When You Run with Wolves

by Robert White

  I had to get that phone and I had seconds to make it. I couldn’t focus my eyes on my wristwatch without losing precious seconds.

  I lost count of the rings but I finally got my hand on it. Calderone’s voice came down the line. “Having a good time, asshole?”

  “Not as good a time as I’m... as I’m going to have – when... when I bash your face in,” I said. It sounded more convincing in my head.

  “That’s the booze talking, fuckhead,” he said.

  “I thought it was me talking to you, asshole.”

  “Shut up. Turn around and down to the corner where that guy’s selling candy apples from a cart. See it?”

  “I shee... I see it,” I mumbled. I was drunk and scared. Even these low-rent resort cops would pull me aside if they came within feet of my breath or looked into my face.

  “He’ll give you something. You’ve got fifteen minutes to fetch the money from your hidey-hole and be in front of the arcade.”

  “I need... I need more time,” I said.

  “Fifteen minutes, starting now.”

  “Where ish- where is...?” I was stuttering into a dead phone.

  Candy-apple stand, my brain screamed: Go!

  I made for it, my steps ever more uncertain. I was blinking and lurching like a man crossing the Gobi. When the man behind the counter saw me approach, he didn’t say anything. He wiped his hands on his dirty apron tied at his waist and reached behind the counter. He pulled out a folded nylon duffel bag and held it out to me.

  “Take it,” he said.

  “Great fuckin’ plan here,” I slurred.

  I took the bag from his hand despite the fact he seemed to be holding it in three places at once. He looked at me with a panicky expression as if I were dangerous as well as drunk.

  I thought about finding a water faucet to douse my head. I slapped my face as hard as I could. People stopped walking by to gape or laugh at the drunk. I wanted to scream that I had to get sober fast, blurt that I was walking into a shit storm without a shield.

  I staggered toward the arcade, one foot in front of the other like a man learning how to walk on prosthetic legs. People’s faces swirled past, my nose was assaulted by honkey-tonk smells, and my stomach revolted at the county-fair smells of cotton candy and dough frying in grease. My burnt-out eyes couldn’t take in the bright colors, all jumbled together in the taffy blender that was my brain, so I focused on my walking. The traffic was blasting the air in the street with guitar riffs, stereo booms of rap that overwhelmed strains of twangy steel guitars and mournful country-western laments pouring out of the redneck bars I passed.

  Think, concentrate – I made it my mantra. I had to get away from the melee of the crowd, find Erieview, and get the money bags in time.

  Somehow my loop-legged canter took me to a restaurant off Times Square where the restrooms had stalls. I stood over a toilet and vomited, which simple act created a spell of giddy laughter; my hands had turned into claws that wouldn’t grasp anything.

  I slipped to the floor and banged my head against the side of the stall. I had an urge to urinate: everything in life is angles, I said to myself, thinking it sounded profound and hollow at the same time.

  Every thought became a rock that I had to push up a hill yet my pinwheel brain refused to obey. “I won’t fail you, Carlos,” I said to the stranger’s reflection in the mirror and stumbled out past several onlookers.

  My swollen eyes nearly got me killed crossing the street. I picked my way through a stream of cars, heard horns blasting in my direction, and found myself bent over the hood of a small car that stopped just in time before it sent my kneecaps into my thighs. Lucky for me then I had the drunk’s relaxed muscles and so was stunned, not hurt, but the ringing in my ears went up a few more decibels to screech level. The shocked face of the driver made me want to laugh, however. I was two minutes from Erieview. The sweat flew from my head and my clothes were soaked with perspiration.

  How I did it, I don’t know, but I managed to haul up the bags, nearly pulling up the camouflaging scrub with them, and despite a bearded occupant of the cottage looking out his window at me. The vomiting and sweating must have helped restore some calm to my brain. I transferred the cash into the black bag from the candy-apple man and headed for the arcade.

  I was a man on a mission, the duffel bag clutched in a death-grip, oblivious to the stares of the crowds and the distractions all around me. I beelined to the arcade, if you can call a drunken stagger a straight line. Two minutes late.

