Crumbtown

by Joe Connelly

  “Stop,” Don shouted, pushing his gun out of the bag. “We’re leaving,” his best bank robber’s voice, “don’t,” even as the store owner turned, his eyes recognizing Don a moment, then the gun jumped in the man’s hand, the bullet parting Don’s hair, a fly going through his ear, and just like that he shot the man in the head.

  “Oh no,” Don groaned, watching the man fall. He walked around the row of little pies to the untended floor behind the register, the man lying neatly in the long square, the size of his coffin, blood already to the edges, like someone pouring it out of a vase.

  Tim lifted his brother, his arm under Tom’s shoulder, dragging him to the door. “Don come on.”

  Don bent down, the man had stopped breathing but his eyes were still open, staring straight up, past the rows of prophylactics to the corner of the ceiling where a tiny video camera stared back. Don stood up to the lens, watching himself step forward over the man, the gun rising over his head. He pulled the trigger until the camera was gone. He turned to the voice behind him, the TV on the counter, Don’s face on the screen, a mug shot from the first time he’d been arrested— the words printed underneath, “Armed and Dangerous,” it said, “$10,000 Reward for Capture,” then a commercial, a song about hair loss. He shot the TV, the screen exploding, the song still in his head. He looked out the window, at the sound of tires on the street, Tim and Tom driving away. He ran outside, the first drops of rain hitting him in the eye. “Rita.”

  92

  “Oh my God,” Dyan cried to the phone, “the man in the store.” The door crashed out, Tim grabbing her by the waist, one arm around his brother, one arm driving her to the car, shoving her into the front. Tom fell into the back, on top of Rita, pinning her to the seat, “Where is Don?”

  Tim turned the key, banging on the wheel three times, “Come on come come on,” banging the gears into drive, his other hand holding Dyan. Don standing in the store window, shooting at something on the counter. “What’s he doing? Come on,” Tim’s foot off the brake, he couldn’t stop it, down on the gas. “Wait,” Rita shouted, pushing Tom off her. “He’s still inside.” She opened the door, leaning out in the rain, the street spraying away from her feet; she was going to jump.

  Tim slapped the wheel around the corner, “He’s coming, Rita,” the door swinging in, slamming her head to the floor. “He’ll meet us at the bar.”

  “Stop the car now,” she said in Russian, pulling Tim’s arm, the car bouncing off a sport utility, into another turn.

  “He said he’d meet us at the bar. Right, Tom?”

  Tom had pulled off his shirt and was busy squeezing it over his stomach, trying to force the blood back into the hole. When the shirt was wrung dry he put his hand over the wound, blood still running out. He pushed his pinkie in, up to the knuckle.

  “Let me out,” Dyan said. “Please I won’t tell, just let me go,” breaking her arm free, reaching for the door as the locks dropped shut.

  “I can’t do that,” said Tim.

  Rita sat in the back, rain on the window, the red car shooting down the block. She spread her arms to where he’d just been.

  ACT V

  Fourteen

  SCENE 93

  Harry Hammamann stopped at the store’s entrance, three homicide detectives inside, already working the floor, forceps and Kleenex, bags of spent shells and chewed gum. They were real cops, like Harry used to be, before he joined the mayor’s department of television, five years now with the MDT. He walked in, nearly stepping in the blood in the aisle, lollipops and candied corn. Over the counter by the register he could see the coroner’s mustache bobbing up and down, like he was digging a hole back there, the body on the floor. Harry didn’t want to see it. He hated these scenes, the reason he left Patrol to take the job with TV. Not the sights so much as the smell, blood sticking in his mouth.

  He held his hand over his face as he stepped around, not wanting to look down, Jack Ng on the floor, a bullet hole in his head, stinking of blood. Jack who used to give him cigars for half price, always talking about his wife, who hadn’t made love to him since they left Vietnam.

