They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Your nephew’s about to lose his resemblance to you, Mr. Klein,” Dean Dallenbach warned almost too calmly. “I suggest you get off of Jerry this instant.”

  I rolled off and got a kick in the ribs for my trouble. It was worth it. Jerry looked like Christmas; red and green all at once. He had one hand on his balls and one on his neck. George smiled at me. That took all the fun out of things. I knew no good would come of his smile. He teased me by releasing his arm from around Zak’s neck. But just as Zak was out of his grip, George pistol-whipped Zak across the back of his head. It was one of George’s specialties. I knew from first hand experience.

  Zak went down harder than Jerry, blood spurting through his thick, reddish brown hair.

  “Have I established my intentions, Mr. Klein? I’m quite certain you can be very stubborn and very brave when it comes to pain. But I know the type of students that attend this school and somehow I don’t get the impression that your nephew, as motivated as he might be, could withstand what you could, sir.” His assessment was twin to mine. “And even if he were able to muster what it would take to put up with George’s skills, I doubt that you would be able to sit through it. Now please hand over the disc.”

  I never got a chance to debate the issue. The door swung open behind Dallenbach and MacClough, hands cuffed behind him and blood leaking from the corners of his mouth, was shoved through. Except for the blood, MacClough seemed well enough. I thought I detected a smile. He had apparently enjoyed his little escapade. He didn’t let anyone else catch wind of his pleasure and got properly serious when he saw Zak face down on the concrete.

  Two of Riversborough’s finest stepped in quickly behind John and closed the door. One of the cops looked like an escapee from a blimp factory and had a nose so full of gin blossoms he could have opened a florist shop. He wore a tired yellow toupee, had yellow fingers with dirty nails and incongruously square white teeth. I doubted the teeth were original equipment. His partner was a fidgety boy with slicked-back hair and eyes that couldn’t agree on which way to look. In most places he would have been lucky to get a job as a security guard. In Riversborough, he’d probably make commissioner.

  “I don’t like it,” said the future commissioner to no one in particular. “I don’t like it.”

  “You’re not getting paid for your opinion,” Dallenbach hissed. “Now get out of here and go tell your story about Mr. MacClough’s escape to any fool who will listen.”

  The fat cop was busily cleaning a few pounds of dirt from under his nails with a key. He wasn’t the excitable type. His manicure complete, he tossed the key to Dallenbach. “For the cuffs,” he said.

  Dallenbach immediately tossed the keys to George. Jerry frowned, truly hurt that his boss had chosen George to hold the keys. The cops left. As the door closed behind them, we could hear the fidgety boy still moaning about his work.

  “These two I recognize,” MacClough nodded at George and Jerry. “That’s the asshole who followed you from the airport and that’s the desk clerk from the Old Watermill. But who’s—”

  “John MacClough, meet Dean Dallenbach,” I introduced them.

  “I know all about Mr. MacClough,” Dallenbach doffed an imaginary hat. “Join us, won’t you?”

  “For a man who’s about to take a tumble, you’re in an awfully jolly fuckin’ mood,” MacClough sneered.

  The smile ran away from Dallenbach’s face. Zak stirred, sitting up. He rubbed the back of his head. I pulled him to his feet. If the three of us were going to try anything, Zak would be better off in an upright position.

  “George!” Dallenbach made a gun out of his thumb and index finger and pointed at Zak. George pressed his Glock to Zak’s temple. “The disc. We were talking about the disc.”

  “There is no—” Zak began.

  “Stop it, Zak,” MacClough cut him off. “There’s no use in jerking these guys around anymore. They’re way too smart to believe that they got played for fools by some college kid.”

  “You’re annoying me, Mr. MacClough.”

  “Good, I’m tryin’ to.”

  George broke into a smile, but Dallenbach told him to calm down. John had bought us a little time.

  “Where is the disc?” Dallenbach repeated, but, for the first time, there was a trace of doubt in his voice.

  “Not so fast,” MacClough played his hand. “After you satisfy my curiosity, maybe we’ll talk about the disc. And do me a favor, don’t even say that I’m in no position to bargain. If I wasn’t, we’d all be dead by now.”

