The Forty-Two

by Ed Kurtz

  He stacked the worn bills neatly and folded them over as far as they would fold before slipping the wad into the inside pocket of his jacket. Then he aligned the open envelopes just as well as though it were a deck of cards and glared at the hand-printed scrawl on the front that designated the Skid Row P.O. Box but not a return address. From the buyer’s point of view that would have been plain stupid. There was no name associated with the address, just the box number and the zip, but the name the guy had sputtered as if it would save his life was enough for Charley.

  Stanley Zoromsky! Stanley Zoromsky! Stanley Zoromsky!

  Good old Stanley the Gorilla. The son of a bitch who’d beat Charley down in the alley between Forty-Second and Forty-First. Eve’s personal bodyguard. And, it seemed, the man Charley was going to cut down before the night was done.

  For Elizabeth.

  But not, he reckoned, for Eve.

  She had spent too much time keeping secrets, vanishing for hours and failing to account for her whereabouts. Worse yet, she demonstrated that she could kill a man without batting an eye, as though maybe she’d had loads of practice at it.

  That night Charley had committed murder for the first time in his life, and while he kept a steady hand, his guts were still twisting up inside. Eve, on the other hand, picked them off like an old pro and made the evidence disappear like a fart in the wind. That had bothered him tremendously at the time. Now it downright enraged him.

  There was no way in hell that she was just an innocent bystander, the girl who tried to do right by her poor sister and yet could do nothing to save her. If her fingerprints had not been on the hilt of the knife that ended Elizabeth’s life they may as well have been. Because that woman was involved and she knew it. Charley could not determine to what extent, but he had never been more sure of anything in his life.

  Charley frowned. He felt guilty, in a way, for reaching that conclusion so quickly. This was a woman he’d been to bed with. He had made love to her, run with her, been chased and shot at with her. Eve saved his life back at that crossroads in the forest, and it was her, not Charley, who was shot by that dirty cop Walker.

  Yet somehow none of that figured into the equation of her evident complicity in the gigantic clusterfuck his life had become. If nothing else, that seemed to prove that he did not love her. Not enough to ignore the facts that were slapping him in the face, at any rate. It all added up to one basic conclusion: Eve Hewlett had been playing him the whole goddamn time.

  He kicked the coffee table and let the envelopes scatter all over the floor. His heart was still pumping like it was trying to make up for lost time, but he was stone cold exhausted. All he would have to do is put his head down on the sofa’s armrest and he would be out for the count like a TKO’ed fighter. And then, he surmised, in would walk Stanley, Eve’s representative and Man Friday, to quite easily smother him with a pillow or even just one of those enormous paws of his. No, rest was going to have to wait a little longer still. Charley groaned.

  He narrowed his heavy, puffy eyes at the ancient RCA television in the corner, its mahogany case partially covered in a thick blanket of dust. If only that old monster worked, he silently groused. Anything to keep him awake; he could actually force himself to watch any of those criminally unfunny sitcoms at this point. No good. There was no telling when the thing last worked, back when it was good for something other than the city’s heftiest paperweight. Now the scattered dust on top was more valuable than the burned out cathode tubes inside.

  At that thought, Charley cocked his head to one side and said, “Huh.”

  He then picked the heavy glass ashtray up, gently emptied its contents on the coffee table, and hurled it at the blank, gray screen. The glass tube popped loudly like a gunshot, exploding into a million microscopic shards from the impact of the ashtray. Charley winced in spite of himself and covered his face with his arms. When he brought them down again to look at the havoc he had wrought, he was only half surprised that the TV was not full of cathode tubes and wires and such at all.

  Instead, it was full of tightly bound and stacked cash. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars, from the look of it.

  “I’ll be a sonofabitch,” he said.

  There were one hundred seventy two thousand, four hundred and twenty five dollars in well-worn United States currency lined up in even stacks on Eve’s coffee table when Charley dialed zero for the operator. The rude, nasal-voiced woman on the other end of the line transferred him to Roosevelt Hospital, and an attending nurse to whom he was eventually transferred told him exactly what he wanted to hear.

  “Yes,” the disinterested woman said, “Ms. Hewlett is stable and doing fine.”

  All was well on that front. Charley thanked the nurse and hung up, his baggy, bloodshot eyes never leaving the mountain of money on the table in front of him. A guy like him could do a lot with bread like that, and the thought was never far from the forefront of his mind. He could make a movie, maybe two or three. The last couple of weeks had been more than enough inspiration for a script. Maybe, he considered, he would do just that, if he was lucky enough to survive what remained of this waking nightmare.

  All of these thoughts came to Charley like dreams, which they very nearly were. His breathing was shallow and his eyes closed, the earliest stage of falling fast asleep. Catching himself, Charley stood up quickly and bobbed like a punch-drunk fighter when all the blood rushed out of his head. He shook it off and marched into Eve’s bedroom where he dumped a pillow out of its linen case. Clutching the pillowcase tightly in one fist, he returned to the pile of money he found in the television. In a reverse Santa Claus routine he filled the pillowcase with the cash and knotted it at the top before resolving to make tracks before anyone came along and caught him in the act.

