by Andrew Post
“I didn’t expect shit to go that way,” Robbie managed to say, some blood slopping out of his mouth and down his double chins. “I…didn’t think there’d be so goddamn many of them here. But you’re our boy, Frankie. We look after our own.”
Frank found the worst of the bleeding, the rent in Robbie’s guts gushing hard and hot against his searching fingers. He pinched at the artery, slippery as it was, and held it closed, feeling the pressure immediately build and balloon behind it. He’d need a clamp.
“Why’s it smell like shit?” Robbie gurgled.
“She cut open your large intestine,” Frank said.
Robbie dropped his head back. “That probably ain’t good, is it?”
“No. But I can help you.”
“You should run, Frankie. The cops will be coming.” His eyes, slowly blinking and unfocused, moved around the room, seeing all the bodies that lay around them, arms and legs draped every which way, smoking guns in many hands held with loose, uncurled fingers. “The war’s over, but some of these boys, they got boys of their own. And they’ll grow up and hear about this shit and…and they’ll do something about it. They’ll see it gets straightened out…you gotta tell them, Frank. Tell them what they did to Big Robbie, okay?”
Frank held on to Robbie’s artery, pinching hard until he thought he might break his own fingers, the lips of the tear in the man’s gut gumming at his wrist softly, swallowing him. “I gave Simone an abortion yesterday morning,” he said. “Bryce brought Vasily here. She killed him.”
Robbie’s lips pressed together. When they parted with a pop, a red bubble swelled between the edges of his teeth as he said, “You what?”
“She asked me to do it. She paid me to do it. I didn’t want to, but I did it.”
“Was she raped?”
“I don’t think so.”
Robbie tried looking over at the pompadour kid. “Did Joey know…?”
“No. She said she wanted to fit into her maid-of-honor dress. She—” Frank felt a warm barrel of a gun touch his temple.
“And you fucking kill it just because she asked you to?” Robbie said.
“Yes,” Frank said.
“You fucking piece of shit. They got so many of us here.”
“I know.”
“Was it a boy?”
“I’m sorry, Robbie, I—”
“Was it a fucking boy, Frank?”
“Yes. But, Robbie, listen to me, this is all her fault. If she hadn’t killed Vasily—”
Click. Frank flinched. He’d let go of the artery. Reaching in, he couldn’t find it again. Blood came out in a gush, dampening Frank’s legs and chest.
Robbie glared up at Frank all the while, pulled the trigger again. Again. Again. Nothing but dead clicks. “You fuck. You little fuck.”
Frank withdrew his hand, the wound slapping shut but continuing to drool a wide pool of blood onto the carpet. He stood as Robbie tracked him with the gun, still squeezing the trigger, still not firing.
Robbie paled. His arm slapped wide, the gun spilling out of his clutch. And his eyes, as Frank stared into them, made himself stare and watch and witness, lost their light without a sound.
With a wet, slippery hand, Frank picked up the empty gun. He’d never held a real one before – a rubber one in drama class in high school had been his only experience. The real deal was much heavier.
Frank stood, blood slathered on his clothes up to his elbows, ears ringing, dust settling in his hair and across his shoulders. All of these bodies, knee-high in his living room, all of them beyond saving. He had to do something. He couldn’t stay here. Someone would have certainly called the cops. He had to run. Like he should’ve, like Ted said he should’ve. Fuck.
He looked around his house. Bare walls now full of holes. Broken TV. He had no photos to take with him. No treasures from his childhood. No heirlooms. No one and nothing to lift, rescued, to his chest to come along on his escape. Just him. They would find the bodies. They’d find his operating room too and the illegally obtained equipment and tools and drugs. He didn’t have any money to take. Nothing but himself. But he might be able to contact some help, he thought, and struggling to wedge his hand in, Frank fished out Robbie’s phone from his slacks pocket. He tucked it into his own pocket, stepped over Robbie, shoes squishing in the carpet as he tried to avoid stepping on any dead men’s hands or necks. He picked his way over to the side door of the house. Stepping out slowly, listening for any stragglers that might be running up on him, the cool night air lapping on all the wet parts of him – blood, sweat. He glanced across the street before running to his garage.
