Bang Up Read online

  It had not turned into a screaming match. Ralph had merely looked disheartened. After a sexless week, she found out where her co-worker got Dippy and bought a replica, but Ralph explained that it just wasn't the same.

  Though it wasn't as if they stopped having sex altogether, their mattress remained mostly un-bounced upon. Ralph, never a prime physical specimen, let himself go. They became more like roommates than a married couple. But he was a good roommate, at least compared to the two poisonous relationships she'd had before meeting him, and she never quite worked up the motivation to actually leave him.

  She did monitor his e-mail. He was good at many things but not the creation of inventive passwords. Most of his e-mail was work-related, but she wanted to make sure he wasn't flirting with anybody. She'd refused to give him a sock puppet hand job but somebody else might eventually step in.

  When she saw the e-mail to Kirk reminding him that Ralph had spoken to him about paying a thousand dollars to seduce Julie, her first reaction had been intense shock. She'd stared at the e-mail for almost ten minutes.

  Then she'd wondered what Kirk looked like.

  If he was reasonably attractive, this might be a wonderful thing.

  She was tempted to talk to Ralph, ask about his motive, but she'd have to confess that she read his private e-mails, and if he was busted he might call off the whole thing. She didn't want him to call off the whole thing until she saw Kirk.

  When she saw Kirk (Ralph had e-mailed him the address of the library where she had book club, so she knew to expect him) she was very, very pleased. Ralph had chosen well. He knew what kind of man she liked.

  As she lay in bed, she decided not to bring it up unless Ralph did. If he never did, she'd have to decide if she was indeed going to leave this as a one-time glorious experience, or if she'd renege on that and try to see Kirk again.

  11

  "Hi."

  "Uh, hi."

  "May I buy you that burrito?"

  The man looked down at his half-eaten beef burrito. "This place is counter service. I've already paid for it. You could buy me another one to go if you wanted."

  "I'll do that," said Ralph. "Mind if I have a seat?"

  "Are you trying to turn me religious?"

  "No. I have a job offer." Ralph slid into the booth across from the man. He'd spent most of his day searching for just the right prospect. Somebody who looked like a killer. This guy was gigantic, with hands that seemed like they could snap a person's neck like breaking the head off a ladybug. When Ralph had watched him taking a bite of his burrito, there was a primal savagery, like a fierce lion tearing into the throat of a gazelle.

  "Are you making a movie?" the man asked.

  "No."

  "Aw."

  Ralph took out an envelope and slid it across the table. "There's a hundred dollars in here. If you don't take the job, this money means that this conversation didn't happen."

  "The job pays a hundred dollars?"

  "No. The job pays a lot more. But if you don't want the job, you take the hundred dollars and we never met."

  "What if I do want the job?" the man asked. "What happens to the hundred dollars?"

  "It goes toward the job fee."

  "Okay. So either way, I get a hundred dollars and a second burrito?"

  "Yes."

  The man grinned. "That's pretty cool. I like that. Is it a hundred dollar bill or is it five twenties or what?"

  "It's five twenties."

  "Nice. A lot of places won't take hundred dollar bills."

  "I know."

  "One time I was getting cash out of an ATM and it gave me a hundred dollar bill. I swear I'm not making that up! I was like, what am I supposed to do with this? But I hate when you pay with a twenty and they hold it up to the light or draw on it with that marker to make sure it's not counterfeit. Makes me feel like a criminal when I'm just trying to buy some groceries. And paying with a jar of change has its own set of problems. I'm Skip, by the way."

  "Hi, Skip. I'm Ralph."

  "I go off on tangents sometimes. I hope that's okay."

  "It's fine."

  "Is this job offer legal?"

  "I'm giving you a hundred dollars not to talk about it, so..."

  "That doesn't necessarily mean anything. Plenty of legal job offers come with an NDA. I feel like we're getting away from the main topic. You know what, if it's okay with you, I'll just be quiet and let you talk."

