by Chris Bauer
The Honda engine revved, insinuating I should move out of the way. Fungo was already in the driver’s face, barking and snarling, his paws on the car’s window ledge.
I exited the van and grabbed for my German Shepherd partner’s leash. Mr. Dodger and his driver couldn’t help but notice my drawn Glock and my Sarah Connor camouflage tee, me straining to keep Fungo under control. Whatever they were thinking, that I was a local K9 cop or State Police or maybe off-duty SWAT, had them paralyzed. There was room for the car to run, but only in reverse.
“Something wrong, ma’am?” the driver said. A pudgy-faced white guy, midtwenties, his words were loud enough to better the noise coming from the car’s speakers. Weed smelling sweeter than a freshly mown lawn clouded the car’s interior. Fungo sneezed, expelling a huge wad of dog snot; the timing couldn’t have been better. The pudgy-faced white guy cursed while he wiped the snot out of his ear. Mr. Dodger snickered.
“I’m a retired state trooper,” I announced. “Show me your hands.”
Their hands went up. “Toss the purse out the window—now.” I heard bystander activity behind me, corner of the building: the old woman who helped the mother with the toddler. White permed bouffant, black hair bow. Unmistakable as the senior who stared me down yesterday at the bowling alley. She kept her distance with her phone in hand, snapping pictures of us.
“The purse or your balls, Diddy. And turn down that shit you’re listening to. It offends me.”
Fungo sneezed again. This time his dog nails scratched the Honda’s custom paint job. Now the driver was pissed. He shoved against the car door to open it. He was either stupid or had firepower or maybe both. Fungo left his feet, nipped at the driver’s ear, drew blood. I swiveled my Glock back and forth between their crotches preempting either guy showing a weapon. The car door eased shut. Fungo growled and barked while I backed him off.
The purse dropped to the pavement. I pulled Fungo away from the car door by his harness, no easy feat with him this stoked, but when I told him to sit, he did. I went for my phone. This needed to be someone else’s mess to clean up.
The driver wheeled the car into reverse, its tires smoking until it reached the rear corner of the building, then it skidded to a stop. I kept my weapon raised, gripped Fungo’s leash extra tight. Pudgy stared at us from fifty yards away. He flashed a huge fuck-you smile, threw the transmission into drive and flipped me off. The car disappeared behind the rear of the building.
Fungo whimpered and twisted me up in his leash, all because we now had company. The white bouffanted hair-bow lady offered me a shake of her hand. I resettled Fungo in his crate inside my van with his piece of jute first.
“I’m Ursula. Thank you, miss, for going after them,” she said. Her shake was a bit on the skeletal side, but still firm.
“No problem, ma’am. Counsel Fungo. I’m a retired state cop. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. My granddaughter will be too, once she gets her purse back. You missed what went on inside the pharmacy.” A too-bad shake of her head. “He pistol-whipped the pharmacist unconscious and left with a lot of pills.”
The plastic shopping bag. Shit. Glad I didn’t know. I might have done something stupid.
An approaching siren. Fungo howled, rhapsodizing with the ear-piercing noise. Tess joined him from the passenger seat, her window cracked open. Horrible racket from the two of them, as earsplitting as a Yoko Ono/Tiny Tim duet. Rewards in the form of jute rope pieces shut my deputies up.
“Not to worry,” Ursula said, her eyes brightening. “The store has cameras. Plus I took some pictures of their car with my phone.”
The pictures might have been useful on some level, but chances were Pudgy and Mr. Dodger were halfway to New York or Jersey by now. When the State Police realized the car or the plates or both were hot, and they would, the case would go cold. Made me wonder if these Rancor folks had taken enough into consideration thinking this whole elected sheriff with no additional cops all the way through. A dead body, felony vandalism, an assault and a robbery, all in the day and a half since I’d gotten here. So much for a crime-free town. Shine a light on something good, the story went, and it wilted. The media would eat this up once they heard about it.
“So someone from the pharmacy already called this in?” I asked her. There was only so much the state cops could do with an incident like this. Within the law.
“Yes,” she said, “it’s been called in. And the pictures are out there. Someone’s tracking down our sheriff.”