One of the pickup trucks across the street was hissing down on one side, its front right tire punctured. A house alarm was going off kitty-corner from Frank’s place, the house’s front window lying smashed in the yard and a perfect circle piercing the curtains. Then, drawing him around, he heard an old man howling in pain. Facing the Shulmans’ house, there in the window stood Mister Shulman, whom Frank seldom saw outside their home, clutching the sides of his head and screaming down at something Frank couldn’t see, on the floor. “Cynthia. Oh, God, my Cynthia.”
And when the wind turned, Frank could hear the sirens. Several going at once, their peals mingling and overlapping, sometimes syncing – but all of them, together, were growing louder.
Frank, only hearing his footsteps and not feeling any part of his body as he ran, moved up the driveway and into the garage. He got behind the wheel of the Lexus, tossed Robbie’s gun onto the passenger seat, and smeared the door handle and the wheel and his keys with blood as he got the engine started and backed out of the driveway. He took off, in the opposite direction from the sirens, turning the first corner that came up so he could no longer see the flashing red and blue in his mirror behind him.
He had to stop a few blocks away to be sick. He didn’t get the door open in time. He got back on the road, flew through a red light, turned onto the highway, and filled his car with screams and curses, forgetting all language but the animalistic noise of precise agony, bottomless regret, and self-aimed anger, as he tore off into the night at ninety-five miles per hour.
* * *
The world felt soft and unsure under Amber’s flip-flops as she stumbled out the front door of the tavern, an arm draped over the shoulders of her new friends. Everybody laughing, she knew so many new names. In a loud pack of red faces, they stepped together out to the lot. No traffic on the nearby street. The few streetlights in this part of town flickered, those that worked. The bartender followed them out, stood at the door and watched everybody navigate the parking lot, weaving like flies banging against a windowpane, toward their cars.
“And there’s my buddy,” Amber said as her new friends approached the hearse with her. The keg sat in the front seat, as if waiting for her. “Think I could use the carpool lane now?” She remembered walking the bartender out to the hearse to load up the keg but couldn’t say, for sure, how many hours ago that’d been.
Amber, released by her friends, receiving many thanks and loving claps on the back, was set free to try poking her key to one side of the car handle, then the other, as everyone else filed off and left, some of whom probably couldn’t afford another DUI on their record but were going to chance it anyway.
The bartender called from across the lot, “Maybe you should consider calling a cab, darling. Be kind of ironic to die in a ride such as yours.”
“I’m fine,” Amber said. “I got a funeral tomorrow, I need to get home.”
“Might be your funeral if you don’t take a cab. They might even let you put the keg in the trunk if you ask real nice.”
“What, are you my mom or something? Said I’m fucking fine, okay? Jeez.”
“Eight vodka tonics would make even an elephant drive kinda screwy, girl. And you ain’t no bigger than a whip. I can’t tell you what to do, but this is ju
st me, a concerned citizen.”
“Then shut up, butthead.”
“Say the word and I can call a cab for you—”
“Fuck you.” Amber got behind the wheel, pulled the door closed, sat in the sudden silence of the hearse. She gave the finger to the bartender until he shook his head and went back inside.
The lights along the front of the tavern went dark. Amber murmured a curse; she’d been using them to try and get the key in the ignition. She stamped the gas in time with twisting the key, unable to find the right synchronization of movements to get the finicky engine to relent and turn over. She paused, counted to three, breathed deep, tried to get her hand on the key and foot on the pedal to cooperate and work together, and tried again. Twist, stamp, twist, stamp.
The car rumbled to life. She put it in gear and, meaning to go backward, instead shot forward. She heard the underside of the hearse bark sharply as she ran over the cement parking strip. But since she was already in motion, she decided to just keep going, went over the sidewalk, slammed onto the street, took a really wide turn to get aligned with the lane, and drove leaning forward over the wheel, squinting in the dark to get the watery world beyond her eyes to focus, fighting to line up the front left corner of the hearse’s long hood with the double yellow line.
