Grant Park

by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

  “Mr. Wonderful,” said Bob.

  “Right,” said Amy. “And husband number two is no prize himself. Giuseppe Funicelli—Joe to his friends—works for his father at the family toy company. Chases every skirt from here to Ohio, verbally abuses the boy when he’s not ignoring him altogether. Finally abandons them both when Clarence is 18 for some stripper in Cleveland. The one bright spot is that Joe’s father has taken to the boy. When Joe abandons his wife and stepkid, the grandfather is so embarrassed that he denounces his own son and provides Irene with a stipend to help support her and Clarence. It continues til the old man dies a couple years later. Then Joe swoops back into the picture and he and his siblings abruptly cut Irene off. That’s apparently the last thing the siblings ever agreed upon. The old man’s kids have been embroiled in some big fight over his assets ever since, although Irene says—”

  She paused when Bob held up his hand like a traffic cop. “Wait a minute,” he said. But he didn’t say anything else. He sat there, frozen, thoughts racing. All at once, he started the van, threw it into gear, and took off fast.

  Questions crowded Amy’s eyes. “Bob?” she said.

  Bob glanced over. He had almost forgotten she was there.

  “I think I know where they are.”

  twenty-four

  It was dark inside the warehouse now, the only illumination coming from a crescent of moon and the pale orange glow of the sodium lights from the highway above. Otherwise, the room was enveloped by shadow.

  McLarty had moved the van up to the rollup door. Now, he and Pym were using a dolly and a makeshift ramp to load the metal drums into the back, working by the light of two halogen lanterns clamped to the door frame. They still didn’t seem to be getting along very well—muttered curses occasionally reached Malcolm’s ears. McLarty had become increasingly peevish under Pym’s hectoring, but apparently, they were getting the job done.

  “They’re going to kill us. We’ve got to get out of here.” This was Janeka, whispering behind him.

  Malcolm didn’t answer. What was the point? What was he supposed to say? He had been tied to this chair for thirteen hours. He was spent. His joints were stiff, his ribs ached, his skull throbbed, his head hung like a weight, and his trousers were still cold and damp with his own urine.

  “Malcolm, come on. Think of something.”

  “You think of something,” he told her. He tried to muster anger, but even that was beyond him. His voice felt like a dead thing lodged in his throat. Malcolm was simply ready for all of this to be over, one way or another. He didn’t much care how.

  “You think I’m not trying?” hissed the woman behind him. “Come on, you can’t give up. If we could just figure out a way to cut this damn duct tape, I could get that key and we could get out of here.”

  If.

  It reminded him of something his father used to say: “If worms had machine guns, the birds would stop fucking with them.” Because “if” was the most useless word in the entire English language. Malcolm shook his heavy head. “It’s no use,” he said. “There’s no way.”

  “So we should just die?”

  He sighed. She was determined to have an argument. Intellectually, he understood what she was doing. She was trying to jolt him, fire him up. But Janeka Lattimore hadn’t been sitting here since dawn. What was he supposed to do? Was he supposed to dislocate his thumb and slip it out of the cuffs like some action hero in a movie? He wasn’t an action hero. He was a 60-year-old man who had spent his entire professional life sitting on his ass typing at a keyboard, a man who had seldom in all those years done anything more demanding than take the stairs. And she was expecting him to save them?

  No. There was nothing he could do. Nothing they could do. There was no way they could get out of there. There was…

  All at once, the litany of anguished thought stopped. His mouth fell open. For a moment, Malcolm could not move. Then he shook his head. He almost laughed.

  Lord, the answer was right in front of him. It had been there the whole time. Literally, right there in front of him.

  “Come on, Malcolm,” said Janeka. “You can’t give up. You can’t—”

  He cut her off. “I’ve got an idea.”

  “Bob, slow down!” cried Amy through her gritted teeth.

