Unhinged

by Barbra Leslie

  “No, I’m good,” I said. “But maybe leave a couple of bottles of wine for me?” We debated the merits of the Pinot Grigio versus the Sauvignon Blanc, and I felt like I was in The Twilight Zone. “Listen, Patrick, you should probably get out of here. I mean, finish packing up or whatever, but you should probably speed it up a bit.”

  “Uh. Why?” He looked at my gun again, then back at me. I put my hand over it and drew it back to me.

  “I’m supposed to be meeting one of the cops here,” I said. Top of my head. “They interviewed me in the hospital, but they wanted to talk to me again and I guess they wanted to take a look around here, probably secure the place better. I live close by, so I said I’d meet him here.” I hoped he’d believe me, and take off quickly. He wouldn’t want to be caught walking out of the place with bins of their booze.

  “You came to meet a cop, carrying a gun?” he said. He smiled at me slowly, looking me in the eye. “Pull the other one.” He had a pleasingly weathered, boyish look about him, but his face seemed different, now. Then again, I had my paranoid glasses on, not to mention cocaine making my synapses fire more quickly than usual.

  “Hey, after what happened that night, I wasn’t coming near this place without my little buddy here.” I held it in my hand, ready to fire, to move quickly if I had to. My hand was sweating, though, and I felt a bit sick. Cocaine can do that to me, when I haven’t had it in a while. Especially when I haven’t eaten anything, and decide to throw a bunch of wine into my stomach quickly. “I wasn’t planning on waving it around.”

  “Then why not put it away,” he said. “Guns make me nervous.”

  “Really? I’m the opposite. They make me feel all warm and fuzzy.” I smiled sweetly. He was probably wondering if I was murderous, or just crazy. He wouldn’t be the first.

  Patrick broke my gaze and said something about being sick of Gershwin. When he turned to change the music, I saw the bat at the same instant that he reached for it.

  The baseball bat he kept behind the bar. The one with iron nails hammered into it. The one that he’d used to intimidate the frat boys the first night I’d walked into Helen of Troy. It was old and splintered, but still deadly for all of that.

  Those spikes had torn my skin.

  I didn’t hesitate. I’d felt what that bat could do to a body. I didn’t need a reminder.

  Before Patrick could turn and swing it in my direction, my gun was in my hand, and I fired.

  THIRTY

  Patrick didn’t scream, which surprised me. I’d have pegged him for a screamer.

  I walked behind the bar, where he was lying on the floor, curled up in the fetal position, protecting what was left of his right hand. He may not have been screaming, but he was doing a good job of moaning.

  “Hurts, huh,” I said. I felt clear, calm and oddly happy. I’d just shot a man’s hand off, effectively, and that was my reaction. I knew I’d pay for my calm later, in one way or another. But it was exactly how I needed to be to get through what I had to do now.

  I squatted down next to him, making sure that he saw that I still had the gun in my hand. Not that I thought he was in any state to try anything, but better safe, etc. I patted him down and took a phone out of the back pocket of his jeans. He had nothing else on him.

  “Okay now, Patrick,” I said. “Upsy-daisy.” I pulled him to his feet and led him out from behind the bar. He slumped – his face was white and sickly – and I let him rest for a moment with his body weight slumped over the bar. But he rallied quickly, and I led him to a bar stool.

  “Well, color me embarrassed,” I said to him. I took off my belt, and with it tied Patrick’s wrists to the copper rail that ran along the outside of the bar. It wouldn’t hold long if someone was fighting to get loose, but as one of those two hands had been about forty percent blown away by an automatic pistol at close range, I figured it would do for the moment. “I really hadn’t figured you for one of the bad guys.” I was talking tough, but the sight of his hand was actually making me feel the carbonation in my brain, and if there was ever a moment I couldn’t afford to faint, this was it.

  I walked behind the bar and washed the blood from my hands, my gun stuck in the back of my combat pants, and grabbed a stack of bar towels. I went back and wrapped Patrick’s hand in a couple of the towels and told him to keep pressure on it with his other hand. He was moaning less, but he looked very much as though he was going to vomit. I started to feel sorry for him, when a twinge of pain from my sciatic nerve put that to rest pretty quickly. But I wanted him verbal, and quickly. I had no idea how long it would be before we had company.

