EYEHEARTZOMBIES

I came back to myself a few minutes later, my arms burning from the work and my shirt drenched in blood from the bullet cut in my right shoulder. God, the pain of that wound. I know knee shots and gut shots are the most painful, but being grazed and burned by a hard little metal slug is one of the most intense experience of pain you’ll probably ever have. The scar stings to this day when I think about it too much.

The guy was dead, of course. I don’t know if there was a part of his body I hadn’t smashed and whacked with that board. There was blood all over the floor and some cloth from his shirt was stuck to the ragged end of the two-by-four. My hands ached from clenching the board so tightly — I had driven several inch-long splinters deep into my palms and fingers without feeling anything at all — and my arms screamed for me to never raise that board over my head again. I threw it to one side and the clatter it made smacking the floor made me jump. I was breathing hard and feeling pretty light headed.

I hadn’t killed anyone before today. Not personally. Joey had killed a couple on some of our earlier enforcement gigs, and I had watched another of the muscle men interrogate a stool pigeon for hours until the guy collapsed from exhaustion, choking on his own sick. The muscle guy was Tony. He wasn’t one you wanted to be partnered up with, and he didn’t want to be partnered with you anyway. He seemed to be on a mission to rid the world of the human race, one person at a time. He’s the only guy I’ve ever known that enjoyed the smell of someone pissing themselves.

Now I had killed two people with my own hands. Well, one with a gun and one with a board. Either way, I was responsible. I’m a bit ashamed to say I liked the feeling of power that this gave me; the feeling of control.

I stood there, over the dead body, for a minute or so, catching my breath, deciding what to do. I dusted off my clothes and picked up my gun from the corner it had slid into. Then I remembered that Simon was badly hurt on the second floor. I ran down the two flights to where he was still sitting, slouched in a streak of his own blood. He was dead already, so I closed his eyes and folded his hands into his lap. He didn’t look peaceful, but he didn’t look unhappy or worried, either. I think he went out like he wanted to, really.

I went down another floor and out the side door that Simon and I had gone in through. The guy I had shot was still laying there, of course. I kicked him once in the ribs on my way past him, and never gave him another thought until I wrote this down today.

I called over the fence to Lucca that I was coming over — no sense in losing my head, seriously, at this point in the game — and I climbed over. Dropping to the ground on the other side, I saw there had been a fifth guy. He had come out of the back door and Lucca had conked him over the head with the butt of his shotgun. The guy had just regained consciousness and Lucca looked at me, as if asking what to do with him. I thought about telling him just to go ahead and kill the guy, then thought better of it.

“Hey. Hey, dipshit,” I said to the dazed thug. “Hey, look at me. What are you guys doing with our truck?”

“F–” he spat out a mouthful of blood. Lucca must have caught him in the face, too. “Fuck you, man.” He raised his head to look at me and I could see that insane hatred for the victor that burns in the eyes of so many criminals. They hate anyone that gets ahead in this life. “Fuck you and the horse that rode in on your mom.”

I slapped him with the butt of my gun, which I had forgotten I had in my hand. I slapped him twice with it, the second time bringing a groan and more spat blood. “You shouldn’t talk that way,” I said. “What if your mother heard that? I bet she’d roll right over in her grave, wouldn’t she? Your poor mother. Now, look, we’re not bad guys. Really, we’re not. You guys just picked the wrong van to steal. Where’d you get it?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know! I just work for Ricky! I’m just muscle! Just fucking muscle…” His voice trailed off into a bit of a whimper. Lucca stepped a bit closer to the guy, putting him in deep shadow now that the sun was all the way below the buildings.

“Ricky? Which one’s he? The one upstairs?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s Ricky.”

“Ricky’s dead, amigo. He met the wrong end of a carpenter’s bad day. In fact, you’re all that’s left. And, you know, we don’t like to leave a job undone. We’d hate to forget something and have it come back to bite us in the ass.” His eyes widened and all the blood ran from his face. He started to stammer, but I kept talking, afraid I was going to lose my bluff against this know-nothing musclehead. “You wouldn’t do that, though, would you? You wouldn’t run and get your buddies or, Heaven-forbid, the cops. Would you?”

“N — No, no, sir. I wouldn’t do anything like that.” And he started sobbing in Italian. I looked at Lucca and he nodded at me.

“Alright, we’ll trust you, then. You’re gonna climb in that van there. Go on, get in there.” He slowly stood up, Lucca moved back to let him get to his feet, and took a couple of wobbly steps toward the van. I raised my gun and cocked it. It was loud in the twilight quiet. The beaten thug jumped a little and I saw his back tighten as he prepared for the bullet. “I’m not going to shoot you. I already told you that, remember? I’m just making sure you don’t get stupid on us all of a sudden. Keep walking.”

He made it all the way to van. He tried to open the door, but couldn’t, weak from either the blows on the head from Lucca or just from fear. I motioned toward the van and Lucca lumbered over and wrenched the door open. It groaned against the bashed in frame.

