Scenes From the Secret History (The Secret History of the World)

by F. Paul Wilson

  "No, I'm Pumpkinman. And this way I know you but you don't know me. You see, Matt, I've been keeping close tabs on you. I know all your haunts. I stand in plain view and watch you. I've watched you play pool at Gus's. I've walked up behind you in a crowd and bumped you as I passed. I could have slipped an ice pick between your ribs a dozen times by now. But don't try to spot me. You won't. While you're trying to hard to look like Billy Idol, I'm trying even harder to look like nobody."

  "You are nobody, man!" His voice was as tough as ever, but a haunted look had crept into his eyes.

  Jack laughed. "Surprised to see me?"

  "Not really," Reilly said, recovering. "I figured you'd show up."

  "Yeah? What's the matter? No faith in your hit squad?"

  "Hit squad?" There was genuine bafflement in his eyes. "What the fuck you talkin' about?"

  Jack sensed that Reilly wasn't faking it. He was as baffled as Jack.

  He let his mind wander an instant. If not Reilly's bunch, then who?

  No time for that now. Especially with the muffled screams coming from the front. He turned Reilly around and shoved him back through the swinging doors to the front of the diner. Once there, he bellied Reilly up against the counter and put the .45 to his temple. He saw Reece covering half a dozen customers with a sawed off shotgun. But where was that psycho, Cheeks?

  "Okay, turkeys!" Jack yelled. "Fun's over! Drop the hardware!"

  Reece spun and faced them. His eyes widened and he raised the scattergun in their direction. Jack felt Reilly cringe back against him.

  "Go ahead," Jack said, placing himself almost completely behind Reilly. "You can't make him any uglier."

  "Don't, man!" Reilly said in a low voice.

  Reece didn't move. He didn't seem to know what to do. So Jack told him.

  "Put the piece on the counter or I'll blow his head off."

  "No way," Reece said.

  "Don't try me, pal. I'll do it just for fun."

  Jack hoped Reece didn't think he was bluffing, because he wasn't. He'd already been shot at twice tonight and he was in a foul mood.

  "Do what he says, man," Reilly told him.

  "No way!" Reece said. "I'll get outta here, but no way I'm givin' that suckuh my piece!"

  Jack wasn't going to allow that. As soon as Reece got outside he'd start peppering the big windows with shot. He was about to move Reilly out from behind the counter to block the aisle when one of the customers Reece had been covering stood up behind him and grabbed the pump handle of the scattergun. A second man leapt to his side to help. One round blasted into the ceiling, and then the gun was useless – with all those hands on it, Reece couldn't pump another round into the chamber. Two more customers jumped up and overpowered him. The shotgun came free as a fifth man with a deep cut in his forehead shoved Reece back onto the seat of the booth and began pounding at his face. More fists began to fly. These were very angry men.

  Jack guided Reilly toward the group. He saw two pairs of legs – male and female, struggling on the floor around the far end of the counter. He shoved Reilly toward the cluster of male customers.

  "Here's another one for you. Have fun. Just don't do anything to them they wouldn't do to you."

  Two of the men smiled and slammed Reilly down face first on the booth's table. They began pummeling his kidneys as Jack hurried down to where Cheeks was doing his dirty work.

  He looked over the edge of the counter and saw that the skinhead held the woman's arms pinned between them with his left hand and had his right thrust up under her bra, twisting her nipple, oblivious to everything else. Her right eye was bruised and swollen. She was crying and writhing under him, even snapping at him with her teeth. A real fighter. She must have put up quite a struggle. Cheeks's face was bleeding from several scratches.

  Jack was tempted to put a slug into the base of Cheeks's spine so he'd not only never walk again, he'd never get it up again, either. But Cheeks's knife was in the way, and besides, the bullet might pass right through him and into the woman. So he pocketed the .45, grabbed Cheeks's right ear, and ripped upward.

  Cheeks came off the floor with a howl. Jack lifted him by the ear and stretched his upper body across the counter. He could barely speak. He really wanted to hurt this son of a bitch.