  I pulled my baggie of coke out of my front pocket and my emergency bottle of Percocet from the pack around my waist.

  “You a stranger to illegal pharmaceuticals, Pat?” I said. I cut a couple of lines of coke on the bar and tightly rolled one of the fifties from my pocket stash. I did one line and looked at his face. He hadn’t answered, but he was eyeing the coke like it was the last water in the desert.

  I started to hand him the fifty, out of habit – the rules of polite drug sharing ran deep in my psyche – but of course he couldn’t use his hands. He leaned over and looked at me to help him. I stuck one end of the fifty in his nose and guided him up the line.

  “In a second, you’ll feel a tiny bit better,” I said. I sat a couple of bar stools down from him and took a swig of wine. Then I took one of the clean bar towels and placed two oxys in one and folded it into a neat package. I grabbed one of the unopened bottles of wine and started to crush the pills. “You’ll probably know this, being a career bartender and all-around bad guy,” I said to him, “but snorting a ground-up pill – well, snorting anything, really – gets it into your bloodstream faster.” Patrick was nodding. He had a bit of color back. He was watching closely, his eyes not leaving the towel that had the pills inside. “I know what you’re thinking, Patrick,” I said. “Towels aren’t the best for this. But I don’t carry a pill crusher with me, and I don’t see any regular paper around here. Besides, these towels are lint-free.” I kept working, and then carefully brushed the now-powdered pills onto the bar.

  “Thank you,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. I carefully and slowly made four thin lines of the powdered painkiller with the knife I’d used for the coke. “Of course, the reason I’m doing this is because I want answers from you, and in my experience people in severe enough pain will say anything to make the pain go away. Anything they think you want to hear. And I actually want the truth from you.”

  “I don’t know much,” he said.

  “Yes, you do,” I said. “But I know you won’t know everything, so please don’t make shit up. I’ll know if you’re lying. You know that, right?”

  I looked at him with as much sincerity as I could muster. I was very rarely sure when people were lying or telling the truth, but Patrick didn’t have to know that.

  And besides, I was the one with the drugs. And the gun.

  Patrick nodded, gazing at the white lines on the bar. I actually felt sorry for him. He had effectively crippled me and left me trussed up in a rat-infested alley, and he may have killed Ann/Moira. But I’d just maimed him for life. However long his life was going to be.

  I helped him snort two of the four lines, and while I waited for them to kick in, I poured myself some more wine. I hoped Patrick didn’t notice my hands shaking. My calm was starting to slip. I was suddenly very weary. My body was crashing from the couple of bumps of coke and the wine, not to mention the forty minutes of sleep I’d managed the night before and the lovely morning at the morgue identifying Ann’s body. I should have checked into a hotel for a night and gotten some rest before attempting any of this. I moved over and did the line of coke that was still on the bar, snorting a couple of drops of wine as a chaser.

  I looked at Patrick, whose eyes were shut tightly.

  “Did you kill Ann?” I asked him. He shook his head quickly.
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  “I don’t believe you,” I sang, and tapped the barrel of the gun against the bar.

  “I really didn’t,” he said. “I couldn’t kill her. I couldn’t kill anybody.” He looked at me. “I didn’t even hit you as hard as I could have,” he said. “You must know that.”

  That rang true. As bad as it was, I knew even at the time that it could have been worse.

  “Who did?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. His voice was hollow and slow. Pain, I supposed, and fear. “I really don’t. We were just supposed to take her to this dive apartment on Sherbourne and leave her there, and that’s what we did.” He closed his eyes again against the pain. “I swear to God, that’s all of it.”

  “Who was with you?”

  “Garrett,” Patrick said.

  “Garrett Jones helped you knock Ann out and kidnap her from the alley?”

  “I helped him,” Patrick corrected me. “Though neither of us wanted to do it.” He looked at me. “You’re not really meeting a cop here, are you,” he said.

