Both men listened as they gazed out through the windshield of the 1968 Lincoln Town Car. Both men heard the screams, but it seemed to disturb neither of them. After a minute, the night became silent. A moment passed and the man in the driver’s seat, a large fellow named Bruce, broke the silence.
“I wonder who that guy was.” His voice was thick and deep. He had a heavy inner-city accent.
The other man, a tall and wiry man named Sid, snorted at the comment and turned to Bruce. “Does it matter?” he said, his voice higher pitched and nasally. “He’s an enemy of the state.” He chuckled at his own wit, as if he didn’t know who the real enemy of the state was. Bruce either missed the joke or believed it literally, because he continued to stare mirthlessly through the windshield. There was nothing to look at save the thick wall of fog that imposed itself on the South Boston shipyard late every night. The fog was why they brought the scumbags here, Sid had once told Bruce, because it was hard for anyone to see them come and go, and their shouts wouldn’t echo. Well Bruce didn’t know much about echoes, so he just nodded solemnly as he learned to do whenever he didn’t understand something.
A pale white light shone from somewhere above the Lincoln, and it managed to illuminate the patch of cement surrounding the Town Car and the wall of a large rusty shipping crate, neither end of which was visible. In fact, everything a meter beyond the car was so obscured by the fog that it was hard to believe that any of it still existed. If it weren’t for the intermittent screams of agony, Bruce might have forgotten where he was.
Bruce rubbed his hands for warmth, and blew hot air into his palms. His fingers were thick and his knuckles were hairy. He rotated them as if he were roasting a marshmallow, apparently aiming to cook each finger an even golden-brown.
“I just wish we could leave the car on,” he said, pausing to blow more air, “and maybe turn the radio on, like when we’re driving downtown.”
“Are you stupid, Bruce?” the man in the passenger seat said incredulously. “It’s three in the fuckin morning! There ain’t nothin on the radio.”
“Oh. I guess so,” Bruce said plainly. Another scream rang through the air, but it was more faded than the last.
“Hey, Sid,” Bruce pondered aloud to his partner, “We haven’t taken anyone all the way out to the shipyard in a while. You think this one’s special? Maybe he did something real bad, you know?”
“You always got more questions, don’t you?” Sid mocked. Bruce blinked, as if the two hadn’t had fifty identical conversations before.
“Well I dunno. I just thought maybe he…hurt someone. You know, someone important to the boss.” Bruce was a large man, but he always seemed to pick his words with the same caution he might use to pick daisies.
“You think you woulda learned by now,” Sid began impatiently. “It’s money. It’s always about the money. Someone gets to owing, and then it’s time for a visit. But we,” Sid forced contact with Bruce’s eyes and engulfed their whole existence in a gesture with his two fingers. “We just have to get them here. There ain’t no more thinkin than that, mister Albert Einstein.”
Despite the warning, Bruce thought about this for a minute. His thoughts were interrupted by two men who strode quite suddenly out of the fog. The first man looked at Sid through the windshield, and gave him a short nod. Then he turned and strode away, just as calmly as if he were in a park at midday instead of a shipyard before dawn.
“Boss says time to go.” Sid looked at Bruce.
Bruce started the car, and promptly turned on the heater.
* * *
“Alright, open the trunk.” Sid’s raspy voice pierced through the alleyway. It was another cool evening, and Bruce was leaning against the side of the Lincoln. He blinked, and then fumbled for the keys in his pocket to do as his partner asked. Sid had just emerged from behind a rusty metal door, and hot air creeped in his wake. He led a man before him with a burlap sack over his head, its drawstrings tight around his neck. The Sackman wore a rumpled gray suit with an unbuttoned white undershirt and no tie. As they drew closer, Bruce noticed that Sackman’s hands were bound behind his back by a thin steel wire that had cut into his wrists.
With the trunk open, Sid passed Sackman over to Bruce. Sackman was trembling, and his body jerked when Bruce touched his arm. Sid moved toward the passenger door.
