Dead Heat with the Reaper

by William E. Wallace

  There was a moment of silence inside, then Baldocchi cleared his raspy throat. “Yes,” he said. “I remember. What can I do for you, Ms. Carnes?”

  “Mr. Talmadge, the superintendent of the building, told me you live by yourself up here,” she said. “I figured you might like a home-cooked meal, so I made you some mac ’n’ cheese.”

  He was silent for so long she wondered if he was still there. Finally, she heard the sound of the latch inside being released and the squeak of the hinges as he opened the door to his flat.

  Susan could see now that her recollection of how big he was had been wrong. He wasn’t just big: he was immense. Standing straight up inside his apartment’s doorway, he appeared to be nearly seven feet tall and almost a yard wide at the shoulders.

  He had delayed opening the door so he could put on a cap and wrap a scarf around his neck and face. His shirt’s long sleeves were buttoned shut at the bottom, exposing only his hands.

  He saw her looking at his outfit. “I’m sensitive about how I look,” he said. “I’m a mess, so I try to keep as much of myself covered as possible.”

  As he spoke, Susan caught an alcoholic whiff that smelled like whisky. She remembered the sound of him drinking alone the night she’d heard him crying. It made her wonder if all the bottles in the bag he had been carrying on the stairway had been liquor.

  They locked eyes. Unlike most of the people he met, she didn’t turn away and pretend she wasn’t looking at him.

  He gazed at her with curiosity. “Do my... my scars bother you?” he asked.

  “I’m getting used to them,” she said. “I’ll be honest—you scared the hell out of me on the stairs the other day.”

  He winced at her candor, even though he had the same reaction sometimes when he suddenly saw his reflection in a mirror.

  But then she continued: “I started to think about it afterward. I wondered why you had frightened me. After all, it’s just your skin that’s messed up. It isn’t like it’s your soul or something.”

  She sighed with exasperation, unable to find the words she wanted. “Anyway, I decided I wasn’t being fair to you. You hadn’t done anything to me, after all. There wasn’t any reason for me to have that reaction. I was just going by your appearance, not what kind of person you really are.”

  He studied her face. “Oh?” he said. “What kind of person am I?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess that’s what I’m here to find out.”

  For a moment they stood staring at each other. Then Susan cleared her throat.

  “Can I, uh, put this down somewhere?” she asked, giving him an uncertain smile and raising the casserole and eating implements.

  He seemed to notice the crock of hot food for the first time. Shaking himself back to attention he stepped away from the door. “Sure,” he said. “God, I’m so sorry—it’s been so long since I entertained guests, I’m afraid I forgot my manners. Put it down on the counter in the kitchenette.”

  She did as he suggested. The tiny kitchen was neat. The counter had an electric coffee maker at one end and a bowl and a mug in a dish drainer above the sink. A clean steel teaspoon like those sold in supermarkets sat in a slotted plastic container in the drainer’s corner. No food visible anywhere in the room but a 750-milliliter whisky bottle sat next to the drainer. An uncapped twin already half empty next to it.

  The big man spotted her looking at the bottles. He seemed as embarrassed to be caught drinking so early in the day as he was by his scars. “That sure smells good,” he said, nodding toward the casserole. “What did you say it was again?”

  “Macaroni and cheese,” Susan said, depositing the dinnerware on the bare table and setting the steaming container of pasta and sauce next to it. “Sorry it’s not something better, but I work as a nurse and go to school a couple nights a week, so I didn’t have a lot of time to get it together.”

  “What’s the occasion?” he asked.

  “I dunno,” she said, looking him directly in the eye. “We’re neighbors, that’s all. I thought it might be sort of neighborly to get to know each other, just in case there was some sort of emergency or something. At least that way we would have each other’s names.”

  She put out her hand. “So, just to take it from the top, I’m Susan Carnes,” she said. “And you are...?”

  He stared at her hand for a second then slowly took it in his own. “My name is Alan Baldocchi.”