  Bob was driving like a crazy man, hurtling the van down the expressway, riding close on the bumpers of cars that made the mistake of being in his way. He darted in and out of traffic with bare millimeters of space to spare. Now he was bumping along the shoulder of the highway to get around a clump of cars poking along at 65 miles an hour.

  “Can’t slow down,” he told Amy, ducking back into the flow of traffic and hammering the accelerator. “I think I know where they are.”

  “So you said. But where?”

  Bob didn’t answer. He glanced at his sideview mirror, then jerked the wheel hard to his left. The sudden lane change forced the driver of an 18-wheeler to jam on his brakes. That driver expressed his displeasure with the angry blatting of an air horn.

  “Look,” said Amy, “if you don’t care about your life—or mine—you might want to at least think about the fact that Raintree has probably put an APB out on this van. You think none of these drivers has a cellphone?”

  Bob chanced a quick glance at her. She made sense. He hated it, but she did. “All right,” he said. And he eased up fractionally on the gas.

  “Now, where are we going?” asked Amy.

  “It’s just a hunch,” said Bob.

  “Fine. What is this hunch you’re willing to kill us both for?”

  “You remember the backdrop on the video? Seemed like it was shot in some industrial space, right?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “You asked how Clarence Pym could have ever heard of Action Jones, this obscure cartoon that came and went before he was born. And how he could have cared enough to have a complete set of Action Jones dolls.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Think about it,” said Bob. “That’s not something anybody would have bought for him. It’s something they couldn’t have bought him, since by the time he was born it wouldn’t have been on the shelves. So those toys had to have been given to him by somebody who already had a bunch of them. It’s the only way he could have gotten them.”

  “You mean, like, by some collector?”

  Bob shook his head. “No. I mean, by the manufacturer. Probably out of the overstock.”

  He saw understanding dawn like sunlight in Amy’s eyes. “His grandfather—stepgrandfather, I mean—was a toymaker.”

  “Exactly,” said Bob. “Ben Funicelli. Funn Toys. They went out of business a few years ago. But the thing is, they had a headquarters about a mile off Michigan. It’s been empty since the company folded. I remember because there was some talk a while back about a redevelopment project in that area. They had plans to put in a movie theater, some restaurants and shops, make it a real date-night promenade. Most of the property owners around there were all for it, but the deal was held up when the developer couldn’t come to terms with one family.”

  “The Funicellis.”

  “Right. The developer eventually gave up on the idea and moved on. I remember we did an editorial about it, blasting the family for their greed.”

  Amy was nodding. “You might have something,” she said. “The building is in his extended family. Even though his mom is on the outs with her in-laws, it wouldn’t be that difficult for Pym to get access. Maybe he even had a key from when the grandfather was alive.”

  “Exactly. Or maybe he just broke in. A little ‘screw you’ to the stepfather and the in-laws who treated him and his mother like garbage. It can’t be that hard to get into one of those old places. And it’s not like anyone would notice.”

  “I think we should call the cops,” said Amy.

  “We will,” said Bob. “But first, let’s make sure I’m right about this. As pissed off as Raintree is, the last thing I need to do right now is waste his time on a wild goos
e chase.”

  Amy gave this some thought. “Okay,” she said finally. “But if you’re right, we call him right away. No trying to take matters into our own hands. Agreed?”

  “Definitely,” said Bob.

  And at the time he said it, he meant it.

  If he got out of this—still a very big if, as far as he was concerned—Malcolm had decided he would learn the name of the little homeless man who had given his life in a futile rescue attempt and find some way to honor him. A plaque on a wall. A statue in a park. A scholarship in his name. Something.

  He had come running across that room holding a broken ceramic toilet tank lid overhead and he had looked, for just that instant, not like what he was—a ruined little man wielding an absurd weapon—but, rather, like some knight of old charging into battle with his broadsword held high, ready to deliver a killing stroke. It had been a gloriously brutal sight. He had raked Pym’s face with the jagged edge of the thing. And then, moving with a warrior’s grace, moving with the confident surety of some long ago action his bones still recalled, he had pivoted, even as Pym bellowed, and brought the weapon down again, emphatically, breaking it upon the crown of the giant’s skull. And the big man had fallen like a tree.

