Augie looked at me for a moment before finally crossing the room and standing beside me. He looked down at me, his hands in the pockets of his field jacket.
“I’ve been trying to call all day,” he said. “I’ve been worried about you.”
“Something’s wrong with my phone.”
He looked away, probably saw the thing in a heap on the floor, then said, “Yeah, I can see that. You okay?”
“I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t.”
“Try looking at the big picture, Mac.”
I shook my head but said nothing.
“Listen, we have a plan, right? We need to stick to it.”
“This isn’t what I do. You don’t understand. You can’t.”
“Just try to hold on a little longer, Mac. Right now Frank thinks we’re all happy as clams. I don’t want that to change.”
“I’m sorry, Augie. I really am.”
“Look, there’s shit going down you don’t know about. That I haven’t told you about. I’m going to need Frank’s resources. I’m going to need you.”
“I’ll do whatever you want, Aug. You know that. But I can’t work for Frank anymore.”
He took a step toward me. “I need you to suck it up and stick it out. Just a few more weeks, that’s all. Just hang on for a few more weeks. That’s all I ask.”
I didn’t say anything, just looked out my windows, toward the dark night beyond the bare elms that lined my street. The way the branches moved in the wind reminded me of the way people breathe when they are asleep.
Finally, I said, “Okay.”
“Just a few weeks more, Mac.”
“Okay.”
Augie picked up the bottle of Beam from the coffee table. He shook it. If we had been in utter darkness right now, we’d still know by the pitch of the swishing sound that the bottle was almost empty.
“Mind if I have what’s left?”
“Help yourself.”
“I think I’ll take it with me, if that’s okay.”
“Suit yourself.”
“You should get some sleep, Mac. I’m going to need your help tomorrow night. There’s something I want us to do.”
I nodded once more. “I’ll be here,” I said.
Augie went into my bedroom and came out with a blanket. He placed it around my shoulders.
“I’ll be back in a while to check up on you, so stick around.”
“Yeah.”
Augie looked at me for what felt like a long time. Then he left. After he was gone I stayed where I was. Everything was moving around me. My surroundings seemed suddenly strange. I stared at the train station. How easy, now that I had a little money, would it be to get on the next train out of here, disappear like my father had?
Later I heard music from the bar downstairs. Muffled bass notes reverberated in the wood planks and beams and high trebles found their way up through the cracks between. It was reggae music, which usually soothed me, but there was a rage in my heart that could not be consoled. I knew it wouldn’t take much to send me out of control. In the end, it took very little at all.
I suddenly felt feverish and rushed into the bathroom. I dropped to the floor and vomited into the toilet. All the heat was out of me and I became suddenly very cold. Sweat instantly covered every part of me. My gut felt torn up. But I was still drunk, knew I would be for hours.
When I was certain I wasn’t going to be sick again I got up from the cold floor and leaned over the sink and let the water run. I splashed my face and rinsed my mouth. When I was done I lifted my eyes and caught my reflection in the broken hand mirror fixed to the wall above.
I didn’t like what I saw. But I didn’t look away. I wiped the excess water from my face and felt the bristles of a five-day-old beard beneath my fingers. I searched my eyes. They looked sunken in their sockets. I looked as if I were something rotting from the inside out. I studied myself for as long as I could bear. The next thing I knew I was outside, in the cold night without my coat, reeling as I headed for my car.
Frank Gannon was a man who prided himself for never taking no for an answer. Like the Vogler kid, he needed a message that he could not ignore. I would need to make it clear to Frank that I was, and would always be, the one man who could refuse him.
And I wanted as many people as possible to know that I had.
I drove to his office and climbed the thirteen stairs and pried open the door with my tire iron. Then I stumbled inside and turned the place upside down. All I could think of was how my eyes looked and the pain and rage I felt—the pain and rage I had caused strangers. I wanted nothing to do with the misery and mischief of others ever again. I used my tire iron to pry open Frank’s filing cabinets, all six of them, pulling out each and every drawer and turning them over. Files—and the secrets and power they no doubt contained—went everywhere. I flipped over Frank’s desk and broke open its drawers, kicking the pieces across the floor. When I couldn’t do anymore damage, when I was spent and there was nothing else left to destroy, I dropped to the floor and lay there, gasping.
I had cut myself at some point; there was blood on my hands, and on the papers scattered beneath me. But I didn’t care. I just lay there, half conscious, panting. I thought maybe I was going to throw up again but didn’t. Everything settled into a kind of peace inside and around me. All I could hear after a while was my own breathing.
The world had been reduced to the one thing that mattered.
I allowed myself to drift, and the next thing I knew it was morning. I heard someone coming up the stairs but I didn’t move. I waited for Frank to open the door, wanted him to see what I had done and to know what it meant.
I heard him mutter, “What the fuck?”
