Bosstown

by Adam Abramowitz

  “How do I look?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Sort of like an ATM that got run over. You know where you are, Zesty?”

  I tell her.

  “You know what day it is?”

  “Feels like a Monday.”

  “That’s cheating.” Michaela fishes inside a red duffel, peels the cover off a gauze pad, and presses above my right eyebrow. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I got run over by a gold Buick.”

  “Do you remember how you fell? What hit first?”

  I close my eyes, the black street flying up to greet me again. “No.”

  “You remember losing consciousness?”

  “No,” I lie, knowing whatever hospital I’m destined for will insist on an overnight booking if I’ve been knocked out. I understand the precaution but prefer to recover in a nice quiet bar if I can manage it. Last I checked, a bottle of Jameson was still cheaper than an uninsured night in the hospital.

  “Okay. Is there any place hurts really badly, more than another?”

  “My head’s pounding.”

  “No surprise. You’ve got a deep cut above your eye that’s causing most of this blood. You’ll need stitches, but it’s not so bad, considering. Anything else?”

  “I was hearing music,” I say. “In my head.”

  Michaela raises her eyebrows to that.

  “But mostly static. And this high-pitched noise like when you’re spinning a dial, trying to hook a signal.”

  “And you’re sure you didn’t lose consciousness?”

  “Positive.” I flash my best poker face. “Maybe it was a car radio,” I add belatedly, trying to throw her off the scent.

  How can you tell a poker player is lying? Answer: When his lips are moving.

  I don’t say anything else as Popeye reappears with the AED and one of Boston’s Finest in tow, a freckled redhead as tall as Popeye is thick. Red nods at me, almost as an afterthought, crouches opposite Michaela, and unleashes a big hound-toothy smile he probably reserves for sunny June mornings and exotic black-maned EMTs.

  “So what are we looking at here?” From his shirt pocket he pulls out a notepad and lays it on my chest—Zesty the Human Coffee Table.

  “A few superficial lacs, maybe a couple broken ribs. No loss of consciousness. Name’s Zesty. Says he hears music.”

  “Every time I look at you,” I croak.

  They both ignore me.

  “I just need your name, then we’ll lead you out of here.”

  “She just gave it to you.” I tap the notepad with a bloody finger. “You mind not writing on me? It hurts.”

  “I need your full name.” He lifts the pad, flips to a clean page.

  I tell him and watch the ill effects of a Boston Public School education rear its ugly head. Maybe the system’s on an upswing these days, but his class must have gone from Jack and Jill to Dick and Jane; here’s your diploma. Don’t chew gum and operate heavy machinery at the same time. Join the police force. Steady bennies, tons of perks.

  As I’m braced and boarded, I glimpse Popeye admiring his biceps, holding his end of my one-seventy with all the effort of a cat napping. Michaela, bent slightly with the strain, unwittingly gives Red an opportunity to steal a long look down her shirt.

  Before the ambulance doors slam shut, I catch sight of what’s left of my bike, the wheels twisted savagely, hanging spokes, the gear cables snapped, dangling like exposed nerves. The crank is shattered. The seat slumps like a limp dick.

  My luck holds true to form as Michaela slips behind the wheel, leaving Popeye unsupervised to cut through my vintage Clash T-shirt, dreams of surgery dancing in his light blue eyes. The radio crackles. The bus lurches into gear. When my head static reasserts itself, it’s reduced to background noise, no match for the siren broadcasting my pain to the rest of the town. It sounds different from inside, I realize as we pick up speed. But then again, what doesn’t?

  EIGHT

  Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center on Brookline Avenue is the place you hope they take you after getting hit by a gold Buick. It’s clean, well lit, the halls lined with soothing prints of calm lakes and green forests, no doubt chosen by some interior designer who minored in psychology at school: Dull Your Patients to Health 101.

  The emergency room is quiet as I’m wheeled in; people are either getting along or just aiming better. If you read the papers, you’d be inclined to believe the latter. Boston’s inner-city neighborhoods, long balkanized primarily along color lines, are starting to drop bodies at a rate not seen since crack was king and Van Halen topped the charts with a song about wanting to bang your teacher.

