You Were Never Really Here

by Jonathan Ames

  It took them forty agonizing minutes to get to Queens. Joe had the taxi wait, but the bodega was closed.

  Joe then had the taxi drop him off four blocks from his mother’s house. He began a methodical sweep of the streets leading up to the house, peering into each parked vehicle. He was looking for an unmarked police car. He didn’t think they’d leave a standard cruiser on the street for him to see. After looking into sixty-three cars, he found it two blocks from his mother’s house, a black Dodge Charger. The dashboard emergency beacon, which they used when they broke cover, was on the front seat, the telltale sign of an unmarked cruiser. The presence of the Dodge confirmed to Joe that they were inside. His call to the fire department had most likely achieved nothing. They had probably swung by the house and registered it as a false alarm.

  He then circled the long way around and entered the alleyway behind the strip of houses where he had grown up. Three houses from his mother’s, he climbed on top of the shed of one his neighbors. His leg was giving him trouble, but he made up for it with arm strength. From the shed he was able to get hold of a fire escape, which he took all the way to the roof. A few years ago, he had noticed this shed, its proximity to the fire escape, and had filed away the information.

  All the roofs of the houses were on the same level, and the houses were all joined, a late-1940s postwar Rego Park construction style that was to Joe’s benefit. His bad leg couldn’t support much weight, but the roofs were not at a severe angle, so he was able to traverse them fairly easily. The houses were only two stories high, and the trees in the backyards, which were still holding on to half of their leaves, were giving good cover. There was a slight breeze in the air, and the trees seemed to be talking to each other, their language the hush of the trembling leaves.

  From his own roof he was able to lower himself onto the fire escape outside his mother’s bedroom window, which she always kept open a crack, believing in fresh air for health, as well as the superstition that an open window kept malicious spirits from staying inside, from feeling trapped. He gently and quietly removed the screen, placing it on the fire escape, and then he pushed the window up, soundlessly. He could see his mother’s form on the bed, a pillow over her head.

  He entered the room. Moises and Angel were on the floor, fallen over like chess pieces, the backs of their skulls shot off. For his mother, they had held a pillow over her face and then shot her that way, not being able to look at an old lady as they took her out. They’re weak, he thought.

  He heard them downstairs, whispering quietly. They weren’t expecting him to come from above. There were two of them, and he knew exactly where they were just from the sounds of their voices. The house was like an extension of his nervous system, his skin. He had spent the first thirteen years of his life listening for the slightest movement of his father, ready to run and hide if something didn’t sound right. He could tell by the way his father closed the refrigerator door or the way his foot landed on the staircase if something bad was going to happen, so if he hid quickly, he might escape a beating. He always had a few spots, which he often changed and rotated, where his father couldn’t find him.

  The sin of it, though, was that when he hid well, he knew his mother was usually the second choice. Many times, barely breathing, tucked away at the bottom of a laundry hamper or on the shelf of a closet, all his limbs dead and cramped, he listened while she cried, feeling a terrible selfish relief that it wasn’t him. As he got older, around age nine, he knew that God could never forgive him this selfishness, this sin.

  He lifted the scorched pillow off her face. I’ve never been able to protect her, he thought. Her face was destroyed. The bullet had passed through the left eye. Something happened inside his mind. It was physical. He could feel it in the center of his brain—it was as if large plate-glass windows were breaking, one after the other. When the noise stopped—he didn’t know how long it lasted—he cocked his head. They were still whispering. One was hiding by the front door, the other by the kitchen door.

  The staircase from the second floor to the living room was only five steps. If he had two good legs, he could jump down the steps all at once and take out the one by the front door. After that, it would be best-man-wins between him and the one in the kitchen. But he had only one good leg.

  He put the pillow back over his mother’s face. He walked very quietly to her door, glancing at Angel and his son. He was glad they were facedown, that he didn’t have to meet their eyes. From his mother’s door to the top of the staircase was just a few feet. He crossed them without noise.

