Little Odessa

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Little Odessa Page 23

by Joseph Koenig


  He walked her to the bed, pushed her down gently. “No,” she said. “That’s not going to make it easier.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. Have you eaten yet?”

  He shook his head.

  “I haven’t either,” she said. “Let’s go out. I know a special place … a place you’re going to love.”

  The storm had gathered in intensity, gray sheets of rain riding a salt wind out of the east. As they hurried toward the beach Harry tilted the umbrella over his shoulder and a looping gust turned it inside out, wrenched the fabric from the ribs. He dropped it in a garbage can and the gale sucked it out again and sent it rolling into traffic. Kate clung to his bad arm, burying her head against his body. “Where’d you say this place was?” he asked her.

  “On Stillwell Avenue, around the corner from the Typhoon.”

  “Pretty far, on a day like this. What’s so special about it?”

  “It’s in the subway arcade,” she said. “After we talk, you can go upstairs and you’ll never have to see me again.”

  “My favorite kind of cookin’,” he muttered.

  “Don’t be mad at me.”

  “No promises,” he said, and let her hold him a little tighter.

  They hurried down Surf Avenue behind the boardwalk. In the shelter of high weeds sprouting from a sidewalk sand dune, they stopped to let Kate dry her face with a handkerchief. Harry saw the fresh mascara running down her cheeks. “Something you wanted to tell me,” he said as they began moving again.

  “Howard’s back.”

  His heel dragged in the sand, but he didn’t break stride. “You saw him this afternoon?”

  She nodded.

  “You knew he’d be there?”

  “No,” she said, shouting it into the wind. “I lost ten years’ growth when he said hello.”

  “I thought you said he was in prison. In Israel.”

  “He was.”

  “Then what’s he doin’ out?”

  “It’s not important. I mean that part of it doesn’t concern us. What matters is that he’s in New York and that he made me another offer, an even better one, to run the Knights for him.”

  “To move in with him, too?”

  “Please don’t hate me,” she said. She felt his foot catch again, more noticeably than before. “I need something new, something better than this. Howard can change my whole life for me.”

  They crossed a street that ran into the aquarium parking lot. The rooftop pool was empty. A fine day for ducks, Harry was thinking, not for penguins. He started to say something, but then changed his mind. “You think those other two are gonna pack up and quit lookin’ for us ’cause Ormont’s in town?”

  Something told him that she was going to say yes.

  “Howard’s known both of them for a long time. He can straighten things out easily. Everything was just one big mistake.”

  “What happened to Nathan, he can fix that, too?”

  “Do we have to talk about it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  They followed the avenue away from the boardwalk. At a street dead-ending at the beach they stepped into the gutter, standing unprotected in the rain as a garbage truck turned in front of them. Harry glanced up to see the Typhoon’s dark skeleton disappearing in low clouds a block away.

  Kate was saying, “Howard says he can smooth things out so they’ll forget they ever wanted to hurt us. That’s good enough for me.”

  The garbage truck completed its turn and crept toward the beach. Harry and Kate were almost on the sidewalk when a blue van cut across three lanes of Surf Avenue and bore down on them from the side. Kate screamed, “Look out,” and pushed him onto the curb, felt the breeze from the speeding vehicle tickle the hairs on the back of her neck.

  “Fuckin’ lunatic,” Harry yelled, and shot the driver the finger.

  Kate pressed a hand to her chest, steadying herself. Squinting over his shoulder, she saw the van continue halfway down the street, then wheel into a U-turn and tear back toward them. “Oh my God, it’s Bucyk. Howard mustn’t have talked to them yet. Come on,” she screamed, grabbing at Harry’s sleeve. “He’s trying to run us down.”

  They charged along the deserted avenue past disco bumper cars and a Fascination parlor that was shuttered for the season. Caged by latticed shadows, Harry hesitated under the Typhoon, his legs churning as though he was treading water. Then he slipped into gear again, clamping Kate’s wrist in his good hand and dragging her around the corner.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Beach,” Harry said. “He can’t drive that damn truck in the sand.”

