by Alex Irvine
“I’ll get back there after I sleep,” I said, and hung up on him. Then I caught another cab to my place.
5
Dreaming of black water and silence, of copper that moved like the tendrils of anemones, I slept badly and woke up shivering. The sun was going down. Third Stopping Place, I thought. My first stopping place had been down at the foot of Riopelle, where Detroit’s finest caught me with the body of a snitch named Deke Dykema. My second had been the Black Lagoon. Third, third, third…where would it be? Most of the Chippewa had kept going, all the way to Winnipeg or somewhere. I couldn’t do that.
“Bad dreams?”
I registered the voice at about the same time I noticed the guy sitting on the busted-down armchair under my window. I rolled over, not moving fast, and looked into the face of John LaCroix.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Guilty conscience.”
“Yeah, I’m still feeling bad about the Treaty of Sault Ste. Marie.”
“Ha,” said John LaCroix. “I’m going to tell you a story. I already talked to Billy. Didn’t know you guys were into funny money.”
“You’re shitting me,” I said.
“I’m going to believe you,” he said. “You take a fourteen-year hitch for an asshole like Billy Hooper, you must be a standup guy. So listen. You did what Billy told you to do. I don’t blame you. Now that you know the situation, you need to do something for me. Which lake is the van in?”
“Okay,” I said. “Before we get into that, I’m a little curious about the Betamaxes. My friends the filmmakers are going to want to know.”
“Cart before the horse,” John said. “Here’s that story. Once there was a man who thought he was doing the right thing because for him, being loyal was more important than being right.”
I waited.
John cracked half a smile. “You know how it ends, right?”
6
“You know what lightning is, don’t you?” John said late that night, as we were driving the tow truck down to Trenton. It was one of the big jobs used for hauling broken-down tractors. I’d stolen it two hours before from a yard out near the airport, and pinched a hat and coveralls to go with it.
“Thunderbirds fighting somebody,” I said. “You told me before.”
“Water monsters,” John said. “Things live in the water, man.”
“Not in the Black Lagoon, they don’t.”
John laughed. A few minutes later, he said, “You know I have to take him out, right?”
I drove, and let the implications of John’s statement seep in. If he was telling me, either I was already dead or I was about to get what might be considered a promotion. I considered this possibility; could it be that at forty-six years old I was finally about to have a real job—at least insofar as you could have a real job in my particular line of work?
Loyalty, I thought. John and his goddamn Indian Zen-master parables. He kept saying You know, You know, as if I really did know. As if he was trying to convince me that I had already thought what he was telling me, or that he was just agreeing with me on a topic we’d previously discussed. That shifty bastard.
“Well,” I said. “It’s not up to me.”
“Don’t know about that.” John looked out the window.
I shook my head. “You’re calling the shots, chief. I’m just the driver.”
“Things change,” John said. “Or they don’t. Pull off a second.”
I did, and he told me to kill the lights. We were coming through a mostly residential part of Woodhaven, and I parked the van behind a closed auto-parts store. John pointed through the windshield at the stars. “See there, the one you call the Hydra?”
Constellations are one thing I don’t know.
“Take part of the Hydra there, and add Leo right next to it. That’s Mishipeshu.”
“Okay,” I said. “I remember you told me that one too, but remind me.”
“Great Lynx,” John said. “Only it also lives in the water.”
“Like I said, not in the Black Lagoon.” I turned the headlights back on.
John shrugged. “All I’m saying.”
“You’re so full of shit,” I said. “Billy might be dumb enough to fall for it, but I can actually count to ten without using my fingers.”
John didn’t say anything.
“Hell with it anyway,” I said. “This is never going to work.”
7
I shouldn’t have complained, though, since I wasn’t the one standing out on a freezing March night in a wetsuit waiting to go scuba diving in the Black Lagoon at gunpoint. Before he put on the mask and breather thing, Billy Hooper looked at me as if he’d just found out I was banging his wife. “Some people you should never trust,” he said.
There was no point in arguing. I shrugged. “Trick is knowing who,” I said.