  She was surprised that despite the waxy, wet look of the scar tissue, it felt dry. They shook in silence, and she giggled involuntarily.

  “We certainly managed to turn that into a solemn occasion,” she said. “You’d think I just borrowed a bunch of money from you.”

  His face contorted strangely. “Sorry,” he said. “That’s supposed to be a smile. I’m not so good at it anymore, what with all this.” He waved the stumpy remains of his free hand in a circle around his face to indicate the scar tissue. “The scarring is too stiff for normal expression, I’m afraid. When I smile, it looks more like I just had a tooth pulled.”

  Susan noticed she was still holding his hand. She was surprised to find she didn’t really feel like letting it go. For some reason, she felt comfortable with him, despite his size and hideous scars. Somehow she knew he would never harm her.

  She looked into his eyes and saw both mental and physical pain there. Her first impression of him could not have been more wrong—he was a gentle soul trapped in a disfigured body. There was nothing creepy about him.

  She realized he had said something while she was lost in thought.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “What was that again?”

  “Have you eaten yet?” he asked.

  She smiled. “No, actually—I haven’t. That’s why I brought two forks and two plates. Do you mind if I join you?”

  He grimaced his peculiar version of a smile again. “Not at all,” he said. “I’d enjoy the company.”

  ***

  “Check this out,” Marcel said to Sonny Jackson as they sat on the Claymore’s stoop.

  He held open his Oakland Raider jacket and pulled a dark blue semiautomatic pistol out of his waistband far enough so Sonny could get a good look at it. It was an old Army model .45-caliber, the primary sidearm for U.S. military personnel until the mid-1980s.

  “Jesus, man!” Sonny said, his eyes bright with excitement. “Where’d you get it?”

  Marcel grinned as he tucked it back into his coat and pulled up the zipper. To Marcel the gun felt big enough to fill the trunk of a car but it was barely visible stuffed down inside his jacket.

  “Lonnie Tucker,” he said. “He needed a half pound of Tina but didn’t have the bread to pay for it. I asked him what he had for trade and he said the gun. Two full magazines, too.”

  Sonny wrinkled his brow. “I thought you wanted two grand for a pound of crank. That old gun is all scratched up and dinged. A grand is an awful lot of money for a used gun, man. Pinkie Sanders got his Glock for only two hundred.”

  “The beaners only charge me about $500 for that meth and I step on it myself to move on the street. If I pump it up to two grand a pound, I can sell it at cost, too. Besides, Pinkie’s Glock is hotter than a habañero. Alonzo Booker was the last one that used that gun and he shot that A-rab with it when he stuck up the liquor store in Otisville.”

  “Yeah, but that A-rab din’t die, Marcel,” Sonny said. “I heard he was back behind the counter the next day.”

  “Mox nix,” Marcel said with a shrug. “The feds are looking for that gun now. Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. Pinkie gets caught with it, he’s going to end up wearing an orange jumpsuit. And when the feds grab you, you do the whole jolt, no parole. It’s not like a state beef.”

  “No shit?” Sonny said. That’s why he liked hanging out with Marcel: the guy was smart. All the other guys on the stoop ran their mouths, but Marcel knew what he was talking about.

  Marcel patted the gun under his jacket and grinned. “I shoo
t some A-rab with this piece, that motherfucker’s dead, bro. Pinkie’s Glock is a nine mill. This here’s a forty-five: it’s powerful enough to knock a man down with one shot.”

  “So where’d Lonnie get it?” Sonny asked.

  Marcel shrugged. “He and Art Castiglia broke into some rich fucker’s house over on Hillside. They took off a whole potful of jewelry from the guy’s old lady: gold, gems, that silvery stuff that costs as much as gold. They found the gun downstairs in a desk drawer and Lonnie held onto it, figuring it would be worth something to him sooner or later.”

  “So, what you planning to do with it?” Sonny asked.

  Marcel pulled out the pistol and racked the slide like he’d seen somebody do in a movie once. He pointed it into the street and squinted down the barrel.

