The Commute

I thought that I heard the phone ringing, but I wasn’t about to wake up too quickly and risk forgetting the most excellent dream I was having. Then my answering machine chirped, confirming my theory about the phone ringing. I heard my voice saying “Hey this is Vader, leave a message unless I owe you money or you are selling something. In which case, you have the wrong number. Peace.” My little speech, which I still think is funny, ended and the machine beeped again. I was poised to go back to sleep when I heard.
“Hey Vince, it me, Trish,” I sat straight up in bed. “You have talked about you and I going out, well next Thursday, at around six o’clock is good for me. Just call me on my other phone and let me know. Bye.” I was so asleep that the “you and I go out thing” hit me sideways. It felt like the good old days for almost a nanosecond. The fog began to clear from my head and I realized some vulgar truths. First, she was talking in the special ‘code’ that we devised. ‘Going out’ meant that she had some industrial espionage work to do, and she wanted my help. Second, she still calls me Vince, which, coming from anyone else, would piss me off to the tenth power. Finally, as if being awakened before ten in the morning with a stone cold reminder that the girl I love is just a co-worker wasn’t bad enough, I forgot the really good dream that I was having. I couldn’t handle the stress. I went back to sleep.
When I got up a few hours later, I slinked down into the basement and got on a computer. I checked the hidden bbs’s and the encrypted message boards for any idea about the mission that Trish wanted help with, but I turned up nothing. I wanted to appear to be in touch with the underground world of spy vs. spy when I called her later. I thought for a moment that I would call Trisha and tell her no. I would tell her that I couldn’t play the spy game anymore. Then I realized that I couldn’t tell her the truth. Hearing her voice and seeing her face made my heart hurt. We had spent the best part of a decade together, working jobs. The day we met lays on my mind like a 32 oz. raw steak would lie on a slab of marble. Someone in the agency that she was training in had gone rogue and stolen some tissue samples from a local clinic for a huge pharmaceutical company, and if they didn’t get the samples back Trish’s agency would be implicated. I had let it slip to a complete schizo-crack head that I had happened upon a back door into the mainframe, man I hate that word, of the clinic that Trish needed into. As it turns out Buzz, the schizo that I mentioned before was one of Trish’s assets that she used for information.
I reluctantly agreed to talk with Trisha, with the thoughts that I could definitely have to kill Buzz later. It freaks me out when I think back on how naïve I was back then. I decided that we would meet at my house. Granny Vander, who was completely paranoid, left the house to me. It had a double basement that was actually a bomb shelter. I felt really safe there and figured that having two years worth of dried food in the basement would keep an international spy from slitting my throat after getting the information that she needed. I can remember that night as if I watch the highlight film every night.
I heard the doorbell buzz upstairs and rush to finish encrypting the files. I was at least that smart. I put on the most serious, dangerous face I could muster, and I opened the door. When I saw Trish for the first time my mouth dropped open and I felt like my tongue fell out and unrolled down to the floor, like they always to in the cartoons. Her face was soft and milky white. I began wondering what it tasted like. She had big, long, full, dark, curly hair that sort of dangled around her shoulders. Her hair looked so alive that I thought it might reach out and wrap me up, and I hoped it would. Her big brown eyes were deep and powerful, and they pulled me into her the way a river would pull a boat over a waterfall. It was late autumn and she was wearing a jet-black, ribbed turtleneck sweater that had to have been at least three sizes to small. Her black jeans were painted onto her long legs.
She later told me that I was just looking at her and grinning as if she had just flashed me.
“Can I come in? It’s getting cold out here and we have some business to take care of.” Her voice was clear and strong, yet as soft as a feather on the wind.
“Yeah, sure. Come in, come in.” I replied. I coughed out of my hand and pretended that I hadn’t really been trying to figure out how to convince her to bear my children. I looked around outside a time or two before coming inside. I wanted to appear to be checking to see if she was followed.
