by Ed Kurtz
Ursula cowered behind the seat, frozen with fear and sorrow.
She did not know what to do.
The bullet exploded in a brief, bright flash from the barrel of the revolver. Charley heard it sing past his left ear, like some irritating insect on a muggy summer night. Reflexively, he spun around to avoid its path just as Jackie was rising to her feet.
She made it halfway to standing before her right eye burst in a red and pink mist. A short, plaintive moan escaped her lips as she dropped back down on the stage. Her head hit the floorboards with a dull thump. Thick, dark blood gradually began to spread out in an oval shaped pool beneath her.
Charley snorted, choked on his own spit.
Eve whispered, “Oh, goddamnit.”
For one minute that dragged on indefinitely, there was absolute silence in the Harris Theater auditorium on Forty-Second Street in the heart of Times Square.
It was shattered by a keening wail that built up deep inside Charley’s trunk and reverberated outward, bouncing echoes off every chipped, gilded surface in the yawning space.
“Shit,” Eve hissed. “You ruined it.”
Charley whipped his head around like a snake, his face darkening from all the blood rushing to the surface. His eyebrows formed a sharp V over his wild, dilated eyes. His dry lips peeled back like the skin of a fruit, revealed tightly clenched teeth. He was vaguely aware of the fact that Stanley was taping the whole thing.
He was entirely unaware of the building ruckus in the lobby outside. Squeaking shoes, pounding steps, muffled shouts. None of this registered in his enraged mind.
He lunged at Stanley first. The huge man was the bigger threat, and besides that considerably more mobile than the wheelchair-bound Eve.
Stanley emitted a confused growl, much like a dog, but did not hesitate to withdraw Charley’s gun from his coat pocket. Charley sped at Stanley as the barrel rose up to meet his gaze like a single black eye.
Someone shouted, “Hold it!” It came from the back of the auditorium. Charley ignored it and collided with Stanley as a shot rang out.
The gorilla dropped to the stage floor, landed flat on his back. The stage shook from his freefalling dead weight, including Charley’s on top of him. Charley let out a grunt as all the air got shoved out of his lungs. Stanley made no sound at all.
Charley clambered off of Stanley and scuttled backwards, crablike. Stanley lay still, his arms and legs splayed out as though he were about to be drawn and quartered. The giant had fallen the entire length of the beanstalk to the hard, unforgiving earth below.
Charley leapt forward and grabbed hold of the gun that was still clutched in Stanley’s dead fingers.
Another shout, closer. Moving.
“McCormick! Drop—that—fucking—gun!”
Walker.
His voice sounded nasal and strained. A broken nose did that to a guy, Charley supposed.
Regardless of the detective’s harsh demand, he did not drop the gun. Instead, he wheeled around and squeezed the trigger the second Eve was in his field of vision. Her revolver went off, too. Charley flattened out, pressing himself hard against the floor. The next thing he heard was a wet, garbled shriek; a nauseating combination of choking and screaming. He risked raising his head long enough to see Eve.
She was flailing her arms, her eyes wide and bloodshot and bulging out of their sockets. The bottom half of her face was a bloody, dripping mess. Her chin was split apart, but grotesquely wagging. Dark, runny blood came out in splashes and spurts with each wobbly wag.
Charley wrinkled his nose. He wished she would stop making such awful noises.
Before he knew it was coming, he jerked and pitched forward and vomited in a steady spray on the stage.
His eyes filled, hot and salty, and the Harris became a blur.
Chapter 33
Ursula lifted herself into a squat and pushed hard against the floor, launching herself into a sprint around the rows of ragged seats. Her lungs burned hot and her breath came short and raspy.
It was the second shot that spurred her to action. The first had sent her diving for cover. But now she was overcome. If Charley was alive, she decided, it was up to her to rescue him. If he was dead, she was going to kill somebody.
By the time she rounded the periphery of the theater’s left wing and the stage came into full view, there were already two people laid out on it and another on the worn carpet on the floor in front of it. Her desperate eyes searched the grisly tableau, resting on Charley in time to watch him fire a handgun at a woman in a wheelchair. Her face seemed to burst open as she jerked back, a fruitless attempt to dodge the bullet’s path. Charley hit the floor and, for the moment, Ursula was sure he’d been shot, too.
“Charley!” she screamed.
She was certain her wound came open from it. It burned and seeped on the inside of her throat.
She resumed her sprint, the pumps on her narrow feet clopping dully on the mashed-down carpet. She came up to the man in the center aisle, just below the stage. A stocky black guy in a long, gray coat with a gun beside his hand. She studied him for a second or two and noticed a slight tremble. He was still alive. But he was not Charley, and so none of Ursula’s immediate concern. She ran up the steps and across to the middle of the stage.