“Watch your head now,” Bruce said as he bent the man over the open trunk. He oriented Sackman so he was lying on his side, and then lifted Sackman’s legs and bent them so his knees touched his chest. Bruce thought Sackman might have been a gymnast or a runner, because his legs seemed very flexible. Either that or Sackman was too weak to struggle. Looking around the trunk, Bruce spotted a dirty sweatshirt. He quickly bunched it up, lifted Sackman’s head, and placed the shirt under it. “So your head don’t bump so much.” Bruce said. He took one last look at Sackman, who was silent save for his ragged breathing, and then closed the trunk.
Once Bruce was settled in the driver’s seat, Sid passed him a brown paper bag and said, “There’s some food.” It was a cheese danish. Sid had one already in his other hand, and the pair proceeded to eat.
For a few moments, the interior of the Lincoln was quiet. The only sounds Bruce could hear were his own chewing and the occasional wiggle of the car as Sackman attempted to improve his relative level of comfort. Bruce wondered why Sackman didn’t yell or kick, and figured he was gagged and probably very tired. Whenever Sid brought out someone he always seemed so exhausted.
A young couple strode past the entrance to their alleyway. They wore nice black waistcoats, and Bruce imagined they were returning home after a Saturday night party where they drank cocktails and discussed art. Not that Bruce had ever attended a Saturday night party or any party for that matter, but he appreciated the woman’s nicely done hair and imagined her perfume having a faint scent of flowers and honey. Neither of the couple happened to notice the Lincoln parked fifteen feet away.
When Bruce finished his danish, he spoke.
“So where are we headed?”
Sid sucked the crumbs from his fingers before replying, “You know that butcher’s shop over by Stevenson’s? Mitch’s Meats?”
Bruce nodded solemnly.
“Yeah, that one. We got a guy waiting there for us. It ain’t gonna be pretty.”
* * *
Something had gone wrong. The time wasn’t right: it was late afternoon on a Saturday. The location was all wrong: the driveway of a grandiose white house in an affluent neighborhood. It was way too crowded: there were at least ten other cars parked along the street adjacent to the house. Nice cars, too. Chryslers, Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles, and the like. Sid had gone inside fifteen minutes ago and Bruce could hear the voices of multiple people, and above it all Sid’s nasally “Hey!”
Bruce was feeling nervous, like Sid might not come back out, but finally he did. He was leading a tall woman in front of him. She was perhaps in her late twenties. She was gagged and her hands were bound behind her back by a thin steel wire. She was unkempt to say the least. Her dark brown hair was in a tangle, a blindfold covered her eyes, and fresh bruises showed on her face. But even in these circumstances Bruce could tell she was usually beautiful. She wore a sparkling red dress that accentuated her chest with matching heels. They were the kind of shoes that would prevent a woman from doing anything too drastic like jump a fence or climb a fire escape.
Bruce noticed all of this in a moment, but he was much more confused that she even existed. By the fact that she was walking down the driveway, that she was being led by Sid. She wasn’t the kind of person they picked up. Sid said they picked up bad people, people that had done something in need of punishing. Low-lifes, scumbags, and people who refused to pay their debts. And they looked like bad people, too. They had cheap clothes and stinky breath. They hung out in bars and strip clubs and didn’t have jobs. Bruce had never picked up a woman before, and this particular woman certainly didn’t look like a bad person to him.
Before Bruce could roll it over in his mind long enough to make sense of it, Sid opened the back door of the Lincoln and sat the woman unceremoniously in the back seat. He then sat himself in the passenger’s seat and told Bruce to start the car.
Bruce did, and inspected the woman in the back seat via the rear view mirror. She looked exhausted. They pulled out of the driveway and headed for the main road. Bruce knew better than to talk in this kind of situation. He just drove straight and waited for Sid to tell him to turn. They got on the highway, they headed back to town and pulled onto Southampton street.
“Mitch’s Meats,” Sid declared. “Just pull up to the corner here.”
