Hardboiled Crime Four-Pack

by Jack Bunker

  “I don’t have any kids.”

  “Shut your wrinkle hole. I’m gonna come for you, sometime in the middle of the night. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow night, maybe next week, but soon. I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you, man. Sooner or later, maybe just slip a needle in your IV and give you a little something-something. Maybe just an air bubble the size of my dick, you know. Whatever it is, ain’t nobody gonna care. You wouldn’t be up in here if you had some people to care for you. Shit, nobody would. So who’s gonna investigate me? Who’s gonna care one ol’ cracka strokes out in the middle of the night?

  “Beside, don’t nobody believe that John Doe bullshit. Wheeling you in here with a GSW in your gut and that withered-up ol’ leg. Who knows what bad shit you done? Maybe I be doing the world a favor. Maybe I be doing you a favor. Maybe the cops be the least of your worries, your former associates likewise, ’cause now you on the wrong side of Mr. Ray Ray.”

  As he spoke, Mr. Ray squeezed Hobbs’s arm harder and harder. But when Mr. Ray looked for fear and pain on Hobbs’s face, he could find none.

  “Don’t matter how tough you act. You know old people doze off, grandpa? You gotta sleep sometime,” Mr. Ray said, giving Hobbs a shove into his room that caused him to stagger and grab for the railing on the wall.

  Mr. Ray raised his voice so it would carry all the way back to the nurses’ station. “You sleep tight, Mr. Doe.”

  Hobbs staggered into the bathroom and closed the door. He lowered himself onto the toilet riser, an industrial steel-and-plastic contraption that lifted the toilet seat to a height that the infirm could more easily manage. It was old and yellowed and cracked. The plastic screeched under his weight as he sat down.

  Hobbs sat there for a moment, catching his breath, then stood and dropped his pants. He checked the puckered scars to the right of his belly button and on the front of his left thigh. The doctors had said the leg wound was lucky. The bullet had gone in, grazed the bone, and passed through. Lucky? He felt as if someone had filled his hip joint with cold sand. And he was weak, so weak. He sat on the toilet again. He cursed as the plastic moved and pinched his ass. A millimeter of skin caught in a tiny crack on the side of the seat hurt so badly that it brought tears to his eyes.

  Was this to be the end of it? The end of him? Was this the way he would go out? It had all been in his hands, and that bitch had taken it away from him. From all of them.

  He reached down and grabbed the side of the aged plastic. With all the strength he could muster, he pulled up. He groaned, he strained, and then, with a crack, a long, sharp piece of plastic came free. He put the point against the wall and pressed. It bent, but didn’t break.

  When he climbed back into bed, the roommate said, “I warned you not to mess with Mr. Ray.”

  THREE

  Four hours later he heard a faint jingling of keys. Mr. Ray was coming down the hallway. The man’s comfortable shoes made no sound, but the keys on his belt loop, softly clinking together, made just enough noise to give him away.

  Hobbs had lain in his bed patiently, waiting as a professional does. Not waiting for something to happen, not even wanting something to happen, just watching and listening for what did happen.

  Hobbs looked over and saw the wide eyes of the roommate looking at him. Hobbs said, “Turn the other cheek. Pretend to be asleep.” The roommate did not look away. Suit yourself, thought Hobbs. He heard Mr. Ray shutting the door of the room and trying to be quiet about it. Hobbs closed his eyes.

  This was the hard part.

  He heard the footsteps grow closer to the bed and fought a battle not to flinch from an imagined blow he couldn’t see. Hobbs needed the man close. Even though Mr. Ray was a fat, greasy shit, Hobbs was in no condition to run him down. He’d get one shot. If he could get him close.

  He smelled bad cologne, and felt the man’s breath in his ear as he said, “I can kill you whenever I please, but not today.”

  Hobbs opened his eyes.

  Mr. Ray said, “Yeah, that’s right…”

  Hobbs turned quickly in the bed and drove the plastic into Mr. Ray’s kidney. Ray’s face, an inch from his, lost all color. His mouth made a large, round circle, but no sound escaped. Mr. Ray tried to breathe in and failed. He clawed at the side of the bed and then collapsed in a heap along the wall.

