The Unremarkable Life and Sudden Death of James Jeffrey Pace

Fiction by Jeff Harrell

It was supposed to be a day like any other day. But then, James Jeffrey Pace was never very imaginative. If he had been, maybe he would have been surprised when Claire asked him to meet her for a drink after work downtown, instead of inviting herself to his place like she normally did. Maybe he would have been surprised. Maybe he even would have been suspicious.

But he wasn’t. To James Jeffrey Pace, it was a day like any other day.

It was a day like any other day to Randall Louis Stubbs, too. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

James Jeffrey Pace arrived at the bar at a quarter after six, fully fifteen minutes before Claire had said she’d meet him. That was James Jeffrey Pace in a nutshell. He never felt the urge to be fashionably late. He never played it cool. He never, in fact, did anything other than comport himself in the most straightforward, guileless way.

So it was straightforwardly and without guile that he asked the waitress for a vodka tonic and settled into one of the soft, decadent booths that always line the walls of overly expensive downtown bars.

As he nursed his drink, he reached into his briefcase and extracted that morning’s paper. He unfolded it awkwardly on the table, knocking over the salt shaker and putting the pepper in serious jeopardy. He turned the pages quickly, skimming the articles he didn’t understand, which was most of them.

He was all the way through the “A” section and halfway through “Nation” when Claire walked up.

“Thanks for meeting me,” she said as she slid into the booth, trying unsuccessfully to make eye contact with a waitress.

A reasonable man would have raised an eyebrow at that. Why thank him? Of course he met her. He was her boyfriend, wasn’t he? Okay, well, they’d never actually used that word. Once you’re out of your twenties, “girlfriend” and “boyfriend” start to sound quaint and a little embarrassing, like “box social” or “going steady” or “necking.” But vocabulary issues aside, that’s what they were. They were boyfriend and girlfriend, had been for going on three months. So why should she feel the need to thank him for meeting her?

James Jeffrey Pace thought none of these things. With half his brain, he was still trying to figure out what the Federal Reserve did. With the other half, he just said “You’re welcome.”

For the next couple of minutes, Claire made a big show of trying to get a drink out of one of the three twenty-something waitresses who kept breezing by their booth. But it was now after half past six, and the after-work crowd had well and truly formed. Lawyers apologetically elbowed bankers who jostled lobbyists who were staunchly ignored by reporters who came here to put in some serious drinking before going back to the office to finish their articles before deadline. The waitresses had their hands full.

Eventually Claire gave up. She wasn’t going to be here long. Of course, James Jeffrey Pace didn’t know that. And if he had, he never would have been able to guess why.

“I’ll just get to the point,” Claire said. She still wasn’t making eye contact. Her hands were assembling vaguely pornographic configurations of Sweet’N Low packets. “I’ve met someone.”

James Jeffrey Pace gave up on trying to fold his newspaper back into its natural state and stuffed it into his briefcase with a muffled crunching sound. “Really? Who?”

Claire’s long, delicate fingers scattered the Sweet’N Low packets, then began to draw them back together again. “That’s not important,” she said.

“Well, where’d you meet?”

She made two of the packets simulate a sexual position that James Jeffrey Pace had never felt the urge to try. “That’s not important either.”

Just then, before James Jeffrey Pace could ask in his perpetually good-humored voice just what was important about this story, exactly, one of the waitresses materialized by their table. She wasn’t the one who’d taken his order earlier. She had a bead of sweat gradually creeping its way down through the heavy make-up on her cheek.

James Jeffrey Pace waved his hand over his glass to indicate that he wasn’t ready for another yet, and Claire shook her head, then interrupted herself and asked for a double scotch, neat.

When it became apparent that her drink wouldn’t be arriving any time soon, Claire pressed on. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” she asked, still watching her fingers play with the packets of sweetener.

“Sure,” said James Jeffrey Pace. “You met someone today. Was it someone I know?”

“Not today,” Claire said. “It’s been going on for about three weeks now.”

“What has?”

“Our affair.”

James Jeffrey Pace smirked a little. He liked it when she called it their affair. It sounded so adult. So serious.

Then, like the pins in a lock that’s gone unopened for far too long, the parts of James Jeffrey Pace’s mind began reluctantly to move.

“You’ve met someone else?” he asked, half expecting this to be a big misunderstanding, something they’d be laughing about in a couple of minutes.

“Yes,” was all Claire said.

A little bit at a time, James Jeffrey Pace realized that he was feeling an emotion. Emotions were things he didn’t have a lot of experience with. All his life, he’d assumed they were the business of soap-opera stars and characters in books. But he was feeling one now, he noticed. He couldn’t identify it by name, exactly, but he knew it felt a lot like a severe case of indigestion.

“I see,” James Jeffrey Pace said, even though he didn’t.

