Dean looked at Vasily and snarled.
“What do you mean, baa baa baa? Comrade Wolf knows who he is going to eat.”
Vasily’s eyes were as wide as dinner plates. He shifted back and forth on his feet a couple of times, and then he suddenly raised his gun at Boris. But Boris was faster. He turned and fired in one quick, efficient motion, so quick that he’d almost turned back to us before Vasily hit the ground. But I was jacked up with adrenaline and it was like time was slowing down. I bowled straight into Boris, all two hundred forty pounds of me, and I knocked him over and ended up on top. I tried to hold onto his gun arm but he twisted loose and smacked me with the barrel of the pistol.
And let me tell you: that fucks you up. It’s not like the movies where the hero holds his head for a moment, grunts, and then gets back up and keeps fighting. I mean, I felt something snap in my head and there were all these lights and sparks and the whole world turned fuzzy.
But then Dean was on Boris, and they were fighting like mad, and the gun went off a couple of times. Dean cried out and the gun bounced across the pavement. A moment later I heard footsteps banging out a hasty retreat, and then another bang, this one from far away. Boris shouted, not in pain, but frustration. He hit the ground, cursed once in Russian and then he was silent.
Dean was over top of me.
“Terrell, hey, you okay?”
“I don’t know man,” I said. “I feel funny.”
“Just wait,” Dean said. “I’m calling 9-1-1. Just hold on a bit. Okay? Just wait.”
I was blinking blood out of my eyes, lying on my back.
“What about Boris?”
“He’s dead. They’re both dead. Just relax. You saved my life. It’s going to be all right.”
The pain rippled through my head. I wanted to cry but I thought it would hurt too much. And so I just gently whimpered, and Dean held my hand, until the ambulances arrived.
47
So I had a fractured skull. Fractured skulls are bad news, apparently, you can go blind or into a coma or have all sorts of weird problems. In particular, although it was a linear fracture, they were worried about how close it was to a suture. I spent over a week in Sunnydale.
The support I got from the people at work and all of my friends was overwhelming. I couldn’t have many visitors but all of the flowers and stuffed animals were piled up around me. Even my ex-wife showed up. I also got a private room and a TV (paid for by Mr. Goldstein, I was told). It made me feel pretty grateful for the relationships I had, a lot less lonely. Something like that really put all my whiny bullshit in perspective.
Dean was there basically all the time. He wasn’t always in the room with me, but he was always just down the hall. We didn’t talk much, especially at first, when I had such a splitting headache and trouble thinking straight. Other visitors were always coming in and out, and he generally let them do the talking, or headed out for a coffee to leave me alone.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said to me.
“Well, I was right,” I said. “Your plan was stupid.”
“No, you don’t understand. I didn’t mean you getting hurt. I’m sorry that when you were unconscious, I put my dick on your cheek and took a picture.”
I snickered, which made my head hurt.
“Shut the fuck up, it hurts to laugh.”
“Sorry,” Dean said. He ran his hands through his hair. A dark haze of stubble covered his chin and his eyes looked a little red. “Man. What a fuck-up.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“Yeah, looks that way,” Dean said. “But when they got you on the drugs here, you were acting as loopy as shit. I asked the head neurologist when you were going to get better, and he was all like: ‘It’s impossible to tell. Possibly never.’ So I was totally depressed. The next day you seemed better and I asked the nurse and she said: ‘Oh, usually we see a big improvement in 48 hours, but we’ll have to see.’ What a difference those two diagnoses make.”
“Doctors are dicks,” I said.
“Yeah,” Dean said.
After a pause, I said:
“How do you think they figured out what we were up to?”
“Vanya must have told them. I really misjudged him. I’m sorry Terrell.”
“Vasily could have figured it out too.”
“Yeah, it’s possible.”
“So what happened on the bridge? Who shot who?”
“Well,” Dean said. “Boris shot Vasily.”
“I remember that.”
“Then we wrestled around with Boris. Eventually he tried to make a run for it, but someone shot him with a high-powered rifle.”
“Tom?”
“Undoubtedly. But he’s gone. Back to Florida I guess, or wherever. Cops are looking for him but I don’t think they’ll have much luck. They searched the park and found Desean’s body, shot through the head, holding a gun that had apparently been fired once.”
“I guess he missed.”
“Yep,” Dean said. “That must have been the shot we heard.”
“So that’s that,” I said.
“Anyway, just so you know, I made a full statement to the cops.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Dean said.
“Like, full full?” I asked.
He smiled a little.
“I left out anything about Oksana,” he said.
“How did you do that?”
“You know that stripper you chatted up at the Rail? I told them that she told you she’d seen Vasily and Brucie together.”
“You slick son of a bitch,” I said.
“Well, you tell them whatever you want when you talk to them,” he said. “I’m not asking you to lie.”
“I was wondering why I hadn’t seen them yet.”