  Hobbs threw the bedclothes to the other side and regained his feet.

  “You’re going to hell,” whispered the roommate.

  Hobbs snapped the keycard off Mr. Ray’s belt with a brutal jerk. “Not tonight.”

  The roommate looked at Hobbs with wide eyes and shook his jowls as if the momentum could make the whole thing a bad dream. Hobbs knew that the roommate was going to scream before the fat man realized it himself. Hobbs rolled across his bed and staggered to his feet. The roommate sucked in air to scream. Hobbs got to him before he could let it out.

  Mr. Ray’s scrubs were too big for Hobbs. He cuffed the pants and tucked the shirt in as best he could. He tore his hospital gown in half and stuffed half into each of the nurse’s shoes. They were uncomfortable, but they stayed on his feet.

  Hobbs walked calmly past the nurses’ station without looking. The trick to doing something wrong and getting away with it was to do it as if you did it all the time. Hobbs flashed the card at the sensor and pushed through the doors into the elevator lobby. He pressed the button and looked around as though he were bored. Only then did he risk a glance at the nurses’ station. It was empty.

  In the parking lot, he found Mr. Ray’s car by walking around and clicking the key fob until he heard a chirp. It was a beat-up Pontiac Firebird with an aftermarket alarm system and a plastic scrotum and balls dangling from the rear bumper. Big nuts with nothing to back them up. Hobbs thought that summed up Mr. Ray’s life in a nutshell. And then he never thought of him again.

  The majority of the cars in the lot had North Carolina license plates on them. He had made it that far north? He was tougher than he’d thought. Tougher than he felt for sure. He really didn’t remember much of the end of it. Inside the car he checked Mr. Ray’s wallet and saw that his address was indeed in Charlotte, North Carolina. It had been years, nearly thirty, since he had been here. And he didn’t remember much about that either. Just a payroll job at a mill on the north end of town that he had bailed out of when it had gone wrong.

  He smiled. Maybe that job could come to something good after all these years. A plan began to take shape in his head. He felt weak, but good. He went through the glove box and checked under and behind the seats. No firearms. No cell phone. All clear. He had 120 dollars in cash from Mr. Ray’s wallet, and he figured he had until morning, if his luck held, before word was out on the Firebird.

  Cameras would make him leaving the nasty five-story Brutalist building he had just escaped from. Rest home? Hobbs snorted. He turned the engine and the headlights leapt across the badly kept lawn. That was a prison. A slow-motion death row with no appeals. Better to be hunted than to be caged.

  FOUR

  Detective Mazerick looked at the crime scene and couldn’t stop chuckling. The nursing home administrator hovered outside the door and shot Mazerick a dirty look every time he snickered, but Mazerick couldn’t stop himself. And why should he care about that dink? He didn’t know what it was like to be murder police. He especially didn’t know what it was like to have your partner catch it. Not from a shootout or cancer or any dramatic TV bullshit like that. Nope, just running a red light while drunk and getting T-boned by a Caddy.

  All well and good for Jimson, his troubles had come to an end. Mazerick was the one who was left behind, still holding down a full caseload, one man doing the work of two until a suitable replacement could be found. He was buried in the grind of a job that would burn people out with an ordinary caseload. So Mazerick took his yuks where he could get them. And this? This was funny.

  He chuckled again and heard the administrator sigh with exasperation. That made him chuckle some more. It was a grim sense of humor that kept
you going in this job.

  He sucked his teeth and asked the uniformed cop at the door, “You ever hear of anybody breaking out of a rest home before?”

  The cop shook his head.

  “Can you blame him?” Mazerick asked.

  The cop shook his head again.

  “You ever want to make detective?” Mazerick asked. The uniform, a young kid with a shaved head, nodded. Of course he did. “Then step in here and help me talk this through.”

  The uniform asked, “What happened to your partner?”

  “See that, a natural detective—he had an accident. I just need somebody to talk at, so, you know…shut up. OK, so Mr. Doe, former occupant of this bed, is brought here in a coma, three weeks ago. Severely dehydrated, two gunshot wounds, a concussion, and injuries consistent with a”—here he flipped open the file and read—“vigorous physical beating.”

