The Death & Life of Red Henley

by Philip Wilding

  ‘It was something my father used to say,’ said Walker. ‘Life was just a series of ceaseless revolutions leading to a certain death. Say what you like about my old man, but he was a realist, he knew when the curtain was coming down.’

  ‘Though you still felt the need to help him with that,’ said Green.

  ‘You think he was happy in that hospital bed?’ said Walker. ‘He was more a maze of tubes than he was a man by that point. It was a mercy that he died when he did.’

  ‘A mercy?’ Green was incredulous, appalled. ‘Is that how you see yourself, as a power for good? You’re a man who’s used to the world revolving around you, you can’t imagine a universe where someone might question or second-guess you, might is always right …’

  ‘This from you,’ said Walker, suddenly vehement. ‘I’ve watched you work, I’ve watched you strong-arm suspects, you might not get people by the neck anymore, now what, that you’re sated, that you’re clean, that you’ve resolved to be a better man?’ He spat on the floor between them.

  ‘You spend your time intimidating people, standing over them, bending them to your will, you’re as much a bully as me, it’s just that you’re a cop, it doesn’t matter who you break to get what you want, to go where you want to go, you’ve got the law on your side.’

  The late September sunshine made a faint fan of milky light across the uneven concrete floor.

  ‘Christ, you don’t even know the difference between right and wrong,’ said Green; both their voices were raised now. ‘I obey the letter of the law, you just break it, you destroy lives, crush people, I bring people like you to their knees …’

  Walker was shouting: ‘To their knees? Listen to your language, it’s the language of violence, it’s the language of a man who’s out of control!’

  He’d later see the irony in that moment, but it was when Green snapped: rushing forward and grabbing Walker by the throat, he began repeatedly slamming his head against the edge of the drinks cabinet.

  ‘What did you do to Red?’ Blood flooded into his skull, black stars popped into life at the corners of his eyes, he felt hot, I’m literally hot-headed, he thought almost whimsically, strangely pleased with himself. Walker was screaming and then he hit Green across the face with the heavy glass tumbler. Green fell backwards, and felt hands grab him, but he still swung a fist and connected with something, he heard a gasp, someone said fucking cop, but Green was close to happy, he was loath to admit it to himself, but he felt at peace among violence, he sometimes wondered if he’d chosen to be a cop as he knew he’d find himself in harm’s way one day and it was where he wanted to be.

  ‘Stop!’ barked Walker, and just as quickly as the roaring violence had begun it quietened again. He was pulled into a chair; one of Walker’s men laid a hand on his shoulder, pressing him down into place.

  Walker and his other men had moved across to the pool table, Walker was idly chalking a cue. Then, behind them, Green’s eyes picked out the seated figure he’d spotted earlier; he hadn’t moved all this time. A delighted Walker followed Green’s gaze.

  ‘Oh, you’ve not met our other guest, this is Mr Moon.’ Walker stepped back with a flourish like a magician revealing his greatest illusion yet. There, strapped into a wooden chair, was Moon, barefoot and bloody, hands and arms taped to the chair, one eye grotesquely swollen. The right side of his face was almost flattened, pushed down by some horrific force. He looked like he was pressed up against glass, thought Green, and wondered how long he had left to live. He doubted the man even knew he was in this room, which was probably some kind of blessing. Better to be ignorant of the hell he was living in now.

  Walker leaned over the table and took his shot, a ball hitting the rut in the baize and veering awkwardly towards the cushion.

  ‘Fuck …’ said Walker, and then in one seamless, almost graceful move he took the heavy end of the cue and brought it quickly around, crashing it into Moon’s jaw. Moon’s face made a sound like someone stepping on the shell of a snail. He didn’t even gasp or shout, his head swung wildly sidewards, but the heavy chair held him upright. Green realised he wouldn’t even recognise the man from a photograph now.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Green said, but that wasn’t the detective in him; that was the same kid who stepped in to stop bullies, who once almost beat a classmate unconscious for throwing a firework at a cat. He couldn’t stand all the anger and hate in the world, even as his fury and violence added to it. As he watched Walker and his men torment a man to death, he didn’t want to do the right thing and step in and save Moon, he simply wanted to kill them, he wanted to cut their throats, break wrists and stamp on their heads until they too were almost featureless, a mash of blood and bone, completely wiped out, obliterated.