  “No,” I said, my thoughts elsewhere. “Why did you do it? What did you think was going to happen to her?”

  “I thought some… customer wanted her,” Patrick said. “She never wanted to go along before, and I thought somebody must have offered a lot of money to be with her. Because she looked so young,” he added.

  “She was young,” I said. “She was fifteen.” I blinked and saw stars at the edges of my vision. The rage had come rushing back, taking me over. I realized I had yelled the last few words, and before I was aware of what I was doing, I clocked the back of Patrick’s head with the barrel of the gun. Hard, but not as hard as I could.

  So Fred had been right all along about the forced prostitution. That would explain Kelly’s nerves when she’d given me the note, the night she was patching up my hand when Garrett had walked in.

  “Were all the girls involved in this? Were they given any choice?”

  “I don’t think they were all involved,” he said. “It didn’t seem like it. I don’t even think everybody knew about it. Look, I don’t know. It wasn’t my game. I had nothing to do with it. It just started when the new company took the place over. You know, when Garrett started here.” He looked at what was left of his hand and moaned. I helped him snort the rest of the oxy, thinking hard. Garrett Jones? The man who wanted me to teach his daughter self-defense, who blushed at the mention of anything inappropriate in a strip club, pimping out young women against their will?

  “Patrick,” I said, and squeezed his shoulder, hard. “The next question I’m going to ask you is very, very important. Do you understand?” I tapped the top of his head a few times with the barrel of my gun. “Patrick?”

  “Please,” he said. “Please let me go to the hospital. Call the police; I’ll tell them everything. I swear to God I will. And I won’t tell them you were here, I promise. But please just let me go.” He was crying now. The tears made him look younger, and I felt sick. What gave me the right to do this to him? Even if he made it through this day, no doctor would be able to recreate his hand. His life was forever changed.

  But no. This was not a boy. He was a man. I’d shot him in self-defense. If I hadn’t, he would have brought that lethal bat down on my head within seconds. Even if – if – he was telling the truth about Ann and he had nothing to do with actually killing her, he had aided and abetted forced prostitution of young women. And for what? To keep his bartending job?

  “You’ll get medical attention,” I said. “I promise.” Though I didn’t promise when.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “But we’re not finished here, Patrick.”

  He moaned, and put his head down on the bar. He said something that sounded like, “My fucking hand, man.”

  “Who was working with Garrett? Who was his boss? Did you start seeing anyone new hanging around here in Garrett’s office with him?”

  He was sobbing again, his face turned away from me. “I don’t know their names,” he finally said.

  I wished I hadn’t trashed my phone. I had pictures of Dave on that phone. I had to know if Dave had anything to do with this place.

  Then I remembered the contents of my bag.

  “Patrick, hang on another minute for me,” I said. I darted to my bag and found the little leather wallet I’d kept in the safe at home. I had pictures of nearly everyone in it, in case I had to disappear without access to phones or computers. Even Elizabeth Jackson would need to wallow in memories sometimes. I flipped to a picture of Dave I’d taken in the spring in New York. I ran back to Patrick and showed it to him.

  “Have you ever seen this man?” I said. “Has he ever been in here with Garrett? Or anybody else?”

  Patrick wiped his eyes and looked at the picture for a minute. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Not that I’ve seen. It’s hard to tell from that picture.” Dave looked like everybody. It was one of the reasons he was so good at his job; he did not have a memorable face. My heart was pounding. Patrick flipped through a couple of other pictures.

  “Him,” he said. He jabbed at one of the pictures. “He’s here all the time. He’s here with the big boss, Garrett’s boss.”

  He looked happy, Patrick did. He looked relieved that he’d been able to give me some information, that maybe it would stop me from hurting him any further.

  I grabbed the wallet back from him. It was a picture of Fred and Ginger on their wedding day on Cape Cod.

  Fred.

  I opened my mouth to say something. I don’t know what.

