Dying Is My Business

Two

The night-black Ford Explorer was a gift from some rich businessman Underwood pulled a job for, back before my time. I didn’t know the details. Underwood said it was better that way. But the Explorer was perfect for collection jobs. It was big enough to be imposing, the kind of car you didn’t want to get in the way of, and had enough room in the back to hold whatever Underwood sent me to collect—computer equipment, works of art, briefcases full of money. Collector, I thought. It was a fancy name for a thief.

But this was the first time I’d ever been sent to collect a person. What was Underwood planning to do with Bennett once I brought him in? I thought of Underwood’s black door again and shuddered. I put it from my mind. I was hired muscle, paid to do, not think.

I took the BQE back to Brooklyn. The traffic wasn’t too bad this late at night. Bennett sat in the backseat with his hands tied behind his back. He stared out the window like he was trying to put two and two together but kept coming up with the wrong number. When I exited the expressway and steered the Explorer onto Flatbush Avenue, he finally found his tongue.

“Maddock,” he said. “I left him behind to dispose of your body. What happened to him?”

I glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “He’s dead.” I didn’t fill him in on the details, but it was the same every time, for all nine of my deaths. The thing inside me, whatever it was that brought me back time and again, did so by siphoning the life out of whoever was unfortunate enough to be closest to me. It was like there was only so much life to go around, and every new life it gave me had to be taken from someone else. I didn’t know why, but for some reason I wasn’t allowed to stay dead. Then again, after surviving nine different deaths, maybe it wasn’t smart to start looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Bennett was quiet a moment. “Maddock had a wife and kids.”

“Maybe he should have gone into a different line of work,” I said.

Bennett kept talking. “The girl’s going to grow up to be a real heartbreaker, but the boy?” He shook his head. “Dumb as a rock, just like his dad. Like his dad was, anyway. Before you killed him.”

Probably, he was lying about the wife and kids. I said, “Nice try. Underwood wants to see you, and I’m not going back empty-handed.”

Bennett smirked and looked out the window again. “Why not? I think we both know there’s nothing he could do to you. How do you punish a man who walks away from a gunshot to the chest?”

Suddenly I wished the radio in the dashboard worked. At least then I could ignore Bennett instead of letting his words get under my skin. He was right, Underwood couldn’t kill me any more than Maddock could, or any of the others who’d tried, but I wasn’t working for Underwood because I was afraid of him. I was working for him because he was the best chance I had of finding the answers I was looking for: Who was I? Why couldn’t I remember anything before a year ago? Why didn’t I stay dead? Underwood had connections all over New York City, criminals and crooked cops alike. If anyone could turn over the right stones to find the truth it was him. All he asked in return was that I run some odd jobs for him. Be his collector. I owed him for everything I had. Even my name. It was Underwood who’d given me the name Trent to tide me over until we found my real one. It’s a Celtic name, he’d said. It means prosperous. And you, my friend, with your special gift, are definitely going to help me prosper.

I looked at Bennett in the rearview. “So what did you do?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“You must have done something pretty bad if Underwood sent me to bring you in,” I said, though I wondered why I was bothering. Not that long ago, Bennett had ordered his enforcer to kill me. The odds of him wanting to play Confession were pretty damn slim. Still, I was curious, and the worst that could happen was he’d tell me to go fuck myself. “What was it? Did you steal from him?”

Bennett barked out a laugh. “Like that son of a bitch has anything I want.”

“What, then?” I pressed.

“Jesus, you don’t even know the man you’re working for, do you? Underwood’s a collector, like you, only he sends his errand boy to do it for him. Art, rare books, gemstones—the weirder and uglier the better. Stuff the real nut jobs in Park Avenue penthouses pay top dollar for. With all the weird shit he specializes in, I guess it was only a matter of time before he started collecting freaks like you, too.”

I tensed at the word. I wanted to shove it back into Bennett’s mouth with my fist, but I let it slide. “So what does Underwood want from you?”

“Information,” Bennett said. “But we’ve got history, him and me, bad history. He knows no amount of money is going to buy my good graces. Not anymore. The only way I’m going to give it up to a bastard like him is if he forces it out of me, and he knows that. As soon as I caught wind he was on my tail I thought he would come for me himself. I thought he would at least show me that much respect, but instead he sends you. Fucking Night of the Living Dead.”

