Past Due

by William Lashner

  “You mentioned something today about Tommy Greeley.”

  “Did I?”

  “You said Tommy wasn’t murdered that night twenty years ago. What did you mean by that?”

  The elevator came. I stepped into it, turned around, pressed G and door close, door close, door close.

  “Mr. Carl?”

  “He wasn’t killed,” I said as the doors slowly shut in front of me.

  The justice’s long thin arm shot through just as the gap between the doors was about to disappear. The doors fell back and he stepped into the car with me.

  “Mr. Carl,” he said as the doors now closed behind the two of us. “I don’t understand.”

  “Your brother only meant to rough him up. But the guys he used let it get out of control. They thought they had killed him, but they were mistaken.”

  “So what happened to him?”

  “Can’t we talk about this some other time.”

  “No, Mr. Carl. We can’t.”

  “Well, we will have to, won’t we?”

  The doors opened into the lobby. I stepped through and started rushing toward the exit. The justice, studiously ignoring my hints, followed.

  “My wife is missing, Mr. Carl.”

  “And that is a problem how?” I said as I stepped outside and headed toward the parking garage, the justice all the while close behind.

  “Don’t be unkind.”

  “Have you checked her studio?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are her journals there?”

  “Yes, but in boxes.”

  “She’s not going anywhere without her journals.” I turned around, he stopped in his tracks. “Look, Mr. Justice. Tomorrow night, one way or the other, it will all be over and we can talk about it then, but right now I don’t have the time to discuss this.”

  “He’s come back, hasn’t he?”

  “You’ll have to excuse me. I have to go.”

  The garage was right behind me. I turned around, jogged into the entrance, took the stairs two at a time to my parking level and then found my car. I checked my watch. Two minutes to ten. Time to go, time to get out of here.

  “You said he wasn’t killed so he is most likely still alive,” called out the justice as he ran out of the stairwell, his voice coming in spurts between his gulps for breath. “And with everything that has been happening it only makes sense that he has come back.”

  “I have to go,” I said, putting the keys in the car, opening the door.

  “He’s come back for her.”

  He was standing now right behind my car. I couldn’t pull out with him standing there.

  “You have to let me go,” I said.

  “You’re going to him now?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’ll be there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then take me with you.”

  “Mr. Justice, he didn’t come back for your wife. If anything, she’s an afterthought. He came back for money he mistakenly thought he could recover here. And he came back for revenge.”

  “Take me with you, Mr. Carl.”

  “You don’t want to find him, Mr. Justice, trust me.” I checked my watch again. “I have to go.”

  “Not unless I come too.”

  He was standing behind my car. I couldn’t pull out with him standing there unless I ran him over, not that it wasn’t an attractive option. Still, I didn’t think Slocum would be so thrilled, the flattened party being a sitting Supreme Court justice and all. I thought about what to do, glanced at my watch. Skink was waiting.

  “Get in,” I said.

  Chapter

  70

  BEFORE JUSTICE STRACZYNSKI had a chance to snap shut his belt, I slapped into reverse, spun out of the spot, shifted into first and then second as I made my way for the exit. I slammed my brakes at the booth. The driver in front of me slowly searched her purse for the single coin that would give her exact change. I tapped the wheel impatiently. When my turn came I threw the card and a ten in the metal tray, told the man to keep the change, and was off. Up Broad Street, through the wilds of North Philly and then the northern stretches of Center City, past the Moorish-inspired synagogue, past the hideous State Office Building, past the tall white Inquirer Building, and then right around City Hall.

  “Where are we going exactly?” said the justice.

  “I want to show you something,” I said.

  I continued south and then cut over, heading east into Queens Village. At one point I pulled into a parking spot, turned out the lights, checked my rearview mirror. I didn’t see anyone pull over behind me and, as the thin stream of traffic moved by, I didn’t see anything suspicious flow past. Maybe I had been wrong about Slocum, maybe he had just passed on my whereabouts to the justice and left it at that. Sloppy sloppy sloppy; I’d give him an earful when this whole thing was over. Satisfied, I pulled out again and took a now familiar route that led me onto the street with the burned-out storefronts, the yellow tape still wrapped around the entrances, where I stopped the car.

