The Bad Kitty Lounge

by Michael Wiley

  When I’d visited before, Terrence had taken me up the back stairs and through his back-porch garden. Now I went to the front door and saw why he liked the back way. There was a hole where the doorknob should have been, and the rust and wear on the rest of the door said that no one had locked it for years. In the foyer, a dirty ceiling lamp gave just enough light to show two old metal chairs and walls that someone once had cared enough about to cover with flowered wallpaper. A narrow elevator waited for passengers with its door open, its floor about a half-foot higher than the lobby floor, its light off. I took the stairs. Gang graffiti covered the walls up to the first landing, then disappeared, though someone had spent sweet minutes with a girl named Janika on the second landing and had left a message on the wall explaining what they’d done in more detail than Janika probably would have liked.

  The graffiti stopped in the stairway up to the third landing. I knocked on Terrence’s door.

  No one answered.

  I knocked again.

  Maybe Terrence was out hustling and would return in the afternoon. But I’d called him four times since leaving him at the Stone Tower construction site and he’d never picked up. Anyway, a dead hooker with a bullet hole in her forehead and ashes in her mouth made me anxious to see my friend. I knocked a third time.

  No answer.

  I tried the doorknob. No luck. Terrence had three locks on his door, two of them Medecos—too good for me. I went to work on the lousy one. After a few minutes I felt the bolt slide into its housing. I tried the knob again and the door swung open.

  I grinned, though the two unbolted locks worried me enough to make me pull my Glock out of its holster.

  I stepped inside and called, “Terrence?”

  A noise came from the kitchen. I went toward it silently. The apartment was cold the way only the inside of an unheated building can be cold, colder than outside where the dim sun still shined.

  I came to the end of the hallway, leading with my gun, and stepped around a corner into the kitchen. A gray creature fluttered wildly into the air. I jumped back. It was a seagull.

  I shouted, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  It landed on the kitchen table and stared like it was wondering the same about me.

  The cold apartment made no sense. The seagull made no sense. I kept my finger on the trigger and stepped into the living room. Four seagulls stood on the floor. One held a long, thin strand of something that looked like uncooked beef fat in its beak. It peered at me as if I might take its lunch. Another gull pecked at something small and wet and white. The giant plate-glass window that had separated the living room from the back-porch garden was gone, shattered outward onto the wooden decking. Cold air blew into the room through the gap. I stepped out through the window frame. Spots of blood trailed over the broken glass to the outdoor stairs. I would need to follow those spots, but first I stepped back inside.

  Another gull flew through the room and landed at my feet like I might give it a fish. I kicked at it and it leaped into the air and fluttered out through the broken window.

  I went from the living room toward Terrence’s bedroom. I hoped I would find him sleeping, a pillow hugged over his head to muffle the knocking of a worried friend. I hoped the plate-glass window had been broken by someone dancing wildly during a late-night party. I hoped the blood on the wooden decking came from a seagull that had flown too close to the jagged glass that jutted from the window frame.

  But I knew better.

  I stepped into Terrence’s bedroom.

  I smelled him before I saw him—a sharp, salt odor of blood and urine. The giant man was lying on the floor next to his bed, his head by an open gun cabinet, a gaping hole in his belly. His gentle eyes were gone. Blood craters remained. A seagull stood on his chest and dunked a bloody beak into the hole in his belly. It tugged and came up with a strip of flesh. I yelled and ran at the bird. It flew onto Terrence’s bed, carrying the bloody flesh, dragging it over the bedcover, streaking the cotton red. It eyed me fearfully. It knew I was a thief. It cocked its head back and quivered as it drew the flesh into its gullet.

  I swung my gun at it and fired. The bird’s middle disappeared in a blaze of meat, blood, and feathers. The seagull’s head defied everything I thought I knew about the physical laws of the universe—it bounced toward me on the bed as the blast and roar of the gunshot filled the air and made the building shudder. The head came to a rest at the side of the bed, its eyes still open, staring at me accusingly, Terrence’s torn flesh edging from its beak.

