Short Ride to Nowhere

by Tom Piccirilli

  She had her cell phone in her hand already. All she had to do was hit a speed dial button and the dude would come wheeling up. With a knife? A similar knife to the one he’d used to kill a child and nearly murder Hale?

  “Who the fuck are you?” Trina Beck said.

  “Look, I’m not–” he managed to get out before she got the phone to her ear and screamed, “Frank, in the alley!”

  Terrific.

  Jenks zipped himself up and said, “I’m not here to hassle you, I just want–”

  But she already had the door open and was leaping from his car. He didn’t follow. He got out of his car and leaned against the driver’s door while Trina Beck did a little shuffle and backed off twenty feet. He could hear the SUV’s growling engine come hurtling towards them. Jenks did nothing. The SUV’s brakes screeched and the dude hopped out looking for a fight. Everyone always looking for a fight. Jenks checked his hands expecting a blade to be there, but the dude held nothing but his phone. He grabbed Trina and drew her to him and the two of them stood there staring while all the other guys in their cars continued waiting patiently behind their steering wheels, cars humming, lights burning, the night growing darker as dawn approached, the other ladies still shouting and spitting and cackling.

  The dude shoved her behind him and then came rushing forward, his hand in his jacket pocket. So this was how it was going to be. Not like the guy was angry about his woman going down on fifty guys tonight, no. He was angry because Jenks had been the only one who hadn’t had his dick in her mouth. God damn.

  Jenks already had his hand in his pants pocket, his fingers around the butterfly blade, snapping it open. He lifted his chin and moved to the guy. It threw the dude’s approach off. He slowed up, tried to pull whatever he had in his jacket.

  He released the blade, got his fists on the dude’s lapels, and pulled him forward. It was almost an embrace. The guy let out a cry. He drew what he’d been reaching for. It was a blackjack. Jenks reached down and grabbed the guy’s wrist and tightened his hold. Slowly the dude’s hand opened and the blackjack sank back into his pocket. Then Jenks shoved the kid gently away.

  Trina was there at his side. Jenks didn’t know how to calm a pair like this. What to do? The other men in line were enjoying the show but now they were getting edgy, wondering if the police were going to show up and ruin the night. The sun was about to come up. They had to get home. One of them beeped and waved his hands at Jenks, annoyed. Jenks thought, Jesus Christ.

  “You a cop?” the dude asked, touching the knot of his tie.

  “No. I just want to ask Trina about a fight she had.”

  “A fight?”

  Katrina Beck said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “A fight you had in a homeless shelter with a man maybe five months ago. Over a stale Danish.”

  “You’re out of your mind, nutball,” the dude said.

  “No,” she said. “Wait. I remember that.”

  It stopped the dude, made him give a slow turn, take a step away, then back again. “When the hell have you ever been in a homeless shelter?”

  “Like he said, about five, six months ago. I–I didn’t want to tell you. It was while you were in Atlantic City that last time.”

  “I won fourteen thousand that weekend!”

  “Yeah, but while you were gone I...I went home to see Michael.”

  You always went home again, even though you could never go home again. Jenks said nothing, let these two tell him the story in their own fashion. The dude halfway between angry and heartbroken, sympathetic and on the verge of being an asshole. “Oh...oh babe, you know you shouldn’t...you know how you get.”

  “Yes, but I wanted to see him. And...”

  “Right. And he put the screws to you and made you feel guilty, just like he always does. Just because you want a better life for yourself. He’s twenty-seven years old, he should understand.”

  “But he doesn’t.”

  “And it got you down. And when you’re down, you get high.”

  Jenks interrupted the lovers’ tete a tete. “So what happened?”

  Trina Beck lit a cigarette, took a long drag. “I bought some meth and got high and woke up on my feet on the streets without any money. So I stopped into the shelter to get straight, have some coffee, and fill my belly.”

  “And what about Hale?”

  “Who’s Hale?”

  “The guy you fought with over the Danish.”

  “Oh him. What of it? Why are you asking? What’s this all about?” Her face screwed up in puzzlement again. There was something about her confusion that made her look young and innocent and fresh. Finally he started to get aroused. What the hell would Freud have to say about that? Probably nothing good.

  “He’s dead,” Jenks said. “I want to know what happened to him.”

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  It was a good question.

  “I just wondered if you remembered anything...noteworthy about the incident.”

  “Noteworthy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was hungry. I wanted the fucking Danish. So I grabbed it. He wanted it for his daughter.”

  “His daughter?”

  “Little girl, maybe eight, nine years old.”

  “He was with a little girl?”

  “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  Jenks nodded. “Did he say it was his daughter?”

  “Who the fuck else is going to be a homeless guy in a shelter at eight o’clock in the morning surrounded by bums and winos and meth-heads and whores?”

  “What happened after the fight?”

  “Stop calling it a fight. It wasn’t a goddamn fight. I grabbed the stupid Danish and I told him to fuck off and then I went and ate it. How is that a fight?”

  “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

  She smiled like she couldn’t believe the question. So did the dude. His cufflinks flashed with the rising sun.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” the dude said, the world growing brighter, the guys in the street having missed their chance, beginning to drive off.

