“I think about you all the time, Joey,” she said, and those words filled me with a sense of contentment so profound I felt airy and light. I wondered if I should strap myself to something lest I float away like a balloon in the wind. “And I have nightmares about one of us not making it.”
That deflated me right quick.
Dread replaced my momentary elation, pushing its way like a bully cutting in line.
“This Mr. Perrelli doesn’t seem like a nice guy,” she said. “And I get the feeling his blockheaded friend likes to hurt things. Ten million dollars is a lot of money to lose. When he finally believes that we don’t have it, he’s going to be pissed.”
I agreed with all of this and so continued my record-breaking silence.
“I got the distinct impression,” Tara continued, “that when Mr. Perrelli gets pissed, people get hurt. I think those people are going to be us.”
She sought my hand again and squeezed it. My fingers intertwined with hers, each touch like dynamite going off inside me.
“Jim or Bobby. Your sister maybe. You or me. I don’t think this thing will pass without us suffering for it.”
Finally, I found words and said them, knowing they were inadequate even before I spoke them, but saying them anyway.
“We seem to have done alright so far.”
“Is that so?” Tara said. “We beat up some punks; threw rocks at a fat sheriff; and killed a man.” In my mind I corrected her, saying: No, you killed a man; you’re the one that shot him. Horrified at my own selfishness, I wisely kept my mouth shut. “And for what? A bunch of money we ended up burning anyway?”
She looked away from me again. Dropped my hand.
“I wonder if it isn’t all our fault,” she said in a near whisper. “I wonder if maybe we wouldn’t have been better off never meeting.”
“Don’t say that,” I said, wondering how the conversation had turned in this manner, my heart sinking. She had called me. She had picked me up and driven us out here. She had walked me out to the lake and given me my present and then kissed me. This time I grabbed her hands and held them tightly. “Don’t ever say that,” I repeated and then I was moving forward and kissing her. At first she tried to pull away but I pulled her back, and then she was yielding, accepting it.
This time I did use my hands, desperately, almost without even thinking about it. First they were on her hips, moving up and down the denim of her jeans, finding the seam there between her blouse and waistband, touching that small strip of skin. Then they were under her blouse and touching the flat of her stomach, smooth and taut like leather. I felt her gasp into my mouth, tasted her breath in puffs. I pulled her close like I’d wanted to minutes ago, making those dozen small contacts: legs brushing legs, stomach to stomach, chest to chest and the swell of her breasts mashed against me, and her heartbeat behind them. Our faces were close, and when the kiss was done, but my hands still moving, roaming like they had minds of their own along the hidden skin beneath her shirt, we leaned against each other so that our foreheads rested one against the other.
“Don’t ever say that again,” I repeated once more, whispering it fiercely to her, breathing it on her, wanting the words to go into her and take root there. “This will be over soon.” I realized that like a hero in a movie I was making my first promise to a girl, and I wondered if I’d be able to keep it. “It’ll be over and we’ll still be here.”
That was the last thing either of us said there in the night by the black water, the trees whispering their devious secrets, their own promises maybe, of shadowy things and hidden things. And suddenly, despite the kisses and the touches, the girl in my arms and the taste of her on my lips, I didn’t want to be out there anymore.
Tara felt this, I think, as well and we walked back to the truck and she drove me home, where I had many feelings in the long night in my bed, and many nightmares. Oh, God, were there nightmares, and morning seemed so far away.
5.
Dad was off to work and Mom went into town for shopping when Sarah came into my room and tried to rouse me from bed. I was awake but not wanting to be, trying to make up for the sleep lost the night before. My breath had that morning stench like sour things and I hoped it hadn’t smelled that way yesterday when I’d kissed Tara.
I purposely blew it into my sister’s face.
“You stupid troll!” she said, backing away and holding her nose. “You smell like ass! Go brush your teeth or something!”
“Don’t … bother me then,” I croaked. I added a fart too, just for good measure, hoping it would scare her away. But Sarah held her ground. “What do you want?”
