Icepick

by Philip Depoy

  Cass didn’t know what to do for a minute. Then, eyes still on Echu Matta, she backed into the kitchen.

  ‘And a couple of crullers,’ I called out.

  In two shakes, Cass was back with a bagful of donuts and to-go cups of coffee.

  I slapped a fiver on the counter, way more than I needed to pay. Cass had a hard enough life.

  Echu Matta backed toward the door, eyes locked on Cass.

  ‘You know to be careful with them guys, right, Foggy?’ Cass said softly.

  I was staring down into the bag. ‘Hey!’ I said. ‘Eclairs!’

  Echu Matta held the door open and I handed her a cup.

  We headed toward Blake Road. I offered her an eclair.

  ‘These things are so good,’ I told her. ‘You have to try one.’

  She downed the hot coffee, crumpled the cup and put it in one of the pockets in her jeans. Then she reached in the bag, took out an eclair and put half of it in her mouth. I realized then that I hadn’t eaten in two days, and she’d probably gone longer than that.

  No wonder we were both feeling mean.

  In the time it took us to walk to the abandoned building on Blake Road, Echu Matta and I had finished off a half-dozen donuts and my coffee was gone.

  Even before we got to the door we could hear people talking inside. All of them were adult voices.

  I put my index finger to my lips and took my pistol out. She nodded. I stood to one side of the door and she stood on the other. I crouched down and she did the same. I took hold of the handle and twisted it. Then I shoved the door in and waited.

  No gunfire. That was a good sign.

  I peered around the edge of the doorframe.

  Brady and Watkins were staring out, flanked by three other men in very nice suits. All Seminoles.

  Before I could stop her, Echu Matta was standing in the doorway grinding out some of the most vicious sounding monolog I’d ever heard. All in Seminole. All incomprehensible to me. But the meaning was clear.

  So formidable was her presence that the men stood transfixed and motionless.

  After a beat of silence, one of the Seminole men spoke. He said a single word.

  ‘Huppa.’

  Echu Matta didn’t respond. But she stopped talking.

  ‘Huppa Iste,’ the man said louder.

  ‘I am not a child,’ Echu Matta said then. ‘You don’t frighten me with your supernatural inventions or your bad diction.’

  I got it then. It took me a second, but the word came to me, thanks to John Horse. Huppa was owl. Iste was person. The guy was trying to convince her that he was some kind of spirit creature.

  For some reason that irritated me beyond all measure. Probably the exhaustion and hunger.

  Without thinking better of it, which I obviously should have, I stood up, muscled Echu Matta out of the doorway and shot Mr Owl Person in the shoulder.

  And what do you know: he screeched. Kind of like an owl. But he also bled very much like a person.

  I turned to Echu Matta. ‘So, I guess that settles that.’

  Watkins had his gun out, and Brady was trying to talk. The other two Seminoles were staring at me with a mixture of vague curiosity and mild irritation, which I found strange.

  ‘Before you guys get all excited,’ I said to the room, ‘this woman beside me was kidnapped, beaten, starved and otherwise inconvenienced, so I had to shoot somebody. You understand that. Also, I brought her back here from Oklahoma so that she could be reunited with her children, and now I find that someone took them. Someone who was a cop. And since I don’t know any other cops in Fry’s Bay as well as I know you guys, I was thinking of shooting you too. In the pursuit of my duties. See, I’m a State employee, whereas Fry’s Bay cops are County. I, like, outrank you.’

  No one in the room was impressed by my speech. But Echu Matta was laughing. So that was something.

  Watkins was the first one to get himself together.

  ‘I don’t know how you’re still alive,’ he snarled, ‘but you have no idea what kind of trouble you’re in.’

  I turned to Echu Matta. ‘How do you feel about collecting everyone’s gun?’

  Her answer was to dart into the room immediately and begin taking weapons off the men.

  Watkins started to object, but I interrupted him.

  ‘You see that I’m in the mood to plant bullets,’ I said. ‘I’m very tired and I’ve had a bad couple of days, and I think I’ve got a sugar rush from donuts. I’m hopped up. So, really, I wouldn’t do anything to set me off.’

