Joe Kurtz Omnibus

by Dan Simmons

  Before Wheelchair and Bruce Lee showed up, thought Kurtz. He said, “Any chance of getting these cuffs off? I wasn’t able to eat my breakfast left-handed.”

  Singh looked physically pained, his brown eyes sad behind the glasses. “I’m truly sorry, Mr. Kurtz. I believe that one of the detectives is already downstairs. I’m sure they will release you.”

  She was and she did.

  Ten minutes after Singh bustled out into the now-busy hospital corridor, Rigby King showed up. She was wearing a blue linen blazer, white t-shirt, new jeans, and running shoes. She carried a 9-mm dock on her belt on the right side, concealed under the blazer until she leaned forward. She said nothing while she unlocked his cuffs, snapping them onto the back of her belt like the veteran cop she was. Kurtz didn’t want to speak first, but he needed information.

  “I had visitors during the night,” he said. “After you pulled your uniform off hallway guard.”

  Rigby folded her arms and frowned slightly. “Who?”

  “You tell me,” said Kurtz. “Old guy in a wheelchair and a tall Asian.”

  Rigby nodded but said nothing.

  “You going to tell me who they are?” asked Kurtz. “The old man in the wheelchair slapped me up the side of the head. Considering the circumstances, I should know who’s mad at me.”

  “The man in the wheelchair must have been Major O’Toole, retired,” said Rigby King. “The Vietnamese man is probably his business colleague, Vinh or Trinh or something.”

  “Major O’Toole,” said Kurtz. “The parole officer’s father?”

  “Uncle. The famous Big John O’Toole’s older brother, Michael.”

  “Big John?” said Kurtz.

  “Peg O’Toole’s old man was a hero cop in this city, Joe. He died in the line of duty about four years ago, not long before he would’ve retired. I guess you didn’t hear about it up in Attica.”

  “I guess not.”

  “You say he hit you?”

  “Slapped,” said Kurtz.

  “He must think you had something to do with his niece getting shot in the head.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “So you remember things now?”

  Her voice still did strange things to him—that mixture of softness and rasp. Or maybe it was the concussion acting on him.

  “No,” said Kurtz. “I don’t remember anything clearly after leaving the P.O.’s office after the interview. But I know that whatever happened to O’Toole in the garage, I didn’t make it happen.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Kurtz held up his freed right hand.

  Rigby smiled ever so slightly at that and he remembered why they’d nicknamed her Rigby. Her smile was like sunlight.

  “Did you have any problems with Agent Peg O’Toole?” she asked.

  Kurtz shook his head and then had to hold it with both hands.

  “You in a lot of pain, Joe?” Her tone was neutral enough, but seemed to carry a slight subtext of concern.

  “Remember that guy you had to use your baton on in Patpong in the alley behind Pussies Galore?” he said.

  “Bangkok?” said Rigby. “You mean the guy who stole the sex performer’s razor blades and tried to use them on me?”

  “Yeah.”

  He could see her remembering. “I got written up for that by that REMF loot…whatshisname, the asshole…”

  “Sheridan.”

  “Yeah,” said Rigby. “Excessive force. Just because the guy I brought in had a little tiny bit of brains leaking out his ear.”

  “Well, that guy had nothing on how I feel today,” said Kurtz.

  “Tough situation,” said Rigby. There was no undercurrent of concern audible now. Kurtz knew that the words could be abbreviated ‘T.S.’ She walked to the door. “If you can remember Lieutenant Sheridan, you can remember yesterday, Joe.”

  He shrugged.

  “When you do, you call us. Kemper or me. Got it?”

  “I want to go home and take an aspirin,” said Kurtz. Trying to put just a bit of whine in his voice.

  “Sorry. The docs want to keep you here another day. Your clothes and wallet have been…stored…until you’re ready to travel.” She started to leave.

  “Rig?” he said.

  She paused, but frowned, as if not pleased to hear him use the diminutive of her old nickname.

  “I didn’t shoot O’Toole and I don’t know who did.”

  “All right, Joe,” she said. “But you know, don’t you, that Kemper and I are going on the assumption that she wasn’t the target That someone was trying to kill you in that garage and poor O’Toole just got in the way.”

