The Wrong Man

“You don’t think I’ve got the money?” O’Co

“Need to see it,” the bartender replied. He had stepped back, and O’Co

He looked at the bartender again. The man was too old and too experienced in the world defined by the gloomy corners of the decrepit bar to be taken unawares. And, in that second, O’Co

So, he shrugged. He spun and stared at the man at the bar a few feet away.

“What’re you looking at, you old fuck?” he asked angrily.

The man refused to make eye contact.

“You want another drink?” the bartender demanded.

O’Co

He laughed. “Not in a shit hole like this.” He rose and exited the bar, leaving the men behind in silence as he passed through the door. He made a mental note to come back sometime, and felt a surge of satisfaction. There was nothing, he thought, nearly as pleasurable in life as moving to an edge of something, and teetering back and forth. Rage was like a drug; in moderation, it made him high. But every so often it was necessary to truly indulge; to get wasted with it. He looked down at his watch. A little after lunchtime. Sometimes Ashley liked to take a sandwich out onto the Common and eat beneath a tree with some of her art class friends. It was an easy place to keep an eye on her without being seen. He thought he might just wander over and check.

Michael O’Co

In addition to his good looks, O’Co

In a run-down dive of a bar, catering to alcoholics and fringe criminals, he could be a tough guy. Then, just as easily, in Boston’s massive student population, he could appear to be just another college kid. The backpack, filled to bursting with computer texts, helped form that impression. Michael O’Co

Had they, he thought, they would have been scared.

He watched, easily picking out Ashley’s reddish blond hair from the group. A half dozen young people were sitting in a loose circle, eating lunch, laughing, telling stories. Had he been the seventh member of that group, he would have turned quiet. He was good at lying and making up believable fictions about who he was, where he’d come from, and what he’d done, but in a group, he always worried that he would go too far, say something loose and unlikely, and lose the credibility that was important to him. One-on-one, with someone like Ashley, he had no trouble being seductive, creating a need for sympathy.

Michael O’Co

It was a familiar sensation, one that he both welcomed and hated. It was different from the anger he felt when he was readying for a fight, or when he got into an argument with a boss at any number of the occasional jobs he held, or with his landlord, or the old lady who lived next door to his tiny apartment and who bothered him with her cats and leery-eyed stares. He could have words with any number of people, even come to blows, and it was to him next to nothing. But his feelings about Ashley were far different.

He knew he loved her.

Watching her from a safe distance, unrecognized and unobserved, he stewed. He tried to relax, but could not. He turned away because watching was too painful, but then, just as quickly, he twisted back, because the pain of not looking was far worse. Every laugh she emitted, tossing her head back, her hair shaking seductively around her shoulders, every time she leaned forward, listening to someone else, was agony. Every time she reached out and, even in the most inadvertent of motions, let her hand brush up against another’s-all of these things were like ice picks driven deep into his chest.

Michael O’Co

She constricted his every thought.

He reached down into his pants pocket, where he kept a knife. It wasn’t the Swiss Army multiuse-type knife that could be found in hundreds of backpacks throughout Boston’s student universe. This was a four-inch folding knife, stolen from a camping goods store in Somerset. It had heft. He wrapped his hand around the knife and squeezed it tightly so that, although the blade was concealed within the handle, it still bit into his hand. A little bit of extra pain, he thought, helps to clear the head.

Michael O’Co

Sometimes he believed that he traveled in a world of about-to-bes. The students, like Ashley, were all in the process of turning themselves into something other than what they were. Law school for the soon-to-be-minted lawyers. Medical school for the ones who wanted to be doctors. Art school. Philosophy courses. Language studies. Film classes. Everyone was part of becoming something. On the verge of joining.

He wished, sometimes, that he’d enlisted in the army. He liked to think that his talents would have translated well into the military, if they could have seen past his difficulty taking orders. Perhaps he should have tried the CIA. He would have made an excellent spy. Or contract killer. He would have liked that. A James Bond type. He would have been a natural.

Instead, he realized, he was destined to be a criminal. What he liked to study was danger.