  Dallenbach did the finger gun thing again and had George move the real gun to John’s temple.

  “Kill me, asshole, go ahead. You see, the problem is, I’m the only one who knows where the disc is. I had it with me when I ran and ditched it on the way out of town.”

  “You’re bluffing.” Dallenbach squirmed.

  “Then call the bluff. You’re gonna whack us anyways.”

  I’d been in several rough situations with MacClough in the past, but he was really pushing it this time. I couldn’t believe what was coming out of his mouth. It was all I could do not to tell him to try and play it a bit less over the top.

  “Very well.” Dallenbach gestured for Georgie boy to lower his 9mm. “What is it you want to know?”

  “How’d a clown like you get involved with Isotope in the first place?” John asked.

  “Your manner is starting to annoy me, Mr. MacClough.”

  “Slap me on the knuckles with a ruler like the sisters at St. Mark’s. It didn’t improve my manner any, but it made them feel better. So how’d ya get involved?”

  “Weakness,” Dallenbach replied matter-of-factly. “Weakness.”

  “That covers a lot of territory,” I noted, pointing my head at George. I thought Dallenbach almost blushed. “Well, yes, I am rather fond of George’s type.” George wasn’t so fond of the word ‘type.’ “But it was my gambling, I fear, that did me in. It is one thing to be a compulsive gambler with few resources. It is quite another to be one and have access to a well-funded school’s endowment.”

  “But you’re just a dean!” I exclaimed. “You shouldn’t have—”

  “But I had access to someone who had access. Money, money, money. . . .”

  “But the well went dry,” MacClough said.

  “It always does, Mr. MacClough. My friend got faint of heart and was afraid of being found out. You see, he was using the school’s purchase of the Old Watermill to cover our tracks and I got just the slightest bit greedy and asked that he divert some additional funds to cover another investment. I thought that other investment would see us through our old age and cover my debts.”

  “Cyclone Ridge,” I said.

  “Very good, Mr. Klein. Cyclone Ridge.”

  “That well went dry, too, and quicker than you thought,” MacClough put his two cents in.

  “Much too quickly. Cyclone Ridge was a dog, an albatross.”

  “Don’t tell me,” MacClough smirked, “you found some new partners.”

  “To be perfectly accurate, Mr. MacClough, they found me. Gamblers do tend to wear their debts on their sleeves. My creditors saw an opportunity and called in their markers. It was a set up that suited their purposes quite well. Cyclone Ridge was a perfect storehouse and transshipment point for the distribution of Isotope across Canada and the Northeast. Who would think to look for drugs in sleepy, little Riversborough? Until that fool Markham loaded the goods into the wrong BMW, the arrangement worked out rather nicely for all parties involved.”

  “Yeah, everyone but your old boyfriend who got you access to the endowment,” John said. “It’s a good bet your new partners had you dissolve your old partnership.”

  Dallenbach soured. “I’m afraid they insisted on it.”

  “What happened,” I wondered, “a convenient midnight skiing accident?”

  “I don’t know, frankly. I didn’t want to know.”

  I was curious. “But you did have Steven Markum killed?”

>   George got all happy at my question. That alone was answer enough.

  “Yes,” Dallenbach confirmed, “and he bloody well deserved it. If it were not for his abject stupidity, we wouldn’t all be standing here. Valencia Jones would be just another student struggling with her second tier course in metaphysics.”

  “And Kira would still be alive,” I growled.

  “That’s on your head, Mr. Klein. If you had spent more time looking for your nephew and less time chasing a piece of skirt, your friend would still be drawing breath. It was you who presented us with the opportunity. We simply took it.”

  No matter the situation, chatting reduces the level of tension in a room. That’s how I managed to get my fist into Dallenbach’s teeth without interference. Some of his teeth splintered. Normally, I might have felt some of the jagged enamel dig into the skin of my knuckles, but I was way too preoccupied with the bullet ripping through the top of my left shoulder to notice pieces of broken teeth. Christ, it burned like acid on fire inside me. The floor reached up and yanked me down hard. I forgot how to breathe and why. The shot’s report rang in my ears.

