The Drop

It’s a goddamn shame, all this death and dying but I don’t have the time to make any kind of penance now, there’s a pack of murdering madmen hot on my trail and they won’t let up until they’re wading ankle deep in my blood. Sure, I screwed up, I screwed up big time, but I screwed up for all the right reasons, in particular a five foot eight inch reason with silky blond hair and legs a mile long.

I peer out around the side of the building--nothing but blackness and the drip drip of the rain in the alleyway. The bastards shot out the street lights and are hiding in the shadows, sharpening their knives and reloading their guns. There’s no way I’m getting out of this one alive. I should have walked away when I had the chance but that would give people a reason to call me yellow, I couldn’t live with that on my conscience.

I hear the pin of a hand grenade hitting the macadam and only a fool wouldn’t know what’s coming next. I dive behind a dumpster and the grenade explodes right where I was just crouching. The shrapnel tears into the dumpster like it was made of Styrofoam.

“It’s all over, Ludlow,” Bimby yells. “Throw your gun down and come out with your hands up…actually come out with them down if you like, it doesn’t matter which you’re going to die anyway.”

I put a fresh clip in my roscoe and chamber a bullet. “How about I keep my roscoe and you and your goons come out with your hands down. I don’t like killing people who look like they’re surrendering.”

“You really are a whack job. There’s half a dozen of us and only one of you. The odds are in our favor. ”

“I was never one to put much stock in odds. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. Worse things happen to scum. I make sure of that.”

“You’re a regular goddamn hero, Ludlow. Why don’t you stick to helping little old ladies down from trees?”

“I’m no damn Boy Scout. I’ve done the wrong things before but only for the right reasons. You, you don’t give a good goddamn about anything but lining your pockets with sawbucks. You’re going to have yourself one hard time trying to use them in hell before they all burn up because that’s right where I’m sending you.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Ludlow. You’re the one that’s going to hell and all for a two-bit dame. I thought you had more sense than that but I was wrong.”

“It’s the price I might have to pay for doing the right thing. A bastard like you wouldn’t know anything about that. Sure, I just met her but she needed me. She trusted me. That means everything.”

“She trusted you would take the bait and you did. She’s working with us, Ludlow. Youv’e been set up.”

For once Bimby shuts that big trap of his long enough to give me time to think. Was she really trying to set me up or is he full of it? She seemed to be legit when I met her but then again a lot of things aren’t the way they seem.

* * *
My contact told me to meet her at the Hoof and Gristle--a steak and beer hut down on North Front Street overlooking the Susquehanna River. It’s the kind of place hard types on loud motorcycles frequent in-between stays in the joint. Drinks are served in plastic cups because one too many heads had been split open with bottles and glasses. I don’t much go for places that cater to scum but in my line of business you go where your contact commands and you don’t ask questions.

I sat at the bar stirring the ice cubs in my plastic cup of bourbon when the cowbell over the front door rang. I turned, as did every other stiff in the joint, and through the sunlight cast through the open door, there appeared the dame my contact had so inadequately described. She was to give me the details of her situation but what she gave me was a tent stake in my boxer shorts.

She took a step forward and her long white leg appeared out from the slit of her skirt and there wasn’t an eye in the place that wasn’t glued to that gorgeous gam. The door shut behind her and as my eyes adjusted to the dark the only thing I could see was the glow of her white dress which made it look like she was gliding across the floor like an angel. If it was wrong to want to screw an angel then I was going straight to hell.

When she got close enough I motioned to her with my hand to sit in the chair across from me. “Have a seat, Ms. Sprat.”

She smiled with the greased ease of a used car salesman. “This place is sort of scary.”

I lit a cigarillo. “Sort of? Ha, there’s no sort of about it. On a good night this place would give Stephen King nightmares.”

She took a fat envelope out of her purse and handed it to me. “In this envelope are all the details you’ll need.”

I took the envelop and tossed it onto the table knocking over a candle. I quickly extinguished it. “I’m not interested in the watered down version. Some goddamn document sealed in an envelope. I want the facts straight from your gorgeous lips. ”

Her hands were trembling and right away I suspected she had the DT’s, that perhaps she’d been too friendly with the giggle juice for too long and she had a bum liver and maybe days to live. In fact I’d never been surer of anything in my life.

“You’re right, some things can’t be explained adequately with words. Open it, you’ll see what I mean.”

