Brennan stared out at the darkened hills of Panama City, at the shadow play of Palmetto trees swaying back and forth in the wind, and imagined all the rest.
There was a skyline out there, curving smooth around the kind of mirror-clear ocean you only saw near the equator. People were enjoying the 30-degree drop from day to night, lazing on blankets that slid in the sand, smoking cigarettes on piers and staring down the endless temperate dark. Brennan wondered how many languages were being spoken, how many stories shared as the Panama Canal flexed its muscles, vaulting ships from one side of the world to the other, confident in the fact that it was once the sole connection between both edges of the map.
Brennan had never seen any of these things. Probably never would. But this wasn’t the first time he’d found a window at 1 a.m. and drawn a line from himself to wherever, enjoying the fantasy regardless of fact.
He turned back and the taste of recycled air hung in his throat, a reminder that he wouldn’t see anything outside the airport, real or imagined, for another eight hours.
The layover at Tocumen International was part of the plan, or maybe it was more like a scheme. Brennan didn’t think it was fair to call it a plan, since a plan implied actual planning. This was more of a reaction, him rolling from a major mistake then preventing it from turning into a fatal one. That had been the score for a while. Getting knocked down the ladder, clawing back to normalcy, climbing to a comfortable height and then clinging to that rung, not sure if he was more afraid of the strange and rarified air above or the shit he knew below.
Brennan turned left, scanning a row of people lying across a bank of airport seats, looking for the man who could vault him back to the middle.
They were travelers, mostly of the non-English speaking variety, using their luggage as pillows for security instead of comfort. Hondurans and Colombians and Brazilians headed home to visit the family members whose names they only used to fill out checks now. A few white men sprinkled in, one wearing his hair over his watery eyes, sporting the sleep-starved and always concerned stare of his Central American counterparts.
The man from Coney Island gave himself away in his half-sleep, arms crossed over his chest, blocking the breast pocket where he was almost certainly hiding the paper and ink Brennan had come for.
He’d teased his hair down, even gotten a spray tan in a pathetic attempt to mask his ethnicity, but J.P. was easy enough to pluck out of the crowd.
Maybe 5’6. Maybe 150 pounds. He didn’t represent much of a challenge. Brennan was 6’3, walking around at 250. It should have been 240, but Brennan didn’t need to be in fighting shape. He just needed to look like someone you didn’t want to fight. A hulking gait, degenerate facial hair and arm sleeves usually do the trick when it’s your job to keep overzealous johns in line.
But J.P. wasn’t the problem. It was the item J.P. possessed, the one he had no business holding onto, the story he knew about how it wound up in his pocket.
If J.P. told that story, it could pick apart the carefully constructed illusion that Brennan called a life. If Brennan silenced him, he would make the illusion fact, and Brennan wasn’t sure if he could get right with that plan.
Minutes passed, and J.P. kept fidgeting, finding nothing that would qualify as a comfortable position. Eventually he got up, walked past the shuttered fronts of a half-dozen businesses, went down an escalator and into a darkened part of the airport.
Gone, just like that.
That was how it was supposed to work. That was how everyone thought Brennan made his living, making problems vanish for a low-level pimp by the name of Sal Alberti.
Everyone around Coney knew Sal had connections to the Decalavante family, so they left him alone. Just like everyone knew about Alberti’s main muscle, a hitter by the name of Brennan, the guy who took out Jimmy Fresno one year earlier.
It’s amazing what people “know.”
Brennan followed J.P., checking his watch as he walked. Seven hours until his connecting flight. Seven hours to make sense of twelve months.
That’s how long people had been calling Brennan a killer. That’s how long Brennan had been wondering what would happen if he ever had to become one.
Seven hours to figure out if he preferred fact to fiction.
When Brennan met Sal Alberti he was 22 and lacking a few essentials. Like money, a GED, or parents that gave a shit. Mom dead before he could write in cursive, Dad gone before that. What he did have wasn’t much: an aunt with a big heart, a bigger couch and a friend who owned a bar that needed a bouncer. It was decent money, nothing to live on.
After a few months at the Mermaid Lounge, a gay-friendly dive that housed women who owned more fishnets than pants, Brennan caught the eye of the man behind the girls.
Alberti was a pimp, so Brennan had to handle all the requisite dick swinging that came with that. But he didn’t raise a hand to his girls and he never shorted Brennan on pay. Alberti knew all their names, kept up a pretense of friendship with them. He even bought his pros Christmas presents some years.
Brennan liked him, enough that he didn’t mind the endless nights in an old Crown Vic three cars behind Natalya or Carrie or whoever, waiting to see if any of the johns who liked getting rough needed a reminder that was a bad idea.
