The Wrong Man

by Louis, Matthew

  At five to two I parked in front of Vanguard Liquors and looked at the place with its neon OPEN sign glowing and the seedy cardboard LOTTO advertisements propped in its dust-caked windows. I wished I could reach into my chest and take hold of my heart, squeeze it hard enough to stop its wild twitching. Inside that building was the underbelly of Blackmer. Inside was my fate. I stood out of the car, imagining Sully and his friends staring at me, nudging each other and saying, “Holy shit! Sam’s out of his fucking mind! He’s gonna get killed!” It added a faint whiff of satisfaction to the death-march atmosphere.

  I locked my car and moved. Over the blacktop, past the newspaper display rack, through the doorway. It was cool and dim inside and Sully said, “What’s up, Sam,” in a flat, possibly sarcastic voice. He had one friend standing across the counter from him. A Mexican gangster in a huge white T-shirt, with slicked back hair and the usual lip caterpillar.

  I said, “What’s up,” and got an orange juice from the cooler. I deliberately said, “What’s up,” to the gangster and he stared a moment, then gave a single nod.

  There was a used car salesman yammering from the TV in the corner. The three of us didn’t say anything and I just sipped my orange juice, again and again, a nervous tick, being careful not to slop it over my chin, hoping the two young men couldn’t see how much my hand was shaking.

  “Well, I’m outa here,” Sully said, somehow extricating himself from everything with those words.

  I kept my jacket on, although I became uncomfortably warm. Fifteen, twenty minutes passed and I stood behind the counter. Two guys came in and bought a couple of twelve packs. A guy in a suit came in and bought cigarettes. I was too distracted to bother turning off the sports program on the TV. There was something comforting about the noise and presence; about the way it had nothing to do with me, as if evidence that I wasn’t Sam Schuler after all. I surveyed each customer as they approached the store, telling myself I had the advantage here—they had to enter through that thirty-inch doorway. They couldn’t sneak up on me. I was positioned like the Spartans at Thermopylae. I could whip out my little revolver and start blasting away, on more or less equal terms, with whoever came at me through that door.

  My cell phone began its electronic impersonation of a real phone. Ring-ring! Pause. Ring-ring! I retrieved it, saw the distantly familiar number and snapped it open. “Hello.”

  “Where are you, Sam?”

  “Tommy!”

  “Yeah, Grandpa Art just raked my ass over the coals. Thanks a lot for that, ya prick. Where you hiding out?”

  “I’m at work.”

  “At that fucking liquor store?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Listen.” His voice sounded strange. Strained. “You’re gonna get killed, Sam. I mean that literally. Some people already asked me about you. I mean some fucked up fucking people. You can’t just––fuck. Lock the door and just hang out there. Lay down behind the fucking counter, why don’t you. I’m coming right now.”

  “You’re coming here?” I said, but he had hung up.

  I took out my keys and moved toward the door, but Jean was there. She was a brain-damaged sixty-year-old ex-addict who came in every shift. She had bloodless, parchment skin, thinning hair with a cheap auburn dye job, and an IV bag on a roller-stand next to her. She called the IV bag and roller her “date,” which I thought was funny the first dozen times she said it. She had some terminal condition and the only joy in her life was throwing away her social security money playing scratch-off lottery tickets. I think she went hungry so she could buy them. I didn’t even have the chance to tell her I needed to close the store; she and her “date” had already passed the threshold and were shuffling toward the counter.

  She stationed herself against the counter and began her ticket-buying spree, two, three, five at a time, selecting the different themes—Gold Rush, Luck O’ The Irish, etc.—which all had the same dismal odds of paying off. Sometimes she won five bucks, sometimes two, and she always put her winnings back into more tickets. She called out the plays to me as she scratched away with her nickel—“Oh, there’s two pots of gold! I just need one more!”—and I suffered this for ten minutes before I saw the car stop right in front of the door and felt my nerves melt.

  I watched the stout, tough gangster—the gamecock from the other night—rise out of the passenger’s side, cross the walkway and trigger the door buzzer as he stepped through the entrance. Out in the sun the driver popped up from the other side and followed. I wrapped my hand around the gun in my pocket and began to duck. Jean said, “There you go! Lookit that! Two free tickets!” and waved the thing in front of me.

