Past Due

by William Lashner

  “Where is he?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t I believe you?”

  “Because you are a cynic, Mr. Carl, as well as a coward. I want my notebooks.”

  “You’ve made that clear to me, and to him too, I’m sure. Are you going to leave with him this time?”

  “I’m a married woman, Mr. Carl.”

  “Not for long, I figure.”

  “Oh, I’m not so easily rid of.”

  “Sort of like syphilis. But still you are packing.”

  “I haven’t yet decided my future path for certain.”

  “Can I ask you something? One thing that’s still not clear to me.”

  “Ask what you want.”

  “Were you the one who bashed Lonnie in the head that night?”

  “The motorcycle man? I only found out at the last moment that he would be guarding Tommy and the suitcase. There was no telling what could have happened had he spotted Benjamin’s men at the meeting place.”

  “So you cracked his head open.”

  “I was a switch hitter in softball.”

  “Oh, I bet you were.” I closed the suitcase, pulled it off the bed. “Do you know where he is?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to tell me where you’re meeting him?”

  “No.”

  “He’s a selfish psychopath out to further his own rotten ends.”

  “He always was.”

  “Okay, then,” I said as I walked toward the door. “Just tell him if anything happens to my partner I’ll never stop until I destroy him.”

  “That’s between the two of you.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “You’re smack in the middle of it and so I’m holding you responsible too. You know, I must say, Mrs. Straczynski, I look at you and I am stumped. I have no idea of what makes you tick.”

  “I’m a simple girl, Victor, with a simple view of the world. Everything on this earth exists only for the purpose of providing either for my pleasure or my art.”

  “Well,” I said, “I guess that explains it.”

  Chapter

  68

  I PLANNED A quick visit to the hospital, just to say hello to my father, to spread some cheer, to banter like a bantamweight, and then I’d be free to finish my preparations. I had planned a quick visit, but Dr. Mayonnaise had different ideas. She was behind the desk at the nurses’ station on the fourth floor and when she saw me leave the elevator she nearly jumped out of her chair.

  “Victor, I’m so glad you’re here. Have you spoken to your father? Have you heard the news?”

  “No,” I said. “News?”

  “Good news,” she said, her face bright, her blue eyes shining. “Great news.” She stepped out from behind the desk, took hold of my arm, started leading me down the hall. “We’ve scheduled your father for tomorrow.”

  “Scheduled? You mean his release?”

  “No, Victor. His operation.”

  “I thought his condition had to be stabilized first.”

  “But it has. His response to the Primaxin has been terrific. There’s no reason to wait. And you’ll be really happy to hear that a hole opened up in Dr. Goetze’s schedule and she’s agreed to do the operation.”

  “Dr. Goetze?”

  “She’s brilliant. Really. Amazing. The top pulmonary surgeon in the region. Your father’s very lucky.”

  “Lucky lucky lucky.” I glanced at the door to his room, partially opened. “Does he know yet?”

  “Of course.”

  “Has he met Dr. Goetze?”

  “Just this afternoon.”

  “And?”

  “And what? Victor, trust me. If you need someone to surgically resect your lungs, you want it to be Dr. Goetze. She practically invented the procedure. The operation is scheduled for tomorrow morning. Your father is fasting now and we’ll gently sedate him tonight so he gets a full night’s rest. He’ll spend the next couple days in intensive care and then, after a few more days of recovery, you can take him home.”

  “It all sounds so easy. So tell me, Karen, how did a hole open up in Dr. Goetze’s schedule?”

  She squeezed her lips together. “Oh, you know,” she said. “Things happen.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “Good luck, Victor. We’re all very hopeful.”

  “I’m sure all indicators are promising.”

  My father was lying in his bed, his eyes closed tight, his arms placed at his sides. It was as if he was already in position for the coffin. I think all the death we see, all the funerals we attend, are in some ways practice for the day we bury our fathers. I should have been prepared, I should have been overprepared, but still, to see him there, lying peacefully, without his anger or bitterness, without his prickly personality, without everything that had made him my father, brought me to tears. I don’t think I would have felt like that before he entered this hospital, before he started to tell me his story about the girl in the pleated skirt, but something had changed, something in me, and now grief at the possibility of losing him overwhelmed me.

  I closed the door behind me, sat down by his bed, leaned my head back, tried to gain control of myself. That was when something started shaking in my pocket.

  Yes, I know, no cell phones in hospitals, but I was in the middle of an emergency, dammit, and so I hadn’t turned my phone off, just set it on vibrate. I grabbed it out of my jacket pocket and snapped it open.

  “Is that you?”

  “Yes, it’s me,” I said softly. “Where are you, Phil?”

  “Still outside that damn studio. She went out for a bit of errands, had a drink at that bar of hers, and then went back to her building. You said she had a bed in there, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It looks like she might spend the night. How long you want me to stay out here.”

  “Until morning if you have to. If he shows up, call the FBI at the number I gave you. If she goes somewhere, follow and then call me. If we can take care of this tonight, that’s what I want to do.”

