An Element of Surprise

"Is this Alex Garth?"

"No, moron. It's Bonnie Prince Charley. I always stay at the Budget Six Motel when I'm in Boston. Who is this?"

"That's one thing I like about you, Garth. You've got a sense of humor."

"Shrinking by the minute. Who is this?"

"Who's not important."

"Just what I was thinking," I said and hung up the telephone. It started ringing again while I was walking into the dingy little motel bathroom. I took my time. I wiped my hands on my pants. It was still ringing when I came back out, so I picked it up.

"You've got twenty seconds," I said.

"That's another thing I like about you, Garth. You've got a lovely temper."

"Fifteen seconds and counting."

"All right," he said. "They're going to punch your ticket when you get back to New York."

"Who's they?"

"Some of the people you work for. Something about some snow that stuck to your shovel."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

"Suit yourself, pal. I was just trying to do you a favor. Forget it."

"Hold on," I said. I paused for a moment, then figured, What the hell. "This hit. Who's supposed to do it?"

"Charley Cletis."

"You know when?"

"When you get back. This weekend. I don't know exactly."

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked him.

"You did me a favor once. Now we're even."

"Who is this?" I said.

"Sorry. Your twenty seconds is up."

Click.

I put the phone down and plopped back on the unmade bed.

I did him a favor once? That just didn't ring true. I couldn't remember ever doing anybody a favor. Not when I was a cop in New York. Not when I was trying to make a living off that crummy private-detective agency. Especially not since I'd been taking a lot of money to kill a lot of people.

Who had called? That was the only puzzle. The rest of it was (continued on page 136)Element of Surprise(continued from page 84) easy. Some snow stuck to my shovel. That was in Philadelphia, my last job, and the guy I bopped had a kilo of pure cocaine in his room and I took it. And somehow they had found me out. All right, a mistake, but I wasn't going to let it turn into anything serious.

I stood up and saw the gun on the end table next to the telephone. Damn it, I thought, I should have gotten rid of that. I took it into the bathroom and used toilet paper to wipe it clean. Then I wrapped it inside the paper bag they used for a liner in the wastebasket, those cheap bastards, and stuck it inside my jacket pocket. I went over to the motel office. I had paid cash in advance and wanted my change. Simple and no records.

The clerk was a college cretin with pimples. "How was everything, Mr. Johnson?" he asked me.

"Fine. I think you're growing a better brand of roach since the last time I was here," I said.

"Roaches?" He put this big concerned face on. What ought to have concerned him was zits. "I'll call our exterminator right away."

"Try a demolition team," I said, pocketing my change.

"What do you mean?"

I just sighed. "Forget it, will you?" Another flea, another flea brain. The world was filled with them; it really could use a good exterminator.

Outside, the sun was shining its ass off—I read that once in a sappy detective novel—so I put on my sunglasses. I wished I hadn't when I looked back and saw Pimples staring at me through the office window. But then I figured, Aaah, to hell with it. Everybody looks alike wearing sunglasses.

Two blocks away, I bought a newspaper from a dork who told me to have a nice day. Another block later, I took the wrapped gun from my pocket, put it inside the newspaper and dropped the whole package into a litter basket.

Another block away, I flagged down a cab.

"The airport," I said.

The guy looked into the back seat and said, "Logan, right?"

"You know another airport in Boston?"

He turned back. "Logan it is. Wicked hot, ain't it, this summah?"

I've always hated New Englanders and their stupid accents. They talk like retards and, to boot, are absolutely the worst drivers this side of Mexico City.

"Just can the chatter and get me to the freaking airport in one piece, will you?"

Directionals must be outlawed up there. To make a right-hand turn, this imbecile pulled into the left-hand lane, leaned on his horn and swerved across two lanes of traffic into another street. It was Charles Street, and all the shops seemed to have signs that read, ye oi.dk this and ye olde that. These merrie olde shopkeepers ought to try visiting ye olde London, where the people had to be the stinkingest on earth. I had been there two years earlier, and ye olde soap bar and ye olde deodorant hadn't seemed to be real big hits.