  “This was where Lonnie Chambers died,” I said.

  The justice’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t say anything.

  “He was shot in the head and then his shop was burned around him so that his corpse was little more than a cinder. I just want you to know what we are dealing with, what kind of anger and rage and pent-up violence. He’s a bitter man seeking a bitter revenge.”

  “I can handle Tommy.”

  “No, Mr. Justice, that’s just it. You can’t. He has no real beef with me, but he thinks he does with you. Why don’t I let you out here?”

  “My wife is with him.”

  “He’s already killed at least two whom he thought betrayed him, including Lonnie. He thinks you betrayed him too.”

  “And you intend to tell him that it wasn’t me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And so he’ll know it was my wife. Do you realize what he might do to her, have you thought of that?”

  I didn’t respond because he was right.

  “Let’s just go, Mr. Carl,” he said.

  I gave him a long look. He was staring ahead, his face set with both fear and determination. The sight of him strangely calmed me. His motivations were obscure, the source of his loyalties was unfathomable, and yet there was in him an undeniable bravery that I found comforting. I am, by instinct, a loner, but I didn’t mind just then having his bravery beside me.

  The traffic on Columbus Boulevard, south of the movie theater and the strip joints and the Home Depot, was sparse. The road here was full of potholes, train tracks jogged between the lanes. When I saw what I was looking for, I did a U-turn across the tracks, across the northbound lanes, into a separate drive that serviced the piers in the day and was completely deserted at night. I drove down a bit until I reached the huge white sign Skink had mentioned and then pulled into a small parking area right beneath it. To our right was the pier where Joey Cheaps’s body had been found. To our left was that big ghostly boat.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  As the justice climbed out of the car, I went into the trunk and pulled out a large blue flashlight and the suitcase. The suitcase was heavier now than it had been when I had taken it from Alura Straczynski’s studio. In addition to the old clothes that had been left there, I had filled it with everything that had been in the footlocker buried at Jimmy Sullivan’s house, including Alura Straczynski’s precious notebooks, and I had added the photographs, all of them taken down, finally, from my wall. I was bringing everything that had been demanded of me, everything except the money, but I was doing it at a time of my choosing.

  Skink was waiting for us at the gate, but so well hidden in the shadows that if I hadn’t been looking for him I would have missed him completely. I would have to ask him sometime how he did that.

  I introduced Skink to the justice and then Skink pulled me aside, none too pleased at the company.

  “What is he doing here?” he said in a low voice
.

  “He insisted on coming.”

  “Why didn’t you just insist on saying no?”

  “He didn’t give me much of a choice, and he might be of use. His wife’s in there, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I figure he deserves a chance to say good-bye.”

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to be stealthy with six shoes stomping.”

  “We’ll be fine. We’ll split up. Straczynski and I will keep the bastards occupied while you search for Beth. When you find her, call the number I gave you.”

  “All right.”

  “But not before. I don’t want anything to endanger her, which also means no shooting.”

  “There won’t be no shooting. I didn’t even bring my gun.”

  “No gun?”

  “Well, not the big one anyway.”

  “Is the gate locked?”

  “Was.”

  The guard booth at the entrance was lit, but empty, and the chain-link gate, which had been fastened by a padlock, was open just enough for the three of us to slip through. Walking three abreast, Skink, me with the suitcase, and Mr. Justice Jackson Straczynski, we walked across the long wide pier, strewn with piles of scrap metal, walked past a long row of bright yellow school buses, walked toward the huge looming ocean liner moored to the side of the pier with great blue ropes.

  “The SS United States,” said Skink, when we stood in front of the massive boat. “Back in the day, it was something special, it was. Back in the day it was the fastest ship in the world.”

