Past Due

by William Lashner

  “Ah, Jackson, Jackson, Jackson,” said Tommy. “You’ve gained some weight, I see.”

  “Hello, Tommy,” said Justice Straczynski. “I thought you were dead.”

  “I was. And I suppose Victor’s bringing you here means you were responsible. But after you killed me, as in all great stories, came the resurrection.”

  “You always did have delusions of grandeur.”

  “What are you doing here, Jackson?” said Alura Straczynski.

  “I came to take you home.”

  “By the hair?”

  “If necessary.”

  “Tell me, Jackson,” said Tommy Greeley. “How do you like my ship? Quite a thing, yes? I’ve been on the committee to save this old relic for years. I’ve always been one to conserve the past. Sorry about the condition, but they found a bit of asbestos and were forced to strip it bare. This was the tourist-class lounge. I prefer first-class accommodations, but this room still has its original floor, the original bar. How did you find us?”

  Colfax waved his gun at Alura. “They followed ’er.”

  “Ah, yes, of course. How careless of you, dear.”

  “I did everything exactly as you said,” she complained. “I obeyed all your instructions. I checked repeatedly. There was no one.”

  “See, the problem with birds like you,” said Colfax, “is you’re oblivious to anyone but yourselves.”

  “Who are you again?”

  “I’m the ’ired ’elp,” said Colfax. “All right now. Enough of our tender reunion. Let’s ’ave a look.”

  He grabbed the suitcase out of my hand and hoisted it onto the bar. Then, standing to the side, as if afraid of a booby trap, he opened the latch and lifted the top. With the point of his gun, he rummaged around.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “Old clothes, looks like they could use a wash, with plenty of bleach, mind you. Some old notebooks.”

  “They’re mine,” said Alura Straczynski.

  Colfax heard something in her voice, some sense of desperate longing. “Are they now? What’s in them? Something valuable?”

  “No,” she said as she strode over and grabbed the four bound notebooks from the suitcase. “Nothing of value to anyone but me.”

  “Thank God you found them, Alura,” said her husband. “Now your life is complete.”

  “Yes, Jackson. Now it is.”

  “Because we all know that life itself was never enough.”

  “What’s this?” continued Colfax. “Photos. Snapshots and the like. ’Old on,” he said, lifting an old envelope, the old law school envelope, taking out the stack of photographs, those photographs, my photographs, undoing the rubber band, pawing through them. “Racy little things, they are. Who’s the juicy number?”

  “I’ll take those, thank you, Colfax,” said Tommy Greeley.

  With some unerring animal instinct, Colfax looked through the photographs and then turned to Mrs. Straczynski. “They’re you, aren’t they? Yes, they are. Well, I suppose, given enough time, even the tastiest plums turn into prunes.”

  “Who is this man, Tommy, and why is he here?”

  “I’m the man who gets things done,” Colfax said as he tossed the photographs to Tommy. “But I don’t see no money. Where’s the fucking money?”

  “There is no money,” I said.

  “That’s not possible,” said Tommy Greeley.

  “It’s all gone,” I said. “All of it. There’s nothing.”

  Colfax stared at me for a moment, something dark and very personal rising in his features, and then he smacked me across the jaw with the point of his gun, smacked me across the jaw and sent me spinning to the floor. A line of pain shot from the edge of my jaw, through my teeth, into my stomach.

  “Colfax, stop it,” said Tommy.

  “Shut up, you pompous fool,” spit Colfax and Tommy seemed to shrink at the words. “I’m owed money. Where’s my money?”

  “Calm down,” said Tommy, slowly. “It has to be somewhere. Let’s start with the money from Brockton. Victor, there was money in the same place as the notebooks. What happened to it?”

  “What do you think happened to it?” I said as I climbed onto my hands and knees. I touched my jaw. It hurt like hell and felt mis-aligned. Blood came away in my hand and two of my teeth were loose. “You turned Sully into an addict with your Federal Express deliveries. He was using, going into debt, ever more desperate. And you trusted he wouldn’t bust open a locker you asked him to keep safe? You trusted he wouldn’t grab what money he found and suck it up his nose?

