The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott - Chapter 14: The Hitman (Part One)
Previous Chapter: Chapter Thirteen
I had to make a difficult call the next morning. Luckily, Debi was at work early so we could talk before Angel returned from her night out. I’ve never liked breakup calls to the point I usually don’t make them, so I don’t usually break up. Debi was amazingly mature as I told her why we couldn’t see each other anymore. I said I was worried about Clark, that the affair was weighing on my conscience. I don’t know if she believed me. She had to have heard about my firing a few days earlier, gossip can get around the 178 floors of the Landmark building pretty fast. I had been expecting a message from her to land on my answering machine during the previous couple of days, or maybe an email asking if I was okay, but I suppose that would have provided evidence of the affair.
Like I said, she was the mature one and that meant she was the cautious one, too. She knew how to cover both of our tracks. She did say she had been worried about me, but she wanted to wait and let me contact her, she knew I would eventually call and fill her in on all of the details of what happened. But I didn’t fill her in on the details when we talked. It was a short call. I suppose Humphrey had ended the affair for us and we both knew it. And I was worried about her, if he found out about our affair it would be just another way he could get at me, he could use her to hurt me. It sounds like a gangster film or something but it’s true, with the affair ended it insulated us both. Anyway, it was probably for the best. I don’t know how long we could have continued on the way we were with the baby due soon. I just wasn’t ready for the responsibility of having an affair with the mother of a young child.
Angel returned right after I hung up, exhausted after a busy night. She kicked off her impossibly high heels and swore a few times in relief as she put her feet into comfortable slippers. My eyes must have been a little puffy because she asked me, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said as Angel knew I was lying. I was so caught up in my breakup with Debi I had completely forgotten about Angel’s mission. This is probably why she just kept standing by the door waiting for me to say something more.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Don’t you want to ask me something?”
“How was your night?”
“No, the hitman thing. Don’t you want to know what I found out?” She couldn’t help but to smile despite the grim topic because she had found something out, she enjoyed this undercover information gathering.
“Someone is trying to kill you, Ben.” She was way too happy about this.
“Great.”
“I felt ridiculous at first asking other girls, dropping hints like I was somebody in the know about these kinds of things, like I had heard something from a client and was curious. The first couple of girls I asked had no idea what I was talking about, but you know what?”
“Then one of the girls knew.”
“Yes!” She was definitely way too excited about this. “I couldn’t believe how good I was at getting information from them. I should be a cop or something.”
“That’s fantastic news, Angel.”
The abstract conversation solidified and Angel remembered what we were talking about. “Oh, sorry. I just got excited. It’s like I found out I have talents I didn’t know I had.”
“I know the feeling.” The groggy wheels in my head began to turn slowly. I had been working on the problem over the night, but then my nervousness of breaking it off with Debi and having to call Debi had overtaken what by any objective measure should have been my greater concern. It was comforting to be able to focus on the smaller more manageable problem of breaking up with my adulterous pregnant girlfriend than to have to work through all of the possibilities of how to stop a professional hitman from killing me.
“He has you under surveillance,” Angel said as she went into the bathroom to change into her home clothes.
“What?”
Muffled sounds came from the closed bathroom door. I don’t know how this apartment building had paper-thin apartment doors and walls but had bathroom doors made of lead.
“What?” I said again as the door opened and Angel reemerged in a t-shirt, sweatpants and glasses (and slippers).
“He has your apartment under surveillance.”
“Like right now?”
“I guess. That’s what I was told.”
I jumped up from the couch, grogginess gone, and went to the window and slightly separated two of the tin-like cheap metal blinds. There was an apartment building on the other side of the alley. If he had me under surveillance he had to be in one of the apartments in that building. We were on the 3rd floor, I surmised that if he was even a half-decent hitman he would get an apartment on a floor equal to or above mine. The building across the alley had 5 floors, so this gave me 3 floors to check out. There were 10 windows per floor, I didn’t know if this was 5 apartments with 2 windows each or 10 apartments with one window, it didn’t matter, either way there were 30 windows to check.
“Do you have a pair of binoculars?”
“Binoculars. No. Why would I have binoculars?”
“I don’t know. Some people have binoculars.”
“Do you have binoculars in your apartment?”
“No.”
“See.”
“See. What?”
“See. I don’t have binoculars.”
I made a half-frown, half-smirk, thinking about what else I could use.
“Would a telescope help?”
“What?”
“A telescope. You know, for seeing the stars and stuff.”
“Yeah, that would be perfect actually.”
