EYEHEARTZOMBIES

Life was so simple at eighteen. I ran drugs, booze, and cigarettes back and forth; New Jersey to New York, New York to Canada, Canada to Maine. Wherever. Then the whole college thing and life changed quite a bit. Since I got out of going back to college by promising to do some of the dirty work, they threw me in head first.

I didn’t start out killing people and breaking bones, but it wasn’t long before I got there. I started out tagging along as enforcement when deals went bad or money went missing. I was partnered up with a guy named Joey. Joey was a big guy, easily two hundred and sixty pounds or more, well over six feet tall. I don’t know if there’s anything more intimidating than a huge black man coming through the door when you own his boss money for six months back rent. Maybe the gun he carried. Maybe.

For all his bravado and volume, Joey was a great guy. He and I used to hit the gin joints down in the bad part of town just to listen to the blues singers on stage. He always said he knew ‘em from back home, but I think he was just trying to make me jealous. There was one girl — I can’t remember her name — but she always used to sing the strangest blues songs. Full of phrases I’ll never forget, but never understood. They almost seemed like magic spells or something at the time. Joey tried to introduce me to her one night, but I chickened out. I wasn’t very good with the women when I was young. Oh, I could romp and play with the any of ‘em, but when it came to talking, my teeth turned to mush and my tongue to rubber.

The last job I did with Joey just happened to be his last, too. We were sent to get retribution for a truckload of whiskey sent to a warehouse just outside of Harlem. Joey and I went in light, just a pistol each, plus a headache bar like the cops carry. When we got there, the place was eerily quiet. The truck was there, I recognized the panels on the sides, but there wasn’t anyone else around. It had just snowed that morning, too, and we didn’t see any tracks in the snow. That wasn’t that odd, though, as the delivery had been made a month ago.

We went carefully around the truck, checking under and inside it. It was empty except for a few crumpled packs of cigarettes. The cab was empty, too. Keys were still in the ignition, though, so I snatched them out before we closed it up again.

There was only one light on the outside of the building and no windows on the ground floor. The rest all looked boarded up and dark anyway. The orange security light was above a metal door set into one of the walls. The door was, of course, locked.

Joey wasn’t one to leave a job undone. Luckily he was also one to learn all sorts of useful tricks while he’s finishing these jobs.

“Go check the truck,” he said.

“What for? There’s nothing in it.”

“Yeah, I know. Go find me a screwdriver or something. Needlenosed pliers’d work, too.”

“There ain’t nothing in that damn truck,” I said. He turned and looked at me with both of his deep-set eyes. I went and looked.

Turns out there was a screwdriver in the truck. It was in a little toolbox for roadside repairs under the seat. I almost missed it for all of the girly books and cigarette wrappers in the floorboard; it was shoved way back under the bench seat in the cab. I took the screwdriver and a wrench back to Joey.

“Don’t need no wrench,” he grunted at me, but he took the screwdriver anyway. He pulled a few metal pins out of a pocket in his coat and bent down in front of the door. Somehow he managed to get his head up next to the door so his ear was just above the lock, which was set above the knob.

“We could just shoot the damn thing off,” I suggested, but he didn’t want to hear any of that. Didn’t want to hear anything at all, really. He just grunted at me and went back to trying to toss the tumblers.

Damn, it was cold out there. I stomped around a bit to warm myself up, cursed myself for not wearing a heavier coat or a muffler or something, and was just about to suggest I go get us a cup of java (jokingly, of course), when Joey stood up and pushed the door open.

Immediately, I lost all sense of cold. The job was on. We went inside, our hands going towards the docker’s clutch holsters we both wore. Keeps the gun handy and doesn’t make much of a bulge. At least not in the huge trenchcoats that seem to be standard tough guy issue. We stepped inside, Joey in front, and waited for our eyes to adjust to the gloom. After a half of a minute or so, Joey started feeling around on the wall for a light switch. He found one and switched it on.

The room revealed to us by the swinging lamps hanging from the ceiling wasn’t anything special. Scattered wrappers, some abandoned clothes that winos and homeless people must have left. No sign of the booze or of the buyers of said hooch. We propped the door open behind us.

The bottom floor was one big room with support poles crisscrossing the length and width of it. I’m sure you’ve seen a hundred warehouses just like it. There was a winding set of metal stairs in the back leading to the second of the three floors. Joey had me go up first again. Mostly ’cause I was smaller and faster, and partly just ’cause I was expendable.

The second floor was a lot like the first. One big room for the most part, columns and all. It had a small office, with a window in its big wall. next to the staircase, though. There was a light on in the office.