  "Naughty, naughty!" he managed to say. "Didn't you ever go to Catholic school? Didn't the nuns tell you that bad things would happen to you if you ever did that to a girl?"

  He stretched the guy's right hand out on the counter, palm down.

  "Like you might get warts?"

  He pulled the meat hammer from his belt and raised it over his head.

  "Or worse?"

  He put everything he had into the shot. Bones crunched like breadsticks. Cheeks screamed and slipped off the counter. He rolled on the floor, moaning and crying, cradling his injured hand like a mother with a newborn baby.

  "Never hassle a paying customer," Jack said. "George can't pay his protection without them."

  He grabbed Reece's scattergun and pulled him and Reilly free from the customers. Both were battered and bloody. He shoved them toward the front door.

  "I told you clowns about trying to cut in on my turf! How many times we have to do this dance?"

  Reilly whirled on him, rage in his eyes. He probably would have leapt at Jack's throat if not for the shotgun.

  "We was here first, asshole!"

  "Maybe. But I'm here now, so scrape up your two wimps from the back room and get them out of here."

  He oversaw the pair as they dragged Rafe and Tony out the front door. Cheeks was on his feet by then. Jack waved him forward.

  "C'mon, loverboy. Party's over."

  "He's got my ring!" the brunette cried from the far end of the counter. She held her torn dress up over her breasts. There was blood at the corner of her mouth. "My engagement ring."

  "Really?" Jack said. "That ought to be worth something! Let's see it."

  Cheeks glared at Jack and reached into his back pocket with his good hand.

  "You wanna see it?" he said. Suddenly he was swinging a big Gurkha kukri knife through the air, slashing at Jack's eyes. "Here! Get a close look!"

  Jack blocked the curved blade with the short barrel of the sawed-off, then grabbed Cheeks's wrist and twisted. As Cheeks instinctively brought his broken hand up, Jack dropped the shotgun. He grabbed the injured hand and squeezed. Cheeks screamed and went to his knees.

  "Drop the blade," Jack said softly.

  It clattered to the counter.

  "Good. Now find that ring and put it on the counter."

  Cheeks dug into the left front pocket of his jeans and pulled out a tiny diamond on a gold band. Jack's throat tightened when he saw the light in the brunette's eyes at the sight of it. Such a little thing... yet so important.

  Still gripping Cheeks's crushed hand, he picked up the ring and pretended to examine it.

  "You went to all that trouble for this itty bitty thing?" Jack slid it down the counter. "Here, babe. Compliments of the house."

  She had to let the front of her dress drop to grab it. She clutched the tiny ring against her with both hands and began to cry. Jack felt the black fury crowd the edges of his vision. He looked at Cheeks's round baby face, glaring up at him from seat level by the counter top, and picked up the kukri. He held it before Cheeks's eyes. The pupils dilated with terror.

  Releasing the broken hand, Jack immediately grabbed Cheek's throat and jaw, twisted him up and around, and slammed the back of his head down on the counter, pinning him there. With two quick strokes he carved a crude "X" in the center of Cheeks's forehead. He howled and Jack let go. He grabbed the shotgun again and shoved Cheeks toward the door.

  "Don't worry, Cheeks. It's nothing embarrassing – just your signature."

  You can find the rest of the story in either: The Barrens and Others or Quick Fixes – Tales of Repairman Jack

  November

  The Long Way Home

  Toward the end of May, 1990, Joe Lan
sdale called, looking for a story for Dark at Heart, an anthology he was editing with his wife Karen. He wanted it dark but without any supernatural. I suggested a New York mean-streets story starring Jack. He loved the idea. “The Long Way Home” was the result. I started it in late May but due to a crowded plate, didn’t finish it until the end of July.

  Fifteen years later my agent contacted me about Amazon Shorts, a new feature at Amazon.com that would allow readers to download a short story for a nominal fee. Could I write something for them?

  Nope. Too much on my plate at the time to cranks out something new. But I did have a long-lost Repairman Jack piece called “The Long Way Home” from Joe and Karen’s four-hundred-copy anthology that hadn’t been seen since 1992. I showed them that.

