“What about her?”
“Do you only hit her on special occasions, Richie, or is it an everyday thing?”
“Why, what did that bitch say?”
“How does it make you feel when you hit her? Like you’re finally getting your share?”
“Whatever she said, she’s lying.”
“She chose you, you son of a bitch. Of all the people in this world, Madeline Worshack chose you. You showed up when she was down and she allowed you into her life, and you should be worshipping her every day for that one act of grace. Instead you haunt a dump like this and complain about the things she won’t do. And you hit her to make yourself feel like someone other than the piece of dog shit you are.”
“Forget it,” he said, looking down at his phone as he started pressing buttons. “I’ll take what Clevenger is giving. It comes without the bullshit. Enjoy your death, asshole.”
“I’ll surely enjoy yours,” I said as I calmly pulled Holmes’s gun out of the holster clipped onto my belt and jammed the tip of the barrel hard into Richie Diffendale’s temple.
“Ow,” he said when the metal banged into his head. And when he realized exactly what it was I was pressing into his head, his eyes widened nicely. I took his phone, dropped it into his drink. Beneath the grinding music, I could hear a silence descend in the bar. Even in a strip club, with breasts bobbing all about, you pull out a gun and it will be noticed.
“What do you want?” he said.
“I want to kill you.”
“I won’t call, I swear.”
“See, the problem is, I can’t trust you further than I could spatter your brain. Which is only as far as that wall. So really, what choice do I have? You’ve got me in a vise, all right.”
“You’ll be in jail the rest of your life.”
“No, I won’t. I’m two names beyond J.J. Moretti already. For twenty-five years I was a ghost in Pitchford. Once I kill you, I’ll walk out of here and become a ghost again.”
“You’re crazy. You can’t just walk out.”
“Who do you think will stop me?” I slapped his cheek with the barrel so his head jerked toward the bartender, who was standing stock-still not five feet from us, staring at the gun. “Him?”
“Help me,” said Diffendale in a voice as gratifyingly high as a castrato’s.
The bartender slowly, carefully, ducked down until he disappeared.
“Her?” I said as I slapped his other cheek so he turned toward a girl in a bikini who had been not three feet from us but was now backing away.
“Oh God, no.”
“Him?” I said, slapping his face again so his head swiveled toward a man in a black leather jacket who was suddenly standing by the door.
“He’s going to kill me,” said Diffendale.
“No, he’s not,” said the tall man in a hushed gravel road of a voice.
I took a longer look at the man, who had now taken two steps toward us. He wasn’t the bouncer who had been here when I arrived. This man was taller and broader, with a hard face, long blond hair, a blond goatee. And there was something familiar in the squint of his eye.
I suddenly swiveled the gun to the huge man’s gut. “Do you have next ups, Tony?” I said. “Do I have to kill you after I kill him?”
“You won’t have time for both of us,” said Tony Grubbins. “You’ll only get one shot before Sid behind the bar blows your head off.”
I looked to my left. The bartender, who had ducked down, was up again with a shotgun trained at my head. Now I was in a vise for sure. My mind clicked like a baseball card in the spokes of a bicycle wheel through all the James Bond moves that could get me out of this. Maybe, if I dropped down below the bar, I could pop Tony and Richie both, before rolling like an acrobatic monkey out of the club, evading Sid’s buckshot. It almost seemed reasonable, excepting the small detail that in a million years I couldn’t pull it off.
“Then I guess it’s you, Tony,” I said. “For what you did to Augie.”
“What’d I do to Augie?”
“Don’t even try pretending you don’t know.”
“Alls I know, Moretti, is after a couple decades of never thinking of your ugly face, I come into the Stoneway and here you are with a gun at Diffendale’s head. Not that he doesn’t deserve it every now and then.”
I considered it all for a moment, considered the calm behind Tony Grubbins’s hushed voice, considered the way it turned out that Richie and not Tony had sent those Devil Rams assholes into my bedroom the night I got my scar, and then, without saying a word, I turned the gun back on Richie Diffendale.
“Shit,” said Richie Diffendale.
“I have an idea,” said Tony Grubbins. “Instead of dying today and really messing up the decor of the club, why don’t we all just calm down, act like human beings, and have ourselves a couple of beers?”
29. Tony Grubbins
IT WAS A move born of fear and hysteria, my pulling a gun on Richie Diffendale. I didn’t intend to kill him, but I sure as hell meant to scare the crap out of the twists of his bowel. And it felt surprisingly good, like I was pulling a gun on the bastards who had killed Augie and were chasing me now, like I was pulling a gun on all my fears and frustrations, like I was pulling a gun on my past. But even as I pulled that gun on Tony Grubbins’s pilot fish, I knew it was as if I were dumping a bucket of chum into the ocean. And like the shark he had been, Grubbins wheeled around and came for the blood.
