by Tom Kakonis
After he’d put enough distance behind them, Lester slowed down, glanced over, and said, “Want me find a, like, hospital? Have ’em take a look at you?”
“No hospitals.”
“Where, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could go by my place. Least clean ya up little.”
“Whatever.”
“That okay with you? Go there?”
“Fine.”
They drove awhile in silence, down a maze of back streets, dark and winding. Finally Marshall asked him where they were.
“Almost there. That’s Cass up ahead. I’m just couple blocks over, on Chicago.”
Cass and Chicago. Lester—last name what?—Caulkins, that was it. Marshall filed these casually dropped bits of intelligence in a corner of his gradually clearing head. Why, he wasn’t sure.
They pulled into a parking space outside a grim, stucco-sided three-story. Lester cut the engine, handed Marshall the keys, and announced, “Here we are.”
“You live here?”
“This the place. C’mon in.”
“Thanks, but I think I’ll go on home.”
Lester looked at him puzzledly, a trace of hurt in his eyes. “Hey, man, it’s safe. I ain’t gonna roll ya.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Marshall said. “It’s just that I’m going to be all right now.” He was too. Could feel some of the stiffness easing, even the pain lessening a little, settling into a dull throb.
“You drive okay?”
“I’ll make it.”
“Sure you don’t wanna come in? Wash up, have a beer? Get yourself straight?”
“I’m sure.”
Lester shrugged. “Well, guess you the one oughta know.”
“What I don’t know, Lester, is why they did it.”
“What, thrash on you, y’mean?”
“Yes.”
“Got me. Like I tol’ ya in the bar there, they ain’t big on strangers. Remember me tellin’ ya that?”
“I remember. But he’s got to know something about my son.”
“Jimmie, you sayin’?”
“Yes. Why else would he do what he did?”
“Beats shit outta me. But I was you, I’d stay outta his traffic. Dudes he runs with, they don’t dick around. I know. Took a trip out back once myself.”
“You too?”
“Yeah, me too,” Lester said dolefully. “They learned me good. I found out in a hurry, same as you better do.” He lowered his eyes, seemed to examine his palms a moment. “Look, I gotta go in now, so—”
“Lester, wait a minute. Please.”
“What for?”
“Do you remember the story I was telling you, starting to tell, inside the bar?”
“Which story’s that?”
“About the car on the tollway? License plates?”
“Oh, yeah, that one. What about it?”
“Does this Jimmie drive a Mercury, bronze color, AZ in the license?”
“No, Jimmie, he drives a van.”
“Van,” Marshall said defeatedly.
“Yeah. Bronze Merc, AZ in the plates, that’d be Mike.”
Now Marshall gazed at him steadily, all that was left of his spirit gone to his eyes in a tight, searching squint. “Mike?”
“Mike Wazinski. Everybody call him Waz, so he got himself them designer plates on his car. Why?”
Marshall opened the glove compartment, took out the notepad and ballpoint. “Mike Wazinski? That’s his name?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Why you writin’ it down?”
“Because he’s the one I’m looking for.”
“Mike? Listen, I know Mike. He’s cleaner’n a whole pack a Boy Scouts. Sure as hell ain’t into baggin’ kids.”
“That may be. But he, or his wife, girlfriend, some woman—they’re involved someway. Know something.”
“How come you so sure? Lots a guys drive Mercs out there, Norse.”
“But only one with AZ in the license.”
“So what’s that suppose to mean? I don’t get it.”
“Doesn’t matter, Lester. What I have to do is get to him, this Mike Wazinski. Can you help me?”
“No way, man. Mike ain’t no Jimmie, but he ain’t no pansy neither.”
“All I want to do is talk with him. You say you know him. You could arrange it.”
“Can’t do it. Sorry.”
“But why can’t you?”
“Why is because I ain’t gettin’ into this no deeper,” Lester declared, his voice lifting agitatedly. “Ain’t good for the health. Take tonight. If Jimmie’d seen me with you out behind Nick’s there, I’d be in the serious dog poop. I gotta live with these guys.”
