by C I Dennis
Marcus caught me in the hallway as I tried to make my way out of the hospital without passing out.
“You sneaky son of a bitch,” he said.
“It’s been nice knowing you, Marcus,” I said. “Gotta run.”
“Where are you going?”
“To get my computer. Then...home I guess.”
“You are going to hurt like hell in a couple hours,” he said. “Wait here.” He went down the hall and came back in a few moments. He handed me a small white envelope. “There’s two Vicodins in there just to keep you alive until you get a prescription. Don’t tell anyone or I get fired.”
“Thanks.” I wobbled down the hall and found an elevator. Ten minutes later I was out in front of the hospital looking like I’d fallen down a coal shaft. My shirt was filthy, and there were drops of dried blood across the front of it. The cab was waiting, and the driver tossed his cigarette butt into a banana shrub when he saw me.
“Dude, you sure you’re OK to leave this place?” he asked.
“You know where there’s a Seven Eleven on East Davis?”
“Yeah. Five minutes from here, max. You need help getting in?”
“I’ll manage,” I said, and I got into the back seat as he put the flag down on the meter.
*
There were a couple of cars at the Seven Eleven, but it was Sunday and it was hot, so people were either at the beach or in their houses in front of the air conditioning. We parked next to a dumpster and waited for a few minutes until a kid wearing a backpack rode into the lot on his bike. I waved him over. He looked about Roberto’s age, and was skinny, with spiked, reddish hair and a pasty complexion. Even though I wasn’t feeling any pain, I was madder than hell when I thought of him and his friends swiping the laptop out of my wrecked car while I hung upside down in the seat belt. He propped his bike on a kickstand and walked over as I lowered the window. My driver must have sensed something was up, and he excused himself and got out of the car for a smoke.
“Let’s see it,” I said. The kid handed me the laptop through the window. I opened it up and turned it on. There were my programs, including the trackers and the listening bugs. It was mine all right.
“Where’s the money, mister?” he said. “You said you had cash.”
“You’re out of luck, kid,” I answered. “This is my computer. So fuck off.”
He pulled an automatic out of his backpack and aimed it at me, through the rolled-down window. It was a Raven .25, a cheap piece of crap that would just as likely blow up in your hand as kill somebody. But it was still a gun.
“Hold on there,” I said. “I have the money.” I got out of the car, slowly. He backed away, but still held the gun close—too close—and I snatched it and twisted his arm behind his back. The boy screamed, and two guys who were at the pumps getting gas turned to look at us. I picked the kid up off his feet and held him over my head, then tossed him into an empty dumpster. He screamed again as he hit the metal floor. I got his bike and threw it in on top of him, and then I lobbed the gun up onto the high canopy over the gas pumps. The two guys who were filling up their cars stared at me, open-mouthed.
“New sheriff in town,” I said to them.
My driver stubbed out his cigarette as I walked back to the cab.
“How much to drive me to Vero Beach?” I said.
He thought about it. “Two hundred plus the gas?” he asked.
“You got it,” I said. “I have to stop at my hotel first.”
“You ain’t gonna stiff me, too, are you?”
“No. They allow you to do a long trip like that?”
“My shift ends in an hour. I keep the cab at my house on Sundays, and I got a way to roll the odometer back. So we’re cool,” he said.
“Christ,” I said. “I think I’m in the middle of a crime wave.” I settled in the back of the cab and we turned toward the Best Western. Old Smoky began to chatter about the Bucs, the weather and so on, but I was sleepy and not paying attention. I knew I would be paying for my punk-tossing episode when the drugs wore off.
*
I gathered my stuff from the hotel room and checked out. The blonde woman who’d flirted with me was behind the front desk again. She did a double take at my appearance.
“You all right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Y’all didn’t stay in your room last night, did you?”
“No ma’am,” I said.
“I bet you’re wishin’ you did now.” She batted her heavily mascaraed eyelashes. “I wouldn’t have left no marks on you, neither.”
She blew me a kiss on the way out. Too bad I felt like I’d been crushed under a rock, or I might have reciprocated.
