“Yeah, I’m going soft.”
I hoist the case onto his desk and slide it over to him.
“Archibald’s?”
“Yep,” I answer.
“He give you any problems?”
“Naah, he’s all bluster. What I want to know is: who’s he working for?”
This catches Pooley off guard. Ours is a business where certain questions aren’t asked. The less you know—the fewer people you know, I should say—the better your chances of survival. Middlemen are as common as paper and ink, another office supply, a necessity to conduct business. They are used for a reason: to protect us from each other. Everyone understands this. Everyone respects this. You do not go asking questions, or you end up dead or relocated or physically unable to do your job. But those seven letters at the top of the page changed the rules.
“What?” he asks. Maybe he hadn’t heard me right. I can’t blame him for hoping.
“I want to know who hired Archibald to work as his go-between.”
“Columbus,” Pooley stammers. “Are you serious?”
“I’m as serious as you’ve ever known me.”
This is no small statement, and Pooley knows it. We go back nearly twenty years, and he’s seen me serious all my life. This breach of professional etiquette has him jumpy. I can see it on his face. Pooley is not good at hiding his emotions, not ever.
“Goddammit, Columbus. Why’re you asking me that?”
“Open the case,” I say.
He looks at it suspiciously now, as if it can rise off the table and bite him, and then back at me. I nod without changing my expression, and he spins the case around and unhinges the snaps.
“In the envelope,” I urge when he doesn’t see anything looking particularly troublesome.
He withdraws the envelope and slides his finger under the flap as I did. When he sees the name at the top of the page, his face flushes.
“You gotta be shitting me.”
Like I said, Pooley is practically my brother, and as such, is the only one who knows the truth about my genesis. When I was thirteen and he was eleven, we were placed with the same foster family, my sixth in five years, Pooley’s third. By then, I could take whatever shit was thrown my way, but Pooley was still a boy, and he had been set up pretty well in his last home. He had an old lady for a foster mother, and the worst thing she did was to make him clean the sheets when she shit the bed. Not a particularly easy job for a nine-year-old, but nothing compared to what he had to survive at the Cox house after the old lady passed away.
Pete Cox was an English professor at one of the fancy schools outside Boston. He was a deacon at his church, a patron at the corner barbershop, and an amateur actor at the neighborhood theater. His wife had suffered severe brain damage four years prior to our arrival. She had been in the passenger seat of a Nissan pickup truck when the driver lost control of the wheel and rolled the truck eleven times before it came to rest in a field outside Framingham. The driver was not her husband. The last person who could substantiate their whereabouts was the clerk at the Marriott Courtyard Suites . . . when they checked out . . . together.
Subsequently, his wife occupied a hospital bed in the upstairs office of Pete’s two-story home. She was heavily medicated, never spoke, ate through a tube, and kept on living. Her doctors thought she might live another fifty years, if properly cared for. There was nothing wrong with her body, just her brain, jammed in by the door handle when it broke through her skull.
Pete decided to take in foster children, since he would never have children of his own. His colleagues felt he was a brave man, a stoic; they certainly would have understood if he had divorced his wife after the circumstances of the accident came to light. But not our Pete. No, our Pete felt as though his wife’s condition was a consequence of his own sin. And as long as he took care of his wife, as long as he showed God he could handle that burden, then it was okay if his sin continued. And grew. And worsened.
Pete liked to hurt little boys. He had been hurting little boys on and off since he was eighteen. “Hurting them” could mean a number of things, and Pete had tried them all. He had nearly been caught when he was first learning his hobby after he had sliced off the nipple of an eight-year-old who was selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. Pete caught up with him in the alley behind his cousin’s apartment—just luck he had been visiting at the time!—and invited the kid to show him his sales brochure. With the promise of seventeen subscription purchases, which would qualify the kid for a free Sony Walkman and make him the number-one salesman in his Cub Scout den, Pete got him to step behind a Dumpster and take off his shirt. He had the nipple off in no time, but he hadn’t anticipated the volume of the child’s scream. It was so loud, so visceral, so animal, it excited Pete like a drug; yet, at the same time, windows were going up all over the block. Pete booked it out of there, and no one ever came looking for him. He promised himself to be more discreet the next time. And the next time. And the next.