  He figured that when he jumped his leg would buckle—there was no way around it—so he had to factor that into his shooting. He took out the .22. There were nine bullets left in the clip. He didn’t want the neighbors to hear anything. McCleary’s .45, which would be much louder, was the backup.

  He leaped down the stairs, his leg crumpling as he expected—in a flash he saw the shocked face of the undercover cop by the front door—and he did a roll, came up with the .22, and shot the cop once in the heart and once in the mouth. Joe was facing away from the kitchen as he squeezed the second shot, and the other one came running into the living room—also equipped with a silenced .22, their weapon of choice—and shot rapidly at Joe, firing off three shots, all of them high. Joe was rolling on the floor, trying to turn, to face the cop, and then the cop’s gun jammed, making things easy. Joe shot him in the throat and he dropped. He bled out very quickly. Both men were dead.

  He took out their phones—they were communicating with their superiors by text. This made things simpler. He could masquerade as them for a little while, which would give him some time, but he wanted to move quickly, very quickly.

  He lived in a very minimal way—he had only one valise’s worth of clothing. Most important, because he was going to need a new look, he had a nice dark blue suit and a yellow tie that he had used for church the first few years he had been at home—his mother had still gone to Sunday Mass then. Other than his meager amount of clothing, including one good pair of shoes, he had no personal effects, except for a briefcase, which had his passports and the banking information for his different aliases. He filled a small toilet bag with his shaving needs and added that to the suitcase. Though he had all his possessions, his instinct was to leave absolutely no trace of himself, no DNA-rich evidence. He thought of burning the house down, but he didn’t want to risk killing any neighbors. The house would have to be left intact.

  While he finished packing, a text came in on the first cop’s phone: “Anything?” He looked at the cop’s style in his earlier responses. “All quiet,” he texted back.

  He then found the keys to the unmarked car on the body of the one he had shot in the throat. He limped to the car as fast as he could and double-parked it in front of the house, its hazard lights blinking. From the basement he got two large black garbage bags and, doubling them up, put his mother inside and carried her out to the car, placing her gently on the backseat. He didn’t want strangers touching her body when they came to the house. There was nothing he could do for Angel and Moises.

  He wrote down what seemed to be the important names and numbers from the cop’s phones—their most recent calls and texts—and then left the phones with the bodies so he couldn’t be tracked. He took their weapons—they both had silenced .22s, as well as Glocks, with regular barrels, in their ankle holsters. He took their extra ammunition clips. He wouldn’t have to buy any black-market guns or ammo for a little while, but for what he had planned, he would need to eventually.

  He drove the unmarked car out of Queens and across the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. He took the Harlem River Drive north to the lower level of the George Washington and crossed into New Jersey. It was late morning now, and off of the Palisades Parkway, about five miles from the bridge, he pulled into a parking lot, which had a scenic view of the Hudson from the high cliffs of the Palisades.

  There was a dirt path you could walk along to a higher promontory, hidden by
trees, for an even more spectacular view of the river, the bridge, and Manhattan. It was a clear, cold day, and the world looked magnificent—the make-believe city and the ancient river.

  He got out of the car and went on the path, carrying his mother in the doubled-up garbage bags—she didn’t weigh much in life or death. There were no tourists about, and he added a very large rock to the sack and then sealed it tight with the duct tape. When he got to the promontory, he tossed her with all his might into the water hundreds of feet below. No one saw. He watched her make a dimple in the water, float a moment, and then sink. It was the most beautiful funeral he could think to give her.

  Then he drove to a gas station off the Palisades, which had a parking lot for commuters to catch buses into the city. He didn’t want to hold on to the car much longer. They would be tracking it soon. He called a Fort Lee taxi to come pick him up. He had the taxi take him to a motel off of Route 4, near the bridge.

  He checked into a room, shaved his head, showered, keeping his leg dry, and then put on his suit. He was now a bald businessman, carrying a suitcase and a briefcase. They were looking for a construction worker in a black baseball hat.