  On the morning of May 11, Amazon, adamant about no previously published material, rejected it. By afternoon they’d reversed themselves. I was told that Jeff Bezos himself had said to screw the technicality in this case.

  So I revised the story to bring it into the twenty-first century and sent it in. Amazon Shorts launched in August. “The Long Way Home” became the second most downloaded piece (and the #1 fiction download) during the program's first eighteen months.

  (NB: Jack doesn’t drink Rolling Rock anymore.)

  The story begins with Jack’s worst nightmare: He’s arrested…

  The Long Way Home

  1

  Jack saw the whole thing. Another minute’s delay in leaving for home and he’d have been a block away when it went down. And then a different man would have died on the pavement.

  But Julio had held him up, detailing his current bitch about all the yuppies chasing out his tavern’s regular customers. He was especially irate about one who’d offered to buy the place.

  “You believe that?” Julio was saying. “He wanna turn it into a bistro, meng. A bistro!”

  An incomprehensible stream of Puerto Rican followed. Which meant Julio was royally pissed. He was proud of his command of English and only under extreme provocation did he revert to his native tongue.

  “He was only asking. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Because he offer me a lot of money, meng. I mean a lot of money.”

  “How much?”

  Julio whispered it in Jack’s ear.

  Right: A lot of money.

  “I repeat: What’s wrong with that? You should be proud.”

  “I don’ know ‘bout proud, but I was tempted to take it.”

  “No!” Jack said, genuinely shaken. “Don’t say that, Julio. Don’t even think it.”

  “I couldn’t help it. But I tol’ him to get lost. I mean, I like money much as the next guy, meng, but I only risk so much for it.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the motley collection of scruffy locals leaning on the bar behind him. “You know what those guys do to me if I sol’ out to a yuppie? Have to run for my life.”

  “You may still have to if Maria finds out how much you turned down.”

  “Don’ tell her. Don’ breathe a word, Jack.”

  “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  Jack left with his cold six-pack of Rolling Rock long necks and turned the corner onto Amsterdam Avenue, heading downtown. Quiet on the Upper West Side tonight. A lot of the restaurants were closed on Mondays and it was too cold for a casual stroll. Jack had the street pretty much to himself.

  Gentrification had slowed in these parts – mainly because everything had been pretty well gentrified – and was seeping into Harlem and even Morningside Heights. This neighborhood, once ethnically and socioeconomically mixed, had homogenized into an all-white, upper-income enclave; neighborhood taverns had metamorphosed into brasseries and bistros, mom-and-pop grocery stores and bodegas into gourmet delis, sidewalk cafés, overpriced boutiques and shoppes – always spelled with the extra “-pe.” Rents had taken up residency in Mir’s old orbit.

  At the next corner Jack spotted a blue-and-white parked by the fire hydrant in front of Costin’s. His first instinct was to turn and walk the other way, but that might draw attention.

  He checked himself out in his mental mirror: average-length brown hair, NY Jets warm up jacket over a flannel shirt, worn jeans over dirty white sneakers. Just an average Joe. Virtually invisible.

  So he stayed on course.

  Waiting on the curb for a car to pass, he did a quick scan of the scene. Quiet. Only one cop in the unit, in the passenger seat, looking relaxed. His partner was stepping into Costin’s. The light filtering through the open door revealed a very young-looking cop. Baby-faced. Probably picking up some donut-shaped teething biscuits.

  Costin’s had been there forever – a Paleolithic prototype of the convenience store. Now it was one of the last mom-and-pops in the area. Old Costin had to stay open all hours just to meet the rent. The locals left over from the old days remained loyal, and most of the cops from the Two-oh stopped in regularly to help keep them going.

  Jack was halfway across the street when he heard a boom. He knew that sound. Shotgun. Instinctively he ducked behind the nearest parked car on the far side. The sound had been muffled. An indoor shot.

  Shit. Costin’s.

  He set the six-pack down and peeked over the hood. The cop was out of the unit’s passenger seat now and on the sidewalk, drawing his pistol. Just then the door to Costin’s burst open and a giant leapt onto the top step. He stood six-six at least and looked completely bald under the flat black leather cap squeezed onto the top of his head; the loose sweatsuit he wore only emphasized his massive, bulked-up frame. He was snarling, his shiny black features contorted in rage. He held a sawed-off ten-gauge pump-action against his hip, aimed down at the cop.