The cab lurched to a stop at Logan, nearly loosening my teeth, and Idiot Boy said, "That's foahteen dollahs." So I dropped a ten and a five through the from window.

"Keep the change. Use it for remedial driving school."

I had a few minutes, so I stopped in the lounge for a drink. The television screen was filled with a solemn dickhead reporting on "the gangland-style killing" of a young attorney that morning. He had been shot by an unknown assailant as he left his home for work. The only description of the killer was that he wore dark sunglasses. I took off my sunglasses. The lawyer left a wife and three small children, and they had an interview with the wife, who was crying and wailing and wondering why someone would kill her husband, who didn't have an enemy in the world.

Wrong, lady, I thought. He had an enemy, somebody who hated him enough to pay me to kill him. What the lawyer had done, I didn't know and didn't care. He was just another day's work.

•

When the shuttle to New York was airborne, I ordered a Chivas Regal on the rocks, then figured maybe I ought to walk back to the bathroom to see if there was anybody on the plane that I recognized.

There wasn't, so I hunkered down in my seat with my Chivas and thought about that phone call again. So they were going to try to kill me, all over a stinking 2.2 pounds of cocaine, a stinking pile of degenerate powder for stinking degenerates who wanted to kill themselves.

I had taken it only for the money. That much blow was worth more than a quarter of a million out on the street. So it was a risk, but I'd taken it and then they'd found out and had given Charley Cletis the job of killing me.

Funny, but my own first solo contract had been on the guy who'd recruited me and taught me about the hit man's trade. So I thought it was poetic justice that they gave the job of kissing me off to somebody I had trained. It was the way the people I worked for liked to plan: neat, tidy, no loose ends.

I was thinking it all through when this redheaded bimbo leaned over and said, "Another drink, sir? Last call."

"If I wanted another drink, I'd ring your bell," I snapped. She got uppity, the way they always do when somebody doesn't fall for their big, phony I'm-staying-at-the-Plaza smile, and stalked off, so I just nursed the Chivas and weighed my options.

Option one: I could run away.

Option two: I could kill Charley Cletis.

Option two was better. If I ran, the contract would stay open and anyone could collect on it. I had this image of what my life would be like—a marked man, looking over my shoulder, sleeping with a bazooka under my pillow, owning a freaking toy poodle that barked at raindrops, just to make sure nobody sneaked up on me.

If I killed Cletis, though, the old peppers who ran the organization would have to vote on whether or not to issue a new contract on my life. Chances were they wouldn't. I had worked for them for 15 years, and I knew them. They didn't like untidiness or risk and, despite all that crap about Marlon Brando and Don Corleone, if they were faced with a man who fought back, they would back off. They'd accept their losses, assume I'd keep my trap shut, and I'd go my own sweet way. With the cocaine. Maybe they'd even give me a gold watch for faithful service. Anything rather than risk being shot themselves.

It was the only way to go, I thought. That left Charley Cletis to get rid of. I figured it wouldn't be any problem at all.

I put on my sunglasses and tilted the seat back and thought about Cletis. He wasn't the kind of guy you would forget, 6'6" or so, less than 150 pounds, a big shock of hair that looked like straw. I could picture him, an automatic in each hand, firing out entire clips like some dim-witted Rambo or Schwarzenuts, or whatever his name is.

It wasn't a bad thought, because Charley Cletis just wasn't too bright. He had something else going against him, too: He had lost the surprise factor, thanks to that phone call. I had warned Cletis about surprise when I broke him in ... hell, it had been six years ago. We were at one of the organization's properties in New Jersey—one of those big, isolated warehouses they build to keep the garbage dumps from running into each other. I had been asked to show Cletis the ropes as a favor to some organizational friends in Chicago. No skin off my nose; my territory didn't reach all the way to Chicago.

