“Quit talking like a brother, motherfucker. I heard. I know. Me and you got business, bitch.”

  “That’s right: It’s just business, U.”

  “Bullshit.”

  He hung up. I pulled into Carol’s driveway. Above, clouds I could almost touch. The sky had descended. Soon, astronomers could drop their telescopes.

  “You could lay a hand on Uranus,” Harley would have said.

  “Oh, Chet,” Carol said.

  What the fuck? With a pair of Adidas visible just outside the bedroom, I heard Uranus say, “He’s here? Get the fuck out of my house, Chet.”

  I ran. I could have shot him right there, but I ran.

  I sped home, for Uranus drove a souped up Saturn; he hadn’t quite made it yet. I steered with an alcoholic’s coordination, as somewhere deep inside, tiny needles injected adrenaline in my toes, ears, tongue, nose. Everything tingled and twinkled. My body radiated. But there was something else. Carol was nothing but a pseudo fag-hag and now had switched to the old school rap game. No loss. Did I say I loved her? I didn’t. Now I almost wanted to send her a thank you card, a bouquet of roses for a reason to kill Uranus. Double jeopardy and here’s the final answer: “A gun does what to fake gangsta rappers?”

  I called Harley. “You were right,” I said, breathless from my fight and flight reaction. “That son of a bitch is at my girl’s house, in her bed.”

  Harley laughed and laughed. He finally said, “Fuck, that’s funny.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “‘We’ll see’ what?”

  “What we see.”

  Leave ’em hanging, they say, but I hadn’t yet knotted the noose.

  At home, it was nearly dusk. I had a small home in a town that couldn’t be called a town, but there was nothing else to call it and so we called it a town. We were free of police, except the county fellas, two, I think, and the state cops, plentiful but usually on the freeways. In many ways, this was a world of slow-motion anarchy, where anything could go unseen and unheard yet rarely deserved notice. Once in a while, we made the nearest paper’s blotter: “Driver runs over mailbox, Route 3. Headlight found at scene.” A more perfect place for what would commence could not be devised, not even Antarctica, which was losing snow as Vermont gained it. Meanwhile, the stars and soon the planets appeared.

  I waited so many hours. I knew why: Uranus was well-known for lengthy sessions, and not the recording variety. He might have moved up to a Benz had he spent more time in the studio. I listened to his records and tried to absorb his bravado.

  “You stick to avocado dip,” Harley would have said. Everything rhymed in our world, but there was little reason.

  Poor Uranus. Orphaned in Brooklyn, somehow ending up here in Vermont with foster parents, white, of course, and so, as he explained in every interview, “It’s like I got white hair, but I’m dyeing my roots, know what I’m sayin’?” He came to us with a demo tape. It wasn’t bad, nor was it particularly good, but somewhere close enough to good that we thought we might groom him. Harley encouraged U to commit petty crimes. He said, “Go to New York, show up at a club, flash a gun, and let the cops kick your ass.” Uranus was happy to oblige but had so far lost three cases against the cops; we couldn’t afford lawyers. Harley didn’t care. “Art requires sacrifice,” he’d say.

  We sent Uranus on “tours” of local bars. Sometimes the kids came, and sometimes the adults, and a few times I sat in the audiences and studied the misplaced jaws of mystified homo sapiens.

  We had an old school bus for these tours. We painted it black and gold and put a minifridge inside. Harley learned how to crack hotel fridges, and we’d restock the bus so that the artists thought they traveled first class. Harley drove. I gave directions from Yahoo maps. Sometimes we ended up in New Hampshire and had to cross back to Vermont. The artists never cared. We had a Playstation rigged in the back. We drove to the sound of gunfire and John Madden. In the mornings, afternoons, and nights, the bus filled with pot smoke. Sometimes Harley took a hit or two, and then the jokes started. I memorized those jokes, every single one.

  In a way, it was my job to raise these kids. Harley called me “mom,” and soon the artists did, too. “Maybe you want to try a love song, like LL Cool J,” I’d tell Uranus, just like a mom.

