Punch List

Bascom picked me up after dark. I’d just had breakfast, so we stopped for a drink first at Lee’s. It’s a good spot, dark and loud enough for us to talk freely.

“We got our punch list,” he told me over beers. He had a boilermaker with Ballantine. I like a strong drink, but I thought that was excessive on a work night and stuck with a ’Gannsett. “What the fuck,” he said. “Live a little. Get your nose out of those comic books.” I think it was for my benefit that he dropped the shot in the mug, drank it fast and ordered another. What the hell, he was right. I did read more than your average mug, but there can be a long wait between jobs.

“Anyways,” he said. “Nelstone wants this all cleaned up tonight. We got a full night’s work ahead of us.” He went over a series of jobs, bing-bang-bongo. We’d never done more than two in a night, and like I said, sometimes we went months without a contract, but this was a full fist: five hits in one night.

“You think he coulda stretched this out,” I said. “What’s the rush? This ain’t a war, and some of these jobs are delicate. Number two alone needs a bit of planning.” The last entry was just an address, no names or anything.

Bascom shook his head. “This is a sprint. Bonus if we report back before midnight.”

I checked my watch. It was already nine o’clock. Three hours for the whole list, and the first of them outside the city limits. Like a delivery service, we mapped out the route, starting with the most distant job. It spiraled like a galaxy, right up to the black hole at the center.

Bascom finished off his second boilermaker. I still had an inch left in my first pint. It was gonna have to be my only for the night. I threw it back and we left.

His Continental glided through the night like a shark. The drive out was mostly quiet, except we worked out some details. Not everyone was a solitary creature. There’d be collateral. And if we didn’t move fast, word would get out that something was up. I still didn’t know why it was just us two, but you didn’t question Nelstone. That’s why he was still around, had been since I was still shitting in diapers.

We landed on a quiet suburban street with Caddies and boat-like Chryslers in the driveways. Garages were for motorboats and shit. Bascom checked his paper in the streetlight, and pulled into a circular drive. He left the car running, pointing towards the street and we climbed out.

The house was a newish build, one of those split-level ranches that went up after the war. Not quite a mansion, but big enough. No bell ringing here—I took the lead and kicked in the front door. The noise brought the guy downstairs right quick. When he saw us, his eyes bulged and he thought he’d make it back up the steps, but at this range it was an easy shot to the back of his head. From this angle, the splatter fanned out and up a few more steps. We skirted the naked body and made our way to the bedroom.

The bed was mussed up, but empty. And instead of the musk of sex, there was the sickly fragrance of medicated powder. We tracked Kelly, Nelstone’s ex-business partner and one-time wife, hiding in the master bath, crouching in the sunken tub. We each put a bullet through her, but didn’t wait to see the blood go down the drain.

“Why her?” I asked in the car. “She been with the boyfriend five years, Nelstone never cared.”

“Retirement planning,” Bascom said.

“We ain’t even collecting,” I said. Bascom shrugged.

He stopped for gas then wove through the light traffic—it was after ten on a Wednesday—and we made it back to the city. I wasn’t feeling too good about the bonus, even though things had gone smooth so far.

Our next stop was at a warehouse by the train yards. This was the one I was worried about: Frank Hutchison’s poker game. Everyone knew where and when it was, but that only meant that the security was something fierce. The other thing everyone knew was that the guards on the inside and outside all carried Colt Pythons, practically hand-cannons. That’s what I was saying to Bascom about planning, but he didn’t sweat it.

We wheeled in behind a warehouse two over from Hutchinson’s game. Bascom told me to cut the chain while he took from the trunk the cans of gas he’d filled up at the service station. He gave them to me and explained the layout and said to meet him back at the car in fifteen.

Inside, I lugged the cans up a rickety staircase to the third floor, then made my way around the catwalks until I came to a skyway that linked up to the next building, and from there continued on until I could look down on the place where the game was held. I cranked open the huge multi-paned window. It swung out wide enough for me to huck one of the cans with a flaming rag across the alley way.

The bomb hit the opposite window, splashing flames across the glass. The other dropped and straight down and exploded, blocking the exit and sending a guard running—without his cannon.

That left the front entrance, and Bascom was there picking off the other guard and the fleeing gamblers one by one. Most of the flames had died down, the building being made of sheet metal, but the pop-pop-pop of Bascom’s gat filled the night. I heard just one Python roar, and didn’t stick around to see how it all ended. But when I got back to the car, Bascom was already in the driver’s seat. He smelled of gas and smoke, but didn’t seem the worse for wear. It was quarter to eleven.

