Hiding Among the Dead

by Chris Bauer

  The skylight, in the upstairs bathroom—that was the breach; the entrance to the house he rarely thought about. Fucking thing never opened, not during the eighteen years he lived here as a kid or the six years after, when he still used to visit, and also not since he’d moved back in, the cranking mechanism gummed up from inactivity. But it was another way to get into the house, because all that separated the bathroom from the elements at roof level was glass. Seventy-year-old glass, not tempered to resist shattering. Glass that was no doubt now all over his tiled bathroom floor. Someone would soon step on it, something he’d hear if he listened hard enough.

  No crinkling-tinkling footsteps, no other noises.

  He eased one foot onto a carpeted step, pulled himself gently up, went for a second step, then a third, his raised gun leading him, its safety off, its trigger with so light a touch that worn fingerprints could fire it, just the way he liked it. The bathroom’s closed panel door appeared in his sights, each step exposing more of it, eggshell white, many paint layers applied by his dad, then subsequent homeowners, the glossy paint reflecting the glow from his Sock Monkey nightlight in the hall. The nightlight lit the door as far north as the handle.

  Top of the steps now. He swiveled to see bedroom two, swiveled again to see bedroom three, both doors open, then another body-swivel to bedroom number one in the front of the house, lit poorly by another nightlight. No visible threats, and still no noises from anywhere upstairs.

  The closed bathroom door, had he left it that way…?

  He reached for the doorknob.

  Hard push, or soft and slow?

  He shoved the door back and stiff-armed his raised-gun entrance, assumed a military stance. Glass shards were everywhere, sink, tile floor, bathtub. The cold, starry night was evident through the broken skylight, the air inside already frosty, his breath visible. On the floor was a cinder block and spider-webbed breaks in the floor tiles under it. He took a step forward, his swim shoes doing their job on the sharp glass, their molded rubber soles flexible, thick, paying dividends for him yet again—

  The opaque shower door was ajar—room inside for one person comfortably, two intimately, where he and Lola had been earlier in the evening. He stepped closer to it, snapped the shower door open toward him. Empty.

  Behind him he heard it, turning too late, guns sliding out of their leather holsters, two thugs with one each, their arms stiff as they reached them into the doorway, their firepower red-dotting his body. Fuck. The skylight breach had been a diversion.

  “Drop your weapon,” one thug said, the man brawny under black thermal outerwear, with black slacks and black shoes, his white face the only part exposed. “Do it. If we were here to take you out, you’d be dead already.”

  Philo felt his Sig’s trigger, its magnetism, its yearning, its wanting his finger to show it the faintest twitch, but he breathed down his adrenaline and did as asked, turning the gun around and setting it on the sink. There was always the handgun under the fake tissue box on the toilet tank.

  The dark-costumed toady retrieved the forfeited gun. He motioned at the toilet. “Have a seat.”

  Seat down, Philo sat. Behind him on the tank, the tissue box beckoned.

  “Thank you, Mr. Trout. Someone would like a word with you.” The thugs parted to let a third man enter. Business-suited and bulky, he smelled of alcohol. No gun visible, but something might be under the jacket. It was now a bit crowded in here.

  “Hello, Philo,” Mr. Business Suit said. “To help in securing your trust, and to prove my sincerity, I’ll tell you my real name. You might remember it. Wally Lanakai.”

  “Sorry, chief,” Philo said, “but that’s not doing it for me.”

  “Think LA, August 2001, the Barrio. Your last fight.”

  Philo narrowed his eyes in concentration. That night had been a fucking cataclysm. He was lucky he’d gotten out alive.

  Yes, Wally Lanakai. Banker, fight promoter, and manager. Hawaiian money guy. Philo never met him, but the name was synonymous with promoting the best illegal bare-knuckle boxing matchups of the day.

  Shit. He suddenly knew what this was about.

  “I didn’t take the purse,” Philo said.

