Stu glimpsed his near future—first a wheelchair, then crutches, then a cane, then just a limp. Sorrow poured over him, but then poured off just as quickly, like a bucket of water over some rainproof fabric. He was too doped to be morbid, and he embraced the feeling of well-being the drugs created. Fake, but useful. He took a silent minute to shove the thoughts about his future into a heap in some back corner of his mind. He would sort through that pile later. “Thank you,” he croaked, “for the truth.”
“The truth sucks,” Povich said, in what sounded like an apology.
“Truth is a relief,” Stu said. “Sometimes when I can’t decide if I’m asleep or awake, I wonder if I’m already dead.”
“What happened in that car?”
Stu told him about the gunman and his prisoner at the side of the road, about the pistol in his face, the slalom down the old country road at seventy miles per hour in a car built for Sunday drives and backseat necking at the drive-in.
“Do you remember the crash?”
“I can’t know if this is a memory or a dream,” Stu admitted, “but I’ll tell you.”
Stu listened to the voices. Were they real? He struggled against sleep and opened his eyes. Through a blur, like through a smear of grease on glass, he saw tree trunks, looking like gray scratches on the black night. A trickle of cold water ran over his left arm. He was on his back. His whole left side was soaked. He wondered, embarrassed: Have I pissed myself? He listened to the gurgle of a tiny spring and realized he was on the ground. The earth beneath him was soft and smelled mossy. He was on a bed of pine needles. This would be a good place to camp, he thought. He listened for the voices. Somebody moaned. Footsteps shuffled through the underbrush. Stu’s breathing was shallow. He balled his hands into loose fists and wiggled his right foot. The left foot ignored him. What he felt was not pain, exactly, but a stunned detachment from the broken parts of himself. He understood that his mind had erected a dam to delay the flood of pain that would drown him if he felt it all at once. He was hurt deep inside his belly—that much, he knew. He was hurt in places only a doctor could reach. He tried to lift his head, but it weighed too much. He could not save himself; he would have to wait for help.
He inhaled deeply and smelled the car. His nose wrinkled at the stench of gasoline, burnt rubber, and the sickening fumes of smoldering vinyl and foam. There was a spicy metallic odor, too, he could not place at first, until he felt the hot rivulet down the side of his nose and realized he could smell his own blood.
He thought about his parents and felt a pressing sadness. They had decided twenty-five years ago to invest all their love in just one child, and now were too old to have another.
Someone moaned again. Stu thought about calling out but decided to save his strength. The moan had come from atop a steep embankment that began at Stu’s feet. He could make out the dark scrape on the hillside where his sliding body had gouged the forest floor. The underbrush crackled. Stu’s field of vision steadily narrowed as the flesh near his eyes swelled around his injuries.
With a hollow roar, a sudden explosion upon the hill flung yellow light against the trees. A fireball spun skyward in the shape of an unraveling question mark, and then burned out, leaving a thousand tiny orange fireflies where the flame had singed the pine trees. Stu waited to feel the heat of the explosion on his face. He felt just the coolness of the air beneath the hill, and was disappointed. He watched the fireflies die out to black. He listened to the fire excitedly explore the innards of his old Lincoln. The car had been his grandfather’s. His grandfather had been a spiteful eccentric, and Stu had not cried when he had died. He cried for the old bastard now.
five
The men hitting Kit were not sexists. No, they beat her as hard as they would any man. Kit saw the blow coming and clenched her stomach muscles. Whump! The fist popped off her flat abdomen. She ground her teeth and tried to stay silent to deny them the satisfaction of her pain, but she could not help releasing a low grunt and a puff of air.
Just a bruise, she thought. Nothing more. The two men holding her arms snickered.
Anonymous dance music vibrated through the walls and filled the narrow hallway where the three goons had caught her trying to sneak into the nightclub. They could have had her arrested for breaking and entering. The law citation flashed into Kit’s mind.
Title 11, Chapter 8-5.1. Unlawful breaking and entering of a business place.