  My body shook.

  I didn’t trust myself.

  I crammed my Glock back into its holster and sank to the floor next to Terrence.

  He was as big in death as he’d been in life. I could hardly believe that when he’d fallen the whole building hadn’t come down under him. His eye sockets stared at the ceiling like he was amazed by how far and hard he had fallen. I reached for him but stopped. His size could paralyze you, and that didn’t change now that he was dead. I closed my eyes and reached, put my fingers on the side of his neck. It was still warm—not as warm as the neck of a living man but warmer than the cold room. How long had he been dead? As far as I knew, a man his size might stay warm for days, like a cooling planet with a molten core.

  I fought to think clearly. What had happened here?

  The door to the gun cabinet was open, emptied of the arsenal I knew Terrence had kept in it. If I figured right, Terrence had been reaching for the cabinet when the killer entered the bedroom. He had spun and the killer had shot him in the stomach. The blood on the wooden decking outside the living room probably meant that Terrence had managed to get a gun out of the cabinet before being shot and had wounded the killer. But the killer was in good enough shape afterward to empty the cabinet and carry its contents out the back.

  I got myself standing and looked around the room. The window faced the empty parking lot and other apartment buildings beyond it. I walked around the bedroom, taking it all in. Terrence had a couple of small abstract nudes in frames over the head of the bed. The furniture was heavy, big, made of wood and steel. Two framed photographs stood on the dresser. One, fading, was of his younger brother, the brother shot by the cops. The other was of a woman with perfect black skin and tightly curled graying hair, cut so short you could see her scalp. Her irises were so dark they merged with her pupils. She had on a red turtleneck sweater. Terrence’s girlfriend, Darlene.

  In front of the dresser I picked up a small metal disk from the floor. It was as wide as a dime, but heavier. Its bottom was smooth and the dirty gray of lead. Its top was brass and, in the middle, a perfectly round edge formed a crater. It was a big-caliber slug. The hole in Terrence’s belly was a big-caliber hole.

  Stan Fleming would want to see the bullet. He might need it to catch whoever killed Terrence and the others.

  I held it to my nostrils. I touched it to my lips. I fought an impulse to put it on my tongue and swallow it. I put it in my pocket.

  The dresser drawers held clothes, nothing else. The table next to the bed had magazines. I went to the closet. More of the big man’s clothes hung on the bars.

  There were four boxes on a closet shelf. I lifted them. Two had gloves, hats, boots, and winter clothes. The others had high school football trophies, a diploma, and old photographs. I put the boxes back on the shelf, stumbled out of the closet, and sat on Terrence’s bed. The seagull head shifted on the mattress. I opened my hand to swipe it away, then lowered my arm and left it there. I looked at Terrence’s body and he seemed to recede from me.

  I needed a drink. I needed to rest on a stool in a bar that smelled of old whiskey and wood. I needed to go away. The destination didn’t matter. It was the trip itself, the leaving behind.

  I got up and walked into the living room, wondering if I should fight the urge or drive to one of the places I knew that poured a tall shot and tolerated you when you got beyond reason. But I never got to choose. I stopped hard.

  David
Stone was standing in the living room. He held a large caliber pistol. It was pointed at my belly.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  HE LOOKED AS SURPRISED to see me as I was to see him. “What the hell are you doing here?” he said. Like I was a seagull in the kitchen.

  I stared at him. “I’ve been asking myself that a lot lately.” I took a step toward the front hall.

  He moved between me and the hallway and wiggled the gun barrel at my belly. “What the hell are you doing?”

  I looked at him up and down. The band on his ponytail had come off and his hair hung wild. But if Terrence had shot him and the blood on the wooden decking was his, he didn’t show it. He had no obvious holes in him.

