SNAP

by

Barry Baldwin

Considering what he'd done and not been got for, it was only right that he should go down for something he hadn't. He'd turned into a suitably dubious bar for a couple of drinks while he checked out further possibilities. Well away from his home territory, the usual extra precaution. But, all too soon he became aware he was among at least two other people's possibilities. So, he was half-way to the door, pushing through the halitosis, smoke, and sports-cum-sex hum, when a blue tide of cops poured in like sewage.

The drug squad. Routine swoop, or a tip-off? Same difference. Everybody was frisked and bundled into the black wire-meshed vans lined up outside. Down at the precinct, he'd not been able to explain the packet they'd found in his overcoat. Said they'd found. He figured it was fifty-fifty whether it had entered his pocket via a zealous cop or one of the other bar patrons off-loading.

It had in fact been planted by an officer on a private crusade ever since he'd lost his own daughter to heroin. He hadn't liked the man's looks, and so was taking no chances. His chief was new, anxious to establish himself in the public eye as a zero tolerance enforcer. The judge who did the sentencing was cut from the same cloth, even more so; he made Roy Bean look like a liberal.

So, to adapt what Bill Clinton said, maybe to Monica as well as the media, Three Strikes And In.
But not for long. He got himself a champion. Or rather, was got by one. Nothing in the Norman Mailer-Gary Gilmour league. One of the few let go after the raid was a freelance journalist sniffing around there for stories and to compete with the barman for the rough trade available. Unlike the cop, the journalist had liked the man's looks and was set to make a move ahead of the barman's obvious intentions when the night was aborted. This frustration, plus long-smouldering resentment of cops who never gave reporters a break, produced a story about heavy-handed law enforcement that was grist to the mill of the city's biggest radical sheet.

Once on the streets, it mushroomed, thanks to the fastest of the ambulance-chasing lawyers out to make a name as little-guy champ, the ones who couldn't get in on the big tobacco cases, and an ambitious bleeding heart outfit anxious to get itself a national profile. Between them, they raised enough stink to up the whole thing into a coast-to-coaster, which encouraged the bartender to step up for his fifteen minutes of fame, along with the bonus of overshadowing the journalist and the hope of racking up some brownie points in the man's eyes for future use, by pointing his stubby finger at the pocket-filling policeman.

Thus, an innocent bad man was given his clean record back and released, a guilty good man was drummed out of the force, and both the bartender and the journalist were found dead within a week of each other, a double whammy that would have given the investigating officers a triple Tylenol headache had they known all its possible permutations. But tears over drink-pourers and dirt-dishers don't last, and the blue energies were soon diverted by the constant flow of new crimes.
*
Normally, the screw signing out the day's releasees didn't give a damn about any of them. They'd be replaced immediately by a new batch, possibly no worse, certainly no better. There was, however, one of that morning's batch that did move him to thought and speech.

"There's something about that guy that really spooked me."
"Which one?"

The screw pointed to the list of ticked-off names.

"What, him? Gave us no lip or bother. Ain't that the way we like 'em?"

"Sure, but he never said a word of any kind, not to us nor any of the other inmates."

"Maybe, maybe not. We're not on duty twenty-four hours a day, Thank God."

"I know, I know, but he's the first guy who ever put in a request for solitary without proper reason. The only ones who need that are the child molesters and other deviants and he wasn't in for any of that stuff."

"Considering the nature of the company here, I'd say that was a mark in his plus column."

"And he never did anything. Never read so much as a comic book or racing paper, never watched TV, just stood by himself in the exercise yard..."

"So, he's a loner. Anything wrong with that? When was the last time yoiu came down with the boys to watch Monday Night Football at the sports bar?"

"No, it went beyond that. The others seemed to sense it as well. You noticed how they steered clear of him? Any other time, they'd have ganged up on a guy who looked like he was acting superior. And you'd hardly call him Mister Muscles. But nobody touched him, not even the lifers..."

"Okay, he was a weirdo. Who'd you rather have had, Hannibal Lecter? Listen, if you can't handle it when there's nothing to handle, maybe you should think about asking for early retirement..."

"What, on our pensions? I hear what you're saying. But I guarantee you..."

What he was going to guarantee was never heard, since at that moment they got a call ordering them to the Governor's office toot de sweet to run over the day's rosters with him. And the screw never brought it up again, except inside himself.

To the man himself he had said, "Take a bit of advice from one who knows, pal. You beat this one. Maybe that's right and maybe that's wrong. I don't know, and they don't pay me to care, only for some reason I do with you. Move to a small town some place. Get a job, something outside that'll leave you bushed by five. Stay out of those bars. Give the cable guys a call and watch the action on ESPN..."

