I can tell from the slur she’s drunk. “I can’t do this right now.”
“Don’t be mean to me, I…” Talking just above a whisper, she gasps, “Please.”
“What’s the problem this time?”
A pause, and then: “I know what you did.”
Something stirs deep inside me, like something asleep has suddenly come awake. I turn away, take a few steps from the young man and lower my voice. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Crying harder, she says, “I know a lot of stuff, I—I’m not stupid, you know!”
“Shelly, I’m in the middle of something. I don’t have time for this.”
“You—please—you’ve got to come get me, okay? I can’t—I need you!”
“Christ. Are you serious?”
“I can’t drive.”
“Get a cab.”
“I’m out of money, I...”
“Where are you?” I ask through clenched teeth.
“In a bar…”
Of course you are. I glance at my watch. “It’s not even ten o’clock in the morning.”
“I been up a…awhile.”
Code for she’s been bar-hopping all night. “Are you by yourself?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Which bar this time?”
She says something indecipherable and then, “In Everett.”
That information does not come as a surprise, since that’s where she lives. “If you want me to come get you, I need to know where you are. Try to focus and listen to what I’m saying. What bar are you in right now?”
“Dirty E’s,” she sobs. “Hurry okay, I don’t—I don’t feel so good.”
“Stay put. I’ll be there soon as I can.”
“Thanks, baby, I—”
I disconnect the call and turn back to the young man.
He’s gone.
* * *
The city of Everett lies four miles north of Boston, so depending on traffic, it’s about a thirty-five to forty-minute drive from my house. I’ve spent some time in Everett due to work, but I’m not all that familiar with it. Known for its highly successful high school football program, Everett has a diverse population and cross-section of neighborhoods, and while the majority of residents are honest, hardworking, law-abiding folk, Everett is also infamous for hardcore drugs and a relatively high crime rate. I’d been to Shelly’s apartment a few times to drop her off after rescuing her from assorted bars in the area, so I knew how to get in, get there and get out, but that’s about it. I let my GPS take charge, as it offers the fastest and allegedly easiest route to Dirty E’s, no doubt a wonderful and wholesome establishment suitable for the entire family. I follow its instructions, but all I can think about is the strange young man’s vanishing act.
I spun like a top in a frantic pirouette, searching for him but finding no trace. It didn’t seem like there was enough time for him to get up and leave the yard, but evidently he did just that, as he was nowhere in sight. At first I dropped to my knees, certain I’d slid into a complete breakdown. Had I imagined the entire thing? Could that be possible? Was I that far gone? Then just as I was certain I’d crumble to pieces, I saw the cigarettes next to the fire pit. Flattened and mangled—mostly just filters—they lay in a haphazard pile in the grass right where he’d dropped and stepped on them. I crawled closer, scooped them up and squeezed my hands into fists, crushing the cigarette butts between my fingers. They were real. More than see them, I could feel, touch and smell them. And if they were real, then so was he.
The GPS unit leads me into Everett, and I pay closer attention as the directions become more complicated. Although it’s a myth that all sex offenders run around in long raincoats and live in slums—most don’t—there are times, because of my job, that I do find myself in bad areas, and often disturbing, potentially sticky situations. I know enough to focus on my surroundings and the task at hand, so I shake off the fear and confusion coursing through me as best I can. As the neighborhoods grow worse, I turn a corner and roll down what at first appears to be a deserted street. Several boarded-up and abandoned duplexes line the street, followed by an empty lot where a building has evidently been demolished not too long before, the area covered with bricks and debris. There is no one on this street. Maybe it’s too early. Maybe everyone’s left.