He entered, stopped short, and then he must have seen me among the debris and wreckage I had caused because I heard him rushing toward me, his shoes stomping on the wood blanks. Before I even saw him over me I took two kicks to the ribs. I heard him cursing, heard his heavy breathing. I tried to move, but before I could he kicked me a third time. I had rolled over and gotten to my knees, was ready for his next blow, ready to take him apart like I had taken his office apart, but I heard a second voice coming from somewhere else in the room, followed by more rushing footsteps. I anticipated a second assault, but it never came. Instead, Frank and this second man began to argue. Frank was so enraged he was almost incoherent. When words broke down, and Frank launched one last kick, a scuffle broke out.
I heard Frank yell, “Get this son of a bitch out of here right now!” The room seemed to be made smaller somehow by his voice. Someone got me up off the floor like I was nothing. I could barely stand. I felt an arm around me and two huge hands holding on to me firmly. Someone was beside me, walking me toward the door. I barely felt the floor beneath my feet.
Frank yelled, “I don’t ever want to see that piece of shit again.”
Then I was out in the hallway, and someone was saying, “Jesus, Mac, you’re covered in blood.”
I recognized Augie’s voice. He led me down the steps and out the door to the sidewalk, then across Main Street. The next thing I remember was being laid down on the torn upholstery of the back seat of my LeMans.
“I thought we had a deal,” Augie said. “I’ve been looking for you all night.”
He checked the cut on my hand, said it was superficial and gave me a handkerchief to wrap around it.
And then we were driving. I looked up and saw trees moving above us, as bare as skeletons. They passed, one right after the other, like a parade of dead people, the blue morning sky blinking brightly beyond them …
The last thing I knew I was sprawled out on my couch. I lay there and listened to Augie’s breathing. Eventually I saw the shape of him in a nearby chair. He was just watching me. After a while, though, he got up and left. He closed the door with the broken lock behind him. Then sometime after that I drifted into unconsciousness and dreamed of some woman named Rose.
Chapter Four
It was m
onths later, on a cool night in early May, that I found myself waiting outside the Hansom House for Augie.
The air was still and pale dark clouds roamed the broad black sky in herds. Augie had called me early that morning and said he needed my help with something tonight, that it was urgent and that he would come by for me when I got home from work that evening. It was a fast call that ended abruptly. Before that morning I hadn’t heard from him in over a week. Unlike me, he was a busy man these days—busy working for Frank, busy keeping him near. He was busy, too, doing something else, something he didn’t ever talk about.
The day that he called I got home from work exactly at six o’clock and waited upstairs till nine. But there wasn’t any sign of him, and it was too beautiful to stay inside my cramped apartment, so I came down to the street to wait in the open night air and smell the heavy scent of freshly dug earth coming from the potato fields behind the train station.
I was certain that Augie would have called if he had been able. The events of last November were still very much on our minds. The cop killer was still out there somewhere, and we knew nothing more about what it was Frank was up to.
With so much still up in the air, I didn’t think Augie would have left me hanging like this if he could have helped it. I knew he would have called to tell me of any change in plan, as what might appear to be his sudden disappearance would have certainly caused me concern.
Deep down I knew Augie was up to something. And he knew that I was on to him. He was gone every night of the week, even the nights when Frank had no job for him. Augie and I had proceeded over the last five months with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. I didn’t want to know about the work he did for Frank, and we steered clear of any mention of it during the few times a week we were able to get together.
But all that changed when he used the word “urgent.” I’d never known him to use that word, or any like it, before. It played in a loop in my head as I drove all day from one end of the East End to the other, delivering truckloads of antique and restored furniture to the affluent. I had tried to call Augie at his home during my lunch break but got nothing but the same unanswered ringing I got each time I tried his number before coming downstairs to take in the rich night.
I hadn’t been standing in the doorway of the Hansom House for very long, when I saw an old red-colored taxicab come up Railroad Plaza, pass the train station and make the right-hand turn onto Elm Street.
It was Eddie’s cab. It passed the Mexican restaurant on the corner and slowed, then pulled to the curb and stopped across the street from me.
Eddie’s arm was hanging out the open driver’s door window, his white shirt sleeve rolled up, his black skin shiny under the streetlights. He waved me over. I left the doorway and walked down the pathway to the street, then crossed to him.
The motor was running a little rough, the body of the cab trembling slightly. I could hear reggae music coming from inside, drifting out on an invisible cloud of clove oil and Old Spice.
Eddie was a middle-age black man who had come to America years ago from Jamaica and started a small cab company on the East End. I had helped him out of a jam once, when I was young. He was a thin man with skin like coffee and a narrow, bony face. His smile was pleasant despite his yellowed teeth and shockingly pink gums. His face was unshaven, his bristles white and as thick as quills.
We weren’t friends, really. We didn’t frequent the same places, we didn’t go out of our way to see each other or even say hello. But we knew each other. He was, being a cabbie, sometimes privy to things no one else knew. Sometimes he made a point of seeking me out and telling me things he thought I, for one reason or another, should know.
So I knew by the fact that Eddie drove by my place and stopped that something was going down. My heart raced a little.
“What’s up, Eddie?”
His white bloodshot eyes were stark against his dark skin. His face was wrinkled, with deep furrows by his eyes and mouth. Between his teeth, sticking out from the right side of his mouth, was the stub of a cigar, unlit.