  ‘Moscowitz …’ Brady began.

  ‘Shut up,’ I told him. ‘You’re first on my list.’

  I wasn’t sure what I meant by that, exactly, but it seemed to mean something to Brady. He shut up.

  Echu Matta came back to me with an armful of guns.

  ‘Here’s what you don’t know,’ I announced. ‘I still have friends in New York. They pointed me to Pody Poe in Oklahoma City. That’s where I found this woman. And all the other ones. They’re all on a bus with John Horse, coming back to Florida. And my friends in New York are now very unhappy with Poe. Who is, in turn, very unhappy with Bear Talmascy. Who is, in turn, tied up in some upper-middle-class chateau in Oklahoma City, waiting for Poe to come and kick his head in, or some such. I tell you these things to let you know where you stand. Which is out in the cold.’

  Sure, it was a little rambling, but it got the point across, I thought.

  Echu Matta set all the guns down on the sidewalk in front of the vacant store. All except one. It was a sleek little Parabellum Luger Mauser, a real collector’s item. She checked it like she meant business and then pointed it into the room.

  ‘If someone doesn’t tell me where my children are,’ she said, cold and calm, ‘I’m going to start shooting people. I’ll stop when I know what I want to know.’

  To prove her point, she shot one of the Seminoles. In the thigh. He sucked in a breath, gritted his teeth and said, ‘Hockta.’ Then he spat on the ground.

  That, of all things, got me mad.

  I zoomed into the room, right up to the guy, cocked my left hand back and knocked out his two front teeth.

  ‘You spit when you call her woman?’ I railed. ‘You didn’t have a mother? You don’t owe your life to a woman?’

  My unfortunate ire was short-lived. The Seminole with the missing teeth knocked my gun out of my hand. The one I’d shot bopped me in the back of the head. And Watkins kicked my left shin so hard that my relatives felt it.

  The next thing I knew, I was on the floor and Echu Matta fired her gun. I don’t know what she fired it at, but the room went very still very quickly.

  I rolled over and stared up at the men.

  ‘You really should tell her where her children are,’ I said to them, struggling to my feet. ‘You probably guessed that I wasn’t going to kill anybody. But she probably will, before it’s all over. She could kill all five of you, in fact, and disappear into the swamp. Never seen again.’

  I retrieved my gun and got to the doorway, bloodied but unbowed.

  ‘The thing is,’ she said to me once I was by her side, ‘that one, the one with the missing teeth and the bullet in his thigh. He was one of the men who put us into the storage container in the abandoned bakery. He doesn’t recognize me, but I know him. He’s friends with Bear.’

  The guy had lost some of his swagger. He was starting to feel the bullet, and his mouth was bleeding.

  I smiled.

  ‘If you’d seen what she did to Bear,’ I told the guy, ‘you’d need to change your pants.’

  I thought that might scare him. Letting him imagine what she might have done would be a lot worse than what had actually happened.

  And it worked. He began whispering feverishly to Watkins. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was obvious that there was concern.

  Watkins sighed, nodded and looked at me. ‘So, here’s the deal, Foggy. We got the kids in a safe location. They’re fine – at the momen
t. But we’re going to hang on to them, see? So that you don’t do something stupid. We’re ready to retire, me and my friends. You let us get clear of all this, get out of town, and then we’ll let you know where the kids are.’

  ‘No good, and you know it,’ I said, before Echu Matta could speak up. ‘You give us the location of the children right now and we can all walk out of this building. You abscond; we retrieve.’

  He understood. ‘Like a race.’

  ‘Like a bet,’ I countered. ‘You bet that you can disappear before I find the kids.’

  ‘You won’t come after us.’ He gave me the iron stare.

  ‘I won’t. That’s not my job. My job is the kids.’

  He knew me well enough to know that was true.

  ‘Right,’ he said, staring me down.

  But there was something else in the room. A certain odd vibe. And it was coming off Brady. He caught my eye, and I blinked. It was because of him that I wasn’t dead in an alley. Watkins would put that together, if he hadn’t already. Brady wasn’t who anyone thought he was.

  Time to figure that out.