*
We stopped at the Tampa P.D. building downtown, and I negotiated with the desk sergeant to get my shotgun back. I showed him on the web where the Florida gun regs were, and he got a tape measure and measured the barrel. He finally handed it over with no apologies, just a dirty look like I was going to do bad things with it and he would regret this. I was just glad to have it back; it’s kind of a talisman, and is my weapon of last resort.
I wanted to sleep, but my driver wanted to talk. It was nice being chauffeured, although Old Smoky didn’t exactly look like the chauffeur-type. He wore a grey ponytail and mirrored aviator glasses, and the interior of the car was decorated with POW-MIA stickers with green, yellow, and red stripes. The cab stank of smoke. I asked him a rhetorical question.
“You serve in Vietnam?”
“One-Oh-One Airborne, 1969.”
“That rings a bell,” I said.
“Hill 937. They called it “Hamburger Hill.” The North Vietnamese had a whole regiment up there. I watched our guys die for ten days.”
“We won that battle though, right?”
“Yeah, if you call it winning,” he said.
“You know anything about PTSD?” I asked.
“I’m living it, mister,” he said. “I don’t sleep. That’s why I drive a cab. They’ll let me drive eighteen hours when they’re short-handed, and that suits me fine.”
“Do you get any treatment?”
“Yeah, I go to the VA, there’s a big one in Tampa,” he said. “But I been so many times they pretty much gave up. They just want to give you drugs. I’d rather wake up with the cold sweats now and then than live my whole life fucked up on downers.”
“Have you ever heard of a kind of PTSD where a guy thinks he’s two people? He even sets up two houses, two wives, everything?”
“Yeah, I heard of that, I think I read about it one time. I don’t know if it’s PTSD though. I used to go to a group where we sat around and told each other how fucked up we all were, as if that was supposed to help. There were some guys there who were pretty psycho, and there were some guys who acted completely normal, but who knows what was in their head. Personally I think you are who you are, and being in a war is only going to make it worse.”
I looked out the window at the steamy central Florida landscape. We were getting close to Lake Wales, and I’d be home in a little over an hour. My chest was starting to hurt a lot, and I had the driver pull over at a store so I could get some water to wash down the two Vicodins that Marcus had given me. I slumped in the back seat and waited while he finished his unfiltered Camel. I had a lot on my mind and there were many things I could be doing, but my primary ambition was to get into my own bed.
*
Smoky woke me up when we got to Vero, and I directed him to my house. The Vicodins weren’t doing the job; every breath was painful. I paid him off and sent him on his way, then took my gear into the house, stripped, and got into the shower. There were bruises on my left arm that would soon start turning colors, and a band of bruises across my chest where the seatbelt had been. I couldn’t raise the soap any higher than my stomach without feeling like someone was knifing me in the chest. I toweled off and made a mental list of what I absolutely had to do before I could go to bed. I decided I really only needed two things
; some food, and more drugs. If I didn’t have some more of the Vicodin on hand soon, I wouldn’t be getting any sleep. I had plenty of drugstore pain medicine in the house, but I needed something that was industrial strength.
I called Tampa General and got nowhere. Marcus was off his shift, and his replacement convinced me that there was no way I could get a prescription until Monday. She said that even then it was dubious, since I’d checked myself out. She recommended I try a twenty-four-hour clinic in Vero, or the emergency room at the hospital.
I dressed in a clean shirt and trousers and eased myself carefully into Glory’s BMW. It’s a low-slung car, and I wondered, once I got in, if I’d be able to get back out. There was an all-night clinic on the Miracle Mile, and I made it there despite a little Vicodin-induced weaving. If I was still a cop, I would have pulled myself over and administered a breathalyzer.
After two hours in the waiting room filling out my life story in my wobbly handwriting, I realized why they called it a twenty-four-hour clinic; because it takes twenty-four hours to actually see somebody besides the receptionist. I was pretty sure you could wander in there with an amputated leg and they would tell you to hop over to one of the orange plastic chairs and please not bleed on it while you wrote down your insurance information. The room was full of sick and injured people, and according to the receptionist I was in the middle of the queue, and she couldn’t tell me for sure when I could see someone. I didn’t know if I was going to live that long. I walked back outside into the heat and dialed a number on my phone.
