almost okay

SHERMAN WHISTLES WHILE HE WORKS
Chapter Four: Dinner and a Murder?

I parked the van up the street from her place, ate the chicken and waited. It was still an hour before she'd be home, provided she stuck to her M.O. It was messy going, the eating. I spilled the gravy and lost a big chunk of the cornbread under the seat, but I managed to get enough food in my mouth to satisfy my hunger. I kept thinking about 'Latisha', though...

She had been placed in the witness protection program by the Feds and moved to Lancaster from Ohio after testifying against her boyfriend, Luis Gonzalez, a big-time drug dealer known as 'Little Papi' because of his resemblance to the Red Sox ball player and the fact that he only stood five-five. Little Papi was a bad guy. That much I understood. He wasn't just a drug dealer. Weapons, gambling, prostitution...you name it...if it was illegal, Little Papi had a hand in it. Word on the street was he'd put a bullet in the head of a rival or two, and cut up a couple folks just out of meanness. The world was a better place with him in prison, that's for damn sure, but even behind bars Gonzalez had power. And he'd decided that his former girlfriend should pay for what she did. That was where I came in.

It was eating at me, though, as I sat in the waning daylight waiting for her to come home. This girl wasn't an evil person, not like the two I'd done before. And she wasn't a prized pet, like that dog I'd taken out in L.A. as a lesson to its deadbeat owner. This was a young, pretty girl with her whole life in front of her. Christ, I don't think she was more than twenty-three. I kept telling myself that she was complicit in all of Big Papi's crimes, that she might even have helped him on occasion. More than likely this bitch has witnessed a murder, I thought. No matter what I told myself to try and make the job easier, it didn't help. She was pretty and she was young, and that's all I could see.

As night fell, the late afternoon song of the cicadas turned gradually into the comforting trill of crickets. A small dog yapped from a back yard down the street. With the windows down in the van I could feel the weight of the humid air as I sat there and watched the sun descend and die over the tree tops, the soft melon-colored strips of cloud turn blood-red then black when the last of the daylight was gone.

Once it was dark I put on the rain poncho, then a pair of latex gloves, over which I slipped on the work gloves. I put a couple of the trash bags in my back pocket, grabbed the extension cord and slipped down the street and up the driveway to get behind her house. The poncho was a precaution in case of blood, but I was really hoping to avoid that. There was a big Hibiscus bush at the edge of the driveway as I reached the back corner of the brick bungalow. I took my spot in the shadows behind it and waited. Mixed with the scent of the Hibiscus was the aroma of smoke from a neighboring barbecue, and that fucking dog was still yapping. I tried to channel my irritation with the dog into anger. It worked. My hands were really beginning to sweat by the time I saw her headlights bounce off the garage door.