Double Cross

Sweet.

It was going to be so sweet.

Things started out just fine and everybody was going to be really rich and I mean really. And then the problem.

Usually life’s been like it was in high school ten years ago with me and the guys humping and sweating and doing jobs that work out pretty good and pretty much nobody gets hurt too bad and we score some cash here and get truckloads of something there. But every once and a while something big shows up you don’t expect it and the world opens up. Like you’re in a bar downtown near the Renaissance Center and this blond girl all top heavy and in black stockings and sprayed up comes on to you even when you’re not exactly the tallest guy in the room or the richest and you think it’s a joke but it isn’t and you wake up together the next morning and she hasn’t copped your wallet or anything.

I mean things like that do happen.

So here it is. A month ago Marco who’s Papa’s nephew and me snatched this guy and drove him to a forest preserve outside Detroit. Where Papa was. Marco called this guy Trunk Man because of where we tossed him when he got drove to the preserve and we all laughed at that. Marco is funny. He has a good mind. Quick, I mean.

Trunk Man owed Papa large and hadn’t paid for a while. Standing in his socks because we kept his shoes he kept crying saying he couldn’t come up with the vig let alone the repay and “was totally up against it.” Which nobody knew or cared what it meant.

Anyway we were in the forest near this barbecue thing made out of brick. The whole place was empty being early in the morning and it was a Tuesday. Papa wasn’t saying threatening crap to Trunk Man. He’s not that way but Dave who we also work with was there too. Dave is blond and big and a former soldier and Marco is dark and big not black but just dark. Dave and Marco moved up close and were looking at Trunk Man and then at the barbecue like we could start a fire and burn off his hair or feet or something if he didn’t hop to with the money. Which I don’t know if Papa would do but it got Trunk Man’s attention. And me, I just kept staring at him and that maybe freaked him out too because I have a face that’s like a wolf sort of with narrow eyes and long hair that’s blond and people’ve said I look scary.

But before it came to burning anything Trunk Man stopped crying and told Papa he had an idea. He worked in a brokerage firm and he said in the firm safe file, which they don’t have cash in like you’d think, they just got in some things called bearer bonds, which mean they’re like cash. Now, I’m a Mastercard and Visa and Andrew Jackson kind of guy so I don’t know bonds from squat but Papa was interested and it turned out you could sell them like anywhere and even better they earn interest up until you sell them. The interest isn’t like vig but it’s not bad, Trunk Man said.

Trunk Man told us he could perp about a million in these bonds. A million dollars! And the best part was that they didn’t mature for three months, which meant that we could boost ’em now and nobody would even go looking for them in the safe until August. Trunk Man would cover our tracks doing stuff with computers or whatever.

Papa is about sixty and round and has a chest like a beer keg and he walked up to Trunk Man looking scared like a scared puppy and he ought to be and Papa leaned close and asked some questions about finance stuff I don’t understand and then he nodded and Marco and Dave got him back into the trunk and drove him home.

We three of us got together and talked about it over coffee that afternoon with Papa and his lawyer. The lawyer would find a buyer on the Q.T. Papa’d get the biggest cut because he was Papa but Marco and me and Dave would split three hundred K. Oh and Marco and Dave made plans to wait till closer to August and then pitch Trunk Man off a roof somewhere and make it seem he’d stole the bonds for himself because there was no way for Trunk Man to use a computer to hide a missing million and even I knew that. Marco said without smiling, which he does, “He’s not gonna cover any tracks. He’s gonna cover the sidewalk.”

Marco, hilarious. I was saying.

The next Sunday Trunk Man went into work at the brokerage place. It was empty. Marco came to pick me up in wheels he’d boosted from the airport, which is a lot easier than people think. I like Marco. He’s only a couple years older than me but being Papa’s nephew and with good connections in the organization he’s like a way older brother. He’s tall and works out and takes his time answering questions and is just cool. I wish I was him. I try to do that exercise stuff and boxing but I’m not really into it. I’m good at video games though. And I know sports. A teacher once said when it comes to some things not everything I excel.

He showed up in the perped wheels, a Nissan, a few years old. My father, rest his soul, told me that it used to be driving a Jap car on the streets of Detroit you might expect a rock in the windshield or at least get some fingers lifted your way. Not anymore. Half of this car was probably built here. Or somewhere in the US. Things change.

I got in and we drove downtown and it was pretty deserted, being the weekend.