  “Not in here!” Dallenbach screamed, spitting out blood and bits of his teeth. “You nearly shot me, you fool!”

  George enjoyed being called a fool almost as much as he liked being called a type.

  “I just clipped him,” George did speak. “And I didn’t come close to hitting you.”

  Zak and MacClough, his hands still cuffed, came to attend to me.

  “Leave him!” Dallenbach had completely lost his sense of humor. “We’ve wasted enough time, Mr. MacClough. Where’s the disc?”

  “Fuck you, asshole! There is no disc.”

  I winced for MacClough, expecting George to punish him for his delightful use of the English language. But George wasn’t smiling, flashing his fists, nor pistol-whipping anyone just now.

  “Oh, God, not that again. I warn you, my patience is at low ebb.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if your patience were at neap tide,” MacClough laughed, “there is no disc.”

  “If you’re stalling for time, Mr. MacClough,” Dallenbach said, grabbing the 9mm out of George’s hand, “you needn’t bother. The cavalry isn’t coming. I’m afraid that DEA agent who’s been following Mr. Klein about had a rather nasty accident in the fire at Cyclone Ridge. Unless you’ve got an in with Ezekiel, and can conjure up charred bones, no one’s coming to your rescue.” Dallenbach ejected a bullet from the gun’s chamber for dramatic purposes, pointed it at Johnny’s heart and began counting backwards from ten: “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two—”

  The spring-loaded door flew open, clanging against the wall. Zak and John jumped. I was already so wired that I barely reacted. Dallenbach, however, and his two boys seemed unfazed. I thought I saw Dallenbach check his watch. Two men—one dressed in a loose-fitting trench coat, the other in a full-length vicuna coat—came into the tunnel.

  “You’re late,” Dallenbach tapped his wrist.

  “Fuck you!” vicuna coat said, “these fuckin’ tunnels get me all whacky. It’s like a fuckin’ sci-fi movie down here, people livin’ in tunnels and shit. Hey,” he screwed up his face, “what the fuck happened to your face, you suckin’ on concrete lollipops or what?”

  “One of your partners?” John surmised.

  “Actually, Mr. Lippo’s one of their representatives. How ever did you guess?” Dallenbach wondered, tongue in cheek.

  “With that vocabulary it had to be a toss-up between a wise-guy and Werner Von Braun. Since Von Braun’s dead . . .”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Lippo ordered. “These the guys?”

  “Those three, yes,” Dallenbach confirmed, “but not yet. They have some information I need.”

  “Bullshit! The boss says I gotta whack ‘em, I whack ‘em. He didn’t say nothin’ about waitin’ time. And you,” he glared at Dallenbach, “I’m supposed to teach you a lesson.”

  “What,” the dean’s voice was breaking, “could you possibly teach me?”

  Lippo looked at Zak, Johnny, and me. “Which one of youz girlfriend’s got whacked?”

  “Me,” I said, propping myself up.

  “That shouldn’t’a happened,” Lippo said. “That was sloppy like every other fuckin’ thing around here.”

  “Thanks for the sympathy.”

  “Gino!” Lippo snapped his fingers and held out his hand. Gino placed a .38 police special in Lippo’s hand. “Here!” Lippo held the gun out to me. “Go ahead, kill either one a those two pricks. And don’t get no ideas. Gino boy’ll cut you down before you fart the wrong way.”

  Suddenly, my left shoulder didn’t hurt so much. I took the gun and swung the tip of the barrel between George and Jerry. George looked particularly unhappy, but not especially frightened. Jerry, on the other hand, was a whisper away from begging. I picked Jerry. Dying at my hand would have no special significance to George.

  “Okay,” Dallenbach threw his hands up, “I get the point. We shall endeavor to be more careful in the future. Now take that gun away from Klein and let’s get on with this.”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Lippo puzzled. “I ain’t jokin’. Go ahead and kill the prick,” he urged me.

  Dallenbach was sweating now.

  “Don’t!” MacClough shouted. “Don’t do it, Klein. It’ll stay with you forever.”

