Rough Trade

by Todd Robinson

  Fun fact: Junior once described my sneezing as comparable to a howler monkey having his balls electroshocked. If the sneeze got loose, the jig was up. Like most things in my life, I hadn’t really thought through this line of action and raced to think how I was going to explain my presence.

  I had nothing.

  Through my watering eyes, I saw a tiny pale hand creep out from under the coffee table and pull a throw pillow off the couch behind the cop.

  “You seem upset, Mr…” the cop said to Dana.

  Dana looked up at the looming officer. Over the distance and through the slats, I could see the tears in his eyes. He was losing it. “Campbell. Dana Campbell.”

  The cop didn’t write it down.

  Ginny’s eyes kept darting between her roommate and the officer.

  “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?” The cop’s hand moved toward his notebook, then slid to the holster, gently popping the safety strap off his cannon of a revolver.

  This was going somewhere bad.

  Dana turned his head as the tears started rolling down his faWAAAA-CHTUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!

  That, by the way, was what my sneeze sounded like.

  My head was too close to the door and smacked into the slats, knocking three loose, my face poking out like a poor man’s version of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

  Before I could even consider following up with a “Heeeeeere’s JOHNNIE,” the cop drew his gun in one swift motion and was arcing it up toward my face.

  Twitch popped up behind him, rolling out from underneath the coffee table.

  As the cop’s gun was leveling at my nose, Twitch pressed the cushion against the back of the cop’s head, then pressed a gun into the pillow.

  The cop’s eyes went wide for a fraction of a second.

  The fraction before Twitch pulled the trigger.

  Bang.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I’m eight years old in my mother’s kitchen.

  The cop’s forehead popped outward like a piece of squeezed bubble wrap, but didn’t burst. His right eye crossed up and to the center, as if trying to see what just happened to his brain. The left eye stayed on me.

  The bullet hits my chest and I fall, fall, fall.

  A thick gush of blood cascaded out his nose.

  Another shot and my mother falls to the cracked linoleum.

  Then the life winked out of both eyes. The cop crumpled onto the area rug, lifeless.

  Ginny fell to the floor in a dead faint.

  The Boy opens his mouth to scream.

  Dana opened his mouth to scream.

  “Don’t scream,” said Twitch. He doesn’t belong here, in my mother’s kitchen.

  Dana smartly listened to the man with the gun.

  The Boy can’t scream.

  I am The Boy.

  I am in my mother’s kitchen.

  My brother Twitch just shot a cop. In the head.

  My mother’s boyfriend just killed her. Just killed me.

  I was in Ginny’s living room, and there was now a dead cop on the floor.

  More blood.

  The Boy is here.

  Boo.

  Boo.

  “Huh?” I felt the cold of shock seeping in through my fingertips.

  Every instinct told me to hide. To run. I was frozen, my body as lifeless as the cop. As my mother.

  “Boo!” Twitch was kneeling over the dead officer, pulling the cop’s gun out of his hand with no more concern in his voice or demeanor than if he were pulling a Hot Pocket out of the microwave. “This isn’t a cop, Boo.”

  “Huh?”

  Twitch held up the hand cannon like an auctioneer. It was a nasty-looking silver snub-nosed revolver. “This is a .44 Ruger. Boston PD don’t carry these.”

  “That’s it? That was why you shot this guy in the head?” I said quietly. I was afraid that if I said it much louder, it would come out a shriek.

  “They’re not allowed to carry these, Boo. BPD all carry Glock model 22 or 23 which are .40 caliber semi-automatics. SWAT teams carry .45 caliber either Sig Sauers or Smith & Wessons.”

  None of that meant a goddamn thing to me. Whenever Twitch turned into Tom Clancy, the part of my brain that processed math shut down.

  I ran to the door. I opened it half expecting a few boys in blue to open fire, but only encountered the cold air. I looked up and down the street. No black-and-whites anywhere.

  My blood pressure dropped a notch. I had a hard time believing that a beat cop in JP would be strolling the neighborhood in this weather, canvassing a murder.

