Applaud the Hollow Ghost

by David J. Walker

  We each took a swallow of Pepsi. I looked at Lammy for a while and Lammy looked everywhere but at me. Finally, though, he gave up and looked right into my eyes. “Uh, what’s your plan?”

  “First, we go get a pizza. After that,” and I couldn’t help smiling, “what the hell, maybe something’ll turn up.”

  Lammy smiled, too, just briefly.

  “Aha!” I said. “That’s number two!”

  He didn’t answer, and he didn’t look as though he knew I was talking about the smile.

  CHAPTER

  30

  JASON JOINED US. I’D spotted him down the hall when I put the paper bag full of rotten whatever-it-was outside the door, and was surprised and happy to see that he’d taken the bag and disposed of it. We went for pizza and I allowed myself one beer and then switched to coffee. Lammy ordered a beer, too, although he didn’t seem to enjoy it much and I wondered if it was a first and if I was starting him down the road to ruin. Jason seemed to have become very health-conscious and washed down his pizza with nothing but bottled water as he regaled Lammy with detailed replays of his own twenty-five or thirty greatest moments in sports. That was fine with me. I had plenty to think about.

  When we dropped Jason off at his dorm he made a major point of how welcome Lammy was to come back. “Any time, man,” he insisted. “Any time.” Jason was so relieved to see us leave that he was able to make it sound as though he really meant it.

  Once out on the open road, I showed Lammy how to make the seat recline and he was dead asleep before he had time to close his eyes. I wasn’t sure he even knew he was supposed to have been in court earlier that afternoon. I hadn’t mentioned it, but told him only that Renata and I would do everything we could to see that he didn’t go back to jail. He hadn’t asked any more about my plan of action. Maybe he suspected I didn’t have one, and didn’t want to hear that. My guess, though, was he was as relieved as Jason was that I’d come and gotten him.

  “I don’t wanna go home,” he’d repeated several times, “but I guess I have to.” Socially backward he might be, but Lammy had enough sense to know that he couldn’t hide out forever.

  Two and a half hours after we left Madison, and were approaching Oak Brook, I reached for the phone Barney Green’s man had left in the Voyager. It was past midnight and Casey, who was staying on at Lammy’s place, would be asleep. Still, he’d want to know I’d found Lammy, so I tapped out the number.

  No answer.

  I hit the disconnect button and tried again, taking care with the numbers. I counted twenty rings. Then five more.

  No answer.

  When I set the phone down I caught the speedometer moving quickly toward ninety miles an hour, and forced myself to ease up on the gas. I couldn’t keep it below seventy, though. Lucky I didn’t get stopped.

  When we arrived back at my motel, I dragged a groggy Lammy out of the minivan and walked him to the room. I tried Casey again.

  Still no answer.

  “Maybe the phone’s turned off,” Lammy said.

  “Yeah, that must be it,” I said. “Anyway, I have to go out for a while.” I left him a room key and very careful instructions about answering the door and telephone. “The room’s paid up until noon. If I’m not back by then, use your credit card and pay for two more days.”

  “Uh-uh,” he said, “I can’t. ’Cause how will I pay the bill when—” He saw the look on my face and realized he better shut up.

  Then I went to see why Casey didn’t answer the phone.

  * * *

  IF THERE WERE COPS, or anyone else, watching Lammy’s block and waiting for me to check on Casey, I couldn’t spot them. There were a couple of lights on at the Connolly house and, in the next block, lights at Dominic’s place as well. That might have been significant, at that hour in the morning. But then, nearly every block in that working-class neighborhood had at least one home showing a light in a window. Someone sitting up with a sick child, maybe, or struggling with insomnia; someone winding down from working a late shift, or gearing up to work an early one.

  Lammy’s place, the two-flat far from the streetlights at either end of the block, was as bleak and dark as my own suspicions. I’d made a point of reminding Casey to leave the porch lights on all night, front and rear. But they were out. With Lammy away, maybe he thought the lights were unnecessary. Or maybe he forgot. Or maybe some other innocent reason or two. But none of them was convincing, given the splotched remains of about three dozen eggs that had been smashed against the front of the two-flat. Even in the dim light, the splayed, frozen splatters were visible, mostly on and around the second-floor windows.

