I wasn’t sure if that was exactly true or if I was attributing the cause of my lack of writing to my lack of drinking in the recent past. Perhaps it was the grey scenery in the rehab center or the lack of anything interesting to put pen to paper about, but it might as well have been the drinking.
God, I missed the drinking.
But now, sitting with this cold one in my hand, the condensation on the outside of the can and the frosty bubbles trickling down my throat, I felt whole again, ready to embrace this article.
“So, what do you know about Groening?” I asked.
The kid looked me up and down. “The new police chief? A political appointment,” he said. “That’s all I know.”
“He’s got priors,” I said, “or at least that’s what I found out. Most of them have been hushed up.”
“How did you find that out?”
I held out my phone, waved it to him. “This funny little thing called the Internet.”
He laughed. “I had a look, too. Maybe you’re just better at searching.”
“Maybe I’m just better at seeing what’s not being said.”
And then, a scream splintered the air, coming through the paper-thin wall with next door. There was a bump, and another thump, and the light fixture in Jackson’s room shuddered above the TV and the TV wobbled on an art deco stand. Jackson steadied it. “Sorry, man. It’s usually quiet in here.”
I looked down at the carpet and doubted he was telling the truth. There were thick patches on the pile that might as well have been blood or wine stains. They had been scrubbed hard.
“I’m sure it is,” I said, and another scream punctuated my sentence. Another thump and the screams were cut off.
I went to the door, opened it, stepped out and along the narrow balcony to the next door and knocked hard. There was no answer. I knocked again. Still no answer. I stepped back, preparing to run up and launch myself at the door, but in the moment I was turned away the door opened.
Something smooth, hard, and glinting brushed my hair, hit my nose, and settled around my throat. I was wrenched backwards into the room. My fingers came up to my throat, came up to the smooth tubing around it and tried to pull the garotte away, but it was tightening and my larynx almost caved in. I was in the room now. The silence, deafening. Blood rushed in my ears. The door slammed shut behind me, but I barely heard it.
Bubbles of beer no longer tickled my throat. They were now roiling, turbulent in my stomach as I kicked out and squirmed, wrestling with myself, with the wire noose, with the beige carpet, with the smell of dank cigarettes and the hazy edges of my vision focusing in on a single point: a young girl with her bloody face smooshed into the floor beside me.
Eliza McNamara pushed her head back down into the uncomfortable hospital pillow. “What the hell do you want?” she asked.
Groening looked over her. “I wanna talk, that’s all. Nothing more, nothing less.”
Eliza knew all about Groening. She’d even worked for him in the DMV when she first joined the civil service. She’d watched the way he stabbed people in the back, preyed on young women, and then dropped them in the shit at the first opportunity. And here he was doing it all over again, taking a political appointment and running on the President’s ticket of law and order. The thing was Groening’s definition of law and order was so far removed from the TV show that it involved gunning people down on the street. The more the merrier, especially if they didn’t look like him.
“I don’t wanna talk to you. I don’t talk to people who don’t give a shit about the way people live.”
“You’re hardly in a strong negotiating position, Eliza. You’ve seen the photo, I take it?”
She didn’t reply.
“What do you think, Eliza? See, I never work without assurances.”
“You say you wanna talk?” said Eliza, scratching at her temple, listening to the beeping sounds on the monitors beside her bed.
Groening sat up in his chair so she could see him. She turned her cheek away, looked the other direction.
“You can’t even look at me,” he said.
“I can look at you.” She turned her chin and held it up to him, staring him down, her eyes glaring. “So, you need my help.”
“What makes you say that?” said Groening.
“The fact you’re here. The fact that you’re threatening me. The fact that you had six men with guns around my bed and took a photo and left it here. But then, you’re still here. That’s what surprised me. If you didn’t need my help, why else would you stay here?”
“Maybe I just find you sexy.”
She tasted bile at the back of her throat.
He stood up from the chair and perched on the edge of her bed, sitting down, pushing the mattress down. The action made her body roll towards him. She grimaced and tried to roll away but was too sore and too weak. Her fists clenched. Her jaw was set firm against him.
“Well? Ask for my help then,” she managed to say.
“These riots are getting worse,” he said. “Okay?”
“Isn’t that precisely what you want?” she demanded, and Groening looked her up and down.
He reached out with his hand, gripped her chin and squeezed. Then he turned her face one way, and then the other, as if he was looking for a weak point, or inspecting a horse’s teeth, or perhaps trying to find a point of entry into her brain, some way to bring her down, make her weaker, smaller, deader.
“It’s not just getting worse,” he said. “It’s getting much, much worse. I think I made the wrong decision.”
“What, to trust that being chief of police during a riot would be a good political move?”
“Isn’t it?” he said.
“You tell me. You’re the one here asking for my help.”
“Okay, okay; it’s not exactly what I thought would happen. I thought I’d be able to control things.”
“But you can’t, because nobody likes you, and things were already out of control before you stepped in.” This, she felt, gave her a position of leverage. Maybe she could get out of this unscathed.
“Yes, and the people have heard about your accident and they blame us. They blame me.”
“And?”