“If you weren’t so stupid and gross I would have told you by now.”
She went to my bedroom window and looked out. Then she turned back to me.
“Hurry and get up. I have something to show you.”
“A … new face?” I said through a yawn. “No need for me to see it. I’m sure it’s an improvement.”
Sarah moved quickly to the bed, grabbed my leg and the covers, and pulled hard. I slid along the mattress and then there was no mattress and I fell in a tangle of sheets to the floor. Bandit leapt down from the bed at the disturbance. My head hit the wall.
“You tampon!” I said, rubbing my head. “What’s your problem?”
“Remember those journalism skills you asked me about?” she said, and she smiled in triumph. “I went on Dad’s computer and found out some stuff about your friend Mr. Perrelli.”
The triumph quickly left her face and was replaced by something else. Worry, maybe, or fear.
“I think you should come take a look.”
I was already struggling to my feet at the mention of Mr. Perrelli. We moved quickly out the door and down the hall towards Dad’s office. Bandit brought up the rear, his nails clacking madly as he rushed to follow the excitement.
In Dad’s office I moved around his large oak desk and took the swivel chair, rolling it close so I could reach the keyboard, mouse, and lean in close to the monitor. Sarah at first stood close behind me, looming, and so I puffed another burst of dragon breath in her face and she backed up a few steps, looking like she was deciding whether to retch or punch me in the face. In the end she did neither, but just stood back as I read what she had pulled up on the computer screen.
As my eyes roamed down the screen, taking in the words and pictures there, stark validity was brought to the fears that Tara had voiced last night. I added my own blooming fears to those, and it seemed I’d stepped into another world.
“This is insane,” I said.
Using the mouse to move the onscreen pages up and down, I re-read some of what I already had. I looked back over my shoulder at Sarah. She stood there, leaning against the wall in her pajamas, chewing on a fingernail.
“He’s a mob boss,” she said, speaking the words around the finger in her mouth. “Ties in Philadelphia and Chicago.”
She glanced from me to the screen.
“He’s the real thing,” she said.
I turned slowly back to the computer screen.
On the screen was one silver-haired, black-eyed Vincent Perrelli, a black-and-white photograph of him standing in front of a brownstone building. Around him were several uniformed police officers, one of them standing behind him, only partially seen. Mr. Perrelli’s arms behind his back let the viewer of the photograph know what was happening, as if all the cops weren’t enough of a hint. He was being arrested, though from the smile on his face and his casual, leisurely posture, he could have been surrounded by a personal escort, readying for a night on the town.
“Indicted on five counts of murder,” I said, reading aloud the words on the screen before me. “Three counts of racketeering and two of extortion. He did seven years of a fifteen year sentence. Paroled after an appeal brought into question the chain-of-custody of certain forensic evidence, and one of the witnesses changed his story.”
“I get the feeling this witness didn’t just wake up one morning, r
ealizing he’d given bad testimony,” my sister said, and I agreed with her.
“And now Perrelli’s after us.”
“What do we do?” Sarah asked.
That was the ten-million-dollar question, which I had no answer for, because the ten million dollars that had briefly been in my possession had gone up in smoke.
I wondered if we were next for the flames.
* * *
Fat Bobby was out on the porch and I called him upstairs. The heavy thumps of his footfalls on the steps and then coming down the hall announced his approach. Poking his head into the room like he wasn’t sure if he should be there, he looked at us in front of the computer, and I waved him over.
We showed him the stories about Vincent Perrelli. I even narrated some of it for him, like maybe he was dyslexic or retarded and wouldn’t understand the gravity of what he was reading.
But he did grasp it, and there was that pasty pale hue to his face again like he might get sick. He rolled his eyes, leaned against a wall, and held his head in a way like he was thinking about it and coming to a determination. In the end he fortunately didn’t spew all over my dad’s computer, but there was this large lump that went down his throat like he’d swallowed what had been about to come up. This made me a little sick in turn.