We parked a couple blocks from the brokerage house and waited till Trunk Man called. He was pretty low level at the company and didn’t have the code to the safe file but that’s one of Marco’s talents. He can get into anything or almost anything. Marco and me were in suits and ties, which was funny ’cause we never wear them except for weddings and funerals, and sunglasses too. We wore golf hats, which was what businessmen might do planning to play some links or whatever they call it after working on Sunday morning. So it’d be hard to recognize us.

Trunk man was a nervous little shit though not really little. He was six inches taller than me but weighs like 140 or something.

We went right to the safe file and I kept a lookout in the hall. The place was pretty stupid with posters up that said things like “Teamwork” and “Achieve” above pictures of sunsets and surf. Don’t ask me. Marco opened the safe in all of five minutes. Trunk Man found the bonds and Marco took pictures, which he sent to Papa and his lawyer. They texted back that they were good.

Marco and me left in our hats and keeping our heads down.

The building had CCTV in the lobby but Trunk Man has checked and the video was overwritten every week. Because the brokerage place wouldn’t know they’d been robbed for three months there wouldn’t be any evidence of Marco and me being there.

There were cameras on the streets of course because we’re talking Detroit and we know for a fact that those tapes are never rewritten. You could’ve asked my father. So yeah in three months when Trunk Man’s covering the sidewalk and the bonds are found missing the gold shields from Detroit PD’ll look at the tapes but all they’ll see is two guys they can’t see clear and a car a couple blocks away. They’ll check the tags and see it’s stolen and long gone. And just give up and the insurance company’ll pay the million and that’ll be it.

So there we were driving back home with a million dollars!

Which would’ve been so sweet.

But then the problem happened.

All of a sudden there was a ton of traffic and we saw the streets were closed. I panicked and was thinking it was a roadblock because there were a lot and lot of cops. But then we saw it was just a rally with hundreds of people holding signs and singing or chanting. Something about black rights and gay rights and trans rights and brown rights, which I guess are Hispanics, I don’t know. I relaxed but Marco said rule number one is don’t hang around a place with a million cops in a stolen Nissan with a Meijer shopping bag full of a million dollars in stolen bonds.

See? Funny.

So we looked around and Marco saw a temporary road for highway construction nearby. Sunday and there were no workers at the jobsite and Marco turned down the road and damn he got stuck. This puddle he drove through was a lot deeper than it seemed and we went in to the axle.

“Shit.”

The Altima’s clean so we could just walk away. Not the best idea but no option. Couldn’t hardly call a tow truck, could we? Marco called Dave and told him what happened and he said he’d come get us.

In twenty minutes Dave got there and pulled up to the curb. But just then this guy walked up and I thought, shit, he’s a cop or security because he was looking like that. Athletic and he had that calmness cops and soldiers have. I can’t really describe it. He was in jeans and a tan jacket but he could’ve been off duty.

“You need a hand?” He was looking at the sunk Nissan.

“Naw, that’s okay,” Marco said.

“Nice car,” the tan jacket guy said because Dave drives a yellow Porsche 911 Turbo. The guy walked off and got in his Ford and drove off.

And we went to Papa’s to talk about the problem.

Which was that the guy in the tan jacket was a witness.

Marco said what we all knew: “He can put the perped Nissan together with Dave’s nine eleven. In three months the bonds go missing and Trunk Man’s dead and the police see the tape of the Nissan. They see a record of it being abandoned in the jobsite today and canvass for witnesses. They find this guy in the tan jacket and he remembers us three and a yellow Porsche. Which because it’s a yellow Porsche there aren’t that many of them and it can be traced to you.”

Looking at Dave.

We were sitting at Papa’s house, which was like a house in old-time England in Ann Arbor. Now that’s a nice place with a lot of girls in the college who are mostly tall and blond and even if they ignore you when you smile they’re still good to look at.

Papa’s wife came in and set out coffee in a real silver thing like a pot and the cups were small and had handles on the side your fingers don’t fit through. Lucille’s real sweet. She smiled at us all and left.

When she was gone Papa said in a soft voice: “That guy in the tan jacket? He’s got to go away.”

Marco was nodding and he said, “But how do we even find him? We don’t know anything about him, other than a description.”

“Yeah, we do,” I said, “he’s driving a Ford Taurus with Michigan tags and the number is five eight one six six one two.”

I was saying I excel. At some things.

Being there was no big hurry I spent the next month tracking down the guy in the tan jacket and finding out what I could about him. From DMV I found out his name was Jonathan Larkin and he lived in Bloomfield Hills, which is a very nice place. I dated a girl from there once. Larkin was single and worked freelance as a computer programmer so he wasn’t police, which made us relax because that’s a problem when you go killing one of them. He also was a veteran and had been overseas fighting with special forces. Which was something that we had to keep in mind of course.