Claire looked up at him then for the first time. “I should have told you before,” she said. “But I wasn’t sure until a few days ago, and there was never the right time, and” … She trailed off, looked away. For a moment, James Jeffrey Pace got the idea that she was stopping herself from making excuses. He had no idea where that thought came from, and if you’d called it “intuition” he would have laughed at you. None of that alters the fact that he was, in that moment, exactly right.

The waitress reappeared with Claire’s drink then, and then vanished back into the increasingly more raucous crowd of after-hours white-collar workers. Claire threw back the drink and dropped the glass on the table like she was auditioning for a part in an Old West movie.

“You understand, right?” she asked, and he could smell the fresh booze on her breath. He didn’t understand, not remotely, and he was trying to think of the most diplomatic way to say so when she continued. “We had a lot of fun together,” she said, which he knew was true. “But this was never going anywhere,” and he supposed that was also true, though honestly he’d never really thought about it. He did think about it then, and he had to admit that she was right. Not that James Jeffrey Pace saw anything particularly wrong with not going anywhere. If where you are is pretty good, why try very hard to be someplace else?

He said none of this aloud.

“You’re great, James, really,” she said. She was the only one who called him James. His co-workers liked to call him Jimmy or Jim or Jimbo or Jay, but she always called him James. It was one of the reasons he liked being around her so much. One of a whole lot of reasons. “It’s just that this doesn’t feel like a long-term thing, you know? It doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere.” There it was again. Her thing about going places. Where was she so desperate to be all of a sudden?

“Do you see what I mean?” she asked.

James Jeffrey Pace thought about it. He really did. He tried to work it all out in his head like it was a word problem. Two trains leave their stations at noon. An hour later, one of them is still moving along at a steady pace, making good time, while the other is hugely dissatisfied for some reason and wants to talk about going somewhere else. He couldn’t make it add up.

“No,” he said.

“Do you think I’m wrong?” she asked.

Now, a reasonable man would have taken the hint. A reasonable man wouldn’t have needed the hint. He would have been able to see it in her eyes. The way she’d been so evasive before but how she was now staring at him intently, an almost pleading look on her face, begging him to say something, anything. To take some kind of decisive step so she wouldn’t have to make up her mind.

But James Jeffrey Pace just said “No.”

Claire’s eyes fell back to the table where, without conscious direction, her fingers had been arranging Sweet’N Low packets into threesomes and foursomes, a regular orgy of artificial sweetener.

“Okay,” she said, not looking at him. “I guess I should,” she started to say, but she was interrupted by an amazingly loud noise from the other end of the bar. People were yelling at each other, going completely nuts. Somebody must have a sporting event on, Claire assumed. The home team just scored a goal or something.

But James Jeffrey Pace didn’t think it was a sporting event. One glance over his shoulder and he knew exactly what it was.

The next thing Claire knew, she was being dragged bodily from the booth. James had his hand wrapped around her wrist and was pulling, hard. Everything was happening so fast. People were running, for some reason. All Claire saw were feet in expensive flats and cheap loafers, all going in the opposite direction, toward the door and the street. But she was going the other way, being pulled, pulled by her wrist, her wrist that hurt so hard she thought it might even be dislocated, pulled by her wrist toward the back of the bar.

And then her mouth hit the wall and everything went out of focus.

Her mouth hit the wall because James Jeffrey Pace had thrown her into a corner and slammed his body up behind hers in an obscene pantomime of penetration. He held her there, just waiting, breathing heavily into her ear. She was still too stunned to struggle, but he knew when she got her bearings back that he could expect an elbow in the gut, or worse. He couldn’t have that. So he took her forearms in his fists and put her palms flat on the wall and leaned in, mashing her face up against the wall, knowing it was the only way.

One gasping breath, in and out.

Then another.

Then he heard footsteps come around the corner of the bar.

Randall Louis Stubbs was exactly who you think he was. He was a municipal highway worker with the a good head start on full-fledged alcoholism and a family history of schizophrenia. When he got his pink slip that morning, spending a third of his last paycheck on booze seemed like the most natural thing in the world. And later, when an astonishing amount of that booze was gone, it also seemed like the most natural thing in the world to take the snub-nosed .38 and a handful of ammunition from the cardboard box under his bed and go for a walk.

The walk took him from his rent-controlled tenement in the unfashionable part of town to a block lined with tall office buildings in the fashionable part of town. In the middle of that block was a bar, the kind of place where rich white people go to get numb after a hard day spent doing whatever rich white people do. If you’d asked him — though of course now you’ll never have the chance — he couldn’t have told you why he turned into that bar instead of walking past it. And he couldn’t have told you why, when he got inside, he hesitated for a full thirty seconds, scanning the crowd near the door, looking at all the faces one by one.

But if you’d asked him why he suddenly reached into his pocket, pulled out the pistol and started shooting, he would have told you exactly why.

