by Anthony Izzo
“There’s a mechanic’s coveralls in the garage. Take them and put them on. You’re making me sick looking at you.”
Dietrich slunk out of the room, head bowed, hands cupped over his crotch to protect what little dignity he had left. Rafferty followed him to the garage, where Lincoln’s other two patrol cars were parked.
Rafferty let him into the garage and flipped on the lights. The garage smelled of oil and fresh gasoline. Dietrich took a pair of grease-splattered coveralls off of a hook on the wall and stepped into them.
Rafferty led him to the back door and issued him one more warning.
“Remember, no more hunting. And tonight never happened. Not the warehouse, not me bringing you back here, nothing.”
Dietrich nodded and walked away, disappearing around the corner of the station house. Good riddance, Rafferty thought. He stepped out of the humidity and back into the police station.
CHAPTER 4
“My God, Matthew, are you all right? I’ve been worried sick.”
“Really, Aunt Bernie, I’m fine. I’m sorry I couldn’t call sooner. I was busy changing that flat,” he said.
“Well, you come on over now, Matthew. I’ll cook you something right away.”
His Aunt Bernie was five-three, weighed maybe one hundred five in two layers of clothes and constantly cooked. She ate like a white shark and Matt could never figure out exactly where she put it all.
She was a second mother to him, and he loved her like one, but she had always called him Matthew and never Matt. That was really the only thing that bothered him about her. Other than that, he didn’t think there was a sweeter person on earth.
“Give me about twenty minutes, okay? I stopped outside town to use a phone.”
“All right, but you be careful. See you soon.”
He said good-bye and hit the End button on the cordless, cutting the connection.
“Everything okay with your aunt?” Jill asked.
“I worry about her. When my uncle’s been into the beer, he can be pretty mean.”
“You should get going and see her.”
He asked her if he could use the bathroom to change and she said that was fine. Carrying his suitcase, he went into the bathroom and caught the smell of roses in the air. Jill’s soap or perfume. He inhaled the scent, wondering if her neck would smell like that if he were to nuzzle it.
Take it easy there, cowboy. You’ve known her a grand total of an hour.
He pulled his shirt off, his muscles screaming in protest as he did so, rinsed off his face and chest and changed into a fresh T-shirt.
Jill came to the door and knocked to see if he was okay and he told her he was fine. In reality, he felt like Ken Griffey Jr. had used his head for batting practice.
Stuffing his dirty clothes in his suitcase, he returned to the living room where Jill sat on the couch. She rose and handed him a piece of paper with her phone number scribbled on it in blue ink. Then she handed him a paper and a pen and instructed him to do the same.
He wrote down his aunt’s number and gave it to her.
“Will you give me a call so we can talk? This whole thing is blowing my mind,” Jill said.
“We’ll make a date.”
As he turned to leave, she reached out, squeezed his arm and thanked him. Tears welled in her eyes and he wanted to hug her, but decided against it. He smiled and told her she was welcome.
He told her good night and went down the stairs, his ankle killing him.
Jill watched Matt limp down her stairway. Her heart finally stopped hammering and was back to a normal rhythm. The incident in the warehouse had spooked her: when the perpetrator grabbed her around the neck and cut off her air, she thought she was a goner. She wasn’t one to back down or scare easily, but the attack left her genuinely frightened.
She supposed that her tough attitude arose from living with a mother who had tried to plot every course of her life.
She had skipped two grades in school, partially because of her intelligence and partially because school came easy to her. She devoured books, made the most difficult equations in algebra seem simple and could recite chemistry formulas faster than most people could tell you their phone number. On top of it, she drove herself hard, one time crying when she received a B and not her standard A on a Revolutionary War essay.
High school was a breeze, and she became the first valedictorian at Sacred Heart Academy to have a 4.0 all through school. Scholarship offers poured in: Berkley, Stanford and Duke were among the many. But she had settled on the nursing program at the University of Buffalo, instantly disappointing her mother.