Now Tony and Richie and I sat in a ratty back office of the club, a room lined with old file cabinets and piled with empty liquor boxes, a tragic fire just waiting to happen. Being in the same metropolitan area as Tony Grubbins gave me the sweats; being in the same room as Tony Grubbins was appallingly terrifying. He could have been wearing a priest’s collar and I’d still be shaking. It was something deep and primitive, this fear, and I desperately missed the security of a gun in my hand, but Tony had insisted I hand the piece off to the bartender before we did any talking and, like my fourteen-year-old self, I had done what Tony ordered. So there I was, facing off against the monster beneath my bed with fear in my heart and only a beer bottle in my hand.
Grubbins leaned back and stared at me from behind an old metal desk, lit a cigarette, tossed the smoldering match into one of the empty cartons. A curl of smoke rose out of the box.
“Okay, this is good,” said Tony, his voice a crushed pack of Marlboros. “The guns are put away and we’re almost acting civilized.”
“He took it,” said Richie Diffendale.
“Took what, Richie?”
“The money, man. From your house. The money that the Devil Rams stashed with all them drugs.”
“You think little J.J. Moretti here took that money?”
“I know it.”
“And that’s why he came back to Pitchford and put a gun to your head?”
“So I wouldn’t tell.”
“Tell who?” said Tony.
“You.”
“Me?” Tony stared blankly at Richie. “It wasn’t my money. Why the hell would I care?”
I cocked my head at that. Nothing in the last few days had surprised me more. Why wouldn’t he care? Why wouldn’t everyone care?
“And there’s someone looking for him, Tony. Someone looking hard.”
Tony took a draw from his cigarette and exhaled slowly, like he was trying to figure something out. “You said Augie Iannucci was murdered, is that right, Moretti?”
“That’s right.”
“Richie, is this guy you were going to tell about seeing Moretti the same guy who killed Augie?”
“I don’t know anything about what happened to Augie,” said Richie.
“Don’t you think you ought to find out before jumping into the deep water?”
“Right after the police found the drugs,” I said, “the Devil Rams stormed into my house, looking for the missing money. They gave me this scar.”
“What did they find?” said Tony.
“They found nothing, b
ecause there was nothing there. But I always assumed it was you who did the ratting.”
“Pretty fair assumption,” he said.
“But tonight I found out it was Richie.”
“And that’s why you pulled the gun.”
“Wasn’t I justified?”
“They came for me, too,” said Tony. “This was after I was sent to that group home for rejects. Two of my brother’s old gang pals, Corky and the Fat Dog. They wanted the money, which I didn’t have. And then they wanted a name.”
“Who did you give them?” I said.
“I wanted to give them you, Moretti. Not because I thought you had the money, just for spite. That’s the kind of kid I was. We had that thing between us.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that.”
“I’m not. I had a lot of hate in me and it was a pleasure dishing it out to you because you had hate in you, too.”
“Me?”
He let the smoke rise in front of his face. “But I sure as hell wasn’t going to let those bastards beat it out of me.”
“You protected me?”
“Not you. Something else.”
“What about our share, man?” said Richie.
“Our share of what, Richie?” said Tony. “It wasn’t your money either.”
“But it sure as hell wasn’t Frenchy’s. If he wants to keep us quiet, he needs to pay.”
“Truth is, I don’t know if there was ever any money to take,” said Tony, looking now at his cigarette as it smoldered. “I always thought my brother made off with it long before, and then called in the cops to arrest his butt and get him off the street. It’s something he would have pulled. A few years in jail and the rest of his life to spend like a fool, no matter what happened to me. That would explain why he’s disappeared off the face of the earth; he’s spending his cash in every whorehouse in South America.”
“But the guy who is looking for Moretti offered up a reward,” said Richie. “We can split it, Tony. You and me.”
“Blood money, dude.”
“As long as it’s J.J.’s blood,” said Richie.
“Guys like that,” said Tony, shaking his head. “I been around enough to know that guys like that don’t leave loose ends.”
“I can take care of myself,” said Diffendale.
“Like you were taking care of yourself at the bar when Moretti here put a gun in your face? You get guns put in your face enough times, one of them is bound to go off. My advice, Richie, is to forget all about our friend Moretti here. Anything else won’t end well. Now get on home to your wife.”
Richie sneered at me before he stomped out of the room; I pointed my finger at him like the barrel of a gun. Tony shook his head as if saddened at the very state of the human race.
Tony Grubbins was nothing like I had expected after twenty-five years. Sure, he was raw and huge and scarred and imposing, the kind of guy if I saw him in an alley I’d throw my wallet at him and run the other way, but there was something in his manner that I found shocking. As if the hate that had been his defining trait as a boy had somehow been burned right out of him. As if he had somehow evolved, evolved in a way I hadn’t been able to.
“Richie always had issues,” said Tony.
“So why’d you let him hang around with you all those years?”
“Every dog has fleas. What are you doing here, Moretti?”
“Someone killed Augie looking for the money,” I said. “And now they’re coming after me. And my family. I thought you were behind it.”
“And what were you going to do about it?”
“I was going to do something.”
“Die, most likely.”
“Or make a deal.”
“With what? That gun of yours? Do you even know how to shoot it?”
“It’s got a trigger.”
“And a safety, which was on,” said Tony. “And a chamber that needs to be primed, which it wasn’t. That gun was as dangerous as a mug of milk in your hand.”
“Do you really not care about the money?”