  Then I saw the huge, brown, rust-rotted cruise ship from 1974 heave up beside the gangster’s car and rock as the brakes were applied. It was a Plymouth or a Pontiac or something—twice the size, at least, of the Japanese vehicle. Tommy was already out and running around the hood.

  “Hey!” the old woman said. “You gonna give me my tickets, honey?”

  I was in a half crouch. The gun was caught in the torn lining of the pocket of my derby. The gamecock had a gun at his side, I now saw, and he was looking at the old woman, trying to figure out if he should shoot me in front of her. Beyond him, just outside, was the skinny gangster, and my eyes traced down from his bony shoulder and I saw his gun too. His skeletal, mud-colored Indian face was taut and half-crazed with fear. The electronic beeper sounded as he finally passed into the store and in that instant the beeper sounded again and his eyes rolled up in his head and his legs turned to water. I saw Tommy lifting the length of pipe away as the skinny gangster crumpled to the floor without a sound. I jerked at the thirty-eight now, shredding the lining of my coat, and I managed to fire it through my jacket pocket, into the shelving under the counter.

  The shot seemed to shake the whole store, left the air itself quivering. “OH!” Jean said, pulling her IV bag closer to her, eyes wide and mouth sagging open.

  The gamecock was now rushing at me, bug-eyed. The explosion of the gun had clearly panicked him and he whipped the big black pistol up, to just kill me, when Tommy hacked the pipe down onto the crown of his skull, causing blood to spring forth instantaneously. Tommy clubbed twice more as the man was on the way down, and I heard him muttering through clenched teeth, something about, try to kill MY motherfucking cousin!

  I was stepping around the counter without knowing what I was doing. Jean was staring at me, still holding up her ticket that was good for two more of the same. Her mouth was an O, her eyes were huge, her face comically grotesque. At her feet now was the unconscious gangster and I watched her eyes find him.

  “Come on, Sam!” Tommy barked. “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” There was nothing but business in his voice. He shoved the pipe in his back pocket, bent and took Gamecock’s gun, then crouched over the skinny gangster and took his gun as well, saying, “Fucking punks!”

  “Oh my gaaaawd!” Jean said, but she sounded amused now.

  The skinny gangster stirred and tried to sit up, and I watched in respectful awe as Tommy passed both the confiscated guns to his left hand, cocked his right fist back and neatly clipped the young man on the chin, causing him to exhale and sag flat onto the maroon mat.

  “Get in your car and follow me!” he said, already beeping the door buzzer, jogging out to his car.

  I hadn’t even got the thirty-eight out of my pocket. I looked at Jean over the two flattened gangsters and said, “Those guys were trying to kill me. I have to go!” and she astounded me by saying, “Run! Run!” and she was already dragging her IV bag toward the door after me.

  I left the store open with the two gangsters in piles on the utility mats and the old lady getting herself out of there behind me. I ran straight to my car and jabbed the key into the driver’s door. Tommy waited, revving his nineteen-seventies heap, shooting black smoke from under the rear bumper, staring at me and then pulling out as soon as I sat down behind my steering wheel. He chirped the tires around a row of parked c
ars and I cranked the ignition key and shoved the Fairlane into first and took off after him.

  We had to sit at two lights and then we were hurtling down the freeway onramp and sliding over and fitting ourselves into the fast lane traffic. I fished out my cell, found Sully’s cell number after a few moments of punching buttons and darting my eyes between the gadget and the road, and punched CALL.

  “Yo,” Sully answered.

  “Sully, man, can you go down to Vanguard and cover for me? I had to get the fuck out of there.”

  It was silent for a few seconds and I figured he was profoundly stoned. “Yep,” he finally said. “I guess so. What happened?”

  I left Tommy out of the retelling. I just told Sully two guys had come in to kill me and I had run for it. I told him that the store was just sitting there open, and if he could get down there before too much was stolen I’d owe him big. He sighed and said, “Fuck it. Sure.”

