Another Clicker

The rain in the city didn’t fall; it leaked. It drifted down like dirty grease, sticking to the brick of the warehouse district and turning the crushed stone of the freight yards into a gray slurry.

Craig stood in the shadow of a rusted loading crane, his trench coat pulled up to his ears, watching the office across the street. The fourth-floor window was lit by the steady, jaundiced hum of a fluorescent tube. Through the dirty glass, he could see a silhouette leaning over a drafting table—a man who thought he was alone, a man who thought the five million dollars he’d skimmed from the municipal transit fund was still a secret.

Craig didn’t move. His boots were soaked through, the leather gone soft and cold against his toes, but he didn’t shift his weight. He had been standing there for three hours.

His hand went into his pocket. It didn’t go there by decision; it went there the way water found a drain.

His fingers brushed the crinkled cellophane of the soft pack, found the hard, square corner, and nudged one white cylinder up through the foil. It was an old ritual, smooth and practiced as a card dealer’s second deal. He pulled it out, tapped the filter against his thumbnail—tap, tap—and brought it to his lips.

The match came next. A red-tip safety match, scraped against the rough strip on the box.

Hiss.

The sulfur flared, blue and orange in the damp air, smelling of rotten eggs and old iron. Craig touched the flame to the tip, drew in his cheeks, and watched the red eye brighten in the dark.

Click.

It wasn’t a sound the match made. It was the sound of the world locking into place.

The smoke hit the back of his throat—dry, acrid, tasting of cured hay and charred paper. It didn’t feel like pleasure. Pleasure was something you chose, something soft that you welcomed. This was different. This was the master coming home, dropping his keys on the hall table, and the dog—the big, graying, scarred dog that was Craig—flattening its ears and wagging its tail because the heavy hand was finally on its neck.

Good boy, the smoke seemed to say as it filled his alveoli, scraping the grey fuzz off his brain. There it is. Now we can think.

Craig exhaled into the drizzle. The smoke dissolved instantly, grey ghosts mixing with the exhaust of a passing diesel truck.

He was a professional. In the trade, they called him a cleaner, though the word was too tidy for what he did. Craig was the man who arrived after the mess had already been made by amateurs—the politicians who thought they could play with wire-transfers, the cops who thought they could skim from the drug lockers, the middlemen who forgot that loyalty was a ledger item. Craig didn't leave bodies; he left voids. People just stopped appearing at their desks, stopped answering their phones, until their names became footnotes in files that the department’s internal affairs division quietly sealed and shoved into the back of a damp filing cabinet.

He was good at it because he didn't have an ego. He had a procedure.

And the procedure always started with the pack.

"You're killing yourself with those," a voice said from the darkness behind him.

Craig didn't jump. He didn't even turn his head immediately. He knew the boots; they had the squeak of cheap rubber soles that had been walked through salt slush. That was Richards. Richards was the agency’s handler for this district—a fat, gray-faced man who smelled of ham sandwiches and stale peppermint.

"Not fast enough," Craig muttered, the cigarette twitching between his lips as he spoke.

Richards stepped out from under the eaves of the crane, holding a black umbrella that was missing two ribs on the left side. Water dripped from the rim onto his collar. He peered across the street at the lit window.

"He's still at it," Richards said. "The accountant."

"Waters," Craig corrected. "His name is Waters. He’s got a wife in Queens who thinks he’s at a late-night audit for the sanitation board."

"He’s got five million in bearer bonds in a briefcase under that desk," Richards said, his tongue clicking against his teeth. "You got the stuff?"

"In the car."

"Clean?"

"As a whistle."

Richards reached into his own coat—not for a cigarette, but for a tin of mints. He shook one out, popped it into his mouth, and crunched down with a sharp pop. "Do it now. The rain’s supposed to turn to sleet by midnight. I don't want to be dragging a sack across the bridge in the slush."

"Ten minutes," Craig said.

Richards frowned, his small, wet eyes narrowing. "Why ten? You’ve been standing here smoking like a stove since nine."

"The ash isn't right," Craig said, staring down at the glowing tip between his fingers.

Richards stared at him, then let out a short, wet snort. "You're getting weird, Craig. Too many years in the damp. It's just a weed."

"It's not a weed," Craig said softly.

Richards didn't hear him. He was already turning back toward the alley where his sedan was parked with the engine idling, its tailpipe puffing white smoke into the dark. "Ten minutes. Then go. If he’s not in the river by midnight, I’m sending Hayes."

Hayes was twenty-four, had a flat-top haircut, and used a garrote made of piano wire that he’d bought at a music shop on 4th Street. He was sloppy. He left fibers. Craig took another drag, deep and cold, feeling the nicotine hit the small, dark center of his brain where the panic lived—the panic that the cigarette itself had dug out and hollowed out twenty years ago.

There, the smoke whispered. Quiet now. The room is safe.

***

The file on Waters was thick, but it could have been summarized in two words: Weak tea.

