Ride the Lightning

by Dietrich Kalteis

  “That’s got a ring.”

  “Could be one. We’ll see how it goes.”

  It got her smiling, saying, “And I’m going to meet Mother.”

  “You’d love Bovina.”

  “That her name?”

  “Where she lives, in the Catskills—beautiful this time of year.”

  It scared PJ a bit, thinking of herself as his girl. Taking his hand, she dropped the pimento into it, folding his fingers over it and squishing it. Then she was back to Walt, telling Karl they were suing the Playhouse Theater for inadequate security on seniors’ night after two old-timers pummeled the bejesus out of each other in the line-up. She went on about nailing some waste management company for eight figures after some environmentalist photographer fell from the top of one of their garbage trucks, Walt arguing his client couldn’t have known the truck might move.

  Karl reached in his pocket, pulling out the travel brochure, pretending to ignore her, opening it to the picture of a couple feeding white-faced monkeys, saying again she needed a break. Artie Poppa’s money would land them in a five-star and leave enough for IKEA.

  Seeing the phone number and Helen’s name on the back, she asked what his mother’s name was.

  rain check

  “Got it,” Miro said into the phone to Stax. The audio surveillance recorder worked like a charm. The guy at the Spy Shop assured him it was the latest thing, undetectable, voice activated, time and date stamped, the very thing the feds used. The bastards could listen through the cell phone in your own pocket, eye you from a satellite, tap into your home computer with their spyware. Can’t be careful enough, the kid told him, throwing in a discount for paying in cash.

  The tiny wire Miro had Bruna sew into Stax’s jeans did the trick, the audio perfectly clear, Artie’s voice, Karl’s voice. Their words enough to incriminate both of them. Worth every cent Miro paid, everything on track until Stax called, throwing a wrench in the works, saying there was a change of plans, wasn’t going to take out the two clowns, at least not now.

  “What’re you talking about?” Miro’s euphoria popped like a bubble.

  “Too much heat since the raid—my car the cops found at the docks, not yours.”

  “So, your car was there.”

  “Means they’re watching me.”

  “So, be careful.”

  “Here’s how we do this, we forget about the Burnaby house, lay low a bit, leave the personal shit out of it.” Stax thinking of the JayMan, DeJesus and the hangarounds that got busted. The cops tore the Knot So Fast apart, pulling eighty keys and a couple dozen G36 automatic rifles from the false floors. Banging on his door, they wanted to know what his car was doing at the docks. Stax saying he loaned it to a friend, JayMan saying yeah. With nothing to hold him on, they released his car and promised they’d be watching.

  “Either way, the two clowns got to go,” Miro said.

  “In due time,” Stax said and hung up.

  With Karl Morgen and Artie Poppa on tape, they were going down. Miro ached to stop by whatever prison they threw Morgen in, do a little visitation, dangle the recorder the kid at the Spy Shop sold him, tell the fucker through the glass who set him up, ask how it feels. Do it before the feds came with their extradition papers.

  Bruna came in the living room, handing him a coffee, fifth one today, checking out his squashed nose, saying it was time to change his dressing, the bottles and gauze under her arm. He lifted her shirt tails, giving her a pat, saying how about it, raising a brow. Bruna pulled a face, saying sorry, sugar, she was already late getting back downstairs, thinking Miro was looking worse for wear every time she looked at him.

  the nurse that sucks lemons

  Leaning against the juice machine, Karl made like he was intrigued by getting the lowdown on Valerie Bertinelli’s engagement. The security guard passed on his rounds, Karl saying hi to him again, face buried in the old issue of People. When the intercom called the nurse at the station over to psychiatric, Karl tossed the magazine on the table, ducked past the empty station for the third time that morning and poked his head into Pinkie Fox’s room, hoping to catch her awake this time.