  “Yeah,” Kurtz said wearily. “I know.”

  She left without another word. Kurtz waited a few minutes, got laboriously out of bed—hanging onto the metal railing a minute to get his balance—and then padded around the room and bathroom looking for his clothes, even though he knew they wouldn’t be there. Since he’d ignored Nurse Ratchet’s bedpan jar, he paused in the toilet long enough to take a leak. Even that hurt his head.

  Then Kurtz got the IV stand on wheels and pushed it out ahead of him into the hallway. Nothing in the universe looked so pathetic and harmless as a man in a hospital gown, ass showing through the opening in the back, shuffling along shoving an IV stand. One nurse, not his, stopped to ask him where he was going.

  “X ray,” said Kurtz. “They said to take the elevator.”

  “Heavens, you shouldn’t be walking,” said the nurse, a young blonde. “I’ll get an orderly and a gurney. You go back to your room and lie down.”

  “Sure,” said Kurtz.

  The first room he looked in had two old ladies in the two beds. The second had a young boy. The father, sitting in a chair next to the bed, obviously awaiting the doctor’s early rounds, looked up at Kurtz with the gaze of a deer in a hunter’s flashlight beam—alarmed, hopeful, resigned, waiting for the shot.

  “Sorry,” said Kurtz and shuffled off to the next room.

  The old man in the third room was obviously dying. The curtain was pulled as far out as it could be, he was the only occupant of the double room, and the chart on the foot of his bed had a small blue slip of paper with the letters DNR on it. The old man’s breathing, even on a respirator, was very close to a Cheyne-Stokes death rattle.

  Kurtz found the clothes folded and stored neatly on the bottom shelf of the small closet—an old man’s outfit—corded trousers that were only a little too small, plaid shirt, socks, scuffed Florsheims that were slightly too large for Kurtz, and a raincoat that looked like a castoff from Peter Falk’s closet. Luckily, the old guy had also brought a hat—a Bogey fedora with authentic sweat stains and the brim already snapped down in a perfect crease. Kurtz wondered what relative would be cleaning this closet out in a day or so and if they’d miss the hat.

  He walked to the elevators with much more spring in his stride than he was really capable of, glancing neither left nor right. Rather than stopping at the lobby, he took the elevator all the way to the parking garage and then followed the open ramp up and out into brisk air and sunlight.

  There was a cab near the emergency entrance and Kurtz got the door opened before the cabbie saw him coming and then collapsed into the back seat He gave the driver his home address.

  The cabbie turned, squinted, and said around his toothpick. “I was supposed to pick up Mr. Goldstein and his daughter.”

  “I’m Goldstein,” said Kurtz. “My daughter’s visiting someone else in the hospital for a while. Go on.”

  “Mr. Goldstein’s supposed to be an old man in his eighties. Only one leg.”

  “The miracles of modern medicine,” said Kurtz. He looked the cabbie in the eye. “Drive.”

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  Kurtz’s new home, the Harbor Inn, was an abandoned, triangular three-story old bar and bargeman’s hotel standing alone amidst weed-filled fields south of downtown Buffalo. To get to it, you had to cross the Buffalo River on a one-lane metal
bridge between abandoned grain elevators. The bridge rose vertically as a single unit for barge traffic—almost nonexistent now—and a sign on the superstructure informed snowplows: “Raise Plow Before Crossing.” Once onto what locals called “the Island,” although it wasn’t technically an island, the air smelled of burned Cheerios because the only remaining operating structure amidst the abandoned warehouses and silos was the big General Mills plant between the river and Lake Erie.

  The main entrance to the Harbor Inn—still boarded over but boarded now with a lock and hinge—was at the apex of the building’s triangle where Ohio and Chicago Streets came together. There was a ten-foot-tall metal lighthouse hanging out over that entrance, its blue and white paint and the Harbor Inn logo beneath it so rust-flaked that it looked like someone had machine-gunned it. A fading wooden sign on the boarded door read—FOR LEASE, ELICOTT DEVELOPMENT COMPANY and gave a 716 phone number. Beneath that sign was older, even more faded lettering announcing

  Chicken Wings—Chili, Sandwiches—Daily Specials.

