Raw Deal

by Les Standiford

  Deal turned to stare at Tommy, who in fact did seem to be babbling along. In all the time he’d been living in the fourplex he hadn’t strung more than a few words together at a time. Isabel had begun to outstrip him, in fact.

  “I wouldn’t rule out tissue trauma entirely, of course,” Goodwin continued.

  “Tommy?” Deal shook his head, trying to get Goodwin’s drift. “You’re saying Tommy’s…” Deal broke off, picturing Driscoll there in the shadows, whirling his finger around his ear, rolling his eyes and making cuckoo noises.

  Goodwin frowned. “Tommy is sick, yes indeed. Do I think his problems are psychological, yes again.” She glanced in through the windows. Tommy’s face had twisted up once more. He clutched the arms of his chair and began to toss his head back and forth.

  “He’s worked out a fairly vivid persecution scenario, Mr. Deal. He feels a great need to be punished. It’s a bit early to say, but it’s all in the paranoiac vein.” She glanced at him. “Apparently, he has conflated your tragedy with his own need for punishment, which only exacerbates his feelings.”

  Deal shook his head.

  “He’s taken credit for any number of tragedies,” Goodwin continued. “The assassinations of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, the bombing at Lockerbie.” She raised her eyebrows, her gaze on Tommy now. “He was describing the invasion of a Caribbean country when I left to bring you in.” She turned to Deal with the hint of a smile on her face. “You seem to find this hard to digest, Mr. Deal.”

  “I can’t,” Deal said, stunned. Bad enough to think of Tommy barely able to cope, withstanding all the “look at the dufus” shit he’d have to take from the world, but to think that he had all these demons raging inside him as well? Deal felt a twinge of anguish, another of shame. Good old Tommy. Whistle a tune, Tommy. Deal had been as bad as anyone else, attributing happiness to this fractured man just because he had a job and a roof over his head.

  “I can’t digest it,” he repeated. He turned to the doctor, choosing his words carefully. “About my house…” He broke off, tried again. “You said he felt guilty about what happened…” He paused again. “To Janice and all.”

  Goodwin nodded, waiting. She showed no reaction.

  I’m just a bug, Deal thought. A bug with a voice whose wife got scorched. He bit back his anger and continued. “Did Tommy say he’d done something…”

  “Start the fire, you mean?” Goodwin shook her head. “No, Mr. Deal. It’s not that he claims to have done all these things, you see. He simply believes them to be his fault somehow.”

  “I don’t follow you, Doctor.”

  “That’s why it’s so interesting,” Goodwin repeated. “Most people limit the scope of the sins they take on to personal matters, ‘I’ve ruined the lives of my wife, my father, my family,’ that sort of thing. Tommy seems to have taken on the sins of an entire nation.”

  She leaned forward, flipped a switch on a console beneath the one-way window. “Let’s just have a listen, shall we?”

  Tommy’s voice drifted eerily into the room then, the same childlike tones Deal was familiar with, but the words clearly formed now, the sentences halting but coherent, and cohesive, and somehow impossible:

  “…good guy, Charley. He was coming up out of the water onto the beach. I’m thinking, hurry, Charley. Hurry into the jungle. And the other guys, a dozen guys, they’re still in there, in the ALC, picking up their gear.” Tommy’s face twisted.

  “Go on, Tommy” came the soothing voice of the therapist.

  After a moment, he found his voice. “He just flew apart,” Tommy said. “Charley. Like blew up. Never saw that. A tank round, I don’t know. Hit him and he blew up. A ball of fire where he was a second before. I saw his arms, both of them flying through the air, that’s all. The noise. The noise was awful. Because the planes were coming then. Shooting. They all blew up. All of them. They said captured, but it didn’t happen. Every one of them, blown up. In pieces. In the water.” He clutched the rails of the chair and gave a wail that seemed to shake the glass between them.

  The therapist in the room dropped her pad and jumped up to soothe Tommy, who was thrashing in his chair. He was trying to get up, but Deal saw them now, for the first time, thin rubber straps across his chest, others at his knees. The restraints held him down, but his arm snapped out, catching the therapist, sending her flying over a coffee table.

