Striking Back

by Mark Nykanen

  “Make him tell you. You have all kinds of leverage with that creep. That’s why he’s here, right? To start owning up to what he did?”

  “But how am I going to know it’s true?”

  “Oh, you’ll know.” Warren chuckled again, this time with real feeling, and left.

  Despite the oppressive heat and humidity, the stone walls looked chillier than ever. The only natural light seeped through three filthy windows high on the wall, narrow and dim as daybreak. The place felt like a dungeon.

  None of these guys is going to show, she told herself, though none had called, either. They’d take their hit on an absence. God knows, she would have. But seconds after dumping the stress logs and control logs on the desk, Jesse burst in the door.

  She noticed his taut face knotted and grim from running the gauntlet, and forced herself to ask if he was okay.

  He settled his wiry frame in a stuffed chair without answering, running his hand nervously over his carefully combed ducktail. He finally nodded, “Yeah. I’m okay,” sounding surprised to find himself here. “How about you?”

  “I didn’t kill those guys.” Gwyn shocked herself with her bluntness. She hadn’t planned on saying this to him, of all people, or to any of the other men, but speaking up made sense as soon as the words flew from her mouth. She needed to set the record straight, and establish firm boundaries. Especially with him. She remembered his threats to kill Frank Owens after they’d listened to Owens beating his five-year-old daughter on the 911 tape. She wondered if Jesse would ever say anything like that again, now that Chuck Simmonds had turned up dead in a dumpster. Kruber and Santini before him. It’s a new ballgame when you make a threat and someone dies, even if he’s not the someone you threatened. Words are cheap till words have to reckon with brute reality. Was he worried about that?

  “Don’t sweat it. I know you didn’t do it.”

  She nodded, felt gratitude that surprised her, but in the ebb of emotion wondered how he could be so certain. Unless he were the killer.

  The door burst open again, and Lupe barreled in, strands of moist curly hair pasted to her glistening face, mouth open, ready to rock; but she spotted Jesse and closed it fast. “Oh, my God,” she said instead.

  “I know,” said Gwyn.

  “They were arresting a woman when I pulled up.”

  “Real short hair, denim jacket?”

  “Dyke. Yeah, that one,” Lupe said. “What’d she do?”

  “Tell you later.”

  Lupe looked at Jesse, but only for a second, because Kaj arrived next. He was twenty-three, but looked even younger, as if childhood were still making claims on his chubby chest and cheeks and the roll of belly fat under his tight Metallica tee. But he’d “exploded,” according to his nineteen-year-old wife, who’d been pregnant till he started beating and kicking her. She was still grieving the loss of their baby. He’d done six months in county jail. If Gwyn had been the judge, she’d have slapped him with a five-year sentence.

  Lupe pulled her aside to say she’d spoken to Hark, told him he could sit in on the group. “He let you know?”

  Gwyn nodded.

  “He’s very convincing,” Lupe said. “Nice too. None of that ‘I’m the big bad doctor bullshit.’ And I contacted every one of these guys to tell them he’d be here.”

  “Good move.” No one likes surprises, not in this business.

  “Thanks for letting me make the call.”

  “Your group today,” Gwyn said.

  The room was filling up fast, which surprised her. Sean came in, red hair, red-faced, breathing heavily from what he’d just encountered.

  Were they throwing questions at the guys in the group? Gwyn asked herself.

  What do you think?

  The door opened for Barr, and she heard a reporter shouting, “What’d you do to your wife?” Gwyn had called Barr three times, left messages. She had plenty to ask him, but he hadn’t called back. If he were smart, maybe he’d sensed her suspicions in her sudden interest, maybe he’d even been wondering when she’d start checking on him. And if he was dull as dust? Maybe she’d get her answers quicker; seeing through an easy lie often comes faster than hearing a difficult truth.

  As she started toward Barr, Sean collapsed on the couch, pushing that red hair out of his face. He looked scared, the way his eyes darted to the door, the unsteady, intrusive world that waited outside. If it were fear, maybe she could use it to make him understand what he’d done to Melissa, his wife of four years. He’d married her in a hurry and told her no one had ever made him feel like she did. That he needed her. That all she needed was him. The hell with her friends, family. Classic signs, right up to the first punch in her face, and the last one that smashed her through the sliding glass door.