The job wasn’t too tough. No one seemed to think Sal’s girls were worth that kind of fight.
No one except Jimmy Fresno.
Jimmy was the kind of guy who made Brennan hate being big. A California native with a Venice Beach build, Fresno was the type of asshole who never matured past the second grade. He wanted what he wanted and there was no reason he shouldn’t have it. He wasn’t above maiming a few of Sal’s girls either.
Eventually Sal got tired of it, sent a few guys to put Jimmy down. Brennan was the only one who made it back.
In Brooklyn lore, Jimmy Fresno was catching a blowjob from Alberti’s top girl in a Brighton Beach apartment when three guys kicked the door down. Jimmy fought the first two off, broke one guy’s arm and stabbed the other. But then Jimmy ran up against Brennan, and that was the last time anyone hurt one of Sal’s girls.
Like all lies, the legend had some basis in fact. Brennan walked in on Fresno getting a blowjob, and he was alongside two of Sal’s guys. But after Fresno killed the first one, Brennan froze and watched him kill the second.
He remembered the look in Fresno’s eyes, the electric refusal to surrender. This wasn’t the kind of man Brennan could intimidate, the kind he could knock out and walk away from. The Derrick Brennan who slept on his aunt’s couch and thought Hostess fruit pies were the greatest things ever created wasn’t ready to put a period on anyone’s life.
But when it was over, Jimmy was dead and Brennan wasn’t. Brennan had barely touched him, but there no one around to contradict the myth.
So Brennan became the guy who killed Jimmy Fresno because that’s who Sal paid him to be.
Brennan checked his watch. 1:30 in the morning. Eight hours without a smoke had him chewing his lower lip like it was gum. Sure, he could have found a bathroom and tried to sneak one, but Brennan couldn’t let J.P. out of his sight.
Killing him wasn’t the only problem. It was killing him close enough to his flight that they wouldn’t have time to shut down the airport. Killing him while certain the little prick hadn’t told anyone else how those names and numbers wound up in his breast pocket, the ones that would make it impossible for Brennan to return to Brooklyn.
All those factors to consider, but only if and when Brennan decided he had the stomach for murder.
A monitor listing arrivals and departures caught his eye. Atlanta. Colombia. Miami. Cuzco. Portugal. A whole bunch of places Brennan hadn’t seen. A whole bunch of places where no one knew Jimmy Fresno or Sal Alberti. Places where he wasn’t a killer.
Movement interrupted Brennan’s day-dream. He saw J.P. at the edge of his field of vision, scurrying to the right and headed deeper into the terminal. He followed, cursing at himself to be more careful.
J.P. could have had the same idea he did about using Tocumen as his own personal Bermuda Triangle. If J.P. was going to sell the list, this would be a smart place to do it.
Brennan re-dedicated himself to the cause as J.P. rounded a corner, passing a shuttered-up newsstand. Someone stood up from a crowd of sleeping locals.
The guy was as tall as Brennan but lacked the broad shoulders and Nathan’s-induced-gut. A long ashen ponytail hung down to the small of his back, swinging two ways, tapping the patches of dry skin on his elbows. He was thin with a little definition in the arms, leftover muscle from a time when he might have been stronger.
He walked with a hitch, not necessarily a limp, favoring his left leg. Brennan couldn’t see the man’s face, but there was something familiar about that gait.
Brennan checked his watch then peeked over his shoulder. No cops, but too much time between what the hour hand said and when he could make noise.
But Gimpy was less than twenty feet from J.P.
Maybe he could make a little noise.
There was a gap in the left side of the wall, a service hallway between two fast-food chains that were closed for the night, and that would have to do.
Brennan’s forearm slipped over Gimpy’s throat, his hand clasping the man’s mouth to silence all the coughing and gasping a haphazardly applied choke tends to cause. He dragged Gimpy into the artery and felt a set of teeth clamp down on his palm.
Brennan’s grip loosened, and Gimpy started throwing elbows into his midsection. Years of overeating protected him, but the back kick to Brennan’s shin did the trick.
The guy tried to make a run for it, but his ponytail was his undoing. Brennan yanked hard, the way you would on a mad dog’s leash. The impact with the floor was nasty, the kind Brennan imagined Gimpy feeling in his teeth.
Gimpy tried to get up but his hand slipped out from under him. If he wasn’t concussed, he was close.
Brennan tucked his arms under Gimpy’s shoulders and slipped the choke back into place. Gimpy coughed and sputtered again, and Brennan kept his eyes forward. He couldn’t see the man’s face and didn’t want to.
