There was a huge cheer as she rumbled forward into the guts of the moving mob. Torches were raised high, the flames burning wildly, sizzling in the rain. Guns were held aloft, blades waved, invectives shouted. The whole scene grew ever more medieval as the grand army of the Crapstown Furies moved west, through the rain, marching toward the stronghold of the enemy. Scrbacek held his ground as his friends rejoined the march and the remainder of this ragtag people’s militia surged past.
He had told their Inner Circle, deep in the cavern, that there would be a lawsuit, that the killing would stop, that if they had the strength of purpose to hold their ground, they could do it without the war, do it within the system, and everyone would be better off. But Regina, converted to action, had led the battle cry and the others had followed. The word had been spread, this army had been raised, there was no turning back. They wouldn’t wait for the system to take the boot off their necks, they wouldn’t wait for a deliverer, they would do it themselves, now, and Scrbacek couldn’t blame them. He couldn’t join them, because it was not his way, but he couldn’t blame them. Hit first—that was part of what he had learned in his four nights in Crapstown. Jump on them before they jump on you. And so they would.
At the tail of the mob, he could hear the creak of wheels and a bumping, rolling noise. It was a metal cart, like a room service cart, its top and sides covered by a white oilcloth, except that room service carts don’t have a big red cross painted on the cloth and a black medicine bag sitting in the center. The cart was being pushed by a small man, his head down, straining to keep up with the crowd.
“What do you have there, Squirrel?” said Scrbacek.
Squirrel stopped suddenly and lifted his head. Rain poured down his face as he squinted behind his big round glasses. “Oh, Scrbacek. It’s only you. Just a little first-aid station. We each must do our part.”
“I bet.” Scrbacek leaned toward the cart and lifted the oilcloth. The stink of formaldehyde washed over him. Rows of large glass bottles sat on the two wide shelves beneath the cloth, all but one empty except for a clear fluid sloshing back and forth. All but one. This last held some large obscure mass, and the fluid in the jar was dark, and all that gave away what once the mass had been was the great clot of red hair that floated about it.
“Everyone needs a hobby,” said Squirrel as he jerked the cloth out of Scrbacek’s hand and let it fall to cover the spectacle.
“So you’ve said.”
“He won’t miss it, I promise you.”
“No,” said Scrbacek, “I suppose he won’t. You got a bandage for my cut?”
The little man examined Scrbacek’s split cheek before rummaging in his bag. “You need stitches,” he said as he pulled out gauze, tape, a gleaming pair of scissors, “but I don’t have time for niceties.”
When Squirrel was finished, the wound closed with tape, covered with gauze and more tape, he put everything back in his bag, bent low, and without a word began again to push his cart forward, the creak of the wheels following like a warning.
Later, much later, after the lawsuit was settled for an astonishing amount of money and after Ed was elected mayor, astounding the pundits, and after the first of the new community centers was erected, its stainless steel surfaces echoing the hammered sheen of Donnie’s model city, Scrbacek would handle a delicate legal matter for one Octavio Shlemnick. In gratitude, Shlemnick would invite Scrbacek into his private den on Garfield Street, lead him through the secret doorway, and then down the long dark steps to the basement, where rows and rows of large glass jars were each brilliantly illuminated. Inside the jars floated Octavio Shlemnick’s grand collection. Hands, eyes, livers, the twisted lines of aborted Siamese twins. A foot, with its toenails needing trimming. A bottle of spleens. A penis that, by God, must have been Dillinger’s. The long loops of a gastrointestinal tract. Remi Bozant’s smiling face.
Scrbacek would gasp when he saw it all, and then feel the fascination rise within him. Rubbing his chronically sore arm, itself once destined for the jars, he would walk among the samples, examining each. And he would stop in front of one bottle, larger than the others, and stare for a long time. Even after examining the rest, he would return to this selfsame bottle. Inside, so big that the oversize bottle could barely contain it, would be a huge pink thing, flabby and soft, the consistency of a rotting sponge, with clogged white things swooping up and out on either side. There would be no labels, but no labels would be needed, for Scrbacek would know exactly what it was inside that gaol of glass.
And whenever the old stories again were raised, the litany of horrors, whenever the legend of Caleb Breest was told and told again, Scrbacek would tamp down the talk and tell one and all, with complete conviction, “Say what you will about Caleb Breest, but I represented him, I understood him better than anyone alive, and I can tell you, unequivocally, that he had the biggest heart of any man I’ve ever known.”
When Squirrel had caught up to the mob, Scrbacek turned away and began again walking east. He could see now, behind the sallow glow of Casinoland, the brightness of something rising above it, promising to turn the neon insignificant. He kept walking, soaked through and not caring the least, until he found the thing that he had asked for.
“You the guy I’m supposed to wait for?” said the man sitting in the driver’s seat of a beat-up blue-and-white excuse for a cab. “Are you—what is it? Scribble-something?”
“Scrbacek.”
“Scrbacek, yeah, that’s it. What the hell kind of name is Scrbacek?”
“It’s an old Apache name. It means ‘lost no more.’”
“Funny, you don’t look Indian.” The taxicab driver gestured to Scrbacek’s damaged face. “I hope the other guy, he looks worse.”
“Does he ever,” said Scrbacek as he opened the door.
When Scrbacek dropped into the seat, a wave of weariness flooded through him. He couldn’t believe he could be this grievously sore, this tired, this relieved to be still alive. He leaned forward and checked that the face on the taxi license matched the face of the driver. It did. Jake Tomato. Nice name. He leaned back.
“Where to?” said Tomato.
Scrbacek reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a soaking wad of bills, all that was left of his glorious win at blackjack four nights before. He tossed the whole wet mass through the window in the Plexiglas partition. “Is this enough to get me to Philadelphia?”
The driver carefully extricated the bills one from another and smoothed them out on the seat beside him. “Yeah, it’s enough. It’s more than enough.”
“Good,” said Scrbacek. “Then let’s do it.”
Tomato started the engine. The cab, its shocks spent, jostled off and turned hard to the left. Scrbacek’s head bounced to one side, bounced to the other. He had so much to think about, to digest, there was so much of his past he had still to pay for, but just then he didn’t have the strength to review it all. He barely had the strength to close his eyes.
He awoke with a thundering panic as the cab fell in and out of a pothole. He looked out the window, desperately trying to figure out where he was. It was already bright. The sun glared from behind him. He was in a cab. He was bouncing through the air, soaring high into the sky.
“Hey, you’re up,” said Tomato. “Good. We’re already on the Walt Whitman. Made damn good time.”
Scrbacek leaned over and saw the gray Delaware River flash beneath him and the skyline before him and the morning light all around him, which looked as stark and fresh as a new beginning.
“It’s a big city, Swifferdeck. So whereabouts exactly in Philly we going?”
“Chinatown, Jake. Let’s start it over again in Chinatown.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2016 Sigrid Estrada
William Lashner is the New York Times bestselling author of Guaranteed Heroes, The Barkeep, and The Accounting, as well as the Victor Carl legal thrillers, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages and sold across the globe.
The Barkeep, nominated for an Edgar Award, was an Amazon and Digital Book World #1 bestseller. Before retiring from law to write full-time, Lashner was a prosecutor with the Department of Justice in Washington, DC. He is a graduate of the New York University School of Law as well as the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives outside Philadelphia with his wife and three children.
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