  “Bloody ’ell, you didn’t tell me he was a frigging addict.”

  Tommy looked to the side, thought for a moment. “What about the money in this suitcase, the money stolen from me. Where is that?”

  “Spent,” I said, grabbing hold of one of the thin white columns, pulling myself to standing. “Gone. All of it.”

  “You spent my money, Jackson?”

  “Guess again,” I said. “You’re asking the wrong—”

  “Yes, I spent it,” said Jackson Straczynski. “All of it.”

  “What are you—”

  “Quiet, Mr. Carl,” the justice said. “I gave it to charity, I gave it to the poor. I couldn’t wait to get rid of it all. You should be glad, Tommy. You did some good in your miserable life after all.”

  “You always were jealous of me,” said Tommy Greeley.

  “I wasn’t the one coveting your wife.”

  “Not just coveting.”

  “Everything was never enough for you, was it?”

  “Don’t lecture me about ambition.”

  “I haven’t broken every law and commandment known to man.”

  “Oh, do you all smell that? The bright scent of pure self-righteousness. I didn’t do anything anyone else didn’t do, Jackson. The whole world was buying and selling. There were a hundred operations on campus. I just did it better. That was my crime. I did everything better.”

  “Enough already,” said Colfax. “Such a tender scene, old friends and all, but I frankly don’t give a crap whose dick is bigger. And it’s not like she cares none. All she cares about is ’er silly books.”

  It was true, Alura Straczynski was staring into her journals, her past lives, entranced by long-ago written words, long-ago described emotions, only dimly aware of what was going on around her. In the silence, she looked up, saw us all staring. “What?” she said.

  “What indeed,” said Colfax. “What the ’ell are we going to do about the money?

  “That’s your business,” I said. “I did my part, now I want Beth.”

  Tommy Greeley’s neck bent in puzzlement. “Beth?” he said. “Your partner? What about her?”

  I looked at Tommy and then back at Colfax, and then back at Tommy and then back at Colfax, and suddenly a whole new possibility arose. It was in the way Colfax spoke to his supposed boss, the way he had taken control of the present encounter. The way he held the gun. Colfax, that son of a bitch. From the start I had read the balance of power wrong.

  “Colfax,” I said. “You’ve been a bad boy.”

  “What did you do, Colfax?” said Tommy.

  “The legal term is kidnapping,” I said.

  “Colfax, dammit. How could you do that without—”

  “Don’t start balking at my tactics now. If I left it to you, we would have been sleeping fast when the coppers stormed the house.

  ‘Don’t worry, Colfax, ’e doesn’t know for certain.’ ’Ell ’e don’t, and ’e got your fingerprints on that book and next morning they come streaming in. I was promised another payment. Them was the terms. So don’t go all surprised I had to take matters in my own hands. I got your suitcase here, didn’t I? I got them journals. And even the bloke you wanted for that little sword fight of yours, he showed up. Everything you told me you wanted you’ve got. So, don’t ‘Colfax dammit’ me.

  “Sword fight?” said Straczynski.

  I shook my head and it hurt, but I couldn’t help but shake it, even with t
he pain in my jaw. “A sword fight,” I said. “Of course there would be a sword fight. Now this is truly pathetic.”

  “Poetic, I thought,” said Tommy Greeley as he walked over to the black covering at the end of the bar. He whisked it off, revealing two fencing swords.

  “What are you doing?” said Straczynski.

  “Take hold,” said Tommy as he tossed a sword into the air toward the justice, who ducked and let it rattle at his feet. “Come come, man, you can do better than that?”

  “You’re not serious,” said the justice.

  “Of course he is,” I said. “He wants to duel. He wants to stage some magnificent scene of derring-do, gaining his revenge at the end of some thrilling sword fight. He fancies himself another Edmund Dantes.”