He would have said it was to wipe the smug look off that laughing jackass’s face.

Two rounds from Randall Louis Stubbs’ revolver took care of that problem nicely.

Randall Louis Stubbs emptied the pistol faster than he expected to. Six quick shots, then it was just click-click-click, like in the movies. People were screaming by that time, screaming and running past him out into the street. Not just women, either. The men were screaming too, screaming like little girls, crying for their mommies. Arrogant pricks.

By the time Randall Louis Stubbs got six rounds into the pistol and closed the cylinder, there was nobody left in the front room of the bar. Gun in hand, pointed at the floor in front of him, Randall Louis Stubbs made his way over dropped bottles and glasses and lost shoes toward the back.

One breath, in and out. James Jeffrey Pace felt her hair move in front of his face when he breathed, tickling his nose.

Another breath. Maybe four seconds had passed now, and Claire was starting to come back to her senses. She tried to move her head. He leaned into her harder, putting as much of his 240 pounds on her as he could.

Then footsteps. Footsteps on broken glass.

Somebody screamed. Two shots, pop pop. No more screaming. Then two more shots. Pop pop. Then two more, incredibly loud, coming from right behind him.

Then the sound of metal clicking on metal. He was reloading.

James Jeffrey Pace moved without hesitation. Hesitation was an emotion, and emotions were none of his business. He let go of Claire’s wrists and spun on his heel. He almost lost his balance when his other foot came down on an ice cube. He put his hand on the back of a chair and regained his stability.

The guy was standing about ten feet away, reloading a ridiculously small handgun. James Jeffrey Pace’s hand closed on the back of the chair. His arm brought it up off the floor. His feet moved apart, kicking that stray ice cube out of the way, and his legs took a step forward. The parts of his body were moving of their own accord.

But it was James Jeffrey Pace that threw the chair.

It wasn’t a big chair, or a very heavy one. But even when a small chair comes flying out of nowhere and hits you across the bridge of your nose, it gets your attention. Randall Louis Stubbs let go of both the gun and the four remaining bullets in his hand; both went flying in opposite directions. He stepped backward, turned his heel on a beer bottle and fell, landing flat on his back.

James Jeffrey Pace landed on top of him.

James Jeffrey Pace had never had a moment’s training in unarmed combat. He had no idea whatsoever what he was doing. So it was just pure luck, then, that brought his forearm down right on Randall Louis Stubbs’ Adam’s apple. And more luck that it came down with the force of a large man falling from a height of three feet. Randall Louis Stubbs’ larynx was driven back against his cervical spine. His laryngeal and cricoid cartilages popped like chicken bones. His endolaryngeal mucosa shredded and blood began to fill his airway.

Due to his elevated heart rate and the shock of his injury, it took less than three seconds for Randall Louis Stubbs to lose consciousness.

When James Jeffrey Pace saw the blood bubble out of the man’s mouth, he took his arm away from the man’s neck. It was soft, mushy. The man’s eyes were still open, staring at him. No, they weren’t. Not any more. Now they were just staring at nothing in particular.

As James Jeffrey Pace watched from four inches away, Randall Louis Stubbs’ pupils began to dilate.

That’s when James Jeffrey Pace tried to stand up, realized he couldn’t, and remembered he’d been shot twice in the back.

Claire was beside him before he realized what was happening. She put her hand on the small of his back to steady him, felt the blood that had soaked through his undershirt, dress shirt and jacket, forming a barely visible darker stain on his dark blue suit.

Claire didn’t realize it, but she was saying “Oh god, oh god,” over and over again.

James Jeffrey Pace winced as he rolled over, winced and started to cry out, but when he inhaled something in his chest bubbled and he began to cough. Frothy blood sprayed from between his lips.

Claire screamed for help, then screamed again. No one came. Everyone who could still move had gotten as far away from the gunman as possible; no one left in the bar was in any position to render aid.

Claire wiped the bloody spittle from his lip with her thumb.

“Why?” she whispered. “Why?” she demanded. “Why?” she screamed.

James Jeffrey Pace didn’t understand the question. He didn’t know what to say. Which is all right, since with a collapsed lung and a shattered kidney, he wasn’t in much of a position to uphold his end of the conversation.

But he could manage a whisper.

“Why not?” he gasped, and died.

Claire was still kneeling beside his body when the police came. It felt like an hour but couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes. Broken glass was destroying her knees, and she didn’t care. The police tried to take her away, but she wouldn’t let them.

Soon there were more sirens, and paramedics came into the bar with collapsable gurneys to carry away the two bodies.

When they were gone, Claire sat back on her heels, feeling blood drip down from the cuts on her knees.

Inside the suddenly silent bar, she heard a sound. From inside her purse, still sitting in the booth where she’d left it, her phone began to ring.

She knew who was calling.

She didn’t answer.

Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Harrell. All rights reserved.