The Four-Night Run

by William Lashner

  “Yes. Of course, yes.”

  “What is the nature of the emergency?”

  “Someone is trying to kill me.”

  “I see. Yes. That would be an emergency. And can you give me your name?”

  “Scrbacek. J.D. Scrbacek. And please hurry.”

  “Oh, Mr. Scrbacek. Of course,” said the woman, her voice quickening in recognition. “Stay on the line, please, and I’ll find her right away.”

  He was put on hold. Music was pumped through his phone, nice cheery music with violins. He closed his eyes and listened to the music as if it were a lifeline, the sweep of the strings like the sweep of a rope as it flew in the air to save him. When he opened his eyes to catch sight of the rope, he saw the shadowy figures, three of them, walking in a line down the street toward him, three of them, walking in a line.

  And the music in Scrbacek’s ear was suddenly as loud as a Sousa march played by a great brass band.

  10

  ANSONIA ROAD

  They had to hear it, the three walking toward him, the music was so damn loud.

  Scrbacek pressed the phone tighter to his ear, and the crazy music grew even louder as the figures stepped closer. With a rush of panic, he ripped the phone from his ear, disconnected the call, and pressed the device against his chest to hide the light as he scrunched backward to fit as tightly as possible in the darkened corner of the stoop.

  The three figures approached, their footsteps growing louder, their voices more distinct. Scrbacek couldn’t yet make out the words but could read the tone: young, arrogant, slow. He scrunched up even tighter and kept his breath as silent as his fear would let him, fighting the compulsion to cough.

  Closer they came, closer.

  The tall shadow was doing most of the talking, the short shadow was letting out the occasional “Yes” and “Oh man,” the middle shadow was saying nothing, but walking with a speed and purpose that forced the other two shadows to keep up their pace.

  “They’re like great bowls of Jell-O, and it don’t take much of a joke to get her laughing and them two bowls going.”

  “No, man, it does not.”

  “Just a little joke, a three-priests-on-a-boat joke, and the Jell-O, it be jiggling and joggling.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Makes you want to go in with a can a whipped cream and a spoon and get you some, all that jiggling and joggling.”

  “Oh man, yes, it does.”

  As the three shadowy figures approached his spot, Scrbacek jammed himself as far into the corner as his bones would allow and held his breath. Except for his heart, which was thumping madly in his ears, he was totally silent.

  “She’d be good-looking, too, Rita, yes, if it wasn’t for them teeth. I’d be afraid to stick anything near them teeth, she’d a bite it right off.”

  “Yes, she would.”

  “Like a beaver going after a big old oak tree.”

  “Now you’re getting proud.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  Scrbacek was sure they could see him, certain of it, wincing involuntarily at the recognition of his presence he was sure would come. But they kept walking and talking, coming ever closer, right up to the stoop where he hid. And then, quick as that, they were past.

  He didn’t dare breathe yet, waited as step by step they moved past him, step by step, their footsteps dropping in tone, their voices growing lower, quieter. He couldn’t hold it any longer and slowly let out a breath, and as soon as he did, he heard the loud blaring of some techno-jazz.

  He jerked when he heard it, sending pain crashing through his shoulder. It was his damn ringtone. Crap. He answered the call as quickly as his shaking fingers would allow, jamming the phone to his ear.

  “Mr. Scrbacek? Are you there, Mr. Scrbacek? I’ve paged Special Agent Dyer, and she should be calling in shortly. We were disconnected somehow.”

  He was shaking so hard he couldn’t answer, just listened to the phone, shaking, staring down at the cracked cement beneath him as if to do so made him smaller, less obvious.

  “Mr. Scrbacek, are you there? Are you there?”

  “Yes,” he said softly, “I’m here.”

  “Can you tell me where you are, Mr. Scrbacek?”

  When he looked up, there was a man bending over him.

  The man was young and squat and said nothing. Behind him were the tall figure and the short figure. The man bending over him and saying nothing reached out, took the phone away from Scrbacek, canceled the call, and passed it to the tall figure.