The man just about moved his head, you coudn't call it a real Yes nod or No shake, what a kook, he'd never come across anyone before who had so many ways of saying nothing.

*

Not that the screw would ever know it, the man did take his advice, up to a point. He moved, though not to a smaller town, that didn't suit him, took various jobs which made him fit and alert and paid in cash, no questions asked, no benefits given, and flitted from one to another before his work mates could get to know him, not that many of them tried, and those that did soon gave up. He rented a room in a run-down apartment building where no one cared about anything or anyone, the landlord above all. His car was parked in whatever street space or vacant lot he could find at night. Every now and then, he would change the license plates, of which he had built up quite a collection. Like most of the other tenants, he went up on the roof and hooked himself on to cable without the company ever having him on their customer list. He didn't watch any sport, though, just the local news. Otherwise, he stuck to his videos, which were not the kind of thing his neighbourhood Blockbusters stocked, not even on the bottom shelves.

*

She'd never been in jail for any reason right or wrong. Instead, she was in this town. It was no New York or LA, but plenty big enough for her. and what she did. Plenty big enough to have a wrong side, too. Which was where she'd fetched up for the moment. Head cook and bottlewasher in this dump. It wasn't the sort of place many people would go in twice. Hell, it wasn't the sort of place many people would go in once. The man did, though, banging the door. She looked up from wiping the counter. A last-minute customer. Her lucky night.

"I'm just closing up."

"I need to use the head."

Neither considered stitching a Sorry to their sentences. The man plunged into the washroom. He stood for a moment in front of the variously-stained urinal, doing nothing. Demanding the head didn't rate as one of the great come-ons of the century, but it had got him in, maybe the In he was after, a change from his private video shows.

When he came back, he was encouraged to see a cup of coffee on offer, even if half of it was slopped into the saucer. "It's what was left in the urn. Might as well pour it down you as the sink."
Pure stomach stripper, but it hit the spot, wherever that was. The man looked around. It was the kind of place where the customers, when there are any, eat alone if they eat at all. Plenty like it everywhere; when you've seen them all, you've seen one.

Head down again over the counter which she was still polishing like it was an altar, the woman said, "Funny, I never forget a face, but I don't recall yours, yet you've been here before."

"How do you figure that one?"

"The sign's gone, but you knew exactly where the washroom is."

No flies on this one. She wasn't to know the way he looked depended on what he was after. He attempted a laugh. It didn't come out right, it never did with him. "Guess I was lucky. Anyway, how many spots could the head be? These joints are all the same."

She clammed up on that one. His gaze drifted by the tacked-up notices. Top billing went to DO NOT ASK FOR CREDIT AS A SMACK IN THE KISSER OFTEN OFFENDS.

"Nice guy, your boss."

"I put that one up."

Wariness danced a silent two-step between them. He sized her up, aware she was doing the same to him. He didn't have regular lady friends. Any woman was his type, and she would do very well. As tall as himself, mane of dark hair, flesh where it counted.

"I never heard a vehicle outside. How'd you get here?"

"I was walking around and just happened by; my bladder did the rest."

"Nobody walks around this area. Where's your car?"

"Don't got one. I like walking. People don't walk enough. And I can look out for myself."

"Maybe you can, maybe you can't." She paused. "Five minutes later and I'd have been gone. Listen, I'm headed for a bar where I go most nights to wash this place out of my mouth. There's a cab stand two blocks from it. That help any? Or do you want to keep on walking?"

The man nodded, a better effort than he'd made for the screw. She killed the lights, steered him out the door, did things to it with various keys. Her car squatted in an adjoining alley; it looked more abandoned than parked. She read his mind.

"It gets me where I need to go and it doesn't tempt anyone." He tried for another laugh, no better than the first one.

"What's your name?"

"Depends. What's yours?"

"Much the same."

They were there in no time flat. He was impressed. This old clunker. Cars are like women: you're never quite certain what's under their hoods until you open them up. Plenty of room in the lot, but she still squeezed in between two equally dilapidated old bangers. Making some kind of a point; he wasn't sure just what.
She switched off, a noisy business, and creaked her door open. Almost the same movement, no alarm to set, no Club steering-wheel clamp to screw on.

"You can buy me a drink to pay your fare."

Cheap at the price, he thought. Following her, he couldn't remember a time when he'd walked behind a woman he wasn't interested in one way or another.

*

The place was okay. Enough people that no one would stand out unless they wanted to, not enough to cause any ruckus. He was content to let her guide him into a dim corner booth where there'd be no eavesdropping if anything worth saying was said.

"Be out of range of those damned cell phones here."

"Know what you mean. I once heard somebody call them the modern leper's bell."