  I thanked him and ended the call. A few cars ahead of me, Tommy’s brown Cadillac or Plymouth or whatever it was was cooking along at seventy-five, leaving a thin, black mist in its wake. I kept my eyes fastened on it and just tried to breathe.

  11

  We dropped to a legal sixty-five miles per hour and drove for about ten minutes—Tommy’s brown rusty cruise ship and my muscle car fallen from glory scudding up the highway. We hit a town called Greens Landing, a beachfront community which existed in the netherland between quaint tourist trap and dismal slum, featuring failing antique shops and seafood restaurants hoping to hook tourists going between Monterey and Del Mar.

  Tommy’s right turn signal began blinking through its grime and he slowed and veered over, lifting roadside dust, and I followed. We swung down a sidestreet with that sunny but miserably windy and sandblasted quality that beachtown streets sometimes have—as inviting as the surface of Mars. Tommy swung his car hard to the left, so the suspension rocked the frame almost to the ground, and I followed him into the back parking lot of a bar and seafood restaurant.

  As he stood out of his car he dragged hard on a cigarette and then flicked it into the windswept lot. He threw his hood back, exposing his outdated blond hair and unshaven jaw and threw me a look and a “come on” jerk of the head, and passed into the back door. I recognized the place as I rose from my car. It was called The Greens Landing Jazz Club and featured smalltime local bands every weekend. I had been there once with Tommy, two years ago when I was single and on the prowl, and I remembered being badly disappointed by the prospects presented. There had been only a motley gathering of aging local types and Norse Viking bikers, shouting, playing darts and pool, dancing with their fat “old ladies” to raunchy George Thorogood covers. There was a feeling of shady deals and of the possibility of getting beat with a chain in the back lot. The bar was Tommy’s second home.

  The inside was dark as a moonless night, until your eyes adjusted, at which point it became only dark as a porno theater. The woman tending bar greeted Tommy like he was her brother, took his order for fish and chips and set us up with a pitcher of Busch and two glasses, which we took to a far corner booth. There was one other table occupied by a couple of workingman types, but they were all the way across the room.

  “I ask her,” Tommy said, throwing a look toward the bar, “she’ll commit fuckin’ purgery in front of a grand fuckin’ jury for me.”

  I raised my eyebrows, nodded.

  “So we can say what we want. We got an alibi if we need it—or we got someone to say were were never here and never had this conversation.”

  I looked at him. His cheeks were flushed. His hands moved perpetually, fluttering through his hair, bringing his beer to his lips. His ass kept shifting as if he was sitting on broken glass. This was what happened when you banned smoking in bars. “You know,” he said, “there’s only one way out of this.”

  We looked at each other. I was blank. “What is it?” I finally said.

  “You really don’t know?”

  “Fuck! Just help me out here, Tommy. I’m fuckin’ scared.”

  He fired a glance toward the bar, then leaned forward. “You gotta fuckin’ kill Owen Ferguson, Sam—”

  “Come on!” I leaned back, turned my beer in my hands, took a nervous gulp, slopped some down my shirtfront.

  “You fucked up, Sam. Get it through your head. Some scrap motherfucker offered me money to scare you up this morning. Fuckin’ idiots. My own cousin! They told me two hundred bucks I help ’em out. Owen’s put the word out, man. It’s business now. Probably a thousand bucks or something, so this dude comes to me figuring I could show him where you’re hiding out and he’d get to you first and clear eight hundred. Or maybe it’s more, I don’t know. And then you just show up for work?” He shook his head.

  I tried not to show it but my heart had begun thundering. I wanted to pitch my head over the side of the booth and puke. This was Hollywood stuff. There was a hit out on me. I cleared my throat. “No shit,” was all I could get out.

  “No shit, Sam. So you can either run for it, or you can do something about it.”

  “You’ll help me?” My mouth reacted almost against my will. Committing me.

  Tommy scoffed and said, “What do you think I’m doing, asshole?” and reached over the table and shoved my shoulder almost belligerently.

  “What am I supposed to do? Just go and shoot him? Go the fuck to prison?” The pitch of my voice was climbing.

