Mink Eyes

by Dan Flanigan

  He stuck out his old hawk’s face and said, “What’s your name, little angel?”

  “Kelly O’Keefe,” she said, stepping back on the porch, preparing to turn around and run if she had to.

  “And an Irish angel at that,” the old Irishman said, affecting a brogue.

  “And look, Herbert,” the old woman said, “she’s an angel with a broken wing.”

  “Why don’t you come on in here and have some hot apple cider,” the old man asked, “keep us old folks some company for a few minutes?”

  “My dad,” she mumbled. “He’s waiting for me out at the curb.”

  “Well,” the old lady said, “let’s have him in too.”

  She started to say “No.” If her dad came up to the house, she might lose the bet with the other kids. Would that nasty Chris Larkin call that cheating? Where will I get the money to pay all those dollars? But the old couple stood there beaming, and she did not see how she could tell them “No.”

  “Dad,” she yelled. “Dad, come up here a minute.”

  She heard him rustling along the hedgerow. “Don’t be afraid,” she told the old couple. “He’s a gorilla.”

  “THEY WERE NICE,” she said as she and her dad came out from the Ryans’ yard onto the sidewalk. There were no trick-or-treaters left on the streets, and most of the porch lights had been turned off.

  “Will you carry my bag for me, Dad? I’m tired.”

  “Heavy,” he said. “I think they gave you all the candy kisses they had left.”

  “That’s what I’ll show the kids tomorrow. All those candy kisses! I’ll bet nobody else went inside,” she said proudly. But she thought she would leave out the part about her dad coming in with her.

  “Look, big kids,” she said, and shrank toward him. Down the block two skeletons, both of them taller and broader than children, taller and broader even than teenagers, walked toward them. They did not seem to have much in their bags. They were almost walking in step, not like teenagers out on a lark, more like soldiers out on a march. They said something to each other, then, at the very same time, each of the skeletons reached into his bag.

  Kelly lost her grip on her own bag of treats when her dad suddenly snatched her up, hoisted her over his shoulder, and started running back toward the Ryans’ place. Her candies scattered all over the sidewalk. From over her dad’s shoulder she could see that one of the skeletons had dropped to one knee and was pointing something at them. Soundless flashes of fire jumped out from the skeleton’s hands, and she guessed it was bullets that were whizzing all around them and crashing into the bushes. Then her dad fell down, and she spilled hard onto the sidewalk. The fall knocked the breath out of her, and when she looked up, he was on his knees and crawling toward her, struggling to his feet. He swept her up again and they plunged through the Ryans’ front hedgerow. She cried out when the spike-like branches jabbed and scratched her face and arms and legs. Now he had dropped her and was pulling her along the ground, and she thought he might pull her arm clear out of its socket. The pain kept her from seeing the pistol muzzles flash on the other side of the hedgerow, kept her from hearing the skeletons crashing after them and cursing because they had a hard time struggling through the thicket.

  Now her dad was dragging her into some kind of hole that she later realized was the big window well of one of the Ryans’ basement windows. He covered her up, crushing her with his big hairy gorilla’s body, and whispered for her not to make a sound, but he was breathing so heavily and choking and gagging that she just knew the skeletons would hear him. She waited for them to come and fire the soundless bullets into their huddled bodies, and it was only then that she started to cry.

  They told her later that she had gone into what they called “shock.” She did not really remember very well the footsteps of the skeletons running past the window well or the long minutes after her dad passed out on top of her and she thought his bulk might smother her. She only vaguely remembered the flashlight shining down on them and old Mr. Ryan standing above them and saying, “Oh, my God, oh, my dear God,” or the policeman carrying her to the ambulance. But she remembered too vividly seeing them pull the gorilla’s head off her dad and the blood that covered his head and face and how she screamed and how they had to hold her down for a while after that until they gave her a shot of something that made her fall asleep.

  O’KEEFE SAT ON an examining table in the emergency room with the bottom part of his gorilla suit still on and twelve new stitches in the back of his head.

