John Jodzio - Knockout

“This job is dumb,” she said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Before we left, Julie went and stole some money from the cash register and then she and Rancho and I bought some frozen pizzas. We ate those back at my place. For dessert we had some leftover cocaine fudge I had in my fridge. Julie and I ate the rest of the pan and then she and I went into my bedroom and I did my enticing, erotic jig for her again and then we had a marathon sex session and then we watched the sun come up while Rancho scratched his paws against the bedroom door and whined.

Vic’s bulletproof vest is draped over the motel chair. It’s thinly layered Kevlar, slate colored, perfect for the summer months. It has extra cargo pockets for ammo and energy drinks. It’s awesome. I want to put it on and get shot in the chest over and over and never fucking die.

My bulletproof vest is puke green and doesn’t have storage space. My ex-wife, Autumn, bought it at an army surplus store last Christmas, two months before she left me. The price tag is still on it—$299.00 plus tax. It feels bulky, which means it won’t stop shit.

Vic sprays his vest with Lysol and pats it down with a hand towel. I don’t clean mine, no matter how pitted-out or gin-soaked it gets.

“You can’t get sweat out of Kevlar,” Vic warns. “It burrows into the fibers and then you smell like beef jerky forever.”

Vic and I are working in Athens, Georgia. We’re in Greektown, which the locals refer to as Athens, Athens. We’re subcontracting for the DEA, surveilling a smuggler named Santo Kristoff. We’re doing the grunt work for the Feds, tapping phones and manning wires, staking out Kristoff in a Ford Econoline van with the words “Passmore Electrical” written on the side. We’re the B squad, sent in to see if there’s any glory the real agents might want to swoop in and steal.

Our employer, Kromberg Security Solutions, hasn’t exactly rolled out the red carpet for this job. We’re bunking in a shithole called the Acropolis Lodge. It’s grasshopper season and the Acropolis is infested. They’re hopping around everywhere, sliding around in the bathtub, entombed in the cubes we get from the ice machine. A couple of nights ago I woke up to find one of them bedding down in the warmth of my pubes.

At least the Acropolis has a pool. I go swimming a lot because I’ve found the pool is a good place to cry. I’m usually alone down there, but if anyone stops by while I’m bawling about Autumn, I dive underwater. When I come up for air I rub my eyes and say, “Damn they sure use a lot of chlorine in this motherfucker!”

Vic does some crunches on the carpet, then some knuckle push-ups. I flop down on the bed, unbuckle my belt. A grasshopper lands on my nightstand and I crush it under a coffee cup.

“You skimp on your house, you skimp on your car, you eat smack ramen every meal for the rest of your life,” Vic lectures, “but you do not, under any circumstances, skimp on your body armor.”

Vic’s flat bellied. I’ve got the beginnings of a gut. It’s already big enough that my bulletproof vest feels like a corset. I can’t zip it over my belly unless I take a deep breath in.

When Vic steps into the shower, I scratch at the waistband of Autumn’s panties that I’m wearing under my jeans. They’re cotton, black and boring, not frilly or lacy. They’re panties Autumn normally wore to the grocery store or to the doctor. They’re comfortable and they breathe well. Before Autumn left, I asked her for a pair to help remind me of her when I was out on the road. I should’ve realized something was deeply wrong with our relationship when she gave me these, but I didn’t.

The grasshoppers throw their reedy bodies off the walls while Vic and I try to sleep. I’ve pleaded with corporate to move us to another hotel. I’ve held my phone out and let the accountants listen to the grasshoppers’ constant chirping. Instead of moving us, corporate sends us earplugs, mosquito nets, two cans of Raid.

“Hope for a cold snap,” Spiros, the manager of the Acropolis, says. “Pray there’s a late frost that kills the bastards.”

I don’t blame Spiros. He’s like us, he’s not the owner, he’s the help. He lives in a tiny room behind his office, sleeps on a pullout couch. He’s going out of his mind too. A few days ago I saw him trying to chase the grasshoppers out of his room with a torch made from a magazine.

The pool is usually empty in the mornings, but today I find a girl curled up on one of the chaise lounges. She’s young, early twenties. Her legs are covered up by a satin jacket from Ari’s King of Clubs, the strip club down the street. When I dive into the pool, she opens her eyes.

“What time is it?” she asks.

“Too damn early,” I say.

The girl has a wide mouth I want to be generous, but probably isn’t. She slides off her cutoffs to reveal bikini bottoms and then she drops into the pool. She swims a few laps then hops out and towels herself off. I’m probably never going to see her again unless I say something to her right now.

“You just swam in my tears,” I blurt out.

I can tell she’s probably used to men blurting out strange things in her presence. She stares at me for a bit, gathers herself, her face slowly tightening into a smile.

“Sometimes I come here to rinse off the drunken stares of hundreds of horny men,” she tells me before she grabs her stuff and hightails it to her car.

Our ops center is down the street from the Acropolis, in a renovated shoe factory. Whenever the air conditioning kicks on it smells like leather and glue. I complained about this to corporate, told them the chemical smell gives us migraines, makes us dizzy. Instead of finding us new office space, they sent us some pine-scented air fresheners and a box of Dramamine.

“Nothing new on the wire,” Foot Nose yells out to Vic and I when we walk in. “Quiet as shit.”

Foot Nose looks like a fetus; he can’t grow a proper stakeout beard. The hair on his face is patchy, mostly coming in around his cheeks. He’s been working overnights this week, twelve hours straight, fueled by Red Bull and Hot Cheetos. Right now his forehead is so oily I can almost see my reflection in it.

Grimace sits on a metal folding chair, puking into a garbage can. Grimace is pushing sixty, pear shaped, too old for this shit. Every time I walk by his computer, instead of clicking off porn, he clicks off pictures of beachfront time-shares.

“Take a sick day, vodka tits,” Foot Nose yells over to him.

Grimace responds to him by puking again. His puke is green and leafy and it smells like when you stick a shovel into the wet ground and flip over the dirt underneath. He’s told me if it was up to him, he would’ve retired long ago. It’s not. He’s dragging three divorces behind him. He’s got a kid in college, one in diapers. He’s going to be working until he’s eighty.

While I type in my log data from yesterday’s run sheets, I occasionally glance over at Grimace. He lies down on the floor, pulls his knees to his chest, moans.

“Retire already, you assface-looking mofo,” Vic says, chucking a soda can at his head.

This morning Vic and I park the surveillance van outside Kristoff’s warehouse. We’ve bugged his house, hacked his email, tapped his landline and his cell. The DEA keeps assuring us Kristoff’s a huge player in the Southern drug trade, that he’s smuggling guns up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Unfortunately for us most of his phone calls are with his wife, Lani. The DEA wants us to parse their words for code, but there’s no code there. They’re talking like a married couple talks. We’re out of toilet paper, we’re out of milk. Can you pick up my blood pressure medicine at the pharmacy? Should we drive over to the mall this weekend and pick up that daybed we’ve been thinking about? These are conversations I used to have with Autumn. There’s no code here, the words only mean what they mean.