  Ralph glanced around to make sure nobody was eavesdropping, then leaned across the table and spoke in a whisper. "I want you to kill a man."

  "Sounds good. I'm in."

  "That's it? You're in?"

  "Sure."

  "Have you ever killed anybody?"

  "No, but I could practice first."

  "I'm not asking you to practice."

  "Why do you want him dead?" Skip asked.

  "He slept with my wife."

  "Okay, okay, I completely understand. I'll kill him good."

  Ralph leaned back in his seat. "Fantastic."

  "I'll throw in your wife for free."

  "No. Nobody touches my wife."

  "Except the guy you're paying me to assassinate, right?" Skip chuckled, then grimaced. "Sorry. That was a joke. I guess I shouldn't joke about that. I assume the nerve is still raw since you want him dead."

  "Very raw."

  "When did you want me to kill him?"

  "He'll probably be on high alert for the next couple of days," said Ralph. "But soon after that."

  "Well, my schedule is pretty clear, so I can do it basically whenever. I guess it depends on how heavily he's guarded."

  "He's not guarded at all. He's just a normal guy."

  "That'll make things easier. I figured he was a movie star with bodyguards and stuff. How much are you paying me? I'd do it for free, but since you offered..."

  "One thousand dollars," said Ralph, who'd originally planned to offer five times that.

  "Will you cover expenses? Like if I needed to buy a shiny new axe?"

  "No axe murdering."

  Skip's face fell.

  "Nothing messy," Ralph continued. "A quick strangulation, then you dump the body, and it's over."

  "Dump the body in one piece?"

  "Yes."

  Skip sighed.

  "No torture or anything like that," said Ralph. "I want revenge but not sadistic revenge. If he's dead, that's good enough for me. All you're going to do is go to his place, pretend to be delivering a pizza, talk your way in, and then kill him. Easy peasy."

  "What kind of pizza?"

  "What the fuck difference does it make?"

  "There's no reason for that kind of language. My grandmother used the f-word all the time and few people liked her."

  "It can be whatever kind of pizza you want."

  "Good. Because if somebody's at my door with a mushroom pizza, I'm not letting them in. The only reason mushrooms should be on a pizza is if the pizza has been sitting out so long that the mushrooms grew there naturally."

  "Mushrooms wouldn't grow on a pizza no matter how long it's been sitting out."

  "Have you tried?" asked Skip.

  "No."

  "Maybe they would in a tropical climate."

  "The only way mushrooms are growing on a pizza is if you ordered a manure pizza. And if you show up at somebody's door with a manure pizza they aren't going to let you into their apartment. So this whole conversation is stupid."

  "Most of my conversations are," Skip admitted.

  "You're okay with the terms? No mess?"

  Skip nodded. "You're the boss." He finished off the last bite of his meal. "I usually only eat two burritos on special occasions, but I think this qualifies. Can I get guacamole?"

  "Sure," said Ralph.

  "It's two bucks extra."

  "That's fine."

  "No beans. I like beans, but if you order it without them they'll sometimes give you extra meat to compensate."

  "I wasn't going to order the burri
to for you. I was just going to pay for it."

  "Are you going to get one for yourself?"

  "I might get some nachos."

  "Oh, you should. They have great nachos here. They're so gooey you have to eat them with a fork. The first time I got them I didn't know that and I hadn't bothered to get a fork because I didn't think I'd need one for nachos. It was the last time I made that mistake, let me tell you. Also, the cursing isn't why people disliked my grandmother. She was just a naturally unpleasant person."

  Ralph didn't have a good feeling about this guy. He wished he had connections in the underworld so he could hire a real hit man, but he wouldn't even know where to start the search, and no way could he get a professional on his budget. He'd just have to hope for the best.

  He supposed he could murder Kirk himself, but, no...Ralph was no killer. Blood was gross. Ralph would almost certainly pass out, and considering that this murder was vengeance for his humiliation, he didn't want to embarrass himself further. "He couldn't satisfy his wife or kill her lover—what a frickin' loser."

