Sick Like That

by Norman Green

  “Frank . . .”

  “Listen to me,” he whispered harshly. “I had plenty of time to dope this out, and I ain’t goin’ down this way. Swear to God I’m not. These guys think they can use me and then just throw me in the garbage. I ain’t goin’ for it. Get ready, here they come.”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “They’re in the kitchen. Listen, this asshole Raffi has any brains, which is debatable, okay, he’s gonna try to shoot you first hoping that’ll stop me.”

  “I thought you said he wasn’t gonna shoot.”

  “Quiet, get around behind me.”

  There was some creaking of ancient wood and then the lights in the basement went on. The window in the door to the tiny room they were in was a small bright yellow square. Al saw Frank for the first time since Costello’s. He was a big man, broad shouldered, barrel chested, short growth of beard, dirty face. He was down on one knee, leaned on the knuckles of his right hand, his left hand dangling, twitching slightly. Looks like a defensive end, Al thought, late in the game and he’s tired, he’s waiting for the last moment to get set. He glanced at her. “Behind me,” he said softly. “Down on your knees. Don’t look at ’em. Be ready.”

  “Get back!” a voice said. “Both of you, get back!” A key rattled in the door.

  Frank didn’t move, but Al could feel him tense up. There was a shadow of a face at the yellow window, then the door opened outward.

  It was Raffi, and he carried a semi-automatic in one hand.

  I should stop this, Al thought, I should say something, but then Frank exploded out of his stance like a bull in the chute, Al had never seen anyone his size move that fast. He had called Raffi a soldier, but Raffi had his non-gun hand on the door, he had to let go of the door, reach up, and rack the first round into the chamber. Frank Waters blasted into him, drove him over backward and knocked the door the rest of the way open. Behind Raffi, the kid Tonio dropped the tray he carried and he stumbled backward. Al ignored the pain in her chest and vaulted the two men on the floor in the doorway. Tonio was up on his knees, he had a knife in his right hand. Al never slowed, Tonio slashed at her, but she went high over the blade and kicked him in the chin as hard as she could. The kick sent her down to the floor and the impact took what breath she had. She rolled over onto her hands and knees. Tonio lay on his back, eyes wide, watching her, but nothing below his neck moved.

  Just a kid.

  Behind her, Raffi’s gun went off twice.

  Overhead, a door banged, footsteps ran across the old wooden floorboards. Frank Waters lay like a dead weight on top of Raffi. The smaller man squirmed hard, trying to get his gun hand free before Alessandra reached him. He did manage it, but not quite fast enough, she got to him in time to grab his gun hand in both of hers and twist it until the muzzle pointed at the side of his own head. The acrid smell from the first two rounds filled her head. Raffi’s mouth opened, but no sounds came out, his eyes went wide as she helped him pull the trigger. Her ears rang with the sound of the shot as the far side of Raffi’s head blew out and blood and brain matter splattered across the basement.

  Al wrestled the pistol out of Raffi’s hand, put it aside, took Frank by the shoulders and rolled him off Raffi and over onto his back. He had two entry wounds in his chest, but they didn’t seem to be bleeding much. His eyes met hers and then he looked up at the ceiling. He was trying to say something, she had to lean down close to hear. “Hurry.” She could barely make it out. “Hurry.”

  She took his hand, but there was no life in it. He stared at the ceiling. “I’m going,” she told him, and she squeezed his hand but got no response. “You hang on, I’m coming back for you,” she said, but she could not tell if he heard her or not. He didn’t look at her again. He might have been staring upward in an attempt to urge her on, or he may have been thinking about the sun he would never see again, she didn’t know, but when she let go of his hand it fell limp to the floor. She reached over and picked up the pistol that killed Raffi, the one that had her prints on it now. She looked at Frank one more time, but he was not responsive.

  Tonio was paralyzed, unable to breathe, dying for air. She walked past him.

  There was no way to creep up the stairs, they groaned every time she shifted her weight. Other than that, the old house was silent. Either the other two had left, run off to fire their missiles, or else they were waiting for her . . . She kicked the cellar door open and rolled out onto the floor, scanning wildly for them as her ribs registered their objections once again.

