The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott - Chapter 24: The Setup
Fingers and I rushed to Louie’s place. Luckily, Angel mentioned the street he lived on when she filed her reconnaissance report and her description of his apartment building was surprisingly detailed so it wasn’t difficult to spot and it was even less difficult for Fingers to pick the front door lock. Louie’s apartment was number 301, we got that from the downstairs mailboxes. A half hour had already passed by the time we reached his front door. I hoped the Maxwells were procrastinators, we needed to get to Louie before they made that call. I let Fingers do the knocking, very loud knocking, to get Louie’s attention.
“Bang. Bang. Bang.” The door shook as the big man pounded. It looked like it had recently been reattached to it hinges.
“Maybe he’s not home.”
“Where else is he going to be?”
“The bowling alley.”
“It’s nine o’clock in the morning, the bowling alley isn’t open.”
“You don’t know that bowling alley. It’s a 24 hour place.”
“Knock again.”
As Fingers’ clenched fist moved towards the wonky door one more time, we heard an irritated voice on the other side, “who is it?”
“An old friend.” Fingers made a half-hearted attempt to disguise his voice and kept his left hand over the peephole. He figured Louie might not be happy to see the hitman that had suddenly quit on him for no reason.
“Francis?”
Fingers and I looked at each other, confused. For a second I wondered if Francis was Fingers’ real first name.
“No. It’s another friend.” Fingers took his hand away from the peephole.
“Oh, you. What do you want?”
“We need to talk.”
“No way. I’m done with the hitman business. I’m not talking to any of you anymore.”
“I don’t think you have a choice.” Fingers lowered his voice an octave to sound extra intimidating.
No response from Louie.
“Come on, Louie,” I pleaded, “we’re not going to hurt you.”
Still no response from Louie.
I turned to Fingers. “Break it down.”
“My pleasure.”
Fingers reared back and we heard the unlocking of one, 2, 3 locks. The door opened, Louie was in a faded red (so now pink) robe, t-shirt and boxers underneath, he had obviously just woken up. The good news was his nose wasn’t broken like Toledo’s nose. The bad news was he had two black eyes and a swollen lip and his place looked like a hurricane (or a Maxwell) had hit it.
“Come in. I don’t want to have to fix the door again, it cost me over a hundred bucks last time.” Louie sat down on his couch that was a different shade of faded red than his pink robe. “I thought you quit.”
Fingers didn’t like Louie’s tone and charged at him like a bull seeing red (which I guess in a way he was with the robe and couch) and was quickly nose to nose with Louie (an unfortunate developing pattern in Louie’s life) blowing steam down on him. Louie didn’t shit his pants like he did with Harry Maxwell, a part of him was over that kind of fright, there’s only so much a person can be threatened and intimidated and frightened before they become numbed and defeated. Louie wasn’t numb, but he was near defeated, at least as far as the murder-for-hire business was concerned.
“Come on. Please don’t hit me, it’s been a bad enough week already.”
“Having some problems with your new friends?” Fingers growled.
“Friends?”
I popped up over Fingers’ shoulder into Louie’s line of vision like a toy mole in a whack-a-mole game. “Harry and Tommy Maxwell.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
I was incredulous. “I’m the guy you’re hiring people to kill.”
“What? Oh, fuck me.”
“How could you not know that?”
“I don’t know, you look different in the photo Mr. Humphrey, oh fuck, I didn’t say that, you look different in the photo that I have of you that I didn’t get from anybody named Mr. Humphrey.”
“It’s okay. I know who wants me dead. We’re very well acquainted. You could even say we share a type of kinship.”
“Is that why he wants you dead?”
“Partially.”
Fingers hadn’t moved from his perch on Louie’s nose, his forehead creeping slowly to Louie’s forehead. Louie kept trying to back his head up, to back his body up, but there was only so much couch. Fingers was great at this intimidation stuff, either that or he was pissed off for real because he had grown fond of Angel over the last few days. I didn’t know if I could handle pissed off Fingers again. It took 2 of us to pull him off Toledo. I don’t think I had the strength to do it on my own.
I popped back down behind Fingers letting him continue to play the bad cop as I wandered the distressed apartment wondering where the Maxwell destruction ended and Louie’s general messiness began.
“So where are your new friends?” I asked as I picked up a broken red plastic ashtray with the Caesar’s Palace logo on it.
“They’re not my friends. I mean, I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“That’s not a very convincing denial.”
“How can you possibly know about them? Nobody knows about them, not even Mr. Hum… I mean, the guy who hired me.”