  Forty-three thousand bucks. Largest purse ever, winner-take-all, for young Tristan Trout, age twenty-three at the time. Undefeated in sixty-four fights, all won by KO. He was a bare-knuckle street-fighting prodigy from Philly, none of his contests lasting more than five minutes. He lost the pretty-boy name Tristan around fight number twenty, the new nickname not of his own doing, became “Philo,” after Clint Eastwood’s late seventies movie namesake and bare-knuckle brawler Philo Beddoe. His undefeated record had evoked the comparison. That, plus a lean physique and an Eastwood-inspired rooster-comb hairline.

  Philo’s bare-knuckles talent: it was all in the leverage and the pop, Chuckie Fargas had told him. Chuckie was his best friend from childhood, and his fight manager. “You’ve got both, Philo baby. Long-arm leverage, big wrists, and fists that explode on impact, plus a Marciano chin. You’re gonna make us a ton of money.”

  That night, in the empty Barrio tire warehouse, Philo had figured, yes, he would do that, he would make them more money than they’d ever seen before, by notching win number sixty-five against Wally Lanakai’s sumo-size bull of a fighter from Hawaii. It was all good, “…all in the leverage, Philo baby, all in the leverage.”

  And Chuckie had, indeed, leveraged all of it. He stole the money. Wally’s and the money gathered from the crowd of bloodthirsty drunks who had shown up. Chuckie was gone before the first punch was thrown. The fight never happened.

  “Chuckie boosted the purse,” Philo said to his unwanted houseguest. “Not me.”

  “Yes, we know. Took us a while but we found him. You might have heard, maybe?” Wally let his smile and the insinuation sink in for Philo.

  Philo had heard. RIP Chuckie Fargas, 2002 or thereabouts.

  “We retrieved what was left of the money and went looking for you. We did find you, but we backed off.”

  9-11 had hit. The World Trade Center. Philo quit the fight game, quit civilian life, quit fucking civilization, period, and enlisted in the navy, in honor of his late father, a retired USN pilot who’d turned full pacifist in his later years, but still retained his hatred for “those sneaky bastard Japs and their goddamn Datsuns.” His father was a passenger on American Airlines hijacked Flight 77, the one that hit the Pentagon.

  “Yeah, well, I was busy back then.”

  “I know. Accept my sincere thanks, Philo, for your military service. But now you’re out. You’re what, thirty-nine? You still look good. Real good. Bigger than you were back then.”

  Yes, he was a full twenty pounds bigger, in all the right places, a solid two ten and in kickass shape. “What’s this about?”

  “You owe me a fight, Philo.”

  Philo smiled. “You’re funny, Wally. You break into my house, and you go through all this hotshot mobster bullshit with your pussy posse here, just to get me to fight again? You wasted your time. Find someone else. I’m a businessman now.”

  Glass crunched underfoot as Wally’s two offended toadies leaned forward into the doorway again, posing. Philo didn’t flinch. Wally spread his arms to stop them; they stood down.

  “Like it or not, Philo, you’re the gold standard in the sport. A legend. People still talk about you. Fifty-seven and oh, all knockouts, all under six minutes—”

  “Sixty-four KOs, five minutes or less.”

  “Forgive me, champ,” Wally said, “for not giving you your props. It’s not like they keep these records on ESPN.”

  Champ. A title reserved for the professional boxing elite. One lament Philo always had was he’d never turned pro. His pacifist father would have disowned him if he had.

  “I’ll get the record right when I talk the fight up, Philo. I have a fighter—”

  “I don’t give a shit who you have, I’m not interested. How’d you find me? And why not just ring the doorbell?”


  Wally’s jowly chin tightened. “You’re making it easy for me to dislike you, Philo. Almost as easy as it was to find you. You’re living in your parents’ house, genius. And I don’t ring doorbells.”

  So Philo was. Living here was for sure a subconscious death wish. Fuck the psychology of it. Wally Lanakai was the least of his worries, hadn’t even been on Philo’s radar; other more worrisome enemies were, but only to a point. You had to die sometime.

  “As I was saying, the guy I’m promoting—he’s destroyed everyone out there, and has no one left to fight. As much as I’ve talked you up, he’d like to meet you, champ. Meet you,” Wally’s sly smile was also a taunt, “so he can knock you out.”

  Same bullshit boxing promoter Don King pulled with boxers past their prime. Tell them how good they were, then tell them how someone had dissed them to get them all fired up, and stoke them into fighting again. Self-serving, money-grubbing asshole.

