“Would that kind of document be worth four lives?”
“To you, maybe.”
He shook his head like I amazed and saddened him. He pulled his gun from my ribs and regripped it so that he could hold the barrel and smash the butt on my head. “You don’t know when to quit,” he said.
I held my arm to protect myself from a blow, hit the brakes, and slid onto the shoulder of the road, jamming the transmission into Park.
He watched me with a weird, patient sadness.
Then he raised the gun.
I dived across the seat for him, reaching for his throat, his face, his eyes. He brought the gun butt down on me. I threw my left hand up to deflect the gun but it went through it like I was a ghost. Before the pain, I felt the metal sink into my skull. Then I felt the pain. My vision narrowed and went black, and a small bright red thing the size of a maggot floated across the dark field, and I thought in that final crazy moment that it looked like it might work as fishing bait. Then the red maggot disappeared, and all was dark and cold and very deep.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I OPENED MY EYES. I was riding in a car. I wondered how I’d gotten there, buckled tight into the passenger seat. The cold October sunlight cut through the windshield. Someone or something had cracked my head. Pain shot down my neck into my shoulders, and nausea flooded my belly and chest. I closed my eyes and the world was a blue veined darkness.
I opened my eyes and a street sign said COLUMBIA AVENUE. It meant nothing, said nothing about where I was going or why. Overhead, dozens of telephone wires extended up and down the street. More wires crossed the street and segmented the long wires into squares and rectangles as if someone had stretched the first yarns on a loom to make a blanket that would shelter me from the sun. The asphalt on the street was old and cracked, repaired with snakes of black tar. A woman with an Afro stood by a bus-stop bench, wearing tight shorts and a sleeveless halter top that showed her belly and most of her breasts. She shivered and glared as the car rolled past.
“Where—?” I said.
Like magic, a ten-legged water tower rose on the roadside. Block letters on the water tank said THINK HAMMOND.
Hammond, Indiana.
People told jokes about Hammond, Indiana.
Before I could remember them, the world gave itself back to the blue veined darkness.
I opened my eyes. The car had stopped. A man was pulling me from the front seat. I helped as much as I could. Why not? He seemed friendly enough. I fumbled with the seatbelt but it was already unbuckled. I fumbled with it anyway. The man slapped my hands away. I slapped his hands. He reached under my arm and lifted me. He yelled at me and slapped my face. I lunged at him and connected with his chin. He stumbled backward.
I got myself out of the car and onto my feet as he came back for me. My legs didn’t like standing. Maybe with one-sixth of earth’s gravity they would like it. I tumbled onto the man. I had thirty or forty pounds on him but he held me up and we danced some steps on the pavement. I looked at him eye to eye. His hair was long and wild. His eyes were fierce.
“Not my type,” I mumbled, and tried to push him away.
He didn’t resist. He let me fall.
The cold pavement cleared my head. I kneeled on it and stared at him. A huge sky with a horrible sun framed his raggedy face.
“Stone,” I said, “I’m going to kill you.”
He grinned.
I dragged myself to my feet, swayed, and steadied myself. He didn’t take any chances. He drew his pistol and pointed it at my chest.
He directed me toward a brick building with a giant open garage door. Scraps of sheet metal and a trash bin full of bent pieces of rebar stood on the sidewalk in front. The gaping space inside the building was dark. Sparks wheeled into the air from whining, ripping, pounding machines.
I stumbled inside in front of Stone’s gun. A dozen men worked the machines. They wore T-shirts, work boots, and blue jeans stained black with oil. Their faces were creased and lined, sweaty from the heat of their tools. They fed sheets of metal into the teeth of saws, carted slag in wheelbarrows, and opened the door to a fading green monster of a processing furnace that rose almost two stories to the ceiling. We were thirty or forty yards away from the furnace and the heat swelled over us.
“What is this place?” I managed to say.
Stone guided me into a dark hall at the back where the air felt cold and smelled like grease and damp soil. “ ‘Metalworks,’ ” he said.
