The Baby Merchant Read online

  “Mom. Mo-om!”

  “Stop squirming or I’ll smack you!”

  “Mom, I have to go!”

  “Not until you say what you’ve got on your mouth.”

  “Nothing.” He uses the back of his fist to wipe it off, fingers clamped around something, what’s he holding so tight?

  “It looks like chocolate ice cream to me. Delroy Steptoe, what you got in your hand?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Come on, Delroy, what are you holding?” Damn him, he is giving her that old Del smile of complete scorn that she is most afraid of; she grabs him, prying at the fingers, “Give it here!”

  “Let go. Ow!”

  “Listen at me, Delroy, where’d you get this?” It is knot of bills. “Delroy Wilson Steptoe, did you steal this money?”

  His face squinches up into a miserable knot. “No Ma’am.”

  “Don’t play like you aren’t lying.”

  “She gave it to me.”

  “Who did.”

  “Miz Egan.”

  Her heart falls from a great height onto nails. “What for?”

  “Minding the baby, OK?”

  “Delroy, she was paying you to tend that baby?”

  “Yes Ma’am.”

  Deep down inside of course she is mad at herself. After she got off the phone her new man Todd made a move that if she followed up on it she sure as hell would see more of him and not just on delivery days. So her mind is pretty much on that when she asks Delroy, “But she’s back now, right? She’s back so she let you go.”

  “Who?”

  “Miz Egan. She’s back now, Right?”

  He doesn’t answer. She smacks him and he starts to cry.

  “Delroy, hold still!” God, she was just down there, the girl isn’t back, that is, unless she just came in; Delroy’s lying and she’s too upset to figure out which part is the lie. “Is she here?”

  Chocolate like sin, staining that crumpled, deceitful face. “I don’t know!”

  “Be straight with me, Delroy. She paid you when she got back from wherever she went to, right? And then she took the baby and went back out in the car.”

  “No Ma’am.” His face is going all funny. Lying for sure, but she can’t tell which parts. “She paid me before.”

  “And you took off and got ice cream.”

  Sobbing, he nods.

  She has him by the neck now, shaking hard. Her voice comes out like thunder. “TELL ME WHERE YOU GOT THAT ICE CREAM.”

  “I got it from the …” He’s sobbing so hard that he can hardly breathe. “I guh-guh-got it from the Good Humor Man.”

  “In hell you did, he don’t come here!” She smacks her cheek. “Shit! The mall.”

  “Yes Ma’am.”

  “What did I tell you about the mall?”

  “I mean, no Ma’am.”

  “You know what you’ll get if I catch you at that mall.” God forgive her, she is so upset that she’s slapping him now, smacking him upside that face like a cartoon mother, left-right, left-right. “Now, Delroy Wilson Steptoe, did you take that baby over to the mall?”

  “No Ma’am!”

  “You weren’t looking after the baby at all, were you, Delroy?” She smacks him one last time and then gets all guilty because tears spray all over the place. “You stole that money.”

  “No Ma’am,” he says, insofar as he can speak at all.

  “You stole that money and lied to cover up.”

  “I didn’t, I didn’t!”

  “Where did you get it, Delroy. What have you …”

  “I didn’t, I … Owwww.” Grief comes out in a clotted howl.

  This is not a question because no question she asks Delroy gets a straight answer; she shouts, “What the fuck have you done!”

  “Ow- oh-wooooo …” There is no making sense of what he’s trying to tell her now.

  Then she looks up and sees the orange Toyota pulling into the lot. She drops him. Thud. Her heart implodes. “Oh my God.”

  She wants to go out; she’s afraid to go out. In fact she is waiting for Sasha to get out of her junk heap holding that baby because Marilyn knows better than anybody that you can’t believe anything Delroy Steptoe tells you, and she is gold plated four alarm certain that he’s pulling her chain and that sweet baby’s in the back of Sasha’s car after all, strapped into its little seat nice as pie right now, he isn’t lost or stolen, he’s perfectly fine. In which case she will snatch Delroy baldheaded for stealing money and lying about it.