I sent the information to Papa who thought the thing over for a few days and then called me over to his place. Lucille brought coffee out again and this time I used the handle of the little coffee cup because I bought a set at Macy’s and practiced.

Papa and me drank coffee and talked about the job and I was proud that he wanted me to be the triggerman to body the tan jacket guy, which I’d never done before. And he’d put me in charge of bodying Trunk Man too, figuring out the best roof to throw him off of. It was going to be a step up in the organization for me in a big way so things were looking good. Pretty soon I’d have a hundred K from the bonds and here I was going to earn my first blood. I was going places.

Imagine.

Yeah, I was in Heaven.

Dave and me were the ones on the tan jacket guy job. We had another two months until the bonds matured so there wasn’t any big hurry but now that we knew who he was and where he lived why not just get it over with?

Dave was a different sort of guy than Marco. He was more muscle than thinking and he was flashier. No sense of humor. But he was a pretty solid guy. Him and me had a beer and talked about the job. One thing I found was that Larkin was a former special forces soldier, which didn’t affect Dave one way or the other because he’d been a soldier too. But I said we’d have to be careful because Larkin would probably know hand-to-hand combat or karate and might have guns in his place. We talked about it some more and then left and the next morning we drove to Bloomfield Hills.

“I dated a girl from here,” I told Dave.

“Yeah? She hot?”

“Yeah. Totally.”

Okay the fact is I asked her out and we had coffee after community college once. It was after I’d dropped out and it didn’t go so well at Starbucks because we didn’t have anything to talk about. So we didn’t really date so much as have a date but even if she hadn’t just walked out I wouldn’t’ve been interested anyway because who wants to date somebody snooty? But she was hot.

Larkin lived in a nice complex, which was all yellow and beige and Dave and me could park behind it and see his balcony and windows but the lights never came on and we didn’t see the gray Ford. Hours we waited. So maybe he was away. We decided to break in and see what we could see. Dave wasn’t as good with locks as Marco but he was okay with doors and windows and simple stuff. Larkin didn’t have an alarm, which might’ve screwed things up because they aren’t easy to crack if it’s central station.

We had gloves on but as soon as we were in we put on booties and bonnets like the doctor who came out to tell me about my father at the prison hospital, which is what I always think about when we put them on. We did a fast search and made sure it was deserted put the Glocks away and searched more.

One wrinkle that happened was that Larkin had a girlfriend. But it looked like she just stayed here sometimes because there wasn’t a lot of clothes or cosmetic stuff. If we were lucky Larkin would come back alone but if not she’d have to be handled too.

Dave said, “Maybe a rape/murder thing. Some immigrants did it, you know. We could plant evidence.”

I’d have to think about that. Wasn’t a bad idea.

Dave pointed to some pictures of Larkin with some of his buddies. They were in combat gear in the desert. They looked fucking scary if you ask me. Other pictures of him with friends or family or alone showed a serious guy who didn’t smile a lot. He just stared at the camera. Yeah, Dave and I agreed he’d be dangerous and we’d have to be careful.

I was ready. Dave was ready.

But Larkin never showed.

We stayed there the entire night and didn’t eat or drink anything or pee or crap because of that DNA stuff.

At dawn we left and I called the condo office from a burner phone. I said I was a friend of Larkin and he wasn’t answering his phone. Did the manager know if he was all right?

“Oh, you didn’t hear?”

“No. What?”

“He’s at a hospital in Indianapolis, getting treatments. He didn’t say but cancer, I’m guessing. He’ll be down there for a month.”

“Hey, sorry to hear,” I said.

My mom had radiation and chemo and that kept her going for another couple years. But if Larkin’s was bad maybe he’d just die and I wouldn’t have to body him. Which was kind of disappointing.

“Poor guy. I want to send him something. Is he in the VA down there?”

“I don’t know the hospital. But I don’t think inpatient. I got an address to send mail.” He read it to me. It was the Welcome Residence Inn in Hartfield outside of Indianapolis.

I thanked him and hung up and told Dave we were going to Indiana.

It’s now a week later and here we are.