  “You daughter’s fine,” the intern said. “She’s sleeping. She’ll be ready to go home tomorrow. You’re lucky you had that gorilla’s head on. I think it deflected the bullet so it only grazed you. Lots of blood, but not very deep. Without that ape head, I’ll bet it would’ve taken the whole back of your head off.”

  “Can I go now?”

  “Yeah. The cops are waiting outside to talk to you. And one very angry lady.”

  He saw her through the window of the emergency waiting room, pacing and sobbing. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, and her eyes grew even darker when she was angry. She had fought hard in aerobics and exercise classes to keep the thickness of approaching middle age off her and had succeeded admirably. She wore a sleeveless red dress that looked so good on her that he forgot for a moment why their marriage had broken up.

  She came charging in as soon as the intern left. “You bastard,” she said. “That little girl was almost killed tonight because of you. You should have seen her, you bastard. She was scared almost to death. Trembling and shaking and sobbing and screaming until I thought she was going to go crazy.”

  It surprised him when she reached out and slugged him and tried to slug him again. He caught her arm and held her away from him. She sobbed and shook her arm from his grip.

  “Well, if I have my way, you’re never going to see her again without a police escort. I’ve already called my lawyer, and he’ll be filing something tomorrow. No court in the world is going to make me give my daughter up to a man who endangers her life!”

  He started to say she didn’t have to file something, he would do whatever she wanted, but she turned and stomped off before he could say it. He didn’t want to yell after her, it seemed hopeless.

  “Geez,” said one of the cops, watching the woman in the red dress stalk out of the emergency room door. “I think if I was you, I’d rather get shot at.”

  THINGS WERE BAD, real bad, but Karl couldn’t help being amused though he took care not to show it. The Boss had sent boys to do a man’s job. They sat there now, looking sheepish and resentful, pouting like the spoiled children they were. The Boss had been amazingly patient while he listened to the story, but Karl could tell that the Boss would soon blow like Old Faithful.

  “It was the perfect plan,” Jimmy Raymond was saying, “Legitimate disguises on Halloween, nobody can recognize you, hide the guns in the treat bags, nobody even challenges you, you’re just another monster in the street . . .”

  “So you thought it was just a great idea to start blasting away right in the neighborhood there when you could have killed the little girl and who knows how many other kids. No way I could have survived that. No way.”

  “We know how to aim, God damn it. No chance we were going to hurt the kid . . .”

  “Get the fuck outta here,” the Boss told them. “Get the fuck outta here before I tear both of ya apart with my bare hands.”

  They obeyed, a little insolently, Karl thought, affecting a casual air, slouched shoulders and rolling hips, as they walked out.

  “Anymore you got nothin’ but shit to work with,” the Boss said.

  “You shoulda had me do it.”

  The Boss shrugged his shoulders. “You gotta let the young ones learn sometime.”

  “You want me to do it?”

  The Boss shook his head. “Too much heat too close to home. We need to bring somebody else in. I’m thinkin’ about Joe Sola. Call him. Tell him he needs to get up here right now.
Meanwhile, you keep an eye on that detective every fuckin’ minute of the day and night. That little visit he made down here. What a cocky bastard. What a stupid bastard. Well, that was his death sentence. He sentenced himself to death. We’re gonna chop him up. Alive.”

  LATER IN THE evening, when her mom had gone home to pick up some things at the house, the duty nurse let him sit in a chair by Kelly’s bedside. Kelly lay on her stomach in her usual way. She slept soundly and peacefully, apparently no skeletons haunting her dream, a couple of deep scratches on her face the only marks the evening had left on her body. Yet there would be scars for sure, inside at least. It had been a close-run thing. He imagined her dead. Become nothing. Gone forever. The one thing in his life he knew he had done right, however accidentally, was helping to bring into the world this precious creature sleeping there beside him. And it was he who had put her at risk, brought terror and nearly death itself to her on that fog-shrouded street. He put his elbows on the side of her bed and buried his face in his hands. He was exactly what her mother said—a danger. He had forfeited whatever rights a father was supposed to possess. And it seemed fitting to him that he would now be cut off even from Kelly, the only thing that had been holding him to the world all these years. He fetched a piece of paper and a pencil from the nurse, scratched a note, and, left it on the table by Kelly’s bed.