  And so it was, back in the day, though that day had long passed. What it was doing on some squalid Philadelphia pier I couldn’t tell you, but there it was, the huge passenger liner, glowing dully in the dim city light. It was obviously once some great and gaudy ocean steamer, with its sleek dark body and two huge raked stacks, the red, white, and blue paint flaking as if from some foul disease. It floated high in the water, still proud and haughty even as it rusted away on the Philadelphia waterfront, a ruined relic of some bygone era, ready to be scrapped for steel to make refrigerators or Chevys. Its appearance there was so anachronistic and yet so perfectly apt it almost made me laugh. It was as if the past itself, in all its fetid glory, had floated up the Delaware to meet us.

  “Up there,” said Skink, pointing to a faint glow coming through a row of windows high on the ship’s port side. “I scouted it some already. There’s a crew entrance a little ways back toward the rear, one of the big doors is open, and a metal gangplank leads into it. Five steps up, careful and quiet over the metal and you’re in. The door leads into one of the engine rooms. It’s dark in there, use your light, and don’t get spooked by the birds. We’ll take a left and climb the narrow metal ladder that leads to one of the service decks. From there we continue on about a hundred yards to the forward stairs. It’s about seven flights to reach them lights. If we’re splitting up, I’ll lead you to the stairway. Then you two will go first. I’ll be your backup.”

  I looked up at the ship, that great ruined monster. Stepping inside would be like stepping inside history itself. And sitting in there, like some pasha sitting atop his silken tufts of bitterness, was that son of a bitch Tommy Greeley.

  Chapter

  71

  IT SMELLED OF oiled metal, stale air, must, ammonia, rot, carpet glue and bird dung, old triumphs, faded hopes, dust and ruin; it smelled, in short, of the past.

  Straczynski and I climbed slowly up the old wide stairway rising through the bow of the great ship. We moved as quietly as we could. It was as black as Tommy Greeley’s heart inside that old boat and so the flashlight was our only guide, the beam intermittently catching glimpses of the companionway’s railings, the raw perforated aluminum of the ceiling, the bare metal bulkheads yellow with primer, the long deserted passageways leading off to the various decks. The ship had been stripped of everything not integral to its structure, not a stick of furniture or piece of plaster remained, the cabin walls were now mere outlines of aluminum. We were climbing through a skeleton.

  At each step I waved the beam to be sure it was clear and every now and then we stopped and listened for a sound, any sound. A few flights up we could see a faint glow of light slipping out from Tommy Greeley’s hideaway. And at the bottom of the companionway, Skink was waiting, listening to us climb, listening to see if something went wrong, if someone stopped us, if disaster struck. So far disaster had patiently bided its time as we rose through the ship.

  I halted; Straczynski stopped behind me. I could hear his breath, hear my heart. I put down the suitcase, bent low, concentrated the beam on something that had caught a razor’s edge of light. It was a line, fishing line. I followed it with the beam, from where it was attached at one end of the stairway, across the entire step, to where it fell down into the well. What was it attached to? An explosive? A firearm?

  Old strips of sheet metal.

  A crude but effective alarm system. I turned to the justice and whispered, “Do you have a handkerchief?”

  He reached into his inside jacket pocket, pulled one out. As carefully as I could, I tied the white cotton around the fishing line so that Skink would find it on his climb, and then carefully stepped over the line. Straczynski did the same and we moved on.

  It was another flight and a half to the deck from where the soft light leaked into the stairwell. We climbed more slowly, more carefully than before. There was another line a little farther up and this time I had the justice give me his tie to wrap around it.

  “Why don’t you use your tie?” he whispered.

  “Yours is silk,” I said. “One drip of gravy and it’s gone anyway. But polyester lasts forever.”

  We stopped at the landing with the soft leaking light. I turned off the flashlight, put down the suitcase. The suitcase had grown heavier as I climbed. I moved my arm back and forth to ease the strain. We were at a dimly lit hallway. A muffled voice could be heard, a bright light came through an open doorway about forty yards off.

  I turned to Straczynski, raised an eyebrow. He nodded. I picked up the suitcase, started down the hallway, stepped as softly as I could. The voice grew louder, grew more distinct, snatches of words came clear.

