The Way I Die Read online

  Mr. Laughlin leans back and reads Gretchen’s essay while she fiddles with her hair. “Umm-hmmm,” he hums every now and then, or adds an “okay, okay,” or “that’s interesting” while she sits on the beanbag chair, a baby bird waiting on worms. After an interminable ten minutes, he snaps the journal shut so that it makes her jump, and he starts laughing.

  “It’s very good, Gretchen. Very good,” he purrs, and her face brightens. It’s that easy. A little flattery. A little making her wait for it, making her beg for it, and he has her, the predator, the bastard. “When you wrote of the gathering storm, what was the allegory you were trying to convey?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I was just like trying to, you know, say that like my family is sometimes, you know, sort of fighting like a storm.”

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he says as she explains, and the prick isn’t even using allegory correctly and I’m going to shove his faux intellect straight down his throat.

  He stands and closes on her, choosing at the last moment to fall on top of the beanbag chair next to hers. She stops playing with her hair and shifts closer to him, pulling her sweater tighter across her chest, hoping he’ll notice, and she’s rewarded with a widening of his eyes. He’s not done playing though, savoring every moment, a meal made sweeter by forcing himself to wait.

  He opens her notebook again and points to something so she’ll have to lean closer still. “You use the word lightening here.”

  “Yes. Like lightening, in a storm,” she responds.

  “Oh . . .” he pretends to suddenly be enlightened by this revelation, as though it isn’t a common mistake and he never would have guessed that lightning is what she meant. “Oh, you see, you spelled it with an e, which means ‘lightening,’ like when the sun comes up and there is more light in the sky.”

  For a moment, she has no idea what he’s talking about, and then understanding hits her with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Gretchen smiles broadly and her mouth shows a row of uneven teeth. He beams back at her with a bit of flirt in his voice that is as stomach-churning as a bucket of vomit, and says, “There’s no e in the ‘lightning’ you mean,” and he leans in close to her so their foreheads are almost touching, and I don’t care if she is a witness, I am going to kill this man right here, right now, in front of her, but before I step into the room, a loud BANG reverberates through the school as the front door flies open and smacks into the neighboring wall like a cymbal crashing.

  Mr. Laughlin’s neck snaps up to see what intrusion ruined his triumphant moment, and his eyes narrow when he sees it is Meghan. My old friend Meghan, who looks around like it’s the most natural thing in the world for her to be at school an hour and a half before the first class. She does a theatrical shake, says “Brrrrr,” takes off her coat, turns like she’s surprised someone else is here, and shouts, “Gretchen! Mr. Laughlin! This is a surprise.”

  Good ol’ Meghan, employing the oldest trick in the book for children dealing with adults: underestimation.

  Mr. Laughlin stands quickly, like a dog over a spilled flowerpot, and stammers, “Meghan, I . . . we were . . . Gretchen and I were having a private study session.”

  Meghan strolls over to the beanbag circle and drops into the one next to Gretchen, the one Mr. Laughlin vacated.

  “It’s a private lesson,” Gretchen spits petulantly at Meghan. She might’ve stuck out her tongue had she been a few years younger. Instead, she does so with her chin.

  “Oh, is it private? Like tutoring? My mom says I need tutoring but I don’t . . . I just don’t always feel like doing homework so I don’t want one.”

  Mr. Laughlin looks at Meghan, sorting choices. How can he get rid of her? How can he do it without Meghan figuring out his true purpose?

  Before he can say anything, Meghan interrupts those thoughts. “Mr. Laughlin, if I told my mom you give private tutoring in the early morning hours like you do with Gretchen all alone, do you think she’d let me take private lessons too?”

  I can’t see her mouth from my vantage point, but I know she has a smile working. Not much, just a hint, so that Mr. Laughlin knows she knows, knows he’s stuck.

  He looks down at his shirt and tries to smooth the wrinkles with fussy fingers. “Uh, Meghan, why don’t we discuss this later? I’ll speak to your mother and we can—”

  “It’s just that I get confused sometimes . . . like what’s the difference between lightening with an e and lightning without the e, you know? Maybe that’s the kind of thing you could help me with . . . in your private lessons, I mean.”