  “Love you” is all it said.

  Then he was gone. Time to tie up all the loose ends.

  CHAPTER 22

  O’KEEFE SPENT MOST of the next morning with the police. They seemed to care, seemed to want to do something, but like everybody else, they had a hard time believing that Carmine Jagoda was mixed up in some piddling mink-farm scam down in the boondocks. The Lieutenant called the Sheriff’s office. The Deputy told him the Sheriff had gone off on vacation and that only the Sheriff knew anything about the status of any investigation that might be underway. The Deputy did not expect the Sheriff back for a couple of weeks.

  “They don’t know their ass from a hamburger bun down there,” the Lieutenant said. “O’Keefe, I’d love to do something, but there’s this little problem called evidence. There isn’t any—no eyewitness identifications, nothing. If you look at this deal from the standpoint of the evidence, all it looks like is that you’re some kind of human magnet that exerts a strong attraction for speeding bullets.”

  “What about Ullman?”

  “That’s the only direction we’ve got to go in. We’ll find him. A guy can’t just vanish these days.”

  “Tell that to Jimmy Hoffa.”

  O’Keefe had left a few things out of the story. He did not tell them that Tag had been seen in Arizona or that George was out there searching for her right now. At best the police might put her in jail as some kind of accessory to something; at worst they might get her killed. Mr. Canada seemed to be more powerful than the cops. Same old story. Mr. Canada could trump them at every turn because they had to adhere to law and procedure, and Mr. Canada did not. And that was fine, he knew, because that was the only thing that kept them from becoming Mr. Canadas themselves.

  “And you’ll have a car driving by my daughter’s house for a while? No way they would be stupid enough to go after her, but still . . .”

  “Count on it. For the indefinite future. We won’t pull it off until you tell us it’s okay. But I don’t think your little girl is anywhere close to danger. At least as long as you’re not with her. It’s you they’ll be after.”

  But the cops did not offer him any protection, and he asked for none. A police escort would only get in the way of what he intended to do now.

  YEARS OF STALKING people had taught Karl patience, but he was getting more and more disgusted with this stake-out on the private detective. Sitting in a car in the darkness so close to the guy’s apartment just couldn’t be smart. It would be much easier and less dangerous if the Boss would just let him quietly ease himself on inside and put the idiot out of his misery. One way or the other, the guy was going to end up an ugly way of dead, so why not make it simple? But the Boss had not wanted the people close to him to be involved in this killing so close to home, and, as always, he followed the Boss’s orders, stupid or not. They had journeyed all this long way together, he and the Boss.

  The guy’s lights had turned off just after ten, now Karl’s clock said ten minutes to midnight. His police-band radio told him a patrol car had moved closer to the neighborhood. It might be a little tough to explain how one of Carmine Jagoda’s men had come to be sitting in a parked car so close to the private detective’s apartment. He knew of an all-night place on the other side of the little pocket park next to the apartment. The guy had parked his van on the street; it would be visible from the window of the all-night place, and he might as well walk over there and keep his parking space.

  He had started down the stone steps that led into the park, his hands trapped in his trench coat pockets, when someone tackled him and knocked him over the railing. He thought at first it must be a cop, or a mugger. Then the cord tightened around his neck. Clutching frantically at the cord, he tried to flail out of his attacker’s grasp, but his assailant was too strong. Then he realized he might be about to die. He thought he had forgotten how to be afraid, but just before he lost consciousness, he tried to scream through his closed throat, and when he couldn’t scream, he shit his pants instead.

