The Soak Page 3

  As he laid the map on the counter, the light-brown clerk said in a singsong accent, “Map? You don’t have a smartphone?”

  Hobbs just shook his head and kept it turned away from the camera behind the plexiglass shield. “No, too smart for me.”

  Back in the truck he looked at the map and ate the sandwich. He wondered if it would still be there. Only one way to find out. He started the truck. Its throaty, big-engined rumble was reassuring. He would be sad to part with it.

  The neighborhood he was looking for had changed since the last time Hobbs had been there. After ripping off that textile mill payroll, he had never wanted to see this place again. Now that he had come back, he realized that he never would. Everything had changed.

  The city had flourished, and this neighborhood of rundown mill houses on the north side of a booming city center had been gentrified. The mills here had been converted to high-end apartments. The theater that had showed porn now booked bluegrass acts. The whorehouse had been converted into a pizza joint. The artists who had moved in for the cheap living had painted the drab houses all kinds of crazy colors, then sold them to yuppies, the kind of people who had to buy their cool at full retail. Later these yuppies had knocked the colorful houses down and built new ones on top of the ruins. It was now a neighborhood of people who went antiquing. It made Hobbs feel like an antique.

  The house he was looking for was still there. It had been a shotgun shack. Now it was a two-story shotgun shack, with big windows and a fresh coat of lavender paint. He didn’t need to go inside to know that the place had granite countertops.

  He parked the truck down the street in the shade and watched the house. A guy came out on the front porch with a phone and a laptop. He spent a lot of time on the phone, and he talked with his hands.

  After two hours of this, Hobbs realized this guy wasn’t going to leave. In the old days he would have waited it out. Patience was a heister’s best tool. The heavier the hit, the more of it you needed. But he had lost too much time. They’d make this truck sooner or later. As if to prove the point, he saw a patrol car sliding along underneath the shadows of the oak trees on the next street over. Always a cop when you didn’t need one.

  He stepped out of the Ford and shut the door behind him. On the porch the yuppie was shifting his attention back and forth between the laptop screen and the smartphone, typing on one, texting on the other. Hobbs’s legs shook as he walked. He told himself he was just playing the part of a frail old man.

  The yuppie didn’t even look up until Hobbs was on the porch, and then he held up a finger as if to say, “Lemme just finish typing this.”

  Hobbs said, “My truck broke down, and I’d like to use your phone to call a…”

  The yuppie looked up and evaluated the person he saw in front of him, and then an expression of concern crossed his face. “Of course,” he said. Hobbs realized his mistake even as the yuppie swiped the code on his smartphone. He handed it to Hobbs. Hobbs just stared at it. “Do you, uh, know how to use that?” the yuppie asked.

  Fuck it. “I don’t really need your phone.” That got the yuppie’s attention, but he wasn’t yet afraid. Hobbs had been physically threatening all his life, so he wasn’t sure how to play it when he wasn’t. It was hard to grow old and learn new ways to do the old, old things. Maybe that’s why people retired?

  “I’ll tell you the truth. My bladder is the size of a walnut. And I gotta take a leak, or I’m gonna whiz in my truck over there. So, I was wondering,” he said, putting all his limited acting skills into it. “If I could use your head.”

  The yuppie’s frown faded away into an understanding smile. “Same thing happened to my grandfather, toward the end. You should have heard him complain about it on fishing trips. C’mon inside,” he said, leading the way.

  Hobbs let him get in the door, then he dropped the heel of his fist into the back of the yuppie’s neck. It was a good shot, and the yup dropped like a sack. Looking at him in a heap on the floor, Hobbs didn’t feel so old and worn out. Then he realized that his bladder really was small, and he really did have to pee.

  After, in the bathroom, he splashed water on his face and neck. When he was done patting his face down with a towel, he looked at it in the mirror and realized that, for some reason, the vain, unconscious fucker who owned this house had put up facing mirrors. So you could see all of yourself, and infinity, if you looked the right way.

