“It runs pretty deep, too, you and me.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you need anything else? I got—I got whatever you want. You know that. A little blow? A little crank? A little weed to take the edge off?”
It took Martin a moment to shake his head, his uncertainty surprising him.
“All right,” Tommy said as he stood up. “I’m gonna hit the head, then hit the road.” He extended his hand. “Good seeing you, Martin.”
Martin stood up and pulled his friend into an embrace. They held it for a moment, then slapped each other heartily on the back before releasing it.
“Stay out of trouble, Martin,” he said, turning toward the door. “Or get yourself out of it clean.”
As Tommy disappeared into the coffee shop, Martin sat back down to wait, staring at the full cup of coffee in front of him.
When he looked up toward Marco, he caught the kid looking away. Not too cool. Not too cool at all.
Waking up in the dark prison infirmary, Martin knew that he wasn’t alone. A cold fear cut through the morphine haze—his first thought was of Rudy, come to finish the job. He tried to pull himself to a sitting position, to figure out some way to defend himself, but the movement was too much, and he could feel the cut across his back like a line of fire against his skin.
It wouldn’t be a fair fight, then. He didn’t think that would worry Rudy too much.
“You keep jumping around like that you’re going to pull out all your stitches,” came a voice from the darkness. “Just relax. You’ve got nothing to fear from me.”
The voice was vaguely, distantly familiar. Martin struggled to make out the figure in the darkness, through the morphine cloud in front of his eyes. “Who . . .”
Without warning, a light came on. Martin didn’t know from where, but he flinched from the brightness. It took his eyes a moment to adjust.
The man in black was sitting in a chair alongside his bed.
Jack. The man from the park. The man who had taken Andrew.
“You—” Martin struggled again, trying to rise, the surge of fury almost overcoming the pain. Almost.
The man shook his head. “I told you—you’re going to pull out your stitches.” His voice was even, unconcerned.
He was exactly as Martin remembered him: the same face, the same jacket, the same faintly bemused expression. In nineteen years, he hadn’t changed a bit.
Martin wondered if he was imagining the whole thing.
“You took Andrew.”
“I took him?” His voice was smooth, almost guileless. “That’s not the way I remember it. The way I recall, you were all too eager to give him away.”
Martin had thought about that night, their conversation in the park, too often to be able to deny what he was saying. “But you said, you said three days.”
The man nodded. “Yes I did.”
“It’s been nineteen years,” he almost shouted. He had missed another anniversary, but he never lost track of the time.
“Here,” the man said flatly.
“What?” At first Martin thought it was the drugs, that he had lost track of the conversation.
“It’s been nineteen years here,” the man said, as if explaining something to an idiot. “But by my watch,” he looked at his wrist. “It’s only been . . . what? Two and a half days? A little more?”
“Relativity,” Martin muttered, surrendering to the suspicion that he was hallucinating the entire conversation. There was no way the man in black could be here—it had to be a dream.
“Something like that. I think I read somewhere that on Venus, a day is something like six thousand earth hours long. Two hundred and forty three earth days for one day on Venus. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
Martin wasn’t feeling capable of thought.
“And if your brother was in a place where a single day took seven years to pass, well, he’d be arriving home in just a few hours.” He looked at Martin meaningfully. “That’s a bit less than two years from now.”
Martin groaned, struggling to cling to the threads of the conversation.
“Three days. Just like we agreed.”
He tried to sit up. And failed.
The man stood up next to the bed and looked down at Martin.
“Of course, things aren’t looking too good for you right now, are they? You keep this up, you’re gonna be the one not to make it the three days.”
Martin couldn’t help but think of Rudy Cezzoni, the look on his face, the shouted promise that he was going to finish the job. No, things weren’t looking too good for him right now.
As if reading his mind, the man said, “If you’re worrying about that fellow who attacked you, who put that slice in your back, don’t. He won’t be troubling you again.”
For a moment, Martin’s vision of the man seemed to waver and shift. His black coat became, for an instant, a guard’s uniform. His hair was cut short, regulation-length, and he was covered in blood, soaked in it, his hand stained red, his face sprayed.
Then Martin blinked and everything was normal again, the man looking down at him, almost comfortingly.
But when he laid his hand on Martin’s arm, Martin felt himself pull back from the warmth.
“I’m worried about you,” the man said, not noticing. “Look at you. You spend your days lying around, intoxicated by whatever means you can find, dying by inches. It’s pathetic, really.”
Martin was too stunned by the man’s knowledge, the accuracy of his description, to take offence.
“If things don’t change, I don’t think you’ll make it.”
“Make what?” he asked, still trying to follow along.
“The day your brother will come home,” he said. “What did you think we’d been talking about?”
“Andrew?” He could feel himself starting to lose the fight against the morphine.
“If you don’t change, you’ll either be dead or you’ll be in here. Amounts to the same thing.”
The warm fog of the drug started to lay heavily upon him. “Andrew?”