  He ended up getting a quesadilla instead of nachos, a decision that met with Skip's approval and led to a lengthy monologue that started with quesadillas vs. nachos but ended with the public transportation system in Portland. Ralph wasn't in favor of violence, so maybe he'd get lucky and Skip would just talk Kirk to death.

  12

  Kirk wanted to contact Julie.

  Don't contact Julie, said his conscience.

  But he really wanted to.

  Tough shit. Don't do it.

  Maybe she wanted him to contact her as well.

  She doesn't. She said it was a one-time thing. She's married. Her husband knows you were vigorously intimate with her. He's not happy about it. Contacting her is not the intelligent course of action. It is, in fact, very, very, very, very, very, very, very dumb. Extremely dumb. Astoundingly dumb. Dumb to the twelfth power. If you do it, you can never again claim to not be dumb. Don't do it.

  But...

  Shut the fuck up. Let it go while you still have your fond memories and a non-severed penis. This infatuation is going to get you into a lot of trouble. It may be too late; do you even know for sure that Ralph has let it go?

  Ralph, who'd received a full refund, was probably trying to pretend it had never happened. He could have barged into Kirk's apartment with a gun or a pickaxe. Since he hadn't, it was probably safe enough to assume that Ralph wouldn't come after him.

  Yeah, if you don't do anything else! That's the key element. Ralph may blame himself for this misadventure, but he won't if it happens again. What if he goes completely psycho? You don't need a psycho in your life. Nobody does.

  The concept, though, was that he and Julie would continue their affair in secret. She wouldn't leave the house and say, "Oh, hey, I'm off to ride Kirk again. Don't wait up." They would sneak around and stuff. Ralph would never know.

  Can you trust her?

  Sure, why not?

  You think you can trust a woman who has already been less than discreet, whose husband will be insanely suspicious of any changes in her routine, and who obviously does not have a poker face because Ralph already knew that she had multiple orgasms?

  Sure, why not?

  Because he'll be expecting you two to get together again! Anytime she leaves the house alone he'll think that it could be to see you. He's going to be filled with paranoia. At least wait a few years.

  His conscience was just being a worrywart.

  I'm not being a fucking worrywart, you brain-dead son of a bitch! I'm trying to keep you alive! You're not thinking straight. You're thinking like somebody who has been completely mesmerized and is likely to make a decision that is not in his best interest. You need to snap out of it. This was not your first time touching a breast. Be the smart alive guy instead of the dumb dead guy.

  Okay. He wouldn't try to contact her.

  Are you lying to me?

  No.

  You're lying to your own conscience! What the hell, Kirk? I was there for all of the sex, and yes, it was really good. But you have to listen to reason.

  Kirk didn't wanna.

  Ask Myra what she thinks you should do.

  No way was Kirk going to mention this to Myra. She'd already made him promise to lie about doing it in the first place, and he didn't want to lose a perfectly good friend with benefits over this. For all he knew, the ladies might be bi-curious...

  Myra isn't going to have a threesome with you and Julie.

  She—

  Nope.

  Myra was not a good source of advice in this case. He didn't want to explain his situation to somebody whose response would be to point at him and shriek like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  Fine. Locate a human being. Any human being. Talk them through everything that's happened up to this point, and then inquire as to whether or not they think you should get in touch with Julie again. Literally any human being.

  Just because nobody would agree that he should do it didn't mean he shouldn't do it. The people dispensing advice hadn't been inside of Julie. They couldn't possibly understand.

  Do you want to die?

  No.

  'Cause it kind of sounds like you want to die.

  No!!!

  Prove it.

  Fine. Kirk wouldn't make an attempt to reconnect with Julie. As excruciatingly painful as it was, he'd try not to be a suicidal idiot.

  13

  That night, Skip wandered the city in search of prey.