She took her first real job at Buffalo General as an R.N. in the emergency room. It had been tough and messy, and during the first week on the job, she had been bled on and puked on. Despite the unpleasant aspects, she found it rewarding. That was something that her mother could never understand. Mom had always told her she should go to Harvard or MIT.
She thought of the message on the machine.
It was a little past one in the morning, and she knew Harriet Adams would still be awake, watching Turner Classic Movies. Reluctantly, she picked up the phone and dialed her mother’s number.
“I was worried about you, dear. I left that message at ten o’clock.”
“I was out jogging, Mom.”
“So late?”
“I didn’t have a chance this morning.”
“You shouldn’t do that, dear. It’s dangerous out there.”
Harriet Adams rarely left her house, so anything further than her front porch was considered “out there” and therefore dangerous.
“Gotta stay in shape, Mom.”
“Why don’t you join a health club? Don’t you have the money?”
“Plenty of money. I just like jogging outdoors.”
“How is the new job, anyway?”
“Going great.”
“Better than the General?”
“Much better.”
“That’s good, dear. I still wish you’d consider being a doctor. Nursing is so lowly, you know, cleaning up vomit and blood and other things.”
Jill’s grip on the phone tightened. “There’s more to it than that, Mom.”
“I can see I’ve ruffled your feathers a little. Didn’t mean to. Just giving you something to think about. I’ll let you get going now.”
“Good-bye, Mom.”
“Good-bye, dear.”
Jill slammed the receiver onto the base. Her mother could never understand why Jill wanted to be a nurse. Her father’s death had a lot to do with it.
The memory of her father and the anger at her mother made Jill’s throat tighten. It seemed an eternity since he had been killed, but Jill could remember that night with no problem. Sometimes the memory could be a curse.
Jim Adams had been returning home at night after a long day at his law firm when he stopped at Wilson Farms to pick up a loaf of bread. A guy in a ski mask entered, robbed the cash register and then for no apparent reason, shot the cashier and her father. The staff at the ER worked feverishly to try and save him, but he couldn’t hang on; the wounds to his liver and heart proved too severe.
Jill had been eight at the time and remembered her mother coming home from the hospital to tell her the doctors and nurses couldn’t save her daddy. She had broken into tears and gone to her mother for a hug, but her mother turned her away with a pat on the head, telling her she needed to be alone.
Jill had soaked her pillow that night crying herself to sleep, alone in her bedroom with the moonlight spilling onto her bed. It was one of the loneliest, most awful nights of her life. The sun seemed like it would never come up again and she felt like she had been sentenced to live with eternal night.
Could she make up for Dad’s death by saving others? She didn’t know, but she loved her job. That was good enough.
Now, she brought the tray with the medical supplies on it to the kitchen and then went into the bathroom. She turned the shower on, making the water
lukewarm, and stripped off her clothes, careful to avoid the bandage on her abdomen. Peeling off the bandage, she got into the shower and found her thoughts drifting back to Matthew Crowe.
The comments he made about the police being crooked were strange. Hell, he was strange. But there was something appealing about him, maybe the whole knight in shining armor thing. Hopefully her knight would call back and tell her what the hell was going on in this town. Should she call the cops? Right now all she wanted to do was hit the pillow and sleep.
She lathered up with the soap, rinsed off and got out of the shower. After toweling off, she went into her bedroom and slipped on a pair of panties and a T-shirt. Then she climbed into bed, thinking that she might give Matt Crowe a call after work tomorrow.
It was one hell of a way to meet a guy.
Matt pulled in his Aunt Bernie’s driveway, got out of the car, and dragged his suitcase from the backseat.
He approached the house, a white Cape Cod with black shutters and a large picture window overlooking a rose garden in front. There was a set of copper wind chimes hanging over the door and a large pot of herbs on the porch. From the outside, it looked like a typical suburban home, but it carried a lot of bad memories for Matt. Memories of a black eye from his uncle, and the night when he’d left Lincoln for good.