  Stepping on magazines to get around the coroner, the video and player under the counter, why Homicide had called him in. It was an old tape deck, you had to have seen one before to know how to work it, the buttons in a little cabinet in the back, unmarked. The screen came on, white static, Harry rewinding until the store appeared, Don Reedy’s face in the lens, pointing a nine-millimeter. Harry watched as Don lowered the gun, stepping backward over the man on the floor, around to the door. Jack Ng stood behind the counter, pointing a little .22, one shot. Then Jack turned his gun to a masked man in the aisle, bang bang, the bullets coming back. Don walked backward out of the store, past Tom Dwight sitting on the floor, blood disappearing into his stomach. Tom jumped to his feet, a loaf of bread in his hand. He placed it on the rack and stepped back to the door, the masked man with him, who had to be Tim, walking out. Jack put his gun under the counter and looked out the window, he turned to the TV next to the register.

  Harry played the video forward, back again. Either way it didn’t make sense. Jack with his gun out before they even walked in. And why was Tim wearing a mask, Tom not? Fifty thousand dollars in the car, they didn’t need this. Harry turned to the TV behind him, which Jack was watching before the twins came in, now off forever with a bullet hole in the center.

  The radio started in his car, Harry could hear it beeping from the store, the production company alert system, Miss Delouise calling his number. Carefully he stepped around the coroner, around the counter to the street, the little Delphi they’d lent him, last car on the lot. He got in, Delouise’s voice banging on the speakers, saying the tracer on Don Reedy’s cell phone had been activated, ten minutes before, one of the robbers, a man named Tom, just used the phone to call his mom. 1313 Lemmings Avenue, Gloria’s bar. Harry would be assisting Little Eddy in making the arrest.

  “Ten-4,” he said, and dropped his head on the seat, too heavy to lift, the rain on the roof, Jack’s eyes on the floor, all the mistakes Harry had made in the last two days. If he’d shot Tim when he had the chance, or arrested Don the day before, cuffed him in the bank the way a cop was supposed to, Jack Ng would still be alive, watching TV, complaining about his wife. If Harry hadn’t become a cop here in the first place, hadn’t listened to his cousin Henry, a captain over in Vice, always talking about the financial opportunities in Dodgeport policework. Three more years and Harry could retire, spend more time on his writing. That’s how he met Loretta, the creative nonfiction class they attended together, the old Widows’ Hall on Gambit. She wanted better adjectives for her real estate properties. Harry was going to start a novel.

  94

  Tim dealt five cards down for Dyan, five for Tom, and five for himself. He yelled out to Rita, her head on her arms at the end of the bar, “You sure you don’t want in?” and when she didn’t move he picked up his cards and looked at them, and then he picked up Dyan’s. “You need two,” he said.

  Dyan scratched her nose with her shoulder as she watched him deal. She’d been tied to the stool with silver duct tape, silver lines circling her elbows to her ankles, hands taped together taped to her legs taped together. A filthy towel wrapped in tape and tied around her mouth.

  “I’ll take one,” said Tom, who had taped himself to his stool to keep from falling down. The wound in his stomach had stopped bleeding, every now and then oozing a yellowish fluid the color of lager. “I’ll bet three hundred,” he said, searching his pockets. “Where’s my money?”

  “I told you already,” Tim said. “Don’s got the money.”

  “Where’s Don?” Tom asked, his head covered with sweat, running into his eyes. “I thought he was with us.”

  “No, he’s not with us.” Tim picked up the cards and threw them down and carried his glass to the bottle next to Rita, pouring it in.

  “Where is Don?” Rita said.

  “He’s coming.”

&n
bsp; “He’s not here?” asked Tom.

  “For Christ sake, we’re playing cards, aren’t we.” Tim paced the back of the bar, the bottle to the glass. Then he sat on the cooler, his back to the bar, rocking in the mirror.

  Rita stared at the phone in her hand, Don’s phone that he’d left there the day before. The last half hour hoping he’d call, hoping Tim was right, that Don would come to the bar. What choice did she have? To go out looking in the street, alone, Crazy Louie’s, and if he wasn’t there, and if he came to the bar when she was out.

  She picked up the phone and threw it at Tim, picking it up again to hit him with it. “You leave him there,” punching his arms and ribs, “you left him.” Tim’s head in his lap, hands wrapped on top, rocking.

  “Where could he go? Tell me you would know.”