An eager kid was hovering almost before the weight was off their feet. He wondered why she would choose to wear so little when she had so little to show. Maybe it was management policy. He felt the need to assert himself over both these females, but she got in first. "Bottle of Canadian Rye, two glasses, no ice."
Erasing all hopes of a tip, the kid switched off her smile, went, came back, went.

She poured for them both. "That to your taste?"

"People sometimes ask me what I want before giving it to me." He surprised himself more than her with this. As a rule, he wasn't great at small talk, never needed much. Maybe this was how it started, what he'd never had, never wanted: that thing between two people. He squinted out of the booth.

"That kid didn't seem to know you. Nor anyone else, come to that. Thought you were regular here?"

"She's new. They never last. And people don't come here to socialise. Most of them are working stiffs. It's enough for them to be sitting down while somebody else looks after them."

He took the cue, splashed another shot into her glass, left his own as it was. She looked at him. He looked at her. She went on looking, He went on looking. When the dialogue lurched forward, information was measured out like doses of bitter medicine.

"The customers are lousy, the tips are lousy, that what makes the job lousy. The owner's a heel, but he pays me off in cash and treats me not too bad mainly because he wants in my bed."

"That on the cards?"

"Not him nor any other. I started and finished with men soon enough. My mom died when I was fifteen. My father figured I'd be a cheap and easy replacement. First time he tried to put that theory into practice, I laid him out with the bottle he'd emptied and took a midnight Greyhound to anywhere, which turned out to be here."

She motioned for him to give her another slug. It was quite a while since any more had gone into his own glass. "Like I said, the owner treats me okay. And not just because of his in-my-pants ambition. He needs someone he can trust. I'm not always going to be that someone, but that's in the future. You've seen the dump. It's just a frornt. he needs something for the IRS. The real action is upstairs. He's quite an operator. Numbers, off-track betting, fat poker game once a week with him dealing, runs a couple of girls, pipe line to the local drug merchants, you name it. As a matter of fact, there was something going on up there tonight. All the time you were in the head and drinking that coffee, my foot was never but a few inches from the floor buzzer."

A stroke of luck for them both, he reflected. "Guess it's good I didn't step out of line, then."

"You never know. And like I said, I had that feeling you'd been in before. Still do. You could have had a gun or anything stashed away in the washroom."

He nourished the thought that she was on the right and the wrong lines at the same time. "Maybe you've been watching too many movies."

"Movies? Never bother with them. They've got nothing on real lfe. Listen, the girl who was there before me was shot. Right there on the job. A guy turned up, in a cab, would you believe? Came in, made her empty the cash register, blew her away, she went down for a lousy fifty bucks, went out, drilled the cab driver and drove off just like that."

Simple. The best plans always are. That was the way he operated. No car to trace. And who looks twice at a cab?

"You ever seen anyone get shot?"

This seemed the right moment to take his long-overdue refill, not that she'd left him much by now, though there was no sign of any effect on her. "Only once. Well, twice. When my old man shot my mother and then turned the gun on himself."

No Jesus Christ! No I'm So Sorry! "Fathers!"

"He had his reasons. She was in their bed with his best friend. She used to tell me what she'd do to me if I didn't keep my trap shut. One night, he came home early and caught them at it. The hollering and screaming woke me up. I got into their room just in time to see him blast her."

"What about the guy?"

"Didn't get a scratch. I guess it was more what she'd done than who she'd done it with. And maybe he just couldn't do it to his best friend. He always set a lot of store by friendship, and that guy was really the only one he had. He never bothered with me, but that was a whole sight better than the way she did."

If that was a pitch for some sympathy, it cut no ice.

*

The bottle was empty. Both knew what the next move was. She looked pointedly at her watch, a cheap affair that any self-respecting mugger would have taken one look at and handed back. Like her car, nothing to attract criminal attention. Like her clothes too, come to that. Apart from her looks, which she could do nothing about, except for doing nothing with them, her entire being seemed designed to discourage interest of any sort.

"I guess you're beat, what with the time and the shift and all."

Her shrug despised the obviousness of his remark.

He hesitated. "I'd offer to buy you a meal..."

"Only...?"

"Only it coudn't be anything fancy. I'm a bit broke right now, and it's a way to payday, and I don't figure you'd want to go to some dump like the one you work in."

"Forget it."

Something in her manner hinted she didn't exactly mean this.

"I'd take you back to my place, I can cook a bit, that was one thing I got out of family life, it was fend for yourself or go under, only my place is a rat trap and..."

"I said, forget it." Then her face came as close to a smile as it had done all the time they'd been together, though like his laughs it fell short of the real thing. "Wait a minute. Are you serious about cooking.?"