  But what if he’s telling the truth?

  Oh, she’ll punish him for sneaking off the place to get ice cream, but if the rest is true, awful as it is she’ll have to make it up to him some way. See, she hit him pretty hard; loving a kid you don’t much like bends you into peculiar shapes, she can make it up to him with pizza maybe, there was a Domino’s guy out there just now, which is the source of her inspiration. Things are bad between them and it’s her fault. It won’t hurt to let him off his diet just this once. She’ll sort this out and then call in a nice big order to Pizza Hut, she and Delroy can make up while they’re deciding which toppings, but not until she sees that girl get out of the car and lean over in back and unbuckle the baby and hold it up so she can be sure.

  Instead she sees Sasha opening the back and pulling out … Packages. Nothing but packages. Grocery bags. A freezer bag with ice cream. Baby, she keeps thinking. No, willing. Baby next. But wishful thinking doesn’t make a baby and the girl lets herself into the unit and the door slams shut. So … What?

  If Delroy Steptoe is lying, she is going to tan his hide for real.

  Oh God, if he’s telling the truth then they are in deep shit here, the depth of which she really, truly doesn’t want to know.

  28.

  Once doubt slithers in it feeds on you, growing until it is tremendous. It becomes your creator and your lover, the alien stirring in your secret parts, the sick uncertainty you love and fear gnawing its way to the surface— the obsession you harbor precisely because it will destroy you.

  He never should have interfaced with the mark.

  In the course of what should have been a routine prep, he also killed a guy.

  I am not that person.

  Uncertainty rocks him.

  God, am I that person?

  He is not thinking clearly now.

  It was an easy pickup, easy in, easy out, getting inside the girl’s locked unit at the DelMar was like cracking into a milk carton with a butcher knife. Naturally he’d scoped the place, nobody of Starbird’s caliber would do an on-the-premises pickup without making a dry run. He knew the lay of the land, the ingress and egress and the niceties of the access road. He was familiar with the DelMar in spades. He studied the terrain before the mark left the hospital. When she locked her door today and got into the car he was watching from the top of the berm. He knew the road between here and the Food King, he knew where she went to fill prescriptions and he knew the exact turnaround time for each. When the motel manager’s kid popped out the door minutes after she left he slapped the Domino’s sign on top of the car and went in.

  The removal was a picnic. Motel patrons all checked out before he rolled in, supplier safely off the scene for fifteen minutes minimum. On his way in he did run into one late departure shambling along to the key drop, but he held the carrier high and dodged the DelMar patron with that adroit weave that pizza guys use to make themselves feel important. He passed without notice: Tom Starbird as generic pizza guy, think invisible. By the time he moved on the unit the last overnight customer was long gone. It took him no time to score and the subject slept through the pickup. It squirmed a little in the red plastic pizza carrier as he headed for the car, that’s all. When he opened the trunk and slipped it out of its carrier the subject didn’t cry. It didn’t even whimper as he set it down in the dummy UPS box fitted out with bedding and a white noise machine— took it like a little trouper. The kid snuggled into the thermal blankets like a mouse into a nest. Correctio
n. The product, packaged and ready to roll.

  Easy out, too, or it should have been. He had it all timed out. Domino’s sign off the roof— twenty seconds. Ten seconds more to clear the DelMar lot, sixty on the access road to the freeway, he’d timed it, blend in with the last of the rush hour and go with the flow. Forty minutes max to the spot where his second car waited; north to south, the state of Georgia’s small; Tom Starbird should be out of state before anybody thought to call 911. Hell, by the time the local cops threw up their hands and called in the Feds, he could be halfway to Texas.

  Instead he is here.

  Stymied. Marking time in a motel in Myrtle Beach. While giggling tourists bob up and down in the Atlantic just outside his window and the product snuffles in its pet carrier, Starbird is considering.

