Bozant reached down and flicked a finger into Scrbacek’s eye. Scrbacek screamed and clutched his left hand to his socket.
“At wit’s end,” said Bozant.
“You’re insane,” shouted Scrbacek, the sharp pain wakening him out of the daze.
“So they tell me. I’m actually in court-ordered therapy, but it hasn’t much helped. My doctor’s an ambivalence chaser. I take so many different-colored pills I dream in Technicolor.”
Scrbacek pressed down on his right hand until he was sitting up slightly. “You’re getting paid to kill me, not to torture me with bad jokes. If you’re going to do it, just do it.”
“You shouldn’t think I’m just killing you for the money. Well, not only for the money. I’m not a total mercenary.”
Scrbacek spit blood, his hand still to his eye. He couldn’t help notice Bozant’s ease of manner as he sat on the trash can, chatting. “You killed Ethan Brummel,” said Scrbacek, “you killed Freaky Freddie Margolis.”
“They just got in the way of what you had coming.”
“Go to hell. Stop blaming me for your getting kicked off the force and into jail—you did that to yourself. You were the one who corrupted your badge, you were the one who lied on the stand, you were the one sleeping with the whore.”
“Well, you know what they say—nothing risqué, nothing gained.” Bozant’s foot shot out and caught Scrbacek in the stomach. “Still, I owe you some of the credit.”
Scrbacek groaned as he rolled onto his side, curled like a fetus. “I was just doing my job,” he managed to get out.
“Your job. You’ve always had the Midas touch, Scrbacek. Everything you touch turns into a muffler. Well, I’m just doing my job, too. But you’re right—I’m as much at fault as you. I loved her from the start. Amber, I mean. She was crazier than I was. First time I took her in, she kicked me in the nuts, I smacked her in the jaw, she smiled and spit out a tooth. I couldn’t help myself. I always wanted a girl just like the girl that Dad had on the side, and she was it.”
Scrbacek pushed himself again to sitting. He rubbed at his eye. “So if it’s not the money, and not because I proved you a liar, then why are you still after me?”
“You thought you were on the side of the angels getting Amber off, didn’t you?”
“You gave me the key, I just turned it.”
“I know. And don’t think I don’t beat myself up over what happened, too.” Bozant slammed his fist into his own face.
“What are you talking about?”
Bozant leaned over and rapped his knuckles on Scrbacek’s head. Tap tap. “Hello?” Tap tap tap. “If ignorance is bliss, why aren’t you happier? I’m talking about Maya. My daughter, Maya. Remember her?”
Scrbacek stared at Bozant for a long moment as the rain poured like tears off the both of them. He felt something slide through him that was different now than the fear and the pain.
“It was one thing to release that psycho-bunny into the world,” said Bozant. “It was quite another to deliver my daughter into her grasp.”
Scrbacek closed his eyes and felt that thing slip through him and knew now what it was, exactly what it was. “How could I know what would happen?” he pleaded, as if to a judge and not some homicidal maniac.
“You found her. It was your job to know.”
“It was another lawyer who brought her back.”
“But you didn’t stand up and fight it. You knew it was happening, and you let it.”
“What could I do?”
“Tell the court the truth.”
“I couldn’t. I couldn’t. Everything I knew was privileged. But it wasn’t even Amber who ended up killing her. It was the boyfriend.”
“Who did you think she was going to end up with after Lucius and me? Pop Warner? Did you have any expectation that crazy Amber would protect her daughter?”
“What could I have done?” moaned Scrbacek, even as he knew he could have done more, even as he knew that the thing slipping through him was the keen blade of shame for all that he didn’t do to protect that girl, that young, pretty girl with the ribbons in her pigtails.
“You found her, you dragged her back to Amber’s attention, it was your responsibility to do something to protect her. I convinced Amber—with much difficulty and violence, I might add—to give her away. And I made sure Maya had the best care the foster system could deliver. She was out of the life, into something better, and then you dragged her back. I was never much of a father to Maya, but I figure I owe her one last thing. So get up, Scrbacek. Get the hell up.”