This motel place Larkin is staying at is pretty nice and I mean more than a regular motel. It seems business people who’re moving to the area stay here till they find a house. A month or two. Frankly it’s a lot nicer than my place outside of Detroit, which is near Eight Mile. I can’t complain because I inherited it but it can be kind of grim. I’m talking about the neighborhood. My father kept the house in pretty good shape. He was one of those handy people. But it’s pretty big to live in by yourself. The Welcome Inn is modern and all fenced in even though the ’hood doesn’t look scary or anything. There’s a pool and nice landscaping and a common area where you can have parties and they have cocktail hour from five thirty to seven. Meatballs and ziti along with nachos and popcorn tonight. That’s what the sign says.

You can get onto the grounds without going through the front office and there’s no CCTV outside. Which makes my life a lot easier. We check out Larkin’s unit. It’s off by itself and there are some bushes in front that’ll be good cover for us going in. There’s no gray Ford here now so he’s probably at the hospital. In a way I’ll be doing him a favor because when my mother went it was pretty bad. The pain.

We wait a little and he doesn’t show so we head off to Applebee’s and have some food and a beer but only one because we have to stay sharp. We drive back and Dave is all chatty. “You know what an aardvark is?” he asks me.

I sort of do. An animal of some kind. But I just look at him.

“I just think it’s neat. Not the thing itself. No. What’s neat is it’s the first word in the dictionary. I read the dictionary. I like to do it. You learn things.”

This is pretty crazy to me, both reading the dictionary for fun and telling me he reads the dictionary.

“What’s the last word?” I ask him.

“I don’t know. I haven’t got there yet.”

I wonder what letter he’s on but decide not to ask.

Dave says, “So you’ve never bagged anybody before.”

“No.”

“I’ll do it, you want. I’ve done six.”

He’s sort of bragging maybe. I can’t tell.

“Naw, Papa wanted me to.”

“Like a test. Like a chemistry test.”

I don’t know if Dave’s laughing at me but I don’t think he is so I don’t say anything. Maybe he’s trying to make me feel comfortable.

But we stop talking because we pull into the parking lot and there’s Larkin’s Ford. He came back when we were eating.

If he’s inside we may have to wait. We park a ways away and get out and put our weapons and the booties and gloves and bonnets in a grocery bag and walk to the big landscaped area in the middle of the place, which is all grass and gardens and sidewalks. We’re both wearing golf caps again and we keep our heads down. Larkin knows what we look like and even if it was over a month ago we’re pretty distinctive with Dave big and me kind of short and looking like a wolf. He’d wonder what the hell are these guys doing here and might even call the heat. Or beat the shit out of us with his special forces and karate or whatever.

We pause at the gate leading to the courtyard and see he’s not here. There’s an old guy in a sweat suit and a woman getting their mail at one of those racks of mailboxes and a couple kids on skateboards. Nobody pays any attention to us.

“Let’s go.” I nod toward Larkin’s unit. We walk across the courtyard and up to the front door and I peek through the window and can see through a gap in the blinds. It looks deserted. “Don’t see anything.”

We pull on the gloves and take the guns and chamber rounds but keep them under our jackets and knock on the door.

Both of us are ready to push inside and I remind Dave to be careful because of the special forces stuff again.

But Larkin doesn’t answer. I give it a few minutes in case of the shower and knock again. Nothing.

“Pick it,” I say to Dave.

And he does. In a minute we’re inside and cover each other while we get on the bonnets and booties. We search fast and see the place is empty.

“Where is he?” Dave asks.

That cocktail hour starts in five minutes. I say maybe he’s there.

“Where should we be when he comes in?” Dave asks.

I look around then walk to the door and glance out through the peephole to see if Larkin is on his way but he isn’t.

“Come on in here.” I nod toward the kitchen.

“It’s your ball game. You want me in the kitchen?”

“Yeah.”

Dave joins me and I pull a long filleting knife from the butcher block and shove it into Dave’s chest. At the same time I grab his Glock with my other hand and take it. Then for good measure I slash his throat then step back fast from the spray.

“What, what, what...?”

And after he collapses on the floor I bend down, minding the blood, and I tell him what Papa told me to tell him before he dies when Papa and me met about the job. “You dumb shit. When you came to pick us up at the jobsite the day of the heist you shouldn’ta brought the Porsche. If you’d come in stolen wheels like you shoulda you’d still be alive.”

He makes some wicked throat noises and pretty soon he’s dead and I walk back to the peephole. Still no sign of Larkin. I go through Dave’s pockets and get his phone and anything else from his pockets and his wallet that’ll link him to Papa or me or Marco or anybody else in the organization.

This’s the plan that Papa and me figured out. Dave and Larkin fought and Larkin stabbed him but before he died Dave shot Larkin.

I glance down at Dave.

I think I should be feeling something bad but I don’t.

I sit down to wait for Larkin.