“What do we do?” Fat Bobby asked. “That was obviously his money in the car, and we burned it all. What’s he going to do when he doesn’t get his money?”
I had no answer for him as I’d had no answer for my sister and myself. For a time in that room there was only silence, and I felt uncomfortably like someone had me in their crosshairs with their finger on the trigger. So strong was this feeling that I stepped away from the window, which brought me closer again to the computer monitor. Not wanting to, my gaze found the black-and-white of Vincent Perrelli again, smiling like a kindly grandfather or a man on a stroll.
I wondered if this was how our end would be: just another story in the morning paper. The totality of us summed up in a few paragraphs and maybe a poor photo and a caption.
CHAPTER TEN
1.
The night with Tara at the lake, and my sister’s findings on the Internet concerning Mr. Perrelli, made for a conflicting mess of hope and dread in my mind. One moment I would be thinking again of holding Tara’s hands in mine, leaning in close, anticipation for the warmth of her lips on mine setting my heart aflutter; and the next those images were invaded and sent scurrying by that of Vincent Perrelli and the squat, brick-house figure of Brock, sandwiching me between them at the Fourth of July show in front of the courthouse.
Such a bundle of nerves had I become, that my mom noticed when I paced too often about the house, or peeked out the windows, and she asked what was wrong. I made some weak excuse about being restless and bored, and at the first opportunity when she left to run some errands, I picked up the phone and called Jim.
I told him what Sarah had found on the Internet about Mr. Perrelli, and Jim came over not twenty minutes later. The four of us—Jim and I, Bobby, and Sarah—tried to come up with some ideas on what to do. Should we tell our parents? Should we call the police?
After the events on Lookout Mountain, both these options held particular appeal. Yet I remembered what the Collector had said about collecting, how sometimes he collected for others, sometimes for himself, and the gratification such work brought him. This led naturally to Mr. Perrelli’s businesslike impersonality, and the image I had of him back at the sandwich shop, like a CEO at the head of a conference table.
Mr. Perrelli, for all his professional demeanor, was no doubt a collector of a sort himself. Tallying his allotted dues on a ledger in his mind, the debtors filed just so in some mental Rolodex.
If we didn’t give him what he wanted, I knew it wasn’t just us kids that would pay. He would collect from our families as well.
I wouldn’t allow that to happen, and, I was glad to see, my friends seemed to be of the same mindset. Gathered about the kitchen table, snacks, drinks, and printed copies of the articles on Mr. Perrelli spread before us like the articles of the world’s lamest staff meeting, the four of us decided against telling our parents or the police. For the time being, at least.
Pushing up from our chairs, the four of us parted, Bobby to the guestroom he was using upstairs, complaining of feeling sick, which I understood only all too well; Sarah to her room, promising me she’d call Tara and fill her in; and Jim and I out to the porch, idly deciding what to do with the rest of the day. Jim suggested we go to his place, kill some time roaming about the car yard or playing video games.
I said fine, and we headed off.
* * *
Jim and I were walking down the highway towards the turnoff that led to his father’s shop, Bandit gliding between us, when I heard the sound of an engine coming up the road from behind. Remembering the night Dillon Glover and his friends had pulled up beside me—Dillon in the shadows with his head and hands seeming to float in the darkness, and the click of his knife flicking open—I turned to watch the vehicle approach.
The long black Cadillac in which Vincent Perrelli and Brock had driven away from the restaurant patio just a couple days before, now cruised towards us. I turned back around and quickened my pace. Jim spun about to see what had captured my attention, saw the Cadillac approaching, and hurried to keep up with me.
“Shit,” he muttered, jogging beside me. “What do we do?”
I shook my head.
There wasn’t much we could do. The Connolly yard was still maybe a quarter mile away. We could make a dash for it, but even in that short distance the car would overtake us. Which it did just then, rolling past us and turning in a right angle across the shoulder of the highway, blocking our path.