  “Who’d he piss off?” asked the uniform.

  “Whom, had to be multiple guys—the GSWs were already treated when he was picked up…behind a Dumpster behind a Bojangles on South Tryon.”

  “Who is a plural.”

  “What?” said Mazerick, looking up from the file.

  “Who or whom doesn’t make a difference.”

  “Seriously, you’re correcting my grammar? That’s just obnoxious. It’s not going to help you rise in the ranks, that’s for sure.” He turned back to the empty bed. “So our guy, who is evidently popular with a range of unknown persons, wakes up from his coma, takes a few days to get his legs under him. Then kills a nurse and escapes.”

  “What about the guy in the other bed?” the uniform asked.

  “I questioned him downstairs in the clinic. But it’s a pain in the ass to get information out of a guy with a broken jaw. Says he saw the guy kill the nurse, but other than that he doesn’t know anything. Except that Mr. Doe was the devil and he was most certainly going to hell.”

  “Why doesn’t Mr. Doe just walk out?” asked the uniform.

  “Good question, wrong question, but a good question. He doesn’t just walk out because they won’t let him. But the better question is, why doesn’t he just stay?”

  “What?”

  “Kick back, enjoy the Ensure, rest and heal. Why is he in such a hurry?”

  Mazerick looked at the room again to give the uniform time to figure it out.

  “Somebody was after him!” said the uniform.

  “That’s one,” said Mazerick. “What’s the other one?” This time Mazerick waited so long, he ran out of patience. So he answered his own question: “Or he was after somebody or something and was worried about running out of time.”

  “He could just be angry,” offered the uniform.

  Mazerick squinted and waggled his open hand from side to side. “Kinda weak.”

  “So who is this old boy?”

  “Yeah,” said Mazerick, “that’s the thing. Who is this guy? And right now we don’t know. And we’ve got no way of knowing. All we got is a stolen car maybe six hours old, some prints that don’t match anything, some pictures, and some shitty surveillance cam footage. Unless he’s stupid and we catch him, we may never know who he is or what he wants.”

  A female voice from the doorway said, “I know who he is.”

  Mazerick and the uniform turned to see a woman in a dark-blue suit. Mazerick immediately thought, Naughty librarian. And a split second after, he thought, There goes that sensitivity training the city paid for. Screw them, this lady was one of those suits who managed to turn the line between professional and sexy into a demilitarized zone—a place where you knew action should happen, but if it ever did, you just knew that shit would be going all the way wrong.

  Thick blond hair, white blouse straining to hold its contents in, dark-red nail polish, and, at the very end, the badge and ID wallet that read “FBI.” He tried not to let his biological reaction show; that was just a sure way to piss off a broad like this. And he had an overwhelming urge to try to make her happy.

  “Great,” said Mazerick, “but who are you?”

  “Special Agent Wellsley, FBI,” she said. Mazerick loved the way she pronounced all three syllables. F-B-I, her upper teeth pinning her lower lip as she enunciated the F.

  “FBI,” joked Mazerick. “You gonna take over this domestic rest home terrorist case? Snatch this nurse murder from my plate?”

  “Actually,” Agent Wellsley said, displaying a humility that Mazerick had not expected from an FBI agent, “I was hoping for a little cooperation.”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Mazerick, “but by the time I’m done, we’ll probably have him in the bag. He’s a feeble old man, we got the car he’s driving, he doesn’t have any credit cards. He’s gonna leave a trail like he’s dropping glowing bread crumbs.”

  “I hope you’re right, Detective…”

  “Mazerick, ma’am.”

  “Ma’am?” asked Wellsley, playing at being offended.

  “Eh, sorry, I moved down here from New York a few years back, it just kinda rubbed off.”

  Agent Wellsley smiled. Mazerick liked it.

