Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

“And you need to put on some weight,” he says, pulling a small, dog-eared logbook from his breast pocket. Oswald keeps no records of his work, and he notates only necessary information in his little spiral-bound in a coded shorthand, which Gerbil still finds difficult to decipher.

“I asked you how Tilda’s doing.” Gerbil has met the man’s mysterious wife only once—at a Fourth of July picnic at Oak Street Beach into which Gerbil had stumbled almost accidentally three summers ago—and she remembers being impressed by the woman. The lady was tough, self-possessed, and smart—Gerbil’s kind of gal. One would have to be this kind of woman to put up with Oswald. “Seriously. I want to know. How’s she doing?”

Oswald gives her a weird look. “She’s been better. Anyway. I got this thing needs to get done.”

“I’m slammed down at work, Oz.” Gerbil searches for her Camels, finds a half-smoked butt in an ashtray, and sparks it back up. She blows out smoke on an exasperated sigh. She works sporadic hours behind the espresso machine down at the Java Joint on Halsted Street, but lately she needs as many hours as she can get to keep her in patchouli oil and piercings. “Is this, like, shit you’re gonna need this week?”

“It’s, like, shit I’m going to need tonight.”

“Excuse me?” She picks a fleck of tobacco from her lip and flicks it away. “Did you say tonight?”

“Already have the recon, the target’s patterns, all that.” He scribbles in his notebook as he paces, brushing past her TV set, nearly knocking it over. “Gonna need you to spot. Around 10... 11 o’clock tonight. In the vicinity of the Rusty Spoke.”

“Tonight?” She stares at him. “You’re doing this one tonight?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Gerbil gawks for a moment. This is not how things are done. This is not how a good contract killer is supposed to conduct his work. Sure, Oswald’s been drinking with a vengeance lately, but there’s still a level of craftsmanship to maintain, and the craft demands a certain amount of prep work. A carpenter measures twice and cuts once. That’s what Oswald always used to say when he was training Gerbil to be a spotter.

Oswald tears a page out of his spiral-bound. “Gonna need you to meet me on—”

He halts abruptly and glances across the room, his expression changing, his eyes dilating and firing suddenly with the torments of the damned. He sees ghostly silhouettes of the dead behind Gerbil’s drapes. These are restless spirits for whom he’s responsible. “ Not now!”

“What?” Gerbil glances over her shoulder at the empty studio. “What is it?”

Oswald stares at the phantoms. “You’re dead!”

Gerbil cocks her head, looks around. “I’m what? Are you referring to—?”

“Leave me the fuck alone!” Oswald covers his ears. He slams his eyes shut. “You’re worm food, okay? Deep six—!”

“Hello? Oz?” She waves at his face. “Earth to Oz! Who the hell are you talking to?”

He opens his eyes, looks at her. “Nobody... I’m sorry.”

“Nobody?”

“Do you have any Kaopectate?”

“Excuse me?”

Oswald rubs his neck. “My wife came home to die this morning and I got stomach cramps like you wouldn’t believe.”

Hands shaking like an old crone on a crack binge, Jeff Harkness packs the silver-plated Smith and Wesson .38 snub-nosed revolver into his workout bag. The handgun has a pearl inlay on the stock and the firm’s LCP&R insignia engraved on the muzzle. A gift from the senior partners on the occasion of Harkness’s triumphant win over the Chicago Housing Authority three years ago in the Oxidine v. CHA case, the gun has always had a special place in the attorney’s heart.

Harkness also stuffs a carton of hollow-point Remington Ranger XTS rounds into his bag.

Over the intervening three years since the CHA victory, Jeffrey Harkness has fired the weapon only on two occasions: once, when Old Man Cohen dragged all the junior partners out to the Barrington Gun Club to have an old-fashioned turkey shoot and picnic, and one other time, about a year later, when Harkness had gotten paranoid about a gangbanger client who had gotten sent off to Marion Max on a nickel’s worth due to Harkness’s negligence with filing deadlines. On the latter occasion, Harkness had spent an entire sweaty, paranoid Saturday afternoon making holes in paper silhouettes.

Now he zips the bag closed and quickly slips into his Air Jordans.

He wears a chocolate-colored exercise suit, which makes him look like an asshole, but he doesn’t care. His plan is to stop by the Chicago Athletic Club before going to the Spoke, and work himself into a frenzy in spin class. His nerves are jumping and he needs to at least work off some of the excess adrenaline. He needs to center himself before he walks into this insane trap from which he’s supposed to emerge, according to the Candy Man, victorious and debt-free.

All he has to do is wax this prick who’s been hired to take him down in a couple of hours.

Harkness isn’t sure if this is another one of the Candy Man’s petty torments, but there are really no options here. Harkness has to kill the cocksucker before the cocksucker kills him, and he has to do it tonight. He has to do it around midnight down the street from the Spoke, and that’s that. He has to do it, or he’ll be underground quicker than a person can say, “Installment payment.”

The elevator takes forever to rattle up to the tenth floor. Harkness fidgets as he waits for the doors to clack open. Then he rides the enclosure down to the lobby, tapping his foot like crazy, whistling graveyard music.

He procures his Beamer from the valet without a word, and then drives across town through a fine mist—from his condo high-rise on the Gold Coast, down to the seedier environs of the West Side warehouse district—listening to conservative talk-radio with the volume on low. The glistening gray streets pass in a blur. The faint background of shrill voices soothes Harkness,