“Like you said, you ought to get something out of twenty-five years besides a gold watch.”
“Yeah. But . . . Johnny, you been thinking I killed your old man? Since when?”
“What do you think?”
“Since it happened? That been on your mind all this time? Ah, Christ, kid, what put this pazzo idea in your head?”
So easy to just grab the pistol, put it to Uncle Philly's temple, and pull the trigger. Put Dad's soul to rest and keep him off the bed. A son has obligations he can never neglect, no matter the cost. Any resolution was better than none. Dane's chest started to hitch, his hands tight on the steering wheel like a second-rate driver.
You couldn't get away with saying this was an accident. That this was somehow self-defense.
Here, you're going to mess up this exquisite '59 Caddy with viscera and fluids.
You're about to willingly become the thing you hate most.
“You poor twisted kid,” Phil said, and Dane's scars began to burn.
The flickering image of Vinny appeared all around the Cadillac, wearing a black Armani suit and an open leather overcoat. In several spots at once—holding a cigarette, hands in his pockets, clutching a gun. It was just beginning to rain, but Vinny was already drenched like he'd been in the storm for hours. Dissolving and solidifying, finally, into one figure, he stood there outside of the passenger door, grasping a .38.
Dane reached into his jacket pocket for his own gun and it wasn't there anymore.
Vinny had it. In some other track he'd gotten into the car, wrestled with Dane, and managed to grab hold of the pistol.
Now he was out there, pointing it into the Caddy. Grinning with those dentures. The fake eye with emerald flecks watching. Another boy with a sick brain.
TWENTY-EIGHT
You wait so long for the moment to come, imagining what it'll be like and how you'll feel about it, and when it finally arrives you feel nothing.
Staring at the man who, out of everybody in the world, still knew you the best.
Teeth bearing down on the tip of his tongue, Dane let out a soft, loose growl.
Vinny fucked around for another minute, aiming the barrel first at Dane's face, then at Phil's, then back again. Letting out a soft hiss of empty laughter every so often, like it was a game he'd played so often it had driven him crazy with boredom.
With an easy glide, Phil's right hand started to work down into his lap, reaching for the 9mm.
“Don't,” Dane told him.
The water dripping down his face, funneling through the dent across his brow, Vinny let the wind flap his overcoat open behind him, trailing in the breeze whistling through the cemetery gates. He motioned for Phil to roll down the window, then looked inside and told Dane, “He killed your old man.”
“I'm not so sure anymore.”
“It's true. If you want, I'll help you bury him. We could drive down to the Jersey Shore. Or we could do it right here, inside. No one will ever find him.”
Phil started to protest several times, but he fudged his words. He wasn't so much scared as he was doing his best to play the situation right, but he just didn't know how. “Look—look, Vincenzo, this, this here, it's—look . . . I'm . . . I'm not—”
“Tell him that you killed his father, Phil.”
“No.”
“Do it. Make it right after all these years.”
“I didn't shoot my partner,” Phil said flatly, staring straight ahead through the windshield, so if Vinny did pull the trigger, he'd have to shoot Phil in the temple. Dane looked over and saw that he was telling the truth. Phil Guerra hadn't killed Sgt. John Danetello.
“Let him go,” Dane said.
“You certain about that?” Vinny cut loose with another hollow giggle, only a dim echo of real emotion.
“Yeah.” Dane turned to Phil and said, “I'm gonna keep the Caddy for a little while longer, Uncle Philly. You'll get it back soon though, I promise. Now take a walk.”
Phil climbed out. With more emotion than Dane thought possible, the man said, “You two have had this coming for a while. Good luck on settling it.”
This was the kind of thing that Cogan enjoyed about Brooklyn. Only here could you point a gun at somebody and nearly bury him in somebody else's plot, only to have him wishing you well two minutes later.
“Shut up, you dirty rat bastard prick,” Vinny snarled as Phil backed down the street. The wind took his toupee and hurled it into the street. Vinny laughed and cocked his chin at Dane, still not climbing in. “He really did put one in your dad's head, you know.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. If he hadn't, he'd go run over to those cops in front of your house and call them down here. But look what he's doing.” Vinny craned his neck and let out a merciless laugh. “He's ducking and pretending not to see them.”
“Maybe he just wants us to finish it without anybody else getting between us.”
“There's always somebody in the middle.”
Even now. There was someone else there, in the backseat. Dane couldn't stop sweating, his hair almost as wet as Vinny's. He hoped it wasn't his father, appearing just to tell him what a foul-up Dane was, letting a killer go free.
He checked the rearview. It took a while but he eventually recognized her from the night of the accident. It was the girl Vinny had laid down in the Jersey dunes, who'd been pissed that he'd offered her cash afterward. The one who'd called the cops.
She said, “Kill him. He murdered me. After he got out of the hospital, he came back and found me and stuck a knife in my back. Eleven times. He took his time. He dumped me behind the same dune where he fucked me. Kill him.”
Vinny clambered into the Cadillac. He shoved his dripping hair back off his forehead, then plied the fabric on the seat. “This is that Fleetwood Sixty metallic shit.”
“He got screwed by the restorer.”