  Though Ralph had insisted that a practice kill was unnecessary, Skip didn't want to mess up by being unprepared. He'd heard—perhaps from a James Bond movie—that killing people got easier the more you did it, and though he didn't want to become a serial or a spree killer, it couldn't hurt to have at least one notch on his belt before his first paying gig.

  In a perfect world, he'd stumble upon a mugging in process and be able to slay the assailant in a heroic manner. But that was pretty unlikely. Also, muggers had weapons, which would make them a lot harder to murder without getting murdered himself. So most likely Skip would end up just strangling a hobo.

  He wasn't sure where to look for them. There were several intersections where homeless people held up cardboard signs, but they didn't really do that after dark. He figured if he kept walking around, he'd eventually find somebody sleeping in an alley. It would be an easier task if he was willing to go into one of the bad neighborhoods, but Skip didn't want to feel unsafe.

  Skip took his cell phone out of his pocket and checked the time. 1:21 AM. He'd been wandering the city in search of prey for almost five hours. This was starting to feel like a waste of time. He wished there was somebody he could ask for advice. How did one go about finding a mentor in this field?

  He knew he should call it quits for the night, but he'd really hoped to get in this practice session. It was important to Skip that he did a good job for Ralph. The desire to do his best at every task was a personality trait that he'd possessed since he was a kid—he just cared too much.

  It was unlikely that Ralph would find himself in the position of hiring somebody to murder another one of his wife's lovers, but if he was in the market for another revenge kill, he wanted Ralph to think, "You know, that guy Skip did an excellent job, and I should definitely use his services again." Repeat customers were a crucial element of any thriving business.

  That said, it was also important to be well rested. If you yawned while you were trying to kill somebody, that afforded them an opportunity to escape. Skip didn't want to lose a victim because he was sleepy. He decided that he would search until 1:30 AM and then try again tomorrow.

  At 1:29 AM, he saw a homeless man sleeping on a bench.

  Skip didn't believe in God, but he did believe in a heavenly being with all of God's powers. Clearly, this heavenly being was looking out for him tonight. Skip walked over to the bench.

  The man had a thick gray beard, was dressed in filthy, torn clot
hes, and clutched a large brown bottle to his chest. He snored softly. Then, as if aware that somebody was there, he opened his eyes.

  Skip gave him five dollars and left.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, he told himself. That had gone terribly.

  It wasn't too late. The man hadn't moved from the bench. Skip wouldn't take his five dollars back—that would be stealing—but he could still kill the guy. He spent a couple of moments thinking murderous thoughts and then returned to the bench.

  "Hello," he said.

  The man opened his eyes again. "Yeah?"

  "May I sit down?"

  "I guess so." The man sat up, making room.

  Skip sat next to him. "How's everything going?"

  "Pretty bad."

  "Because you're homeless?"

  "Yeah."

  "Do you ever feel suicidal?"

  The man shook his head. "Nah."

  "You sure?"

  "Death is permanent. I'll find a way out of this."

  "You might not, though."

  "I've had a string of bad luck, but nothing lasts forever. It's just a rough spell. It'll get better."

  "I don't know," said Skip. "Sometimes it's best to cut your losses."

  "Are you trying to depress me?"

  "No."

  The man glared at him. "I appreciate the five bucks, but I don't need your negative attitude."

  "Don't you ever think about how it might be better to pass on to the next world? You could be at peace. No more suffering. No more shame."

  "I'm not ashamed."

  "No way do you sleep on a bench and not think about the sweet release of death."

  "Are you trying to get me to kill myself? Is this some kind of bet?"

  "No. I'm offering to do it for you."

  The man, with surprisingly quick reflexes, took out a knife and pointed it at Skip. "You stay the hell away from me."

  "I didn't mean to offend you."

  "Get out of here or I'll jab this right into your throat!"

  Skip got off the bench and held up his hands to show that they were empty. "I apologize. If I'd known you'd take it this personally I never would have said anything. I just think that some people are better off dead, but if you don't consider yourself to be one of them, I won't try to change your mind."