He stared at me for a long moment as he finished his cigarette. “Let’s just say if someone did steal it, he did me a favor.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t live with my brother. You kick a dog enough, he just lies down and licks your hand and takes it. But when a stranger shows up, he becomes the most vicious son-of-a-bitch watchdog you ever saw.”
“But you’re not that dog anymore,” I said, not a question, instead a puzzled declaration. “If it’s not you, then it’s your brother.”
“How does that follow?”
“They called me Frenchy.”
“Frenchy, huh? Derek would have known you by that name.” Tony leaned forward on the desk, let the smoke wash over his face like a veil. “So,” he said, his hushed voice wide with apprehension, “Derek’s back.”
“You look like the scientist in a Godzilla movie.”
“I feel like I’ve been slugged.”
“Do you have any idea where he is?”
“None.”
“Who would?”
“You don’t want to go there, trust me.”
“I’m running for my life. My family’s in hiding. I don’t have a choice. I need to find your brother.”
“You’re saying all this as if I give a crap. Why on earth would I want to stick a shovel in the dirt and dig my brother up from wherever the hell he’s buried himself?”
“Because he’s doing to me what he did to you.”
“Then do like I did: fix it yourself.”
“I need your help.”
“What you need to do is to go home.”
“You owe me.”
He laughed at that. “What could I possibly owe you?”
“You terrorized me, you beat me up, you threw a football at my face, you scarred my life. You owe me something.”
“I threw a football at your face?”
“You don’t remember?”
“No, but I’m sure you deserved it.”
“And you killed my dog.”
He looked at me, looked down at the desktop, rubbed his beard. “Yeah,” he said finally, “I always felt bad about the dog.”
30. Death in Guaymas
I WAS ANGRY as a scorpion when it all went down,” said Tony Grubbins in his husk of a voice. We were now in his pickup truck, well south of Pitchford, heading deep into the heart of Philadelphia. For some reason Tony had agreed to help me discover where I might find his brother, and I didn’t think it was only because he had killed my dog thirty years before. “I was ripped away from everything I had ever known. For my own good, the judge said. But they couldn’t find a relative willing to take me. So they put me in the group home, where Corky and the Fat Dog found me. First chance I got I stole a cycle and roared out of there.”
“Where were you going?” I asked.
“It didn’t much matter.” He laughed a little. “And once I got there I kept on going. All I had was the anger, but it was better than a truckload of Red Bull at keeping me fueled.”
There was something about this current incarnation of Tony Grubbins that made me doubt one of my most cherished certainties. I never believed that people changed. Their relationships changed, their luck, the size of their investment portfolios or the value of their real estate, even their habits, but the inner person, the continuing monologue that droned on and on through the entirety of a life, that didn’t change—at least mine never did. That’s why we could always recognize the kid in the adult. Richie Diffendale was still the same owl-eyed brat, Augie had always been the same self-destructive sardonic daredevil, I was the same calculating resentful snit. But this man sitting next to me seemed a living refutation of what I had taken for comforting fact. Simply sitting next to him was disorienting. “What the hell happened to you?” I had asked him, a little amazed. This was his answer.
“And it wasn’t just the things that had been done to me by my brother that caused the anger,
it was also the things I had done. I had become as much an animal as he was. That’s what happens when you get beat on every day of your life: you find places to release the pain. In the schoolyard, on the football field, in the backseat of a Chevy with insecure girls. And that’s the way I still was, when, in the middle of the desert, I ran into Nat.”
It was in a bar in Nogales where Tony had beaten the crap out of some migrant who had accidentally caused him to spill his beer. Nat was old and gray and missing half his teeth, but his eyes remained sharp enough to see Tony clear. With the blood still drying on Tony’s hands, Nat pulled him aside, bought him a drink, made a proposition. They were holding unsanctioned prize fights on the other side of the border—no rules, bare fists—and they were looking for Anglos who could take a beating. The money was good, but for Tony the violence was better. He signed on right then, and was in the ring the next night.
It was a raucous crowd of Mexicans and dissolute Americans, all being worked on by bookmakers and prostitutes, by tequila boys moving through the stands and selling shots. The girls parading around the ring with numbered signs indicating the round were topless, the canvas floor of the ring was stained with blood and urine. Fighters came back into the basement dressing room with their noses flattened, their ears hanging, deltas of blood streaming from their foreheads. This wasn’t boxing, this was cockfighting without the birds, pure barbarism untouched by art. For Tony Grubbins, running from something and running to nothing and angry at the world, it was perfect.
If I’m embellishing, humor me. Tony’s story has expanded and grown in my mind’s eye since first I heard him tell it. I take it out now and then like a golden coin and twist it in my fingers, rub its cold hard surface with my thumb, smile at its shine. For me, it is no longer just this tale I heard in the midst of danger, it is part of me. Every once in a while a story hits so deep it buries itself in your bone.
“Work fast and don’t show fear,” said Nat before the first bell that first night over the border.
“What’s fear?” said Tony.
“Now you’ve got it,” said Nat. His voice was high and scratched with age, the caw of a raven. “Don’t play around in there. Start pounding and don’t stop until you put him down.”
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