“Sonny, it’s Vince Tanzi.”
“Dude,” he said, “It wasn’t me, man, I got an alibi.” Sonny was Myra the dispatcher’s half-brother and had been one of Vero’s biggest cocaine dealers when I had been a cop. He’d done time twice, and as far as I knew he’d retired, because the third time you get busted for coke in Florida they tend to put you away for keeps. He lived on 28th Avenue in Gifford, which a generation ago they called the “colored” section of Vero Beach, and back in the day there had been of steady stream of white kids in their parents’ Volvos visiting his place. Cocaine was a white drug; they had the money. Most of the African American and Latino kids had to settle for crack, which was cheaper and far more lethal, although there were plenty of white kids who had overdosed on crack too. It was an equal opportunity killer.
“You’re off the hook, Sonny,” I said. “But I want your help.”
“What?” he said.
“I need some pain meds. I got banged up, and nobody will give me a prescription.”
“Whoa,” he said. “You got a wire on you or something?”
“No,” I said. “I’m serious, and this is personal. A favor.”
He laughed. “Come on over, man. I’ll fix you up.”
I re-inserted myself slowly into the Beemer and drove north on Highway 1, then turned west onto 45th Street and crossed Old Dixie Highway and the railroad tracks. Gifford didn’t have much industry left; there was a citrus trucking depot, a middle school, several hundred modest homes, a few stores, some bars and some churches; the neighborhood was slowly being squeezed out of existence by higher-priced housing developments. I would miss it when it was gone; I’d spent a lot of time there when I was with the Sheriff’s office, and I knew most of the residents. It had all the problems that come with poverty, but the people looked out for each other, which was something you didn’t always see in the gated enclaves over on the barrier island where many Gifford residents worked as the help.
A kid on a motorcycle was leaving Sonny’s driveway as I pulled in—part of the supply chain, I figured. Sonny had two pit bulls who greeted me as I walked to the door. They seemed to remember who I was from before, when I’d occasionally visited their owner for professional rather than personal reasons. I didn’t have any dog treats, and once they realized I was empty-handed they trotted off to the shade. Sonny answered the door and showed me in. He was watching the Bucs play a team up North, and he had a beer open.
“You look like shit, man,” he said.
“Gee, thanks,” I said.
“I got you some goods. Fifty OxyContins. These are the forty-milligram ones, so you can take two at a time. Don’t take more than six a day, and don’t chew them. Just swallow them whole, or they will fuck you up good.”
“You should have been a pharmacist, Sonny.”
“A pharmacist would stop you at two a day. And he’d only give you ten of them, and when you ran out you’d have to get on your knees and beg for more. This shit is more addictive than any of the stuff I used to deal.”
“Trust the big pharma companies to perfect the dope business.”
“You got that right,” he said. I took out my wallet. “Vince, no way, man. Put it away. Now you owe me,” he said, smiling. “I like that.”
*
I popped two of the pills, hoping that they would mix OK with the Vicodins I’d taken in the taxi. It was only a few miles to my house, and I figured I had plenty of time to get there before the effect of the drug kicked in. I passed through the middle of town and decided to stop at the Publix for some groceries as I was starting to feel a hell of a lot better. In fact, I felt great.
I was in the store for almost an hour, and I filled my cart with gourmet cheeses, several kinds of crackers, potato chips, beer nuts, salsa, French onion dip, Easy Cheese, kettle corn, a giant bag of Cheetos, and a frozen lasagna. I decided against getting any beer or wine; my off-the-books prescription was mellowing me out just fine. I smiled at the very pretty girl at the register, and she scowled back. I picked out a bouquet of Alstroemeria flowers near the checkout, thinking it would be a great idea to drop them off for Lilian, Roberto’s mother.
