Where the dead lay fb-2

by David Levien

  The Tip-Over Tap Room was not currently open. Besides Terry, Knute was the only one with a set of keys, so it’d be a perfect place to meet with the Chicago guys, whom he’d called and told to hang back for a while until the cops had dispersed. After having a drink and seeing what was in the safe to pay them with, Knute would call the Chicago guys again, have them come in, and give them the assignment of punching this Frank Behr’s ticket. Even if there was nothing in the safe, Knute felt pretty sure he could talk them into doing it on a payment plan. After all, their asses were riding on the outcome, too.

  The building was dark and locked, as it should have been. That’s why it was such a goddamned surprise to Knute when he walked into the back office and saw they were already there.

  “What the fuck’s up, guys?” Knute said, reaching into his pocket and coming out with a slip of paper that had Behr’s address on it. “You’re early.”

  Tino nodded and kicked the office door shut behind Knute, who felt the air change in the room, just like out on the yard at ISP before someone got offed. It just changed. It got cold or dark or somehow unfamiliar and indistinct. Whatever it was, Knute didn’t have much time to weigh it, because the quiet one, Petey wrapped him up in a bear hug and lifted him straight off the floor. The guy was strong as fuck, and all of a sudden Knute felt weak as diner coffee…

  When he’d recall it later, Petey wouldn’t remember the man with the pink scar on his face fighting very hard, but then again, when it finally comes, there’s not much use in fighting it. Before long it was over and they’d wrapped him in a blue plastic tarpaulin. They considered whether or not they should drop him in the same place they’d done the dumping the last time, but that spot hadn’t seemed to hold up very well. Bobby B. figured he knew another one that was a lot closer and easier. Knute Bohgen never made it beyond the parking lot-specifically his own trunk. Petey remembered to pick up the slip of paper that Bohgen had dropped. Add-on jobs were not the way you stayed out of jail in their line of work. Eliminating the nexus was. Petey burned the paper before they made their way out, back to Chicago.

  FORTY-FOUR

  You want another?” Neil Ratay asked, threatening to pour a fourth cup of coffee, black and strong. But Behr had had enough and waved Ratay off. Behr had gone straight home on the heels of the longest day he could remember living and passed out into a dreamless sleep. Seven hours later he shot bolt upright. He’d sweated through his T-shirt and the sheets. He had a feeling that would be happening for the next few weeks, or months, or maybe even longer. When he noticed morning had slipped around the blinds and into the bedroom and there was no point in trying to go back to sleep, he rose and went to get Susan. And while Susan sat there listening, her jaw clenched tight, he’d told it all to Ratay-all except for Pomeroy, and the name of the big investigation firm. It was what he owed the man, plain and simple.

  “So I can write it?” Ratay asked, jotting his final notes.

  “Give me a day to think it through clearly,” Behr said, “but yeah, you can write it.”

  • • •

  After that he took Susan home. They didn’t talk along the way. Something he couldn’t name wouldn’t let him speak. All Behr could do was glance over at her every half block or so and replay the events of the past week in his head. None of it made much sense to him, and the part that made the least was why he’d felt the same sensation when he learned Susan was pregnant as he had when he’d faced Terry Schlegel’s gun: cold, chest-squeezing blackness. He could dress it up and tell himself he’d felt disloyal, that he’d been concerned that a new life would wipe away his memories of Tim, and even Linda, and those memories were all he had left of his son-they were all he had at all for a long while-but now he knew the truth. He was afraid, plain and simple. Because what she had given him with those words in his car that night was hope-hope, and a chance at joy, and a future. But it is a fearful thing to love what death can touch. And the prospect of losing it all again was more than he could face.

  Too quickly they reached her house, and the thing that wouldn’t let him speak kept on and she climbed out of the car. She looked at him for a long, disbelieving moment, then turned for her place.

  FORTY-FIVE

  The strapping young man got the first Whopper of the day when the breakfast menu switched over to lunch, backed it up with a chicken sandwich, and despite his pronouncement that he “never eats this shit,” wolfed them with a monster Pepsi. Then he walked down Scatterfield Road and entered the United States Marines recruiting station there.

