Mondo Crimson Read online

  Brenda said, “I’ll call you when I’m about to board.”

  “You better.” She could hear his smile, picture it.

  She mouthed the words just to feel them, “Stephen, I love you, but I want you to know something about me. I kill people for a living.”

  All it would take was one breath. An exhale put behind the shapes she was making with her lips and these things could go from secrets to things he knew about his wife. The razor’s edge. I could shatter him, everything he knows about me, the love we share, all in less than a second.

  One breath.

  Her phone thrummed in her hand. It made her flinch. Another call coming in.

  “I love you,” Steve was saying.

  She took the phone away from her ear only long enough to see who was calling. Felix.

  “I love you too,” she told her hubby, and explained she had to go because apparently the meeting was back on after all, telling the emptiness of her room, “One second, I’ll be right there,” and told Steve goodbye.

  She took the other call. “Everything all right?”

  “That’s how you answer the fucking phone?” Felix said. “You see it’s me calling and immediately jump to something must be wrong?”

  Brenda was not in the mood to deal with the delicate ideas men had about themselves right now. She’d humor Steve, but Felix did not deserve it. Stroking his ego was wife number four’s job.

  Softening, Felix said, “Is everything okay with you?”

  Going from talking to her hubby to talking to her boss so abruptly required Brenda to perform some mental gymnastics and apparently, this time, caused her to stutter slightly, a minor synaptic misfire. “Everything’s fuh-fine.”

  “Good. Everything’s fine,” Felix said, his annoyance plain. “Can we move on to the reason I’m calling?”

  Brenda sat up. Head rush. A fog before her eyes. Reality sifted back in and she met the eyes of a familiar woman sitting in a room just like this one, worry nakedly bright in her face. Brenda turned on the mattress, away from the mirror.

  “Where are you now?” Felix said.

  “At the motel.”

  “Get everything you need? That was one specific special request.”

  “I found a place that sells it.” Brenda looked at the bag she’d laid by the door, the thin plastic hugging the bottle, its terrible contents.

  A moment, Felix running down mental checklists maybe. “Get the mail today?”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  “Of course. Know where you’re going tonight?”

  “I can find it,” Brenda said, clipped. “You worried about something?”

  “Nah, just had a few minutes, thought I’d check in, grab a quick update from you.” Felix chuckled. He could hide the fact that he was smoking two packs a day until he laughed. “Don’t take no offense to it.”

  “Things are progressing fine. Like I said.”

  “Good, good,” Felix said. “Say, while I got you on the horn….”

  Brenda closed her eyes. Felix never said ‘say’ unless it was going to precede some tall request or he was about to drop some monumental detail it would’ve been good for her to have had months prior. The true motive behind this call.

  “Got a potential job coming together. Kind of unorthodox. Thought I’d ping you, see what you make of it.”

  “Unorthodox how?”

  “Well, I shouldn’t say too much until the client’s made up their mind.”

  Then why bring it up? “All right.”

  “They’re mulling the idea of an extended visit.”

  “How extended?”

  “A week. Round the clock attention, hour breaks between sessions at most. Which may require playing doctor some, keep them from stepping out prematurely.”

  “Where?”

  “Minneapolis.”

  “Has a price been determined?”

  “We’re going back and forth but it’s hovering around fifty, fifty-five. I suggested we keep it simple and just say ten per day, but they said that was a bridge too far. Tightwads.”

  Brenda wasn’t confident in Felix’s abilities as a haggler so she subtracted Felix’s thirty per cent fee from an optimistic base of fifty thousand and considered how much that remaining sum could help with the mortgage, the copay on Steve’s pain meds and doctor visits, groceries, gas, the car payment, their oldest’s upcoming orthodontist appointment, their middle one’s soccer equipment, the youngest’s unwavering insistence that the store-brand cereal wasn’t as yummy as the stuff with the more well-drawn cartoon character on the box that cost two bucks more.

  Felix said, “Interested?”

  “Put me down as a maybe.”

  “You got it. I’ll let you know when we finally agree on a price tag.”

  “Have you talked to anyone else about this?”

  “You and one other.”

  “Being who?”

  “Planning on bumping off the competition?” Felix laughed, coughed. “You know you just need to say you want it. The boys understand how seniority works.”

  “Who else?”

  Felix sighed.

  “Merritt?” Brenda said.

  “Yes. Merritt.”

  “Did you call him or did he call you?”

  “He emailed, actually. The Minneapolis job is the next one in the hopper. What was I supposed to do? Tell him I don’t have something when I do? I mean, Minnesota is Merritt’s neck of the woods. He could fucking drive, save me the cost of a plane ticket and a rental. And even if I did have to fly him, I doubt Merritt would insist on first class, unlike somebody I know.”

  “Put me down for it.”

  “For Minneapolis?”

  “No, for who hosts the next Girl Scouts meeting. Yes, for Minneapolis.”

  “Okay, okay, just making sure we’re on the same page. We talking pen or pencil?”

  “Pencil, for now, but I want dibs.”

