I Got A Proposition For You

An unassuming car is parked beneath a street light on an empty street. Two men sit inside, their fedoras pulled down low, the collars of their trench coats popped up high. Their faces are almost entirely obscure, but one can vaguely tell that the man behind the wheel is wearing a mustache. A neat mustache, trimmed short with just a hint of a waxed uptick on either side of his lips. The other man is presumably clean shaven, but perhaps has some stubble as though he hasn’t shaved in a few days. But that might be a shadow.

They sit in relative silence, just waiting. The clean shaven man coughs into his leather glove. It is a hacking sort of cough, dry. Like he’s been fighting back a cold.

“You alright there, Jackie?” the mustachioed man asks, breaking the silence even further. There is an unmistakeable tone of concern in his voice. “Maybe you should’ve taken the night off.”

“I’m fine, Smooth Johnny,” he replies when he’s done coughing. “Just getting over a cold, you worry too much.”

Smooth Johnny pouts. “I worry an appropriate amount. You keep coming around with your colds, then you’ll get me sick and it’ll be a whole thing.”

“Will you stop complaining? It’s just a cold, alright?” Jackie unwraps a cough drop. He tosses it up in the air and catches it in his mouth. “Besides,” he says, “I can’t afford to take a day off right now, you know?”

“You get me sick and the next thing you know you won’t have a job. You’ll be filing for disability payments, you hear?”

“Real mature,” Jackie murmurs in response.

The two men resume their silence, watching ahead through the windshield at the empty street corner in front of them. They adjust their fedoras again, to make sure no one could possibly see them or even see the sweat on their skin glisten in the yellow halogen light of the street lamps that line the quiet city street. They wait in the car, the windows rolled up and no airflow inside. Despite the slight chill of the September evening, it is warm inside the black sedan.

“I’m sorry, you’re not mad at me or nothing, right?” Smooth Johnny turns away from the windshield to look at his partner. “I didn’t mean to threaten you. I’d never do nothing like that to you. I was just trying to rib you is all.”

“I know that,” Jackie replies. “With some of the other guys I might take them seriously, but I knows you were just playing around.”

“Good, just wanted to be sure we was on the same page. You’re a good friend, Jackie. Take some time off if you need it. I could help with your bills if you’re worried about money.”

“I don’t need help with my bills, I’m doing alright. It’s just, rent is pretty pricey in the city. Keeps going up.”

Smooth Johnny quickly checks his watch. It’s nine forty-two. “We could always get a place together. Split the cost fifty-fifty.”

Jackie quickly turns his head back to the street corner they’re watching. He pulls his collar up higher, trying to mask the inadvertent rush of color to his cheeks. “Maybe,” he says, “my lease is up first of October.”

Smooth Johnny’s neatly trimmed mustache rumples as he smiles. “I sign month to month.” He checks his watch again. It’s still nine forty-two.

“You in a hurry there?”

“Sooner the job’s done, the sooner we get paid.”

Jackie nods. “Want to get a bite after work?”

“Sure,” Smooth Johnny replies.

“How about Sal’s?”

Smooth Johnny shakes his head almost frantically. “No, not Sal’s. We went the other day. Let’s do Bistro al Bistro tonight.”

“Fancy, you’re buying.”

Smooth Johnny shrugs, “Sure,” he says. “It’s gonna be a good paycheck this week anyway.” He turns away to hide his sheepish grin. Time isn’t moving fast enough and the silence in the car is already deafening. “Hey, you know something?”

“Yeah?”

“This is the same corner we were staking out on our first job together. What was that? Seven years ago?”

Jackie smiles. “Has it been seven years? You’re not sick of me yet are you?”

“Not even a little,” Smooth Johnny replies, smooth as ever.

A figure crosses the street and stops underneath the lamp post on the street corner. They pull something out of their coat pocket that glints in the soft yellow light. They move the object around purposefully, rhythmically casting a reflection cat-a-corner into the darkness of the city park.

“There’s our guy,” Jackie says.

Smooth Johnny nods his head and puts his index finger to his lips like a librarian shushing a loud child.

Carefully, they open their doors and step into the street. They leave their doors partially open, so as not to make a sound. Creeping up through the long shadows cast by the tall buildings overhead, Smooth Johnny pulls a sleek handgun from the holster hidden under his coat.

BANG! BANG! BANG! Shouts ring out, echoing along the street. Somewhere in the distance a woman yells out her window, “Didn’t I say to knock off that racket!?”

Smooth Johnny and Jackie break into a run to reach the body on the sidewalk, bathed in a pool of lamplight and also blood.

“Keep watch while I search him,” Smooth Johnny orders briskly. He kneels down next to the body, stealthily pulling a small box out of his own pocket. He rumples around in the pockets of the man on the ground. “Hey, look at this,” he says.

“Yeah? What did you find?”

Like a magician at a kid’s birthday party, Smooth Johnny makes it look like he’s pulling the box off the stiff. Still on one knee, he turns to Jackie and opens the box, revealing a beautiful diamond ring.

Jackie’s face turns beet red as he almost stumbles over the corpse in surprise. “Oh my, oh my,” he says under his breath.

“Jackie,” says Smooth Johnny, “I gots a proposition for you.” He’s smiling so much that his neat mustache almost looks like a Dalí. “It’s an offer you can’t refuse,” he says, stammering out the words as though he hadn’t practiced in the mirror every morning for a month. “Will you marry me?”

“Oh, Smooth Johnny! Of course I’ll marry you,” Jackie exclaims. He pulls Smooth Johnny up onto his feet and they embrace, kissing passionately under the soft yellow light of the street lamp, standing over the body of a man they just killed.