“Well. Let’s get to it.” She said. Again with the silly grinning. It only lasted a moment and I quickly invited her to sit at the table.
“I am Vader, as you already know. I mean what with you being a . . . you know. Uh, yeah. Well. I am Vader. I have something that you want.” I made a mental note to learn how to talk right after Trisha left.
“You can call me Sarah.” she lied. She would always use fake names from the bible, which still wierds me out. I have seen how people have reacted when she would say, “You can call me Ester, or Sophirra”. At least she never said, “You can call me Lot’s wife”. “My associate tells me that you have security information on the Borland Clinic. Is that - - What’s so funny?”
I couldn’t hold my giggling. “I am sorry. I just never thought I would ever hear someone refer to Buzz as their ‘associate’. Sorry, please, continue.”
“Thank you. I need to get into Borland and back out without being detected. Can you help me?”
“Well, I can get you in and out, but . . . “
“But what?”
“But any security tech or investigator with a brain will be able to pull logs to see when the system was activated. I would be helping you access the system like a normal user, not bypass it altogether.”
“That’s fine. No one will be checking to see if someone has been in and out of there. And if they do, it won’t matter.”
I thought about this for a minute. The liability seemed great. “What happens if you get caught? What happens to me?”
“Nothing. I live by a code of honor. I would never turn you over. The only thing that you have to worry about is did you cover your tracks getting this information.”
I just grinned. She was testing me then, I know. “Then I have nothing to worry about.”
“Do you do this type of thing much?” I just shrugged. “Are you one of those adrenaline junkies who sneak in just to see if they can?” Again, I just shrugged.
She stared at me with a wide smile. “How good are you, Vader?”
“Good enough. What do you care?”
“Someone with the right skills and the right frame of mind can make a good living for himself.” She kept staring at me and it made me feel naked. I felt like she was downloading my personal files to her hard drive for later review.
“Well,” I interjected. “What’s next?”
“Money. How much will it take to get what I need out of you?”
Money? I hadn’t thought about that. My Grandma left me a fortune when she died. I had money in CD’s, stocks and a butt load of bank accounts. I was looking for a rush. She must have seen the turmoil on my face.
“Five hundred?” she offered. “Two hundred now, and three more if the info is legit. Does that seem fair?”
“Sure, sounds good to me.”
She pulled a neat stack of money from her pocket and started counting out some bills. I think she was relieved to look up and see that I was more interested in her breasts than the unholy amount of money that she was toting. She put two hundred dollars on the table and I put an unencrypted version of the security code-generating program on a floppy disk.
I handed her the disk and I could see the relief, which she was trying hard to hide, come over her face. I didn’t know it at the time, but this assignment was her last shot to make a name for herself in the agency. The piece of the puzzle that I added made her live a ton simpler.
“Vader, if this works out like I hope it does, it could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”
“I sure hope it does.” After that brilliant line, I practiced kicking myself in the butt with one foot while I secured the other firmly in my mouth.
That night was the beginning of a unique work relationship that is uncommon in her line of work. I say her line of work because I never joined her at the agency. In fact, it wasn’t long after being brought in that she took the fall for a beauracratic screw up and left the agency, accused of being a possible mole. Once Trisha made some contacts, she prospered on her own. We prospered together. I kept her in gadgets and security fixes and she kept better, high profile, jobs rolling in.
I don’t want to call her. I know that I will, however. There is no way that I can’t help her now. I have written out the pros and cons of aiding an international spy a thousand times. It complicates things exponentially when I would trade one of my testicles to be back in her life. All of my reasons aren’t selfish though. Actually, I do it mostly for her. I don’t need the money and I sure don’t need the excitement. There comes a point in espionage that the thrill either scares you away or sucks you in. Trisha is sucked in.
She grew up on the mean streets and had to fight every day to prove herself. Not only was she youngest kid on the block, growing up in Queens, but she was the only girl on her street for at least two blocks. I guess she still feels like she has to prove herself. Her mom left when Trisha was a few months old. Trisha is on a never-ending quest to prove that she is better than she is. The problem is that she never knew her mom. So, with nothing to measure against, Trisha just keeps pushing the envelope to get better and better.