  He saw the number eleven on the back of his neck. The two tendons, standing up away from the skin and the muscle. He had known more than one old hard case who said that when the eleven came up, a man was done for. He had known a jugger, a safecracker, one of the best he had ever worked with, who, when the eleven appeared on the back of his neck, was all washed up. Nerve gone, confidence shot, not worth a damn to anybody. If that jugger had been an animal, he would have had the sense to lie down and die.

  He looked at his tendons. Maybe he was done for. Maybe he wasn’t. Didn’t matter. He needed to keep moving. Revenge didn’t care what age you were. He’d roll a wheelchair to the ends of the earth to get his revenge, strangle somebody with a colostomy bag if he had to. He promised himself, then and there, whatever happened to his flesh, his will would stay strong. Even as he did, he knew that somewhere, death was laughing at him.

  Done with this foolishness, he stepped out of the bathroom and started looking for the cellar stairs. In the old layout there had been stairs going down, but they had been removed. There’d still be some kind of access outside. Maybe the same door he’d used all those years ago.

  Then he heard a noise behind him and realized his mistake. Was it the Curse of the Eleven?

  He turned and saw the yuppie struggling to stay on his feet in the middle of his own living room. When he saw Hobbs looking at him, the yup said, “Old man, you fucked up now,” as if he was trying to sound like a movie. The play was to stay quiet, and not give Hobbs any sign. The yuppie charged low, like a guy who had wrestled in high school, or an idiot.

  Hobbs kneed him under the chin. If Hobbs had been whole, the knee would have taken the guy out. But when Hobbs raised his good leg, the bad one gave out. His heel rolled like a hinge full of broken glass and they crashed to the floor together.

  The yup had been expecting this even less than Hobbs. He tripped over Hobbs and put his head and part of his arm through the drywall. He fought his way free and dived on Hobbs.

  “Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou,” he repeated as if it were some kind of blasphemous mantra. But he wasn’t serious about the fucking. He punched ineffectually at Hobbs’s ribs in a way that suggested hitting a man in the face was somehow impolite.

  Hobbs didn’t have this problem. He clawed at the yup’s face, trying to catch an eye socket and a lip in the same motion. He got the fishhook and, with a grunt that was more from annoyance than effort, threw the yup off and into the butt end of the sofa.

  Hobbs tried to stand, but his ankle wasn’t having any of it. He clawed his way up a bookcase, but at an altitude of three feet, the pain was waiting for him. The left side of his body went hot, then numb. All the drive went out of his legs. As he collapsed back to the floor, he managed to grab a terra-cotta statue of the Buddha from a bookshelf. He and the Buddha crashed to the floor together. One of them shattered.

  The yup redoubled his attack, this time grabbing Hobbs’s neck with both of his dainty hands. The yup squeezed for all he was worth, which wasn’t much. In his younger days, Hobbs would have laughed it off. Or maybe taken a nap. Waited for this man to wear himself out with his ineffectual choke. But now, this guy’s “not much” was more than enough to do him in. Hobbs heard the roaring in his ears. He saw bright flecks off to the sides of his vision. He tried to roll, but could not.

  The yuppie gave a howl that he must have thought was terrifying and barbaric. To Hobbs it sounded like a kitten being strangled. Even as he blacked out, he couldn’t believe that this jackass was going to choke him out.

  “No,” Hobbs croaked.

 
; “Yeah, yeah!” said the yup, who had finally gotten the idea to bang Hobbs’s head against the floorboards. “Nobody comes into my house. You understand?” He stopped banging Hobbs’s head against the floor so he could ask again, “You understand?”

  Holy shit, thought Hobbs, he wants an answer. He said nothing, but his right hand scrabbled in the fully and completely awakened shards of the Buddha on the floor next to him. His hand closed on a likely piece just as the yup shrieked, “Huh, who’s the man now!”

  With what was left of his failing strength, Hobbs jammed the shard of pottery deep into the yuppie’s neck. The yup said, “Ow,” like he didn’t quite understand the whole thing. Then Hobbs pulled the shard toward him, ripping through muscle, tendon, and artery alike. Blood sprayed across the refinished wooden floor. Choking on his fear, the yuppie clamped his hand to his neck, but it was no good. Instead of spurting out sideways, the hot yuppie juice shot up and down.