“I’ve stayed too long,” the man said. “You need your rest.”
“But . . .”
“Remember what I said, Martin. I always keep my word. Three days. Midnight on the third day.”
“Andrew . . .”
But the man had already stepped away. “I’ll see you soon, Martin. Stay well.”
Without any fanfare, the man seemed to turn to one side and to take a step around a corner in the air that Martin couldn’t see. He disappeared, as if he had never been there.
Martin slipped back into sleep almost instantly, falling back into the warm softness of the morphine.
His last thoughts were the words “three days, seven years.”
Martin watched Tommy leave the coffee shop, turn around the corner and walk away, Marco falling into step behind him. He never glanced back at the table where Martin was sitting, and gave no hint of even recognizing him.
Marco looked back at him, though. A quick glance before walking away that Martin wouldn’t have caught if he hadn’t been watching for it.
He sighed, looked down at the untouched coffee cup in front of him. He wasn’t convinced by Tommy’s assessment of the kid’s loyalty. He wasn’t comforted.
Blood ties.
Ah well. After tonight, it probably wouldn’t matter.
He waited several minutes, smoking another cigarette, before he went inside. Getting the key from the barista, he let himself into the men’s room.
It only took him a few seconds—the room was pretty bare, without a lot of practical hiding places.
The gun was in the first place he looked, tucked into the trash can between the liner and the metal body of the can itself.
Lifting it with an exaggerated care, he hefted the gun in his ha
nd. It was a good weight—solid, but not too heavy. It was matte black, and seemed to swallow the light it touched.
He looked down the short barrel, turned it in his hand, feeling for its balance.
It would do.
He was putting the garbage can back together when he saw that Tommy had left him another gift, a plastic zip-top bag crammed deep in the container.
The bag was surprisingly heavy: a double handful of pills in a rainbow of colours. A chunk of hash and a big, crystally bud. A couple of tinfoil twists. A smaller bag of white powder. A small vial of rock.
Martin smiled at the thought of his friend carefully putting the bag together for him, tucking it lovingly into the garbage bin alongside the gun. “Just in case you change your mind,” he imagined Tommy saying.
The thought warmed him, and he shifted the bag into the inside pocket of his jacket. The he slipped the gun into the waistband of his pants, looking at himself critically in the mirror to be sure that the bulge wasn’t too obvious with his jacket done up a bit. He had to be careful: it wouldn’t do to get picked up by the cops for packing a gun. Not tonight. Not yet.
He turned to one side, then the other, looking at himself. It seemed fine—a slight bulge, but nothing obvious.
He washed his hands in the sink, and ran his wet fingers through his short hair, meeting his own eyes in the mirror.
Tonight. Now.
The van bounced with every bump, lurching and rattling. Martin tried to ignore it as best he could. The vehicles from Corrections weren’t built for comfort; hopefully, this would be the last one he would be riding in.
“It must have been hard for you.”
Martin glanced up at the van’s driver through the grated metal barrier. He assumed the guard was talking on a cell phone or on the radio until he saw the man’s eyes looking back at him in the rear-view mirror.
It was just the two of them in the van, but Martin still wasn’t convinced that the guard was talking to him. “What?”
“You’re Martin Corbett, right?”
Martin nodded, surprised.
“I remember what happened. With your brother.”
Martin tried not to sigh. “Yeah.”
“That must have been hard for you,” the guard said. He was an older man, probably close to sixty, with longish silver hair and a full beard. He had the softness that some of the guards got, a puffiness that did little to hide the strength underneath. “Having to go through all that.”
Martin nodded, almost speechless. It had been years since someone had even hinted at what it had been like for him. If they remembered his brother at all, it was usually a matter of I wonder whatever happened. . . . Poor kid.
“It was. Hard, I mean.”
The guard nodded. “I remember watching the news when it happened, seeing them talking to you. You were so young, and I knew—I said to my wife—that kid’s carrying an awful lot of this. Shouldn’t have to. Not when you’re so young.”
Martin couldn’t think of anything to say. “So how did you know my name?”
“I’ve got your file,” he said, gesturing at the papers on the seat next to him. “On my coffee break I read through your sheet, then I looked at the name and the penny dropped. It explained a lot, when I remembered seeing you before.”
“Like what? What did it explain?” Genuinely curious.
“Like how you managed to make such a shit-heap of your life in such a short time.” The guard glanced back at him, gauging his reaction. “I mean, I’ve driven guys twice your age that don’t have sheets half as long as yours. Assault. Assault with intent. Possession with intent. Possession of a weapon. Armed robbery. . . . And you’re what? Thirty?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Right. Well, knowing where you came from, what all you went through, that explains a lot. Doesn’t excuse anything, though.”
“No.” Martin shook his head. “No, it doesn’t.”
