The Four-Night Run

by William Lashner

  “Not tonight,” said Surwin. “You recognize this place, Scrbacek?”

  Scrbacek looked around and shook his head. “Should I?”

  “I expect you were here once, just to case it out, but I’m not surprised you don’t remember it. It’s not very memorable without the blood and shattered brain on the walls, or the chalk outline of a figure drawn on the asphalt, but still I thought this an important stop on our tour. This is where your client beat the life out of Peter Malloy.”

  Scrbacek didn’t say anything, just kicked at the wet blackness at his feet.

  “Malloy’s wife is doing as well as could be expected, in case you’re interested,” said Surwin. “I suppose she doesn’t have much choice but to keep going, what with four daughters. I talk to her regularly, and the sadness is overwhelming. It seems to run in a current over the wires, from her house to my office, bleeding through the phone into my gut. She still asks one question over and over again: Why? I don’t have an answer.”

  Scrbacek turned to stare at Surwin. “That was why I was able to get Breest off.”

  “I gave the jury the best motive I had.”

  “But it wasn’t the right one. The crap about Malloy trying to clean up the labor union never rang true.”

  “You have a better one?”

  “Not yet,” said Scrbacek. “But it’s out there. You shouldn’t have brought the case before you found it.”

  “I had the DNA. I had the fingerprint.”

  “But it wasn’t enough, was it? You’ve been giving me nothing but shit for winning my client an acquittal—the underlying theme of the whole night has been ‘See what you’ve done, asshole’—but you were the prosecutor who lost the case. You were the prosecutor without all the answers. You were the man who was so certain about everything but couldn’t prove out his case. All I did was widen the hole in your proof and lead my client through it as the Sixth Amendment requires.”

  “Is that what the Sixth Amendment requires, that you spread lies and falsehoods to get a criminal off?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s easy enough to sit back in the County Prosecutor’s Office with an untroubled heart because you decide who to investigate, who to indict, who to try to kill. But it’s not so simple on the other side of the bar. Not everyone you accuse is guilty. Not everyone you want to kill deserves to die. Someone has to represent the human being in the dock.”

  “But it wasn’t Amber Grace this time, was it?” said Surwin. “This time you were representing Caleb Breest.”

  “You think I should stand in judgment of my client?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think I have a responsibility to society beyond doing whatever the hell I can to get my client off?”

  “As an officer of the court, you have a responsibility to see justice done.”

  “My old law professor would disagree,” said Scrbacek. “He would say that since we are merely human, we can’t know what true justice would really entail. He would say that only God can make that determination. All we can do is perform our roles and hope for the best. I did my job. If you have a problem with what happened in that courtroom, look in the mirror.”

  “But what happened wasn’t justice—you know it as well as I do—and leaving the determination to a higher authority is a cop-out. Do you know what medicine Caleb Breest takes for his oversize heart? Digitoxin, nitroglycerin, and Lasix. Digitoxin keeps his heart beating like a machine, nitroglycerin is an explosive, and Lasix is what they give to racehorses to make them run faster. Caleb Breest is an inhuman predator and you were his knight-errant.”

  Surwin backed up, took a deep breath, and turned away, as if he couldn’t bear to look at Scrbacek.

  “Get in the car,” he said. “I have one more place to show you.”

  “I could take you to Dirty Dirk’s,” said Surwin. “Show you your client in his natural cesspool, but I don’t suppose that would be the healthiest spot for you to show your face. So I’m taking you somewhere else instead.”

  “Dirk is in league with the guys who are after me,” said Scrbacek. “But what I still can’t figure is why the hell they want me dead in the first place.”

  “It’s not too hard to puzzle out.”

  Scrbacek didn’t say anything, just turned his head and stared at Surwin.

  “We went into your office after the fire. All your files had been burned beyond recognition.”

  “My file cabinets were supposed to be fireproof.”