Bozant rose from the trash-can seat, grabbed Scrbacek’s collar, and pulled him to standing. Scrbacek staggered onto his feet, weak with the brutal cocktail of pain and shame.
“Get up so I can give my little baby one last gift.” Bozant reached into his coat and pulled out a huge fillet knife. “Today, on The American Sportsman, catching and cleaning the North American largemouth bass.”
Bozant shoved Scrbacek away. Scrbacek staggered back, unsure of what to do, still filled with a paralyzing shame. Bozant was going to kill him. He was going to kill him, dammit, and Scrbacek wasn’t sure he didn’t deserve it. Bozant took a step forward and gave Scrbacek another shove. Scrbacek fell back onto the ground. Bozant stood over him, waving the knife.
“We’re playing The American Sportsman, so I’m going to be sporting. I’m going to give you to five before I chase you down and gut you with this knife. I like this knife, because if I stab you in the chest it’s flexible enough to slip around a rib and still dive into your heart. I finished off that dog with this knife.”
Something came loose in Scrbacek. He shook his head to alertness and, for a moment, the shame abated, overcome by anger. “You killed my dog.”
“Was that yours? If I had known, I would have enjoyed it more.”
“You shouldn’t have killed my dog.”
“One.”
Scrbacek scrabbled to his feet, grabbing a handful of pebbles and stones in his right hand as he did.
“Two.”
Scrbacek turned as if to flee and then whipped around again, tossing the pebble mixture into Bozant’s face. As Bozant reeled back, arm to his face, Scrbacek began to run.
From behind, he heard Bozant scream out, his voice still in good humor, “Three, four, five. Ready or not, here I come.”
Scrbacek gripped his left arm as he lurched forward, step by step, gripped the arm that Bozant had first crippled with a bullet and then slammed with the wooden board and was now aching and useless. He leaned forward to keep up his speed, fighting to ignore the pain spinning like a cyclone through his body. He could hear Bozant’s footsteps gaining on him at an alarming rate. He only had a few dozen seconds before the maniac would overtake him. He darted right, along a building’s edge, darted left at its corner, staggered down a narrow street.
He felt flooded with a strange sensation that he had done this already. And he had, the night his building burned down and Bozant had called out his name and then shot a bullet through his arm. How long ago had that been? A lifetime? He tried to count the passing of the days, fought to separate what had become a blur. One two three four nights. Four nights that changed everything. And now, still gripping his arm, the very same killer in mad pursuit, he was running out of Crapstown, out of the darkness that had once promised safety, toward the corrupt yellow glow of Casinoland. But he wouldn’t get there, he couldn’t, Bozant would catch him first, he wouldn’t get there, unless . . .
He cut right again, running as fast as his weary legs and the pain still pooling in his abdomen would let him, zigged left once more, the footsteps gaining on him, the knife growing ever closer. And then, to his right, he saw the flickering glow of fire reflect off the top of a building. He dived right, into an alley, Bozant behind him, so close now that Bozant could almost grab at the trailing edge of Scrbacek’s raincoat.
When they burst out of the alleyway, they ran smack into the center of a great crowd, a strange army of men and
women packed together, torches held high, standing shoulder to shoulder, facing away from the sea, a wild shifting regiment that filled the streets and spilled over onto the sidewalks. The two lurched together into the middle of the crowd just as Bozant dived at Scrbacek with his knife.
Scrbacek jumped back as the knife sliced the front of his shirt. He turned to run and felt hands grab at him. He swatted them away, but others grabbed at him as well, more than he could fend off, gripping him around his chest, his biceps. Dozens more, grabbing his legs, his neck, lifting him off the ground, immobilizing him totally, halting his escape from the knife. As he struggled, he noticed that Bozant was being similarly embraced, lifted, held in check.
But for how long? Bozant was fighting furiously, knife still in hand. How long until he slashed himself free and lunged at Scrbacek’s chest with his blade? He was close, so close, less than an arm’s length away. Scrbacek struggled to get free, to continue his flight. “Stop it,” he yelled. “Let me go!” But his screams were useless, caught as he was, imprisoned, clutched into helplessness, at the mercy of the mob.