  “No,” I said, “what the hell are you doing? My friend’s lying dead in his room and I’m going to take a wild guess—if I sniff the barrel of your gun, I’ll smell cordite. And there’s a dead hooker lying in her bed about a mile from here and I’ll bet you killed her, too. A nun and a priest are in the morgue and, who knows, maybe if we poke around your car and your house we’ll find a thing or two that links you to them. What am I doing? Who cares what the hell I’m doing! What are you doing?”

  His face went ashen and he stepped backward as if my crazy, angry words were blunt weapons and I was swinging them at him. I stepped toward him and reached for my Glock. But he held his gun toward me, his hand shaking, and fired. The shot went past me and tore a hole in the wall. The sound of it almost knocked me over.

  I stopped and panted.

  He stared at me wide eyed as if I had the gun and was shooting it.

  “Okay,” I said, calmer. “What now?”

  He needed a moment to think about that. “Your gun.” He caressed the trigger of his pistol with his finger.

  I nodded but said, “Last time I reached for it, you shot at me.”

  He thought some more. “Take off your jacket. Slow.”

  I opened my jacket, exposing the gun, and started to slide off the sleeves.

  “Stop,” he said.

  I did, and he came to me and removed my gun from the holster. My sleeves cuffed my hands behind me. Unless I kicked his knees or bit him, he had me. He backed away with my gun, and I slid my jacket onto my arms again.

  He gestured at Terrence’s bedroom. “In there.”

  “You going to shoot me, too?”

  He pointed his gun at my belly. I walked into Terrence’s room.

  He came in and glanced around like he’d left something behind. He saw the remains of the bird I’d shot, spread across the top of the bed—feathers and blood, an intact wing, and two orange feet. “What the fuck?”

  “A seagull.”

  He gave me a look.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  He must have figured that he didn’t because he went back to looking around the room. He went to the gun cabinet and peered inside. He retraced the search I’d made, though he didn’t bother with the closet and he never glanced at Terrence. Whatever he was looking for, he didn’t find.

  “Need help?”

  He gestured toward the door. “Out.”

  He marched us around the apartment, looking for something that didn’t seem to be there. In the kitchen the seagull stood on the table. Stone pointed his gun at it but it stared at him blankly and he left it alone.

  “Okay, let’s go,” he said, and he steered me back into the living room toward the broken window.

  It was cold out there. I shook my head. “I’ve had enough. If you want to put the gun away and tell me your sad story about why killing four people wasn’t your fault, I’m curious to hear it. If not, you can leave on your own. I’m tired—”

  He lowered his gun and shot at the floor and this time the shot was no mistake. A five-inch hole splintered the wood in front of my feet. The blast of the gunshot roared through the apartment.

  Sweat broke inside my shirt and between my legs. “What kind of noise does it take around here before the neighbors call the cops?”

  He raised the gun and pointed it at my chest. “You ready now?”

  “Let’s go,” I said. I stepped through the window frame into the freezing air.

  I went lightly, quietly, afraid I might make him pull the trigger again. But then my cell phone rang inside my jacket. I raised my hands, half expecting the noise would make Stone shoot me in the back.

  “You want me to answer?” I said.

  He thought some more. “Give it to me.”

  I gave him the phone. He looked at the display. “Lucinda?”

  “My partner,” I said.

  He dropped the phone on the deck and ground it to pieces with his heel. “Not anymore.”

  He directed me down the stairs past the cases of bottles and the bicycles and tricycles. The spots of blood continued all the way down. At the bottom of the stairway, Stone’s silver Mercedes was parked in the trash-filled alley.

  “You drive,” he said.

  I slid into the driver’s seat and he got in beside me and stuck his gun in my ribs.

  The car crunched over beer cans and cardboard boxes in the alley. I swung it onto the street and drove past the McDonald’s. My Skylark sat in the parking lot and I wished I was in it. If I left it long enough, maybe the seagulls would finish eating scraps of Filet-O-Fish and French fries and devour it, too, rust and all.

  “Where to?” I asked again.

  “The Dan Ryan. South.”

  “Did Terrence wound you before you shot him?”

  He looked at me hard.