  “Fuck that shit.”

  “What about politics?”

  “Bullets and pussy,” Harley would interrupt. “Listen to dad, not mom.”

  “What do you need me for, then?”

  “To read the maps. Girls are better with directions. Guys know it. That’s why we get so mad.”

  I wanted to say, “Ohhhhhhh, you make me so angry,” but Harley would have replied, “You sound like a fruitbat, fruitfly.”

  A door rattled. House settling? No, that only happened on the Brady Bunch, the one where the kids haunt the house. My house had settled forty years before and wasn’t moving anywhere. Therefore, I knew the planets had met the earth’s surface.

  “Uranus is here,” U said as his Adidas shoe chopped the door in half.

  He reached into the pockets of his big down coat. “Yeah,” I wanted to say, “I know you got a gun, Uranus.” He paused and looked at the ceiling, trying to remember something, and then he rattled:

  I see your derriere

  in Montpelier,

  I swear to God,

  I’m gonna make you odd.

  See, you was even before,

  Two balls, same story,

  Now you got one.

  No guts, no glory.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” I said, aiming the gun at his zipper.

  “You best not even think it.”

  “Take the gun out,” I said. “You know this dialogue, right? You watch a lot of action movies. Take the gun out very slowly, where I can see it.”

  He did.

  “Aim it at your foot.”

  “I lift this gun, you dead.”

  “You lift it once inch, you lose however many inches you got.”

  He sighted the gun on his left shoe. “Not my Adidas, man.”

  “Your shoe or your balls.”

  “Goddamn,” he said, making the face of a little boy about to be spanked.

  “This is going to hurt nobody but you.”

  “Man, yo, Chet, you practically my mom.”

  “And is that any way to treat your mother, by popping her girlfriend? Show some respect.”

  “We can work it out. Lemme talk.”

  “No more rhymes, U. I can’t take it.”

  “Fuck that, man. You wanna know the score? This is the deal. Harley dealt those tapes, the ones from that guy you signed. He said it wasn’t shit, anyway. He told me to go to Carol’s house. He told me to get you worked up, scare the shit out of you, so you was ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “Ready for killing, man. You the target. You was the target all along. Harley said, ‘Get him out of my life. I can’t stand him no more in the front seat next to me. I can’t stand him no more in the studio.’”

  “Yeah, but what about you? Maybe he wants you gone, too? Because the thing is, U, your records ain’t selling shit. Maybe he wants us both dead.”

  “Fuck, man,” Uranus said. “I never thought of that. But he couldn’t know that would happen.”

  “Either way, one of us dies, right? And if he’s lucky, you pull your gun, I pull mine: bam.”

  “Bam. Shit.”

  “That’s right, it’s shit, Uranus. So what are we gonna do about it?”

  “Kill the motherfucker,” he said, right on cue.

  “That’s right, U: Kill the motherfucker.”

  As I drove to the studio, U mumbled rhyming nonsense and Malice in Wonderland gibberish. It was too dark for Ansel Adams, as no flashcube could have lit our surroundings. In the canyon was another canyon that might send us for a ride, an invisible detour. After all, Harley could have been waiting for us. But I remembered then that Harley always drove the bus for another reason: He read maps worse than I did.

  “You gonna be ready?” I said.

  “You gonna be ready?”

  “I’m ready,” I said, patting my pocket. “Say, U, how many tracks we lay down for you so far?”

  “Got to be fifty. Maybe more. Why? You ain’t released ninety percent of ’em.”

  “I bet there might be more.”

  “Hell, yeah, there is. I’m just talking about the studio. At home, I got probably two hundred tracks. I even got those love songs you’re always crabbing about. But I can’t stand ’em. Worse than—excuse me—but worse than sleeping with Carol when I didn’t want to do it, know what I mean? Somebody else’s idea.”

  “True, but sometimes somebody else’s idea works out way better than they predicted, though maybe not for them.”