  Only here at Beth Israel, all is floral, the waiting room stocked with enough flowers to bury a war hero, a 1-800 number engraved on each vase in case you’ve only come calling with a lousy box of chocolates and some trashy magazines.

  When Michaela finishes relaying my status to the intake nurse, an orderly with double-shift eyes bumps me through a set of swinging doors, and two hours, five X-rays, and one sleepwalking intern later, a supervising doctor is straight-up carving hieroglyphics on a prescription pad, his smile there but the rest of him already at the club preparing to tee the first hole. “Any questions, concerns?”

  “I’m good.” I don’t tell him about the rough static I’m hearing, the high-pitched frequency floating another familiar song off the dial between my ears, “Where Is My Mind” by the Pixies.

  The static is annoying, but my internal DJ rocks.

  “The nurse will bring your initial dose. If you don’t have a change of clothes, you’re welcome to those scrubs on the bed.”

  It takes me five painful minutes to change into the surgical greens. It takes another three to pad barefoot to the nurse’s station and beg the phone. Not surprisingly, nobody addresses me as doctor. Happily, nobody mistakes me for a pillar of salt.

  Martha picks up on the fifth ring, still chewing with enthusiasm. “Mercury Couriers,” she intones between bites.

  “You forgot the jingle.”

  “You don’t have a jingle. Where the hell are you?”

  “Beth Israel,” I tell her.

  “Doing what?”

  “Working my magic on Florence Nightingale.” A nurse looks up from her paperwork, rolls her eyes toward her coworkers. I try winking at them, but the stitches are too painful.

  “Yeah? Well, I’ve been busy farming your runs to Owen and Damien. We’ve been off the hook since an accident backed up Boylston. And why didn’t you pick up at Black Hole?”

  “What?” I say between static waves and a sharp pain that causes me to squint. “Say that again.”

  Martha obliges me between chews, and I counter with my own version of the morning, up until my head and the cash hit the street. I can tell she’s riveted because the sound of chewing actually stops until I’m done. Or maybe she’s just run out of food.

  “Zesty, why would Black Hole claim you no-showed if you lost all that money?”

  “I don’t know. You ever get ahold of Gus?”

  “No. Another reason we’re swamped.”

  “Listen, if you get in touch, have him give me a call. No, scratch that,” I say, realizing I no longer have a phone or the Motorola. “Just let him know I need to talk.”

  “You think Gus knows something about the money?” Martha hooks on to my line of thinking: Gus’s client. Gus’s run, only I got the call instead. I can almost hear the whirring of internal gears as Martha resumes chewing. “Zesty, what’re you gonna do?”

  “I don’t know. Wait for the other shoe to drop. I’ve got insurance, right?”

  Judging from the sound at the other end of the line, whatever Martha had been chewing might have just exited through her nose.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” I say, glumly.

  Martha recovers enough to explain that while I do carry insurance, the coverage maxes out somewhere in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars, a paltry sum in retrospect but more than enough to cover the da
ily slog of contracts, blueprints, and other paperwork that constitute the bread and butter of my assignments.

  “I mean, how much money was there?”

  I reach down the front of the surgical greens and lift the sticky bills from my cycling shorts. If the nurses weren’t amused with me before, they’re genuinely disgusted now. I look at the crumpled hundred and twenty in my hand. When I’d come around on Boylston, the sky was a downpour of bills just like them.

  “Never mind, I’ll dig up the paperwork. Only maybe you won’t need it.…” Martha was uncharacteristically leaning bright-side: If the money stays unclaimed, I’ll have nobody to repay.

  “I guess we’ll see. I’ll get in touch as soon as I can.” Figuring at the very least I have a built-in excuse to visit Vanilla Vampire again; give me time to rehearse my lines. Sorry, the money’s gone. What’s with the bullshit? You busy Friday night?

  “Zesty…” Martha says something else, but heavy static clouds the connection.

  “What? You’re breaking up.”