  ‘The only caveat, if I may,’ I told Watkins, ‘is that you could give us a bogus location, and you’d be gone while we were empty-handed. So, one of you has got to stay behind. Collateral.’

  ‘That one,’ Echu Matta said, pointing her gun at the man with the missing teeth.

  ‘It’d have more heft if we kept a cop,’ I said to her.

  ‘It won’t be me,’ Watkins started.

  ‘No,’ I interrupted. ‘It’ll be Brady. I owe him for shooting me and leaving me and John Horse to die. This is going to be fun.’

  I tried to sound as mean as I could.

  Brady got it. He turned to Watkins. ‘No!’ He sounded panicked. ‘Watkins, you can’t leave me with this goddam Jew!’

  Watkins was not in the mood. ‘You should have killed him a little better, then, Brady. Jesus.’

  ‘Sit down, Brady,’ I said, pointing my gun at him. ‘I’ll let you go when I have the kids, and you know I’m righteous. Sit.’

  ‘No.’

  I fired my gun. The bullet zipped by his ear. He sat down.

  Watkins began his speech. ‘A lot of people don’t know that Blake Road was, at one time, the only access to the two-lane blacktop that came past Fry’s Bay in the thirties and forties. After the highway was completed, Blake went by the wayside. But if you follow it out past the bus station – it’s mostly shrubs and weeds for a while, but there’s still some leftover asphalt – you’ll eventually come to a big stand of pines and a couple of clapboard houses. The kids are in one of them.’

  I glanced down at Brady. His eyes said that Watkins was telling the truth.

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  Watkins looked at the Seminole men. ‘Time to go.’

  I went to Brady and Echu Matta stepped aside to let everyone pass.

  When they were gone, Brady stood up. ‘You can put that gun away, Moscowitz,’ he said, his southern accent completely gone.

  ‘My guess?’ I said to him, slipping my pistol back into my suit coat. ‘You’re FBI.’

  He held out his hand. ‘Special Agent Meyer Rothschild,’ he said, with the hint of a smile on his lips.

  NINETEEN

  Special Agent Rothschild explained to us that the FBI had been wise to Bear Talmascy’s scheme for a while. Bear had taken five groups of women to Oklahoma. Rothschild also told us that the FBI currently had an eye on the shack where Echu Matta’s kids were being held, so we shouldn’t worry.

  ‘I’ll take you to them right now,’ he assured her. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’

  Echu Matta turned to me. ‘Go home. You need sleep. I’ll bring the children to you later.’

  I tried to disagree, but I was truly dead on my feet.

  ‘You should take them both to Maggie Redhawk before you do anything else,’ I said. ‘Your daughter’s been in a coma, and your son hasn’t been eating. Also, Maggie’s worried.’

  She nodded again. Her mind was only half with me. The other half was in a rundown shack in the woods at the other end of Blake Road.

  Rothschild called for a car on some sort of government walkie-talkie he had hidden in his sock. Then he locked eyes with me.

  ‘You realize that you and I are going to have to sit down and confer,’ he said to me. ‘We have lots of questions.’

  ‘And I have lots of answers,’ I assured him. ‘But she’s right – I’m just about useless at the moment.’

  ‘Understood,’ he said. ‘How about the donut shop tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Agreed.’ And with that, I evaporated.

  The front door of my apartment had never looked so good. I pulled my T-bird up as close to it as I could. I’d had better luck getting to my door drunk than I did that morning. Dead on my feet was an understatement.

  So, when I opened my door and saw a shadowy figure sitting in my living room, my first reaction wasn’t fear or flight, it was annoyance.

  ‘No,’ I said to the shadow. ‘I’m too tired to try to kill you. If you want to talk with me, make yourself comfortable and wait a couple of hours, because I’m going into my bedroom now and falling down on to my bed.’

  And I headed toward the bedroom door.

  But a weirdly familiar, forlorn voice stopped me in my tracks. ‘Foggy?’

  I turned. All the curtains were drawn, there were no lights on, no way to see his face. But the voice was impossible to miss.

  I swallowed. ‘Pan Pan?’

  ‘Jesus, Foggy, you got no idea how glad I am to see you.’

  I took a single step in his direction before I saw the gun in his hand.