“I understand,” Marshall said resignedly. “You’ve helped me enough. And I want you to know I appreciate it, Lester. All you’ve done.”
“Forget it. Also my name, you decide to go talkin’ to anybody. Forget that too, okay?”
“Okay.”
Lester cracked open the door, climbed out of the car, and started away. He paused, turned, and said, “Oh, one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“You go sniffin’ around anymore, you better cover your back, huh.”
“I’ll do that,” Marshall said.
Her reaction was predictable: paralytic stance, epileptic shudder, skin gone waxen, eyes banjoed in sheer, blank fright, voice—“Oh, God! What have they done to you?”—threaded through with hysteria. Predictable but understandable, forgivable. A passing glimpse in a hallway mirror revealed a face splotched with purpling bruises and crusted with blood. He shuddered too, but what he said was, “It’s not as bad as it looks,” and kept on moving, wobbling stiffly toward the kitchen.
She fell in behind, tried to touch him. “Marsh, what happened?”
He waved her away. “Later.”
“I’ll call Dr. Horton.”
“Forget Horton. Don’t need a doctor. Need the book.”
“Book?”
“Phone book.”
He pulled it out of a drawer, slapped it on the counter, flipped to the W’s. Mumbling “Wazinski, Wazinski…Herman, George, Kenneth,” he drew a finger down a column of names, and then, stabbing the page, fairly bawling: “Michael! Wazinski, Michael, Mike Wazinski. That’s the one. Got to be him.”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
He didn’t seem to hear. “Lisle? He lives in Lisle? That’s just up the road. They were that close? All this time?” He shook his head slowly, truly dumbfounded by the geographic proximity.
“Marsh, please. Talk to me. Please please please please.”
He glanced up, saw her standing, forgotten, in the doorway, quivery fists held at her chin, voice trembling now on the edge of tears. “I think I’ve found them,” he said exultantly.
“Found who?”
“That car out on the tollway. Those people.”
“You found them?”
“I think so.”
“How?”
“Never mind how. I found them. We’ve got a name now. An address.”
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“Look at you. That’s what it took to get that name? What they did to you?”
He put a flat palm in the air, a motion of blockage, distancing. “Don’t say it, Lori.”
“What? Say what?”
“What you’re thinking. The P-word. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t need any police to talk to these people.”
Her face began to crumple in that peculiar slow-motion descent into an anguish powerless and vast. A tremor passed through her thin shoulders, followed shortly by the quake of great wrenching sobs.
Marshall sighed. He wasn’t up to this. Been enough for one night. Nevertheless, he came over and dutifully took her in his arms. Stroked her hair. Empty of solace and comforting words.
“I can’t stand any more of this, Marsh. Jeffie’s gone…I can’t lose you too.”
A curious obliqu
e memory surfaced, supplied him with something to say. “Lori, listen to me, now. Listen. Remember when he had that cough, infection, whatever it was? About a year ago?”
She moved her head up and down.
“The doctor said it was nothing, gave him some medicine. It got worse. Remember? Our helplessness at his helplessness?”
“Yes.”
“When we got him to Emergency he could barely breathe. They took him into an examination room, told us to wait outside. We did it, we did what they told us to do. And all the time we could hear him screaming behind that door. And when they finally brought him out, remember the look on his face? Accusing, it was. Like we’d abandoned him, betrayed him. The people he loved. Trusted.”
She tilted her head back, gazed at him through a wall of tears. “I remember, Marsh.”
“Well, he’s out there somewhere. Maybe close by. And whenever he thinks about us, that’s how he’s got to look. Only it’s not going to happen again. Not this time. Doctors, police—it’s all the same. This time we’re not going to abandon him.”
But that remembered event, so vivid to him in the telling, was in fact murky as a scene lifted from some long-forgotten film, or a snippet of an overheard story, told by a stranger. And later, lying in bed, overtaken by exhaustion and ache but too wired for sleep, it struck him that an obsession—Lori’s term for what had gotten hold of him—may doze awhile but never really sleeps, and that this fanatic search of his had somehow, in a manner too subtle to grasp, become paramount, its object subordinate, and anymore he had trouble even conjuring a clear image of his lost son.
