Kill 'Em With Kindness, page 10
“You coming with me?” he sighed.
It felt good to be on the course again, better than he’d have thought. Even with Kimmy tagging along, Nick felt good. And he did take a certain pleasure in forcing Kimmy to help him lug the twenty-pound salt bags from the trunk. They headed to the fence line closest to the eighth hole, near the pond.
“What’s Chad got you doing?” she grunted. “Thought we were dropping off a little pot.”
“That too,” Nick said. “This is for me though.”
Nick tried to hold onto the feeling though it threatened him with its own kind of suicide. He liked to think that past and present criminal activity aside, he was the decent person people saw. Someone who didn’t cause trouble, didn’t want it. Someone who wouldn’t do dirt at the behest of someone else, especially if the dirt meant fucking over someone who didn’t deserve it. Did Kurt DeVries deserve what he was doing to him? In certain circles, prison maybe, he’d be a snitch bitch who’d gotten what he deserved a long time ago. He’d been pining for Nick’s job, said as much. The right thing done for the wrong reasons is like a contract signed under duress. Doesn’t mean shit. That’s what Nick told himself. So he gave in to the personal pleasure it was going to give him to fuck over Kurt Devries. Get him locked up, miss the bowling finals, petty shit. Nick was sure he’d walk away from the ordeal unscathed. And that’s what the salt was for.
Nick and Kimmy moved quickly in the dark. Kimmy attempted to hoist the bags over the fence, but her throws fell short each time. “Fuck it!” she said. Nick laughed. “And fuck you!” she added before leaving the bag on the ground for Nick to retrieve. She disappeared into the dark tree line that separated the road from the tall chain link. Nick was ready to write off her help, but as he hoisted her bag over the fence she came out of the trees with two more. She dropped them at his feet as he reached out for them, then disappeared again.
“This is the last of them,” she said when she returned again, huffing and glowing, wet in the moonlight. Nick had liked the idea of taking a little revenge on the girl for all the sweating she’d had him doing. But whatever she was into this evening had her in good spirits. Nick liked to think maybe it was bringing out the real Kimmy, or if it was what she was on, at least it made her better company.
“Now what?” She grinned, teeth clenched.
“Now we hop the fence,” Nick said. “That going to be a problem?”
She answered by scrambling up the chain link and hoisting herself over with an ease she hadn’t been able to muster for the bags. Nick took a look over his shoulder before following.
“C’mon,” Nick said.
“What about the salt?” she asked.
“Leave it. We’ve got something else to do first.”
The fairway leading up to the clubhouse was well lit. Giant spots hummed with power and swarms of tiny nighttime bugs clicked their hard bodies together as they flew in confused, overlapping patterns. Nick and Kimmy hung close to the shadowy rough, made their way over the hills, and finally reached the first hole and the clubhouse beyond.
“What about cameras?”
“Broken when I was here.”
“So how do you know they didn’t fix ’em?”
“Kurt Devries didn’t replace them when I told him to. No reason to think he’d do it with no one telling him to.”
Nick led Kimmy up the cobblestone path, past the small dining patio where the Mayor and Art Sojka of Sojka Chevy ate pancakes and bacon before their Friday morning eighteens. Nick skirted by the brunch steam carts tucked away in a dark corner near the building. They entered a small service corridor that descended to the basement level. Nick tried the delivery door and found it locked. Outside Swingers, the club bar and drinking patio, he jumped and swiped across the rafters. The whole place smelled of old rich piss that dripped through the wooden deck. Nick couldn’t help but think about the day Paul Troost, club manager, had told him that some members were complaining about the smell and it needed to be taken care of, and the memory had him swearing under his breath as he felt in the dark and detritus for the key. His finger touched metal. Found it.
“You okay?” Kimmy said.
“Fine,” Nick said. He sparked his lighter and found the key. He opened the door, ushered Kimmy inside, and closed the door gently.
Nick took a hard right at the first dark hall of the club kitchen. At the end of the hall was a large locker room with the employee time clock hanging next to the door. He flicked on the light switch as Kimmy watched him from the hall.