“See, Hutchinson’s guards were there to watch the dough. We were there to shut down the game. No money, no problem.”

“So now we got Nelstone’s ex-wife-slash-bookkeeper, and his game capo, plus assorted moneyed clients and other collateral. Bascom, this is a cockeyed list. What’s the deal?”

We were making our way across town. The bars were starting to empty, and the traffic picked up on the narrow streets, but we made decent time. Bascom shrugged. “We don’t call the shots, do we?”

“I guess not, but damn, that’s a lot of bodies on a single night. Cops’ll have to take notice. What’s the escape plan?”

“You’ll know it when you need to, little buddy.”

I guess that’s why he was the one that Nelstone contacted. I was just an up and comer, doing what I was told. And when Bascom pulled in behind a pizza joint lodged beneath an apartment block, and told me to go inside and clean up, that’s what I did—two to the head of the old Italian pizza cook who never saw me coming, and a duffle bag of cash hooked on my shoulder. One minute flat, door to door, and it was just past eleven-thirty. We had half an hour to hit the last pair, including the unnamed address at the center of town.

He pulled into a parking garage beneath one of the office towers downtown. The slam of the car doors echoed off the concrete. Same for our footsteps. If we weren’t packing, I might’ve been creeped out myself, but there was no one to see us mount the stairs to the lobby and then into the night.

Across the street, a squat row of brick office blocks loomed dimly over us. Bascom led the way to a glass door on the left, and we entered a long, narrow marble lobby. Carpeted stairs marched up the left-side wall, and we took them one at a time. There was no rush. On the second floor, a row of wooden doors with pebbled glass stretched before us. Most were dark, except the last one, at the back of the building. The black and gold lettering identified the tenant as C. Giteau, Atty at Law.

We didn’t knock. I knew Giteau was Nelstone’s lawyer, a fixer who hid millions and scared off pests while toiling away in this squalid back room of an office. And squalid it was: the place was a tiny hovel, just a receptionist’s desk and a back office. Every one of the cheap shelves sagged with law books and bulging accordion files. Even the plastic plant next to the old leather sofa for “clients” wilted under the weight of the dust.

Light glowed beneath the door to the inner sanctum, and a tinny transistor played doo-wop hits. Bascom waved me to go first. I put my hand on the knob, then stopped.

Something rustled on the other side of the door. I stepped back against the wall, just as the door swung open from the other side. I saw the barrel of a gun slide out, then Giteau’s outstretched arm. I had a close up as he squeezed the trigger. Twin explosions echoed in the tiny space: Giteau’s gun shot upward and Bascom’s found its mark. Giteau dropped the gun and stumbled back against his desk. He scrabbled at the phone next to him, but succeeded only in pushing it to the floor.

Giteau clearly recognized his shooter when Bascom stepped forward. I also noticed that his shot hadn’t gone completely off-target: a rose bloomed on Bascom’s trench coat by the shoulder, its center burned and gory. Luckily it was his left hand, and the right held his gun steady enough to end Giteau’s career with the bar. Bascom reached down to the body and pulled off the tie. Then he shrugged the coat to the floor.

“Help me get this on,” he grunted.

I holstered my .38 and wrapped the silk around his arm like an ace bandage. It already had splashes of Giteau’s blood on it, and soon Bascom’s mixed with it. I knotted it as tightly as I could, until Bascom’s neck muscles strained with the pain. But he never said a word, I’ll give him that. I put the coat back over him, letting the left sleeve dangle empty.

“Good enough,” he said through gritted teeth. “Let’s finish the job. Time?”

I checked my watch. “11:45. We can do it, but I’ll need to drive.” He nodded, and we left Giteau’s corpse listening to the Platters crooning “The Great Pretender.”

The walk back to the underground garage took longer than we expected, and Bascom’s arm was bleeding freely, obscuring the diamond pattern of Giteau’s tie so the gash in his coat was just a dark void. He handed me the keys and the slip with the address. But I already knew where to go.

The engine turned over like a rhino in heat, and I floored it up the ramp. This time of night, the barrier was raised, but I would’ve gone through it anyhow. Time was dribbling away.

So, it seemed, was Bascom. He leaned back in his seat, breathing slow.

“Want a doctor?” I said, but he just shook his head.