  Tripping over his heels, Kate struggled to keep pace. Her arm was still locked in his as she spurted two steps ahead of him. They were less than fifty yards from the boardwalk when the sidewalk erupted in pebbly shrapnel, and she saw Nicholas at the railing, pointing a shiny gun that looked like precious metal against the dark raincoat around his shoulders. Without slowing, Harry swung her into a taut semicircle, and then they were racing back toward Surf Avenue. Behind them Kate heard a second bullet carom off a hydrant.

  Harry was in the lead now, pulling her with him as her legs began to give out. Her lungs were burning, and she cursed all the nights she had spent in smoky rooms.

  “Run,” he yelled. “We make it to the subway, maybe a cop’ll scare ’em off.”

  Kate pushed herself forward, breathing through her mouth. She was about to come even with him when he stopped suddenly and she bruised her chin against his back. The squeal of tires forced her eyes to the middle of the street, where the blue van was angling at the sidewalk. She panicked then and would have backed against the Typhoon’s chain-link fence if Harry hadn’t yanked her into motion again, shoving her toward a gingerbread booth where a fat woman in a sharkskin suit jacket was shooing away two tattered black children. Harry threw five dollars at the woman, didn’t wait for change. He ran around the kids, prodding Kate into the narrow loading area where the roller coaster’s six cars should have been.

  “What are we doing here?” she asked.

  Looking down the empty track, he went inside his jacket for the Beretta. “Think you can shoot this?”

  She put both hands on it, pushed it away. “Not at a person.”

  “They’re tryin’ to kill us, you know.”

  “I can’t,” she screamed. “I can’t.”

  Then the cars glided along the platform and three couples drenched to the skin came toward them laughing uncontrollably. “Maybe you won’t have to. Let’s follow these nice people out. Your friends wouldn’t try anything in a crowd.”

  Kate took a long, soothing breath, but gulped it back as she saw his eyes narrow. “What’s wrong?”

  “Shit!”

  She followed his gaze to the ticket booth, where Nicholas and Bucyk were pushing money at the fat lady. “What do we do now?” she asked him.

  Harry didn’t answer.

  “Think of something,” she pleaded.

  “I’m tryin’, damn it. Nothing’s comin’.”

  She looked toward the booth again. Nicholas and Bucyk were muscling the laughing couples aside as they hurried to the loading area. Harry dropped her hand and ran for the front car. When she took off after him, he shoved her back roughly.

  “Get away from me,” he hollered. “I gotta get as far from you as I can.”

  She stood there, defeated, watching him run. She saw him pull out the Magnum, then wave it uselessly as the black kids got in the way, racing him to the front. He tripped up one little boy, pushed him into his friend and jumped in the first seat. Nicholas and Bucyk brushed past her with guns partially concealed by the raincoats draped over their arms. She felt tears in her eyes once again as Harry surrendered the Magnum and Bucyk relieved him of the Beretta.

  His lone act of resistance consisted of refusing to leave the roller coaster. She saw him looking small and injured beside them, shaking his head like he was going to snap it off his sho
ulders. Poor bastard, she thought—forgetting just how frightened she was herself—poor, runty tough guy, too terrified to move, or even to think. Howard had been right about him, like he was right about everything. She laughed, realizing that it was too late now for even Howard’s good sense to do her any good.

  Bucyk was stuffing Harry’s guns in his jacket as he came back for her. He pushed her into the last car and sat with his body angled against hers. Up ahead she could see Nicholas with his weapon buried in Harry’s ribs, the bad ribs, sliding into the front seat.

  “So what’s new?” Bucyk laughed through puffed lips.

  Kate twisted away, avoiding his smile. “What’s going to happen to us?”

  “Whaddaya think’s gonna?” He leaned forward, adjusting the guns in an inside pocket so that he could sit comfortably. “We’re going for a ride. Then, if you want, I’ll buy you some cotton candy and a frank. We’re all gonna have a swell time today.” He folded the raincoat over his lap. In his hand she saw a gun that was even nastier-looking than the ones Harry had showed her. “Well, maybe not everyone.”