No, Trish is too deep in, and I can’t abandon her now. I wouldn’t brag; there are a thousand guys as skilled as I am, but she couldn’t make it without me. I tend to worry about the things that she can’t. That is what makes us work so well together. I can’t describe it. I have always heard of love at first sight and about fifty other worn out clichés that I didn’t, and still don’t really, believe in. With Trish and me, it was necessarily ‘love at first sight’ as much as a process of realizing how much we complemented each other. Then we loved being together, always. Then one day, I don’t even want to talk about it.
Trish and I worked on so many levels. We had passion for each other that was as intense and crazy as you can imagine. But we also had a solid connection and relationship that would stand up after the passion waned, as it inevitably would. Since I have been spending so much time dwelling in the sorrow cellar of “what happened to us”, I have forgotten how we actually ‘hooked up’. I ain’t much to look at. I am about 5’8” and weight about 245lbs, if I push myself. I keep myself clean, and my teeth are good. I can’t seem to make up my mind about what color my hair should be, and my facial hair changes every week or so. I don’t dress particularly nice. She didn’t know that I had money. I mean the house looked like 1970, just like Grandma left it. Another thing that endeared Trish to me was that I never got the idea that she loved me for any vain reason. From day one, I have been me, Vincent Vander. Vader to everyone but her. I think back to our first ‘date’ and a blanket of nostalgia warms me.
I had told Trish that we should try going out, as a couple, to practice for the future, in case we had to go undercover. She saw right through that but agreed that we could go out. We had just finished a three-week operation, one of the first big successes since she struck out on her own, and she wanted to celebrate. I told her not to worry about a thing. All she needed to do was be ready to be picked up at her brownstone at seven o’clock the next night. I knew that she wasn’t used to having someone dictate to her what to do, but I think she liked it.
She had no clue what she was getting into. I had planned our first date in my head, though I never thought it would actually happen, every since we met a few months before.
Trish thought that she had acquired some impressive assets and contacts, but she didn’t know my Grandma. I laugh at Trish’s puny connections. Grandpa Vander was a world famous saxophone player. All I had to do was get out Grandma’s little book of places to call when she needed to find Grandpa, drop the Vander name and somebody was going to get bumped off of the reservation roster.
I was mostly a slob, but not a slob without potential. I had four really nice Brooks Brothers suits that had gotten about as much use as the Vanilla Ice Greatest Hits CD I bought. I got out the sharpest, darkest suit I could find and had it pressed and dry cleaned, even though I don’t think I had ever worn that one. I went to CVS and picked out a nice, blond color for my hair. I shaved my mustache and painfully divided my eyebrow into two. By the time six o’clock the next day rolled around, I was a wreck. It was nothing a couple of beers couldn’t fix.
The looked on Trish’s face was worth every hair that I had plucked from my brow that day before.
“Wow.” She said after a long pause. “You look really nice.”
I smiled at her and said, “I don’t have the words.” as I glanced at her stunning little party dress. It was true. If it weren’t for the magical powers of fermented grain, I wouldn’t have been able to swallow. It was kind of funny that, after all of the fuss of how we both looked, that we climbed into Grandma’s sky blue, 1971 Skylark. Trish didn’t seem to mind.
“So, what other pleasant surprises do I have to look forward to?”
“Trish, if I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise now would it?”
We drove in silence for a little while in silence. I was getting intoxicated on her perfume. Somehow, it made me think of making love in a hot tub while it snowed rose pedals. I felt a drop of sweat roll down my face, and it snapped me back to reality. I realized then that I had missed my exit, but it didn’t matter, there were others.
I cleared my throat and said, “I really felt like we did a good thing this time. With the op, I mean.”