  The shower was a meager substitute for sleep, but he was grateful for it, and he made some instant coffee that came with the room. It was more of a placebo than anything else. He was running on adrenaline. The hunt had begun.

  With his credit card, he used the hotel phone to call information in Albany. After two attempts, he was put through to Senator Votto’s office. A receptionist answered. Joe did his best to come across as a half-cocked citizen. When he wanted, Joe could play many characters, do many voices. He was a great mimic, a great liar.

  “I voted for Senator Votto,” Joe said to the receptionist in a self-important rush. “Can I come in and talk to him? The cops in my town are giving out too many tickets. I got one for a dirty license plate. This is taxation, not law enforcement. It’s not fair. He should do something about this.”

  “Senator Votto meets with constituents every Friday, from nine to twelve. This Friday is all booked, but you can make an appointment for next week.”

  “Will he definitely be in this Friday?” Joe asked. “I could just show up and if somebody misses their appointment, he could see me, like when you go to the doctor.”

  “I wouldn’t suggest that. What’s your name? We can put you down for next week.”

  Joe cut her off. “Will he be in this Friday? I don’t want to pay this ticket.”

  “Yes, but—”

  Joe hung up the phone. He had the information he needed. Votto was alive. He then called another taxi and had it take him to Macy’s on Thirty-fourth Street, back in the city. He picked up a tan raincoat to wear over his suit. Then he walked a block to Penn Station and bought a train ticket to Albany. He only had to wait forty-five minutes. He wasn’t experiencing hunger, but he got a container of soup. In the Marines you ate whenever you could, no matter what was happening. He bought all three newspapers and got some reading glasses. He didn’t need them, but they added to his cover. He sat on a bench and read the papers. There was an article about the suicide of Senator Wilson in the late edition of the Post.

  Wilson was a married father of three, who had recently separated from his wife. Unspecified drugs were found in his hotel room. He had jumped from the roof. The article implied that a suicide note had been left—foul play was not suspected.

  Joe got on the train to Albany and stared out the window. He was going to find out for sure—he figured he had some things wrong—but he thought it had all gone down something like this:

  Votto runs for office. The name recognition gets him in and also the story of redemption—he will undo his father’s legacy. And he probably believes it himself, thinks he’ll be clean, not like his dad. Then the men who had run his father for thirty-five years begin to threaten him, want a piece of him. Albany spends twenty-five billion dollars a year on construction and road building. It’s a bigger racket than drugs, gambling, or prostitution. So they need a man in Albany, and Votto is it. He will be their new boy or one of their new boys. But, not wanting to be like his father, he resists, and so they punish him.

  They abduct his daughter, put her to work as a whore, and say they’ll kill her if he doesn’t do what they want, and if he tries to report them, he and his wife will be killed. He’s weak, doesn’t know how to fight back. They promise him they’ll let his daughter go in a year if he shows himself to be loyal. So he lets everyone believe the Facebook story that the mob cooked up—they even came up with a phony computer trail for the cops to see. His wife figures out that Votto is somehow complicit, but he tells her there’s nothing they can do. Despairing, she kills herself.

  So Votto sits on all of this for six months. It’s a living hell, but he survives. He sometimes thinks of how his daughter loathed him, and this makes it a little easier.

  Then he gets that text, it’s rubbed in his face what’s been done to him and his family, and he cracks. He comes down to New York and calls McCleary. Fuck the mob, he’s going to get his daughter back, and he’s going to kill the bastard who raped her. It was too much to bear that someone he must have known had violated her. But he can’t involve the cops, because they might figure out what really happened.

  So Joe takes the job. While Joe is sitting in his car on Forty-eighth Street, Votto is getting drunk at the W. To distract himself, he puts on the TV. NY1 comes on. He sees that Stephen Wilson has killed himself. He knows Wilson. He knows he has demons. He knows in his gut that it was Wilson who texted him. The text was Wilson’s confession, his last. Votto sits there in the W. What has he done? His anger dissipates. Wilson’s death resets everything back to the way it was. The mob will kill him and his daughter for pulling this stunt, for hiring McCleary and Joe.