“The hell you doing?” she said. “Why you messing with that?”
Nick huffed with a satisfied chuckle as he located and pulled Kurt DeVries’s time card from its slot next to the clock. “Because most criminals are dumb fucks,” he said, punctuating the sentence with an exclamatory crunch of the time stamp. He looked at Kimmy. “Creature of habit they’ll say.” And he slid the card back home.
Nick pulled the ounce of weed from his pocket and opened the locker assigned to Kurt DeVries. He tucked the bag back on the top shelf of Kurt’s locker.
“Oh the poor thing,” Kimmy said.
Nick shot her a look. “Yeah. Poor him. Inherited the kingdom at my expense. I should have thought of this years ago.” He slammed the locker. “Let’s go.”
Kimmy looked around the cluttered dusty space as she followed Nick out the door. “Some kingdom.”
Nick started down the dark hall again to another set of doors and another dark hallway, and finally to the maintenance storage. Leaving her again in the hall, he returned pulling a gardening wagon with thick black tread tires.
“For the salt?” Kimmy said.
“For the salt. Wish we’d had one that day you had me running jars of coins back and forth.”
“It would have helped.”
“Yeah yeah. Make it up to me now and get a wagon,” Nick said.
The wagons rumbled almost happily over the cobblestone, almost like clumsy dogs happy for fresh air. Nick left the path just beyond the first tee and Kimmy kept close behind on the way back to the place they’d come in over the fence.
After loading the wagons with the salt, Nick led the way to the large fountain pond at the eighth green. When he’d taken over, Nick had planned and oversaw the installation of a water recycling system that reclaimed runoff and clean sewer for irrigation. The project had even won the state eco award for environmental excellence the year before Nick was fired. Horton Country Club had the second largest population of threatened cricket frogs in the state, kept safe from progress by living with progress, croaking in the night in the pond where Nick and Kimmy stood.
Nick took a bag of salt, ripped it open, and poured it into the pond.
“You looking to kill the fish?” Kimmy said, handing Nick another bag.
“Not looking to, but they’ll die. It’s all going to die. Irrigation draws from here. Sprinklers come on in half an hour. They’re going to stay on until every inch of this course is salted.”
“Remind me never to get on your bad side.” Kimmy tore a hole on a fresh bag and pouring it into the water. “You’re too creative to say you don’t enjoy it.”
And Nick continued to pour salt under the moonlight and soon the croaking frogs quieted. Didn’t make him happy to kill the frogs, but it had to be done. It was his own little fuck you to Kurt. Maybe the man deserved it, maybe he didn’t.
“Everybody’s done something,” he thought out loud.
“Everyone’s done what?” Kimmy asked.
Nick shook his head as an answer but Kimmy didn’t see it. She didn’t ask again. The pair just stood in the dark, pouring salt into the pond, and killing everything that depended on the fresh water
After dumping the wagons into the depths of the pond, Nick and Kimmy toted the salt bags back to the tree line. They hopped the fence again.
“Need you to drop me off at the police station,” Nick said.
“What the hell you need with that son of a bitch?”
“Work stuff. Don’t worry about it. Chad stuff.”
She didn’t say anything else on the short drive from the club to the center of Horton.
Nick got out of the car. It was still dark, going on four in the morning.
“You want me to wait for you?” Kimmy asked. She smiled but he saw how tired she was underneath it.
“Nothing worth waiting for,” he said. “Get some rest. I’ll see you later I’m sure.”
“Chad say anything about Iron Mountain?” Kimmy said.
He nodded.
“Shit.” And she drove away.
Nick climbed the steps and entered the bright lobby. He stared out the window onto the town square but saw nothing in the glass but his own reflection. And then Chief’s. Nick turned with a start.
“Nervous?” Chief said. “You haven’t even taken care of our problem yet? Don’t need to be scared of me. Yet. Your friends on the other hand. You figure out what you’re going to do about the dogs?”
“Working on it.”
