The Price

by Joseph Garraty

  She walked across the room and sat.

  “Jimmy,” she said. “I was hoping you wouldn’t end up here.”

  “Could be worse.”

  “Yeah. Could be the morgue.”

  I shrugged. “What are you doing here, Kit? It’s late.”

  She stifled a yawn. “Remember the deal? You won’t talk to the feds, but you said you’d talk to me. Well, here I am.”

  “And what do the feds—excuse me, you—want this fine evening?”

  “They—we—want Frankie Lazzaro.”

  “You’re welcome to him. Got nothin’ to do with me.”

  Kit put her elbows on the table and leaned toward me. “You gotta give him to us.”

  I said nothing.

  “Frankie Lazzaro is a mad dog,” Kit said. “We want him off the street, and we think we could put him away for at least a few years for aggravated assault, if not something worse, but everybody who was in the club tonight seems to have come down with amnesia. Somebody’s gotta testify, Jimmy.”

  I gave the two-way mirror a pointed look, then looked back at Kit. Can’t talk about that here. She got the message.

  “Come on,” she said.

  I followed her into the hall, wondering vaguely how things had gotten so fucked up. It hadn’t been all that long ago that we were just a couple of kids from the neighborhood. How on earth had we gotten here from there? My whole life seemed like a protracted dream. I’d wake up any minute to find myself on the couch, ten years old, with a late-night infomercial blaring from the TV. If only I were so lucky. I’d make some different choices the next time around, that’s for sure.

  Kit commandeered an office and shut the door behind us.

  “Well?” she asked.

  I thought hard. I was probably going to get out of this mess. But what then? More of the same. More war, more violence. And, yeah, more of Lazzaro’s insanity loosed on the streets. More of Kelsen’s bullshit. More guys like Stiff, bleeding out from gunshot wounds, and more guys like that poor fucker at the other club, the guy the dog ate. I wasn’t looking to get out, not really, but the thought of waking up from this dream, of starting over, had an almost hypnotic allure. After all, did I really want a whole lifetime of this?

  I spoke very cautiously. “How would it work?”

  Kit’s eyes widened, and I understood that she hadn’t thought there was a prayer of me testifying. Well, maybe there was and maybe not. Depended what she had to say. I didn’t have to commit to anything.

  “You’d testify. Nothing complicated—just verify that Lazzaro was at the club, and talk about the things he did tonight. He goes to jail, you go into witness protection.” She smiled ruefully. “You’ll have to work with the feds on that. Sorry. I’ll help where I can. You get to start over, Jimmy. Forget all this junk and start over.”

  I thought about it. Maybe Kit was right. I could get away from Benedict, the Slob, Lazzaro—the whole fucked-up lifestyle. They’d come after me if they could. Witness protection might be able to cover the mundane stuff, but Benedict would try to track me down using rather more arcane methods. That worried me a little, but I knew a few things now, and given his piss-poor luck with Kelsen, I thought there was a good chance I could keep him from finding me, too.

  Clean slate.

  Kit’s face had slipped out of cop mode, and she was looking at me with a strange softness in her eyes.

  There is no straight for guys like us, Benedict had said. Maybe he was right. I could feel the magic calling to me, and I didn’t know how to deny that call forever . . . but that didn’t matter, I realized. Benedict couldn’t teach me anything new. Maybe I could go straight, and maybe not, but the magic was mine if I wanted it, and Benedict couldn’t help me even if I let him.

  “Let me think about it,” I said.

  Kit smiled and squeezed my shoulder. “Great,” she said. Then she took me back to my cell.

  * * *

  I stayed up most of the night trying to think over the sound of drunks yelling at each other. There was a lot to consider, but I thought, on balance, if I could get my folks out of harm’s way, it might be worth it. We could all start over. It would hit Dad the hardest. He’d built his little business up over twenty years of sweating and slaving, and it would sting like mad to abandon it. But if witness protection would get me out of the mob and get my folks out of a section of town that seemed to have crosshairs painted on it, maybe it would be worth it.

  I’d have to talk to Kit some, get more of the details, but if there were no ugly surprises, I thought I might just go for it.