  What about Gus’s promise that Lammy would be left alone till the case was over?

  I parked a block away to the west and returned on foot through the alley. It was cold. The starless sky was heavy with low clouds that absorbed enough urban glow to turn them a dull gray, but illuminated nothing below. The alley light closest to Lammy’s backyard was out. That happens. People support whole families replacing burned-out pole lights around the city, so …

  Besides, the missing light made it less likely I’d be seen going in through the door—the unlocked door—at the bottom of the enclosed rear porch. Down half a flight the basement door was locked, as was the back door to the first-floor apartment.

  I climbed cautiously up the dark stairs, straining for sounds from above, but there was nothing. Lammy’s kitchen door was right at the top of the stairs on the second-floor landing. When I got up there I stood perfectly still for a moment, staring. The four-paned window in the door was broken out, mullions and all, just a few shards of glass still hanging in place—and the door to the dark kitchen stood just slightly ajar. I moved forward, bending low to keep my head beneath window level.

  With the Beretta in my right hand now, I crouched, left shoulder close to the door. I slipped my left hand through the narrow opening and found the light switch I knew to be just inside. I waited, listening, fingers motionless on the switch. There were the softest of muffled sounds from beyond the door. Short, snuffled breaths, maybe. Or the rustle of clothing.

  Or maybe there weren’t any sounds at all beyond my own imagination and the pounding in my chest. I could crouch outside that pitch-dark kitchen and wait forever to find out. Or I could withdraw my hand, and turn and creep away.

  But I flicked the switch, flooding the room with light, and nudged the door with my shoulder. I pushed harder than I intended, and the door slammed against the countertop behind it and the rest of the window glass broke free and fell on the counter and the floor. By the time the rebound of the door brought it halfway closed again, I’d gotten a glimpse inside. Breathing hard, my back pressed to the brick wall, I stayed out on the porch, out of sight of the wide-eyed man in the kitchen … and of anyone else in there that I hadn’t seen.

  A thousand years of seconds ticked by. Nothing happened.

  Still keeping low, I peered around the doorjamb and into the kitchen. There was still nobody in sight but Casey, no noise of anyone rushing down the hall toward the kitchen. I stepped inside. Casey was tied with clothesline to one of the white wooden chairs. His ankles were lashed to the chair legs and there were coils of rope wrapped around his midsection and chest, binding him with his hands behind the chair back. His mouth was covered with duct tape, wrapped completely around his head several times. He was alive, but clearly struggling to breathe through nostrils that must have been partially closed off by blood that had clotted inside, as it had clotted on the tape over his mouth and on the front of his white collarless shirt.

  He was far too big to be tied to that ordinary chair, so they’d kept him in place by pushing the back of the chair close to the refrigerator, putting a noose around his neck, and looping the rope around the refrigerator, then knotting it to the handle of the freezer compartment. The skin around his neck was raw, showing old, caked blood, and fresh blood as well, from the rubbing of the rope.

  “Is there anyone else here,” I as
ked, my voice a harsh whisper.

  He shook his head as well as he could, but that seemed to tighten the noose. His eyes swung crazily in a clear attempt to tell me something I couldn’t understand. I dropped the Beretta in my pocket and yanked open drawer after drawer, looking for a sharp knife to cut the rope that dug so deeply into his neck that I thought it might be cutting off his air.

  I finally found a scissors and went to work on the rope just beyond the slip knot at the back of his neck. The scissors were dull and Casey was no help, constantly twisting his neck, squirming around and trying to wrestle his arms free. I told him to sit still, but he didn’t. His eyes were wild with pain and fear.

  “Damn it, Casey!” I finally yelled, my voice too angry, far louder than I wanted, as though he were to blame. “Sit still!”

  He stopped struggling abruptly, and there was apology—maybe even humiliation—in his eyes. But still the fear, also. I sawed away with the scissors until the rope finally frayed, then snapped.