I set the two pieces of the ash tray down next to a lamp that had been shattered. “You should be careful with what you say when you’re trying to impress a woman during sex.”
“What? Oh, fuck me. I knew it. I knew I shouldn’t have slept with her.”
“They have her.” Fingers growled again in his low rumble.
“I know.”
“You know?” (x 2)
This probably wasn’t the smartest thing to say to a close to overheating Fingers.
“I mean, I’m not surprised. They came here last night asking about her.”
“You little maggot. You little maggot.” I think Fingers was getting ready to do the femur bone thing to Louie.
“Be--- Because you guys put cameras all over your apartment they thought I was setting them up.”
I brought Fingers back from the brink, gently edging him away from Louie’s face and then I sat down all friendly-like next to Louie on the couch. “Were you?”
“What? No, of course not. You put the cameras there, right?”
“Did we? It would be a shame if the Maxwells found out you were lying to them. If they found out that actually, yeah, you were trying to set them up.”
“I wasn’t.”
“If I let it slip that you were working with me, just by accident, the next time they called, they might get a little suspicious. It wouldn’t take much, they already know you told the girl about them. They weren’t happy about that, right? It looks like they pawed you around a little because of it. If they found out you told her on purpose as part of some larger plan, that we’re all in on this together in some kind of grand conspiracy: you, me, Angel, Fingers, they’d do a helluva lot more than smack you a few times. Torture would be involved, I know that much.
“And I’m sure they’re wanted somewhere by law enforcement, god, I hope they are, so it’s not that farfetched there’d be a conspiracy to try to entrap them, maybe it just so happens to be that you’re a low level FBI informant and I’m an undercover agent.”
“That doesn’t seem very realistic.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” I patted Louie on the back, still all friendly-like, “it doesn’t have to be. It just has to be plausible enough, possible enough, to make the Maxwells want to hurt you. And, you know what, Louie, I’ve seen them at work and I don’t think it takes a lot to make them want to do something like that. I kinda think they’re always looking for a reason or an excuse to torture and kill somebody. They’re not pros like Fingers here. They do it for fun. And if it turned out that they needed to tie this whole operation off and liquidate everyone involved in order to save their own skins, I know who they would start with.”
I smiled at Louie. I think I could see a tear form in his left eye. We were going to be friends. “I guess what I’m saying here, Louie, is that Fingers and I are offering you a kind of witness protection program. And Fingers is good at this protection business. Or let me put it another way. Who would you rather trust; a couple of kindly, rational men like Fingers and myself, or those fucking psycho Maxwells who tore this place up for no reason and already beat the shit out of you once?” I put my arm around Louie, comforting him like an older brother. “I am absolutely positive the Maxwells will not offer you this same deal.”
Louie’s tear inflected eyes were wide like a little kid who just realized if he says the right thing he’ll get dessert after dinner, “Oh, shit, man. What do you want?” He said the right thing.
There were three missed messages on Louie’s phone when he checked it after our little talk. He had turned off the ringer after the Maxwells’ visit and left it off all night taking to bed early to tend to his wounds. Louie called the Maxwells back as Fingers and I listened in. Harry Maxwell offered a half-hearted apology at the beginning of the call to soften Louie up before asking a favor, a favor that dovetailed nicely with the favor Louie was already doing for us.
After a brief negotiation between Harry and Louie the phone call was over and Harry had accepted Louie’s brilliant plan (which I suppose was my brilliant plan).
“It’s done.” Louie said as he put down the phone. They’re going to come over here tomorrow when I call you.
“I heard.”
“So you should probably leave.”
“Oh, come on, Louie, that’s not until tomorrow. We have all night to spend together. Fingers and I will keep you company.” We weren’t about to leave Louie on his own and give him a chance to rethink his loyalties (or perhaps, more likely, skip town). “Are you hungry? I’m hungry. I bet your hungry.”
“I just woke up.”
“I can make pancakes.”
So I made pancakes and Fingers helped Louie put the place back together. In the process of cleaning up the back closet, Fingers found various neglected entertainments from decades ago, one of which (in a slightly used not mint condition) was a vintage version of the board game Stratego with painted wood (and not plastic) game-playing pieces. Fingers took this frayed edged Napoleonic-imaged cardboard box in both of his hands lighting up like an anthropologist (or maybe archeologist) who had just discovered the type of rare and previously hidden thing that makes anthropologists’ excited (I don’t actually know what that would be).
“This is an original version.”
“Man, I haven’t played that game since my first marriage. She always wanted to play that instead of having sex. That should have been my first sign there was something wrong with our relationship. That and the time I caught her making out with the plumber.”