  “Maybe I’ll pull it on that cunt of a nurse upstairs, the white bitch who’s so fucking snooty. I been sniffing around her for a couple months now and she won’t give me the time of day. I bet I’d get a taste of her sugar if I put this under her chin.”

  Sonny’s expression changed. He swallowed loudly and looked nervous.

  “What?” Marcel said.

  “You didn’t hear, then?” Sonny said.

  “Hear what?”

  “That soldier guy,” Sonny said. “Apparently him and that nurse got something going on. She took dinner up to his apartment the other night. They ate together.”

  Marcel’s eyes narrowed with anger. “She gives me the brush but has dinner with that ugly motherfucker?” His voice squeaked with anger. “That skank makes Bitsy look like a fucking nun and everybody in the district knows what a slut Bits is.”

  He looked at the pistol in his hand, grinding his teeth with rage. “I’d like to shove this fucking gun up her twat and give her a lead douche,” he said, hefting the .45 in his hand. “I’ll figure something out, don’t worry about it,” he growled, jamming the pistol back into his waistband.

  ***

  Baldocchi rarely slept more than a couple hours before the dream about hitting the IED woke him up.

  It always started out the same: with him and the commander inspecting the vehicle while the rest of the squad—the dismounts—slogged out to the Bradley M2A2 with their gear slung over their shoulders, climbed into the big tin can and hunkered down for patrol.

  Baldocchi was the gunner, sitting up with the 25 millimeter chain gun on the right side of the turret, right next to the commander.

  The turret position gave him a bit more room than being packed in the space below, but he was too big for the damned thing, and ended up with a backache every time they ran a mission. He preferred riding with the hatch open, standing up, though it made him a target for the insurgents his unit was supposed to be fighting.

  The Commander, Castlewood, preferred to keep the top down, using his periscope array to navigate the vehicle and calling down to the driver.

  The driver, a new guy named Olson, was laid back on the left side forward, using scopes to see where he was going and look for obstructions. He was the greenhorn: he’d been through the TRADOC school and was rated on the M2A2, but the Army’d had him driving Humvees up until the last week when the Bradley’s regular driver, Kilmer, rotated back to the states. He was still having trouble orienting himself by looking through the scopes.

  Both Castlewood and Olson had hatches they could open, but they preferred looking through the tubes because they were nervous about exposure to insurgents on patrol. Baldocchi closed his when they entered an area where they were likely to come under fire, but he kept the top up as much as possible so he could stretch and avoid the back pain he got from crouching inside the turret.

  It was a clumsy set up, but there wasn’t anything that could be done about it: it was just the way the M2A2 was designed.

  On the day the Bradley burned, Baldocchi climbed into his rig, strapped up and put on the VIS headset that let him communicate with the rest of the crew. When the vehicle was loaded, he gave Castlewood the all clear and they pulled out of the base camp, followed by a hard-target Humvee with another squad of infantry aboard.

  They had completed about half of their 150-mile patrol circuit in Nuristan Province and had hit the fork in the road at a pivot point they dubbed “Utah.” To Baldocchi, still riding high in the turret, the split didn’t look right for some reason. There was a pile of rubble on the roadway that looked suspicious. He used his headset to let Castlewood know about it.

  “There’s shit in the road up ahead,” he said. “Maybe we should stop and get out to take a look.”

  “Where?” Castlewood said. “I don’t see anything.”

  Castlewood didn’t like getting out of the M2. During his first tour of Afghanistan, he had been in a convoy that came under attack and the infantry unit he was transporting took heavy casualties. Two Humvees were destroyed by enemy fire, and the damage that RPGs had done to the vehicles made him leery of stepping outside an armored transport.

  Baldocchi, forgetting that he was the only one who could see his gesture, pointed to the left fork of the road.

  “It’s over there,” he said.

  Olson’s voice came across the intercom. “Where? I got nothing in my scopes.”

  “It’s on the left,” he said anxiously as the Bradley continued to shoot along at close to twenty miles per hour.