  I knew Harley would still be at the studio. It was an alibi, just in case the police came calling. “Me?” he’d say. “I was right here all night, in this chair. It’s a tragedy, is what it is. Who died, again?”

  I parked next to the bus. We were no Partridge Family, that’s for sure. Behind the bus was Harley’s car. He drove—I swear—a Mercury’ Somewhere, at least six other planets were involved in a plot I didn’t care to know about.

  We didn’t sneak. We didn’t prowl. We didn’t pick locks. The overconfident asshole had left the door ajar because the heat always ran too high. He was in the soundproof booth and we came in behind him. He spun to see us.

  “You worked it out, then?” Harley said. “I’m proud of you both.”

  Uranus slammed Harley’s head into the mixing board, leaving the imprint of an equalizer on top of the wrinkles. But Harley wasn’t out. He shook it off, and then he reached, of course, for a gun. I grabbed his arms.

  “Wait ’til I move and then shoot,” I said.

  “What? You shoot him.”

  “I left my gun at home,” I said.

  “I should kill you both.”

  “You listen to me, U: I’m gonna let go of his arms and step aside, and then you blast him. I know what I’m doing. You’ve got to trust me.”

  He looked at me. Did he see what I hoped he saw? I tried to encourage that vision: “I’m your mom, after all.”

  I took my chances and let go of Harley’s arms. There was a delay that I would soon apply in a most artistic fashion, and then Uranus fired.

  We waited. The universe was quiet. One might think planets would make a lot of noise, but not us, not until I explained, and then Uranus got it, every word.

  As president of the company, I waited three years. For once, I hired an attorney. It’s a wonder what notoriety can do, and an even bigger wonder that the police bought the story that I’d never known about the gun in U’s pocket. By the time he was released, Uranus had ten hit records, including two love songs sustained by a delay effect, which made U’s voice sound as big and open as the universe that had closed upon us.

  JEFF STRAND

  JEFF Strand is best known as the creator of Andrew Mayhem, hero of the novels GRAVEROBBERS WANTED (NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY), SINGLE WHITE PSYCHOPATH SEEKS SAME, and CASKET FOR SALE (ONLY USED ONCE). His most recent novel is the thriller PRESSURE.

  Jeff says, “When I write about killers, they tend to be of the ‘raging lunatic’ variety. They’re scary people, but in some ways a hitman is even scarier. When a serial killer is slicing you up with a knife stained with the blood of the rest of your family, at least you know he’s probably getting some insane pleasure out of the process. To a hitman, you’re nothing more than a paycheck. That’s cold.”

  Visit Jeff at www.JeffStrand.com.

  POOR CAREER CHOICE

  Jeff Strand

  IF YOU’RE LIKE ME, you spend a lot of time trying to joke your way out of socially awkward and/or potentially fatal situations. A good example of this took place one summer evening when I was relaxing in my recliner with the novel Whose Blood Is In My Popcorn?, which I’d been reading off and on for the past four years. I’m not an ambitious reader.

  I looked across the living room into the kitchen and saw an extremely large man holding an extremely large knife. He had long greasy hair, was wearing a black leather jacket that had metal spikes around the wrists, and I sort of got the impression that he had broken into my home to kill me.

  By “broken into,” of course, I mean that he’d probably just casually walked in through the door in the kitchen that my wife Helen was always reminding me not to leave unlocked. She’d never specifically used a man with a knife as an example, but I’m pretty sure this is the kind of thing she was referring to.

  “Are you here about the leaky faucet?” I asked.

  Not my all-time funniest comment, I’ll admit. Still, when you consider that I said it to a huge guy with a knife and a homicidal glimmer in his eye, it was a more than passable effort.

  He shook his head. “No. I’m not.”

  “Oh.”

  I considered my options. The only weapons I had readily available were the dog-eared paperback and a grape juice box. I’d already drank most of the juice, so the box probably wouldn’t even carry all the way across the living room if I threw it. However, the straw provided a defensive possibility.