So I had tried my best. I sat this big scarecrow down and told him the truth.

"Nothing is important except surprise. Look at political killings. The easiest hits are where you just walk up to the target and blow him away. If you don't have to, don't even take the gun out of your pocket; just shoot him right through the cloth. The target doesn't even know he's a target. Surprise. Surprise is the key, because without that, it's just another even fight, and who the hell wants an even fight? You're not getting paid to win half the gun fights at the O.K. Corral."

But Cletis just looked at me, and I could see contempt in those watery blue eyes of his. I knew it right then. He was some kind of throwback to the merry days of Al Capone and the Twenties, the type who'd use a submachine gun when a .22-caliber target pistol would do the job. His teeth were too big for him to be smart.

"Goddamn it, Cletis, did you hear anything I said?"

Cletis smiled and gave me that soft Southern drawl, the way they talk when their mouths are filled with sheep turds, and he said, "Raht. Suhprazz."

Christ, I hate Southerners. They wouldn't recognize an idea if it jumped up and fastened its teeth on their corncob pipe.

"That means, 'Right. Surprise,' doesn't it? In English?" I said.

"Raht. Suhprazz," and then he walked off to shoot another 100 rounds into a stationary target.

So that was that and Cletis was off to Chicago. I scanned the papers once in a while, expecting to find him dead in some dumb shoot-out, but he must have gotten lucky, because I never saw anything about him, and I put him out of my mind.

Until that phone call. Charley, I thought, you've been lucky, but your luck is running-out. I'm going to have a surprise for you.

•

After the plane touched down in New York, I walked around the airport for a while, making sure I wasn't being followed, then I grabbed a cab.

But I didn't go back to my apartment. Instead, I checked into a fleabag hotel on the other side of 14th Street, then called my own phone number and used a beeper to get the messages from my machine.

There was only one.

"Hiya, ol' buddy. This is Charley Cletis. Long time, no see. How boutcha give me a buzz when you get in?" He left a phone number.

I could feel the sweat on my palms as I asked the hotel operator to get me the number. It was a good feeling. It was starting.

"Hello, Cletis. This is Garth."

"Ax, ol' buddy. Nice message there on your machine. Most folks do leave some kind a message, you know. Not jus' thirty seconds' dead air."

I hated him. I hated the way he talked, the way he sounded talking to a man he was planning to kill. I hated him for thinking he was good enough to take me on. I hated it that the dumb Rebel bastard couldn't pronounce Alex and always called me Ax.

But all I said was, "You know me; I don't care much for chitchat. You want something?"

"Jus' in town for a couple days' R&R," Cletis said. "Thought we maht get together for a drink."

"You run out of shit kickers to drink with?"

"Naw, but 'tain't often I get a chance to drink with my mentor." He pronounced the last word slowly—men-tore. "'Course, iffen ya don' wanna. ..."

"What the hell," I said. "Let's get lunch."

"Fahn. When? Where?"

"Let's meet at my office tomorrow," I said. "I get in around eleven. Meet me there and I'll take you to a good restaurant. Real food. Not that catfish crap you people eat."

"Eleven o'clock? On Sattiday? Business must be real good."

"Not that good," I said. "It's just my schedule. Saturday morning, ten o'clock sharp, I get my car cleaned at the car wash down the block, and then I go to the office to check the mail. Like clockwork."

"You always was like clockwork," Cletis said with a dry chuckle. "You still driving that old blue clunker?"

"Sure," I said. "I like my cars slow, only my women fast."

"Fast women, fast ponies. That's what I remember about you," Cletis said. "Ya been away?"

"Out of town a couple of days. On business."

"But you're home now," he said.

"Right now, I am where the welcome is warm and so is the company," I lied.

"Old dog," Cletis said. "Ya gonna get married and settle down is what ya gonna be tellin' me next."

"Not a chance," I said. "Listen. This lady is anxious and so am I. Tomorrow, at the office. Any time after eleven."