“What are we doing here?”
He didn’t answer. He led me to an office, used a key to let us in, and flipped on the light. He shoved me and followed me in.
“Sit down,” he said.
There were a couple of worn office chairs next to a metal desk with a fake wood-grain top. File cabinets stood next to the desk and a water cooler.
I went to the water cooler, helped myself to a cup, and did as I was told.
“What are we doing?” I asked again.
He busied himself with a coffeepot that stood on a battered credenza, then turned to me. “This is where you disappear.”
THIRTY-NINE
I THOUGHT ABOUT THE furnace. I thought about disappearing. I said, “It looks like it would hurt.”
“Not for long,” Stone said. “Give me your wallet and keys.”
I gave them to him. “You going to rob me before you kill me?”
He shook his head. “The wallet gets burned separately. So do your shoes and belt, but you can keep them for now.”
“You’re learning. You weren’t so careful with Judy Terrano and the others.”
He adjusted the coffeepot under the drip filter, then sat on his desk facing me. “I didn’t kill Judy.”
“No? You started with the priest?”
“I didn’t kill him, either. Or Terrence Messier. Or Louise Johnson.”
My head hurt every time I moved it, but I shook it at him. “I suppose you didn’t light the fire that killed the four kids at the Bad Kitty, either.”
He gave me a half smile. “That one’s more complicated.”
“You want to know what I think?”
“Not really.”
“I think you lit the fire and Judy Terrano testified against you and sent you to jail, and when you got out you waited eleven years for an excuse to kill her. Everything goes back to the Bad Kitty, but now the building’s gone and Stone Tower is rising on the land where it stood, and that’s your excuse. I saw how much your family has invested in that building. What? Twenty or twenty-five million so far? More? Judy Terrano could show what really happened at the Bad Kitty and then you would lose it all. That’s enough to kill for.”
“A nice story,” he said. “How do you explain the others?”
“What’s to explain? The priest was in the wrong place at the wrong time—if he hadn’t been searching Judy Terrano’s room, he’d still be alive.”
“Could be,” he said.
“Louise Johnson knew Judy Terrano when they hung out with you at the Bad Kitty. She still knew her. She probably knew her secrets and how much they were worth. If she called you after I visited her yesterday, you would have worried about what she knew and what she might want from you.”
“That wouldn’t stand up in court, but it sounds reasonable.”
“And Terrence went with me to Stone Tower yesterday. We ran into one of your cousins. Terrence kept him busy when I left to talk with you at your house. But you weren’t at your house. Where did you go? To the construction site to deal with Terrence?”
He shrugged.
I thought again about Stone’s cousin surprising me as I looked through the file of property deeds and titles. I thought about Terrence picking up the papers as Lucinda and I left and about him sitting down and reading them like they were a good book. Maybe the deeds and titles meant nothing, I thought. Maybe. “Who owns the property where you’re building Stone Tower?” I asked.
He looked surprised, then resigned. “It doesn’t matter now,” h
e said. “Everyone thinks Judy Terrano was a saint, but she was a hypocritical cunt. She blackmailed my dad. Made him sign over the deed. You think that sounds like virtue?”
He’d lost me, or almost. She blackmailed him. Made him sign over the deed. Judy Terrano owned the land?
If so, that meant what? She saw David Stone burn down the Bad Kitty and guessed or knew that his father was involved in the arson? Then she took the land in exchange for what? Her silence in court?
I answered, “I don’t know. I think it could be justice.”
He threw up his hands. “Then you’re as bad as she was.” He stepped past me toward the coffeepot.
I said, “You needed her copy of the title to the land. That’s what you were hunting for when you killed her, and that’s what you were hunting for when you killed the priest. Who has it now?”
I should have seen his gun butt coming. If he hadn’t already hit my head with it once, I might have seen it. I was sitting on a desk chair, and then I was tossing through the air. I didn’t hurt. I didn’t have time to. I was flying and I wondered when and where I would land. I never knew. I was unconscious by the time I hit the floor.