“See, I need you to come to a press conference, to stand there with me, show your support for the department.”
“If you haven’t noticed,” said Eliza, waving her hand over the bed, “I’m currently preoccupied, and threats tend not to work too well on me.”
Groening nodded, bounced up and down a little bit on the bed. “It’s not particularly comfortable, is it?”
Eliza shrugged, just her shoulders moving up and down, the slightest of motions.
“Have they given you anything to eat?”
Eliza looked over at the drip. He squeezed it. She shuddered as cold liquid ran into the vein in her arm, and then he reached down below the bed onto the chair he was sitting on earlier, took out a package, an envelope. Opened it, pulled out several photos.
“It’s hard to find something you care about, Eliza, beyond the department.”
She looked at the photos. In them, several of her officers were tied up, surrounded by men with the guns pointing at them. Her officers’ eyes pleaded with the photographer.
“You don’t have any family,” said Groening.
“I don’t need any family,” said Eliza.
“I’ll make the senate within the next three years. Have it on good authority. Crack down here, then move onto the state legislature. You’ll want family then. I could make your life hell.”
“What with family like you, with people climbing the political ladder, trying to make a name from misery, from other people’s disasters, other people’s shit. That’ll be hell, alright. You’re a parasite, Groening. I won’t help. I won’t stand on the podium beside you, lying, saying everything will be okay when it won’t.”
He squeezed the bag again, and then moved his gnarled fingers down her neck and around her throat.
�
��You’ll do as I fucking say, Eliza. If I ask you to be on that podium beside me, you’ll be on that podium beside me, you’ll say exactly what I ask you to say, or each one of those officers will get a bullet between their eyes, and then it will be made out to look like it was the protesters out getting revenge for the police shooting.”
Eliza considered this for a moment, and then she spat at him. “Screw you.”
“Anytime you like, darling.” Groening said and squeezed her throat tighter.
Then he sucked in a quick breath and thumped his fist into her stomach. She doubled up on the bed. He squeezed the drip bag again until she squirmed and screamed and ripped the catheter out of her arm.
“As I said, Eliza, you do as I fucking well tell you to.”
McNamara shook her head. The tears were welled in her eyes now. She couldn’t fight them back. They kept coming no matter how much she tried to hold them in.
“Or I kill you and every single one of them, and there’s nothing you can do about it. The White House has my back. I have their authority for this. I don’t need your stinking fuckin’ help. The only reason I asked is because I thought you wanted to make this world a better place.”
“I do,” said McNamara, “I do.” Through the tears and gritted teeth and the aching bruises from the car accident, she said, “and to make it a better place, I can’t work with creeps like you.”
He pulled back his fist and smacked it into her again and again, all below the waist.
“Think about it, darling,” he spat. “You’ve got ten seconds before I string this catheter cord around your neck. No one’s outside. Nobody’s listening. I’ve cleared the floor. You’re dead to me. And then you’ll be dead to everyone else. I can tell them that your parting words were that we need peace, that you stand by the police force, that we’re all in this together. So, it doesn’t matter if you die doing this, it doesn’t matter if you refuse, because the same thing will happen. The same statement will go out to the public. In fact, it’d probably be easier.”
With that, he grabbed the cord from the drip bag, wrapped it around her neck three times, and pulled tight, tight, tighter.
McNamara’s hands flew up to her neck.
Her eyes bulged.
Her fingers fumbled with the plastic tubing.
Groening kept his eyes fixed on hers. He rearranged his grip.
I took in the details of the apartment as Assman tied me up. It was much the same as Grant Jackson’s room. I was dragged onto the bed next to the girl, my arms were bound behind my back, and then bound to her arms, which were bound behind her back. We lay there, looking in opposite directions, me facing the television that was crashed to the floor, smashed up into tiny pieces, and her facing the headboard that had been bumped against the wall so many times, that the plaster had cracked in several places. There was no way out of this, no way to make this work.
I surveyed at my options. I couldn’t kick out at anything. I couldn’t see the window. I couldn’t even see the door. Hopefully, Jackson would investigate, maybe come and knock. But then what?
Sure enough there was a knock on the door, and then silence. Nobody went to answer. And then, another knock, and the man moved around my side of the bed, stuffed a sock in my mouth before I could cry out.
“Don’t you dare,” he said.
I wanted to ask his name, but I didn’t need to. I knew him. We’d met before on the side of the highway. I shouldn’t have let him get away. Now, here he was, with a young girl in a seedy motel room. And I was tied up to her on the bed. Assman pulled a knife from one of the drawers, not a butter knife but a steak knife. Not enough to do a lot of damage with, but enough to hurt. He signed running it across my throat if I made so much as a sound. Then he put one finger up to his lips.
“Shh,” he hissed, and I watched as the wall with its gray flaking whitish paint, its cross, its picture of the Virgin Mary in a dark wood frame, bounced with each of the knocks and juddered against the wall.
The man, the huge man with the tattoos on his arms, stepped out of my view. I couldn’t see the door, but I heard it open. I heard his voice, chipper. “Hi. Is there anything I can do for you?”
