Roachkiller and Other Stories Page 9

  “Wow.”

  “I wonder who lives there now? His daughter probably. She was gorgeous. She still do the lights?”

  “I haven’t seen any Christmas lights over there.”

  “No?”

  “Yeah, I know people who live there. But not the owners.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  * * *

  The Toyota finally turned on Union Avenue. Bianco continued on Metropolitan, under the overpass of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, where James could see homeless people camping out, and moved toward the river.

  James kept drumming the doorway, bopping his knee. “We’re going to see the Hasidim?” James said. “Or what I like to call ‘the Amish of Brooklyn.’”

  “‘Amish.’ That’s funny. Yeah,” Bianco said.

  They got to Berry Street then turned onto Division Avenue. They would deliver around the old Navy Yard first, where the Hasidim, in their long beards and dark clothes, lived.

  James had come to Brooklyn from Seattle for a girl he’d met at a friend’s wedding. Open bar, slow dance, coatcheck room. He followed her to New York then lived with her. Things were good for a while, but she was always on his back to get a job. Lucky, he had a couple of buddies in town, so he moved in with them. Now they lived in a tiny apartment. No heat, no bathroom sink, five million roaches. But he’d gotten a job.

  He liked the work. It felt good, physical. Much better than his job at the used record store. More than anything, James was happy that the driver was so easygoing, and that the two of them could talk like real people. They’d been working together two weeks already, and James was fascinated to know somebody who was actually from Brooklyn. He loved the way the driver spoke and looked and gestured. To James, it was like watching a movie from the ’70s.

  “After this, we’re doing the regular route down Bedford?” James said.

  “Yeah. The Asscrack of Williamsburg.”

  “Asssscrack!” James laughed. Then he pulled out his smartphone to check the time.

  “You know when I was growing up,” Bianco said, “four guys could get high on a quart of beer and that was enough, you know. We mostly got along with the Germans and Irish guys from around McCarren Park, as long as they stayed away from our girls.”

  James guffawed.

  “We had self-respect, you know. We took care of our own. Back then, a woman could walk the streets any hour of the day.”

  “Wow,” James said.

  “Then came the wets and the eggplants, you know, with their guns and their knives and their drugs. Then the whole neighborhood went to shit. One time we caught a Spanish guy holding hands with my sister Theresa. We followed him for a while, then we took care of him.”

  “You beat him up?” James said.

  “We beat him so bad he couldn’t take a regular piss for the rest of his life,” Bianco said. He parked in front of a clothing store. “These two,” he said, signaling two packages.

  James took the larger one, scraping his hands under it. “Fuck!”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Fine.”

  Walking to the store, Bianco said, “Like I was saying, now the neighborhood has changed, you know. You have what you call your hipsters and your yuppies moving in. Nice people. Good, clean people. Like you, James, you know.”

  James laughed. He didn’t like to be called a hipster. But he didn’t want to get into it. Not today.

  * * *

  Bedford Avenue was a narrow crevasse of sushi restaurants, computer stores, record shops, art galleries, and clothing stores with Soho prices. During Christmas season, delivering along Bedford’s busiest strip—about five blocks—could take six hours.

  James picked on a tiny piece of skin on his right pinky. After some time they stopped in front of 175 North 5th Street.

  “Stay here,” said Bianco, picking up two packages. “This’ll be quick.”

  Just as Bianco jumped off the truck, James said, “Hey, isn’t this for the same address?” He was holding up the package Bianco had picked.

  “Nah, I think they marked it wrong.”

  “Are you sure? It’s the same address.”

  “I’m sure, kid. Leave that there.”

  James stood there, holding the package.

  “Leave it there,” Bianco said again.

  At that moment, the woman who lived at 175 North 5th Street came down the street. She smiled at Bianco. “Frank! I’ve been waiting for you. You should have the last of my Christmas shopping.”

  “I got these,” he said, moving closer to the building.

  She looked at the packages. “Yes and yes. But I was supposed to get something from Apple.”

  Bianco felt it before it happened.

  “Hey! Is this it?” James jumped from the truck with the package.

  “Ooh, yes! That’s it! Perfect.”

  Bianco’s face went poker blank as she signed for the packages.

  “You missed that one, boss,” James said. “See, I told you.”

  “Good looking out,” Bianco said. “Good looking out.”

  Back in the truck, James began to chew his hand again. Bianco gave him a dead-eyed look. “Maybe you should get some gum,” he said.

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “You chew your finger like a dog with a bone. Jeez.”

  James said nothing. They turned onto Kent Avenue. Bianco was looking up at the next turn, when two black SUVs coming toward them turned and screeched to a stop right in front of the truck.

  Bianco heard packages in the back tumbling to the floor. “Asshole!”

  A man with a black wool mask covering his face, and dark shades wrapped around his head on top of the mask, came out of the passenger side of the smaller SUV with a gun. He pointed it right at Bianco. Another man in a wool mask came out of the same SUV and ran around to Bianco’s side.

  “Get out of the truck,” he said.

  “What the fucking fuck is this?” said Bianco.

  “Just follow along and you’ll live,” said one of the men. He had a thick beard. “Just chillax.”

