Matryoshka Blues (The Average Joe Mysteries Book 1) (4 page)

6

D
ude’s got a gun, while I’ve got a screwdriver and a look of utter stupidity underneath a miner’s light not even strong enough to make the guy squint, much less blind him. Want to place bets on who has the upper hand?

Here’s a hint: it’s a trick question.

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” the guy says. His voice is Barry White smooth, but not as deep. And a touch too playful for someone holding a weapon. “You look like you’re in the middle of something important.”

I look around the dust-caked room and shrug. “Customer asked for high-speed internet. Figured I’d start in the solarium.”

The man laughs. That’s a good sign.

He kicks the door closed with the heel of a red Converse All Star, leaning against the jamb and letting the gun hang casually by his side. He keeps the flashlight raised, however, kindly aiming it at my chest so he doesn’t scorch my retinas with its LED laser vision.

I need to get me one of those. This miner’s light isn’t worth shit.

Between the darkness swallowing him and the flashlight limiting my field of vision, I can’t see his face clearly, but his teeth are white against a sea of black. His skin is dark and blends almost perfectly with the shadows; his silhouette covers a good chunk of the door. He’s in black jeans and a dark-colored long-sleeved shirt, untucked and rolled to the right below the elbows. I get no tension off the man, no pent-up aggression. He’s simply standing there behind a gun and a flashlight like he owns the world. I’m kind of jealous. When I do that people think I’m constipated or some shit.

No pun intended this time, I swear.

“What’s your name?” he asks. The gun kinda-sorta moves in my direction, which experience has taught me to always take as a threat, so I tell him. “Never heard of you. No offense.”

“None taken. Why would you? I’m just your average joe. What’s yours?”

He nods before answering, confirming something to himself. “Everyone calls me Sergeant.”

“Like the guy who replaced the real Darrin on
Bewitched
?”

That’s actor Dick Sargent to those of you not paying attention, or to anyone born sometime after Y2K.

Please tell me I don’t have to explain what Y2K means…

Sergeant shakes his head. “Like the drill instructor.”

“Gotcha.” At least he got the reference. That’s one more than Sandecker and his James Bond knowledge, so points to the hired killer.

Damn it. I just realized something: I’ve now got Sandecker and Sergeant, and Tully and Turnbill. Hope I can keep all that straight.

I hold up the screwdriver as non-threateningly as possible. “Sure you don’t mind?”

Sergeant shrugs dismissively. “Not much else to do and more than an hour to do it in.”

He ain’t just whistlin’ “Dixie”. Something tells me I’m in for a long night.

“If you want to put that gun down, I’ll totally let you help.”

Hey, it’s worth a shot. Maybe he’s not as smart as I’m giving him credit for.

“I don’t know anyone dumb enough to fall for that,” he says smoothly. Like I said, worth a shot. Sadly, I do know people that dumb. So does Tully. An entire town worth. I tell Sergeant as much. He laughs again. “Where you from?”

“Out east. You?”

“Toronto, born and raised.”

That explains it. He’s been far too polite, professional or no. But a Canadian killer? Yeah, it makes perfect sense now.

Shut up. Of course it does.

“You think I’m being nice because I’m Canadian,” he says. “That’s profiling.”

Wow, that’s spooky. Now I’m thinking he’s a goddamn psychic who should be working fairs and carnivals in exchange for rides on the Tilt-A-Whirl. I tell him that as well.

He shakes his head. “My momma didn’t raise a fool. She raised a gentleman. You’d do well to remember that.” He waves the gun at my unfinished work. “Get that cleaned up. I can’t stand half-assed home-improvement projects.”

I look down at the screwdriver, wondering if I’m lucky enough to throw it like a ninja star at Bob Fucking Vila over there and embed it in the barrel of the gun. Then I realize I’m not even lucky enough to throw it and hit the fucking wall beside him, so I finish my prep work, even though it’s painfully obvious I won’t be using any of it.