  Jenks got the fuck out of there.

  12

  Retreat, regroup, reevaluate.

  Jenks did what he seemed to be doing a lot of since the bottom fell out. He wandered for hours. He drove without any idea or care about where he was going. He circled Queens and then drove out along the North shore of the island and then circled back down Route 111 and picked up Southern State Parkway and headed back into Brooklyn. He crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and threaded his way up Manhattan and wound up parking again in the same garage right off Times Square. He stepped out onto the street with no idea of where to go next.

  He’d made a bad mistake. He’d gone off track somewhere, following these empty, vague leads. The question was where.

  He turned the corner and there was the Hyena, alive and smiling like he happiest insane person on the planet. Holding up three knockoff purses in each hand as he swung about his table and called to all the ladies.

  It wouldn’t have shocked Jenks any more to have seen Hale standing there with his warped and stained books.

  Jenks rushed over, moved up on the Hyena as the man spun one more time and looked at Jenks like he might be a customer. Ferdie didn’t recognize him at all. “Prada bag? Gucci? What you need for you wife? Your daughter? Your sexy little girlfriend, she at home waiting for you right now? Think how happy she be when you give her a nice new Prada bag, man like you get lucky with a lot of love.”

  Jenks said, “There was a teenager here the other day.”

  “Huh? What’s this?”

  “A kid. Bobby.”

  “He’s my partner.”

  “He said you were dead.”

  “What the hell you talking about?”

  “The kid. I asked him where you were and he said you were dead. That you’d been stabbed.”

  “Why should he tell you anything? Who the fuck are you?”

 
Another good question. Everybody had good questions except Jenks. Who the fuck was he. Why should anyone tell him anything? He ran through the scene again, the way he’d come up on the teen, prodded him, eventually brawling with him. Why the fuck would Bobby tell him anything. Jenks had been too adamant, too eager. He’d forced the conversation to go in the direction his imagination was pushing it.

  At first the kid had just said that Ferdie wasn’t there. When Jenks pushed it, looking crazy, getting mean, the boy wanted to get free of him and said that Ferdie was dead. Who wouldn’t have made up a lie like that to get a crazy stranger off your ass? It was Jenks who asked if Ferdie had been knifed. And the kid had gone with it. Yeah, he had his throat cut. You happy now?

  The Hyena was still smiling widely but Jenks could sense the same impatience brewing in the guy as had been Bobby the other day. They just wanted to work the street, sell their bags, not waste time answering a bunch of stupid questions. Made total sense, until you threw a nutcase like himself into the mix. The rest had all been in his head.

  He thought, What makes you fuck up the worst?

  What makes you jump when you should stand still? What makes you fight when you should slide? The answer was obvious. It had always been obvious, really, but he’d been wasting hours and days and memories and hope. Maybe he’d wanted to waste them. Maybe that’s what all of this was really about. Not about Hale, not about searching for the truth. It was just about wasting the days before they all piled up on top of him and crushed him into the dust.

  What makes you fuck up the worst?

  Love.

  13

  So it came back to love. It came back to mad love. Maybe it always started and ended there. Maybe that’s all that mattered.

  Jenks got to the shelter and stepped inside. He didn’t see Angela anywhere up front so he proceeded back to her office. The door was shut. He knocked. He tried the doorknob. It was locked.

  Behind the front counter Mike was inputting information and having a hard time of it. He kept fouling something up and then was forced to delete it, which caused him to mutter a string of single syllable invectives. He sounded like a child trying out adult language for the first time. “Shit. Fuck. Piss. Shit. Damn. God. Christ.”

  Jenks stood in front of Mike and tried to make his presence known without saying a word. It wasn’t working. Mike couldn’t see anything except the computer screen. The litany of curses continued, moving into double syllables. “Fuckall. Mother. Fucker. Shitface. Ballsack.” He pressed another wrong key and the computer blooped at him angrily. Mike hammered the desk with his fist and said, “Goddamn Angela.”

  “Where is she?” Jenks asked.

  Mike looked up, frowned and huffed air, but said, “Can I help you?”

  “I’d like to see Angela.”

  It miffed Mike. He stuck to his guns. He asked in the most unpleasant, unhelpful way he could muster, “Can I help you?”

  “No. I’d like to speak with Angela Pinchot, please. When will she be back?”

  Now Mike gave a grand sigh. He really put a lot of energy and emotion into it. “If you don’t want to deal with me, you can just leave.”

  “I really can’t.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Where’s Angela?”

  There were others back there, working in the shelter, on the phones, filling out paperwork, who kept their heads ducked even though they knew, they had to know, that Mike was the wrong guy to put up front in charge of dealing with folks. Jenks scanned the other faces hoping to find someone who might take a step forward, but they doggedly kept their heads down. That didn’t bother him, didn’t even tug at his guts where the rage lay coiled waiting to unfurl and strike. Instead, it made him smile. He turned his gaze back to Mike, thinking, the guy doesn’t deserve what he’s going to get, but since when does deserving have anything to do with it? Never.