  ‘Red,’ said Walker, ‘you know I fucked her, right? She might even have liked it.’

  Green’s internal voice became a scream, a confluence of voices begging him to stop, to think his actions through, to find his peace and cling to it as if his life depended on it, and in a way it did. He was up and out of the chair, elbowing the goon nearest him in the throat, he reached Walker just as he was swinging the cue to meet him, the intractable collision of two forces. Green literally saw stars, bright lights speckled across the factory’s ceiling as the stick caught him hard across the temple. He heard someone laugh as the room gave way, he was no longer moored to the earth, space fell through him, he was truly disembodied, made of dust, a speck in the endless strands of the universe’s DNA. As he fell further and further, he saw Walker’s men snap Moon’s head back, pick up the green number six ball from the table as precisely and calmly as a game official might and then force Moon’s mouth open and push the ball in beyond his unyielding teeth. Something made a snapping sound and even though Moon was barely conscious, he did his futile best to kick against this intrusion, this dead weight being forced inside him. From very far away, Green could smell fear, the panic, the last final, fleeting hope, and wondered what he might do when it came to his turn, how long could he clench his jaw and hope that his teeth held out.

  *

  In Bulley’s dreams, New York City was on fire, finally consumed by its own sins, towers fell, people ran as panicked embers, and he stood among them appealing for sanity, some sense of understanding, but it was a misplaced call for calm. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the hellhounds gathering, waiting to take him away, to settle his debt. He’d wake and go to the window and look for the orange glow over his city, the final reckoning, but the world was mute, lit-up buildings under a black and purple sky. He sat in his basement and wondered about Green and Red and where this would finally end, what might have happened had Karen lived, what Walker had meant to him and how profoundly he had broken his heart, pushed him to the edge and sent him here trying uselessly to ever atone for his murderous act.

  Bulley looked down at the bag of sins at his feet and felt the sudden fear and panic rise up through him as he realised it was now empty. It was quiet then and suddenly he could hear the baying of hounds that were on the scent of something, that were on his trail. Something was moving, and then he saw that his hand was on fire – as the city and people had burned around him he’d never seen the flames on himself, he wondered why he’d ever been spared that, and now, as far as he could tell, both hands were on fire. The flames spread slowly up his legs, wrapped themselves around his torso and raced towards his chest and face. He felt calm momentarily and then he heard the scurrying of dogs in the stairwell and voices outside, someone was calling his name, he saw the city on fire, heard the barking of the dogs and then the door burst open and there stood Walker and his men, Walker was grinning as they dragged Bulley along and tied him to his chair. Walker, a gas can hanging loosely from one hand, came in close to Bulley’s face and for a moment Bulley thought Walker might speak, but his old friend just held Bulley’s chin and began pouring gasoline methodically and slowly onto Bulley’s clothes until Bulley finally understood that he was going to meet his fate.

/>   October 1980

  As Green saw it, he now owed his life to Walker and he carried that burden as heavily as Bulley had hefted his black sack of sins. Green had finally come to in the factory; the only light reaching in was from a stack of bottles lining one wall that were catching the sunlight from a high, recently opened window. There was nothing else left; even the radio had gone. It was just Green and Moon and the now empty pool table making up this bloody tableau. He’d reached for his jaw instinctively, felt his teeth and wondered why he wasn’t choking for air, why his teeth weren’t stowed in, why he wasn’t holding his head forward to stop a pool ball blocking the air trying to reach his throat. Moon was less lucky; his head was snapped sideways as if a thread of tendon were the only thing holding it in place. One eye was completely shut, his features levelled, his partially opened mouth – lips literally beaten black and blue – revealed a blood-smeared pool ball; red on green, thought Green, Walker’s sending me a message.