He was forty-five, balding, with teeth that were slightly too large for his gums. He wore cardigans with leather buttons and drove a beige sedan that smelled of wet dog. When the transit board’s computerized audit had spit out an error code three weeks ago, Waters hadn't fled to Brazil or bought a yacht. He had simply taken five million dollars in municipal development bonds, put them in a canvas bank bag, and rented a dingy fourth-floor office above a radiator repair shop on 9th Avenue, where he sat every night until two in the morning, staring at the serial numbers under a desk lamp as if he could love them into legitimacy.

Craig walked up the stairs of the radiator shop. The wood was old and dry, groaning under his weight like a ship’s timbers in a swell.

At the landing, he paused.

His hand went into his pocket.

The pack was there, but it felt lighter. There were only two left. He could feel the cardboard bending under the pressure of his thumb.

Not yet, he told himself. Do the work first.

He didn't draw a weapon. Craig didn't use guns—they made too much noise, and they left brass that some kid with a microscope in the basement of police headquarters could trace back to a batch sold in Paterson in '94. He used his hands, or he used the environment. Tonight, the environment was cooperating. Waters had left the fire door on the landing unlatched because the radiator in his office was hissing like an angry goose and he liked the draft.

Craig slipped through the door like grease through a sieve.

The office smelled of stale coffee and damp wool. Waters didn't hear him enter. The accountant was bent over his desk, a magnifying glass in his right hand, tracing the watermark on a thousand-dollar bond with the tip of his tongue between his lips.

"Mr. Waters," Craig said.

The man didn't jump; he simply collapsed inward, his breath leaving him in a long, wet wheeze. The magnifying glass slipped from his fingers, hitting the linoleum floor with a hollow clack.

He turned around slowly, his chair screaming on its casters. His face was the color of skim milk.

"Who—who are you?" Waters whispered. His hands went to the edge of the desk, his knuckles turning the color of lard. "I sent the—I sent the first installment back. I told them I wouldn't—"

"You didn't send anything back, Edward," Craig said, stepping closer. His boots left wet prints on the linoleum. "You bought a second-hand Grundig radio and three boxes of frozen shrimp. The board doesn't want the shrimp."

"I can give it back," Waters sobbed, his voice cracking into a high, childish treble. "It's all here. Every cent. Look—in the bag."

He pointed a trembling finger at the canvas sack under the desk.

Craig looked at it. It was just canvas. It was just cotton duck stamped with the seal of the city. Five million dollars of municipal asphalt and school bus tires, sitting in the dust between a wastepaper basket and an empty can of motor oil.

Craig felt a strange, cold clarity settle over him. It was the same clarity he felt when he looked down at the glowing red tip of a match in an alleyway. Everything was simple. Everything had a cause and a finish.

He reached down.

His hand didn't go to his pocket. It went to the canvas bag.

And then—without warning, without any logical reason—the small, gray, persistent voice in the back of his head started to scratch at the door.

Now, the voice said. You’ve done the hard part. The deadline is met. The room is cold. Reach in.

Craig froze. His fingers were an inch from the strap of the bag.

His mind didn't go to Waters. It didn't go to Richards waiting in the sedan with his mints. It went to the pack of cigarettes in his coat pocket.

There was one left. The last one. The one he’d been saving for the walk back to the river.

If you don't smoke it now, the voice whispered, sounding remarkably like his father, or his first sergeant, or any of the dozen men who had told him how to survive the winter of '88, you’re going to spend the whole three blocks thinking about it. You’ll be jumpy. You’ll make a mistake.

Craig stood up straight. He didn't look at Waters. He reached into his coat, pulled out the soft pack, and shook it.

Nothing rattled.

He pulled the pack apart with his thumb. The last cigarette was there, bent slightly in the middle where he’d leaned against the crane. The paper was frayed at the seam, a tiny little white tongue lolling out toward the filter.

He put it between his teeth.

He reached for the matches.

Click.

The flame flared. In the small, dim office, the orange light caught the grease on the window and the grey stubble on Waters’s chin.

Waters stared at him, his mouth open, waiting for the wire or the knife. Instead, he got the smell of burning Turkish leaf.

Craig drew the smoke deep into his lungs.

And for the first time in twenty-five years, the click didn't fix the room.

The room stayed wrong. The radiator kept hissing its ugly, dry steam. The rain kept tapping against the glass like a handful of small, cold fingers. The smell of Waters’s fear didn't go away; it just mixed with the vinegar-and-charcoal smell of the tobacco, creating something thick and nauseating in the back of Craig’s throat.

He looked down at the cigarette between his fingers.

It was small. It was pathetic, really. A little cylinder of dried weeds wrapped in bleached wood pulp, held together by cornstarch glue and engineered by three men in a glass tower in Richmond who were currently playing golf in Palm Beach. They had spent forty million dollars figuring out the exact millisecond of cortisol spike that would make a grown man stop what he was doing, walk out into the rain, and set fire to his own life one inch at a time.

They didn't want him to be calm. They wanted him to be handled.

Craig looked at Waters. The accountant was still sitting there, waiting for the end, his eyes wide and wet.

"You're shaking," Craig said.