  Uninterested in riding the subway with a hundred and seventy-two grand in a pillowcase, Charley hailed a taxi right outside the building. The interior of the checkered cab reeked of incense, and the driver eyed Charley suspiciously.

  “New Rose Hotel,” Charley told him.

  As the cab pulled back out into the street, he smirked at the realization that he was going to have to pay the driver out of the money in the pillowcase.

  Sol glared at Charley with dark, dilated eyes. His frown was so severe it looked like his mouth was melting. For a fraction of a second Charley noticed Sol’s lips quiver, as though he might begin to cry. Instead the corpulent German grunted and shook his head.

  “You I don’t believe, Chahley,” he said sadly. “All dis time and you do me no good dis way.”

  “I know, Sol.”

  “And now! Now here is come Chahley, asking for favors. You I don’t believe.”

  “I’m sorry, Sol. Really I am.”

  “You know policemen come looking for you? You know dat, Chahley?”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, here. Vat you think, dey come to my apartment?”

  “Big black guy with a busted nose?”

  “Dat’s de one. Vat’s he vant vith you, ha?”

  “He tried to kill me a little while ago. Put my girlfriend in the hospital.”

  “You got a girlfriend?” Sol asked, more stunned by that than the part about a policeman attempting to murder Charley.

  “Well, maybe not. I think maybe she’s just as bad as the cop.”

  “You don’t make such nice friends, Chahley.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  The German pursed his lips and ran his fingers over his mostly bald head. He sighed heavily and adopted the expression of a disappointed yet loving mother.

  “Maybe you vant to sleep here tonight.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Maybe you pay like everyone else.”

  “I aim to.”

  Charley unknotted the pillowcase for the second time and extracted a trio of crumpled one hundred dollar bills. He slapped them down on the desk and smiled sadly.

  “For everything,” he said. “Maybe that’ll help so
me.”

  “Jesus, Chahley,” Sol said, quickly scooping the bills up and depositing them in his shirt pocket. “Do me a favor, ja? Don’t never tell me vere you got so much money, okay?”

  Charley took a room on the third floor—three-twelve—that was right at the corner of the hallway across from an ancient, moldy sign that said NO FUMAR. Whether or not residents of the New Rose read Spanish, the admonition was universally ignored; almost everyone there smoked and plenty. The room itself smelled like an overflowed ashtray in a bar at three A.M., but so did every other room in the joint and Charley was pretty well used to it. So he double locked the door, drew the curtains and flopped on the thin mattress. He was out as soon as his head hit the yellow, nicotine-stained pillow.

  He dreamed about killing: him killing people, other people killing people and, in the end, of himself being killed. The stale odor of cigarettes was absent in the dream. Instead, the pervasive, biting smell of blood was back.

  Even when he woke up, it was still there.

  Chapter 29

  When she coughed, the tube in her throat shifted and it hurt like hell. In spite of it, Ursula was dying for a smoke. So when a fat nurse with ankles broader than Ursula’s neck waddled by, Ursula made a horrible wet croaking sound meant to catch the nurse’s attention. The nurse seemed to shudder a little as she stopped in her tracks and angled her fleshy red face at the source of the nauseating noise.

  Ursula placed two fingers to her lips, the universal sign for smoking, and raised her eyebrows. The nurse just frowned, shook her head and walked away.

  Bitch, Ursula thought.

  Ever since she regained consciousness post-surgery, she had been confined in a painfully uncomfortable bed in a room that smelled like piss and alcohol in a hospital where everyone treated her like garbage. If she had a voice she would have screamed. As things stood, she could only sneer. But she did so vehemently.

  It was not that she wasn’t happy to be alive. She was, if not a little surprised about it. The people who had wanted her dead certainly tried hard to put her down, but if she was anything, she was a survivor. No amount of Serbian thugs working her over or grinning blonde sluts slashing her throat were going to kill her so easily, that much was damn sure.

  Her mouth was arid, but there wasn’t anything to drink within her limited field of blurry vision. So she worked up a mouthful of saliva and swallowed it, just to assuage the scratchiness in her aching throat. The possibility that she might never speak again loomed over her, in addition to the likelihood that her throat would never stop hurting. Then there was the matter of the ugly scar she was going to have to live with for the rest of her days, a damaging liability in her stock in trade. But that was life in the big city. You won some, but you lost a whole lot more. The key to the game was keeping on—if you made it to the end of the line, you won. It was the suckers who got stomped down into an early grave who really lost.

  She groaned and struggled to edge back into a kind of upright position. The last time she tried that some idiot doctor yelled at her, insisting that she remain prone. She wanted to tell him, ten bucks a jump, asshole, just like everybody else, but the mincemeat that bitch at Drina’s had made of her neck rendered that pretty much impossible. Now, with no one around to get on her case, Ursula crept up and up, straining and sweating until at last her back was flush with the wall. She rested, focusing as much as possible on the rising and falling of her tight, labored breathing rather than the pain in her neck and throat. It did no good; the wound still hurt worse than anything she had ever felt before.