Trish nodded and I felt compelled to elaborate. “Most times it seems like we are just pawns in some inter-corporate war where nobody really wins. The advantage just keeps bouncing back and forth between the same billion dollar companies. But I think that we saved lives today. Helpless lives.”
“I guess I am so used to not thinking about it that I haven’t looked at it that way. I hope that the files that we swiped are enough to put those scum away forever.”
“Yeah. When I think of sweat camps, I usually think of Korea or Thailand, not Chicago and New York.” I catch a glimpse of her face and I realize that she appears to be really digesting the mission for the first time. A storm of emotion passes over Trish’s face and I wonder what she if feeling. It is so hard to tell sometimes.
Crap, I missed another exit.
The surprise is complete when we roll down West 3rd Street and stop in front of Blue Note, New York. Blue Note is one of the premiere jazz clubs on Earth. Two young valets approach the car and open the doors for us. It may have been the beer, but I couldn’t refuse the opportunity to use a good Eddie Murphy line.
As I slipped the twenty into the valet’s hand, I said, “Look, park me by something nice. All of this happened last time I parked here.” as I pointed to the dents and chips of the old car. Trish gave me a look.
“What? Sorry, I couldn’t refuse.” We locked arms and went inside.
The host recognized me and greeted us. “Mr. Vander and you must be Ms. Magdalene I presume.” Trisha nodded, trying to hide her reaction to the biblical cover that I picked for her. It wasn’t at all necessary, but I thought it was a nice touch.
We sat and enjoyed Chucho Valdes and David Sanborn for a few hours. It was awesome. It made me think of when I was young and I would come and listen to Grandpa play. I never knew my dad and my mom died having me, so Grandpa played many roles in my life. In his own way, he wasn’t a fit role model. He drank, and smoked, cussed and played with the best of them. But he loved me and he taught me how to be fair and work hard. He taught me something else that I had worked into my plan for the evening.
“Ladies and Gentleman,” the host began “as a special treat for tonight only, we have the grandson of the late, great Harry “Slim” Vander to play a few songs. The place erupted in applause as I stumbled onto the stage. I was such a klutz. I intentionally didn’t look back to see how Trish responded to the whole thing. I stepped up and blew the lint out of the mouthpiece that I had in my coat pocket, and secured it in place. I played a few Sigurd Rascher tunes, then some more popular stuff. I finished my time on the tenor with a number Grandpa had composed for Grandma called “Like Spring Loves Green”. I could see Trish smiling and I overwhelmed with a might dose of courage and stupidity. After a little convincing, Manny Marshall got started on the violin with a tune somewhere in the neighborhood of B. I hadn’t sung in front of people for a while, and certainly not in front of a crowd of people who paid $75 to see the world’s greatest Jazz music. I dug down as deep inside myself as I could and bellowed out my best tenor rendition of Etta James’s, At Last.
After my exaggerated display of shamelessness, Trish’s heart had melted. I awkwardly sat down beside her.
“I don’t guess I need to tell you that I sang that for you. I mean, what with you being a . . . you know.” I laughed a little and she wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.
“I think that we have had this conversation before.” I say. We both laugh then.
The mood lightens with our shared laugh. “You know, I wanted to wait until the end of the night to kiss you. But you are so beautiful, I don’t think I can.” Trish looks at me a little funny.
“I have heard that somewhere before, I think.”
“Yeah, it is from some movie.” We both laughed again. “But if you really mean it, what difference does it make who says it before you?”
“That was original wasn’t it?” I smile and nod.
“I liked it. It’s a good line. You should remember it.”
“Well, if things go like I plan, I won’t need it again.” I lean into her and we share a soft, closed mouth, kiss that curled my toes. I felt like summer had come over me all at once, melting the ice and snow that had built up during the years of winters that I had lived. New life poked through the, newly fertile, soil of my heart. We pulled apart and my lips were quivering. My heart pounded so hard that I couldn’t draw a breath for many seconds.