  Wait a minute…

  Pieces started to fall.

  The “cop” said he was investigating a disappearance, not a murder.

  And I was pretty goddamn sure that Byron’s murder had long progressed past the point of canvassing uniforms and into the hands of detectives.

  Twitch was right.

  But we still had a fucking corpse on the living room floor.

  When I walked back into the living room, Dana had Ginny off the floor and was moving her toward the bathroom. She was conscious, but her lips were blue with shock.

  “He’s not a cop,” I said feebly. It seemed even to me a small comfort for the carnage in their home.

  Twitch had Fake Cop’s wallet open. He looked at me with grateful tears in his eyes. “You believe me?”

  And all of a sudden, he was the kid at St. Gabe’s again. The kid who was desperate for acceptance, to impress the big kids. To be believed when he told you that he’d done the right thing. He wanted me to tell him he’d done a good thing.

  This touching moment when I saw Twitch for the boy he was deep inside was slightly knocked off-rail when a chunk of brain fell out of the hole on the back of Fake Cop’s head. It landed on Ginny’s ruined Oriental rug with a wet plop.

  It also snapped me back to the horrible, horrible reality I was currently facing. I breathed deeply through my nose, trying not to hyperventilate. The stench of gunpowder, blood, and evacuated bowels filled my senses.

  I felt like storming, grabbing the situation by the balls and squeezing hard. I really did. My legs and knees, however, were still weak from the execution I’d stood three feet away from. As I wobbled over to the bathroom, the sounds of vomit hitting toilet water hit my ears. I knocked stormish-ly on the door.

  “We gotta talk, guys.” And yes, that sounded just as stupid to me.

  The door opened a crack. Dana’s red-rimmed eyes looked back at me. His lips were also pale underneath his wobbling moustache. Christ, if both he and Ginny dropped from shock, this shitshow was would turn into a full-blown Emmy-winning six-seasons-and-a-movie shit-com.

  Ginny yanked the door all the way open. She’d regained some of her color the way a solid vomiting could do for you. “What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do, Boo?” Her face was a mask of barely contained panic, hair a pulled-back tangle. “Is he dead? Maybe…maybe he’s not dead.”

  The chunk o’brain plop echoed back into my mind. “Um…no. He’s dead. He’s…really dead.”

  Ginny’s face scrunched up and went beet red as she cried, “Ohmygod. There’s a fucking dead guy on my carpet.”

  “Pretty sure he was intent on killing all of us.” I wasn’t, but I figured the suspicion was as good as surety when there was a corpse on the floor.

  “What aren’t you telling me, Dana?”

  “What?”

  “That guy wasn’t here for me.”

  Dana’s lower lip started trembling. “I don’t know anything.”

  “Well, somebody was ready to kill the both of you for whatever it is you don’t know.”

  “What are we going to do here, Boo?” Twitch called from the living room.

  How the fuck did I know? Why was he asking me? Did his plan stop just short of having a goddamn body to handle?

  And everyone was looking to me for an answer.

  “You guys have to go,” I said to Ginny and Dana.

  “What?” Ginny said, snapping
out of her stupor.

  “Grab a bag and get the hell gone. Don’t tell me where. Do it now.”

  “Where are we supposed to go?” she said.

  “Go back to Nova-fucking-Scotia, for all I care! Let me handle this.” Man, I sure could talk a talk. For a second, even I believed me. Then I remembered that I knew me. Knew me well. Very goddamn suddenly, the situation had spun out of any league I was qualified to play in.

  I went back to Twitch while Dana and Ginny scootched off to grab whatever they could carry.

  Twitch was doing his best to roll the body up into the carpet. A dead arm flopped out of the fold. Twitch had a sheen of sweat on his already pasty face and his bird-like chest heaved with exertion. The physical labor part of what to do with a body was plainly not in his wheelhouse.

  Then the idea hit me, along with the nausea that was going to accompany my call.

  Damn.

  “You gotta go, Twitch.”

  “What?”

  “You gotta get out of here, too. I’ll take care of this.”