  Kurtz got the extra key from its hiding place, unpadlocked the front door, pulled the board out of his way, stepped in, and locked it all behind him. Only a few glimmers of sunlight came over and under the boards into this triangular main space—the old lobby and restaurant of the inn. Dust, plaster, and broken boards were scattered everywhere except on the path he’d cleared. The air smelled of mold and rot.

  To the left of the hallway behind this space was the narrow staircase leading upstairs. Kurtz checked some small telltales and went up, walking slowly and grabbing the railing when the pain in his head made him dizzy.

  He’d fixed up three rooms and one bathroom on the second floor, although there were hidey holes and escape routes out of all nine rooms up here. He’d replaced the windows and cleaned up the big triangular room in front—not as his bedroom, that was a smaller room next to it, but as an exercise room, fitted out with a speed bag, heavy bag, a treadmill he’d scavenged from the junk heap behind the Buffalo Athletic Club and repaired, a padded bench, and various weights. Kurtz had never fallen into the bodybuilding fetish so endemic in Attica during his eleven and a half years there—he’d found that strength was fine, but speed and the ability to react fast were more important—but during the last six months he’d been doing a lot of physical therapy. Two of the windows in here looked out on Chicago and Ohio Streets and the abandoned grain silos and factory complex to the west; the center window looked right into the pockmarked lighthouse sign.

  His bedroom was nothing special—a mattress, an old wardrobe that now held his suits and clothes—and wooden blinds over the window. The third room had brick and board bookcases against two walls, shelves filled with paperbacks, a faded red carpet, a single floor lamp that Arlene had planned to throw away, and—amazingly—an Eames chair and ottoman that some idiot out in Williamsville had put out for junk pickup. It looked like some eighty-pound cat had gone at the black leather upholstery with its claws, but Kurtz had fixed that with electrical tape.

  Kurtz went to the end of the dark hall, stripped out of the old man’s clothes, and took a fast but very hot shower, making sure to keep the spray off his bandages.

  After drying off, Kurtz took out his razor, squeezed lather into his palm, and looked at the mirror for the first time.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said disgustedly.

  The face looking back at him was unshaven and not quite human. The bandages looked bloody again and he could see the shaved patch around them. Blood had drained beneath the skin of his temple and forehead down under his eyes until he had a bright purple raccoon mask. The eyes themselves were almost as bright a red as the soaked-through bandages and he had scrapes and road rash on his left cheek and chin where he must have done a face-plant onto the concrete garage floor. His left eye didn’t look right—as if it weren’t dilating properly.

  “Christ,” he muttered again. He wouldn’t be delivering any love letters for SweetheartSearch-dot-com again anytime soon.

  Shaved and showered now, somehow feeling lousier and more exhausted for it, he dressed in clean jeans, a black t-shirt, new running shoes, and a leather A-2 jacket he’d once given to his old wino-addict informant and acquaintance, Pruno, but which Pruno had given back, saying that it wasn’t really his style. The jacket was still in pristine condition, obviously never worn by the homeless man.

  Kurtz gingerly pulled on the fedora and went into the unfurnished bedroom that adjoined his own. The plaster hadn’t been repaired here and part of the ceiling was falling down. Kurtz reached above the woodwork of the adjoining door, clicked open a panel covered with the same mildewed wallpaper as the rest of the wall, and pulled a .38 S&W from the metal box set in the hole there. The gun was wrapped in a clean rag and smelled of oil. There was a wad of cash in the metal box and Kurtz counted out five hundred dollars from it and set the rest back, pulling the weapon free of the oily rag.

  Kurtz checked that all six chambers were loaded, spun the cylinder, tucked the revolver in his waistband, grabbed a handful of cartridges from the box, stuck them in his jacket pocket, and put away the metal container and oily rag, carefully clicking the panel back into place.

  He walked back to the triangular front room on the second floor and looked in all directions. It was still a beautiful blue-sky autumn day; Ohio and Chicago Streets were empty of traffic. Nothing but weeds stood in the hundreds of yards of fields between him and the abandoned silos and mills to the southwest.

