by Max Lockhart
Johnny had hardly jerked open the door when he felt Quinlan's hand on his shoulder. "Get your hand off me," he said without turning around. "Or I'm going to gut you, no matter how big and mean you are."
"Wait for me, kid. I'm going with you."
Johnny looked over his shoulder. "Like hell you are."
"I owe Jack, kid, and this is my last chance to pay him back. I'm begging you to take me with you. I have to tell him something."
"What?"
"I have to tell him he did the right thing on that island during the war. For God's sake, kid, I've got to tell him thank you."
"Then let's go."
"Just a minute," said Quinlan, turning back to Eileen and grasping her shoulders. "I want to start a new life. I want it to be with you. Now what time does that bus leave?"
Johnny could see that Eileen didn't entirely believe Joe. He could understand that. Frankly he didn't quite believe him, either. But sometime or other, everybody deserves a second chance. "Nine-thirty," said Eileen, finally making up her mind.
"I'll be there," said Joe, kissing her forehead before turning back to Johnny. "Let's go kid."
Cleary skidded the Eldorado to a stop in front of Tucci's house, not worrying about whether the flying gravel would nick the Caddy's paint job. If it did, he would worry about it later. If there was a later. If he got blown away, then a few nicks wouldn't matter.
He pounded on the front door, and hoped whoever answered wouldn't shoot first and ask questions later. If that happened, it was going to be a real short visit. A second later, looking down the barrel of Ralphie's gun, he knew no bookie on the Strip would take bets on his living long enough to blink his eyes. The bookies would be wrong, he thought as he slammed past Ralphie and into the house. "I'm looking for Tucci."
Ralphie smiled. "Isn't that funny. He's been looking for you."
"You've got a great sense of humor, Ralphie," he said as the hood patted him down and took his gun. "Watch that. Loaded guns are dangerous."
Ralphie pushed him toward the stairs. "You're a barrel of laughs yourself, Cleary. Mr. Tucci's waiting to hear some more of your funny stories. But I gotta warn you. He's not in a good mood this morning. He's got a hair-trigger temper. His temper, my hair trigger." He laughed at his own joke more than Cleary thought it was worth.
"Where's your kennelmate?" he asked as he climbed the stairs.
"Keep up the smart remarks, Cleary, and I'll shoot your kneecaps and tell Mr. Tucci it was an accident."
Cleary shut up. He was out-gunned and out-manned. Aggravating an already bad situation could get him killed. On the other hand, it might not be possible to aggravate Frank Tucci any more than he already was. The crime lord came out of the shadows like Dracula, a white towel around his neck, and clearly looking for a victim. Dressed in a short silk robe, last night's trousers, and a bandage as large as Cleary's palm covering the right side of his neck, Frank Tucci was angry.
"He packing heat?" Tucci asked Ralphie.
"A .38, but I got it. Maybe we can arrange for him to eat it." Ralphie laughed again. Being shot at must agree with him, thought Cleary. He seemed to find everything so damn funny this morning.
Tucci moved to the bar and ran water on the towel, then gently patted his face with it, studying Cleary as if he were a bug under a microscope. "This isn't a gangster movie, Cleary. You don't get any retakes. You and Gold missed your big chance," he finally said. "You got lousy shots out here in L.A. I wouldn't pay any hit men who emptied two submachine guns and didn't manage to kill anybody." His voice was loud, and straight from New York City's East Side.
"I was set up just like you, Tucci."
"You expect me to believe that? You think I got shit for brains? "
"You do if you believe I set you up, Tucci." He lowered his voice. "You think a hit man can pick and choose targets with a submachine gun like he could with a handgun? You've been in the business long enough to know better than that. No one was supposed to leave this room except in a body bag, me included. I had nothing to do with last night, and I'd be a damn fool to show up here by myself to finish the job. I'm here because I don't want to be looking over my shoulder waiting for one of those torpedoes to put a bullet in my back."
Tucci swiped at his ear with the wet towel and scrutinized Cleary, his black eyes revealing indecision. "You may be on the level, Cleary, and you may not. But before I decide what to do with you I'd like to know what your angle is."
