You Were Never Really Here

by Jonathan Ames

  He thought he had been moving slowly, but he had actually been moving very quickly, and he could feel the cop’s great animal strength and will to live pushing back against his own, and they went down to the floor and rolled, and Joe came up on top, his body flat against the cop’s like they were lovers, and he still had the shooting hand under his control, and the cop was pounding at him with his left fist and thrashing and kicking his legs. He was a wild, large, gross thing beneath Joe, his breath warm and rancid with fear and rage, and then Joe got his hand under the cop’s chin and with all his strength he pushed the cop’s head back unnaturally until the neck snapped, and the whole thing beneath him shuddered, a tremor that ran from head to toe—Joe felt it like a wave beneath him, like a blanket being fanned out over a bed—until all the life was gone and the thing that had been a cop, a man, went still.

  Joe rolled off, panting, his vision returning. He scrambled to his feet, his right calf felt ballooned and on fire and was bleeding profusely, but he didn’t have time to mess with the wound. He had no choice but to leave a blood spoor. He took the cop’s .22 and, dragging his leg, he went quickly down the hall toward the emergency staircase, which he couldn’t access from the lobby earlier in the day. No hotel guests came out of their rooms. The silencer had worked.

  Joe pushed open the metal door and flung himself down the gray-painted staircase, swinging his bad leg as fast as he could. He had the gun in his hand—he expected a cop or someone to emerge at each floor—but they weren’t on to him yet. He was angry at himself for not taking the cop’s cell phone to figure out who he was talking to, but it was too late for that, and anyway a cell phone was like a tracking device and Joe had to get in the clear.

  He made it to the parking garage in the basement. No one was there. He moved as quickly as he could up the ramp, until he came to the lot’s exit on Carlisle Street, which was on the other side of the hotel. He couldn’t risk circling the block and getting his rental car, which was on Washington Street at the front of the W. Whoever the cop had been talking to would have somebody there very soon, maybe the same cops who had taken the girl. So he limped rapidly up to Greenwich Street, holding the gun in his pocket. A little bit of luck was on his side: a taxi was heading downtown, and Joe hailed it, got into the car, looked through the back window—no one was coming.

  “Coney Island, Surf Avenue, in front of the stadium,” Joe said. “I’ll give you a nice tip for going to Brooklyn.”

  The driver grunted, displeased, and headed for the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel. Joe’s leg needed attention, but he didn’t want to go to a Manhattan hospital. He’d go to Coney Island Hospital, though he didn’t want the driver to know that and be able to tell someone later. He had left blood in the hotel room and on the stairwell, and pretty soon they would be looking for a wounded man fitting Joe’s description. They’d start with the hospitals that were closest to the hotel. So Coney Island, miles away, was a good choice.

  Also, McCleary lived near the water, right by Kingsborough College, not far from the hospital, and Joe’s instinct as a Marine, when a mission goes bad, was to report to his commanding officer, and in this case that was McCleary, and this was a mission that had certainly gone bad. Dirty cops were involved, and Joe had just killed one of them. He took the duct tape out of his pocket and, using the cutting razor, made a tourniquet for himself. He didn’t want to lose his leg from the knee down. He was acquiring enemies—enemies he didn’t know—and he needed to be whole.

  Joe went to an all-night bodega on Surf Avenue and bought a quart bottle of Budweiser and a small bottle of rubbing alcohol, which was next to the condoms and the toothpaste. Then he went out to the beach, limping across the sand, and sat near the water so that his screams wouldn’t be heard by the few late-night stragglers walking like zombies up and down the boardwalk against the cold wind.

  A three-quarters moon had come out, just enough light for Joe to see by. He cut the tape off and rolled up his pant leg. The wound started to bleed. The bullet had torn a gutter through his calf muscle, but it could have been much worse. If it had hit the bone or his Achilles tendon, he’d be in bad shape. He tilted the bottle back and gulped from the beer. He wanted to reek of beer in the emergency room to help his cover story ring true—he had been drinking, decided to do a little late-night home-repair work, and had shot himself with his nail gun. His construction-worker appearance would also help to sell the story.