  “I don’t want you bleeding to death,” I said. “Not in your car. Not on this fine leather upholstery—”

  “Would you shut the fuck up?”

  “Sure,” I said, and I drove onto the Dan Ryan and headed south out of the city. I merged into thickening traffic, swung two lanes to the left, and accelerated. If the speed worried Stone, he didn’t show it. “So how is Greg Samuelson trying to take Stone Tower from you?”

  Stone shoved his gun harder into my ribs. I took a hand from the wheel and pulled the barrel away from a rib bone. “Shooting me at eighty miles an hour would be bad for both of us.”

  He put pressure on my ribs again but let me breathe.

  “Samuelson’s definitely trying to play you. When he went to your mother’s house after he walked out of the hospital, he wanted to confront you—he wag going after something big, big enough he was willing to risk his life again after you’d shot him. He could’ve killed you if he’d wanted to. He could’ve killed everyone at the table. But that would have ended the game right there, and no one would’ve won. I figure he wanted money—big money. The kind of money only rich guys like you usually see.

  “You know what I don’t get, though? What’s with Samuelson’s wife and your brother? Why’s she screwing him if Greg is about to take his money? And why’s he screwing her if her husband’s extorting you? You got any ideas?”

  “I’ve got the idea that I wish you’d shut up.”

  “Yeah, you said. But who knows? Maybe it’s love. Stranger things have happened—”

  I grabbed the barrel of his gun and shoved it toward him and up. With my other hand, I cut the wheel, and swung the car across two lanes, then back. The trick almost worked. His body bounced off the passenger-side door and if he’d squeezed the trigger, he would have made himself a sunroof. But he reached into his waistband and came up with my Glock and pointed it at my head.

  I let go of his gun.

  He said, “Don’t do that again or I’ll shoot you, eighty miles an hour or stopped.”

  I forced a smile. “Fair enough.”

  “And shut the fuck up.”

  I nodded. We drove for a while quietly. Overhead signs said the expressway would split into the Dan Ryan to the south and the Skyway toward Indiana and the southeast.

  “The Skyway,” Stone said.

  I nodded again. “So you made two mistakes.”

  He growled, “Shut up.”

  “Right. When you shoot a man in the head, sho
ot him in the brain. A jaw shot will make him ugly, but it won’t kill him. You needed Greg Samuelson dead. That’s your first mistake. Your second mistake was the priest, not that it could be helped. You needed to search Judy Terrano’s room, and there he was, poking around. Did you find what you were looking for? I don’t think so. If you’d found it, all of this probably would have stopped and you wouldn’t have killed Louise Johnson or Terrence, and I wouldn’t be driving your car—which, by the way, handles beautifully—”

  “If you grab again, I’ll shoot you.”

  “I don’t want the gun. I want to know what you were looking for in Judy Terrano’s room. And why you killed her to begin with. What did she know that threatened you? Something about the fire at the Bad Kitty Lounge? What did she have?”

  “You’ve got the ideas. You tell me.”

  I thought about it. “A photograph? You stripped Louise Johnson’s photos off her refrigerator and walls. So why not a photo? I don’t know what you were looking for in Terrence’s apartment but why not a photo in Judy Terrano’s?”

  “Sure,” Stone said. “Why not?”

  “It would have to be a pretty good photo for you to kill four people—a photo that would get you in a lot of trouble.”

  “It would,” Stone agreed.

  He watched my face like I was becoming more interesting to him but he hated me all the same. A sign on the shoulder of the highway advertised an Indiana Welcome Center a mile ahead, just outside the city limits.

  I said, “Not a photo.”

  “No?”

  “No photo is worth four lives.”

  “How much are four lives worth?”

  “Depends on whose. Your life, about ten bucks. Mine, about twice that on a good day. Most people’s, a whole lot more. I figure you were looking for a document of some kind.” I thought about the folder of titles and deeds that I’d seen at Stone Tower and that Terrence was reading when I last saw him alive. “Something that tells what really happened at the Bad Kitty Lounge.”