Soon, the line was on the right, somehow, and she tweaked the wheel with one hand, fumbling to light a smoke with the other, and got back on her side of the road.
The light ahead changed, yellow, red. She braked a little early and had to creep up to the intersection with small shoves of the accelerator. Once stopped she noticed a crimson comet flaring across her blurry vision. Next to the red light was a little white light hung on the same line. It usually indicated an ambulance was going to come through the intersection soon, or a cop car on a chase after somebody. Shit. Killing the radio’s distraction with a swat on the knob, Amber straightened up in the seat, made sure she’d actually buckled up, and watched out the rearview mirror for flashing lights.
She glanced to her right. In the passenger seat sat the keg. Well, maybe this was a poor choice after all. But when she finally heard the sirens and saw flashing red and blue blasting near out of the darkness, they weren’t coming from behind her, but going past her, ahead of her car. Six police cars tore past, followed quickly by an ambulance struggling to keep pace. Amber sat watching them, mesmerized by the flashing lights as, soon, only the lights, not the vehicles they were attached to, were all she could make out, several blocks down. She watched them, flash-flash, flash-flash, as she leaned over the steering wheel to see.
Despite her condition, she almost wanted to follow them just to see what the big ruckus was about. Maybe somebody got shot. Maybe she could load them up and take them to Becky. Those lights were amazing to watch, either way, flashing off into the night like coked-out lightning bugs on a mad run.…
The hearse was drifting out into the intersection.
Amber, realizing she was moving, cursed, and tried slamming the brakes but hammered the gas instead. The hearse’s engine screamed and tires squealed, lurching her further out into the intersection.
A car coming the other way flared the inside of the hearse with its headlights. Squealing tires, it swerved, blared her with its horn, and narrowly avoided T-boning her.
The hearse was still going – her feet couldn’t remember which pedal did what – and the chain-link fence, dead ahead, jumped forward to snag her like a catcher’s mitt.
There was a rattling clatter of metal as the fence flew up and over the hood and draped across the windshield. Amber screamed when the pavement ended and it was just dirt and trash as the path ahead angled sharply downward – and the car, nosing down, even once she found the brakes, would not slow.
The hearse banged and jumped and lurched side to side as it picked up speed, tumbling down the ravine under the highway overpass. She heard something crack, saw a bright flash of light in one eye, and felt something warm drawing a line down her neck, safety glass embedded in her cheek. The pain came on a delay.
The headlights caught something gray and unmoving ahead. Through the blood in her eyes, Amber watched, helpless as the hearse ran straight at the cement pylon keeping the highway above her standing. Fighting the wheel did nothing. The hearse was determined to kill itself.
With a deafening slam of metal on cement, the hearse’s slope-made inertia was violently ended – equal and opposite forces and that.
Her head, and the keg, both lashed forward upon impact. But whereas her head was stopped from flying out through the windshield by still being attached to her neck, and bouncing off the steering wheel as well, the keg wasn’t likewise restricted – it leaped through the windshield with a splash of breaking glass, and struck the support structure of the overpass ahead with a resounding clang. Hitting the trash-strewn ground outside the hearse, hissing, bleeding beer, it spun and hopped around, foaming the ground as it depressurized, finally coming to rest in a bubbling puddle a hundred feet away.
Amber lost consciousness, tasting blood.
Chapter Seven
Jolene, for a lack of anywhere else soft, lay in one of the caskets in the display room. The one with the pearlescent finish and platinum hardware, which they always called their ‘hip-hop special’ but never in front of clients.