  “Oh man,” said the tall one, gazing down at the phone. “This sucker was just released. The Freak’s gonna love this.”

  “Nice,” said the short one.

  “The Freak, he’s gonna pay top dollar for this one, not like that old flip unit we took out from that van last week.”

  The man bending over Scrbacek started searching through Scrbacek’s front pants pockets. When Scrbacek said something, the man ignored him, and when Scrbacek tried to grab the man’s arm to stop the search, the man just slapped his hand away before reaching in a pocket and pulling out his keys. He looked at them and handed them to the man behind him.

  “Now what are we going to do with these? What the hell use are keys?”

  The man bending over Scrbacek grabbed Scrbacek’s hip and rolled him over onto his side. Scrbacek landed on his wounded arm and screamed in pain. The silent figure checked Scrbacek’s back pockets and pulled out his wallet. He handed the wallet to the tall figure behind him.

  “Now look at this, look at this,” said the tall man. “I told you stuff was happening on the street tonight. I told you we ought to get off our fat asses and find us some trouble, and now look at this. Cash, cards, the whole shooting match. We’re going to have us a time with this.”

  “Is there an address?” said the short man.

  “Of course there’s an address. What does that matter?”

  “The keys.”

  “The keys? Oh yeah, the keys. We got the house, we got the car, we got the cash. Oh, we’re going to have us a time. Let’s get what we can get and then go to Stinger’s, man, scarf some shrimp, have us a time. What else that dude got there, Jorge?”

  The techno-jazz played, and the tall man answered the call, saying, “Hello, no one home,” before hanging up.

  The silent man grabbed Scrbacek’s right arm and yanked up the sleeve of his raincoat, then dropped it and grabbed the left arm. Scrbacek screamed again in pain as the silent figure shoved up the sleeve on the left arm, grabbed hold of Scrbacek’s metal wristwatch band, flicked it loose, and pulled it off the wrist. He handed it to the tall man.

  “What’s this? Tag who? You think we could luck at least once into a Rolex.”

  “You’d think.”

  “A Rolex would look sharp on my arm, yes, it would.”

  The silent man stepped back and lifted up Scrbacek’s leg. He eyed the sole of Scrbacek’s boot, did a rough measurement with his hand, let the leg fall back to the cement. Then, still without saying anything, the man stood up straight, turned away, and started walking again down the street.

  “Is that all?” said the tall one, hurrying now after the silent man. “No shoes, no belt, nothing else? What about the raincoat? Even filthy as it is, it’s got to be worth something.”

  “At least something,” said the small one, following behind.

  “Jorge, man, what’s the rush? I mean, we can’t just throw away these opportunities. Jorge, come on, man.”

  They continued down the street, their voices growing less distinct until Scrbacek could no longer make out the words, just the tone: young, arrogant, slow. In the distance he could hear the techno-jazz ringtone play and then die, play and then die.

  Scrbacek leaned back against the edge of the stoop and held his arm and gasped. He had never felt so lost, so scared, so hurt, so weak, so hopeless. It was as if even the air, as it burned his lungs with every breath, had betrayed him. He closed his eye
s and tried to make it all go away, tried to force himself to wake up back in his apartment, whole and uninjured, ready to start another day as the brilliant legal hotshot with the whole city at his feet. But then his eyes snapped open. He thought he heard something. He thought he heard them, Jorge and his two lemmings, coming back for the raincoat, the belt, the boots. He pulled himself up to standing, fought the wooziness, looked down the street the way they had gone. Even though he saw nothing, he headed in the opposite direction.

  He wasn’t running now. He was too tired, too weak and dizzy, in too much pain. He was walking, slowly, limping from his jammed leg, holding his injured arm tight to his chest, coughing and shivering with every painful step. When he reached a cross street he turned, and when he reached another cross street he turned again. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular, just going. At the next intersection he looked at the street signs to see if he could get his bearings.

  Taft and Ansonia.

  Ansonia?

  It was somehow familiar.

  Ansonia Road.