  Sergeant Fred Kilgen’s eyes got big when the kid walked in. It had been a slow day, hell, a slow time altogether with the latest press the war was getting, but now he felt like a buyer at auction sizing up a prime Angus beef calf.

  “I want to join,” the kid said. He was salty as hell, that was for sure, from the spiky hair right on down to the wiseass T-shirt that read “Jesus Didn’t Tap.” They were gonna love him in basic.

  “Sure,” Sergeant Kilgen said, getting out his sheet to start writing down the particulars and trying to look cool about it. “Where do you live?”

  “I stayed at the Motel Six last night. That’s where I’ll be until this is done.” The kid didn’t mention the cell phone and car he’d dumped after his half hour drive to Anderson.

  “How fast you want this to happen?”

  “I don’t even want to go home.”

  “Well, okay,” Kilgen said. This was the kind of signing that would help him “make his mission,” as they said at the productivity briefings. “We’ll contract you here. Then you’ll head down to the MEPS in Indy for processing. It’s a two-day thing-don’t worry, we’ll cover your room and board. You’ll do your medicals, your ASVAB-that’s your vocational exam. There’ll be an Initial Strength Test, which, to tell by looking at you will be a layup, and you’ll be a shipper.”

  “Head off to boot camp?”

  “That’s right. Next stop Parris Island,” Kilgen said.

  The kid just bounced his head along to the information. He didn’t have any of the usual questions: How long? How much money will I make? Do you pay for college? Do I get to fight? Will I have to fight?

  “Now, you got your high school diploma or GED?” Sergeant Kilgen continued, bracing for the usual hurdles.

  “I can get a copy,” the kid said. The sergeant didn’t know it, but the kid figured he’d work one up on a computer at a Kinko’s or use his brother’s.

  “Couple of standard questions. Ever do drugs?”

  “No.”

  “Ever been sick?”

  “No.”

  “Are you gonna change any of your answers for the doctor?”

  “No.”

  “Outstanding. Welcome aboard.” Sergeant Kilgen threw a laugh that sickened him a bit over the last part, and he had a strong stomach. “So you sure you don’t want thirty days? Go say good-bye to the folks?”

  “I’ll send ’em a fucking postcard from Afghanistan or wherever the hell else you put me.”

  The recruiter nodded. “Good idea. And you’re gonna want to check that language, son.”

  “Got it.” The kid nodded.

  “Name?” the sergeant asked, his pen poised to write.

  “Kenneth Schlegel,” was the answer.

  FORTY-SIX

  Behr stepped out of the station house on King Street where he’d just confirmed his statement, and he could feel the end of summer in the slight evening breeze. The two-day wait had been worth it. He’d gotten what he needed. He moved toward his car, adjusting his gun, which had been returned to him. When he reached the parking lot, he saw that someone awaited him there. It was Pomeroy, alone this time, and in full uniform. Gone were his captain’s bars, in their place the oak clusters of a major.

  “A farmer’s combine turned up the rest of Bigby and Schmidt in a cornfield,” Pomeroy said.

  Behr bowed his head at the inevitability. “You knew that their murders and Santos and the Schlegel crew were connected,” Behr sa
id.

  Pomeroy shrugged.

  “How?”

  “Flavia Inez was a person of interest. We had her working in one of their houses. Then we lost her, until you turned her up. We had Santos as a player.”

  “That wasn’t in the file I got.”

  “I said I’d give you the file, I didn’t say I’d give you the file.”

  “Dominic told you I was at Santos’s academy that morning. That I was personally connected,” Behr said, unnecessarily.

  An imperceptible nod came from Pomeroy. “I knew you’d push, and keep on pushing, and that’s what I… that’s what the department needed.”

  Behr absorbed the words in silence.

  “This is for you,” Pomeroy said, and handed him an unsealed envelope. Behr glanced inside. It was a money order, in the amount of $9,990. “That’s from the Caro Group.” A higher amount would have triggered bank reporting to the IRS or other paperwork that opened everyone up to scrutiny, Behr supposed. Or perhaps that was how much they figured he was worth.

  “Karl Potempa wants to offer you a job with them,” Pomeroy said.

