by Joe Connelly
“Havana,” she said.
“I mean somewhere we can drive to.”
“Mexico City,” she breathed, his ear on her lips.
“Crossing the border’s too risky. I’m talking about in the United States.” His finger circled a mole on her hip. She raised his shirt to his navel, “We passed that motel in the road. The Las Vegas,” she said, “I would like a place called the Las Vegas.” He let go of her back, she grabbed his hands as if he might fall. “We can stay here, too,” he said. “They used to have a room upstairs. There was a couch and a rug and the door locks . . .”
“Anywhere,” she said.
Dyan and Tim danced slowly next to the jukebox, their bodies bumping into it like ships against a dock, making the records skip. She was so drunk she had to dance on her toes to feel the floor. “Look out,” she said as the floor dropped again, clinging to him as if he were holding her from a trapeze. “What was in that drink?”
“It’s a crumbsoda,” Tim said. “All the white liquors are there, gin, vodka, tequila, rum, and triple sec, and some cola for color.”
Tom leaned over the bar and banged his bottle against the sink. “Hey Ingrid, put on channel 63, The Brian Halo Show, it starts in five minutes. He’s making a TV show about when we used to rob banks.”
“And more drinks for everyone, right?” said the man next to Tom, whose name had something to do with cannons.
“That’s right,” Tom said.
“Cost you fifty bucks to change the channel,” Ingrid said.
“Fifty bucks? You used to charge a dollar.”
“The Sox are on.”
“Forget the goddamn Red Sox, Ingrid. Here’s a dollar to change the channel. Been watching the Sox lose my whole goddamn life. That’s why I’m getting out.”
“Don’t go,” the man next to him said. “Please stay.”
“I crashed my father’s car the night we lost the tiebreaker,” Tom said. “Nineteen seventy-eight. I was in the hospital for eight weeks.”
“My wife stopped talking to me after ’86,” said another man, his face riddled with toothpicks. “Up by two runs in the bottom of the ninth. One out left to win the whole thing. Hasn’t said a word to me in fifteen years.”
“It ain’t like the old days, though,” said the old man at the bar’s end, his hat cleaned of all color. “My father died after the impossible-dream season, ’67. Heart attack in the last game of the series, after they lost to Gibson for the third time. Survived Guadalcanal, and the goddamn Red Sox killed him.”
“Well they’re not gonna get me,” said Tom, “because we’re leaving, baby, and we’re going where nobody ever heard of the Boston Goddamn Red Sox. Now come on Ingrid, turn the channel.”
“One hundred bucks,” said Ingrid.
74
The Brian Halo Show opened the same as always, a spinning helicopter shot of Manhattan night, cutting to a limousine heading south on Seventh Avenue, to stop at a world-famous alleyway, the velvet doors opening, the thumping of lights within, a blinding face-filled din as one beautiful person after another yelled “Hi Brian” to the lens. The show then cut through a montage of parties: a political fund-raiser in a downtown cathedral, a soup kitchen benefit on a Miami schooner, a PTA meeting in a Beverly Hills pool hall. Each scene had been crowded with the most popular people, from every walk of life, all of them speaking bluntly of why they loved Brian Halo, the sequence ending with model Susan Klee saying, “Because he’s the only person I can talk to about sex.”
This Friday, however, the opening went beyond Ms. Klee, the camera “eye” traveling to one more showcase, a short city street adrift with red emergency lights, the former child actor Little Eddy standing next to a police car, Brian Halo’s hand on his shoulder. “There’s no party here, folks, no movie premieres, only police lights. Tonight we’re coming to you from the little city of Dodgeport, where a stunning tragedy has just taken place.”
To a backdrop of carefully chosen cuts from the day’s shooting, Brian Halo described the crash, the robbery, the valiant efforts of Little Eddy as well as the other actors and homeless men who worked together in vain to retrieve the money. He provided a moving elegy to the mayor of the city, who had had a heart attack during the shooting, a man who lost his life for giving, the segment ending with footage from Ten Thirteen, describing how the robbers kidnapped Ms. Dyan Swaine. A ten-minute tribute followed the commercial, Dyan’s work on Ten Thirteen, as well as cover shots from major TV magazines, pictures of Dyan at parties, the famous hotel shower shots of the French paparazzi.