The monetary fine for B and E was three hundred dollars, which seemed light compared to the possible jail time—three years. Had they called the cops after they had grabbed her, Kit would have argued she didn’t break, she had just entered through an unlocked back door. Maybe she could have pleaded down to trespassing. Not that it mattered; her captors had decided that the police, the lawyers, the judge, jury, and the media would only get in the way of punching her.
“Hey, Robbie,” said the hulk holding Kit’s left arm. “That’s your best?” He laughed. He had sharp fingernails for a guy, and they bit into her bicep. His long goatee, dyed pure white, brushed her shoulder. “I’d let her go, but I’m afraid she’d kick your ass.” He squeezed her arm. “She’s been in the gym.”
The hulk on her other arm leaned close to Kit. His eyes were dazzling green, the eyes of a movie star or a fairy-tale prince. He smelled like cigars and Old Spice. “You got any skirts our friend Robbie can borrow?” he deadpanned.
“What are you, Rob?” the first hulk asked. “About a size eight?”
The guy throwing the punches was Kit’s height, five foot five, and by far the smallest of the three thugs. He dressed in a black turtleneck and a Charlie Chaplin derby hat made of shiny felt, with a rolled brim and a red silk band. He wore sunglasses, indoors, despite the late hour and the dim light of the hallway. The glasses looked like something a poker player would wear to hide his eyes: two round, shimmering, rainbow-colored discs in an invisible nylon frame. Though slim in the waist, his shoulders were mushy and he seemed pitiably out of shape—after just three punches his colorless skin, peppered with freckles, glistened wet, and he pretended not to pant.
He had confined his blows to her midsection. Probably to avoid making marks a prosecutor could examine, she figured. They won’t kill me, not tonight. They intended only to knock her about. The revelation gave her new confidence, which burned in her chest like a hot shot of whiskey. I can handle this. She stared at Robbie, the little man in the silly derby, who looked more exhausted for hitting her than Kit did for taking it.
Kit sucked a deep breath and said in a hard whisper, “He’s no bigger than a size six.”
The two hulks shook with giggles. Robbie’s lip peeled up in a snaggletoothed sneer. He drew back his arm as if to slap her face. She flinched and turned away. He did not slap her. Instead, he suddenly rocked back and plunged another uppercut into Kit’s stomach. Whump! She had not had time to fully tighten her muscles, and the punch wobbled her. She gasped, and was thankful for the hulks holding her arms; if not for them, she would have gone down. She’d rather have taken five ounces of speeding lead behind her ear than let Robbie see her go down.
It’s just pain, she reminded herself as she grimaced against the void in her lungs and waited for the air to return. She remembered the runner’s proverb, the code for her life etched with a knife into her headboard: Pain is weakness leaving your body. She spoke the code out loud every night before she slept. The code had helped her, now at age thirty-three, through twenty marathons and six triathlons. Robbie’s jab could inflict no pain worse than what Kit regularly inflicted on herself, in training. She thought about the interval workout she had run two weeks before: up a one-mile dry ski slope in New Hampshire, a double black diamond cluttered with boulders, downed trees, and winter wheat. She had run until her legs could no longer support her weight. After she had collapsed on the mountain, she dry-heaved until she thought she might squeeze out her spleen or gallbladder, or maybe something important she might need in a race.
For a runner, Kit�
�s legs were a little short of ideal, her hips a little wider than Olympic proportions. Slightly bowlegged, with high arches and a choppy running gait that no film study had ever fixed, she had never beaten a professional marathoner. That was all right with her; she could not control genetics, and was content to condition herself to within a whisker of her theoretical maximum. She had never lost a race to another amateur.
She wheezed a half breath.
Whump!
Pain is weakness leaving my body.
For a shrimp, this guy was whacking a lot of weakness out of her.
The dance club racket bled continuously through the walls of buckling plaster. One song blended into another, mixed by a skilled DJ who knew how to keep a crowd of ravers on their feet. The walls of the hallway were covered with a high-gloss cream paint. The floor had long ago been painted red, though thousands of footsteps had worn a path down the middle to the tan floorboards. At the far end of the hall, the outside door was closed, to not invite attention to Robbie’s Tae Bo workout. One screw-in fluorescent bulb, curled like a pig’s tail, hung from the ceiling. The exit sign above the door was dark. Hmm, a burned-out bulb in the exit sign. That’s a fire code violation, Kit thought. Section 23-28. Somebody needed to write these guys up.
