He needed it to do more now than simply mask the pain growing once again in his hand.
Only a half dozen or so vehicles were in that beachside lot tonight, significantly less than half of what Cal had counted when he was last there two nights ago. Among them there wasn’t a single Town Car, so he didn’t have to worry this time about drivers-for-hire watching as they waited and smoked. Still, he studied each vehicle there—luxury cars all—to make certain there would be no witnesses.
We have to think that way, Lebell had said. Like criminals.
It was, for Cal, more now than a simple matter of just thinking like one.
He waited behind the wheel, watching the entrance to the path that curved through the thick wall of trees separating the lot from the old monastery. Invisible when he had first arrived, but he could see it clearly now. Angstrom and Pamona were supposed to be there, that was what Cal had instructed, but there was no sign of them, no sign of anyone.
Then suddenly, through the trees, a flickering light in motion.
A flashlight.
Cal climbed out of the Mustang, heard the water off to his left, kept his eye, though, on the light. It wasn’t long before two figures were standing in the path’s entrance.
By then, Cal was feeling the full effect of the oral morphine.
He approached them, his hands in the pocket of the Belstaff jacket. His good hand, his left, held the revolver, his finger covering its trigger.
Neither man was in costume tonight. Pamona wore dark slacks and a silk shirt, black shoes, and a wool jacket; Angstrom, jeans and a hooded Baja pullover. White, it made him, unlike Heather’s husband, something of an easy target.
Angstrom was holding the flashlight. He shined it on the pavement between them. The light reflecting up was enough for each of them to see the other by.
Cal felt his palm begin to sweat. The walnut grip quickly grew slick in his hand. Pamona, he noticed, was staring at his face. Cal had yet to reach the two men, was still a good ten paces away when Pamona spoke.
“I know you,” he said. “You were the dishwasher. Your brother was that wise-ass punk. Rakowski, right? What was your name? Cal? You enjoy fucking my wife, Cal? With my kid inside? You enjoy that, you piece of shit—”
Cal removed his left hand, aimed the revolver at Pamona’s chest, and fired. The man folded and dropped, and before Angstrom could do more than flinch, Cal sighted him.
The single gunshot was less loud here—less loud than back in the kitchen of that abandoned hotel. Distilled by the open sky and swept off quickly by the wind, it was, nonetheless, a gunshot. There was no time to waste.
“Give me your cell phone,” he ordered.
Angstrom was frozen. “What the fuck?”
“I want your cell phone.”
Angstrom dug into his jeans pocket and removed it, holding it up.
“Put it on the ground, slide it over to me.”
Angstrom did. The phone came to a stop at the toe of Carver’s snake-skin boot. Cal glanced at it, saw no logo, no brand name.
“Is that a prepaid phone?” he said.
“What?”
“Is that a prepaid phone?”
“Yeah.”
“And that’s what you used to call Heather.”
“Yeah.”
Cal smashed it with the boot, grinding it to several pieces with the hard heel. He then kicked the larger of them into the woods and scattered the smaller ones among the bits of sand at the lot’s edge.
Just one more thing remained.
He held his aim, his hand steady. Angstrom had both hands up in surrender. Cal noticed the rabbit’s foot hanging around the guy’s neck.
“Please don’t,” Angstrom said. “Just don’t shoot, okay.”
Cal’s mind raced. It was more than the spinning of a brain under the influence of morphine, though. He knew he had to fire, just like he had done a moment ago, just like he had done back in the kitchen of that abandoned hotel. With Angstrom dead, there would be no one to connect Heather to Cal, and no way, then, for anyone to see this for what it really was.
A young man killing the husband of the woman he loves, for the woman he loves.
With Angstrom dead, there was no proof that Heather hadn’t simply disappeared on her husband two months ago for parts unknown, nothing to indicate that she had anything at all to do with the kid with the leather jacket and busted hand the ferrymen had seen twice now, first on Halloween, then again two nights later.