Bruce could hardly believe his ears. Mitch’s Meats? Bruce couldn’t bear to imagine what they would do to her in there, but he couldn’t stop himself from imagining either. Her thin, delicate frame shackled to a meat hook in the freezer. They’d hit her and cut her with all sorts of sharp things. Blood would get all over her nice dress. She would be tortured and tortured and would probably die. And Bruce didn’t even know her name!
He pulled over at the corner, and Sid stepped out onto the sidewalk. The car was still on. The heater was still running. Bruce still had his hands on the wheel. The woman in the back seat was still a woman and still looked exhausted. Why would they do this to her? She couldn’t possibly have done something to deserve what was coming. She was a woman, not a villain. Not a payment-dodger, not a thief, not a murderer, not a crook. She was a woman. She deserved cocktail parties and art. She deserved protection, not torture.
Sid stepped to the back door on the passenger side, and started to open it. The blood was pounding in Bruce’s head. He couldn’t let this happen. He just couldn’t. It was wrong. The nice house, the red dress, the butcher’s, it was all wrong. Bruce heard the click as the back door opened. The woman didn’t stir. And right when Sid put his hand on her shoulder, right when Sid was about to pull her out of the car and there would be no hope left, Bruce panicked.
He slammed his foot on the gas. The car shot forward like a dart, and Sid stumbled backward. The back door slammed shut, stopping the woman from falling out. Bruce heard Sid’s voice crying out behind him, nasally and high-pitched with surprise. “What the fuck, whaddaya doin? Get back here you big fuck!” Sid’s voice trailed off into the distance, and Bruce kept driving.
* * *
The woman in the red dress opened her eyes. She was no longer blindfolded and gagged, and a pale mid-morning light illuminated the room through translucent window shades. She was in a cheap motel room. It looked much like any other cheap motel room. She lay on a bed with a tacky floral print on the duvet. There was a chest of drawers, a small television, and a lamp. In the corner there was a small writing table with a pistol on it, and in the chair a burly man was dozing.
The woman gasped at seeing him, and struggled to sit upright. Her hands were still bound behind her back, as she was reminded by the sharp pain of the wire on her raw wrists. Finally she managed to sit up, but her movements were enough to wake the man.
For a long moment they just stared at each other blankly.
“Who are you?” The woman asked.
The man blinked as if he didn’t understand the question. “Bruce,” he finally said.
The answer surprised her. Thugs usually didn’t offer their names.
“Who do you work for?” She asked. “Is it Morelli?”
“I ain’t with nobody,” Bruce responded. He kept staring at her with the strangest look. He was an immense man, with short dark hair and hairy knuckles. His arms were thick, and his skin was weathered, but his face was painted with a bizarre mixture of fear and excitement. Was this guy retarded or something? She wasn’t looking forward to finding out.
“You took off my blindfold.” The woman figured she’d give her sweet voice a shot, and put on her most deplorably innocent voice. “Would you untie me?”
“I don’t want to you be scared, ma’am,” Bruce replied, in a very slow, practiced tone. “I ain’t here to hurt you.”
Obviously not. But he looked like a sad excuse for a hero.
“Do you know who I am?” The woman asked.
Bruce just stared. So he was clueless. Well, the woman had been in worse situations and she knew how to handle herself. So she would wait for an opportunity.
“My name is Linda,” She said softly, “and I can’t thank you enough for rescuing me.”
Bruce smiled and introduced himself a second time, “I’m Bruce.”
Linda replied, “So what’s next, Bruce?” By his look the idiot clearly hadn’t thought this through. “How about getting this awful wire off my wrists? It’s hurting me ever so bad.”
As if he had forgotten, Bruce blinked twice and then quickly got up from the chair to untie her. Maybe this would be easier than Linda thought. She thanked him sweetly and took a proper look around. Bruce was between Linda and the door, so she probably wouldn’t be able to make a run for it. And even if she tried, she didn’t know where she was and she wouldn’t make it far barefoot or in heels. Then she spotted it; on the table next to the pistol lay a set of car keys.
“I could really use something to eat, Bruce.” Linda gave him a weak smile.