But then I hear them. Sirens. Getting closer.

Probably nothing.

Except a minute later they’re really close and I look out the kitchen window and see police cars and there are three of them pulling into the parking lot of the Welcome Inn.

Did somebody see us break in?

Hell. Maybe. I’ve gotta leave. I’ll figure out something about Larkin later. I put Dave’s gun and phone and other stuff in the grocery bag and walk fast to the front door and glance out through the peephole. No police. Just the woman with the mail walking back from the reception area of the inn with a glass of wine. She’s not looking this way just at the sound of the sirens.

I open the door and leave, then pull off the booties and bonnet and gloves fast. I keep my head down and walk along the sidewalk toward the gate and the parking lot. I relax some because the sirens are in a different part of the complex. Still I want to get out of there. I pass the woman and I’m looking away and I’m glad she doesn’t say anything ’cause I don’t want to have to answer. Then just as I pass she tosses away the wine and turns and lifts my left arm straight up in the air really hard and, Jesus, she kicks my legs out from under me. I mean, serious martial arts. I land hard on my back and my breath is knocked completely from my lungs and I can’t move.

Two minutes later I’m sitting in Larkin’s unit again and I’m fighting to breathe.

Which isn’t easy.

The woman — pretty and as hot as I remember — has emptied my pockets and is looking over everything that was in the bag with one hand. And she’s holding my Glock in the other like she knows what she’s doing. She’s looking through my phone and Dave’s and writing down the numbers. I go all cold because that’ll lead her to Papa. I make a move but she has the gun up in an instant and I sit back. At first I think she’s a cop. But if that was the case she would’ve kept me on the ground and cuffed me or called for backup.

And then I think: Wait. She had Larkin’s key since here we are.

“Who the hell...?” And then my voice stops.

And I see the she isn’t really a she.

Holy Christ.

She’s Jonathan Larkin, the tan jacket guy.

I close my eyes for a second or two and then look closely.

He’s nodding — yeah, I have to think of him as a him. I just do. And he says, “It was me at the jobsite in Detroit. When you got that Nissan stuck in the pothole.” The voice is feminine but low. He’s got tits and smooth legs his hair still short but it’s kind of tinted. He’s got makeup on.

I say, “You were at that protest in the park. The gay people, the trans people.”

He nods. “I hadn’t started the treatment yet.”

That’s what he was doing here at the hospital. Not cancer. He’s here to take medicine and do that surgery thing to become a woman. So the clothes and cosmetics we found in his apartment in Detroit weren’t a girlfriend’s. They were his.

Larkin says, “Let me figure this out. You two come here to kill me because I was a witness. I can associate that Nissan with his Porsche.” A nod to Dave, dead and real bloody. Larkin doesn’t seem very upset at the sight. He comes back to me. “The police look up all the yellow nine eleven turbos and find him and they figure out he was the one who did, what? A robbery? A hit?”

I shrug. “We boosted some shit.”

“Boosted?”

“Robbery.”

“Ah. And your boss told you to kill the Porsche guy.” Another look at poor Dave. “Because he was stupid enough to bring that car to pick you up.”

“Something like that.”

“You double-crossed him.”

I nod and for some reason Larkin starts laughing his head off. “Whole new meaning.” He gestures toward the dress, which is white with little blue flowers on it. “Double cross.”

I don’t get it but I’m smiling too just because.

Then Larkin says, “It’s funny about this sex change thing. The hormones, you know.”

I just wait. He’s smiling.

“A month ago, this had happened, I’d’ve beaten the crap out of you. I mean, broken things. Serious. And I know how to do it.”

Another nod.

“But now I’m not — I don’t know — I’m not pissed off. It’s not a mano-a-mano thing. A woman would look at this whole thing and say, well, I came pretty close to getting killed but it’s all right. Nothing to get too worked up about. A woman would find the calmest way to handle it. Least confrontational, you know.”

Which I’m totally relieved at because I know he’s thinking he’ll let me go. He doesn’t want the publicity of police coming here and reporters asking him questions when he’s dressed like that.

Larkin lifts the Glock and shoots me right in the center of the chest.

I fly into the back of the couch. The shock of the impact becomes this burning and that starts to spread outward but then it’s pretty numb.

I whisper, “But...”

Larkin frowns, looking down at a fleck of blood on his dress. Then he stands up and with a napkin picks up the knife I used on Dave and sets it in my hand. I drop it but it doesn’t matter. My prints are on it.

“No, come on...”

He aims the gun at my forehead. I see his finger tighten on the trigger and