  He had represented someone who lived on Ansonia Road, a man picked up on a weapons violation. Donatino Guillen. Donnie. The case had been a loser except for a minor search-and-seizure issue, which Scrbacek had built into a major problem for the County Prosecutor’s Office, allowing Donnie to plead to a gift—three years, suspended, with two years’ probation. He remembered Donnie Guillen because Donnie had been very grateful after everything and because Donnie hadn’t seemed the type to play with guns. He had been small, quiet, sweet, actually, without the aura of violence that usually attached to his gun defendants, which was peculiar because they had found on Donnie Guillen enough weaponry to arm a battalion: seventeen handguns, two automatic rifles, a hand grenade, a silencer. And he remembered Donnie Guillen’s address because it combined the number of home runs Babe Ruth had hit with the Babe’s New York home, the Ansonia hotel. When Scrbacek had mentioned the coincidence, Donnie had said, “Who’s Babe Ruth?”

  714 Ansonia Road.

  Scrbacek was on the five-hundred block of Ansonia Road. He started to make his way north, through the five hundreds and the six hundreds, staying in the shadows, hiding when a police cruiser slid by. The street, he could see, dead-ended at the bay, there was only so much farther he could go, and still it seemed like he would never get there. He grew weaker with each step. The dizziness increased, the coughing, the shaking. Twice he felt like he was about to faint before he caught himself. He wrapped the raincoat as tight around him as he could, but still he couldn’t stop his shivering.

  He staggered on and on, and finally he was there: 714 Ansonia Road. And his hopes sank until they pooled at his feet.

  An old tenement building near the very end of the street, dark and ruined, with all but one of the windows planked with plywood and this last showing not the faintest ray of light. Looming behind was an abandoned warehouse with bricked-up doors and windows. The warehouse’s lot was ringed with a fence topped by barbed wire. Trash was piled high outside the warehouse, sat in drifts along the fence, spilled out from beneath the house’s porch. The whole place was as forlorn as anything Scrbacek had ever seen. If Donnie Guillen had lived there once, he lived there no more, unless he had fallen lower than a rat. Still, without a choice, Scrbacek struggled to climb the steps. He crossed the rotted beams of the porch and banged on the door.

  Nothing.

  He banged again, harder and longer, feeling the reverberations in his injured arm, banged until his right hand was numb from banging. He leaned against the door and felt a wave of weakness fall through him. He closed his eyes and thought of sleeping, and his knees buckled and he barely caught himself. And then he heard a sound. From inside the building. A shuffling, growing louder, coming closer.

  He banged again and shouted, “I’m looking for Donnie. Donnie Guillen.”

  Slowly the door opened.

  A face appeared out of the darkness.

  “Mr. Scrbacek?”

  “Donnie, thank God. I need . . . I need . . .”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I need . . .”

  “You’re bleeding. Let me call an ambulance.”

  “No ambulance. No hospitals. No one can know where I . . . where I . . . They’re after me. They’re . . .”

  “Mr. Scrbacek?”

  And then he fainted, J.D. Scrbacek, fainted right into the ruin that was 714 Ansonia Road.

  If you were looking from across the street, you would next have seen an unsettling sight. A man in a bloodied raincoat, lying on the doorstep of an all-but-abandoned house, his body half inside the black doorway, his legs on the porch. And then you would have seen those legs slowly disappearing, dragged into the building inch by inch, until their entirety was inside, and the door was closed, and everything was again as it should have been on Ansonia Road in the heart of Crapstown. Dark, deserted, despairing.

  Desolation.

  SECOND NIGHT

  11

  SQUIRREL

  Scrbacek dreamed his clothes were being stripped off his body until suddenly he awoke to find his clothes being stripped off his body. He opened his eyes to see a score of hands clutching at him, shouted out from the pain in his arm, and fell hard back into unconsciousness.