75
Five minutes after The Brian Halo Show began, Ingrid cut off the jukebox and turned up the television volume. By the time Don’s picture was shown at the end, with a description of the ten-thousand-dollar reward, a phone number to call for information, the men at the bar were giving it all the attention they had.
“Damn,” said Tim, who’d watched the show with Dyan sleep-dancing on his shoulder. “Uncle Maury died. We should have a drink for Maury.”
“We should leave now,” said Tom, pointing to the men around them, all heading to the pay phone.
“Oh come on Tom, these guys wouldn’t turn us in.” One of the men came and asked for a quarter, then took his place in the line that now ran from the phone to the bathroom.
“We have to go,” Tom whispered, pointing to Warner Hotel blocking the front door. “And we need to tell Don and Rita. I think they went upstairs.”
Dyan Swaine lifted her head from Tim’s neck, “They tied me up in the back of a store,” she said, “going to shoot me in the street,” splicing her day together from the three crumb-sodas she’d drunk, and the two explosions earlier, in her chest and back, which made it hard for her to see objects on her right. “Two months they wouldn’t give me any lunch.”
“Filthy men,” Ingrid said. She pulled a lead-filled baton from under the bar and waved it at Tom’s head. “I hope they fry you up for this.”
76
Don led Rita up the stairs and down the hall, the room in the back smelling like an old tree fort, of pine and pee and wet porno magazines. The same jukebox songs were playing there, two speakers in the wall nearly as loud as in the bar, but with only half the anguish. Hank Williams started to sing, “I’ll never get out of this world alive,” as Don reached out blindly for the Creosote logo on Rita’s shirt, his fingers reading each letter twice. So happy to be free of last night’s hooks and buttons that he took his time going underneath, around her hips first, then up to her shoulders and back, unsnapping her bra on the third pass. Slowly, he guided both hands forward, going further under and finding himself pushed off the couch, sitting on the carpet, Rita standing over. “Watch carefully,” she said, turning her hands back and forth, as if about to do a trick, then in one quick move she reached in her sleeve and pulled out the bra, holding it like a rabbit by the ears. Don climbed to his knees to her breasts loose under her shirt, her nipples growing up in the lines of his palm.
There was no rush, time had broken. The only clock in the world was his hand lifting up her shirt, which at the rate it was going might take hours to take it off. Because for the first time in a long time, longer than he could remember, he didn’t want to be anywhere else, didn’t want to be anyone else. What else did you call that except happy; he was happy; everything here was for them. She had a little mole next to her navel, round and brown, and he’d spent the past several minutes kissing her there, the navel to the mole and back again, the out to the in, the beginning to the end. “Come here,” she finally said, and pulled his mouth back to hers, her hands rappelling to his hips and, with a deafening click, unsnapping his pants. “Havana,” he said. Followed by another click as Tim and Tom and Dyan burst in.
“We got a problem,” Tom said.
77
King and Arnold waited in the front of an unmarked ’98 Hurricane police cruiser. They wore new police uniforms, with new haircuts and makeup to accentuate their policelike earnestness. Behind the Hurri
cane, Rob Landetta and Brian Halo held up sheets between their outstretched arms, to improvise the walls of a dressing room in which Little Eddy stood, in boxer shorts and police uniform socks, his hands out to ward off the wardrobe assistants, the lineup of police pants they’d brought.
“I don’t understand,” Eddy said. “Why I have to be a cop?”
Rob stepped forward, “Just put the pants on, Eddy. We’re going live in two minutes.”
“Shut up, Rob,” Brian Halo said. “I’m directing now.” He turned to Eddy and began nodding aggressively, “You’ve been robbed, Eddy. These people have been robbed. Dyan Swaine, one of the most popular actresses on the planet, has been kidnapped. This is about justice. Now please put the pants on.”