  “They forced the locks, pulled out the drawers, spread a homemade napalm over everything. They did the same to your computers. There wasn’t a piece of data remaining in your whole building. And they would have burned the files even if the car bomb had killed you as planned. They need you dead, because in the course of your representation of Caleb Breest you learned something they can’t afford to have revealed. There’s something going down in Crapstown, and you know what it is.”

  “But I don’t know anything. They’re wrong.”

  “They’re not wrong. You learned something—you just don’t know its importance yet. What you need to do is tell me everything you learned while representing Breest, and we’ll figure it out together.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “They’re trying to kill you, Scrbacek.”

  “But I don’t know who they are. And I won’t violate the attorney-client privilege just because you have a theory.”

  Surwin sighed with disgust. “Only conversations between you and your client are covered by privilege. From what I understand, most of your meetings were with Joey Torresdale.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Anything Torresdale told you is fair game.”

  “Don’t you think I’m in enough trouble?”

  “I’m trying to help here, Scrbacek, but you need to throw me a bone.”

  Surwin pulled the car to a stop at the edge of a seedy business district, with a dusty old grocery, a fishmonger’s storefront, a clothier with yellow and brown suits in the window. In front of the stores was a shuttered newspaper shack, and from behind it came a woman, ratty and thin, hunched over, black scraps of wet cloth hanging from her limbs.

  She stepped closer to the car and swayed on her heels. “Are you two boys looking for—?”

  Surwin pulled out his credentials and flashed his badge. The woman stepped back unsteadily and then slinked behind the shack.

  Surwin pointed to a row of windows on the second floor above the clothier. Painted across two of the windows were the words:

  TRENT FALLOW INVESTIGATIONS

  “Trent Fallow, PI,” said Surwin. “That’s his office and, as best we can tell, his living space, though it’s not zoned residential.”

  Scrbacek looked up at the filthy office windows. “Doesn’t say much for his lifestyle.”

  “He was your investigator on the Breest case.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How’d you meet?”

  “Joey Torresdale introduced us one night at Dirty Dirk’s. Why?”

  “Fallow is one of Breest’s primary errand boys. Those pictures from the whorehouse sent to powerful high rollers? It’s Fallow who sends them and works out the payment. The young kids who fill the secret brothels? It’s Trent Fallow who hangs out at the bus stations and kiddie parks, recruiting the loners who wander free. Word is, if there’s a scut job that Breest needs doing on the sly, he sends Fallow. What did you and Fallow talk about?”

  “When we first met, it was just small talk. You know, ‘Hi, how you doing? Let me buy you a drink.’”

  “And then what?”

  Scrbacek shook his head. “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean you can’t?”

  “Why do you care, anyway?”

  “Because he’s just the kind of low-life, low-level fixer who ends up knowing more than he should about everything. And then ends up dead. I’ve been sort of expecting him to bite the dust for a wh
ile now, but it turns out that it’s you, not him, who’s getting chased all through Crapstown. He might be the connection.”

  “I don’t see how,” said Scrbacek.

  “That’s because you’re not looking.”

  Scrbacek lowered his head and closed one eye in thought. Aboud had told him Fallow was looking for him. He had thought the PI was just after the reward, like everyone else in Crapstown. But maybe it was something else. He peered again at the windows, thought about their meager interactions. “Son of a bitch.”

  “What?”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “What’s going on, Scrbacek?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Tell me what you think.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What the hell do you mean, you can’t?”

  “First, because I honestly don’t know anything yet. And second, because I can’t tell you anything he told me. Half our conversations were about his work on the Breest case, which makes it attorney work product. I’m not allowed to disclose that.”

  “And the other half?”

  “Well, I can’t reveal anything about those discussions either.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because it turns out that Trent Fallow, that son of a bitch, is a client of mine, too.”

  36

  TRENT FALLOW, PI, CONT’D.

  Finished with his rounds, Trent Fallow, PI, now heads home to reap the fruits of his sowing. His answering machine, he hopes, is full of answers. It would have been better, on a day like this, to have a cell phone bought cheap from Freaky Freddie, but at forty bucks a month for service, fuggetaboutit. It’s cheaper to pay to hijack a line off the fish store downstairs. Zero a month. Now that is a calling plan he can live with.

