Patrick lifts his right hand from the wheel and rips the piece out of Sayid’s hand. He glances at it, clicks off the safety, aims at Sayid, and then there’s a big bang that makes Linda and me cup our hands over our ears and there’s smoke and the stink of cordite and Sayid is screaming and there’s a hole in the side window with a ring of blood all around it. Sayid goes on screaming. “You cocksucker!” he shouts. “Cocksucker!” He covers his face with his hands, covers his mouth and nose, and he looks at me and pulls his hands away and his nose ain’t there no more and he asks how bad it is while the blood runs into his mouth.
I don’t know what to say.
“How bad is it?”
“Your nose,” I say. “It’s your nose.”
“How bad is it?”
“Your nose is — Jesus, it’s sort of gone, G.”
Linda pukes into the bag of money.
Patrick drives. “I’m sorry,” he says to Sayid. “I was trying to blow your head off.” He holds the wheel with his left hand, the piece in his right. He checks his mirror and says the Dodge is back. I turn around but don’t see it. “There,” he says, and he nods at the bike path between the road and the lake, and there’s the Dodge, zigzagging a little, probably the tram threw off its alignment.
“Who’s in there?” I ask.
Patrick says he already told us. “The people I work for. Worked.”
Sayid whines, his hands cupped over his face. “I gotta go to the hospital,” he cries. “I really gotta go to the hospital, man.”
Patrick looks at Linda in his mirror and says her name.
She looks back at him.
“You think twelve thousand’s enough?”
She stares past Sayid at the hole in the passenger window and the blood all around it. “No,” she says, “not anymore.”
“You think two million’s enough?”
“Two million? Where you gonna get that kind of money?”
I tell her there’s two million in the bag. “You stupid bitch,” I say.
“Don’t insult her,” says Patrick, and he glances over to the Dodge, which is keeping up with us on the bike path.
Sayid screams, his hands cupped in front of his face. “You stupid bitch!”
Patrick touches the barrel of the gun to Sayid’s head and pulls the trigger.
Explosion.
Cordite.
Sayid’s body slumps against the passenger door.
“Patrick,” I say. “Patrick.”
Linda sits pressed up against the backseat, her hands covering her eyes.
Patrick steers the Focus to the side of the road, bumps over the curb, and now he’s right next to the Dodge.
“I’ll shoot you later,” he tells me, “but I can’t do it now because you’re behind me.”
We’re driving parallel to the new boulevard that runs along the short side of the Sloterplas — before last year it was just trees here, with a walking trail between them, but they cut down the trees and now they got expensive tiles and benches — and Patrick runs the Focus into the side of the Dodge. The Dodge is much heavier than we are, except the tram must have shook it up because it smashes into one of the steel benches and comes to a stop. The streetlamps cast a soft glow on the boulevard’s tiles and on Sayid’s blood.
Patrick puts the Focus in park and gets out and comes after me, but I jerk away and pull Linda in front of me and she screams, and I smell her puke and I think she’s pissed herself. Patrick doesn’t shoot.
At first I don’t dare to look, but Linda pulls free and I see Patrick’s on the other side of the car now, the gun — my gun — aiming at the Dodge, and he fires three times.
Linda and me sit up straight, and we see somebody fall out of the Dodge. Then we look at each other, and then we both look at the laundry bag with the two million euros, the laundry bag I could have stashed with the bags of my old man’s shit in the storage unit. I try to wipe off Linda’s puke and Sayid’s blood. I grab the bag and she grabs it too, and I want to pull it away from her but two million euros is heavy, man. And for a second that’s the whole world, the backseat of the Focus and our four hands on that bag, all that money so close, and for that second it feels like I ought to kiss her like it’s a fucking movie. Then the door on her side swings open and Patrick yanks her out, and I’m so surprised I let go of the bag and it flies out with her.
I see Patrick drag Linda and the bag onto the boulevard and it’s like I’m in a long dark tunnel and the tunnel feels safe — just leave me right here — but then Patrick sees me. He hunkers down and holds the piece in both hands and aims at the tunnel, my tunnel, and he shoots — there’s a bang, but not so loud this time because I’m in my tunnel and he’s outside, and I think about that bang while my shoulder is blown to fragments. I drop onto a bench and I die. I think I’m dying. My buddy’s lying here in front of me and he’s already gone, and I’m on my way. I open my eyes and lie on my back and look upside down out of my used-to-be-safe tunnel — it seems so long ago now, that feeling of safety inside my tunnel.
Patrick says something to Linda. I can’t really hear it. She just squeals. She’s lying on the boulevard in the glow of the streetlamps and she’s squealing, and behind her I see the Sloterplas, its black water beautiful beneath the black winter sky, and I see the Dodge and the man who fell out of it, and he tries to sit up and he stares at me and I see the disappointment on Abdulhafid’s face.
“I didn’t know it was you,” I say softly, and he didn’t know it was me, either — all I told him was we were gonna score a hundred thou, he never thought I meant his two million.
Patrick stands up and grabs the bag of money and unzips it. “Two million,” he tells Linda, loud, “two million.”
She shakes her head, sobbing.
I hear him say he’s gonna ask her one more time. And then he asks her: “Linda, will you marry me?”
I hear her say no, soft, sobbing.
Patrick picks up the bag by its handles, and in the glow of the streetlamps I see him carry it to the water’s edge. He drops the bag on the ground, then grabs it by the bottom and flips it over, and I can’t see the bundles of five-hundred-euro notes drop into the lake but I think I can hear them, plop plop plop, quick splashes as the packets hit the water.
I laugh ’cause I still got one of the bundles in my pocket. How many bills are in a bundle like that? A hundred? I suck at math, but I figure it’s gotta be a shitload of money, right?
Patrick walks back to Linda, who’s lying on the ground weeping like a drama queen even though he ain’t even shot her, and he asks her if she sees what he gave up for her. “Did you see that? I did it for you. Will you marry me?”
“No.”
He grumbles and turns to Abdulhafid, who’s lying next to the Dodge and who I figure is already dead, but Patrick shoots him in the head with the piece the other Abdul loaned me.
The gun’s been used, so it’s gotta go in the lake. I laugh again. I remember our scooters parked in front of Van Vliet. It’ll be days before anyone finds them. I figured it would be professional to put them there. I laugh, and I keep on laughing.
Patrick hears me, and he comes back to the Focus, and I press my hand against my jacket pocket, against the bundle of five-hundred-euro notes, a hundred of them, that’s four zeroes, so fifty thousand euros, and I laugh because I’m dying richer than I ever lived.
Starry, Starry Night
by René Appel & Josh Pachter