Fingers wasn’t listening to Louie, his hands caressing the image of the 3 soldiers and their giant hats on the cover of the box. “We need to play this.”
“What? I don’t even remember how to play.”
“We need to play this, now.” Fingers was pretty emphatic about that and no amount of dissuasion could get him to change his mind, so we all sat down around Louie’s kitchen table and ate pancakes and played Stratego. And kept playing Stratego into lunch when we ordered pizza and drank beer and kept playing past dinner time, as I ran out to get some Del Taco (and more beer). Louie turned out to be not particularly trustworthy or a good Stratego player, but surprisingly decent company for a guy who had been tasked with arranging my murder. And I think he felt the same way about us by the end of the night.
We left the next morning, bonding complete, and waited in Angel’s apartment for Louie and the Maxwells to call Fingers’ phone. Fingers was worried about a Maxwell surprise attack and had set up several booby traps in the stairwell and hallway and the entrance to Angel’s apartment. I thought I could hear Phil scream for help at one point in the morning as we waited because he had accidentally stepped into the steel-toothed bear trap that Fingers had put under an innocent looking cheeseplate.
I tried to reassure Fingers not to worry about such surprise attacks, that my plan was foolproof (he said he had heard that one from me before and he wasn’t taking any chances), and besides the Maxwells didn’t know we were using Angel’s apartment unless they had tortured it out of her (a grim thought I was sort of in denial about) or they made the supposition themselves (something I thought was less likely than the torture), I was already coming to them, why would they need to surprise attack us. I was more worried about the apparently empty red corvette that was parked in the alleyway below Angel’s window. Fingers gave it one look and in his expert opinion said it wasn’t the Maxwells and quickly dismissed my concern.
“Cars park in alleys all the time. Don’t worry about it.” My half-frown half-grimace returned from hibernation as I had the vague sense that someone was trying to listen in on our conversation.
The manufacturers default ring of Fingers’ cell phone went off at noon exactly. I answered and a nervous, babbling Louie was on the other end. I wanted to tell him to breathe and slow down but that would have shown too much familiarity so I had to listen to him babbling babbling babbling until he got to the point and set up the secluded meeting place for the next day. I repeated the meeting place and time into the phone for Fingers’ and Louie’s and the Maxwells’, hell, for everyone’s benefit, to ensure we were all on the same page. I wasn’t exactly dealing with most cooperative group here and didn’t have complete confidence that no one would get confused when we hung up, but I did my best to ensure that it wouldn’t happen. And the red corvette quickly left at the end of the phone call, which was either a good thing that reduced my paranoia or a bad thing that increased it.
“So that’s it.” Fingers said to me after it was all set.
“That’s it.”
“Is this going to work?”
“Of course.”
Physical behavior can be as communicable as disease, I once had a girlfriend who quickly picked up my nervous leg jiggling habit and after only a few months was doing it even more than me (and eventually needed medication to help her stop doing it), and now Fingers caught my half-grimace half-frown look of slight concern and strong disapproval.
“It’s going to work. Trust me.” I tried to reassure him.
The half-frown, half-grimace stayed as we found ways to occupy ourselves for the rest of the day and night. The meeting time was 2 o’clock, that would give us plenty of time to be well-rested, assuming that we would be able to go to sleep at all. I don’t know about Fingers (actually I think I do because there was no snoring which would strongly indicate he didn’t sleep either), but I couldn’t sleep, tossing and turning in my cot as much as one can toss and turn in a cot without tossing and turning the entire cot over.
Angel’s bed stayed unoccupied for the night (even though both Fingers and I, me especially, were trying to sleep on substandard bedding) like a ceremonial shrine, a sign of hopefulness for the next day. I watched that empty bed for most of the night without seeing it. I didn’t have any visions of wraiths nor was my mind pleasingly blank, meditation-like. It was racing. My mind was racing, even faster than my words do. I tried to engage in positive visualization like athletes are supposed to engage in before the big game, imagining myself scoring the winning touchdown or the winning goal. I tried to imagine myself killing Harry and Tommy Maxwell; with my bare hands, a gun, a knife, a well swung tennis racket, nothing worked, they were still alive when I finally went to sleep.
And they were still alive when the alarm went off waking us in the morning at a very early hour. And they were still alive as Fingers and I got dressed preparing for the day. And they were still alive when we got in Fingers’ Cadillac to journey to the meeting point. Fingers turned the radio on to KEarth101 like he usually did when he started the car. I turned the radio off. I didn’t want to listen to oldies as I prepared for death of one kind or another. I didn’t want to listen to oldies as I couldn’t help but to wonder whether any of us would still be alive at the end of the day.