Yet Cal couldn’t close his finger around the trigger.
“Please, man,” Angstrom said again.
Cal’s hand was steady, Angstrom’s rabbit’s foot right there in his sights, but he just couldn’t fire.
It was then that Cal detected motion directly behind Angstrom. Someone was emerging from the path. Someone with a weapon drawn.
It was a man in a suit.
The man who had inadvertently prevented Pamona from tripping over Cal as he hid at the other end of the path.
Cal was in this man’s sights, but this man was moving—not running, that would have made too much noise, but in motion nonetheless, walking steadily both forward and to his left. Clearing the path, looking for a clean shot. He was, Cal sensed, just seconds from pulling the trigger.
Out of reflex Cal stepped to his right—displace, like he had back in the kitchen—and dropped low. That, dropping low, was the wrestler in him. As Cal moved, Angstrom was placed for a brief second between him and the man in the suit. It was at that instant the man in the suit fired.
Just like Pamona had, just like Tierno and Janssen and Carver had, Angstrom folded and fell.
A man falling through a trapdoor.
As Angstrom fell, Cal, in crouch, extended and raised his arm, to aim at the man standing over him. Whatever emotion had caused his trigger finger to freeze was long gone now. He squeezed once, and this fifth shot hit the man in the face.
He, too, folded and fell.
Cal stayed down, waiting, his eye on the path. Would another man emerge from it? Were there more? He heard and saw, though, nothing. It took a moment, but eventually Cal was able to stand. It took another moment, but finally he was able to think.
Despite the morphine, or maybe because of it, he realized what he had to do.
That was his gift, always had been. He could look at something—something mechanical—and just know what to do.
It wasn’t till recently that he realized this natural ability of his extended beyond the intricacies of all things automotive.
He hurried to Angstrom, knelt down, and picked up Angstrom’s right hand, fitting it around the grip. He knew that for this to look the way he wanted it to look, the cops would need to find powder burns on Angstrom’s hand. Yet another drug deal gone bad, perhaps—anything but what it really was. Placing Angstrom’s finger over the trigger, and his own gloved finger over Angstrom’s, he aimed the revolver out over the dark water and fired off the final round.
This shot, like the ones before, dissipated quickly, might have been, to the remaining partygoers inside the monastery, the crack of nearby fireworks.
Or maybe not.
Still, Cal didn’t stick around to find out. He ran to Lebell’s Mustang, got in behind the wheel, and drove to the north end of the island, where another ferry landing was located, this one connecting Shelter Island to Greenport, on the northern fork of Long Island.
As he made his way through those dark streets, Cal kept his eye on the rearview mirror, watching for some indication that he was being pursued. Often he would realize that he was holding his breath, tell himself to breathe, only to find a moment later that he was holding it again.
He continued to watch what that narrow mirror showed of the world behind him as he parked the Mustang at the bow of the empty ferry and waited for this crossing to begin.
PART FOUR
November 2–5
Fifteen
He ditched the Mustang, along with the Belstaff jacket and snake-skin boots, in
Connecticut, where, like the Rakowski he was, he boosted an old Pontiac and in it made his way to eastern Ohio. There, at a walk-in clinic, he had his wrist set and put in a cast. He paid in cash, giving the name Adam Pulaski to the admitting nurse because it would be easy enough in his current state to remember, and because Cal Rakowski simply no longer existed.
The only document to contradict that fact was his New York State driver’s license, which he cut up and flushed down the toilet in the clinic’s rest room.
At a bus station ticket counter a few blocks away, when asked for identification, he claimed to have lost everything in a recent mugging. One look at him and there was no reason for the ticket agent to doubt his story. A woman Angelica’s age, though nowhere near as well-tended, she took pity on the boy and issued a ticket anyway, even wished him luck.
