by Chris Bauer
The medium-well filet sliced like butter, didn’t have a speck of fat, and was better than any steak he’d had in recent memory. Audrey the server returned to take beverage orders from the two ghetto boys. Randall witnessed her make a production of carding them.
“Jersey City,” she said, reading from a driver’s license, flirting some. What it was that attracted young women to small-time gangstas, Randall had never been able to figure.
“You’re—let me guess, don’t tell me—Scranton,” the white one with the bandaged ear said, his response clever, or so his snicker to his buddy said. He leered at her neck tats.
Such repartee.
She filled their water glasses. “Nice try. I work in Scranton, but I live in Rancor.”
“Rancor? Whoa,” the Latino one said, his palms out. “Been there. Got some crazy old folks and female storm troopers and shit. Not going back. Make it two Yuenglings, babe. Bottles.”
Their beers arrived. The server chatted them up on the merits of a porter on tap versus bottled as she poured for them, then hung around and flirted a little more. They sucked their beers down, ate their salads and some bread. Audrey brought two more beers. They drained them. It was then they both headed in the direction she’d thumbed them, which was the hallway that led to the men’s room in the rear of the restaurant.
Randall waited for Audrey the server to return, him wanting to settle his bill asap, interested in making his acquaintance with the two young men in the men’s room, but there she was, texting again in the rear of the restaurant. He raised his hand. “Miss, check please.”
Outside the restaurant in the alley, costumed party-crashers huddled. Their initial decision had been to wait there until the pistol-whipping punk and his accomplice left the restaurant. Better to not make a scene in the Peter Kugen Steakhouse dining room. Then came the next text. The punks were in the restroom doing drugs right now.
Change of plans.
They entered the men’s room, the three of them, in dark hoodies, sweatpants, and soft-soled shoes. One leaned against the swinging-door entry to the rest room to seal off the access, the other two advanced. Their targets were now bio-break busy in two of the stalls, punk number one sitting down, the second punk two stalls away, on his feet and peeing.
A gripe from the first stall, from the sitting punk: “Ugh. Fucking breakfast burrito.”
One of the three new bathroom patrons stepped closer, leaned down close to the floor, confirmed that only two stalls were occupied.
The standing punk finished his business, started to zip up. “That’s what you get when you order a burrito from a fuckin’ Greek diner, you ’Rican dipshi—”
The door to the standing punk’s stall swung open, pushing him forward into a stutter-step. He spun to face his attacker, was greeted by a large handgun with a suppressor, shoved against his forehead. The attacker pulled the trigger without hesitation, splatting his brains against the back wall of the stall. Two stalls away the seated punk fumbled for a handgun inside the pants around his ankles but didn’t come up with it. He stood, his pants down, no gun, only to be pushed backward by someone kicking open the stall door.
“Dude. No. Wait—!”
He flailed at the attacker’s hoodie, caught the zipper, which unfastened the hoodie partway. A raised handgun pushed into his forehead, the punk continuing to flail. The silenced headshot was a little off. Blood from the punk’s scalp sprayed the white tile of the back wall and preceded by a beat the banger’s upper torso slamming into it. Wedged into the corner behind the toilet, the punk was still alive. He gagged, blinked hard at the bleached white uniform top exposed by the unzipped hoodie.
“What the fuck! A nurse?”
The attacker again raised the handgun chest-high.
“Please, no,” the punk begged. “Please…”
A moment’s hesitation, the time it took a guilty conscience to second-guess a previously steel-nerved, depraved indifference. The weak moment ended. The next shot to his head finished it. The attacker zipped the hoodie back up and left.
Randall left his table ready to deal. He stopped short inside the hallway when the door to the men’s room swung open. Three men emerged in hoodies with dark glasses, their faces covered in charcoal, or maybe soot, only one tall enough to be one of the two gangbanger wannabes, but none of them were. They hustled down the hallway and out the restaurant’s rear exit.
Randall entered the restroom. Pills of all colors and sizes littered the tile floor and crunched underfoot inside the stall area. The bodies of the white one and his sidekick rested uncomfortably on blood-spattered cream tile inside the two stalls, one of the stall doors still swinging.