  But Gwyn felt an unexpected glimmer of sympathy for Sean, so clearly spooked as he looked again at the door.

  She bent over Barr, who sat on a folding chair near the back, as he had last week. He didn’t look up to acknowledge her, so she found herself speaking down to his hat.

  “I left messages for you. Did you get them?”

  “No. I didn’t check.”

  He’s lying, she thought. “I want to talk to you after group.”

  The hat moved. A nod? A “no?” Who knows? If she had to, she’d bring in his P.O. to sort out the stories.

  Hark had slipped in while she was talking to Barr. The good doctor looked freshly shaved and showered after his afternoon lecture on the Violence Index. She’d called up the DI last night on the Web once he’d fallen asleep, but had to give up after the first few questions, each one the head of a hammer pounding home the nail of a nightmare.

  Hark’s couch mate, Ortiz—no first name, he’d insisted—had also been sent here for punching out his wife. He sat with his arms crossed, gnawing on the dark mustache hairs that he’d grown down over his upper lip in what she guessed was a failed attempt to hide the gap of his missing front teeth.

  As she returned to her desk, she missed the entry of a burly man in a black hoodie who grabbed another folding chair and set it down not far from Barr. The guy nodded at the men who bothered to look. Evidently, a new face meant little to them after making their way through the mob outside.

  Lupe, however, nudged her, drew her attention to Hoodie. “The new one? You do his intake?”

  Gwyn looked over and shook her head. “Not him. Whoever he is, he goes.”

  Lupe walked up to him. Hoodie smiled agreeably, volunteering that Judge Mallory had sent him over. Gwyn eavesdropped from ten feet away.

  “Who’s your P.O.?” Lupe said.

  “Steve Jacobs. Down on Larchmont.” Real P.O. Real location. But the client was a phony.

  Gwyn was about to head over when Lupe, dancing one step faster, said, “Who did your intake?”

  Hoodie looked around, like the answer might be stamped on the stone rectangles that made up the nearest wall.

  “I.D.?” Lupe said, sounding finished with him.

  Hoodie stood up, half a head taller than Lupe.

  Gwyn read the aggro attitude and was at her co-leader’s side in seconds. “Take off your glasses,” Gwyn said, “and pull that hood down.”

  “What? I need them to see.”

  But the hood came down, and Gwyn placed him by Blanche’s side with a shoulder-mounted camera. “Get out,” she said, “or I’ll have you arrested.”

  He laughed. “You think you’re going to get a cop to deal with me with all the shit going down around you?”

  Gwyn offered her own smile. “Okay, tell you what I’m going to do if you don’t leave by the time I count to three.” It was like talking to a four-year-old. “I’m going to tell these guys who you are,” voice rising, drawing the attention of the group. “And then I’m going to tell them that the bulge in your pocket isn’t your manhood, it’s a camera or a tape recorder and that you’re here to violate their privacy, and then I’m going to turn my back.”

  Hoodie left in a hurry, brushing past Jim in th
e doorway, a tall, gangly guy who’d slapped his wife hard enough to make her cheek swell, and then immediately begged her forgiveness. But she’d been savvy enough to seek help anyway, and to make his return to their home contingent on his faithful attendance here. Jim served as a reminder that some guys wanted nothing more than to change, and even with all of Gwyn’s growing doubts about these groups, a young man like him still sparked real hope in her.

  So did Hap, who scampered in a few seconds later. He stuttered badly, but with great patience she’d learned that he’d caught his wife kissing his cousin at a family reunion. Enraged, and completely incapable of coherent speech, he’d screamed and shoved her hard enough to knock her down, and had to be forcibly restrained by family members from taking a stick to his cousin. Understandably, he volunteered little in group, but he had those “open eyes” Lupe liked.

  “Let’s get started,” Gwyn said to her co-leader.

  Lupe walked to the top of the U that was bracketed by the couches, armchairs, men. Three guys hadn’t shown. The only surprise for Gwyn was that more of them weren’t missing.