At the top of the block, my GPS instructs me to take a right. I do, and turn onto a more commercially zoned street. Although several buildings are empty and all of them are dilapidated and in serious need of renovations, about halfway up the block I see the sign for Dirty E’s hanging above a badly scarred metal door painted black. There is only one window, and it faces the street. A neon Budweiser sign blinks on and off behind the filthy pane. The bar is sandwiched between a ramshackle pawnshop and a horribly run-down strip club, both of which appear to be closed at the moment. I pull over and park across the street, making sure I get a spot with no one in front of me. I’ve learned from past experiences that sometimes you have to get out of and away from places like this quickly. I sit there a moment and watch the street. There is a small amount of traffic but hardly anyone on foot. Again, I focus on the task at hand, which is going inside and getting Shelly out of there with as little fanfare as possible. Everything else gets left outside that door, because I can already tell that this is the sort of place you don’t go into weak or distracted. You present or carry yourself in the wrong way, it could get you killed.
My job has afforded me a certain degree of expertise in terms of dealing with people—particularly the underbelly of society and those who don’t want to be dealt with—and although I can handle myself reasonably well in a scrap if need be, I’ve mastered controlling situations and people when necessary, and generally have strong enough communication skills to avoid physical confrontation.
Before I left home, I changed into casual clothes—jeans, sneakers, a pullover and a brown suede jacket—but brought my work ID with me, which I keep in a small leather case. I slide it into my back pocket, kill the ignition and hop out of the car.
As I cross the street, a strong industrial smell hangs in the air, mixed with other foul odors, and although the sun is still shining and the morning seems to be developing into a nice day, there is a sense of darkness here, of oppression and sadness so strong it’s palpable. With a final quick look back at the street, I pull open the black metal door and slip inside Dirty E’s.
Significantly darker here than on the street, it takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust, but once they do, I see one long rectangle of a room that reminds me of a train car. But for a few tables against the back wall, the entire place is one big, badly worn wooden bar. The floors are an aged and cracked tile, badly stained and in desperate need of a good scrubbing, and the ceiling is low and dark, the walls covered with cheaply framed photographs of various New England sports teams. A silent jukebox sits in the corner, and a formless smell of body odor and old booze hangs in the air.
I quickly scan the room.
A burly middle-aged man with a boxer’s nose, a gray buzz cut and a beer belly stands behind the bar. He raises a bushy, salt-and-pepper eyebrow, folds thick, heavily tattooed arms across his barrel chest and glares at me like I’ve just exposed myself. Three patrons occupy stools across from him: Shelly, bookended by two men. All three turn and look at me in unison. Shelly recognizes me immediately and offers a drunken grin, raising her glass to me in mock salute. One of the men, a heavyset thirtysomething with balding but long, stringy hair, has his arm around her, and smiles at me with contempt. The second, a lean but muscular man wearing a bandana that sports the Brazilian flag, glances at me with disinterest before quickly returning to his beer.
“Hey!” Shelly says, waving with her free hand. “Come have a drink with us!”
As I cross the room, I toss the bartender a brief sideways glance, but my focus remains primarily on the man with his arm around Shelly. I offer him a quick nod of recognition.
The man tightens his grip on my ex-wife, pul
ls her closer and whispers in her ear. They both begin to laugh.
“You still need that ride, Shell?” I ask flatly.
“She’s gonna get a ride,” the man says, “but not from you, chief.”
The bartender and the Brazilian both laugh, and Shelly joins in, though she’s so drunk I’m relatively sure she has no idea what he said.
“You gonna be in here,” the bartender says in a gruff voice, “you got to order something.”
“It’s ten forty-five in the morning,” I remind him.
The look on his grizzled face assures me he could not possibly care less.
“Fine, give me a Coke.”
The bartender rolls his eyes, then lumbers away as I turn back to Shelly and her two friends. “Let’s go, Shell.”
“Sit down and drink your Coke, Skippy,” the guy with his arm around her says. “She’s with me. Don’t worry about it.”
I work my head back and forth in an attempt to loosen the tension in my neck a bit. He’s not as drunk as Shelly is, but I can tell he’s had several. With a sigh, I take a slow look around. “I’m not worried about it,” I tell him. “But you should be.”