  Dr. Goodwin shoved past Deal, found a key at a ring on her belt, unlocked a door into the observation room. She jerked it open, slammed the door shut behind her before Deal could move. Tommy was still thrashing in his chair, threatening to send it toppling. Dr. Goodwin urged her colleague up, urged her toward Tommy’s flailing arm. They were all struggling like people caught in an awful windy storm.

  Goodwin reached into the pocket of her lab coat, pulled out a hypodermic syringe, uncapped it with her teeth, and jammed it into Tommy’s flesh. She injected the contents and pulled the needle out, tossed it aside. The two women held on grimly as Tommy’s movements became gradually less violent, then calmed altogether. Deal watched it all, stunned. Tommy spouting Back to Bataan fantasies, suave and sophisticated Dr. Goodwin charging in there to sedate him, as practiced as a keeper out of The Snake Pit. He felt as if he were watching some impossible movie on a giant-screen TV.

  He sagged into a chair behind him, watching dumbly as Dr. Goodwin checked Tommy’s pulse and respiration, said something to her colleague, then turned and came back through the passage door to where he sat.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She glanced back through the window. Her colleague was hooking up a blood pressure monitor to Tommy’s arm. “He’ll be all right.” She straightened her coat. “I might have seen that coming. Should’ve seen it.” She gave Deal a severe look, as if it had been his fault she’d been in there gabbing.

  Deal took a deep breath, glanced at Tommy, who seemed to be sleeping blissfully now. He looked like a guy who’d come home from the factory, crashed in the middle of Cheers.

  Deal found himself shaking his head again. “Where does he get all that stuff,” he wondered aloud.

  Goodwin sat down heavily in a chair beside him. He’d been talking to himself, but she seemed to take him seriously. She sat quietly for a moment, then turned to him. “It’s our culture, Mr. Deal. It’s all around us. You don’t like your president, you shoot him. A man offends you because of his skin color, you beat him to death.” She gave him a wan smile. “‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer…’” She broke off, sat back in her chair. “It’s a wonder more of us don’t buckle under the weight.”

  She’d been quoting Yeats. One of the few poems he’d understood, back in the days of literature class. College. Another life, of course. Another dimension. The one where life made sense and poems didn’t. Deal felt himself revising his opinion of the doctor yet again.

  “What can you do for him?” Deal said.

  Dr. Goodwin gave him a look. “Help him,” she said firmly. “It will take time. But we will help him.”

  Deal nodded. He would have to ask the question again now. He hated himself for it, but he thought of Janice, and of Driscoll and his cold eye, and so he asked again. “Could he be dangerous? Could he do something?”

  “To himself?” Goodwin said. She paused. “It’s quite possible.” She gave Deal a thoughtful look. “To others? It’s very doubtful. He blames himself for things, Mr. Deal. Not other people.”

  Deal glanced back through the heavy glass. Tommy stirred in his sleep, licked his lips, formed a childish smile on his face. Dreaming, Deal thought. Back to being good old Tommy, having a little lie-down, and a happy dream.

  Deal found himself wondering what Dr. Goodwin had shot him up with, and, momentarily, if she might be willing to share a little of her stash. He could use a couple weeks of sugarplums and toy soldiers himself. Then he sighed, shook himself, and got up to go.

  Chapter 25

  Driscoll
piloted the white Ford down US 1, past the University of Miami, where the elevated Metrorail train whisked past him going the other way. Something he’d have to take a ride on, one of these days. Something a retired old fart should be doing.

  He drove on through South Miami, then swung west, out Kendall Drive, past the Dadeland Shopping Mall, its lots bursting at 2:00 p.m., a Thursday, middle of a recession, or so they said.

  Apparently no one had told the throngs piling into the mall. He shook his head, pulling around a long line waiting to turn into the parking lots. Driscoll had never been to Dadeland, not to shop, that is. He’d had a few calls there, once had to chase a purse snatcher through an indoor fountain, ruin a good pair of shoes, but he couldn’t imagine shopping there. The immensity of the place overloaded his circuits, made him sleepy. Besides, all those things to buy, how could you ever choose?