  Now both Gretchen and Mr. Laughlin look at her with new understanding. She has been watching them longer than they thought. Before they have a chance to voice a word, she interrupts again. “Anyway,” and she digs through her backpack, “you guys don’t mind me. I have to finish my math before the bell rings so I’m just gonna do it right here while you guys continue your private lesson. I will be as quiet as a mouse and you won’t even know I’m here.”

  She shuffles through papers as Mr. Laughlin sniffs, then turns and walks toward his desk, defeated.

  “Oh, were you finished?” Meghan calls out. “I didn’t mean to interrupt right when you were getting good into your private lesson.”

  Gretchen rises to her feet in a huff, turning red, and bolts to the bathroom. Mr. Laughlin pulls his journal from his desk drawer and writes quietly.

  From her spot on top of the beanbag chair, Meghan chuckles, and right before I back away from my hiding spot, I can’t be sure, but I think she looks in my direction.

  I pick my way through the snow as the sun rises and sparkles the diamonds of the snowdrifts. Meghan’s gonna knock down some walls in her day if she makes it off this island. She’s a bulldozer, a wrecking ball. She has the disposition of some of the greatest killers I know—razor-sharp wit buried inside a forgettable package. Hmmm . . . maybe I’ll come back here someday, years from now, when Mr. Laughlin’s murder is a different generation’s folklore. Maybe I’ll come back and check on Meghan. Maybe I’ll catch up to her right when she’s about to mark a new chapter in her life and suggest a path she can take that’s not so common.

  I warm as I hike the miles back to my house on the edge of the island. I’m not sure how I’m going to kill the schoolteacher, but I know I’ll do it in the next twenty-four hours, before he has a chance to give another private lesson, one without Meghan there to interrupt.

  I turn the key to my front door, crank the knob, step into my foyer, and remove my coat.

  “This is some shit,” Archibald Grant says as he walks out of my kitchen, into the light from the window, blowing on a cup of coffee.

  The way I die is at the hands of a friend.

  2

  Archie is my fence, or was, before I quit killing privately and took up killing for the government. The change of employer cost me my wife, my son, my life, my sanity, my peace. It wasn’t Archie’s fault; he was a pawn like me, pieces moved around a chessboard until the king falls. For us, the board was picked up, slammed against the wall, tossed in the fire. When it ended, it ended ugly, and no one from that particular branch of dark men survived to claim us. Shaken, devastated, I handed my young son over to an old friend and set forward to end my life. I didn’t want anyone to try to reach me through my son, so the best way to make that gulf inaccessible was to kill myself. It made sense, it was logical, it was smart, it was deserved. I planned to do it, I still do, but I want to suffer first. It seems righteous, somehow, to pass through the lake of fire before arriving in Hell.

  So I called Archie and told him my plans, and he said he understood and faked my death to buy me time to do it right. The way I die is shot through the head by a rifle, a long-range sniper with a gossipy mouth told where and when to hit me, while I sit idle in the front seat of a BMW on the rooftop of a parking garage. The way I die is the shooter disintegrates my head, or what he thinks is my head, or what he is told is my head, even if it is a corpse placed there by Archie the night before. The shooter, a
midlevel assassin named Crane, blabs to everyone between the Atlantic and Pacific that he has bagged Columbus, and Archie fans the flames just enough to turn the rumors into a brush fire. The name Columbus fades from rogues’ lips. No one wants to romanticize a dead hit man who went out like a lamb.

  From there, I build a wall between Columbus and Copeland, between my son, Pooley, and me, between the killer who stalked prey and the broken soul trudging around Mackinac Island. A stopgap, okay. A thumb in the dike until I deem my suffering enough to merit death. The devil promises torment, and if darkness is the end, I want damnation first.

  I wander and I grieve and I take pain as comfort and I pick up and move and keep to myself and hurt privately and travel north, always north, until the landscape is cold and barren.

  Here, Archie finds me.