By the time we came to live with him, Pete had hurt hundreds of children all over the country. He had thought his wife to be his savior, the only woman who had really, truly cared for him, and for a while after they were married, he had stopped doing what he did to little boys. But an addiction is tough to put away permanently; it sits in dark recesses, gathering strength, biding its time until it can unleash itself, virgin and hungry, again. It was a week after Pete had fallen off the wagon, had done an unmentionable thing to a nine-year-old, when his wife had had her accident. How could he not blame himself for her fate? The Bible spends a great deal of time explaining the “wages” of sin, and what were his wife’s infidelity and her crumpled brain but manifestations of the evil he had committed on that boy? So he took care of her, and four years later, signed up with the state to be a foster parent.
I don’t need to shock you with the atrocities Pooley and I endured in the two years we lived in the Cox house. Rather, to understand the relationship we now share, I’ll tell you about the last night, the night before we were sent to finish out our youth at Juvenile upstate.
I was fifteen then, and had figured out ways to make my body stronger, despite Cox’s best efforts to keep us physically emaciated. When he went to work, I put chairs together and practiced push-ups, my legs suspended between them. I moved clothes off the bar in the closet and pulled myself up—first ten times, then twenty, then hundreds. I bench-pressed the sofa, I ran sprints in the hallway, I squatted with the bookcase on my back. All of this while Pete was gone; everything put back and in its place before he returned. I tried to get Pooley to work his body with me, but he was too weak. He wanted to, I could tell, but his mind wouldn’t let him see the light at the end of the tunnel, so much had been taken out of him.
On this day, the last day, Pete had given his students a walk. He had not felt good, had started to come down with something, and when the dean of the department told him to go on home and rest, Pete decided to take his advice before he changed his mind. This is why he entered his house not at four o’clock like he usually did, but at two-fifteen. This is why he found me surrounded by books all over the floor, the bookcase lofted on my back, my taut body in mid-squat.
“What the fuck?” was all he could muster, before his eyes narrowed and he came marching toward me.
I tossed the bookcase off my back like I was bucking a saddle, and looked for the easiest escape route, but there wasn’t one, and before I could move, his arms were around me. He hoisted me off the ground—I couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds—and threw me headfirst into the wall. Instead of cracking, my head ripped through the plaster into a wooden beam. Dazed, I pushed away as fast as I could, shaking wall dust from my hair, but he was on me again, and this time, he held me up in a bear hug. His face was both angry and ecstatic, and he squeezed until I couldn’t breathe and my eyes went bleary with tears. I think he would have killed me. I was getting too old to bully and he knew I was building up resistance. It would have been safer to kill me. To go ahead and finish this here and now. He still had one more little boy he could torture.
From up the stairs, Pooley found his voice. “Let go of him, you stupid motherfucker!”
This got our attention, both of us, and distracted Cox enough to make him drop me. From
my
mouth, he was used to hearing such language, such resentment, such fury, but not from little Pooley. We both jerked our heads simultaneously and looked up the stairs.
The door guarding Mrs. Cox stood open. The padlock that usually kept it firmly closed was somehow forced, wood scrapings cutting claw scratches into the wall. Pooley stood just outside the door, his tiny body shaking, drenched with sweat, a glass shard in his hand, blood dripping from the end in large red drops.
Pete’s face metamorphosed so dramatically, it was like someone had flipped a switch, turning from acid rage to sudden confusion and trepidation. “What’d you do?” was all he could manage, and his knees actually wobbled.
Pooley didn’t answer; he just stood there, trembling, his face strained, blood and sweat mingling on the carpet at his feet.