That was the second time Bennett had poked at me about it. He was fishing for information, but I wasn’t about to give him any. The way I saw it, if I couldn’t die, it was no one’s damn business but my own.

“You sound like you’ve never seen someone wear a bulletproof vest before,” I said. It was a stupid lie. It sounded ridiculous the minute I said it.

Bennett’s eyes flashed from the backseat. He saw through the lie instantly. “You could use some lessons in the art of bullshit. No, you were dead, pal. As dead as can be. Maddock felt for a pulse. I trained him to be thorough like that, but I didn’t need the confirmation. I’ve seen enough dead bodies to know what they look like. And you, errand boy, were a fucking corpse.”

I shook my head. I’d started the lie, as unconvincing as it was, and now I had to stick with it. “You’re wrong. It was a vest.”

“One that stops bullets and also prevents anyone from finding a pulse? Must be a hell of a vest. Wish we’d had those when I was in the Army.”

I gritted my teeth and kept my eyes on the road. What did I care what Bennett thought? It wasn’t like he could hold it over me. I’d probably never see him again after this anyway. Most likely, no one would. He would disappear behind the black door like the others.

“Don’t know why I was so surprised anyway,” Bennett continued. “It’s not like you’re the first man I’ve seen come back from the dead.”

I glanced into the rearview to meet Bennett’s eyes.

“Oh, that got your attention, did it?”

I scowled. “If you’ve got something to say, Bennett, just say it.”

“I was in Kuwait in ’ninety-one,” he said. “My unit was working with some Brits to breach one of the minefields the Iraqis had planted all over the southern part of the country. We could only work during the day, though. It was too dangerous at night, so we spent the nights handing out candy to the local kids. You know, trying to win hearts and minds, all that bullshit. One day, when we were about halfway through the minefield, this orphan boy, just a little thing dressed all in rags, came running out toward us. Guess he thought we had candy for him. This one Brit, Sully, was the first to see him. He broke away from the rest of us and ran for the kid to try to warn him away, but I guess Sully forgot where to step. He triggered a land mine and got blown fifty feet across the sand. We all rushed over to help him, but we knew it was too late. No one could survive a blast like that.

“Except when we got there, Sully wasn’t dead anymore. He didn’t even look banged up. He was just lying there on the sand, staring up at the sun, as surprised as we were that he was in one piece. He told us later he didn’t remember the explosion, that everything just went black and he saw a tunnel and a bright light, the whole shebang like right out of the fucking Bible. Then he was back on the sand like nothing had happened. None of us could explain it, least of all him.”

My mouth went dry. My palms felt clammy on the steering wheel. Another man who couldn’t die? Did that mean there were others like me out there? If there were, it was possible they had answers. They might even know my real name.

Bennett kept talking. “A couple of weeks later we were doing recon in some godforsaken, bombed-to-hell village outside Kuwait City when a sniper got him. Hit him right between the eyes. Sully was dead before he hit the ground. This time he stayed dead.”

My shoulders slumped. Sully wasn’t like me after all. I should have known—Sully had seen a bright light, but I never saw anything when I died, only an unending darkness. Maybe there wasn’t anyone else like me. Maybe I was unique, some kind of mutation, an accident of nature, and there were no answers. That was the way the world worked, wasn’t it? It didn’t give a damn about anyone, it just kept turning like some inexorable machine.

Bennett leaned forward from the backseat until his face filled the rearview mirror. “Maybe you’ve got a lucky streak going, just like Sully did. But you gotta ask yourself, errand boy, when’s your luck going to run out? You can only cheat death for so long before it comes to collect.”

I ignored him, turning the car onto Empire Boulevard. Normally a major thoroughfare jammed with traffic, it was deserted at this hour—3:21 a.m. by the clock on the dashboard. I was able to drive the length of the boulevard quickly, passing darkened storefront churches, closed beauty salons, and West Indian restaurants with their gates down. When I saw the gas station coming up, I slowed the car.

