Profane Men (18 page)

The far hillside has receded into a single dimension, and it appears as a lumpy shape that has taken on the flat, nondimensional texture of flat green foam rubber, the silhouette of the hillside exactly that of a human brain, the clouds flattened against the curved sky, and painted according to the plan.

The sky just whacks me out. It is a golden glow of ice picks that stab into my brain, and each tiny pinhole admits sound, sight, information, and comprehension. The sounds have the color of a used light bulb painted with a question mark and the smell of a brass nameplate. The act of breathing takes on a religious importance. My pores fill me with wonderment. I compose a mathematical riddle regarding the mysteries of the number nine, making it rhyme in iambic pentameter as a slight refinement, and decide God is the ultimate stand-up comic as I become helpless with laughter at the hilarious construction of the human knee.

Lucy in the sky with diamonds.

“Timor mortis conturbat me.”

— Kenneth Rexroth

Slowly, nothing out of the ordinary, the boy pulls his Chevy into the empty parking space and gets out. He is thin, wiry, quite nondescript, even innocuous in his calculated appearance, deferential in demeanor. He goes into the convenience store and a few moments later emerges with a small sack containing a bottle of cola, a cold six-pack of beer, and a small bag of chips. Placing the bag on the seat beside him, he gets back in his car, carefully backs out and drives to the apartment complex where he lives under an identity not his own.

At this moment, in fact, Bobby Price has paid a young woman to find someone to begin establishing another residence for him in a nearby city. The residence will be not a safe house so much as a contingency location. It will be extremely costly insurance, involving elaborately contrived false documentation, a careful selection of realtors, and many other factors. Everything from his rent to mail cover will be arranged by long distance, and all of this will cost not a little. All for an address that may never be used. Bobby Price is a professional and it just goes with the territory.

Price goes to his current apartment, locking the door behind him and placing the sack of items down on the counter in his tiny kitchenette. He lives frugally even though he is extremely wealthy. Bobby pops the top of the warm cola and pours it down the sink, boiling a pan of water and carefully washing and rinsing out the bottle, letting it dry thoroughly in the sink. He clamps a long piece of coat hanger to a rag and forces it into the bottle, meticulously drying and wiping the residue inside, and removing the wire and rag.

Opening a drawer, he removes a small metal hose clamp and a spool of black electrician's tape and one of silver duct tape. He pulls on a pair of soft gloves and places the items in a neat row beside the drying bottle, and goes into his bedroom. Using a small screwdriver blade, he chisels through the milk-based glue points in the back wall of his bedroom closet, freeing the panel that now is held in place by the magnets on each of the corners.

Using a special tool made from a lock pick, he carefully pries the top of the wall panel away from the double-facing magnet positions, making a mental note to be sure he works with a strong light when he replaces the panel later. He will touch up the corner spots with a formula of brown watercolor and marker pen, blotting the end result in tissue to cover any trace of the lock-pick tool.

He pulls the wall down, revealing a large storage space between the fake wall and actual closet wall. He pulls a heavy, painted aluminum case from within and lays it on the bed, flipping the catches open with loud snaps.

He removes his scoped piece with great care, carrying it into the kitchen and double-checking his various measurements. When he is satisfied, he returns the piece to its resting place in the heavy, foam-lined case, which he'll not load into his car before dark, and he packs all the rest of his equipment into another bag. He removes his gloves, flicks his stereo on, and pops one of the tabs on his six-pack of beer.

Lying down on his bed, he pulls a scrapbook out and leafs through it. He has two, both incredible in their content, but impressive in both professional layout and comprehensive approach. They are obviously the end product of a lot of tender, loving care. They show the boy's usual attention to detail and fastidious neatness.

In less than four hours, Bobby Price will execute a contract that entails the removal of a human life in cold blood. It is his line of work. He is a teenager in years only. Bobby is as old and as cold as graveyard dirt. And he is very, very good.

He is, in fact, the youngest executioner who has ever done whack-outs for the Texas Thing, which is what that particular crime family calls their loosely connected drug-gun-sex cartel, which they control as the operative arm of the state's political, business, and law-enforcement combine.

In that sense Bobby Price is a freelance assassin employed exclusively by what is laughingly referred to in Texas as “organized crime.” He is already a glowing legend within his field of endeavor, and he has killed for the Thing seven times in ten months.