  Marija stood near the curb about ten feet from the arcade’s front door. She wore a dark sweat suit and had her hands in her pocket. Even drunk, waxed out of my mind with nerves, I still thrilled to the sight of her and cursed myself. Men, we’re all hopeless. Her face took me in at once. She drew out her walkie-talkie and spoke into it.

  I bumrushed past her with my shoulder and heard the padlock fly off. I saw the cut marks where it had been sawn through.

  “Just like home,” I said into the darkness.

  I couldn’t see anything yet. A voice hissed at me from the black.

  “Get away from the fucking doorway,” Calderone said. He seemed to be a long way off.

  “I can’t see you,” I said.

  At the end of the arcade, a beam of flashlight pinpointed the leg of a chair near the far wall. My heart raced faster than my brain. It was a long descent into the blackness. I hoisted the bags over my shoulder and headed for the light beam.

  When I was close enough to hear breathing in the dark, I said, “Carlos.”

  A light whipped out again. I saw legs and arms, a body wrapped in duct tape.

  “That better be money in those bags.”

  “That probably isn’t the dumbest question you’ve asked today,” I said.

  The beam of light poked at Carlos, whose face was bruised. His eyelids fluttered. He looked conscious but stoned. It could be fake.

  “Give me the bag,” he said.

  I stopped about ten feet from the voice. The bag dangled from my hand. I let it drop. It hit the floorboards with a smack and shook dust loose. The light beam found it and played over the bag while dust motes traveled in and out of the beam.

  “Bring it to me, Jack,” Calderone said.

  “Kiss my ass.”

  “You didn’t come this far to be stupid.”

  “I didn’t come here to die, either,” I said.

  “If I wanted you dead...”

  “...I’d be dead already. I’ve seen that film, Calderone.”

  The absence of light increased my vertigo and made my bravado seem dumber than it must have sounded in this surreal atmosphere. It felt like floating in black air.

  The old man’s voice penetrated through the booze fog: Control every situation as if your life depended on it.

  “How do I know my brother’s not dying?”

  “How do I know you didn’t bring your dirty laundry?”

  “Put your light on it,” I said. I bent down and unzipped it. I rooted around in it. I riffled a packet of fifties like a deck of cards.

  “OK, that’s enough. I’ll cut him loose.”

  He played the beam over Carlos’ arm, but I saw the glint of the knife he held in his other hand. I felt him moving in the darkness. I’d never get back to the door before he had me.

  His voice, a baritone shift to basso-profundo: “I’m going to gut you and wrap the end of your intestines around your neck.”

  I felt the hiss of the blade near me and I smelled Calderone.

  Marija’s voice crackled in the blackness: “Someone’s coming!”

  The light swung back and forth. I heard Calderone grunt as he stabbed the blackness searching for me.

  God knows why I took the time to do it, but I did. I bent low and swung my hand toward the floor in the place I had memorized where the straps of the duffel bag were when Calderone’s light shone on it. Heavy as it was, I swung it up toward my body in an arc at the same instant I felt a punch to my midsection
. The bag took the knife’s thrust, but the power of Calderone’s blow sent me backwards flying off my feet. I heard the flashlight skitter across the floor.

  He swore in a panic. He screamed at Marija, cursed, and I heard the blade hit the floorboards an inch from my head. His knee had me pinned to floor. I couldn’t move his weight and I knew the next blow would not miss. Instead, wanting a sure kill, he launched himself off my chest and went for the flashlight.

  My brain screamed at me to run for it. Anybody would have done that – but not anybody had the bizarre upbringing my brother and I had. I rolled five feet away and curled my body into a fetal position with my back to Calderone. I was completely sober at that moment and knew exactly what I was doing. Calderone’s hissed curses covered my slightest movements. And his light missed me every time; he thrust it this way and that, cursing violently as it poked a hole in the blackness and I wasn’t at the end of it. Seconds were stretched out into spaghetti lengths of time as if I had fallen into a black hole yet I was never more than a few feet from him every time he moved. Sarah had dragged me to the Cleveland ballet once and explained what a pas de deux was. In the bizarre way the mind has of doing its own thing, that was what I thought of as I rolled from side to side, listening to the knife stab the floor and Calderone huff from his exertions. I knew I had moments to live.