"Look forward, Ax," he said.

"Me, too," I said; but after I hung up the phone, I said out loud, "You stupid shit kicker, who do you think you're jerking around with?"

It would be the car wash. I knew it because Cletis was just too damned obvious bout it. I left the room to go for a walk. It was cooler, and the night air always helped me think.

One way or another, I wound up going toward Alphabet City—an ugly slash of New York, running south from 14th Street and sliced up by avenues A, B, C and D. That's where it got its nickname—that and maybe from the fact that most of the people there can't recite the alphabet. More than Harlem, more than Times Square, it was New York City's combat zone. The streets weren't unsafe only at night; they were unsafe at high noon. Gary Cooper would get his ass shot off walking down these streets.

I called it home. It's where I lived, among the orange-hairs and the leather boys and the girls who wear tire chains around their necks and T-shirts with holes cut in them so their nipples can stick out. It was where I wanted to live. No one asked any questions and no one cared what you did, and that was all I wanted from a neighborhood. And Alphabet City would stay that way, too, because the scum of the city would always need a place to collect. I felt for the trendies—young women, mostly—who had moved into the area because the rents were low. I saw one of them coming toward me down the street, a tall, thin, uptown type, flanked by two woolly dogs with heads big enough to belong to grizzly bears.

I almost laughed aloud. These dumb broads. What's the point of saving money on rent when you have to spend all you save on 100-pound dogs and tons of soup-bones and Alpo beef chunks by the case and wee-wee pads the size of mattresses?

The woman was getting close, and she smiled this nervous smile at me. Not smart, I thought. Just when she got near me, I jumped in front of her, waved my arms and yelled, "Boo!"

Well, she shrieked, and those two stupid Japanese dogs whimpered and hid behind her legs.

"Hey, lady," I said. "Why don't you move the hell out of here and go someplace nice? Before you and your doggies get hurt?"

She mumbled under her breath and yanked the dogs along. Just for good luck, I reached out and patted her rear end as she scuttled away.

Guard dogs. Not around here, lady, not in Alphabet City. Smarts keep you alive down here, not Yuppie guard dogs that you have to hand-feed sushi to. In Alphabet City, there are only three kinds of people: smart people, dead people and candidates for dead people. I was one of the smart ones. "Down here," I said to myself, "Charley Cletis would be dog meat." I laughed aloud on the empty street. It felt good to be back home.

I turned toward the river, then stood across the street from my tenement building. There were no curtains on my windows, and I could see the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. I never could see spending money on decorating.

I used my key to let myself in and walked up the dark steps to my floor. I listened at the door, but it was quiet inside. I felt at the top of the door for the piece of Scotch tape I always stick there so I can tell if anybody has been in my apartment after I've left. The tape wasn't there and, for a moment, my heart thumped hard and the breath caught in my throat. Then I remembered I had run out of tape just before I left for Boston.

I unlocked the door, pushed it open, waited a beat, then went in. I had come for a gun, but, just like that, a plan started forming in my mind. I took a few pieces of clothing from a pile in the closet and stuck them inside an old gym bag. I picked up the wastebasket from under the kitchen table and from the bottom took a 32-caliber revolver that was taped there. It was loaded, so I put it in the holster on the back of my belt, under my jacket. It was a clean gun—no record of it anywhere.

Back on the street, I felt better, feeling the weight of the gun. A few blocks away, I stopped in a bar called The Stinking Parrot. I'd never seen it before, but that didn't surprise me, because in that neighborhood, a guy opened a saloon, used it as a front while he sold $1,000,000 worth of drugs, then took his money and got out and sold the joint to somebody who changed the name and started it all over again.

When I opened the front door, the smell from the place almost made me gag. It was this mixture of urine and smoke and alcohol and sweat, and it was lethal. I thought that somebody someday was going to light a cigarette in there at the wrong time and the place was going to explode in a fireball. I stood at the corner of the bar and put the gym bag on the floor between my feet.