FORTY
I WOKE UP ALONE on a gray carpet. I was getting used to waking up alone on the floor. I looked at my watch. The face was cracked, the hands frozen at 2:35. I listened. The metalworks was quiet. Instead of sending out for a bag of campfire marshmallows and holding a party, Stone seemed to have decided to wait until the workers went home before making me disappear.
I pushed myself onto my hands and knees. Nausea sank into my belly and I lowered myself back to the carpet. I breathed deep and exhaled, breathed deep again. Breathing exercises—Corrine would be proud of me.
I pushed myself to my hands and knees again. Nausea circled through me and centered in my belly. It was no use fighting. I crawled to a garbage can and emptied my guts. Then I collapsed to the floor, panting.
I listened. A voice was speaking somewhere—a calm voice, no rush, no worry. The voice went quiet and I heard footsteps.
I struggled to get up. If I could find something to swing at Stone when he came back, I might have a chance in a hundred of getting out of the metalworks alive. If I could get to the wall next to the door and surprise him, I might have a chance in ten.
Steps approached outside the door.
Stone’s voice spoke. “Hey, Jerry—”
The voices were friendly but the friendliness was lost on me. All I knew was David Stone and a guy named Jerry were coming for me. It wasn’t worth struggling. I closed my eyes and sank onto my stomach.
“How’d it go?” the guy named Jerry asked.
A key turned in the lock but Stone didn’t come in. He laughed at Jerry’s question. He said, “She says before she’ll do it, I’ve got to go to a doctor and get a checkup. She says she’s heard something about me.”
Jerry laughed, too. “So you go to the doctor?”
“What do you think?” Stone was coming to kill me but first Jerry wanted to chat with him about his love life.
“You went to the doctor,” Jerry said.
It went on like that. I opened my eyes and listened. Jerry didn’t seem to be part of the plan to kill me. I wondered if he would help me if I yelled. I wondered if Stone would push the two of us into the furnace together.
I pulled myself up the side of the desk until I was standing. I worked myself toward the desk chair. The pot of coffee that Stone had made was still steaming on the cabinet next to the desk. I got the pot and set it on the desk, then sat in the chair behind it. I ran my fingers through my hair and tried to put a casual look on my face.
Stone was saying, “I wanted to kick him in the balls when he stuck his finger in me.”
Jerry laughed. “You didn’t do it, did you?”
“Who do you think I am? Of course I didn’t. I think doctors are saints. I said I wanted to. I didn’t say I did it.”
“So you shake his hand afterward?”
“Yeah, I shook his hand.”
Jerry gave Stone a moment, then said, “Fag.”
Flesh cracked against flesh and a body struck the thin office wall, shaking it.
“Hey! I was fucking kidding,” Jerry yelled.
“Go home,” said Stone. “And put ice on that.”
Footsteps moved away from the office.
The knob turned and Stone walked in, inspecting his knuckles. He glanced at the floor where I’d been lying, then saw me at the desk. He grinned. “Hey, look who’s up.”
“Only a little wobbly.”
He laughed at that. He felt good about himself. He had me where he wanted me. He drew his pistol again, swung it around loosely, and leaned in over me. “Yeah,” he said almost gently. “You’re wobbly. Very wobbly.”
He was right. He could get rid of me in any of a dozen ways and no one would ever know what had become of me. One day a tenant in a million-dollar condominium at Stone Tower would admire the crimson tint of the glazing on a steel countertop that had my blood in it. That would be the closest anyone would ever come to bringing flowers to my grave.
So I reached for the coffeepot on the desk, and I swung it at his face. There was no reason that he shouldn’t duck. But he didn’t. He leaned over me and laughed at me. The glass pot smashed against his cheek and the scalding coffee washed over him.
He screamed, “Fuck!” and lurched away.