This was supposed to be a new beginning for him, coming home to make things right, and dwelling on his drunken uncle would only soil his homecoming. Leave it in the past, he thought.
He rang the bell and Aunt Bernie opened the side door. She was a slim, dark-haired woman with a narrow waist. She gave him a little wave. For some reason, he always thought of her hands as her most distinguishing feature. They were thin and small, but always capable of threading a needle on the first try or untying a stubborn knot with little effort.
As he stepped inside she hugged him, and he put an arm around her, returning it. She stood on her tiptoes, kissed his cheek and then led him by the hand into the kitchen.
“I was up waiting for you, as if you couldn’t tell. You want something to eat?”
As they stood in the kitchen Matt smelled the aromas of garlic and onion. “No thanks. I just want to hit the hay.”
“Matthew, it’s so good to see you after all these years. Your uncle is sorry for what happened, and that you left. He’s really changed, you’ll see.”
“He’s sleeping now, I assume.”
“That’s right.”
Good. If he didn’t see Uncle Rex the whole time he was back in Lincoln, it would not break his heart.
“I really should get to my room. I hate to be rude, but I’m bushed.”
“That’s okay. We can talk in the morning. Over blueberry pancakes.”
“Sounds good.”
She said he could stay in the loft over the garage, newly remodeled. There was even an air conditioner to keep him from roasting in the heat.
As he bent over to kiss her good night, she touched the Band-Aid on his cheek and said, “What’s this?”
He shrugged. “Canary attack?”
She stood with her hands on her hips, weight on one leg, hip stuck out to the side.
“You look just like my mom when you stand like that.”
“I do?”
“Yeah, exactly like her.”
“That’s a nice thought, Matthew, but you shouldn’t change the subject.”
His hand went to the Band-Aid. “I took a spill getting out of the car and landed flat on my face. Tripped over my own feet, basically.”
Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Are you sure that’s what happened?”
“Positive.”
“I’m still not sure I buy it, but it’s late and I know you’re tired, so I’ll let it slide. This time.”
She gave him a friendly punch in the arm and he smiled wearily.
“Good night, Aunt Bernie.”
She went over to the door with him and took a leather key ring marked GARAGE off of a key rack.
“Remember, blueberry pancakes.”
“You got it.”
He trudged out of the house, relishing the thought of collapsing into bed in his air-conditioned loft.
The garage was a two-car, white like the house, with a busted window in one of the door panels. Matt opened the door to the right of the garage door and entered.
Moonlight shone through the window, illuminating a splotch of oil on the floor beside his uncle’s Chevy pickup. The garage smelled dusty and Uncle Rex had several boxes stacked on shelves, no doubt containing tools, rags and other implements of the American Male Repairman.
Matt climbed the stairs to the loft and flipped on the light switch. There was a single bed, a scarred pine nightstand (with a black phone) and a thirteen-inch television on a TV stand. There was also a card table with a folding chair and a small refrigerator plugged into the wall, the kind college kids used in the dorms. There was no bathroom, but that was okay; it wouldn’t kill him to use the one in the house.
Matt set his suitcase on the floor at the foot of the bed and switched on the air conditioner in the window. It hummed to life and within ten minutes, the place was as cold as Alaska. The cool air felt great.
After stripping off his clothes and folding them, he put on a pair of sweatpants and nothing else. Then he took out one of his keepsakes from the suitcase and sat on the bed. Time to pick at the scabs again, maybe draw blood and have it run again. Why do I do this to myself ?
He held a New York Yankees cap in his hands. It was wool, just like the Major Leaguers wore. Its brim had been folded in half and properly “duck billed” and the liner inside was yellowed with sweat. It had belonged to his little brother, Mike, and he had been wearing it the day he was killed.
Mikey had bugged their dad for a month to get him an authentic New York Yankees cap, just like Don Mattingly wore. His father had surprised Mikey one night by bringing it home from work, and for the next two months, Mikey had kept that hat glued to his head.
