Chapter 4 Regular Human Things
Regular Human Things
ERIC HADN’T wanted to tell Ace or his friends this, but he’d worked most of his adult life to avoid shopping at Walmart.
Walmart was his mother counting pennies and clipping coupons to feed him and his siblings.
It was jeans that smelled like formaldehyde and fell apart in a year, and tennis shoes that broke in a month but had to last far longer.
It was knockoff Twinkies and off-brand SpaghettiOs (called spa-ghettos by his older brother long before kids knew that was rude) and interminably long lines because the cashiers were exhausted, overworked, and understaffed.
His first kill had put him on the run—from his family, from the law, from himself.
His second had garnered him $10,000 cash, and he’d bought himself some upscale clothes, a lease on a decent apartment, and food from a yuppie grocery store.
He’d made his third kill with a little more skill, a little more discretion, and a lot less desperation.
It had bought him two years in the apartment, a new identity, and a chance to hone what had become his craft.
It seemed that if somebody was a dirtbag—a real dirtbag, not a victim of petty jealousy or greed, which some people had attempted to hire him to off—but a drug-dealing pedophile or an unrepentant racist fuckhead or a sociopath in a business suit who took down anybody in his or her path—a pure evil dirtbag—“Eric Christiansen” didn’t have a qualm in the world relieving the world of that person and profiting off the deal.
He’d been smart as a kid—good in school, good at computers, great at research.
He’d even, behind his father’s back, been good at theater, although he’d had to sneak it in between baseball practice and games, which was supposed to be his way out of the family cycle of poverty.
He’d been cultivating a 90 mph fastball that had a good chance of nailing 100 if he’d continued on into pro-ball.
As a young adult (not even legally an adult that first year), he’d capitalized on being a blandly good-looking white kid. He lurked, looked innocuous, played with his phone. Was polite to his elders, charming to women, and kept his business to himself.
And he’d carefully avoided Walmart, Costco, and Dollar Tree, because he wasn’t Leon Grackle’s second oldest white-trash kid anymore.
It was easy to carry that level of defiance when you were seventeen. When you were thirty-seven, and had quite literally killed your father twenty years ago, you began to realize that being a chameleon was easy. It was deciding what kind of lizard you should be on the inside that made you a man.
So if the nearest place to get food on a budget was Walmart, Eric would go there.
He wasn’t really on a Walmart kind of budget—he’d retired very, very rich, with funds in encrypted accounts not even the government could touch.
Especially not the government could touch, rather.
But borrowing a car to go to the expensive boutique grocery store across town felt… rude.
And while Eric had spent the last twenty years killing for a living, he’d made it a point to not be rude.
His mother had some shortcomings—not least of which had been turning a blind eye to her husband’s deviancy—but she had knocked manners through his thick head, by God if she hadn’t.
And he found he rather enjoyed Walmart. The clothes had improved in quality, and he grabbed a couple pairs of cargo pants and jeans in his size, as well as some hooded sweatshirts in gray and pastel colors, and some basic-colored tees.
Even some tennis shoes, one of the few name brands in his size.
He had a closet full of bespoke suits and fashionable casual clothes, but it felt…
gauche to wear that to Ace’s garage or across the street to have cinnamon heaven with his neighbor.
He avoided the knockoff brands and reveled in the fresh produce, the whole-grain noodles, and the canned tomatoes and olives for bruschetta.
He took advantage of the bakery and bought some flour for pasta, thinking he should be able to ask Ernie if he might avail himself of some of Ernie’s kitchen appliances.
He bought a pasta cutter, just in case that wasn’t where Ernie’s talents might lie.
(So far he’d seen fried chicken to die for and cinnamon rolls he’d trade for what was left of his soul.
He was pretty much an Ernie convert in the cuisine department, but a pasta machine was a bit esoteric, even for Ernie.)
In general, he was enjoying himself far more than he’d anticipated when he felt it. An electrical frisson that raised the hairs on the backs of his arms. Seventeen years dodging the fist of Leon Grackle had made sensing violence almost a sixth sense.
He stood for a moment in the canned food aisle, holding his breath, listening for clues to tell him where the danger was coming from.
Without conscious thought, his hand slid to the concealed holster under the waistband of his high-waisted grandpa slacks, making sure the small Berretta was there.
Yup, hello, Hal, are we ready for some work today?