“You believe this fucking guy?” he asks the bartender. “Lace-curtain motherfucker coming in here like he’s got a cock down to his frickin’ knees.”
The bartender slaps my Coke down in front of me and growls out an overinflated price. I pay him and he returns to the far end of the bar where he pretends to watch the blurry newscast playing on a television suspended in the corner.
I remain standing as I sip my drink. It’s cool and feels good going down. “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen,” I say to the man with his arm around her. “You’re going to take your hands off her, and Shelly’s going to get down off that stool and come with me. Then we’re walking out that door and that’ll be that. Got it?”
“Fuck off.” He jerks a thumb at the door.
“Shelly, let’s go,” I say.
The man removes his arm from her back and spins round on his stool until he’s facing me. His face is pasty, pale, and riddled with acne scars. “Why you being such a pain in my ass, guy? Who is she to you?”
Shelly leans into him, giggles, and in a theatrical whisper says, “That’s my husband.”
“Ex-husband,” I correct her.
“Then what do you give a shit?” he asks.
I place my Coke back on the bar and reach for Shelly’s arm. “Come on.”
“Hey,” the man snaps, grabbing hold of my wrist with a powerful grip.
I yank my arm free and square my stance.
“Look, I just met this slam pig,” he says. “Bought her some drinks and we’re having a good time. So screw.”
I pull out my ID and hold it up to his face. “I’m with the Office of Public Safety and Security.”
He squints at it with drunken confusion. “The fuck is that?”
The Brazilian guy eyes my ID, chuckles, then mumbles something in Portuguese.
“What are you, some sort of cop?” the man asks. “I don’t see no badge.”
“We track and register sex offenders in the Commonwealth,” I explain. “What’s your name?”
“Huh?”
“Your name, what is it?”
“Go suck a bag of dicks.”
“What is that, Scottish?”
“I don’t have to tell you shit.”
“Bet you’ve got a rap sheet a mile long, don’t you?”
“So what if I do? Not like I diddle kids. I ain’t no pedo.”
“You’re about to be.”
“Fuck’s that mean?” He turns to the guy in the Brazil bandana. “Fuck’s he talking about?”
Shelly sips her drink and giggles again.
“What it means,” I say, “is that I’m ten seconds away from calling the cops and telling them you’re a registered sexual predator who recently changed residences and didn’t update his information. My office has been trying to locate you for months. Since you’ve been ducking us and you’re a violent level-three habitual offender, and therefore extremely dangerous, they’ll lock your ass up until we get this all sorted out.”
The man eyes the other two men. “Sounds like he’s from the People’s Republic, don’t he? What are you, one of them Cambridge homos?” He turns back around to the bar. “Don’t worry, professor, I’ll make sure your ex gets home.”
Shelly frowns, slides down off the stool and stumbles a bit, falling back against the bar. “I don’t…” She lets out an enormous burp. “I don’t feel good.”
“Get that bitch out of here if she’s gonna hurl,” the bartender barks.
The Brazilian finishes his beer and nonchalantly signals the bartender for a refill.
“Shelly,” I say, reaching for her, “now.”
“Ain’t telling you again,” the man says, moving between us. “She’s fine right where she is.”
I pivot and fire an elbow up into his face. It lands with a sickening sound, square on his temple and with such force my forearm and fingers go numb almost immediately. He staggers away, then slowly drops to one knee, both hands pressed flat against his temple.
The bartender shouts something unintelligible and pulls a nightstick from beneath the bar, but remains where he is.
I grab Shelly by the wrist and pull her away from the bar, bringing her around behind me. I know I should leave. I should take Shelly and go—and I easily could—but for some reason, I don’t.
The balding guy remains on one knee, grimacing and wincing and clearly so dazed he isn’t quite sure where he is or what’s happened.
I look to the Brazilian. He smiles at me. It’s a creepy, knowing sort of smile. He places his thumb against his neck and runs it across his throat, as if slitting it.