Angel went into her supply closet and started digging. And digging. And digging. Until she emerged with a telescope and tripod. “Ta-da.”
“Why do you have a telescope?”
“I told you I have hobbies.”
I gave her another half-frown, half-smirk.
“I get bored easily, so I move on. Guns, art history, astrology…”
“Astronomy.”
“Whatever. It’s fun for a few months and then time to move on. I can show you Orion or Ursa Minor if you want.”
“No thanks. But I would like to find my hitman.”
“Does that seem wise?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Now it was Angel’s turn to give a half-frown, half-smirk. We had switched roles, I was beginning to see the fun of this cloak and dagger stuff and she was starting to worry. “I don’t think you should use my telescope to spy on your hitman.”
“Why not?”
“He might see you.”
“I’ll keep the blinds down. Besides, he’ll be watching my apartment not yours and the windows in this building are surprisingly far apart.”
We set up the tripod and telescope as Angel continued to give me motherly disapproving looks. I began to peer through the mostly closed blinds, scanning the top 3 floors of the building across the alleyway while Angel went and microwaved a pack of ham & cheese Hot Pockets.
“I still don’t think this is a good idea,” she said as the vacuum cleaner in the next room sound of the microwave reverberated in the background.
“It’s fun.”
“He’s trying to kill you.”
“I’m well aware of that, thank you.”
“It’s bad karma to watch him like that.”
“I haven’t even found him yet.”
“But once you do, it’s bad karma.”
“I don’t believe in karma.”
“How can you not believe in karma?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t.”
“Do you believe in fate?”
“Nope.”
“Don’t you believe it was fate in how we met, twice?”
“Nope.”
“You believe that you, some poor-ass farmboy from Minnesota…”
“I wasn’t raised on a farm.”
“Some poor-ass mailboy from Minnesota is going to take over the world, and you don’t believe in fate.”
“That has nothing to do with fate. It’s just something that I’m going to do, that’s all.”
I went back to looking out the window through the telescope, scanning for my hitman from floor to floor, I had made it to the top floor by this point. “Oh my god, come look at this, there’s a couple having sex in the middle apartment on the top floor.”
“Don’t peep, Ben.”
“I’m not peeping. They should really close the blinds.”
Angel brought a plate over to me with one ham and cheese Hot Pocket on it. I took the hot Hot Pocket from the plate and gingerly bit into it.
“You’re welcome.”
“Hey, this is good.”
“You’ve never had a Hot Pocket before?”
“No?” I couldn’t remember if I had ever tried a Hot Pocket before. “I’ve had Pop Tarts.”
“They’re nothing like Hot Pockets.”
“They’re kind of like Hot Pockets, in theory.”
“They’re nothing like Hot Pockets. Hot Pockets are more like an Americanized version of an empanada.”
“What’s an empanada?”
“You don’t know what empanadas are?”
“No.”
“Well, they’re like Hot Pockets. I had them when I went to South America, they’re Bolivian or something.”
“You’ve been to South America?”
“I told you I have hobbies.”
“Travelling’s a hobby.”
“Yeah, sure. It used to be. When I had a particularly generous client.”
I went back to the eyepiece of the telescope, finishing off the last bits of Hot Pocket. Angel sat down on the couch and turned on the television, Good Day L.A. was on. She always tried to get home in the morning in time to watch Good Day L.A. I wasn’t a fan of the show so I tried to tune out the nattering from the t.v. in the background as I searched the top floor. There was a flash of light in one of the windows on the top floor. The morning sun was hitting that window and the flash of light looked suspiciously like a flash from the lens of a telescope or a pair of binoculars. I focused on that window and saw movement behind the mirrored reflection of the sun. It was indeed a telescope and there was a large man standing behind it eating something, maybe a Hot Pocket. He bent down and looked through the eyepiece of the telescope, focusing on my apartment. “Bingo!”
“Stop watching the couple having sex.”
“I’m not. I found him.”
“No.”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“Yeah. Do you want to look?”
“No way. Bad karma.”
I rolled my eyes and bent down to watch my hitman as he watched my somnambulant1 window. A minute passed. Two minutes. Five minutes. This wasn’t particularly exciting. “I think I might need a chair.”
Publishers note: Our apologies for another footnote, but it is important to clarify this is an incorrect usage of an SAT word. The vacant window being referred to in this passage does not resemble the characteristics of a sleepwalker both because it more resembles the characteristics of someone who is actually lying down and sleeping normally and not sleepwalking, and because it is, y’know, a window.