I loaded the groceries into the trunk of the BMW and drove out of town to Roberto’s with no problem at all. The car and I were one. I was a young buck again, and life was as fresh and sweet as sorghum syrup. I pulled into Roberto’s driveway and almost bounded out of the car, flowers in hand.
Gustavo greeted me at the door, looking puzzled.
“Is Lilian home?” I asked. My tongue felt funny, like it had been coated in wax.
“Come in. I’ll get her,” he said. I waited in their entry hall with the flowers, wearing my most charming smile. I hadn’t realized what a spectacular house they had. Everything was so nice and neat, and I wished I had a woman like Lilian to take care of me. Or Glory. Or Barbara. It was a little confusing. I was having some trouble focusing my eyes.
Lilian came around the corner with a rolled up newspaper in her hand, and for a moment I wondered if she was going to swat me like a bad dog. I held out the bouquet and leaned over to kiss her. She recoiled as if she’d been tasered.
“Anybody want a drink?” I said, my words echoing in the hall. Lilian, Gustavo, and now Roberto watched as I began to teeter like a Loblolly pine, just before the second chainsaw cut meets the first one. I reeled sideways into a brass urn full of umbrellas, and knocked a bowl of potpourri off a side table before I hit the floor, chest first, crushing the flowers.
MONDAY
My bedroom faces the east, and whoever had gotten me onto my bed had left the blinds open. The heat woke me up. The pain followed, and as I turned my head to look at the clock I felt the three Roman senators plunging their daggers into my chest. Eight AM. It was twelve hours since I’d trashed Roberto’s foyer and they’d driven me home. I dimly remembered a lot of protesting, shouting and the three of them half-carrying me from their car into my house. Roberto knew the alarm code, so at least we didn’t alert the whole neighborhood. I was fully clothed, on top of the covers, which had been at my insistence. If I was in deep shit with Lilian before, I was snorkeling at the waste treatment plant now.
I found the pills in the pocket of my trousers and swallowed two of them. I lay quietly on the bed to let the drug kick in, and then I made my way carefully down the stairs and got some OJ from the fridge. My groceries from the day before were stocked and put away, and I noticed the BMW was in the driveway; Gus
tavo and Lilian must have driven it back.
The message light on the phone was blinking, and I pressed the playback button.
“Vinny, it’s me.” It was Frank Velutto. “Hey, we got a call from Tampa P.D., they were checking you out. I told them you were legit. Listen...I need to come over. I want to ask you something. Call me when you get in.”
Frank could wait. The drug was already working its magic and I could breathe again, although I didn’t feel as invulnerable as I had when I’d been at the Publix. I fetched two days’ worth of the Press Journal from the driveway and caught up on the local news while sipping coffee and eating some granola with fruit. The OxyContin was so effective I forgot all about going back to bed, and I made another mental list. For starters, I wanted to know more about the money. Thirty million was a lot more than any orange broker or vending company owner could stash away. If I could get in touch with Roberto, I’d see if he had found anything on Empex Import/Export LLC. Money leaves a trail; some of the biggest busts I’d made as a cop were courtesy of a tip-off by a friendly banker or a CPA. Sometimes it was in banks and sometimes in bills—I’d dug up more money in back yards than most people had in their 401Ks.
I also wanted to call Dr. Doug. Doug Leyburn was a psychiatrist I’d met when he’d given courtroom testimony in a case I worked on. I knew that there were veterans among his clientele, and I wanted to try out my PTSD theory. He had an office over by the Indian River Medical Center, and I would have to call first and hope to get lucky—he was a busy man, but we’d hit it off when he had been in court. He had also treated Glory when she’d had a rough patch a couple years back. She’d never explained what was bothering her, it was one of those things that was off limits and I’d let it go because she seemed better after a few sessions and stopped going.
I had to call the auto insurance company and take my lumps. I wondered how much I’d lose on that deal. I was thinking I should just pick one of the two remaining white SHOs on the lot and pretend like I’d never totaled the first one, but that sounded like the OxyContin talking. I’d stick with the BMW for the time being.