  The street outside his office building is deserted, except for the girl who stations herself nightly outside Frankie’s shed, thin and skanky, with her hair lying flat and greasy on her pimply shoulders. It’s not the best or most energetic spot to hustle, the desultory corner outside Trent Fallow’s office, but then she’s not the best or most energetic whore. Though she does have, as Fallow has discovered on many a lazy night, a certain pleasant passivity and an indisputable talent with her tongue. As he wheezes toward his building, she edges toward him, her black rags still soaked from the rain. He waves her away. He’s got work to do, does Trent Fallow, PI. There’s no time to mess about with that mess of bones.

  Slowly, and with great effort, he pushes his bulk up the stairs and into his office.

  It’s not much, his office, just a room with a desk, a phone, file cabinets, and a large map of the city taped to the wall. Off to the side sits a storage room with a bed and a heating plate, and off the storage room sits a small bathroom with a toilet that overflows once a week and a sink in which he washes out his T-shirts and sponges himself every other morning or so. Hygiene, Trent Fallow, PI, has found, is overrated. Even before he checks his machine, he strips off his jacket, drops his pants, and plops onto the toilet, groaning out loud like a gut-shot bear. It streams out soft and burning. A stress shot. What could he expect? And the stink, oh, the stink. He can measure his level of stress from the stink, and this, oh my, this is off the scale. What is he going to do? What the hell is he going to do? What he is going to do is wipe his ass until it is raw and then check his machine.

  There are six messages. He readies a pen and pad before he presses the button. All six messages tell him the same story. Scrbacek was in the Marina District, the cops came flying in, shots were fired, the only corpse was a dog. Scrbacek, that son of a bitch, got away. Trent Fallow, PI, listens with dread, relieved that no one else has yet found the lawyer, that he still has a hero’s shot to save his own life and collect the bounty, but scared, too, terrified that if everything goes right he’ll have to face all by his lonesome Scrbacek and that girl, that stone-cold girl.

  Trent Fallow, PI, sits at his desk, waiting for the phone to ring. One hour. Two hours. He falls asleep in the chair, his fitful dreams full of sex and violence, sexy violence, violent sex, and wakes with a start, sweating and shivering, wakes to silence. Someone has to have seen something. Someone has to have a lead on where Scrbacek is now. Someone. He tells himself to calm down, but he can’t stop shivering. He’s too tense, he’s too scared, he’s useless. He needs something to regain his nerve.

  He finds her at her usual spot, under the streetlamp beside the shuttered newspaper shack. She stands before him, her eyes dark sockets, her collarbone protruding.

  “Five dollars,” he says.

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Now you’re being silly.”

  “Get lost, then, you cheap smelly bastard.”

  “And who am I bidding against, Mia?” he says, waving his arm to take in the whole of the empty street.

  “I’ve got standards.”

  “You’ve got nothing but me.”

  “You’re a pig.”

  “A pig with a fiver, what needs a blow job.”

  “He’ll beat me if I settle for that.”

  “What do I care what the likes of him does to the likes of you? Come on up or not—it’s your decision.”

  She hesitates a moment, looks around, and then begins to follow him to the building, saying under her breath, “You walking fart.”

  He stops, turns around, takes a step toward her. “What did you say, you whore?”

  “I said you’re a walking fart.”

  He looks at her for a moment, at the defiant hatred in her eyes, and feels himself grow hard. He takes another step forward, slaps her across the face, and then grabs her hand and rubs it across his swelling crotch. “Be sure to take it all in. It’s pure protein, baby, and you could use some meat on those bones.”

  Up the stairs, he opens the door for her. She walks, hunched over, through the doorway and stops suddenly.

  “My Lord,” she says. “What died?”

  He locks the door behind him and opens his belt.

  It is dark in the office, only a crack of light slipping from the barely open door of the lit bathroom and the dim glow of the streetlight bathing everything in a tarnished silver. He lets his jeans fall, and his boxers; they pool around his ankles like a Great Lake. He stands in front of her wearing only his T-shirt and holster and boots.