He’d heard nothing, no loud pop-pop-pop from a gun, no arguments, no struggle. A decent, properly horrified citizen would at this point have called 911. Randall, of course, was no such person. He helped himself to some pill bottles and left the restaurant through the same rear exit the gunmen used. He surveyed the back alley. No sign of the executioners.
Three gunmen. The thought stayed with him as he strode up the side street to his car out front of the restaurant. Black hoodies, sunglasses, and faces blackened by burnt cork, or camouflage makeup, or shoe polish. Or, considering the region, what could have passed for coal dust mixed with sweat, glistening like it would on miners at the end of their shift, if he wanted to get melodramatic about it. If he wanted to get more melodramatic about it, this was an ambush, the two homeboys fingered by someone inside the restaurant.
Wait. Not gunmen, his subconscious told him. The hoodie sweatshirts they wore were bulky, but not bulky enough. Two of them had tits.
22
I was done with cruising the police station turned bingo hall. I needed some lunch. I pulled in line at an Arby’s drive-thru. Still thinking about St. Possenti’s.
Concrete blocks for walls, and iron bars fronting thick, murky-glass windows made it as attractive as a hillside WWII bunker. For fifteen minutes I’d watched as men and women entered and exited the hall, nearly all of them seniors. Five or so in, a different five or so out, their baggage in both directions the same: large, heavy purses, knapsacks, and hefty bingo supply bags. On the surface, it all looked legit. Still, seniors flocking to play bingo in so dismal and uninviting a space seemed… off. A Tourette’s riff queued up.
“—flocking fuckers, saint possenti, placenta bingo. Gabriel gringo ringo bojangles, Gunny saint dot-com dot-mom got milk—
“—tits—”
Then again, who cared what went on in there. All consenting adults. I wasn’t here for them. I was in Rancor to take a depraved fugitive bastard off the streets.
Tits and guns and guns and tits and gun-tits and bingo. My van moved another spot closer to the Arby’s drive-thru window.
Occasionally I missed taking my meds. One-tenth of a milligram of clonidine, twice a day. Missing them was my subconscious telling me I shouldn’t need them, that it wanted me to be normal, that my brain had no right misbehaving like it did. Maybe it also wanted me to test how long I could go without meds and not have an episode. Experience showed this to be the better part of a day. A missed-dose indicator: when my dogs and fuzzy keychain were with me but I still verbally wailed on someone I had no real interest in. Strangers, for example. On the street, me like a derelict, or at the mall, or at the local gun shop—hell yeah, twice; I was still able to buy the gun I wanted—or at fast food drive-thrus. I kept my meds handy the same way a heart patient did her nitro pills, in a thumb-size prescription bottle in my jeans pocket.
The word of the day, courtesy of my disease, was apparently “tits.”
A moment ago I downed the med dose I should have taken this morning, but this wasn’t until after I placed my lunch order then rendered some obscene declarations into the drive-thru squawk box. I now waited for the Arby’s order taker to bring me my roast beef sandwich, curly fries, and an additional four or more side orders of tits. And during the episode I, of course, had told her why I wanted these tits, scream
ing my reasons at her.
“—tit-fuck, tit-suck, someone bite my nipples /
“—tub-o-tits wonder bits super chicks booger zits…”
I apologized on the heels of the order, the apology not as loud as the tirade itself, so the patrons inside the restaurant probably only got to hear the rant.
I arrived at the window. The manager was standing in for the teenager I’d screamed at. A robust woman, blonde, stone-faced. She waited me out, decided my apology was sincere, took my money, and handed me my lunch. I thanked her, apologized some more.
I pulled the van forward to a parking space, Tess my Bull Terrier deputy on the passenger seat, her nose sampling the air. She’d get a fry or two, as would Fungo in the back. Not good for them, but I could never help myself.
A tap on my driver’s side window.
No shit. Andy. He had a bagged Arby’s lunch in his hand.
“I was at the counter,” he said. “You were a hit inside. Mind if I join you for lunch?”
