Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

Regarding the actual jobs, I’m not going to say too much. I can’t.

I will say that if it so happened that I killed a dozen or so people—people I wouldn’t be able to talk about now, because the DA didn’t know about them so they weren’t part of my immunity agreement—then these would have been the years during which I did it. Not that I’m saying I did. I’m saying if .

Furthermore, if I killed these people— if, motherfucking if —I would have made sure that every one of them was some truly evil fuck. A guy who, if you knew he was out there, would make you want to keep your family in a bank vault. David Locano would have known better than to offer me anything else.

And—last point—I would have done every single one of those jobs right. No shell casings, no latents, no alibi gaps. No bodies, even, for most of them. So don’t even try.

But anyway.

Skinflick and I were still working in trash-haul, at least on paper, when he found out Denise was getting married.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross at one point said that our comprehension of death passes through five distinct stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. [31] I say “at one point” because this progression is what we think about when we think about Kübler-Ross. But what we avoid thinking about when we think about Kübler-Ross is how she later changed her mind and decided we’ll all be reincarnated. I wish I was shitting you. When Skinflick got the news about Denise, he went straight to sullen and irritable, then started losing weight and spending a lot of time alone.

As it was, between the girls, the drugs, Kurt Limme, and the fact that we both had other places to stay (I still had my grandparents’ house, he had his parents’), I wasn’t seeing all that much of him anyway, even though we kept our two-bedroom condo in Demarest. But in the week before Denise’s wedding, Skinflick failed to show up to work even once, and I didn’t run into him anywhere else, either. And on the night before the wedding, Kurt Limme called me.

“Pietro, have you seen Skinflick?” he said.

“No. He didn’t come to work this week.”

“I saw him about three days ago.”

It so happened that I had had lunch with David Locano a day earlier, because he was worried about Limme’s influence on Skinflick, so I knew Locano hadn’t seen Skinflick for a while either. “He’s probably staying with some girl,” I said.

“Not with Denise getting married,” Limme said.

“Good point.”

“I’m worried about him, Pietro.”

“Why?” I asked. “How much coke did he have on him?”

Limme said, “I don’t do cocaine or know anybody who does.”

“Chill out,” I said. “I just want to know if he’s in trouble.”

There was a pause. “Yeah, he might be,” Limme said.

“All right. If I hear anything, I’ll call you.”

“Thanks, Pietro.”

“Yeah.”

Twenty minutes later the phone rang. I figured it was Limme again, but it was Skinflick.

Slurred. “Where are you?” he said.

“I’m at home. You called me.”

“Yeah, I was trying all the numbers. Dress up. I’m coming over in a limo. I’ve got a girl for you.”

I looked at the clock. It was only nine, but whatever this was sounded bad.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Hello?”

He’d hung up.

The inside of the limo was like a nightclub lit by penlights, and it took me a moment after I got in to adjust to the darkness. On the squishy leather couch at the back were Skinflick—glistening and pale except beneath his eyes—and Denise. Next to me, facing them, was a young blonde with good posture and strangely muscular bare shoulders and a broad neck. I later found out she’d swum competitively in college, which had ended for her three months earlier.

Skinflick was in a tuxedo with the shirt open. Denise was in a black sheath. The blonde’s dress was weirder: green satin. “Jesus,” I said, leaning over to kiss Denise as the car started up. “I didn’t realize it was prom night.”

“You look good enough, honey,” Denise said. “This is Lisa.”

“Hi Lisa.”

Lisa kissed my cheek and breathed hot alcohol on me, saying she’d heard a lot about me.

“You too,” I lied.

“Lisa’s the maid of honor,” Skinflick said.

“No shit,” I said.

Skinflick keyed the intercom. “Georgie—you know where we’re going?”

“Yes sir, Mr. Locano.”

“Where are we going?” I asked, as we started moving.

“It’s a surprise,” Skinflick said.

I looked at Lisa, who had “weak link” written all over her as far as information pumping went, but she just shrugged at me as she leaned toward where Denise was holding out a coke spoon for her. It was a weird moment.

The limo turned north at the first big intersection, so the Midtown Tunnel was out. Denise scooped some coke for me as Skinflick licked a joint closed.

“Let me have a drink first,” I said.

By the time we got to Coney I was completely drunk and stoned, and everyone else was worse. Skinflick was talking about coke spoons. Who made them, and whether they came as part of a whole tiny cutlery set. The driver, Georgie—he was a guy I knew, with a ponytail and a full chauffeur’s outfit—parked in the same lot I’d parked in when I killed the Russians in 1993. After he let us out he got back in the car to wait.

I told Skinflick I didn’t want to go to Little Odessa.

“We’re not going to Little Odessa,” he said. He took Denise’s arm and led her out across the boardwalk, toward the ocean.

The Coney Island boardwalk has to be one of the widest in the world. When you’re as fucked up as we were it seems endless. And that’s when you’re on top of it. Once we made it down the stairs to the beach, and the women got their high-heeled shoes off, Skinflick took a small Maglite out of his pants pocket and announced that we were going back the way we came, but underneath the boardwalk.

Like in the fucking Motown song.

“No fucking way,” Denise said. “I’ll cut my foot. I’m getting married tomorrow.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Skinflick said. “If he doesn’t take you I will.”

“I’ll step on a crack needle.”

“It’ll be worth it.”

“To you, maybe.”

“Just step where I’m stepping.”

Skinflick headed in without looking back, and Denise followed him. It was that or lose the benefit of the flashlight he was holding. Lisa went next, with me in the back.

It was creep-out city down there. Somehow the Motown song doesn’t mention the semivisible homeless people, or how they fast-shamble away from you like they’re scared of something only they know is down there.

Still, even in the darkness and the moving shadows, and even with all the columns, Skinflick got us to the other side pretty quickly. It was like he knew his way around. At the time I thought it was just that he was so depressed about Denise getting married that he didn’t give a fuck what happened to him or any of the rest of us, but when we reached the end—a chain-link fence that had long strips of plastic woven through it vertically—he already knew where the loose corner was. While Denise and Lisa complained about how cold the sand was, Skinflick pushed the corner in and held it open. Denise went first, and suddenly we were all back under the glare of the New York night sky.

We were on asphalt, at the rear of some kind of complex that looked like a cross between a power plant and a high school. A jagged line of cylindrical cement buildings, two or three stories tall, connected to each other at ground level by aboveground tunnels. No windows, just pipes coming out through the walls. There was a hum, and a strange smell of rot.