  She lay in the air-chamber burn bed under the fluorescent lights, drifting in and out of consciousness, hooked to a series of tubes for fluid resuscitation. Blue eyes nearly swollen shut, a gauze pad over one cheek, a cravat bandage around her forehead, her hair singed off. She spoke, her voice belonging to Phyllis Diller, barely audible, complaining about no peace in this dump, adding, “I already told you guys I was picking berries, just stopped to ask for directions . . .”

  Karl held up the bouquet. “I’m not a cop.”

  She checked him out, just her eyes moving. “You always dress like that?”

  “I get that a lot, probably the haircut.”

  “No, hon, it’s the shoes.”

  He looked down at the Oakleys, realizing she couldn’t see his shoes.

  “So, if you’re not a cop . . .”

  “Guy you work for sent me.”

  “With flowers?”

  “Wants to know who blew up his place.” Karl laid the flowers down. “And the big guy that eclipses him, the guy you phoned from the house, wants to know who shot his dog.”

  “Stupid thing wasn’t even housebroken.”

  “So you shot it?”

  “Think Stax ever cleaned up after it?”

  “That what you want me to go back with?”

  She blinked at him like it didn’t matter what he went back with, saying, “Who’s picking up my tab?”

  “You mean for here?” Karl had to lean in to hear her.

  “Think Blue Cross covers getting blown to hell in a grow-op?” Her voice a whisper, she turned her head to the wall like she was talking to somebody. “Guy sends me flowers.”

  “The flowers are from me.” Karl picked the bouquet off the bed. “Yellow, you know what it stands for?”

  “Yeah, means we’re friends, means you give a shit—like if I call up, we can catch a show or a bite like old buddies, and you won’t expect a blow job.”

  Karl raised a brow, and she said, “That’s what pink’s for.”

  “You know your flowers.”

  “And I know this guy I’m supposed to work for didn’t send lilies for Loop.” She coughed.

  “Sorry about your friend.”

  She closed her eyes to the pain, and Karl waited, watching the readout on the machine, hearing her breath come in rasps, wondering if she dropped off again. Then her eyes opened, and she asked if he’d heard about this cat that lives in a ward someplace back east, New England she thought it was. “Cat comes in and sits on a patient’s bed when it’s their time, curls up right through the family tears and last rights. Cat never gets it wrong. Thing sits on your bed, you’re done.”

  “Some cat, huh?” Karl thought about his own cat, Chip, the way his eyes moved, like he was seeing things Karl couldn’t. “Yeah, why not? An extra sense or something. I’ve got a cat that’s pretty tuned in.”

  She said good for him and closed her eyes against another wave of pain. “Prick could’ve sent some methadone, not even a fucking Hallmark card.” She looked at him, saying, “Still say you look like a cop.”

  “Think you know I’m not,” Karl said and turned as the nurse walked by the door, going back to her station.

  “What I told the ones this morning, the guys that dressed like you: look for a couple of guys with assault rifles, Vietnamese guys, something like that.”

  “Cops’ll dig out the slugs, match them up, dust for prints then they’ll ask you again, maybe get you under oath.”

  “I’m hooked to wires, eating painkillers like candy, second- and third-degree burns all over, just had a friend shot. Think I give a shit?”

  “Sorry, Pinkie, I really am.”

  She drew a long breath. “How about yo
u go find the nurse that looks like she sucks lemons, tell her her painkillers are worth shit.”

  “That it?”

  “No. Take your flowers and your cop shoes and go fuck yourself.”

  “Nice.”

  “Oh, it’s white for that.”

  “White, huh? I go back with that, you’ll be seeing the big guy with the sour face. Don’t think he’ll be bringing flowers.”

  She was quiet a moment, knowing the kind of guy Stax was, then said, “The one guy’s name was Mitch. The one that came in and shot Loop had one of those rapper things on his head.”

  “Okay.”

  “But the one you really want’s a bug-eyed runt with bad teeth, goes by Miro.”

  It hit him like a punch. “Miro Knotts?” His mind flashed to the two guys standing by the Porsche outside Miro’s the day he made the serve. They had to be the other two.

  “Got a new way of walking after stepping in my Victor trap.” Trying to smile, she started hacking, trying to tell him to get lost.