I picked up the envelop, tore the end off, and dumped the contents on the table. It was a human hand. Okay, maybe I was wrong about the dame being a lush but what I wasn’t wrong about was that there was a hand on the table with very hairy knuckles. “That’s kind of gross.”

“It’s my husband’s. They cut it off and said they were going to kill him if I didn’t pay them 5 million dollars.”

I blew a cloud of smoke across the table. “I hate to break the news to you but if you’re looking for a loan I blew my last fifty bucks on a case of Troegs Mad Elf. Damn, fine beer and potent too.”

She turned on the faucets and whipped out an embroidered hanky faster than I could say emotionally volatile. If there’s one thing I can’t take is seeing dames ball.

“I’m not asking you for money Mr. Ludlow.”

“Good, because that would have been kind of awkward since we just met and all.”

“What I want you to do is deliver the ransom money for my husband.”

“Why me? If I deliver this mazula who is to say they won’t kidnap me and ask my parent’s for ransom?”

“You’re parents are dead.”

“That’s what I’m worried about. No one would pay to get me back. And I have to say I’m impressed with your research. You must have really checked my credentials out. Most people think a guy like me never had parents. That I fell from the sky and was raised by vultures in the desert.”

“Vultures? I don’t think I understand.”

“Don’t worry about it. Most people don’t.”

“Well then will you do it? Will you make the drop?”

“I’ll do it if the compensation package is appropriate.”

“Oh, I assure you it will be appropriate. How does $50,000 dollars sound to you?”

“It sounds like a hell of a lot of Troegs Mad Elf.”

She turned the faucets off and tucked her fancy hanky away in her purse. “Good, then we’ll have to get going. They want the money at midnight.”

I looked at my watch, it was eleven fifteen. “We’re cutting it a little close aren’t we?”

She stood and pushed her chair under the table. “I didn’t want you to have time to reconsider.”

“I never reconsider; it shows a lack of character.”

“Huh?”

“Right, aren’t you forgetting something?”

The hand was still lying in the middle of the table and people were starting to stare. I picked it up. “It’s a movie prop.”

They started to look away. I stuffed the hand in one of the inside pockets of my trench coat.

“What are you going to do with my husband’s hand?”

“I’ll take care of it. Now, let’s get out of here until someone figures out it was real.”

* * *
I got into her car, a snazzy little number without a roof. It didn’t seem like the kind of car a woman whose husband had been kidnapped would drive. It was too light and airy, too pretentious. I would have preferred something more sullen like a black limousine. Yeah, that would have been just about right. Surely, a rich dame like that had several cars at her disposal. I wondered why she chose the one that was the same shade as a clown’s lipstick. We sure as hell weren’t going to any damn circus. Or so I thought.

She drove fast, way too damn fast and I was wondering the whole time if I would feel the impact when she hit a tree or if there would just be blackness like a candle being snuffed out. We didn’t die though and we came up to the city limits and the old industrial center of Harrisburg.

She lit a cigarette with the car lighter but it blew out of her mouth and out onto the road. I acted like I didn’t notice.

She pulled up next to an old warehouse. “The briefcase with the cash in it is in the back seat,” she said.

“When do I get my money?”

“When the job is done. I’ll be waiting here in the car for you.”

Something told me to jump out of the car and run like hell. These things always have a way of turning out bad, or worse but she was so goddamn beautiful and I was powerless to tell her no. It’s my only weakness, broads, well that and booze and a few other insignificant vices that aren’t worth mentioning.

I put my mitt on her knee and squeezed. “Okay, and maybe afterwards we can go out for a fine steak dinner on me.”

She laid her fingers on mine and looked into my eyes. “I’d like that.”

I think I fell in love with her that moment or maybe it was in the next moment when she unzipped my fly. The sequence of events is unimportant. What matters now is how to get myself out of this goddamn mess.


* * *
The smell of rotting food and god knows what else in the dumpster is starting to make my stomach turn. I need a stiff drink and a girl with soft hands to rub my shoulders with that nice scented massage oil. Yeah, that would be just about right.

“You really are a rube aren’t you, Ludlow?” Bimby yells. “Mrs. Sprat hired us. She told the police you kidnapped her husband. When you tried to give us the money we were going to take it, kill you and split it with her. You were supposed to die along with her husband in a big fire and when we’re done killing you here we’ll take your carcass, put it in that building with Mr. Sprat and burn it to the ground.”

