The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

  This was it. The most crucial part of our plan so far. Success here meant smooth sailing for the next several steps.

  “She’s hilarious,” I said. “You ever spend any time with her? She should have been a stand-up comedian. Could have been, too, if it wasn’t for that husband of hers.”

  I knew he wanted her out. All the other tenants had accepted buyouts. With her gone, he could do a gut renovation, annex it to one of the Pequod properties. She’d turned him down because she refused to cede an inch to the invaders, but Jark didn’t need to know that.

  “She told me she wants to move,” I said, “but she can’t risk a buyout because her husband’s sobriety is such a fragile thing. If he had access to a ton of money all of a sudden . . . bad things would happen. And then the money would be gone, and then so would her husband. They’ve been down similar roads before. And he’s abusive, so even if the money was all in her name, she doesn’t trust herself to be able to hold out if he threatened to hurt her. Because she knows he will.”

  “Really . . .” Jark said, drunk eyes wide.

  “If she had a house all ready to move into, on the other hand, some asset that couldn’t be easily liquidated, they’d be safe.”

  “Wow,” he said. “That’s so sad.”

  “Isn’t it? Makes me feel a lot better about being single.”

  He clinked his empty glass to mine. I could see the ideas vibrate behind his eyes, the well-oiled machinery of his mind chugging down the precise tracks I’d laid out for it.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  RONAN

  “Happy Columbus Day weekend,” Marge barked, walking in with two big paper grocery bags. “Prepare to not be able to walk on the fucking street because it’s so packed with goddamned tourists.”

  Shit, I thought, my stomach twisted and my head full of wasps from Jark’s rye. Who said expensive liquor doesn’t give hangovers? Please, God, don’t let it be Saturday. Don’t let me have missed the most important part of our plan, failed to do the thing I needed to do, fucked the whole thing up.

  But my phone assured me it was Friday. And early, still. I might feel like shit, but I’d lost barely any time.

  One text message, from Attalah: I hope your boy Tom can deliver tonight.

  He will, I typed. If there’s one thing I know, it’s how easily horny men can be manipulated.

  I logged in to Grindr. Tom’s inbox was predictably packed. Including one from the night before, from just the man I’d been hoping to hear from. You around? he’d asked, at midnight.

  Hey man, I typed. Sorry I missed this. Passed the fuck out after work. How you doing?

  The response—Great dude how r u—came almost immediately.

  tom.minniq: I’m alright. Going crazy with work and errands and shit

  Just Quint: sorry

  [two minutes of silence on my end—on Tom’s end]

  Just Quint: so no time for fun today?

  Top Model Quint would never have given a guy who looked like me a second glance or a polite word. But for Tom Minniq he sent over the most explicit imagery imaginable—including several videos where he offered up his orifices to a wide variety of men.

  tom.minniq: Probably not :(

  tom.minniq: Unless I can clone myself and make the other me go pick up this shit

  Just Quint: What shit?

  tom.minniq: stuff for my buddy’s business. Business cards and buttons and shit. He got it printed up at Staples and I stupidly told him I’d go pick it up for him.

  tom.minniq: It’s all paid for, I just don’t have time to drag my ass all over town getting the stuff and dropping it off downtown. I’m way the hell out in Great Barrington helping out on a roofing gig for a friend of mine and it’d take me two hours with all the driving.

  [Forty-nine seconds of silence on my end]

  Just Quint: I could go pick it up for you

  [Tom’s response came with eerie speed, because I’d already typed it and had only been waiting for the offer to arrive to click send]

  tom.minniq: holy shit dude thank you

  tom.minniq: That’d be amazing

  tom.minniq: Gimme your full name and I’ll call him, have it added to the order

  tom.minniq: You’ll need ID to sign for it

  Just Quint: yeah man happy to help out

  Just Quint: especially if it clears up some space on your schedule so you can come play [winking devil face emoji]

  tom.minniq: one of the things is a big tube. Probably too big for a car. You got a pickup truck?

  I knew he did. It’s why I picked him, out of all the boys who’d gladly have done anything Tom Minniq asked of him.