“Oh, I believe you. I do. But I’m the kind of man who likes to light a fire, not out of meanness or just because I can, but because I find that a man with a clock ticking in his ear is a man better able to focus on the job at hand. Forty-eight hours.” Chief moved toward Nick, gave him a chummy grin that folded his grizzled face over on itself with wrinkles. Nick realized that the man was older than his years, probably the kind of man born old and humorless. That humorlessness probably made him a good bit of sport for the other kids on the schoolyard, making him mean and helpless, until his size caught up with him.
“Two days,” Nick said. “Fine. But I need your help. Chad does, I mean.”
“What’s the boy want?” Chief sighed.
“He heard that Kurt DeVries, turf manager over at the club, had some illegal substance in his work locker.”
Chief laughed, hard. “Let me guess, needs him locked up. Until after next Tuesday maybe?”
“Probably be long enough,” Nick said. “He didn’t say anything much about it.”
Chief looked hard into Nick, as if trying to crack him with his gaze and make Nick spill anything he might be holding onto. “Put you on the DeVries job, huh? What do you think about that? Feel good to settle up?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “Sure.”
“Sure,” Chief repeated. He laughed again. Nick didn’t know what to do, didn’t want to set the man off but didn’t want to be the butt of some unknown joke all night either.
“He’ll be into work in about an hour.”
“All right. All right. Sound as naggy as the missus. You probably know all about that. Oh, I’m sorry. You did, right? And I certainly don’t mean to be disrespectful, but that’s just the way I am.” And the man erupted into laughter again, clutching Nick’s jacket and dragging behind. He pointed to the front seat of the cruiser. Nick climbed in and Chief continued to laugh.
They drove in silence to the club. Nick dozed as the sun began to blue the black sky, then, right on time, Kurt DeVries pulled up in his brown and rusted ’83 Ranger. The squeal of brakes pulled Nick from sleep and he sat straight, alert.
“Be right back,” Chief said. He got out and left Nick to the county sheriff’s band on the radio. Nick watched Chief walk up behind the man, towering over his short-average frame. The greeting appeared cordial. Kurt laughed before motioning with his head for Chief to come along and follow.
Nick looked around the maintenance lot, this morning like the many mornings he had come in to work. The air smelled of fresh grass clippings. The buzz of electric trimmers, weed whackers by their pitch.
Again Nick thought about that final day, his fight with Kurt, then Grete. What would she have said to him? He could never know. It was too late. Too late.
Too late.
Nick looked up as the service door opened again. It was still in the shadow of the rising sun, no sign of life.
“This is bullshit. That’s what this is!”
Nick slid back to his seat as Chief marched a bleeding Kurt DeVries to the cruiser, tossing him in the backseat like a sack of potatoes. Chief got in and Nick tried to look away from Kurt, behind him, behind the metal mesh.
“Nick? Nick? What the fuck? What’s this about?”
“Shut up,” Chief said. “Or that little punch I gave you inside will feel like a mistress’s kiss.” He turned to Nick. “That’s the best kind.” His eyes went to the rearview. “You agree with that, Kurt?”
Kurt sat back in his seat, still a fluster of breath and blood and spit. “I don’t use drugs. Never have.”
“Who said you were using drugs?” Chief said. “Not me. Didn’t even think it. Marijuana these days, not really a drug in the drug sense, anyway. There’s bigger problems than a stoner with the munchies. Corner one of them in an alley and they’re liable to pull a microwave burrito on you!” He laughed hard at his own joke but the mood in the car wasn’t uplifted any. “Okay, that isn’t mine, I heard a comedian say it. But I read in the paper last summer about a black boy and guess what that son of a bitch did? Got all messed up on some bath salts he bought perfectly legally. And this is what he did: he ate another black boy’s face. Believe it? No, I’m not worried about a little marijuana. We’ll take care of this. Don’t worry a bit.” Chief laughed lightly, sounding almost jovial, but Nick saw the daggers in the eyes. Kurt stayed silent, and the rush of the road underneath the car was the only sound.
Once back in the station and safe in his cell, Kurt took on an indignant air. “I want a lawyer. Know who I was talking to the other day? Art Sokja, mayor’s buddy? Sells cars? Ring a bell? This is bullshit and you know it. You’ll be demoted to dog catcher when they get through with you.”
