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A Little Off the Top

Bob Strother

    God the Father and Sunny Jesus, what the fuck was she doing?
    She walked into the restaurant just before 7:30 in the evening—an older place, soft lighting, polished wooden floors, and air redolent with the fragrance of fresh baked bread. It wasn’t crowded. A few leather-backed booths had groups of two or three diners each, but there were only two men sitting alone. One was older, with unruly white hair and an owlish face. The other was perhaps forty years old, had a strong jawline, and was reading a book. That part seemed out of character, she thought, but then again what did she know?
    She hung her coat on a rack near the door and stepped over to the bartender. “I’m meeting a Mr. Gray,” she said. The bartender pointed to the rear of the dining room, and for a moment, she thought he was directing her to the owlish-looking gentleman. Then he said, “The guy with the book.”
    “Thanks.” She headed for the table, and as she approached, the man stood and said, “I’m Seth Gray. You must be Carrie Hartley.” They shook hands, and he waited for her to sit before he eased back into his own chair. A brief silence ensued, and she felt awkward, not knowing how to start. She glanced down at the drink in front of him where three olives, impaled on a tiny plastic sword, lay suspended in clear liquid. A bead of condensation hung precariously from the stemmed glass rim.
    He followed her gaze. “They make an excellent martini here. Would you like one?”
    “I hear they’re back in fashion these days.”
    He lifted the sword from the glass, extracted an olive from its slender blade, and popped it into his mouth. “They never went out of fashion as far as I’m concerned.”
    “Maybe I will have one,” she said.
    He signaled the bartender, pointed to his glass, and held up two fingers. Then he looked over her shoulder toward the restaurant’s front windows. “I hope you didn’t drive in all this mess. It’s really nasty out there tonight.”
    She shook her head, grateful for something to talk about other than the real reason she was there. “I took MARTA. They have a stop just down the block.”
    “That’s one nice thing about Atlanta; you can use the transit system to go just about anywhere —even the hinterlands like this.”
    Carrie shrugged. “I wouldn’t call Lawrenceville the hinterlands, but I was sort of surprised you wanted to meet here.”
    The waitress delivered their drinks, and the man waited until they were alone before responding. “What, you thought we’d be meeting in some dingy backstreet bar in the city? Christ, what did Clancy tell you about me? Actually, I own half a dozen car washes between here and Decatur. The clientele’s nicer here and the taxes are lower.”
    She took a sip from her martini. The clear, crisp taste was exactly what she needed and she told him so.
    “They have a great rib-eye, too,” he said. “We could order a couple if you like.”
    “No, I hadn’t really planned to stay that long.” Why was it so hard to get to the point? They both knew why she was there, in that restaurant, at his table. She turned and glanced back to the window. The rain had picked up, pelting the glass with big drops and painting fuzzy haloes on the lights of passing cars.
    “I would’ve had to take MARTA even if the weather were nice,” she said.
    “You don’t own a car? I thought everybody in Atlanta had a car.”
    “It was his car.”
    “His car,” he said. Then a knowing look passed over his face. “Oh, you mean his car.”
    Might as well get down to it, she thought. “His car, his house, everything was his. But I paid my own way. I did all the shopping, paid the utilities and cleaning bills. I even bought new curtains.”
    “But now you’ve parted ways,” he said.
    “I rented a small apartment close to downtown.” She sighed and looked away. “The first couple of years were okay, you know, good even. But the last few months were hell.” She took a moment to dig around in her purse, finally producing a folded sheet of white paper and handing it to him. “And now, we have this. It’s a copy. He has the original.”
    The man studied the paper closely. In the dim glow from the table’s centerpiece candle, his face was all angles and shadows. He wasn’t handsome; there was a hardness about him, but his eyes—she couldn’t tell if they were green or blue; she thought probably blue—softened it a bit.
    He refolded the paper and returned it to her. “This says you borrowed ten thousand dollars from him and promised to repay it.”
    “It was for a trip we took to Europe. It was all his idea, his treat, he said. The note was so he could have some kind of tax write-off or something.” She could feel the tears starting to well up in her eyes and blinked them back. “I didn’t know. We were happy together at the time. I had no idea he’d turn around and pull something like this.”
    Gray toyed with the bottom of his martini glass. “Well, I suppose that brings us to the business at hand.”
    She leaned forward, clenching her hands to keep them from trembling. “Ten thousand dollars is all I have in the world! I’ve got to buy a car. I had to pay two month’s rent up front plus a cleaning deposit. I need that money; it’s my safety net.”
    “I can send a couple of guys around,” Gray said, “get him to back off. It would cost five hundred dollars.”
    “That sounds reasonable. I can afford that much to scare him a little if you’re sure it would work.”
    “Oh, it would work all right, done correctly. You just need to understand a few things first.”
    A couple came into the restaurant carrying shopping bags. As they passed Carrie’s table, she could smell the rain on their clothes. They were young and laughing and, for a few seconds, Carrie’s mind wandered back to happier times.
    When the couple had settled into one of the far booths, Gray continued. “You need to ask yourself how far you want this to go. Let me explain. If a couple of my guys push him up against a wall and tell him to back off, he’ll probably be frightened and agree to anything. But if they don’t get physical with him, he might go home and start to think about it and get angry.”
    “I can see how that might happen.”
    “But if they get physical with him, work his ribcage a little, make him feel it for a few days afterward, he’ll be too scared to get angry.”
    “I guess I can see that, too.”
    Gray plucked another olive from the sword and chewed it slowly. “My guys are very professional. It’s just a job with them, but they’re also human, and sometimes things happen.”