  ‘Is that a Luger?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh.’ He looked down at the pistol in his hand. ‘Forgot I had it. I been in your apartment for two days. Sleeping on the sofa. Where you been?’

  ‘Oklahoma.’

  He nodded. ‘You got the message, then.’

  ‘Pan Pan,’ I said, ‘you’re not dead.’

  ‘Not quite,’ he told me. ‘But I been better.’

  ‘I’m going to snap on a light now,’ I said. ‘And you’re going to put that Luger away. OK?’

  ‘Sounds good.’ The gun vanished.

  I turned on the lamp beside the sofa. And there was Pan Pan. Alive. Conservative grey suit, paisley tie, pale blue shirt. He looked like a banker. His eyes were tired but his face was calm. And his shoulders were tense, you could see that.

  I sat down in my big chair.

  ‘I’m very glad to see you,’ I said. ‘But I’m also confused. You’ve been pronounced dead in the state of Florida.’

  ‘Really?’ He leaned forward. ‘What did I ever do to Florida?’

  ‘Well,’ I explained, ‘Sammy “Icepick” Franks killed you and then dumped you in the bay here in the little town where I currently live.’

  ‘They thought that was me?’ His voice got higher.

  ‘The stiff had your driver’s license in his pocket,’ I said.

  ‘Oy.’ He slouched down. ‘I wondered where that was.’

  ‘Oy?’ I asked.

  He smiled. ‘I been hanging out with your mother and your aunt. Hiding out, actually. They’re very nice.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I told him. ‘I thought you’d put on a few pounds.’

  That made him laugh. And there it was: the patented Pan Pan laughter. It filled up my little apartment. It banished all gloom.

  ‘OK, let’s take a step back,’ I began. ‘Icepick drove all the way here in that Lincoln that we sold him in order to dump a dead body in the bay. A dead body which had your identification on it.’

  ‘That was supposed to be the message,’ Pan Pan said.

  ‘Yeah, I don’t understand this use of the word message.’

  ‘Right. So. The reason I was hiding out at your mother’s,’ he explained, ‘is that all hell was breaking loose concerning some deal that Icepick didn’t like but his associates in Manhattan went for anyway. Which meant that
Manhattan was on edge and Icepick was on the prowl. So, guys like me, the small potatoes, scattered for cover until the storm was over.’

  ‘Understandable.’ I knew that enmity of the sort he was describing was liable to involve stray bullets. It was only prudent to take cover. And, truth be told, Pan Pan was always looking for a good excuse to hang out with my mother. ‘But that still doesn’t explain why you are simultaneously dead in the morgue and sitting in my living room.’

  ‘Icepick told me he was going to send you a message because the deal which he didn’t like involved people from here, from Fry’s Bay. That’s the reason he didn’t like it. He knew you were here and didn’t like to see you get screwed with in any way. He likes you. He must have taken my ID off me when he told me all that.’

  ‘Message,’ I insisted. ‘You still haven’t explained the term message.’

  ‘Right. He said he was going to send you a message that you couldn’t ignore that would explain what was going down. I just didn’t know it would be a dead body that was supposed to be me. Although, you see how that would get your attention.’

  ‘It got my attention,’ I said. ‘I just didn’t understand what he was getting at. I’m beginning to piece it together now, but it’s a little after the fact.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  I explained, in as few words as possible, the scheme that Bear Talmascy had hatched – the kidnapping, the various fraudulent ways it would make money, and the way the women would have ended up. All of which disgusted Pan Pan.

  ‘Now I see why Icepick was so upset,’ he told me.

  I shook my head.

  ‘You never heard him talk about his mother?’ Pan Pan asked. ‘You talk about your mother like she’s a saint. He doubles that times ten about his own mom. It’s, like, weird.’

  ‘So – what? Icepick was offended by the scheme on the basis of having a loving mother?’

  ‘That’s my thinking.’

  ‘And he killed some poor slob and dumped his body in my bay just to alert me … to give me a heads up?’

  Pan Pan nodded. ‘Maybe it would make more sense if you knew who the stiff really was.’

  ‘They wouldn’t let me look at the body,’ I said, and then my weary bones got a shock.