Chief laughed, looked at Nick, and back to Kurt. He approached the bars, fist cocked, and Kurt flinched backward, stumbling and landing on the single metal cot against the back wall. “Think the mayor or any fucking Gyp salesman gives a shit about you? Talking to them, huh? What, while you were scraping the shit from their shoes between rounds?” Chief thumbed to Nick, “And quit looking at him; he don’t have anything to do with this. And what if he did? He’s going to bend my will one way and then another? Just like that? Nah, this isn’t about you being a snitch, it’s more than that. Just coincidence we get to do this all together. Kind of like closing a chapter on another story I suppose. Think he can guess, Kurt? Let’s see. C’mon Nick, I got something interesting for you.”
Nick looked at Kurt for some spark of memory or clue written on the man’s face. But he just rubbed his eyes, face in hands.
Chief sat him again in the chair in front of his desk, uncuffed this time. The laptop lay closed where Chief had left it after showing Nick the video of Kimmy’s confession. The Chief sifted through the mounds of papers and unmarked file folders until he found the loose gold key he was looking for. The key fit a two-drawer filing cabinet that showed much more order than the rest of the big man’s work space. Meaty fingers danced over the files until he pulled the folder he wanted. Chief turned to Nick with a big smile on his broad face.
“You have a peek. I’ll be back.”
Nick watched Chief go and opened the folder. On top was a paper with the heading “Client Questionnaire.” The information had been filled out by Penny DeVries, including all relevant contact info, spouse (Kurt) and children’s names (N/A), make and model of household vehicles (Ford Ranger, Brown).
Nick had no idea what that information had to do with him but as soon as he turned the page it all became clear in a rush. He knew her body without looking at her face, the familiar birthmark on her shin. He recognized the man too, by his tattoo, barbed wire around the bicep. Nick continued flipping through the pictures, wondering how Chief managed to get such candid shots of his dead wife fucking Kurt DeVries. For a moment Nick thought that maybe they were old photos from before he and Grete were together, unlikely as that was. But that thought was quelled with the clear image of Grete’s diamond ring on her finger as she clawed Kurt DeVries’s back.
“Nick!” Chief called out from the small cell block. “You studied up? You ready for the test? Ha! Get your ass back here boy!”
Nick was still holding the file folder. He looked into the wide open cell. Chief was with Kurt, freshly bruised and handcuffed, holding him steady as the man stood precariously on a stack of books donated from the shelf that served as the jail “library.” A bedsheet had been torn, half at Chief’s feet and the other wrapped tight and tied around both Kurt’s neck and some exposed pipes above. Nick looked at Kurt’s arm, the barb wire tattoo poking out below the sleeve of his Rolling Hills polo.
“Everything make sense now? See Nick?”
Nick flipped through the photos again, for no other reason than to look at something different than his reality. He saw a clear picture of her face and barely recognized her for a moment. The odd expression Nick realized was a smile. This is how she used to look. A long time ago. Before the baby. The baby. And Chief asked the question at the exact moment Nick was dodging it.
“When did you break it off?” Chief said to Kurt. “’Bout the time this one’s missus fell into her slump I suspect.” He turned to Nick. “You know he’s still married to Penny? She cried like a baby when I showed her these, but look what happened? Scared straight, huh Kurt? Or faithful anyway. What a guy. This is the part I love about public service, helping people. Saved a marriage. Got kids now too, right? Kids. Nick was going to have a kid. Knocked up his old lady, again, right around the time you ended things. That right, Nick? That about the time you got her with child?”
“What are you going to do to me?” Kurt said.
“That’s up to Nick and I can’t say for sure, but I suspect I know what he’ll do.”
And with those words Chief let go of Kurt and kicked the books out from under him. Nick watched him dangle, face red, hands fighting against the handcuffs. His toes scraped lightly across the concrete, so close to standing on his own.
“What you going to do, Nick? You want to do the right thing? Do the right thing.”