  Jenks was vaguely aware that he had vaulted the counter and landed on top of Mike, who sucked down a huge breath as if to scream. It ended there, stuck in his throat as Jenks brought the blade up to the guy’s Adam’s apple. He wondered whether he had any control left at all or if he was following Hale right into Sojourner State, right into death. He’d threatened and fought with more people in the last few days than cumulatively during the rest of his life. He didn’t feel like he was enjoying himself either, but he heard a strange laugh peeling away from the back of his throat. Maybe this was his way to get back at the bank, to scratch this asshole’s throat and watch just a drop of blood leak out. It felt like that was how he was going to have to earn his return into the world, drop by drop.

  He flicked the butterfly blade across Mike’s chin and watched the shallow cut well with a faint red that hardly looked like blood at all. It wasn’t even deep enough to trickle.

  Still no one else seemed to care what was happening.

  Enunciating his words very carefully, Jenks said, “Sit down.”

  Mike dropped back into his seat in silence. His stomach was acting up and making noises and he held himself tightly around the guts and seemed like he wanted to cry or run to take a shit. Jenks didn’t blame him. Jenks had felt that same way for over a year now.

  He got on the computer and got the database up again, then punched in Angela Pinchot’s name. She was probably in the phone book. It would’ve been easier to go elsewhere and not fight with this guy and not cause trouble and not hang twisting in mid-air, which is what he was doing now, turning and turning with the wind whistling around him as he was drawn higher and higher above the city for all to see, the cops drawing their weapons, the place going berserk. Her address appeared on the screen.

  She lived out on the island, maybe ten minutes from where Jenks and Hale used to live. He wasn’t surprised. He should’ve realized from the beginning that somehow this whole mess was somehow going to take him closer to home.

  You always went home again, even though you could never go home again.

  14

  Jenks pulled over to the curb at the end of Angela Pinchot’s street and watched the house for over an hour. No one came and no one left. Angela didn’t cross the front bay windows. He drummed his fingers across the steering wheel, thinking about love.

  He climbed out of his car, marched up the block, up her driveway past the well-clipped lawn to her door. He didn’t knock or ring the doorbell. He walked inside.

  She was sitting on the couch in the living room.

  On the wall, on the coffee table, all over the end tables, were framed photos of a little girl in all the usual poses you expected. There at the beach, smiling without her front teeth. At a ballet recital. At birthday parties, the circus, swimming in a back yard pool. As a baby swathed in blanket in a crib. There she was at the Bronx zoo, at the top of the Empire State Building. On Halloween, dressed like a bumblebee.

  “She was your daughter,” he said.

  “Yes. Her name was Christine.”

  “What happened to her?”

  The memory of it was something she couldn’t bear up under. She raised her hands in front of her like she was warding off a blow, turned her chin aside and let out a quiet grunt of agony. The truth was trying to make its way out. She turned her head in the other direction, cocked an ear as if listening to the girl’s whispers. Jenks waited. Her fingers flexed once. The fingers were telling the story along with the rest of her. Jenks got closer. His hands tightened. He could hear them as clearly as if they were moving along a violin, playing the music of his life. He cocked an ear too, listening in. When Angela brought up a whimper, so did Jenks.

  He said, “You took her to the shelter, didn’t you? To meet him. To meet Hale. To meet...what? Her new daddy?”

  Jenks could see it playing out, Angela dressing the girl, smiling for the first time in years, the girl spooked by her mother’s teeth, wondering what was going on.

  “I loved him.”

  “You didn’t even know him.”

  “I loved him.”

  “You’re insan
e.”

  “Yes, maybe. But it’s true, I loved him.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  She did, in that dead voice. “I wanted them to get along. I wanted them to spend the morning together. I wanted–”

  “You wanted to bring him home like a puppy dog.”

  “I loved him. Christina was eager to meet him. I had told her about him the night before, I had said–”

  “I know what you said. You told her she was going to have a new daddy, that he was going to come and stay with you and change your lives.”

  “I thought–”

  “You didn’t think anything. You’re way past that, Angela.”

  “But–”

  “Jesus, the fucking Danish.”

  “Yes, after Katrina Beck took the last Danish, and started shouting and shoving at Ben, Christina became upset. She was a very mature girl, a very giving and responsible girl, but she was rather upset, you see.” Angela with her eyes focused, staring straight ahead. All these dozens of pictures of her daughter and she wasn’t looking at any of them, hadn’t looked at any of them since the girl died. “I asked Ben to take her out. I gave him money. He was reluctant. He was–”

  “Embarrassed. He knew what you were doing, what was going on in your head.”

  “He walked to a diner about three blocks away.”

  The rage bloomed in him, bright and red and almost loving, bringing a grin to his lips. “You didn’t even know him and you left him alone with your nine-year-old daughter?”

  “I loved him. They never made it to the diner. Somewhere in just that short span, less than three blocks...something happened.”

  “Of course it did.”

  “I don’t know...I don’t know what occurred. He wouldn’t have hurt her.”

  “No, he wouldn’t have.”

  “I don’t know what happened.”

  “And you didn’t tell the cops anything. You never said a word about Hale. Or Christine. You never went to see him in the hospital. You abandoned her and you deserted him.”