Doug Allyn: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 835 & 836, March/April 2011

There was a man’s voice from deeper inside the house. This man was yelling to someone named Tony, asking him what was happening. Charlie moved quickly and stealthily towards that voice, and Patrick followed him, his mind still refusing to accept the events that he had witnessed.

As they moved through the house, a man walked out of a bathroom. He was bigger than the man Charlie had earlier shot, taller and wider in the shoulders, and he must’ve been the one who had been shouting out to someone named Tony. His eyes grew wide as he saw Charlie. Before he could reach for the gun he had tucked away in his waistband, Charlie fired three rounds, each of them leaving expanding red dots on the man’s chest. He toppled backwards. Charlie moved to him so he could search through the dead man’s pockets. He was doing this when a noise sounded from behind Patrick.

“Goddamn it, kid,” Charlie growled in exasperation. “There’s someone behind you! Do your job as backup!”

Without even realizing he was doing it, Patrick started firing his gun as he turned. Like Charlie, his gun had a silencer attached to it, and the bullets made only a soft puff as they hit their target. It was a girl. She was unarmed, no older than twenty, and was half naked, wearing only a pair of panties. She must have stepped out of a bedroom to see what was happening. Patrick had shot her twice in the stomach, and she collapsed on the floor and moaned in agony. Charlie pulled a thick roll of bills from the dead man’s pocket and gave Patrick a disgusted look. Patrick stood paralyzed as the girl writhed on the floor nearby.

“What’s the matter with you, kid? You going to let that poor girl suffer?”

Charlie waited for Patrick to act. When he didn’t, Charlie walked over to the girl and shot her once in the temple. She stopped moving then. Patrick must’ve gone into shock, because everything became dreamlike after that. Charlie taking his gun from him, the two of them leaving the house, Charlie giving him the car keys and telling him to drive, saying that he was to drop Charlie off at the strip mall in Paterson where he had left his Escalade and then lose the car at an address in Newark. It wasn’t until Charlie had taken a flask from his jacket pocket and made Patrick drink from it that the world snapped back into focus. He started shivering then, his arms shaking as he gripped the wheel. Charlie had him take another swig of the bourbon that was in the flask.

“Kid, you must’ve figured out by now that I did more than just muscle in my younger days,” Charlie said, his voice flat, a weariness softening it. “The thing is, it don’t matter if you become a bestselling crime novelist, once you’re in you’re in, and you stay in until they nail the coffin lid shut on you.”

They sat in silence while Patrick drove. After several minutes of this Patrick muttered under his breath, calling Charlie a lousy stinking bastard.

“What was that?”

“You’re a lousy stinking bastard,” Patrick repeated, his voice louder, but sounding odd, as if it weren’t really coming from him. “You drag me to a mob hit?”

“Kid, you better watch your mouth. I like you and I’d rather not knock those pearly whites out of your mouth.” Charlie pushed a thick hand across his eyes and let out a heavy sigh. “About dragging you to this hit, I’m sorry about that, kid, but it couldn’t be helped. Somehow I lost track of the date. You’ll see when you’re my age. That stuff happens. But the hit had to go down tonight and I needed backup and didn’t have time to arrange anything else. You did a crappy job shooting that broad in the stomach like that, but here, for your troubles.”

Charlie tried to hand Patrick the roll of bills he had taken off the second man he had shot inside the house. When Patrick wouldn’t take it, Charlie shoved the money into Patrick’s jacket pocket.

“There’s over two grand there,” Charlie said. “Don’t be a schmuck. Yeah, I know, you’re upset about that broad. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone else in the house except for those two mooks I took out. In a way it’s a shame she was there. That broad had a nice rack on her. But in another way, it was a damn lucky break. If she wasn’t there and things didn’t go down the way they did, I would’ve had to leave you in a landfill tonight with your brains leaking out of your skull, and I like you, kid, and I’m glad I don’t have to do that.”

They didn’t say another word to each other after that until Patrick pulled up next to Charlie’s Escalade at the strip-mall parking lot where they had earlier left it. Charlie put a hand on Patrick’s arm. He said, “Kid, be over at the house tomorrow at seven. I’ll have Eunice make a lasagna the way you like it with chopped up sausage. Afterwards I’ll introduce you to some guys. Whether you like it or not, you’re in now, but I’ll take care of you and make sure you get treated properly. And this is what your writing needed. I’m sure of it. You’ll see that I’m right.”

Charlie nodded to Patrick and left the car. After the car door closed, Patrick headed off towards Newark without looking back at the other man. For a long time all he could feel was sick to his stomach as he replayed in his mind what went down in that house. He kept seeing the faces and the gaping wounds of the people they had killed. Especially that girl’s. She was so young, and even when he squeezed his eyes closed he’d see her as she lay on the floor with her guts leaking out of her stomach. At some point before he reached Newark his thoughts had shifted away from those killings and to his novel. Almost as if a light switch had been flipped on, he saw clearly how he needed to rewrite the bank heist scene so that it would have the same type of realism that he loved so much in Charlie Valtrone’s novels. He started getting excited over the prospect of doing this. By the time he ditched the car at the address he was given, all he could think about was getting home and working on his novel. He also found himself salivating over the thought of Eunice’s lasagna with chopped sausage.

Copyright © 2011 by Dave Zeltserman