John LaCroix laughed. There we were, the three of us and two silent braves borrowed from the woods of Luce County to shoot Billy if he gave them any more trouble. They stood at the shore flanking Billy. I was at the back of the tow truck, ready to feed out the winch cable. John stood a little back, at the open passenger door of the truck where he could get some benefit from the heater. It was spitting a little snow, but not enough to stick, and there was no ice to speak of on the water. The plan went something like this: haul the van up out of the water and drive it away. If the cops showed up, the two braves had orders to shoot first. I figured that I would be on the target list, right after the cops and Billy…although John had left me in some doubt on that score. Toward the top of my list of reasons for hoping that nobody would get shot that night was a perverse desire to see the copper again. Also I considered that some day it would make a fine story if I could somehow get the van winched and cinched and drive down Jefferson with river water turning the road to a hockey rink behind me.
For that to happen, though, Billy Hooper had to find it. I’d rehearsed what I did, and Billy said, “You lying sack of shit.” To which I replied, with what I can only call haughtiness, “Says the counterfeiter.”
That was when he started giving me the betrayed look. And, despite my knowledge that Billy Hooper was a psycho and mean-tempered on top of it, I felt bad that he should have to go down into the Black Lagoon and expose himself to God knew what infernal toxins just so John LaCroix could get his copper back. I mean, Billy probably had enough money to make the whole thing good, but that wouldn’t do for John. He wanted to make a point.
Which, to get circular about the whole thing, was why I had some small hope that I might survive to see what how the Tigers did with Hernandez and Bergman instead of Wilson and Wockenfuss. If John wanted to make a point, he had to have someone to make a point to. It wasn’t going to be Billy, and the Luce County braves wouldn’t care. That left me.
“Okay,” John said. “Let’s get this show on the road, eh.”
The wind dropped, and nobody said anything. From the truck’s cab I caught a snatch of some Def Leppard song, the one with the fakey German intro.
“I didn’t know the money was wrong, John,” Billy said.
John shrugged. “We get the van, it’s all bygones.”
Billy looked at him, then at me. Again I had the feeling that I’d done something wrong, and against my better judgment I opened my mouth.
“Look, Billy, man,” I said. “At least you don’t have to dive to the bottom of Cass Lake.”
“That’s funny,” Billy said. “You conniving fuck.”
One of the braves lit a cigarette. “You want?” he said to Billy.
“Nah,” Billy said. “I’m going to hold my breath the whole fucking time in case there’s fucking dioxin seepage in my mask or something. Okay. What the fuck. Show on the road.”
He tested the valve on his tanks and made sure that air was coming through the mouthpiece. I wanted to say something else to him, because of what John had said to me. I wanted things to be right between us, which tells you something about me, since all Billy Hooper had ever done for me
was throw me shit jobs and let me take a fall for him so I could miss the World Series. But still. Maybe there was some truth in John’s gnomic pronouncements about loyalty.
“Didn’t know you could scuba dive,” I said.
“Shit,” Billy said. “I saw it on Magnum, P.I.”
Then the mask was over his face and the mouthpiece between his teeth, and he was wading out into the shallows of the Black Lagoon with the winch hook looped through his weight belt. I paid out the cable, giving him plenty of slack. About five yards out, he hesitated, and his body dipped low into the water. He’d found the dropoff. He flicked on a flashlight and took a long, oddly gentle step forward. The water closed over him with a swirl lit like clouds when lightning arcs inside them.
“Okay,” John said. “You two go back toward the road and keep an eye out.”
The two braves sauntered off. The one who’d offered Billy his cigarette looked back at the water once and then pulled his hat down lower over his ears. John and I stood by the truck, watching Billy’s bubbles break on the surface. Once I saw one last a long time until a snowflake hit it, and something about that moment got me. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.
I paid out maybe thirty yards of cable, then forty. Billy had been underwater about three minutes, which was getting to be a lot even in the wetsuit. I was starting to think he was just going to swim for Canada when the cable jerked in my hand. “How about that,” I said, and drew up the slack. When the cable got taut, the pitch of the motor’s whine got a lot higher and its action a lot slower. “If that’s not the van, it’s the Edmund Fitzgerald,” I said, just to say something.
“I know a story about that,” John said.
I watched the cable dripping in the wash of reflected arc-sodium light from the clouds over McLouth. Then I saw Billy’s flashlight, and had that feeling of symmetry again, remembering the van’s dome light slowly fading into the Black Lagoon. Ricky Twombly had died then, and Billy Hooper would die now. John LaCroix had said so, and John didn’t lie unless he was telling you bullshit stories about the wendigo or something. The surface of the water bulged, and the back of the van appeared, and standing on its bumper was Billy Hooper. He saluted us with the flashlight, then flicked it off and threw it over his shoulder out into the river.