"Get you something?" this fireplug bartender yelled at me over the noise.

"Chivas, rocks," I said.

"Pretty fancy for in here," the bartender said.

"Not for me."

"Why not?" he asked.

What I wanted to say was that I was a Lithuanian princess in disguise, looking for a suitable husband. What I said was that I hit a pony and would he please get me my drink.

I gave him the three dollars and looked around the place. It was lit like a pinball machine, and I wondered how much money a person could make in a dive like this. I spotted the big man at the bar right away. He was this big, noisy black dude wearing a black-leather jacket and dirty white painter's pants and, even in the middle of July, he had a ski cap on.

The plan for the whole thing was coming together in my mind, but I had to work it out carefully. No slip-ups. I thought I had been careless a couple of times already that day. Taking too long to dump the gun in Boston. Wearing sunglasses watching that stupid news report. Even waiting too long before checking to see if anybody dangerous was on that plane. No tape on the door. Little mistakes like that, I knew, could cost you. I was swirling the drink in my hand, watching the black man's mouth move and wondering again why the organization would send someone like Cletis after me. Christ, they could've hired Martino. He was a wop, but at least he was a professional.

"Yo' be havin' trouble wif yo' eyeballs?"

I blinked and saw that the big guy was yelling at me. I had been staring at him. I looked away, but it was too late; he came down the bar and stood alongside me.

"Ah ask you, some fin' wrong wif yo' eyeballs, you starin' at me like dat?"

On a different night, a different place, I might just have said, "No. Actually, I was mesmerized by your mastery of the English language." But not this night.

So I said, "Sorry, mister. I'm just leaving."

"You leaves when ah says you leaves."

The bartender was hovering around, so I leaned over and said softly, "Get this tree climber off my back, will you?"

"Hey, Uncle Joe," the bartender said. "Let him be. He's leaving now."

"Ah makes sure o' dat."

I grabbed the gym bag in my left hand and headed for the door. I could feel the black guy walking behind me, and I knew what was next. As soon as I got outside, he'd slam me in the back, cold-cock me, drag me into the alley and lift everything I owned.

I had the gun in my hand before I was out the door, and I sensed when he was starting his punch, so I pulled away, spun around and let him see the gun aimed at his face. He still had his fists clenched together, in front of his head, but now he separated them slowly.

"Hey, bro'. No need fo' dat," he said. Then he smiled. Then I smashed the heel of the gun butt into his nose. He dropped like a wet sock. I knelt alongside him and slammed his face again with the butt of the gun. What there was of his nose went soft under it.

"You're lucky, Bomba," I said. "I'm busy tonight, or I'd just love taking you apart." He groaned and his eyes rolled back into his head, so I picked up my gym bag and took off at a trot before any of his littermates came out looking for him.

I walked back to the hotel, feeling good. I might be getting older, but I wasn't old yet. Not yet.

I stayed awake for two hours, carefully working out the trap I was going to set. When I finally rolled onto my side to get to sleep, I knew it was dead-center perfect. I closed my eyes, wondering again who it was that had called me in Boston. Why would somebody want to help me? And in those last few seconds before sleep, the answer popped into my head. It had to be somebody who hated Cletis even more than I did, somebody who had a score to settle with the redneck rube. It was a good reason and it solved the puzzle and I slept like a baby.

•

Nine o'clock the next morning, I parked my car in front of a small luncheonette two blocks from my apartment. The neighborhood was ripe, I thought as I stepped from the car. The hot July sun was already baking the garbage on the sidewalks and the sweet stench of decay hung in the air.

Through the window, I saw a beefy gray-haired man behind the counter and, when I went in, he said, "Hey, Al. How's the private-eye business?" His name was Benny, and he thought he was my friend.

"Looking good. I need a favor."

Naturally, he looked away without answering. In Alphabet City, favors generally get you thrown in jail.

"Nothing serious," I said. "I need you to drive my car through the car wash down the block."

