Patrick Quinlan - The Hit

Well, this probably qualified as an emergency – he was hiding out from bounty hunters at his mom’s house! Gant would probably pop a blood vessel if he knew where Foerster was calling from, but hey, pay phones could be hard to come by in this day and age. Anyway, Foerster needed to get a message to Gant that he was no longer where he said he’d be, and that he needed to be picked up quick before he got put away again. The fastest way to do that seemed to be by telephone.

But it was a risk. Phone calls were easy to trace, and Gant had said in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want the cops to have any way to connect them. Well, fuck it. If Gant wanted him to do the job, then he needed to know where Foerster was. If he sent one of his men over to Foerster’s apartment, Foerster wasn’t going to be there. And Foerster couldn’t wait around here forever, wondering when Gant would send somebody – he had fucking people on his trail, man.

Shit. Foerster could not understand why everything always got so fucked up. It seemed like the simplest thing would suddenly take a turn and head off down some trail toward disaster. It was the story of his life. By all accounts, he was a genius. From his earliest days, he had a tested IQ in the 150s. It was at the far right end of the bell curve, where fewer than one percent of the population could be found. He could sleepwalk through school – without even trying, he was done with the sixth grade curriculum before the end of fourth grade.

This wasn’t good enough. His father had wanted an athlete, a football player, not some scrawny kid with a big brain. Foerster’s drunken bum of a father had taken to calling him Nancy Boy, and beating him with a leather strap. When had this started? He wasn’t even sure. It seemed like his first memory was of a huge, red-faced beast standing over him, the smell of mingled beer and whiskey in Foerster’s face, the smack of the leather loud in his ears, the sting of the whip on his skin, and his father saying, ‘I’ll make a fucking man out of you yet.’ If there was a hell, Foerster hoped the old man was roasting there right this minute.

But his father had only been the start of his problems. It seemed that nobody in this entire world wanted a smart kid. Having intelligence made you some kind of a freak. Nobody ever liked Foerster. His school teachers hated him – probably, they knew he was smarter than they were, and were envious of him. The other kids? Forget about it. If they noticed him at all, it was to throw rocks at him, or chase him home, or hold him down and punch his legs until he got painful Charley Horses. He’d show up at the house bruised and battered, and his father would laugh and say, ‘Serves you right for not fighting back.’

If Foerster had been dumb enough to believe in God, he’d say that God was testing him like He’d tested Job. Almost nothing had turned out right as far back as Foerster could remember. That is, until he met Tyler Gant. Although Gant’s personality left something to be desired, and Gant’s tough-guy authority act chafed on Foerster, the time he had worked for Gant had probably been the one thing that had gone well in more than twenty-five wasted years.

Gant had used Foerster’s brains the way they were meant to be used, working him to his highest level. He had shown Foerster at least a dollop of respect, and had paid him what he was worth. Their project had come off without a hitch, and they had made history together. Foerster had watched the news coverage for days, silently bursting with pride, almost unable to contain himself. At the Illinois state house, politicians and their staff members – blood ticks sucking on the near-dead carcass of this diseased country – were dying of anthrax.

Foerster wanted to go a bar and have a few drinks and say to someone, some stranger, ‘See that? See what they did? That was me. I was on that team. I grew that stuff.’ He wanted to call his mother and tell her all about it. He wanted to dig up his old man and rub it in his face. But of course, he could never talk about it with anyone, ever, the rest of his days. About the only person he could possibly talk about it with was Gant himself, but Gant had told him to stay out of communication. One day, Gant said, he would be the one to reinitiate contact.

Foerster never imagined two cruel years would pass before he heard from Gant again. The world had slid further into the abyss during that time, and Foerster had slid with it. He had nearly forgotten about Gant, about the feelings of achievement, of being a winner that had come with working for him. Then a brief note, no return address, had appeared in Foerster’s mailbox. Although Foerster had moved three times since last they spoke, Gant had found him. Got some work for you (maybe). Same terms as before, times 2. Will send someone. Burn this letter. TG.

Same terms, times two – that was awesome. Foerster had made $25,000 on that job, for two weeks of work. He had received ten percent in cash before he ever did anything. That meant he would get $50,000 from this job, and $5,000 as an advance. Foerster had been in and out of jail in the months since that first note had arrived, but other notes had come since then. The time was getting close – Foerster could expect someone to pick him up any day.

Until yesterday, when those two clowns had crashed into the middle of Foerster’s plans like a bulldozer, he hadn’t realized how much he was looking forward to working for Gant again. As he slid the business card onto the table and closed his eyes, Foerster committed himself – he would do whatever was necessary to keep out of jail and get back to working with Gant.

Jonah felt exposed.

It was early the next morning. He and Gordo were parked in St. George, a few blocks from the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. They sat at the corner of Richmond Terrace and a quiet side street of shabby homes. Traffic was busy on Richmond Terrace, a weird parade of bicycles, motor scooters belching exhaust, a few cars and many people, some pushing along carts of various kinds. Diagonally across from Jonah and Gordo was a convenience store. A hand-lettered sign in the window read ‘CASHIER LEGALLY ARMED.’ Jonah wasn’t sure if that sign made life safer or more dangerous for the cashier.

From the passenger seat, Jonah pointed a big parabolic microphone at a house maybe fifty yards down the side street. The house was a ramshackle place, with light-blue aluminum siding that had seen too many winters. The microphone protruded from its base like a long black phallus, and was surrounded by a clear plastic half-dome. Jonah gripped it by its handle, which was rather like that of a gun. The mike was plugged into a tape cassette player sitting between them, which in turn was powered by the car’s cigarette lighter. The whole rig looked somewhat like a satellite dish, or perhaps like a death ray weapon from outer space. Gordo had picked it up at a second-hand sale.

For years, Jonah had noticed men on the sidelines at professional sporting events, holding the ultra-powerful mikes so that the television audience could get the benefit of every grunt, every scream, every high-speed collision between the finely-tuned war machines out on the field. Later, he learned they were also used by nature lovers for listening to songbirds. The mikes were even sensitive enough to listen to those birds through walls, or while the birds carried on boring phone conversations near open windows half a block away. Yeah. Jonah was familiar with parabolic microphones.

Unfortunately, nobody else seemed to be. He was attracting a lot of hostile glances.

‘Man, everybody’s gawking at us.’

In the driver’s seat, Gordo was reading the science pages of the New York Times. For once, he was dressed neatly, in a pressed shirt and slacks. He was clean-shaven. If things went their way, today he would be a man of God.