  Even after I loosened the rope around his neck he struggled, trying to breathe. Maybe what he’d wanted to tell me was to get his mouth free first. Still using the scissors, I went to work on the duct tape, hacking away at the back of his neck; where I was less likely to slash his skin.

  When I’d cut it through I set the scissors on the counter and got a firm grip on one end of the tape with my right hand. “Sorry about this,” I said, and holding his head still with my left hand, I tore off the tape, bringing hair and tiny bits of skin with it.

  He sucked in air hard and fast through his mouth, and blew it out again, over and over—like a boxer between rounds, too winded to talk, staring down at the floor.

  “It’s okay, Casey. It’s okay now.” I stood right in front of him, one hand on each of his shoulders, and tried to calm him down. “You’ll be fine now.”

  He lifted his head and the fear was leaving his eyes. I knew he was trying to say thank-you, only the words wouldn’t come out.

  “Give it some time,” I said. “Don’t try talking yet. You—”

  His head jerked suddenly backward. “Waaash out,” he rasped, and a new, hopeless terror sprang up in his eyes.

  Then a massive arm locked itself around my neck, squeezed tightly, and pulled the top half of my body backward, against the knee in the small of my back.

  For the briefest of instants I may have blacked out—shock maybe—but then rage at my own stupidity snapped my mind alert. In my relief at getting Casey free, I’d absolutely forgotten what I was doing, where I was.

  I struggled against being bent backward and clawed at the arm around my neck with my left hand, slamming my right elbow backward, trying to reach the man’s gut, but accomplishing nothing. I instinctively reached out for the counter beside me for balance, and my hand landed right on the scissors. I grabbed and held them like a knife and slashed backward, hard, over and over, slicing at anything I could reach. When I finally found flesh, I drove the scissors deeper, twisting and yanking them side to side.

  He screamed then, the man behind me, and let go of my neck. He pulled himself away and I lost my grip on the scissors. I turned and faced a man in a ski mask, standing six feet from me. I watched him reach down and pull the scissors out of the flesh of his inner thigh. Blood dripped from them, and he groaned when he saw it. Then he realized the weapon was in his hand now. He looked up at me and took a tiny step my way.

  “Hold it,” I said, and I held the Beretta aimed at his chest. But the sight of the gun made no difference to him. With the scissors waving wildly back and forth in front of him, he took another step.

  He kept coming at me … until I shot him.

  CHAPTER

  31

  I WAS BACK IN control of myself, so it wasn’t a killshot. It might not even have stopped him if it hadn’t been for the bleeding gash in his thigh. But the slug caught him in his left shoulder and seemed to wake him up, as though he remembered again that he was losing blood, and now had two sources of steadily mounting pain. Whatever the reason, he dropped the scissors on the floor, slumped into one of the kitchen chairs, and stared up at me.

  “Fuck you,” he said. “You’re a walking dead man.” The very phrase Gus had quoted.

  “Right,” I said, “and aren’t we all. The difference is, Dominic, I’m still walking.”

  “You just don’t know,” he answered. His gaze kept flitting around the room, but try as he might, he couldn’t keep it away from the open doorway to my right. “You just don’t—”

  “Quiet!” I whispered the order because I’d heard the sound, too. Someone had come in the front door of the apartment. Keeping the Beretta trained on Dominic, I stepped closer to the hallway and listened.

  No one was coming down the hall. I leaned closer to the doorway, and then heard sounds from the front of the apartment—strange, gurgling, sloshing sounds, as though someone were emptying bottles of water onto the floor. Then the smell hit me. It wasn’t water being poured out; it was gasoline.

  “… the sink. Drawer under the sink.” Casey was talking, but I hadn’t been hearing him. “Knife. Cut me loose.”

  “There’s no time,” I said. “We’ll be burned.” Shoving the gun back in my pocket, I grabbed Casey from behind by his arms, and dragged him—chair and all—across the kitchen toward the porch door.

  Dominic sat and watched, but lacked either the strength or the will to try to stop us. I got Casey over the door ledge onto the porch, and right to the top of the stairway. Then I realized I couldn’t drag him down the stairs or he’d topple over on me.