"Yeah?"

"That's it," I said. "There's twenty bucks in it for you. Ten minutes' work."

"Just go get your car washed?"

"At ten o'clock. That's all," I said.

"This isn't dangerous, is it?"

"Come on, Benny, for Christ's sake. I'm talking about a car wash."

"Twenty bucks." Benny hesitated. "Awright. What the hell."

"Ten o'clock sharp," I said.

"No sweat. Louie can watch the counter."

I took three ten-dollar bills from my jacket pocket. "Here's your twenty. The extra ten's for the car wash."

"What do I do afterward?"

"Bring the car back here," I said. "I'll pick it up later."

"Ok."

"And be sure to wear these." I took off my snap-brim hat and my sunglasses and put them on the counter. I tried my smile on Benny. "A disguise for you," I said.

"So I should look like you," Benny said.

"You should be so lucky, fatso," I said and grinned at him. Like a friend would.

In the men's room of a saloon on the corner, I took a bottle of black shoe polish from the gym bag, put some on my fingers and dabbed it on the hair on my temples, changing the gray to black. Then I washed my hands, put the shoe polish back into the bag and changed from my suit jacket into an old baseball warm-up jacket. I put on a New York Yankees baseball cap, then folded my suit jacket and put it inside the gym bag. On top of that, I put the 32-caliber revolver.

When I walked away from the saloon, I felt the churning in my stomach that I always feel when a job is near. Some people may find that sensation unpleasant, but not me. Draw up a good plan, execute it well and bingo. It's what life is all about. And death.

There was the usual Saturday-morning line at the car wash. A couple of old winos and other assorted debris from last night's drinking lay cluttered around the apartment buildings on the block.

Like trees lining the entranceway to some estate, mounds of green-plastic garbage bags decorated the entrance to the Kleen-Kwik Kar Wash. In other parts of the city, garbage piles up when the sanitation men go on strike. In Alphabet City, it's always there, a municipal monument.

At one minute to ten by my watch, I saw my car pull into the end of the line, and I saw Benny behind the wheel, with the snap-brim hat and the sunglasses.

Almost time, I thought. I still hadn't seen Cletis, but I knew he had to be around.

Benny was now only two car lengths from the car-wash entrance, so I opened the gym bag, took out the revolver and stuck it in my belt, under the jacket. I stashed the bag behind a garbage pail and started strolling down the street to the Kleen-Kwik.

It happened just like I knew it would. As Benny pulled the car up to the entrance, the door of another car parked on the street opened and a gangly, tall man with straw hair stepped out. He left the door open and walked toward Benny in the car. He swallowed it, I thought. Hook, line, sinker and fishing rod.

The thin man stopped next to the car Benny was driving. He put his hands on the car roof and leaned over to look inside the passenger's window. I remember thinking it was strange that his hands were empty; but before he could reach for a gun, I stepped up behind him and put my hand on the gun inside my jacket.

"Hello, Charley," I said. "Sorry, but somebody dropped a dime on you."

I wanted him to turn around, to see my face as I shot him. The man turned. It wasn't Charley Cletis. Somebody else but not Charley.

My hand squeezed the grip of my gun. Hard. The man said, "You Garth?"

I nodded. "Who are you?" I asked. He looked so much like Charley Cletis.

He said, "I've got another message for you. I was told to tell you, 'Another thing I like about you, Garth, is that you're so predictable.'"

That's what he said just now, and I don't understand it; but I know that if I have a minute or two, I can figure it out.

Do I have a minute? Maybe not. I feel something now against the back of my neck. It's hard and it's cold, and I know what it is. It's the muzzle of a small gun.

I don't have time to turn around. I just hear a voice, this soft Southern voice, and it's saying . . . what's it saying? It's saying:

"Suhprazz, Ax, ol' buddy. Suhprazz."

"The guy I bopped had a kilo of pure cocaine in his room and I took it. Somehow they had found me out."