And then Bozant seemed to pull away from Scrbacek, as if atop a cloud, magically floating away into the sea of arms and faces, shoulders and necks. Bozant reached out a hand, grabbing hold of Scrbacek’s raincoat. Scrbacek felt the tug, but he was held too firmly himself by the mob, and Bozant’s grip faltered and then failed. And he floated away alone, floated farther and farther away, until slowly, as if in a dream, the mob closed in around him and he disappeared from view, except for the one arm that had gripped Scrbacek’s coat. That arm now stretched high, over the heads of the crowd, as if seeking to grip the heavens themselves and drag them down with him. There came a scream, something dark and inhuman, fierce and strangely empty, and slowly the hand fell until it vanished from Scrbacek’s sight, along with the rest of Remi Bozant, disappeared into the mob, vanished as if from the face of the globe.
Scrbacek was stunned at what he had witnessed, didn’t understand what had happened, why or how he had been saved. And then the part of the crowd that had swallowed Bozant whole split in two, and through the opening roared a motorcycle, huge as a horse, encrusted in chrome, its handlebars reaching high to the sky. Straddling the great machine was a huge woman in a black leather vest, with a gun in her belt and thick reddish dreads coiled about her face.
“What have we here?” said Regina. “Why, bless my heart, it’s J.D. Stifferdeck, bloodied but still alive, come to join the party.”
57
THE FURIES
They had come from the crumbling buildings of west Crapstown, from the tenements in the south, gangbangers and schoolteachers, weight lifters carrying the lame and the halt. They had come from church shelters and from squatters’ dens and from town houses in the Marina District. Shopkeepers, shoplifters, the guys who sell vegetables from their trucks. One by one and in clumps and in streams, they had joined together, turning themselves into the Crapstown Furies, feared avengers seeking justice for all. Waitresses and drug dealers, taxi drivers and bicycle messengers, blind men clutching their tin cups, sunburned women walking in packs, talking to themselves as if talking to each other, together approaching normal. There had come pimps in business suits, there had come women in whorescloth, there had come kids with skateboards, wizened old women, bookish men with wire spectacles. They had come from the basements of shattered buildings, they had come from the cardboard boxes under the colonnades on West Harrison. Girls with guns, guys with cell phones, old men with tattered clothes falling like stripped skin off their backs. There were bookies taking bets, and gamblers searching for better odds, and men and women both who had found the one true God and were exclaiming to the world at the glory of His word. They had emptied out the crack houses on Coolidge. They had emptied out the mission centers on Pierce. Hoops players and craps players, rappers and twelve-steppers and addicts who hadn’t yet stepped, the coughing, the limping, predators and prey. They had come from west, north, south, from even within the penumbra of Casinoland’s neon glow. They hugged and laughed and fought as they marched together in the rain, ready to violently assert their collective will against that which had torn apart their home.
Scrbacek stood in the middle of the advancing army, amidst a group with which he had become strangely familiar in the past four nights. Regina, still on her Harley, and Ed, shotgun in his arms and cleaver in his apron, and Aboud with his Zastava, and Sergei the Russian, brandishing a tommy gun, and Blixen, a ragged old rifle leaning on her shoulder, and Elisha Baltimore, holding on to Donnie’s arm as he pulled a heavy wooden crate on a dolly. Scrbacek felt a surprising fondness for them all as marchers streamed by on either side. If he had friends outside this ragtag crew, he couldn’t bring them to mind just then.
“Well, we’re doing it, Stifferdeck,” said Regina. “Just like we told you we would. Don’t you be trying to stop us.”
“If you wait a bit,” said Scrbacek, “they’ll do your work for you. When I left there was a war going on inside of Dirk’s.”
“That don’t matter none,” said Regina. “We’re wet to the bone and tired of waiting. If it’s only mopping up, all the better.”
“Suit yourselves,” said Scrbacek. “Did you get me what I asked for?”
“Behind us, Mr. Scrbacek,” said Donnie. “Waiting for you.”
Scrbacek glanced at the crate Donnie was dragging. “What’s in there?”