  Success had been short-lived, of course. But maybe that death had not been in vain. Because the broken pieces of the ceramic tank lid still lay on the floor, the closest one just two tantalizing inches beyond the foot Malcolm was now desperately stretching to reach it. The handcuff bit into his ankle as he extended his foot as far as he could—further than he could, yet still, not far enough. The thing lay in a pool of moonlight as if placed there by God’s very hand, escape, salvation, redemption, all wrapped up in a shattered ceramic shard from some old office crapper.

  Reach, goddamn you. Reach!

  He reached. With everything in him, he reached.

  “Have you got it yet?” Janeka was peering over her right shoulder, trying to see.

  Malcolm didn’t answer her. He grunted with the effort, his flaccid, 60-year-old tendons popping and creaking from the unaccustomed exertion. The entirety of him was focused on this one task, the toe of his pricey athletic shoe hovering so close, so close…

  “Malcolm?”

  He ignored her.

  Come on, man. Reach! Reach!

  “Malcolm, why don’t we just move the chair?”

  Come on, Malcolm. Almost there. Just reach, and…wait. What? Move the chair?

  She seemed to hear the thought. “We could bump it forward, couldn’t we? You’ve got a good six inches, maybe even a foot of give in those handcuffs. Wouldn’t that work?”

  “Uh, yeah,” he said. “It might.”

  Move the chair. Of course.

  “Okay,” he said, “on the count of three, try to lift up and scoot back. And be as quiet as you can, okay?”

  She said okay. He counted to three.

  It was a difficult and awkward maneuver, requiring Janeka, with little leverage and with both hands and feet duct taped, to lift her backside and push the chair, with Malcolm in it, forward as Malcolm stretched his legs out as far as he was able—which wasn’t very far at all—using his feet to pull the chair forward. His exhausted body groaned in protest. Behind him, Janeka grunted a curse as she put her weight behind the chair. Through the open door, he heard McLarty reading to Pym what sounded like bomb-making instructions.

  Malcolm felt the chair totter beneath him. “Come on,” he said softly, “come on, come on.” But it was no use. The leverage was all wrong, she wasn’t strong enough, it wasn’t going to work.

  And then, with a harsh scrape of wood on stone, the chair moved. The sound was so loud, Pym and McLarty had to have heard it. Malcolm didn’t breathe, straining his ears for the sound of one lunatic or the other coming to investigate. Instead, he heard McLarty mutter, “OK, that’s the last one. Now you start mixing up the Kool-Aid while I get to work on the wiring.”

  Kool-Aid? Malcolm didn’t even want to know what that meant.

  Behind him, he heard Janeka gasping heavily. “Did that do it?” she asked.

  Malcolm reached his foot out. It hovered easily over the broken ceramic. “Yeah,” he said.

  With his foot, he drew this makeshift knife closer. When he had it centered right in front of him, right between the legs of the chair, he said, “Here it comes.” And then, with a flick of his ankle, Malcolm sent the thing skidding back for Janeka to catch it.

  “You got it?” he asked.

  There was a moment. Then she said, “I got it.”

  Malcolm felt himself breathe for what felt like the first time all day. “Then get us out of here,” he said.

  The van had been a gift from his Grandpa Ben, who was not his real grandfather at all, but who, for a time, had been the only person besides his mother who treated Clarence Pym like a human being with human feelings. It had been one of the fleet that Funn Toys salesmen drove all over the upper Midwest hawking his grandfather’s products.

