Hard Stop sahm-4

by Chris Knopf

  He pointed at my coffee.

  “Is that the cup?”

  “It’s in the truck.”

  I got up from the table, forcing him to follow. We scooped up Eddie and found the pickup.

  “While I got you in a good mood,” I said, after giving him the cup, “I’m hoping you can let Honest Boy Ackerman back into town.”

  The storm clouds behind his eyes darkened another shade.

  “That chump.”

  I told him about the encounter up island and the subsequent conversation.

  “And you believe him?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. But I can’t see the harm. I don’t have to tell him anything I don’t want to.”

  He just walked away, shrugging his meaty shoulders.

  “Come to dinner with us,” I called to him. “At the Pequot. Seven-thirty. You and Honest Boy can catch up on old times.”

  I think I heard him say something like, “Yeah, maybe. We’ll see,” but I wasn’t sure. Though I felt a gentle stir in the vibe currents left in his wake, telling me to secure a big enough table for the three of us and the inevitable incursions of the proprietor and his idiosyncratic daughter.

  I killed the rest of the day in my shop trying to stay ahead of the projects I’d promised Frank, and had to hustle over to Sag Harbor so I wouldn’t be late to meet Ackerman for dinner. I was afraid to leave him alone with the regular Pequot clientele without an introduction.

  The parking lot was full of pickups and ragged Japanese compacts, but no black SUVs. I let Eddie clear the lot of invisible antagonists, then lead the way into the restaurant. While he hit up the usual suckers for clams and French fries I grabbed a table next to the kitchen. Save Hodges a few steps.

  “Did you know they flavor this stuff now? Lemon, orange, raspberry,” said Dorothy as she dropped my Absolut in front of me. “The salesman just talked my father into buying a case of each.”

  “I thought you had a shotgun behind the bar.”

  “That’s for mortal threats.”

  “Exactly.”

  I told her to bring an extra menu for a guy recently canned from the security department at my old company. She stood there waiting for me to flesh out the story, but after thinking about it, I didn’t know how.

  “It’s involved,” I told her.

  “It always is,” she said, taking a final half-hearted wipe at the table and going back behind the bar.

  Eddie greeted Honest Boy at the door, delighted with a newfound relationship: “Cool, this guy is, like, everywhere!”

  For his part, Honest Boy looked somewhere between repelled and vaguely alarmed. The Pequot often had that effect on people. Once they got to know the place, the repulsion wore off.

  “I didn’t know they let dogs into restaurants,” he said as he pulled up a chair.

  “Eddie rejects those artificial social barriers.”

  “I thought it was the health department,” he said, looking around the joint.

  “You’ll have to take that up with them.”

  “Judson said you had mental problems,” said Honest Boy, half to himself, then realizing what he’d said, quickly added, “Not that I think that.”

  Dorothy arrived in time to hear.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said to him.

  “He has to tell the truth. His name’s Honest Boy.”

  Dorothy looked impressed, not an easy thing to achieve.

  “Get out of here.”

  “That’s the handle. Honestly,” he said, for the fourteen millionth time. She reached out to shake. He looked at her hand, taken aback by the fingerless glove that went up well past her elbow. Then he took it, tentatively.

  “Glad to meet you, Honest Boy. I’m Dissembling Dorothy. Not officially. What’re you drinking?”

  “She’s the official bartender,” I said.

  “Any imported beers?”

  Dorothy continued to look at him like he hadn’t said anything. He looked to me for help.

  “From as far away as Wisconsin,” I told him.

  “Sounds just right,” he said, smiling at Dorothy’s back as she strode through the double doors into the kitchen, black leotard–covered hips in full swing.

  “Unusual girl,” he said.

  “I think she likes you.”

  “That’d be a first.”

  “Keep your insecurities to yourself. She’ll smell it on you like a dog smells fear.”

  “Sometimes it’s hard to imagine you ran Technical Services and Support from almost nothing to, what, a billion dollar enterprise?” said Honest Boy, eager to change the subject.

  “A billion point two,” I said.

