Blvd. of Blood

Book 4, chapters 14–15

(Upcoming appearances: July 15, 6–7:30, author talk, Old Stone Church, 251 Main St., East Haven CT) | July 19, 10–3, Book Walk, Main St., Old Wethersfield CT)

Continued from here. Table of contents for ease of navigation here.

(The story so far: Colin Lang and his rifle have arrived at Bernie' Feldstein’s house. All they have to do is wait out the night, and the next day the killing begins.)

14.

Many of the carefully enumerated contents of the duffel bag were now scattered around Bernie’s living room floor. Colin was filling magazine after magazine with bullets. Fortunately this was extremely easy to do. It might have been tedious if he had not been giving such attention to each bullet, lest any go in crooked or askew. One of the magazines, the one with a black Sharpied X on it, was the magazine he’d been practicing with all these months; he’d been practicing with several of them, of course, but this was the one he’d been practicing with full, to make sure the weight was right, and he didn’t know if rattling around full all those months may have caused some kind of internal damage. Maybe it would jam. He removed all the bullets, one by one, and then reinserted five—only five—of them.

Worst of all, he had to urinate. He’d left the bathroom door open a crack before, and he’d seen Bernie fussing with the rifle before he’d actually gotten to relieve himself. Only the safety had saved everything. Of course, Colin could pick up the rifle and carry it to the bathroom, but who knew what mischief Bernie might get into with the magazines? He couldn’t carry everything into the bathroom. It would be easier to carry Bernie. He’d just have to hold it in.

But then he also needed to get rid of Bernie for the next part of the plan. “I’m going to cover up your license plate, but I need your help,” he said, after a few moments’ thought. “Can you turn the car around, you know, back it into the driveway? Push the passenger seat as far back as it can go. Then turn off the engine and the lights, but wait in the car keeping lookout until I knock on the window. Then we’ll go inside the house one at a time, me first. Leave the car unlocked. Got it?”

Bernie said he did.

“Can you repeat the steps?”

He more or less could.

Bernie went out alone and started the car. After a minute the engine cut, and Colin went out with the cardboard, the blackened cardboard with the thread taped on. That car had to have been much older than Bernie, perhaps older than Colin. It was not in good shape. There was a bumper sticker for D.A.R.E that had obviously once read dare to keep kids off drugs but had been doctored with an X-acto to read dare to keep drugs. Crouching in the dark behind the rusted trunk, Colin freed one end of the black thread. He hooked the creased end of the cardboard over the license plate. Then he unwound the thread, passed it behind the right rear wheel, catching it on a tread, and wrapped it around one of the nuts. Tap on the window and head inside. From the door, slightly open, he watched Bernie exit the car. He watched as Bernie’s head turned, in the dark driveway, towards the black space where the license plate had been. And there Bernie nodded appreciatively.

Colin had practiced this is his own garage, rolling his car back and forth three feet, and he knew that as soon as the wheel started to turn it would whip the cardboard off the plate. Only an idiot would go out driving with an obscured plate—the first cop they passed would’ve stopped them. With the car turned around, no neighbor would even see the plate. The cover could stay on all night long.

He was rather proud of this trick. He’d remembered what Bernie had told him, the Pennsylvania plates. Unlike New York, Pennsylvania does not require front license plates. Perhaps it was unnecessary, but if it kept Bernie from complaining about using his car, all the better. If they couldn’t use Bernie’s car—well, with the Ridgemont Rest car doubtless gone by this point, they’d have to kill one of Bernie’s neighbors and take his car, and that extra complication, although hardly impossible, sounded unpleasant. Surely it was hard enough living next to Bernie Feldstein without having to die for it.

The spool of thread, the Sharpie: needless to say he’d thrown them both out weeks ago, shortly after preparing the post-its.

Bernie came back in, and Colin ate one sandwich and a banana. Bernie ate pretzels and watched him.

