“Hard times.”
“And yet,” Sully said, “the core business, my core business, remains untouched. I’m recession-proof, you might say.”
“That’s good.”
“So there’s work for you, my friend. If you really want it. If you think you can still do it.”
If he really wanted it. If he thought he could still do it.
His coffee cup was empty. Lost in reverie, he’d drunk it without realizing it. He’d been looking out the window, but had he registered what had passed through his field of vision? Maybe the man he’d been waiting for—
No, speak of the devil. There he was now.
Colliard took a bill from his wallet, put it back. Ten dollars was too much, she’d remember him. Five was more than enough.
Besides, he didn’t need to throw money around these days.
He put a five on the table top. Outside, the man he’d been waiting for was standing at the parking garage two doors down the street, waiting for them to bring his car down. He’d probably called ahead and wouldn’t have long to wait. Colliard, parked at the curb, would have to get moving if he didn’t want to lose him.
He stayed where he was. An attendant got out of a bright blue Subaru and held the door for Colliard’s quarry. A bill changed hands — a dollar? A five? A ten? Colliard watched as the car pulled away and was gone.
He returned the five-dollar bill to his wallet, managed to catch the waitress’s eye. He wasn’t really hungry, but he decided to order something. You had to eat, didn’t you?
If he really wanted it, if he thought he could still do it. Because, Sully had told him, people change. Even when they stay the same, they change.
“Like the film. He had to go back to South-Central, you know? The Ivy League clothes and the Ivy League friends suited him well enough, but he had the street in him, and he had to go back to it.” An appraising glance. “But, see, it didn’t work for him, did it? Harvard, Princeton, wherever it was, it changed him. Was it Dartmouth? Never mind, doesn’t matter. Lost his edge, didn’t he? Lost whatever it was that keeps you alive on the street. Lost it, and that’s what got him killed. Not going back all by itself, but going back and not fitting in there anymore. That’s what got him killed.” A quick smile. “Of course, it’s only a film, isn’t it? Some story somebody made up. Wouldn’t want to read too much into it, but it’s something to think about, don’t you think?”
Colliard had never been in a street gang. They hadn’t had Bloods or Crips in the small city where he grew up, although he understood that they had them now. They’d had other gangs, ethnic in composition, raising a fair amount of hell, but Colliard had never gone near them. His family was lower middle class, just managing to hang on in a marginal suburb. Mortie Colliard was out of high school and bagging groceries at Safeway before he fell in with bad companions. The bad companions introduced him to Sully, and Sully found him things to do that paid better than bagging groceries.
“Paper or plastic, ma’am?” Life was simpler then, living in a room in his mother’s house, getting by on minimum wage. He couldn’t live like that now, but even if he could, who’d hire him? At his age?
At first what he did for Sully wasn’t much more complex than putting boxes of Tide in grocery bags and loading them in the trunk of some lady’s Toyota. But Sully was adept at finding the right person for the job, and when he got to know Colliard he spotted something — or the absence of something. And Sully sent him across town with a man everybody called Wheezy, though Colliard never knew why. Wheezy pointed out a man behind the counter in a hardware store, and the following afternoon Colliard returned on his own to the hardware store, examined power tools until another customer finished his business and left, and then approached the counter, took out the revolver Sully had provided, and shot the man twice in the chest and, after he’d fallen, once more in the head. He wiped his prints from the gun, dropped it beside the corpse, and went home. On the way he stopped for pizza, and had three slices with pepperoni and extra cheese. Drank a large Coke. Back home he watched TV for a while and then went to bed at his usual time. Slept fine, woke up refreshed.
Nothing to it.
Back in the day, before he’d improved himself and risen in the world, before the college courses and the first corporate job, Colliard would have timed things differently. He’d have been out of the diner before his quarry appeared, and would have been within a few feet of him when the attendant brought his car down. Even as the fellow was applying the brakes, Colliard would have put the brakes on the car’s owner, drawing the .22 automatic, pulling the trigger twice, and quitting the scene before anyone knew quite what had happened.
Instead, all he did was sit there watching.
People change, don’t they? Even when they stay the same, they change.
He’d ordered a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich. It came with french fries, and he asked the waitress to make them very well done. “Crisp and brown,” she said, when she set the plate before him. “Some more coffee?”
He shook his head, told her to make it a Coke. She said they had Pepsi, and he assured her Pepsi was fine.
Like old times, he thought. Grilled cheese and bacon was close enough to pizza, and Pepsi was close enough to Coke. But shooting somebody and watching passively while he drove away, well, there was a fairly substantial difference there.
He had a fair appetite, and the food was good. The cheese had a toasty tang, the fries were the way he liked them, and if she’d simply passed off the Pepsi as Coke he’d never have known the difference.
So it was a good enough meal. And if it seemed to him that the long ago pizza had pleased him more, well, maybe it had, but you couldn’t blame the food for that. There were other factors.
If he’d followed the guy, if he’d set out after him, then what? Maybe he’d have aborted the mission somewhere along the way, turned left when the blue Subaru turned right. Maybe he’d have been able to tail him all the way into his driveway and gun him down before he got his front door unlocked. Or maybe he’d have stuck the gun in the man’s face only to have his finger freeze on the trigger, or—
Endless scenarios. Too many ways it could go wrong, all of them possible because what was not possible was for him to know how much he had in fact changed, and whether he could still do this.
Go up to a stranger, some man who’d done Colliard no harm. Point a gun, pull a trigger, go home and wash your hands. Eat some pizza, watch TV.
He’d stayed in his seat just now because he couldn’t go ahead and write the first chapter until he could see his way through to the ending. Because if it turned out that he couldn’t do it, that he was done with that stage in life and couldn’t go back to it — well, that was not a discovery he wanted to make with a gun in his hand and his eyes locked with those of the man he was suddenly unable to kill.
All that could do was get him in trouble. With the law, if its minions showed up while he stood there, paralyzed, incapable even of fleeing the scene. Or, if he somehow got away clean, with Sully, for having put the quarry on notice, thus turning him from an easy to a hard target. He finished his sandwich, finished his fries, finished his Pepsi. And left the waitress a very good tip, because he’d taken up a lot of her time, and because his failure wasn’t her fault. And, finally, because it didn’t matter anymore if she remembered him.
It was past nine when he got home. He’d told his wife he wouldn’t be home for dinner, but she’d made a casserole and offered to warm it up for him. They were eating out less since his business failed, and she’d surprised him by blossoming as a good cook. Nothing fancy, but good simple dishes.