“But I look at you—” He glanced again in the rear-view mirror. “I drive a lot of guys to a lot of hearings. A lot. Parole hearings, mostly. And most of ’em, you can just tell their changes are an hour old and a hair deep. They think that if they get new haircuts, and spend a couple of minutes yes-sirring and no-sirring and wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly-sirring, the judge is just gonna let them out. It works a lot of the time, too. But I look at you, and I don’t see that. You look like maybe you’ve really changed.”
Martin didn’t say anything, didn’t move to agree or disagree.
“You’ve been working in the library.”
He nodded. “A little more than a year now.”
“You like that?”
“It makes the time pass,” he answered. It had also allowed him to spend a lot of time on his own with the books, trying to figure out what the man in black had been talking about, trying to figure out how three days could be twenty-one years.
He thought he understood now. He thought he knew where Andrew had been all this time, and where he would be coming back. Assuming the man in black hadn’t been lying to him, jerking him around. His kind were known for doing that: lying, or playing games with words and their meanings.
Three days. Seven years.
“I bet it does. Most of the guys I drive, they take on a job like that a month or two before their hearing, really try to look like they’ve cleaned up their act. It’s different for you, though, isn’t it?”
Martin nodded. “I like to think so.”
They spent most of the rest of the drive in silence, with Martin thinking ahead to the hearing that was waiting for him. He needed to get it exactly right. He needed to be out. There were no second chances. If his petition for parole failed, he’d be inside on the anniversary of Andrew’s disappearance.
He wouldn’t be there when he brother came back.
He wouldn’t be there to put a bullet in the man who had stolen his brother.
The park was dark, its shadows broken only occasionally by bright pools from the tall floodlights.
Martin kept to the dark and the shadows. It wasn’t cold, but he pulled his jacket tightly around himself, shivering a little. It all came down to this: all the years of absence, all the years of pain, and it all came down to tonight.
He was grateful for the gun, tucked into the waistband of his jeans.
He had no reason to believe Jack when he said that Andrew would be coming back. He had no reason, he knew, to believe that the man was anything other than a figment of his imagination. But for some reason he trusted him. He would be here. Martin was sure of it.
And soon, he thought, glancing at his watch. It was almost twelve. Almost the end of twenty one years. Almost the end—somewhere else—of three days.
He pressed himself into the shadow along the outside wall of the right-field dug-out as a small group of kids passed. Two girls and two boys, laughing uproariously, shouting at each other, pushing and jostling and passing a joint from hand to hand to hand. They passed so closely he could have reached out and touched any of them. He smiled at the thought of how freaked out they would have been, and once they were gone he allowed himself to relax.
He looked at his watch again. Almost.
He almost heard them in time. There was a noise—the sound of a breath? The soft crunch of gravel underfoot?—and he started to turned, but it was too late.
The first punch caught him in mid-turn, crunching against the left side of his jaw near his ear. A bright flash of pain and he reeled, spinning toward another punch that broke his nose, that cracked two of his front teeth.
He tried to put his hands up, tried to turn himself out of the way, but there were too many of them. No matter how he turned he was met by punches, blows raining in on him, forcing him to his knees.
He could taste his own blood as they started to kick him, heavy boots cracking his ribs, driving the breath from him. When a steel
toe connected with his kidney, he thought he was going to pass out. The world spun away from him, shifting in and out of focus, fading to dark.
Hands at his shoulders. Pulling him up. Pressing him against the wall of the dugout. A fist driven into his stomach, but he couldn’t fall.
“You think you’re so fucking cool,” the voice hissed into his ear, stinking of garlic. Martin tried to see, but he was too close, and it was too dark.
“You waltz back into town all fuckin’ big man and shit, but you ain’t nothin’.”
The voice stepped back, into the light. Marco. The light shone off the smoothness of his head, off the edge of the knife he held up in front of Martin’s eyes.
“You’re not so fucking tough, are you? Not so tough now.” The kid sneered, and turned the knife to catch the light. “You scared? You gonna cry now?”
Martin hadn’t cried in more than twenty years—he wouldn’t give the kid the satisfaction. Instead he tried to raise his hand, tried to meet his eye.
“I didn’t—” Every word was an agony, every breath sending waves of pain through him. “I didn’t kill your brother,” he said.
But it didn’t matter.
Marco buried the knife in Martin’s chest, just below the ribs on his right side.
Martin didn’t feel the blade go in: there was a moment between the impact, which felt like a punch, and the pain, a moment when he felt like maybe he was going to be okay, that maybe Marco had decided to teach him a lesson, rather than to kill him.
That hope vanished with a wave of pain that forced his head back, that forced a scream from him.
Marco leaned in close, the smell of him in the space between them, and met Martin’s eyes. “This is for my brother,” he said slowly, as he twisted the knife.
The darkness rose up mercifully, and swallowed him.
He wasn’t aware of opening his eyes: one moment there was darkness and the next there was light. He was lying on the ground, the world heaving and buckling under him, within him. It almost felt like a bad trip, and he thought that if he just managed to ride this out. . . .
Seven Crow Stories Page 14