“Where’s your garbage?” Colin asked, banana peel in hand.

“Oh, I threw it out back.”

“I mean, your garbage can. Your inside garbage can for throwing trash in. I didn’t see one in the kitchen before.”

“Yeah, I don’t have a garbage can inside. I just carry stuff out to the toter.”

Colin put the peel into one of the trash bags he’d brought. He sat down on the floor again, cross-legged, the rifle at his side and half under his knee. He started setting up the tape holders, jamming seven full magazines into each.

“That’s also like Pez,” Bernie said as he watched the spring-loaded action.

“I don’t know what that means,” said Colin.

15.

All the work was done, and Bernie could tell that the Colonel was hinting they should go to bed. But Bernie had slept most of the day; and anyway he was too excited to sleep; and anyway he was terrified of the morning, which would, as he understood it, come sooner if he slept. But the Colonel just sat there on the couch, his knees together, in what was probably a military pose. Bernie was in danger of getting bored.

“Can’t I go get my phone?” he asked.

“You can’t use your phone until the mission is over,” Col. Anderson said, “but in a little while you can go get it.”

“Oh, okay. I thought there might be news we could use on it.”

“News?”

“Spies and things like that.”

“Your phone will betray you. When you need it most it will let you down,” Col. Anderson said. “I never take a phone into a tactical situation.”

“Do you want to play video games?”

“You should simply go to bed.”

“I don’t think I can sleep,” Bernie said, lighting up another cigarette. This was the most he’d smoked in a non-pizza environment in years. It was just that he knew what he was doing when lighting up, or ashing, or even in blowing the smoke out his nose. Anything else he tried to do there was a pretty good chance he would bungle. He had to keep smoking to conceal his incompetence.

“Fine. Do you have cards?” the Colonel asked.

“Sure.”

“A pinochle deck?”

“What?”

“Just get the cards, I guess. I’m going to get a glass of water. Glasses in the cupboard?”

Bernie had probably not drunk straight water for three solid years, but he said, “Get me one, too,” just to fit in, and then in a panic followed it with “please” and then “sir.”

As the Colonel went to the kitchen, Bernie started bumping through some drawers in his parents’ old room. He finally found a pack held together with a rubber band so old it splintered like wood and fell in half when he touched it. A dark stain marked the back of the cards where the band had been.

He came back to the living room as the Colonel entered, two coffee mugs in his hands.

“I couldn’t find glasses,” he said half apologetically, holding one out. It sounded odd coming from him, but he was probably just being polite. Bernie took the proffered mug, and then noticed the one the Colonel was going to drink from. He hadn’t seen it it years. It said World’s Greatest Mom #1 over a picture of a koala.

“Not that one, not that one,” said Bernie, and he stepped forward and took it right from the Colonel’s hand. He had acted without thinking, but he suddenly remembered that Theodore Anderson was a trained combat veteran and could kill him with his bare hands. He froze, wondering if he was going to die.

But the Colonel just took the other mug from Bernie. It simply said Feldstein and sported an etymology. Field + stone, essentially, although the mug spelled it out with more words. Bernie didn’t give a rat’s ass about that mug; he didn’t even remember ever having seen it before.

He could see the Colonel shaking his head and smiling. The Colonel sipped some water as he walked away.

Bernie took the koala mug back into the kitchen, and dumped the water out in the sink so he wouldn’t have to pretend to drink it. When was the last time he’d seen that koala? Fifteen years? He noticed a partially open cupboard, and realized he had probably never looked inside it, at least not since his childhood. When he opened it further, he saw it was filled with mugs. He carefully put the koala mug back in the cupboard. He didn’t want to get in a car and shoot anybody right now, he just wanted to look through the old mugs. Some of them looked familiar, or at least triggered a weird ghost of a memory, like a dream from two nights before.

He wanted a reprieve. He wanted to shoot Alan Jancewicz not later today but tomorrow.

