Toledo was muggy this time of year…almost mid-July, and the water towers looked like they were boiling in the afternoon haze.
A 51-year-old version of Kip rubbed on another dab of sunblock. This caused the kind of aroma that assaulted one’s nostrils with pungent flair. It was definitely not the sunning liquid that reminded one of Caribbean escapes, coconuts and tropical flowers, breezing through palm trees. No, with 96 degree plus heat, this was that ugly oxide shit a lifeguard might have on his nose, but he leveled it all over his face. Not the most incognito of guys, or at least to the outside observer, he wore an obnoxious red and yellow flowered shirt even the most crazed tourists would have passed up, over which he wore a khaki cargo vest filled with all manner of useful things, including the sunblock.
From the back alley he’d sauntered into, he jumped a chain-link fence to the lid of a closed dumpster and slid down to the ground to a building with fire escape access and took two steps at a time to the roof to get a better view of his target, clicking and clacking his way up in his well broken-in stilettos. By their sound, it would be hard to tell if they were merely men’s tap shoes. Due to his hemmed pant legs flush to the ground, any onlookers would be hard pressed to think differently.
Now on the roof, Kip eyed a roach-like man skittering along the sidewalk below, wearing too much clothing, a trench coat no less, for a day like today. The creature was tall, but bent over so as to not draw too much attention to his height or perhaps his face, although his dark, maybe southern Italian features in the Irish Catholic neighborhood made that pretty much impossible.
Kip had no intention of fulfilling his contract on the stranger today. This was reconnaissance. Kip wasn’t the guy you hired for his brain or even his skill. He was barely passable as a security consultant, let alone a hitman. His kill rate was maybe 52%. That percentage went up given enough time and if a client were really serious, but many of his were not. They often merely wanted him to frighten their enemies or flunkies and hiring a “real” professional was just, well, overkill.
Kip’s cell phone buzzed and he looked at the text, then swiped away from it and put it back into a vest pocket.
As far as Kip knew, a guy who knew a guy had given this latest client Kip’s number for a “possible solution” to that “potential problem” of his. The young man’s palms had likely reached a sweaty peak before feeling compelled to dial the number. Kip figured the young man, a venture capitalist from Cincinnati, wasn’t sure if this was the right way to deal with this latest crisis, but it was the only way he could think of and he had thought and thought and thought it over. They usually had by the time they got to him.
A few seconds later, Kip’s cell phone buzzed again and he took it out, looking at another text message that read “Urgent”.
“Godammit, ‘Elvis,’ I’m not ready yet,” said Kip to himself and swiped off the phone again.
Kip returned his attention to the street. The man was making his way toward the prominent corner pub.
In Kip’s jobs, he seldom encountered a mark who had a gun, let alone knew how to aim it effectively. It was low risk for him, so his body wasn’t exactly what you would call “fit”. And self-defense classes? Untaken. He stuffed a cinnamon mini-donut in his mouth, the package housed in another vest pocket. The man below was likely toast by the end of the week, but Kip’s client seemed uncertain. Even though he got the money up front, whether he was to pull the trigger or not, he always ensured himself a bonus for an actual hit. Should the business end of his silencer be engaged or excess wear and tear on his person and equipment be required, the bonus came in handy.
The cell phone buzzed again and Kip said to himself and to no one, “WHAT?!” as he read the text. It said, “Wait.” Kip swiped it off and said aloud, “That’s exactly what I was going to do, Elvis.”
The man on the street was known as “Tycho”, but the reason was uncertain. He was neither Danish nor an astronomer. It was frustrations like this that made Kip sometimes wonder what he was doing with his life. Here he was, sweating his balls off, scoping out this guy with a useless name. But he was Kip’s “type” and not in the sense of sexual partner, but in the sense that Kip had a problem with certain tall people.
Kip did have a type in the other sense, but he had yet to find her. His best friend in high school most closely resembled that type, but he found women of her height didn’t like men of his. He’d always tried to disabuse himself of the notion that women were shallow for only liking tall men, whether or not they themselves were short too.