"I told you: money," said Cleary, instinct telling him not to mention Joe's name. Never reveal a vulnerable spot to a viper like Tucci because that would be the next place he would bite. And Joe was a vulnerability, Cleary admitted to himself. He didn't know how much further he would go to protect a friend, and he didn't want to find out.
"Now you're lying, Cleary. The word on the Strip is that money doesn't mean much to you."
"Everybody needs money."
"Not Jack Cleary. Money won't buy you, certainly not the couple of grand Gold's paying. That's public opinion, and I've got no reason to disbelieve it. So the question is: what kind of a hold has Gold got on you? How'd a smart guy like you get involved in all this?"
Johnny parked the Merc at the bottom of the hill. "I'm walking from here. I don't want to risk setting anything off by roaring up to the house like gangbusters. You shake up a nest of hornets, and they're gonna sting everything in sight. I don't want Cleary to get stung. He'd get more than an itchy bump."
He slid out of the Merc and softly pushed the door shut. "Keep down and wait for the cops, Quinlan. Tell Fontana to keep the sirens off."
Joe slid out of the passenger side, a determined look on his face an opposing Roller Derby player would recognize. It said somebody was going to get knocked off the oval, and it wouldn't be Joe Quinlan. "I'm going with you."
"The hell you are, champ. You keeping your ass right down here where you're safe. I don't have time to worry about you taking off on your own again like you did when you made that deal with Gold."
Joe started up the hill. "Jack's in that hornets' nest because of me. The least I can do is risk getting stung, too. Besides, kid, you don't have time to argue with me, aad you sure can't keep me down here unless you blast me or knock the hell out of me. I don't think you can do that. Cleary, maybe. He's had more practice telling himself it would be for my own good."
Johnny caught up with him. "All right, I'll let you come. But you obey orders, you hear?"
"You sound like the fucking army, kid," said Quinlan, a grin on his face.
Tucci's house came into view, a futuristic nightmare of circles, angles, and for all Johnny knew, square roots. All he knew for sure was that he didn't like it. It looked... cold. Like some kind of mausoleum out in Forest Lawn. It didn't look like any place he wanted to live. Or die. His shotgun dipped as he shivered. This was no time to think about dying. Damn it, Cleary, he thought. Why the hell did you have to get involved? Quinlan wasn't worth it, war buddy or not.
He glanced over at Quinlan. Cleary had saved his life, wiped his nose, picked up the pieces of his life and gave them back to him, and what had Quinlan done? Thrown the pieces down because they didn't look like they had before. Well, to hell with that. Everybody had to glue pieces of their lives back together, and the cracks always showed. But you slapped on the glue, stuck the chip back in where the hole was, and went on. Nothing came with a lifetime guarantee. Not even life.
Motioning Quinlan to follow, Johnny moved onto the lawn, running hunched over to the double car garage. The split-level house loomed over his head like something out of a science-fiction movie. He grasped the other man's shoulder. "You stay put. I'm going to check out the back, see if I can find a way in this place. You don't move, you hear me? Cleary wanted you safe, and I work for him, so I want you safe, too."
"Jack always spent too much time worrying about keeping people safe. Most of the time he didn't bother to ask if that's what they wanted."
Quinlan's voice sounded strange, but Johnny didn't hav
e time to analyze it. "If that's what Jack Cleary wants, it's good enough for me. You mess this up, and you'll find out I've had a lot of practice blasting people."
He moved off without another backward glance, sweat rolling down his sides, soaking the white T-shirt he wore under his leather jacket. It wasn't that hot, so he must be scared. He grinned to himself, felt his lips quiver, and tightened his mouth. Damn right he was scared. Cleary had stuck his neck out too far this time. Cleary's problem was that he was a real, honest-to-god hero and didn't know it. Johnny didn't have anything against heroes, except that there were more dead ones than live ones.
He noticed the boarded-up windows on the second story, and wondered what happened. Maybe everybody inside was dead. No, that didn't make sense. If everybody was dead, then who boarded up those windows? Climbing up a wall, he decided modem architecture wasn't so bad after all. All the odd angles and unnecessary walls made easy climbing.