  Marija’s voice saved me. I heard her say “FBI” and “cops.” That must have broken through Calderone’s rage. By then, I was tucked against the wall and folded into as small a space as I could manage with my arms and legs tucked under me, the black duffel bag protecting my neck and head. Even with Marija’s hysterical voice warning him, he kept scouring the floor and walls seeking me out. Finally, mercifully, the torch’s sweeping arc ceased to probe. It pointed downward at the floor just about five feet from my exposed backside.

  Then Marija’s whispered hiss: “Coming inside!”

  Calderone was rooted to the floor listening as intently for footsteps coming toward him as I had listened for his.

  I saw my only chance.

  I uncurled my body, came up with the bag in two hands and swung it like a hammer thrower right at the point in the darkness where Calderone’s head had to be. The smack of connecting with his head, hearing the grunt, gave me a spurt of adrenalin to my legs and I was running straight for the back wall where the door was – that is, I was running for a spot I had tried to fix in my head as I lay prone waiting for the beam of light to find me. I had the duffel bag in front of me as a buffer in case I misjudged. The padlock, hacksawed through like the one out front, was nothing to stop my momentum. In fact, the entire door blew off its hasps and I was outside on my belly skidding across the gravel on top of the bag like a body surfer in the shallows.

  I scrambled to my feet and ran to the green dumpster. I swung the bag over the lip, heard the reverberating thunk of it hitting the bottom, and kept running.

  A man came drunk-walking down the sidewalk opposite me. I was terrified he was an undercover cop, but I didn’t slow; up close, he looked shabby like a tourist who’d had too much to drink and been rolled. He stopped to stare at me as I bore down on him and I saw the fearful look on his face.

  The rest is largely a blank. Bless you, Stevie, I thought. I do remember thanking her for the dumpster.

  I circled back to my cottage through back alleys and twisting paths.

  As I was putting the key into the lock, all the tension, joy, and fear were colliding in me in the aftermath of my escape, when the door opened of its own accord, and I knew then I was fucked.

  When I came to, I was on the floor in a different cabin and Randall Calderone was sitting in a chair talking calmly into a walkie-talkie. When he noticed me awake, he shifted in his chair just enough to plant his boot on my chin.

  “You know I’m going to kill you, right?” He said it without malice or pleasure, and as I was thinking that odd, his boot came down hard on the point of my chin and this time the blackness swallowed me whole. Daylight opened my eyes for me and I finally regurgitated all that was left of the alcohol and fear in my stomach.

  #18

  I managed to roll myself into an upright position. My hands and feet were laced together with a nylon cord.

  I coughed some of the rheumy phlegm up from the back of my throat.

  Calderone was oiling an automatic.

  “That for me?” I asked.

  He barely turned his head to acknowledge me.

  “Where’s my brother?”

  “Marija scored some shit. He’s zoned out.”

  “You mean a hot shot? Is he dead?”

  A sibilant hiss of static air came over his walkie-talkie. I leaned my back against the wall and tried to ease some of the pressure from my aching wrists.

  For a split-second, I was terrified Calderone had recovered the money. That was the only reason I was still alive.

  He was bare-chested and had a bottle of Jack Daniels on the table in front of him. Two glasses, one with lipstick stains on the rim. Besides the gun-cleaning equipment on the table, he had a Bowie knife and a cell phone. This cottage had Norman Rockwell prints. I didn’t know if we were close to my cottage or whether I had been moved while unconscious.

  Then it clicked: They couldn’t get near the money in that dumpster. Too many cops around...

