USA Noir - Best Of The Akashic Noir Series

by Johnny Temple (Editor)

  Cassius slinked over to him, even climbed up on his lap when Eric, unbidden, took a seat at Bob’s kitchen table and patted his inner thigh twice. Bob couldn’t even say how it was Eric Deeds talked his way into the house; he was just one of those people had a way about him, like cops and Teamsters—he wanted in, he was coming in.

  “Bob,” Eric Deeds said, “I’m going to need him back.” He had Cassius in his lap and was rubbing his belly. Bob felt a prick of envy as Cassius kicked his left leg, even though a constant shiver—almost a palsy—ran through his fur. Eric Deeds scratched under Cassius’s chin. The dog kept his ears and tail pressed flat to his body. He looked ashamed, his eyes staring down into their sockets.

  “Um . . .” Bob reached out and lifted Cassius off Eric’s lap, plopped him down on his own, scratched behind his ears. “Cash is mine.”

  The act was between them now—Bob lifting the puppy off Eric’s lap without any warning, Eric looking at him for just a second, like, The fuck was that all about? His forehead narrowed and it gave his eyes a surprised cast, as if they’d never expected to find themselves on his face. In that moment, he looked cruel, the kind of guy, if he was feeling sorry for himself, took a shit on the whole world.

  “Cash?” he said.

  Bob nodded as Cassius’s ears unfurled from his head and he licked Bob’s wrist. “Short for Cassius. That’s his name. What did you call him?”

  “Called him Dog mostly. Sometimes Hound.”

  Eric Deeds glanced around the kitchen, up at the old circular fluorescent in the ceiling, something going back to Bob’s mother, hell, Bob’s father just before the first stroke, around the time the old man had become obsessed with paneling—paneled the kitchen, the living room, the dining room, would’ve paneled the toilet if he could’ve figured out how.

  Bob said, “You beat him.”

  Eric reached into his shirt pocket. He pulled out a cigarette and popped it in his mouth. He lit it, shook out the match, tossed it on Bob’s kitchen table.

  “You can’t smoke in here.”

  Eric considered Bob with a level gaze and kept smoking. “I beat him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Uh, so what?” Eric flicked some ash on the floor. “I’m taking the dog, Bob.”

  Bob stood to his full height. He held tight to Cassius, who squirmed a bit in his arms and nipped at the flat of his hand. If it came to it, Bob decided, he’d drop all six feet three inches and two hundred ninety pounds of himself on Eric Deeds, who couldn’t weigh more than a buck-seventy. Not now, not just standing there, but if Eric reached for Cassius, well then . . .

  Eric Deeds blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. “I saw you that night. I was feeling bad, you know, about my temper? So I went back to see if the hound was really dead or not and I watched you pluck him out of the trash.”

  “I really think you should go.” Bob pulled his cell from his pocket and flipped it open. “I’m calling 911.”

  Eric nodded. “I’ve been in prison, Bob, mental hospitals. I’ve been a lotta places. I’ll go again, don’t mean a thing to me, though I doubt they’d prosecute even me for fucking up a dog. I mean, sooner or later, you gotta go to work or get some sleep.”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  Eric held out of his hands. “Pretty much everything. And you took my dog.”

  “You tried to kill it.”

  Eric said, “Nah.” Shook his head like he believed it.

  “You can’t have the dog.”

  “I need the dog.”

  “No.”

  “I love that dog.”

  “No.”

  “Ten thousand.”

  “What?”

  Eric nodded. “I need ten grand. By tonight. That’s the price.”

  Bob gave a nervous chuckle. “Who has ten thousand dollars?”

  “You could find it.”

  “How could I poss—”

  “Say, that safe in Cousin Marv’s office. You’re a drop bar, Bob. You don’t think half the neighborhood knows? So that might be a place to start.”

  Bob shook his head. “Can’t be done. Any money we get during the day? Goes through a slot at the bar. Ends up in the office safe, yeah, but that’s on a time—”

  “—lock, I know.” Eric turned on the couch, one arm stretched along the back of it. “Goes off at two a.m. in case they decide they need a last-minute payout for something who the fuck knows, but big. And you have ninety seconds to open and close it or it triggers two silent alarms, neither of which goes off in a police station or a security company. Fancy that.” Eric took a hit off his cigarette. “I’m not greedy, Bob. I just need stake money for something. I don’t want everything in the safe, just ten grand. You give me ten grand, I’ll disappear.”

