“I’m asking. For real.”
The old man stared at Tony like he was a freak, shifted his weight, looked awkwardly behind him. He was one of those guys who had aged far beyond his years. Ancient and wizened, he might have been only in his early sixties, but the years had been hard. Early sixties put him at late thirties when he slipped into my house and stuck his knife into my throat.
“I’m trying to make a connection here,” said Tony.
“What the hell for?”
“What I wanted to say,” said Tony, “what I need you to know, Corky, is that I’m sorry. That what you and Flynn did to me that night, it’s in the past and I’m sorry I drove you to it.”
The old man looked at Tony for a long moment with his wet rheumy eyes and then spat on the floor. “I don’t want your stinking apology.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Tony. “It’s not like a blender, you can’t give it back. So now you’re off the list.”
“What list?”
“How was that?” said Tony to me.
“Pretty good,” I said.
“What’s this list?” said Corky.
“Am I finished yet?”
“One more,” I said.
“What the hell is this list?”
“All the people I need to apologize to. I won’t be able to apologize now to Flynn, which is a shame. I had a lot of apologizing to do to Flynn. But now I only need to find my brother.”
“You want to say sorry to that son of a bitch?”
“He stepped up to take care of me after my parents died, and I treated him like dirt. That’s all. There was the time I crashed his car, the times I stole cash from his wallet, all the times I stayed out late and ignored his advice, the grief I gave him. He did a lot for me.”
“He beat you like a lazy dog, day after day.”
“That he did, but I usually gave as good as I got. I just want to give him a sorry, check him off the list, too. You know where he is these days?”
“That a joke?”
“No sir.”
“I ain’t seen him since he went off to jail.”
“Has anyone here heard from him?”
“Let me tell you, Tony, if anyone did know where he was, he wouldn’t be there no more.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Tony, standing now and tossing some bills on the bar for the soda waters. “But that’s all I came for.” He put his hand on the old man’s shoulder, peered deeply into the old man’s eyes. “Thank you for listening. Take care of yourself now, Corky. And I mean it.”
A moment later Tony was headed out of the bar and I was scrambling to catch up, grateful as hell to get out of there, when a huge man, like a great block of ebony, stepped in front of the door and shook his head. He was almost Tony’s size, but even so his presence wouldn’t have stopped Tony without the tire iron he held like a baseball bat. When we turned around, Corky was right behind us.
“You may be done asking your questions, Tony,” said Corky, “but we got some of our own.”
“I don’t have any answers.”
“We’ll see. Give up your wallet.”
“My what?”
“You heard me.”
“No way.”
“Hand it over,” said Corky, pulling a huge bowie knife from behind his back. “Billy wants to talk.”
“Is this a robbery or an invitation?” said Tony.
“In this joint there ain’t much difference. Billy’s waiting for you. Billy Flynn.”
“Flynn?”
“That’s right. The Fat Dog’s kid, and Billy wants to talk about old debts.”
32. The Fat Dog’s Kid
FUCK YOU, TONY, all right?” said Flynn. “And fuck your brother, too, only harder and in the ass. I ought to shoot you in the head just for thinking we might know where that piece of shit is hiding. And who is this table-faced white-shirt faggot sitting next to you?”
The last of this spew of obscenity from Billy Flynn was aimed directly at me.
Billy was not the man we had thought he was. In fact, he was not a man at all. Instead, Billie Flynn was the woman at the head table, huge and round, with a face like a fist. The man beside her was her so-called old man, even though he looked a decade younger than she, but from the authoritative honk of her expletive-spewing voice and the cold, maniacal blue of her eyes, it was clear who was in charge.
“Drink your fucking beer,” said Billie to Tony. Billie had sent Corky over to get enough beers for us to have one in each fist and a boatload to spare. The table looked like an Anheuser-Busch parade.
“I’m off the stuff,” said Tony.
“Not tonight you’re not. We don’t buy that twelve-step bullshit, not in here, not at my table. At my table any man who can’t drink doesn’t walk away in one piece. Drink your fucking beer.”
Tony stared for a bit until Corky picked up his knife, poked it into the table, flicked out a chunk of the wood. Tony drank half a bottle in one swallow.
“How’d that taste, Alkie Boy?” said Billie.
“Pretty damn good.”
“You bet it did. I tried the whole Bill’s-club thing once under court order and the only way I could stand the meetings was to get shitfaced before them. What about you, Pencil Pocket?” she said to me. “Drink up.”
I quickly took a sip.
“What, your husband won’t approve? Drink the whole damn thing, you tan-pantsed fuck.”
I took a bigger sip.
“Who the hell are you, again?”
I was starting to give her my Jonathon Willing name when she said, “Shut the fuck up.”
I shut the fuck up.
“So Tony, how are things on…” She opened the wallet Corky had taken off him, looked at the driver’s license. “Buxton Drive in Pitchford, PA.”
“Dreamy,” said Tony.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying your life. My daddy’s not enjoying his anymore. He died in that prison your brother shafted him into. Someone shoved his head into a lathe at the machine shop. Needless to say, the casket was closed, which was a relief, really, because even with his face, my daddy was uglier than me, and that’s saying something.”