  FIVE

  Hobbs had started north on little more than instinct. When he saw signs for the interstate, he jumped on the superslab. It was forty-five minutes of drone and wind before he saw what he was looking for. It came in the form of a train station. At four forty-five in the morning he pulled into the Amtrak parking lot in Salisbury, North Carolina. He eased the Firebird into a spot in the back and killed the engine. There weren’t many lights in the lot, and back here the illumination came from a couple of old-fashioned frosted globe streetlights with a tree growing around them. Hobbs sat in the darkness until his eyes adjusted.

  He had to fight off the urge to sleep. He knew he sorely needed it. But he needed to make one more move before he could rest for a while. Still, he felt fatigue pulling him down. When one eye drooped, he snapped upright in his seat, asking himself, “You want to rest in jail?”

  He scanned the lot until he found something that would work. Four spots over, an ancient but well-loved pickup truck. Ancient, thought Hobbs. He remembered when that model was new. It was back when he was new. He reached up and clawed the plastic dome off the Firebird’s cabin light. Then he pulled out the bulb so he wouldn’t call attention to himself or ruin his night vision when he opened the door.

  He got out of the car and groaned with the effort of unfolding. He stepped into the landscaped median that separated the rows of parking spaces. He stood motionless in the shadows. The only thing he could hear in this town was his breathing. Then he heard the stoplight change on Main Street.

  He saw a light play across the storefronts on the far side of the street. Then he fell down. He had meant to kneel gently by one of the trees, but there was a pain and his leg gave out. He heard something crack and hoped it was just one of his old joints.

  It was bad to move fast. The eye is attracted to fast-moving things, especially in low light. Nothing for it now. So he lay on the ground and watched the police car glide past. Was it looking for something in particular? Couldn’t be. Sure they had to have him on cameras, but had they gotten the word out that fast? He was sixty miles away. They couldn’t have gotten the word out that fast. But, as Hobbs slowed and aged, there seemed to be no limit to how fast everything around him became.

  The police car disappeared at the far end of the street. Hobbs decided the cop was just bored and on a regular patrol.

  He got up slowly and it hurt. He limped to the old truck and tried the driver’s side door. Locked. Then he pressed his hand against the window and slid it down. Old truck meant old parts. Old parts meant that sometimes there was enough play in the window that it would slide down and give him the space to reach in and pull the door lock. But not this one. Then he tried the triangular little window at the front of the door, but it didn’t budge either.

  Hobbs worked his way around to the passenger side, stopping to feel the top of each tire and the well under the rear bumper. He came up empty, but then
he tried the window trick on the passenger window and it slid down about three inches. He worked his hand and arm through the door, then pulled up on the lock mechanism. The door was well greased and opened without a sound. Somebody was going to miss this truck.

  He switched off the interior light and waited. He thought he heard something, so he pulled his head out of the pickup and listened for a long time. A sharp pain went through his skull, reminding him that he was tired, too tired. There wasn’t even wind. The air on this hot Southern night just hung in place and sweated.

  He leaned into the car and reached underneath the dash and made a sharp jerk. He came up with three wires. He squinted at them for a second, but couldn’t make out the colors. He stripped them, one at a time, with his teeth, making sure not to ground himself against any of the metal in the mostly metal cab. After everything he’d been through, there was no need to take twelve volts in the mouth. When he had them stripped, he cupped the overhead light and turned it back on. He needed only a sliver to see which wire was which.

  He slid in behind the wheel and closed the passenger side door behind him quietly. He wondered, wait for the cop to pass again, or chance it? Better to be active than passive. Besides, if he were that cop he’d be asleep somewhere by now.

  Before he touched the wires together, he felt around and found the manual choke knob. It wouldn’t need much on a hot night like tonight, but a little wouldn’t hurt. He pulled it out halfway. Then he twisted the red and the blue wires together. When he touched the black to them, the engine sputtered and tried to start. He gave it a little gas and the good old truck turned right over and purred.

  He dropped the column shift into place and eased it out of the lot. There was a lot of life left in this old truck, and for the first time since he’d woken up in that rest home, he felt some hope for the future.

  As he merged onto I-85 again, this time headed south, he flipped open the triangular window in the front of the door and let the air rush across him. He chuckled an evil, phlegmy, old-man chuckle. Yeah, he thought, a nap and a couple more good moves, and he’d be back on the right side of this thing.