  “Cut me loose. Please cut me loose.” He kept saying that over and over, all the while twisting and wrestling around, panic-stricken at being unable to move his arms and legs.

  There was no sign of a fire yet, so I left him backed up to the stairway and returned to the kitchen for a knife. “I’ll be right back,” I said. “I promise.”

  Dominic wasn’t in the kitchen anymore.

  I ran to the open doorway and peered down the dark hall. Dominic was limping badly, but was almost to the other end already. More importantly, there was another man, also wearing a ski mask, coming my way, sloshing gasoline from a huge red can as he came. The fumes were overpowering and a gunshot might have sent us all up and out through the roof.

  I turned and ran to the sink and pulled open the drawer. There must have been five sharp-looking knives. I grabbed one and turned to see the man with the gas can burst into the kitchen. He came at me, lifting the can above his head. I swung the knife in a wide arc at his midsection, slicing through nothing but air. The gas can crashed down on the top of my head, and the world went away.

  * * *

  MY NEXT CONSCIOUS MOMENT found me sliding around on my knees, looking desperately for the knife in the dark. Then I realized I was alone in the kitchen, with the light turned off and gasoline everywhere. Still no fire, but there were voices from far away, at the front of the apartment. I struggled to my feet and went to the back door. The wooden door was soaked with gasoline, and it was closed—closed and locked from the inside with a key, and the key wasn’t there.

  I ran across the kitchen into the hallway, then all the way to the front door. It was open and when I got there I looked down the carpeted front stairway. The stairs took a right angle turn halfway down. I saw no one, but the odor of gas on the stairs was sickening. I made it to the landing hallway down in two jumps and saw the man in the ski mask with his back to me in the door at the bottom of the stairs. When he turned his head around he looked up at me and I stared back, frozen for an instant as he tossed a burning torch of newspaper up onto the stairs.

  I dove down the remaining steps even as the flames shot up toward me. I hit the bottom rolling and kept on going, out onto the front porch, down the steps, and into the snow. By the time I got to my feet the front entranceway of the two-flat was ablaze and flames were already showing through the second-floor windows.

  I swung around, looking for Dominic and Steve—because the se
cond man was Steve, for sure. They were halfway down the block, just getting into a car, the car Tina had driven. I ran that way, driven by instinct rather than sense, as though I could catch them or get their license plate number, as though that made some difference. Stupidly, I chased the departing car almost to the corner, but they were long gone and I turned back to the two-flat. The wail of fire sirens rose up in the distance. And only then did I remember.

  Casey, for God’s sake. Casey.

  One of the second floor windows exploded above me and flames shot out, as I pounded clumsily through the snow, across the front yard and into the gangway. By the time I got to the back of the building I could hear fire crackling on the upper part of the enclosed wooden porch. Steve must have spread gasoline out there, too, before he locked me in, and the fire had either burned through the kitchen door already, or gone up and through the broken window.

  I went through the door into the enclosure and made it up the steps as far as the first-floor apartment. Beyond that it was hopeless. The dry, aged wood made perfect kindling. Pieces of the roof were dropping down around me. I turned and went back down the steps and into the backyard. There was nothing left to do.

  Fire engines were arriving out front from the south. I went into the alley and headed north, forcing myself not to run.

  * * *

  I WANDERED AROUND FOR a while, telling myself I was looking for Casey, telling myself he must have gotten out somehow and might be freezing in the snow. And not really believing it. I don’t know why I wasn’t picked up by the cops, except there were other people on the street now, drawn by the fire and the excitement.

  I lost track of where I was, but eventually found myself on the corner diagonally across the intersection from Steve Connolly’s house. This was as close as I could safely get, mixed into a softly talking group of men and women, some carrying children on their shoulders, many with pajamas visible beneath their winter coats. It was a crowd that was constantly changing—some people getting cold, or bored, and turning away, but always replaced by others who arrived with the same excited curiosity about what was going on at the pervert’s house. I tried to stay within the crowd, and still not engage in any conversation.