“I’m sorry about your father,” said Tony.
“No you’re not and neither am I. The only two things he ever did for me was ejaculate and die. But he was my daddy and someone’s got to pay. Hey you, Mr. Tan Pants, you think this is funny?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just that my father was a bastard, too.”
“Now this is touching. Here we are, drinking beer, swapping stories about our dads. Tell me more, or, on second thought, fuck your daddy. You think I care? I’d as soon have Corky slice your throat than listen to one more word about your fucking family.”
“I think I knowed him,” said Corky, tilting his head as he continued to stare.
“You couldn’t,” I said.
“I could swear,” said Corky.
“The scar on your throat,” said Billie, waving a fat finger at me, “that thing that looks like a caterpillar trying to hump your Adam’s apple. How’d you get that?”
“Golf.”
“Tough sport,” said Billie’s old man, nodding.
“Did I tell you to talk, Stoner?” said Billie. “I want your opinion, I’ll pull your head out of my cockpit and ask. It looks like your work, don’t it, Corky? I mean the scar, not them two bruised eyes.”
“Sure does.”
“What are you doing with a weak stream of piss like this one, Tony?”
Tony looked at me, shook his head. “He’s my sponsor.”
She barked out a laugh. “I got my sponsor off my back by getting him hooked on coke, which I was selling at the time, so that worked out well. Drink up, boys.”
We drank up. When our beers were finished she pushed two more at us.
“Drink until you puke and then drink some more. That’s what I got out of the two A’s. It wasn’t just my daddy your brother put in jail, he put Corky in, too.”
> “Six years,” said Corky.
“And half the other guys here. Ever since I was ten and my daddy was in that jail, he would tell me about the Rams on my visits, about the rides, the fights, the glorious outlaw life. It’s all a girl could ever want. I got myself tattooed like a Chinese sailor in anticipation. But when I showed up here there was nothing left but the chicken bones. Your brother, Tony, he tore the whole thing apart. And I’ve built it back piece by piece for one purpose. These are our life goals now, in reverse order: to drink, to fuck, to ride, to fight, to fuck, to cut Derek Grubbins’s fucking head off his fucking body and nail it to the wall.” She looked up at an open spot between two ragged vests. “Right there, actually, so I can stand on the table and hump his face.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Tony. “What you’re telling me is that you don’t know where my brother is either.”
“Tony, you never was too bright,” said Corky.
“If we knew where your brother was,” said Billie, “he’d be dead already and we’d have drunk a keg of beer to celebrate and pissed it out on his corpse.”
“Do you have any ideas, any possibilities?” I said.
“You’re talking? Why are you talking? Tell him to shut the fuck up, Tony, or I’ll have Corky cut his throat all the way through this time.”
“Shut the fuck up,” said Tony.
I shut the fuck up.
“He’s somewhere, your brother, in some fancy house probably,” said Billie, “living under an assumed name, playing tennis and screwing the neighbors’ wives. He thinks he’s safe in witness protection? They better protect his asshole with a cork, because when we find him we’re going to let Sparky over there stuff it with dynamite.” She nodded toward a skinny kid with greasy blond hair at another table, flicking his lighter on and off, on and off. “Sparky likes fire. It’s good to have a hobby, don’t you think? Mine is murdering your brother.”
“I get it,” said Tony. “You want to kill my brother. You really want to kill my brother. You want to kill my brother and then bring him back to life with electric paddles so you can kill him again.”
“Payback’s a bitch and I intend to strap on and pound away until her nose pops off.”
“You know what you got, Billie? You got issues.”
“You’re damn right I got issues. I weigh three hundred pounds, I’m a mean drunk, I bash heads to calm my nerves, and I want to fuck my dead daddy. Even my issues got issues. Anything wrong with that?”
“But think about it,” said Tony. “Whatever my brother did to your father, he did when you were ten. And you’ve been carrying it like a boulder all this time. Isn’t it getting heavy? Don’t you think it’s time to let it go?”
“Then what would I do for fun?”
“Just let it go. Just drop it, like a stone into a pond. Plop. You don’t know how light you’ll feel.”
“I don’t want to feel light. I like my hate. It keeps me hungry and horny. Oh, baby boy, I’m going to find and kill your brother, yes I am, but only after he coughs it up.”
“Coughs what up?”
“You always was stupid, Tony,” said Corky. “But not that stupid.”
“My daddy told me that back in the day they were pulling in so much cash they didn’t know what to do with it all. They couldn’t bank it, invest it, or spend it; the only thing to be done with it was hide it away or steal it. My daddy said he would have done the stealing himself if Derek didn’t beat him to it. Then maybe I would have been born a rich little girl, and then maybe I wouldn’t have this big fucking stone of hate on my shoulder.”
“So it’s not just revenge you’re after,” said Tony. “It’s also your childhood.”
“Am I on a couch? It’s about the money, Sigmund Fuck. And that means you’ve got a chance here, Tony. You’re on step nine, right? And you want to make amends to your brother? What about making amends by saving his fucking life, how does that sound?”