  He should be enroute to Galveston, his designated point for the transfer of property.

  But he has botched the operation. Interfacing with the mark. That accidental killing. Of these two mistakes the first is the graver.

  He keeps seeing her face. That he can’t shake it has made him edgy and so badly disrupted that exiting, he left the note— I left a note? It’s the kind of thing you do only when your systems are gravely compromised. Tom Starbird, up and running, would never have made assurances by voicemail. Which, God help him, he did the other day. Tom Starbird in his right mind would never compound the mistake by leaving a … Fuck, I left a note.

  This is what kept him lingering in the DelMar parking lot a hair longer than is S.O.P. Considering. Should he go back and trash the note or leave it so she wouldn’t worry? Cruel to trouble somebody you almost like, but still … He was hung up for only a matter of seconds, but in a clean pickup a provider has to keep moving, click click click. Instead of dumping the Domino’s sign and scratching off, he sat behind the wheel in the yellow evening light, weighing it. A note. With that fat fuck of an ex-boyfriend planted in the saw-grass off the inland waterway, a bloating time bomb ripening up for the sniffer dogs, he compromised himself further by leaving that note. It was a stupid thing to do. Why did he think the girl needed to know the boyfriend was gone for good? Worse. Why did he need to let her know the baby’s OK? In a precision maneuver, it was a slip. The kind of stupid mistake even an expert can make reflexively, out of some sick need to help.

  Stupid, yes.

  Unless it was suicidal.

  When doubt creeps in, every decision you attempt looks hinky. You never know if you wanted to shoot yourself in the foot or you did it because somebody else wanted it, but it happens.

  A note, he thinks, pacing. Granted, he fucked up. He could either leave it and color himself gone before forensics started pawing the evidence or he could slip back inside her room and retrieve it. The question spelled itself out in seconds. The answer took too long to come. Indecision was new to Starbird and it was making him weird— how long did he really sit there dithering? Straight answer? Too long. While Starbird idled in his car, circling the drain, the supplier’s rusting Toyota rolled into the lot. The decision was no longer his. The note stays, Starbird. Now, leave! Weirdness made his hands shake and his mouth dry out. It stopped him cold. He should have been out on the Interstate by that time, heading for the state line on the route he had drawn due west to the Gulf coast. Galveston. Mexico and beyond.

  Instead he slouched behind the wheel with his eyes on the rearview mirror and waited for her to get out of the car. He just needed to see her right then. He had to see her however, whenever, whyever. Why the fuck ever? Did he think she’d find the note and understand? Did he think she’d come running out to thank him? To beg him to take her with him? What? Why did the weakest part of him care what she did or what happened to her next? Granted, darkness is safer than daylight, but for what he does, it can never get dark enough. Sighing, he started the motor. Still he lingered. Fixed on the mirror, he watched the girl’s progress: slender in her black T-shirt, you’d never guess she’d just had a baby, but walking as though some deep, soft part of her still hurt. Carried her head like somebody he knows and almost loved once, where the fuck is this coming from? It was stupid but he felt safe enough sitting there in the twilight, the Domino’s sign and the dumb hat turned him into an object you don’t see, a unit you may note but will not remember as a person with a face: pizza guy. It was still stupid.

  Unless it was suicidal. He is not the person he was when he went to ground in New York and this colors all his decisions. He is in transition. There is no telling what he will become.

  It took her a minute to get out of her car and collect her bags—the plastic kept slithering away from her— and another to cross the parking lot and another minute to unlock the door and schlep the supplies inside. He started the motor, idling long past the vanishing point. There should be nothing left of him but a vapor trail, dust settling. At this stage in the operation there should be nothing where Starbird was sitting but thin air. Instead he hung in place, watching her reflection. What did he want, her to turn around and recognize him and flash a smile like a gift, was he that crazy? What was he waiting for, really? Applause for what he was doing? Military trumpets and a large cash prize?

