EYEHEARTZOMBIES

I showed up at O’Hare around three in the afternoon. Ray said he’d have everything worked out for me, and he did, but it turns out I wasn’t going to be flying straight to Vegas. They had a couple of jobs that needed to be done in Saint Louis first, so that was my first stop. I came in on the Illinois side of the city and caught a cab to the house that was to be mine for the next few weeks in the Missouri side. It was common practice back then to send an agent in on the wrong side of a city. Kept the feds from noticing a lot of traffic into a neighborhood. I don’t know if they do it that way not or not.

Anyway, I caught the cab and my first site of that fabulous arch. I’m not one to go on and on about architecture or paintings or something. I’m not an art kind of guy. But I like that arch. Big and powerful. It takes over the sky when you see it. All that blue and then this big fucking white thing, cutting across it. It’s like a permanent rainbow or something. Anyway, I was speechless over a building for the first time in my life. I went up in a day or two later. It was just as amazing from up there, too.

When the cab pulled up to my new house, I unloaded everything from the trunk. I only had a few bags, and one of those held my guns and other “toys.” This was before you really had any security in the airports, so carrying guns around was just a matter of not being stupid. You always checked your gun bag. Checked baggage just got thrown in the belly of the plane, never looked in by human eyes. Unless you were stupid, that is. I remember one guy that forgot to unload all of his guns. He had a shotgun in his bag, one he’d retrofitted himself so it’d take a scope and had a clip that hung by the barrel. Kept him from having to dig in a pocket if he needed another shell or two. Lousy shot that he was, I don’t doubt that he did sometimes. Anyway, he tucked this monstrosity into his gun bag and then checked it when he was flying from New York to Miami. A handler threw it onto the trolley and it jostled around some more. By the time it reached the plane, something had gotten caught in the finger guard and when they threw it into the plane, the damn thing went off. It blasted a hole through his bag and tore the hand off of one of the other baggage handlers. They pulled him off the plane, two federal agents did. From what I’ve heard, they pistol-whipped him in a holding cell in the airport, then carted him fifty-five miles to the nearest county jail that didn’t have toilets in the public cells. I don’t think they let him piss or shit until after his arraignment, and he was arrested on a Saturday. Like I said, you don’t get caught if you’re not stupid.

I carried my suitcases, garment bag, and gun case up to the house and unlocked the door with the key Ray had had stashed in a locker at the St. Louis airport. I looked around at the street before I went in, though. Not the best idea to enter a new house without knowing your surroundings. The street was pretty domestic. Houses up and down the street with cars in the driveways, flickering lights on inside that probably meant television sets streaming in news on Korea and the rest of the world. Lawns that actually looked cared-for and trees with tire swings. Not the sort of place you’d expect to find a Mob gunman, huh? But here I was. I opened the door and went in.

The house was a lot nicer than I had expected. When Ray told me at the airport that I was going to St. Louis to work on a couple of jobs there and that everything had been taken care of, I expected to be shacked up in a motel somewhere with roaches the size of kittens and maids that you were lucky if they emptied the trash, much less left chocolates on your pillows. Instead I got a nice two-story house with a backyard and everything.

Just inside the door of the house was the living room. Your usual setup; a couch, a couple of recliners, a coffee table. Beyond the living room was the kitchen, on the right, and a hall leading back to the master bedroom and the downstairs bathroom. The kitchen was a modern job, formica everywhere. It was one of those nasty green jobs, too. Avocado or whatever they called it. I hated that color, but I didn’t have to put up with it long. Fridge, range, oven, sink. Nothing strange there.

Down the hall off of the living room, like I said, was the master bedroom and the downstairs bathroom. It wasn’t much of a bathroom. Just a toilet and a sink. But I guess it did the job of taking care of guests. I never had any, so I don’t know for sure.

The master bedroom had a big feather bed in it. It also had a bathroom attached with the full service. Toilet, bathtub with shower, sinks, mirrors. Even a medicine cabinet. The bathroom was done out in gold and white. Another nasty color combination, but, like I said, I didn’t have to put up with it long. I was only there for a couple of jobs.

Upstairs were another couple of bedrooms, another bathroom between them, and a big open room. A great room, I guess they call it. It opened onto a patio deck with a sliding glass door. There were a couple of wooden chairs on it. They were Adirondack chairs and I fell in love with them immediately. I was reaching a point in my life where I wanted things to be easier, more comfortable. I could see myself sitting on this porch, smoking a cigarette and sipping on some booze. A nice glass of bourbon. Yeah, that would go great. The porch had a railing high enough for you to not walk over the edge and an awning to keep the chairs dry. It looked out over the backyard, too.

This was my first glimpse of the backyard. It wasn’t very big, maybe only a quarter of the whole lot, but it was nice. There was an oak tree growing in the far corner of it, and a small shed in the other corner. I found out later that there were wood-working tools in the shed. A lawnmower for the yard was in the garage, too, along with my car for the time I was here. It was a dark gray Plymouth and I ended up taking it with me to Vegas. I loved that car.

I went back down to where I had dropped my stuff in the living room and took all the luggage to the bedroom. I sorted everything out into the closets and dresser and then started to check out the house a bit more thoroughly. I stored the guns around the house, at least one with fifty steps of any normally-occupied place in the house. There was a shotgun under the bed, a pistol under each of the recliners, a rifle slid under the couch, and other scattered around the house. Only the bathrooms didn’t get a gun, and they each had enough sharp objects in them, counting the knives I planted, for me to feel very safe.

All that fortifying takes it out of a guy, and I found that the house came pre-stocked. I took a slab of salami out of the fridge, poured myself a drink (bourbon, just as I planned), and went up to the porch. I used my pocket knife to cut of slices of meat and thumbed them into my mouth along with some crackers I ran back down to get. I sat on the porch, eating Italian meat and crackers, sipping on my bourbon until the sun sat and the moon rose. It wasn’t full that night, but it was getting close. When I started getting heavy-eyed, I went back inside and, after locking all the doors and windows twice, went to bed.

I slept like a fucking log.