have. Plus my wife’s filed for divorce, I’ve been shot, and one of my best friends ain’t speaking to me.”
See? You hear the damnedest things. Rivkin relaxed some. Mr. Klick sounded sincere. And hurt. Maybe he really wanted help.
“Start where you like.”
“I wish I knew where to start. Don’t I have to go all the way back to when I was an itty-bitty baby? You know, how I hate my mother and all that?”
“Do you hate your mother?”
“I don’t even remember her, to tell you the truth. Hardly, anyway. And I don’t understand that, either. I was twelve years old when she died. But I only remember a few things that happened in those years. And anything I do recall is out of time, you know, out of sequence. Sitting beside her on wooly, brown sofa looking at pictures of Vietnam, showing me where a brother served in the Navy. Sitting on a ramp on our porch, falling, getting caught by a neighbor while Mom laughed. Breakfasts. Suppers, her cheese and onion enchiladas.”
“What does that tell you?”
“What? What do you mean what does that tell me? You’re the one getting paid for this, what does it tell you?”
“Have you always been so belligerent, Mr. Klick?”
“Yeah, pretty much. At least since the fourth grade when I got kicked out of school for calling Mrs. Neal unheard-of-names.”
“And what were those?”
“Don’t ask. It might embarrass you.”
“Ah. I shouldn’t have asked. Losing your mother at such a young age meant there was no one there to reinforce your past, to imprint those younger memories. A mother continues all through our lives to tell us the things we did as a child. So not remembering her too well, that probably means no one filled the gap she left, no one reminded you of what she was like. You were also probably told to ‘go on with your life.’ That’s common enough.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Like maybe I’m just like anyone else, huh?”
“Don’t you feel like everyone else?”
“No, I’ve always felt…different. I’ve never fit in anywhere.”
“That’s not at all uncommon with people who’ve lost a parent early in life.”
“Anyway, the heck with the past. I don’t want things to go bad on me again.”
Rivkin had to smother his laugh. People were always trying to forget the past when it was actually the most important part of understanding one’s self.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“Life has a way of kicking my teeth in when I pause to turn around and see just how good I have it. It’s always waiting there like Big Mike at the Fort Worth Zoo.”
“You mean the gorilla, Mike?”
“Yeah. He’s been there ever since I was a kid.”
“Mr. Klick, Mike died a few years back.”
“Really? Hmm. See, there you are. Life just did it again. It just rolls over everyone and never stops. Leaves behind anybody. And everybody. A few weeks back it snuck up on me and kicked me in the shins. Then the balls. Then when I was dazed, Life paused to give me a sweet kiss, just when I thought it was over. Hell, I was praying it was over. I wanted life to say goodbye, ka sa-ra sa-ra. Life’s sadistic.”
“But…?”
“You kidding? It was going all right, my job was beginning to pay off because of the hours I put into it. Had a new house, the kids going to a good school. Wouldn’t you know it, though? That was the problem. It always is. I should stay poor and just be some red neck that don’t care ‘bout nothing.”
“Go on.”
“Well, I guess it really started one morning a few weeks ago. Yeah. My best friend had called me, told me to meet one of his men at a warehouse until he could get there. You might say he’s in the security business. So I went…”
The Set-Up
“Never been there.”
“Man, you joking or what? I’d heard you and Chan were in the Army together.”
“Yeah, so?” I glanced at my watch.
“And you two never been to ‘Nam?”
“Peace-time Army,” I said. “After Viet Nam.” I frowned. Where the heck was Chan?He’d called from the airport just thirty minutes ago.
“Man, I’d heard Chan was a real bad-ass. And never been to ‘Nam. Huh.”
He made it sound like if a man hasn’t been in a war, he hasn’t ever been shot at. As if getting shot at was something to do. Almost as much fun as getting shot, huh.
I looked up at the sun, hanging at ten o’clock. Hot enough to be afternoon. I squinted at the glare and held my hand up to shade my eyes. Drops of sweat tracked down my face. Ninety-nine percent humidity and no clouds in sight. It was only early May.
I had the feeling it was going to be a long day.
“Hey, damnit, you deaf? I’m talking to you.”
I frowned some more. I looked at the guy, standing there giving me a go-to-hell look with his mean gray eyes. He wore a black leather jacket, green camouflage t-shirt underneath, green camy pants and black jump-boots, the kind of boots a military man gets in Korea with two-inch rubber soles. I didn’t even know the man’s name.
He was chewing a tobacco plug crammed in his wide jaws. It fit his image, along with the Marine-short hair; so short it was hard to tell what color it was under the Peterbilt cap he was wearing.
If I was broiling just dressed in jeans, yellow t-shirt and deck shoes, then the man in front of me must’ve felt like a Christmas turkey.
He held a shiny silver, pump 12-gauge Remington shotgun in his left hand. I held a matching one.
“Chan did hire you, right?” I asked him with a taste of wonder in my voice.
“Nah, he wasn’t around but was short a hand, and I was hanging around. Thing is, if he sent me, what’s he need you for?” He topped that off with a mean grin, trying to get a rise out of me, I guessed.
I had the shotgun cradled in my arms like a baby. It’ didn’t seem worth the trouble to put it down and smack the man in his red face. Besides, the shotgun wasn’t mine.
I grinned back at him. In his boots we stood eyeball to eyeball. I glanced around his thick neck and saw Chan walking up behind him. I looked back at the guy and gave him my best smile.
“What’s your name, anyway?” I asked, sticking my hand out.
He took the hand, but suspicion clouded his eyes.
“O’Hara.”
I forced myself to stifle a laugh. “Nice meeting you, O’Hara.”
Then Chan was there. O’Hara turned, his right hand snaking under his jacket as if he were reaching for a pistol.
Chan stopped and looked down at both of us. He stood six-feet three, and that was without any fancy boots. He looked slim standing there in a black suit, but I knew he outweighed my one-ninety by a good forty pounds. At least.
Guessing what was coming, I grinned even bigger. O’Hara squirted some tobacco juice between his lips. Brown spittle dribbled down his chin as he asked, “You Chan?”
Chan eyeballed me. He looked back at O’Hara and nodded at him, just giving up that blank oriental face and nothing else.
“Well ya’ gook, can’t you talk, or what?”
After a nice beat or two more of that silent look,