  The big firms all liked having a “radioactive” guy around, Behr knew, someone who would go into the gray areas and beyond. Case management meetings were held without this guy, and no one wanted to hear a rundown on what he’d been doing on a file. It was fake smiles around the water cooler and thanks for the results, but no invites to the bar later, and a fall guy if things went badly. The fact was, most big firms would go under without their radioactive guy, but like someone who’d been exposed in a nuclear plant accident, no one really wanted to get close.

  “I don’t like wearing suits,” Behr said, thinking of what he really wanted.

  Pomeroy shrugged and produced a small black velvet box from his pocket. “This is also for you,” he said, and handed it to Behr, who noticed right away that it was too small to hold a badge. He opened the box, and what was inside sparkled. It was a gold ring, with “IMPD” written in diamonds atop the band. Behr looked at it, then up at Pomeroy.

  “What’s this?” Behr asked.

  “What you did means a lot, Frank,” Pomeroy said.

  Behr nodded, his eyes falling to the ring again.

  “Go ahead, put it on,” Pomeroy urged.

  Behr took it out of the box and slipped on the ring.

  “They don’t generally make ’em that big. Had to be done up custom. Your size was still on file.”

  Behr flexed his fingers, unused to the weight.

  “You’re a friend to the department is what that signifies,” Pomeroy said, meeting his eyes. “You know what that means?”

  Behr nodded. It meant access. Courtesy. All the things he hadn’t had for the last bunch of years. He also knew what it didn’t mean: that he was back on.

  “We’d talked about a spot for me,” Behr said, each word costing him something deep inside him he knew he’d never get back.

  “You know how we do it: let’s kiss first, see how it goes,” Pomeroy said. A check, a ring, and a handshake. Pomeroy had worked him like a pro. Behr had threatened, entered, hacked, pushed, bribed, hurt, and even killed for him. And for what? A check, a ring, and a handshake. He still didn’t know how much he didn’t know, and suspected he never would.

  Behr looked at Pomeroy’s outstretched hand. Then he shook it. He didn’t see another choice.

  Behr drove toward home making a mental list of what he’d need for his trip. He’d gotten his gun back. That was good. He had plenty of rounds for it still. He fingered the money order in his front pocket. Now he had cash. He’d bring his computer. He’d need his peephole viewer. Binoculars. His lock-pick set. His jump-stick for opening security chains. A shotgun and shells. Clothes. He had no idea how long he’d be in Chicago. As long as it took, he supposed, to find the three-Bobby B., Tino, and the quiet one.

  He pulled up to his place and parked. He got out of the car and was walking toward the steps when he saw motion inside and stopped. Then he saw who it was. Susan was there, moving about in the living room. She spotted him and came outside and down the steps toward him.

  “I’m getting my stuff, Frank,” she said, holding up her backpack. The finality of what she was doing, and what he had done, landed on him.

  “Susan,” he said, and she stopped across a strip of grass from him.

  “Yes?”

  He fought to find more words. This time he wasn’t willing to fail. Finally he spoke, his voice raw. “I’ve gone a long time thinking there are mistakes you can make, that afterward, no matter how you live, you can’t make them right.”

  Her face changed, and she crossed to him. “If the past guaranteed the future, we’d all be screwed,” she said. She saw the pain in him and must have seen the doubt in his eyes. “It can be different, Frank. It will be. You’ll see…”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  They stood in silence as the twilight hardened into darkness around them.

  “Are you done?” she asked.

  He wasn’t sure what else he owed Aurelio, but he was sure what he owed Susan now, and maybe even himself. He didn’t want to go to Chicago anymore. He wasn’t going. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  “I’m done,” he answered. She closed her eyes in relief. His hand waved between them. “You want to do this?”

  “I do,” she said.

  They found themselves in each other’s arms, shaking.

  After some time had passed she went back upstairs, and he stayed outside for another moment drinking in the evening air. There it was. On mats in empty studios, in garbage bags dropped in fetid water-filled ditches, in stubbled cornfields, in empty garages, on raw mattresses in stripped houses, in bleak hospitals and out in the streets and beyond is where the dead lay, waiting, to be found, to be tended by the living, to be solved, to be remembered, and finally to be put down to rest. He’d reached an end in himself, and a new start. It was time for him to lay them down, too. He went up the steps toward his place. Susan had paused at the door, and she swung it open wide for him and smiled as he reached her. They stepped inside.

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