  The yup tried to stand but only stumbled backward three steps. Before Hobbs passed out, the last thing he saw was the man falling backward, bleeding out, into his own bathroom.

  EIGHT

  Hobbs woke up coughing. There was a raw patch in his throat where the yuppie had tried to choke him. He struggled to his feet and checked the window.

  Outside he saw a cop peering in the window of the old truck, his cruiser parked behind it. He saw the cop trigger the radio mic on his vest and say something. Yeah, he’d been made. And here he was in the slaughterhouse, covered in blood. This was bad.

  A sharp pain flashed through his head, followed by a wave of exhaustion. He felt that urge that men fighting fires on sinking ships know, that siren song that only men making last stands can hear. Let it be over. Just lie down and die. Go to your rest and who cares what your “reward” is. Men who are so hopeless and exhausted that they’d trade in all their tomorrows for a few minutes of peace and an eternity of black silence.

  The older you get, the fewer tomorrows you have to trade, and the better the deal begins to look.

  He shook it off. With effort he dragged himself into the bedroom. He stripped down, and once again put on somebody else’s clothes. These fit a little better. A white button-down shirt and a pair of gray wool pants. The yuppie’s shoes were too small for him. He wondered how much longer his socks would hold out.

  He found a ball cap with a golf logo on it and slipped it over his head. He used the man’s sheet to wipe some of the blood off his face. He thought about going into the bathroom to clean up, but he didn’t want to face that idiot’s husk.

  Mostly he was pissed at himself. It was Hobbs’s fault that he had had to kill the yup. If he had done it right at first, none of it would have been necessary. It was sloppy, fucking sloppy.

  He checked the front window again. The cop was sitting in his car, typing away on a laptop. Lucky, thought Hobbs, he’s waiting for backup. Trusting to the technology. In the old days that cop would have been knocking on doors and peering through windows. But more cops were on the way. That was the problem with cops. There were always more of them.

  Hobbs moved as quickly as he could. Out the back door, down the steps. The backyard was different. Twenty years ago there had been a creek back here. He had crawled along it, dragging a bag of money, as cops swarmed around the mill a mile away and braced his idiot partner, who had scotched the play.

  All those years ago, he had slipped into the basement of this house and hid for two days. He got by without food and with what little bit of water he could sneak from the tub of the old-style wringer washing machine tub. When he left, he stole a set of work clothes—little more than rags—and stashed the payroll in a hole he dug in the foundation. He replaced the bricks and hoped for the best. Then he slipped into that stinking little creek—nothing more than a community piss rivulet—and followed it until he came to a train track.

  Hobbs had hopped a slow-moving train and was grateful to have gotten out clean.

  Money left behind like this was known as a spike, cash you stashed in a place that couldn’t be traced to you. They were good to have. Even if you put money in a safe-deposit box, or hotel safe, it was linked to some identity. If that identity got burned, then it wasn’t safe to go back. Ever. So, throughout his career, Hobbs had hammered spikes in case he needed them.

  Not many of them were left now. He’d never gotten back around to this one. After he had gotten clear of that payroll job, he had hit a good streak and hadn’t needed money. When you are rolling in it, you don’t want to crawl into a musty basement, or remember the taste of soap flakes in stale water, if you don’t have to.

  Was it still there? Had it been noticed in the renovations? Maybe some home inspector had quietly pocketed it for himself? There was only one way to know, and he needed to be quick about it.

  The door to the cellar had been replaced. The old one hadn’t had a lock on it, but this was a proper exterior door with a pattern of nine rectangular glass panes on the top. He rolled up the shirtsleeve around his elbow and gave the pane nearest the knob a pop. It didn’t break when he hit it. It popped out of its mounting and landed on the floor. Hobbs reached through and switched the dead bolt.