The ambulance arrived. The EMT techs wheeled a gurney into the pharmacy. I watched the pistol-whipped pharmacist come out, still unconscious, her face bandaged, then I waited longer on the sheriff, chatting Ursula up. I soon ran out of patience. Aside from giving a statement, there was nothing else I could do here. At least the EMTs were quick.
I handed Ursula a business card, told her she could use my name and have their sheriff call me for descriptions and a statement whenever he got around to it.
20
Andy, in his nurse whites, filled in for a flu-stricken nurse who couldn’t finish her shift. He tended to patients in the psych ward’s large recreation room.
“Nurse Ratched, help me,” a patient pleaded. “It’s not working.”
A nickname. Louise Fletcher played the iconic SOB nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; she won an Oscar. Coworkers referred to Andy this way in front of the guests, where it was expected to, and did, go viral internal to the hospital. Not a harmless joke; a well-intentioned slur. He ignored the patient’s parroting, accepting it as part of the facility’s monkey-see, monkey-do atmosphere.
The hospital/detox center had two hundred and forty beds, but over the last two decades its occupancy had dropped by more than 50 percent. Patient care was not the reason; not one malpractice suit had been filed in over twenty years. No, it was because the hospital was still recovering from a 1990s scandal involving its chief administrator, Andy’s wife at the time, Dr. Jasmine Prudhomme. Andy had been the whistleblower.
“Mr. Shils. Mr. Shils, please, you need to give that to me, sir.” Andy opened his hand, wiggled his fingers, awaited the patient’s acknowledgment. “It’s not a cosmic plutonium electro blaster. It’s a plunger. You remember what a plunger does, right?”
The slur was perpetuated by those still on staff who were sympathetic to his deceased ex, the hospital’s former CEO. Only a few legacy staffers remained at the facility post–Dr. Prudhomme, but even one hateful person was all it took to make Andy’s nursing life difficult.
“Yes, Nurse Ratched,” Mr. Shils said. “I mean no, Nurse Ratched. Sorry, Nurse Ratched. Here, Nurse Ratched, take it, but be careful…”
In late 1993, Andy brought his wife, Jasmine, up on charges of sexual misconduct with hospital patients. He had witnessed it himself on more than one occasion—unruly teenagers given a large dose of meds who Jasmine then seduced during their evaluations—so Andy blew the whistle. The charges filed were, unfortunately, deemed too much he-said, she-said, and with no one else corroborating the offense, the Scranton DA decided not to indict.
“Ratched.” Jasmine’s name for Andy behind his back prior to the incident, their marriage already in the shitter. After the allegations she’d say it to his face, often in front of the hospital staff. When the charges against his wife were dropped, Andy was fired from his nursing position for insubordination, a trumped-up offense, and blackballed at other local hospitals. His wife sued him for divorce. The proceedings turned into an assault on his integrity and that of his family. His surgeon mother had been vocal in her support; it nearly cost Charlie her career. But the vendetta caused a greater heartbreak: it took Aunt Kitty’s life. On an alcoholic bender, and in desperation one wicked-weather night, Kitty had requested asylum from her alcoholism at the inpatient’s detox unit and was turned away.
“Thank you, Mr. Shils,” Andy said, accepting the “weapon.” “You should be outside on the lawn, a nice day like this. How about it, bud?”
>
Andy swung open a pair of French doors and escorted Mr. Shils onto a patio. The patient found his way across the light swale of the lawn to a semicircle of Adirondack chairs and dropped himself into one, next to another male patient. Andy lingered on the patio, absorbing the lawn’s expanse, its perimeter enclosed by a tall chain-link fence with barbed wire that glistened in the summer sunlight. To his right, on the other side of the fence and open to the public, a park bench glowered at seventy yards. The bench, as always, was a visual magnet for Andy from this vantage point, much as he wished he could ignore it. It was where a hospital orderly found a reclining Aunt Kitty three days after a blinding blizzard and ice storm, frozen to death, a human ice-and-snow sculpture. The Scranton Fire Department had to use spray deicer, hair dryers, and a pry bar to separate her body from the bench’s wooden slats.