  “This is ludicrous.”

  “So, it’s ludicrous.”

  “You don’t just walk into someone’s life and—”

  “That is life: someone like me coming along when you’re not looking.”

  Bob put Cassius on the floor but made sure he didn’t wander over to the other side of the table. He needn’t have worried—Cassius didn’t move an inch, sat there like a cement post, eyes on Bob.

  Eric Deeds said, “You’re racing through all your options, but they’re options for normal people in normal circumstances. I need my ten grand tonight. If you don’t get it for me, I’ll take your dog. I licensed him. You didn’t, because you couldn’t. Then I’ll forget to feed him for a while. One day, when he gets all yappy about it, I’ll beat his head in with a rock or something. Look in my eyes and tell me which part I’m lying about, Bob.”

  * * *

  After he left, Bob went to his basement. He avoided it whenever he could, though the floor was white, as white as he’d been able to make it, whiter than it had ever been through most of its existence. He unlocked a cupboard over the old wash sink his father had often used after one of his adventures in paneling, and removed a yellow and brown Chock full o’Nuts can from the shelf. He pulled fifteen thousand from it. He put ten in his pocket and five back in the can. He looked around again at the white floor, at the black oil tank against the wall, at the bare bulbs.

  Upstairs he gave Cassius a bunch of treats. He rubbed his ears and his belly. He assured the animal that he was worth ten thousand dollars.

  * * *

  Bob, three deep at the bar for a solid hour between eleven and midnight, looked through a sudden gap in the crowd and saw Eric sitting at the wobbly table under the Narragansett mirror. The Super Bowl was an hour over, but the crowd, drunk as shit, hung around. Eric had one arm stretched across the table and Bob followed it, saw that it connected to something. An arm. Nadia’s arm. Nadia’s face stared back at Eric, unreadable. Was she terrified? Or something else?

  Bob, filling a glass with ice, felt like he was shoveling the cubes into his own chest, pouring them into his stomach and against the base of his spine. What did he know about Nadia, after all? He knew that he’d found a near-dead dog in the trash outside her house. He knew that Eric Deeds only came into his life after Bob had met her. He knew that her middle name, thus far, could be Lies of Omission.

  When he was twenty-eight, Bob had come into his mother’s bedroom to wake her for Sunday Mass. He’d given her a shake and she hadn’t batted at his hand as she normally did. So he rolled her toward him and her face was scrunched tight, her eyes too, and her skin was curbstone-gray. Sometime in the night, after Matlock and the ten o’clock news, she’d gone to bed and woke to God’s fist clenched around her heart. Probably hadn’t been enough air left in her lungs to cry out. Alone in the dark, clutching the sheets, that fist clenching, her face clenching, her eyes scrunching, the terrible knowledge dawning that, even for you, it all ends. And right now.

  Standing over her that morning, imagining the last tick of her heart, the last lonely wish her brain had been able to form, Bob felt a loss unlike any he’d ever known or expected to know again.

  Until tonight. Until now. Until he learne
d what that look on Nadia’s face meant.

  * * *

  By one fifty, the crowd was gone, just Eric and Nadia and an old, stringent, functioning alcoholic named Millie who’d amble off to the assisted living place up on Pearl Street at one fifty-five on the dot.

  Eric, who had been coming to the bar for shots of Powers for the last hour, pushed back from the table and pulled Nadia across the floor with him. He sat her on a stool and Bob got a good look in her face finally, saw something he still couldn’t fully identify—but it definitely wasn’t excitement or smugness or the bitter smile of a victor. Maybe something worse than all of that—despair.

  Eric gave him an all-teeth smile and spoke through it, softly. “When’s the old biddie pack it in?”

  “A couple minutes.”

  “Where’s Marv?”

  “I didn’t call him in.”

  “Why not?”

  “Someone’s gonna take the blame for this, I figured it might as well be me.”