The Shell station was a derelict from another decade, shuttered for going on twenty years. The pumps were dry, and the only things on the shelves inside the convenience mart were cobwebs and rat droppings. It was what was under the station that mattered. Back in the 1960s, the original owner had bought into the Red Scare so fully that he’d built a fallout shelter beneath it. It made the perfect base of operations for someone like Underwood who didn’t want to be found. I pulled up to the chain-link fence and got out of the car to unlock the gate. I glanced up at the sign that towered over me. The S had fallen off years ago, leaving the word HELL written across the sign’s faded yellow clamshell shape in enormous red letters. Underwood got a big kick out of that.

I drove around the back of the station, locked the gate again behind us, and then opened the back door of the car. I grabbed Bennett’s shoulders and hefted him out.

He squirmed out of my grasp. “Get your hands off me, you freak.” He took a deep breath and held his chin high. His attempt at dignity would have been a lot more impressive if we hadn’t been standing in an abandoned gas station parking lot. “Which way?”

“This way,” I said. I guided Bennett around the back of the station to the storm doors at the base of the rear wall, keeping one hand on the plastic tie between his wrists in case he tried to run. Then I said, “I’m going to let go for a second. You’re not going to try anything, are you?”

“What if I did?” he asked. “Would you kill me like Maddock?”

Not like Maddock, I thought.

I let go of the plastic tie and pulled open the storm doors. Below, cement steps descended into a murky darkness. I guided Bennett down the steps until we reached the dirt floor at the bottom. Before us was a metal door embedded in a cement wall. The old fallout sign was still bolted next to the door, three yellow triangles inside a black circle, faded and dented with age. I gave the special knock Underwood had taught me, then heard the sound of a bolt being pulled back. The door swung inward. A hulking shape stood in the doorway—Big Joe, one of Underwood’s enforcers. He was six foot five with shoulders that looked broad enough to scrape the walls of the narrow hallway behind him.

Big Joe sized up Bennett, then turned to me with an all-too-familiar glare of hostility. “Took you long enough, T-Bag.” There’s a cliché about organized crime henchmen being men of few words. It’s a cliché for a reason. We’re not exactly eloquent. “Underwood was expectin’ your sorry ass half an hour ago.”

“There were some complications,” I said.

“Big surprise. There’s always complications with you.” Big Joe stepped aside to let us in, then closed and locked the door. “He’s waitin’ for you inside.”

I escorted Bennett past Big Joe and into the hallway.

Bennett snickered. “T-Bag? Really?”

Annoyed, I kept my mouth shut and pushed him forward.

“Do you even know what tea bag means?” Bennett pressed. “He must really hate you.”

Hate wasn’t a strong enough word for the way Big Joe felt about me. He blamed me for the death of Ford, Underwood’s collector before me. Ford and Big Joe had been tight. If Big Joe thought he could get away with it, he would slit my throat as payback in a heartbeat. Not that I would stay dead, but he was the kind of guy who’d do it anyway just to blow off steam.

A string of work lamps lit the hallway, clamped along the seams between the walls and ceiling. As we walked deeper, the constant hum of the portable generator grew more audible. Bennett shivered and hugged himself for warmth. Our breath clouded in front of us. For some reason, Underwood kept it freezing cold in the fallout shelter, using the generator to power several portable air-conditioning units set up throughout the space. Just one of his many peculiar eccentricities. The hallway emptied out into a large, cement-walled room that was lit by bright standing lamps and a ceiling fixture. The walls were stained with a brownish-yellow tinge from cigarette smoke. Dark circles from extinguished butts spotted the red and tan Oriental rug on the floor. There were two gray metal doors in the right wall and another door in the left. The black door. I averted my eyes from it. In the middle of the room, a wide table stood cluttered with empty pizza boxes, drained liquor bottles, and a couple of small crates of stolen goods. Directly under the table was a big steel lockbox containing a cache of handguns.

Underwood’s second enforcer, a muscular, neckless bull of a man who went by the name Tomo, was sitting on a folding metal chair. He stood up as soon as he saw us enter. He straightened his shirt’s hem over the butt of the gun tucked into his pants.