  But Philo wasn’t past his prime. Philo was more dangerous now than he was in his midtwenties. No matter. “Get out of my house, Wally.”

  “I understand your reluctance, Philo, really, you being rusty and all—”

  Philo’s tissue box gun was calling him. Hands at his sides, he rose from the toilet. “Get—the fuck—out. Now.”

  Two raised guns again.

  “You are being stubborn, Philo, so let’s say we do this. First, here’s two thousand bucks, a thousand for the bathroom, a thousand for your front door.” Wally dropped the cash into the sink, on top of broken glass. “Now let’s talk about that biohazard business of yours. You bought it from the Gore Whore, right?”

  Grace’s nickname. It apparently had legs on the other side of law enforcement, too. This got Philo’s attention. “What’s your point, Wally?”

  “She sold it because she’s sick, right?”

  Philo didn’t respond.

  “Needs new lungs, right? On the transplant list for what, more than three years?”

  The man had done his homework. “Again, Wally, make your point.”

  “I can help with that.”

  11

  The Hawaiian thugs were gone, had left the way they entered, through the front door. No real mystery how they managed the rooftop breach: an extension ladder, a cinder block, and a glass skylight. A ladder raised anywhere along the city block would allow someone to walk across the tarred flat roofs of twenty homes to any skylight in seconds.

  But the front door locks needed investigating. The mechanisms were blown out, sitting in pieces on the floor, and Philo hadn’t heard any such noise while he was upstairs. He examined one of the locks, then realized why.

  “Captive bolt pistol,” he murmured.

  Also called a stunbolt gun, cattle gun, bolt gun. Pneumatic. It rendered cattle unconscious by using compressed air to shoot a stainless-steel bolt into their brains. The bolt could also penetrate door locks. Quiet, effective, and trendy, a new unregulated weapon of choice. He’d used one himself, more than once. He shouldered his front door closed, now slightly off plumb, would need to rely on the tiny push-button lock for the rest of the night. He stuffed dishrags into the two holes where the lock used to be, to keep out the cold.

  The damage to his house was to the front door and bathroom only. Except where the hell was Six?

  “Six? Six, sweetie?”

  Upstairs, downstairs, the basement—no sign of her. If she’d gotten out, he’d find her purring at the front door at some point, cold and hungry.

  By three thirty a.m. the tile floor in the bathroom and the hardwood floor just inside the front door were shop-vac clean. He settled into the living room recliner again with his Sig Sauer back in his lap, then texted Grace to let her know he’d be sleeping in today. They had no jobs until the afternoon.

  Wally Lanakai: a mob fight promoter from Philo’s crazy past. People like Wally were out there, many not liking that they’d lost money each time Philo knocked their guy out, some wanting another shot if they could find him. Still, worrying about people from that part of his past wasn’t what warranted his sleepless nights. Potential blowback that had queued up from fifteen years of clandestine military missions, however, did.

  Wally would make the arrangements, would accommodate Philo’s schedule, and he promised a fifty-thousand-dollar winner-take-all purse, all details that were of consequence but still only the barest of interest to Philo, even the money. What did it for him was what it meant for Grace and her condition.

  Philo had watched his mother die; him fifteen, her forty-eight. Cigarettes. Lung cancer. Chemo, radiation, remission, then it traveled. Brain cancer, hospice, and a return home when there was nothing more they, or his father, or he, could do. The emptiness he felt—the helplessness…

  But with Grace—Grace was dying, and he could do something about it.

  Wally’s promise was there’d be two new lungs awaiting her, regardless of the outcome of the bout. Philo would talk with her and propose a what-if, but he’d leave out the sensitive parts, like anything to do with the fight, or a Hawaiian wiseguy claiming to also be an organ broker. Her need to know would pertain to the availability of the organs only, and how a transplant might happen. The less she knew, the better.

