The Dead Past

by Piccirilli, Tom

  "Terrific," I grunted. This was Jackals. This would always be Jackals.

  I spun and saw a short guy with a swimmer's body already in his attack stance: fists up, knees bent, snarl in place but with calm and intelligent eyes, ready to come straight on at me. Even though he had a crew cut, a collared shirt, and a tie on, he still looked like he should be named Noose or Viper. "You smacked my beer right outta my hand, boy!" he shouted.

  I hadn't been anywhere near him, but I apologized quickly. There are guys itching for a chance to get into somebody else's face and run a bit of blood, and if a reason didn't come along they'd make one up. I didn't need trouble tonight. "I'm sorry," I said. "Let me buy you another."

  It wasn't enough. It's rarely enough. He wasn't going to let it go. The lady bartender called, "Hey, break it up!"

  "This son of a bitch knocked my beer down!" He made it sound like I'd attacked his mother with a cat o' nine-tails.

  A lot of people stared, milling around us, fascinated with the disturbance—the group mind at work. I wasn't going to fight him. Really, I thought, no matter what, I wouldn't fall into it. "Look," I said, "Let's just….”

  The eyes should have warned me; cut through the antics and look at those beady, icy baby-blues. He'd already skipped the preliminary shouting match and landed a jab straight into my forehead. It hurt like hell and a blast of stars shimmied and danced, and I dropped back a few paces, trying not to land on my ass. He came at me again, arms out wide like the claws of a crab, wanting to lock me up. People scattered out of our way, gasps and laughter all around. One girl shouted, "Kill him!" and I hoped she wasn't talking about me.

  He jumped the last two feet between us and I pushed him off without actually hitting him. "You've got be kidding me," I said. Of all things, my eyebrows hurt from the punch. "An honest to God barroom brawl?"

  "You . . ." he said. Most of the silly anger was gone, replaced by a well-stoked hatred.

  "No, man. This is just too cliché for me."

  He dipped his chin like a dog that hears a funny noise, lips compressed and almost white. I checked for the other bartenders or bouncers and didn't see any of them; Doug and Willie were on the far side of the room, and didn't even know I was involved. My other high school chums either didn't recognize me, didn't care, or liked the other guy more. "Listen," I told him. "What if we had a fight at the Lady Daphne's School of Ballroom Dancing? That' d be original, anyway. All right? Anywhere but a bar. You don't want to get in a rut."

  He wasn't much for sarcasm or talking. He was, however, heavily into growling at the moment. It came from down deep where the real darkness hides. With a roar he swung at me, wide, hoping to take my head off with one shot. I side-stepped and felt the breeze of his fist pass by my chin. He was faster than he looked.

  Crew cut charged and caught me low, aiming for my groin but catching me in the left thigh. It took me back a few feet before I could set myself and break his grip. He charged again and nailed me square in the stomach and I went over backward, falling hard against a window, my elbow shattering a blinking neon beer sign. In books and movies you're supposed to be able to turn an opponent's leverage against him, so when he charges you can just trip him easily and let him go slamming headfirst into the wall.

  He grabbed a beer mug by the handle and smashed it against the bartop; it made for a competent weapon, all that jagged glass waiting to tear open a throat. I was still bewildered it had gone this far.

  I dodged and backpedalled. Too slowly. He brought the mug down across my chest and I screamed, watching the blood burst from me like a leaping, crimson animal.

  And so it happens.

  Like the pin pulled from a grenade, it happens. You feel the rage consume you where there wasn't any an instant before; the humor flees and the wisecracks stick in your craw. The world recedes like the tide leaving corpses on the beach. Sudden clarity while the rest of the room blurs, noise stops, but the bleeding continues.

  My teeth dried, and I knew I was smiling. I worked his wrist first, chopping the side of my hand down and feeling the tiny crackle of his bones beneath; he yelped and the broken mug hit the floor. I rapidly struck him in the center of his chest twice, first with my fist and then snapping down with the meaty part of my palm, two solid thumps as his breath exploded in my face. I hauled off and beat his lower ribs on the left side, then brought my knee up into exactly the same spot, and once more as he cried out a garbled curse. He got a couple of shots into my face and the sharp taste of blood filled my mouth. I kicked and swung back against his knee, jamming the cartilage the opposite way nature meant it to move. He screamed and hit a higher pitch than I've ever reached.

