NYC Midnight: Killing Cookie Abiloni & Other Associated Transgressions

Drama 

A Business Trip

Biologist

Brief Synopsis: Wayne and Bella have murder on their minds when they happen to meet at the bar across from the Continental Hotel.

Thrill Before the Kill

Planning to kill and doing it are two very different things. The tension building in both their bodies was a testament to that truth. His was a simple job with one target. Hers was complicated with global consequences. Neither knew as they struck up a conversation on the stools at the bar across from the Continental Hotel in Washington, D.C. that the other was suppressing the anxiety of his and her’s first potential kill. Yet that energy was like a magnet attracting the two together.

She expounded on how the government was destroying the environment and exploiting biology for devious reasons. He commented on how American culture robbed people of their individuality. Both agreed that a reckoning was coming.

The energy percolated in their blood stream, mixing with the alcohol. Just one other thing could alleviate the stress. They both sensed it. Just before midnight they entered his room — No. 910 at the Continental — and the alleviating commenced.

As the throes of passion subsided and the booze dissipated making his limbs feel as if they were floating, the compulsion to confess overwhelmed him.

“A man paid me ten thousand dollars to kill his wife today.”

She blinked at him, shaking away the pull of a deep vodka-induced slumber.

“Who?”

“The woman you spent the afternoon with at the White House.”

“You’re going to kill Cookie?”

“That’s the plan.” He reached over to the nightstand, put on a glove, and then pulled a pistol from the drawer. “She’s in the adjoining room, and the door is unlocked. Do you think I should do it?”

The Abilonis Check In

Cookie began her adult life rolling in dough. Just not the green kind. After a mediocre high school career, her uncle hired her as cheap labor in his bakery in Middleburg, Virginia. Mornings passed with her elbow-deep in mixing up bread, cakes and, of course, cookies. While working the counter one day a year later, she met Lou Abiloni, a rising star in the Middleburg realty scene. Several dates and a few extra orders of cookies for non-existent house showings later, Lou proposed to Cookie.

Happily ever after from there.

Well, mostly.

Twin boys – Lou Jr. and Lester – arrived, grew, raised a bit of hell, and then went off to college into ever-fruitful Liberal Arts programs.  Lou Jr. is living in sin with some woman ten years his senior, and Lester occupies the Abiloni’s basement between shifts of delivering pizza around Middleburg. For Cookie and Lou, twenty-five years of life flew by with the usual ups and downs of a marriage.  Now both were waiting for the “Death do us part” part. Well, waiting isn’t exactly the right word.

Trying to hurry the parting part along is what brings the Abilonis to the lobby of the Continental Hotel. Lou, with his dark hair combed over the top of his pale dome and wearing a wrinkled blue suit, consulted his wristwatch every few moments. Cookie, a stout woman with hips wider than her shoulders, believed in perms that twirled her red locks in tight loops close to her head and in sweatshirts bought from Wal-Mart featuring animals and kooky sayings. In the lobby, she sported a sky-blue number with a squirrel clutching a chestnut and with yellow lettering proclaiming “LET’S GET NUTTY!” She packed a matching one for Lou despite his vehement protests against wearing anything but suits outside of the house.

“I bet I can get Trump to put on the sweatshirt,” Cookie said. In front of them a long-legged blonde dickered with the clerk about her room. “I’ll get a picture of it, and I betcha they’ll put it on TV.”

“First, Mr. Trump doesn’t have time for that. He’s too busy. Second, you’re not seeing him because you’re not leaving the hotel. You’d get lost.”

“Too busy, that’s rich. All men are just too damn busy.”

“Not that again. I told you three months ago that this wasn’t a vacation. I’ve got work to do.”

Lou had told her that this trip was for business and not pleasure a hundred times before, knowing she’d never listen. He planned this early spring trip to D.C. for two big reasons. The first was legitimate work. He’d lucked his way into a ripe property just outside of Middleburg that he was dangling in front of three, maybe even four, possible investors from the D.C. area. His first meeting was later in the afternoon and that’s why the Abilonis arrived at the Continental shortly after noon. Lou just needed to check-in and drop off all his luggage, Cookie included.

His second big reason was waiting at the bar across the street. 