  She didn’t see anyone.

  She breathed in quick, shallow, painful gasps.

  The house phone was dead.

  The kitchen window blew inward, something dug long gouges in the ceiling, and then she heard the gun.

  They were parked on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, out in front of Alessandra Martillo’s building. Sarah’s mother’s car did not seem happy. Sarah revved the engine, hoping the thing would cough the phlegm out of its throat and run smoother. “She’s not answering,” Sarah said, and she ended the call. “I wonder if she’s okay.”

  Jake West sat restless in the front passenger seat. “Maybe she forgot,” he said. “I have to ask you something. How did you know I didn’t, you know . . . How do you know it wasn’t me?”

  “She’d never forget,” Sarah said, but she called the office phone just to check. “No answer there, either.”

  “Sarah . . .”

  “What?”

  “The police suspected me and Isaac, you said so yourself. How do you know we didn’t do it? You could be sitting in this car with a terrible person, someone who would kill his own father.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not.”

  “How do you know?”

  She put the phone away and looked over at him. He had dark shadows under his eyes. The closer this meeting had gotten, the more haunted he looked. It was almost as if the very idea of seeing his stepmother again was poisoning him. “I know,” she said.

  “Don’t tell me it’s intuition,” he told her. “You can’t just . . . When did you start to trust me? Do you trust me?”

  She sighed. “This really bothers you, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “People look at you differently when they think you might be guilty of murder, even if there isn’t a shred of evidence, even if it’s only speculation. I could see it in people’s eyes after those newspaper articles came out. Even my friends. They didn’t look at me the same way anymore. Because they couldn’t be sure.”

  “I know you better than they did, Jake.”

  “Sarah, that’s not an answer. Talk to me, please.”

  “All right.” It was not so easy, explaining. Sarah knew that she saw things other people did not notice, but, more important, she felt things that they did not or would not feel. And there were times when she just knew what she knew. “Your father’s face,” she said.

  “My father’s . . . Do you mean the piece in the gallery? By the door? What’s that got to do with anything?”

  She looked at her watch. “That piece isn’t just a hunk of brass,” she said. It was so hard, sometimes, to put into words something that her mind told her was true. Words could be blunt objects sometimes, it was like trying to build a bicycle out of bricks. “Every single emotion inside that face,” she told him, “you had to feel it first. You had to feel it, live with it, understand it. You had to feel it hard enough to get it down out of your head and into your hands. Otherwise, no one would feel a thing when they looked at it, like I did. When I saw that face, I knew something about you. Do you get that? Haven’t you ever looked at a painting and felt that you knew something about the artist, just from what he did? I don’t think you can hide, not when you’re an artist, Jake. Besides, you wouldn’t be able to live with emotions that strong if you’d really done it. You’d have to do something about them.”

  “I would have to kill myself, you mean.”

  “Well, I was thinking you’d have to find a way to pay it ba
ck if you could, like, ’fess up and do the jail time. But I suppose suicide would work, too. Anyhow, I know who did it, and it wasn’t you.” She glanced at her watch again. “At least, I think I do. We’re gonna have to go soon.”

  “I will never understand you,” he said.

  “Keep trying,” she told him. “Besides, if you did have all that money that disappeared, you wouldn’t be living in a garret above your gallery in the middle of nowhere, with no car. Jake, I dropped a piece of tinfoil on your kitchen floor and the wind blew it across the room.”

  He nodded. “It’s an old building.”

  “Old? It’s a wreck. Someday it’s gonna fall down, hopefully without you inside it. Listen, we’re gonna have to make a call pretty soon. If Al doesn’t show, do we go ahead without her or do we try to reschedule?”

  “Reschedule?” He looked horrified. “God. Aren’t we, you know, all ready to go? Could you even get this all arranged another time?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just worried about Al.”

  “Let’s just do it,” he said. “Get it over with. Then if she hasn’t turned up, we’ll go find her.”

  “All right.”