  “I’m not—”

  “You’re getting the fuck gone!” I used a tone I hadn’t used with Twitch since we were kids, when Junior and I ran our crew at St. Gabe’s. It was my boss voice. My bouncer tone. If everyone had decided I was the point man on this disaster, then I was sure as hell going to be one.

  Twitch’s body immediately went rigid, his eyes popped wide. His shoulders slumped forward, his posture that of the little brother not only being bossed by but accepting the bossing from big brother.

  “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “Stick with Ginny and Dana. Keep their heads down.”

  “We’re not going anywhere with that psycho,” came Ginny’s voice from behind me. Her eyes were fiery, but there was a legitimate fear of Twitch behind them: fear of what he was capable of.

  If she only knew.

  Ginny slung a red backpack over her shoulder. Dana put a calming hand on her back that she shrugged off.

  “Do what the fuck you want, Ginny,” I said. “I’m trying to keep you alive right now. And, very probably, the reason you might get killed is because of the goddamn lies you handed to me and Junior in the first place.” I could feel my own rage building. The whole shebang rumbled through my head, boiled down into its simplest terms.

  It wasn’t fair.

  And I fucking told her so.

  “All of this. None of it would have happened if you’d been straight with us at the start.”

  “You’re right, Boo. It wouldn’t,” she said, nodding. “Because you wouldn’t have helped us at all. You and Junior, with the macho bullshit you two strut around with…you wouldn’t have helped us at all if you knew Dana was a man and that he was gay.”

  “You don’t know that, because you didn’t tell us the whole story. So you don’t get to judge us. Not now. Not when we’re neck deep in the mess that you shoveled all over us in the first place.”

  “We needed you. I needed your help.”

  “And you’re still not telling me everything.”

  Twitch held up a finger. “Um, guys?”

  But I was on a roll. “I’m talking to you, Dana. You seem awfully fucking quiet for the person at the epicenter of this shitquake.”

  “I don’t know anything.” His voice quavered as he spoke. “I don’t know anything. Shouldn’t we be calling the police or something?”

  With that suggestion, Ginny seemed to forget her righteous indignation at my machismo and remembered the concrete fact that there was a carcass in a police uniform rolled up in her carpet. Her face broke into tears. “And there’s a body on my fucking floor.”

  “No cops,” Twitch said, a dangerous tone undercutting his words. The little brother was gone. The dangerous person who just shot a suspected fake-cop-cum-possible-killer in the head was back.

  This was turning ugly. Fast.

  “Look. You two get yourselves gone. You want to do it alone? Do it alone. I got enough crap to wash off of me and Junior now, thanks to you two. I’m perfectly fine losing your goddamn problems the moment this body is gone.”

  “Are you listening to yourself?” Ginny said.

  “I got this,” I said with a firmness that belied the fact that I was lying my ass off.

  It might have been the biggest lie of my life. And I’d spent a lifetime telling whoppers to myself.

  We all stood there for a moment. Then Ginny and Dana started for the door. The only words spoken as they left us were Dana’s.

  “I don’t know anything,” he said once more for good measure, almost mantra-like.

  And goddammit, I believed him.

  Which left us as screwed as we were when we showed up.

  Except we were much, much worse off now.

  You know. With a fucking corpse.

  Fuuuuuuck.

  “Give me the gun,” I said to Twitch.

  “What?”

  “The gun you…used. That’s gotta go too.”

  “I can—”

  I held out my hand.

  He didn’t say anything, just handed me the ugly piece of metal. I slipped it into the back of my pants, the cold barrel icing my spine as it nestled between my butt cheeks. “Now get out of here.”

  “But…”

  “If this shit goes south, I need someone on the outside. I don’t need you caught up in this anymore.”

  “Uh, Boo? I don’t know what you define as ‘caught up,’ but I already killed a guy.”

  I had no answer to that.

  Twitch hung his head, hurt emanating off his tiny body. As completely cuckoo as it sounds, it hurt me to send him off like that. Twitch spent his time with me trying to please. Fucked up as it was, killing the guy was just Twitch trying to help. And far as I was concerned, he may have saved us all.