  “Not that I’m criticizing. I’ve spent a lot of time with the big dicks that run Con Globe. Bunch of uptight, self-serving, humorless pricks.”

  “Pricks or dicks. You have to make up your mind.”

  “It’s no wonder they’re afraid of you.”

  I laughed at him. It surprised both of us. I don’t laugh a lot. Not built for it.

  “As the fox fears the rabbit,” I said.

  He smiled broadly.

  “Right. Like I said, it’s no wonder they’re afraid of you. Crazy like a fox.”

  Dorothy showed up with a mug and a can of Budweiser, which she poured for Honest Boy, something I’d never seen her do before. He thanked her warmly. Before things got out of hand, Eddie intervened, whining for French fries and his regular bowl of water.

  “Okay, handsome, keep your fur on,” she said to him.

  “What kind of dog is this, again?” Honest Boy asked, scratching Eddie’s head.

  “A Zen retriever,” said Dorothy. “Knows where the stick is going before you throw it.”

  “Make a good bird dog,” said Honest Boy.

  “Not if you ask the birds,” she said. “You want anything to eat? We got imported burgers and local fish. With imported tartar sauce and imported French fries.”

  “Pommes frites, my mother called them,” I added. “She was French-Canadian.”

  “You people obviously know what works here and what doesn’t,” he said. “You decide.”

  “He wants the fish,” I said to Dorothy. She nodded, of a mind.

  “I’ll take a burger,” I called to her as she headed back to the kitchen. The front door opened loudly enough to cause Honest Boy to turn around and look. A half dozen smelly crew off one of the sportfishing boats crowded through the narrow entrance, leading with their beer bellies, coats open and baseball hats turned to the back, proud of their hard-won, rugged ignorance.

  No one else in the place took much notice, but I caught Honest Boy tapping his chest under his left arm.

  When Dorothy came out of the kitchen they started to chant “Dot-ty, Dot-ty!” and only stopped when she told them to shut the hell up, which they did, immediately. Though not soon enough to evade the notice of Paul Hodges, who followed his daughter out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on his off-white apron, his eyes bristling with irritation.

  “Goddammit, Pierre, I told you,” he yelled at the lead meatball, “you’re allowed to be drunk when you leave. Not when you come in.” Pierre looked sheepish.

  “We’re not drunk, Mr. Hodges,” he said. “Jez happy from the catch today. She’z big, like the customer tips.”

  Hodges looked over at me.

  “I’m not responsible for every Canuck who comes into the place,” I said to him as I slid my chair around the table and grabbed Honest Boy by the throat, reaching my other hand into his sport jacket and plucking a little snub-nose out of its shoulder holster. I slid it into my jeans pocket.

  “Hey.”

  “House rules,” I said. “I’ll give it back when we leave.”

  The boat crew settled down after Dorothy passed out drinks and took orders. Eddie sat next to their table trying to get in on the action, but she shooed him back over to us.

  “Judson didn’t tell you anything, did he?” asked Honest Boy, when things finally settled down.


  “He told me about the Mandate of ’53, meant to keep Con Globe independent in perpetuity. He implied that members of the board thought Donovan wanted to break the mandate. That’s pretty much it, none of which has anything to do with me.”

  Honest Boy sat back, looking self-satisfied.

  “I knew you’d say that,” he said.

  Before I could respond Dorothy and Vinko came out with our meals. Honest Boy studied the slice of lemon sitting atop the white mass on his plate.

  “So what sort of fish is this again?” he asked.

  “North Sea fin tail,” said Dorothy. “Caught off Hog’s Neck, right here in Noyac Bay.”

  “Really,” said Honest Boy, looking suspiciously at his plate.

  “Why’d you say that?” I asked him.

  “I like to know what I’m eating.”

  “Why’d you say ‘I knew you’d say that’?”

  “’Cause I knew you would,” he said.

  “Say what?”

  He took a bite of the fish and smiled approvingly.

  “I’ll have to get some of this when I’m home.”

  “That’d be a neat trick. Did Judson tell you something different?”