The Belle of Germ Warfare

Belle Blackberry’s itinerary for the afternoon, like Lou’s, was tight. She needed to get this dingleberry clerk to switch her rooms, and then she needed to catch a cab down to Pennsylvania Avenue. Like Cookie, her thoughts were on Pennsylvania Avenue’s most important resident. The difference was that Belle had no interest in pictures or sweatshirts. Behind Belle the aging couple argued, and she focused all her mental energy on the skinny little termite of a man standing behind the desk.

“The room reeks of cigar smoke.”

“That’s impossible, mam. That room has been smoke-free forever, and we take great pride in cleaning the rooms and preparing fresh linens daily.”

“Well, pride comes before the fall, and this hotel’s online ratings are falling precipitously each second I stand here.”

The man behind the desk, a neurotic thirty-something with an overbite and scoliosis, was named Leonard, and this gorgeous blonde intimidated him.

“Let me check the computer,” Leonard offered. He was stingy about room changes. The Continental was a popular, but dated, destination hotel, and with numerous special requests, the slightest room change could send his entire system into hysterics. The other desk clerks just made switches without any regard for the precision of his system. “I have a double on the ninth floor, but you don’t need two beds.”

“That’s fine.”

“But there’s only one of you,” Leonard had a fierce sense of symmetry and the notion of one person staying in a double made his left eyelid twitch. He sighed and started counting in his head. That’s what his therapist said to do. It was stupid.

Minutes later, Belle Blackberry was alone in her room with the curtains open. The American capital with all its brilliant devotion to white shrines honoring white men appeared just below the horizon. On one bed was her overnight bag. Standing beside the other bed, she opened her briefcase. Inside were three vials that appeared empty, but definitely were not, resting on a bed of foam.

The briefcase was a present from her mother when Belle earned her PhD in microbiology. Her dreams then were to study germs and find disease cures, but just as this country was currently perverted by a false ideology, Belle Blackberry’s professional career became corrupted into creating germs – very resilient and active airborne germs. She lifted one of the vials.

“This one is for you, Mr. President.”

Everybody, Wayne Chung

His given name was Wayne Chung. No kidding. His Chinese parents were so eager to blend into their Omaha, Nebraska neighborhood that they gave their son an American first name. He spent his high school years going to parties that started with his schoolmates shouting “Everybody Wayne Chung tonight!” The joke spilled over to the hallways and when he graduated somebody rigged the sound system to play the song when he received his diploma. As the rolled-up paper slipped into his hand, he never believed more that his destiny was to kill people. The prankster responsible for the graduation humiliation would have been a good start, but he never found out who did it, and two years later, he moved away from Omaha and his parents with the stated intentions of becoming an engineer. He real objective was to become an assassin, just like in his favorite video games.

Soon his objective would be achieved. The pistol holstered under his jacket rubbed against his ribs, the silencer was in the pocket of his khakis. Above him a baseball game blared on a big screen and a Jack and Coke warmed in front of him. He shouldn’t drink anything until it was over, but his nerves were snapping all his synapses with little jolts of electricity. He needed to calm himself somehow. A pear-shaped white man in a blue suit dropped onto the stool next to him.

“Are you Lee Greenwood?” The man asked.

“Yes,” Wayne replied.

The man pushed an envelope over. Wayne opened it, counted the bills and then pulled out the picture of the woman and a hotel keycard with 910 scribbled in pen on top.

“This her?”

“Yes, my wife…”

“I don’t want to know more. Where is she?”

“Across the street, we just checked into the Continental. Room 912. I am heading across the city for a meeting, and she’ll probably leave in the next hour or so.”

“How do you know she’ll leave?”

“Because I told her not too.”

Wayne sipped on his drink, put the photo of the woman into the inside pocket of his jacket, and stood up.

“Hey, you’re kind of little for this kind of thing, aren’t you?” The man asked. Wayne stood only a hair over five feet and weighed about one hundred and ten pounds. He flashed the holster at the man.

“It’s all about the size of the gun.” Wayne made to leave, but stopped. “Why not just divorce her?”

“Shit, I got some big things going down, and I’m not giving half of it away.”