  “I can … just fine.”

  I extend the receiver as far as the cord will stretch, but the static lingers. “I’ll call you later,” I shout at arm’s length, as the nurses stare at me with defensive postures.

  “Wrong number,” I whisper, gently replacing the receiver.

  I’m just starting to lace up my Adidas when my nurse arrives, Dixie-cup rattling my first dose of pain relief. “It says Tylenol and codeine.” She barely glances at the prescription I try handing her. “You can start with these, gratis.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “Concerning what?”

  “Check the chart. I got run over by a Buick! That’s like an oversized ashtray with wheels. And,” I add triumphantly, “I have an extra vertebra.”

  “Congratulations. You want those or not?”

  I throw back the pills, choke them down dry while she delivers instructions in a monotone suggesting a dark knowledge that I won’t be following them but here they are all the same.

  “Any questions?”

  “Yeah, what does someone have to do to get some Percocet around here?”

  She concludes the question is rhetorical and exits between a pair of suits who come barging past her, the hot pursuit of their shadows apparently enough of a workout to leave the older of the two, heavyset and black, wheezing in the doorway, his rumpled blue wash-and-wear looking as if it’s been getting more wear than wash as of late. The same could be said of his face, which is creased and stubbled, heavily stained under his eyes, giving him the sulking demeanor of a hungover bloodhound. His hair is cut close to his scalp, graying in patches. An unlit cigar protrudes from the corner of thick lips.

  The younger man is another story altogether, wolf-lean and hard angled, his midnight suit assembled with Secret Service–like care. He has stubble on his face too, but it has clean-razored lines that come only with expensive manscaping. His hair is gelled, meticulously parted to one side by a team of Caltech engineers. There are no bags under his luminescent green eyes. His fingernails are buffed and polished. His tan is perfect. His shoes belong to Brad Pitt.

  Gold Boston Detective shields hang from lanyards looped around their necks. They cross the threshold into the room, the older man kicking out the rubber doorstop behind him. I greet them with a frown. They pretend they’re happy to see me.

  NINE

  They’re lousy actors. Homicide detectives almost always are. By rule, it’s the narcotics squad that gets all the theatrical types, the stand-up comedians. By comparison, the homicide dicks are the Ed McMahons of the police force—potted plants, spear holders, and cue card readers—players of two roles only and sometimes even those not so well.

  The exception to that rule was poker.

  In my father’s illegal yet sanctioned poker games, the homicide detectives who played—always at the invitation of someone higher up the food chain, a department rabbi or someone dialed into the mayor’s office—used their lack of range to their advantage, the gist being that it’s awfully hard to read a potted plant. The homicides were also observant, quick to study other players’ tendencies and body language, first to capitalize on tells while rooting out the false signals and manufactured tics sent up like smoke signals to obscure the strength or weakness of hands. Poker is a social game, and they were in the people business after all, both the living and the dead.

  As a group, if there was one hole in their play, it lay in their dogged pursuit of a hand that needed to be released. The homicide players, almost to a man, were keen observers of others but could hardly recognize their own faults and weaknesses; they stuck around too long and often got burned.

  I figure the young cop will lead, work the generational angle, the obvious shared love of fashion. I don’t need anybody to tell me I look good in surgical greens.

  “Zesty Meyers?” I’m wrong, the seasoned detective opens, leaving the younger detective to drift into the wings silently mouthing his lines. “I’m Detective Brill. Robbery homicide.” He tilts his chin toward his gold shield. “My partner there, Detective Wells. How’s the head feel?”

  “Like it’s been run over by a Buick,” I tell him.

  “So I hear. Doc was amazed it wasn’t worse, considering.”

  “I guess I bounce well,” I say, even though I don’t really feel it.

  “Or you got a hard head. How many stitches he sew into you?”

  “About twenty.”

  “Mmm, not bad. Little war wound give you some character. Isn’t that right, Detective Wells?” He addresses his partner’s back, the detective busy clicking on the panel lights where my X-rays hang illuminated like haunted house decorations.

