David Jackson - Pariah

Inside, there is a single sheet of paper, folded once. He opens it up and reads the typewritten text:

Bang. You’re dead.

Alvarez feels his heart pound harder. He senses that he’s been dropped into the middle of a situation he doesn’t fully understand. He doesn’t know whether to be afraid or angry.

He glares hard at Cavell and flaps the note at him. ‘You write this, Tremaine? This your idea of a fucking joke?’

Cavell is shifting his weight from foot to foot. ‘I don’t even know what’s in the fucking note, man. Just take it and leave, okay? I done my part. Take the note and get the fuck out of here. That’s what’s supposed to happen.’

Alvarez shakes his head in an effort to clear his confusion. ‘What are you talking about? What do you mean: supposed to happen? I ain’t going nowhere until you start talking some sense.’

Cavell just stares back. His eyes are bulging. His chest is heaving.

And then he does something totally bizarre.

He begins talking to himself.

Or, rather, to an imagined person behind him.

He twists his head so that it is angled over his shoulder and says, ‘We done, right? I done what you said. We straight now.’

Alvarez whips his gun out. He doesn’t know why, or what he is going to do with it, but it seems the prudent thing to do in the face of this insanity.

He levels the gun at Cavell’s face. ‘What’s going on, Tremaine? Talk to me, man.’

Cavell continues to stare and to suck hard on the air, like he’s having trouble getting enough oxygen into his system. Alvarez rushes toward him and puts the gun to his nose, squashing it against his face.

‘Who you talking to, Tremaine?’

He puts his left hand around Cavell’s throat and forces him back against the wall. Cavell almost screams his protest: ‘My back, man! Watch my back!’

The shock of Cavell’s cries sends Alvarez reeling away from him.

He looks Cavell up and down and thinks, I frisked the guy. He’s not strapped. What did I miss?

It strikes him then how warm it is in this apartment. The heating is turned up high. And yet Cavell — the man who earlier today was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt in near-freezing conditions — is now hiding his muscles under a zip-up sweatshirt.

Alvarez takes up a two-handed shooting stance, the gun aimed at the exact center of Cavell’s chest.

‘Take off the sweater,’ he orders.

‘What? No, man.’

‘Do it, Tremaine, or I start shooting.’

Cavell’s eyes seem to shiver in their sockets.

‘Do it!’ Alvarez barks.

Slowly, shakily, Cavell reaches for his zip and starts to slide it down. He talks over his shoulder again. ‘I have to do what the cop is asking. Don’t do nothing now, okay? Stay cool.’

He takes off the sweater, lets it drop to the floor.

‘Now the shirt,’ Alvarez says.

Cavell consults his invisible friend again. ‘It’s okay, man. This ain’t nothing. Just ride it out.’

He pulls the T-shirt over his head and lets that drop too. His muscular torso glistens with a sheen of perspiration.

‘Turn around,’ Alvarez tells him.

Cavell swallows, his eyes saying to Alvarez, I hope you know what you’re doing.

Slowly, he turns to face the wall, and that’s when Alvarez sees it.

The package is taped high up, nestling in the deep channel between Cavell’s shoulder blades. The hooded top had covered the bulge, and Alvarez had missed it in the pat-down.

Shit!

Alvarez raises his eyes from the sights of his gun and refocuses on the package. There are wires — for a microphone of some kind. Somebody has been listening in to everything that has been said in this apartment.

But this isn’t just a listening device.

Alvarez recalls what was in the note. The note which Cavell hasn’t yet seen. .

. . and that’s when he decides it’s the moment to get out of here.

In that instant, time slows to a trickle. Alvarez turns toward the door. Run, he tells his legs. Run like fuck!

But it is like trying to swim through treacle. He can see where he needs to be, and he knows what he needs to do to get there, but he’s like a toy with a dying battery.

A sudden realization descends on him that he will never reach his goal. Not like this. Not unless he can sprout wings and fly.

And then his wish comes true. He is flying. Flying while the heat and the light and the pressure overwhelm his body and tear it apart.

Sitting in the hired Ford van, behind its blacked-out windows, the man listens to the reverberations of what he has just done.

His finger is still on the button, pressing so hard that the nail has turned white. He removes it, watches the blood rush back.

It worked. There were moments when he had his doubts, when he worried that he was trying to be too clever, too ingenious.

He had worried, too, about the amount of explosive to use. A bigger charge could have been stashed in the apartment somewhere, but it carried the risk that Cavell would have run away from it at the first opportunity. Turning Cavell into a human bomb like that, along with a microphone that would reveal any attempt to remove the package, was a stroke of genius. He can still picture the moment when he told Cavell. He’d put a gun to Cavell’s head, forced him against the wall, slapped the bundle onto his back. Stepping away, his gun still raised, he revealed to Cavell what he’d just done. The expression of disbelief and horror on the pimp’s face was so exaggerated it was comical.

Even with Cavell’s big muscles and the hooded sweater there was only so much explosive that could be taped to him without it being obvious, but that didn’t matter. C-4 detonates at a velocity of 18,000 miles per hour. You don’t need much of that shit to take out a whole roomful of people.

And if Alvarez had found it, so what? It would have simply meant pressing the button that little bit sooner.

But Alvarez missed it in the frisk, didn’t he? A trained cop, years on the job, and he missed it. Ha! How delicious was that?

It meant that the message could be delivered, offering Alvarez the chance to puzzle over what it was he had done wrong. And yet he suspected nothing. Even when confronted with the reason for his imminent demise, he was still too stupid to grasp its implications.

It meant too that the note could be given to Alvarez, allowing him to contemplate the sounding of his death knell.

But above all, it meant that everything that Alvarez said and did right up to the moment of his annihilation could be overheard.

The man in the Ford leans back and reviews his accomplishment here tonight. He feels like he should be lighting up a cigarette, the way they do in the movies after great sex. In the distance he can hear sirens, and he knows he will have to drive away soon. But he will allow himself to revel for a moment longer. This has been so much more satisfying than the killing of Joe Parlatti.

When the phone rings, Doyle doesn’t know where he is. As he reaches out to his bed table he blinks his eyes until the hazy lights on his clock sharpen into recognizable numerals.

It is five-thirty in the morning.

Shit, he thinks. Telephone calls at this time of day carry only bad news. There’s a law about it somewhere.

Next to him, Rachel groans her disapproval and pulls the duvet over her head. When Doyle’s fumbling hands finally locate the handset, he answers the call with a mouth that feels like it’s filled with cotton wool.

‘Hello?’

‘Cal? It’s Mo.’

The tone is subdued.

‘Okay, Mo, what is it?’

There’s a lengthy pause. ‘It’s not good, Cal. There’s no easy way to tell you this.’