Charley was laid out on the floorboards, his mouth working but no words coming forth. His eyes were glazed over and his head was resting in a puddle of his own puke. She made a face at the stink but refused to let it slow her down. She was stronger than him; it was not too great a strain for her to scoop him up in her arms.
While she made the precarious descent down the stage steps, in pumps and with a hundred fifty pounds of dead weight in her arms, the ghastly mess in the wheelchair gurgled and spat. Ursula shivered.
On the way back around the front of the stage, the man on the floor managed to reach out and grab hold of her ankle. She nearly tumbled over, tits over ass, but managed to retain her balance. With her other foot she drove a sharp kick into the man’s face. He groaned and let go.
The double doors leading from the lobby crashed open and a pair of uniformed cops burst into the theater, their guns drawn. They shouted at the same time, effectively rendering one another’s words meaningless. Ursula ignored them and made a beeline for the door she’d come in through.
She blasted through the door, kicked it shut behind her, and dashed for the farthest, darkest spot at the end of the cold, rank corridor.
All around the alley, the city’s cacophony went on undisturbed. Closer, the Harris’ backdoor clanged open, the light from inside dully illuminating the cop who came through. Ursula remained crouched in the damp corner, Charley’s prostrate form folded up in her lap. The cop peered down the alley to where they were, but he went down the other way.
When he was gone, Ursula ran her fingers through Charley’s greasy hair and whispered, “I—I was coming to save you.”
He whispered back, “You did.”
• • •
It was a long, dismal hour they spent huddled together in the alley behind the Deuce’s south side. The cop never came back, and no one else emerged from inside the theater, at least not out the back. Ursula could not get the bloodbath she’d seen in there out of her mind, no matter how much she tried to focus on Charley. She had seen dead people before, even one murder victim, a hooker who’d been stabbed to death between Broadway and Seventh Avenue the year before last. But nothing like what had gone down in the Harris.
When Charley started to come back around, she pulled him up to his feet and walked him the length of the alley, up to Eighth, just as she had done the night she met him. They crossed the street, hiding in the center of a moving throng of jaywalkers, and turned the corner around to Forty-First before slipping into the Port Authority.
Charley felt like a rag doll, the way Ursula dragged him along. He didn’t quite realize where they were, just that it was warm and cavernous and that there were a lot of people rushing all around him. After wha
t felt to him like a full night’s worth of wandering down hallways and up stairs, the strip lighting flickering when it wasn’t out altogether, he found himself being dragged into a filthy men’s room and pushed into one of the stalls. The ammoniac odor of urine stung his nose and throat, but it went a long way towards snapping him out of his funk.
“It’s the little bathroom, the one the Jersey commuters use,” Ursula breathlessly explained, her voice wet and hoarse. She was sitting between the toilet and the wall with her knees up to her chin. “Rough trade in here some nights, but mostly they keep it clean. I don’t think anybody’s going to look for us in here.”
“Why don’t we just get on a bus or a train?”
“What, you want the transit cops all over us? No. We’re spending the night in here.”
In the commode, Charley thought darkly. This is where my life’s ended up.
He drifted in and out of sleep for a while, sitting on the toilet with his trousers on. Occasionally he woke up to find himself quietly crying.
At some point in the middle of the night, somebody banged on the metal door to the stall. Charley and Ursula both jerked awake. They stared at the door, waiting for it to be pried open to reveal men with guns aimed at them. Instead, whoever came knocking grew impatient and shuffled away.
Just some bum or hophead or both. Neither Charley nor Ursula went back to sleep.
In the morning, they stole out of the Jersey commuter’s john and back into the crowded corridors of the Port Authority. No one accosted them, not even when Ursula bought two bus tickets to Boston.
The ride took five hours. Charley slept the whole way.
Andy Donovan got a call from Boston, Massachusetts in the early morning, six days after he was released from the hospital. His jaw was still wired shut, so all he could do was listen.
“I’m sorry I missed the premiere of your movie,” Charley quietly told him. “I didn’t want to. Jesus, everything is so fucked up. Jackie’s dead. Eve killed her. I shot her in the mouth, Andy.”
There was a long pause after that. Andy could hear stilted breaths and short, wracking sobs.
“I hope Rosey gave you the whole week at the Anco. You deserve it, even if the movie didn’t. We got our own grindhouse district here in Boston, you know. Not quite the same thing, though, is it?
“There ain’t nothing like the Deuce, not anywhere in the world.”
Andy gave a muffled hum. There was no telling what he meant by it.
Charley said, “I guess you’ll be heading out to California pretty soon, like you said. Be good out there, Andy.”
Andy started to cry then.
“I love you,” Charley whispered.
He hung up.
Epilogue
The orange line took Charley from the walkup in Jamaica Plain almost all the way up to Downtown Crossing. He got off one stop shy of it, at the Washington stop, right in the heart of the Combat Zone.