  Just Quint: yup. government-issued-ID name is Quentin Skerping. But don’t tell anyone lol. I model under the name Quint Sawyer

  tom.minniq: absolutely dude. Maybe this evening. U looking to get fucked?

  Just Quint: #always

  tom.minniq: dirty slut

  tom.minniq: I appreciate a dirty slut

  I sent him the location, where the stuff needed to be dropped off. Behind the abandoned taxi-dispatcher stand, across from the train station. Then I lobbed back his winking devil face emoji and logged out.

  Marge was in the kitchen, unpacking grocery bags. “Can I give you some cash for that?” I asked, pulling out my wallet.

  “Your dad paid,” she said, flashing his credit card and putting it down on the counter. “They know me out at ShopRite. I got every receipt in a folder in this drawer, so he can review them. If he ever, you know, can.”

  “Thanks, Marge,” I said. We hugged. Of course she couldn’t sense my awkwardness, couldn’t tell from that how I’d betrayed my father and sold the building and fucked over our town forever. Could she?

  “Hey,” my father said, standing in the doorway. My jaw dropped. It wasn’t that he was standing there—he could be mobile—but he’d very definitely just said a word.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, afraid to speak louder than a whisper.

  “Making your coffee, Jim,” Marge said, gesturing to the coffeepot and putting away the groceries like this was super normal.

  Dad grunted and went back to the living room.

  “Does this happen a lot?” I asked Marge.

  “No. Sometimes, but not a lot. Having you here is doing him some good. I knew it would.”

  She touched me then, an awkward hand on top of my head. A forgotten bubble of fondness for her swelled inside me, a sense memory of being a little boy at the butcher shop with her massive hand on my head.

  “Thanks, Marge. For everything.”

  When the coffee was ready, I brought two cups out. Sat on the couch. He was sitting in his recliner, but the TV wasn’t on. He was watching out the window.

  “Here,” I said, setting his coffee down on the narrow table between us.

  He turned and smiled. The smile was weak but it was there. “Thanks, Ronan.”

  “How’ve you been, Dad?”

  Nothing.

  “I’ve missed you so much. Dad.”

  “Me, too. Ronan.”

  We sat. We sipped coffee. Marge made noise in the kitchen. If I shut my eyes and tuned out everything and tried my best to come unstuck in time, she could have been—

  “Mom,” I said, opening my eyes. “We never talked about Mom. You never wanted to, at first. And then, neither did I.”

  Dad stared into his cup.

  Here it was. The gulf I’d been skirting since I got there. The pain I’d been hiding from, behind hate. “I want to talk about her now,” I said.

  “Your mother loves you,” he said.

  “I know that, Dad.” This might be my only chance. He might never be here again. “But why did she . . . do it?”

  The question filled the room, like the echo of an explosion. Like we’d both been stunned, deafened, damaged by it.

  Dad did not respond. And so, asshole that I am, I repeated it.

  “We still get bears,” he said, when he spoke again, and already I could hear
something missing, something that had been in his voice when he spoke a moment ago and was gone now. “Backyard, sometimes. Wild boars, too. Big nasty things.”

  Maybe it was true. Behind our house was a scraggle of woodland, and a couple of scrawny dead-end streets, and then the cemetery. But it had no relevance to what we’d been talking about. My dad was gone again. He’d shown up on our doorstep—a miracle, a semi-feral house cat who we thought had run off forever—and I’d scared him away.

  “They always unsettled her,” he whispered. “The bears.”

  He’d be back. I told myself that. Let the sweet tang of hope fill my mouth.

  “I need you,” I said. “I know you can’t help me—not right now—but I know you’re in there. And I think you can hear me.”

  Did Dad nod, or was it just my imagination?

  “I can’t beat them alone.”

  My phone rang. Dominick. I got up, kissed my father on the forehead, and went into my room.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “How is he?” Dom asked, and the strong, clear sound of his voice went a long way toward diminishing the anger I felt for myself, for bringing up my mother and scaring Dad back into his shell.

  “He had a good morning. Talked for the first time since I’ve been here.”

  “That’s fucking awesome, dude. And you?”

