Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, No. 1. Whole No. 821, January 2010

Who Knows Where It Goes by Lawrence Block

MWA Grand Master and multiple Edgar Award winner Lawrence Block has been writing a lot of short stories this year. In addition to the following new suspense piece, which has its seed in the economic recession, he’s got stories coming up in Dark End of the Street, edited by S. J. Rozan and Jonathan Santlofer; Indian Country Noir, edited by Liz Martinez and Sarah Cortez; and Warriors, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. EQMM has another new Block story slated for March/April.

When the waitress brought him his coffee, Colliard managed a nod and a smile. He added milk but no sugar, stirred, looked out the window at the entrance to the four-story commercial building across the street. He didn’t really want the coffee, he’d had enough coffee today, and this cup wouldn’t make him any more alert than he already was. Its only discernible effect would come hours from now, when he’d want to sleep and it wouldn’t let him.

Of course, that might be difficult anyway.

Maybe he should have ordered decaf. He never did; he never even thought of it until he already had a cup of regular coffee in front of him. He’d never been able to see the point of decaf. Why drink the stuff at all if not for the caffeine? It never tasted as good as you hoped it would. Sometimes, if it was particularly good coffee, the smell was wonderful. But then you took a sip, and all you got was disappointment. And caffeine.

He picked up the spoon, stirred the coffee some more, put the spoon down. And left the cup in its saucer. It wasn’t as though he had to drink it. He’d had to order it so that he could have this table by the window, but now that she’d brought it to him he could sit here until closing time. It wasn’t as though they needed the table for another customer. The diner was mostly empty and would likely remain that way, like every place else in town. Like every other town in the country.

Hard times. Sometimes it was tough not to take it personally, to see the entire break in the economy as having been aimed specifically at him. When he got that way he forced himself to take a good look around. And it was pretty easy to see that it wasn’t just him. Everywhere he looked, businesses were failing and men and women were out of work. Corporations, absolute household names that had been around as long as he could remember, were going out of business. Banks were imploding. Retailers, from the big-box chains to the hardware store on the corner, were turning off the lights and locking the doors. As an economy move, someone had quipped, the light at the end of the tunnel had been turned off.

A matter of months ago Colliard had been sitting on top of the world, and the perch was all the sweeter for the time and effort it had taken him to get there. He’d sweated it out to get the union card — an M.B.A. from a top university. He’d lived off his savings and hit the books hard, and the degree got him his first corporate job. He worked hard, and when the headhunters came calling, he was ready to move up. He earned the promotions, he got the cash and prizes, and he bought the right house and married the right woman. He earned big bucks and lived within his income, and when the chance came along to start his own company, he jumped at it.

And made it work. And figured he had it made.

“Warm that up for you?”

It was the waitress, coffeepot in hand. He smiled, shook his head. “I’ve had too much coffee already,” he said. “But thanks.”

“Something to eat?”

He shook his head.

“That’s okay,” she said. “You sit there as long as you like. That way people look in the window, they see we’re still open. You know Sacco’s? On the next block?”

He didn’t know the neighborhood at all, but the question didn’t seem to require an answer.

“Thirty years they been there,” she said. “Good times and bad. Friend of mine’s worked there twelve years herself, and Friday afternoon the owner called them all together and told them it was the last day. Just like that. Twelve years, thirty years, just like that. How can a business just disappear, here one day and gone the next?”

He said, “‘Who knows where it goes when it’s gone.’” She looked at him, and he told her it was a line from a song. She said she’d like to hear the rest of the song, and he said that was the only line he remembered.

“Well, it’s a good one,” she said, “‘Who knows where it goes when it’s gone.’ Not me, that’s for sure.”

“I’d see your name in the papers,” Sully had said earlier. “Morton H. Colliard. What’s the H stand for?”

They’d met two days before in a diner not too different from the one he was in now, but a hundred miles away. They sat with cups of coffee in a rear booth. They knew Sully there, knew to bring him his coffee and then leave him alone.

“Henry.”

“Never knew about the H, never mind the four letters after it. Just Mort Colliard, and I couldn’t have said if it was Morton or Mortimer. Or just Mort. Means death in French, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t speak French.”

“Didn’t you have to learn it in school? Got my own hands full with English. Morton Henry Colliard. Gave me a turn the first time I saw it, and I can’t say I ever got entirely used to it. Of course, it was a good thing, a sign you were getting places, and I was happy for you.”

Was he? Sully had cool grey eyes, hard to read. Colliard had learned to take what Sully said at face value, because trying to get any deeper was a waste of time.

“But all the years I knew you,” Sully said, “the whole point was keeping your name out of the papers. So it was hard to get used to, that you were in the papers, and glad to be there. Was it a kick for you? Did you clip the stories, keep a scrapbook?”

“Not my style.”

“No, I don’t guess it would be. But people change, don’t they?”

Did they?

“Saw the wedding announcement. Fine-looking woman. Never expected you to marry, though I can’t say why not. Any kids yet?”

“One on the way.”

“Boy or girl? Or don’t you know?”

“We figured we’ll find out soon enough.”

