TKO

by Tom Schreck

  I got within ten feet of the door and I found myself stopped in my tracks. My neck was twitching all over the place, but there was an invisible force keeping me from moving forward. My rage was there but I couldn’t move.

  I went back to the Eldorado and opened another beer. I held the cold can to my forehead and wiped the tears off my face with the back of my hand. I was shaking.

  I called Monique, who I knew would still be in the office late on a Friday afternoon. I gave her the background on Billy and Sofco.

  “Let it go,” she said.

  “I can’t let it happen again,” I said.

  “That’s not for you to decide.” Her voice remained in the same gentle but forceful tone. “This is a dynamic that will go on despite any beating you give this man, Duffy. There needs to be a change of permanence for Billy and his mom to make a difference,” she said.

  “I want so much to hurt this man.”

  “Is that about you or helping the Cramers?”

  She was right. She always was.

  I headed to the Hill to take care of some business that I would need to do to get this project done. There was a creep whose reputation I knew from the gym named “the Caretaker,” who the street kids talked about. He was really kind of a street broker who dealt in situations more than product, but if you needed something he either had it or knew where to get it. The rumors were that he did enough dealing to make a living but that he was obsessively careful not to rise above law enforcement’s radar screen.

  I only saw him once but I remembered him. He was a black man but he had that weird condition that Michael Jackson claims to have where patches of his skin become almost bleached white. Three-quarters of his face were blotched white and his kinky hair, which he wore tight to his scalp, was reddish. Strangely enough, he dressed like a preppy even though he did all his dealing deep in the ’hood.

  He had an office of sorts in the back room of a place that sold DJ tapes, and I knew enough about how it worked to know that I had to ask up front and give my name to get an audience with the Caretaker. I did just that with the black kid with the ridiculously baggy white jeans up front who did his best to look disinterested as he called on the phone. With a real economy of words and a head gesture he directed me to the back of the store to a curtain. I went back beyond the curtain to see the Caretaker.

  He was wearing one of those pink golf shirts with the guy riding the horse on it and a pair of neatly pressed khakis. Loafers with no socks filled out the outfit that made as much sense on this individual as Nell Carter in a thong.

  “How can I help you … Duffy … right? You’re the fighter,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s me. I need a gun and some heroin,” I said.

  “Hmmm … The devil’s right hand for the pug and some of the white vacation …”

  “I have something difficult to do and I’m going to need some help.”

  “Yes, apparently you do. How big of an army would you like?” The Bond-villain-speak was getting on my nerves.

  “Army?”

  “Caliber?”

  “Whatever, it doesn’t matter. I hate guns.”

  He rummaged through his desk and handed me a handgun.

  “Tres ocho por Señor. Now for the whiteness, I’m hoping you’re not looking for volume. The Sky Pilot has not landed this week.”

  “Sky Pilot?”

  “My … uh … distributor. He’s somewhat not of this earth.”

  “Yeah, a couple of bags would be fine.”

  I gave the Caretaker what he asked for and didn’t hang around for small talk. I had shit to do and frankly, the guy creeped me out with his looks, what he did, and his affected James Bond speak. I kept waiting for Dr. No and Pussy Galore to come around the corner and offer me a martini before they forced me into some sort of diabolical death machine. Still, you couldn’t accuse the Caretaker of being your run-of-the-mill ordinary Crawford citizen.

  I made a quick trip to AJ’s to get help from the guys and as usual, if the favor involved free drinks, they were up for it. I led them all out to the Insideout and they knew their job and they knew it well. When it came to getting bombed, no one, and I mean no one, did a finer job than the brain trust.

  I sat in the parking lot with another Schlitz and felt uneasy in the presence of the gun. Having a few bags of heroin on me didn’t sit quite right either but I was definitely going to need it. Elvis was halfway through “How Great Thou Art” and I was finishing off the six-pack. I got out of the Eldorado and went over to the red pickup.

  Sofco may have been a real asshole, but his timing was impeccable. He came out of the bar just as I was through and he passed me as I walked back to the Cadillac. He was staggering a bit—two hours with the Fearsome Foursome on a mission would do that to anyone. I started up the Eldorado after I made the call and let Sofco get a fifteen-minute start on me. Hopefully, that’s all it would take.

  I eased out of the parking lot and headed down Route 55, which headed toward Crawford and the side of town Billy lived on. The twitch in my neck let me know that Sofco wasn’t going to make it there tonight.

  I was only driving for about ten minutes when I saw the flashing lights and the Crawford police cruiser. The number on the back of the car, 9261TS, told me it was officer Mike Kelley. The handcuffed Sofco told me he blew the wrong numbers into the breathalyzer. And the fact that officer Kelley was looking in the glove box told me that Billy and his mom would be safe tonight.

  You see, two-time felons, guilty of DWI, with an illegal handgun and heroin in their possession don’t make bail.

  26

  Al must’ve sensed the twitching in my neck and my elevated blood pressure because he went extra nuts when I came through the door. I got him his sustenance and cracked open another can of sustenance for myself.

