Empty Ever After

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  I shook my head yes.

  “Put your money … away,” she said, closing the door behind her, “and … fuck me.”

  I didn’t have to say what. My face said it for me.

  “You heard … me.” Tina unbuckled her belt, unhitched her leather pants, and made a show of slowly undoing her zipper. She reached up with her free hand. “You don’t even have to … look at … me. I’ll bend over or … you can shut the … lights.”

  I didn’t flinch. My father-in-law and I had played a game of chicken that lasted two decades. If I hadn’t flinched for him, I wasn’t going to for Tina Martell. I’d also learned that chicken was a two-team sport and that it worked both ways.

  “You know, Tina, I didn’t think you were ugly till right now,” I said, starting for the office door. “I can find out what I need to know without Crank. But remember this, anything happens to my family because it took longer than it had to, I’ll come back and burn this shithole down.”

  She stopped tugging on her zipper. “Once, I coulda had any man … I wanted. I did and … women too … sometimes. Now look at … me. I can’t even suck—”

  I kissed her hard on the mouth, running my hand through her shortcut hair. She didn’t exactly resist, but she didn’t quite melt either. She stepped back after a moment.

  “You must really … need Crank,” she said, looking anywhere but at me.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “A cabin back in the woods … off Dunbar Road and … Limehouse Creek Way in Craterskill.”

  “By the lake?”

  She nodded. “Be careful … out there.”

  Before I left, I stuck my head back into the office. “No one’s ever accused me of doing things I didn’t want to.”

  STROLLING INTO HENRY’S Hog was one thing. Driving up on a meth lab out in the woods in the middle of the night was something else. The cop vibe at the roadhouse earned me a few nasty stares. Here, nasty stares would be the very least of my worries. Meth was big business and these guys didn’t fuck around. Shooting first and asking questions later was what they did with their friends. In my case, the questions would come after they had chopped me up and fed me to the local porcine population. As I rolled down Dunbar to the gravel road that was Limestone Creek Way, I thought that I might have asked Tina’s advice on how to approach Crank without getting a shotgun stuck up my ass. It was a wee bit late for that now.

  I had three options, none of them any good, but some more dangerous than others. I could have left my car where it was and tried to work my way through the woods to the cabin on foot. That was my ‘if ’ option: If I was twenty pounds lighter … If I was twenty years younger … If my knees worked … Even then, I’m not sure I would have tried it. The woods around the cabin were probably full of eyes and ears and booby traps. Call me a worrier, but I didn’t much feel like stepping into a steel trap or wire snare. I could have tried to sneak up on one of the lookouts and have my .38 convince him to take me to Crank. Again, I wasn’t sure I could pull it off nor did I want to create any more ill will than my unexpected visit was apt to generate. I needed Crank’s help, not his animosity. I went with option three. I restarted my car, put on the brights, rolled down my windows, blasted the radio, and headed straight for the cabin. I might be accused of stupidity, but nobody was going to accuse me of trying to sneak up on anyone.

  That was all well and good until the front end of my car plowed into a log placed across Limestone. I didn’t hit it hard enough to have the air bag deploy, but the seat belt tightened up and gave me a pretty good jolt. Before my head had fully cleared, someone reached out of the darkness and stuck a cold hunk of metal into my neck just under my jaw.

  “Shut the car off, asshole. Put your hands on the back of your head, and get out easy,” the man said, slowly pulling back the car door and guiding me with the end of his sawed-off. I still couldn’t quite make him out, but the rifle caught enough light for me to see. “Walk. That way. Slow.” He indicated which way with the gun barrel and moved it from my neck to my back.

  If I had ever been more frightened, I couldn’t remember when. I’d been involved in a few shootings, but they had just sort of happened. One minute there wasn’t shooting and the next minute there was. The first time happened up in the Cat-skills. I was in the room when a crooked town cop blew the head off his fellow blackmailer. The next time was a setup. I’d been lured to a meeting at a shuttered Miami Beach hotel during the Moira Heaton/Steven Brightman investigation. When I showed, an ex-U.S. marshal named Barto tried to kill me. I fired back. I think I hit him, but didn’t stick around to make sure. Then there was the shooting at Crispo’s bar in Red Hook when Carmella’s partner was killed and she took that bullet in her shoulder. At Frankie Motta’s house in Mill Basin, there were a few minutes of calm before the old mob capo and his former henchmen shot each other.