  Benedict’s lawyer came for me in the morning, and I gotta say, her performance was masterly. I figured we’d get put in front of a judge and I’d have to make bail, and then we’d get out of there and figure out how to beat the charges later, but I hadn’t reckoned on the awesome wiles of a Mafia lawyer. I don’t know who she talked to, or what hell she raised, but by the time she was done, there weren’t even any charges to beat. I hadn’t fired a gun—I had not, in fact, even had a gun on me—and I hadn’t laid a finger on anyone. Stiff was the only one of us who’d put a bullet in anyone, and he was dead. None of the witnesses would say a word, and, as I’d suspected, the police couldn’t even put me in the club at the time all the shit went down. Even Lazzaro, who was in somewhat deeper shit than I was, hadn’t talked.

  I was a free man. I shook hands with the attorney on the police department steps, grinning like I’d just won the lottery.

  “Nice work. I can’t thank you enough.”

  She shrugged. I swear, that woman’s face was made out of plastic—I hadn’t seen a genuine expression on her in the hour or so I’d known her. “All part of the service.”

  “Well, I’ll make sure they throw you a few extra bones anyway.”

  She nodded, and then she was off down the stairs. I inhaled the cool Boston air, still grinning. It was good to be alive, good to be on the other side of those bars. I thought it might be just as good to be on the other side of the mob, and I resolved to give Kit a call later. We had a lot to talk about.

  “Oh, Jimmy, I’m so sorry.”

  I turned, confused by the sudden sound of Kit’s voice. She stood a few steps up, her face crinkled in grief. Not real, bone-deep grief, though—vicarious grief. Grief on somebody else’s behalf, a knife scratch compared to the sickening agony when the knife was plunged into your own heart.

  I grabbed the metal handrail to keep the world from knocking me down.

  “Oh, Jimmy,” she said again.

  Chapter 15. Hospital

  Kit drove me to the hospital herself, a gesture I would have appreciated more if we hadn’t taken her squad car. I’d had enough of police cars to last me a lifetime. She went inside with me, too, and guided me through the labyrinthine hallways of pastel linoleum and hideous wall art like a pro. Hell was a hospital, I thought with part of my mind that had come detached and floated about eight feet behind me, all motion and emotion dampened as though that part of me were tethered to my body by an elastic string. Hell was a hospital with harsh blue-white lighting that exaggerated the pores on the passionless faces of tired nurses that ran to and fro, alleviating suffering or prolonging it, postponing the inevitable or hastening it, depending on how good you’d been in life. A hospital with a thousand sensory inputs—the scent of alcohol and antiseptic, machines that beeped or whirred, sporadic announcements in garbled voices over the PA, muted conversations about life and death and misery couched in impenetrable jargon as though the grim facts could be muffled if the words were confusing enough. If you paid attention to even half, it would surely drive you mad.

  We stopped outside the burn ward. Kit said she’d wait there. A nurse made me put on a smock and mask, gloves and a cap in ghastly hospital blue-green. They had a horror of infection in the burn ward, with good reason.

  I paused in front of the curtain outside the room, not at all sure I wanted to see what was inside. There was no escaping it, though.

  I slipp
ed through. The curtain barely rippled.

  My first thought was That’s not my dad. That could be anybody. But Ma wouldn’t be sitting next to just anybody, so the white-swathed lump in the bed must have been my father. All I could see were his eyelids, closed in slumber or drug-induced stupor. Below the medical smell lurked a stench I’d grown horribly familiar with.

  Ma turned her head toward me. I expected, if not tears, at least the sort of quiet sorrow she’d carried after her father died, so the dry-eyed look of hate on her face hit me like a tire iron between the eyes. She seemed to take up half the room, and I stepped back to give her space.

  “You did this, Jimmy,” she said.

  A strangled, mangled non-word fell out of my mouth, part denial, part agreement. The ceiling seemed too low, and Ma was way too big. There was no space in this room, none at all.

  “Who?” she said—repeated—and I understood that’s what she’d asked the first time. Who did this, Jimmy?