Andy’s vindictive wife, Jasmine. While on her rounds that night, the admissions desk had alerted her that a Kitty Buchinsky, drunk and depressed, was requesting emergency admittance to the detox unit. His wife made a point of coming to the front desk to deliver her smug response personally, Andy had learned: “All our beds are full. Go somewhere else.” It had been a lie.
Kitty Buchinsky, dead at sixty-six. No viewing; a closed casket. At the service, Andy spoke a few words to the grievers, shared cheerful anecdotes about his warm, colorful, one-of-a-kind aunt. At graveside, Andy delivered a resolute, fatalistic message to the deceased: I changed my mind. I’m in.
Late that same year Andy’s ex-wife relocated to Philly’s main line to become CEO of a Philly hospital. On an early evening jog on Kelly Drive, someone murdered her. Shot her twice in the face, no sexual assault, also no witnesses. Philly law enforcement came after the ex-husband, hard. Andy’s alibi, with multiple witnesses, held. One Rancor police chief, one bowling alley bartender, three Rancor town watch folks, one daughter, all in agreement: “He was bowling.” The homicide remained unsolved.
Internal to Rancor, Jasmine Prudhomme’s murderer had a name, explained away with a flat mention and a shoulder shrug: had to be Aunt Kitty, the town’s guardian angel, right as rain, common as coal.
Andy’s shift ended; he intended to grab a fast food lunch before going home. He put on a sweater, picked up a Red Bull from a cart in the lobby, and headed out the hospital entrance. Cool, comfortable summer air, a crisp breeze with a trace of Pocono pine. He arrived at the bench where Kitty had frozen to death nearly two decades earlier and sat, communing with her, as best he could. Calming moments for him, always.
Andy wasn’t “all healed,” like he’d told his mother this morning. On the inside this would never be the case. And since his divorce and the difficult years before it, there’d never been anyone close. Sure, there were a few relationships afterward, some physical. Hospital acquaintances, professionals from nearby boroughs, even an affair with a married woman. Hookups he broke off before they could turn serious and complicate things, for him or for them.
The baggage—it would always be the baggage; the rumors. Their gravity guaranteed that, inside, he would always be alone. Alone in spirit, alone in his heart. Physical intimacy, he’d had. Enduring, soul-bearing emotional company would remain forever elusive. His role—his secret, violent deeds—kept his core emotions private, unapproachable. A love-hate relationship that had become a heavy burden. At times they were gratifying, even exhilarating. Other times they were overwhelming, the violence more than his conscience had been able to accept.
For the longest time his only confidante had been his mother, the secret easy to manage, Rancor being a sleepy little burg that rarely hurt itself. But when a street thug in Scranton widowed Dody Frink, Andy went to Dody and spilled. Dody became a plus-one, to the secret and the avocation both. After that, their clandestine congregation grew.
The one bit of fallout he hadn’t anticipated: the loss of his adult daughter. Not to death, but to the outside world. Fourteen years ago when Teddy, short for Theodora, turned eighteen, she came to her father.
“I want to enter law enforcement, Dad. I want to become FBI.”
Not a stretch, and not a complete surprise, Andy initially thought, all things considered. But there would be… complications. Family history. Aunt Kitty. His ex-wife’s murder. “We’ll make it work, honey,” Andy told her.
But they couldn’t make it work. His daughter left Rancor and never looked back.
Painful. Estrangement from her, and his daughter’s estrangement from Rancor. His daughter’s choice. Regardless, Andy suffered under its weight.
Yesterday, nearby to Rancor, someone committed a horrendous sexual assault and murder. Hearing about its victim, a young girl, had resonated. The monster remained unidentified, walking free among Scranton’s population, or among some other town’s population.
“I miss your pep talks, Aunt Kitty,” he said aloud from Aunt Kitty’s bench.
Had Kitty responded, it would have been to tell him to saddle up, doll, because the shit-storm created by the People article had arrived. She’d also have words for whoever killed the little girl in Scranton:
Come to Rancor. I beg you. A tacit goad, not an invitation to tea. Kitty was every bit his coal-miner father’s sister, worthy of the hero worship, the memory, the legend.