Brennan wasn’t sure what he was doing, but if this was the moment that made the lie real, he wanted to remember as few details as possible.
He cinched the hold in deeper. Gimpy’s thrashing started to slow. He was fading. Life leaking out of him like water through bad plumbing. Brennan remembered Fresno’s face, remembered the fear that flashed across it when he figured out he was out of road, and let go.
He wasn’t ready. Not yet. Maybe he would be before sunrise, but if he was going to cross that line, he wanted to be damn sure why.
The old man coughed, coughed some more and doubled over, hands feeling for floor and wall to find balance.
A minute crawled by before he stood up, turned around, and made Brennan really happy he’d shown mercy.
The poorly lit hallway hid Gimpy’s face well enough, but at close range, Brennan realized why he recognized that limp.
Gimpy’s name was Leo, another one of Sal’s guys. He wasn’t the type of person to leave Brooklyn without a good reason, but that reason probably wasn’t good for Brennan.
“Now this is interesting,” Leo said, still trying to catch his breath.
Brennan pushed past Leo, hoping he hadn’t lost too much ground, rounding the corner from the service alley. He found J.P. staring right at him.
Brennan didn’t move. He didn’t have any moves to make.
J.P. was hunched forward in a chair, elbows on knees, staring straight ahead with his eyes open, but vacant. His mouth shuddered, letting something between a snarl and a cough escape.
It eventually registered as a snore.
“That’s impressive,” Leo whispered, sliding up behind Brennan.
“What is?”
“Well if a guy like you tailed a guy like me halfway around the world, I guess I’d have reason to sleep with one eye open. Didn’t think J.P. would take it literally.”
“This isn’t fucking funny Leo,” Brennan growled.
“It is, a little anyway. Funny’s not the word I would use though. Now curious, curious might be the word. All three of us winding up in this exact spot at this exact time.”
“Coincidence.”
“I’m too old to believe in coincidence Derrick,” Leo said, using Brennan’s first name in that way an old relative would.
“I ain’t here to discuss your belief system, old man.”
“No, but you’re probably here about that list in J.P.’s pocket,” Leo replied.
Brennan stared Leo down, wondering why the man would be stupid enough to share that information, considering what he and everyone else thought Brennan was capable of.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Brennan said, his poker face non-existent.
“Let’s pretend you do,” Leo replied. “I think we should go somewhere and talk.”
“I’m not much for pretending,” Brennan said, thinking about the ridiculous nature of that statement.
“Maybe I’m conjuring the wrong images. Let’s pretend I know you need a cigarette as badly as I do, and maybe in the course of that smoke, we have that conversation.”
Brennan didn’t wait too long before nodding. It wasn’t about the smoke. Not entirely anyway.
He’d flown to Panama City worried he wouldn’t have the stomach to kill one man. Now Brennan was pretty sure he’d need to kill two.
Brennan wasn’t surprised to see Leo pull the coke from the open wound in his left forearm. Hell, he’d seen the man do it before. But that didn’t make watching it any easier.
Leo was the kind of guy who bounced from one hard-luck cliché to the next, somehow finding an agreeable place to land each time. Got drafted, got shot in the knee outside Hanoi, got a heroin habit not long after returning to the states. A decade in and out of alleyways and rehab left him with a wealth of contacts in Brooklyn’s drug world.
Leo hadn’t put a needle in his arm for the better part of two decades, but his status as everyone’s weird uncle in Coney Island helped turn him from a hard scrabble drug user to an efficient drug dealer. If Sal’s girls needed party favors, Leo was the guy he turned too.
Leo’s left forearm was forever hidden under bandages, and he liked to joke that he was part Kangaroo. The “pouch” was the product of a knife wound suffered in a 2003 bar fight. Leo thought of it as his own little superpower. Brennan didn’t entirely understand the science of it, how it never got infected with some permanent malady, but it gave Leo a secondary income as a smuggler.
“Sal sent you all the way here for that?” Brennan asked.
“Sal sent you all the way here to put J.P. down like the thieving little shit he is?” Leo replied.
“Sal doesn’t know I’m here.”
“Same. So let’s relax and keep it that way.”
Leo wiped the blood off the baggie, blotting it with a damp paper towel. He pulled down a baby changing station and carved out three lines. Brennan stepped forward but Leo stopped him, motioning towards the smoke detector above. It was secured with those tri-headed screws you only see on video game controllers, the kind you need a special tool to remove. Leo produced one.
“Paid off one of the night guards,” Leo said. “We have something of an understanding.”
“Been coming here a lot lately?” Brennan asked.