  What shrinks call validation? Some sign that if not grateful, she was at least relieved?

  She ran out screaming.

  Doubt kept his foot off the gas even though she came tearing out into the parking lot, spinning to look here, there, in a frenzy. This girl was nothing like the other women he’d relieved of kids they didn’t really want; they pretended to be upset, where this one was desperate. Her face was drained of light. The girl ran along with her mouth wide and her straight hair streaming. She was a little whirlwind. Shouting, she came on like a dust devil— in rage, woe or what? He had no way of knowing. As she bore down on him Starbird hit the gas and instead of flooring it he glided past her and God help him he didn’t mean to, but he thinks he smiled at her. What did he think, she would ask to come along? Did she want him to take her along? Confusion slowed him down. She looked right at him. He thinks she saw the face under the hat. As he hit the access road she went running back inside— the 911 call or her car keys? It didn’t matter which, by that time Starbird was in the clear and headed for the freeway with the product stashed in the trunk. He floored it, pretending none of this had happened.

  And what if it had? What if she made him out and gave chase? Did she have any idea how hard it is to keep up with an expert driver in a car chase, especially in that Toyota? Piece of junk. What if she made him out back there, and called the cops? Did she know how long it takes to get a 911 response? He’d be long gone by the time they came.

  But doubt boiled in his belly and when the girl ran at the car that way, doubt broke out of his chest like the monster in Alien, ripping him to bits and slithering off on evil errands of its own. Now it is lashing its tail in his path, filling every road he takes and, mysteriously, directing him not west, but north; wherever Starbird turns doubt waits like an anaconda with its great jaws wide, preparing to glide in and devour him.

  Instead of driving nonstop to Galveston he is stalled in a nonsmoking single at the EconoLodge in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, considering next moves. Worry has him pacing the narrow room while on the bed, freshly fed and cleaned up again, the product slumbers in the pet carrier he chose for this phase of the job.

  Odd, what brings you from there to here.

  He took the glitch in the parking lot as a temporary aberration, but when he stopped to switch cars, he made another slip. He had the fresh car well hidden, gassed up and waiting on an overgrown peninsula. When he reached it, Starbird stripped the plates, took out the Domino’s sign and stuck it in the trunk of the relay car, to be destroyed later. One more switch and they’d never catch up with him. For this leg of the trip he had picked an unremarkable navy blue sedan, a choice based in experience: the color nobody notices because it’s so dull. Navy blue says, reliable, no matter who’s driving or how fast; stay within the limits or don’t, no cop will give you a second look. He t
ook the product in its container and plopped it on the passenger’s seat next to him. When he was done doing what he had to do for it, he would transfer it to the pet carrier and secure it with the seat belt.

  “This will only take a minute,” he said to the container; his heart jumped. Had it died in there? It stirred and began to whimper. He patted the case. “Hang in. I have to do a thing.”

  He ran the pickup car to the edge of the bank and pushed it into deep water off the point— quicksand in the channel; eventually they’ll find it, but it will take time. The sign and the UPS carton, he would ditch on his way inland, in a place nobody will ever think to look.

  Now he had to do certain things for the kid. This phase of the operation was never his favorite but he was used to it. Feeding. Requisite diaper change. When he flew in from an ordinary pickup, back in the days when he still had a staff, he only had to do this once. On this one, he’s in for the long haul. First, the feeding, which took too long. On routine jobs, the kind he had the liberty of orchestrating, Starbird made sure the subject was old enough to eat efficiently before he picked it up. On remote pickups he and the product would fly into LaGuardia— in ordinary times. From LaGuardia, there were dozens of secure ways to get back to his place where he would have Martha waiting, and she was a trained nurse. He’d have Martha on hand to take over the feeding, changing, all the necessaries until the clients came in for the transfer of property; yet another good way to depersonalize. He had a pediatrician on tap to inspect the goods and solve any unexpected problems, all bases covered and everything under control. Then he made his third mistake.