  The bottom of his stomach glistens with sweat in the narrow light as it sags below the shirt, his thighs are huge and lumpy as if injected with great mounds of curdled lard, his knees are grossly dimpled, his calves are overstuffed sausages erupting from his boots, and his ass, his ass is as big as all creation. From the matted, twisted hair of his crotch protrudes his skinny uncircumcised dick, like the probing proboscis of an anteater.

  “God, you’re ugly,” she says.

  “You better believe it, baby. Now on your knees. And if you want to dig your nails into my ass while you’re at it, feel free.”

  She’s a few minutes in, squatting on her haunches, gagging at the gamy, coffee-flavored taste of him, thinking of the glamorous life of the call girl for which she left the secretarial pool. Her mouth feels to him like a sink of warm soapy water. He grips her head with both hands and jams it back and forth, into and away from his crotch, back and forth, back and forth—baby, yes, baby—back and forth, and forth, and fucking forth, when he glances up and sees a shadow slip through the darkness of the storage room.

  “What the—?” is all he can get out before the shadow splits into two.

  He can see only silhouettes, one taller, in a long coat, the other shorter, thin, a girl with broad shoulders and an assault rifle held at the ready. He pushes the whore away, starts to run to his right. His feet tangle in the clothes at his ankles and he falls so hard the room shakes.

  On the floor he rolls onto his back and is reaching for the Colt Detective Special still holstered in his armpit when the girl with the gun says, “Don’t,” and he freezes.

  “Hey, Trent,” says the second silhouette, stepping forward until it stands over his half-naked
, supine figure. In the thin silver light, Trent Fallow, PI, can detect the silhouette’s features. J.D. Scrbacek, as if he didn’t already know. “How’s it going, buddy? Sorry about barging in like this. Am I interrupting something?”

  “Well, you know, I was—”

  “Good. I’m glad it was nothing important. Word I got is you’ve been looking for me.”

  “You know, J.D., as a matter of fact, with all this stuff happening I was concerned about—”

  “You were concerned? Really?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “I’m touched, Trent, touched.”

  Scrbacek kneels down over Trent Fallow’s torso, swats Fallow’s hand away from the holster beneath Fallow’s armpit, and himself pulls out the Colt Detective Special, hefting it in his hand.

  “Nice piece.”

  “Thanks.”

  Scrbacek takes hold of the gun by the grip, his finger on the trigger, and starts aiming it around the room. “You could do some damage with this baby.”

  “Careful with that. It’s loaded.”

  “Is it?” says Scrbacek, waving it loosely now back and forth between Fallow’s head, eyes bulging, and his bulging stomach. “But I’m sure the safety’s on.”

  “There is no safety.”

  “No safety? That could be dangerous.”

  “Yo, J.D., what are you doing here?”

  “Trent, buddy, remember that time when you called and asked about the file you had given me about your case, that Mendoza matter, where you were just helping the man vacate unsafe premises, and I told you we’d talk about it after the Breest trial was finished?”

  “Yeah, I remember. So?”

  “Well, good news, you fat fuck. Trial’s over. Time to talk.”

  37

  MONEY AND HAPPINESS

  Trent Fallow, PI, sat behind his desk, pants back up, thank God, ankles and hands bound with duct tape, his torso and legs taped tightly to the chair, trussed like a well-stuffed turkey ready for roasting. Feed a family of forty with plenty left over for sandwiches the next day.

  Mia the whore was back on the street, three Ben Franklins warming her breasts in exchange for her promise to tell no one what she had seen, wondering at the price of a bus ticket to Chicago. The Nightingale was perched atop the roof of Fallow’s building, scanning the streets below. And J.D. Scrbacek, on the loose again after being allowed by Surwin to just walk away, was searching through Trent Fallow’s files, one by one, as he spoke to the man in the chair. “Mendoza,” he said. “Let’s start with Mendoza.”