Underwood himself sat on a reclining easy chair on the far side of the table. He had his legs up and his arms folded behind his head like he was enjoying a lazy afternoon in his backyard. Dark black sunglasses masked his eyes. He was never without them, even inside or at night. When I first met him, I thought he might be blind. He wasn’t. He was just the kind of guy who always wore sunglasses because he thought it made him look intimidating, imposing. In the Brooklyn crime world, appearances were everything.

“There he is, the man of the hour,” Underwood said, getting up and coming around the table. As he came closer, the smell of his cologne was overwhelming. Underwood practically bathed in Obsession for Men, another of his eccentricities, but of course no one dared tell him to dial it down. “Did our friend here give you any trouble, Trent?”

“Nothing I couldn’t handle,” I replied.

Underwood turned to Bennett. “So glad you could join us, Mr. Bennett. I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”

“Go fuck yourself, Underwood,” Bennett spat.

Underwood smiled a thin, closed-mouth grin. “Tomo, would you take our guest in back, please?”

Tomo stepped forward. He grabbed Bennett by the arm and dragged him toward the black door.

“You’re not going to get what you want, Underwood,” Bennett shouted. “I don’t care what you do to me.” Tomo opened the door and pulled Bennett inside. Before the door slammed shut again, I caught a glimpse of a single wooden chair in the middle of a bare room. The chair had straps across the armrests and on the two front legs. There was a drain in the cement floor beneath it. I felt cold all over.

Underwood turned back to me and noticed the bullet hole in my shirt. “So it happened again,” he said. I nodded. “And it was just like before? You’re okay?”

“I’m not dead yet,” I said, and handed him Bennett’s snub-nosed revolver.

Underwood pocketed the gun. Then he laughed and tapped me lightly on the cheek with his open palm. The potent, musky scent of his cologne tickled my nose. “Good dog. See, what did I tell you? You’re a miracle, Trent. We’re going to do amazing things together, you and me. So do me a favor and lose the long face, okay?” He pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket, peeled off a few, and handed them to me. “Get some rest, you’ve earned it. Once I get what I need from Bennett, I’m going to have a big job for you. Your biggest yet. There’s a lot riding on this one, and I’ll need my best man on it. You’re my best man, aren’t you, Trent?”

“Sure,” I said. I pocketed the money. The black door glared at me like the eye of the devil.

Underwood made guns out of his fingers and pointed them at me. “I knew I could count on you. You’re my go-to guy!” He opened the black door and went inside, blocking my view of whatever was happening in there. When the door slammed shut again I was left standing alone in the room.

I sighed and approached the first of the gray doors in the opposite wall, the one that led to my room. With no home of my own, Underwood had given me the room rent-free. At the start it had struck me as a generous act of friendship, but now, suddenly, I wondered if it was something else. If maybe he wanted me close so he could keep an eye on me, like a pet you don’t quite trust.

From the corner of my eye I saw the second gray door swing silently open. I turned. Peeking out from behind the door was a woman. She had a thin face, big eyes so dark they almost looked black, and long, ragged black hair that fell in slender wisps across her features. She was Underwood’s wife, or girlfriend. To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what the status of their relationship was. Underwood never talked about his personal life, only business. But she was never far from his side. She never spoke a word to me, or to anyone as far as I knew. In the year I’d been here I had yet to hear Underwood address her by name. Maybe she didn’t have one.

She glared at me, her eyes narrowing. I hated when she did that, which was all the time. I got the feeling she was scared of me, or disgusted by me. Maybe both.

She disappeared behind the door again, and I went into my room. The cement walls there were just as bare as in the main room, but unlike the main room there was no rug, just more cement that felt cold and hard against my feet when I took off my shoes. I’d never bothered to decorate the room in any way. It would have been like admitting this was where I would always live, that I’d never find my real home, and I refused to accept that.

A twin-sized bed, rescued from a garbage dump, rested along one wall, its metal frame speckled with rust, the mattress moldy and stained. I sat down on the bed. I wondered what was happening to Bennett on the other side of the black door. I expected to hear the sounds of torture coming through the walls, the high-pitched whir of a drill or the meaty slap of fists hitting flesh. I expected to hear Bennett scream. I waited a long time, but the sounds never came.

In a way, the silence was worse.