“That little girl, that daughter of your friend, I saw her not long ago in town.” Eddie knew pretty much everyone on the East End. He had driven Augie home from my place several times when Augie was too gassed to drive. Augie had even used Eddie’s cab once during a surveillance job for Frank, and paid Eddie well for it.
“Augie’s kid?”
“Yeah, that’s her.”
“What’s going on?”
“I think she could use a friend right now.”
“What do you mean?”
“She was with some boys. High school, by the letterman jackets they were wearing.”
“Where?”
“By the library.”
“Is she in trouble?”
“Let’s just say the odds don’t seem in her favor, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded and looked in the direction of the village. The library was a mile away; I didn’t know what I expected to see.
I looked back at Eddie. “I’ll check it out. Thanks.”
“No problem, Mac.”
My LeMans was parked just a little ways down on the same side of the street. I took a step toward it, then stopped. I turned back to Eddie. “Hey, you haven’t by any chance seen Augie recently, have you?”
“No. Can’t find him?”
“It’s probably nothing. If you see him, though, let me know, okay?”
“I’ll keep an eye out for him. A man like him would be hard to miss.”
I thanked Eddie and continued on to my car. His cab pulled away from the curb as I unlocked my door. I climbed in behind the wheel and pulled the door shut, then cranked the ignition till the engine caught and shifted into gear and pulled into the street. I made a U-turn, turned left at the end of Elm Street onto Railroad Plaza, and then made the left onto North Main Street and followed that for a half mile into the village, heading toward the library.
It was a quiet night in town. The shops were closed, the sidewalks empty. The restaurants I passed weren’t all that busy. Unoccupied tables and wait staff with nothing to do were visible behind large storefront windows. The library was around the corner, on Job’s Lane, but I parked near the end of Main, close to the corner. I could cut around to the back of the Village Hall and approach the library that way and not be seen on the street by anyone.
My shortcut to the back of town was the alleyway that ran between Frank’s office and Village Hall. I hadn’t even walked past Frank’s place since the night I trashed it and Augie had to pull me out and take me home. The front window to Frank’s office was dark now, but I still didn’t like being so near it all that much. The sooner I was away from there the better.
I got out of my car and stepped to the curb and listened. It didn’t take long for me to pick out the sound of laughter coming from somewhere behind the Village Hall. It sounded distant and thin, and I went after it, walking down the alleyway to the small parking lot used by cops. Once there I heard something other than laughter.
A shriek sounded out and carried briefly, then was cut off, gone.
I tried to place it but it was too brief. Beyond the cop lot was a municipal parking lot the size of two football fields. It was empty now. To the right of that, behind the library, was a small park surrounded by a cluster of fir trees and a cyclone fence. It was a tiny park, not much bigger than my apartment. But I looked toward it intently and waited. It was the only enclosed area around, and anyway I had a feeling about it.
I stopped just outside the alleyway and held still and listened. The shriek had been such a brief sound that a part of me doubted now that I had heard it. But there also was a part of me that didn’t doubt it, that heard it well and knew just what it meant.
A car passed down Main Street behind me, and I could hear very little over it till it was gone. Then silence returned to the open parking lot and I waited in it, not making a move, my eyes fixed on the tiny-fenced in park behind the library.
T
hen my ears found something, a rustling sound from near the center of that small park, the unmistakable sound of a struggle.
I heard murmured words, male voices giving hurried and hushed commands. Then finally I heard it, another shriek, or half a shriek, for it was cut off midway through just like the one before, cut off before it could rise and carry, before it could reach above the dense trees that surrounded that park.
It was all I needed to hear. My heart burst and sent a terrible ache through me, and I broke into an all-out run.
I reached the fence and cleared it as quickly and quietly as I could. Then I moved forward through the border trees. This park was significantly darker than the open lot was, but still I spotted them almost instantly. They were on the other end of the enclosure, in a patch of open ground that was only slightly better lighted than the ground under the crowding trees.
There were three of them, three boys in lettermen jackets. And there was Tina, in the middle of it. I could see her well enough. She was in their arms, not one part of her touching the ground. She was kicking and bucking and trying with all she had to get free of them. It looked like a feeding frenzy.
I could hear her murmuring. One of the boys had his hand over her mouth. They were all talking at once in voices that weren’t all that hushed but still quiet. They didn’t hear my approach.
The three boys were busy with Tina, busy keeping her still, busy yelling at each other, busy tearing Tina’s T-shirt open, pulling at her white bra, trying to peel down her jeans. They had no idea I was even there till I was upon them.
The first boy I reached had shoulder length hair, thick. I came up beside him and grabbed a handful of that hair and gave a good yank, pulling it like I was ringing a church bell, bending my knees and tugging him almost head first to the ground. I used all my body weight and hung onto him till he was flat out on his back. I couldn’t have him getting back up right away, the fall he had taken wasn’t hard enough to stun him, so the instant he hit the ground I let my legs buckle and dropped down on him, landing my right knee, with all my body weight behind it, onto his ribs. I heard a quick crack and a deep grunt.
The Poisoned Rose Page 7