"I'm serious about everything."

"Me, too. Listen, if you're not putting me on, I'll take you to my place and you can cook me a meal. Doesn't have to be anything special. There's stuff in the fridge, some of it drives home with me from the dump. Like with the drink, it's mostly the idea of a meal I don't cook and I don't serve. I guess you can understand that?"

His all-purpose head movement served to convey his understanding and conceal his satisfaction.

*

But it would have been hard pressed to mask his reaction to where she lived. He'd been expecting an apartment like his own, or some crummy basement. How come they were in one of the smartest sections of town, on this broad leafy street lined with big houses set behind battlements of hedges and lawns and gardens, impressive under the regularly-spaced parade of street lights, not one of which had been shot out? On what a waitress makes? It occurred to him that she must have been lying about not putting out for her employer. That would explain a lot.

Even allowing for the fact that she was weaving through a maze of shorter and shorter streets all called something Crescent or Mews, she was driving with an odd slowness. Couldn't be the heap, not the way it had caroomed from dump to bar. She must be showing off her address, rubbing his nose in it. That made him feel a whole lot better about what he had in mind.

"Don't let it get to you," she said. He felt a twinge of unease at how well she could anticipate him. "I'm only sitting it. Sub-sitting, as a matter of fact."

"Meaning?"

"You know, house sitting. There's always people going away on vacation or getting posted overseas for a spell or what have you, and with all the break-ins and vandalism these days they daren't leave them empty. That's where house sitting comes in. Free accommodation, free heating and power, free use of the TV and VCR and whatever else gadgetries they've got, just for keeping it in order and being here nights."

"Maybe I should try it," he said, to keep his end up, while thinking that it was just being a glorified tramp, at the end of the day you're on the road again, at somebody else's say so.

The car stopped. "Look, don't take this the wrong way, but why don't you duck down in your seat until I get into the garage?"

That needed more than the nod. "Huh?"

"Because strictly speaking I shouldn't be here. A girl friend of mine is really the sitter. But she had to go out of town suddenly for a while, a sick relative she said, though my guess is a fling with one of her studs. So, she got me to take over. Trouble is, there'd be hell to pay if the owners found out about any of it. They know her, but they don't know me, obviously, and she's bonded and I'm not, whatever that adds up to. They'd spread the word and she'd be blacklisted around the sitting circuit, maybe even get taken to court for breach of trust or whatever. It's bad enough trying to sneak in and out without being spotted, though leaving early and coming back late helps, but it'd be a hundred times worse if a complete stranger was caught bringing in a guy with her."

More than most, he appreciated the need to take no such chances. "No problem."

*

She drove into the garage, courtesy of a silent electronic door-opener. A flight of stairs took them straight through to the house, no need to go outside again. She led him through a big room filled with uncomfortable-looking furniture, or so he thought, giving it a quick once-over, furniture being one of the many things that didn't interest him much, into a kitchen that was almost as big; it certainly beat the hell out of his one-burner hot plate. Wasting no more time on appliance-envy, he took over, first checking the contents of the tall side-by-side refrigerator, briefly imagining what Jeffrey Daumer could have crammed in there. "An omelet and salad do you? Or I could fry up these steaks with a few onions and stuff."

"Let's go for the steaks. I feel like some meat. You know what I mean?" He thought he did. "I practically live on eggs and such, here. Doing for one, you know how it is."

"Meat it is. You go on up and take a shower or bath or whatever. I'll give you a holler when I'm ready."
He watched her up the stairs and out of sight. When he heard the water running, he went back to the fridge, pulled out a couple of the steaks, and got them going over a slow heat. Might as well put on the full show.
Then he moved along the kitchen drawers until he found the one with the cutlery, did some testing.
The steaks were almost ready for him, and he was almost ready for her, when the phone rang. He let it go two or three times. Then, figuring it would bring her down too soon, he went to the foot of the stairs and called up, "I'll take care of it. Be down in five."

He picked up the phone which sat handily on the counter, putting down the selected knife beside it. "Yeah?" No answer. "Yeah?" he repeated, then shot a more offensive monosyllable into the electronic void. Must be one of those computerised calls, the ones that always come around meal times.

It wasn't.

What with the ringing from the call which had come from within the house and the water that was still running as it always had been by itself and the tiled floor and the bare feet, he wasn't aware of another person there and behind him until the arm around his neck coincided with his slamming down the phone and he hardly had the chance to twist it round enough to register that the dark mane had been replaced by a short-cropped blonde which made the bargain-basement toupe on his own balding head seem puny before her knife taken from the dump that would never miss it since she took care of inventory went into his back finding the right spot with a skill and experience that matched his own.

END