  “All right, mate. It’s your call.”

  “We have to find her, Phil.”

  “I know we do.”

  When he hung up I raised my chin and let out a great sigh of fear and frustration, and it was that sigh, I think, rather than my conversation, that woke my father, because when I looked down again there he was, eyes open, staring at me. It gave me a start, like a corpse coming to life, and I jumped a bit.

  “You look like you seen a ghost,” said my father.

  “Well, you woke up,” I said. “How are you doing?”

  “Lousy. I’m hungry. Go get me a candy bar, why don’t you?”

  “You’re not allowed to eat.”

  “The hell with their rules.”

  “You’re having your operation tomorrow.”

  “The hell with their operation.”

  “Your operation. How do you feel about it?”

  “All of a sudden you care about my feelings? Well, this is what I’m feeling, I’m feeling hunger.”

  “I heard the doctor came in and spoke to you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you think?”

  “Seems to know what goes where.”

  “So you’re okay with the surgeon.”

  “One can kill me as well as the next.”

  “I thought you might, you know, not be thrilled that the surgeon is a woman.”

  He let out a bark. “For the whole of my life, women been slicing me up and taking out pieces. Why should this be any different?”

  “Well,” I said, patting his hand and starting to stand up. “You need your sleep.”

  “What, you in a hurry?”

  “No.”

  “You look nervous, you got a date tonight?”

  “No.”

  “With that doctor of yours?”

  “We’re just friends.”

  “So where are you off to?”

  “I don’t
know yet.”

  “Then don’t go so fast. I’m getting cut on tomorrow. Don’t go.”

  “All right, Dad.”

  “All right, then.”

  “So maybe we can talk,” I said.

  “Don’t get carried away.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations?”

  “Screw off,” said my father.

  “Okay.”

  “You want to know, really?”

  “Sure.”

  “They’re the same they been every day of my life. To make it past tomorrow.”

  I sat and thought on that for a moment. “By that standard, at least,” I said, “your life has been a roaring success.”

  He laughed at that, my dad, and I laughed with him. We laughed together, laughed at the strange and wondrous fact that he was still here, sitting with his son, with enough breath in his lungs to be able to laugh. In the middle of it I thought back and wondered when was the last time I laughed with my father. I couldn’t remember. We never had anything to laugh at before, but now we did. He was still alive.

  “So go on with the story,” I said, when our laughter had subsided and his disposition returned to his natural state of grump.

  “I told it,” he said. “It’s over.”

  “No, it isn’t. You were there, in your apartment, with the girl’s head on your chest and the box of coins sitting on the bureau. What happened the next morning?”

  “She woke up,” he said.

  “Go on.”

  “She woke up, she stretched, she sat up in the bed.”

  She wakes up, she stretches, she sits up in the bed and the blanket falls off her chest and her shoulders are smooth, her breasts are free, her smile, when she spies him sitting in the chair across the room, is iridescent. And her eyes, her wide moist eyes are as innocent as the morning. She is the very vision of loveliness, she is the very vision of perfection, she is all he ever wanted. Yet as she wakes up and stretches and sits up, as the blanket falls to reveal her proud breasts, a shiver goes through him.

  Come to bed, she says, her voice still slow with sleep.

  No, he says.

  Then let’s go somewhere. Where do you want to go first, Jesse? Anywhere but here. New York. Chicago. Hollywood. Someplace we can be somebody.

  We can’t go anywhere, he says, his voice flat. There’s a man dead. He is connected to you, and through you to me. If we leave they will know it was us.

  But then let’s buy something. We can sell one of the coins and buy something marvelous, something we could only dream about before.

  We can’t buy anything, he says. If we buy anything they will know it was us.

  She pouts, sticks out her pretty lower lip, then bites it. Okay, she says. Maybe you’re right, for now. But let’s just look at what we have.

  She climbs out of the bed, naked, her legs strong, her hips, the pillow of her belly, her breasts rising as she raises her arms over her head to stretch some more.

  Let’s just look at what we have and dream about the future, she says. Dream about all the things we’ll buy. She moves about the apartment with the excitement of a schoolgirl, searching. Where are they, Jesse? she says. The coins. Where are they? And why are you dressed already?

  I’ve been out, he says.

  Where?

  Just out.

  And the coins. Where are the coins?

  Gone.

  What did you do? she says, her voice rising. What the hell did you do?

  I buried them.

  Dig them up.

  I can’t.

  They’re mine, she shrieks.

  No, they’re not. They’re his. If they link them to us they will know what we did. If they link them to us we will go to jail. Separate jails.

  You had no right.

  It was the only thing to do, he says. The only way.

  Where are they?

  I don’t know.

  Dig them up.

  I didn’t make a map. They could be anywhere.

  Without those coins you have nothing. You are nothing. You cut lawns for a living for God’s sake.

  There’s no crime in that.

  Get them back.

  This is the only way, he says.

  Where’s the shovel?

  Remember? Together forever?