  An attendant came by and pulled the bar over their knees, then went to the first car and locked Harry in with Nicholas. Nicholas dug his gun deeper into Harry’s ribs, savoring the wince it produced. “I had no idea a roller coaster could be so much fun.”

  “Let Kate go, at least,” Harry said. “She didn’t know what she was getting herself into.”

  Nicholas tried the muzzle against another rib. “She had a good idea the night you two broke into my house.”

  “What’s the big deal? You got just about everything back. What are you out, you’re hardly out anything.”

  “You underestimate me,” Nicholas said. “I’m a very sensitive fellow. When I found out that my home had been entered, it was as though I had been personally violated by you two.”

  “By me,” Harry said. “Kate only went along for the ride.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “I don’t know where you get your information from, but it was all my idea, my score. There’s no reason for that ape to hurt her.”

  “Stan?” Nicholas said, his head tilting back as the cars lurched away from the platform. “Stan would never harm the girl. As you must have noticed, he’s quite taken with her.”

  Some of the pain went out of Harry’s face.

  “So I’ll deal with her myself. As I’ll deal with you.”

  In the tunnel Nicholas played the muzzle hard against Harry’s side. “I wouldn’t try anything in here. I wouldn’t even think of it.”

  “You say so,” Harry croaked.

  “Just stay nice and calm, and answer a few questions for me, and who can say, you might live an extra two or three minutes.”

  The darkness diluted and Harry felt the rain on his face. He looked over the boardwalk, but saw only the derelict tower of the parachute jump piercing the blackness.

  “That night at my place, you were looking for something … krytrons. Tell me what they’re for.” Waiting for an answer, Nicholas surveyed the emptiness. “Tell me, or I’ll blow you away this second.”

  Harry cringed, inching away from the gun until his back was against the side of the car. “Oh,” he said like Kate would. He put his hand outside and felt for the lock on the safety bar. “Oh, that!”

  They crept to the edge of the incline, and Harry watched Nicholas take a deep breath and hold it. As they spilled over the top Nicholas reached automatically for the bar, falling forward as Harry sprang the lock and the steel rod shot away from their laps. Nicholas put his free hand out to push back against the gathering speed, and with the other raised the gun at Harry. Harry swiped at the weapon and it went off beside his ear, the pain as intense as if he had caught the bullet. The ringing that filled his head told him that he was still alive and that he would never hear much else with that ear again.

  They were dropping, careening into the hairpin curve that would bring them to the second hill. Harry wrestled the gun out of Nicholas’s hand, saw it clatter through the scaffolding to the street. Nicholas threw a short punch to the side of the jaw and the momentum carried him into Harry, pinning the good hand against his chest. Before Nicholas could land again, Harry brought the cast up sharply into the other man’s chin. Nicholas recoiled, punching blindly with both hands, but Harry was too out of control to notice. He grabbed a fistful of the glossy hair and slammed Nicholas’s face into the cast, smashed it again and again, crying out as the knitting bones shattered in his arm. Then he pulled back on the hair and saw the fine nose spread over Nicholas’s face, drove it one more time against the plaster.

  They dove and looped and soared over another hill, and Harry lost his balance and clung desperately to the seat. Behind him he made out the top of Bucyk’s head coming over, the rise. He twisted around just as Nicholas’s limp form was toppling over the side of the car. Harry let go of the seat and grabbed Nicholas’s raincoat, watching as though from a distance as it came off in his hand and the other man fell away from him. Too late he reached out again as Nicholas pitched headlong into the scaffolding, snagging on a beam long enough to make eye contact before hurtling to the roof of the gingerbread booth.