Great, packed all this shit for nothing. Could’ve spent that time doing something constructive, like watching
Gravity Falls
, or ordering myself a new miner’s light. But no, instead I’m stuck in the worst episode of
This Old House
ever created.

“You’re here early,” I say as I righty-tighty a two-inch drywall screw above where the baseboard would go, securing the sound effects machine firmly into place.

“There’s nothing for it,” Sergeant says cheerfully. “It’s where the guy I was following came. Since the exchange isn’t—” He stops and flashes a bright-white Cheshire grin. “Well, I knew something was going down.”

That literally gives me pause. Isn’t what? Isn’t going down for another hour and change, or isn’t going down at all? I thought this guy was a scout, a point man brought in to sniff out the riff-raff. But now it sounds like he’s the bouncer—the guy hired to keep undesirables from getting past the velvet rope.

Shit. Have I been played?

For a brief, anger-fueled second, I imagine Jeff Sandecker in his Corporal Brooks Brothers uniform, drinking my coffee and lying to my and Tully’s faces about the whole damn thing, and it pisses me off.

Although…

Loretta Turnbill, Sandecker’s secretary, supposedly got an email claiming others were looking for the box. Was she right, and Sergeant the Canadian here is part of that new reality? Perhaps a power struggle is occurring between either Sandecker and Turnbill or Sandecker and his backers. Am I somehow the new contestant in a game of Who Can Screw Who Best?

Hang on—screw
whom
best? Damn. I really hate non-unanimous consent on shit like this. Makes it look like we as a species have no clue what we’re doing.

Sergeant doesn’t look like much, but personal wardrobe choices don’t mean jack anymore. Very few people have a sense of fashion these days, myself included. I’ve never worn a tie in my life, and I still think suspenders and belts are perfectly acceptable.

But please, say no to the socks-with-sandals thing. I mean, dude. Have some self-respect.

Point is, even though my own private doorman over there looks like he stopped by on his way to the club, it doesn’t mean he’s not a pro. He’s not acting flashy or with overt bravado. He’s just…chill. That says pro to me. At least he’s not here to kill me. Not yet, I mean. I’m still alive, right? So that’s something.

One way to find out what’s going on, I guess…

“Why follow me?” I ask. “Why not just go after it yourself?”

I leave the
it
vague to see what happens.

He smiles again, and I’m about ready to try my luck with the magic screwdriver throw. Fuck his perfect teeth and sixteen bullets.

“That’s not my assignment,” he says, savoring every damn syllable.

Of course it isn’t. God forbid shit’s ever simple.

“What
is
your assignment?”

He checks his watch like a parent seeing if their kid can come out of timeout. “Ask me again in ninety minutes.”

7

H
ave you ever spent ninety minutes shooting the shit with a man keeping you prisoner in a run-down building while you waited to steal—by force, if necessary—an item of unknown importance to an unknown number of people?

What am I saying? Of course you haven’t. I mean, look at you.

It’s every bit as tedious as it sounds. Coerced small talk? Fucking shoot me, please. You don’t have to kill me; you can aim for the big toe if you want. Or the pinky. On the right hand, please and thank you.

Yes, I’m a southpaw. Thought you’d have noticed when I used the screwdriver. Pay attention, will you?

But I digress. The point is I’d rather eat a bullet than be psychoanalyzed by some homicide-prone Canadian with amazing choppers and a hankering for goddamn small talk.

On the plus side, he let me finish my work. If the exchange were to go down now—which, hello, it’s not—then I would be the undisputed Master of Disaster up in this bitch.

All the cool kids still say that, right? I mean, the classics never go out of style, do they?

To fill the time, Sergeant and I chat about everything from the socio-economic nuances of post-Gorbachev Russia to a free healthcare system; from the designated hitter rule to why rugby is more brutal than American football and hockey combined; from our favorite
Happy Days
episodes to what the fuck Robert de Niro was doing in
Rocky & Bullwinkle
. We even lower ourselves to discussing the weather and why neither MTV nor VH1 play actual music anymore.

And now you know why I want the damn bullet.