  Fake Cop was pulling his piece on me. That much was a stone cold fact.

  Maybe it was an instinctive response to a two hundred and forty pound man bursting out of closet and sneezing like a Yeti with a sinus infection.

  But maybe, just maybe, he was going to shoot us all either way.

  I didn’t know what would have happened; I just now had to deal with what did.

  Because heaven help us if Twitch was wrong, and that was an honest-to-God real cop that wasn’t breathing anymore because of us.

  With the posture of a beaten dog in retreat, Twitch left too. Leaving me with only my thoughts and the recently departed.

  I sat on Ginny’s couch and put my face in my hands.

  How the hell did we end up here?

  At least Junior wouldn’t be facing possible charges for this murder. Instead, he was facing charges for the one that we didn’t do. Ain’t that some shit?

  Kind of amazing, if you really thought about it.

  Was there a lesson so far?

  I was sure there was one in there. Somewhere.

  But I’d be damned if I could tell you what it was.

  I pulled my burner phone out to make the call. If this all turned worse than it already was, I decided I was going to eat it. The whole turd sandwich. I didn’t know how much of the fall I could take, but I had every intention of taking it all.

  I needed to minimize the impact. If stepping in front of the bullets kept Junior and Twitch out of the same cell I would wind up in, then I had to do it. Like Mr. Spock said, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

  Holy shit. Did I just quote Star Trek?

  Ollie would be proud.

  Twitch would call me a nerd.

  Junior would just call me out for my martyr complex. And he would be right.

  But Junior wasn’t there, now was he?

  I had to take care of my family, one way or the other.

  I didn’t know any prayers, so I just looked up at the ceiling before I dialed and spoke to Ginny’s ceiling fan.

  “Give me a fucking break here, will you?”

  The ceiling fan didn’t answer me, so I dialed the phone number I thought I’d n
ever call.

  The phone rang twice before a woman’s voice picked up, a pleasant Irish lilt inflecting the greeting. “Conor’s Publick. How can I help you today?”

  I almost laughed. If only she knew the answer.

  “Frankie Cade, please. Tell him Boo Malone needs a favor.”

  ***

  The call was made.

  I sat on the easy chair next to the dead man.

  What the fuck had I landed in the middle of?

  Why was this dude even here?

  If the guy was a dirty cop and was there to cause traumatic bodily harm to Dana and Ginny, he sure as shit wouldn’t do so with his service piece. But “dirty” wasn’t the important word in that sentence. “Cop” was.

  Who the frig was he?

  I was missing some ridiculously huge pieces in the narrative I was in the middle of, and had no idea how to figure out where the gaps were.

  The possibly fake cop was looking for something. I think.

  Dana said he was holding Byron’s possessions after his trip abroad.

  Somebody put Dana on the wrong side of the grass.

  What I had wasn’t too bad. My pieces fit together well. All I was literally missing were the who, the what, the where, the when, and the why.

  Shit.

  I decided to start with the ‘what’. Once I knew the particulars of the item Dana was—maybe—killed over, it could lead me to the rest.

  I opened the first bedroom door to what I quickly figured for Ginny’s room. Bright and tidy, a Helmut Newton poster hung on the wall over the bed, a black and white of some guy with a tire slung over his shoulder, more abs than I’d ever see in a lifetime. I subconsciously sucked in my gut as I closed the door.

  The second bedroom was an unholy mess. A pile of dirty laundry sat behind the door. The black bedspread was in a heap at the foot of the bed, a framed, signed T-shirt from Tool leaned against the wall on top of a dresser piled with makeup and empty Diet Coke cans.

  Huh. Tool was Ginny’s favorite band. Call me ignorant, but I was impressed that the tiny gay dude would be a Tool fan. Maybe Ginny had turned him on to them. Goes to show you what running with the stereotype will get you.

  How was I ever going to find Byron’s mess in this junkyard? And how was I going to do it without contracting Hep C?