Reaching the pool, he heard a voice screaming. Somebody's pissed, he thought. Then he heard another voice, Quinlan's voice! Son of a bitch was all he had time to think before he circled around the pool at a dead run looking for a way in.
Joe Quinlan stepped into Tucci's living room with his Army-issue .45 pointed at Tucci. "He's involved because of me."
"Who the hell are you?" demanded Tucci.
"His buddy," said Joe.
"He's gonna be nobody's buddy in a minute," said Ralphie, aiming his pistol square at Cleary's nose.
"Drop the gun!" said Joe.
"Take it easy, Joe. I've got everything under control here," interjected Cleary, seeing the anticipatory gleam in Ralphie's eyes, and the reckless look in Joe's.
"Like hell you do. These guys were gonna blow you away."
"Just say the word, Frank," said Ralphie.
"Tell him to put it down, Cleary," warned Tucci.
"Gimme the word, Frank," asked Ralphie again.
"Put the gun away, Joe," demanded Cleary, blinking away the sweat trickling into his eyes.
In that blink of an eye, that split second he couldn't see, his ears registered the first shot. He focused his stinging eyes, saw Joe stagger backward against the bar as two more shots punched obscene red holes in his chest. Mouth open, the dawning of a terrible knowledge in his eyes, Joe fell sprawling as his dying brain shut down motor functions to conserve energy to fuel consciousness until the last possible second.
"Joe!" screamed Cleary, and knocked the gun out of Ralphie's hand, then hammered him between the eyes, sending him crashing backward down the staircase.
"Cleary!" shouted Nico.
Cleary jerked his head up and saw Nico's still-smoking gun pointed at his heart. He was going to die. He knew it in his shrinking body, knew it and screamed a silent protest at dying uselessly at the hands of a man not good enough to be in the same room as Joe Quinlan. He froze—waiting, regretting, hating. There was no place to run, no choices to make.
The shotgun blast that released him and sent Nico Cerro to hell left him weak as he staggered over to Joe. He barely noticed Tucci escaping through the shattered door, barely saw Johnny Betts loosely holding his shotgun, horror etched into his young face. He gently cradled Joe's head and shoulders in his arms, saw the radiating pain revealed in his friend's eyes.
Joe licked his lips, and took a shallow breath. "We got 'em, didn't we, Jack?"
Cleary examined Joe's wounds, saw the location of each, and knew the delicate organs that determined life and death of a body were damaged beyond a surgeon's skill. "You dumb son of a bitch. I had it under control. Why did you do it?"
Joe took several more shallow breaths, his eyes beginning to dull as the life began to flicker. "You were always there when I needed you." He laughed, and a spasm of pain twisted his mouth. "Even when I didn't want you to be. This time, it was my choice."
Cleary looked blindly around the room, caught a flash of Johnny's anguished face, saw a beefy cop push Tucci into the room at gunpoint, followed by Fontana come to collect his evidence against the forces of evil. Fontana abruptly stopped and holstered his .38. His face twisting with sympathy, he joined Johnny Betts in what Cleary knew was a deathwatch.
Cleary finally looked down at Joe again, suddenly angry, angry that life seemed to promise happy endings and delivered broken dreams instead. "Look at you," he said, his voice sounding hoarse. "What the hell happened to you?"
Joe smiled, his eyes blinking back the descending darkness. "Nothing happened to me. Everything changed after we got back. No call for heroes, Jack." He opened his eyes wide, as if he saw an essential truth he had deliberately avoided seeing. "Eileen didn't care about heroes. All she wanted me to do was catch a lousy bus. And I couldn't even do that."
His breath caught, then rushed past his lips in a moan, as if life blinked and then went out. Cleary clutched the empty shell that once was Joe Quinlan and looked up at Johnny Betts, and at Charlie Fontana, whose men walked quietly among the dead.
ELEVEN
Cleary saw the suitcases, stacked on the sidewalk in front of the house like the baggage of hopeless refugees he had seen during the war. He stopped the Eldorado and leaned his head against the steering wheel, willing the stinging tears to dry. Finally he raised his head and looked toward the house. Eileen must have been waiting just inside because she immediately stepped onto the porch, thick auburn hair glowing in the sun, large brown eyes looking hopefully toward him. Seeing the hope die was like seeing Joe die all over again.
