I fell asleep and dreamed of violence, then awoke to my telephone ringing. I answered it with my eyes closed. For a few seconds I felt disconnected from the world, a man with no life to which he was attached. The feeling was gone in seconds, much too soon.
“Yeah.”
“You okay?” Augie said.
“What’s going on?”
“I’m on my way to your place. You up for a ride?”
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I want to find out. Meet me outside. I’ll be there in two minutes.”
“Augie, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Maybe something, maybe nothing. That’s what we’re going to find out. I’ll see you in a minute.”
He hung up. I found my tea and drank it down. It was still warm.
We rode back to the pond at the edge of town and parked along the shoulder of the narrow road. The cab of the truck was warm, but the window glass was still cold to the touch. The only winter coat I had was gone, taken by the cops, Augie had said, from the scene of the accident. I had only a denim jacket on over my sweatshirt and jeans. Augie kept a change of clothes in his truck, in a mesh duffel bag behind his seat, for emergencies. He took out a spare jacket and gave it to me. It was much too big for me, but my denim jacket filled it out slightly, and anyway it would keep me warm. How I looked was the least of my worries now.
I tried to remember if there were any papers in any of the pockets of my winter coat -- bank statements, old mail, pay stubs. I didn’t want the Chief’s boys to stumble upon anything like that and somehow use it against me. What I had told Tina back at my apartment was only partially true. The Chief would settle for public humiliation, but everyone knew what he really hungered for was to see me do time for something -- that and to keep me for a night in the basement of the police station, just him and his boys and me.
Augie didn’t seem that much the worse for wear. He wasn’t tired, that much was for certain. He drove alertly, pushing the speed limit all the way. The girl we had tried to save was dead. He told me that right off. But the questions he now wanted answered fed his mind and occupied him in a way he hadn’t been since his beating last May. He was alive, back in business, his depression suddenly lifted. He felt useful again, vital. I could see it in everything about him as he drove.
After he parked the truck, Augie climbed out into the cold night air, and I followed him. The motor was still running, the headlights still on. We stood within their influence and looked from the point where the car went over the bank, a little ahead and to the right of us, to where it had appeared around the curve.
“I’ll tell you, Mac, things don’t add up here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Our friends, the cops, they weren’t acting much like cops, you know. They seemed to me more like a clean-up crew than trained and experienced investigators. They towed the car out of the water, loaded it onto a flatbed, and then, boom, it was gone. Not so much as a roll of film or even a single measurement was taken. No one bothered to note the tire marks on the road, nothing. They took my statement fast, then put me in my truck and told me to drive myself to the emergency room. Of course I didn’t. I parked up the road and waited and watched the whole thing.” He paused. “They were almost acting scared.”
I watched his face. His ears were red, and when white fog wasn’t bursting from his mouth, it lingered there, churning and then rising slowly past his face.
“When you went over that bank there, did you come across anything on your way down that might slash a car tire to the rim?”
I thought for a quick second, then shook my head and said, “No. Why?”
“I saw the girl’s car when they pulled it out of the water. Then later I saw it when they loaded it onto the flatbed. All four tires were cut up, slashed to the rim. On one tire the rim was completely bare, no rubber at all.”
“You sure about that?”
“I’ve got pictures.”
“Video?”
“Stills. I crawled in from where I parked and shot a roll. These weren’t blowouts, Mac, I can tell you that. I mean, what are the chances of all four tires blowing out all at once? No, these tires were slashed, there’s no two ways about it.”
“How?”
“Follow me.”
Augie led me down the road, toward the curve and the cluster of trees where we had seen someone run across the road just before the accident.
When we were near the trees, Augie stopped and said to me, “Would you say this is where the car first lost control?”
I looked around, nodded.
He knelt suddenly, pulling me with him. He took a pocket light from his jacket pocket and shined it on the pavement between us.
I looked closely and saw in the center of the circle of white light several fanglike punctures in the blacktop.
I looked back up at Augie and said, “A spike strip.”
“That’s what I thought, too. Come here.”
We crossed the road, to the side where Augie’s man had hid before bolting across. Augie knelt again and aimed his light on a divot in the dirt bank.
“He nailed it in here and waited till he saw the car come, then dragged it across the road. The spikes tore up all four tires at once. If a car is going fast enough on a winding road like this … well, you saw what you saw. Girl dies in a car accident on a back road late at night. That kind of thing happens all the time. No one would think twice about it. And if someone did, no evidence.”
“You’re talking murder and conspiracy, Aug. You’re talking a lot of people, if the Chief’s boys are in on it.”
“Who else uses spike strips, Mac? Why the shoddy clean-up? You know what money can buy in this town. You know this better than anyone.”
He rose, and I followed. Together we looked back over the dark, narrow road. The tall grass lining it was dead, bent sharply by the sudden cold. I thought of the pond down the bank and the icy water that almost killed me. I thought of the poor girl, whoever she was. I thought of those home waiting for her.
Augie took a good look around, then said finally, “Something’s up. Something’s going on. I think it might do us well to find out just what that something is.”