Then, in his head he heard Ernie’s frantic order. Don’t shoot! For a moment he warred with himself. Ernie had proven uncannily right so far, and what kind of fool ignored a psychic with specific, concrete advice?
With a silent breath, Eric glanced around him, looking for another weapon, and found in his cart, among the bags of produce, the clothes, and the shoes, three small cans of sliced olives.
Perfect.
After scooping them up, he left the cart in the aisle, as out of the way as possible, and listened for any odd sounds, any high-pitched voices any—
The babble of panic caught his attention, and he edged that way.
“Please, Bruce… please, man, put that away. There’s no reason to pull that out here—”
“You’re here, shopping with my wife?” Bruce sounded more than a little snockered in the middle of the afternoon, and Eric rolled his eyes. God save him from this bullshit drama in the middle of Walmart.
“No, Bruce, I’m here with my wife. She needed help with the shelves. Sandy came with us for company. I swear, Bruce… there’s no reason to—oh God.”
A single shot and a lot of screams, and then a woman’s voice. “Oh God. Bruce! Bruce, he’s still alive. Ken. Ken, you still here?”
“Shoulder,” came the strained voice. “Mary, go. Just… he’s crazy. Get out of his way.”
“Bruce,” said the loyal Mary. “Please. I swear—”
“What would you know about it?” shouted a tearful Bruce. “You’re useless, with your arthritis and your heart and your diabetes. You wouldn’t know if they were fuckin’. You wouldn’t know if they were dead!”
Oh, this guy was a prince, Eric thought grimly, but he was a prince with a gun, and Eric edged around his final aisle to take in the expected tableau.
A chubby middle-aged couple, huddled on the floor together. The man was bleeding heavily from a wound in his shoulder that would probably be okay if dressed soon, and the woman, barely mobile, was down on her knees, the position obviously painful, as she held her husband’s head in her lap.
A part of him was so disgusted he was a hair’s breadth from pulling out his gun and wasting this Bruce loser with one shot.
Look at them—as innocent as chubby bunnies.
These weren’t the people Eric got paid to take out.
These were the people who sometimes mortgaged their houses to pay him to protect their daughters or sons when they got involved with someone like… oh yeah.
Look at this gentleman here.
Bruce was a chesty, beer-gutted white man, with an untrimmed dirty-brown beard—much of it on his neck—brown teeth, and a hangdog expression.
The man could hang beads on his ear hair and still not be any more repulsive than he was right now.
“Bruce, Ken wouldn’t cheat on Mary with a supermodel,” said, presumably, this behemoth’s woman. “He sure wouldn’t cheat on her with me. Now put the gun down—”
“Then who you fuckin’!” Bruce yelled, aiming the gun at another middle-aged woman, this one a little less chubby and a little more highly maintained, with a black-dyed braid down her back and a tight sweater on over black yoga pants.
Her expression was anguished, though, as she took in her two friends huddled on the floor and tried to get her own personal monster out of their lives.
“Only you,” she said, and the bitterness in the words told Eric that this man had probably ruined sex for her for life. “After you go at me, I wouldn’t touch another man if the world was flooded with piss and he was the only tree.”
“You’re lucky to have me,” Bruce slurred, and oh, thank God, he was using his moment to wave his gun around pointing up, instead of at one of the three people he seemed to have in his sights.
Two things happened then in quick succession. One was: Eric spotted that handsome young police officer who’d been at Ace’s, lurking behind one of the shelves with giant jars of mayonnaise on it. And the other was: Bruce spotted him.
Before the behemoth could bring his gun down to aim at Eric, Eric reacted, finding his stance by instinct and pitching a can of olives at top velocity, straight at Bruce the Behemoth’s forehead.
The smack it made filled the store, and Bruce’s gun hand dropped to his side, the gun clattering to the cement floor. He stared stupidly at Eric, who had the other olive can loaded already, and Eric let loose, aiming for the same spot on the man’s forehead.
A little low—this one broke his nose, and as the blood spurted, Bruce fell to his knees and then faceplanted on the floor next to his wife.
Who screamed and ran to her friends, grabbing a towel she’d had in her cart on the way and using it as a pad for Ken’s shoulder wound.
Brady—yes, that had been his name—with the plain sandy-brown hair and plain brown eyes and earnestly square features—ran forward and cuffed Bruce while he groaned on the floor, before pulling out his radio and calling the all clear, asking for two EMT crews and more cops to take statements.
Oh shit.