Leo smirked at Brennan, lipped a cigarette and disabled the smoke detector.
“You tell me why you’re here first,” Leo said.
“What the hell would I do that for?” Brennan asked.
Leo took a bump, and waived Brennan over.
“One, because I just turned your layover into a Friday night. Two, you’re not exactly the portrait of composure right now. Seems like you might need to talk.”
Brennan took his dose, tossed his head back and let the drip tickle his throat. He blinked twice and stared at the mirror, found the bags under his eyes and felt cold grip his stomach.
“I almost killed you before,” Brennan said.
“Maybe you’re off your game then,” Leo replied. “Hell, I would be, if I fucked up as bad as you. How the hell did you let J.P. get his hands on that list?”
“Fuck you very much.”
“Oh stop trying to be coy. That cat’s out the bag, down the block and headed for the nearest liquor store. He tried to sell it to me and a few others.”
Leo took his bump. Brennan craned his neck, looked at the third line drawn, and wondered if it was too soon for a second helping.
“Sell it?” Brennan asked. “That list is only worth real money in Sal’s hands.”
Leo tried to laugh, but it came out as a cough.
“Kid, what exactly do you think it is you lost?”
Brennan remembered where it was hidden. The black notebook, maybe twice the size of a wallet, tucked inside the liner of a painting. Somewhere no one would look during a robbery unless it was the thing they’d come to find.
He didn’t feel compelled to share that with Leo. He shouldn’t have felt compelled to share anything with the old man, but the cocktail of cocaine and panic was loosening his tongue.
“Sal’s ledger,” Brennan said. “Names of repeat customers. Favorite girls. Preferences. Drug of choice. It was a business model, maybe a bit of leverage on those guys if he ever needed it.”
Leo tried laughing again. This time it worked.
“Guess you don’t know the man like I do. Then again, guess you only see what a man shows you,” he said. “You ever wonder how Sal makes his money? His real money. We both know those mob connections are just noise.”
The one commonality he and Sal shared but never spoke of. Survival by way of myth.
“Boys, Brennan. That’s how Sal gets by. The women bring in their share, but Sal is a regular twink merchant. Twenty-somethings who look like they’re 15. Drives all those closeted lawyers and doctors who only married their wives for the sake of office décor crazy. That’s the real racket. But those men like their secrets, and when Sal needs something, he uses those secrets to get whatever it is. Money. Zoning permits. Cars.”
“And here I thought pussy was the root of all evil,” Brennan said.
“Oh it is,” Leo repied. “But every man’s got his vice, and if you deal with the right crowds, there’s plenty other dark shit jockeying for second place.”
Brennan took that second bump, hoping time would speed up or at least get on without him.
“So now you know what you didn’t know,” Sal said. “Care to make us even?”
Brennan flared his nostrils, feeling a slight burn.
“And how would I do that?”
“I need to know how J.P. got that list, and I need to know why you let him live long enough to try and sell it.”
Brennan looked at the bathroom door, and wondered what he might have to do if and when he left the room.
“You ever get trapped in a lie Leo?” Brennan asked.
“You know anyone who hasn’t?” he replied.
“Not a white lie. Not the ‘I cheated on my girlfriend’ kind Leo. I mean one you have to live with, maybe even live within.”
“You’re talking in riddles kid,” he said. “If you want me to help you, speak English.”
“I told J.P. where the list was,” Brennan said.
“And why the hell would you do a thing like that?” Leo asked.
“Cause I got tired of living in the lie. Thought he might be able to help me wind my way out of it.”
Leo went to cut Brennan off but the big man held a hand up.
“Who am I Leo? I mean, really, when my name comes up, what do people really know me for? Just that one thing I did that mattered, right?”
“Fresno,” he responded.
“That’s all I am to almost everyone we see with any regularity. Big Brennan, don’t fuck with him, that’s the guy that put Jimmy Fresno down,” Brennan said. “Well I didn’t kill him man. Truth told, no one did. The story is mostly the story. I was there. Fresno killed two of Sal’s guys. I should have been next. But when Fresno got his hands around my throat he dropped dead. There’s no legend, no magic about me Leo. Guy had a fucking heart attack.”
Brennan had thought about that moment for twelve months, hoping it would change something, catharsis by way of confession.
It didn’t. He was still standing there, the same man with the same problems.
“You don’t want to kill J.P.?” Leo asked.
“I don’t give two fucks about J.P. But I don’t wanna be the guy that killed J.P. Or the guy that killed Fresno.”
“Then don’t be,” Leo said.
“Like it’s that simple?” Brennan asked. “How does my rent get paid the next month then, you gonna front me the cash?”