  Being marched to your own execution was more than a little bit different. The string was going out of my legs and I didn’t think I had the strength to walk much further. A thousand things to say went through my head, but my mouth just didn’t seem capable of forming any words. On the other hand, the little voice, the one that never leaves me, had no trouble with words. “Be a man. Don’t beg. Don’t shit your pants. Be a man.”

  I was so angry at myself for worrying not about my family, but about how I would look to strangers when they blew the back of my head off, that I nearly turned around and charged the guy holding the shotgun on me. Given another few seconds, I think that’s just what I would have done. Luckily, I didn’t get a chance to find out.

  “Pull his car off the road. I’ll take it from here,” someone said, stepping out of the darkness in front of me.

  “Crank, is that you?” I said, my voice cracking.

  “That was awfully fucking stupid, coming up here like that. Good thing Tina called ahead.”

  “Good thing,” I agreed.

  “Come on inside.”

  The cabin in the woods was just that, a cabin in the woods. There was a stone fireplace, a futon, a TV, a stereo, a small kitchen with a table and chairs, a bathroom, and not much else. There wasn’t any lab equipment that I could see and I hadn’t spotted any chemical drums on the walk up. Crank followed my eyes and smiled.

  “We don’t cook the shit here, man. Biker don’t equate to moron, you know.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Tina says you wanna talk, so talk. You wanna beer?”

  “Sure.”

  He handed me a Coors. Panic makes your pants wet and your throat dry. I hadn’t realized how dry until the first sip of beer went down smooth as silk and cold as ice. From now on, Coors would definitely be my post-shotgun beer of choice. I wondered if they could work up an advertising campaign around that slogan.

  “How you feeling?” I asked.

  “Okay. You risked getting your ass shot off to check on my health?”

  “That night at the ER, you said you had to lay your bike down when an SUV ran the light at Blyden and Van Camp, right?”

  “Asshole blew right through the intersection without hesitating and didn’t even tap his brakes after I went down. Good thing I was paying attention.”

  “Can you remember anything about the SUV? Color? What state the tags were from, how many people were in—”

  “Pretty sure it was a pewter Yukon. New, I think. At least two people, men up front. New York plates. Sorry, but I was a little too busy to get the number.”

  “That’s good, but how do you know there were two men up front?”

  “Dome light was on. I can’t tell you anything about them. Everything happened so fucking fast, you know? Does that help?”

  “More than you can know. Thanks a lot, Crank.”

  I shook his hand. When I did, he pulled me close and whispered in my ear, “Don’t come back here no more, bud. Makes the boys nervous to have cop types around and that don’t do me no kinda good. We understand one another?”

  “We do.”

  I turned
to go and then the world shook. Baboom! The explosion wasn’t in the cabin, but it was close enough to shake the place and blow out the windows. I bounced off the wall and saw the fireball rising up out of the woods about a hundred yards away. I thought I could feel the heat on my face, but I was probably imagining that. I ran over and helped Crank up off the floor.

  “You gotta get outta here,” he barked. “The timing don’t look so good for you.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “I know you didn’t, but they’re not gonna believe that. Keep your head down by the door and listen. You’ll know what to do.”

  Crank waited till I crouched down and then ran out the front door screaming, “He jumped out the window and headed toward the lake. Hammer, you get Blade and Cutter and get to the lake. Skank, you go check on the kitchen to see if anything’s left of Skinny and the equipment. I’ll check the woods to make sure he don’t double back.”

  “Shit, Crank, ain’t nothin’ gonna be left a Skinny, not after—”

  “Listen, Skank, get the fuck over there and check on Skinny or—”

  “Okay, Crank. Jesus, fuckin’ Christ, who the fuck died and left you God?”

