“It was the guy in the cannon that interested you, isn’t that right?”
“Yeah. That’s right! Why would anyone let themselves be shot out of a cannon? I sure wouldn’t do it. Would you?”
Mitch paused, pretending to be deep in thought. “I guess it would depend on what they paid you, wouldn’t it?”
“They could never pay me enough, that’s for sure.”
“How about if I said I’d give you a thousand dollars to let me shoot you out of the cannon at the Gardens?”
“No way.”
“But it’s been tested. Never had a serious accident. A little hearing loss maybe.”
Elaine laughed. “And you talk with a slight stutter afterward. But what the heck, eh?”
“Exactly. What the heck.”
“You guys are crazy.”
“What about you, dear?” Mitch asked, smiling at Elaine. “How much would they have to pay you before you’d let them shoot you out of a cannon at the Gardens?”
“I think the guy at the Gardens probably has it made. I mean, he’s got a net and people applaud after he does his job. He’s two up on me there. What do you think, dear?” She stared at her husband long and hard, smiling, and finally sipped some wine.
Barbie sat silently, glancing from one to the other, understanding that the levity had disappeared, somehow, without fully comprehending exactly how it had happened.
Mitch’s face became serious. But only for a moment. Then the twinkle returned, forced to the surface by a superhuman effort on his part. They all continued eating.
“I hope,” Barbie said, breaking the silence, “that he has earplugs at least.”
Mitch finished loading the dishwasher, then broke the news to Elaine. “I’m going out for a bit this evening.”
“Oh.” She turned, looked at him. “Where?”
“Restaurant, down on the Danforth.” He straightened the cutlery in the drawer.
“But we’ve already eaten. Or didn’t you notice?”
He smiled. “I’m going to meet a guy there.”
“Who?”
“Just a guy. A guy who might know something about—about what happened to Mario.”
“That’s out of your hands now, Mitch. You know that. It’s being handled by detectives, by Homicide. It’s got nothing to do with you anymore.”
Mitch’s eyes hardened. He had made the story up, in order to leave the house with a minimum of fuss. But hearing how it had nothing to do with him anymore sent spidery tingles of outrage through his brain.
Suddenly, he found himself in a bizarre kind of impassioned defense for his imaginary rendezvous—triggered by Elaine’s dismissal of his responsibility. “It has everything to do with me. Everything. Anything I could learn would be helpful. Those bastards down at headquarters have come up with nothing, a big zero, and the longer it sits around, the farther back it gets shelved.”
She watched him in silence as he breathed heavily, watched his jaw muscles tighten, noted the distant ice in his eyes, and understood. She could not agree. But she understood and knew that she should say no more. A lot more time was needed to heal this wound. What her role in it all should be was the dilemma—a dilemma she would have to continue to sort out by herself—as we sort out all dilemmas, inevitably, she thought.
“I’m sorry.”
His eyes were still far away. But he heard her. He was coming back.
“Just don’t be gone too long. O.K.?” She touched his hand. He heard Barbie flipping the dial on the TV in the living room.
“O.K.,” he said.
11
Mitch Helwig scarcely turned a head as he surreptitiously slid into the Bleeding Bandit just after eight o’clock. Blue and orange electric lights were the prominent illuminants, and the smoke and noise enfolded the patrons like a sleeping python. The throb of electricity was the lifeblood of the bar, its power, its identity.
On his belt, partially concealed beneath his open, cotton jacket, Mitch had hooked the Barking Dog, hoping that it could get enough video input from there to prick any balloon. Even without it, he knew he would slice through the bullshit in a way that Station 52’s finest could never hope to match—at least, not until they started fighting back with adequate artillery, he thought.
He walked unassumingly to the bar, sat down. The bartender approached, a youth with pointed spikes of green and yellow hair and a curving row of fake diamonds glinting from his left ear. He waited for Mitch’s order without speaking.
“Molson Lite.”
The youth reached into a cooler beneath the bar and produced the beer and a glass, and moved off down the mahogany sleekness to the far end, where he conversed in muted tones with a trio of similarly attired and groomed males. Mitch tilted his glass and drained the bottle into it, letting the foam rise, then settle. He sipped some from the top. It was cold and biting and good.
Squinting through the gloom, he surveyed the room, noting only about twenty or so people throughout. It was still early.
Off in a corner, a stripper, better looking than the place deserved, gyrated in the glow of blue and orange, her breasts tilted to show an artificial fullness, her thighs quivering on that fine line between the sensuous and the jouncy. She was duly ignored by most, who in turn duly ignored one another; this was not a spot where one went to be noticed. It was, in fact, quite the opposite. People got lost here. On purpose.
The music—a touch too loud and a lot too shrill—oozed from the twin speakers hung like grotesque bat wings in each corner of the room, the audio accompaniment to the video flickering riotously in the lounge’s most remote nook.
He sipped at the cool brew again.
The bartender approached, weaving to some personal, unheard beat, carrying an empty glass.
“Excuse me.”
The youth glanced at him with cold, dilated eyes.