  “Go to your left,” Castlewood told Olson, misunderstanding Baldocchi.

  “OK, left,” Olson responded. “Right, I got it.”

  “No, turn to the right,” Baldocchi said as the Bradley neared the pile.

  “Jesus, Sarge, make up your mind, would you?” Castlewood said.

  The rubble was directly in front of the Bradley. The armored vehicle would pass over it in a second or two.

  “Take the right,” Baldocchi said with a panicky edge to his voice. “The right. The right. Take the right fork; there’s something wrong with the road on the left hand side!”

  “Roger that,” Olson said, swerving at the last moment as the Bradley began to pass over the rubble. But he turned too late and the left hand side of the Bradley passed directly over the pile.

  Baldocchi couldn’t remember anything about the first explosion. It must have been a sonofabitch, though, because it lifted the 28-ton vehicle in the air before dumping it on its right hand side 20 feet away. If the Bradley had tipped a little further over, Baldocchi’s scars wouldn’t matter because the vehicle would have rolled over him, crushing his upper body between its turret and hatch cover as it did.

  Whatever had been in the IED was powerful enough to split the Bradley’s hull in a couple of the weak places on its underside. He hung in his web safety belts, only semi-conscious, and could smell the greasy odor of diesel fuel as it gurgled out into the passenger compartment below.

  He was vaguely aware of a smoky scent, too, and the sickening sweetness of cooking flesh. The explosion had left him dazed with his head spinning, but in the back of his mind he realized that something inside the Bradley was on fire.

  He struggled to unfasten the nylon webbing of his safety harness but his hands didn’t seem to want to grip. Instead, he pawed ineffectively at the material, swearing at its resistance until it occurred to him that his fingers might be broken.

  He might not have been able to remember the first blast, but the second one was burned vividly into his memory. That was the one that happened inside the hull of the Bradley when sufficient diesel fuel leaked out to reach the vehicle’s short-circuiting electronics.

  It caused an eruption of burning diesel that coated his body from just above his knees to the inside of his helmet. The fuel exploded, making his inability to get out of his safety harness moot: the force of the blast simply threw him out of the vehicle, breaking both his shoulders and shredding the nylon straps that confined him. He landed about two and a half meters from the burning vehicle, screaming with agony as the flames swallowed him. Fortunately a blast of carbon dioxide gas quickly extinguished the fire and soothed him as the first of the G.I.s
from the Humvee reached him with an extinguisher.

  His last words to Olson echoed in his head as he slowly came out of his fitful sleep. Take the right, Baldocchi had said with a panicky edge to his voice. The right. The right. Take the right fork; there’s something wrong with the road on the left hand side!

  Why won’t anyone listen to me?

  ***

  Jerking awake in the darkness, Baldocchi lay in his bed and listened to the dry rasp of his lungs as he struggled to catch his breath. It was the fourth time in the last six days he had lived through the nightmare.

  When he first woke up in the surgical unit outside Kabul, he recalled the entire incident from beginning to end every single time he closed his eyes. Four nights out of six was real progress, he thought.

  Maybe by the time he was 85, he would be dreaming about the explosion and fire only a couple of times a month.

  ***

  “Did you win the lottery or something?” Dr. Smith said as he washed his hands in the examining room, sneaking a glance at Baldocchi’s face in the little mirror above the sink.

  Baldocchi finished buttoning his shirt before responding.

  “Not unless you can win without buying a ticket,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

  Smith folded his arms on his chest. “For one thing, you haven’t bitched once about how badly you feel since you walked into the office,” he said. “You took your clothes off without complaining and you’ve been here twenty minutes but haven’t told me you would probably be better off dead in Afghanistan than alive in the United States. Your attitude seems to be improving. Did you join a book club or something?”

  Baldocchi pulled his trench coat around him and picked up his cap. “I guess I do feel a bit less depressed,” he said. “I’ve made a friend.”

  Smith grinned. “I should have guessed. Who is he?”

  “It’s a she, not a he,” Baldocchi said. “She lives in my apartment house.”