  “How noble of—”

  “How do you know her?”

  Eric looked over at Nadia hunched on the stool beside him. He leaned into the bar. “We grew up on the same block.”

  “He give you that scar?”

  Nadia stared at him.

  “Did he?”

  “She gave herself the scar,” Eric Deeds said.

  “You did?” Bob asked her.

  Nadia looked at the bar top. “I was pretty high.”

  “Bob,” Eric said, “if you fuck with me—even in the slightest—it doesn’t matter how long it takes me, I’ll come back for her. And if you got any plans, like Eric-doesn’t-walk-back-out-of-here plans? Not that you’re that type of guy, but Marv might be? You got any ideas in that vein, Bob, my partner on the Richie Whalen hit, he’ll take care of you both.”

  Eric sat back as mean old Millie left the same tip she’d been leaving since Sputnik—a quarter—and slid off her stool. She gave Bob a rasp that was ten percent vocal chords and ninety percent Virginia Slims Ultra Light 100s. “Yeah, I’m off.”

  “You take care, Millie.”

  She waved it away with a, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and pushed open the door.

  Bob locked it behind her and came back behind the bar. He wiped down the bar top. When he reached Eric’s elbows, he said, “Excuse me.”

  “Go around.”

  Bob wiped the rag in a half-circle around Eric’s elbows.

  “Who’s your partner?” Bob said.

  “Wouldn’t be much of a threat if you knew who he was, would he, Bob?”

  “But he helped you kill Richie Whalen?”

  Eric said, “That’s the rumor, Bob.”

  “More than a rumor.” Bob wiped in front of Nadia, saw red marks on her wrists where Eric had yanked them. He wondered if there were other marks he couldn’t see.

  “Well then it’s more than a rumor, Bob. So there you go.”

  “There you go what?”

  “There you go,” Eric scowled. “What time is it, Bob?”

  Bob placed ten thousand dollars on the bar. “You don’t have to call me by my name all the time.”

  “I will see what I can do about that, Bob.” Eric thumbed the bills. “What’s this?”

  “It’s the ten grand you wanted for Cash.”

  Eric pursed his lips. “All the same, let’s look in the safe.”

  “You sure?” Bob said. “I’m happy to buy him from you for ten grand.”

  “How much for Nadia, though?”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Oh.”

  Bob thought about that new wrinkle for a bit and poured himself a closing-time shot of vodka. He raised it to Eric Deeds and then drank it down. “You know, Marv used to have a problem with blow about ten years ago?”

  “I did not know that, Bob.”

  Bob shrugged, poured them all a shot of vodka. “Yeah, Marv liked the coke too much but it didn’t like him back.”

  Eric drank Nadia’s shot. “Getting close to two here, Bob.”

  “He was more of a loan shark then. I mean, he did some fence, but mostly he was a shark. There was this kid? Into Marv for a shitload of money. Real hopeless case when it came to the dogs and basketball. Kinda kid could never pay back all he owed.”

  Eric drank his own shot. “One fifty-seven, Bob.”

  “The thing, though? This kid, he actually hit on a slot at Mohegan. Hit for twenty-two grand. Which is just a little more than he owed Marv.”

  “And he didn’t pay Marv back, so you and Marv got all hard on him and I’m supposed to learn—”

  “No, no. He paid Marv. Paid him every cent. What the kid didn’t know, though, was that Marv had been skimming. Because of the coke habit? And this kid’s money was like manna from heaven as long as no one knew it was from this kid. See what I’m saying?”

  “Bob, it’s fucking one minute to two.” Sweat on Eric’s lip.

  “Do you see what I’m saying?” Bob asked. “Do you understand the story?”

  Eric looked to the door to make sure it was locked. “Fine, yeah. This kid, he had to be ripped off.”

  “He had to be killed.”

  Out of the side of his eye, a quick glance. “Okay, killed.”

  Bob could feel Nadia’s eyes lock on him suddenly, her head cock a bit. “That way, he couldn’t ever say he paid off Marv and no one else could either. Marv uses the money to cover all the holes, he cleans up his act, it’s like it never happened. So that’s what we did.”