  “You remind me of some guys in the joint,” Calderone said. His voice made me jump. I couldn’t imagine what my brother’s fear must have been like when he walked into his cell and found this psychopathic ape glaring at him. “The ones like you, Jack. The ones liked the sound of their own voices too much. I enjoyed breaking them up the most.”

  “Go get the money if you know where it is, Calderone.”

  “If you don’t want the yellow shit stomped out of you, you’ll be quiet now.”

  “Trying to be useful,” I said.

  “That FBI agent, the nigger that’s been hanging around you, he isn’t looking at the arcade,” Calderone said. “But Marija’s got cops all over her sweet little ass.”

  “I just want to get my brother and me out of this,” I said, but it came out of me like a squeak. I had no courage left. My father’s bag of tricks was all used up.

  “Who said you or your bro are getting out, fucker?” He gave me the wide-open grin up to his canines. It wasn’t comforting.

  I asked him for a drink of water and that merely earned a response to the effect that my front teeth would be kicked into my stomach if I repeated the request.

  Ten minutes later, Marija called on the cell. Calderone listened but said few words back. I gleaned this much: Rick reported his truck stolen and it was towed off.

  “Pippin thinks I can lead him to you,” I said. “You just made his job easier.”

  Calderone didn’t use his boot this time, but the backhand had some zest in it. I couldn’t wipe bloody drool off my chin. This wasn’t how it went in the movies.

  “Your FBI nigger,” he said, “he sees you walking around, what’s he gonna think?”

  “I kept my end of the deal,” I said. “What do you gain if you kill me?”

  “Satisfaction,” Randall said. “I like it. It gets me hard.”

  He got up, stood in front of me and rested his boot sole against my cheek and pressed my head backward into the wall until my face twisted into a grimace of pain.

  “Like that, Jack. I like that look.”

  He picked up the walkie-talkie from the table and spoke into it. I heard “choppers,” I assumed he meant helicopters, not false teeth or Harleys.

  Then, very clearly, indifferent to what I might learn, he barked into the phone: “Give him whatever the fuck you got, bitch. Who gives a shit now?”

  I knew Carlos was alive and he was with Marija, wherever that was.

  How long could nine-hundred thousand bucks sit in a dumpster before the FBI, the cops, Calderone or Marija – maybe even one of the resort’s dumpster-divers – found it?

  I saw the wolf grin appear on his face as he turned to check
on me.

  If you run with wolves, don’t trip. Another saying of the old man’s, another lesson I had failed to learn well until it was too late.

  Two weeks ago I had seen it coming apart at the seams, but it was in another house in a different county: Alicia Fox-Whitcomb’s house. Instead of being surrounded by her loving husband and daughter, she had three strange men holding her hostage, everyone waiting for the bank to open...

  Two weeks ago

  Monday, August 16

  3:03 a.m.

  “Bank Day”

  #19

  I woke in the middle of the night with my same nightmare: the hail pelting me senseless and every chip of ice drew blood. I leaked like a sieve and stumbled from one side of the road to the other. Then I discovered a shovel in my hand and started looking for a place to dig a shelter. I was alone.

  The hallway was black but there was a thin light beneath the door of the master bedroom at the end of the hallway. I walked toward it and looked in. I didn’t have to see him to smell him. Randall was asleep in there among the black formless shapes. I remembered how he had crept up on me that first time. I heard the sound of his deep breathing and relaxed.

  I leaned over the staircase and saw Alicia’s husband David slumped in his chair. Brandi, the daughter, and her boyfriend were nestled into each other as well as their handcuffs permitted. The boy used his body like a shield for hers. I saw her foot twitch in nervous sleep.

  I was a few steps from the boyfriend’s head when I saw him twist his neck to look up at me. He stared, confused at first, and then his pale features assumed the rigid look of hatred.

  Carlos had left sufficient light to see around the room but only enough to make it look from the outside like a house asleep for the night. I leaned farther over the banister and picked up the sound of his voice from the kitchen – an urgent sort of whispering, conspiratorial but something else, too, friendly like, as if two intimates of a household were stealing a few minutes together for a midnight snack or a close chat.