  He ran, skipped, hobbled out the door and, shaking and ready to puke, the knot between my eyes growing and tightening, I let him go.

  Somebody grabbed me from behind, turqoise fingernails again, clutching.

  "I thought you were going to kill him," Karen Bolan said, excited and jubilant.

  “No."

  "But your eyes." Wonder in her voice, intoxication and sex. If I wasn't about to throw up it might have made me horny. "You should have seen your eyes, Johnny."

  I didn't want to think about it. I didn't want to tell her that I had killed a man once, right here. He'd bought at this bar the bottle of scotch he poured down my father's throat. He was the best friend and partner of my Dad, and I'd called him Uncle Phil most of my life. He'd murdered my parents and crippled my grandmother and shot me, and even so—on that night six years ago, somewhere within the twisting child within me, while I cracked his head against the bar railing until his ears leaked—I'd almost allowed myself to cry.

  "Wait'll I tell Mary Jean Resnick," Karen said.

  SEVEN

  I drove myself to emergency room of County General. It took only six stitches for a silent, competent nurse to close the gash on my chest, but every time I moved too quickly the bandages pulled and pain flared. Something about Jackals wanted me dead, but I'd beaten it again.

  Anna was asleep by the time I got home and I didn't wake her. Details could wait, and I still needed to talk to Tons Harraday and find out why he hadn't showed at the bar. Anubis smelled blood and disinfectant and kept making reproachful faces at me. He stalked closer, canted his head and drove his nose against my thigh, gave a discouraged grunt from the back of his throat before going off to lay in front of Anna's door.

  Sleep wouldn't come for a long while, and remained only a few fitful hours. I couldn't remember any dreams, but had a vague, uneasy sense they'd been anything but as pleasant as the previous night's fantasies.

  I needed a shave but didn't want to carve a greater mess out of the puffy, bruised meat that stared back at me from the mirror. My bottom lip was split and I had two purple-black eyes from the shot in the forehead. I dressed and was out of the house by eight, minutes before Anna usually got up.

  The day was sunny and much warmer than earlier in the week, those vicious lake winds having died down; icicles crackled free from the telephone wires, and I passed lawns where snowmen melted into gorillas with their branch arms hanging down to the ground.

  I parked in front of the flower shop, unrolled the window, and waited for Katie. The urge to see her had dug in deep for reasons I didn't fully comprehend besides the obvious. I hoped it didn't have to do with her cooking. Perhaps I wanted to talk with her so badly because she was a stranger in Felicity Grove, someone I could confide in. Anna found too much mystique in mystery. Broghin had his own agenda. Wallace played it safe, expecting the world to run itself without him. Lowell Tully put honor and loyalty before most other principles, possibly even before justice. The rest of the town got their jollies from making up stories about Anubis mauling dead bodies. I had to position myself to be the balance, and I wasn't sure how to do it.

  Katie materialized beside me like the phantom of the opera and said, "Hi there!"

  I jumped and rapped my head on the Jeep's roll bar. "Jesus, don't do that."

  She laughed pleasantly
. "I thought it was you, Jonathan. I've been standing on the corner over there for five minutes. Nobody's ever been here before me, and I guess I got a little paranoid until I remembered you were driving a Jeep. You here for your tulips this early? You must have had a hell of a fight with your girlfriend. How long you been waiting?"

  "Not very." I opened the door and she got her first real look at the swelling and bruises.

  "Oh God, what have you been into?" Her eyes widened. "Your face. Did you at least get a few good licks in?" She touched my chin and yanked my head to one side so she could inspect the damage, like a mother about to spit-clean her son's cheeks before church.

  "Yeah," I said. "Adonis envies me. Be careful where you're touching when lust consumes you and you're forced to smother me with kisses."

  "But what happened?"

  "Adonis was so jealous he beat the crap out of me.”

  “Hey." Her expression swung from alarm to annoyance, pretty features shifting as she scowled at me.

  "Stop being a wiseass for a minute, will you please?”

  “Somebody hit me repeatedly."