In an effort to keep this story PG-13, I won’t elaborate on the events following the trip to Baskin-Robbins and the stroll through the East End of Central Park. Suffice to say, everything changed then.
The sound of the doorbell snaps me out of my trance. I hit monitor four and see that it is just some vacuum salesman or something so I ignore him. I look around, trying to resume whatever I was doing before my daydream, and I see the, secure, satellite phone. That thing has to weigh 400lbs.
I stare at the phone sitting by my computer. I reach for it but end up grabbing the half-eaten crunch bar from the night before instead. I used to work in telemarketing. I absolutely hated calling someone up and saying, “Hi, I’m Vader. I would like you to spend money you don’t have on things that you don’t need to impress people that you don’t like. May I have your credit card number?” I did that for a while to get an inside track on an illegal import operation based in the same building. As much as I hated to pick up that phone, it was nothing like this. I didn’t bother planning what I was going to say. I never, ever, said what I wanted to anyway. I gather courage and dive for the phone. I feel the cool handset in my hand and a memory strikes me like a bolt of lightning. I remember that fated telephone conversation that we had about a year back. The memory ran through my heart cannonball through a bed sheet. No single event in my life changed me as much as that phone conversation did.
While things between Trish and I had been on the decline for a while, it all came to a head one night. We had employed the help of this turncoat rogue, that I heard was caught doing double duty moonlighting for some Nazi cult while working for Omega Ops. He was a six-foot homeless stud who had intimate knowledge of the facility that we had been casing. We were on hire from a security company, of all ironies, to check the integrity of a new security measure that they had in place. It stunk from the get go, I thought, but the pay was ridiculous. Even after splitting with Petoir, which must be Russian for numb nuts, we still stood to make a mint, with a nice bonus added in if we were successful on all points of the mission.
I tried to tell Trish that we were walking a dangerous line. I reminded her that to security companies, we were the bad guys. She wouldn’t listen. She kept going on about honor among thieves, and how this is how the big boys, I think she said girls, do it. I felt like we were in way over our heads. The more I wanted to pull back, the harder she pushed forward. We had spent eight years making money like we owned a printing press. We had accomplished a lot, I thought, in our field. We weren’t going to be super spies, I knew, we simply didn’t have the resources. We had carved out a nice little niche for ourselves. But it wasn’t enough for Trish. She was like a crack-head, and she would do anything for the next, bigger, fix. She needed the rush of the mission more than she ever needed me. When missions were going well, we were happy. But when jobs weren’t rolling in, or we were sloppy on an Op, we struggled. The highs were high and the lows were really freakin’ low.
I don’t know which was worse about working with Petoir, his crappy Lithuanian accent or the way he buzzed around Trish, as if he intended to pollinate her. He insisted on giving, unsolicited, opinions on everything. Thankfully, Trish made it a point early on to let Pete know that she was in charge.
The farther that we got into the mission, the worse things got. Pete turned out like I thought, 20% substance and about 80% Soviet horse manure. We were supposed to enter a military building, medium security, and plant a ‘breech of security’ notice in the control room.
Pete didn’t know much about the facility. He had no schematics, no diagrams, and no access codes. All he had was a “pretty well ideas” of how to get around the building, and a single key that he didn’t remember what it opened. It looked like the key to a janitor’s closet door. He really clamed up when Trish told him that he couldn’t go inside with her. He refused to cooperate unless she let him go. I thought that surely she would scrap the mission then, but she didn’t. At this point, I was begging Trish to pull out.
“Trish, please,” I pleaded. “This is a really big job. We ain’t prepared and Pete isn’t panning out.”
“Vince, if you can’t handle it, maybe you should pull out.”
I remember looking at her as if she had three eyes. “Are you high? You don’t stand a chance with my help. This is a suicide mission.”
“This is what we do, Vince. We take a job and we finish it. We’ve never backed out and we’re not going to start now.”