Eddy grabbed the pants and then pushed them back, “Look, I don’t got to hide behind no badge, man. I can take care of Don, no cameras, no backup, just me and him, that’s all I’m asking.”
“Eddy, Eddy, listen to me. Rob here had this idea of making a crime show without cops, and I think it’s pretty clear from the mess we have here why we need cops in a crime show, okay. It’s important that you put this on so that people will see you as the moral authority here, as a symbol of order, so that the people will see that the system still works.”
Eddy put one foot into his pants. “Nobody gets away with robbing me.” He hopped several times on one leg, “I want Don myself, I want him,” hopping until he fell on the Hurricane, punching the trunk with his forehead.
“Help him, Rob, what’s wrong with you?” Halo said. “It’s okay Eddy, you’ll get Don, don’t worry. For all of us, and for your father, too.”
“My father?”
“Your father on The Two of Us. Sergeant Chryton Langdon, NYPD. I think he’d be pretty proud right now, to see you in that uniform.”
“I think he’d be very drunk right now.”
“He was a good father, Eddy, and a good cop, too, maybe the best TV cop of all time, am I right? So who better than you to take his place?”
Eddy battered in the buttons on his police shirt. “If I messed up my lines he used to beat the shit out of me.”
“But on that screen, Eddy, he was the best, and no one can ever take that from him. Everybody’s going to want to see how you handle the job. There’s some pressure on you. Especially as you are going to be starting off as a lieutenant.”
Brian Halo held out the gold bars for the wardrobe assistant to pin on. “A lieutenant?” Eddy said, nodding his head.
“There’s something else I have to tell you. I didn’t want you to get too upset but the truth is that Dyan Swaine is your partner, Eddy, for years now. They kidnapped your partner.”
Eddy grabbed his own hair with two hands and pulled up until he was standing on his toes. “My partner.” One of the wardrobe assistants bent down to buckle the police belt, adjust the holster, Eddy jumped backward, shouting “Freeze.” He walked over to the Hurricane and retrieved his nine-millimeter pistol from the pile of clothes on the hood. He checked the clip. “Cops thrive on pressure, Brian. That’s the one thing I have in common with cops.”
Rob stepped forward, “We’re going live in one minute.”
Eddy holstered the gun and patted it, “If you think about it, my study of Don was only to help prepare me for this role of catching Don. I know what he thinks, I know what he wants. I may be the only one who can find him.”
78
Tim closed the door and pushed his back to it, shouting to Tom and Don to slide the couch up because the lock wasn’t going to hold. The voices of men coming up the stairs, turning their fists against the door, all arguing over who would get the reward. Then the bludgeoning of Ingrid’s baton, her relentless accent, a mix of German and Costa Rican, “Let that woman go before I break this door and then you pay for it.” Her enormous hand twisting the knob. “I am getting the key you just wait.”
Tim and Tom moved the couch to the door, Don still tying his shoes on one end, Rita trying to put her bra on under her shirt. Dyan sat down between them, her eyes closed, she began to snore.
Tom climbed out the window and along the gutter to the end where a fallen tree made a drunken ladder to the ground. Don helped Rita out and they held hands on the roof’s edge, waiting for Tom to bring up the car. Sirens began from somewhere far above, as if from a police plane, then suddenly loud and close as the red lights of the Hurricane appeared atop the hill, twisting toward them. Tom parked under the window and Don and Rita let themselves down to the hood.
“Maury’s dead,” Tom said. “He had a heart attack or something when we robbed the bank. We just saw it on the news.”
“Then we can go to the Gail,” Don said. “We’ll be safe there.”
“What’s the Gail?” Rita asked.
“It’s a secret house, up in the woods. Maury built it in case the feds caught up to him, or the Libyans.”
“No one knows where it is,” Tom said, “or if it exists.”
“I’ve been there. Just take 25 North. I’ll tell you.”
Tim grabbed Dyan’s hands, “Come on,” pulling her off the couch, her arm over his shoulder as he led her to the window.
“Where are we going?”