His destination was a town a thousand miles from everything he knew. A college town, it was a place his brother had often mentioned, a place where thousands of people his and Cal’s age walked around every day and there were plenty of restaurants and bars in which to find off-the-books work. It was the town, in fact, Aaron’s girlfriend had come from. She had filled Aaron’s head with stories about it, and he had filled Cal’s.
Upon his arrival, Cal found a cheap hotel to stay at, checking in with the same story about having lost his identification. Then, after allowing himself a few hours’ sleep, during which he dreamed of being followed by some faceless shadow, he began to search around for long-term accommodations.
The right accommodations.
He began to seek out, too, news coverage of all that he had left behind. Reports were limited at first to the New York papers—the headline of the New York Post read BRIDGEHAMPTON BLOODBATH—but the story was picked up within days by the national press. It was a report in USA Today that first referred to a connection between those murders in Bridgehampton and an apparent drug deal gone bad on Shelter Island. The gun that had killed three men in Bridgehampton—one of which was an FBI agent—also killed two of three men murdered on Shelter Island on the same night. It was the next day that an article in The New York Times connected those murders with an apparent suicide in Southampton that had taken place in the home of a “prominent and beloved town matriarch” who herself had been killed in a suspicious motorcycle accident and the murder of a seasoned detective.
For days and days it went like that, each paper Cal opened offering newly disclosed details—revelation upon revelation, connection upon connection, yet each new piece seemed to only add to what had become a state of confusion. In none of the articles, however, appeared the name Cal Rakowski—and, more importantly, neither did the name Heather Pamona. Even when the stories focused on the violence that had occurred on Shelter Island—one of its victims, Ronnie Pamona, was connected through the sale of a restaurant to a South American gangster that had recently gone missing—even then there was no mention of Pamona’s estranged wife.
Eventually, though, Cal knew, someone would make that connection. On the day that the names of the Shelter Island victims were reported, he’d felt an overwhelming urge to call Heather. He didn’t dare write down her number, so he repeated it countless times a day like a mantra, got to the point where he could have dialed it in his sleep. But he knew better than to risk it, to risk her. He’d gone through hell to remove from that nightmare all trace of himself and her, all the things that connected them.
It was best to leave everything as it was, for now anyway.
Still, the time was coming when Heather would be able to emerge from hiding. The articles were setting that up nicely. Cal had no doubt that she’d know what to say and what not say about where and with whom she had been for the past few months. Who could blame her—now that it was coming out exactly what kind of man her husband was, the life of decadence he was drawn to—for having taken off in the first place?
All that remained, then, as far as Cal could see, was what might be recovered from the old Triumph motorcycle. He usually wore gloves when he worked on the thing, but perhaps on one of the engine parts, something small that had required a dexterous touch, awaited a perfect print. He had to be careful from now on, not that he wasn’t careful by nature. But, now, even more so. The last thing he needed was for his fingerprints to be entered into the nationwide database. The one thing that could bring this all down around him was something connecting Adam Pulaski with Cal Rakowski, and Cal Rakowski with what the press was now calling The Halloween Murders.
It was three days before he found a sign that interested him. ROOM FOR RENT, in a window above a little breakfast and lunch place. INQUIRE WITHIN. He watched the restaurant for much of the morning from a coffee shop across the street—it was that kind of neighborhood, lots of places to eat everywhere you looked, so maybe he’d find work that he could walk to, which would be helpful since he couldn’t buy a vehicle, at least not till he was officially someone else.
But where to look for someone like Lebell’s friend Pearson?
First things first.
He waited till the lunch rush was over and the only waitress inside was alone, then crossed the street and entered.
The room above was gloomy but big, had a kitchenette and a small table set beside a window that overlooked the busy street. High ceilings, a bed twice the size of his old bed, and, directly above it, a wooden fan.