Kit coughed, spat on the floor, and stole a deep breath. One hulk held up his hand to freeze Robbie in place. “Let’s see if that was enough,” he said. To Kit, he asked: “Want to tell us why you were snooping around back here?” He chuckled. “Don’t want to pay the cover charge?”
“I told you … gentlemen,” she said, her voice sounding scratchy in her own ears, “I’m here … to speak to Mr. Glanz.”
Robbie suddenly stuck a finger in her face and blurted, “People make appointments to see Mr. Glanz!”
These were the first words she had heard him speak. The outburst, and the thin voice, as colorless as the lines of sweat running down his face, surprised her. The two hulks smiled at each other, sharing some inside joke at Robbie’s expense. Kit didn’t know which thug to address. “I tried making an appointment,” she said. “He won’t return my calls.”
“That,” one hulk said, “would be known as a hint.” He nodded to Robbie.
The little man reared back and aimed a punch at Kit’s abdominals. She tightened in time. The blow bounced off with little more force than a slap. Robbie was too tired to put much behind it. He shook his hand at the wrist. Her breath had quickly returned.
“So what’s so important,” said the second hulk, “that you gotta interrupt Mr. Glanz while he’s ignoring you?”
Robbie pointed at her again and shouted, “What you wanna see him for?”
“I’m here to talk about Judge Harmony.”
Robbie reared back to hit her again, but the first hulk, the talkative one, waved him off. He stroked his silky blond beard in silence for a few seconds. Their grip on her arms slackened, and it was clear the beating was over. “So who are you?” he asked. “You’re too young to be the wife.”
“Maybe the judge’s comatta?” the other hulk said.
Kit wrenched her arms and they let her go. “I’m not his mistress,” she growled, with a moment’s glare for each of them. “I was his law clerk.”
Robbie’s lips slowly rolled in on each other, until his mouth was just a colorless slice across his face. He cried suddenly, “That judge put my brother away for life!”
“Easy, Rob,” said hulk number one.
His brother? Kit could hardly believe it. So this pipsqueak was the younger son of David “Rhubarb” Glanz?
This was nepotism at its worst—she had been pummeled by the runt son of a mobbed-up nightclub owner who obviously wasn’t qualified to be a backstage hooligan. Robbie clutched his sore wrist and panted like a racehorse. If this were a state job, he’d probably file for disability. No wonder the two hulks, the real muscle, despised him. Kit clenched her right fist and fantasized about driving Robbie’s teeth down his throat. Her breathing was still shallow and her abdomen was sore. There wouldn’t be much power in the blow, and it would be a shame to be stomped or killed over one mush punch.
Someday, Robbie, she swore.
The four of them stood there in the hall for an uncomfortable moment. There seemed nothing more to say. They were all aware of the criminal conviction of David Glanz Jr., Robbie’s brother, on two counts of manslaughter, and of Judge Harmony’s harsh sentence. Nobody had expected the judge to hand down the maximum—thirty years for each count, to be served consecutively—but, as the judge had told Kit, he had seen enough of the son that reminded him of the father, and he put junior away.
They were all aware, too, of Rhubarb’s threat to get even with the law, and with Gil Harmony.
“A shame what happened to the judge,” said the second hulk, his voice flat. “Killed by a trespasser. That happens sometimes.” He stepped closer to Kit, almost touching. She held her ground. He looked straight down at her. Softly, he warned, “Most of the time, it’s the trespasser who gets killed.”
His gentle smile mocked her. The beauty in his green eyes unnerved Kit. Those were the devil’s eyes, she thought, the perfect eyes of a fallen angel. She was suddenly frightened by what the beauty had hidden from her—for the first time that evening, she realized she had blundered close to her own funeral in trying to force her way to see Rhubarb Glanz.
Fear attacked her body with electrified jaws; its low-voltage bite shocked her all over.
six
The rattling of boots up a chain-link fence in the middle of the night was like white noise in this hardscrabble neighborhood of three- and four-decker apartment buildings. People scaled fences all night around here, and nobody with any street sense ever gave them trouble for it. Citizens minded their own business, out of fear or indifference.