Joey ducked back down the stairs so just his head was over the landing and waved for me to go check it out. This wasn’t the time for billy clubs, so I put it down and took the gun out of its holster.

Slowly, I crouch-walked over to the window of the office and peered. In my mind I wished that our eyes were higher on our heads so this part wouldn’t be so scary. There wasn’t anyone there, though. Just some papers and a little transistor radio. The radio was on, but I couldn’t hear any sound coming from it, so it must have had a broken speaker or been tuned to dead air. Either way, it made me a lot more nervous.

I motioned Joey over and he scuttled over, making himself as small as he could, which was about the size of a small calf. “You find anything?” he asked when he got near enough to whisper.

“No. Just a radio.”

“A radio?”

“Yeah. A radio. You know, those magical noise boxes?”

“I know what a friggin’ radio is, ya hooch hound. Just kind of odd to find a radio an’ no people. Gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

“Yeah. I don’t like it, either,” I said. He nodded in agreement and then motioned for me to go up the stairs. “What? Are you crazy?” I asked. “I’m not going up there with God knows who, there. You go up first.” Joey grabbed me by the lapels and threw me toward the staircase.

I tiptoed up the flight as softly and quickly as I could, deciding to get it over with and get on with living my life, if I was alive after I climbed the stairs, that is. At the top was another long room, but this one had several desks in it. I didn’t see anyone at the desks, but there was another lighted office at the other end. I saw dark shapes moving behind the window blinds on the office window and I knew we had found the buyer.

I climbed the rest of the way up, not really worried about being seen as the floor was dark except for the office. I motioned for Joey to come up, too, but stopped him when his head was above the floor.

“I can see some people down in the office. Looks like three or four guys, none of ‘em even near your size,” I whispered to him. I pointed in the darkness and he climbed up a few more steps to get a good look. He held up three fingers and I nodded. Three, four…does it really matter? I moved into the darkness behind a desk and Joey climbed up out of the hole in the floor and crouched behind another desk.

“How do we do it?” I asked. “Go in guns blazin’ and screamin’ for our money?”

Joey just shook his head and tossed me my club. He held his up, then tucked it behind his back. He mimed that we were going to go open the door and if they gave us any shit, we’d knock ‘em out. Puttin’ ‘em out cold sounded like a good idea to my nineteen-going-on-twenty ears, so I nodded happily. We started creeping up to the door, moving from desk to pole to desk. The poles didn’t work too well for Joey.

When we were a row away from the office, Joey motioned for me to move around to the side that had the door, so they couldn’t see us through the window. We could hear them, now, talking quietly in their office. We could also see why we hadn’t seen the light on from outside. All the windows on the second and third floor had been painted black.

We moved over, and then out and toward the door. I got there first, but Joey grabbed my shoulder before I could reach the door. He held up three fingers, then two, then one and on one, he grabbed the door knob, twisted it, and pushed inward.

For about thirty seconds the two of us faced the three — no, make that four — of them. Then one of them grabbed a gun that was laying on the table and shot Joey. I heard him grunt at the gunshot and he stepped a few steps into the room. He raised his club and was about to smash the bejesus out of the closest guy when the gunman shot him two more times, one in the chest, the other in the head. Joey grunted again and fell forward. I ran.

How I made it down both flights of stairs, I’ll never know. All four men were right behind me, I know. I could hear their steps chasing me through the dark rooms. When I got to the bottom floor, I ran as hard and fast as I could for the door, thinking only of getting out and getting into the car we had left running a quarter-mile down the road. Somehow I remembered to flip the light switch and kick the prop out from in front of the door. I slammed the door behind me and ran for all I had in me. For a few steps I could hear the men inside screaming and cursing at me as they fumbled around in the dark, but soon I was well out of earshot.

When I reached the car, I was out of breath and had a horrible stitch in my side. I got in and started driving back to the closest safehouse. I got a few miles into Harlem and it all hit me. I had to stop the car. I pulled off into a diner’s parking lot. I started thinking about Joey getting shot and what I was gonna tell the boss — Joey’s dead, I didn’t get a good enough look to pick any of ‘em out for revenge, didn’t get the money, didn’t get the van — and I started to feel sick. I kicked open the door of the sedan and puked into the cold, winter air. A lot of a man’s worry is located in his stomach, I guess, ’cause I felt a lot better after the barffest. After a few foul-tasting, nervous sobs, I started driving again.

At the safehouse, I called my boss, Ray, and told him what had happened. He just listened then said, “It’s OK, kid. We thought it might go badly. Not as badly as losing Joey, though. You sit tight and we’ll send a car for you.” I sat as tight as possible and when the car got there, they took me home.

It took a long time to get to sleep that night, but I never slept well after death.