“No, Lucca. Not that door. The back one.” A stroke of genius had come to me. I was planning on just shooting him once he got to the van, or letting Lucca practice some punches. Now I had a different idea. Lucca looked at me, nodded, and walked to the back of the van, which was almost up against the garage door. He could just get the passenger-side back door open enough to squeeze Guido (as I had come to think of him) in. Guido got in and sat down in the back. “Now, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to close this door. You’re going to sit inside like a good little boy, like the slug I think you are. You’re going to sit there in the dark and hope, hope and pray, that the people we send to pick up the van get here before the cops do. I don’t know what our guys will do to you; kill you, break some more bones, I don’t know. But I do have a pretty good idea what the cops’ll do with you. It’s not like they have any love for two bit street thugs.”

His eyes widened again, something I wouldn’t have thought possible, and he began to blubber in Italian again. Then he remembered his tongue and begged to be let out. “Please, sir, you gotta let me out. My wife and kids. What’ll they do? What’ll happen to them? Let me out. I’ll go straight. No more of this for me. No more, never, I swear. Please!”

Lucca slammed the back door shut. He twisted both handles around, they were the claw-looking kind that so many old cars had on them, so they both pointed downward and stuck a billy club through it. The club he pulled out of his pockets, which apparently held hundreds of weapons at a time. I know I never saw him without one.

Once the van was locked, we raised the garage door and went inside the garage. The dark green sedan was still sitting there, of course, and we looked inside. There were a couple of rifles and a shotgun in the back seat. It was a good thing they didn’t decide to take their guns into the building when they came in or we would’ve had a much harder time of it. There was also a briefcase with a few thousand dollars in it. Lucca and I took the guns and case out of the car. We closed the back garage door, opened the front, walked out, and closed the front behind us.

We walked across the street in deepening night, just the glow of the one security light casting faint shadows on the buildings around us. We went back to the building we had been watching from and Manny met us at the door.

“What happened? Where’s Sim�n?”

“Simon’s dead, Manny,” Lucca said. It was the first I had ever heard him say and his voice was very soft. It didn’t fit him at all, just for looks, but it fit his personality perfectly. I’d come to treasure and look forward to the few sentences he’d say in the course of any given job.

I nodded in agreement and Manny’s face dropped. “Oh,” he said, very quietly. Then I heard him start whispering something in Spanish. I think he was praying for Simon.

“Get everything together,” I said. “We have to go. Now.” Lucca, Manny, and I walked up the stairs together in total silence. Manny had stopped praying at the quiet urgency in my voice and remembered we had a job we had to finish doing. We got to the top floor, packed everything up in the trunk we had brought with us, and carried it downstairs. Lucca and I carried it to where Manny and I had stowed his car. The car was too small to carry all of us and the trunk, so Manny and Lucca rode with the trunk and I walked back to a more commercial part of town so I could hail a cab.

That was a very quiet walk for me. I kept thinking about the guy I had killed — Ricky, I guess his name was — and how I didn’t hate myself for it. I had worked and lived with murderers, both professional and amateur, clinical and sadistic, my whole life. I had never counted myself among them. Now I was, wholly and completely. I had killed two men that day, and probably sent a third to a certain death. I was sure our clean-up guys would kill him once they had the van away from the warehouse. If the cops got there first, not that we had heard any sirens or had any reasons to suspect someone had heard the gunshots, they’d almost certainly kill him out of anger at him not knowing enough to help them find us. We were all very careful in those days, what with all the gangland raids and attacks that had been going on, and none of us carried any identification. Not even so much as a matchbook from a favorite club. No, the cops had no reason to show up, but cops have a bad habit of being up where they have no business being.

I walked back quicker than I thought I would, lost in my thoughts, and stopped at a little diner to grab some coffee and a slice of pie. It was a nice enough little place for a greasy spoon; maybe it was a greasy silver spoon. A cute-enough middle-aged waitress asked me what I wanted.

“A cup o’ Joe, black. What kind of pie you hidin’ back there, doll?”

She looked in the pie cooler and said over her shoulder, “We got apple, lemon meringue, cherry, and peach cobbler, hun. Any of that sound good?”

“Sure, gimme a hunk of that apple. I don’t need any frozen moo juice, though. Just straight pie.” I wanted to get out pretty soon, just in case sirens did begin to wail.

She sliced out a piece of pie for me and slid it onto a plate. Then she filled up a white, ceramic mug with some thick, black coffee and set them both down, along with a fork and napkin, in front of me. Then she hurried off to tend to another customer that was standing at the register.

I watched her work the till for a minute, thinking pointless thoughts of family and the “normal life,” then went back to the meal at hand. I ate the pie in a few bites, gulped down the almost-cold coffee, then stood up to go. I walked over the cash register and she rang my snack up. One dollar even. I handed her two and told her to keep the rest. She looked at me like I was crazy, but I leaned over and quietly said, “I’ve had a good day. You have one, too.” Then I left the diner, stopping at the pay phone outside to call Ray, who sent a car to a corner a few blocks away. I got there just as the car did and the driver took me back to my house. I slept fitfully that night, as I don’t rest well after killing is done. But you already knew that.