A Slepyng Hound to Wake

by Vincent McCaffrey

  Henry had asked what the subject might be.

  Duggan had recalled a time in his youth, during the 1960s, when he had tried to live on his own in New York. “I wanted to write plays then. … Now that’s a real madness. I was inspired by Sean O’Casey and the lush readings of Siobhan McKenna. I lived on the Lower East Side and went to Off-Broadway theatre whenever I could afford it. I didn’t have two cents to rub together. I was working days as a copy editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, on Madison Avenue. … And that was just about the time Eddy was shipping off to Germany, but it was much the same city as Eddy described in his book, and his book brought back clear memories of all of it. … And I’ve decided—I’ve decided now to use that time as the setting for a new book myself. I owe Eddy a debt. He’s given me the push I needed .… He and Morgan.”

  Duggan especially remembered the old theatres on 42nd Street near Broadway where he had escaped once a week to the double-feature Westerns, all in Technicolor, “like no color anyone uses today. That was the color of real life to me. The world I saw with my own eyes was pale by comparison.”

  In fact, Duggan had just seen a preview of a new film about cowboys while he was in LA, and it brought back all of those times. He hated LA, but he would have spent the six hours in the plane anyway just to see a good Western again. A real old-fashioned Western. The studio had made him fly out of Portland, because they needed to consult with him for pre-

  production on Dreams of Bithynia. He hated small planes. He hated to be away from Red Hill Camp at all before the leaves were off the maples. He told Henry he would be subletting an apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston over the winter, just so he could be closer to Logan Airport. He’d be going back and forth a lot until the film was completed.

  Henry had little more to offer the conversation himself other than a ready ear. He talked a little about first seeing a reissue of Shane at the old Orson Welles theatre with Albert. Albert was crazy about Westerns. Henry admitted he had never been much west of the Connecticut river. Duggan encouraged him to buy a motorcycle and just go. Duggan had done that once himself. The greatest summer of his life, just after college. Henry admitted he had never been on a motorcycle. Then, remembering Duggan liked baseball, Henry had offered him Albert’s extra ticket without considering the fact that Duggan could probably get special tickets anytime he wanted. Duggan apologized and told Henry he already had an invitation to sit with some “big wigs” out in the new seats over the Green Monster that night, but thanked him for the offer.

  “Why don’t you take your father?” Duggan had suggested.

  That had shut Henry up. He was glad Della had not heard it. Which prompted another thought. He knew his father would not go, but perhaps Della would.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  It was an odd feeling. He did not know why he was awake. He stared at the shadows on the ceiling for most of a minute before he heard noises; then it was quiet again.

  These were not familiar sounds. Henry listened harder and heard nothing. He knew Sasha was spending nights with her boyfriend again. Mrs. Murray was in Maine for the week—her first visit there, after a week at Tremont Press with Nora, learning some of Duggan’s routines.

  Henry got out of bed slowly and went into the living room without turning on a light. Still there was no sound except for the blood rushing in his own ears. He waited.

  The small cry of a middle stair was suddenly clear.

  Henry moved toward his door, and then quickly away. He suddenly knew that he should move away.

  Lifting the receiver on his phone, he began to dial before realizing it was dead, and set it back. He shifted carefully toward the kitchen window.

  Someone was just outside his door. He was sure there was more than one.

  Henry pulled the window up, lifted the screen and stepped out on the fire escape. His bare feet ached against the iron grate. He pushed the screen down again, knowing it was a minor hindrance, but hoping it would not give him away too soon.

  To one side was the roof of the front porch. If he jumped from the porch, he might find them waiting for him. Below him was a drop of fifteen feet or more into the dark of Mrs. Murray’s garden and the tomato plants with their wooden stakes. He had never liked heights. Across the side yard was the Phillipson house, still for sale after six months and still empty.

  He had already begun the climb to the third floor when he heard the crack of wood from his own door. Adrenalin splintered into his body and made him jump forward. Sasha’s window was partly open, as he hoped.

  He lifted her screen and then the window and stepped in. The emptiness of her apartment offered a faint echo to his movements as he found her phone in the near-dark. Her phone was dead as well. He was stupid. There was no reason to think her phone might work if his did not.

  He pulled out a drawer in her kitchen, and then another, looking for knives in the dark. A can opener fell to the floor. His hand pressed at several empty plastic bags on the top of the counter as he opened lower drawers. Beneath them was loose string—violin string—too thin and too short to offer any hope of carrying his weight. In an odd flash of fantasy, he imagined using it to garrote his pursuers, and, grabbed at this as the sound of movement on the stairs came upward.

  Stepping out onto the fire escape again, he thought to yell as loudly as he could, before thinking again that it was more important to put some small distance between himself and his pursuers before they knew exactly where he was, if only because he was very sure they had at least one gun. His toes sank through the grating.