I reminded myself that, like the incident at the diner, it was daylight, and nothing would happen to us. We were safe in the day.
The passenger and driver’s doors opened.
Brock came out from behind the wheel. Vincent Perrelli stepped out onto the dirt shoulder from the passenger seat. His eyes hidden behind the sunglasses he wore was somehow worse than the black eyes themselves. Behind those tinted lenses I knew I was being watched, weighed, measured. He wore a gray-and-black pinstriped suit, the coat seeming heavy to me in this heat, yet the older man didn’t produce a single bead of sweat.
He seemed in control of everything, even the biological function of perspiration.
I couldn’t even reliably control when and where I pissed.
“Hello, Joey,” he said. “I came to see about our little dilemma.”
He looked from me to Jim, but neither of us spoke.
Bandit was growling and took a couple steps towards the man before I called his name and he stopped. He stood his ground, though, poised, legs and back tensed like he was ready to spring.
“You don’t still expect me to believe that story about you kids burning the money, do you?” Mr. Perrelli said. “With all the stuff you could buy with that kind of money, you really think I believe even for a second that you burned it?”
“It’s the truth,” Jim said.
“Books and toys and maybe a new bike,” Mr. Perrelli continued, speaking over Jim as if my friend hadn’t spoken at all. “Maybe some girly magazines to peek through at night when the folks are asleep.” He said this last with a sly and confidential grin that said: Ahhh, I know what you kids do. “The possibilities are endless. That’s a lot of money.” A sober and earnest expression replaced the warm smile, like he was a doctor with bad news.
“But it’s not your money,” he said. “And I would really like it back.”
“You’re gangsters,” I said without thinking.
Mr. Perrelli gave a short bark of a laugh like he’d heard a good joke. But it must not have been all that funny because then he was all business again.
“I told you. I’m a businessman. And I think it’s past time we ironed out the terms of the deal I have for you.”
Brock came around the Cadillac to stand ne
xt to Mr. Perrelli. He stood casually with his substantial arms crossed over his chest. Bandit’s growl rumbled again at the thick, squat man’s approach, but he stayed where he was, back arched, ears pinned against his skull.
“Brock is what I like to call my contract negotiator,” Mr. Perrelli said. “I tell him what I want and he sees to it that I get it. He can be very persuasive.”
Brock’s eyes were a steely gray, like chips of flint stone. I don’t know if I’d say they were persuasive eyes, but they were cool and reflected nothing of emotion or anything resembling human sentiment. They seemed like the glass optics of some sort of machine.
“And I think that’s what you children need right now. A little persuasion to bring you around to reason.”
“We don’t have the money,” Jim repeated, and the tremor in his voice made me feel not so bad about the terror jumping around inside of me.
“Brock,” Vincent Perrelli said and gave a slight gesture with one hand, “if you would.”
Brock came forward, and Bandit charged to meet him.
I called out to my dog to stop.
One huge slab of a foot shod in a steel-toed leather boot came up and met Bandit’s head with a thunk like something heavy hitting the floor. Bandit dropped to the ground and stayed there.
I charged the man-mountain and he backhanded me like he was swatting an insect. My head rang and my teeth clacked hard together and the ringing seemed to echo through my skull. I fell to the dirt, tried to stop my fall, skinned my arms and elbows in my awkward landing.
From my low perspective I saw the boot that had kicked my dog step past me and towards Jim. I lifted my head to watch, trying to push up. Dirt stuck to the blood at my lips where Brock’s knuckles had cut me. Grains of it in my mouth ground between my teeth.
Jim turned to run, and, surprisingly, I wasn’t angry. That was the right thing to do; the only thing to do. One of us had to get away. But my friend had waited too long to make a move. The man like a tank was there, intercepting him. One arm went around Jim’s middle, pinning his arms to his sides. Brock’s other arm brought Jim’s left up and out at the elbow. Brock held Jim’s hand out so that we could all see.
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