  I considered making a run for it. But when I say that the man was “extremely large,” I don’t mean that he was an obese gentleman who would chase after me in a labored waddle. Though it was hard to tell under the jacket, he looked to be all muscle. And as he walked toward me, he moved with a grace and efficiency of motion that gave the impression that he could have me tackled to the ground and nicely decapitated before I even made it to the stairway.

  But maybe not. After all, I’m rather nimble myself. I decided to let this one play out and wait for the precise moment to act.

  “Are you Andrew Mayhem?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, a split-second before I realized that the more intelligent answer would be “No.”

  He stood in front of me and held up the knife. “I’ve been hired to kill you, Mr. Mayhem.”

  I lowered the recliner’s footrest. “By whom?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “You can say if you’re going to kill me, right? I promise not to scrawl the name in my own blood on the carpet.”

  He shook his head. “No, I’d get in trouble.”

  “If you’re going to kill me, you’ve at least got to let me know who wants me dead. Give my ghost something to avenge.”

  “I don’t know. . .”

  “It’s the least you could do.”

  “Hey, I waited two weeks for you to be alone in the house. I could’ve done this while your wife and kids were home. Would you want your wife and kids to see you die? Would you?”

  “Helen would kick your ass.”

  The hitman smiled. “She sure puts you in your place. Damn, but you’re whipped.”

  “Not whipped. Henpecked.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Y’know, you may be here to kill me, but you’re still a guest in my home. Let’s be respectful, okay?”

  “Fine with me. I’m not here to talk. I’m here to cut myself a slice of bitch.”

  I stared at him for a long moment.

  “Did you just say you’re here to cut yourself a slice of bitch?”

  He nodded.

  “Was that, like, a planned comment? Did you actually come in here with the intention of speaking those exact words?”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “It means that you’re a bitch, and I’m here to cut a slice of you.”

  “No, no, no, no, no, that doesn’t work at all. Trust me on this. Have you really said that to other human beings? What was their reaction?”

  “I haven’t said it to anybody else.”

  “Good. Don’t. What do you usually say in this situation?”

  The assassin looked a bit sheepish. “Actually, you’re my first hit.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, well, that explains it. I know that you were trying to sound all cold-blooded and stuff, but the only reaction you’re going to get is ‘Oh, crap, I’m gonna be murdered by a doofus.’ What’s your name?”

  “Victor.”

  “Hi, Victor.” I extended my hand politely. He didn’t shake it. I figured I probably should have seen that bit of rudeness coming and placed my hand back on my lap. “Listen, you need a catchphrase that doesn’t make you sound like a street punk. Something sinister but classy. Because I’ll be honest with you, right now I should be so scared that I can barely keep my urine on the inside, and I’m just not feeling it.”

  “I bet you’d feel it if I stuck this knife in you.”

  “I’m sure I would. But if you’re an assassin, you need to be memorable. You need to be stylish. I mean, any common hooligan can run somebody over with a car, but you, you’re the kind of guy who gets up close and personal with a knife. It’s all about the presentation. You need to leave a lasting impression.”

  Victor nodded almost imperceptibly, as if he were considering my advice. Then he scowled as if suddenly realizing that he’d become the kind of assassin who listened to helpful hints from people he was supposed to kill. “No, I don’t. You’ll be dead!”

  “Yeah, but this isn’t about me. It’s about you. I might be dead either way, but how would you feel if I died thinking that your hitman persona was sub-par?”

  Victor shrugged. “I get paid either way.”

  “Is it just about the money, though?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “I kill for money. That’s what an assassin does. When I slit your throat, I won’t feel a thing.”

  I wasn’t happy that the conversation had turned to slit throats, and I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “How many people have you killed?”

  “I told you, you’re my first.”

  “You haven’t killed anybody? Not even for recreation?”

  He shook his head.

  “What about animals?”

  “No animals.”

  “Have you ever flushed a goldfish?”

  “Look, I don’t need to have dozens of corpses stacked in my closet to deal with somebody like you. I can kill you. It’s not a problem.”