The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott - Chapter 14: The Hitman (Part Two)
So I watched my hitman all morning and I was right, it wasn’t exciting in the least. After a half an hour, he gave up on his telescope and did normal boring surveillance stuff like sitting in a chair and doing nothing. I think he may have had a pack of cards with him, I guess that counts for being prepared for surveillance duty because after another hour it looked like he was playing solitaire. As he played solitaire, he would glance at my window every ten minutes or so and as the solitaire became more interesting than my window, the rate of glances dropped and went from every ten minutes to every fifteen to every twenty minutes.
Angel had fallen asleep on the couch to some mid-morning talk show that had more shouting than talking. I tried not to let myself get distracted, knowing I was in a staring contest with my hitman. I had to make him blink first and unfortunately the solitaire didn’t count as blinking. But leaving his apartment did. After a godawful long time of watching him play solitaire, he got up from his chair, put on a titanium gray windbreaker and walked to the door of the apartment and disappeared.
“What time is it?”
“Huh?” Angel grunted between a half-snore in her balled-up position on the couch.
“What time is it?”
“You’re still at the telescope?” She let out a blood-curdling yawn, arms outstretched, “it’s 11:40.”
“I gotta go.”
“What?”
I rushed out of the apartment before Angel could stop me with any sensible objections.
My hitman was easy to catch and follow on the sidewalk outside of our two apartment buildings. This is because he was bigger than nearly everyone else on the street. Not in a tall way, he was probably only a little taller than me, 6’1, 6’2, and not in a fat way or even in a bodybuilder way. His largeness was more the largeness of a dark night descending or perhaps the Incredible Hulk when he got angry or maybe a Cadillac. His largeness was about solidity more than gigantism, he was a boulder who rumbled along the sidewalk, and just like if there had been a giant boulder rolling through the noontime Glendale crowd, he was easy to spot.
I assumed he would be heading for the small cache of restaurants located only a few blocks from where I lived. I knew he knew this area because it contained the place where he shot at and tried to kill me the day before, as well as three other medium-priced restaurants. There was a Spanish Tapas place I always mispronounced as “topless,” getting a laugh from Angel every time. There was a sandwich place that had a name that insulted overweight people. And then there was a Fuddruckers, which I suppose was for the overweight people the sandwich place was insulting.
As I followed the hitman, I guessed he would choose Fuddruckers, not because he was overweight (boulders don’t get fat), but because he seemed like a red meat kind of guy and Fuddruckers is great for red meat kind of guys. However, instead of going to Fuddruckers or the sandwich place or even the topless place, he went to Bira’s, my favorite pizza place. My favorite pizza place!
This was wrong in so many ways. First of all, what kind of person goes to the restaurant where he had tried to kill someone the day before, where he had slaughtered numerous defenseless animals with no remorse. The survivors of that pigeon massacre still roamed the sidewalk like they usually did, but there was no way they had recovered from the previous day’s tragedies. I tried to telepathically communicate with them to attack my hitman, but they were still too dazed and unorganized to mount any kind of sustained offensive, they were in recovery mode like a city that had just been through a natural disaster, the pigeons were focused on rebuilding not revenge. And now this monster was going to serenely eat some pizza in their midst.
He made it worse by ordering a hamburger. Not only does he desecrate my favorite pizza place with his presence, but he doesn’t even order pizza or Italian food, instead ordering a fucking hamburger. (And a beer, which was almost as insulting because he was supposed to be on duty.) Although, I have continually called it a pizza place, Bira’s is more a medium-priced Italian restaurant than a place that only serves pizza, so they have gnocchis and raviolis and alfredos on the menu as well as pizza, and in addition to these traditional Italian items, as a sop to the heathens that would go to an Italian restaurant even though they didn’t want Italian food and family members (usually of the younger and more obstinate variety) who refuse to get with the program and always need to order something ‘different’ from the menu, they have a few grinders and hoagies and a chicken sandwich along with the option of a hamburger. But no one orders the hamburger at Biras. It was like this hitman was purposely trying to goad me into revealing myself by insulting things I held dear.
I was incensed with my hitman and took the opportunity of his slow chewing to walk off my anger and get a disguise at the local Rite Aid. I grabbed a cap off the rack for tourists (it said ‘I heart L.A.’ on the front), some cheap sunglasses and a pair of translucent green toy binoculars and rushed back to watch my hitman finish his meal, still undisturbed by the shell-shocked pigeons, then order another beer and promptly drop one of his last french fries on the sidewalk. I don’t know about the memory capabilities of pigeons (it wasn’t in the Wikipedia article I looked up), but they surprisingly continued to give the eating Cadillac a wide berth even with a dropped french fry at his feet. He looked around to see if anybody was watching and then slowly picked up the french fry, looked around again, as I exclaimed, ‘Don’t do it!’ in my head, and ate the french fry. (I know he was trying to kill me and everything, but I wouldn’t wish a sidewalk french fry on anybody.)
He finished his second beer after the french fry incident and without any further excitement, went inside to pay. With my new Rite Aid toy binoculars, I could see inside the restaurant quite well, watching his every movement as he first waited near the register at the bar and then paid in cash, not taking the receipt, and for some reason continued to stay near the register at the bar as the waitress and bartender wandered away to other customers and he wandered himself two steps over to the condiment station, all the while making sure he wasn’t being watched by any of the waitstaff.