“I sort of cut a deal with Angry Detective Unabrow. He was hitting the roof, as you can imagine, but I basically said, I’m going to lay everything out honestly for you, and in return, let Terrell recoup till he gets out of the hospital. The gloomy head neurologist came in handy there. Probably he told Aston something like: ‘You can question him if you like, but I can’t promise it won’t instantly kill him.’”
“Ha,” I said.
“Anyway, they’re up to their asses in alligators,” Dean said. “Aston was skeptical at first, or at least he pretended to be. But when they got a confirmation on Boris’s ID shit got real. Plus someone in the police department leaked part of the story and it was all over the papers.”
“Are we in trouble?” I asked.
“We’ll see,” Dean said. “Obviously, they’re a bit cranky about our amateur detective work. With the benefit of hindsight, maybe they’re right.”
“You think?” I said.
“My guess is they don’t want to make a stink out of anything. The bottom line is it looks like a young man had been killed and they hadn’t figured it out, that Boris had been living in the country for years with no one keeping tabs on him, and all the rest of it. They don’t want all that in the papers.”
“Nice,” I said. “Way better than California.”
Dean smiled.
“Can you tell me something?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“How much of how you handled this was about Oksana?”
Dean looked away. His smile curdled in that particular way of his, and then without looking back at me he said: “All of it, Terrell. It was all for her.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“More than you know,” he replied.
48
A couple of days after I got out of the hospital, while I was still hanging around my apartment watching Breaking Bad on DVD and not doing too much, I got a call from Dean. He was going over to Jay Goldstein’s place to have one last chat about the whole situation and he wanted me to come with him. I told him fine, that I’d walk over and meet him there.
I walked to Jay’s house and rang the doorbell. It took a while for anyone to answer. Eventually I heard Jay’s slow foot
steps and the door opened.
“There he is,” Jay said. “Good to see you up on your feet again.”
The clothes Jay was wearing looked too big for him, his face was worn, his hair was thinner and grey. When he smiled it looked like something was going to crack.
“I heard you hooked me up at the hospital,” I said. “Thanks a lot. I really owe you big time.”
“It was the least I could do,” Jay said. “I’m very sorry about what happened to you. Come on in.”
Dean hadn’t arrived yet so we went back to the solarium together and each had a fancy beer. I wasn’t sure what to talk about after the usual pleasantries. So I finally said:
“How’s your legal situation going?” I asked. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Oh, it’s going,” Jay said.
“What’s happening next?”
“Looks like my lawyer is going to bring a preliminary motion trying to strike the notice of allegations,” he said. “Which is interesting, because you don’t see that too often in these sorts of proceedings. He thinks we can knock it out.”
“Dean explained it to me,” I said. “It sounds like bullshit.”
“Well, that’s certainly my position,” Jay said.
“How are things going at the firm?” I asked, trying to change the subject.
“Didn’t Dean tell you?”
Shit, I thought.
“No,” I said.
“Well, it’s tough to keep doing what I do until this is sorted out, for any number of reasons, and it looks like it might be a long time until it does get sorted out. If the motion I was talking about gets appealed, for instance, it could take years even before that gets finished. So it looks like I’m leaving the firm.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Yes,” Jay said. “I’m just working on transitioning everything.”
“Are you going be okay?” I asked.
“Money isn’t a problem,” he said. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do with myself.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
Jay shrugged.
“Just one of those things,” he said.
The doorbell rang and Jay shuffled to the front door, like an old man, and then returned with Dean. Dean bumped fists with me and then sat down.
“Well,” Dean said. “There’s not much left to talk about. Let’s just listen to this.”
Dean took out his laptop and set it up on a coffee table. After a few minutes he started playing an audio file.
“What’s this?” I asked.
A moment later, I heard a voice speaking.
“I still can’t believe I’m free.”
It was Oksana.
I looked at Dean, questioningly, but he was looking at the computer with one hand over his mouth.
“It will probably take a while to sink in.”
The second voice was Dean.
I looked at Jay, but he had no more idea what was going on than I did.
“With a man like Boris, you never think you will be free of him. He was too clever and too cruel. I owe you everything.”
There was a rustling noise, like cloth sliding on cloth, and the sound of wood creaking. The recording was made in bed. A little pulse of some unpleasant feeling hit me, like I’d been flashed by an exhibitionist in a trench coat. I didn’t want to hear this shit.
“Well, we couldn’t have figured it out without you. You were very brave.”
“Yes. I was very brave. I am a brave girl for you.”
A wet, physical sounding noise.
“What is this?” Jay asked.
Dean said nothing, but his voice spoke from the laptop.
“There’s still some things I don’t understand though.”
“You will never understand everything in life. You should not try.”
“Maybe not.”
And then the silence spilled out, and there was more movement, and I wondered if that was it, and if so, what was the point, when Dean’s voice came again.
“But sometimes you can’t help wondering, even if you don’t want to.”
“Hmm?”
“Like, for example, who exactly killed Brucie?”
“Boris, I thought.”
“Well, then why didn’t he know how Brucie knew about the restored comics? Because if he and Desean got their hands on Brucie, they would have scared it out of him. But when I talked to Boris on the bridge, he didn’t know.”
