Howard Shrier - Buffalo jump

The pain in Ricky’s hand was radiating out of the meaty part below the pinky. The tendons of the pinky and ring finger couldn’t be seen for the bluish swelling around them. One bad punch, that’s all, after Kevin admitted how much money he’d skimmed. Kevin ducked and Ricky’s right hand slammed the back of the chair the miserable fuck was tied to. That’s when Ricky taped Kevin’s mouth and stuck him the first time, using a boning knife from Kevin’s own drawer, watching his eyes widen like some kind of scared pack animal. His mouth strained against the tape but it was past time for words. Past time for money. It was duct tape time. Knife time.

Poor Kevin was on Ricky’s dance card.

Ricky had always liked knives. He had been killing with them since he was eight or nine, starting with frogs in a creek that ran between boulders on a wooded lot in Bethany, where he had grown up, east of Buffalo and north of Attica Correctional Facility. He’d throw his penknife at big bullfrogs, try to pin them to the dirt where they sat. He killed a mouse that got caught in a trap his dad had set in the mudroom, where you always heard them scurrying around in the walls. The mouse tried to fend Ricky off with its ridiculous little paws until he cut them off.

The first time he killed a cat, he didn’t mean to. He was playing with it and it scratched him pretty badly. Okay, maybe he had been a little rough but that was no cause to rake him like that. He stuck the cat through the throat with a switchblade an older cousin had brought back from a trip to Mexico. Ricky loved the sound the blade made as it flicked out of the side. Later he learned that stilettos made better work tools because the blade comes straight out of the tip. Palm it, get up close to someone, and snick, there’s a blade at their throat. Their groin. Their eye.

While he respected guns for their utility in work situations, and knew how to care for and use them, he didn’t have the same feeling for them that he had for knives. Knives were quiet. They didn’t send neighbours running to the phone. They were easy to get, easy to hide, and the penalties for carrying them were mild compared to guns. Knives didn’t shatter windows or kill pedestrians if you missed. They didn’t have serial numbers, require ammo or cost a grand on the street.

And he could play with a knife. He could cut a man plenty of times before he killed him, as long as he had a working gag. How could a gun compare to that? A gun put you off at a distance. A knife brought contact and intimacy. It invited you to dance.

He killed his first man at eighteen. After all the frogs, the mice, the cats, the friendly little mutt he’d come across in the Bethany woods, he had to do a person. He had to know what it felt like. He bought a grey lightweight raincoat at a thrift store, matched it with an old cap and runners, and set out looking for a vagrant or drifter no one would miss. He walked around under an elevated section of the New York State Thruway for hours, carrying a bottle of cheap sherry in a brown paper bag, waiting for full dark, watching, scouting, noting who hung in groups and who kept to themselves. What they were drinking, how much and how fast. Who was big and who was small. Who had cuts and bruises on their faces from losing past fights. Who had them on their hands from winning.

Near midnight he found his man: a loner, about sixty, shuffling slowly along in boots that had no laces, heavy duffle bags weighing down both shoulders. The sole of the right boot flapped as he walked. Ricky stayed well back of him, swigging from the bottle every now and then, spitting most of it back down the bottle neck. He wanted to look like he was drinking but didn’t want to be drunk. Whatever happened, he wanted to remember every second.

Men gathered near pillars supporting the expressway, finding what shelter they could from the wind. Ricky saw shapes huddled under thin grey blankets that looked like they’d been stolen from shelters. Empty mickeys and bottles were strewn in the dirt, along with malt liquor cans and plastic rings from six-packs.

The old loner was a hundred yards ahead, kneeling against a fence that kept people off the Thruway, making up a little bed of discarded newspaper and cardboard. Then he sat and took a foam container out of a plastic bag and began shoving some kind of Italian food in his mouth with filthy fingers. Ricky gagged. This isn’t even a man, he told himself. It’s an animal, no different from the cats, the dog, even the brainless mouse he had dismembered. It eats like an animal. It smells like an animal. The closer Ricky got to this thing, the ranker its smell became, a mix of piss, puke, tomato sauce, more puke, tobacco and God knew what else.

Ricky let the paper bag slip down off his bottle as he walked past, and let his gait become more unsteady. If the guy was anything short of blind, he’d see a natural mark-a moonfaced kid looking drunk and vulnerable-with a nearly full bottle in his hand. If that didn’t get someone’s darker nature fired up, they plain didn’t have one.

Ricky Messina’s father was Sicilian but his mother was from the north and he had her colouring: dark blond hair and green eyes. His face was so round that kids used to call him Moon Face and Mooney before he gained some size and built it up hard in gymnasiums inside and outside prison. To this day people who didn’t know Ricky might look at his open face and think him pleasant. That suited Ricky just fine.

As Ricky stumbled along the fence, trying to look drunk, like he was barely keeping his balance, he heard footsteps fall in behind him, heard the flapping of a leather sole against the ground. Ricky let go of the fence and reached in for his knife: not a stiletto back then, but a steel hunting knife bought secondhand at a surplus store. The bottle in one hand, the knife in the other, Ricky leaned back against the fence. He felt ready. He kept his eyes half closed as if passing out, but through lowered lids he watched the animal approach, hefting a chunk of concrete in one filthy hand. Ricky had learned patience killing animals; he waited until the bum raised the rock to bring down on Ricky’s head and stepped deftly aside. The bum’s hand came smacking down on a fence rail and he dropped the rock with a hoarse lupine cry.

Ricky spun the bum around, the bum older than he’d looked from a distance, closer to seventy than sixty. His beard was grey except around the mouth, where nicotine had stained it orange. One eye was covered by a filmy cataract. “Drink?” Ricky asked, and smashed the bottle across his face. The bum howled again, louder, but Ricky knew no one would care. Breaking glass means nothing but bad news to drunks.

Ricky then made his only mistake of the night: he stuck the man in the throat. Arterial blood sprayed Ricky from forehead to sternum. Blood in his face, in his eyes, God, on his lips and in his mouth, seething with the animal’s vile germs. AIDS, Hep C, TB, they all flashed through Ricky’s mind as he pulled the knife out of the man and shoved him to the ground. In thirteen years since that night, Ricky had never made that mistake again. If he needed to kill quickly, he did it from behind. If he had time, he knew where to put the knife so it neither sprayed nor killed too quickly.

When the phone rang, it was a long-distance signal: the man himself calling from Canada. Ricky let it ring once while he drained his Scotch; again while he prepared himself. Let the man vent, he told himself. Don’t take any bait. There’s too much keeping us together. He won’t blow you out of the water.

He answered it right after the third ring and didn’t speak again for three minutes.

Ricky had been listening to a terrific book-on-tape in the car lately: The Manager Inside Me. He thought it could really help a forward thinker like him define his goals more precisely and hack and slash his way toward them. While the man in Toronto was tearing strips off him every which way, Ricky stayed calm and detached. The Manager Inside Me had a chapter on that very subject, “Accepting Constructive Criticism.”