  Some people liked that, lots of glitter, lots of action. Driscoll preferred quiet and grubby. When he needed something, he went to Gabby’s, an outlet store in West Miami, a place that sold stock overruns and discontinued items of every stripe: clothes, small appliances, even canned goods. You had to be careful the pants you bought had the pockets sewn in, check the expiration date on the canned hams, but it was quiet and dimly lit, and the shoppers pawed silently through the bins like numbed survivors of disaster.

  On top of that, the prices were right. He’d been going to Gabby’s for years, had even outfitted the new apartment with things from there, including the first piece of art he’d ever bought: a big painting of a zebra running across a plain, which he had hung over his sofa, first thing you saw when you walked in, $49.95, frame included.

  He liked the zebra painting a lot, even if the animal seemed a bit too big, too sleek, too graceful-looking when you really studied it. That was one thing about living alone. If Marie were still around, he’d have had to settle for a seascape or still life or something. At the very least, he’d have had to hear about how his zebra looked like a horse with stripes, bunch of shit like that.

  Now, with her in California, living with her sister, he could do exactly as he pleased, she could too. He’d given her all the furniture—good riddance to a lot of floral-printed rubbish—and he had let her sell the house and keep the equity. She’d also taken the good car, a three-year-old Chevy wagon. Never mind it was Marie leaving him. He’d kept the Taurus—long since stolen—his books, his collection of 78s, and his less than glorious pension fund: Sayonara, Marie, it was a great twenty-eight years and write if you get work.

  He hung a left in front of a wall of oncoming traffic—more people headed for Dadeland, he supposed—ignoring the blasts of horns behind him as he bounced across the low storm curb and entered the long curving driveway of Presbyterian Hospital. Thirty years on the force, catch you later, guys. Twenty-eight years with Marie, ciao baybee. A lot of change when you thought about it. And, none of it having been his idea in the first place, he did his best not to think about it.

  He took it easy up the drive, a half-mile or more, enjoying the look of the place, more like a Venetian palace than a hospital, big rust-colored towers and clay-tiled roofs poking up into the blue sky, a sizable pond off to the right surrounded by rangy malaeluca trees and an exercise path that was full of people doing just that: young women jogging in spandex, old codgers walking determinedly, a stroke victim struggling along in a walker.

  It made Driscoll tired just looking at it. He tried to imagine jogging, getting himself up in a pair of bike pants (as if they made them that big), trailing along after one of those skinny butts. He imagined the engine of his body, all the chambers getting the news. Organs: “Jesus Christ, what’s going on?” Brain: “Batten down the hatches, men, lardass is jogging!”

  He could see it, every blood vessel in his body, rigid as old PVC tubing, suddenly sloughing off God knows what kind of crud in the surge created by actual exercise. All that stuff would slosh up to his heart, if he was lucky he’d get in half a lap around the pond before he keeled over, be dead before they could gurney him the hundred yards to the emergency entrance.

  Still, he needed to make some kind of effort at regrouping, didn’t he? He’d made exactly zilch progress on his big postretirement plan of opening his own investigative agency. He’d reneged on his promise to himself to move out to a place near the beach. He’d seen exactly one Manatees game with the season pass the guys had given him at his going-away party. Pitiful.

  He’d seen it in plenty of ex-cops before him, the life-implodes-upon-you syndrome: All those big talkers, full of plans, “just wait ’til I’m out of this place, I’m going fishing, hunting, golfing every fucking day…” and three years later they’re sitting at home alone, wife long gone, sick of being around a guy so batshit crazy he can’t get out of his pajamas before it’s time to go back to bed, sitting there alone at the kitchen table with a bottle of store-brand booze, and forget the ice—shit, forget the glass—spinning the old .38 around in circles on the Formica, waiting to see if it comes up pointing at you…

  Driscoll wiped at a sheen of sweat on his face, guided the Ford up to the curb near the entrance, killed the motor, and got out. So maybe that was why he was running around, poking his nose into Deal’s business, trying to make something where there really wasn’t anything, because he could look down the barrel of the future and see his mouth closing around the opposite end. Elementary, my dear Driscoll, elementary.