It still had mud caked on the brim. Matt sniffed it to see if he could conjure up a memory of his little brother. He smelled the faint odor of sweat, a child’s sweat, but no bubble gum. Mikey had constantly chewed Double Bubble, stuffing four or five pieces in his mouth at a time. Their mother always worried that he would either choke himself or rot out all his teeth.
Mikey had only been five when They chased him down to the ravine, where he lost his balance and went over the edge. Matt could still hear the high-pitched scream as his brother tumbled over the edge and fell eighty feet to his death on the rocks below. He had screamed for their mother the whole time.
Matt had been fourteen when that happened. Mikey and his parents murdered on the same day, Matt helpless to stop it. He wished for the three of them back. In the next four years after the murders, Aunt Bernie had done well filling in for his mother. Then came the blow up with Uncle Rex and Matt’s departure. After leaving his aunt and uncle’s home, he’d thought long and hard about his future and decided on the Army Rangers. He’d learn to fight, handle weapons. And then he’d return.
Matt felt himself start to tear up; his throat felt as if he were trying to swallow a chestnut, and he thought again that it probably wasn’t healthy to carry around the dead’s clothes. It was even a little morbid, he supposed. But it was also fuel that fed the fire that burned inside of him. Every time he took out that hat, it cut him open again, pissed him off. Like poking a cut just to feel the pain and remember what it was like the moment the skin tore open.
Someone would pay. That phrase had echoed in his mind while he endured marches with sixty-pound packs, freezing cold mud and water and drill sergeants screaming in his ear. That was why he had almost relished it, the sizzling sand and heat and walking through a minefield during Desert Storm. It all led back to Lincoln, getting ready for his own war.
He put the hat back in his suitcase and lay back on the bed, his hands twined behind his head.
“I miss you guys,” he said.
Remembering t
he light, he got up, switched it off and flopped back on the bed. As he drifted off to sleep, he prayed for no dreams of a little boy plunging over a cliff.
CHAPTER 5
The sun creeping through the blinds awoke Matt at six o’clock the next morning. He sat up on the bed and stretched. Six o’clock, the same as every other morning. He swung his legs around, put some weight on his ankle. It smarted, but not as badly as he thought it would. Just a twist, no sprain.
He managed fifty push-ups and two hundred crunches. Normally, he also would have run a few miles, but Jill Adams and her crowbar put that on hold.
Matt went downstairs, opened the door and peered at the house. There were lights on, and Aunt Bernie walked past the dining room window in a fuzzy red bathrobe. He wondered if Uncle Rex was still asleep.
Uncle Rex was the reason Matt left Lincoln in the first place. After the death of Mikey and his parents, he went to live with Uncle Rex and Aunt Bernie. Aunt Bernie cooked him huge meals, trying to fatten him up, always telling him he needed to eat more.
Uncle Rex was another story.
Rex Lapchek was ill-tempered, ignorant and in Matt’s eyes an all-around gorilla. He even looked a little apish, what with his hairy knuckles and jutting forehead. He’d been working at the Ford plant since he was eighteen, starting off in the foundry and still putting together engine blocks after thirty years on the job. In his mind, he was always getting screwed.
The UAW wasn’t fighting hard enough for him, GM was trying to take away his pension, the other workers were “lazy sonzabitches” and he still had to work with too many minorities.
The world was never right with Rex Lapchek, despite the fact that he had a highly coveted manufacturing job and brought home nearly sixty thousand dollars a year with overtime.
When Matt had lived there during his teen years, he made every attempt to stay away from his uncle. It was relatively easy, because Uncle Rex worked second shift—even after thirty years at the plant, he never exercised his option to take a position on the first shift. Matt suspected he worked second shift so he wouldn’t have to spend time with his wife. He would come home at twelve thirty or one in the morning, reheat the leftovers Aunt Bernie left him and slam down a few Budweisers. Then it was off to bed until noon the next day. When he’d been into the Budweiser a little too much, he referred to Matt exclusively as “shithead.” Charming man.