  “…wouldn’t fancy getting caught in between…quick stop in Freeport maybe…after George Town we could…a mate told me about this here Ambergis…”

  I recognized Colfax’s arrogant Cockney drawl, and I could tell what he was doing just by the gaps in the sound, the slowness of his voice. He was looking at a map, most likely tracing the possible routes with his finger, tossing out suggestions of where to go, where to hide. And I recognized the route too, a water route, which told me all I needed to know about their planned escape from the city. Kimberly had said she was going to buy a boat for her boss. Something comfortable, no doubt, maybe a sailboat or a small fishing vessel to take them down the coast, around Cuba, down to George Town, not the Georgetown in Washington, D.C., but the George Town in the Cayman Islands, where money travels when it wants to disappear.

  We kept walking down the hall, closer and closer to the door with the light.

  “What about Negril?” came a different voice, a woman’s voice. “I’ve heard wonderful things about Negril.”

  A sharp breath from behind me, Justice Straczynski recognizing his wife’s voice as she plotted her escape from him.

  “Yes, maybe, why not?” said a third voice, with a sharp Brockton accent. “Why not Negril?”

  Something grabbed my arm. I almost jumped up and shouted, but I didn’t. I gained control, turned around, saw Straczynski with his eyes glistening. “That’s Tommy,” he said.

  I nodded, looked down at my arm until he let go.

  “Are you ready?” I said softly.

  He waited for a moment, peered past me down the hallway as if he was peering into both his painful past and his uncertain future, and then nodded.

  Slowly, silently we walked toward the open door. We had to be careful. I had wanted to surprise them, to catc
h them off guard, to learn what I could before they were aware of our presence and to give Skink the time he needed, but I didn’t want to surprise them so much that Colfax started shooting before he realized who we were. So it wouldn’t do to just appear at the doorway, no that wouldn’t do. I would be polite, I would knock.

  I rapped once, twice.

  “Hello,” I called out. “Anyone home? Victor Carl here, and I have a delivery.”

  Chapter

  72

  THERE WOULD BE a sword fight, of course there would be a sword fight, how could there not? Isn’t that how all great revenge stories end, with a sword fight, and wasn’t Tommy Greeley aiming to make his revenge into a great story, casting himself in the leading role? So there would be the inevitable sword fight, yes, but before that stirring duel we had to deal with Colfax, who stepped out into the hallway, glowering, in his hand a gun, matte black with a wooden grip. Mr. Beretta, I assumed.

  “What are you two doing ’ere?” he said.

  “I didn’t want to wait,” I said and then jerked a thumb at the justice. “He came for his wife.”

  “You want ’er back?” he said, his voice wide with astonishment. “I figured you were the only one making out ’ere.” He peered beyond us along the hallway and into the stairwell. “Who’s with you?”

  “No one. We came alone.”

  “You’re not really that stupid, are you?”

  “Yes,” I said cheerfully. “Yes, I am.”

  Colfax glanced down at the suitcase, glanced over at Straczynski. “You brought everything?”

  “Everything I have.”

  “Bring him in, Colfax,” called Tommy Greeley from the lighted room. “Don’t make us wait.”

  Colfax looked at us for a long moment, checked again the hallway, and then shook his gun at us, indicating we should step through the doorway.

  It was a large stark room, divided by white stanchions, and well lit from spotlights hanging from overhead steel girders and hooked up to a large battery on a table. The room was stripped like the rest of the ship, but with some homey touches remaining. The floor was black, with a few scattered linoleum tiles, and there were the remnants of a curved, art deco bar, posts of bar stools lined before it, some of the seats still in place. Standing by the bar was Alura Straczynski; sitting on one of the remaining stools was Tommy Greeley. He was dressed all in white, white shirt, pants, bucks, like some wax model of Gatsby that had been left out in the sun. His shiny face was too immobile to show interest, but his eyes behind the lifeless flesh were focused intently on the justice. On the bar were charts and maps and, off a bit to the side, a large black cloth.