He looks at his watch for the twelfth time in three minutes, and I decide I can’t take it anymore.

“Stop that,” I tell him. “There’s no use pretending.”

He laughs. “Wasn’t sure you’d figured it out.”

“Thanks. Worked it out a while ago. I’m smarter than I look.”

“I can see that. Unless you’re trying to convince me
Bitches Brew
is a better representation of Davis’ genius than
Kind of Blue
. Which, it’s not. Obviously.”

“Didn’t say I was a musical genius. Only that I shouldn’t be underestimated in my ability to grasp the obvious.” And for the record, it totally is. Take that, fucker.

“Clearly. Why do you think I stayed over here the whole time?”

It’s true—dude hasn’t moved since he got here. He’s shifted position, and done some weird warm-up stretches, but he hasn’t moved from that door.

I shrug. “For laughs? A childhood love of doorknobs? Extreme koinoniphobia?”

That last one’s a fear of rooms, by the by. Google is a fucking God-send.

Seregant groans and yawns in an elaborate display, knowing full well I’m considering making a move for the gun. “Well, it’s been real, and it’s been fun...” He pushes off from the door and opens it. “If you’re smart, you’ll stay here another five minutes.”

“What happens in five minutes?”

He looks at me like I’m slow, which is the general idea. “I’ll be out of this building and scattered to the wind,” he says. “And you’ll be standing here wondering what happened.”

“Spoilers—kind of doing that now.”

He beams with false pride, like I won a gold star in fucking attendance or something. “Excellent. Keep that up for another five minutes, don’t forget to pack up your things, and have yourself a pleasant evening.”

And like that, the fucker’s gone—
poof!
—the faint echo of retreating footsteps and a barrage of
what the fuck just happened
s keeping me and my ignorant ass company.

“Son of a bitch,” I say to the rats.

There was never an exchange, at least not in this dump. I knew that a while ago, but I didn’t want to believe it. If an exchange did go down, it was probably an hour ago, somewhere two hours away.

I pack up what I can, but ultimately leave the rest. There’s no time to take it down again, so I’ll have to come back for it. Hopefully it’s still here when I do. If not, I’m buying new shit off of Amazon later, and that’s a browsing history I’d rather not let anyone discover. I mean, judge me on the porn all you want. I’m hardly the first, and the shit I look at is straight-up vanilla so far as proclivities run.

What I need is cell phone reception, so I run downstairs and into the street, panting like a beached whale while I make a call.

Tully picks up on the first ring.

“It’s early,” she says, her eighty-inch flat-screen serenading me through the phone with the joyous sounds of John McClane shooting terrorists at Nakatomi Plaza. “Everything okay?”

“What’s Sandecker’s address?”

It takes me about a minute to say those three words, huffing and puffing as I am. I swear I’ll drop dead on the asphalt before I finish, so color me shocked when I actually get them out.

The TV goes mute. “What’s wrong?” she asks. I tell her everything. “Fuck me with a lemonade stand.”

I honestly have no idea what that means.

“Focus, Tully. What’s his address?” Breathing’s easier, but holy shit will I feel this later.

She tells me, and I type it into my phone’s navigation app while she keeps talking. “You think he set us up?”

“He definitely set someone up. Not convinced this is about us specifically, but it’s a possibility. I don’t know, and he does, so I want to ask him.” I look around, trying to remember the bus schedule. This part of town, this time of night, it’s a really bad idea to be hanging around all willy-nilly on a street corner. “I need a ride.”

“I’m coming with you.”

I know exactly what she means. “No.”

“Fuck you. I’m not asking.”

“You’re not the freelancer here, Tully. You go to Sandecker’s home looking for a fight, your company gets dragged through the mud because of it. Pick me up, take me to my car, then go home. I’ll handle this.”

She hates me because I’m right, which doesn’t happen often between the two of us. She should be shocked, like I am, rather than angry.

“You really think we’re being played?” she asks after a lengthy pause.

I smile at nobody. “Yippee ki-yay, Tullinger.”