PART SIX
Punctuality was a virtue prized by Dingo, and so when, punctually at six p.m. the following day, he once again swung his Lincoln into the alley behind the Norseman Lounge and found Jimmie nowhere in sight, a furrow of annoyance creased his smooth brow. He waited, fingers drumming the wheel, engine purring, air in the car tempered to a cool, satiny sheen. Moments passed. No Jimmie. He brought the window down a notch, lit a cigarette, and watched the plumes of smoke drift out into the heat-shimmered light of a dropping sun. To spare himself another trip inside that steamy den of rank sweat and assorted stinks, he’d deliberately phoned ahead, spoken directly with Nick (or as directly as one could speak to a sullen, ignorant Greek), and left explicit instructions for his confederate: six o’clock, out back. Yet the digital clock on the dash read 6:19. Still no Jimmie. He crushed out the cigarette, and a for him uncharacteristic obscenity sprang unbidden to his lips. Six meant six.
And that’s exactly what he said to him when, thirteen minutes later, Jimmie came through the back door (moving, Dingo noticed with no small irritation, at a leisurely pace, a slight forward tilt to his walk, side-to-side swing built in, the sort of stride that carries the calculated announcement: Look at me, I’m cool, I’m bad), strutted over to the car, and climbed into the front seat, displaying an unapologetic face full of teeth, from which grinning mouth escaped an odor so noxious Dingo was reminded, too late, of the air freshener he’d forgotten to purchase: “Six means six, Jimmie.”
“Huh?”
“We were to meet at six. Didn’t you get the message?”
“Yeah, Nick, he tol’ me.”
Dingo indicated the dash clock, a wordless rebuke.
“Sorry about that,” Jimmie said, but his relentless grin betrayed little in the way of regret.
“Sorry won’t cut it, Jimmie. Not in business. In business, time equals money.”
“Wait’ll ya hear why, though. Speakin’ a business.”
“So tell me.”
“Okay,” Jimmie told him in a voice quickened by good news and, sadly for Dingo, dispatched on a breath so gamy it blighted the air between them, “reason I’m runnin’ little late is because I just wrote up seven more orders inside there, them Rolies. Bumps the total to—you ready for this, Dingo?”
“Try me.”
“How’s a big two-seven-seven crank your engines?”
“Two hundred seventy-seven orders?” Dingo said after him, and only by an effort was he able to contain the elation in his own voice. “You’ve secured that many?”
“That many and countin’. Still got a few grunts left to tap. For sure gonna bust three hundred.”
“Three hundred is a nice round number.”
“Bet your ass, round. Add it up in your head and you lookin’ at the kinda loot we ain’t never scored. Not off one hit.”
No arguing that. And Dingo needed no prompting to do the mental arithmetic and arrive at a figure so inspiriting, so exhilarating, he had to suppress an impulse almost to cheer. That would be unbecoming, a man of his weight, so what he did instead was reward his partner with a thin smile and some carefully chosen words of praise: “This is splendid work you’ve done, Jimmie. Most impressive.”
Jimmie’s ordinarily sallow face seemed to glow from within. Out of Dingo praise was never easy to come by, and he took a moment to bask in its nourishing heat. Only a moment. “That ain’t all,” he declared pridefully.
“There’s more?”
“Oh, yeah. Remember that little pro’lum I was tellin’ ya about, other night?”
“Regarding the child?”
“That’s the one.”
“Indeed I do.”
“Well, now y’don’t have to. Remember, I’m sayin’. Can scrub it right outta your head.”
Dingo looked at him skeptically. “Really. And how exactly is that?”
“That weenie I tol’ ya showed up at the plant? One handin’ out his missing-squirrel flyers?”
“Yes.”
Jimmie gave him a long, ironic wink. “He got his punk card pulled last night. Pulled good. You shoulda seen it, Dingo. You’d’ve got a hoot outta it.”
“I doubt that. I’ve never much cared for that end of this business.”
“Yeah, well, anyways, ain’t nothin’ to sweat there. He ain’t gonna be sniffin’ around. Not no more.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Hey, bet to it. That one’s a cold pack.”