“Maybe.”
Augie sighed, a puff of white bursting from his mouth, then shrugged. “Let’s hope for the best, then. Let’s hope its nothing.” He looked at me. “I should get you home,” he said. “You look beat.”
“I’m okay.”
“I’ll find out if the car went to the impound lot or a junkyard. Frank has men in Village Hall. I’ll have him make a few calls and pull some favors.”
“Sounds good.”
“Maybe one of my nurses was working at the hospital tonight. I’ll see if I can get some information on the girl, ID, address, that kind of thing. Maybe her autopsy’ll turn up something interesting.”
“If you get a lead on a junkyard, let me know. I could maybe have a look around tomorrow, between shifts.”
We both knew this could be nothing but trouble for me. But I wasn’t planning on letting Augie go headfirst into whatever this was alone. I wouldn’t have done that before he was put in the hospital, let alone now.
“You’re far enough in the shit as it is, Mac,” he told me. “If this is what we think it is, it’ll be hard keeping low like you have been.”
“If somebody killed that girl, I’d want to know who did it, cops or no cops. It’s my town, too, Aug.”
We stood together and looked out over the barren farm fields, barely visible in the darkness. After a while, I said, “It’s cold. It’s as cold as hell.”
Augie looked at me. “We should call it a night, Mac.”
We started back down the road toward his truck. Halfway there I heard a sound in the distance behind us, the abrupt sound of a car door shutting and an engine starting. Augie and I stopped and looked back and listened. The car took off, the sound of the motor fading. It was heading away from us, the mot
or winding up, then pausing as gears changed. Someone was pushing a sports car to its limits along another road somewhere beyond the field behind the cluster of trees. We lingered till the sound of the car was gone, then continued on toward the truck and drove back to the Hansom House.
As we got near it I started to remove the spare field jacket Augie had given me. He told me to keep it for as long as I needed. When we parked at the curb on Elm Street we shook hands and I stepped back out into the bitter cold. Augie waved and pulled away as I started up the path toward the door. It wasn’t till his truck had turned the corner onto Railroad Plaza and was half down the block and my hand was about to grip the door knob that I heard the sound of footsteps suddenly behind me.
I started to turn but someone slammed into me from behind, the length of his body against mine, and jacked me up against the wall alongside the door, pinning me. I knew right off that whoever the asshole was, he outweighed me significantly, and I could tell by his breath that he was a smoker.
I couldn’t see his face, I couldn’t turn my head around far enough. My left cheek was hard against the wall, my right ear near his mouth. His breath breezed into me when he spoke.
“You don’t want to push your luck, kid,” he grunted. “Just forget what you saw, understand? If you don’t, I’m going to shit some serious hurt your way.”
The only part of me that I could move was my feet. I turned them, swinging my toes to the left, as if trying to point them behind me. I knew the only escape was a reversal. I inched my toes a bit at a time. It was the only way to go. I needed to buy a little time, maybe piss him off so he’d back up to take a swing at me and I could make my move.
“Fuck you, asshole,” I said.
“Try a little of this, motherfucker.”
I sensed his right hand move then toward my back, as if in a stabbing motion, and then I heard the crack of electricity. There was nothing I could do. The stun gun was pressed into my right kidney and a charge sailed through me. It was like taking a hit from a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire.
He pulled his right hand back and I buckled, but he wouldn’t let me fall, kept me jacked up against the wall, hard.
“Still feel brave, motherfucker?” he said. I didn’t get to respond. I heard the stun gun test charge again, and then he leaned close to me and said, “Have a little more, you know you want it.”
He fired another shot through me. The electricity raced along every inch of my body in a matter of a second. My legs gave out again but he continued to hold me up.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” he hissed. “Do yourself a favor, remember it. Forget what you saw and remember how this feels. Next time I set it on high and zap your balls till there’s nothing left but smoke.”
My legs came back to me more slowly this time. When they did, I turned my feet even more.
“And they told me to look out for you, that you were some kind of badass, some kind of Judo-man. You don’t seem so bad to me.” He leaned in close to me then, closer than he had been so far. “I wonder if your friend is liking this as much as you are.”
My head turned enough then so I could find his eyes. They were small, hateful slits.
“You don’t like that, do you? Too bad all you can do about it is stand here and take my shit.”
It was then I moved.
The instant the stun gun was off me I spun between him and the wall and crouched slightly, grabbing his balls with my right hand and squeezing with everything I had. I moved fast, surprising him. I could feel my legs tremble as I drove him backward, my right shoulder in his chest, and hooked his right leg with my left arm for a takedown. He fell at once onto the porch, landing with a crash on the planks. I landed hard on top of him, twisting his balls like a door knob before letting go and trapping his right arm between my left arm and my rib cage and torquing his elbow till I heard a sickening pop. The stun gun hit the floor of the porch and bounced twice and then lay there. I flung it into the bushes. Then I balanced myself over him and landed a half-dozen elbow shots to his head, bouncing it off the planks.