  “You got it. But just so you know, we’re looking at a start date two weeks from tomorrow.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “Is Steve going to be okay with that, you barely getting back before heading out again? We’ll try to avoid it, but you might end up missing Christmas.”

  She hated Felix knew her husband’s name, but at least he had the wherewithal to never utter the names of her girls. “If it comes to that, I’ll make it work.”

  “Before you say anything,” Felix said, “I know it’s none of my beeswax, but I wish either you or Merritt would tell me what happened between you two.”

  “Things are fine as they are,” Brenda said. “You know to never pair us on anything again.”

  “That I do. Loud and clear. Well, someone’s ringing the buzzer so I’ll let you go. Call me when this one’s done, all right? A text or something, at least.”

  “Sure.”

  Dial tone.

  She told the dead line, “Asshole.”

  * * *

  Mel drove to where Chicago fell away and there was nothing but empty office buildings, these giant glass monstrosities all wearing real estate banners stretched across them – reminding her of homecoming queen sashes – that declared in desperate red: Office space available. Tattered by wind, the phone number illegible on most now. Kind of a sad sight. There were so many.

  A few years ago, there’d been a mass migration to Illinois. According to overenthusiastic prognosticators, a tech boom was supposedly imminent, and Aurora was set to become Silicon Valley 2.0. Smelling ripening opportunity to exploit, land developers slapped down all these office buildings in preparation because surely nothing could ever go wrong, right? Well, the boom didn’t boom. The implosion happened instead. And as a result, the area ended up with a lot of empty office buildings no one had a use for and a slew of confused, jobless transplants. Those who’d
moved here with high hopes, a good number decided not to retreat when things fell apart. Either they’d gotten hitched to a local in the meantime who refused to live anywhere else, the transplant got other work, or they just found Capone’s old stomping grounds agreeable and figured they’d tough it out. Or option D, an anchor of bad decisions had gotten lashed to their ankle that’d kept them from leaving, as was Mel’s situation.

  She was driving a ’97 Geo Prizm with 347,129 miles on it. Six months after running over some broken glass, she was still rocking the donut. The road under the car was visible through the rust hole in the floorboard. She’d lost multiple lighters and one phone to it. There was a metaphor to be had with that all-consuming hole, but every time she’d tried putting it into words, she’d just turn the radio up louder – because at least that still worked.

  She’d left Erie, Pennsylvania, for Chi-Town with her entrepreneurial spirit burning hot. She wasn’t going to directly contribute to the tech boom that never happened, but while everyone was convinced it was still a sure thing, she had hoped to benefit from it, be in the right place at the right time – for once in her life. Her thinking had been: what do eggheads who’re suddenly loaded after developing some wonder app immediately purchase believing it’ll help them get laid by the cheerleader-types who’d rebuffed their advances all through high school?

  Cars, of course! Stupid-fast, overpriced cars!

  Mel’s idea was to loop in some investors and open an auto lot that specialized in everything from Range Rovers to Lambos to Bugattis. And if all these rich-ass nerds would soon be calling the Chi home, she’d be more than willing to put them behind the wheel of whatever gaudy pussy magnet they fancied.

  She prided herself on having this ability to read people’s desires and dreams – and, coupled with the ability to fulfill them, provided she could secure the backing, it’d make her a likewise wealthy person too. Then, she might be able to finally get behind the wheel of that ’68 Ford Mustang GT fastback she’d had her eye on ever since her uncle had given her a shrunken-down Hot Wheels version for Christmas that one year.

  Before he got sick, her uncle was going to help her with the auto lot. After he got sick, she was going to name it after him. And after finding out his illness was worse than the doctors originally thought, she took the money she’d been entrusted with by investors and ‘temporarily diverted its focus’ to help pay for his treatments. Temporary turned out to not be so temporary. Nothing was getting named after anybody anymore. And people wanted their money back.

  In Mel’s opinion, the only takeaway was: this just goes to show what’ll be the most likely result when you let a dream stick around instead of just stomping it flat as soon as that dream – or a microbe of an idea that may calcify into a dream – rears its ugly head.

  Find a job, her uncle would say, and just do that job. She used to go with him when he’d picked up a job to remodel somebody’s bathroom because that’s what he’d chosen for a job to do. Yeah, she’d hand him tools as he scraped perfectly good tile off the wall that only had the crime of falling out of fashion and tell her, “Existence is not a gift but the cosmos leveling a threat that lingers approximately sixty to ninety years. This is America, we only exist to make someone else money. All that shit about life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness?” he’d say. “That shit’s just to make it feel like it’s your idea to keep punching the clock, like you got some option about it – it isn’t, you don’t. It’s the pact my brother and your mama made on your behalf that you, unfortunately, didn’t get any say in. These right here,” he’d say and show her his callused, scarred hands, “they can’t take these from you. These tools can’t be repossessed. Teach your hands something not everybody can do and you’ll keep that refrigerator full.”