  “’Scuse me?”

  The voice brought Driscoll out of his reverie. He realized he was already at the entryway of the building. The rent-a-cop who patrolled the front was staring at him as if he’d said something. Driscoll wondered if he’d been muttering to himself as he walked.

  “Nothing,” Driscoll said. He flashed a shield, a joke badge that said HONORARY MIAMI VICE COP—SONNY CROCKETT, CHIEF if you were given the time to read it, another going-away present from the gang. “The car okay there?”

  “Sure,” the rent-a-cop said. Even if he had any doubts about the badge, one look at the white Ford, another at Driscoll himself, the rent-a-cop put them aside.

  It was the same at the reception desk, again with the records clerk. “Marielena Marquez,” the clerk repeated after a glance at the badge, already punching the name into her computer. She was in her twenties, a perky young woman with dark, frizzed-up hair and an ingenuous smile, like maybe she hadn’t been fried one bit poking around in computer records from nine to five, five days a week. Watching her pound the keys, the color high in her cheeks, her tongue poking out of her frosty lips, Driscoll found himself wishing he were twenty years younger.

  “Lots of Marquezes,” she said. “Would you believe it?” She glanced at him, smiling. Driscoll found himself with an irrational urge to weep. It was just a young woman being nice to him. Lord, he would have to get a grip.

  She was back to her screen before he had thought of anything to say. “Here it is,” she said cheerily. “Marquez, Marielena.”

  She smiled and swung the monitor around so he could see. She pointed. “Checked out ten days ago, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, copayment by check, missed an appointment with therapy last week.”

  Driscoll nodded his thanks. “I don’t see an address there,” he said.

  She nodded, spun the monitor back, tapped some keys, squinted at the screen, hit another key. A printer sprang to life, whined a couple lines of type, chinked out a sheet of paper that the clerk handed to him with her open smile. “What else?” she said, ready to please.

  Driscoll had to smile. He stood, folded the address away, patted her on the shoulder. “Sweetie, if you only knew,” he said.

  She stared at him. For a moment he thought he’d offended her.

  “And thanks,” he added, going out. He felt her gaze on him all the way to the door.

  ***

  He had the computer printout in one hand, the wheel of the Ford in the other, was poking along halfway down the block checking house numbers before it hit him. “Jesus Christ,”
he said, gliding the Ford to a stop.

  He got out, walked around the front of the car, went across the sidewalk, stopped at a little strip of raggedy grass. He stared out over the faded police ribbon at the place where a house had once been. A fairly substantial house, to judge by the size of the property, and by what was left of the foundations. A fairly impressive house, to judge by its neighbors. But why hadn’t he thought to check the address that clerk had given him, anyway? Some cop. He’d driven all the way back across the city, mooning about some girl thirty years his junior, thinking he was going to Ms. Marquez’s house, to find himself staring at the ruins of the bombed-out museum.

  He ducked under the plastic ribbon, walked closer. A broad stone entryway led up five steps into nothingness. A few feet away, another set of steps led down into what had once been a basement. A basement. That was a rarity in Miami, he thought.

  He glanced around. This side of the street seemed to be elevated. Most likely he was standing on a coral ridge, an ancient deposit of shells and sea life, one of many that crisscrossed this city where everything had once been under water. The ridges, seldom more than a few feet high, gave the landscape what little variation there was.

  The rear of the property was a tangle of ficus and underbrush that hid the waters of Biscayne Bay not more than a hundred yards away. Once the water had covered the spot where he stood, had covered most of Florida, for that matter. He was tempted to think of that as a better time, nothing but sun and tide—but even then there had been little fish and big fish, he thought.

  He walked around the basement and found some shade under a big poinciana tree. Or what was left of one. The side of the tree away from the building still had most of its limbs. The other half had been sheared away by the force of the blast. He caught a glimpse of something shining in the dirt at his feet, bent down to check.