  Then he put on a fresh pair of latex gloves, poured the rubbing alcohol on his razor and on the gash, and, not suppressing his screams, he peeled back the skin of his calf, like opening the flap of an envelope. He dug around inside the wound with his fingers and the sharp blade, making a mess of the thing. The thin ropes of his flesh felt like a pod of small snakes.

  After nearly a minute, the pain became too much and, needing to stop, Joe quit damaging himself and let loose one more doglike howl. Then he was quiet, almost peaceful. He stared at the water, one or two ships blinked far away on the horizon, like fallen planets, and the ocean was a rolling black tongue, content for the time being to just taste the land. Joe looked back down at his ripped-open leg. He hoped it would pass inspection. He didn’t want the doctor to look too closely and see that it was a bullet wound and put in a call to the local precinct, which would be standard procedure.

  He cut up his pant leg to obscure the tear made by the bullet’s entrance and exit, then lowered the shredded fabric and wrapped a lot of fresh tape around it, making a new tourniquet, which would add to his do-it-yourself, drinking-man story. He finished the beer, tried to lessen the burning pain in his calf with steady breathing, and replayed in his mind the scene at the hotel.

  Nothing added up. Whoever operated the brothel must have known who the girl was, but how would they know Votto was in town? How would they know where Joe was taking her? And how high up the food chain did this go? If you run a brothel, no matter how much it brings in, you don’t have dirty cops who carry silencers on your speed dial. You have cops but not cops who are assassins. Someone very high up had been contacted and made that call. There hadn’t been time to get private killers. They called the badged killers who were already on the street, on duty, ready to go. Joe had left the brothel at approximately 1:30 and gotten to the W about fifteen minutes later. The cops seemed like they had arrived just before he did.

  And where was Votto? Was he in danger or somehow involved? If he was involved, it made no sense. Why wouldn’t he be there to see his daughter? Why would he try to have Joe killed? And where was the girl now? Votto, if he was alive, would have answers, but he needed McCleary to get to Votto. He dragged himself back out to Surf, found a working pay phone, and called McCleary’s cell. It went right to voice mail. He tried the old man’s landline and it went to a phone-company digital voice mail. Joe hoped the old man was asleep, that he turned his ringers off at night.

  He didn’t like to leave a message, but if they had Votto, they might get to McCleary. He said: “Be careful. Things are bad.” Then he called the cell again and left the same message. McCleary was old, but he was tough. He could handle himself. Joe limped a few blocks to the hospital, and he started to enjoy the pain, thinking of it as a punishment for his failures.

  In the unclean, ugly-bright Coney Island Hospital emergency room, Joe, after signing in, had to wait. A stabbing victim and a car accident with three injured parties had shown up just before him, it was a busy night, and his tape-job, for the time being, was keeping his leg together. So he waited to be attended to, tried to get comfortable in the plastic bucket seat, and after he had been there about twenty minutes, something happened that caught his attention.

  A television hanging in the corner, suspended by chains like a television in a prison ward, was playing loudly, bothering Joe, but it was tuned to NY1. It was a channel he never watched with his mother, but now twice in one night he was aware of it, and a news segment from earlier in the evening was being rebroadcast. A man had jumped from the Sheraton in Midtown around 10
:30 p.m. The reporter was on the scene. The body had landed on a parked taxi, but on the passenger side. Two feet over and the driver would have been dead. They showed the caved-in taxi, though the body had been removed.

  Then the driver was being interviewed. That would have been enough to make it newsworthy—the taxi driver’s narrow escape—but this was an extra-special suicide. The man who had jumped was a state senator from Albany named Stephen Wilson. Joe wondered if State Senator Votto knew State Senator Wilson. He figured he must, and he wondered if Votto’s disappearing act tonight was somehow linked to the suicide. It seemed like too much of a coincidence. Something was going down.