  “Hungover,” I said, and laughed, and so did he, and the shared sound of it sent a tingle straight to my groin. Which is probably why I said the stupid thing I said next. That, and the fact that asking Dad about my mom had opened the floodgates to introspection I typically avoided. “I have a problem.”

  I’d never said it before. Not out loud. Not to another person; not without a jokey tone.

  “What kind of problem?” he said.

  “I’m a drug addict. And a sex addict.” And apparently also addicted to mayhem conspiracy. “And I do terrible things when I’m in the grip of it. Why am I telling all this to a cop?”

  “Because you’re an idiot,” he said, and laughed, and I wasn’t laughing this time, so I could appreciate the sound of his. “And you trust me. And anyway, I already found you collapsed in the street like a fucking drunk, the first night you were back. So I figured you were all kinds of fucked up.”

  “I love you, Dom,” I said, startling myself anew. But unlike with my father, this time once the words were out I felt insanely happy.

  “I love you, too, buddy.”

  “Not like that,” I said.

  “Not like what? You don’t know how I feel. And I don’t know how you feel.”

  “I’m telling you how I feel.”

  “Yeah, but, here’s the thing about being a cop. For me, anyway. You figure out real fast how words are bullshit. Best not to go by them, not really. It’s not that people lie, although they do, all the time. The real problem isn’t dishonesty. It’s ignorance, or confusion. People don’t understand themselves at all. Why they do the things they do. What they’re really feeling, and where it comes from. So the narratives they construct in their heads, and the way they give voice to those stories, they have a pretty minimal relevance to reality.”

  “That’s deep, dude.”

  “I’m a deep dude. Don’t let the uniform fool you.”

  I was grinning like a happy idiot schoolboy, there in the darkness of my curtained room. Headache and heartache forgotten by the sound of Dom’s voice.

  “You got plans tonight?” he asked. “You and my wife masterminding anybody’s utter destruction?”

  “Nope. Nothing.” He made me high. Reckless. “Why? You wanna go out on a date?”

  “There’s a big fundraiser for Jark Trowse’s election campaign tonight, and there’s someone I want you to meet. Gay kid, goes to Hudson High. Reminds me a lot of you, back in the day. By which I mean, fucking miserable. Got no friends. Wants to be a photographer. Figured maybe you could take him under your wing.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Okay. I’ll see you there.”

  Who knew whether it was Dom or my dad who made me so happy as I got dressed. Both of them, certainly. But my dad more. I drank glass after glass of water, feeling the ache of my dehydrated head diminish with each passing moment.

  He’s in there. He’s not gone.

  I muttered it under my breath, the staccato rhythm of it buoying me up, filling me with a love as high as helium.

  I couldn’t help the happiness I felt, the hope that he might come back. But I also couldn’t help the fear. That he’d find out what I’d done and hate me forever.

  And all the air went out of me. And I was suddenly so very small.

  No, I thought, grabbing hold of the blade between my ribs. Giving it a twist. Not this. Not now. There are too many monsters to punish. Too much mischief still to unfold. Tonight we declare war. The whole thing shifts.

  Tomorrow, things get really messy.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Searchlights sweep the sky. A step-and-repeat has been set up outside the Elks Lodge, red-carpet-style. On the sheer white backdrop, old-fashioned woodcut whales with the words CITY OF HUDSON around them alternate with the edgy modern logo of Jark’s company, and the slogan JARK TROWSE: A MAYOR FOR ALL OF US. People pose. Ronan dutifully does likewise, on his way in. Cameras flash by the dozen. One of the photographers is Vernon Sutphin, the author of a blog that calls itself the Hudson Gazette in emulation of an actual (long-dead) Hudson newspaper, who believes (erroneously) that this blog makes him (a) a journalist, and (b) practically a local. Ronan isn’t sure who the rest of them are. Probably Jark paid most of them, to give a false sense of paparazzi frenzy. He is on hand, greeting people, popping into the picture with anyone who wants him there. And who doesn’t want their picture taken with a famous billionaire and future mayor?

  * * *

  ON THIS NIGHT, Zelda Outterson will put more miles on her car than on any other night of her life.