  I listened to all the footsteps heading away from the cabin and the road where my car was parked.

  Crank kicked the door with his heel. “Go now. Fire your gun when you get to your car.”

  I didn’t hesitate. Taking off, I kept low as I could and close to the trees. My car wasn’t too far from where I left it. I didn’t bother checking the damage to the front end. As Crank asked, I fired off a few rounds. He didn’t have to explain. I was giving him cover for when his crew got curious about how I had escaped.

  As I drove back into Janus, I thought about what Crank had said about the timing of the explosion. It was one hell of a coincidence that his meth lab just happened to blow up during my visit. I didn’t like it, not even a little. I called Pete Vandervoort. He was asleep, but when I told him about Crank’s lab being launched into low Earth orbit, he agreed to meet me in his office.

  Given the sheriff’s looks, I was glad I’d avoided mirrors. And he was just tired. I’d crashed a car, had a shotgun stuck in my throat, and witnessed a recreation of the Trinity test. I had just about used up my yearly allowance of adrenaline and was now paying the price. I could literally feel myself crashing and unless he was hiding a fifty-five gallon drum of coffee somewhere, I wasn’t going to last much longer.

  I described the SUV to him that Crank described it to me.

  “We’ve got a winner!” I think I remember him saying.

  I recall his mouth moving some more after that, but I had already retreated behind a wall of sleep.

  YOU REACH A certain age in life and you’ve woken up in a few strange beds, Even so, it can be a pretty jarring experience. Waking up in a jail cell kicked that jarring thing up to a whole different level. The bed wasn’t too terribly uncomfortable and the bleach and pine disinfectant aroma wasn’t quite as pleasant as my dad’s Old Spice aftershave, but I guess it had its charms. On the other hand, I didn’t find the cold metal toilet hanging off the wall very welcoming. I kind of felt like Otis the town drunk on the old Andy Griffith Show. I think I half-expected Barney Fife or Aunt Bee to show up with my breakfast.

  My watch said it was 8:22 a.m., but the florescent lighting and lack of windows kept the place in a kind of perpetual dusk. I threw some cold water on my face. I might have dunked my head into the water had the sink been larger than the ones in aircraft rest rooms. I was about to try the door to make sure the sheriff didn’t have a frat house sense of humor. Just then he walked in and swung the door back open.

  “Where’s Opie?” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Forget it, Pete. Thanks for putting me up. I was pretty zonked.”

  “I’d say. I’ve been checking on you every hour,” he said, pointing at the security camera mounted on the ceiling outside the cell, “and you’ve been in one position for most of the night. Come on, I got some coffee for you out here.”

  We stepped into the offices. Here, the sun streaming through the windows confirmed that my watch was telling the truth. Vandervoort handed me a cup of coffee and motioned for me to sit down in front of his desk. Although his expression was neutral, I could tell that the news he had for me wasn’t good.

  “It’s a dead end, Moe. We got your Yukon on one of the tapes and we got the kid walking into the convenience store at the station, but it’s impossible to read the tags. The driver never got out of the vehicle to buy gas or anything and he drove off right after dropping the kid.”

  “Shit!”

  “I know it’s not what you wanted to hear, but it totally confirms that this is a setup. You got that much, anyway.”

  “Tape show anything about the driver?” I asked.

  “Well, the good thing is that this tape was brand new, so it’s much cleaner than the other one I gave you. No murky images on this one.”

  “But …”

  “But you can’t tell anything about the driver. The windows are slightly tinted and there’s some sun glare.”

  “Can I have the tape?”

  “I knew you’d ask that.” He shoved a plastic evidence bag across the desk. “Here you go.”

  “Any news on the lab?”

  He started laughing. “The damned explosion registered on earthquake sensors. That was no small operation there, my friend. Somebody’s not going to be happy about it going boom.”

  “I don’t suppose they’re going to file any insurance claims.”

  “I suspect not.”