  “No, dumb-ass!” And then a blank and charming smile opened up on his face and he leaned back and said, “There you are!” as the barmaid set the plastic basket of fish & chips in front of us. There was a little dish of tartar sauce in the side and the grease on the breaded food shined as if it was painted on with a brush.

  “What’re you two so secretive about?” she said, not really caring.

  “Big time deals,” Tommy said. “You know me.”

  “Oh yeah, I’m sure,” she said. She was maybe forty with whatever good looks she’d once possessed blasted off her as if by a nuclear explosion, leaving her skin dry and brown, her black hair thinned and dead. “Lemme know if you need anything else,” she said, turning away.

  “You know what I need!” Tommy called after her, and she laughed and actually swung her flat, fat backside as she walked back to the bar.

  “Don’t tell me you hit that,” I said.

  “No, Sammy, I still got pretty good vision—and sense of fuckin’ smell!” he said, leaning in again. But there was no doubt in my mind he had walked away from the woman buttoning his pants at least once.

  “Now listen.” He was speaking around a mouthful of food, his jaws working, lips glistening. “There’s no telling Grandpa Art after this one, Sam.” He swallowed. “We do this shit, we get our stories straight and we never mention it again. No evidence, no nothing. We were never there.” The beer in front of me had emptied somehow, leaked right through the bottom of the glass, and I filled it again from the pitcher. I was just nodding, trying to drag my consciousness to the place where it believed I could commit murder.

  I was slightly drunk when my cell rang. It was Lucinda, the three-hundred-pound manager of Vanguard Liquors. She said she had called the store and discovered Sully was working instead of me and she wanted to make sure I was all right and would be able to work my next shift. Sully had told her I was sick and she asked me what was wrong. I said I had a flu bug or something; I had thrown up and my head was throbbing. She said nothing about any gangsters trying to kill me and I realized the whole episode had gone unnoted by cops or citizens, as if erased from the record of time. The gangsters must have just got up and left, wondering, literally, what had hit them. Jean, the scratcher ticket lady, might talk about it in the future, but people would probably think she had hallucinated the whole thing. As far as anyone not involved knew, I had merely gotten sick and left work early. Lucinda told me to sleep as much as I could and drink plenty of liquids and call if I wouldn’t be there tomorrow. I promised I would, thanked her for understanding, and thumbed th
e END button.

  I hung out with Tommy all day. We drank three pitchers of Busch in the Greens Landing Jazz Club but he never got drunk, and I guessed it was because he was tweaking. After a while we left to ditch my car. I followed him to a house in town and parked in the back, and then we went through a backyard like a city landfill and knocked on a door held to its frame by little more than habit. A tattered and cadaverous young man answered, shook hands with Tommy, and we hung out in his so-called home for an hour or two; he had a huge, high definition TV and we watched a show about ancient Rome on HBO while he and Tommy made a quick drug deal, then smoked crank in tin foil, then chattered at a machinegun pace and got excited whenever naked people appeared on the television screen.

  As the sky beyond the smudged window turned red, Tommy said, “Hey, we gotta go. Can we leave my cousin’s car in the back there?” and the cadaver said, “Sure,” and continued looking at the TV, fanning the fingertips of his two hands together. It seemed Tommy might have asked if we could piss on the living room rug and the man would have said, “Sure,” and continued staring at the TV and fanning his fingertips together.

  In Tommy’s mildew-stinking car, rolling up the street, he said, “Don’t big bad Owen hang out at that bar right by your work?”

  “Yeah. We gonna go there and get him?”

  He made a ridiculous voice and said, “Now you’re catchin’ on, country cousin!”

  “I can’t walk in that fuckin’ place. Neither can you. He knows you and knows we’re cousins, right?”

  “Calm down, Sammy. We’ll go there and stake the motherfucker out. You need to watch more TV. But first we gotta get rid of this piece of shit.”

  So we nursed the great brown stinking cruise ship across Greens Landing and mercifully turned off the engine in front of yet another of Tommy’s friends’ homes.

  “This is someone you know?” I said. This house had a fresh coat of paint on it and a landscaped little yard out front.