  Who? Maybe the fire was an accident, I thought. Electrical fire. Ma left the iron plugged in. Did I really know anything about this? I remembered the way Kelsen had pointed at me, though, the way he’d marked me. No way this was a coincidence. “Gangsters,” I said. “Russians.”

  She turned her body in her chair, and I saw the sling cradling her left arm. No cast, just bandages—also a burn, then. She didn’t seem to notice it. “This is what we paid for? This is what we gave up our son for?”

  “Ma, you didn’t—” A slight narrowing of her eyes cut me off. That’s all it took. Some tough guy.

  “They can keep their protection.”

  My hands hung useless at my sides, twitching like the feet of a hanged man. “I—Ma . . . I’ll make this right, Ma. I swear.”

  “Look at your father,” she said. “Look at him and tell me, big shot. How are you going to make this right?”

  As she said it, I realized I hadn’t even been looking at Dad. I’d been trying to find somewhere to hide from the galaxy-spanning presence of my mother, trying to maintain some kind of cohesion in the face of her flesh-stripping cosmic wind. Even now, I couldn’t seem to look past her to where Dad lay on the bed.

  “I’ll find who did it,” I said. “I’ll find them, and I’ll make them pay.”

  “That will be a great comfort to your father.”

  Now, as though she’d released me, I could look. I did. It could have been anybody in there, I thought again. Did that make it better or worse?

  “Is he going to be okay?” I asked, my voice small. Even as I said it, I knew it was too good an opening for Ma to pass up. When she wanted to cut, she cut deep.

  “Define ‘okay.’”

  The scorn—the hatred—in her voice was at last too much for me to handle. She didn’t want me here and Dad, well, Dad was in no position to care.

  I backed up to the curtain. “I’m gonna go.”

  Ma’s face trembled, vibrating like she was about to explode. “Go,” she whispered, and I knew if she allowed herself to say any more than that, it would all come, detonating a bomb that would wipe our fragile relationship from the Earth without leaving a speck.

  I fled.

  The curtain closed behind me, and I tore off the smock as I walked. I left it on the floor like the crumpled body of a hit-and-run victim. A nurse stepped out to complain and then stepped back after looking at me. I threw the cap on the floor. Past the nurses’ station, one glove hit the ground, then another. Lastly, the mask.

  Kit met me outside the ward. Concern flooded her eyes, and she put her hand on my shoulder. I kept walking, and she fell in next to me.

  “How bad is it?” I asked without meeting her eyes. “Is he gonna wake up?”

  “Yeah. He was burned pretty bad, but he’s just sleeping. He’ll live.” I didn’t think to ask how she knew.

  “What happened?”

  “We don’t know. The whole building went up, and the ones on either side. It burned very quickly.”

  I bet it did. I felt my pulse hammering in my temples, and I thought of the cool rage my mother harnessed so effortlessly. I needed to do that, needed to put a saddle and bridle on my own wild anger and ride it straight over Kelsen and anyone in my way. Ride it straight into Hell, if necessary.

  “Are you going to be all right, Jimmy?”

  “Yeah.”

  I said nothing else as she escorted me from the building.

  “You need a ride?”

  “No. I need to walk.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Hey, about what we discussed—”

  “Don’t talk to me about that. Not now.”

  I felt her fingertips on my elbow. “Okay. Not now. Later, though?”

  I couldn’t look at her. If I looked at her, she’d see the murder in my eyes for certain. “Yeah,” I lied. “Later.”

  “Call me if you need anything, even if it’s just to talk.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and I walked away.

  It was only as I left that I thought of Ma’s trembling face, and in the treacherous light of memory it seemed weirdly like maybe she hadn’t been going to explode. Maybe she’d been about to cry.

  * * *

  I shouldn’t have been on the street alone. That’s what Benedict would have said, anyway, and most likely the others, too. Fuck them, I thought. I hoped the Russians would find me. I’d explode their bullets in their guns, I’d burn them down to tallow and ash, and if it meant a scorched-earth war on my own soul, so be it.