  I got up. “Thanks for the tape and for the accommodations, Pete. I better get back down to the city and see if I can figure out how to come at this from another angle.”

  “Sorry the SUV thing didn’t work out for you.”

  “Me too. Later.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THERE ARE TIMES when Brooklyn feels more like home than others. This was one of those times. I considered stopping at the office, but decided against it. I’d stop by later and drop off the new videotape and see if Devo had made anything of the answering machine tape and the original security video. Without tag numbers, it was a waste of time to put people on tracking down the Yukon. There were probably hundreds, if not thousands, of Yukons registered in New York State. Crank and the SUV had been worth a shot, but the sheriff was right, it was a dead end. Dead ends, unlike closing doors, are not very Zen. When one door closes, it’s said, another opens. When you hit a dead end, you make a U-turn. I needed to clear my head and think. I used to do my best thinking in Coney Island.

  I strolled down the boardwalk toward the looming monster that was the Parachute Jump: its orange-painted girders rising like dinosaur bones two hundred and fifty feet off the grounds of Steeplechase Park. What a silly beast it was, after all, serving no purpose but to remind the world of its impotence. It might just as well have been a severed limb. Besides the salt air, the boardwalk smelled of Nathan’s Famous hot dogs, Italian sausages frying with sweet peppers and onions: the fat from the sausages hissing and spitting on the grill. It smelled of sun block too. The beaches were crowded, but not so crowded as when I was a kid. The beaches weren’t as much of a magnet for city kids as they once had been.

  With Sarah fully grown and nearly all my old precinct brothers moved or dead, I didn’t find much cause to come back here as I used to. I still loved the wretched place. How could I not, but it had never been the same after Larry McDonald’s suicide. This is where I saw him alive that last time in ’89, the ambitious prick. He had been a murderer too, though I didn’t know it then. I guess it broke my heart a little to find that out about Larry. That day back in ’89, Larry and I stood on the boardwalk directly over where his victim had been found. Larry threatened me and my family. He said he was desperate. Maybe he was. Somehow his words and deeds had tainted the place a little. It was the divorce too. Divorce does more than split things apart. It taints things, all things, especially the good one
s.

  As I walked I thought back to my chat with Mira Mira and how she said the older guy with the eye patch was a cop. Maybe there was an angle in that, but intuition didn’t usually stand up under scrutiny. It had been my experience that people who insisted they knew things for sure didn’t necessarily know shit. I don’t care if every one of the tattoo artist’s relatives was a cop. Just because a man is a chef doesn’t mean his kid can cook.

  I thought about how much money was involved in arranging for the audition ads, for paying the kid and fixing him up to look just like Patrick. I thought about what it had cost to fly around the country for the auditions and to have arranged for the roses and the dramatics at Jack’s grave. I estimated it had cost between ten and thirty grand, maybe a little bit more, to stage this little charade. A nice chunk of change, yes, but not big money. Any regular schmo, if he was motivated enough, could come up with that kind of scratch, so the money was another dead end. It all led back to the motivation. In the end, it was the only way I could figure to come at this. There was someone out there who wanted to hurt me and wanted to use my family to do it. For now, I had to go back to stumbling around in the dark, to interviewing everyone I could think of who might have a reason to want to hurt me.

  IT WAS NO wonder that Devo’d had trouble tracking down Judas Wannsee. First off, the name was an obvious alias, a construct of the most hated Jew in history, Judas Iscariot, and of the Wannsee Conference at which the Nazis worked out the details for the Final Solution. Headquartered in the Catskill Mountains, his cult, the Yellow Stars, rejected the concept of assimilation and believed that the only way to avoid Jewish self-hatred was to announce your Jewishness to the world, to brand yourself a Jew, and to avoid the false comforts of fitting in. Most of the members did this by wearing the eponymous yellow star on their clothing to mark themselves as the Nazis had marked the Jews of Europe. Some went so far as to shave their heads and don the striped pajamas of those herded into concentration camps. In a few extreme cases, they had numbers tattooed on their forearms and ate a meager diet of stale black bread and potato soup.