  “You’re insane,” said the justice.

  “Come on, sir.”

  “Says Hamlet to Laertes,” I said.

  Straczynski looked down at the blade at his feet. It was thin, about three feet long, with a shiny guard at the hilt and, at the point, a small round loop. The sword in Tommy’s hand had the same loop.

  “Pick up your saber,” said Tommy. “That’s what you preferred, right, Jackson? Sabers? The cutting blow. Twenty years I’ve been living with this. Twenty years.”

  “And what have you learned in twenty years?” I said. “What great new insights in the human condition did you discover? Twenty years and the best you can come up with for transcending your miserable failed past is a stinking sword fight?”

  “At least I’m being proactive.”

  “I’m not going to fight you, Tommy,” said the justice.

  Tommy took up a fencing position as best he could with his stiff left hand at his back hip, his right knee bent, his right foot facing forward, the sword held straight in front of him. He lunged and a loud SWAK rose as he slapped Straczynski on the biceps with the sword.

  “They beat my face in with a baseball bat, did you know that?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? That makes it all better.”

  Another lunge. Another SWAK. This time against the left side of the justice’s face. The justice cringed in pain and when he stood up straight again, a red line had appeared on his cheek. Blood dripped from the edge of the wound.

  “They beat me senseless and bloody and when they were done they rolled me off the pier, so my corpse would float out to sea.”

  “I didn’t want that to happen,” said Straczynski.

  Another lunge. SWAK. This time a backhanded blow against the justice’s right shoulder.

  “A barge dragged me out of the water.”

  “Stop this.”

  “I was unconscious,” said Tommy. “Near death.”

  “Get hold of yourself,” said Straczynski.

  Another lunge, SWAK, this time a sharp downward flick of the wrist that slapped the sword against the justice’s chest.

  “All I had on me was my new ID. My old friend Eddie Dean had died of leukemia while still in his teens. I was planning to use his name, his Social Security number in my new life. I had already obtained a Delaware driver’s license in his name. So it was that when I woke up, Tommy Greeley was dead and Eddie Dean was on life support.”

  Tommy lunged again, trying to slap at the justice’s right cheek, but this time the justice ducked low as the blade passed over him. When he stood again, the other sword was in his right hand, held off slightly to the side, the blade pointing up toward Tommy Greeley’s eyes.

  “Passata soto,” said Tommy with a nod. “Nice tierce position.”

  “It’s coming back to me,” said Straczynski.

  “Let’s see.”

  Tommy lunged, trying to slap down upon the justice’s chest, but this time the justice, with a flick of his wrist, raised the blade into the air horizontally and parried the blow.

  “Quinte,” said Tommy. “Very good.”

  “You’re not as fast as you used to be,” said Straczynski.

  “I never fully recovered from what you did to me. But I’m still fast enough.”

  Tommy Greeley lunged, Jackson Straczynski parried, and they went at it for a moment, two middle-aged men with swords in their hands, the ringing grate of steel on steel, the slap of their feet on the black linoleum, the clash of metal sabers one on the other. It would have been stirring, almost, if after their moment they both hadn’t been leaning forward, hands on their thighs, gasping desperately for air.

  “What,” said Tommy Greeley between his fitful breaths, “no riposte?”

  “I’m not,” gasped the justice, “going to—fight you—Tommy.”

  “Of course—you are. That’s why—you’re here.”

  “No, it’s not. I’m here—to take my wife—home.”

  “She’s not going home.

  “Yes, I am, Tommy,” said Alura Straczynski, holding her notebooks tight to her chest.

  “But you said—you loved me. You said you always would.”

  “I did, yes. And I suppose I do. But Jackson is a part of me. I can no sooner leave him as leave my heart, my lungs, my journals. I couldn’t leave my life then, I can’t do it now.”

  “And you would take her back, Jackson? Again?”

  “Again and always,” said the justice. “Without hesitation. Her life is my adventure.”