Andy’s phone rang. There’d been a robbery and an assault at a local pharmacy.
Lunch would have to wait.
21
Randall dropped sixty-five bucks and his room key on the motel lobby counter. “Where can I get a good steak?”
The stubble-faced motel clerk with a drinker’s nose winced at the question, severely hung over. He slurped from his blue-and-gold Greek motif cardboard coffee cup and answered Randall like a tortured prisoner in exile.
“New York.” York sounded like tawk, squawk, and cawfee. If Randall had asked about good pizza, cheesecake, bagels, or blow jobs, the answer would have been the same.
“Anywhere closer?” Randall managed, adding a play-along smile, except now he had a strong urge to crush this alcoholic’s head with the large steel Bunn commercial “cawfee” maker at the end of the counter.
Another sip of coffee, another pained response from the clerk. “Karl Von Kugen’s, downtown Scranton, is decent. It has family ties to Peter Kugen’s steakhouse in Brooklyn.”
Randall smiled and nodded his head in touristy agreement. “Really? The Peter Kugen Steakhouse? In Brooklyn, New York?”
“That’s the one.”
“Wow,” Randall said, humoring this pretentious fuck, then his expression turned serious. “Never heard of it.”
Randall parked on the street in metered parking, across from Karl Von Kugen’s steakhouse.
Inside the vestibule were a short line and a slender table with menus, wine lists, and dinner mints for on the way out, plus one oddity: a yellow coal miner’s helmet with its safety lamp, scuffed and bruised from real-world use, and not fitting in with the vestibule décor. Affixed to the wall above it, an oversize card written in elegant calligraphy explained its affiliation with a charity. Randall stuffed a ten-dollar bill into a large slot in the helmet, making a display of it for the hostess’s benefit.
He was woefully underdressed in cargo shorts, sandals, and an untucked, white short-sleeved shirt with a flyaway collar. The hostess sat him at a table with a view of the street. Businessmen and women on all sides drank and ate their power-lunches. He received a few glances from them on and off, no worse than what a clueless uncle got when he wore stripes and plaids together at a family picnic.
The parking space in front of Randall’s Buick emptied, was filled quickly by a red, custom-painted Honda Civic with a flaming orange-red rear spoiler. Two men exited the Civic. One dropped coins into the meter, the other opened the car trunk then tinkered with the rear license plate. They jaywalked across the one-way street when traffic cleared. When they entered the restaurant, they got a few stares from the patrons and servers and some additional buzz when they were seated next to Randall. One of these homeboys was Latino,
Randall surmised, the other white, the latter with a gauze pad covering his ear to handle what looked like a piercing gone bad. Both ghetto wannabes appeared giddy-nervous. Not a scared, we’re-out-of-place nervousness. More like a we’re-wired-and-so-fucked-up-we-can’t-sit-still kind of nervous.
They were holding, Randall figured, and whatever it was they were holding, he wanted some. When he finished his meal, he’d look to connect.
His steak arrived along with separate dishes of garlic mashed potatoes and creamed spinach. His server spooned each of the sides onto his entrée plate, but she was a little off her game, distracted by the bling on the boys next to him. Her wrist was decorated with artwork that for sure ran up her arm, her long-sleeved waiter’s smock covering it, with more of it visible on the nape of her neck. Her phone rang, startling her. She fumbled for it before turning it off. One creamed spinach spoonful dropped dead center onto his beautifully presented, juicy, sixty-two-dollar, fourteen-ounce filet. She apologized.
“So sorry, sir. Would you like me to take it back?”
The bartender witnessed the infraction, was all over her like a plantation overseer. “Phones off, Audrey!” he barked. “And you know better than to ask. Just put in another order.”
The bartending prick was here as much to rat on the servers as he was to mix drinks, Randall decided. “All goes to the same place, right, miss?” Randall said, smiling at her. “I’m fine with this one. Thanks.”
Audrey the server smiled her gratitude then glided by the bartender, but not without saying something under her breath to him. He stared daggers at her back as she hustled to the rear of the restaurant. In a dark corner Randall watched her key in a text then exhale a deep breath. She put the phone away and entered the kitchen.