  “You did . . .” Eric barely in the conversation, but some warning in his head starting to sound, his head turning from the clock toward Bob.

  “Killed him in my basement,” Bob said. “Know what his name was?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Bob.”

  “Sure you would. Richie Whelan.”

  Bob reached under the bar and pulled out the 9mm. He didn’t notice the safety was on, so when he pulled the trigger nothing happened. Eric jerked his head and pushed back from the bar rail, but Bob thumbed off the safety and shot Eric just below the throat. The gunshot sounded like aluminum siding being torn off a house. Nadia screamed. Not a long scream, but sharp with shock. Eric made a racket falling back off his stool, and by the time Bob came around the bar, Eric was already going, if not quite gone. The overhead fan cast thin slices of shadow over his face. His cheeks puffed in and out like he was trying to catch his breath and kiss somebody at the same time.

  “I’m sorry, but you kids,” Bob said. “You know? You go out of the house dressed like you’re still in your living room. You say terrible things about women. You hurt harmless dogs. I’m tired of you, man.”

  Eric stared up at him. Winced like he had heartburn. He looked pissed off. Frustrated. The expression froze on his face like it was sewn there, and then he wasn’t in his body anymore. Just gone. Just, shit, dead.

  Bob dragged him into the cooler.

  When he came back, pushing the mop and bucket ahead of him, Nadia still sat on her stool. Her mouth was a bit wider than usual and she couldn’t take her eyes off the floor where the blood was, but otherwise she seemed perfectly normal.

  “He would have just kept coming,” Bob said. “Once someone takes something from you and you let them? They don’t feel gratitude, they just feel like you owe them more.” He soaked the mop in the bucket, wrung it out a bit, and slopped it over the main blood spot. “Makes no sense, right? But that’s how they feel. Entitled. And you can never change their minds after that.”

  She said, “He . . . You just fucking shot him. You just . . . I mean, you know?”

  Bob swirled the mop over the spot. “He beat my dog.”

  * * *

  The Chechens took care of the body after a discussion with the Italians and the Micks. Bob was told his money was no good at several restaurants for the next couple of months, and they gave him four tickets to a Celtics game. Not floor seats, but pretty good ones.

  Bob never mentioned Nadia. Just said Eric showed up at the end of the evening, wave
d a gun around, said to take him to the office safe. Bob let him do his ranting, do his waving, found an opportunity, and shot him. And that was it. End of Eric, end of story.

  Nadia came to him a few days later. Bob opened the door and she stood there on his stoop with a bright winter day turning everything sharp and clear behind her. She held up a bag of dog treats.

  “Peanut butter,” she said, her smile bright, her eyes just a little wet. “With a hint of molasses.”

  Bob opened the door wide and stepped back to let her in.

  * * *

  “I’ve gotta believe,” Nadia said, “there’s a purpose. And even if it’s that you kill me as soon as I close my eyes—”

  “Me? What? No,” Bob said. “Oh, no.”

  “—then that’s okay. Because I just can’t go through any more of this alone. Not another day.”

  “Me too.” He closed his eyes. “Me too.”

  They didn’t speak for a long time. He opened his eyes, peered at the ceiling of his bedroom. “Why?”

  “Hmm?”

  “This. You. Why are you with me?”

  She ran a hand over his chest and it gave him a shiver. In his whole life, he never would have expected to feel a touch like that on his bare skin.

  “Because I like you. Because you’re nice to Cassius.”

  “And because you’re scared of me?”

  “I dunno. Maybe. But more the other reason.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was lying. Who could tell when anyone was? Really. Every day, you ran into people and half of them, if not more, could be lying to you. Why?

  Why not?

  You couldn’t tell who was true and who was not. If you could, lie detectors would never have been invented. Someone stared in your face and said, I’m telling the truth. They said, I promise. They said, I love you.

  And you were going to say what to that? Prove it?

  “He needs a walk.”

  “Huh?”

  “Cassius. He hasn’t been out all day.”

  “I’ll get the leash.”

  * * *

  In the park, the February sky hung above them like a canvas tarp. The weather had been almost mild for a few days. The ice had broken on the river but small chunks of it clung to the dark banks.