  "Why?"

  "No reason. You walk here from Margaret's house? That's where you're staying? It's got to be more than a mile away."

  Katie gave an exasperated sigh. "You're not especially subtle when you switch the topic. You should work on that."

  "So I've been told," I said.

  "But to answer your question, no, I don't live there. I couldn't stay in her house knowing she'd died there. I took a cottage at The Orchard Inn complex, over on Prairie Lane. You know it? I was planning to get out and find my own apartment soon, but the rent is cheap and the place is so nice I don't see any rush. Come inside. You have coffee yet?"

  "No," I said. My stomach still rumbled from the beer and tension last night. I rarely drank coffee, but could use a boost from caffeine. "I'd enjoy a cup."

  "Decaf, okay?"

  Damn it. "Fine."

  She ushered me into the shop, flicking on lights as we entered. She had a graceful style to every movement, stepping with a ballerina's bounce. "Pardon me for a minute," she said, heading to the back room. I took off my coat and tossed it on a chair. Katie returned a minute later and filled the coffee maker with grounds and water, flipped through a number of papers stuck on a clipboard, checked the answering machine and had no messages. She plucked the phone receiver up and punched in a number. "This really can't wait. I've got to call these orders in or I'll be screwed up for another week. I never knew there were so many middle men and distributors and delivery services involved to these tiny stores. Pain in the ass."

  I watched her talking fervidly to a guy named Carl, and it was time I considered well spent. Katie was mobile even on the phone, always in motion, fumbling the receiver into the crook of her neck as she grabbed two mugs off the shelf behind her. She wore a light beige blouse with a thin black belt and dark matching slacks, and her hair fell across her shoulder in such a way that—if I'd been more of a poet rather than a maker of stupid lists—I would have described as cascading. It fit her, the fluidity of the word. Her jade eyes flashed with thought while she talked, as readable as pages of a novel: piquancy, humor, interest, impatience. Apparently Carl didn't have enough of the flora she wanted, and he'd already sent on a number of items she didn't need.

  Her expressive eyes were perplexed, forehead crinkling and smoothing as she searched through the papers on the clipboard and fiddled with the pencil attached to the clip by a string. "But I already have enough irises, Carl! Okay, okay . . . no, forget that, I'll mail the check on Thursday, and you'd better get me those yellow roses. No more red or whites or pinks. Yellow. Okay, are we clear on this now? Fine. Yellow. Good-bye, Carl." She hung up with a slam and said, "Jerk."

  "The high pressure world of floral arrangements?"

  "You'd be surprised. I'd think he was stabbing me in the back just to unload excess quantities of merchandise if I wasn't so sure he's too dim-witted. Do you think many people will want to buy azaleas and irises this month?"

  "I only hope there won't be a rush on red, white, and pink roses."

  "Me too." She turned and grinned her crooked grin, and my breath hitched in the same way it had when I'd first seen her. "By the way, your tulips came in late yesterday. They were already on back order so I didn't have to fill out an extra batch of forms. I don't know much about the actual process of growing flowers, what to do with the bulbs and seeds and the like, but I learned that tulips are out of season now. They'll start coming in for Easter. It was really just dumb luck that the first shipment arrived this week."

  "Thanks for getting them. I appreciate the effort."

  "Hey, it's my job to fulfill your floral needs." She put down the clipboard and pulled the chair with my coat on it beside her own behind the counter. "Jeez, I'm sorry, I haven't even asked you to sit down yet. Come on, don't wait for me." The coffee was ready and we sat and drank, and I watched her watching me, wondering if what was going through her head was anything like what was going through mine. I seriously doubted it.

  Katie brushed her hair back off her shoulder. "Now, do you want to skip the humdrum pleasantries and get down to business and explain what happened to you?" she asked, her voice an odd mixture of timidity and firmness. "Or shall we chat about the weather, Jon?"

  "It's cold."

  "Uh-huh."

  I chuckled, but it wasn't easy to open up; though I'd felt the need to speak with her about—I don't even know what about, just… just—I found it difficult deciding where to begin. If I told her about the bar and the fight, she wouldn't understand the reasoning unless I went back to the four am call from Anna, and would that make sense unless I went further back to Jackson Whuller's murder five summers ago, and the babynapper, and Phillip Dendren, and the death of my parents? And maybe even that wasn't the beginning. I couldn't be sure. There were more disassembled pieces than I'd realized.