I was really getting fumed now. I didn’t stand up to Trish a lot, but I let her have that day. “When is it ever going to be enough with you!? What will it take to make you feel like you are complete? Does somebody have to die?” My face was beat red and, for the first time, she didn’t have anything to say back. I kept going.
“You can’t keep determining your self value based on how far you can push yourself. I like what we do, but I love you. Is there ever going to be a time when it will be enough for you just to have me? I can’t compete with this insanity.”
She dipped her head and I knew I had hit a nerve. I had only seen her cry a few times, and it killed me every time. I had no idea what dying was like, but it couldn’t be near as painful as watching Trish break down. She began to sob. I grabbed her up in a hug and we dropped down to sit on the floor. She squeezed me tightly and buried her face in my chest. We sat together without talking for several minutes as she cried. Finally, she stopped and spoke.
“I can’t stop, Vince.” She began. “This isn’t what I do, it’s what I am. There is a void in me that I can’t fill right now. I don’t know if it’s because of my mother, or how I grew up. But that is how it is right now. Doing these things, these crazy stupid things, makes the pain go away. For a little while at least. For now, I need this. And I need you. I know that you are getting the short end of the stick, but I can’t do this without you. I love you, Vince. Please don’t make me go through this alone.”
What could I say? She admitted her problem. She offered a solution, and she asked me to help. If I truly loved her, could I say no? We set out for the Waco building, at the Shepard Air Force base in Wichita Falls, Texas, the next week.
I won’t go into details. I wasn’t inside, Trish was. She and I haven’t talked much about what happened. The long and short of it is that it was a sting from the get-go. The security company who hired us had offered to help them nail Pete, a.k.a. Ivan Spalko, in exchange for amnesty for dirty laundry that they had accumulated. Trish was just bait. Undercover CIA people had given Trish Pete’s name and told her that he could help with the mission, which they also tipped her off to. Trish was going to be a bonus for the CIA. Apparently, Pete was more than a thief and a double crosser. He had made some assassinations in Afghanistan for the, now defunct, U.S.S.R. during Russia’s attempt to take claim that region. Luckily, Trish’s sixth sense kicked in, and they didn’t step right into the trap. Pete was nabbed but she got out, but not before taking a .44 slug to the left shoulder.
After that, Trish agreed to cool things for a while. We didn’t do a single job for a month while she was healing. Just as things started looking up, she began to get that itch again. Inevitably, she came up with a job and it was almost as bad as the security gig. I tried to reason with her, but it did no good. Finally, I had to call her bluff. I made a phone call I thought I would never make.
The tone of the phone dialing Trish’s number still echoes in my mind. When she answered, I almost lost my nerve. But I knew what had to be done, for both of us.
“Trish, it’s me, Vince.”
“Hey, I was going to call you, we need to go over some stuff. I just got my secure packet and it has a ton of information in it that I know nothi—“
“Trish, no. We need to talk. I can’t do this anymore.”
She was silent for a few moments. “Vince, I thought that we already had this talk, I nee—“
“No,” I interrupted firmly. “we haven’t had this talk.” I had her attention. “It’s over. I can’t keep up anymore and I can’t stand by and watch you kill yourself. I called with the thought that I would give you a choice: me or the job. But I already know the answer. This is it, we’re finished.”
Silence hung in the air like a thick fog, only colder and darker.
“Goodbye, Trish. I love you.” I hung up the phone and fell apart. I spent the next week crying, drinking and puking more that I had in my entire life. Finally, I got up and told myself that this was the best way to help Trish. I slowly started learning how to live again.
About six months later, I agreed to bail Trish out on a real serious bind that she had gotten into. I got her some codes she needed and I didn’t hear from her for a few weeks. She finally called back and talked about the possibility of me doing some work for her, strictly on a professional level. The conversations were cold and short. She was over me. I told myself that I needed to do something occupationally, but I realize now that my subconscious was screaming to have Trish back in my life.
The subway blasted under the city that never sleeps as we sat there across from one another quietly. I hadn’t been this uncomfortable since puberty. She just sat there. She wouldn’t even look at me, or maybe she couldn’t. A lot had passed between us. Almost all of our old bridges were ashen ruin.