When the van’s rear tires were just visible at the shoreline, Billy hopped off into shin-deep water and spit his mouthpiece out.
“God damn,” he said, and sneezed.
And that’s when the van’s rear doors burst open, and out flooded a rush of black water, a small avalanche of copper, and something that had once been Ricky Twombly. One of the doors knocked Ricky off balance, and the rush of water swept his feet out from under him. He fell on his side in the water, and the thing that had been Ricky stood up. It was man-sized—Ricky-sized—but where Ricky had had a gelled mat of brown hair, it had twists and tangles of copper that ran in ridges from its head down along its back and arms. I remembered the way the pieces of copper had bitten into Ricky’s flesh on the drive from Oakland County, and when I looked at the gnarled copper claws on its hands and the ragged copper canines in its mouth, all I could think of was blood on Ricky’s mouth and the way his hands were torn on his copper bier.
I did this, I thought as the thing that had been Ricky Twombly pounced on Billy—like a cat, I couldn’t help thinking—and drove him into the mucky shallows. Billy fought it, but it dipped its head toward the back of his neck and, still pinning him with its claws, bit down and shook. The van, still creeping out of the water, tipped onto its side from the sudden redistribution of its weight, and the whine of the winch drowned out the sounds of Billy Hooper’s death. Then two things happened at once. The tow cable snapped, the loose end ripping through the sleeve of my coat and the skin of my left arm, and the thing that had been Ricky Twombly stood again, Billy’s body dangling from its mouth, and vanished into the Black Lagoon.
My arm hurt like a son of a bitch, but I didn’t move. The van lay on its side at the shore, and the winch still turned, flipping the loose end of the cable around and around. The braves appeared again, and took in the situation.
“Damn,” said the one who’d offered Billy his cigarette. “We missed it.”
“Looks that way,” said the other.
“Okay, John,” said the first. “See you around, eh?”
“See you around, boys,” John said.
When they were gone, John came over next to me and switched off the winch motor. “Told you, didn’t I?” he said.
Still looking at the water, I said, “Guess you did. Mishipeshu, is that how you say it?”
“That’s about as good as a white man usually does.”
“Uh huh.” I peeled back the sleeve of my coat. The cable had left a six-inch cut, wide and deep enough in the middle that I could see muscle and a little flash of bone. “I’m going to need a stitch or two,” I said.
“Get you out of that tow outfit first,” John said. “The boys left me a car down around the corner.”
“Uh huh,” I said again. “So you don’t want the van.”
“Nah,” John said.
We started walking back across the park. I’d been wearing gloves the whole time, and the van was registered to someone who didn’t exist, so my whole mind was free to indulge my anxiety. John’s car was a shitbox ’78 Corolla that took a long time to heat up. I shivered in the silence for a while and then said, “So you knew this was going to happen.”
“Told you, didn’t I?” John answered.
I guess he had. Time passed, and the air coming from the Corolla’s vents got marginally warmer.
“Remember that story I told you over at your place?” John said.
I didn’t have to answer him.
John cracked a smile. “Let’s talk about those Betamaxes.”
And in my head I was hearing Al Ackerman saying This is the year.
The End
Download Other Kindle Books By Alex Irvine:
Novellas
Mystery Hill
Short Stories
Green River Chantey
The Dream Curator and Other Stories
The Dream Curator Collection Includes:
Black Lagoon
This Thing Of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine
The Word He Was Looking For Was Hello
Eagleburger’s Lawn
Homosexuals Damned, Film At 11
Remotest Mansions Of The Blood
Shad’s Mess
Shambhala
Seventh Fall
The Truth About Ninjas
The Dream Curator
About Alex Irvine
Alex Irvine's most recent novels are Buyout, The Narrows, Transformers: Exiles, The Seal of Karga Kul, and the novelization of The Adventures of Tintin. His comics work includes Iron Man: Rapture, Daredevil Noir, Hellstorm, Son of Satan: Equinox, and the Vertigo Encyclopedia. He has also written games, most recently Marvel: Avengers Alliance. His short fiction is collected in Unintended Consequences and Pictures from an Expedition. He lives in Maine.
Alex’s Website
http://alexirvine.blogspot.com/
More books are available at Alex’s Amazon Author’s Page.