  First, she drives down to the abandoned taxi dispatcher stand, where the packages Quint dropped off wait for her between two buildings. Four big heavy boxes, and one massive tube. The tube stays where it is. The boxes she loads into her car. Searchlights make slow circles in the sky, from somewhere to the north. She wonders what the occasion is.

  In the past week, she’s made nearly a thousand phone calls. Of the three hundred people on the list Attalah gave her, some of them were hard to reach. She was expecting that. When you’re struggling, when you probably owe a lot of money, you don’t just answer every unknown number whose call comes in. So she left a lot of messages and tried a bunch of times. Many of them are people who she knows.

  Some of them said no right off the bat. Some of them took several follow-up conversations. Some never responded at all. Some had had their cell service switched off.

  A hundred and eight of them said yes.

  So Zelda has a hundred and eight stops to make tonight. At each one, she pulls over and opens up her trunk. From one box, she takes a button. From another, she takes a pamphlet. These go into an unmarked envelope. The envelope goes into the mailbox.

  It’ll be a busy night, but she should have no trouble getting through it all before the real fun starts at 3:00 A.M.

  * * *

  “RONAN SZEPESSY!” someone says, and a heavy hand clamps down on his shoulder.

  “Hey, Mr. Warsaw,” Ronan says, acting surprised to see the man with the unlit cigar in his free hand. In truth, he’s orchestrated this “surprise” by standing at the makeshift bar pretending to stare into his phone.

  “Please, Ronan! Call me Wallace! You’re not ten years old anymore.”

  “I suppose I’m not,” Ronan says, laughing loudly. It’s the last campaign fundraiser before the election; everyone in the Elks Lodge is drunk and laughing loudly. They think they have this in the bag. They think nothing can stop their golden boy billionaire candidate. “How have you been, Wallace?”

  “Not as good as you, conquering the world down there in New York City!”

  Wallace Warsaw has been the
cochair of the Columbia County Chamber of Commerce for as long as anyone can remember. An insufferable blowhard, in Ronan’s father’s eyes, but like every other business owner on Warren Street, he paid his annual membership dues to the Chamber and went to its seasonal dinners and believed in his heart that the sixth sense for business that had helped Wallace turn his failing father’s distribution center into the county’s most profitable company would help turn the whole local economy around.

  Which, apparently, it has.

  “Pretty big deal, getting Jark Trowse to be this year’s honoree,” Ronan says. “Still, it’s a strange choice. An out-of-towner.”

  Wallace nods, like this is a conversation he’s had to have more than once. “Jark’s done more for this city than ninety-nine percent of the people who’ve been here for generations. All the money that’s flowing into this city now, we owe this to him—well, to lots of people, but to him most of all—and with him our future will just keep on getting brighter and brighter. The more love we show him, the more love he’ll show us.”

  But who’s that money really flowing to? Ronan refrains from asking. Instead he smiles. Waves across the room, to that earnest woman Lilly with the rhinestone glasses. “Wallace, it truly is incredible, what you’ve done to this place.”

  ***

  TREENIE WATCHES RONAN from across the Elks Lodge and knows in her gut that he is up to something.

  She couldn’t say how she knows it. Sometimes she just knows things. She’s blessed with good instincts, that’s all. She’s a people reader. Served her well in high school, and it’s served her well in real estate.

  After each new person he’s introduced to, he steps to the side and takes out his phone. She can tell what he’s doing by the rhythm of his tapping. Looking them up, learning who they are, then tapping out a brief message and clicking send. She sees his face when he’s alone, when he’s unaware he’s being watched, and that’s the Ronan she remembers from the high school hallway, the one smoldering with quiet rage, sullen hate, the one who dreams of summoning up a flaming scythe and swinging it in a circle and slicing everyone in the room in half horizontally—according to an eleventh-grade English class journal entry she wasn’t supposed to read. But then he blinks, takes a couple of deep breaths, and approaches some new circle or triangle of happy partygoers and effortlessly inserts himself into it. She sees how much work it is, to flip that switch inside. Finally, she sees how carefully he orchestrates an “accidental” encounter with Wallace Warsaw. How he texts someone immediately afterward.