Her eyes were red and sagging. I knew she hadn’t slept much lately. She was probably having dreams about her next mission, she always does that. As if it weren’t bad enough to think about it all day, she would lay the whole thing out in her mind, while she slept. That is what is both great and awful about Trish, her focus. When something was on her mind, she focused all of her energy on it. I wasn’t her focus now, I knew. It hadn’t been for a while.
We had worked on this kind of stuff together for almost ten years. She would take a job, usually stealing something or stealing something back, and I would get her inside of wherever she had to go. It was a great marriage. Actually, it wasn’t a marriage, which was a big part of our problem. I should have married her.
Lately these missions, while much less frequent for me, have gotten tougher. I have a real job now, almost full time. And the new security systems are getting tougher every day. Her mom always said that Trish’s work would get her killed someday. Lately I would be inclined to agree.
Trish’s cell phone chirped and nearly scared the fluid out of us both. It turned out to be a wrong number. Instead of hanging up, the caller wanted to know how Trish had gotten that phone number. This was confirmation to my theory that normal people can’t live in this town. Trish was in no mood to argue with a stranger so she hung up.
She was different after the call, on edge. That made me more nervous. She was fidgety and started looking over her shoulder. Trish was always so cool. That was what made her good. All of a sudden, I catch a glimpse of something that makes my stomach flip so hard I almost puke my heart out. She was wearing the necklace that I gave her when we first started dating! She hadn’t worn that, as far as I knew, since we broke up a year ago. Apparently, she saw me writhing on the floor and she slipped the necklace down into her turtleneck. She grabbed her phone again and acted like she was checking her messages. I wonder if she would rather we get back together, or for her to no longer need my skills?
Outside, on the street above the subway, it was hot and dark. I don’t recall New York being so dark. Come to think of it, another such night does come to mind. We were on a different subway, headed a different direction than we are tonight. Some small computer chip company had come up with a new technology, and a much larger chip company wanted it. Had I known the name that the latter mentioned company would make for itself later, I would have requested that a few more zeroes be added to the end of our fee.
Anyway, it was about six o’clock that day so the subway was jam-packed. It was warm for New York, and the way Trish and I were carrying on didn’t help that any. She was sitting on my lap and we were kissing like we had invented it. We pretended to ourselves that the making out was a cover for our next mission. But back then, we didn’t need a reason to get freaky, we just needed a place.
As I think back, we must have looked like a pretty ridiculous pair. Trish was a twenty-year old knockout in a slammin’ blue business outfit and I was an overweight dork wearing a janitor’s uniform.
We had a good plan, however. I would enter the building, posing as the janitor, and copy the patch codes from the main security hub. Then I would input the codes that Trish would need, into a fake ID I was making, It would work fine as long as Fred, the real janitor whose clothes I was wearing, didn’t prematurely miraculously recover from the dose of Sodium Amatol that Trish hit him with.
We decided to get off on the Rose Boulevard exit and walk the two blocks to the Adair Complex. It was Trish’s idea, and a pretty rotten one I thought. But I had already learned not to argue with Trish on nights like these. She was wound way too tight.
We got close to the building and I made my way inside. I headed straight for Fred’s lair in the basement, and setup operations. He happened to have a bunch of maps of every floor pinned up to the wall, probably so he could plan where to clean next. The maps that Fred had matched almost perfectly with the ones that I had, which gave me a little confidence in Reginald, my source for such things. I headed right to the box and pulled the codes without a hitch. It was so easy cracking that system; it was no wonder that it was a crime.