Despite his continued amazement at how much cleaner and more efficient Boston’s T was in comparison to the IRT back in New York, the Combat Zone gave Forty-Two a run for its money. A tightly packed hodgepodge of neon and flashing marquees and dirty bookstores, it subsumed a block of Washington Street between Boylston and Kneeland Streets. And, just like the Deuce, it was the city’s hub for sex, drugs, and every other vice under the moon. Also uncomfortably reminiscent was the occasional murder that happened in that wicked little stretch. That Harvard football player back in ’76 was the one everyone still went on about, but there were countless others unlikely to upset the bluebloods as much. For his part, Charley opted not to dwell on it.
He’d had enough bloodshed for thirty lifetimes.
He emerged on the street from the T stop and glided past Boston Bunnies and the long, artless awning that promised Live Nudes for a quarter, complete with rap booths. In front of the place stood a fat girl with long, wavy blonde hair. She stopped Charley by way of grabbing his elbow.
“Wanta see my apartment?” she cooed.
Charley shook his head and wrenched his elbow from her pudgy, sausage-like fingers. The fat girl mumbled something grouchily and walked away in search of another john.
Charley’s destination was the Pilgrim Theater, cattycorner from the Publix across the street. It was the best spot on the block for light sexploitation, just what he needed tonight. It was just a revival of some crummy old Joe Sarno flick—Swedish Wildcats—but Charley didn’t much care. He just needed some time alone in the dark with just him and the images on the screen.
Some of the old theaters in the Combat Zone had balconies, harkening back to their long gone glory days of movie palace glitz and glamour. Charley avoided the hell out them. He was strictly ground level now. The Pilgrim’s balcony was officially closed anyway, but that never stopped guys from sneaking up there to shoot up or score with some trick. No one ever tried to stop them, at least not that Charley ever saw.
The film was a bore. It was about a bunch of girls, presumably the titular wildcats, who worked in a cathouse. Christina Lindberg was in it, but only briefly. Mostly it consisted of endless sequences of poorly lit, poorly shot softcore fluff. Charley’s mind wandered. It was easy to do since, unlike the any of the theaters he used to frequent in Times Square, Bostonian sleazehounds almost never made a peep during the show. They just sat straight-backed in their seats, always leaving at least one empty seat between themselves and the next guy, their eyes fixed semi-permanently to the screen.
As fleshy girls in saggy panties and lacey brassieres pawed at hairy, beefy men on screen, Charley slipped into a sort of daydream. Mostly, he thought about Eve. Not Jackie, the sweetest girl in the world who never deserved to have met the likes of him, and not even Ursula, his savior and roommate and only friend in the world. He thought about the worst person he’d ever known. He thought about her smooth, pale skin and her animal energy and the rough, almost violent sex he’d had with her. He remembered the moment it became clear to him that it was Eve who cut Ursula’s throat, and how he never mentioned it to her. He also recalled the massive sum of cash he’d retrieved from Eve’s wonky old television set, the pillowcase filled with crumpled green bills that he left sitting in his room at the New Rose Hotel. Had Walker gotten his hands on it? It seemed probable. Yet Charley had no idea if the crooked bastard had managed to survive the ordeal at the Harris that night. Nor Eve, for that matter. If she was alive, she’d be taking her food and oxygen through a series of plastic tubes for the rest of her life, that much was sure.
He stifled a laugh, thinking once again how he had suffered the least of anyone’s injuries over the course of the whole awful nightmare.
He pulled his back. Big fucking deal.
He just wished he had back all that money. Wouldn’t have to live in a hovel in Jamaica Plain anymore. Could pay for Ursula’s surgery, too. Finally give the best person he ever knew all she ever really wanted.
She deserved it. She deserved everything.
Swedish Wildcats finally drew to a close and the Pilgrim’s lights came back on in a bright, shocking flash. Charley ambled back out to Washington and wandered without purpose for several blocks until stopping at the first bar he came across. The joint was kind of rowdy, filled to capacity with blue collar New Englanders shouting at a TV screen showing a baseball game. Charley ordered an Olympia from the bartender and listened to the announcer wax majestic about the fifth game of the World Series. It wasn’t even Boston in the game—Philadelphia and Kansas City, as it turned out—so he couldn’t quite figure why these guys were so damned excited about it. He hadn’t even realized it was that time of year already. October, he thought between sips at his swill. Ten months since New York. Almost a year.
Christ.
It looked like a close game. Three to two Kansas City in the bottom of the sixth, but he really couldn’t give a shit. The guy behind the bar asked if he wanted another. Charley shook his head. He swallowed the backwash at the bottom of his glass and left.
Ursula was bound
to start worrying if he wasn’t home before midnight.