  My hands were shaking and I wasn’t sure if it was my flirtation with the underworld, the illegal shit I did that could’ve caused me a world of trouble, or the fact that I just set up a man to go to prison for a long time. It might have been that stuff or it might have been the fact that I didn’t get to beat the shit out of Sofco.

  Or it might have had more to do with me being away from the gym. Since I took up karate at age eleven, I haven’t gone two weeks without sparring or fighting someone. I’ve had a handful of street scraps, not very many, but I always had the outlet between the ropes. My self-imposed avoidance of the gym left me with a gap, and that gap was sending adrenaline, anger, or Schlitz-induced rage through my veins. Maybe it was all much simpler. Maybe I just wanted to beat the shit out of a bad guy.

  Al calmed down and I went through the mail. Six credit card companies were offering me their business, there was the cable bill and a solicitation from the Polish American Club, and there was a letter from the office, which I opened. It read:

  This is to provide you with written notification from Jewish Unified Services that we intend to terminate your employment on September 2. You will have until that time to appeal this termination.

  It was signed by the Michelin Woman, and it finally seemed like she had won. The hardest part for me to accept was the fact that I had made it easy for her. Sure, I could appeal, but that was a futile formality that would just serve to further embarrass and demean me, and that was a pleasure I didn’t want to give Claudia.

  It had been a hell of a month.

  I hit the button on the machine to see who had called and I had three messages. The first was a recorded sales message about aluminum siding, which I found particularly absurd considering I lived in a steel tube. The next message was from Marcia.

  “Hi Duff, I just wanted to let you know that I’ve met someone new and very special, and even though my therapist thinks it’s too soon for me to get involved, I really feel something special for this man. I just knew you’d be happy for me. Take care.”


  That really was special.

  The third call was from Dr. Pacquoa.

  “Duffy, I called an old colleague about our days in the prison. The graduate student who disappeared shortly after the deaths was named Victor Gunner, and he was in the doctoral program at the University at Albany. No one knows what happened to him since. Don’t know if this helps. Thank you.”

  Hmmm … that felt like something important, though I wasn’t completely sure how or why. Suffice to say, between the evening’s events and the Schlitz I wasn’t firing on all cognitive cylinders at this point. Of course, it was nice to hear that Marcia had found somebody special. Geez.

  I was drifting off on the couch when the phone rang. It was Kelley and it was now close to one in the morning.

  “You up?” Kelley said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “You’re drunk, aren’t you?”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “Hey, this DWI you tipped me off to. The Foursome tells me that you gave them cash and drove them out to the Insideout to drink with him.”

  “Yeah, so.”

  “So, bullshit. Those four leave AJ’s every time there’s an eclipse. What’s up?”

  “The guy’s abusive to a goofy kid I’m teaching karate to.”

  Kelley paused. He didn’t know anything about me and Billy.

  “The kid you teach karate to … let’s just leave that alone for a second. You knew this guy had a record of DWIs and drug possession.”

  “Yeah, you told me that, remember?”

  “So you get him drunk on the outside of town and call me when he’s on the road?”

  “Yep.”

  “I probably don’t want to know if his claim that the gun and the drugs weren’t his is true, do I?”

  “Uh, Kell, the guy was regularly beating the kid and his mom.”

  “You’re fuckin’ nuts, you know that, don’t you?”

  “Yeah—tell me something I don’t know.”

  I hung up and the next morning I woke up on the couch with my head using Al as a pillow. I was hungover but otherwise I slept pretty well.

  27

  According to the University at Albany, Victor Gunner graduated and got his license to practice psychiatry in 1997. There was no mention of his abrupt departure from the prison internship, and after he got his MD he went to a medical center in Seattle in 1998, then to a prison in North Dakota in 2000, then to a hospital in Mississippi in 2002, and then finally to another hospital in Wisconsin. Then it appeared he left the country. They didn’t have any further information than that on him.

  When I Googled his name on Rudy’s computer, nothing came up. I checked into some serial-killer websites and was disturbed at the shear number of them available. Some of them were straight reference sites but others were like fan clubs for the murderers. Slashanddie.com had a listing of unsolved creepy murders by state and I checked in to the places Gunner had been to. In 1998 there were three murders of teenagers in Seattle in which the victims were drained of blood. In Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 2002 there were four slayings that involved the disfiguring of the corpses and sexual mutilation of teenagers, two male and two female. In Natchez, Mississippi, they found a teenager’s headless body drained of blood, and she had been sexually assaulted. There were four other teenagers murdered by puncture wounds who had lost significant amounts of blood.

  A blood-drained, female, teenaged body was found in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, in 2003, and another was found in Waco, Texas, in 2005. The website didn’t speculate on whether any of these slayings were related. In fact, they listed blood drainings and decapitations as categories like they were hardware products or groceries. It’s a strange world.