  He can’t think straight. Then he decides. He’ll call them, explain what’s happened. They’ll have to understand. How much can a man take? But at least he came to his senses—he warned them—and they’ll be ready for Joe, keep him from getting his daughter.

  But by the time Votto calls, Joe is already heading for the W. The girl is leaning her head against the passenger window. While Votto is talking to them, pleading, explaining, the security guards at the brothel come to and make their calls. So now Votto’s handlers have to scramble. They tell Votto to get out of the hotel. They have dirty cops ready on an as-needed basis. They send them to the W to intercept Joe.

  They figure they’ll kill Joe and put everything back the way it was. They want to keep Votto working for them. He’s more valuable than his daughter, but she’s their control over him. But Joe kills the cop. This complicates things. They need everything clean. They’ve got to protect their asset, their politician. They can’t have people like Joe running around, people who know something, even if what they know is just a thread.

  From Votto they get McCleary. McCleary will give them Joe. They probably pick him up around 4:30 in the morning. He had been asleep when Joe first called, but while Joe is getting stitched up, they go right to McCleary’s house, ring his bell. They wake McCleary and he answers the door. Doesn’t take his gun. He’s tired. He’s old. They put pressure on him. They want Joe. He says the only link to Joe is back at his office. They take him there. He gives them the Rolodex. They shoot him in the head. They go to the bodega.

  Angel, Moises, and Joe’s mother are just pieces of garbage in the way, but they can’t be left out there. They want this thing very clean. Access to twenty-five billion Albany dollars makes this imperative. So they need to find Joe. They check all the hospitals and they have the two undercover cops waiting at his house. They should have sent more.

  Now Joe is on a train to Albany, and he has phone numbers to work with. But his first step is to find Votto, see how much of the story he’s got right. He figures he has it pretty close, but he can’t be certain, and he wants all the facts. And from Votto he’ll find out where the girl has been taken, get her to safety, and finish the job.


  Then he’ll wage a slow war, working his way up the food chain until he gets to the man who pulled the trigger on all of this. Joe wants to bleed him. First he’ll kill everyone beneath him and let him feel Joe coming for a while. He’ll also go after his sons, if he has any, pick them off one by one. After that, he’ll kidnap the bastard, take him somewhere, and cut him to pieces over a few weeks, always stitching him back up, keeping him alive. But each day, methodically, he’ll remove his fingers, toes, feet, hands, testicles, penis, tongue, nose.

  Then maybe at the end he won’t kill him. He’ll leave him that way. Drop him off at a hospital. Let him survive. A limbless, deformed creature. The man who killed McCleary, Angel, and Moises. The man who killed his mother. The man who told someone to pull a trigger.

  These were the things Joe thought about as he looked out the window of his train. At his core, Joe was a very angry boy who had never gotten proper vengeance on his father, which is what all boys need, what all men need.

  When he arrived in Albany, he checked into a nice hotel. Then he went out to a hardware store and picked up a new hammer.

  Joe had gotten just about everything right, except for one crucial detail. The mob hadn’t gone to Votto. He had gone to them.

  Votto went to the man who had owned his father and asked to be put in office. This man, the violent patriarch of one of the biggest crime families, said he would do it, that he would have Votto elected, but that Votto’s daughter would have to pay for it. He didn’t think Votto would accept these terms—he offered them as a way to say fuck you to the dead grandfather, whom he always hated for being pompous and prideful, for half-believing that he was an actual public servant—but Votto Jr., unbelievably hungry for power, unbelievably hungry to surpass his father, agreed to give them his daughter. Votto’s wife figured it out and killed herself.

  After that, everything more or less had played out as Joe figured. Votto cracked when that text, which was sent from Wilson, found its way to him. He couldn’t take it anymore. Had to get his daughter. Then when he saw the news of Wilson’s death, he got scared and realized he wanted to take it all back. He had acted impulsively by contacting McCleary. He had made a mistake—they could keep his daughter. What could be left of her anyway?