  He could not believe it when he woke up. He wasn’t dead, yet anyway, but he was tied up like a calf at a rodeo. The driver drove fast and wild, and he was bouncing around in the back of a van. After a while the van stopped, the driver jumped out, and the side door of the van slid open. The fucking private detective. It would have been so much better to have killed him right off the bat.

  The detective dragged him out and threw him on the asphalt parking lot next to Angie’s. He lay there for a long time, trying to groan and scream the pain away, wishing the crap in his pants would dry out. It surprised him that he seemed to be falling asleep despite the pain. When he woke up, the Boss and Joe Sola were standing over him.

  “Anymore you got nothin’ but shit to work with,” the Boss said.

  “Look, Boss,” said Joe, “there’s a note pinned on him.”

  “Maybe it’s from his Mama,” said the Boss.

  Joe ripped the note off him and opened it up.

  “What’s it say?”

  “It says, ‘FUCK YOU.’ That’s all it says—‘FUCK YOU.’”

  O’KEEFE ALSO LEFT a note for Sara. When she arrived at work the next morning, she cursed herself for leaving her computer on the night before until she saw that someone had typed a message on the screen:

  I’m gone out of town, and nobody but you needs to know it. I’ll call in. Pete

  P.S. You’re a wonderful person. I didn’t deserve to know you.

  After she read the note, she stood there glaring at the computer screen for a moment, then reached out and pushed it off her desk, sending it crashing to the floor.

  THEY WOULDN’T LET you tote an M-16 automatic, a .45 caliber pistol, and several hand grenades onto an airplane, so O’Keefe had to drive. He took the northern route, across Kansas, through Colorado Springs, down into New Mexico. The vast, empty plateaus, the far-distant ridgelines, and the endless sameness of the ghostly landscape seemed to contain a secret and to promise him a vision, but he had no time to stop.

  West of Albuquerque he entered Indian country. Far off the road he could see tiny shacks, modern-day hogans, broken-down cars littered around them, a culture that had paid a high price for trying to live easy on the land, a culture that did not know how to dig in and root and burrow and cling, a culture unable to excrete itself in edifices, in suburbs and strip centers and fast-food franchise stores.

  Arizona was a revelation too. He plunged down from the alpine heights of Flagstaff, the San Francisco Peaks looming above the town like white-capped breasts of rock and trees thrusting from the earth to nourish the sky. Down from Flagstaff to the desert floor. Amazingly green. Giant sag
uaro cactus lined the foothills like sentinels. Broad valleys full of mesquite trees and dust, mountain ridges rising from the desert floor in the distance, bordering your vision, otherwise you might be able to see forever. To his right as he rolled into Tucson hovered Baboquivari Peak where the Papagos believe the world began. He pulled off the road and called Sara.

  “Pete, you’re scaring the shit out of me. That note you left me sounded like a suicide note.”

  “It wasn’t. Have you heard from George?”

  “George is at a motel in some place called Sierra Vista,” she said. “He says he thinks he has good news, but he has to confirm it first. He’ll meet you at the motel.”

  George. George and his over-quotient of luck. Rather be lucky than good. Yet even luck gave you no answers if you failed to ask the right questions. O’Keefe had asked the right questions. Again. That’s what had made him a success. He had learned from Harrigan the art of asking the right questions, and he wondered if there would ever be anything he would be able to teach Harrigan in return.

  “Pete, you’re uncanny sometimes,” George said as they cruised down an isolated state road not many miles from the Mexican border. The government owned most of the land on either side of the road, part of the national forest system.

  “The real estate lady recognized your lady right away. ‘All business, cold as a fish’ is how the real estate woman described her. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in her mind when she saw the picture. Even though the lady doesn’t have that long hair anymore.”

  “Really? She cut her hair?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” George wondered why O’Keefe sounded so sad.

  O’Keefe tried to imagine her without the long hair and failed. He could not even bring her image clearly into his mind.

  “It’s right up here,” George said.

  O’Keefe drove slowly by a mailbox and a dirt road that wound through the desert and disappeared over a rise in the land.