanche revolver with a 9-shot magazine. They were pretty cheap and he bought them by the six-pack for a discount. The originals had 6-inch barrels but he’d taken a hacksaw to all of them and cut two inches off the muzzles. All the work he did was close up and personal, and he didn’t need a gunsight to hit a frontal lobe.
He got out of the car and slipped on the double-breasted blue blazer with the gold buttons that he kept in the car for his work. He looked around to make sure no one was looking and stuck the gun into his waistband. He took a pair of sunglasses from the dash and slipped them on.
He opened the back door and picked up a soda can from the floor. He’d stuffed it lightly full of cat hair that he’d accumulated from weekly brushings of his 12-year-old Angora cat, whose name was Boston Blackie. The rate at which Blackie was shedding was sufficient to handle about three hits a month, and since Ken rarely achieved such a level of business, he had a bale of hair at home, enough to stuff a couple of pillows or knit a few sweaters.
He locked the car and headed back to the Danforth, occasionally raising the soda can to his lips and pretending to take a sip from it, but all he got was a whiff of pussy hair. Typical. Sometimes a whiff, rarely a taste. But all that could change…
He glanced at himself in the window of a storefront. Lookin’ sharp, man, like a car salesman in a recession, all dressed up and no place to go. A couple of songs danced through his head, competing for his attention. He’s a real nowhere man, working with his awesome hands… And those bearded Texas bluesmen, singing Everybody talkin’ ‘bout a sharp-dressed man…
He was a hundred feet away from the restaurant when the banana shirt stepped out onto the sidewalk. That was one thing Ken had, it was a sense of timing, like he was right in lockstep with destiny. He followed Mr. Banana a dozen stores down the street, and stood looking in the window of a bookstore until the guy re-emerged from a convenience store. Mr. Banana tore the cellophane off a pack of cigarettes, ripped out the foil-wrap sleeve and lit a cigarette with a lighter. He crumpled the waste in his fist and threw it half-heartedly at a trash bin, totally missing the waste paper aperture, and the garbage fell onto the sidewalk.
Ken gritted his teeth, picked up the litter and placed it in the Paper & Plastic compartment. It wasn’t much, but it was the principle of the thing. What was the matter with people these days?
He followed the guy around the corner onto Carlaw. A dark blue Porsche Cayenne was illegally parked in a commercial zone. Its lights blinked, its horn made a little toot, and its engine started up as Mr. Banana approached it. Ken crossed the street with him, glancing around him as he went. No innocent bystanders to witness what was about to happen, the nearest pedestrians on Danforth a good twenty yards away.
Mr. Banana opened the door and slipped behind the wheel. Ken was just five steps behind him. He saw it was a Cayenne Turbo, which listed for about $125K. Interestingly enough, there was a big blue Handicapped placard lying on the front dash. Oooh, bonus points!
He caught the door just before Mr. Banana swung it shut and in one smooth movement he pulled the Comanche from under his jacket, jammed its barrel into the mouth of the soda can and popped the guy one right under the armpit. The home-made silencer burped discreetly. The guy leaned away from him, pawing the air like he was trying to shoo away a bumblebee, and his voice gagged in his throat, like the noise Blackie made when he was trying to cough up a hairball. Ken grabbed the flapping hand, held it tight for a moment, and popped the guy another one right in the temple.
There was no big splat from an exit wound because a .22 didn’t have the power to do more than one cranial wall. The slug just went in and bounced around once or twice and that was all she wrote. The Cayenne’s cream leather interior would be left unspoiled and the wife could either keep the ride or, if she felt any guilt about it, sell it like new.
“Now you’ve got a real handicap,” Ken told the dead guy.
He kept the soda can but dropped the gun on the floor and closed the door. He looked around. Not a soul was looking in his direction. He’d always been lucky that way too. He walked back to Danforth and headed for his car. He stopped at one of the litter bins and inserted the soda can into the compartment marked Cans and Bottles. He peeled off the latex gloves as he walked along the sidewalk, glancing at the happy couples eating pikilia and drinking wine.
There was a small square at the corner of Danforth and Logan dedicated to Alexander the Great. Ken put the gloves in the Garbage compartment of another litter bin. A place for everything, and everything in its place, his mother used to say. Just that he’d never understood why she had to go so soon to the place most people tried to avoid.
He unlocked the Volvo, took off his jacket and laid it flat in the back seat. He was hungry and there was a souvlaki joint right there on the square, but it was already after five, and he didn’t want to spoil his appetite.
As he headed back downtown, he ran through a short list in his mind of places where he could take Barb for dinner. But mostly, he wondered what he’d tell her when she asked him what he did for a living.
– The End ‑
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Did you like this short story? Want to try something longer, with a whole lot more action? Read some of the reviews for my novel Harm’s Way:
“For Canadian writers setting hard-boiled stories in Canada, the closest thing yet to a US-style private eye is Montreal investigator Lee Harms in Harm’s Way by Alan Annand.” – David Skene-Melvin in Rara-Avis
“Harm’s Way is a solid P.I. thriller, a nastier-than-you’d-expect slab of pornography, cocaine, gangsters, incest, madness, torture and vengeance.” – Thrilling Detective
“Energy, superior punch-‘em out sequences, and humor.” – Kirkus Reviews
“Underneath the New Age trappings, divorced ex-cop Harms is plenty hard-boiled, using fists, guns and sheer wit to escape the many tight spots here.” – Publisher’s Weekly
Harm’s Way
A private investigator searches for the runaway daughter of an aspiring politician only to find that, on or off the campaign trail, honesty is the rarest commodity. As mystery descends into mayhem and murder, he confronts an unsettling truth – the innocents are always the first victims.
Kindle: www.amazon.com/Harms-Way-ebook/dp/B005LVXIA2
Other: www.smashwords.com/books/view/86740
Sextile 