A truck turned into the lot, a camera crew on its roof, and with it, Ingrid’s voice rushing up from the bar, “Hey boys, we’re on TV. Come down to here and look.” The men forgetting about the door, rushing downstairs to see.
Dyan was halfway out when she heard the noise. “TV?” she cried. “We’re on TV? Where?” She climbed back into the room, pointing to the old television in the corner. “Let’s see.”
“Come on Dyan, we have to go.”
“Wait.” She stumbled to the television, switched it on, the bar shaking itself onto the screen, the view from the camera crew bouncing into the parking lot. “Oh look, there’s the bar, and look in the window there is me and you watching TV.”
Tim pulled at her arm. “Come on, Dyan.”
“Oh no I can’t go out like this. I’m too drunk to go out there.” She tried to pull away. He lifted her over his shoulder and climbed out the window. “They think that we kidnapped you.”
“Kidnapped?” she shouted, grabbing the frame with two hands. “No way am I getting kidnapped again,” fighting to pull herself back in, “let me go.” She kicked him in the stomach, Tim slipping off the gutter, clutching her belt, Dyan holding them both from the sill. “Let go of me.”
“Let go of her,” Tom shouted from the car below, “and get in.”
“She wants to come,” said Tim. “I want her to come.”
Dyan pulled her head above the sill and looked back to the TV in the corner, the picture of outside the bar, of Tim sliding down her leg. “Oh my God,” she said, “look how big my butt is.”
79
The Hurricane’s siren died painfully, three men in their uniforms getting out, crouching behind the open doors, guns drawn. Little Eddy called into his loudspeaker, “This is the cops. Drop your weapons and put your hands on your heads.” He lowered the mike and leaned forward, “Let’s not shoot the hostage unless we have to.”
The back doors of the camera truck opened and a camera crew marched out, assembling in a line in front of Rob Landetta. “I want you to set up about twenty feet ahead of Eddy,” Rob said, “so that it looks like his gun is pointed at the camera.”
“Not me,” said the cameraman, his head still bandaged from being knocked off the truck. “Eddy already shot that one actor.”
“It’s okay, we put blanks in the gun.”
“What about the other two,” the man said. “We’re not doing it.” He put down his camera and walked back to the van, the rest of them watching. Then the cameraman’s assistant stepped forward and picked up the camera.
“You got the job,” Rob said. “Okay men, stay low,” and the group charged forward, getting in line on their knees in front of the police car.
Little Eddy stood with his gun pointing through the car window, over the heads of the crew, the way
thousands of cops had done it before. “Hold your fire,” Eddy said, blinking repeatedly through the sights. There was Dyan hanging from the window, Tim holding on to her police belt, which had slipped to her knees. “Not yet,” Eddy said, watching the belt slide to her ankles, her shoes, sliding over. Tim fell to the car below, up on his knees on the hood. “The hostage is free,” Eddy screamed. “Take them out.”
Dyan heard the gunfire behind and closed her eyes, waiting for the explosives in her back, the second time she’d been shot at in one day. Then the sill broke off in her hand and she slid down the roof and over the gutter, ten feet to the ground, crawling to the car. Five hundred thousand dollars was not enough for this. More shots followed, Little Eddy shouting “Cease-fire” as she climbed into the seat beside Tim, down to the floor at his feet, where Tom was squeezing into her bulletproof vest.
“Give me that,” she said.
80
Brian Halo watched the show from his command truck, parked on top of the hill. In the back were phones stacked on computers, two technicians sitting before a bank of three televisions. Screen One was from the camera he’d stationed outside his truck, a wide view of the bar below, the Bollinger and the Hurricane in the lot. Screen Two was from the camera truck at the edge of the lot, a close-up of Dyan and Tim getting into the Bollinger. Screen Three was empty.
“What happened to Three?” Halo yelled. “The close-up of Eddy. Where’s my cops?” He turned to Screen Two, the Bollinger’s lights driving out of the lot. “They’re getting away. I need Three.”
“There he is,” the technician pointed to Screen One, zooming in to the cameraman’s assistant, sitting on the ground in front of the police cruiser, holding the pieces of Camera Three.