The roads wrapped the center of town, past office buildings and under the elevated tracks. Here and there neon signs lit the way. We passed a few corners where the action was on the sidewalk, late night girls looking for a date, but Bascom didn’t even glance at them. The lights glistened off the sweat on his forehead.

I drove past a movie theater, the crowd letting out and dispersing to either direction beneath the marquee. As the last movie-goers straggled out, the sign went dark. I pulled over a few doors down, in front of a dentist’s office. The shingle swayed in the late autumn breeze.

“You wanna stay here, and I’ll finish the job?” I said to Bascom. “Then we can claim the prize, and I’ll get you fixed up.”

He shook his head, but could barely utter a word. Not the kind of reaction you want walking in to make a hit. But he rallied a bit, lurched forward and opened the door. “Get a move on,” he gasped.

I got out, shut my door, and then his, too. He stood on the sidewalk like an old man, unsure of which direction to go. I pointed a few doors down from where we were parked, a narrow brownstone with a bowed front that looked like all the others in the neighborhood, except for the fact that the door and first floor windows had iron bars. They curved to hint at decoration, but it was no less a fortress for the daintiness. Whoever waited inside had an inkling we were coming.

We inched our way to the chipped steps then waited while Bascom caught his second, maybe his third, wind. It was only five steps up to the door, but it was hard enough to lift his feet on level ground. He leaned on me as we mounted the first step. A couple ambled behind us, maybe refugees from the movie theater. I looked over and saw the man trying to weave his hand beneath her coat for a tighter embrace, but she fought him off. Neither seemed to notice us aiming like a pair of drunks for the second step.

It seemed to take forever, but after a brief stumble where I had almost all of Bascom’s weight on me, we made it to the door. I wasn’t surprised to find the iron grate locked, so I reached to twist the bell handle, but Bascom stopped me. He patted his left pocket. It must’ve hurt like hell, since that was his wounded arm. I tucked my hand inside and found a fob with two keys. One was a shiny Yale key and the other a long skeleton. The skeleton was heavy for its size, a hunk of wrought iron.

“You been holding out,” I chuckled.

I inserted the skeleton key and gave it a sharp twist. The thunk of the bolt drifted in the cold night air. The second door opened more quietly and we stepped into a deep carpeted foyer. Heavy drapes covered the side windows. A faint whiff of sandalwood, along with the stillness, reminded me of that terrifying moment in the confessional before the priest slid back the door and exposed all your evil. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. But no one was going to tell me Ego te absolvo tonight.

Bascom lifted his chin towards the doorway past the stairs to the second floor. We moved forward, careful not to hit the sideboard and its empty vase. The heavy wooden door was closed. I put my hand on the oblong brass knob and glanced at Bascom. He nodded. I turned the handle and pushed.

It opened to a small darkened kitchen. Frilly curtains admitted a single ray from a light in the back alley. Something nasty overwhelmed the scent of sandalwood from the hall. A clock above the back door ticked relentlessly, but its owner could no longer hear it.

Nelstone sat by the small breakfast table, a gun in his left hand, resting by the afternoon paper. One of his eyes was gone, and the wall behind him oozed bits of brain and bone, sparkling in the weak light. He’d probably been there since before I woke up that evening. Bascom had cinched up the operation pretty tight.

Not tight enough. I turned in time to see him raising a blackjack in his right hand. But he’d lost too much blood to catch me by surprise.

Being a hit man, you learn a few things. Like the fact that rigor mortis hits the face first, after a couple of hours. It takes another six hours to reach the limbs. It was just about the witching hour, maybe four hours since Bascom called me.

I stepped behind Nelstone and helped him with his aim. I thought of the old Norse god Loki, helping the aged Hodor throw the fatal sprig of mistletoe at Balder. Nelstone took out Bascom with a clean shot to the face. By tomorrow, maybe it wouldn’t be so easy to figure they didn’t die together, but I’d never know.

Nelstone had a duffle at his feet, bills peeking out. Bascom must’ve planned to let me see it before he took me out. Regretting that I’d left the other bag in the car, I shouldered it, dropped the keys on the table, and slipped out the back door into the alley.

I suppose I’d graduated, but it was time to find a new gig. The Greyhound terminal was just a couple of blocks away, and the buses ran all night long.

BIO: J.M. Taylor's work has previously been published in Thuglit, Tough Crime, AHMM, and Wildside Black Cat, among others. His first novel, Night of the Furies, was published by New Pulp Press, and Genretarium released his second, Dark Heat. His most recent, No Score, was with Unnerving.