“Just a few little treats,” said Donnie, grinning. “Homemade.”
“You’re a damn good artist, Donnie. Too good to waste your talent on guns. After this, no more silencers, all right? No more grenades. You can make a fine living from your artwork.”
“I’d like to believe that.”
“You fix up that model, someday it will be on a postcard. You saved my life, Donnie. All of you did. Thank you.”
“You’re the one we owe.”
“Malloy maybe, but not me. I’m just the fool. Ed, when this is over, you’ll keep the grill warm for me, make me some of those special home fries?”
“On the house, Mr. Scrbacek. And from now on, you’ll never have to pay afore you eat, only after.”
“Then all this hasn’t been for naught. You’ve got the common touch, Ed. You ever think of politics?”
“Hell no. I’m an honest man.”
“Well, be careful. All of you. Sergei, take care of Aboud.”
“He safe as puppy with me.”
“That’s good to know.”
“Of course, in Russia now they eat puppy like chicken.”
“Aw, I can take care of myself,” said Aboud, casually waving the Zastava. “You come to the club when this is over, Scrbacek. With Dirk’s gone, business will improve. We’ll be able to hire us some of our girls back, have a whale of a time.”
“I wouldn’t miss it.”
“Maybe I’ll even have the great Elisha Baltimore dancing for me.”
“Dream on,” said Elisha. “I’ve got plans. That lawsuit thing you were talking about, J.D., am I going to get a piece?”
“I expect so,” said Scrbacek. “You all should, though I can’t say when anyone would see the money.”
“Well, maybe when I get my share, I can sort of try this thing I’ve been wanting to try. A dance school.”
“Exotic?” said Aboud.
“No, silly. Ballet. For kids. I took ballet as a girl and loved the twirling. I’d like to pass something on.”
“There was a dance school in my model,” said Donnie. “Right next to the West Side Community Center.”
“That’s what got me to thinking about it.”
“I put it in just for you,” said Donnie.
“Donnie,” said Elisha, beaming, “that is so sweet.”
“It’s going to be good, Mr. Scrbacek,” said Donnie, a wide smile. “The whole thing. I know it is.”
“I believe it,” said Scrbacek. “I actually do. Hey, Blixen?”
“Yes, sir,” said the old woman, raising her poor old bo
nes into some semblance of attention.
“What about you? Are you going to hang around?”
“I’m sticking by the sea,” said the old woman. “With my daughter.”
“I’m glad. When I get back, I expect I’ll start lawyering again. Maybe represent kids in trouble, start making up for past mistakes. I’ll need someone to work in the office, keep track of files and motions. You looking for a job?”
“What do you think, I’m crazy? Wear a dress? Go to work? Shave? What do you think, I’m insane?”
“Well, maybe then you’ll just hang around the office and play chess.”
“You can’t keep up with me.”
“I beat you once already.”
“I let you.”
“I know.”
“I told them you were our knight.”
“I’m not. I never was.”
“You’ve got the nipples for it, though, don’t you? Our home is your home now. Just stay away from the piers. Don’t swim near the piers. The pylons are murder.”
“I won’t, Blixen. I promise.” Scrbacek looked around. “Where’s the Nightingale?”
Blixen pointed into the air. Through the rain, Scrbacek could just make out a shadow standing tall on a rooftop, hip cocked, gun in hand. Scrbacek waved, and the shadow waved back.
“This is touching as two humping hummingbirds,” said Regina, “but we’re getting soaked just standing here.”
“Caleb Breest wasn’t part of it,” said Scrbacek.
“He tell you that?”
“Not in so many words, but it’s true. It was all Torresdale.”
“It don’t matter. Breest killed Malloy, didn’t he?”
“Whatever he did, it was because of Torresdale.”
“What are you, still his lawyer?”
“I’m just telling you the truth.”
“The truth is, Stifferdeck, it’s time for you to clear out and for us to do our damage.”
“There’s another way.”
“Maybe,” said Regina. “But this is our way.” She revved her engine and shouted to the passing crowd: “Let’s kick some ass and make it happen.”
The Four-Night Run Page 36