  Then his name was called. His story worked on the exhausted ER doctor, and forty-five stitches and three hours later, Joe was released. He tried McCleary’s numbers from a hospital pay phone, but everything went straight to voice mail. Joe didn’t leave any messages this time. It was nearly 6:00 a.m. He figured there was a good chance McCleary was still asleep. He hoped he was still asleep.

  Taped to the pay phone was a card for a car service, which he called. As the sun came up, he was driven over to McCleary’s dead-end street. It ran alongside a little harbor and waterway that fed into the Atlantic. Some of the houses were gaudy and cheap, but it was a beautiful spot. He had the driver go past McCleary’s house, a simple, white-brick two-story affair with a living-room window that had a view of the ocean. McCleary’s ten-year-old Caddy was in the narrow driveway. Joe got dropped off at the end of the street, which was at the water’s edge. The driver did a U-turn and left.

  Joe looked around. He didn’t see anything that looked out of place. There was no overnight parking on the street, so the only cars were the ones in driveways and, ostensibly, they would be the homeowners’ cars. Joe couldn’t be certain, but he didn’t think McCleary had visitors. Everything felt calm. Nobody was up yet. He walked toward McCleary’s house.

  Sailboats at the other end of the waterway, in the little harbor, were moored, rocking peacefully, clinking, like wind chimes. McCleary has done all right, Joe thought. He had never been here before, but he had memorized the address when he first started working with McCleary just in case he ever had to come here, just in case things went bad.

  McCleary had bought this place on the water thinking it would be his wife’s reward for all the years they had lived on a trooper’s salary. But she was only in the house for three months when she died, breaking McCleary in half, though he hadn’t yet followed her to the grave the way a lot of longtime spouses do—one dies and the other is quick to join.

  Joe took the gun out, shielding it from view, and limped up the three steps to the front door. He pushed the bell. Waited. Nothing. When McCleary didn’t answer after a third ring, Joe put his hand through the small glass panel in the door and let himself in. He went on a little tour of the house—it reeked of stale cigarette smoke, embedded deep into every pore of the place—and McCleary wasn’t home. His bed was unmade, maybe he had slept in it that night, but Joe couldn’t be sure.

  The only thing for certain was that McCleary wasn’t there, and this gave Joe a bad feeling. He didn’t think McCleary had gone out for an early breakfast without his car. The nearest commercial strip was too far away for someone like McCleary to walk to. There was the chance that McCleary had spent the night somewhere else, maybe he had a woman, and then from the woman’s place he’d go to work. So Joe’s next stop was going to be Thirty-eighth Street, McCleary’s office. If McCleary wasn’t there, he’d wait for him to show up and he’d keep calling his cell phone. If he never picked up his phone or never showed up, that would be Joe’s answer.

  Using McCleary’s landline, he called the car service that had driven him from the hospital. He was going to need a ride into the city. He didn’t want to be on the subways. Those dirty cops might have circulated his description, trumped something up—who knows how they were covering up the cop’s death at the W, but they would have, there were too many loose ends—and then when he was pulled in, they would find a way to extricate him from the system and put a bullet in his head.

  The car service said it would be there in ten minutes. Joe hung up and then, not expecting a good result, he tried McCleary’s cell—still nothing.

  While he waited for the car, he went into McCleary’s bathroom and found some Tylenol. He took four of them. His calf was starting to throb relentlessly, the shot they had given him was wearing off. He went into the living room and elevated his leg. He wasn’t supposed to be on it, but that wasn’t going to happen. He closed his eyes; he hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. He fell asleep almost instantly, and then the car service was outside honking.

  He started to head out and then, on a hunch, he went back up to McCleary’s bedroom and looked in the bedside table. There was a .45 there. Loaded. Joe took it with him. He liked his hammers, but sometimes you needed an arsenal.

  Joe had his hands on both guns in his pockets and looked around, but nobody was in the lobby of McCleary’s building. In deference to his wound, he took the elevator. He headed down the long hallway, which looped around in a circle, though it was a square, and he came to McCleary’s office door. He tried the knob—it was unlocked, as it usually was when McCleary was working. So Joe opened the door and something was blocking it. He pushed against whatever it was and squeezed in. It was McCleary blocking the door. He was facedown on the floor, the back of his head shot off, like a hairpiece had been removed. He had been kneeling and was shot execution-style.