  When the business went under and all his assets were liquidated, the old man had held the van out and given it to Clarence. Clarence had been delighted. Designed for commercial use, it was big enough to accommodate his size. Clarence had learned to drive in this thing. When he got his license, he’d had the Funn Toys slogan (“It’s Ben Funn!”) and phone numbers on the sides painted over and he’d used the thing to go everywhere—to Bulls games, where he had to sit in folding chairs in a spot designated for cripples in their wheelchairs, or to baseball games and movies, where he watched standing up behind seats he could not wedge himself into. People stared, but he told himself that was okay. It was worth it just to be out on his own like a normal guy.

  Clarence had loved this old van. After a childhood spent largely in classrooms, doctor’s waiting rooms, and his bedroom, it had given him something he’d never had before: freedom. Now here he was, turning it into a bomb.

  Sitting in a chair behind the old van, Clarence stirred a mixture of ball bearings, nails, and bolts into small plastic tubs, each already half full of something Dwayne had dubbed “Kool-Aid,’” a foul-smelling sludge of piss, liquefied dog shit, ammonia, roach spray, and rat poison. These tubs would sit on top of the larger drums that constituted the bomb itself.

  Anybody who survived the initial explosion would be in for something almost as bad, Dwayne had said, when they found their wounds infected with shrapnel coated in that nasty concoction. He had giggled at the idea like a little girl and told Clarence he wished he could see the faces of the doctors and the CSI types when they realized what all manner of nastiness coated that shrapnel. They would go absolutely apeshit.

  Maybe they would, thought Clarence, face congealed in a frown as he ran one of his mother’s cooking spoons down into the filthy concoction and stirred. But in the meantime, he was the one who was forced to deal with the stuff. He felt as if he were about to be sick to his stomach,

  Dwayne saw. “Cheer up there, Sergeant,” he said as he sat inside the back of the van, braiding copper wiring together. “Just think of all the niggers and nigger-lovers and Jews that shit will kill. Hell, maybe a nail from that very batch you have in your hand will go right through Barry Obama’s fucking eye, huh? Got to look on the bright side.”

  “Yeah,” said Clarence without conviction as he closed the lid on one of the nasty tubs.

  Dwayne’s face puckered. He had been trying without success to jolly Clarence into talking ever since returning to the warehouse stoked to the gills on meth. It wasn’t that Clarence wanted to stay angry about it. Hell, Clarence had been trying to look past it, get over it, or just forget it ever since it happened. He really had. But nothing had worked. Now Dwayne spoke sharply. “Something wrong there, Sergeant?”

  “No, Captain.”

  “Sure as hell better not be. We’re on the verge of our greatest triumph here. It doesn’t look right for you to be moping around. Get your head in the game, Sergeant. That’s an order.”

  “Yes, sir.” Clarence spoke automatic
ally, without even bringing his head up from what he was doing. Truth was, he didn’t particularly feel like taking orders from Dwayne McLarty just now.

  Dwayne smacked him in the back of the head so hard he dropped the spoon. “Ow!” cried Clarence, more surprised than hurt. He lumbered to his feet and wheeled around, one massive hand palming his head where Dwayne had hit him. “Why the fuck did you hit me?”

  Dwayne was ostentatiously unimpressed. His gaze was level, his voice even as a ruler. “Shape up, Sergeant, or there’ll be more where that came from.”

  At that, Clarence could only stare, his incredulity warring with his rage. “Shape up? You’re telling me to shape up? I’m not the one who came back from a mission all fucked up on meth, ‘Captain.’” For the first time since they had formed their army, he pronounced the rank with air quotes around it, like something ridiculous, something made up, something dumb.

  It got Dwayne’s attention. He came off the back of the van, all pretension of indifference forgotten, and drew himself up to his full height—which brought his nose to somewhere beneath Clarence’s sternum. “Look, Sergeant,” he said, and he pronounced the rank with definitive emphasis, as if to reclaim the whole idea of rank from Clarence’s ridicule, “I don’t answer to you, understand? It’s not for you to question what I do. That’s what the chain of command is all about.”

  Clarence regarded his friend for a long, cool moment. Then he said, “Fuck you, Dwayne.” And he turned his back and walked away.