  I wound up talking about my Mom and Dad, Michelle's tattoos and her leather-clad men, divorce and the bookstore and Debi and Gunter Grass, skipped to Richie Harraday in the trash and told it straight from there. She stopped me and asked questions to make sure she followed along; she wondered about mine and Lowell's friendship, and exactly what the beef with Broghin was. When I got to the part where I played freeze tag with the Dobermans, Katie sucked air and said, "I hate those dogs. There's something fundamentally insane with them."

  For nearly an hour I continued, letting most of it out while she listened, engrossed, occasionally quitting her seat to take care of a stray customer or three. She was friendly and courteous and had a knack for dealing with strangers. One of the things I liked most about Katie was her generosity with laughter. She was always ready to smile.

  I brought the story up to the moment of sitting with her and feeling more relaxed than I had in three days. She asked why I hadn't called the police to have them search for the guy with the crew cut.

  I told her, "The lady bartender said she'd call the cops. The doctor at the hospital filled out a report, and I'll talk to Lowell this afternoon. If the guy has a reputation for being a troublemaker anywhere in the five counties, Lowell will find him."

  Katie changed position, lifted a leg and braced her heel on the chair, wrapped her arms around her knee. "You sound as if you respect him a great deal."

  "I do. He saved my life once."

  Obviously she wanted to hear more about that and my grandmother's current "case," but it must've been equally obvious that I didn't want to continue in that particular vein. She didn't press. I admired anyone with the strength to curb curiosity, a talent I didn't have.

  Katie spoke for a while about herself, describing her past with broad strokes; an Army brat before her family settled in San Diego, writing music was a hobby, and she was one of the few people who actually liked those paintings of cigar-chomping dogs. "Ta da," she said when she'd finished.

  We were silent then for several minutes; I wanted to know about her too, but now wasn't
the time to ask more personal questions, so soon after my own discourse. She was one of the few women I've known who I felt comfortable with in silence. No need to fill the empty space because it really wasn't empty.

  10:45. Katie stirred and maneuvered closer to me, brushing my pant leg, face ridiculously near mine while she poured herself another cup of coffee. "Would you like more?" she asked, and I waved off. Probably the perfect time to lean forward and kiss her, but I've been gun shy about first kisses since I'd stuck my lips out like a guppy for a woman who merely wanted to get close enough to gaze into my eyes because she'd been receiving obscene phone calls from guy claiming his were "the color of saffron." My brown eyes either passed or failed, depending on your viewpoint, and she snapped her mouth away at the last second, leaving me sucking wind.

  It wouldn't be that way with Katie, but at the moment my face was a bit too much like raw hamburger.

  "Why did you decide to take over this shop?" I asked. "You were gearing up for a career in medicine and this seems a complete one-eighty."

  "It's a reversal of sorts, that's for certain," she said. "You're probably waiting for me to tell you about seeing too much horror in the wards, viscera and pain and disease and all that, until my will was broken by staring into a terminally ill child's eyes, losing my faith in the world. Nothing so melodramatic as that. The truth is much simpler and a lot less entertaining. I could make the grades but I wasn't sure if I could make the cut."

  "I'm not sure I know what that means."

  "If I'd stuck to my guns I could've finished well in my class and gone on to a residency, but I don't think I would've made an especially good doctor. Or even a nurse. The pressures were enormous if you want to do it right. The ranks kept thinning every semester. There's a lot more to the medical profession than learning the parts of the body and writing prescriptions in an illegible scrawl. I didn't enjoy the baggage and finally gave it up before I wasted more of my time and tuition money."

  "Is this what you want to do?"

  "For the present I like running this shop more than I thought I would. I enjoy helping the men pick out the right assortment for their wives or girlfriends." I told her about Margaret letting me skimp on my prom date's corsage and she nodded. "That was her, all right. On my sweet sixteen you should have seen the arrangement she had flown out to me. It took up the whole dining room table, and the house smelled like Eden for a week."