I left Knuckleheads liking Freddie even more. After the initial shock of getting finger-spunked on, he accepted my insane story wholeheartedly. He even started writing up ideas for training that would be better suited to me. I needed to be “ready for some real shit” the next time I came for training, according to him. I wanted to stay longer, just shoot the shit with the guy a little, but it was getting dark, and my mark was getting hungry.
My next victim was a man named Ben Jarvis, esquire. He was the waxy-faced lawyer of choice for cartel members all across the state of Texas, representing traffickers of drugs and humans alike and helping them wriggle out of legal action. I saw his face on the side of a bus a few days before and got a terminal case of the heebie-jeebies; he had the dead, perfectly-straight smile of someone who knew right from wrong and chose wrong anyway. It didn’t take much research to find out that my heebie-jeebies were well founded. He was damn near a celebrity in certain circles, lauded online by some of the biggest pieces of shit in the country for his ability to get them out of sticky situations. But he couldn’t wriggle his way out of a meeting with me.
I waited in the parking lot of Jarvis and Associates . It was a horrendously modern building, three stories of sleek silver, with dark tinted windows that let me see the faintest silhouette of people shuffling back and forth inside. The sky only had a hint of blue left in it, and people started to trickle out of the building. Dozens of drones in gray suits got into their gray BMWs and went to their homes — which I could only assume were also gray. No sign of Jarvis though, not yet. Some of them gave me dirty looks as they walked by me, and I reckoned I could’ve just killed some of them instead — my mark wouldn’t give a shit either way — but it didn’t feel quite right. They weren’t quite shitty enough for me to delude myself into thinking I was right to butcher them. They needed to be really shitty. So I waited.
An hour went by without anyone else leaving the building. There was only one car left in the parking lot — not a gray BMW, a gray Rolls Royce — so I figured it had to belong to Jarvis.
This was a rare moment where I was able to put both my bum experience and Boy Scout experience to good use: I took the lace out of my shoes, tied them together, tied the joined laces into a slipknot, and fed the knot through the gap in the door until the loop was wrapped around the lock. Then, with one yank, I was able to unlock the door and get inside.
I laid down in the empty trunk and waited to spring on him like a trapdoor spider. At long last, I looked through the windshield and saw the chubby-cheeked fuck swing the doors of the building open and come out with his arm wrapped around some woman who was half his age and who had twice as much plastic surgery. They looked like two lizards wrestling in the parking lot. He opened the passenger side door and gave the lizard woman an “after you” gesture. What a gentleman. He sat in the driver’s seat and took off.
“Can’t we go out to dinner or something one of these days?” the woman said. “Are we just going to screw in your office forever?”
Stolen novel; please report.
“Donna, I’ve told you a thousand times: if my wife finds out I’m not working late, she’ll cut my nuts off. I’m serious. So anything you want to do, we have to do it in the office. Got it?”
She responded with an annoyed hmph! and that was the end of their conversation. He dropped her off in front of an apartment building and continued home.
“Hey Mr. Jarvis!” I popped out from the trunk and said in the most chipper voice I could muster. He screamed like a cat whose tail had been stepped on and almost swerved into oncoming traffic.
“What the fuck are you doing in my car?” he yelped.
“Not much, just needed a warm place to sleep, ya know?” I said. “Also, I’d like it if you provided me with a full list of your clients, past and present.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Give me a list of every goddamn client you’ve ever had or I’ll put a bullet in the back of your head right now.” I pressed my gun against his headrest, pushing the barrel against the cushion hard enough for him to feel it.
“I can’t do that!” he said. “It’s against the law!”
“I’m sure you could talk your way out of any legal trouble you might get into. You won’t have a chance to do that if you don’t listen to me though.” I jammed the gun against the cushion again and he let out a startled whimper.
“Some of my clients… require complete anonymity. They wouldn’t be happy with me if I just handed you their names.”
I smacked him on the side of the head with the butt of my gun. He made another angry cat sound and tears started to pool on his absurdly high cheekbones.
“I’ll be pretty fucking unhappy with you if you don’t shut the fuck up and do what I’m telling you to do!” I growled. He was pissing me off trying to act like this was a negotiation, but I took a deep breath and decided to play along a little bit. “Look, I’m not a cop. They won’t have any idea you gave them up. I just need their names, alright? Just print me out a list and we can both pretend like this never happened. Or, you can keep trying to talk and I can blow your fucking brains out right now. Your choice.”
I tried my best to be pragmatic, but the pissed-offedness came back out anyway. I couldn’t help it. Still, my one man Good Cop/Bad Cop routine seemed to work.
“Ok,” he sighed deeply. “I’ll print you out a list.”
He pulled up to a metal gate, typed in a code, and it opened, giving us access to his repulsively lavish mansion. It was fucking ridiculous. The yard looked like it should be in front of the White House and took a full minute to drive down before we actually got to his house, which looked more like a palace. It was five stories high and looked like it would take fifteen minutes to walk from one side to the other. Gaudy Greek pillars and ridiculous golden flourishes on the driveway and the side of the house made me want to puke. He led me inside, up two flights of stairs, and into his office. Everything in the office was dark brown: leather chairs, mahogany floors and a mahogany desk, with only a giant painting of a horse running through a field hung on the wall to break up the monotony. He pressed a button under the desk, and it opened up to reveal a computer monitor, mouse and keyboard.
“Alright, it’ll just be a second,” he said. I grunted and waved my gun around a little to tell him to be quick about it. He typed and clicked feverishly, and after a minute or two there was a faint whirring sound in another room. I followed him to the printing room that was joined to the office, and he handed me a thick stack of paper containing even more than I wanted. Not just names, but phone numbers and addresses too, though I had to assume most of them were fake.
“Here,” he said. “Not please leave, okay?”
“Yeah, no problem. Thanks, bud.”
I said, and shot him between the eyes.