  Kurtz flipped on a video monitor that was part of a surveillance system he and Arlene had used in their former office in the basement of an X-rated-video store. The two cameras mounted at the rear of the Harbor Inn building showed the overgrown yards and streets and cracked sidewalks there empty.

  Kurtz grabbed his spare cell phone from a shelf by the speed bag and punched in a private number. He talked briefly, said “Fifteen minutes,” broke the connection, and then redialed for a cab.

  The public basketball courts in Delaware Park showcased some of the finest athletic talent in Western New York, and even though this was a Thursday morning, a school day, the courts were busy with black men and boys playing impressive basketball.

  Kurtz saw Angelina Farino Ferrara as soon as he stepped out of the cab. She was wearing a tailored sweatsuit, but not so tailored that he could make out the .45 Compact Witness that he guessed she still carried in a quick-release holster under her sweatshirt. The woman looked fit enough to be on the courts herself—but she was too short and too white, even with her dark hair and olive complexion, to be invited by those playing there now.

  Kurtz immediately picked out her bodyguards and could have even if they hadn’t been the only other white guys in this part of the park. One of the men was ten yards to her left, studiously studying squirrel activity, and the other was strolling fifteen yards to her right, almost to the courts. Her bodyguards from the previous winter had been lumpish and proletarian, from Jersey, but these two were as thin, well-dressed, and blow-dried as California male models. One of them started crossing toward Kurtz as if to intercept and frisk him, but Angelina Farino Ferrara waved the man off.

  As he got closer, Kurtz opened his arms as if to hug her, but really to show that his hands and jacket pockets were free of weapons.

  “Holy fuck, Kurtz,” she said when he got to within four feet and stopped.

  “Nice to see you, too.”

  “You look sort of like The Spirit.”

  “Who?”

  “A comic strip character from the forties. He wore a fedora and a blue mask, too. He used to have his own comics page in the Herald Tribune. My father used to collect them in a big leather scrapbook during the war.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Kurtz. “Interesting.” Meaning—can we cut the crap?

  Angelina Farino Ferrara shook her head, chuckled, and began walking east toward the zoo. White mothers were herding their preschoolers toward the zoo gates, casting nervous glances toward the oblivious blacks playing basketball. Most of
the males on the courts were stripped to shorts even on this chilly autumn day and their flesh looked oiled with sweat.

  “So I heard that you and your parole officer were shot yesterday,” said Angelina. “Somehow you just took it on your thick skull while she took it in the brain. Congratulations, Kurtz. You always were nine-tenths luck to one-tenth skill or common sense.”

  Kurtz couldn’t argue with that. “How’d you hear about it so fast?”

  “Cops on the arm.”

  Of course, thought Kurtz. The concussion must be making him stupid.

  “So who did it?” asked the woman. She had an oval face out of a Donatello sculpture, intelligent brown eyes, shoulder-length black hair cut straight and tied back this morning, and a runner’s physique. She was also the first female acting don in the history of the American mafia—a group that hadn’t evolved high enough on the political-correctness ladder even to recognize terms like “female acting don.” Whenever Kurtz found himself thinking that she was especially attractive, he would remember her telling him that she’d drowned her newborn baby boy—the product of a rape by Emilio Gonzaga, the head of the rival Buffalo mob family—in the Belice River in Sicily. Her voice had sounded calm when she’d told him, almost satisfied.

  “I was hoping you could tell me who shot me,” said Kurtz.

  “You didn’t see them?” She’d stopped walking. Leaves swirled around her legs. Her two bodyguards kept their distance but they also kept their eyes on Kurtz.

  “No.”

  “Well, let’s see,” said Angelina. “Do you have any enemies who might want to do you harm?”

  Kurtz waited while she had her little laugh.

  “D-Block Mosque still has its fatwa out on you,” she said. “And the Seneca Street Social Club still thinks you had something to do with their fearless leader, whatshisname, Malcolm Kibunte, going over the Falls last winter.”

  Kurtz waited.

  “Plus there’s some oversized Indian with a serious limp who’s telling everyone who’ll listen that he’s going to kill you. Big Bore Redhawk. Is that a real name?”