“What’d you do?” Pete shouted a second time, his voice marked with desperation. Again, Pooley didn’t answer.
Pete launched for the stairs and ascended them in five quick steps. I was close behind, prepared to tackle him with everything I had if he went for Pooley. But he didn’t. He took two more steps toward his wife’s open door, peeked into the room fearfully, as though hands might suddenly reach out and grab him, and then collapsed inside.
I got to Pooley as tormented wails began to waft from the open door. “Come on,” I said.
Pooley’s eyes continued to stare off into space.
“Let’s get out of here,” I added. The urgency in my voice snapped some life back into his face and his eyes settled on me.
“I had to,” he said weakly.
“I know,” I offered.
I put my hand on his arm, and he let the shard drop to the floor. The blood caught it, and it landed sideways, red flecks marring the beauty of the glass. We stepped over it and walked down the stairs. I picked up the bookcase again and heaved it into the living room window, somehow knowing instinctively the front door had been double bolted before Pete turned and found me there.
We climbed out of the window and tasted the air outside for the first time in over a year, just as the loudest wail rose from the dark upstairs. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!”
ALL
those months Pooley had been silent, pretending to be resigned inside himself, he had really been watching, studying, understanding the motivations of our Pete. Taking his beatings in silence, letting me take mine, but watching, waiting. Twice he had overheard Pete in Mrs. Cox’s room, pouring out his penitence to her mindless eyes. Twice he had heard Pete begging for forgiveness, only to increase his savagery two hours later. So Pooley began to figure out that Pete needed her there to continue doing what he did to us. He needed someone who wouldn’t judge him, but would sit passively and let him forgive himself so he could do it again. While I trained, trying to make my body stronger so I could one day fight back, Pooley cracked a mirror in the back bathroom, sharpened a shard on the side of the bedroom headboard, and waited. When Pete came home early and found me getting stronger, he knew he could wait no longer.
The police picked us up before we had gone a mile. We were indicted for killing Mrs. Cox, and my descriptions of our treatment seemed to fall on deaf ears. I had a petty-crime juvenile record in my past, and Pooley was done talking to adults for a long time. I can’t say I blamed him; he saved my life, after all. Nor was I surprised when we were convicted. But because of some of the oddities that came out of Pete’s mouth when he talked cryptically to the judge about swift, painful discipline—lending some credence to what I had said about our treatment—we were tried as juveniles and sent upstate to finish out our youth.
SO
Pooley was the first assassin I had known. When I decided to begin this life professionally—or you might say it was decided for me—he was a natural to be my middleman, though he wasn’t my first.
CHAPTER 3
POOLEY
agrees the coincidence surrounding my father is too odd to let pass without some digging. Since I need to head west without delay, he’ll handle the shovel for me. We agree to speak again when I call next week from the road.
My rule is eight weeks out. I will not agree to complete a job in less than that time, and, as such, have turned down quite a few assignments, even when offers for more money have been dangled like grapes. I can flawlessly plan and execute a job in less time; of that, I have no doubt. But assassinating a target takes psychological preparation, and shortchanging yourself in that area can lead to debilitation long after the mark is in the grave.
I open the folder again and this time, study the contents without flinching. He will be traveling by bus, a “whistle-stop” tour crisscrossing the country, culminating in Los Angeles at the Democratic National Convention. His path is strategically haphazard, planned randomness, with stops in most of the major television markets surrounding battleground states and enough small towns peppered in so that no economic demographic will feel slighted. Three thousand miles and a million handshakes in eight weeks. I will follow the same route, and will wait for him in the Midwest, allowing him to catch up, before I follow him the rest of the way to California.
The next morning, a rental car is parked out on my street with no paperwork to sign, no instructions to receive, the keys on the floorboard under the steering column. A beige car, a sedan, with nothing to distinguish it from the millions of other cars sprawling across American highways at any given time. With only a small duffel tossed in the backseat and a larger case lodged in the trunk, I head west, the sun at my back.