“People need a little suspense in their lives, don’t they? You care much one way or the other, boy or girl?”

“Just so it’s a healthy baby.”

Sully nodded his approval, and Colliard wondered at the lie he’d just told. The baby, due in four months, was a boy, and why had he kept that from Sully?

“I’ll tell you,” Sully said. “I swear I couldn’t believe it when I picked up the phone and there you were on the other end of it. Never thought I’d hear your voice again, not in this world.”

What should he say to that? He couldn’t think of anything.

“Not that we parted on bad terms, but we parted, didn’t we? You moved on to a different life, and you couldn’t do that without leaving the old life behind. Be like a film I saw, young fellow from South Central L.A., he’s in a gang, Bloods or Crips, can’t remember which. You see the film?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, he’s bright, you know? Good in school. Studies hard, applies himself. And there’s this teacher who believes in him, and she fixes it so he gets a scholarship to this Ivy League college. Couldn’t tell you which one. And he goes there, and it’s culture shock, you know? He’s this street kid and his roommate is this typical preppy — you can see where this is going, can’t you?”

Like he cared.

“He adjusts to campus life. And then he goes home because his mother is dying, and he gets sucked into the gang life again, because once you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way.”

Wasn’t it Bloods and Crips a minute ago? Oh, right, the song. He took a moment to hear it in his mind, and when he tuned in again Sully was telling him how the kid died in the streets after all.

“He could get away, see, but he couldn’t stay away. Of course, all it was is a film. Didn’t even claim it was based on a true story, which wouldn’t make it true even if it did. Someone made it up, just to prove that a man can’t get away from his true self. But what’s a man’s true self, can you tell me that?”

“All these questions,” he said.

“Had your own company, didn’t you?”

“Until it went bust.”

“Well, this economy. No shame going broke in times like these. But you must have socked away a few bucks in the good years.”

“At first it all went back into the business.”

“How it’s done, isn’t it? And then?”

“Then it went into investments. There was this hedge fund, promised twelve percent on your money, good years and bad.”

“That’s not bad, twelve percent.”

“That’s what I thought. It’s what everybody thought.”

“This hedge fund, the player’s the one who got his name in the papers a lot lately?”

“That’s the one.”

“And you got hurt pretty bad.” It wasn’t a question, and didn’t require an answer. “You must have a nice home, though.”

“If I can keep it away from the bank.”

“They looking to foreclose?”

“Not tomorrow,” he said, “and not the day after tomorrow.”

“But the day after that? And you don’t want to forget there’s a baby on the way.”

“No.”

“The jobs in your new field—”

“The market’s dried up. There’s nothing out there for me.”

Sully nodded. “Be different when the economy turns around, I suppose.”

“I suppose.”

“And you could wait it out, but that’s not so easy since that hedge fund went south. That about sum it up?”

It was all he could do to nod.

Sully’s fingers drummed the tabletop. “I have some investments myself,” he said. “Different establishments where I’m what you’d call a silent partner. A man owes you money and can’t pay, so he takes you in as a partner. You know how it works.”

“Sure.”

“Most of them, business is off. A lunch counter, a corner deli, you wouldn’t think they’d be affected, would you? People still have to eat. Are they going to stop buying their newspaper in the morning, having a latte in the middle of the afternoon? They still have to have their beer and their cigarettes, don’t they? Yet business is off all across the board.”

“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 tabletop. 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.

She’d be a good mother, he was confident of that. That hadn’t been on his mind when he married her. He chose her because she’d be a good companion, an attractive and personable partner in social situations. And now they were going to have a baby, and she was going to be a good mother.

“We can live in a trailer,” she’d said, when the hedge fund turned out to be a Ponzi scam, when it was clear that the money was irretrievably gone. “I don’t care where we live, or how we live. We’re two people who love each other. We’ll get by.”

But of course she cared, and of course he cared, and they couldn’t swap this house for a double-wide, surrounded by the kind of neighbors who wound up flunking sobriety tests on Cops. They loved each other, but how long would they go on loving each other in a trailer park?

He said he’d have the casserole for tomorrow’s lunch. He’d had an interview, he told her, and it was promising, with a decent prospect of some case-by-case consulting work. The hours would be irregular and the work off the books, but he’d be well paid. If he got the work.

She said she’d keep her fingers crossed.

He slept late, and when he did get up she’d already left for a doctor’s appointment. He found the casserole in the refrigerator and nuked a helping in the microwave. It was spicy, and not his usual breakfast fare, but he ate it with good appetite. The coffee she’d made was still hot, and he drank two cups.

He’d slept soundly, and any dreams he’d had were gone and forgotten when he opened his eyes. But he’d gone to sleep with a question, and now the answer was miraculously there.

He got in his car, drove for an hour and a half.

The town he’d picked was one he’d been to only a handful of times, and not at all in at least ten years. At first glance, it looked the same, but then it hadn’t changed much since before he was born. It had been a mill town, and the industry moved south after the Second World War, and the local economy had settled into a permanent state of depression. There were changes over the years — strip malls thrown up, a drive-in theater torn down — but the town went on, always a decade or two behind the curve.