  The one section that did catch my eye featured pages of pages of copycat murders. There were at least eleven separate slayings that mimicked Manson’s work, complete with bloody messages written on walls, women with shaved heads, and weird devotion to the Beatles. Jeffrey Dahmer had some fans too, with eight different murders since his arrest in which the victim’s body parts were left in acid to decompose. Even that age-old favorite Jack the Ripper had scores of fans doing whatever they could to be like Jack. All of a sudden I felt pretty comfortable with my idolization of Elvis Presley.

  I called the three medical centers in an effort to find out about this Dr. Gunner and asked their human resource departments for information. I claimed to be from a local college where Dr. Gunner had applied to teach. I did my best to sound like a disinterested human resource worker going through a formality. In both cases they gave the standard information that he was employed on such and such dates and that he was eligible for rehire. They wouldn’t give me anything else.

  From there, I checked the New York State Department of Health registry and there was no record of a Dr. Victor Gunner at all. Ol’ sawbones Gunner had either died or quit the doctoring business and disappeared. Somehow Gunner was able to vanish from the face of the earth.

  The stress of living and the stress of metabolizing Schlitz was getting to me. I needed to work out but I wasn’t quite ready to box. I wasn’t ready to see Smitty and the idea of preparing for a bout just kind of gave me a sick feeling in my gut. Still, it would be good to blow off some steam, so I decided to head to the Y to lift some weights. Weight training wasn’t my favorite, but over the years I mixed it in, especially when I was training to fight a heavier boxer who I’d need to push off me. It wasn’t the same release, but it was a place to channel some of my frustration.

  Mostly, I didn’t go into the Y weight room because the bodybuilders and the power lifters got on my nerves. Sure, they could push enormous amounts of weight, but they couldn’t do anything useful with their bodies. They would do their bench presses and then they’d look in the mirror and scowl at the other people in the gym like they were tough. The thing was they weren’t tough and they couldn’t fight—they had huge muscles but those muscles were specifically trained to lift a bar, not throw a punch.

  Every now and then one of these guys would drift into the boxing room and announce that he wanted to become a fighter. Then sooner or later he’d get in the ring and get his ass kicked by someone with a far less impressive body and you wouldn’t ever see him again. I took special joy in smacking around a guy who could bench press a refrigerator.

  I headed to the corner of the weight room by one of the alcoves and brought some thirty-five-pound dumbbells with me. When I lifted I went for high reps with relatively little weight. This way I built some muscle endurance, which would help my boxing, when and if I ever got back to it. On the opposite side of the gym were four huge guys taking turns working on the bench and they were making a lot of noise, grunting and growling.

  It was kind of like a bad car wreck in that I didn’t want to stare but I couldn’t help it. Luckily, my trance was shaken when I heard a familiar voice.

  “Yo Duff, salaam alaikum,” Jamal said.

  “Hey, J, what’s up?”

  “You know, trying not to get too fat in retirement,” Jamal said. It was about the silliest thing he could say. Jamal had the body fat of an Olympic sprinter.

  “Hey, shouldn’t you be down with the bags?” he said.

  “Taking a break.”

  “Sorry about that last one. It happens.”

  “Yeah. Hey, how’s the high-school gig working out?” Jamal was currently a hall monitor and assistant football coach at McDonough.

  “This weird shit with Rheinhart has made the adolescent years even more fucked up than usual.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, you got your kids who are panicked—that you could count on. You got your macho types sayin’ they’re gonna find Howard and fuck him up. But the strangest shit is the Howard fan club.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “There’
s a group who dress all in black—what’s the word they used for them crazy-ass Columbine motherfuckers? Disenfranchised? They got suspended for wearing pro-Howard T-shirts. This, while their classmates are getting murdered.”

  “Holy shit …”

  “Yeah, holy shit is right.”

  “Are the cops looking at them?”

  “I hope so.” Our conversation was interrupted by the four bovine weightlifters. They were grunting and groaning so loud that you couldn’t hear yourself think.

  “Ah, the juiceheads are here,” Jamal said.

  “Juiceheads?”

  “You know, on the shit. You don’t get that big from taking vitamin E, you know.” Jamal smiled. “Look at the jaw bone, the acne, and the foreheads bigger than a billboard. That ain’t powdered protein doing that.”

  “Really? What the hell would these guys be doing that shit for—just to look good?”

  “There you go, Duff. Ain’t no more complicated than that.”

  “How hard is that shit to get?”

  “You thinking it would help you in the ring?”

  “Shit, no, I’m just curious.”

  “You don’t have to go any farther than up those stairs to the karate room. The dragon brothers are taking care of everyone at the Y.”

  “No shit …” Now Al’s parking lot behavior made sense.

  “Oh yeah, no small market for it these days either,” Jamal said.

  Well, there was another reason to hate Mitchell and Harter.

  After a less than satisfying workout with the weights, I headed to AJ’s. Elvis made the ride easier with the 1960 post-army hit “Such a Night,” a tune originally recorded by Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters. It was one of the best swing numbers ever recorded, and an Elvis song you seldom hear on the radio. Besides that, anytime I could work the name “Clyde McPhatter” into a conversation, I did.