The broken glass opened a gash on the side of his face. The coffee steamed on his skin and mixed with his blood. He tried to cover his face with his arms. He windmilled and swung his hands. A terrible burn was in him and he couldn’t get at it. But his gun stayed in his hand and it pointed at me, at the floor, and at the ceiling. I knew I should take it away from him but I wanted out—out of the office, out of the metalworks, out of Stone’s life.
I moved to the door, opened it, and stumbled into the metalworks without looking back. I never wanted to see Stone again.
No one else was in the building. The machines were turned off, but gauges and a warning light on the processing furnace said that it stayed hot and ready whether or not anyone was there to use it. The giant garage door was down. But a standard door stood next to it. I made my way to it.
A man stood outside with a woman. They were at the curb, next to a brown BMW. The driver’s door was open. The woman must have jumped out when she’d seen the man coming out of the metalworks. The man had a cut lip. He might have had a broken nose. I figured he was Jerry. The woman was David Stone’s daughter Cassie. She was holding a white towel to Jerry’s face but it wasn’t doing a lot of good. He was bleeding on himself and on her, too. She was talking quietly to him.
They looked at me as I came from the building like a wounded soldier. I went to them. Cassie’s eyes were misting. Stone had loosened the teeth of his daughter’s boyfriend.
Cassie recognized me and gave me a nervous smile.
“Your dad’s a monster,” I said.
She said nothing to that, but she reached toward my forehead and lifted the hair from it. She looked me in the eyes like she wanted to kiss my bruises and make them better.
“Thank you,” I said, and I moved her away from the car. I climbed in. She and Jerry looked confused. The keys were in the ignition. I started the car and threw it into drive, ripping away from the curb before they could stop me.
At the end of the block I made a U-turn and accelerated back toward the metalworks. Cassie Stone and Jerry stood on the curb and watched me come without stepping into the street to block me. But as I passed the building, David Stone stumbled out of the door and over the curb. If I’d turned the wheel an inch, I could have gotten him.
FORTY-ONE
THE CLOUDS OVER COLUMBIA Avenue had grown thick as the sun dipped west. The dashboard said the time was 4:48. Darkness would come early. The lighted billboards, the business neon, and the streetlights would glint against the black sky.
An auto-body shop sign swung on its chains, blown by a wind from the north. I wh
ipped around a slow-moving truck, passed a scrap yard called Otto’s, a tool and die shop, and Thompson’s Self-Storage, then accelerated over some railroad tracks and blew through a stoplight turning red. Chicago wasn’t even a ghost in the distance.
I glanced at my face in the rearview mirror. A fiend stared back. Eyes that had seen fire. A face that had felt blunt metal. Lips that had kissed an oily carpet like it was a breast. I tilted the mirror away.
The next stoplight turned red. I stopped behind two cars and closed my eyes, slapped my cheeks, opened them again. No rest. Not yet.
I closed my eyes again.
A blast ripped me awake.
In the rearview mirror, the back window looked like crushed ice.
Another blast.
The back window collapsed into the back seat. David Stone’s silver Mercedes stood a car length back. A hand stuck out of the driver’s side window. It was holding a pistol. The pistol was pointing at me.
I hit the horn, cut the steering wheel, and stomped on the accelerator. The BMW spun its tires and shot into the intersection. A pickup truck swerved and missed me. An SUV behind it fishtailed. I cut hard to the side. The SUV tapped the back panel of my car, slid past, and I whipped across the rest of the intersection.
Stone’s Mercedes pulled into the oncoming lane and accelerated. The car closed on me. I held the accelerator to the floor. His gun came out of his window and blasted.
I threw the BMW to the left at the next corner as a line of cars came into the intersection. Stone tried to follow, couldn’t. At the next corner I turned left as he raced down the street, then turned left a third time before he came into view. I completed the square and turned back onto Columbia Avenue. If I was lucky, Stone would have turned right where I made my third left and would be cruising slowly past driveways and alleys, looking for a brown BMW with a missing back window and a cowering driver. I watched the mirror and drove. No Mercedes. No pistol sticking out of a car window. Just a bunch of tired men and women driving home.
The Bad Kitty Lounge Page 19