    “What do you mean?” Carrie asked.
    “Well, say you go into a barbershop—not you specifically, of course, because you’d go to a hairdresser, not a barber—and if you don’t mind me saying so, it looks like you go to a really good one. I like the way your hair frames your face.”
    For a moment, he looked almost boyish. Carrie wondered if he might be blushing.
    “Anyway,” he said, “you ask the barber to take a little off the top, and while he’s cutting, you flinch or move a certain way, and he messes up. So now he’s got to take a little more off the top to even things out, and before you know it, you’re practically bald.”
    She smiled. “Could you be a tad less metaphorical?”
    Now he was grinning. “I’m sorry. I guess I read too much. I’ll try again, but first let me ask you a couple of questions.”
    “Okay.”
    “How big a guy is he?”
    “Big, I guess, but not as big as you.”
    “Does he work out—go to a gym or like that?”
    “He’s got a membership. He went a lot at first, but now maybe once a month or so.”
    “Yeah,” Gray said, “it usually turns out that way.”
    “Do you work out?” Carrie asked. She’d noticed the way the fabric of his jacket pulled tight around his upper arms.
    “I do,” he said. “I started when I was on a two-year ... uh, let’s call it a sabbatical, and it got to be a habit. I have a workout room at home.”
    “I thought so.”
    “What about martial arts? Has he had any training of that kind?”
    “Not that I know of,” she said. “I think he’d of bragged about it if he had.”
    “All right, last question. Does he carry?”
    “Carry?”
    “Does he carry a gun? Lots of people have concealed carry permits these days. Don’t go out unless they’re packing.”
    She shook her head. “I’ve never known him to even own a gun, much less carry one.”
    “Are you sure?” Gray asked.
    “I’m not absolutely sure. It’s easier to know a person has a gun, rather than if they don’t.”
    “I see what you mean,” Gray said. “Well, we’ll have to be prepared for him to have one anyway. We need to address all contingencies.” He drained the last of his martini. “Now, what I was saying earlier, in an obtuse way, was that you have to be prepared for contingencies, too. We can’t always know in advance exactly how far these things will go.”
    Carrie nodded, still uncertain.
    “For example, if he fights back, gets in a lucky punch and hurts one of my guys, things may escalate a bit. Or, say he keeps coming back for more; my guys have to keep dishing it out. Who knows, in a case like that, he might wind up in the hospital, or even worse.”
    “Worse?”
    Gray leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “I once heard of a guy who died just from taking a hard punch in the gut. I’m not saying that’s going to happen in this case. Ninety-five times out of a hundred, it doesn’t. It’s just something you need to be prepared for.”
    “Jesus,” Carrie said. “I hate the bastard, but I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life with his death on my conscience.”
    “Look,” Gray said. “I’m going to the restroom for a minute, and then I’m going to get another martini. Think about what I said, about how far it could go. When I get back, let me know if you still want to proceed.”
    Carrie watched him walk down a long hallway off the main dining room. She couldn’t help but notice that, for a large man, he moved with an almost alethic grace. When he was gone, she used a finger to turn around the book he’d been reading when she’d entered the restaurant. It was titled Contact and was authored by Carl Sagan, whom she’d heard of, but couldn’t remember where. When he returned a few minutes later, he had not one but two martinis.
    “I brought you another one,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
    She took the glass from his hand, aware of a slight tremor in her fingers.
    He sat down. “So, what do you think?”
    “I think you just talked yourself out of five hundred dollars.”
    “It’s okay,” he said, smiling. “You seem like a nice lady. I wouldn’t want you second-guessing yourself later.”
    “I mean I want this to be finished, and I’d like to hurt him a little, but that’s because I’m angry.”
    “Anybody would be,” Gray said.
    “But when I get past the anger, I sure don’t want him dead, or even in the hospital. I just don’t want to give him all my money.”
    “Maybe you don’t have to,” he said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “See, it’s probably not a business thing with him. From what I gather, he’s got plenty of money already. He just wants to stick it to you for dumping him. So what you need to do is reach a settlement.”
    “A settlement?” she asked.
    “Sure. What would you be willing to part with, moneywise, to make this all go away—a couple of thousand, maybe?”
    “Sure, I could do two thousand if I had to; it’s a lot better than ten.”
    “Suppose I went and talked to him, advised him he should take the two thousand and cut his losses. I can be pretty persuasive when I need to be.”
    “How much would that cost me, for you to do that?”
    “Oh, I’d do it free of charge. It’s no biggie, just me having a conversation with a guy. It’s not like I’m a lawyer or anything. I’m just a guy who washes cars for a living.”
    “Among other things,” she added. “And you’re a reader, too. I never figured you for a reader.”
    “That was something else I started doing while on my sabbatical. It’s odd, you know. You’d think prison would be the ideal place to read, but it’s not. It’s too noisy, something going on all the time.”
    “Gee,” Carrie said, “Here I thought I’d have a chance to read all the classics when I went to prison, but if it’s noisy, screw it. I’m not going.”
    “You’re funny,” Gray said.
    “And you’re not at all what I expected,” Carrie replied.
    “Is that bad or good?”
    Carrie leaned back in her chair, folded her hands in her lap, and looked into Gray’s eyes. She decided they were green, after all. “It’s good, I think.”
    The corners of his mouth curled up just the slightest bit. “Is there something going on here?”
    Carrie nodded. “I think something’s going on.”
    Gray checked his watch. “It’s still early. How about we order a couple of those rib-eyes I mentioned earlier? I could run you back into the city afterward.”
    Carrie shrugged. “Sure, why not? A person’s got to eat, right?” She turned and glanced back at the restaurant’s big front window. “I think the rain has stopped.”



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