  Archibald “Archie” Grant is a tall, thin, black man who has survived a long time in the killing game by keeping his clients happy and his stable of assassins formidable. A fence in our business stands between the client and the killer so never the twain shall meet. The fence does the pre-assignment legwork and puts a file together on the target in order to give his contract killer several options to make a successful hit. Success doesn’t just mean a dead target. It means getting away with it, too, so the murder ends in unsolved case files and inconclusive evidence. Archie may look like a refugee from a ’70s-era pornography set, with his tan suits and matching shirts, his wide-brim fedoras, dangling cigarettes, and half smiles, but he is the best at what he does, and he’s the only man on earth I trust, even if I dole out that trust reluctantly.

  He takes a sip of his coffee and leans back in a chair so the front legs come off the floor. “Why didn’t you get back to me?”

  I shrug. “I was thinking about it.”

  “I send you a message that says ‘Call me,’ you pick up the phone. And don’t say you didn’t get it, ’cause I see it right over there.” He nods at the counter, one eyebrow cocked.

  “What do you want me to say? I was busy.”

  “Doing what? This place is the goddamn tundra.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Punishing yourself?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Shit. You a mess.” Archie studies me out of the tops of his eyes, that one eyebrow still arched.

  I’m good at holding a poker face but I’m out of practice so my eyes flash. “No. Zero chance.”

  “Now hear me out. Hear me out before you go all wild-eyed. What do I call you now by the way?”

  “Copeland.”

  “Okay, Cope. I like that. Hear me out, Cope. This ain’t a job, not exactly. Not like you’re used to. But it came to me in a pretty package with a bow on top, and I thought to myself, I got the perfect man for it. He may not know it, he may not agree, but he’s the perfect man for it.” He points a finger gun at me and mimes pulling the trigger. “That’s you, Mary Lou.”

  “Peggy Sue.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the expression. That’s you, Peggy Sue.”

  “Expression? What the fuck are you . . . never mind. Don’t correct my expressions. I’ll use whatever expression I feel like.”

  I hang my head like the effort of even listening to Archie is too much for me. He keeps on harping on expressions so I get up and move to the refrigerator, surprised by how empty it is. “Next thing I know you’re gonna be correcting my grammar and then we gonna have a prob—”

  “What is it? The job. What is it?”

  Archie sets all four legs of his chair on the floor and leans forward. “Like I say, you the perfect man for it. There’s this cat in Portland who’s got a price on his head. A big-ticket price that supposedly comes from Europe or Russia or some shit I’m not too sure about yet. He works in tech or a branch of tech or some kind of tech and crossed horns with the wrong kind of bull, and now he got a contract out on him. I’mma do the work but I’m not there yet. This just came to me, like I told you.”

  I return to the table with a pear from the fridge and a knife, start to chip off slices. “You want me to kill a nerd.”

  “I want you to let me finish.”

  He waits to see if I’ll challenge him, but I eat my pear. “Anyway, this cat’s about thirty days from getting his grave dug, only he gets tipped off it’s coming. I’m not sure how, but that’s the way it’s told to me. We got a mutual acquaintance who works the periphery of what we do and this acquaintance reaches out to me. ‘What can I do about this?’ he asks me. Can his friend pay off this hit and make it go away? Will I find out where it’s coming from because apparently this nerd’s got some enemies. You play in the Eastern European sandbox, you gonna get bullies kicking sand in your face, no doubt. Running and hiding ain’t an option for this guy, so I’m told. He has a business to run. Raising the white flag ain’t an option either . . . you know as well as I do that’s how you end up in the ground. ‘So what can we do?’ the acquaintance asks me. I tell him ‘What your boy needs is protection. Someone who can see all the angles so when this assassin comes at him, this assassin walks into an ambush. Not bodyguards, no sir. Even the best bodyguards, you gonna get what you gonna get.’ ‘Oh, he’s got bodyguards,’ Curtis tells me. That’s the mutual acquaintance, Curtis. Curtis says, ‘Okay, okay, so what you thinking, Archie?’ and I say, ‘I’m thinking fight fire with fire. Your boy needs a hit man of his own. Someone who has taken out men. Someone who has done it a hundred times. Someone who knows the way this hit is going to go down, so he can stop it from going down. You need a Silver Bear,’ and I’m thinking but I don’t say, You need Columbus.”