“I don’t know. Maybe Vasily killed him.”
“Yeah. That makes more sense actually. The night Brucie died, he got a bunch of calls from one number, and then one call from another number. Maybe the first calls were from Boris, and the other number was Vasily asking him to come out of the house. If he did, then maybe Vasily took the money and killed Brucie to cover his tracks.”
“Yes, maybe.”
“But the money had already been stolen by the time Brucie left the house. How did Vasily get inside Brucie’s house to take the money anyway? Did he have the code to the security system? And a key? And why would Brucie come out of the house if Vasily had already stolen the money?”
“I don’t know. What does it matter?”
“You know when I was on the bridge, I mentioned the amount of money Brucie got from Mr. Ha. Two-hundred and fifty-thousand. Vasily’s face jerked when I said the number. It was like he was surprised. But why would he be surprised if he was the one who ended up with the money?”
“Oh my god,” I said, and looked at Dean, but he was just staring at his computer, his hand covering the bottom of his mouth.
There was nothing but silence for a moment. Finally Dean’s voice came on again:
“He babbled on about comics didn’t he? Sure he did. A kid like Brucie couldn’t think of anything better to talk about with a beautiful woman. And so you and Vasily had an idea. Brucie would hit up jumpy old Mr. Ha for a quick score, and then you would liberate the money from him. And since you were the one entrusted with getting the money from Brucie, you had an opportunity to skim off the top. So you told Vasily you were asking for one number and then got Brucie to demand the two-fifty. Brucie picked up the money, you stole it from him, passed on some of it to Vasily, and kept the rest. Nice plan. Only things went wrong.”
Silence.
“Before the blackmail job, Mr. Ha went to Boris. And Boris, well, if someone is up in his shit he wants to know who, and how. So he bugged the money. You found the bug and left it in Brucie’s house, but you still had all sorts of problems. One, you and Vasily spilled the beans about Boris’s scheme to a kid, two, you ripped off Derek Ha, three, you’d already been skimming money off this kid for months, four, you’d even ripped off Vasily during the blackmail scam. Now that’s a terrible situation.”
“I want you to go away.” Oksana sounded as if the idea had just occurred to her.
“So Brucie hides in his house. The money is missing. Boris is calling him, or Desean, or both, over and over. He has no one to turn to. But then someone else calls him and he leaves the house. Now who would he do that for?”
“You’re sick, you’re crazy. You think I killed Brucie? How could I throw him off a bridge?”
“Well, the evidence was never consistent with Brucie being thrown off that bridge anyway. Brucie’s fingerprints were upside-down, like he was hanging off the other side. Now why would he do that? Who knows? Here’s one theory. Maybe you called him and told him you were afraid of what Boris was going to do to you. Maybe you said you were going to kill yourself. Maybe he rushed out there to find you clinging to one of those pillars, just out of reach from the sidewalk. Maybe he hopped over the railing and tried to help you. Maybe he even reached out his hand. He was a big guy, and not very graceful. All it would have taken was one little tug.”
“You are crazy! What proof do you have? That Vasily looked surprised when you said a number? Get out of my house.”
“Yeah, it’s just a theory. But Detective Aston did pull all the fingerprints off
the bridge. They’re still in evidence. So unless you were wearing gloves in August, I guess we’ll see.”
I could hear Oksana gasp, even over the shitty laptop speakers.
“Is that what you come over here to do? To sleep with me and then accuse me of things?”
“No. I came over to look for something. And I found it in a hidden compartment under the sink in the bathroom. I guess the money could have come from anywhere. But if you were going to make that argument, you should have taken it out of the black box you stole it in.”
And now Oksana started to cry.
“I loved you. I loved you from the minute I saw you. And you betrayed me like this. You came into my home and betrayed me. I don’t think you are capable of loving anyone.”
After a long pause, Dean finally said:
“I’m sorry, I can’t help myself. Why did Boris call Tom ‘the technician’?”
Another moment of silence.
“Boris and Vasily were going to kill us on the bridge because they knew we were trying to set them up. Now there are all sorts of ways they could have figured out what we were up to. But why did he say, where’s your friend the technician? I mean, none of them saw Tom doing anything in the least bit technical. Now who did see something like that, Oksana? Who saw something like that?”
She didn’t answer, and so the last words on the recording belonged to Dean.
“What are you thinking when you look at me like that?”
A beat went by.
“The thing is, no matter what you say, I’ll never really know.”
Dean pressed a button on the laptop, and it stopped.
We both looked at Jay. Jay had this look on his face fit to fucking break your heart. Like he was seeing everything around him without seeing it, do you know what I mean? Like that big brain of his was racing as fast as it could to think of something to say, but say what?
“I see,” he said. And then, in a very small voice: “I wonder why I ever thought any of this would make me feel any better.”
I looked down at my feet.
“I wonder,” Jay said.
“I already went to the cops,” Dean said. “I took the money, I gave them the recording. I did that all yesterday. So everything’s done and over with.”
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