  But Patrick’s head flew forward, and seemed to explode. In what seemed like slow-motion, I looked down at the little wallet of pictures I was holding. My hand was covered in blood and what was either bone or brain matter. And hair. A clump of Patrick’s hair.

  My gun. I’d left my gun with my bag, fifteen feet away.

  Before I could turn to look, however, I felt the bubbles in my brain take over, and I was down.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I was probably only out for seconds, maybe a minute. When I regained consciousness, I fought the bile that was rising in my throat. I kept my eyes shut tight and worked on fighting the vertigo that usually came either before or after one of my fainting spells. I heard voices, and a chuckle that made my scalp tighten.

  “Hello, Michael,” I said, and opened my eyes.

  Michael Vernon Smith was standing about twenty feet away, next to my brother-in-law Fred Lindquist. Michael was holding my gun in his hand, and smiling his avuncular smile at me. Fred looked green, and when I met his eyes he looked away.

  I was going to kill him. As much as I hated Michael Vernon Smith, my hatred for Fred was, at that moment, a hundred times worse. A thousand.

  I sat up. I wasn’t restrained in any way, but I also had no weapon on me.

  “I know Fred doesn’t have the balls to pull the trigger,” I said, nodding to where Patrick’s body lay. In the time I was out, it had slumped onto the floor. “And I admit, I didn’t think you liked to get your hands dirty.”

  “It’s really good to see you, Danny,” Smith said. He looked like he meant it. “And no, I hate this sort of thing. I find it repugnant.” He looked like a prosperous captain of industry, in what looked like a bespoke suit and tortoiseshell glasses. He tucked my gun into his pocket.

  “You should have brought a different right-hand man, in that case,” I said. “Hiya, Fred.”

  Fred nodded at me, and crossed his arms in front of him. He was holding a Taser. I laughed. “Not allowed to handle the big-boy guns yet, Fred? Never mind. Maybe someday.”

  I hadn’t been followed here; of that I was fairly certain. Patrick hadn’t made any calls in my presence to alert anyone that I was here. I’d ditched my phone and SIM card, so I wasn’t being traced.

  The only person who knew I was coming here was Dave.

  What I’d suspected – what everyone had suspected, though I hadn’t wanted to hear it – was true. Dave was somehow working f
or, or with, this evil fucktard. I’d called Dave’s emergency number, the one he’d mailed to me back in Maine eighteen months ago when I was recuperating from my last run-in with Smith and his crew. The one I’d relied on so much I’d had it tattooed onto my thigh, so I’d have it even if my mind was gone to the point that I couldn’t remember it. Fuckface Smith wouldn’t have known I was coming to the club. Dave must have let him know.

  It dawned on me, in that moment, that Dave must have been the one who’d spirited Smith away that night in Maine, the night that Fred had stabbed Smith in the eye with the corkscrew and I’d killed what we had hoped was the last of his followers, and watched her body burn in the fireplace. His footprints had disappeared into the snow, and there was a blizzard. Searchers looked for his body for weeks. Nobody knew how he could have survived the night without help.

  I knew that my instincts about people were often flawed. It had been proven, time and again. So perhaps my flee from Manhattan in May was the right move. For once a deeper, intuitive sense had been telling me to cut ties with Dave.

  I would have to think about that later. If, of course, there was a later.

  “So how long has this been going on, anyway?” I said, motioning at the two of them. “This little bromance.” Then I put my hand up to stop the answer. “Actually, before we chat, since we’re in a bar, would anyone like a drink? I know I would.” I stood, feigning more pain than I really felt. I wanted them to think of me as helpless, or at least unable to move quickly. I did have some twinges, but my sciatic pain tended to come and go. And the bit of coke I’d done helped.

  Fred looked as though he was getting ready to Tase me if I came within ten feet of him, but Smith put a gentle hand on Fred’s arm. “A fine idea,” he said. “I see you and Patrick already had a head start.” He looked at Patrick’s body. “Poor choice of words, I guess,” Smith said. “Head start.” He grimaced with distaste, as though Patrick was a dead mouse he’d found under the stove. As though he wasn’t the one who’d shot the guy in the head.