  Honest Boy scoffed.

  “I told you what he told me. Nothing.” He pointed his fork at me. “You can belittle me all you want, but I’m a trained investigator. I’m actually capable of finding things out on my own.”

  “Okay, that’s fine. I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  Sensing a slight upper hand, Honest Boy took his time with the next mouthful of fish. I pretended I didn’t mind. Dorothy came over to ask about the food, which led to a discussion of North Sea fin tail, which Dorothy insisted was far flakier than talapia, a close relative. So it took a while to get back to the conversation.

  “Marve’s convinced that you’re involved with Donovan’s plot to void the Mandate of ’53. An opinion shared by Mason Thigpen, who by the way Marve reports to, officially, not the full Board of Directors like he wants you to think. Marve says there’s no other reason why you’d go from ultimate corporate dead man to Donovan’s pet project. Why else would he hire outside counsel to examine your severance agreement?”

  “I haven’t talked to anyone from TSS since I left. And I didn’t know anything about that mandate until I heard it from Marve.”

  “Have you heard about the big patent settlement? Don’t insult me with a denial. Just keep the straight face. You’re good at that.”

  My ex-wife used to say the same thing about me, though in less complimentary terms.

  “How many people are talking about this?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry, very few.”

  I knew I shouldn’t be surprised that some version of the recent connection between me and Donovan had surfaced, however far-fetched. In fact, it was probably a good thing they’d jumped to conclusions. People are always more inclined to concoct a myth than bother with the facts.

  “So what’s your stake in this?” I asked. “And don’t insult me by saying it’s only curiosity.”

  He smiled.

  “I was telling the truth. There’s a lot I still don’t know. But there’s more to it than that. If I’m right about what I do know, I know which side to be on.”

  “Who said there’re sides?”

  “Oh, there’re sides all right. More than two. I just want to be on the one that sees to it that Con Globe is blown to smithereens and scattered on the wind. When I got fired it struck me like a revelation from God. I hate the bastards who run that place. I have for a long time, I just didn’t know it. Including George Donovan. But if he’s going to be the agent of their destruction, he’s my friend. Him and anybody he brings in to help do the deed. And there’s nobody on the face of the earth better suited to that role than the guy I’m sitting across from right now. So here’s to you,” he said, raising his beer, “and to hell with Consolidated Global Energies.”

  Honest Boy’s triumphant defiance was dampened by the timely arrival of Joe Sullivan, which also quieted down the noisy fishing crew.

  He sat next me and across from Ackerman. Neither tried to shake hands. They stared at each other until Eddie stuck his nose in Sullivan’s lap, disrupting his concentration.

  “Hey, Joe,” Honest Boy finally said, “long time no see.”

  “Not long enough.”

  Ackerman looked over at me. I shrugged.

  “Wait’ll he has a beer. It mellows him right out.”

  Which it did. That and the next two. And the usual distractions from the Hodges family and the general flow of the evening. Dorothy in particular made her presence felt, hanging around the table and salting the conversation with an occasional non-sequitur. After a while, Sullivan and Ackerman were chatting up a storm, like a couple of regular barflies ensnared by their own random nonsense.

  As a signal that things had truly degraded, Paul Hodges brought out a tray full of shots with a bowl of lemon slices. After a lot of yelling and cracking of shot glasses on the pine tables, some civility returned, though less articulate.

  By now Eddie was sound asleep with his head resting on the bar rail and Dorothy was sitting in Honest Boy’s lap, fussing with the thin remnants of hair at his temples and seeming to listen to his tales of undercover adventures in the Third World. Her father was over with the fishermen, arm-wrestling and tossing gutting knives at a knot in the pine paneling above the neon Bud sign. Sullivan eventually fell asleep, snoring a duet with Eddie, leaving me alone with a bucket of ice and a bottle of Absolut Citron, which I forced down as a favor to the local vodka distributor, an enterprise worthy of conditional support.