  He pushed his way outside, it was daytime, it has to be the next day, Green thought, all he knew was that they’d passed a town at some point, he remembered the kid falling from his bike as Walker laughed, the quiet indifference of that small place, the low hum of life on the peripheries – a part of him envied them being away from the clamour – and so he started walking back towards them as best he could remember. A car stopped for him within half an hour, the driver cracking his window only an inch to ask if he was okay. Green couldn’t understand the hesitation and then he saw himself reflected in the car’s window and understood the driver’s reticence to let him in. He looked like he’d somehow survived a wreck on the highway and clambered out of a five-car pile-up, which was how he felt. His face was smeared with blood, his nose was almost certainly fractured and one side of his face was so swollen that it looked like he was perpetually working a gumball around inside his cheek. He saw that his shirt was untucked and hurried to push the tail back into his pants as if that would right this picture somehow. He had no idea where his jacket was and wondered what the impeccably tailored Walker would want with an off-the-peg suit like his.

  ‘You okay?’ asked the man in the car; his wife craned over next to him to better see this bloody spectre that had walked out of the surrounding countryside. He looked like roadkill that had come back to life at the side of the highway, got up and started walking again. Back from the dead, thought Green, back from the dead. And then he reached out a hand towards the car, causing the couple to shrink back in fear, uncomprehending and completely startled, but Green was doing the only thing he could before he collapsed: trying to hold on.

  *

  It was Bulley who was holding on now. Green stood over his hospital bed and tried to find a part of the man he’d once known. He looked like a shadow, a silhouette, thought Green, like charred wood, brittle and black. As if at any moment a piece might break away and flutter to the floor as so much greying ash. Green and Dr Brenda Bent looked at the figure in the bed the way undertakers regard a cadaver: as something to be ultimately moved on to the next place.

  ‘Almost total immolation,’ said the doctor. ‘I don’t know how he still keeps breathing, it’s like he’s in some weird state of grace.’

  ‘He thought the city was on fire,’ said Green. ‘He thought we were all going to burn. He thinks we are all burning, just in different degrees.’

  Dr Bent looked up from Bulley’s chart, she stared at Green evenly. Placing the chart back, she adjusted Bulley’s drip and regarded the sluggish flow of lines scrolling across the monitor screen. She moved past Green and towards the door.

  ‘I’m not sure he’s thinking anything at the moment,’ said the doctor over her shoulder, her back already to him. ‘You might want to say your goodbyes to him now.’ And then she left the two men alone.

  Green pulled his chair up next to the bed so that his head was level with Bulley’s; there was an oxygen mask over his mouth, the rest of his face was almost featureless, it shone like oil, like the sin had melted and stuck to him, thought Green.

  ‘Walker get to you too, James?’ Green said quietly. Where was Walker, he thought? Green knew they were reaching some sort of endgame if he could ever get hold of the slippery bastard. But he still didn’t know why he was alive; he’d witnessed assault and murder, he’d punched Walker hard in the face, got him by the throat, but it was Bulley who had really been made to suffer. He didn’t know why Walker wanted his old friend to hurt this way. Perhaps he just wanted him to know how it was to be aflame and forever alive, to place him in his own literal purgatory and bring Bulley’s nightmare scenario for all of them to life.

  Bulley was looking at him. Two myopic blue eyes staring out of the night that now made up his face.

  Green automatically reached for the alarm button to summon the nurse, but Bulley gave a twitch of his head, no. He indicated his oxygen mask with a downward flicker of his eyes and Green, in spite of himself, reached forward to gently remove it from Bulley’s ravaged face. Bulley’s eyes, once listless behind almost impenetrable lenses, were now animated with life, the only part of his that was anything anymore, thought Green, that’s where all of him is now, all his fervour, that preacher’s spirit, all there in those two, unblinking blue eyes.