  Above him the overhang of the roof was just out of his reach. Below him, the fire escape ended at the lower roof over the front porch. He would have to go past his own window again.

  As he stepped down, his hand found the TV antenna wire against the clapboards. It pulled loose but bowed stiffly with old paint as another idea occurred to him. He knotted a violin string to this and tied the other end to the outer rail of the fire escape behind him.

  He heard the shattering of wood from Sasha’s door. Then he began to yell.

  His first “Help” sounded more like a squawk. “Someone call the police. I need help!” He could not bellow quite the way Albert could. He was standing in his underwear on a fire escape yelling for help in the night while being pursued by murderers, and he felt ridiculous.

  A light went on in the house across the back yard. He yelled again as he edged further down the stairs. Something moved at his own window just below him. The screen slid up. There was the white of a face in the dark. He kicked at it, using his hand on the metal rail to pivot himself. His toe cracked with the impact on the man’s skull, loud enough to echo off the next house. A pain shot up his own leg. There was a curse from the dark below he did not understand.

  Someone pushed out the screen from Sasha’s window above him and it turned like a dipping kite in the air as Henry vaulted downward past the dark of his own window and onto the roof of the porch. A hand caught at his shirt. There was an explosion of sound between the two houses he understood to be gunfire from Sasha’s window. A jolt of pain took his breath as the toe of the foot he had used to kick struck the tar shingles. He was fairly sure the gunshot had missed him. He yelled again for help as he stumbled forward on the porch roof and made the leap he hoped would carry him to the strip of grass below. But he had miscalculated in the dark.

  There was another explosion of sound. Henry’s bare feet met the cement of the front walk, and his legs collapsed beneath him. Someone barked, “Shit.” The low metallic drum of a human body repeatedly striking the iron rails as it tumbled on the fire escape, seemed far away.

  His own pain did not feel so bad, but his left leg would not cooperate and move. His ears rang. He felt blood with his hands. He heard the thud of someone dropping down into the dark of the side yard, cracking wooden stakes as they did. Their curses were in Spanish.

  Henry tried to roll, and felt dizzy. His fingers struck the metal of the open gate in the dark. The blood o
n his hands slipped on the metal post as he tried to pull himself up. He could hear someone coming, their feet clapping clumsily at the grass. A hand pushed down on Henry’s head as the person passed by him through the gate.

  A moment passed, with only the ringing in his ears before this altered to the sound of sirens when the leaves of the trees reflected a pulsing blue from beneath. One police car stopped just beyond the corner, and he heard voices. There was the Spanish again. Another car pulled up at the front of the house and turned a searchlight into the yard, blinding him.

  Henry closed his eyes and let the dark absorb his pain.

  The two cops who questioned Henry as he lay in the hospital bed the next morning seemed to be in a good spirits. The cause of this was not clear. The smell of the coffee they held in paper cups as they spoke to him was more disturbing.

  Judging by the questions they asked, Henry understood some of what had happened, even if they would not directly answer questions themselves. Paul Higgins admitted to nothing. His collarbone was broken in the fall on the fire escape. His concussion was minor. He had been found on the lower roof, unconscious. Higgins was charged with breaking and entering and attempted murder. He was threatening to sue someone for the violin string on the fire escape.

  Henry had offered a shortened explanation to the cops for why he thought Higgins had come after him. This did not include Mrs. Murray, only Eddy’s known past as a drug dealer and the probability that Higgins had mistaken the transaction that night. Henry insisted that Eddy was off the drugs. Neither of the cops was impressed, but the older of the two was more willing to correct him.

  “I don’t think so. Your friend Eddy was a bad guy. He used to have some kind of store over in Harvard Square where he kept the drugs for some partner on the janitorial staff at the university. The janitor had quite a business going—a regular network among some of the students and a few professors. Higgins was part of the police unit that took part in that Harvard bust, and knew all about your friend Eddy. But Eddy got away. He’d gotten rid of the stuff before the search. I’ll bet Higgins had his eye on Eddy-boy for a long time. He wasn’t looking for just four hundred bucks. He was looking for the main stash.”

  Henry tried to shake his head, but it hurt. “You’re wrong,” Henry’s voice echoed within his skull. He whispered, “You’re wrong. Eddy was off drugs. I’m sure of it.”

  The officers smiled knowingly to each other.

  The older one shook his head. “They all go back.”

  Henry whispered loudly enough to ring in his ears, “Not Eddy. Not this time.”

  Both cops nodded patiently at his foolishness.

  Oddly, an opened packet of heroin had been left on the couch in Henry’s living room. The police detective speculated that it probably had been meant as a prop to support the idea that Henry himself was murdered by drug dealers or had been involved in drug dealing as well. Instead, now, it was just more evidence of an additional charge against Higgins.

  Higgins’ first excuse had been that he was off duty nearby and responded to a call for help. But it was the heroin packet he had dropped on Henry’s couch that connected Higgins to the murder of another drug dealer on Magazine Street two weeks before. And it was his partner in crime, a hapless addict from Guatemala, whose testimony was going to keep Higgins in jail without bail.