Keeping Shelly behind me and the bartender in my line of sight, in two quick strides I reach the other man and throw a punch directly into his face.
In a spray of blood, snot and saliva, he falls back and lies there, nose shattered and gushing, running across his cheeks and chin and onto the floor. I stand over him, studying him a moment, but I no longer feel like myself. It feels as if I’m on the other side of the bar watching this all go down.
Straddling him, I grab the front of his shirt and hoist him up off the floor about a foot or so. Limp and barely conscious, his eyes roll about in his head as I cock back my fist and slam it into his face. His head snaps back and he vomits, most of it running over his chin and onto my arm along with the blood. In my mind, I tell myself to drop him and move away. Instead, I hit him again. And again. Then I switch hands and pummel him some more.
Eventually, Shelly grabs me and begs me to stop.
“That’s enough!” the bartender says, though he sounds impossibly far away.
I let the man go; leaving him beaten to a pulp and lying in a pool of his own blood and vomit. My shirt is sprayed with his blood, as are my neck and face. I can feel the warmth and stickiness congealing on my skin. With Shelly hanging on my arm, I stumble away from him and my eye catches the Brazilian, but he faces front and sips a fresh beer, minding his own business.
“Jesus!” The bartender hurries out from behind the bar. “You trying to kill him?”
I don’t answer, because I’m certain the answer is yes.
If you’re not careful, you’ll kill him.
The strange young man’s words and sad face come to me from the shadows. How could he have known about this before it happened?
“Take that skank and get the hell out of here,” the bartender says, nightstick at the ready. “Don’t come back, and make sure that alky cock-tease stays gone too, you hear me?”
I do, but by then Shelly and I are already heading out the door.
CHAPTER FOUR
The water feels cold against my flushed skin but does little to combat the feverish temperature surging through me. From the moment we arrived at Shelly’s building, a two-story walkup located in a better but still fairly rough neighborhood six blocks from the
bar, it’s felt as though I have a bad fever. I help her into her apartment, and then sweating and light-headed, escape into the bathroom to pull myself together. Thoughts of the beating I gave the man in the bar refuse to leave me, replaying over and over again in my mind. The sounds. The feel. The blood. In retrospect, I am repulsed by my actions. But at the time the violence and brutality felt good. It felt right.
I push my hands back beneath the faucet and watch the steady flow of gray water accumulate in my cupped palms. I splash it on my face a second time, then grab a ratty hand towel from a nearby rack and force my eyes to the dirty mirror above the sink. Images disturbing yet familiar stare back—pale skin, disheveled hair, cracked lips and glassy eyes ringed with dark circles and saddled with puffy black bags—all mere consequences, perhaps distractions, from the unbridled terror and confusion that’s stalked me for weeks now. “It’ll be all right,” I tell the reflection quietly. “Just hold it together, it…it’ll be all right.”
I wipe my face and hands, toss the towel aside and turn off the water. In the mirror, I see that the tops of my hands are red. I raise both hands closer to my face. My knuckles are scraped raw just as they’d appeared to be that morning before my shower. Am I seeing the future? Is someone…something…showing it to me?
Exiting the bathroom, I step directly into a dimly lit kitchen. Leaning against the counter, I scan the area as well as the small living room beyond. A wide shaft of sunlight powering through the kitchen windows creates shadows on either side of it, and except for the steady hum of the refrigerator, the apartment is quiet. When we were together, Shelly was always neat and clean, but even that has changed. Like the bathroom, nothing in the rest of her place has been cleaned or even straightened in ages. It looks as if no one has actually lived here in years. And maybe that’s not so far from reality. Shelly’s alive, but one would be hard-pressed to define her existence as anything that even approaches living.
Everything’s upside down. It’s all in flames and wrong.
Apollo, Shelly’s cat, meows and jumps up on the kitchen counter. As he slinks over to me, I feel myself smile and reach out to pet him. “Hey, buddy.”
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