Dingo cast an oblique glance at this scruffy, rancid-breathed, street-talking partner of his. A thought, not yet fully formed, was taking shape in a distant chamber of his head. Not a scheme exactly, more of a notion, a fancy. He said generously, “The problem cleared up, three hundred Rolex orders—you’ve had a productive several days, Jimmie.”
“Been some a your better ones,” Jimmie agreed, beaming.
“How do you want to take delivery? Any ideas?”
“Yeah, I got some ideas on that,” Jimmie allowed, clearly pleased to be in on the planning, for a switch.
“Care to share them?”
“See, we got this plant open house Saturday. Little celebration, like. It’s for family and friends, anybody works there, which means just about everybody show up. I’m thinkin’ you and me’d meet that morning, say, transfer the goods to my van and—”
“When exactly, and where?” Dingo broke in on him.
“In the lot, visitors’ end. I’m gonna be inside awhile, could sneak out, oh, ’bout ten.”
“What about distribution?”
“What I’d do is spread the word around they can pick ’em up right there. Get it all done in one shot.”
“Is it safe? In the lot there?”
“Watches, they ain’t like our other commodities. Be an easy pass outta the van. Look like the toy cops gonna gimme grief, I just bring it down the road a piece.”
“Collections? Payment?”
“Strictly cash. Friday’s payday, they’ll be packin’ heavy wallets. Whole thing oughta be wrapped by five bells. You want, we can connect here, split the take.”
Dingo considered a moment, could find no flaws in the plan. “Sounds workable, Jimmie.”
The arrangements evidently sealed, Jimmie expelled a big, gaseous sigh. “Thirty large each,” he said dreamily. “Know what I’m gonna do, mine?”
“What would that be?”
“Get me a bike. Talkin�
� brand-new Harley here, top a the line. Dressed.”
“Dressed? I don’t know the term.”
“Means all the bells’n whistles,” Jimmie explained joyously, and he went on to elaborate in tiresome detail what those accessories included, his bony hand dancing descriptively through the air.
Dingo attended to the raptured recital of this pitiable ambition, but not very closely. That elusive earlier thought—notion, fancy, call it what you will—seemed to be gathering momentum, substance, evolving almost with a will of its own into structure, contour, texture, design.
“So what’re you gonna do, yours?” Jimmie asked, the paen to his envisioned cycle run down.
“Uh, what’s that?”
“Your half. How you lookin’ to spend it?”
“I haven’t given it much thought.”
“You better. Thirty big dimes, that’s a lotta sugar in one lump.”
So it was. Though nowhere near the sixty in Dingo’s gradually emerging plan. “Maybe I’ll invest a part of it in a growth mutual fund,” he said.
“That like buyin’ them stocks?”
“Something like that.”
“Why you wanna do that?”
“To prepare for the future. You should do the same, Jimmie. Plan ahead. Your golden years. Nobody’s young forever.”
“Not me. Way I look at it, y’never know when the ol’ hammer gonna fall. Suck up all the goodies while y’still can, that’s my motto. Gonna be a long time dead.”
Dingo looked at him appraisingly, a trace of a smile in it, tolerant, mellow, close to charitable and slow to leave his face. “Well,” he drawled, “I suppose there’s something to be said for that philosophy too.”
Marshall was himself operating off something of a plan as, that same evening, he steered his Volvo down a Lisle residential street quieted by the lingering heat, craning his neck and squinting to pick out the numbers posted above the doors of a uniform row of frame ranch houses, borderline shabby, set back from the road by patches of grass scorched a liverish brown. The plan, what there was of it, turned on finding the optimum time and conditions to approach this Mike Wazinski, confront him. Conditions were plain enough: at home ideally, the woman very likely around, children possibly, neighbors, witnesses (last night’s lesson not entirely lost on him). Time was trickier. Daylight was essential (another hard lesson learned), and so at first he considered the morning hours, then quickly rejected that notion on the reasonable expectation of a curt rebuff by a grouchy man in a hurry to get somewhere. No, morning wouldn’t do. Which left only that narrow window of time between late afternoon and dusk.