“How do I do that?”
“Didn’t I just tell you it was about the money, you dumb shit? Here’s a deal. A hundred thou from your brother’s stash and I’ll promise to drop my hate into your fucking pond. How does that sound?”
“Extortion wasn’t what I had in mind.” Tony looked at me like Ollie looking at Stan: Another fine mess you’ve got me into.
“What are you looking at him for?” said Billie. “What does he have to do with anything? Look at me, you fuck.”
Tony turned his head to Billie.
“You want to make amends? Find him before we do, find him first, get us the money, save your brother’s neck.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“You’ve got a week.”
“I can’t find him in a week.”
“Try.”
“You’re insane.”
“You bet I am. And if I don’t hear from you in a week, Tony, I’ll be bringing the crazy to Pitchford. Maybe just so you’ll know we’re serious, I’ll let Corky kill my little tan-pantsed man right here, right now.”
“You’re going to kill him?” said Tony.
“Or maybe we’ll let Sparky do a number on him.” Sparky was still at his table, flicking his lighter, staring at me through the flame. Flick, flick. “You got a problem with that?”
“Not really,” said Tony.
“What?” I said.
“Actually, you’d be doing me a favor.”
“What the hell?” I said.
“I understand,” said Billie. “Sponsors, like a pimple on your ass. And believe me, I know about pimples on my ass.” Billie opened up the wallet, pulled out what cash was inside, and counted. “Twenty, forty, fifty, fifty-five, fifty-six.”
“I guess the next round is on me,” said Tony.
“You guess right. Now drink the fuck up.”
She tossed the empty wallet back, and we drank the fuck up.
33. Rattle Rattle
YOU WERE GOING to let her kill me,” I said as we sped away from The Devil’s Brew, Tony squeezing his truck through the narrow city streets with cars parked on either side.
“She was just barking,” said Tony.
“And what if she wasn’t? Corky was more than ready to finish what he started twenty-five years ago. And that kid with the lighter. What a bunch of freaks.”
“You would have deserved everything you got. They’re after my brother because of what you did twenty-some years ago. And now we’ve got that crazy bitch up our assholes without us getting any closer to finding Derek.”
“Just to be precise, she’s up your asshole, not mine.”
“Oh, she’s up your asshole, too, Moretti. What did she call you? Her little tan-pantsed man? You give her half a chance, she’ll be sitting on your face.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Just the thought…” I paused as I swallowed a belch.
“Like Fat Dog, like daughter. And there you sit, with enough stolen money to get her off all our backs for good.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it? I’ve been in Pitchford, oh, six hours now, and you’re the third person who’s put in a claim for the money. What do you think I have left after all these years?”
“You better hope it’s enough. She’s threatening me, which means she’s threatening you, because if she comes to take me out, I’m taking you out first.”
I looked at him and wondered if I should be surprised and then realized no, I shouldn’t be. So why did I feel such disappointment? “That’s the Tony Grubbins I remember. And it feels good, like the balance of the universe has been restored. Too bad you don’t have a football handy to throw at my face.”
“I’ll find something.”
“It’s funny how some things just never change.”
“You sure haven’t.”
We stayed silent for the rest of the trip, as the narrow city streets made way for the wider suburban boulevards. I hadn’t left my car at the Stoneway; not knowing when I would get back and not wanting to leave it sitting alone in the lot, I had parked it back at my
motel, a Hampton Inn on the Pitchford strip where I had registered as Edward Holt. I still had the Pennsylvania license I had stolen from the airport lot, with its magnets in place, and I had slapped that over my plate just in case anyone trolled the nearby hotels looking for a Virginia registration. What with the fake license plate and being registered in my new name, I figured I was pretty well covered.
But when we reached the motel, and I saw my car sitting dark and silent among all the other cars in the lot, something seemed wrong. I surveyed the area. Lines of cars by the building, a white van in the corner, a truck parked by the Dumpster. Everything quiet, everything dead.
“How long are you staying in Pitchford?” said Tony.
“I’ll be gone tomorrow.”
“No lingering visit to the old hometown, hey?”
“There’s not enough Zofran in the world.”
“Zofran?”
“Nausea medication.”
“Oh, it’s a joke,” said Tony. “Okay.”
“What’s up your butt?”
He stared at me for a bit in the glow of his dashboard. “What were you thinking?”
I knew exactly what he meant. “I was seventeen and high,” I said. “On weed you sold us, I might add.”
“It was your whole little crew, I suppose. Augie and Ben?”
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“You know what you guys did to me, right?”
“You said you were grateful. You said the guy who did it did you a favor.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I was blowing smoke up my own ass. I thought I had let go of my hatred of your fucking guts, but I guess some chains are just wound too tight.”
“But it’s not true that we’re no closer to finding your brother. Billie Flynn told us that after Derek testified he was put in the witness protection program.”
“So?”
“So someone at the US Marshals Service knows where he is.”
“What are you going to do, hack their computers?”
“Something like that,” I said.
“From here on in, leave me out of it.”
“Believe me, I will,” I said. “Does anything look strange here?”
“Where?”
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