Maybe not only for this reason, the average hitman didn’t have many friends, but if one of them had tried to call him “The Kipper,” that person would definitely wind up dead in 24 hours, even on a particularly inaccurate day. As a kid, a bully had once taken his lunch money, calling it a “Kipper snack” and the next day Kip took a sack of quarters with him in a sock and swung it like a shepherd boy with a sling and landed it in the thief’s face during recess. The missing teeth kept the bully from wanting any lunches for weeks. That’s when Kip knew he wasn’t going to end up like other kids…no one was going to push him around. He fancied himself a defender of those similar to him: lacking skills in plenty of areas, but making up for them in others. And he knew that anyone he allowed to get close to him would not be giving him nicknames.
Coming out of his reverie, Kip threw his attention back to the hunched-over giant in a too-tight trench coat down below, who was ducking into the pub, O’Grady’s. He was probably there to see Vin O’Malley, its proprietor’s maternal uncle. These small neighborhoods didn’t have too many colorful characters and, like a game of well-played Trivial Pursuit, all the bright wedges inevitably seemed to wind up in the same wheel.
Kip wiped donut crumbs from the soul patch carefully trimmed into a triangle on his lower lip. He resembled Tom Waits in his younger, but not leanest, years. Had he not chosen the profession that he had, he might have wound up a barfly like his largely absent old man. Pubs were a place Kip blended into, he belonged to, where he could, like a chameleon, drag out a belligerent fool without anyone stopping to question him, unless, of course, they should notice what was on his feet. He wondered if the pub should be his next stop or if that might overplay his hand.
The contractor had said of Tycho to “scare him” and to “make sure he knew why”. That was nice and vague, Kip thought, just the way people in his line of work were used to receiving and giving messages. This guy had the funds to finish the job but didn’t strike him as one with the balls to do so, otherwise he would have called a competitor. Still, it was possible the kid didn’t have enough criminal contacts to know who was likely to ice a guy first and ask questions later. It wasn’t that Kip couldn’t get the job done, it was just that he preferred to wait to see what a client really wanted.
The wannabe Wall Streeter employer had called himself “Elvis” on the first call and Kip held his breath so as to not snicker. He’d heard them all, but Elvis took the Vegas cake. Was it the King mythology, hero-worship, or was the guy thinking he had to be unique if he was ever going to order a hit and this might be Elvis’ only chance? It was certainly memorable and memorable wasn’t what you wanted when you might be conspiring to murder a guy.
“Damn,” Kip muttered to himself. “This heat is murder on my feet.” Was getting an extra four inches in height while looking sexy so wrong? Certainly, his stilettos habit had shaped his big toes into hammers, but, as he imagined was the case with most women, it was worth it for the look day after day. He smiled as he massaged his feet, recalling how he’d started out with cowboy boots, but then that became trendy and he couldn’t endure it.
He remembered the first time he’d been in a department store to specifically look in the slimly populated sized 12-14 women’s section of the shoe racks and find a heel. It was perfunctory. Like, “I gotta work and I got big feet, so this is the best I can do,” but he still had to put it on. It was beige or light tan and he couldn’t imagine a woman feeling great about slipping into it, but he did.
Now, though, he wore custom…your Versace or Jimmy Choo engineered for transvestite men with steel reinforced spikes. He had a contact in the Mafia who made them for bona fide cardinals. A lot of people would think that was funny, but Kip didn’t. It made perfect sense to him and why shouldn’t it to them? Everyone needed their R and R time. He just wore his to work. But how big of a difference were former Pope Benedict’s Italian loafers and his upscale clackers? Both were made by a gay designer, even if the previous Pope was, on paper, anti-gay. With a final squeeze of his toes, he slipped the stilettos back on and sighed, saying to himself, “Time to follow the prey and see what he’s up to in O’Grady’s Pub.” Something told him it wasn’t just to get a cold beer.
