Sweeney on the Rocks

by Allen Morris Jones

  Sweeney feels a cold stone slip down into the quiet pool of his stomach. “You don’t have that bag? I gave it to that Italian kid, your nephew or whatever.”

  “Yeah, well he ain’t picking up his phone. Neither is Lukey, neither is Mike, none of those fucking guys. Nobody’s picking up their phone. Only person in Montana with his phone on is you.”

  “I gave them the rocks, Donnie. Swear to god.”

  “Don’t say rocks.” This is Moretti, cautious of their cell phones. “But yeah, I know that much. They called me this morning. Three thirty, woke me up. Which is fine, that’s what I told em to do. Said they got em, and they got that worthless sack of shit cousin of yours cuffed in the backseat. They’re finding a dirt road somewhere, taking him up into those mountains”

  “I don’t need to hear about any of that.”

  “…and that’s the last I heard. So I’m sitting here thinking maybe all you guys got together on a double cross. Like you’re all one big happy family on the way to Mexico and here’s Donnie Moretti back in Brooklyn, holding his dick.”

  “You got to ask yourself, why would I bring this deal to you then turn around and cross you?”

  “You got any better ideas?”

  “…Uh. Fuck.”

  “What.”

  Sweeney stares past the top of the hospital toward the Absarokas. The closest peaks. “They cuffed him in the back seat.”

  “What I said.”

  “Eddie keeps a handcuff key in his back pocket. Used to, anyway.”

  Moretti makes a noise like he just swallowed a fly.

  “I’ll look around, Donnie, see what I come up with. But maybe those boys of yours aren’t doing too good.”

  “You didn’t think to mention that little fact earlier? The handcuff key?”

  “I gave you Eddie, I gave you the stones. Don’t blame me if those fucksticks you hired couldn’t keep hold of him.”

  “Fucksticks.”

  A delicate matter with Moretti. Balancing your legitimate outrage against Moretti’s capacity for insult. “No disrespect, Donnie.”

  Moretti sighs heavily. “I know, I know, Christ. Cosmo. What the fuck.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out. Who knows, maybe they got stuck in the woods out of cell phone range. Maybe they’re hiking home. Even now, right?”

  “Maybe, maybe.”

  “I’ll call you, I hear anything.”

  After hanging up, Sweeney lets Zeke out of his truck to take a leak. He sits up on his tailgate, considering the mountains. Eddie on the loose. He takes his own internal temperature, finds two distinct reactions. The first? Good for you, man. I got that off my conscience Call this one relief. The second? Eddie out there, with a fresh and vivid hatred for all things Sweeney. What comes next? Dread.

  For now, though, and oddly enough, relief wins out. “Let’s go Zeke.”

  ~

  For Sweeney’s money, nothing beats September. The hot, airless days of August sweeten and swell, the cottonwoods do their thing with the yellow; the velvet comes off the antlers and the brown trout start sweeping up redds. Tourists are a distant theory and the air is crisp enough to suggest a chill even while it’s warm enough for shirtsleeves.

  He’s in a good mood as he unlocks Marilyn’s door, pushes forward with his laundry basket. Humming an old Stones tune. Breaking out into occasional lyrics. “But if you try sometimes, you just might find…”

  Zeke explores the kitchen, makes friendly with the shihtzu, nose to ass. Gives the cat a wide berth. Settles in on a now-familiar corner of the couch.

  In the cramped laundry room, Sweeney empties out a month’s worth of old shirts and jeans. Pours in the Tide. And while the machine chugs, he comes back out to sit beside Zeke, comfortable with the remote and one of Marilyn’s beers. Turns on Days of our Lives. “What do you think there, Zeke? Are Jennifer and Jake getting back together, or what?”

  He’s developed a fondness for these sappy serials. They do seem like the essential gist of some damn thing. Happiness always juuust out of reach. Ain’t that the way it is? The good life evades us all. Even now, and now, and now. We ripe and ripe, then we rot and rot, and then…

  “Big day, Zeke.” One month after Moretti’s phone call. Thirty days since Eddie disappeared. Since they found the abandoned Taurus up Jack Creek; only a few hundred yards, in fact, from the house Eddie had used to hold Aggie and Elizabeth. The Taurus with all four doors open and the headlights going dim. Lukey, cold behind the wheel with his throat cut ear to ear and his shoulder holster empty. Mike Patriso half out of the shotgun side front seat, a single hole neat in his left temple, messy on his right. It doesn’t take a genius to read the forensic narrative. Jake Leon, in the backseat and still in his seatbelt, three holes in his ribs, each one popped close enough to leave powder burns. And the Italian kid, Domenico, twenty yards away in the trees, stretched out on the wooden bench of a picnic table, a single hole in his gut. Breathing, but only just. The only mystery, why Eddie would leave the kid alive. Maybe a message to Moretti. If so, it’s illegible.

  Domenico was discharged from the Billings Clinic last week, minus a spleen and a couple feet of small intestine, and owing six liters of blood to the good people of Montana. He boarded the plane back to Brooklyn using a walker.

  Eddie? Eddie’s on the run and the most wanted list. Which is, yeah, odd. Pulling up the FBI web page, that’s cousin Eddie, man. Big time. Biiig time.

  For now, Sweeney’s not too worried about it. With the diamonds in hand, Eddie’s got the means to do some damage, and certainly the incentive, but you got to think he’s too busy keeping his head low to worry about revenge. For now. And for now’s good enough for Sweeney.

  Now it’s thirty days later, and Sweeney’s been promising himself, you make it thirty days, if Eddie doesn’t turn up, if Moretti doesn’t come at you, you can give yourself this moment.

  He stretches out his legs to reach into the pocket of his jeans. Finds Aggie’s old ring box, the crushed velvet from the jewelry store. He cracks it open and tilts it out over his open palm. Catches a loose stone. The stone. Tina’s sample.

  Hefting it in his palm, it feels heavier even than he remembered. He pinches it up between thumb and forefinger, holds it close to one eye. Tilts it to the light, squinting through the sparkle, the opaque gray.

  And damn. If he makes an effort, he can see shapes in the heart of the stone. Tiny occlusions. Julietta had mentioned them. Past the oblique, prismatic glitter, under the compressed layerings of carbon, he can just make out two slivers of geometry. A horizontal bar that looks, without much imagination, like the roofline of a cabin. And beside it? An incomplete triangle that might be the crest of a pine tree. Put them together, they resemble a certain amount of hope, maybe a slight measure of melancholy.

  Put them together, they look like a life.