  She still couldn’t tell you what the difference was between ambition and self-delusion. But what luck, a man named Felix Eberhardt was willing to help her figure it out, crystal-clear. A friend of a friend of a friend. You should just go talk to him, see what he can do. Problem was she’d borrowed five hundred grand to go toward the auto lot and Felix knew that guy, the one who’d seen promise in her business proposal and wrote her a check. The suggestion to go talk to Felix had been a setup and she’d walked right into it. Like an intervention, except everyone in the room except for her was packing. She wasn’t friends anymore with that friend who had a friend who had a friend – but she was in Felix’s pocket, working off her debt. Sometimes, deep down, she wished they’d just gone ahead and shot her. At least she could’ve retained some dignity. Go out like the gangsters from back in the day, not some fuck-up who lacked money management skills.

  Live and learn.

  If you survive, of course. That’s the tricky part.

  What doesn’t kill you will just try harder next time. Something else Uncle Craig said. Real ray of sunshine, wasn’t he?

  Isn’t he.

  He’s still alive. It made her heart hurt when she forgot.

  Weeds stood growing out of the cracks in the office building’s parking lot, frost on their thistles. There was only one other car there, an Escalade with a pearlescent paintjob. Mel got out and approached the building, not caring for the way each step of her combat boots echoed against its glass face. Felix was inside, waiting for her. Either she was being paranoid or she really could feel him clocking her from the fourth-floor windows.

  She rang the buzzer. There was only one name on the board. Eberhardt Enterprises.

  The intercom crackled briefly but no one spoke. Felix must be in a mood. Mel checked her phone for the time. She wasn’t late. She was early for once. The doors unlocked with a hard snap and she rushed to enter. She didn’t want to have to annoy him buzzing him again.

  Reaching the fourth floor, she arrived at a wide, barren room with unblemished carpet. The space stood ready for cubicles that would never be put in. Wires dangled from the drop ceiling, connected to nothing.

  She didn’t know why Felix bothered renting office space. You could have a sham front to launder money through without a brick-and-mortar location. But it wouldn’t surprise her if Felix was among the old school who thought if you didn’t go to an office every morning, you weren’t actually working. Or it was an excuse to get away from wife number four.

  He appeared in the door to an office, in his snow boots and dad jeans and tucked-in polo shirt under a heavy winter coat. The thin gold chain he always wore caught the light, a dangling tiny pendant that held a nitroglycerin pill. Shiny-bald on top, but he’d let the horseshoe he had left grow long, pulled back in a stubby ponytail. With his silver beard and cheeks ruddy from the cold, he kind of looked like Santa, minus the jolliness – a quiet kind of wrath replacing it. He looked different from the last time she’d seen him. A touch gaunt about the face, but not like an earned trimness from diet and exercise – no, his eyes were slightly sunken and deeply ringed. Maybe he was getting over a bad bout of food poisoning or something. He blinked frequently. His hands had a tremor that’d come and go.

  “Melanie. Thanks for coming out.”

  “Yeah, of course.” She didn’t know what to do with her hands. “Everything okay?”

  “Step into my office. We need to talk.”

  Mel didn’t think she was claustrophobic, but their knees were practically touching. And even though Felix and Mel were the only ones on, not only this floor, but the entire building, he apparently still felt it necessary to close his office door.

  Felix sat looking at her after having said a great deal.

  Mel wasn’t sure if it was okay to speak yet or not. Felix hated being interrupted.

  “Well? You fucking mute? Will that be doable or not?”

  Damned if you do.

  Mel nodded. And remembering Felix also hated it when you nodded, she cleared her throat, afraid her voice would break. “Yes. That’ll be doable.”

  “Then run it back to me.”

 
; Mel parroted the whole thing – how, three weeks from today, she’d take a Greyhound out to the Twin Cities and make her way to South Minneapolis, where a car would be waiting, and how she was to hotwire it. As she spoke, she noticed apart from the smell of menthol Pall Malls and Clubman Pinaud that was always wafting off Felix in near-visible waves, she could also smell gun oil.

  “And then you’ll bring the car to the garage,” Felix said, finishing for her, “and place the keys in Jake’s grease-monkey hand. You try.”

  “I’ll take it to the garage,” she said, “and give the keys to Jake.”

  Felix looked at her another moment, his face empty like he might as well have been just looking at the wall behind her. Hooking a finger over his glasses, he pulled them down to study his phone’s screen. Mel could see a spreadsheet reflected in his lenses. Her spreadsheet.

  There was no one around for miles. Outside the window there were only other buildings identical to this one, probably just as empty. Anything could happen in this room and no one would hear it. But one comforting thought: he’d wouldn’t waste the breath detailing what task he wanted done if he was just going to shoot her. So, there’s that.

  Trying not to stammer, she said, “Will I be taking the Greyhound back then?”

  He didn’t look up from his phone. “What are you talking about?”

  “If I take the car to this Jake guy, how will I get to the bus station?”

  “Your legs work, I assume.”

  “Is the bus station near the garage?”

  Felix groaned. “What do I look like, Google Maps? Figure it out.”

  “But I will be taking the Greyhound back, right?”

  “I certainly wouldn’t recommend a pretty young thing like you hitchhike.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I understand.”

  “You’re going to be making your own arrangements for the return trip on this one. I’m tightening the leash on travel expenses, on everybody. I’ll get you there, but the journey home’s on you.”