“Did a nice job otherwise.”
Dane started the car and drove back around Headstone City as if experiencing it for the first time. Sensing more beauty here than he'd seen the past couple of weeks, and feeling even more at home. This town took your marrow but replaced it with steel.
“Please, kill him now,” the girl said, smelling like the morning tide.
“I heard Fredric Wilson is dead,” Vinny said. Letting it out without any emotion.
Dane looked at the side of Vinny's scarred face. “So you knew his name the whole time.”
“Of course. I wondered when you'd take care of that.”
That put things in perspective.
Dane finally realized that Vinny was harder and stronger than him. He'd never be able to beat Vinny, ever, at anything. He didn't have the fortitude it took to do the things that Vinny was capable of. “And you never went after him? The guy who sold your sister the poisoned flake?”
“It was your debt. I figured you'd eventually handle it.”
“And you didn't put the contract out on me. It was Berto. But you didn't lift it either.”
“Appearance's sake and all that. Besides, I knew he wouldn't be able to find anybody worth a damn, the cheap fuck. Five grand. He was degrading himself. That disgusting finocchio prick, always down at the bridge looking for drag queens, he's lucky one of the other made guys didn't catch him. They'd have broiled his nuts with a blowtorch for a weekend.”
“Joey said they were getting ready to ice him.”
“They should've moved faster.”
They passed police cars prowling the neighborhood. Some of the cruisers going by with their lights flashing, but none taking a second glance at the Caddy. The rain came down a little harder but Dane didn't need to turn on the wipers yet. Watching the world through the smears and dapples, even Vinny got into it, the poetry of their town. Holding his palm up to the lightly throbbing water on the other side of the glass, Vinny said, “Every once in a while, it breaks your heart.”
“I'm not doing what you want anymore,” Dane told him, wincing at how weak it sounded. There was always
one person you'd always be inferior to, no matter what you did.
“Don't you get it, Johnny? Nobody pushed you. Everything you've done is because you wanted to do it. You stand or slump on your own.”
“What do you want?”
“Rispetto.”
“You're not respected enough already?”
“I'm talking about you.” The fake eye fixed, seeing deep into Dane's brain, peering through the fractures that would never completely heal. “I told you. I had something special in mind for you. What's mine I give to you, Johnny. You're taking over. You're going to finish what you started. You're going to kill my father and take what's his.”
“You've completely cracked.”
The radio began to murmur and cackle with the voices of his parents, his father in there sort of laughing, nobody crying at all. His mother, sounding happy, her hands coming together in excitement.
Dozens of others, maybe hundreds, all his relatives going back twenty or thirty centuries, to the Sicilians who revolted against Roman, Carthaginian, Norman, and French rule.
“The Don is dying,” Vinny said without sorrow. “He's got cancer. Pancreas, liver, and prostate. He's rotting inside. All the damn doctors can't believe he's held on this long. He should've been dead more than a year ago. Only weed helps him with the pain. But he's making the effort to keep going for one reason.”
Vinny stopped and waited for Dane to play his role and ask the question. You could only improvise for so long, and then you had to go back to the script.
“Why?”
“He wants to go out with a bullet in his head. The way his father did. And his grandfather. And his uncles, and everybody else in my family going back about a hundred years or more. You'd be doing the old man a favor.”
“He's your father.”
“And I love him. That's why I want you to do this. For me. I'd do it myself, but that's not how it happens. I don't have that choice. You're going to take over the business. After I'm gone.”
“Where are you going? You going to produce movies in Hollywood for the rest of your life? Working with the feds? That why you've been laying the groundwork?”
“There is no groundwork.”
“So how's it going to help Maria into the movie biz? How's it going to be an advantage?”
“It isn't.”
Like talking to a slab of concrete in the street. “Then why do any of it?”
“For you,” Vinny said, and he was serious.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“To help you set it up for Maria. To win her over. To show her how much you love her. Everything I've said, you're going to do it all for her and yourself. Nobody else.”
Dane thought about it for a minute and realized, So at least one of us is totally insane here. Maybe both of them. But that didn't matter much now, at the end of things.
“Don't feel bad, man,” Vinny said. “It's supposed to be this way. I saw flashes of it the day we went through the glass.”
Dane looked around and noticed he had parked back in the same spot, in front of the gate where his old man had died. Where he was supposed to die too.
“Death is nothing,” Vinny went on.
The girl in the backseat lay down with eleven knife wounds in her kidneys, stared at the roof of the Caddy, and let out a cry fashioned from the incomprehensible loss inside her, a scream from the bottom of such intense anguish that Dane had to cover his face.
On the radio, his mother was giggling.
“We beat it a long time ago, when we went through the windshield,” Vinny continued, certain that Dane would come to believe it too. “You didn't know that?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Here, watch.”
Dane thought, Here it is, I'm about to be put down with my own gun.
Vinny yanked the .38 up in a beautiful move, showing just how incredibly fast he was. No one could ever have a chance against him. He pressed the barrel between Dane's eyes. “This won't hurt at all. Trust me.”
An enormous blast like the truest name of God roared up from every corner of the world, as the night folded itself into all the contours of your worst fears. Dane's head flew to pieces.