  Tim dropped to his knees, the top shelf in front of him, “Try Louie’s,” he said, a bottle and no glass. “If he’s not there, then maybe Iron Heinz.”

  “Look at that,” Tom said, stomach bleeding again, blood on his hands, spreading over the red cards on the bar, kings and queens. “I got a full boat.”

  Rita ran to the door and opened it, and like clicking a switch, six spotlights went on across the street, the rain making them six thousand, three television cameras underneath, all pointing at Rita. She closed the door and locked it and put her back to it, the phone ringing in her hand. “Hello,” she said. “No, Don’s not here.”

  Tim climbed over the bar. “Who is it?”

  “The police.”

  “Let me talk to them. Hello? No, this is Tim. Don is out there and he’s got the money and let me just say right now that we’re all innocent.”

  She stepped in front of the window, closing the curtains tighter. “But if they call for Don here that means they do not know where he is.”

  95

  Don lay on Crazy Louie’s couch staring up at the colored birds that hung from every corner in the room, little glass birds turning on glass chains, bouncing back the wet lights coming in from the rain. He’d been lying there for an hour, unable to close his eyes, the hole in the old man’s head. It was like being back in prison again, rolling in his bed, one cell locked into another. He could leave Louie’s apartment anytime he wanted, but for the rest of his life he’d never be able to leave that store, the man lying on the floor.

  And there was nothing else he could have done. He knew that now. Because he had tried everything else. He shot the man a dozen times from Louie’s couch, shot him everywhere except the head, in the shoulder and the arm, shot the gun right out of his hand. He walked into the store and shot Tim and Tom, shot himself in the head. He dropped his gun and turned around and ran back to the car, to Rita’s arms, and then he got up and walked into the store and there was the man on the floor.

  Don stood off the couch and found his bag and took out two bundles of hundreds and left them on the table. He pulled one of Louie’s sweatshirts over his head and went outside and lit a cigarette, streetlights smelling like dead fish, a big rain coming in. He walked the lines of shadowed pavement, up Thorn to Van Brunt, the hood pulled over his face. So afraid of being caught. He wanted to be caught. He’d do anything to not have to shoot that man again.

  Twenty blocks, all the way to Drywell, his old neighborhood, the houses he knew, trying to remember their names, the Nells the Hanleys the Trinkas. Shutters that used to be painted, every one a different color. All the same now, walls peeling gray.

  To the fence at the end, pavement driving down into black water, stumps of houses and electric poles. He looked for some sign of the old pier, the bottom of the street, where he and his friends spent entire summers, fishing for crappies, watching for dead bodies. By the time his father was run over, in ’71, the pier was already under. That’s when the army came in, the dam along Felony that held until Ethel, the hurricane of ’75. By the time his mother went with the cancer, the river had risen past the McKennas’, his house seized by the state in ’83, demolished while Don was serving two years for GLA.

  He put his face to the metal wire, the water still several feet from the wall, tide charging in bursts across the macadam, like his parents were still fighting down there. He walked through the zone of empty lots and broken windows, faded ads for cigarettes and bargain cognac. The old longshoremen’s hall had been turned into a welfare center, now shuttered, its parking lot half filled with crashed cars. On the sidewalk by the gate, signs for flats fixed, the street down the middle riddled with potholes the size of radials. They built a wall to save a wasteland.

  The hookers were still there, three blocks up, staying dry by the pillars under the expressway, twenty or so spread out among the shadowed pilings. No cars. They watched him walk in, asking to see what’s in his bag. He didn’t know any of them. Ten years a long time here.

  “Hey Uncle Don, what you doing?” She stepped into the light, her coat open enough to show a green bra with holes in it. “Don’t you remember me? It’s Bobbi.”

  “Jesus Bobbi what are you doing here?”

  “You used to come over and swing me around when I was a kid.”

  “You’re still a kid. Where’s your father? Where’s Big Mike.”

  “I pretended you were my boyfriend.”

  “Let’s go,” he grabbed her coat. “I’m taking you home.”

  “It’s a hundred dollars.”