Robert Tinnon Price doesn't need the money. He was born, as he used to say, “with a silver spoon up his ass.” His father, a successful Fort Worth businessman and a mean-spirited, treacherous, millionaire sonofabitch, and his mother, the illustrious Olivia Tinnon of Dallas, Curaçao, and Barbados, the preposterously rich petro-heiress and jet-set climber, haven't seen their scion for two years.

They think Bobby is working for a teenaged version of the Peace Corps in India, and it is his pleasure to mail-drop them outrageous postcards from Bangalore and Bombay from time to time, the missives bearing cryptic allusions to sacred cows and starving children. Bobby, as well as being fatally twisted, is a remorseless, icy-veined sociopathic killer. He is as dangerous as nineteen gets.

At the moment he is lying on his bed smelling of solvent, gun oil, and Coors, and getting a hard-on as he leafs through a catalog of recent assignments, his one glaringly excessive vice. It would be so easy for Bobby to touch himself right now, but he knows he must not. If he shot a load of hot cum now and Mistress Leila found out, he knows what would happen to him tonight. As Bobby anticipates the stinging kisses of her leather flail, his penis threatens to punch through the mattress. Perhaps she will force him to wear the cock ring again.

The Texas Thing found him, he didn't find them. He was not your average punk teen with an assassin fantasy; those are the last people they wanted, Bobby was a discovery. He was, as they say down there, “found, and kept an eye on, and brawt along in the bidness.” Bobby was a shooting star.

It wasn't just his inordinate proclivity for violence or his breathtakingly spectacular marksmanship. It was his talent — and make no mistake, it is a talent — for destruction. Outwardly the typical, traditional good kid next door: clean, hardworking, temperate, polite to a fault. Quiet but not stuck up. A nice kid on the surface. Inside, it was a different story. Inside, Robert Tinnon Price's heart of darkness was a fucking rat's nest of freaked-out psychopathy.

Darkness is Bobby's time. He is a well-oiled, nocturnal creature of the night. He glides, slides, eases his way. Slick. Pulled together now and every move sure, subtle, unhurried. He is strong on preparation. He has done his homework. Pencil the fucker out, he told them.

Thing about this line of work, it is a job of long dry spells, big rest periods, weeks of idle down time and then it once again is a job of sudden decisions one right after the other. There are always surprises. So in that way it is like a pro athlete. You can't really fake it beyond a certain point. Talent is what gets you through it.

There are always going to be last-minute changes. It is a business of improvisation. Always that one monkey wrench that is thrown into the machinery at the last second. It is the Murphy's Law of mechanics: if something can surface to fuck you over, it will, count on it. So you deal with it. Your ability to make very fast, sound decisions and ride them out with commitment and verve helps you keep your edge. And the business is nothing if not edge.

Because of the tremendous energies that must be summoned for this work, it is a job for the young man. There are surprisingly few middle-aged assassins, contrary to the wealth of popular fiction that would lead one to conclude otherwise. Barring cowboys and drug dealers, if you can survive in the life for five or six years, you qualify as an old-timer. You can't go to the well too many times unless you are just stone crazy.

Bobby Price gets in his car and drives. He stops at a rest area he has used once before and it doesn't feel quite kosher, so he drives on. He pulls past a Ramada near the highway and pulls on around a big generator, where there is a garbage dump at the edge of some woods. He turns the Chevy around and cuts his lights.

Turning in the seat, he flips the catches on the aluminum case and removes his piece with great care. With very sure hands he checks the bolt, sights down the bore, places the piece butt down in the far corner, puts the bottle on. Sliding the rubber washer down over the barrel where the blade sight was when he bought it, he wraps the end of the barrel in tape. It is close, when he tries the bottle for fit, but not quite. He wraps some more tape around it. He can just barely force the neck of the bottle around the taped barrel.

He slides the small metal clamp down in position and screws the clamp firmly around the barrel. This is why he has the funny-looking scope perched atop a pair of extenders: the scope has to clear a gallon pop bottle. He takes a long piece from the roll of silver duct tape and begins wrapping the bottle at the middle, working toward the barrel, then wrapping around the small hose clamp, and working his way several inches down the barrel's length.

Bobby checks the solidity of the overall unit. He sights through the scope. Satisfactory. Holding the stock in place on the back seat, with the bottle end not touching the seat's edge, he takes his foot off the brake and drives back down to the highway.