When he wasn’t fighting back with his one good arm or screaming or moving any longer, I got up and started toward the door to the Hansom House. George the bartender was standing in the door, his face hung with shock. Beyond him, down a brief hall, was the door to the bar itself. I walked past him, toward the dark bar.
Most of the lights inside were off. George must have been closing up when he heard the commotion. I went fast around the bar and looked around for something, anything, any kind of weapon.
“What’s going on?” George said.
“Once I’m gone, call the police. If he tries to leave, don’t try to stop him. Just see where he goes, if you can. Lock yourself in here and don’t go outside till the cops come.”
I didn’t have time to go looking in the dark for the stun gun. And anyway that wasn’t one of my weapons of choice. I stepped behind the bar and reached for the Galliano bottle, a tall, club-shape bottle of thick, almost unbreakable glass. It was nicknamed “The Bartender’s Best Friend.” I grabbed it off the top shelf and ran past George and out the door.
My attacker, groggy, was trying to stand, on one leg and a knee. As I passed I swung the bottle with everything I had into the knee of the leg with which he was trying to push off. There was a dull, sickening crack, and he screamed out and fell back to the floor. I ran down the path to my LeMans parked across the street, got in, and cranked the ignition. It caught on the third try.
I reached Augie’s house in less than five minutes and skidded to a stop at the end of his driveway. I climbed out fast into the cold air with the Galliano bottle tight in my fist. I saw right away that there were no lights on in or around the house and that the front door was wide open and the front door had been pushed back on its hinges, broken. There was a dent in its lower panel, like a man had been shoved forcibly into it. I broke into a run up the lawn, bolting toward the house. I ran blindly. All I saw was the open front door and the vague shape of the house around it. I didn’t hear anything except for the sound of blood pounding in my ears, the steady lapping of the bay waves against the inlet walls directly behind Augie’s house, and the giving way of the frosted grass beneath my feet. I saw myself bursting through the door swinging.
Halfway up the lawn I stumbled over something in the dark and fell hard onto the frozen ground. I had been running full stride and landed badly on my knees and elbows. The ground was just as hard as the ground that surrounded the pond outside of town, and upon impact a jolt went through me that knocked the air from my chest and set my teeth ringing. I looked back to see what it was I had fallen over but could see nothing in the darkness. It seemed there was a heap at my feet, both solid and flimsy, no more than a bag of firewood, though that didn’t make any sense. Then it came to me, head-on. It was like hitting the frozen ground for a second time.
I rolled fast onto my back and scurried like a crab away from the dead body that lay sprawled flat on its back on the lawn. The head lay at a sharp angle from its shoulders, as if the neck was just so much rubber. The mouth gaped open and the limbs hung askew. They all seemed somehow unrelated to each other. It hadn’t been dead for long, I could tell this by the fact that the blood I had fallen into and scurried over was still very wet. My first thought was that this was Augie, and my heart couldn’t bear that, not one bit.
I moved into a crouch and looked at the body but could barely make out the face and staring eyes in the dark. Blood covered his chest and face. There was a lot of it. Between breaths I muttered, “Jesus,” then looked around the yard and up and down the street quickly before moving closer to the body and taking hold of its face and turning it slowly to maybe see it better. “Jesus,” I said again.
I leaned over the body, my face just a foot away, and peered close. I put my hand on its shoulder to balance myself and felt cold leather. I shifted my attention to the jacket. It was a leather jacket with a fur lining, not an army-issue field jacket. This wasn’t Augie, this
wasn’t Augie. My heart grabbed at this. My mind and my blood were racing in different directions now. I kept low, in a crouch still, my feet in blood, and picked up the bottle I had dropped when I fell. I counted three breaths, then broke and bolted low across the rest of the lawn.
I flew through the open door and ducked low against a wall, bracing myself against it and listening hard. I heard nothing. It was darker inside the house than it was outside. I could barely see my hands. The windows were like shut-off televisions. There was the very pale glow of a digital clock somewhere in the kitchen.
But I knew the house, and I could find my way around it well enough. I stood and started through the living room and down the hallway to the bedrooms and Augie’s office. I walked the fine line between the light and the dark and glanced into every room as I passed by. I could only see the shapes of things, when I could see anything at all. But there was nothing, no sign of Augie.
I backtracked down the hall, through the living room and into the dining room. Nothing. Then I moved into the kitchen and saw by the faint bluish light that the back door was open. I started toward it and was just within reach of it when someone came rushing up behind me and I felt metal pressing sharply just behind my ear and I heard a voice order, “Move and you’re dead, got it?”
It barely sounded like Augie’s. It was full of authority and menace, but it was him, it was his cop voice married with the voice of a man who had just seven months before been ambushed and almost beaten to death in this very same house. His free hand gripped my left arm powerfully, to keep me from turning suddenly around. I didn’t move, I didn’t breathe, I just stood there in his strong grip, the barrel of his .45 pressed against my skull and said, “Aug, it’s me.”
“Jesus, Mac,” he said. “Jesus, what are you doing here?” He removed his .45 from my head and dropped his hand from my arm.
Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard Page 4