  Somewhere near LaGuardia the fourth spark plug must have spit off its carbon raincoat and begun to fire because the engine lost its roughness and the car seemed to settle more comfortably into the business of transport. And wouldn’t it have been something, Sarah thought, you get these two to agree to get together after all this time, but then you wind up stuck by the side of the road somewhere. But that didn’t happen. She followed the directions she’d downloaded carefully. They made a stop in the village first, then they proceeded to Agatha West’s weekend house.

  It was a big old Dutch Colonial, sided with brown cedar shingles and trimmed with red. It sat not far from the shore of Long Island Sound. The water was cold, gray, and rimmed with a coating of stuff that looked more like dirty shaving cream than sea ice. Sarah turned in between two brick pillars and went up the long driveway. A garage door jerked into motion as she neared. She waited for it to open all the way, then pulled into the empty slot next to Agatha’s Bentley. There was another car on the far side of the Bentley, a small red two-seat convertible. Sarah didn’t know what it was, and Jake had his mind on other things. He looked like a man in shock.

  Sarah shut the engine off and got out. Mrs. West’s chauffeur stood in the doorway that led into the house. If he found the sight of Sarah’s mother’s car next to the other two incongruous, he gave no sign of it. “Hello, Mr. Haig,” she said.

  “Mrs. Waters,” he said. “Jacob. Please come in.” The garage door closed behind them.

  Twenty

  Alessandra danced back out of sight.

  The firing stopped. They’re not interested in me, she thought. They just want to get that bitch cranked up . . . But how to see them without getting shot? The stairs leading to the upper floors were just steps away.

  She ran upstairs. It looked and smelled as if no one had been up there in ages. She edged into an empty room just over the kitchen. Bedroom, she thought, one small closet, linoleum floor that curled up in the corners. Two old windows.

  It was about the same size as her room over the bar.

  They had pulled the two vehicles out into the driveway. They were olive drab, dull, gave little clue to their intended purpose. A gun can be beautiful, like an old flintlock produced by a single craftsman, a work of art forged by a man who cared about his work. Or they can be ugly. These things were utilitarian, she would never have guessed what the long tubes were for if Robbie Corgan had not told her. The man she knew as Paolo Torrente was down on one knee in the snow. He was pointing an M-16 at the house.

  Not a lot of elegance in the look of the M-16, either.

  Break the glass, Al thought. Break the glass with the barrel, then focus on him and shoot, because you’re seriously overmatched in the firepower department, and the thin walls of the old house are not going to give you much protection. Go ahead, she thought. Break the glass . . . Funny, how easy it is to break something, when she’d been on the street as a child she’d done it many times, never pausing to think how she was destroying something that she’d had no power to create. How do they even make glass? How had they done it a hundred years ago when they built this place? And wasn’t glass supposed to be a liquid, so slow to move that it still stood there smooth and vertical after the passing of a century? And would you be able to tell if that was true? You could go around with calipers, measure the thickness of window glass in old houses, in theory it ought to be a bit thinner, up at the top . . .

  Paolo checked his clip.

  Alessandra punched out the window glass, pointed Raffi’s gun, and fired.

  Torrente dropped the clip. He jerked the gun up, pointed it in Al’s direction, and fired, something blew through the plaster about a foot to her right.

  Missed, she thought, both of us. Torrente took his eyes off her, leaned over for his clip. Al aimed carefully. What was that thing about shooting downhill? She’d heard about it in an old Western movie . . . And who knew if that was real or just made up? She focused, lined up Torrente’s feet in the sights, pulled the trigger.

  Recoil bounced the barrel skyward, but suddenly Torrente was down on his side. He struggled for the clip frantically. Al’s hands began to shake.

  I hate this, she thought.

  I never wanted this.

  Paolo had seemed like a decent guy . . .

  She focused the sights on him again and shot. He forgot about his clip and began worming his way across the yard, leaving a thin red trail on the snow in his wake. She fired at him twice more. He got almost all the way to the garage before he stopped moving.

  She felt sick.

  There was a pair of feet behind one of the two vehicles, and a thick black umbilical linked them together. It’s him, she thought, the big one, the one they call Vincenzo. The soldier. He’s out there getting his missiles ready to fire.

  This ain’t over yet . . .