“Oh, yeah. I’ve got a sandwich in the car that I picked up for—”
He was interrupted by a sharp knocking at the door, and a high-pitched nasally voice called out, “Open up, Bruce, it’s me!”
Bruce’s eyes grew to the size of silver dollars. He whispered, “It’s Sid,” and looked from the door to Linda, and back to the door, and back to Linda. Linda ran to the corner desk and picked up the gun.
“Quick, here!” She said, holding up the pistol by its barrel and urging Bruce to take it. He just stared at the door when he heard another knocking, like a deer in the headlights.
“Let me in Bruce! I know you’re in there!”
Hidden by the sound of the knocking, Linda snatched the keys and held them behind her back with one hand while holding the gun with her other. She rushed to Bruce and held out the gun, “Take it!” She said. “Do something! Say something!”
Bruce looked at the gun in his hands and called out with the stupidest line possible, “Don’t come in here, I have a gun!”
The knocking stopped and Sid called out, “Come on, Bruce what are you doing? Don’t tell me you killed her! Did you kill her?”
Bruce replied, “No, she’s safe with me.”
“Do you even know who she is? You’re the one who ain’t safe, Bruce. You’re the one in fuckin danger!”
Bruce looked at Linda with surprise and fear, but Linda put on her most confused and innocent face. A shake of her head seemed be enough to win him back.
Bruce looked back to the door, “You ain’t gonna hurt her, Sid.”
“Oh my–” Sid’s muffled curses didn’t make it through the door clearly, and then he said, “Let me in or I’m coming in, Bruce!”
The door was struck with what sounded like a tree trunk. It produced a heavy, thundering shudder that shook the whole room. There had to be at least two people out there, and Linda could tell the door wouldn’t hold for much longer.
“You have to do something Bruce!” Linda whispered urgently. “Save me!”
Another shock. A painting fell from the wall and the door splintered. Linda backed behind a corner next to the bed.
“You have to shoot them!” Linda said. All she could see was Bruce. His face was a cocktail of anguish and misery. He held the gun with two hands and pointed it toward the door, but Linda had no idea if he was prepared to shoot.
The third strike came, the lock gave way, and the door flew open. Light streamed down the short hallway and illuminated Bruce’s face like a spotlight. Bruce shut his eyes, and he pulled the trigger. Once, twice, three times he shot blindly into the light. Cracks rang through the air as shots were returned.
There was a cry. Another voice yelled. Bruce kept firing, eyes open now. Tears were streaming down his face. He was hit in the stomach and stumbled to one knee. Bruce shot one more time before collapsing. And then, only moments after it began, everything was quiet. There were no voices, no footsteps, just silence.
Linda emerged from behind her corner, a little surprised by how unshaken she felt. She stepped over Bruce, whose body now lay motionless on the motel carpet. A small pool of blood creeped out from under him. Linda walked outside, past the splintered remains of the front door and the battering ram on the ground. There were two dying men on the pavement, passed out and bleeding from their various wounds. One was tall and wiry with one hole in his leg and another in his neck. The other was short and squat and bleeding from his chest. Linda picked up the wiry man’s handgun from the pavement. There were only two cars in the parking lot, and both were parked right in front of the motel room. She tried Bruce’s keys on the Lincoln and it opened. She got in the driver’s seat, put the gun in the glove compartment, and started the engine.
Through the windshield Linda could see into the motel room, and Bruce’s hulking body on the floor. Linda took one last look before pulling out out and driving away. She would have pitied Bruce, even felt sad for him, if this whole ordeal weren’t his fault.
She headed down the freeway back to Boston. After ten minutes she noticed a brown paper bag on the floor of the passenger side. She reached down and opened it to find a roast beef sandwich. She pulled over, unwrapped the sandwich, and ate it. As she ate, a pair of police cars passed her in the opposite direction, their sirens blazing. When she finished the sandwich, she never thought about Bruce again.
“No, but I know who to call if it’s serious.”
Midnight Notebook 