  Henry’s own concussion was more serious. He did not remember his head hitting anything. He barely remembered the sound of the ambulance, and nothing else until he had awakened that morning to his father’s face looking down at him like he was inspecting a bit of old wiring. The fracture in his leg had required a cast that edged uncomfortably into his groin. A cast on his other foot now held his toe in place. The scrapes on his feet and hands itched beneath bandages.

  The police finally left. He hoped he had seen the last of them for the day. The nurse said both Albert and Barbara had been by, but were not allowed in.

  Henry slept again and awakened to Della’s face. She seemed unusually cheerful. Besides Della’s chatting, the only sound was the respirator for the old fellow in the next bed hidden behind the pulled curtain.

  Della sat on a chair between his bed and the window and held one bandaged hand as if it were the paw of a dog, unsure how to handle it.

  He asked her, “How did you get them to let you in?”

  She shrugged. “I told them I was your wife.”

  He had no comment for that under the circumstances.

  Della smiled. “Barbara told me she would take care of your mail orders for a couple of weeks. You don’t have to do a thing.”

  He had to ask, “Who’s going to run her store if she’s fooling around with my stuff?”

  Della smiled again. “I’m helping. I’m going to fill in on Saturday and Sunday afternoons at the store. And I’ll wrap your orders in the evenings.”

  She had been arranging things. He wondered what else.

  “The orders should run out pretty soon,” he said.

  “Not so soon. Barbara wants to put more of her own stock on your site. The other stuff sold so well. Why not?”

  All of this sounded fine. Like one big happy extended family. Very modern. Something was bound to go wrong. He had been a Red Sox fan too long to believe otherwise.

  She tilted her head, innocently. “And I spoke to your father.”

  Reluctantly, he asked, “About what?”

  “About your moving home for awhile.” Her smile had sweetened a bit too much. She knew she was on difficult ground now.

  An attempted groan came out of his dry throat as a squawk.

  “Oh, Jesus. My father can’t take care of me.”

  “No … I would.”

  Henry fell silent. It was his father who had forced his sister Shelagh to leave home after he caught her on the couch with her boyfriend Rick years ago. If his father had agreed to the idea of Della living with him at the house, there was little else he could find to say. The world had changed, if only a little, and perhaps for the better.

  “It might be easier to avoid the stairs for awhile.” He said this aloud, thinking of the side room off the hall, where his father stacked boxes of unused electrical supplies.

  “And if you’re well enough in a month or so, we could go to Budapest.” She bounced a little with her words.

  “I don’t think I could afford it.”

  Her eyes widened with the joy of the thought. Her voice rose. “It wouldn’t cost much. My aunt wants us to stay with them. And I have two bachelor uncles who have a farm somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains. Imagine that! The Carpathian Mountains. And my credit cards are empty. We could go anywhere.”

  He had a credit card of his own somewhere. He had used it last the night Eddy Perry was killed. Before that, he had used it mostly to rent cars when he needed one, but now he had the truck.

  He said, “I don’t like the idea of being in debt.”

  “Well, that’s something you’d better get over, kiddo. You don’t have any health insurance. You’ll be paying these hospital bills for a while.”

  His debts seemed to have been growing in more ways than he could keep track of. Health insurance? Even after Barbara’s problems, he had never given it any thought.

  “I suppose.”

  How could life be bound by such mundane things? All he wanted to do was go looking for good books, and read as many as time allowed. Simple enough. He did not need fancy food. Pastrami would do. His old truck was just fine. He did not even need more than one girlfriend. Della was plenty.

  Her face brightened again as if she knew his thoughts. “But then, if we really did get married, you could go on my company health policy.”

  He looked at her. She was not smiling. He whispered, “Is that what you’re proposing?”

  “No. That’s what I’m supposing. It’s up to you to do the proposing. … It’s just something to think about. There’s no rush. I can wait, at least until you can bend your leg.”

  But then, Henry thought, he had two l
egs, and only one was broken.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank my family for their patience and encouragement. They continue to be my first readers and most constructive critics. The second Henry Sullivan story was the first to be completed, and I was much helped by the criticism of Frank M. Robinson at that crucial stage. And, as before, I must thank Gavin and Kelly and the folks at Small Beer Press for giving it their best.

  About the Author

  Vincent McCaffrey’s first novel, Hound, was chosen as a Must-Read Book by the Massachusetts Book Awards. He has owned the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop for more than thirty years. He has been paid to do lawn work, shovel snow, paint houses, and to be an office-boy, warehouse grunt, dishwasher, waiter, and hotel night clerk. He has chosen at various times to be a writer, editor, publisher, and bookseller. He is hard at work on the next Henry Sullivan novel.

  Find out more at vincentmccaffrey.com.