  In the clear air, lit by the mercury vapor lamps lining the block, the scene had an unreal look, like something out of a movie.

  The cop raised his pistol, giving warning, going by the book.

  “Drop it or I’ll–”

  He never got to finish the sentence. The big guy barely blinked as he pulled the trigger.

  The left side of the cop’s face and neck exploded red. His pistol flew from his hand as he was spun to his left to land face down on the hood of the unit. He left a wet, red smear as he slid across the hood. He rolled over the grille and landed on the asphalt in front of the bumper, flat on his back, twitching.

  The big black guy’s face changed as soon as the cop went down. The snarl melted into a smile, but the rage remained, hiding behind the teeth he showed. Casually laying the shotgun across his shoulder, he approached the cop like a gardener strolling toward a cabbage patch with his hoe.

  “Well, Mr. Man in Blue,” he said, standing over the moaning cop. “How’s it feel to bleed?”

  The cop couldn’t speak. Even from down the street Jack could see the blood pumping from his neck. Another sixty seconds and he’d be history.

  Jack found himself on the move before he knew it, his sneakers whispering along the pavement as he raced down the sidewalk in a crouch, watching the scene through the windows of the parked cars he kept between himself and the other side of the street.

  A voice inside urged him the other way. Cops were the enemy, a threat to his own existence.

  This isn’t your fight – butt out.

  But another, deeper part of him overruled the voice and made him pull the Semmerling from his ankle holster. Still in a crouch, he started across the street.

  “You know,” the big black was saying, “I could let you bleed some more and make a bigger puddle, and pretty soon you’d be just as dead as if I blowed your head off.” He grinned as he worked the pump on the sawed-off. A red-and-brass cartridge arced into the street. “But somehow that wouldn’t be the same.”

  He leveled the truncated barrel into the cop’s face.

  “Forget it,” Jack said as he came up behind him. He had the Semmerling pointed at the back of the guy’s head. “You’ve done enough for one night.”

  The guy glanced over his shoulder. When his eyes lit on the Semmerling, he smiled.
<
br />   “Ain’t never been threatened with a pop gun before.”

  “Just drop the hog and take off.”

  “You mean you ain’t gonna arrest me?”

  Jack had acted on impulse. At the moment, the best course seemed to be get rid of the shooter and call an ambulance for the cop. Then disappear.

  “One more time. Drop it and go.”

  The guy’s voice jumped. “You kiddin’ me, man? I could take a couple from that pop gun and sit down for breakfast.”

  “It’s a Semmerling LM-4,” Jack said. “World’s smallest forty-five.”

  The gunman paused.

  “Oh. Well, in that case–”

  The guy ducked to his right as he made a hard swing with the shotgun, trying to bring it to bear on Jack. Jack corrected his aim and pulled the trigger. The Semmerling boomed and bucked in his hand. The gunman’s right eye socket became a black hole and his leather cap spun away like a Frisbee. Red mist haloed his head as it jerked back with enough force to yank his feet off the pavement. The sawed-off tumbled from his hand and skittered along the sidewalk as he sprawled back on the sidewalk and flopped around until his body got the message that what little remained of the brain was mush. Then he lay still.

  Jack knelt beside the fallen cop. He looked like hell. The mercury light further blanched the deathly pallor of his face. Eyes glazing, going fast. Where the hell was old man Costin? Where was the cop’s partner? Why wasn’t anyone around to call an ambulance? Jack felt naked and exposed out here on the street, but he couldn’t take off now.

  He switched the Semmerling to his left hand, located the spot in the fallen cop’s throat that was doing the most pumping, and jammed his thumb into it. The flesh was wet and hot and sticky. He’d read novel after novel that mentioned the coppery smell of blood. He didn’t get it. He’d never known copper to have an odor worth mentioning, and if it did, it sure as hell didn’t smell like this.

  Jack was about to look around again for help when he heard footsteps behind him.