Then he started grabbing ketchup packets. And more ketchup packets. And more ketchup packets. He didn’t take any mustard packets but he just wouldn’t stop with those ketchup packets. He would take a handful and stand there pretending to throw away some food or to be taking one of those small square bar napkins that they have at condiment stations, and then he would look around again to make sure it was all clear and he’d reach in one more time, taking more ketchup packets. He did this five times, stuffing well over a dozen ketchup packets into his windbreaker pockets.
What was he going to do with all of that ketchup? Was there a ketchup shortage I didn’t know about? When you order takeout or delivery (which I can imagine a hitman has to order quite often), don’t they always give you ketchup packets? Why did this guy need all of that ketchup? I wanted to run back to Rite Aid and buy him a bottle. It costs, what, a buck, 2 bucks, even I could afford that. This must be one frugal hitman.
Or maybe not. Because after the ketchup packets he went straight to Starbucks and purchased their most expensive frozen drink, essentially blowing all of the money he was going to save with the ketchup packets. He asked for extra whipped cream on his drink, which made me worry about his heart a little. In my experience the amount of whipped cream on Starbucks frozen drinks is already Tony Montanaesque, now with the extra whipped cream they couldn’t even fit one of those clear plastic bubble tops on the drink. The hitman didn’t seem to mind as he gorged on the whipped cream as soon as they handed him the drink and emerged from Starbucks with whipped cream all over his face and the type of smile of delight a person has when they have whipped cream all over their face.
So that was a fun outing. It was almost one o’clock and time to head back to the apartment so he could surveil and I could be surveilled (actually, I think it was the other way around). But hitmen apparently can set their own hours because he decided not to return to watching an empty apartment and instead continued down the street, far down the street, checking out various Glendale shops and stores along the way.
Now, I know people have some interesting pastimes, but this man spent 2 hours in a stationary store. A stationary store? And it wasn’t even a big stationary store. This was after he spent 45 minutes in a board game shop, which was more understandable but still a long time to spend looking at board games. He caressed every sheet of vellum and fondled every piece of parchment. He even sniffed the bindings of several notebooks. He tested out various colored and non-colored pens (that he didn’t end up purchasing so, in effect, wasting the ink for the future unsuspecting buyers of the writing instruments).
He would finger the gold crucifix around his neck when he saw a particularly exciting item like the very expensive leather-bound journal that was covered in old-fashioned maps or the cadmium orange moleskin planner. I don’t even know all the stuff he did in there. It was like the longest 2 hours of my life. And he spent all of that time in the back of the store without once looking at the almost mildly amusing anniversary and birthdays cards that were located in racks at the front to draw in passersby. No, this man was hardcore about his stationary.
He finally emerged with one purchase. It was a raindrop list pad set of two. I don’t even know what those italicized words mean when they are put together like that, but I looked it up on the Internet that night and that was the description.
The lunch break had turned into a surprisingly intriguing shopping field trip where I got to visit many different local Glendale shops I never would have bothered to visit. Angel was already getting ready for work when I came back to her apartment after the long sojourn.
“Jesus, Ben. I thought you might be dead.”
“No, we’ve been shopping.”
“We?”
“Me and my hitman.” Angel stopped worrying about me and went back to getting dressed disappearing into the bathroom. I went to the couch and laid down in my thinking position, full-length across the couch my head on the northern armrest. “I want to meet him.”
“What?” Angel reemerged from the bathroom with only 1 earring on. “What did you say I couldn’t hear you with the bathroom fan on.”
“I want to meet him.”
“What?” She stopped trying to put the second earring on and looked at me seriously. “This isn’t funny.”
“I’m not joking. I want to meet him.”
“Ben, he’s been hired to kill you.”
“I think I could talk to him.”
“You don’t talk to hitmen who have been hired to kill you.”
“I followed him all afternoon. I think I know him pretty well. I could talk to him.”
“You don’t know him, Ben”
“I think I could convince him to see things my way.”
“You couldn’t convince him.”
“I don’t know. I can be a pretty persuasive guy.”
“He probably has ten thousand reasons not to like you.”
“Ten thousand dollars?” I sat up. “Is that how much you think my life is worth?”
“I don’t know. I just came up with a number.”
“I think my life is worth a helluva lot more than that. I mean, Humphrey offered me an exponentially higher number than that to sell my screenplay.”
“What?”
“Oh, I haven’t told you. This is all because my previous boss wants to buy a screenplay from me and I won’t sell it to him.”
Angel apparently found my statement so ludicrous she didn’t even inquire or ask any further questions about it. Instead, she walked over to me, one earring dangling like a fishing lure from her left earlobe, the other in her right hand, she bent down so we were face to face as I sat on the couch looking back at her. She brought her left hand up and put it on my cheek.
“Please, Ben, listen to me. Don’t try to reason with him. Let’s leave town. I can get ahold of some money, it’ll get us to Vegas. I know a few people there. Maybe we can leave the country, go to Mexico or Canada, and start over.”
“I’ve always wanted to go to Australia.”
“Then Australia.”
She kept looking into my eyes. I didn’t say anything. I gently brought my right hand up and removed her hand from my cheek and stood up from the couch. Angel stood up with me.
“I’d love more than anything to go to Vegas or wherever else with you. But I didn’t come here to give up and run away as soon as I hit my first speed bump.”
“It’s more than a speed bump.”
“I’m staying. I have a destiny to fulfill.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in that.”
“Are you going to help me or not?”