  The car whipped over a smaller rise, and when Harry glanced back again Kate and Bucyk were hidden on the other side. Below he glimpsed Nicholas’s body sprawled face up with a leg curled grotesquely underneath, the arms spread open in supplication, inviting him to jump. Harry pulled his eyes away, and grim curiosity brought them back. Nicholas’s face was a pulpy mask, but the glossy hair appeared hardly mussed. At the corner of Stillwell the black kids he had seen before were pointing to the top of the booth.

  His arm was on fire. Two large cracks in the plaster seemed to be letting the pain leak over his entire right side. Shivering, he picked up Nicholas’s raincoat and threw it over his shoulders. He felt something bulky in one of the pockets, and pulled out a billfold and then a ring of keys. He was examining them when the car slid through the loading area and the tunnel and came out into the rain. The roller coaster slowed for the big hill, inched over the top, and then stopped moving, and he looked down at the street, toward the wailing of sirens muzzled by the storm. He shuddered again as he buttoned the raincoat and swung his feet onto the track, hunting for the easiest way down …

  Bucyk made a tent of his raincoat and raised an elbow for Kate to join him inside. “The hell’s going on? I’m getting drowned.”

  Kate knotted a kerchief over her head, moved farther away.

  “You know who you look like, like that? Like one of those old Russkies—”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Hey,” he shouted, rattling the safety bar. “Let’s get this show on the road.” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hey, Nick, how you two doing? Having fun?”

  His answer was the sound of the wind and the keening of a siren above it.

  Shielding her eyes from the rain, Kate took her bearings. They were stuck below the crest of the big hill with the front cars already out of sight. A flash of red light drew her attention to the avenue and she raised herself cautiously. The ticket booth came into her field of vision and she saw the broken body on the roof, knew at once that it was Harry. She wanted to sob, but had run out of tears. She forced herself to take a second look through clear eyes.

  Bucyk put a hand on her shoulder and forced her down. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Scared?”

  “This thing is always getting stuck.”

  “A roller coaster? How?” He peered down over her side of the car, but the ticket booth was out of view. He saw an emergency vehicle on the street and another arriving. “Looks like trouble,” he said. “Like somebody’s hurt.”

  “No,” she told him. “They send for an ambulance whenever anything goes wrong with the Typhoon. They don’t take chances.”

  “Good idea.”

  They sat there for fifteen minutes before the cars jolted over the hill with a metallic groan and Kate saw that
the front seat was empty. Bucyk did, too, and strained for a better look. Kate pulled him down and threw her arms around him, feeling for the guns against his body, pressing against them as he hugged her to his side. She didn’t let go until they crept into the loading area, where two policemen and an ambulance attendant met them.

  One of the officers, a lanky blond who couldn’t have been older than Kate, helped her onto the platform. “Did you see what happened, miss?” he asked.

  “Ask him,” she said, stepping quickly behind the uniformed men. “But ask nicely. This man is carrying three guns.”

  17

  HOWARD DROPPED ONTO THE dark brown Barcalounger that was his favorite and leaned all the way back. His entire body hurt. He pulled out his shirttails and rubbed the proud flesh beside his spine. After forty years the scar scarcely had faded, the angry reminder of a blunder he had devoted his life to trying not to repeat. As though he needed a reminder on a day like this, when the pain filled his chest again like molten iron. He tucked in the shirt and reached for a bottle on his desk. As he did, he saw one of his waiters passing outside the office.

  “Malik,” he called out, “why don’t you join me in a drink?”

  The sad-eyed man came in dutifully, reluctant to risk intimacy with his boss, or not to. “It’s early,” he said. “I haven’t eaten.”

  “Neither have I.” Howard patted his chest as though it was his belly. “What do you say to some dinner first?”

  “If there’s time …”

  “If I say there is,” Howard told him, “there’s plenty.”

  “Let me go to the kitchen. I’ll see what’s good.”

  Howard stopped him with a stare. “Let’s have real food.” He scoured his desk for a Chinese take-out menu and began circling his selections with a felt-tip pen.

  The waiter rolled the menu into his breast pocket and went away. Minutes later he was back in the office, as uncomfortable as if there was a gun to his head.

 

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