  The floor of the basement was still dirt. That was a good sign. As good a sign as he was going to get on a shitty day like today. And the pane of glass hadn’t broken. He was happy to spare his bare feet. He turned on the light and closed the door behind him. There was a whiff of gasoline from a push mower, but underneath it was the same musty scent that haunted him from all those years ago. His lungs hurt as he pushed into the darkness.

  This dank space didn’t extend the whole length of the house. Twenty-five feet or so in was a block wall. With effort he crawled over that into a crawl space maybe three feet tall. The space was thick with cobwebs and the dried husks of spider crickets. He remembered those things crawling on him in the night, pale and bulbous, nothing like the small, dark, somehow reassuring crickets he had grown up with.

  He felt around the base of the retaining wall, feeling for the stone he had placed there long ago. He shuddered a little as he thrust his hand into the darkness. He hadn’t been a fearful man. What had changed?

  It was still there. Old money in a canvas bank bag, the kind they didn’t use anymore. As he pulled on the fabric, he heard it rip and felt the bundles of bills tumble into the dirt. He shoveled the money out with both hands, throwing it over the low wall into the basement space. As he hunched in the dust and mold spores, he felt something land on his neck. He clawed and crushed it and flung it into the darkness with a curse. He bent again and felt that the hole was empty. He took the time to replace the rock.

  He gathered the scattered stacks of bills and found it was about $12,000. Not much. Maybe enough. He looked out the window into the backyard. No cops yet. He hadn’t heard anybody knocking at the door above, but it was only a matter of time. Sooner or later that knock would come. A cop would waddle around the back of the house, shining his flashlight into the dirty windowpanes. See that one was missing. Hobbs shook off the fear and decided he was going to be a long way away when that happened.

  He found an old backpack in some boxes and threw the money into it. Then he took a mountain bike that was hanging off the joists. Ah, yuppies. He scoffed at the helmet at first, but then realized it was perfect. He turned the baseball cap around backward and slid the awkward hunk of plastic onto his head.

  He wheeled the bike out and mounted it. The seat didn’t have any padding. He felt his balls being separated and crushed, but when he pushed off and started pedaling, it didn’t feel so bad. He managed not to fall over. He rode away from the house, deeper into the neighborhood. Ahead of him another cop car turned onto the street and accelerated past him. Hobbs felt his nuts crawl up tighter against the hard bicycle seat, but he reached a hand out and waved to the officer anyway. Just a law-abiding citizen out for a bike ride.

  The cop didn’t even look at him. He must have been too excited about responding to the APB on the truck. Just
wait till they find that dead yuppie, thought Hobbs. That cop’s hard-on will probably rip right through his tactical pants. Hobbs felt a pang of regret for killing the guy. Sure, the yup was probably an asshole, but it was being sloppy that bothered Hobbs.

  He shifted. The bike’s gears ground and caught and carried him away.

  NINE

  He pedaled out of the neighborhood slowly, coasting more than anything else. When he was faced with a hill, he had to get off the bike and lean on it, using it to limp his way along the sidewalk.

  As he climbed the hill, he passed a mall with a parking lot that looked as if it had been the target of strafing runs by a vengeful Far Eastern air force. The mall was occupied by the conquerors, every sign displaying a name rendered in strange squiggly characters. For a second he thought he could read some of them, but that was from another life, long ago, and he put it from his mind.

  He had a sack full of money on his back, and there wasn’t a thing he could buy. You might forget an old guy who paid for a pack of gum in cash, but an old guy in socks who buys a pair of shoes and counts out musty bills from an old backpack? You don’t forget about that guy. Maybe not ever.

  Hobbs pressed on, following the signs back toward the highway. The pain in his leg was worse now, and the exhaustion made his eyes twitch. He didn’t know how much farther he could push it, but he wasn’t going to stop just because it got hard. That was for the younger, weaker generations—or so he had thought. Until that kid came along.

  A wave of emotion almost drove him to his knees. He hadn’t thought of Alan since he had woken up. Hadn’t thought of any of it, but all of it was driving him anyway. One foot, then another, he pushed the bike to the top of the hill. Before he got there, he found some glass with his foot. The neighborhood was going from “transitional” to crappy.