  “That’s not what I mean. Here,” he took a bundle of bills from his bag and shoved it into her hand. “There’s five thousand. Okay. You don’t have to do this. You get on a plane and you get out of here and you never come back.”

  Bobbi looked at the money, “Five thousand dollars,” she shouted, spreading the bills in front of her, the other women surrounding them, grabbing at his legs, his bag, saying, “Let me take care of you.”

  He dragged Bobbi’s coat toward the alley beneath the factory, the women keeping in a pack behind. A car entered the street from Marginal, its police spotlight sweeping along the pillars, a black Fort Worth coming toward them, the light catching up. At the first burst of siren, he was already running, into the alley and around the trucks in the back, over the loading docks to Lemon.

  The unmarked Fort Worth drove between the pillars into the middle of the women and stopped, King’s head opening the window. “What the hell is this? You’re bunching up again. Come on, spread it out, one to every column.” He turned to Arnold in the passenger seat and said, “I swear sometimes they’re like sheep.”

  One of the women ran up to the window, “Some guy just gave Bobbi five grand.”

  King shined the spotlight ahead, a man running into the factory, Bobbi alone with the glare. He pulled the car forward. “Hey Bobbi, that guy just give you five thousand?”

  Bobbi came up to the car, shaking her head. “Who?”

  “Come on Bobbi,” he held out his hand.

  “It wasn’t five thousand,” she pulled half the bills from her skirt.

  “I’m getting wet,” King said. She gave him half the rest. “You get his name.”

  “I don’t know. Don something.”

  “That’s what I thought.” King turned around to the backseat, Rob Landetta sitting with a camera on his shoulder. “This won’t take long, Rob.”

  96

  Tim paced back and forth the length of the bar, stopping in front of Dyan at every pass to shrug or nod or tap her on the arm. His brother Tom had moved to the floor, his back to the wall, a bloody sheet taped in silver around his bulging stomach. Rita wiped at his head with a towel, mopping the cheeks, his bald crown as white as a sink. The phone rang, Don’s phone in her hand, ‘Hello,” she said. “No, who is this. I call three times already where is the help? . . . He’s right here,” she pushed the phone into Tom’s hand, closing his fingers around, raising it to his ear. “Tell them you need the ambulance.”

  “I got it,” Tom said, fighting to lift his head. “Hello? Brian Halo? I’m okay, how are you?” He turned to Rita, “He says it’s raining,” then back to the phone
, wedging it into his collar, hands free to hold in his stomach. “Dyan’s right here, she’s been great . . . Yes . . . What do I want? Jeez, I got to think.” He slid to his back on the floor, calling to his half brother behind the bar. “It’s Brian Halo, he says we’re on TV.”

  Tim rummaged behind the bottles for the remote, pointing it at the television above, the picture backing onto the screen, of the bar from across the street, lights on, curtains closed. He raised the volume, Tom’s voice on the phone on TV, his list of demands—to see Ted Williams play again, to marry the weather lady on channel 15. A list that seemed to grow faster than Tom could speak: tearful calls for his mother to understand him, for Maureen Trinka, the cashier at Mrs. Donut, to just once in her life say yes, she’d like to have dinner with him. Words running into one another, Tom’s sobs at the end, like a fan belt about to snap.

  Tim hadn’t heard his brother cry since they were kids, thirty years keeping it in, just waiting for someone to ask. The rain on the screen above, tears on Tim’s face as he picked up the phone behind the bar, the same one he’d used so many nights before, same number.

  “Hello Loretta, it’s me Tim, please don’t hang up I have to tell you something . . . Listen to me Loretta it’s just that I love you baby and I miss you so much . . . I’m not drunk, I’m drinking but I can’t get drunk, that’s almost the same as not drinking ain’t it . . . Don’t hang up baby there’s something else. I’m on TV. Channel 63. Turn it on . . . You see the bar, that’s right, I’m inside. Dyan Swaine is here too, the actress, she’s sitting right next to me.” Tim patted Dyan’s shoulder, her face up to his, eyes so full of hate Tim might as well have been looking at Loretta. “I’m in a lot of trouble here baby it’s been a really bad day for me and I don’t know if I’m gonna make it for dinner.”