From his jacket pocket, Mitch extracted the photo he had lifted from DeMarco’s desk in Homicide yesterday. He flashed the snap of the man who had breathed his last words into his ear on the cold pavement of the alley not too far from here. The man’s eyes were closed—society’s concession to propriety.
“You ever see this man before?”
The youth glanced involuntarily at the photo, then back at Mitch, then shook his head.
“Yes or no?” Mitch wanted the words.
“No.” He put the glass in a sink, stared at Mitch with the blank expression of a computer, and left to rejoin his peer group.
Mitch pocketed the photo. Nothing. No howling from the Dog. He placed an elbow on the bar and continued to sip casually at his beer, his eyes and senses alert.
After about five more minutes, he picked up his glass and walked directly to the trio of males that were bobbing and weaving to the beat of the electromusic stinging through the bar. They saw him coming and formed into a defensive semicircle, their constant-motion frames becoming ominously still.
The bartender glanced at him, then at his pals, knowing what was coming. Mitch held the photo out for them to see. It drew their eyes like a magnet.
“Any of you guys ever see this man before?”
They glared at the photo, interested in spite of themselves. One by one, they shook their heads, dismissing him. Mitch needed more. He would have to force it from them. He was beginning to understand the pragmatics of force.
“You?” he asked, suddenly, swinging the photo in line with the one on the far left.
“No, man. I told you, no.” He grinned inanely.
“How about you?” He addressed the next one, a youth of about twenty, who had painted his eye sockets yellow, then rimmed them with purple.
The youth grinned defiantly. “The dude looks dead. I know lots of dead folks.”
“Him?”
“Never had the pleasure, my man.” The grin widened.
“How about you?” Mitch held it out two feet in front of the third youth. Haunted eyes, peering from browless sockets, glanced at it, then at him.
“You a cop?”
“No,” Mitch lied.
“Who is he?”
“He’s my sister. He had a sex change operation.”
The youth smiled, eyes glittering. “Don’t fuck with me, man.”
A small trickle of fear seeped down Mitch’s spine. But he couldn’t let it show. Weakness was what they waited for. He had seen it many times. “Yes or no?”
“Maybe.”
It was the truth. The Barking Dog was as quiet as a graveyard.
Mitch’s adrenaline began to pump. “Where? Where have you seen him? When?”
The youth continued grinning, and glanced at his comrades, who picked up the grin like a spreading wave, letting his dependence on them wash over them in some minute token of victory.
“What’s in it for us?” It was the one with the yellow eyes, graphically limned.
“There’s nothing in it for you, bright eyes. You never saw him.”
“How do you know?”
When Mitch dismissed him by turning back to the boy with no eyebrows, the youth’s mouth twisted contemptuously. “Don’t tell him nothin’, Sten. His sister was ugly anyway.”
He began to laugh under his breath at his joke, and the bartender and the first youth joined in, anxious to be a party to any form of baiting, no matter how vicarious.
But the hollow-eyed youth with the “maybe” was lost in his own world of drug-induced pleasure. A simple yes or no would have halted the game. The boredom that had led to their barroom habitat might be temporarily displaced, if he could play cat to this mouse a bit longer. He glanced at the others, saw the dim lights dancing crazily in their eyes, knew that they too were bored, and that he could establish some form of prestige by setting up the mouse with the picture here.
His eyes swung out and scanned the small crowd in the lounge. Then they stopped, fixed on two men at a table off in the arcade corner.
Mitch followed his gaze, noting well where it fell. He, too, saw the pair.
“I think you should ask Eddie.”
“Eddie who?”
Hollow-eyes nodded to the table with the two men.
“Jumpin’ Eddie.” The other three laughed.
Jumpin’ Eddie was indeed his man.
It had been mere days ago that he had sat here and watched the man that Mitch had come upon in the alley. He had noted that the man was not dressed in leathers or bright cottons like the rest of them, that he was dressed instead in the casual clothes of someone who lived around here—jacket, open-necked shirt—and had wandered in for a few drinks.
A mark. A fly. An angelfish.
Easy chewing.
He had watched the few drinks become several, seen the fistful of bills flash every time another couple were dropped at his table.
Probably just had a spat with his old lady, thought Eddie. Or maybe his teenage son just spit in his eye or wracked up the car or wants to spend the weekend at ElectroWorld with his buddies. Or his boss has pissed him off, again. Or maybe just a walk on a mild autumn night.
It was idle speculation, and it ricocheted in a disjointed fashion through Eddie’s weakened synaptic connections, taking only a second or two.
The bills flashed again. Eddie twitched and danced inside his sinewy body. His own old man, he remembered, would never give him the car. And he had spit in his old man’s eye. But his old man never hit him, because Eddie had told him that if he ever did, he would kill him.
He recalled the fear in his old man’s eyes.
Eddie’s only regret now was that he had not killed him.
When his prey rose to leave, Eddie reached into his pocket and tripped the switch that was wired to his ticklers. He had one clipped to his back between his shoulder blades, where it could literally send a shiver up and down his spine. The other was connected to the thimble attached to the baby finger of his left hand.
Eddie rose and followed him.
On the street, the stranger turned north.
The mouth of a service alley beckoned ahead and to the right. Eddie’s grin widened.
Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew his skinner. It fit snugly into the palm of his hand, its handle nonslip, shock-absorbing neoprene. From between his index and second finger, the three inches of hollow-ground razor-sharp edge broadened to a lethal spear point. With it resting softly in his fist, Eddie felt invincible and deliciously powerful. He had seen it work—seen how it could effortlessly slice through major muscles with only a deft movement. Much of what he had seen, in fact, had been his own handiwork.
Eddie reveled in the eventual submission of his prey, and in his mind he saw his father, again, forever and always.
“Hey,” the stranger said, frightened now. “Hey, you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to hurt me. You want money? Take the money. Okay? Okay? Here...”
The man pleaded with him to take the money and go—to leave him alone with his terror and mortality and shame and helplessness.
“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Yeah, I don’t have to hurt you, do I?”
Cars in the distance. A horn honked.
Eddie looked into the man’s eyes.
Saw the fear.
Then he plunged his right hand into the man’s stomach and ripped up as hard as he could. When the Skinner grated against breastbone, he stopped and stared into the stunned horror that was etched onto the man’s face, stared into the questions that would have no answers, into the face of the man whose last visual image would be that of Jumpin’ Eddie Stadnyk’s grinning, self-indulgent visage.
Mitch watched the youths warily now, watched the glee that his plight had induced in them, tempered his actions and words by slowly pocketing the photo and moving away from them, carrying what was left of his beer over to the table that had been indicated with such malicious delight. He was, he knew, being observed with pleasure from behind.
Eddie Stadnyk, who had been shooting the bull with long-time loser Lionel “The Loon” Santos, debating the merits of shoplifting and straight break-and-entry, watched the man approaching them with the cunning and guardedness of the electric eel that he was.
Mitch hovered over the table with his glass in his hand. “I’d like to join you.” He sat down without waiting for a response.
Eddie’s body recoiled like an eel sliding backward into its lair. Only his fangs were left at the ready, as one hand went to the skinner in his pocket, caressing it like a woman.
“Do we know you?” The Loon’s eyes were dull and dangerous.
“No.”
“Why don’t you fuck off, then,” Eddie added poetically. The lethal spear point of steel peeped from the closed fist inside his jacket pocket.
Mitch stared at them, then stood up. “O.K.” He had decided, from experience and training, that he was too close to the pair. And besides, by standing, he gave the Dog a chance to see them when they spoke. If they spoke.
Slowly, so as not to spook them, he brought out the photo, placing it on the beef-stained wooden veneer of the table.
“Ever see him before?”
The Loon gazed at the picture blankly. “No,” he said. “Who wants to know?”
“You?” Mitch addressed Eddie.
Against his better judgment, Eddie glanced at the picture. It took a second or two for recognition to flare. It would have been instantaneous if the man in the photo had had his eyes open, because Eddie had paid special attention to his eyes.
“Never seen him before in my life.”
The Dog burned him with a searing cold, howling with indignant outrage at the boldness of the lie, and Mitch knew that he had struck pay dirt. It had worked. He felt giddy for a moment.
He sat down again, watching them tense. From the corner of his eye, he could see the delight of the grotesque quartet that had steered him here, and knew that they were anticipating, with ghoulish relish, his submission and perhaps even his demise—here or elsewhere—tonight.
“I told you I�
��ve never seen him. What do you want?”
Mitch could see that the speaker had his hand in a pocket, so he put his hand in the pocket of his own pants and clasped it about the secure shape of the laser there, pointing it through the material in the general direction of his potential antagonist.
“If either of you fuckers even blink too quickly, or even give me a look I don’t like, the laser that’s aimed at you under the table will separate your balls from your body, and you’ll be instant geldings, watching them bounce around your stupid feet.”
Nobody moved.
“Understand?”
Eddie licked his lips, carefully. The Loon remained frozen.
“How do we know you got a laser under there?” It was Eddie’s last attempt at bravado.
“Try me.”
The minute ticked by. Blue and orange electric chords hung in the still air like a matrix for their tension. A video game whirred as a cybernetic missile pierced hyperspace, and the floor vibrated dully with the electrobeat that was everywhere.
For the first time, the Loon looked truly worried. Now that he understood the possible danger, thought Mitch, this one was even less dangerous than before. His strength came from his brute stupidity and the lack of regard he had for his own potential pain and injury. It was the one called Eddie he had to concentrate on now—Jumpin’ Eddie, they had called him. Mitch could see why. He was strung out on something, eyes dilated, his little mouth twitching. Dangerous. Very dangerous.
Mitch didn’t take his eyes off him.
“Whadda ya want?” asked Eddie, finally.
Mitch himself was pulled taut. “I want you guys to get up. Then I want you to walk ahead of me out the door and onto the street. Then we’ll take it step by step from there. Any sudden moves, I kill you both.” He paused. “Or worse.”
Hollow-eyes was watching curiously from across the room.
“Move. Now. Quietly.”
Eddie and the Loon rose slowly.
“And take your hand out of your pocket or I’ll leave it in there permanently.”
There was only a second’s hesitation, then the hand appeared, balled into a tight fist.
Barking Dogs - A Mitch Helwig Book Page 5