  I cut off another slice of pear and offer it to Archie, but he holds up a hand to decline. “So whatchoo think?”

  I take a bite of the fruit and the juice overwhelms my mouth. It tastes sour, not yet ripe. “I’m a killer.”

  “You were. Before all this,” he interrupts, gesturing around the room. “I’m offering you a chance to be a protector. Which from where I’m sitting might be exactly what you need.”

  “What if the nerd deserves it?”

  “He probably does, Cope. He probably does. And you can make that decision. I don’t give a fuck. You wanna pull the matador’s cape and let the bull come stick him, be my guest. I’ll leave that up to you. But I figure, look here, this is a chance to give you a fresh start, to dust off your skills, to wipe your slate clean, to stop wallowing in your self-pity. What you’re doing is unseemly. And maybe . . . maybe Cope, maybe you can find a reason to live again, ’cause this ain’t you.” He shakes a cigarette from a pack of Camels and lights it up, takes a drag, then points the tip at me. “Plus, this nerd is rich as a motherfucker and willing to write a blank check, so maybe I kill two birds, you know what I’m saying?” He leans back like he doesn’t need to tell me any more, takes a long drag, and lets the smoke out slowly so it gathers in the corner of the ceiling.

  I exhale, turning it over in my mind. There are a million reasons to say no, but I can’t think of one right now.

  “When?” I ask.

  “The clock’s ticking. Shit, nerd might already be dead and this all be moot. But I tell you, he’s gonna be dead if you don’t help him. I know that. Either way, it’s nothing to me. I’m just trying to help out Curtis and maybe help you out, too.”

  “Two birds?”

  Archie grins, “That’s it.”

  “You say he already has bodyguards.”

  “That’s what Curtis tells me. I know nothing about them. I heard this story and come straight to you.”

  “Why’s the nerd going to trust me?”

  “Shiiiiit. He’s not. It’ll be up to my man to arrange things. You get him to trust you, or he don’t, and it’s over quick. What do you care?”

  Archie knows he has me hooked and just has to reel in the line now. He stands and claps his hands together. “Let’s get outta this dump. Get back to civilization, Columbus.” He sniffs, but doesn’t wipe his nose. “I mean Copeland. Won’t make that mistake again.” He holds
his hands up, innocently.

  I gather my coat and look around. My eyes fall on the window frame I fixed, the nails I hammered, the glass pane secured. It’s holding.

  Archie reads my thoughts like a good fence should. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  “How’d you get here anyway?”

  “Follow me, and I’ll show you.”

  The prop plane takes to the sky with a bone-shuddering jolt. I look down at the little island, blanketed with fresh powder. It’s easy to pick out the school: a couple of pitched rooftops in the center of the island. Classes just began, and I imagine Meghan in the front row, a tormenting eye on Mr. Laughlin.

  “What?” Archie says, looking over at me in the two-seater behind the pilot.

  In Chicago, Archie booked me into the Peninsula, and I shower, eat, and wait for him to call. A burner phone rests on the bedside table, and I climb under the covers and endure its silence. Darkness comes for me, and with it, inside it, are Risina’s smile, Risina’s kiss, Risina’s touch, Risina’s scent. For the first year, I ran from these images, but the darkness was a fire I couldn’t outpace. I’d climb from bed, take a scalding shower, do push-ups, go for a walk, chop wood, anything to keep from burning in that fire. I could keep the flames at bay for a day or two, but then I’d close my eyes, exhausted, and she’d return, the woman I brought into this life, carelessly, recklessly, foolishly. She would smile, kiss, touch, and the fire would overwhelm me, punish me, suffocate me. I couldn’t run, so I took the heat, wore it like a cloak, wrapped myself in it, until the pain wrecked me.

  The phone rings. I’m not sure how long I’ve been in this hotel room, hours or days.