He has silenced his scoped rifle for a one-shot kill. This is something most of us have no knowledge about, our only source of information being television and movies. TV heroes fire revolvers with silencers on them, which, of course, contradicts all known laws of physics. If a cylinder holds rounds, obviously it must revolve, therefore the gas has a way to escape the breech, which is why a silent revolver is really tough to make. A weapon makes two noises, the gun noise such as the operating slide on an automatic pistol slamming back to throw a spent casing from the ejector port, and the bullet noise when the hot gases are shot out of the barrel by the fired projectile's speed.

Aside from tampering with the bullet itself (as in .22 silent loads), what you want to do is disperse the gas from the muzzle blast to some extent before it reaches the end of the barrel and goes bang. So you have sound suppressors with baffles, gadgets, gas ports, rings, springs, packing, wrapping, all manner of gimmicks to hold the noise down. None of them is any too perfect. And only a couple can come anywhere near the muffled
pppffftt
we associate with Bond movies. Physics, instead, prevails —
baaaannnnngg!!

In a closed room, an excellent silencer will muffle a .22 so it sounds like a loud door slam. In an open field there is proportionately that much less decibel-level of perceived report. His suppressors were one-shot pop bottle specials. He made them not because he couldn't afford to buy good silencers, but because it kept him from having to deal with the arms people who were rife with snitches, undercover cops, and other slime. His homemade units gave him self-sufficiency, a minimum of contacts that might ever backfire.

It was in the areas of battered ego and bust-out drug habit that Bobby Price was not so careful. His brain loved cocaine and he loved/hated himself to the extent that in those areas of dope and ego, Bobby had some serious vulnerability. But what the hell. Nobody's perfect.

He waited on the shoulder of the overpass, where just the night before he had spotted a bear parked with his scanner and two-way blaring, cooping and waiting, ready to fuck with the truckers' minds. Bobby would waste heat just as fast as you could say Waxahatchie three times fast. State rods didn't mean diddlyshit to Shooter Price.

He spotted the marked car with his special glasses. His very expensive glasses picked up the big X he'd put on the top of the car the night before last. He hoped the right driver was behind the wheel. He brought a shell up into the lightly oiled chamber, checked to see if any cars were coming from front, back, or exit lane, laid the barrel in the window, and put her on autopilot. Sighting without sighting. Knowing the nuances of the piece the way a dancer knows the music, totally giving himself to it, loving it, pointing with the flawless instincts of his craft, allowing for wind, movement, shadow, as you allow for distance when you walk up a flight of stairs, every movement second-nature, leading, breathing in, holding, squeezing with the practiced, mechanical naturalness of a professional.

As a fiery explosion breaks the ring out of the bottle, it almost simultaneously reaches out and takes the car's driver behind the wheel in the outbound traffic. And Bobby senses within the same heartbeat the driver crying out in pain as his head explodes just as the windshield disintegrates in a shatter of spider-tracked glass around the bullet hole and he loses control and begins to die in a blood-drenched sledgehammer of startled trauma and anguish.

Shooter drives quickly away, speeding only slightly as everyone does there, oblivious to passersby who might have seen the muzzle flash or witnesses who could have observed the gun in the car window. He hasn't a care in the world. He drives to the bottom of a ravine, a landfill being used as a dump, stops the car, and opens the trunk, removing post-hole digger, shovel, gloves, and the cased piece. He walks over to where the cats and dozers have just been working and excavates a two-foot-deep grave in the moist Texas ground, digging out a hole big enough for the case. He drops it into the hole, tamping packed earth down over the weapon, and throwing in the gloves as he passes the dump nearby. He covers the tracks in the earth back to the Chevy, tosses in the tools, and leaves.

Driving over a small iron bridge, he gets out and pitches in the tools, spent brass, the taped bottle, everything else. He has a small, battery-powered vacuum, which he uses to vacuum out the car floorboards, and then throws the bag over the bridge.

Bobby Price has earned a few hours of relaxation and fun, but Shooter's idea of kicks is not quite your typical teenager's drive-in double date. Bobby pays for what he wants. He whimpers in anticipation as he drives across town to get on the Central Expressway.

Mistress Leila sees Bobby, as she does all her regulars, only by previous telephone appointment, and punctuality is mandatory. Bobby has plenty of time and waits out in front in his Chevy for twelve minutes, humming contentedly. He is standing on her doorstep, eyes riveted to the second hand on his gold Rolex wristwatch, and at the exact second of his appointment he rings the bell. It chimes inside and in a few seconds a gorgeous woman of indeterminate age opens the door and effuses: