Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) by William Lashner

first Duddleman and now this. Jessica was a sturdy woman in her late twenties, wearing a pressed print dress with a flat white collar, and a pair of stolid low pumps. Her shoulders were broad, her hair was fair, her face was round and pretty, her eyes were narrowed as if she were peering at me not across a small marble tabletop but instead across a wide-open plain of dust. Arrange a pea sack around her head like a bonnet and she would have been a Dorothea Lange photograph. I liked her right off.
    What would I have said to poor doomed Jessica Barnes if I could go back in time to that moment in that bar? What would my advice have been?
    Run.
    “You’re not what I expected,” I said.
    “What did you expect?”
    “Someone harder, someone proud of her own slick cleverness.”
    “I’m not proud of myself for this, Mr. Herbert.”
    “Okay.”
    “This is not anything that I ever wanted to be doing,” she said, twisting one rough red hand in the other. “But when the agency called and gave me the number, and then I found out whose number it was, the idea just came. Desperation, it does things to a person. It’s like a disease. It spins you around until you can’t tell right from wrong, and even if you could, you don’t much care.”
    “And here we are.”
    “Yes.” She looked around nervously and spotted the waitress bringing her drink, bright and fruity and totally out of place in that hard joint. When it was placed before her, she spun it on its coaster before she took a sip. She tried to fight a smile and failed. She hadn’t had enough mai tais in her life, that was clear.
    “Tell me about yourself,” I said.
    “Is this part of it? Is this the way it works?”
    “It’s the way it works with me.”
    Everyone has a lesson to teach if you just listen, and Jessica Barnes was trying to teach me the last lesson of her life. But as usual, I was too wrapped up in my own damn self to catch it full. And what was I thinking about, just then, as she hesitated and meandered before getting to the spoiled meat of her sad story? What emotion had suddenly wrapped itself around my shriveled little heart? A strange and perverse sense of possibility.
    “It wasn’t pancakes and roses even before Matthew lost his job,” she said, eyes focused on her drink, “but at least we could keep her fed and pay for the medicine. But when they closed out Matthew’s shop, the unemployment wasn’t enough to make a go of it, and when that ran out, what with them cutting back on my factory job, we were good as dead.”
    “What kind of medicine are we talking about?”
    “My daughter has a liver thing, something about too much copper. Dr. Patusan says she can’t eat mushrooms or dried fruit, chocolate, shrimp. She’s covered by the state, but the insurance only pays for a piece of the medicine even when we cut back. I don’t get benefits, and the COBRA for Matthew was too high.”
    “Has your husband found any work?” I asked.
    “It’s not like he hasn’t tried. They just aren’t hiring men who can do what he can do.”
    “Has he tried retraining? Has he looked into programs at the community college?”
    “Matthew is a good man, Mr. Herbert, and he wants to do right. But it gets hard even getting up every day with that knot in your gut. And then you drink to ease it just for a bit, until the only thing that gets you out of bed is the easing you’re going to get with that first drink. So you can ask the questions everyone asks and blame him if you want, but I don’t. I see the hurt in him. It’s these times. It drives us to things. Which is why we’re here, I suppose.”
    “Yes, it’s why we are here,” I said.
    “I brought the proof like I said I would.” She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a sealed dull-brown envelope the size of a greeting card. She looked both ways, like a kid about to cross a street, before she handed it to me. It was light but not empty; there was something thin inside, a photograph maybe. I