  “Chillax?”

  They took him out of the truck and prodded him into one of the SUVs. They duct-taped his hands behind him and duct-taped his mouth.

  * * *

  They had been planning since the night James got back from his first day of work. They were sitting around, drinking beers and watching porn.

  “You should’ve seen all that stuff we delivered today. Like half a million worth,” James said. “All the money people spend on Christmas. It’s sick.”

  “I hate Christmas,” Aaron said. He was a big man, with a thick beard and a skunk streak of white through his brown greasy hair.

  “Me, too,” Ryan said. Ryan was Aaron’s brother who, for some reason, couldn’t grow a beard. “Imagine if we, like, hijacked the truck and took all the stuff.”

  “Yeah, but what would we do with it?” James said.

  “Keep it. Or sell it on eBay.”

  “There’s even porn in there,” James said. “Frank, the driver, told me some guy gets all this porn stuff delivered to his house from Chatsworth, California.”

  “Porn Valley, USA,” said Aaron.

  “What’s this driver like?”

  “Old Italian guy.”

  “Mafia, you think?”

  James laughed, but he had wondered.

  “Do you think you could take him?” said Ryan.

  “Who needs to take him if we had a gun?” said Aaron.

  “Like we have a gun.”

  Their friend Hamilton, who never took off his wraparound shades, came out of the bathroom then. “Gun? Who needs a gun?”

  They kidded about it for a few days. Then James told them that the driver had said big shipments for all the stores on Bedford would be coming in the following week.

  “It’d be the sweetest Christmas shopping ever,” said Ryan.

  “I love Christmas,” said Aaron.

  When Hamilton showed up with a gun the next
day, they all wanted one.

  * * *

  Bianco’s wife had told him to retire. Judy had gotten tired of his working late every night during the holiday season, even on Christmas Eve sometimes. “You’re not frigging Santa Claus,” she said. But he could make several grand in year-end tips. And then there were the fringe benefits.

  He had been reprimanded several times for undelivered packages. “Packages go missing all the time,” he would say. And then people on the Internet would throw money at you for an ebook reader, fancy boots, a flat-screen TV once.

  Judy saw the stuff piling up in the garage. “What are you, frigging Santa Claus?”

  There’s a lot of bills to take care of and a lot of your relatives to take care of, he thought to say. But he just said, “Leave it alone. Go back to your flat-screen TV.”

  In the SUV, Bianco heard the door on the other side open, to his right, felt the cold outside air come in. The seat shifted weight. The door slammed. He figured it was James, trussed up like he was. Two turkeys.

  The front doors opened. People got in. The car started moving. From behind him, Bianco heard the engine of his truck rev up, then move.

  The SUV stopped. He heard his truck behind him screech then make a turn. Whoever was driving it had a lead foot. Then the engine faded, like it was going inside a building.

  Shit like this happened all the time, he knew. Last year robbers held a FedEx guy for twelve hours. The year before that they shot and killed a UPS driver during a robbery attempt. That’s why the company had been hiring security guards to ride with some drivers—but only for bad neighborhoods, and Williamsburg wasn’t considered a bad neighborhood anymore. Now he was probably going to end up on the news. He could see his wife shaking her finger at him now. It was going to be a merry fucking Christmas.

  Bianco could’ve signaled the company with his DIAD, which had a wireless connection. He had reached for it as soon as he’d seen the second guy with a mask and a gun. But it wasn’t by his side, where it usually was. James must’ve had it, from the last delivery.

  The UPS office wouldn’t be looking for him till way later, when they’d see he hadn’t made a delivery in hours, or the owner of that electronics store called the office to bitch about his shipment.

  Then he remembered—his cell phone. Did he leave it on the dash? He leaned back. He felt its pressure on his left hip. It was under his shirt, which he could never stand to tuck in.

  He slid forward, giving his big hands room, pulled up his shirt, got the phone, flipped it open.

  “Frank, what are you doing?” It was James. Bianco wondered why they didn’t gag him, too? What kind of robbers are these?

  Bianco felt around the keypad and punched in 911. If he got through, all he had to do was leave it on and they would find them, soon enough. Before these bastards emptied his truck, he hoped.

  “I can’t let you do that, Frank,” someone said.

  James lifted the bag off of Bianco’s face.

  “I can’t let you do that,” James said, grabbing the phone. He had no bag or duct tape anywhere on him. Bianco cursed into the duct tape across his mouth.

  “Oh, shit. Did you make a call?” James said, checking the phone’s dialed calls. “Oh, shit. Did it go through?”

  Bianco leaned forward, trying to head-butt James. Instead, he butted the passenger-side headrest, but the bulk of his body had tackled the younger man, almost to the floor.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” James said, stumbling to right himself.

  Bianco realized he’d be able to kick if he slid back, so he did. He kicked James in the chest, then in the stomach. Then he realized with more room he could stomp.

  But James slid loose and back, quickly, against the other side of the SUV.

  “Shit,” James yelled. “You can’t kick a man when you have boots on!”