  This is how I left them. I had to roust Eddie with a gentle nudge of my boot. He stood up, shook out his coat, and followed without complaint. Outside it was cool and clear. The moon was struggling up from the horizon, a bloated red and nearly round. I watched Eddie lope across the parking lot, stopping to pee on the oversized tires of Ackerman’s SUV, and then over to the Grand Prix.

  I let him in the car and headed back to Oak Point. As we negotiated the hilly curves of Noyac Road on the way home from Sag Harbor a set of headlights came up fast from behind and filled the rearview mirror. My first thought was Ackerman, but the lights were too low to the ground to be an SUV. I rarely pushed the big old car much past the speed limit whenever curves were involved, often frustrating the carloads of overachievers pouring in from East Hampton and Sag Harbor on the way back to the City. So I could hardly blame the tailgaters. I kicked it up a little, but then the car behind me tucked up even closer, until the headlights nearly disappeared under the Pontiac’s massive trunk.

  Since that was all the thanks I got, I dropped back to the speed limit. He could sit there and stew until I turned off, or take his chances passing around a curve, which is all there was on Noyac Road.

  He backed off a little, then pulled in close again, even closer than before. I sighed. Intimidation of any kind never sat that well with me, though lately I’d been striving mightily to control how I handled it. With calm forbearance. Maturity and reserve. An almost pacifistic turning of the other cheek. This is how I strove, not always successfully.

  I waited until we hit a short straight patch of road and yanked the steering wheel to the left, putting the Grand Prix into the empty oncoming lane. Then I slammed on the brakes. The car behind shot by on the right. It was a new Mustang, black, the color of choice among automotive intimidators. I pulled the Grand Prix back into the proper lane and fought another little battle with myself.

  When I was younger I’d be inclined to bring the four-mile-long nose of the Grand Prix up to about two inches off the Mustang’s rear bumper and keep it there all the way to the guy’s house, where I’d either let him slink back into his real life as a frustrated, ineffectual asshole or wait for him to get out of the car so I could stick my fist down his throat.

  But I was older now, more mature. I regretted a lot of things I’d done, however satisfying they might
have seemed at the time. I understood now I’d been merely acting out of my own sense of offended righteousness, that my anger wasn’t actually directed at the apparent object of antagonism, but rather an expression of my manifold disappointments and thwarted expectations.

  While I was congratulating myself for evolving to a higher level of self-awareness, the Mustang driver stood on his brakes and slammed a hard left, gunning the rear wheels into an impressive power spin that had him flying past me in the opposite direction before I half realized what he was doing.

  That’s when I thought this might not be an ordinary asshole. And probably not that ineffectual.

  “Aw, shit,” I said out loud. I gripped Eddie’s collar and pushed him down into the foot well of the front passenger seat, downshifted into second and stuck the accelerator to the floor. The ten-ton hunk of Detroit iron leaped forward like a cat, the nearly bottomless torque suddenly awake and engaged.

  I didn’t know the handling characteristics of the new Mustang, but I guessed they were better than what I had available. The Grand Prix wasn’t what you’d call a European touring car. All it knew how to do was accelerate rapidly in a straight line. I figured it would take a few seconds for the Mustang to pull another 180 to get back in pursuit. So I tightened my grip on the ugly plastic steering wheel and held on hard as I experimented with the limits of the big car’s suspension system.

  I’d done what I could with beefy after-market shocks and modern tires, though you can’t do much about the ballistic energy of all that unbalanced weight being flung through hairpin turns.

  I was mostly worried about Eddie. I hoped he didn’t think this was a cool new game and jump back on the seat to take it all in. As I held a death grip on the steering wheel I reached through the centrifugal force to stroke his head and ask him to stay where he was like a good boy.

  The Mustang was back on my rear bumper in less than five minutes. I could hear the throaty roar of the fuel-injected V8 above the wind noise, and the solid scream of tires over macadam, sticky and secure to the road.

  Then I heard a strange little metallic pop, and saw a spider web blossom across my windshield. At first I thought, great, what a time to get hit by a rock. But when the second web opened up I knew what it was.