  I pulled the hammer back on the .38.

  “They’re gonna kill us, Dylan. You’re just makin’ it easier for them to have it look like we all went down in a gun-fight between us and Dallenbach’s boys.”

  “Hey, shut the fuck up,” Lippo warned MacClough.

  “Don’t, Dylan!”

  I began to nudge the trigger toward me. Bang! The shot went off and I went down, MacClough on top of me. The slug ricocheted off the concrete. Everyone hit the floor who wasn’t there already. A light bulb exploded, its glass sprinkling down. The .38 was out of my hand. It was a long few seconds.

  “Get up!” Lippo demanded.

  We obliged. But when we got up, the .38 was in Jerry’s shaking right hand. He pointed it at the spot where Lippo’s vicuna coat fell away from his heart. Lippo ignored him, brushing the concrete dust off his lavish overcoat.

  “Goddammit! I just had this thing cleaned.”

  And as he finished his sentence, there was a sort of muffled spitting sound, a puff of smoke, and Jerry collapsed backwards. He lay all twisted like an ill-constructed jigsaw puzzle, a look of utter surprise on his dead face. Blood pooled where his right eye used to be.

  “The other one, too,” Lippo said almost too nonchalantly.

  George smiled, began laughing in an odd, strangled sort of way. He was not going to go quietly into that good night. He charged. He didn’t get too far; three feet maybe. But because he had been a moving target, Gino hadn’t managed to make clean work of it. The belly of George’s skin-tight ski suit was a crimson mess. He writhed in pain on the floor, trying to hold his guts in place. Lippo calmly removed his coat, handing it to Gino, and grabbed the Glock out of Dallenbach’s fear-frozen right hand. He placed his shoe on George’s throat and pressed down hard enough to steady George’s twisting.

  “Here’s dessert,” Lippo said, placing the gun barrel to George’s heart. “Prick!”

  As the shot went off a wave went through George’s body. I almost expected the floor to shake. Dallenbach was white. I’m not sure whether it was fear or grieving or what.

  “I really do get the lesson now,” he managed to say. “So, can we please get on with it?”

  “I’m a cop,” MacClough said. “You wanna kill a cop?”

  “Retired over ten years ago,” Dallenbach, feeling more his old self, retorted. “No one will send out the National Guard, if your body should turn up.”

  “I don’t like whackin’ cops. My brother-in-law’s on the job. But this ain’t my headache. C’mon,” he said, waving the 9mm at us, “let’s everybody go for a
nice walk.”

  “What about them?” Dallenbach wondered about the late George and Jerry.

  “Them? Fuck them! We’ll worry about them later.”

  “Let’s listen to the man,” I urged, getting to my feet. The pain in my left shoulder nearly knocking me back down. “The sooner they kill us, the sooner that disc gets to the cops.”

  “Disc?” Lippo stopped dead in his tracks and stared coldly at the dean. “What disc?”

  “You mean your partner didn’t tell you about the disc that my nephew downloaded after he hacked his way into Dean Dallenbach’s computer? Makes you wonder what else he didn’t tell you about, doesn’t it?”

  “Shut up and get going,” Dallenbach slapped my wounded shoulder.

  “No!” Lippo disagreed. “You,” he pointed to me, “talk.”

  “Don’t you know what all this is about? My nephew used to date that girl that’s on trial for muling the Isotope. The details of how he hacked the system are irrelevant, but let’s just say that there’s a disc somewhere out there that details your distribution system and implicates your bosses. Now, my nephew’s no idiot. He knew what his life would be worth if he took the disc directly to the cops, so he’s been trying to barter it for the girl’s freedom for months. That’s all he wanted, the girl’s freedom.”

  “I never heard nothin’ about no disc, Dallenbach.”

  “That’s because there is no disc,” he pleaded. “I didn’t want to risk getting other people involved until I was sure it either did or didn’t exist.”

  “Other people are involved, stroonze. You think I’m here for the climate?”

  “What bullshit story did he tell your boss to get you down here, anyways?” MacClough egged Lippo on.