  “What’s that?” With a glowing finger, he traces the alignment of my spine into the area of the hip bones, places his palm flat against the bony stalactites of my fingers dripping off the larger bones of my arms.

  “Character,” Brill repeats, exasperated by his partner’s lack of focus. “The stitches?”

  “Yeah.” Wells squints at the glowing film, tilts his head like the angle might help him see something he’d otherwise miss. “That’s just what this guy needs, more character.”

  “Shoot. Don’t mind Detective Wells, Zesty. He doesn’t like hospitals is all. Makes him sort of—”

  “Tense,” Wells says, pivoting toward us, looking tense.

  “Right.” Brill rolls his shoulders. “Same with me too. And it’s a funny thing, really. Like, I can walk into a morgue, smell of formaldehyde and all those chemicals they got in there, flip toe tags like I’m browsing a yard sale, feel just fine. Relaxed even. But here, even with all them pretty nurses, I get all—”

  “Tense,” I say, saving him the trouble.

  “Squirmy,” Brill continues as if I hadn’t interrupted him. “Isn’t that right, Detective?”

  “Sure,” Wells chimes in on cue. “In the morgue you can catch a nap.”

  Brill smiles benignly. “You know why I think that is, Zesty?”

  “Because you’re a homicide detective?”

  “Because I’m a robbery homicide detective,” Brill emphasizes. “But do you know why, Zesty?”

  “Why don’t you tell me, Detective.”

  “You interested?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Well, that’s too bad. I like the morgue because it’s quiet, Zesty.”

  “Dead quiet.” Wells nails his beat, shrugging up his cuff to glance at his expensive watch.

  “Peaceful. Nobody yelling ‘Code Red,’ ‘Code Blue,’ screaming and crying. The morgue…” Brill spreads his hands. “It’s just me and the Popsicles, and the Popsicles don’t tell no lies, Zesty, you feel me? They’re like the last page of a book where everything’s out in the open, everything’s revealed.”

  “Depends on what you’re reading,” I say, just to say something.

  “That’s true.” Brill concedes the point, taking the cigar out of his mouth for inspection. “Still, it’s all there; m
ight not know the whole story yet, but I sure as hell know the ending. And they’re not going anywhere.…”

  “Unlike the hospital?” I help him along, the Tylenol and codeine doing jack-shit for my pounding head.

  “That’s right. People in hospitals got their own agendas. Always in a hurry to get out, and I can’t say I blame them. So they do anything, make up stories as they go along. I was here. I was there. I was giving my girl the high hard one, you ain’t gonna tell my old lady, are ya?” Brill chuckles but narrows his eyes at me. “You following me here, Zesty?”

  “I think so. You prefer the morgue over the hospital.”

  It’s not the answer he’s looking for, but it’s a perfect segue for Wells to growl in my ear from behind. “Tell us about the accident.” His hot breath smells childish. Bazooka bubble gum. “Whose money did you lose?”

  I’d been expecting the question, but the length of the preamble and the fact that these are robbery homicide detectives doesn’t add up. If Vanilla called Martha claiming I never picked up at Black Hole, I have to figure she didn’t call the money in as a theft either. Which leaves what? The Buick killed somebody else after mowing me down?

  “I was making a delivery,” I say, deciding for now to wait on more cards to fall.

  “From where?” Wells doing the talking now, Brill working a notepad he’d lifted from his jacket pocket.

  “Black Hole Vinyl,” I say, adding the address. “It’s a local record company.”

  “Record meaning black vinyl discs, Detective,” Brill says, without lifting his eyes off the notepad. “With grooves in them, which when played on a phonograph at a certain speed, the disc rotating under a fine needle produces the distinctive sounds of music. I can catch you up on this later if you’re unclear on the concept.”

  Wells pretends not to hear his partner but slips a smile. “Who gave you the package?”

  “Girl in the office, I didn’t catch her name. It was a twelve-by-twenty-four manila envelope. Address on the front in black marker.”

  “Did I ask you that?”

  “What?”

  “Did I ask what the package was?” Wells stares at me.