The Arby’s manager had worried more that someone on her young staff might have wanted to take me up on my rant. This was according to Andy, who acknowledged that restaurant patrons had soda-nose chuckle-fits when they’d heard it, and the counter help all wanted a peek at the crazy lady when she picked up her lunch at the drive-thru.
He grinned telling me this, added a great, husky laugh that pulled me into a laugh as well. I felt something for him, here, now. The laugh, his sense of humor, his acceptance—we were having a moment.
Calm down, sister.
I moved on to a different topic and shared this morning’s pharmacy episode, mentioned the young woman whose purse was snatched. Also mentioned the woman’s grandmother.
“Ursula, her granddaughter and great-grandson,” Andy volunteered. “Don’t look at me funny, Counsel. We’re a small town. Word travels fast.”
I went with that. “Ursula. Right. I give her credit. Whatever pictures she took, the sheriff must be happy with them. He hasn’t bothered me yet. And I might have expected the State Police to want to have a talk with me. The car had Jersey plates.”
“Less red tape for you the better, right?” Andy said.
“Yes. Red tape sucks.”
His smile said he already knew this about me. “What you did today was appreciated, Counsel. Ursula was impressed, and she’s one of the most cynical seniors in Rancor.”
Great. I pulled a gun on someone, wanted desperately to separate him from his junk, and my dog took a chunk out of his buddy’s ear, all because of a stolen purse. And yet I had managed to BS an old lady into thinking I was a good person. Purses and money vs. lives. Good to know I was still able to fool people, looking good and righteous on the outside, with some occasional good deeds to show for myself. But on the inside…
On the inside I was wired for mayhem. For most of my life, on the inside mayhem was all I’d ever felt.
Character. It was defined by deeds. All a person’s deeds, especially the ones no one knew about. The ones that weren’t flattering. I’d committed some of these. Some that were on the extremely violent side of not flattering.
Hell, sometimes I just needed to be gracious about accepting compliments, even ones that were off the mark. “Ursula seems like a nice lady. Maybe a bit misguided, but nice.” I ate my last fry, thought aloud, volunteered I wasn’t sure where to look next for my bounty.
“How about this,” Andy said. “According to Dody, the dead man in the car they pulled out of the pothole owned a used car lot in Dickson City. I know his name.”
He offered it up. Excellent. I would head there next, after I checked in with Vonetta. And after I did this, because of the smug smile he gave me knowing he’d done good. I reached for him, leaned in, and gently kissed him on the lips; he didn’t resist. His eyes, when they opened, weren’t filled with the wanton savagery I might have thought would be there, were instead filled with wonder and apprehension. I wasn’t sure what he saw in mine but in truth, I soon realized, wanton savagery would have been a disappointment. In truth, the sincerity I felt was a bit more than I’d bargained for.
He picked up my hand and breathed a kiss onto my fingers. His eyes indicated the kiss was a placeholder. “I gotta go,” he said by way of apology.
Tess poked into my Arby’s lunch bag, munched a forgotten curly fry, and watched Andy exit the car, as did I, feeling a little better now.
I evaluated the stolen kiss, sorting it out while I drained my diet Coke in the Arby’s parking lot. Some spark there, for me at least. An admission that yes, I partook, and yes, it was good. Except I didn’t know if I could clear out enough of the hurt to make room for the good again.
Feeling maudlin now, self-indulgent, and fucked by fate.
I was twenty-eight, my future husband twenty-nine when we met. He was also a state trooper, also part of the K9 unit. Not much of a stretch to see why we might connect, me a hardcore state trooper and working-dogs handler assigned to peripheral protection for a US vice presidential visit, him assigned to the same detail. Al Gore, President Clinton’s VP, was at a chain pharmacy in South Philly to stump for the federal government’s new healthcare plan, early April 1994. I liked Al Gore. He served in Nam when he could have gotten a fancy deferment because his old man had been a US senator. Except this wasn’t about Al Gore or me. It was about my future husband, Mitch Fungo.
Word ricocheted around the two K9 details during our separate pre-arrival briefings: canines Lucy and Desi were on the job. My new partner was a black Lab named Lucy, and Mitch’s veteran partner was a Belgian Malinois named Desi. Cute coincidence. The twain, our respective supervisors decided, should meet.