  Joe stared at the large pool of blood around the head. Some of it was starting to dry, turning brown like mud, wanting to clot even now. He figured McCleary had been dead maybe two hours. Joe squatted down, put on a fresh pair of latex gloves, and reached under the body. He searched McCleary’s jacket and pants pockets. His wallet and cell phone were gone, and the laptop on his desk was gone. It was meant to look like a robbery.

  Joe stood up and glanced around the tiny office, his eyes scanning—the file-cabinet drawers were open, more stage setting—and he flashed to McCleary behind his desk, smoking a cigarette, acting tough. It was almost like he was alive again, which was a better way to leave things. So, not looking back down at the body, he went to step out, wiped the door handle with his T-shirt, and then stepped back in fast. Something had bothered him: McCleary’s Rolodex was missing.

  He went behind the desk, looked on the floor. Looked all over. There was no Rolodex. McCleary, under duress, must have given him up. Joe knew what this meant. From Angel’s phone number in the bodega—a landline number—they could get Angel’s address. Why hadn’t he insisted that McCleary rip up the number right in front of him? Because I’m fucking slipping, Joe thought. It started in Cincinnati.

  Joe’s eyes blacked over, like a hood had been draped over his head, and there was a shriek of terror in his mind, something he hadn’t felt in years. Then he willed the terror away and willed himself to see. He called information from McCleary’s office phone and got the bodega’s number. He let it ring and ring, but nobody answered. This was not a good sign. Angel lived above the bodega and opened up by 6:00 a.m. each day of the week. Joe didn’t have Angel’s cell-phone number, and Angel, like most people, didn’t have a landline in his residence, so Joe couldn’t call him there on the off chance that he was upstairs and not working for some reason. There was simply no way to warn him, if it was even still possible.

  And if they got to Angel, they could get to his mother because of Moises, and there was no way to warn her, either. They had a landline, but the ringer was always off because the only calls they got were from telemarketers. People from her church used to call, but that had stopped a while back. But even if he could reach his mother, she hadn’t been out of the house in years. She wasn’t capable anymore, she couldn’t walk that well—he did all the shopping. And he had never spoken to any of the neighbors, couldn’t get someone to help her. His paranoia, previously a safeguard, a protective wall, was now a liability.

  He called the fire depar
tment in Rego Park, told them smoke was coming from his mother’s address, then hung up. He didn’t want to call cops to the house, he didn’t know the reach of the people he was up against, but maybe the fire department might get there at just the right time. Might scare off his pursuers for a little while, let him get home and get his mother out of there. It was a long shot, but he had to take it.

  Then Joe left the building. Using a credit card, the same one that he had used at the hospital, he went to an ATM and got more cash. He had two identifications left, having burned the one attached to the rental car. He got a taxi and gave the driver Angel’s address. He still couldn’t risk being down in the subway. But it was rush hour now, and the ride from Manhattan to Queens would take a while.

  The driver headed for the Midtown Tunnel, and Joe’s only hope was that McCleary’s killers had gotten to the bodega after Moises went to school. That would slow them down. They were looking for him and he was looking for them, but they were in the lead. There was the chance, too, that they hadn’t yet gotten to the bodega at all, maybe Angel’s phone was down or there was some other explanation for him not answering. So he had to go there first, and the bodega was on his way to his mother. If Angel was there, he would give him money, tell him to take Moises out of the city and lay low for a while. He knew that Angel’s wife worked as a nurse at a hospice in Rockland County and came home on the weekends. They could go to her. If it wasn’t too late.

  He stared out at the sluggish traffic. There was nothing he could do to move more quickly. He had to accept this. He thought about McCleary on the floor, and he thought about the girl, her face pressed to the window, counting. He thought about his mother opening the door to police officers. Why wouldn’t she? Then he closed his eyes and elevated his leg on the seat. I need to sleep, he thought. I need to do better.