He climbed the eight-foot fence where it met the wall of the apartment building, beneath the front porch. With a foot atop the fence, he could reach the porch roof.
The slanted roof looked like a raft pitched to starboard in a rolling sea of blackness. The shingles were dry and rough and they shed a tiny avalanche of grit into the tin gutter when he climbed onto the roof. The shades were down in the second-floor windows; not that it mattered much in such darkness, with no working streetlight for two hundred yards.
He lay on his back on the roof and rested. The night was clear. A few stars hung dimly over a cloud of light pollution from the city. A distant car alarm sounded. He watched the stars for a few minutes because he thought it especially important to appreciate whatever small beauty he might find on a night such as this.
Then he climbed the fire escape. The iron rails smeared rust on the palms of his tight rubber kitchen gloves. He stopped at the third-floor landing, a narrow metal grate cluttered with clay pots sprouting greens. He passed his nose over the pots and smelled rosemary, overpowering the other garden herbs. The landing was just below a window looking into a small bedroom. Deeper inside the apartment, a light had been left on. He could see the unmade twin-sized bed, and clothing strewn about. His putty knife wiggled easily in the crack above the jamb. The old-fashioned window, counterweighted on a rope and pulley system inside the wall, slid open almost by itself, and he slipped inside, onto the worn-out mattress that squeaked and sank under his weight. The room smelled of dirty laundry and cigarettes. Twisted butts filled a glass ashtray on a pine dresser, next to a digital clock that glowed red—1:07 a.m. The two dots between the one and the zero pulsed to tick off the seconds. He lost himself in the pulse, until the clock flashed 1:08 and knocked him from his trance.
The narrow closet had no door; that was no place to hide.
Instinctively, his hand went to his belt to feel the pick. The ice pick was a rounded steel shank, ten inches long, with a point on one end and a wooden handle on the other. The handle was grooved with four indentations for fingers, and he liked the shape of it in his hand. The antique tool came from an era before refrigeration, when the iceman sold blocks packed in sawdust from the back of a
truck, and customers who forgot to empty the drip pan under the icebox had to mop their floors.
The tool’s handle had not been oiled in a generation; the wood was dry and splintering, but the pick’s hardened metal tip had recently been sharpened to a vicious needle.
The hallway to the kitchen was some ten feet wide, and it served as a living room in the efficiency apartment. A plaid fabric sofa had been pushed against the left-hand wall, next to a decorative wooden footlocker dressed up with black iron bands and lumpy round rivets to make it look like a treasure chest. Three pairs of jeans, a half dozen T-shirts, and a pair of sneakers had been neatly stacked on the footlocker. The light in the hall came from a compact bathroom on the right-hand side, opposite the sofa.
He walked past the bathroom, to the kitchen.
Jesus Christ!
Standing alone in the dark by the window, a man.
He grabbed for the pick, a flush of adrenaline momentarily blackening his vision. He fumbled for the weapon … it slipped from his hand and knocked on the floor. He dove after it.
Wait a second …
Why hasn’t he yelled for help?
What the … ?
“Oh,” he said aloud, then snorted in ironic laughter and pushed himself to his feet.
Just a department store mannequin, that’s all. Not even realistic, either—a boyish waif with shiny sand-colored skin, a molded plastic hairdo, and a stiff pose, like a teenager with a bad back waiting for the bus. The figure had been dressed in tan chinos and a white polo shirt with the collar turned up and the price tag dangling from the sleeve. The right arm had apparently once broken off near the shoulder; it was crudely bandaged with blue painter’s tape.
Feeling his heart slow, and as leftover adrenaline tickled his bowels, he looked around the rest of the kitchen. The room was small and crowded: a white refrigerator and electric range side by side; a giant first-generation microwave consuming most of the counter space; a deep porcelain sink half filled with gray water, dirty cereal bowls, and stainless tableware. A round butcher-block table and a single white farm chair had been shoved in the corner, in front of the only window, next to the mannequin. The apartment door was beside the refrigerator. His mind pictured the sweep of the door. No, he decided, there was not enough room to stand behind it when it opened.
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