Waters swallowed. "Please. I have a girl."

"I have a habit," Craig said.

He didn't kill him.

He didn't touch the bag.

Instead, Craig reached out with his left hand—the hand holding the cigarette—and jammed the glowing red tip directly into the soft flesh of his own forearm, right through the wool of his sleeve.

There was no sound except for a small, wet hiss and the smell of scorched serge and pork-rind skin.

Craig didn't flinch. He didn't make a sound. He just held it there for three seconds until the red went black, until the pain—sharp, clean, and real—burned every trace of the nicotine haze out of his frontal lobes.

Waters screamed, covering his face with his hands. "God! What are you—"

"Shut up," Craig said. His voice was lower than the radiator.

He pulled the stub out of his arm. A small circle of black cloth and pink skin was fused together in the crook of his elbow. It hurt like hell. It hurt with a clarity that made his teeth ache.

Craig dropped the cigarette butt onto the linoleum. He didn't step on it. He let it lie there, smoking against a stray speck of dust.

"Pack your bag," Craig told Waters.

The accountant looked up through his fingers, his eyes blinking through tears. "What?"

"Take the five million," Craig said, his voice level, hard as a railroad spike. "Take the beige car. Go to Buffalo. Don't go to Queens. Don't go to your office. If Richards calls, tell him I fell off the crane."

Waters stared at him, his brain stalling out on the gear. "You're... you're letting me go?"

"I'm busy," Craig said.

He turned around and walked out through the fire door.

***

The rain had turned to sleet by the time he hit the street. It hit his face like handfuls of salt, stinging the raw skin around his eyes.

Richards’s sedan was still idling in the mouth of the alley, its headlights cutting two yellow cones through the gray slush.

Richards rolled down the window as Craig approached, the smell of peppermint rolling out into the freezing air. "Well? Is it done?"

Craig didn't get in the car. He stopped by the passenger-side window, the rain running down the bridge of his nose, plastering his graying hair to his forehead. His left arm throbbed inside his coat, a hot, steady thrum that kept him awake the way ice water kept a drowning man from sleeping.

"He's gone," Craig said.

Richards grunted, shifting the car into gear. "Good. Get in. I’ll drop you at the terminal."

"No," Craig said.

Richards paused, his hand on the steering column. He looked at Craig through the dirty glass. "What do you mean, no? We got a train to catch for the district office."

"I'm done, Richards."

Richards stared at him for three seconds. Then he let out a short, dry bark of laughter. "You're done? What are you talking about? You're a cleaner, Craig. You don't retire. You quit when the heart gives out or when the cops find the drop."

"My heart's fine," Craig said. He reached into his coat pocket one last time.

Richards watched him suspiciously, his hand dropping toward his armpit where the snub-nosed .38 rested in its shoulder holster. "What you got in there?"

Craig didn't pull out a gun.

He pulled out the soft pack of cigarettes—the last two still inside, dry and perfect—along with the red box of matches. He didn't take one out. He didn't tap them against his thumb.

He held the whole red-and-white brick out toward the open window of the car.

Richards blinked. "You giving me a smoke?"

"I'm giving you the leash," Craig said.

He tossed the pack into the passenger seat. It landed with a soft thud on the vinyl cushion next to Richards’s box of mints.

Richards looked down at it, then back up at Craig’s face. There was something in Craig’s eyes—something cold and gray and empty, the look of a beast that had spent twenty years chewing through its own leg to get out of a trap, and finally, miraculously, was standing on the other side of the wire.

"You're crazy," Richards whispered. "You won't last forty-eight hours without 'em. You'll be shaking so hard you won't be able to hold a fork."

"Maybe," Craig said.

He turned his back on the sedan.

Behind him, the engine roared as Richards dropped it into reverse, the tires spinning in the slush before catching traction with a sharp spray of gravel and dirty water. The tail lights flared red, then dwindled down the long, dark corridor of 9th Avenue until they were swallowed by the gray curtain of the sleet.

Craig stood alone in the middle of the street.

The wind was coming off the river now, sharp enough to peel the skin off his cheeks. The world was loud—the groan of the elevated trains three blocks over, the hiss of tires on the wet asphalt, the distant, rhythmic clang of a buoy out in the harbor. It was too loud. It was too bright. The raw, jagged edges of the city were pressing in from every side, demanding a response, demanding the familiar, comforting click of the correction.

His hand twitched. It drifted toward his empty pocket.

The fingers curled into an empty space. There was nothing there. No cellophane. No cardboard. No little white tubes waiting to tell him how to feel about the cold.

Craig stopped the hand. He pulled it out, pressed it flat against his thigh, and took a long, deep breath through his nose.

The air tasted of diesel, wet coal, and salt. It burned his lungs all the way down to the bottom—not with the clean, chemical lie of the handler, but with the raw, heavy truth of the world as it was.

He didn't flinch. He didn't look for a light.

For the first time in twenty-five years, the dog didn't wait for the click.

Craig lowered his head into the wind, put one foot in front of the other, and began to walk.