  Across the street from his house the aura from a lamppost bathed the sidewalk and the parked cars paralleling the curb in amber. The row homes behind it, identical to Philo’s, stood tall in a wall of shadows. Outside, it was quiet and cold, with a trickling of car traffic, and foot traffic that was nonexistent, until—

  A pedestrian entered the lamppost’s amber cone, his hands in his coat pockets and his hooded head down, puffing frosty air onto his chest as he pushed against the cold. No sway, looked sober; not a stray from one of the bars. He stopped under the lamp, turned to face the center of the street, shifted from foot to foot on the sidewalk, shaking off the chill. Philo sat up and opened the shutter slats another millimeter to watch. The pedestrian inched himself closer to the curb, still hopping from foot to foot. He left the curb and crossed the street, toward Philo’s house. Philo was now on high alert.

  A cat strutted inside the perimeter of the amber lamplight.

  Six.

  She slipped between the stranger’s legs, hitched up her back, clawed at his shoes and rubbed herself against pants that were, what, gray? Blue? Part of a uniform?

  Six leaped into the man’s arms, stopping him in the middle of the street. She nuzzled his shoulder, then his exposed chin until he couldn’t help himself and started petting her behind her ears. His head back, a grin emerged from inside the hoodie shadow, slight, goofy, young…

  For fuck’s sake.

  Patrick?

  Philo yanked at his front door with both hands, unsticking it from the doorframe with a pop! It spooked Patrick, who dropped Six and took a hard right, heading back the way he’d come. The cat sprinted toward Philo’s steps.

  Philo cleared his gun, tucked it into his waistband, and stepped around Six onto the front steps. “Hey, no, wait—”

  Patrick made a run for it.

  “Patrick, stop! HEY! C’mon, Patrick, no one better than you, bud…”

  Patrick halted. He turned to face Philo, appeared lost, frightened. Philo met him in the street and guided him up his steps, his arm around him.

  “Dude. Let’s get inside.”

  Philo’s guest picked the raisins and walnuts from the top of the sticky bun, put them aside, broke off a small piece and took a bite. Under-cabinet lighting dusted the granite countertop and rimmed half the perimeter of Philo’s kitchen, the other half lit by a hanging ceiling lamp that cast a soft, diffused light onto a round acrylic table. Sunrise was still a few hours away. The two men were seated next to each other, Philo with a mug of coffee, Patrick nursing a glass of milk to go with the day-old bun. He was delivering disturbing news about Grace. She’d been taken away in an ambulance overnight.

  “When?”

  “Don’t know, sir. Midnight maybe. Hank called nine-one-one. He went with her.�
��

  “You didn’t?”

  “I was on a trolley when Hank called me, sir. My phone woke me up. Hank was crying.”

  A few things were buried inside those comments that would require more prodding. Philo started with asking why he hadn’t gone home or to the hospital.

  “I was out, riding the bus.”

  “I got that. Why not—”

  “I came here instead, sir.”

  “Where is Grace now? What hospital?”

  “Eisenstein.”

  “Einstein? In Olney?”

  “Yeah. I can’t eat any more of this, sir.”

  “Then don’t. How come you came here?”

  “At the car dealership today, there was, um, it was…and Grace, she’s really sick, sir. Hank said she was coughing up blood. And stuff’s messed up, sir, and, and…”

  Patrick gritted his teeth. Philo watched the anger rise, saw his chest inflate, deflate—inhale, exhale—saw his breathing shorten, the rage building. Patrick’s eyes blasted open, looking larger than their sockets. “…and, and…”

  He pounded the table with his fist, his eyes like a madman’s, lost, pleading while he spit his words, “…and I don’t—know who—I am, sir!”

  “Okay, Patrick, okay. Easy, bud, easy. Try to calm yourself.”

  Patrick’s breathing slowed, his man-boy eyes now spilling over, his heartache pouring out through them. “I need to figure stuff out, sir. I just need help figuring all this stuff out…”

  “I know you do. Relax. Finish your milk. Then we’ll take a ride.”

  “Where?”

  “To see Grace.”

  They were in Philo’s Jeep at four thirty in the morning heading across town, traffic nearly nonexistent. Philo nudged Patrick gently with a few softball questions to get him to open up.

  “Grace and Hank. They’ve been really good to you, haven’t they?”

  “The best. Grace worries about me, sir. I tell her not to, but she does. I want her to get better.”