And as he came back to the living room he was about to ask for a day’s delay. The Colonel, who was sitting with his mug on the couch, spoke first, though.

“Did you grow up here?” he asked.

“Yeah. It was my parents’ house.”

“You parents…?”

“Both dead. Cancer. They smoked.”

“You smoke,” said the Colonel.

“Who wants to live forever?”

“Who wants to die from cancer of all things?” said the Colonel; but he left it at that.

“It’s cool having my own house,” Bernie went on. He was aiming to impress. He was talking like a first date. “It’s paid off. Not by me, you know. But it’s paid off, and that makes things easier.”

“Sure,” said the Colonel. “Gives you one up on the other fellers.”

“I’ve never been one up on anyone,” Bernie snapped.

“Not everyone owns a house,” said the Colonel. He was so blasé about it, so cool, that it was making Bernie furious.

“What? Do you own a house?”

“That’s classified.”

“Come on, no one can guess your secret identity from one stupid fact. Do you own a house, yes or no?”

The Colonel looked amused by this outburst. He took a sip of water. Then he said, “Okay, yes. I own at least one house.”

“What, do you have to go to college to join the FBI?”

“You actually have to go through law school to join the FBI.”

“I never got to go to college! I never got to do anything!”

“You’re what? In your twenties? You could still go to college now.”

“I can’t afford college!” He could hear—and it embarrassed him—his voice breaking, but he remembered with shame that he did once, in fact, against the advice of his guidance counselor and parents, start to apply to college. He’d called a toll-free number himself, secretly, to get the application. Oh, he’d had dreams of life on the beach, coeds in bikinis, summer all year long—his idea of college had been shaped by movies, and more specifically certain kinds of movies. Only after he’d filled out the forms and asked for reluctant recommendations and painstakingly written an essay on his greatest achievement, which probably should not have relied, in retrospect, as heavily on video games as it did—only after all of that, as he was addressing the envelope, did he perceive and realize that Miami University was in Ohio.

“You probably meant University of Miami,” said Sarah, who might have become his girlfriend except Bernie, anticipating all the Miami tail, had told her he didn’t want to commit to any local girls.

“You never would have gotten into either one, dude,” Stone said. And that was true. But it was too close to deadline for a University of Miami application to get ready, so he’d never know for certain.

The Colonel, meanwhile, despite the pity and rage on Bernie’s face, was speaking calmly. “You could join the army. Get a GI Bill type thing.”

Bernie snorted. “You think I didn’t try to join the army? If they’d let me in the army, everything would have been different. If they’d let me go to college everything would have been different. My brother got to go to college! But I made one stupid mistake when I was a kid, I beat up the wrong guy—”

“You told me a slightly different story last time,” the Colonel said, “when you were drunker. The shit lottery?”

Bernie pressed on, “What if I’d been like you? I’d be a secret agent, not some loser lying to his boss to get one lousy day off. I’d be doing great things if I went college like you.”

The face Col. Theodore Anderson was now sporting was hard to read. He looked like he was thinking.

“I wouldn’t be some asshole at a pizza place!” Bernie went on, practically jumping up and down. “I would’t be up all night so I could do something stupid for some CIA sting! Wait…are you CIA or FBI?”

“That’s classified,” the Colonel said, but he seemed to say it automatically, while his mind was a thousand miles away.

“Classified? Fuck you, classified! I’m going to go shoot people I think I deserve to know—”. And then Bernie stopped abruptly. He was worried he’d gone too far. Even if the Colonel were not combat certified, he had three inches and fifty pounds on Bernie and he owned a gun. And the queer look on his face…was that the face you made before you killed someone? Stone had told Bernie just the other day that once in a bar fight a marine had picked up another guy and just crushed him into a ball, breaking all his bones. Then the marine just rolled him away, like a giant bean bag. He said there was a video of the kill, but YouTube had removed it. Bernie didn’t want to die that way. He was standing and the Colonel was sitting, but he still felt naked and towered over.