  Somewhere from deep inside Bulley came a voice, it sounded like a man trapped far below ground trying to get his cry for help heard through a fissure in the earth.

  ‘Robert came,’ said Bulley. ‘He thinks I betrayed him.’

  Green imagined he might; even though Walker had wilfully and clinically chosen to take Bulley’s family and life apart, and then kept him close to him in some sort of quiet servitude in New York, it was, in Walker’s deranged, egotistical psyche, Bulley who had betrayed him. Then Bulley said something remarkable.

  ‘Did he hurt you? Are you okay?’

  Green found his concern profound and saddening, that Bulley might actually care about another human being while he lay there waiting to fall into the abyss. It unsettled him; he suddenly saw the misplaced goodness in Bulley that he had always found hard to justify in his own father. Green’s old man was always preaching forgiveness, empathy, when Green could never find it in himself for those who had transgressed, those who had strayed from the path. An eye for an eye was his way, he thought, and where had it got him, where had it got any of them? Bulley looked like he was made of oil and dust, Green had walked away from his life and family when they had needed him most, and Walker had carried his anger for so long that it had mutated into patricide and now he was running out there somewhere in the world, striking out at anyone who might come near. Walker, mad with power, lonely, angry and lost, thought Green, and what am I if not some of those things too?

  ‘You should try and forgive him,’ said Bulley quietly. ‘He’s only ever known pain, he’s just striking back. You know how dogs bark when they’re scared …’

  Doesn’t mean he always has to bite, thought Green tersely; even as he was trying to contain his feelings, the black was slowly rising up inside of him.

  ‘Walker’s gone,’ said Green. It was true too; they’d arrested some of his men, raided his offices, tossed his aerie-like apartment, but to no avail. His records were being pored over, but Walker had become invisible, he’d disappeared as completely as if his molecules had burst into a fine mist, his DNA unwound itself like old rope; he might as well have become of the air. He, thought Green, could literally be anywhere; he recalled that afternoon in the shadowy light of the bottling factory. Walker dour and drunk, his glass literally set at his lips. I could be anywhere, he’d said, and here I am with you.

  ‘He’s coming back, he says you and he aren’t done yet.’ Bulley’s eyes flickered, closed then opened and then closed again. His voice was very small now; he was very far away.

  ‘He says the three of you need to talk – you, him, Red.’

  ‘Talk?’ said Green, leaning forward to hear more, to make sense of what he was saying, but Bulley had drifted away again, blissfully unaware once again
that his skin was as black and impenetrable as the sins he’d once carried around on his back, as if they had finally tipped out and fully consumed him somehow.

  *

  Walker sat with a sigh on the dusty chair and looked around him. He wasn’t so very far away from New York at all. In fact, he was still in the state, hiding in plain view and out of sight. His father hadn’t given him much by way of good advice, or much of anything, but he had told the boy to grab everything he could from an early age, to invest in things, to hold on to what he could, and so as soon as he had the capital he collected property with the zeal of a magnate and the ardour of a kid sat with a Monopoly board. And so through his company, and off the books, he held on to places like this one, this disused orphanage with its high brick walls, the central building an exercise in gothic hell, pointing like an accusing finger at the sky. It looked like the stuff of nightmares. And as if to compound its misery, the surrounding buildings were boxy, airless prefabricated blocks thrown up in the ’60s that were too hot in the summer and bone-chillingly cold in the winter. He could only imagine the misery of kids stuck in a place like this. He rarely came here – he and his men had dragged people into this place on a handful of occasions, and then taken the bodies away for dismemberment and burial, maybe a bonfire in the grounds, but he’d never lingered before; the whole building made him feel sad in a way. He walked the decrepit halls and stopped in what must have been an old dormitory, imagining lights out, the despair of the lonely and abandoned, no place to go to but here.

  ‘Just like little old me,’ he said to himself. He’d wanted to head back to the Tennessee countryside for one last time, but he knew that Green and his men would find him there – they knew almost all of his secrets now, almost all of his hiding places.