  Gently placing her long, rough hands over her face, Ursula touched herself like a blind person trying to make out a stranger’s features. Her full, cracked lips; her long and narrow nose. Smooth skin only lightly peppered with the acne scars of her horrific adolescence as Mikey Jovanović. Inwardly she catalogued all the things that were wrong with that face, all the problems she would have cut apart and reassembled into something prettier if she only had the bread for it. Changes, and there were a million of them, to finally put her on the road toward becoming what she knew she was meant to be. More gentle, more feminine, and perhaps even woman enough to make Charley love her as much as she had fallen in love with him.

  A film of hot tears formed over her eyes, stinging them. No time for that now, she realized as she wiped them clear again. It was all well and good that she had made it to the hospital and, somehow, survived that woman’s attempt on her life, but the job was botched and people like that did not tend to just give up when things went wrong. They would try again, and it was not as though Ursula was terribly hard to get at, laid out with tubes stuck in her and nobody paying too much attention.

  She was going to have to get out of there, no matter what the damn nurses had to say about it. Charley needed her and, perhaps even more than that, she needed him. In any case, she did not know the woman who tried to murder her, but she had an idea. An admittedly wild idea, but with enough credibility in her eyes to convince her that it was time to leave.

  She wrapped her fingers around the tube in her neck with one hand and began working at the medical tape keeping it in place with the other.

  This, Ursula thought ruefully, is going to really fucking hurt.

  Somebody was shouting in the hallway. As the haze of sleep unwound from Charley’s head, the shouting voice spilt into two. It was an argument, which was far from unusual in the hallowed halls of the New Rose Hotel, day or night. He yanked the pillow out from beneath his head and pulled it down over himself in a fruitless effort to block out the noise, but it was useless. He was still perfectly capable of hearing the phone jangling horribly and one of the screaming jackasses in the hallway bellowing: “I don’t know no goddamn Charley, do you?”

  “Christ,” Charley groaned. “What now?”

  He sat up, feeling his back spasm and hearing a snapping sound in his shoulders and elbows. For a guy in his mid-twenties, Charley was starting to feel like an old man. In the hall, just beyond the door to the room, the payphone quit screaming when one of the two shouting men picked it up and hollered, “There ain’t nobody called Charley here, goddamnit!”

  He punctuated it by slamming the receiver down on the hooks as hard as possible. Less than a minute later, the phone started to ring again. Charley leapt up and hurried out into the hall.

  “It’s for me,” he said breathlessly as he squeezed between two drunks who gazed at him with gaping mouths and lazy eyes.

  “Fuckin Charley,” one said to the other. The mystery was solved.

  Charley picked up the receiver, careful not to actually let it touch his face. Part of his old job was to disinfect the phones every few days, but he never was particularly good at taking care of it, and besides, he had not been around for a while. Who knew if Sol had taken it upon himself to pick up where he left off? He was not willing to risk it.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Charley,” came a familiar voice on the other end. He shuddered at the sound of it. “Have a good rest, I hope?”

  There was no doubt in his mind—it was the same voice that had vaguely threatened him before, in his apartment in Alphabet City. He twisted his face into an anguished grimace.

  “Who the hell is this?”

  “Time is short, Charley. The police, it seems, are on their way. And judging by the condition of Detective Walker’s mangled face, I would not guess he is going to be altogether pleased to see you.”

  “I don’t get it,” he said haltingly. “You’re warning me?”

  “I am giving you a choice. You can wait on the police, who I cannot imagine are going to let you leave the hotel alive, or you can leave immediately and meet with me. But I would choose quickly, if I were you, Charley.”

  “I take it you called them.”

  “Of course.”

  “And why should I believe I won’t be killed the second you see me?”

  “I can’t offer proof, but then does it matter who does the killing? Because if you stay ther
e, it’s a sure thing Walker will shoot to kill.”

  “Okay,” Charley said. “But suppose I just leave here and go wherever I please?”

  “I knew where you were and what you were doing there. I’ll know where you go.”

  Charley’s breath halted in his lungs for a moment. When he managed to exhale again, he croaked, “When and where?”

  “Forty-Second, naturally. How about the Harris, in the balcony?”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’ll see you soon, Charley McCormick.”

  There was a click and the line went dead. He set the receiver back on the hooks and hung his head. The drunks gaped at him, having never left the scene. One of them wiped some spit from his white, bloodless lips and slurred, “You’re in some shit, ain’tcha?”

  Before Charley could respond to the degenerate, he was distracted by the mounting commotion downstairs, in the cramped lobby on the first floor. Feet were pounding in, voices raised in alarm, orders being shouted.

  The police were already there. He was too late.

  She was afraid that her clothes were going to be locked up someplace, like they did in jail, only to return them to you upon official release. However, to Ursula’s pleasant surprise, her skirt and tank-top, jacket and pumps were all arranged nicely in the hospital room’s shared wardrobe. She dressed quickly, flinching every few seconds from the searing pain in her neck. As soon as she had all her clothes on, she grabbed her clutch purse and poked her head out the door and examined the hall for prying eyes. It might not have been a prison break, but to Ursula it certainly felt like one.