The satin interior was comfortable, the pad good and pillow soft under her head. She lay watching a movie on her phone, one earbud in to listen for when Amber returned. But that was half a movie ago when she started thinking she’d be back any minute. She sat up, lifted the casket lid from over her lower half, swung her legs out and hopped to the floor. She stepped out into the reception area. The vaulted ceilings – meant, probably, to evoke the feeling of a church – repeated the sounds of her steps. She went around the counter and studied the CCTV screens. No hearse pulling into the driveway, nor parked out at the curb at the edge of the yard. She sat and watched the grainy feeds, watching the time stamp click one minute by, another.
She was still thinking about Cornelius telling on them, and Frank’s questionable behavior. Now, with it being nearly three in the morning, and having not heard back from Amber, despite Jolene having left ten messages, she was beginning to wonder if maybe this Becky chick Amber mentioned had changed her mind – if Rhino changed his/her mind. A whirlwind of possibilities, all bad, circled Jolene.
Deciding sleep wasn’t going to be likely tonight, she went into the kitchen to get the coffee started. Her eyes burned, her nerves were shot, and she tried, yet again, to call Amber. Still nothing. She sat at the kitchen table, taking her coffee with sugar unlike usual just for the spike of energy she hoped to get from it, and waited. Nothing more could be done. But people were due to show up in five hours expecting their loved one to be taken to their final resting spot, and that would require a hearse.
“You better have a damn good excuse, Amber,” Jolene said to herself, and lit the last cigarette left in her pack.
* * *
When the news started to repeat Frank’s life story – beloved local surgeon turned criminal turned back-alley surgeon turned supposed mass-murdering mafia-killer – Frank turned off the radio. His whereabouts were still unknown, they said. Well, he could confirm that better than anybody. He knew where he was. They didn’t. How much longer it’d stay that way remained a mystery.
In Frank’s glove box, he had a pack of Wet-Naps from the last time he went to a barbecue joint. He turned on the dome light of his car, and dabbed at his arms and face and neck, scraping hard at the blood to try to get it off.
The Wet-Naps only did so much. Mostly they just pushed the blood around. But he got his hands clean, at least.
He checked himself in the rearview mirror. Yep, he still looked like somebody who just walked away the sole survivor of a shootout.
He sat in his car behind a closed Pizza Hut in West St. Paul, headlights off, doors locked because West St.
Paul wasn’t exactly a great part of town, and brought his cigarette up to his lips. His hands were still shaking and his ears still ringing two hours on. Ahead of his car, over the dead Kmart’s parking lot, the sun was due to start coming up soon. He couldn’t remember the last time he watched the sun come up.
It took him a few tries to figure out how to get the magazine to eject from Robbie’s gun. He sat looking into the empty handgun – which he thought maybe was called a Glock – and slid the magazine back inside. Even empty, it might be useful. Worse comes to worst, he could always go out via suicide-by-cop.
But he wasn’t at that point yet. He still had people he could call, but was afraid to, thinking the cops would ping his cell phone signal. So he kept his phone on airplane mode, sitting at half-charge on the passenger seat. Another twenty minutes slid by without a police helicopter hovering over his car or a SWAT team wrenching him out through the window. A silent summer morning, dew on his windshield, a rainbow in each little perfect hemisphere of water.
He thought about his daughter and his ex-wife mostly. He thought about happier days. And some of the not-so-great ones, in the later, grayer stages of his marriage. Even those, weeks on end sleeping on the couch, paled in comparison to what his life was now. All he had was his car. His car, the clothes on his back, and the mountain of awfulness his life had become, swelling up over the horizon to blot out the sun. Currently, in reality, the sun was peeking up in the distance, burning away purple and gray clouds, the kind of orange that always made him think of sherbet.
He couldn’t sit here forever watching the sun. Soon it’d come up all the way and people would start driving by. Eventually he’d be seen. He needed an escape.
Reluctantly, Frank took his phone off airplane mode and dialed Ted. One ring, two, three. It never went to voicemail, just kept twittering in his ear, no connection of any kind possible. He had mentioned he was going off the grid, maybe he already had. Frank ended the call and flipped through his text chain with his daughter, those last two desperate messages roaring out at him.