  Cold air gnawed at me, stinging my face and stiffening the joints of my fingers. The wind blew directly into my face, and I walked faster into it, daring it to do its worst. “C’mon, you fucker!” I shouted. “Is that all you got? Is that it?” A woman in a minivan stared at me as she drove past. “You got a problem?” I yelled after her, though there was no way she could have heard.

  I walked still faster.

  My eyes leaked warm tears down my cheeks and my fingers were frozen by the time I got to the burned-out remains of the shop. Three of the four outside walls, built of brick, still stood, but the front had collapsed inward when the fire incinerated the building’s guts. The front door and window had been obliterated, the red “Pecatti’s Meats” signs smashed, the fragments covered in char.

  I looked at the wreckage, and I had a horrible thought. This little shop had been Dad’s life. Why was he burned head-to-toe, while Ma was barely singed? My mind played out a hideous movie, Dad standing in the burning wreckage, unwilling to leave while the flames climbed higher around him. It couldn’t be true—nobody would do that—but it seemed so real for a moment that I could imagine I saw him in the wind-whipped column of ash rising from the mess.

  I shook my head. Again, I shouldn’t be here. If Kelsen or any of the other Russians were smart, they’d be hanging around here somewhere, waiting for me to show up. Right then, a sudden bullet in the skull didn’t sound so bad, as long as it was quick, but I doubted they’d go that easy on me if they caught me.

  More walking. More confusion, twisting my insides. I wanted to break faces, smash heads. I wanted to lie down in the middle of the road and wait for a semi to come along. I wanted to burn everything, to call forth every demon from Hell, and I wanted to scour every memory of magic from my mind. Did this ever get better? Did anything ever get better, or was it all a slow spiral down, ending in the grave or, worse, never ending at all?

  I walked past the corner store, past the cracker-box houses. Ahead of me stood the church. The church where I’d spent hundreds of Sundays, looking for guidance or hope that never came. Eleven o’clock Mass was already under way, and I felt pulled toward the entrance, a soap bubble circling the bathtub drain. God, if there was ever any hope to be had, I needed it then.

  I paused with my hand on the door. How long had it been since I’d set foot in here? I’d done a lot of bad things since then. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to go in, or maybe crossing the threshold would burn me out, fry my brain to smoking goo.

  Either way, what did it matter?r />
  I opened the door and went in. There was no resistance, no lightning bolt from the sky. I didn’t even feel uncomfortable. I took a pew in the back, watching and listening. As usual, the little cathedral was half empty, even on Sunday morning, even in a neighborhood that was almost entirely Irish and Italian. As I listened to the priest, I could see why. This “turn the other cheek” and “the meek will inherit the earth” shit made these people poor and kept them that way. What hope was there in turning the other cheek when the meanest motherfucker on the block would pound his fist through your face and take what he wanted? My old man had been nothing but meek, he’d turned and kept turning after that, and what had it gotten him? A constantly increasing street tax and the occasional severe beating when he came up short. A business on the brink of ruin. Eventually, burning agony.

  Rage swelled in me until I thought it must burst from my chest like a volcanic eruption. For the first time, I understood the significance of the crucifix on the far wall. Christ hung there because he’d accepted the rule of the guy with the bigger gun. Like my old man, he’d turned the other cheek and kept right on turning, and at the end he’d let himself get nailed to the cross to set an example for all his sheep. Let the powerful grind you down was his message. Let them stomp your face in the dirt, let them crack your bones and burn your homes and starve you to death and send your children to war, and you just keep on giving unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and one day the meek will inherit. That day might be a long way off, son, but that’s how it goes. That was his message to his flock, and I knew his eyes were closed so he could better ignore their suffering.

  Fuck that, I thought as the congregation stood for another hymn. The Mafia had taught me that, if a man smite you on the right cheek, you knock his fucking block off. If somebody didn’t respect you, by God, you made him respect you. It was the law of the ever-fucking jungle, and while that wasn’t what we’d been taught growing up, it was the goddamn truth, and it beat the hell out of offering yourself up as a doormat for anyone with a crowbar, a bad attitude, and the willingness to do things you wouldn’t.