There was still a Main Street, and there were still shops on it, but it seemed to Colliard that there were more vacant storefronts than he remembered. A sign of the times? Or just the next phase in the continuing decline of the place?

But what did it matter? He wasn’t looking to start a business, and if he did he wouldn’t start it here. He hadn’t been here in years, and in an hour he’d be gone, and it would be more years before he returned. If he ever came back at all.

Oddly, there were places he recognized. The drugstore on the corner of Main and Edward. The sporting goods store diagonally across the street. The little shop halfway up the block — Mulleavy’s, the sign announced. He remembered the name, but had long since forgotten what it was Mulleavy sold, if he’d ever known in the first place.

Two doors down from Mulleavy’s was a hardware store. He noted it, unable to recall it from a previous visit, and he thought of another hardware store, and that made the decision for him. He circled the block, parked right in front of the hardware store. There were plenty of empty parking spaces, right there on Main Street, and that told you pretty much all you needed to know about the town, and what it was like to be in business there.

Be doing the man a favor.

He stood out front for a moment, checked out the fly-specked merchandise in the front window. The shops on either side were vacant, and the For Rent signs in their windows looked as though they’d been there forever. Colliard drew a breath, let it out, opened the door.

No customers, and no one else either, not for the moment. Then a man in his sixties, balding, round-shouldered, emerged from the back in response to the little bell that had announced Colliard’s entrance.

“Hello there,” he said brightly. “We get that rain yet?”

Were they going to talk about the weather? No, the hell with that.

Colliard drew the gun, watched the man’s eyes widen behind his glasses. He shot him three times in the chest and once behind the ear.

Wipe the gun and drop it? What, and then go looking for another one?

He put it in his pocket and left.

The first thing he did was get out of town. There’d been no one around to hear the shots, and it might be an hour before anyone entered the store. The dead man was on the floor behind the counter, where he couldn’t be seen from the street. So there was no rush to quit the scene, but Colliard wanted to be away from there all the same.

He drove well within the speed limit, knowing that a routine traffic stop was more to be feared than that someone would actually come looking for him. He had the murder weapon in his pocket, and a paraffin test would establish that he’d fired a gun recently. But they wouldn’t know that unless he found a way to call attention to himself, and this was something he’d long ago learned to avoid.

He drove for a while, and when he stopped for a cup of coffee he picked a diner quite like the one with the nice waitress and the tasty sandwich and fries. All he had was coffee, and he took his time drinking it, letting himself sink into the reality of the present moment.

He went over it all in his mind. And he tried to take his own emotional temperature, tried to determine how he felt.

As far as he could tell, he didn’t feel a thing.

No, that wasn’t entirely true. There was something he felt, something hovering on the edge of thought, visible only out of the corner of his eyes. And what was it?

Took him a moment, but he figured out what it was. It was relief.

He took out his cell phone, thought for a moment, put it back in his pocket. The diner had a pay phone, and he spent a couple of quarters and placed a call. The girl who answered put Sully on the phone, and Colliard said, “That order you placed the other day, I wanted to tell you I’ll be able to fill it tomorrow.”

“You sure of that, are you?”

“It might take an extra day.”

“A day one way or the other doesn’t matter. The question is, do you have the goods for the transaction.”

“I do.”

“It seems to me,” Sully said, “that it’s a hard question to answer ahead of the event, if you take my meaning.”

“I know it for a fact,” Colliard said. “What I did, I went and took inventory.”

“You took inventory.”

“Checked the shelves myself.”

He finished his coffee and stayed at the table long enough to make another phone call. He used his cell phone for this one, there was no reason not to, and called his own home. The first three rings went unanswered. Then his wife picked up just before the phone went to voice mail.

He asked how it went at the doctor’s office, and was pleased to learn that everything went well, that the baby’s heartbeat was strong and distinct, that all systems were go. “He said I’m going to be a perfectly wonderful mother,” she reported.

“Well, I could have told you that.”

“You sound—”

“What?”

“Better,” she said. “Stronger. More upbeat.”

“I’m going to be a perfectly wonderful father.”

“Oh, you are, you are. I’m just happy you’re in such good spirits.”

“It must have been the casserole. I had some for breakfast.”

“Not cold?”

“No, I microwaved it.”

“And it was good?”

“Better than good.”

“Not too spicy? So early in the day?”

“It got me off to a good start.”

“And it’s been a good day,” she said. “That much I can hear in your voice. Did you—”

“I got the job. Well, case by case, the way I said, but they’re going to be giving me work.”

“That’s wonderful, honey.”

“It may take awhile to get back where we were, but we’re finally pointed in the right direction again, you know?”

“We’ll be fine.”

“Damn right we will. And we’ll be able to keep the house. I know you had your heart set on a trailer, but—”

“I’ll get over it. What time will you be home? I should really get dinner started.”

“Let’s go out.”

“Really?”

“Nothing fancy,” he said. “I was thinking along the lines of pizza and a Coke.”

©2009 by Lawrence Block. Black Mask Magazine title, logo, and mask device copyright 2009 by Keith Alan Deutsch. Licensed by written permission.