And then I heard Jackson’s voice. “Did you see my friend? I think he came around here. There was a lot of noise . . .”
“Ah, yes, I heard that, too,” said the man with the tattoos, his voice high-pitched, anxious, but also confident. “I think it was from the next room. I was quite worried, even tried to knock myself.”
“Do you mind if I come in?” said the protest leader.
“I don’t know who the fuck you are,” said the man with the tattoos on his arms.
The protest leader held out his hand. “I’m Grant, you know, from reception.”
“Irving Mathers,” said the other man, and then cringed as if he’d said something wrong. “Ah, I mean, Matheson.”
“You don’t know your last name?”
“Still, you’re not coming in. Check out the room next door,” he said, and closed the door, slamming it hard.
I heard the knock on the next-door room. The Virgin Mary shuddered again, rattling on her single nail, and Irving Mathers stepped over to me, placed the knife at my neck. “Do you know what the funniest part of this is, Mr. Hammer?”
I shook my head, grunted.
“Oh, I think you do. I think you know exactly what the funniest part of this is.”
He placed the cold metal of the knife against my throat, against my Adam’s apple. I didn’t move my head. I kept it still, my eyes looking up, fixed on his.
“The funniest part of all this,” said Irving, “the funniest part of all of this is that you are wanted on so many counts and you also apparently won the lottery, and I am gonna collect those winnings for you.” He held up the crumpled lottery ticket.
What the hell was I gonna do with $300 million, anyway? I thought to myself.
He looked at the ticket, checked the numbers, ran over to the sideboard, grabbed his cellphone off the wood-paneled monstrosity, then came back, looked up the numbers, showed me the numbers, looked at it again. “And your ID?” he said.
I glanced at my pocket. This time he dug deeper. There was nothing in that one. And then, he tried the other one. There it was, my one piece of identification, my old military ID. It was now his ticket for $300 million. He pocketed my ID and the lottery slip.
“And do you know what the other funniest part of this is? I’m gonna kill you so you can’t ever, ever come back and try and claim that money.”
I tried to mumble past the gag, “You already tried and failed.” It didn’t sound like anything in particular.
Mathers ignored me. “I’m gonna kill you so you know what it’s like to be humiliated, to be left on the side of the highway with red paint in your eyes. Revenge is delicious, my friend.”
I grunted and tried to spit the sock out of my mouth. It tasted furry and dirty, and smelled like old feet and rotten cheese, pretty much the same way the carpet smelled, and I could still feel the sense of old smoke and soot in this room and the scratchy duvet under me.
“I’m looking forward to hearing you scream, little piggy.” He grinned. “Scream for you mama, Ray. Now why don’t you be a good boy and scream, dammit!”
The girl’s hands behind me shook violently as her whole body was wracked with sobs. Mathers reached down, took the sock out of my mouth. He stood back slightly, expecting a scream.
I didn’t scream. And I didn’t move my head because the knife was still at my neck. I considered what I said next very carefully.
“There’s only one way to die, Irving,” I said, and waited.
“What’s that?” he said.
“Alone, painfully and with my hands around your throat.”
With that, the serrated edge of the knife dug into my skin.
Chapter Twenty-One
Eliza McNamara stood at the podium beside Groening and surveyed the crowd. She gasped. The place was heaving with bodies, and her gu
t clenched as she sucked in air and felt herself hyperventilate. A microphone sat right in front of her, and one in front of Groening. He raised his arms for quiet, but the people surged forward and then backwards, their fists raised, their chants high, loud, sharp, angry and full of hate and cussing. No matter whether the words came from the Black Lives Matter protestors or from the white supremacists, from one side or the other. There was fury in the eyes of all present and fear in their stances. This shook McNamara to the core.
Don’t panic, don’t panic! she told herself, but she was already too far gone.
She was sucking in the breaths one after the other after the other, and her head swirled. She placed a hand against the bruises around her neck as a flare was let off in the crowd, as a firework rat-a-tat-tatted and sent spirals of smoke into the heavens, as bottles were hurled at the stage, and as fists raised to the sky. Again, Groening raised his arms for quiet and slowly lowered them, but the people surged forward, and their voices lifted higher, and more flares and fireworks and gunshots rang out, one at a time, just small pops in the night. Eliza felt her stomach crunch. She felt the bruises as she moved, as she wriggled in her suit that was too tight, her badges and medals settled on her chest.
What the fuck am I doing here? she thought. This is no way to end this, to just go along with what Groening wants. People are angry and they damn well have a right to be. Too many of my brothers and sisters have died to make this country. And what do they get for it? A bullet in the side of the head. The shit kicked out of them in the county jail, or worse, the Lewisburg Penitentiary.
McNamara’s fingernails dug into the skin on her palms as Groening leaned down to the microphone and yelled “Quiet!” into it. And still, above the ringing feedback, the crowd brayed for his blood, for hers, for the blood of every single cop in this town, for the blood of every single person who had ever done something wrong—which was everyone gathered before them, which was Eliza McNamara herself, which was Groening, which was Ray Hammer, which was her musician friend, Jimmy Barrens.
The Fight (A Ray Hammer Novel Book 4) Page 7