  * * *

  James popped out of the SUV and stumbled on the ground, dropping Bianco’s cell phone. He got up, but then felt wobbly and stumbled again. He took a deep breath and, half crouching, ran across the warehouse. “Guys! Guys! Guys!”

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Hamilton’s shaded face peeked out from behind the stack of packages he was carrying.

  “He called 911,” James said. “The driver called 911.”

  Ryan came out from inside the truck. “What’s going on?”

  “What the fuck?” said Aaron, who was loading up the second SUV. “Ryan, I thought you took his phone!”

  “I thought you did.”

  The four of them said, “Fuck!”

  “We gotta get moving,” Hamilton said.

  They ran up the ramp. “James, gimme the keys to the car,” Hamilton said.

  James stopped. “I thought you had the keys.”

  * * *

  With the bag off, Bianco saw he was inside the SUV, parked outside of an old warehouse, facing the river. No one was around. In the SUV, he saw a seat buckle he could use to wedge off the duct tape. He had to turn his body around, but he got it. Only someone with a telescope on Manhattan maybe could have seen him in there, peeling the duct tape off his hands and face. He ripped a long strip of skin off his lower lip. He sucked on it, tasted blood.

  Outside the SUV, a concrete driveway led into the belly of what looked like an abandoned warehouse. Where they’d taken his truck probably. Icy rain began to fall. He heard it pelting the roof of the car.

  He figured he could just run out of there, call the cops from some pay phone. But these fellas might catch up on him. He was strong, but not fast—that was thirty pounds ago. Then he looked down and saw the car keys in the ignition. Now he could easily get to a phone. Or—

  Bianco stepped on the gas. These assholes. For the first time, he saw their faces without masks on. Hipsters. Yuppies. Robber yuppies. It didn’t make sense.

  One of them shot at the windshield. He disappeared under the SUV. Bianco kept his foot on the gas.

  He spotted James right away. Bianco’s little helper was limping along, headed for a concrete column. James froze when he saw the truck and put his two hands together in front of him, almost like he was praying.

  Merry Christmas, Bianco thought. This one is mine.

  * * *

  James remembered later that he kind of expected it. The SUV barreling down the ramp. Ryan was the slowest. They all turned as soon as they saw the van, and James knew that thump he heard was Ryan.

  James ran. He could see his breath in a cloud in front of him. He veered off to the right, but the SUV was right behind him. The driver was aiming for him.

  “I thought we were friends,” he said.

  Unsynchronicity

  People like to talk about coincidence. Fate. Synchronicity. Happy accidents. A purposeful cosmic syncing up of two seemingly unrelated events resulting in good times, good times. You think about calling your bff and just when you’re about to tap in the numbers, she calls you! Ta-da!

  But I like to talk about unsynchronicity: Unfate. Nondestiny. Cosmic happenings that miss each other by a mile. Events that conspire toward unhappy accidents.

  Here I was in not the kind of place I thought I’d end up. A too-well-lit yuppie bar near Grand Central. Fake memorabilia on the wall. Like anybody here even knows Roberto Clemente. You know Roberto Clemente, right? A buffet selection of buffalo wings and macaroni. Homely waitress.

  She took my order for another Bombay gin martini then took forever to walk away.

  It’s not like I was in any hurry. I enjoyed observing the late lunch crowd. Two businessmen red-faced and whispering. One of them might even be a client. In the corner a pair of tourists chewed on cheeseburgers like cows on cud. Openmouthed, vacant-eyed. A brassy MILF at the bar picked up a french fry and bit it in half. Lucky french fry.

  You ever see a dead body? I hate dead bodies.

  The afternoon light was fading. My cheap martini glass was empty. The bartender had a trimmed goatee and took all the time in the world to make my drink.

  I
hate goatees.

  Only later—how much later I couldn’t tell you—I came out of my gin-fueled reverie and realized they were gone. The waitress. The bartender. The MILF.

  That’s when I saw the siren lights reflected on the wall.

  A man obsesses over a foreign film he’s heard about and is desperate to see. He goes to a dozen video stores in one day. And the last store, the store where he finally gives up his search, the movie is right behind the last video he touches in disgust. Unsynchronicity.

  (Could be the man leaves his family immediately after that.)

  Two childhood friends who haven’t seen each other for years both vacation in the same small town in Maine and visit the same bookstore on the same afternoon. But ten minutes apart. One lingers by the cookbooks, the other by the erotica. They both leave after spending exactly an hour there but never run into each other, and in fact never get to see each other again. Unsynchronicity.

  (Well, maybe one of them did see the other and just ducked out.)

  A high school sophomore is treated to some plum pudding for the first time in his life by the head cheerleader. Let’s call her Beth. Two years later at a kegger, he craves some of that plum pudding but can’t find it, until someone says pudding can be had in their parents’ room upstairs, and lo and behold there is Beth, ready to serve. A summer later, the man visits the cheerleader’s dorm, once again craving plum pudding. He remembered the earlier incidents and feels that only Beth can make the pudding just right. But at that moment, across town, a sweat-covered Beth is giving the captain of the lacrosse team a good serving of pudding. Unsynchronicity.

  (You know I’m not talking about pudding, right?)