  During her confrontation with the cameraman, Ryder and Neal had come in together. She didn’t know if they’d been wife-beating buddies before the group, or if having a common interest had sparked a more recent friendship. Both of them were lean as sprinters, with the raw ranginess that speaks of hard-strap muscles and inner madness. Nothing Gwyn could point to specifically, but she felt it at a glance, registering their resemblance to John Appleton.

  They squeezed in between Hark and Ortiz. Crowded couch.

  Frank Owens hadn’t shown. But as she picked up a pen to dock him for one of his two unexcused absences for the year, he trudged in—thick trunk, thick legs, thick skull, eyes no brighter than a couple of burned out headlights in an old Buick. He had his hands jammed in his jeans and the smirk of a fifteen-year-old on his face.

  Barr looked up, eyes following Frank to the other couch. Frank sat next to Dexter X, who had told Gwyn during his intake that he was built like a Masai warrior. “Want to see?” he’d said in all salaciousness. She’d passed, told him to get back in his chair.

  Dexter X shifted away from Frank. It could have been genuine disgust, or tit for tat. Every comfortable seat had been taken except for the one next to the group’s lone black man.

  “We’ll get the money in a second,” Lupe announced, “but first, how about some logs? I think I’ve only got eight up here.”

  Ryder came forward with his. Sean, too.

  “That all?” Lupe said. “I’m still missing one.”

  No response, and then Frank Owens jumped right in. “Not saying much, are you Sanders?”

  Lupe wheeled on him. “You going to try your luck again this week? You got short-term memory loss or something?”

  Frank shrugged his meaty shoulders, but not like a man with nothing to say. Gwyn saw that right away. More like a boxer warming up in his corner.

  Hark stared at him, took notes without looking down.

  Frank must have noticed. “Who’s he?”

  “We’ll review any questions you have about last week’s logs when we break into two groups.” Lupe had ignored Frank, but he didn’t give up.

  “I said, ‘Who’s he?’”

  Gwyn sensed serious trouble. More than those shoulders were stirring. She couldn’t read what Owens was up to, but this wasn’t the ’tude of a man who’d been humbled. This was a man of below-average intelligence who’d spent a week stewing over his humiliation, deciding he’d been wronged and waiting to set it to rights. An emotional bottleneck about to burst.

  “You’re speaking out of turn, so you want to talk, you raise your hand.” Lupe either didn’t sense the danger or didn’t care.

  Frank shot his hand straight up, holding it at the elbow in a goof on a kid in a classroom. “Me-me,” he mouthed, getting one of his highly-prized cheap laughs from Ryder. Not much of one, but Frank never needed a whole lot of encouragement.

  Lupe turned from him, told the group they’d be discussing core beliefs tonight. “We’ll be talking about what they are, give some examples, and doing a lot of work with that. No videos or DVDs. I want to see if you can identify some of your own core beliefs.” She pointed to Frank, who was still waving his hand in the air. “Yes?”

  “He the shrink?”

  “This is Doctor Howard Harken. I told you about him.” She lifted her eyes to the rest of the group. “Doctor Harken is the psychiatrist who’s going to be with us for the next two weeks.”

  Hark gave the group a nod. Most of them didn’t bother looking over for more than a second, and only Frank Owens stared, as if to size him up. Then he shot his hand back into the air.

  Lupe recognized him again.

  “I want to know if you’re running the show tonight ’cause she’s . . . ”—he shot a look at Gwyn; you wouldn’t call it kind—“. . . about to get busted for killing Kruber and those other guys. And I want –”

  “We switch off running the group. Nothing unusual in that. It’s my turn.”

  “What about it, Sanders?” Frank pointed to Gwyn, went on as if he’d never heard Lupe. “You sitting over there picking out your next kill?”

  Again Gwyn thought of a boxer in his corner. She realized it was time to issue her denial, pretty much what she’d said to Jesse. She stood, and Owens stood, too, as if she’d provoked him. He stared at her, never blinking, an unnerving emptiness in his eyes.

  “Frank, sit down,” Lupe ordered.