“I might. Depending on the outcome of this conversation.”
Brennan lit another cigarette.
“You became who you needed to be to get by. I understand that, better than most. Government needed a soldier so I became a soldier. Sal needed a drug dealer and I needed a paycheck so I became that. But I’m just as tired of being who someone else needs me to be as you are. How do you think I wound up down here anyway?”
Brennan checked his watch again, time becoming less relevant as it marched forward.
“I’m 62 years old, and I can count on one hand the decisions I’ve made for myself,” Leo said. “I don’t have much time left, and I’m tired of being happy by someone else’s definition. There’s some things I want to do, places I want to see before I check out, but I need some money to do that, same as you. You think that list only has value in Sal’s hands? That’s bullshit. That list is currency. That list is a new life. For me, you, both of us if you want to go that way. J.P. doesn’t have to die, and if he does, you don’t have to be the one that kills him.”
“Just like that?” Brennan asked. “Get the list and be someone else tomorrow?”
“Who knows you down here?” Leo asked. “No one. Not a soul. There are planes leaving this place in every direction, most to places where your money triples once you touch down. You could wake up tomorrow somewhere no one’s ever heard of you, me or Jimmy Fresno.”
“So you want me to run to where? Peru? Venezuela?” Brennan asked. “The hell would I do for work? Who would I even talk too?”
“Figure that out after,” Leo replied. “No one said change is easy. Change is risk. But it’s also rare.”
“What if I’m not ready for it?” Brennan asked.
“Have you been listening to yourself kid?” Leo replied. “If not now, when?”
Brennan checked his watch again, stared at it the way you stare at someone when they’re lying. They’d start checking in passengers soon.
The door opened. J.P. slipped through, yawning with his eyes half-open, muscles probably stiff from hours spent sleeping while sitting up.
By the time he locked eyes with Brennan and Leo, he’d made it too far in to turn back. His eyes went wide with shock, probably wondering how everything he’d done had caught up with him in that exact moment.
Brennan wondered the same, but it didn’t stop him from lunging toward J.P., grabbing him by the back of the head and smashing his face into the sink. He crumpled to the ground, groaned and clawed at Brennan’s leg. Leo’s boot came across the man’s jaw, putting him to sleep.
J.P. went limp and his coat slipped open, the ledger skating onto the bathroom floor with Leo and Brennan standing on either side.
They stared at each other for a while, two men defined by the stories they told, wondering who they needed to become next.
The window told a different tale in the morning.
Brennan couldn’t fill Panama’s beautiful dark with images of casinos and glistening beaches anymore. The sun washed away the blank canvas, revealing a set of rolling hills beyond the now still Palmetto trees, a favela teeming like an insect hive beyond that.
The city he dreamed replaced by the city he saw.
The clean-up in the bathroom wasn’t thorough, but Brennan and Leo had taken enough care that J.P.’s fate would remain a mystery for a few hours. Long enough to board anyway.
He padded his breast pocket, unconcerned about his boarding pass, making sure the list was where it was supposed to be. That was the real ticket. The thing that would let him go wherever he wanted.
He’d brought enough flash money to placate Leo in the short term. They’d known each other long enough that the old man could trust Brennan would give him the rest of the profits from the list. It was up to Brennan to sell it or return it to Sal, to go home or make a new one.
A woman in a light blue uniform grabbed hold of a microphone.
“United Airlines would now like to welcome all passengers to board Flight 263 to John F. Kennedy International Airport…”
A couple of hours in the air, then one in a car. That was all that separated him from Brooklyn, Coney, Sal. The life he’d borrowed and become less uncomfortable in than all the others he tried.
The same amount of time that separated him from Rio. Or Atlanta. Or anywhere else where he’d have a blank slate to start from.
Leo had killed J.P. But in Brooklyn, people would know it was Brennan, while Brennan got to enjoy knowing otherwise.
He could get lost in a favela or on a beach somewhere, himself and no one at the same time. He could go back to Brooklyn and be someone, even if that someone wasn’t him.
Brennan stared out the airport window again, taking one last look at Panama, thinking about how much he preferred the city he imagined to the city he saw. But there’s a difference between what you hope change is and what it might actually be.
The last call came over the loudspeaker. Now boarding.
At least he knew a good place to get coffee in Coney. And if the deli clerk thought he was a killer, well fuck him, Brennan knew different. He knew his own story. All that mattered was the tale that lived in his head.
Brennan got on board, fell into a window seat, and looked at the favela again, missing his version.
Then he smiled. Closed his eyes. Changed the channel.
–Art by Petra
–Art by NiiCoLaZz
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