Oreos and Climate Change

            “He’s screwing some broad at his office.” This woman, who was either named Cookie or had offered Belle one of the Oreos she pulled from a sandwich bag extracted from her monstrous purple purse, or perhaps both, said.

“Who?”

“My husband. He thinks he’s sneaky, but he’s an idiot.”

“Oh.”

“You sure you don’t want an Oreo? They are my guilty pleasure. I’ve baked millions of cookies, but sometimes these things just hit the spot. Something Lou never really could do, eh.” Cookie elbowed Belle for extra emphasis as the cab stopped. The columns of the White House appeared to their right.

Somehow Cookie had infiltrated Belle’s reconnaissance trip to the White House in one shared elevator ride from the ninth floor to the hotel lobby.

“No thanks.”

“So, you love the President, too?”

“No, I think he’s destroying the earth.”

Cookie bit into her last Oreo, chewing slowly.

“Oh, so you’re one of those liberals?”

“No, I’m a scientist. I’ve seen the evidence, and if something is not done, the world will end.”

Cookie kept chewing, but the conversation was basically over.

On the Target’s Trail

Wayne followed the two women all afternoon to get to know his target. His plan for the execution was already in place.

Revelations

Lou’s afternoon meeting was a disaster as the investor clearly didn’t care about a property way over in Middleburg. His mother always warned him about seeking greener pastures, and the realization of this lesson was causing his ulcer to flare up. He wasn’t going to hit it big after all, he knew it without even talking to the other potential investors. After downing half a bottle of Pepto he purchased at a Walgreens, Lou spent the cab ride back to the hotel staring at a picture from his wallet of Cookie holding their two infant sons from twenty-some years earlier.

“My God, what have I done?”

You can imagine his surprise and relief when he entered his room to find his wife very much alive. For the first time in his life he was glad to have been swindled out of ten grand.

Before he knew it, they were making love like teenagers. When they finished, they ordered room service, watched half a movie, shockingly made love again, and then fell completely asleep. Lou never gave a second thought about the door to the adjoining room that he unlocked earlier.

Revelations II

“So, all you have to do is go through that door and do it?” Belle knelt on her knees on the mattress beside him.

“Yep. I decided to do them both and make it look like a murder suicide. I even bought the gun with a fake ID with his name. He’s the only one that can connect me to them.”

“When?”

“In the middle of the night sometime and then leave in the morning before the staff finds them.”

He placed the gun back in the drawer and removed the glove. Never in his life did he think he’d be in a bed with a woman so beautiful without having to pay her. It didn’t even enter his mind that it was a mistake to tell her any of this.

“Are you going to go through with it?” She bit her lip, wrinkling her brows in an expression he couldn’t exactly read.

He shrugged.

“They aren’t really alive anyways. They are just robots programmed to simulate living. They love each other, but they don’t remember why. They love their children, but they don’t show it. They love America because they are supposed to. But killing them is something I can’t go back on, you know. Up until tonight, I’ve never had anything I cared about losing. Then I met you…”

He thought she blushed, but before he could continue she straddled him. He hardened and she guided him inside her again.

“You told me your secret,” she said, then moaned slightly as she rocked slowly up and down. “Before you say anymore, let me tell you mine. I think you’ll like it.”

Checking Out

            The chaos inflicting his precious room assignment system kept Leonard awake all night. At sunrise, he gave up his futile attempt at sleep and left his tiny apartment to relieve the overnight clerk. Might as well get an early start to achieve perfection for the upcoming night at the Continental.

When the tall blonde who started all his problems stepped off the elevator holding hands with a short Asian fellow that looked vaguely familiar, Leonard felt some relief. Even though the official paperwork would be wrong in saying that she stayed alone in a double room on the ninth floor, he knew two people actually occupied the room. Symmetry, he thought, maybe enough symmetry to keep everything from crashing down. He was wrong.

The couple got a cab together just outside the lobby door, the woman clutched a briefcase, placing it across her lap as the car door closed.

Leonard never thought about the two when they found the mess in 912. When people started getting sick at the White House, any investigation concerning the Abilonis took a back seat, and by summer, Leonard and most of the Eastern seaboard had much bigger things to worry about than a balanced room ledger at the Continental.