  “What does that mean?” said Tommy.

  “She knows.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “Let’s go home, Jackson.”

  Tommy Greeley stared at her for a long moment, his waxy face betrayed by the emotions flitting through his eyes. He turned his face to his old friend Jackson Straczynski. He raised his sword high, prepared to give a brutal blow, when he stopped at the sound.

  We all stopped at the sound. From out in the hallway. From down the stairwell. The sound of metal sheeting clanking loudly, the fishing lines strung across the stairs being tripped, first one, then the other.

  Colfax raised his hand to quiet us, pulled back the slide on his Beretta, walked over to the door. With two hands on the gun, he leaned on the door frame and carefully aimed his gun at the edge of the stairway where I was certain, positive, that Phil Skink, who had obviously missed my signals, who had clumsily set off the alarms, where Phil Skink was about to appear. And I feared at that moment that Skink’s life depended on me having to do something courageous, something athletic, which only meant that Phil Skink was in serious trouble because courageous and athletic was not me, really, honestly, not me at all.

  Chapter

  73

  “HELLOO?” CAME A familiar voice from the hallway and with it I let out a breath of relief. “Helloo? Is, like, anyone home? For some reason I’m tripping all over these wires, like what is that all about? Wires? Helloo?”

  “Bloody Kimberly,” said Colfax. “Get in ’ere.”

  “ ’Sup with the gun, Colfax? Put that away before you hurt someone. What are you, shooting the rats? This place is a major creepazoid. Why can’t you just stay in a hotel or something? I know, I know, the boss wanted to get the feel of the old ship, but really now. Puhleeze. Just know I’m not staying. Sooner I get off this old bucket the happier I’ll be.”

  Kimberly Blue entered the room carrying a brown paper grocery bag. She was dressed down, blue jeans, a loose white shirt, and maybe that was why I thought there was something different about her. Something wary maybe, without her usual obliviousness, something sad yet determined. Different.

  “Victor?” she said, still holding the bag. “What are you doing here? And Justice Straczynski and Mrs. Straczynski? And those swords? What, is it a party? You should have told me, I would have dressed. I have this really mad sailor’s outfit. And instead of lunch meat I would have gotten something festive.” She walked, seemingly unconcerned, to the bar, put down her bag. “Maybe a bottle of imported vodka and some hors d’oeuvres. I could go for some hors d’oeuvres, couldn’t you? Those little quiches, with the spinach. Yah. No fish, of course, I learned my lesson, but how about crab puffs? Are crab puffs
okay?” She looked at her boss, and then at me, took in the strange scene, the somber tone. “So, everyone,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “Did you see anyone outside the ship on your way up here?” said Colfax.

  “Ah, no. Like, everyone’s got someplace better to be than a rusting bucket sinking in the harbor. And I still don’t know why I couldn’t just put the supplies myself onto the little boat. I mean, I put them in the truck, I could certainly take them out and put them in the boat. I’d rather stay there than here any day. At least that boat has a bed. But Colfax is all, don’t go on the boat. And I’m all, but where do I put them? And he’s all, just leave them in the truck. And I’m all, but that’s pretty stupid.”

  “Kimberly?” said Colfax.

  “Yes?”

  “Just shut up.”

  “Okay.”

  “Where’s the boat?” I said.

  “At the end of the pier,” said Kimberly. “Maybe you didn’t see it because it’s hidden by the warehouse. For some reason that’s where Colfax docked it.”

  “I said shut up,” said Colfax.

  “So that’s where she is.”

  “Who?” said Kimberly.

  “Beth. Colfax kidnapped her and put her on the boat.”

  Her eyes widened, her head came around and then again like an old-time comedian doing a perfect double take. “Excuse me.”

  “And the FBI is searching for your boss,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s been a fugitive from justice for twenty years. Because he’s really Tommy Greeley.”

  She took a step back and staggered onto a stool, looked over at Tommy, still standing with a sword in his hand.