  Saying thanks and wishing her a speedy recovery, he placed the flowers on the table by the door and went looking for the nurse that sucked lemons.

  lady luck

  It was mid-morning when he got back to her place, tiptoeing in, PJ sleeping in on her day off, told him she felt like she was coming down with something when they got back from Elmo’s Bohemia last night. Karl spooned her, feeling her warmth, wondering how her old man could just take off back when she was a kid, thinking of his own dad, the way the two of them got along. His dad would have called PJ “a keeper,” saying something like she’d still be a beauty twenty years past drop-dead, the old man’s way of talking.

  When he did get a chance to tell her about the meeting on Wreck Beach, she asked if he was nuts, loud enough for all the heads in Elmo’s to turn, the two of them at their spot at the bar. Karl said Artie wasn’t asking as much as telling, PJ saying the problem was Karl liked rubbing up against danger, pushing it to the edge. “When a naked guy tells you to do something like that, threatens you if you don’t, that’s when you dial 9-1-1.”

  Karl promised to sleep on it, guessing by her look, he’d be doing it alone. But here they were in her bed, her sleeping in his arms, him lying awake, the trip to Costa Rica rolling through his mind again, seeing her on that white sand.

  Lying there, thinking things through, he was wondering what happens to Miro Knotts when he gives him up to Artie, sure it wouldn’t be pretty.

  She turned toward him, awaking and giving him a smile.

  Filing away the early visit to the hospital, he kissed her forehead, feeling her fever, asking how she was feeling.

  “Like crap. You call yet?” She waited, glassy eyes looking at him. “You know who,” she said, pulling the blanket around her neck.

  “You scare me when you do that.”

  “Don’t do that,” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “Change the subject.”

  “You said sleep on it.”

  “Yeah, now it’s morning.” Looking at the bedside clock, she cursed how late it was.

  “Thing is I hardly slept.”

  “That’s the guilty conscience.”

  “What can the cops do? I mean, a guy asks to see you on a nude beach, offers you money to find somebody. Where’s the crime in that?”

  “He offered you money?”

  “I tried to tell you, but—”

  “Tell me now.”

  “Five grand to point them out.” He didn’t mention it was twenty if he pointed more than a finger, didn’t mention one of them was the same guy he cuffed and dragged to jail in Belltown, didn’t mention he went to see Pinkie. “Artie just wants names. Right up my alley.”

  “The alley they’ll find you in.”

  He put the back of his hand to her forehead.

  “Nice try, cowboy.” She play-punched his chin. “Go make the call.”

  He sat up, fishing for his pants. “You’re sounding more and more like a wife.”

  “Logical?”

  “Comes to things like this, I’ve always had this Lady Luck thing.”

  “She in the john when that Bean guy decked you with the pipe?”

  He said good point.

  “I mean, why you?” PJ asked. “He hear the ‘if the guy’s breathing’ line?”

  “Artie’s being watched, playing it like he goes to church on Sundays. That’s why me.”

  “Why not this Stax guy?”

  The front door opened, and Dara called a hello through the house. PJ shot out of bed, grabbing her bathrobe, waving for Karl to hurry and get dressed, a glimmer of that long-ago time: her dad chasing up the stairs, narrowly missing her and Todd getting into things.

  pledgies

  PJ was going for composure, scooping French roast for a pot of coffee, not sure if she put eight or nine scoops in the grinder. Whatever she was coming down with was getting worse by the minute; the fever high, her eyes burning, her head in a vise.

  Karl offered the plate of muffins he ran out to get from JJ Bean’s, saying the very berry were to die for, everybody in town said so—trying his hand at small talk with Dara, a punk version of her mother.

  “So, the two of you coming down the stairs means I have to call him Uncle Karl?” Dara bit into a muffin, her eyes sparkling, loving the moment, catching her mom in the act with her new boy toy. She said to Karl, yeah they’re good, licking a bit of berry from her lip.