TWENTY-NINE
Death is nothing. We beat it a long time ago, when we went through the windshield,” Vinny said. “You telling me you didn't know that? Here, watch.”
Vinny yanked the .38 up in a beautiful move, showing just how incredibly fast he was, no one could ever have a chance against him. He pressed the barrel under his chin and gave a grin that made Dane start to groan.
Dane leaped forward and grabbed Vinny's hand, twisting it backwards so he'd drop the gun. But he wouldn't let go. Somebody pounded on the doors of Dane's skull, wanting to be let in, or out. There was hardly any room to move. Dane chopped at Vinny's collarbone, once, twice, hearing it snap. It just made Vinny yelp and tug harder until the .38 was pointed at Dane's gut.
The bullet took Dane low in the stomach and punched him backwards against the driver's door. He hit hard, the window cracking beneath his head. He felt everything rip inside him and slosh to the left. He opened his mouth and red foam bubbled over his chin. He was going to die with no style at all, but at least he was still behind a steering wheel.
“You stupid, lousy prick,” Vinny said, still smiling, shaking his head, with his busted collarbone poking up a half inch through his raincoat. “You got shit and black blood coming out your belly now. That means you're finished.”
Vinny coughed and panted, pressed a hand to Dane's clammy cheek, and told him, “Don't do that again. Right?”
THIRTY
Death is nothing.”
“It's something,” Dane told him.
“We beat it a long time ago, when we went through the windshield,” Vinny said. “You telling me you didn't know that?”
“No, I don't think I did.”
“Do you now?”
“I'm not sure.”
“You're the pazzo fuck.”
Dane thought that maybe he understood what it had been like for Vinny all along. He felt the draw, the separation of himself heading down toward another life. He stood on one path and looked around, then saw there might be another slightly better chance for happiness if only he made a choice that took him there. There. There.
“Don't do it, Vinny.”
“Look, there's nobody in the middle anymore. Here, watch.”
On the radio, Dad mumbling about the rules of the road, always wearing your seat belt, being courteous to your fellow driver. The girl in the backseat lay down with eleven knife wounds in her kidneys, stared at the roof of the Caddy, and let out a cry fashioned from the incomprehensible loss inside her.
Vinny yanked the .38 up in a beautiful move, showing just how incredibly fast he was. No one could have ever had a chance against him. He pressed the barrel under his chin and gave a grin that made Dane whimper, thinking, How will I explain this to Maria?
Vinny pulled the trigger and took off the back of his skull, fucking up the beautiful interior of the '59 Caddy. He managed to heave a sigh of satisfaction as he flopped into Dane's arms.
They stayed like that for a while.
THIRTY-ONE
Despite it all, having crossed so many of these lines you never thought you'd step over, tears still clinging at your beard stubble, it felt proper to finally have a clear and unswerving purpose. This is what you've always wanted.
On his way out to the Monti mansion, with Vinny's body in the trunk, most of the inside of the Caddy cleaned up, Dane passed St. Mary's and spotted a bright blue hot-air balloon hovering about three feet above the lawn. Vinny had mentioned it back in Chooch's. But what did something like this mean, what symbolism could you find, when a piece of the sky was hanging down in back of your church?
About forty people clotted the front doors of the rectory, trying to keep warm. A handful of the elderly, a group of teens, a few six-year-olds, and even a couple of the modern nuns who didn't completely cover
up in black head to toe.
A priest he didn't recognize stood looking at the basket, scared to let the kids get too close, with the rising wind, and the increasingly heavy rain coming down. Dane had the feeling God was presenting him with one last chance to get out of this—hop in the balloon, cut the ropes, and just drift away.
The priest caught his eye and immediately understood something was wrong. His gaze filled with alert apprehension and meaningless concern as he walked over to the car. “Is there some problem?”
“What is this?” Dane called. “The Jesus Jamboree?”
“Don't you read your Papist Gazette?”
Goddamn, did they really print such a thing? Dane smiled blandly, the growing agitation working inside him trying to get out. He checked the rearview to see who might be in the backseat. Without humor he said, “The neighbor's dog got it off our stoop this week.”
“It's our St. Mary's Redemption and Atonement Gala.”
No wonder you only had a handful of people wandering around wearing puzzled expressions. “You might consider spiffing up the name next year.”
“I'll think about that. Why don't you join us?”
“Sorry, I'm on an errand.”
“We've got grape juice and biscotti.”
Dane let out a chuckle that grew a little too wild, reminding him of Joey's mongoose sounds. He swallowed back the rest of it. “Bread and wine? You bless them so the WASPs are taking communion without knowing it?”
“There's been a lot of police prowling the area today. A good deal of talk.”
“There's gonna be a little more.” Dane reached into the glove compartment and grabbed the envelope with ten grand in it that JoJo Tormino had given him. “Here. To help you hire a couple of horses for next year, and a merry-go-round. A cotton candy maker, maybe pay somebody who tells pope jokes. Bobo the Catholic Clown, that'll get a crowd in. Instead of a funny pope hat going up and down, his goes side to side. You'll make a killing.”
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