But after a moment, the Colonel said, “I have four things to tell you.” He had something like a smile in his eyes, but that was scarier than anything else.

“You mean four things before I die?” asked Bernie pathetically.

“Four things. First, keep your voice down when you’re on a mission. Technically you’re in the field right now, even though it’s your own house. That’s one.

“Second: Classified is classified and no amount of whining about who deserves what is going to change your clearance. That’s two.

“Third: You don’t know all that. You don’t know where you’d end up. Every moment of your life could have gone right and tomorrow might still be your finest hour. You could be a Rhodes scholar and a champion—what sport do you like?”

“Wrestling.”

“—a champion wrestler, and it might not matter. You can still end up an asshole at a pizza parlor.”

“Ring of Honor, not WWE.”

“It doesn’t matter. You might have your back against the wall when you find yourself here tonight. There’s no way around it. Anyone could find himself at the Incident. You can’t know where you’ll end up. All you can do is see through your own bullshit. That’s three.

“And fourth: You don’t have to do this, you know. You’re a volunteer. You can back out. All you have to do is say the word, and I leave. You take an oath not to tell anyone anything ever, and I go away, like none of this ever happened.”

“What? You’re not going to kill me?”

“You’re not on the list. But you do have to choose now. By tomorrow morning, you’ll be locked in. So what is it going to be? Are you in or are you out?”

Bernie usually knew what do in a situation like this. Well, he’d never been in a situation like this, but whenever people asked Bernie a question, he just figured out, from tone of voice or facial expression, what answer they wanted. If he’d learned the trick earlier, he might have done better in school; but at least it had let him graduate.

The Colonel’s expression, though, was a blank. His tone was dry and level. He seemed to have no opinion on which way Bernie would choose. Bernie looked in the Colonel’s eyes, and at first he merely thought they were deep, but as he looked more he saw that deep was the wrong word. They simply had no bottom. There was nothing to see because the viewer looked through and out the other side.

To be perfectly honest, Bernie was not really in the habit of thinking. But: Had he not gotten smarter? Had he not outfoxed the spies and hackers? Had he not concealed from Stone and Randall the impending glory?

The sun rose and the sun set as Bernie stood there thinking. But it was just a car, its headlights momentary on the blinds. If Bernie backed down now, what was there to do tomorrow? Pizza and smokes? Amber, maybe? Would Amber date a man who had never killed another man? Probably, but what if that man were Bernie? No, right? Was she even a spy?

“Just say yes or no,” the Colonel said.

But Bernie did not say yes or no. He was just thinking: Pizza and smokes, and Prishtine and Call of Duty, and nothing else, day after day forever.

“You have to choose,” the Colonel said.

But Bernie did not choose. He stood there, no longer thinking but perhaps looking like he was thinking. All of his effort was spent sending a psychic message to the Colonel, who had perhaps been trained in psychic warfare reception. “Choose,” was the message he sent. “Choose for me.”

And he did. “Just tell me if you’re backing out,” the Colonel said. “If you say nothing I’ll assume you’re committed.” And after a moment Colonel Theodore Anderson nodded—he was always nodding, except when he was shaking his head. He seemed to be constantly baffled and incredulous, except he also seemed very certain and authoritative. “That’s that, then. You’re in, and there’s no backing out. Then you’ll have to go to bed, now, and no excuses.”

“I found cards, though.”

“Hmmm. Count them.”

The deck had 48 cards, which apparently would have been all right, the Colonel said, for a pinochle deck, whatever that was. But it was no good for this one. It was no good for stalling.

The Colonel set his cup on the floor. He stood up. “Go get your phone, the one under your mattress. Don’t turn it on—I’ll know if you turn it on. Put it in a sock and bring it to me. After that: bed, and you can count sheep if you need to.”

He had stood up. It was clear, from his face, what he wanted. So what else was there for Bernie to do?

Continued here.