  Cam the purple-haired groper sat on the counter in the corner, the KitchenAid mixer poking at his back. Acting like he wasn’t high, checking out the muffin in his hand, the Visine doing nothing for his doll eyes.

  “You think about it?” Dara knew she had her mom on the ropes, picking another muffin for later.

  “About you coming back?”

  “No, the other thing.”

  “Not now, Dara.” PJ dumped the beans back in the bag and started recounting.

  “Why not now?” Dara took another bite.

  “Because now’s not the time.”

  “The money’s mine though, right?”

  “The money’s for college. We collapse the plan for something else, we get taxed and lose all the interest.”

  “But I’m not going back.”

  “Maybe you’ll change your mind; you’re young . . .”

  “What about him—Karl, right?” Dara said. “He was young once; let’s ask him.” She smiled at Karl, saying again his muffins were good, crunching the paper cup and tossing it on the plate.

  “Alright.” PJ folded her arms and faced Karl. “Dara and Cam are off the Popsicle wrappers. The new thing’s bigger tits.”

  “Mother!” Dara feigned outrage but was loving this.

  “What suits you then, sweater melons?” PJ turned to Cam. “Cam, what do you call them, dear, your little rack of lamb?”

  Cam was tongue-tied.

  “You wanted me to ask, I asked.” PJ switched on the grinder, counted to ten, turned it off and said to Dara, “Honey, there’s nothing wrong with your original equipment. We should all be so perfect.” She shot Cam a look, shaking coffee into the filter.

  “You know your problem, Mother? You can’t accept change—freaked when I dyed my hair, freaked when I got the eagle claws, freaked when I lost my . . .” She looked at Karl, let that trail off.

  “One minute you’re getting a BA, now, you’ve got D cups on the brain. Two-thirds of all boob jobs burst, you know that?

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “Where’s he going to be if one pops?” PJ looked at Cam. “How about it, Cam—you wake up one morning and one of the rack’s strayed to her naval, leaking like a sieve, what do you do, call Popsicle Pete?”

  Cam was sure he saw the veins throb at PJ’s temples. He put the muffin down, trying to hold it together.r />
  “Come on, Cam. We’re out of here.” Dara shoved her muffins in her jacket pockets, tugged him off the counter and steered for the door. “It’s Boobs-dot-com. Screw the college fund.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dara,” PJ said.

  Dara waited for Cam to stuff his feet in his skate shoes by the door, saying to him, “We’ll go online.”

  “Online?” PJ followed them to the door.

  “Yeah. Boobs-dot-com. Bountification of Our Boobs. They’ve got pledgies sponsoring girls like me.”

  “Dara, you’ve lost your mind.”

  “Come on, Cam.” Dara was out the door.

  Tugged down the steps, Cam turned and said to PJ, “Going up from a B is a big thing, believe me, Mrs. Addie.”

  PJ was looking at an idiot, then turned to Karl. “This from the man who collects Popsicle sticks.” She watched them go, Dara tugging Cam, saying she knew this was a waste of time, PJ yelling after them to get their pledgies to go feed some Africans, they want to help people. “Cup size isn’t a world issue for Christ’s sake.”

  Two doors down, Mrs. Bennett raised her head from tending her geraniums. Closing the door, PJ went back in the kitchen, grabbing the coffee pot that was still dripping. The vise was tightening, her temples throbbing. She just wanted to crawl back into bed.

  Karl held up the plate, offering her the last muffin.

  PJ poured a cup and put the pot back. Twisting off the muffin top, she bit into it. She asked him to get an Aspirin from the bathroom.

  He got up. “Sweater melons?”

  She waved it off. “I’ve got her Barbies and her bear with the button eye in a box in the back of my closet.” She dropped the rest of the muffin on the plate. “Now this, Jesus.”

  Karl went for the Aspirin, then held her until the coffee finished dripping. He told her she needed a change of scenery, meaning his place, along with a bowl of his famous chicken soup. His phone rang. The display told him it was Stax, probably wondering how he was coming with those names.

  louder than words