The detail disbanded soon after the VP visit ended. We, as in the four of us, posed for pictures in our gear. After a few snapshots, my matchmaking photo historian had us close ranks to just the two of us, the dogs off camera. Our leashed partners, however, had a different idea. They snuck into the photo frame in the back. Desi mounted Lucy like a razorback auditioning for king boar. My photographer captured some enthusiastic doggie porn in rapid-fire shutter clicks, managed to stay straight-faced while he posed us, directing our eyes forward, our partners quietly humping in the background until their quiet became raucous, with Lucy taking a chunk out of Desi’s ear. Frustration on Lucy’s part, I posited to Mitch after we separated them. Au contraire, Mitch countered, the photos clearly showed Lucy’s pent-up passion. We agreed to disagree for more than a year, over coffee, dinner, long phone calls, a holiday spent together, and one Caribbean vacation where Mitch popped the question.
I tearfully accepted. He tearfully volunteered that the passion he’d seen in Lucy’s eyes that day had been a prospective projection of his own. Love and mutual lust at first sight. It begot a state trooper wedding, with all four of us in uniform.
The start of a wonderful life together.
Mitch was no slouch in the physical attributes department. Six-one, a buff one-ninety-five. A tough guy who worked his K9 partner hard, and who was also tough enough to housebreak me. When Desi was euthanized, he held his face in his hands and made sure his smile, his love, was the last thing his partner would experience in this life. When I got down on myself, he became my angel of mercy, my confessor, my strongest cheerleader. The warmest, most adjusted, most accepting human being I had ever known. Over time, I convinced myself I didn’t deserve him, and that’s what ruined our marriage. Mental cruelty on my part, pushing him and his compassion away. It was also his compassion that took him away, forever. Compassion for a sibling, his older, mentally unstable brother.
I don’t blame his brother; I never could. Schizophrenia takes no prisoners. A teenage diagnosis for him, kept in check as an adult but with lapses, same as my Tourette’s.
Their lives ended with a panicky, sky-is-falling distress call, one of many from Mitch’s brother to him on Mitch’s day off. Flash-forward to Mitch, at his brother’s apartment, seeing his brother’s self-inflicted stomach knife wounds. Mitch’s high-speed rush with him to
the hospital. His flashing rooftop magnetic police light and siren to clear their way. Their instant obliteration in a crash-and-burn broadside by a semi as they raced through an intersection.
Two charred bodies, both in closed caskets. If I blamed Mitch’s sick brother, I would need to blame my sick self. On the one hand, nobody at fault. On the other, at fault, me. Or Fate. Or God, for creating less than perfect people. I didn’t know; I just didn’t fucking know.
Fuck you, Fate, you dream-crushing motherfucker. You left me for dead when you took away the only person I’d ever had to share my dreams with.
The van door opened. Andy climbed back into the passenger seat, pulled the door shut.
“I suddenly realized,” he said, “that the other place I needed to be could wait.”
There were five guest rooms in the Willow Swamp Farm B&B.
“Let’s go to your place,” Andy said with mischief in his voice, “to start.”
It was the middle of the afternoon. The stairs creaked as we ascended them. Rooms three, four, and my room, five, the Maurice Prudhomme, were on the second floor.
The door latched shut behind us. Just inside, he cupped my face in his hands, admired it and the dash of a beauty mark that I had just below my cheek. I cradled the nape of his neck, guided him closer for a read inside those dark, exotic eyes. He leaned in, blinked softly for a beat, the hesitation, I felt, for assurances, his and mine both. A soft kiss, our lips barely touching, then it was a passionate, moist kiss with our eyes open then closed then open again as we drank each other in. A momentary pause. He reached for the scrapbook on the white antique bureau next to us, connected with it, and snapped it shut.
“My dad doesn’t need to see this,” he said.
I pulled him into me for a full-body embrace, my back against the door, our toned forms each with parts supple and spongy and firm and full, mixed with cherry blossom and musk and scented lavender, each of us offering the other beckoning and cooing reassurances. He helped me lose my camouflage tee and unbuttoned my jeans then waited until I found space on the bureau for my holstered Glock.