  Frank Owens didn’t even look at her. He walked over to Gwyn, grabbed her loose-fitting top, strangled the fabric with his fist and punched her right in the face. The blow caught her on the bone right below the left eye. Stunningly painful, but nothing felt broken, not in that first instant of assessment. All of this coming to her as she squirmed and tried to yank away, expecting more, but Lupe executed a side kick that buckled Owens’ knee inward. The impact sounded like a walnut cracking, cartilage and ligament and bone colliding and twisting, at grinding odds with the fleshy splat of his fist when it had landed on Gwyn’s face.

  Lupe immediately issued a one-two-three punch combination to his ribs; and when Owens, staggering now on one leg, gripped his damaged knee, she spotted an opening and landed another kick right on his fleshy mouth with the side of her foot, then spun around, eyes flaring, hands still fisted, to see if anyone else in the group had any ideas.

  They did. Kaj and Sean were up, so was Barr. Dexter X, sitting back till now, taking it all in with a bemused expression, rose quickly, maybe because he felt, once again, his blackness in the wrong room at the wrong time. Ryder and Neal sprung from the couch in tandem. Everyone up, everyone bristling.

  Hark rushed to Gwyn, caught her as her legs buckled, and was easing her back into the chair behind the desk when Jesse, acting on his threat against Frank Owens, grabbed him from behind, spun him around, and popped him in the face before kicking him savagely in the crotch.

  As Lupe said later, Jesse appeared “deranged,” even compared to Frank.

  It looked as if this might be the end of it, a couple of brief, violent flashes of fury with no more than a few puffs of smoke to drift away. And for a few seconds the stillness held, like the air itself were sealed tight as building bricks, strong enough to bind them all. Then all restraint tumbled away as Owens collapsed to the floor and brushed his face against Dexter X’s leg, smearing the black man’s tan pants with blood.

  “What the fuck?” Dexter X shouted. He punched Owens twice in the head. Frank’s eyes widened in pain and panic and he tried to crawl away.

  Sean grabbed Jesse. Jesse shook him off, yelled “Fuck you,” and the budding chaos, barely controlled till now, blew wide open. Resentments nursed sullenly over a brushed shoulder during a break, or a sideways glance held a second too long, came to furious life.

  Neal was smashed into a sofa—Gwyn didn’t see by whom—and spilled on to the floor right between his buddy, Ryder, and Kaj. Neal grabbed Kaj’s leg, and whe
n Kaj tried to pound him loose, Ryder brought a folding chair down on his back, stunning him but leaving him standing to lunge after his attacker.

  Jesse raced for the door, but not to escape. He threw the lock and jammed a huge armchair up against it so fast that he’d blocked it before Gwyn could yell at Hark to stop him. The rawboned batterer stared at her across the room through the flurry of bodies.

  Hark held the ground in front of Gwyn long enough to fend off a barroom swing from Sean, who looked loopy and bled above his right eye. When Sean tried again, Hark landed a punch that sounded like batter thrown on a breadboard.

  Hark shook his hand as if he’d hurt it.

  Lupe tried separating Ortiz and Dexter X, who were squaring off to Gwyn’s right, but when they both turned on her, she kicked Ortiz in the midsection and spun away from Dexter X, who’d tried to circle her from behind. She dashed toward the barricaded door, but Neal blindsided her with a vicious push that sent her flying over an upturned couch.

  “You like it, bitch? You like it?” Neal screamed.

  Gwyn heard rage in his voice, had heard it before, but not for a long time.

  She hauled herself up from the chair as Lupe rose from the floor, wincing with sudden pain. Innocent-looking Kaj, his round face lit up and hideous as a jack-o-lantern, circled to Lupe’s left looking for an opening as Neal moved to her right.

  “Hark,” Gwyn cried, pointing to Lupe, but Barr jumped in front of her. His narrow lips moved—Gwyn couldn’t hear him—and Kaj backed away immediately. Barr didn’t look feeble anymore. His scarred hands were up, ready to fight, and his body had straightened.

  Hark grabbed the distracted Kaj and slammed him into the stone wall. The impact forced him to his knees, and he crumpled to the floor holding his skull.

  Barr backed up with Lupe to the door. She climbed over the stuffed chair wedging it closed.

  Jesse moved in on Gwyn. “You’re all alone,” he said.

  She thought he intended to protect her, but then she saw him staring at her body and knew better.