  Don’t threaten me, you bastard. Where’s the damn shovel?

  They’re gone.

  Get them back. Get them back. Get them.

  “What could I say?” said my father, in his hospital bed, the night before they were going to slice open his chest and hack out pieces of his lung. “What could I do? I turned away. Closed my eyes. And what did I see? You know what I saw. I saw her, but she wasn’t naked, she wasn’t standing over me, bent in anger, shouting at me, hitting me on the shoulders, the neck, the chest. I saw her, and she was dressed in white, and she was walking down South Street, her pleated skirt swaying with every step, walking down South Street, walking to me.”

  I stayed until they gave him the shot. He barely grimaced as the needle slipped into his flesh. I stayed until the shot took effect, and his eyes widened and then closed and the tremor in his hand eased and he was overtaken with blessed sleep. It was almost as good, that shot, as his Iron City, and after he fell asleep I stayed for a while longer. Visiting hours were long gone, but they didn’t disturb us as I stayed with my sleeping father the night before the operation he would most likely not survive. It was coming to a head, the whole Gordian knot Joey Parma had laid at my feet, it would all come to a head very soon, but I waited a moment more as my father lay peacefully now in his bed, his arms once again at his sides. I waited with him as the hour grew late and the night deepened and quiet fell hard over that room.

  My pocket started shaking, like an electric toothbrush gone off.

  “She’s on the move,” said Skink. “Caught a cab. I’m following.”

  “Probably going home to patch things up with her husband.”

  “I don’t think so, mate. She’s headed in the wrong direction for that.”

  “Which direction?”

  “East,” he said. “Toward the river.”

  “Of course she is. All right, let me know.”

  I stood up and started pacing back and forth in the little room, pacing back and forth until I lost track of time. All I could think about was Beth, pulled out at gunpoint, Mr. Beretta that bastard Colfax had said, pulled out at gunpoint and taken somewhere, probably tied up, probably scared. She was tough, Beth, tougher than I ever could claim to be, but still she certainly was scared. And in danger. And all because I had taken this stupid case, I had decided to find out what happened to Joey Parma, I had started taking things personally. It was my fault, she was my responsibility.

  The phone jazzed in my pocket.

  “You won’t believe this, mate. No, you will not.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “There’s a big sign on Columbus Boulevard with the words ‘Piers 82 to 84.’ ”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll be there waiting for you.”

  “Good work, Phil. Give me twenty-five minutes.”

  I checked my watch. Five to ten. Twenty-five minutes. At this time of night, with traffic light, that would be plenty of time.

  I stopped in front of my father, looked down upon his sleeping body. The breaths were ragged and shallow, his face was tense, almost flinching. I wondered at the dreams he was dreaming. They say as you face death your whole life passes before your eyes, but for his sake I hoped it wasn’t true.

  If you can’t accept your past, had said Cooper Prod, understand it, even love it, if you can’t do that, then you become its slave. You spend your life either running from it or toward it, but either way you are running. My father had spent the whole of his life running from his past, facing it only as he faced death. And then there was Tommy Greeley, the years he wasted dealing drugs, the years he wasted plotting his revenge, never understanding what he had done or what he
was trying to do, just running, running. And then there was me, just as bad, just as much a runner, even though I wasn’t ready to admit what it was that I was running from. We were all running, weren’t we, my father, Tommy Greeley, myself. Maybe it was time to stop.

  I leaned over, kissed my father’s forehead as he lay sleeping in the bed.

  “Good night, Dad,” I said, softly.

  I was wiping at a piece of dust that had fallen into my eye when I passed the waiting room on my way to the elevators. I spied a figure rising from a chair, walking toward me with untoward haste, and I heard my name called. I stopped, turned, ready for something awful to happen, expecting some goon. But who I saw, standing before me, was the Honorable Mr. Justice Jackson Straczynski.

  Chapter

  69

  “WHAT THE HELL are you doing here, Your Honor?” I said.

  Justice Straczynski stood awkwardly before me, uneasy in my company, as if unsure of our positions one to the other. He was used to lawyers groveling for his favor, he was used to sitting on high. But now the roles were reversed, it was he who had come to me, and I knew far too much of what was far too personal for him to be comfortable in my presence. He stepped toward me, swiveled his head as if making sure he wasn’t being overheard, and then said in a low voice, “Mr. Carl, I need to speak to you.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “When I couldn’t reach you at home or at your office I called Mr. Slocum. I said it was an emergency. He told me your father was in this hospital. How is he doing?”

  “Not so well,” I said. “You told Slocum it was an emergency?”

  “That’s right.”

  I shook my head. This was bad, a serious problem. Slocum wouldn’t just put it to the side, he wasn’t that kind of guy. As quick as the justice hung up he would be on the line to McDeiss. This was turning into a mess.

  “I have to go,” I said. I turned away from him and started toward the elevator. He followed, speeding up so that he could walk beside me.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” he said.

  “Mr. Justice,” I said as I reached the elevators and pressed the down button. “I don’t have time right now to chat.”