"He's not coming back, is he, Jack?" she asked as he stopped by the edge of the porch.
He saw the grief beneath the ashes of hope and knew words had to be said, and hoped he could find the right ones. "He wanted to, Eileen. He finally wanted to, but a hood named Cerro took away his chance." He stopped to get control of his voice. "He's dead, and I'm sorry. I tried to keep him out of it. I thought I could save him again. For what it's worth, he died trying to save my life," he finished bitterly.
He looked down at the cracked sidewalk, the flecks of blood on the front of his shirt, and felt guilty suddenly for being alive and talking to Joe's wife while he was still wearing a shirt covered with Joe's blood. He felt ashamed, as though he were a beggar asking for alms by exposing suppurating wounds on his body.
"It was his choice, Jack," said Eileen softly.
Cleary looked up to meet Eileen's eyes. They were filled with expressions of grief and a terrible acceptance. "What do you mean?"
She looked across the yard again, toward that vision only she could see. "He may have wanted to come back to me, but he wanted to be a hero again more. Maybe he thought he could do both. But when the time came he made the right choice."
He grabbed her shoulders. "You're talking crazy, Eileen. He loved you."
"But he couldn't live for me, could he, Jack? You can die for somebody, but you can't live for them. You've got to live for yourself. That's what he was doing when he saved your life. He was living for himself, he was being a hero, because that's all he ever was." She shook her head, splattering tears over her cheeks. "There just wasn't much room for Joe's kind of hero after the war." She placed her hands on top of his. "I'll arrange for the funeral, then I'm catching that bus. It's time for me to start living for myself, too."
He released her shoulders, watched her hands slide off his own, noticed how strong and capable they looked. "Is there anything I can do, Eileen?"
She looked at him and smiled. "Don't feel guilty."
"Give me something easy to do," he said bitterly.
"All right. Live for yourself. Go be your own kind of hero. Go find a dragon to slay even if it's only in your own mind."
"Those are easy?"
She shrugged, and looked old and bitter for a moment. "Heroes never make easy choices. If they did, they wouldn't be heroes, would they?"
He stepped on to the peeling tar-paper roof. There was no blaring radio, no thud of a baseball against the wall, no anguished man except himself. It was peaceful with the sunrise sound of birds and the g
entle rush of wind. There were no ghosts here to whom he could apologize. Joe was gone, happy in his choice of graves. He had haunted this place when he was alive. There was no need to do so now.
He walked over to the ledge and picked up one of Joe's dirty, worn baseballs from the decaying basket. He stood, tossing the ball up in the air and catching it. Go slay a dragon Eileen had said. He looked over the rooftops, past the skyscrapers built since the war, to an old neighborhood of the city, a neighborhood whose residents believed in dragons. For five years he had avoided its streets, shunned its people, haunted its alleys and teahouses and gambling dens in his memories. Like Joe and his rooftop, he was a ghost in Chinatown.
He threw the ball away, backed up several steps, and with four quick strides launched himself into the air, felt its friction, tasted the acrid fear of death, and slammed into the ledge of the building opposite, clawing, grasping, finally pulling himself up. He straddled the ledge and looked down into the twelve-story chasm. "I'm alive," he said aloud. "I'm not a ghost, because ghosts don't slay dragons."
He slid off the ledge onto the roof and dusted off his hands. He touched the bail bondsman's commission in his breast pocket. Tonight he would go to Chinatown.
TWELVE
Cleary took a deep breath. He could feel his heart pounding inside his chest as he knocked on the orange metal door with an embossed image of a dragon swallowing its own tail. That's what he had been doing for five years, swallowing his own tail. Eating himself up with guilt, or with a sense of failure. Maybe they were the same thing. Tonight he would confront himself, slay the dragon. If his mission in Chinatown was no heroic, life-or-death situation, it still gave him an opportunity. Maybe as he walked the familiar streets, he could forgive himself. Or find a way to pay a debt. If he did neither, then Joe Quinlan's death meant nothing. His dying wouldn't make a difference.