  Agatha West sat in a white wicker chair at one end of a greenhouse appended to the rear of her weekend house. She had a great view of Long Island Sound, but she didn’t look like she was enjoying it all that much, her face was lined with pain and her color was bad. She grimaced when she saw Jake, then tried to smile, but it didn’t come off well. Sarah felt Jake stiffen. She put a hand on the small of his back and urged him forward. “It’s all right,” she said.

  “Easy for you to say,” he told her.

  “Hello, Jacob,” Agatha said. “Come now, I don’t bite.”

  He didn’t answer her.

  “I’m sorry you still feel like that,” she said. “Would you feel better if you searched me? Make sure I don’t have a handgun?”

  “Nah,” he said. “You’d never use a gun. Slow poison would be more your style.”

  She pursed her lips. “I had hoped you’d outgrown your bitterness by now,” she told him. “It’s Tipton you should hate, not me. He’s the one spending your inheritance.” She shifted her gaze to Sarah. “Could you excuse us, my dear? I’d like to . . .”

  “No way,” Jake said. “I want her where she can watch you stick the knife in.”

  Agnes sighed. Jake didn’t move. “What if I go down the other end, there?” Sarah said, pointing at the far end of the greenhouse. “That way I can see, but I won’t be able to hear. How would that be?”

  Jake looked at her for a second, then nodded.

  “Thank you, dear. Mitchell, perhaps you could get Mrs. Waters a chair. Make her comfortable.”

  “Ma’am.”

  Jake went over and perched on the windowsill, his back to the frozen bay. He looked at Sarah. “Go ahead,” he said.

  Sarah and Mitchell Haig walked down to the far end of the greenhouse. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and he went into the house.

  Sarah looked out at the water. Million-dollar view, she thought, and most of the time there’s no one here to enjoy it. You couldn’t afford to even pay th
e property tax on this joint, she told herself, and that’s just the smallest part of what it must cost to keep the place operating. And although the house and grounds appeared to be maintained well enough, the place didn’t give you the feeling that anyone really cared about it. Certainly no one loved it. She could see cobwebs in the high corners, mouse cookies in the low ones. And wouldn’t you schmear a little paint around here and there if you loved the place? Hire one of those decorators from HGTV to come in and spiff up the joint.

  But then again, Agatha West had her mind on other matters.

  Still . . .

  Haig returned after a while, he carried an old-fashioned, undersized dark wooden rocking chair. “I hope this is all right,” he said.

  “Fine, thanks,” she said. “How about one for you?”

  He looked down at the other end of the greenhouse. Jake was still perched stiffly on the windowsill, his upper body inclined away from Agatha. She sat still, hands in her lap, head downcast, talking softly. “I think there’s a ditch out back I need to go dig,” Haig said.

  “No fun here,” Sarah said, agreeing with him. “If I hadn’t said I would watch, I’d come help you shovel. Nobody can do you like your family.”

  “Ain’t that the truth. But I do need to beg off, Mrs. Waters. One of the circulators for the heating system is leaking water and I need to go see to it before we have a flood. Ag, ahh, Mrs. West will buzz me when you’re ready to go.”

  “Thank you,” Sarah said.

  After he left, Sarah watched Jake and Agnes for a while. Agatha never raised her voice, but she seemed to be getting to Jake, some of the starch seemed to go out of his backbone and his posture softened. I suppose, Sarah thought, being told you were going to inherit an estate like West’s might do that to you . . .

  Her mind wandered.

  Gotta cost a bloody fortune to heat this place . . . And as much as she disliked her mother’s basement, at least it felt real there, you could walk through the door and tell that it was home to somebody. Mrs. West had the money, no question, plus a certain amount of notoriety. She had done something with her life. You might disagree with her conclusions, but you had to respect her for doing the work, particularly considering that she’d done it by choice, not necessity. She probably could have retired twenty years ago and spent her time playing tennis or whatever. Still, Sarah thought, I’ve got something she doesn’t, I’ve got time. Or at least I assume that I do. Providing, of course, that I refrain from certain risky behaviors, like this little expedition. And my son doesn’t hate my guts yet . . .