  He woke again from the pain twisting inside his arm and called out into the darkness. A woman with a broad face and a great halo of blonde hair appeared over him and smiled as she stroked his brow with her hand. He knew then, with all certainty, that she was an angel and he was dead. She disappeared for a moment, and he felt a stinger slip into his arm, and the angel came back and stroked his brow, and he grew light, and the pain eased, and he rose sweetly back into unconsciousness.

  For a period of time, the length of which he couldn’t fathom, he slipped in and out of a dream state. His constant companions, whether asleep or awake, were the sound of intense muffled conversation from somewhere distant and the dank smell of deterioration.

  A sharp pressure on his chest jolted him to consciousness, and he found himself lying naked on a mattress, covered from the waist down by a blanket, doused with light from a bare bulb inside a cone hanging overhead. A hunched little man with spectacles, big ears, and too many teeth, was twisting a piece of Scrbacek’s chest between his fingers.

  “Three,” said the man, a stethoscope draped around his scrawny neck. He sucked air through pursed lips and leaned close to the piece of flesh between his fingers. “Interesting.” The little man raised his other hand. Light gleamed off the short curved blade of a scalpel.

  Scrbacek tried to sit up, but a weight of dizziness pushed him down onto the mattress.

  The hunched man pulled his hand away with a loud intake of air. “He’s awake.” He took a step back and squealed, “Someone come and hold him down. He’s awake.”

  Scrbacek could feel the pain in his left arm but only at a far remove, as if he were somehow floating above the wreck that was his body. His left arm was bloodied, a long strip of gauze was wrapped tightly around his right hand, his chest was mottled with bruises. He tried again to sit up against the dizziness, pushing with his right arm despite the pain in his palm, and this time he succeeded in lifting his upper body. Slowly he looked around.

  He was on a bed in the middle of a small, seedy room with stained yellow wallpaper. Holes had been punched through the walls. A single wooden chair, with an open black medicine bag on its seat, sat directly beneath a window through which no light flowed. At first he assumed that meant it was night, but when he raised his hand to cover his eyes from the bulb he saw that the window was boarded up from the inside, and so he had no idea of the time of day. There was the same muffled conversation that had been his constant companion, but now he could identify it as a television, somewhere down a hallway, with the volume on loud. In a dark corner of the room stood a ragged bureau with some sort of large dark object perched atop it.

  Scrbacek turned to the little man. “Where’s Donnie?”

  “Donnie is cu
rrently indisposed,” said the little man. “He asked me if it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition to treat your deteriorating condition. I told him it was, but he implored me to come anyway, so here I am.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then stay the hell away from me.”

  “Suit yourself,” said the little man. “You’re the patient, and the patient is always right. But be aware the infection in your arm is spreading every minute.” The little man smiled. “Every second.” He dropped the scalpel into the black bag, clasped it shut, and carried it out of the room, leaving Scrbacek alone.

  Scrbacek tried to swing his legs off the bed and stand, but the blood drained too quickly from his head and nausea forced him to lie down again. He closed his eyes and felt the nausea subside, and he disappeared into some dark, dreamless sleep.

  When he awoke, the television was still blaring, the same endless conversation going on and on about absolutely nothing. The angel was now sitting on his mattress, wiping his face with a wet towel.

  “Finally,” she said in flat, bored voice. “I thought maybe I had given you too much. It’s a sin to waste.”

  Scrbacek shook his head and sat up in the bed. He was still dazed, though the pain had returned to roost in his left arm, flaring sharply whenever he moved. The woman with the towel was pale and pretty and as all-American as football and pom-poms and butter statues at the Iowa State Fair. She wore jeans and a T-shirt pressed to its limits by her sharply nippled breasts, and as he stared at her, he thought she looked vaguely familiar, though he couldn’t place her. A client? A blackjack dealer? A woman he had hit on once in a bar? Probably that, because he surely would have hit on her in a bar. Standing behind her was the hunched little man with the stethoscope and the scalpel, and when Scrbacek saw him, he started scooting away before a sharp bolt of pain stopped him.

  “Calm down, sweetie,” said the woman. “You’ll hurt yourself. My name’s Elisha.”

  “Where’s Donnie?” said Scrbacek.