In thirty minutes, I was in and out of the building, and back with Trish. In another ten minutes, I had rigged up Trish’s fake ID and she was on her way to work her magic. She looked so great. Great and harmless. No one would ever guess as to the hardware that she had in her briefcase, so we thought. Naturally, she was armed. We both were. But she had the most updated gadgets available at that time. She had a dental drill for smoking small locks, an electronic tumbler finder for safes and bigger locks, and even corrosive foam for really big locks. But if you saw her walking towards you, that last thing on your mind would be her brief case. She had other, more endearing and immediately noticeable, assets. Most men would climb a mountain of glass just to smell her farts.
I was pondering how much of a lucky S.O.B. I was when I realized that it had been a really long time. It had been too long. I got the courage to go back and investigate when I heard, what I knew was, a gunshot. I got my .38 snub-nosed pistol out and jetted for the building, freaking out the whole way. I get close and see Trish tear-assing out of the front doors. A rent-a-cop followed her out but retreated when he sees me with a bead on him. I could never shoot anybody, but he didn’t know that. Without a word, we hooked up and abso-freakin-lutely hauled. We got a cab that was about to pull out of an alley and hitched back to a safe house we knew about. We didn’t say a word on the way back. I didn’t ask what had gone wrong right away, I just held her. It wasn’t the first time that we had been shot at, and wouldn’t prove to be the last, but it scared the crap out of us both.
It turned out to be a botched mission. Word had gotten out that someone was going to move on the goods and our employer had failed to mention that to us. When she hit the second floor, some cops cornered her in the elevator and wanted to see what she had in her brief case. She busted them up and got out of dodge, barely.
Later that year, that same big chip company that forked us experienced a series of robberies during a time when their security system kept mysteriously malfunctioning. All and all the mission was profitable for us. We kept our cash advance and word got out to not mess with us. But something about having two ounces of searing hot lead projected at you, at over 200 miles per hour, changes a person. We were more cautious after that.
The parallels between that night and this one make me nervous. We had been on a roll then, like we were now, of getting the job done. We were, and are, seriously distracted by one another and a feeling in my gut was giving me a vague warning.
Everything about tonight worried me. Trish began cursing when she realized that she had left her spare phone battery on top of the TV at home. She was going on about her phone battery while I was quietly pondering us. The appearance of the necklace added a new dimension to our relationship problems. When I got on the train I was desperate, but now I had hope. Why had she worn it? She wasn’t overly superstitious. I don’t know how to proceed from here. Should I jump on the chance to get her back before the moment passes? Or do I wait and let nature take its course? Or am I still buzzing from the cigarette that I hot boxed before I got on the subway? Maybe the necklace meant nothing.
The damp stink of the subway brought back memories of when Trish and I would do this sort of thing every week, it seemed. We would saddle up like Bonnie and Clyde, or sometimes Donald and Yvonne, and slip into some big opulent office building. We rob from the wicked and give to the evil, it seemed. It was fun; stealing trade secrets or destroying design plans to a new type of automatic weapon. Now it was just a job.
I couldn’t put my mind on the mission where it belonged. My heart thumped in my chest. I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh out loud. I look at her and almost do laugh. She is looking over the file folder that she had stuck in her attaché case, which reminded me that I had left the schematics that I should be looking at in my car, as if nothing was amiss. It almost made me mad the way she put up this invincible exterior. On the outside she was as hard as a tank, regardless what was going on inside. She learned as a child, growing up in Queens with her dad, how to be tough and survive at all costs. The look on her face was starting to make me really mad when she looked up at me. I didn’t notice that I had been staring. How could one person draw so much love and hate out of another person. Hate was a bad word. Anger was more like it.
I look up to see that we are two stops away. I start to tell her but she just nods, like she already knew that. I resigned not to press relational issues with Trish, at least not tonight. I have a big job to do. Trish needs me tonight. I put on a good front, but I was not really nervous about the security system that I had to trick. In truth, I am still years ahead of the game. It is fun to me. But to Trish, it is more. The job defines who she is as a person, in her mind. So I can’t let her down. I will just have to live with my what-if’s until she has worked out whatever demons she is fighting. Until then, I will play 007 and keep dreaming. The subway squeaks to a halt and we jump off.