Lovely, angelic Mrs. Sprat, that couldn’t be, she hired me. They’re trying to fool me, to turn me against her. What she did to me in the front seat of that snazzy red sports car had to be love. I won’t believe it. I can’t believe it.

“Don’t forget I still have the briefcase with the five million in it.”

“Don’t worry I haven’t forgotten and either has Mrs. Sprat. Just how she hasn’t forgotten how I bent her over the little red sports car last night and made her howl like a coyote.”

“You’re a goddamn liar.”

“Really? Did she call you big daddy when she was getting passionate? And does she have a heart tattoo just above her--”

“You’re a goddamn liar I said!”

That goddamn bitch. I’ve been set up.

They chamber bullets. I’d know that sound anywhere. They’ll be on top of me in a second, like a pack of weasels on bucket of chicken bones.

I look out from behind the dumpster. I see movement. This is it; time to make my move, time to kill or be killed, time to send the bad men straight to hell.

I thrust my body into the dumpster and it starts to roll. “Goddamn!” My bad shoulder pops out of joint and it hurts like holy hell but there’s no stopping now.

Guns explode everyone around me. Bullets richocette off the sides of the dumpster—sparks rain down around me like fireworks. I love fireworks. They remind me of when I was a kid.

I push harder and start building up a little speed. My bum knee feels like a circus monkey is prying at it with a steak knife but stopping now would mean sure death. “Here I come, you worthless cocksuckers!”

I’m almost running with the dumpster now, breathing heavy from all the cigarillo smoking. My doc told me to quit. I told him I would in time.

I give the dumpster one final thrust and stop. The dumpster rolls down the alleyway going a hundred miles an hour.

I take out my roscoes just as the dumpster smashes into the crates they are hiding behind. They come running out and I start blowing them away like some cowboy, one dirty bastard at a time. I’m a goddamn killing machine. Blood paints the alleyway red and a heat like the burn of a good liquor burns up in my guts. They’ll all have dinner with the devil tonight.

A bullet tears through my shoulder and knocks me to the ground. I stick my finger in the wound. It’s bleeding like hell. What can I plug hit with? I take out my Chapstick and jam it in the hole. That’ll hold it until I can go see my doctor friend.

“I’m coming to get you. Every last one of you,” I scream.

I fire and blow a hole in some fat bastards forehead. The doc ain’t going to be able do a damn thing about that wind tunnel. The mortician will plug it with putty and paint it up real nice like a china doll so the family doesn’t puke at the viewing but this guy has eaten his last canolie.

Silence.

They’re all dead except for Bimby. We’ve been enemies for a long time. I’m sure it was him who recommended to Mrs. Gladen that I be set up.

“Come on out Bimby. Face me like a man.”

“Don’t shoot I’ve got Mrs. Sprat.”

I lower my roscoes—blue smoke is still pouring out their hot barrels, looks like the nose holes of a dragon that just butchered a village. Bimby steps out from behind a brick wall and he’s got beautiful Mrs. Sprat in front of him. She’s tied up and there’s duct tape around her mouth and head.

“Drop your weapons or Mrs. Gladen gets an extra ear hole blown in her head.”

I start walking towards them. “I thought you said she set this whole thing up.”

Bimby is shaking now. “I’m not kidding. Stop or I’ll blow a hole in her head.”

“Let me save you the trouble.” I pull the trigger and blow a hole in Mrs. Sprat’s head. I hate to kill such a beauty but if I didn’t she would have blamed this whole mess on me and I ain’t going to the chair for nobody.

I fire again and hit Bimby in the arm. He drops his roscoe and falls to his knees. Blood shoots out of his mouth and he coughs and spits and then smiles.

“You knew from the start we were setting you up, didn’t you?” Bimby asks.

“I had a hunch.”

I take out my handkerchief and wipe down my roscoes.

“What are you going to do with all that money?”

“I’m going to give it to a church.”

“You’re a religious man?”

“No, but I figure after I kill you I just might have to buy my way into heaven.”

I take Mr. Gladen’s hand out of my trench coat and wrap it around my roscoe. I pull the trigger with the finger and Bimby’s head is spread out on the pavement like a busted melon. I throw the roscoes on the ground, turn, and start the long walk home.