The waitress was a tall woman, in her fifties, Cal guessed. Curly red hair, a deep voice, blue eyes that looked at him with a degree of skepticism. He was getting used to that, though, had been getting such looks from more or less everyone now. Did it show? What he had done? The man he had become? The woman told him that she owned the building and the business below, seemed to want him to know that she wasn’t just a waitress in some coffee shop.
“Do you have a job?” she said. She was standing in the open doorway, watching him as he moved around the room.
“No, but I’ll be looking once my hand heals. I can pay in advance, though. For as many weeks as you want.”
He looked out the window, saw barely any vehicles on that narrow street. Foot traffic only. Voices, footsteps, a flow of people.
“It’s a hundred a week,” the woman said.
“I can pay you for ten.”
She looked him over. He just stood there.
“Yeah, okay,” she said finally.
He reached into his jacket and pulled a grand from his wad of bills. Crossing the room, he held out the money for her.
She didn’t take it just yet, though.
“You’ll have to share the bathroom with the other tenants,” she said. “A couple. They have the back room. I should warn you, they argue a lot. If it gets to be too much, just let me know.”
“It’s all right. I’m pretty good at minding my own business.”
The woman nodded, gave him one last look, then took the bills from him.
“Good for you,” she said. “So what’s your name?”
“Adam.”
“Adam what?”
“Pulaski.”
“What kind of work will you be looking for when you start looking again?”
“Anything I can get.”
“Ever work in a restaurant?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m looking for a busboy-dishwasher. Would you be interested?”
“Maybe.”
“We’ll talk about it when the time comes.” She folded the money, stuffed it into her apron. “I’m Corita, by the way.”
They shook hands. He noticed there were no rings on her fingers.
“Do you have a lot of things to carry up?” She glanced at the cast on his hand. “I can maybe get my cook to help you.”
“No, this is it, this is me. When do you think can I move in?”
She shrugged. “Looks to me like you already have.”
Later, stretched out on his bed in the dark, he listened to the sounds coming up from the street. They lasted well into the night. It was very different here from what he was used to, from the silence
of Scuttlehole Road, but he didn’t mind it. Getting up at one point, he looked out his front window, saw, again, people his age moving about. Couples, here and there; small groups; the occasional solitary soul heading somewhere. Pulling up one of the chairs from his small table, he sat and watched them all.
It wasn’t till midnight that he heard his neighbors arrive. He listened to the noise of them coming up the stairs, moving down the hallway, entering their room. There was nothing unusual for a while, and then, suddenly, he heard raised voices. An argument—like an explosion—that lasted for several minutes, a man cursing and a woman crying. Finally, a door slammed shut, the voices stopped. There were footsteps in the hallway and then on the stairs. A single set of footsteps, angry.
The downstairs door closed, and from his window he saw a man walking away in a hurry.
Tall, dressed in jeans and an army field jacket, storming off. Cal couldn’t see the man’s face but didn’t really want to. Within seconds, his neighbor had disappeared from sight.
Cal waited fifteen minutes, then decided it was time for sleep. Stepping out of his room, into the narrow hallway, he saw that the bathroom door was closed. Before he could turn back, though, the door opened and a woman appeared.
Young, maybe even his age, with shoulder-length dark hair—black hair, really. She was dressed in a T-shirt that was several sizes too big. There were tears in her eyes, one of which—Cal saw this and immediately wished he hadn’t—had a half-moon bruise beneath it. A black smudge that stood out even in the darkness of that hallway.
She saw him, and he saw her, so no turning back for either of them. Nervously, she brushed her long bangs behind her right ear, leaving her left side alone, no doubt to hide her blackened eye.
“You must be our new neighbor,” she said.
Cal nodded. “Yeah.”
“I’m Lily.”
“I’m Adam.”
“Listen, sorry about the noise before.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
She smiled. It was, at best, a forced smile. “He wasn’t like that before we got married. He’s having a hard time finding work, like everyone else these days. It’s a world gone mad, you know. He’ll probably keep it down now that we have a neighbor again.”
[2010] The Violet Hour Page 24