by Paul Flower
“Hold on there, bud. Whoa.”
“Whoa? You f-ing whoa.” Now there was a vibe in Elvis’ voice; a crazy, lazy, creepy vibe. “You want me to just lie here like some whore and take whatever you shovel at me and say, ‘Oh that’s cool’?” It was him, Elvis, talking to the ceiling of his brother’s house. But the tone, the voice, seemed to not be Elvis at all. “You’re all like, ‘She’s alive,’ like it’s some big birthday surprise you two worked out. You’re telling me you faked all this and that—ha ha and tweedly dee—I’m s’posed to just be the idiot that accepts it, that it?” The room hummed; the air had gone cold. Donnel shivered. A thought dangled. Elvis, this Elvis, could kill a man. No. That was stupid. But yeah. Maybe. Yeah he could.
Elvis abruptly rolled to face Donnel. When he looked up, the eyes had gone empty, like the blue-gray had drained away. “Here’s the deal, Donnel. You’re trying to steal my wife. After all these years, you figure, ‘Oh that Elvis, he got his nose on the grindstone and his brain mushed off and he don’t see nothin.’ So you and her decide to get it going, get it on. And know what? That’s cool. ‘Cuz I been asleep at the wheelhouse. You snooze? Well you, you get no booby prize, am I right? I mean, hey, you’re a man and a man’s gotta get it when he can, right? But you shouldn’t lie now, my brother. No. That’s way bad, lying is. You saying all this and that about her and… and… him. But all the time it’s been you? That’s shameful.”
“Dude. Wait. No. Not like goin’ on, not like that. We got something working, see, to help you, see…”
Elvis could see the fox now, eyes blazing. Stop, a voice in his head said, stop that talk right now. Elvis ignored it and sat up. “You fat ugly scumshit. You… Least you can do is come clean.”
Elvis was on his feet, had two fists worth of Donnel’s t-shirt, and was propelling him back, back, back, until he slammed him against the wall. The big man’s eyes went wide as the wind blew out of him—oomp. Elvis heard the fox grrring. This was wrong, very wrong, dangerous and wrong. His mother wagged a finger in his face. Elvis shook his head.
“All my life, Donnel, all my shitty life, I got people walking on me, busting my ass, acting like I’m the dumbest piece of shit that ever dribbled down the pike. Like I don’t know what they’re up to. Like I never noticed anything.” His hook nose was within a hair’s width of Donnel’s nose. Their eyes were locked, Donnel’s brown and worried, Elvis’ now vibrantly blue-gray and cold as death. “I’m s’pose to keep it all under control, you know? I’m s’pose to take your crap and everyone else’s and just ease along with the flow, man. But…” Elvis frowned. His face suddenly went slack. He looked at his fists, confused—how did they get here? Elvis let go of Donnel, looked in his friend’s eyes, searching, the blue-gray swimming.
“Maybe what you’re telling me is the truth. And maybe, yeah, sure, maybe a lot of it is. But maybe. Maybe.”
He walked to the door, turned and looked at Donnel; a look of sadness and something else, something scary. Then, before Donnel could stop him, Elvis was out the door and gone.
Chapter Sixteen
From the front seat of the squad car, Harvey Monahan angled around to shoot a look at Jesse Tieter and allowed himself a quiet smile. “You don’t look so good, doc. Look like you had the shinola beat out of you or somethin’.”
The neurosurgeon turned to gaze out the window, his face a stone. One cool character.
Harvey gave his driver a look of smug satisfaction, but got no response. Behind the wheel, Trooper Clayton Diebold was right out of the State Trooper training manual, buckling up, checking his mirrors, doing a full turnaround to check the prisoner then the road. Perfect. A young cop, mouth shut, ready to haul ass back to the post, no small talk.
Harvey looked out at the drab day and the smile turned to a ghoulish grin. This couldn’t be better. For the first time in a long, long time, life felt crisp around the edges. The world was in balance. Granted, there was no atoning for past sins. The shrink had said what happened would always be with him. Heck, if he closed his eyes right now—he wouldn’t—Trooper Diebold’s peach-blossom skin would become the blushed cheeks of Sandy Tandy, age seventeen. If Harvey allowed it—he couldn’t—the passing scenery would become a stretch of Lake Michigan glittering in the sun of Chicago, late summer. If he let his eyes linger on the passing scenery—he shouldn’t—a flash of something in the roadside weeds would become the girl splashing along, her head buried in the chop from the offshore breeze, that one arm a flash of warning against the blue green water.
If Harvey Monahan let his guard down—never—Diebold’s hands would become his, gripping the wheel, turning hard, hard, hard, one hand leaving the wheel to cut the throttle, to reduce the excessive speed as his brain tried to work its clumsy fingers around the thump, the awful thump. If Harvey Monahan steeled himself—impossible—he could imagine Diebold’s razor sharp and attentive brain becoming his, muddy and mushy from working too late and the beer and the sun and shocked! that he’d been unable to react, or to explain why he’d steered the damn boat so close to shore.
She hadn’t died, thank God. But he’d been finished in his home city before the story had hit the Trib or The Sun Times. The psychologist, Dr. Bernie Cook, had helped him hold it together through the civil trial, the loss of his badge—the hardest part—and the civil settlement. Getting started again, well, that had been rocky but it helped that he was single, smart, and well-connected. In Chicago, you don’t work fifteen years as a street cop and detective and not have some useful information tucked away on the powerjockeys and brokers downtown. His City Hall connections had earned him the deal that sponged his record of any criminal wrongdoing. An administrator in the Police Department with a history of fidelity gymnastics had gotten him the interview with the Michigan State Police. The rest had been up to Harvey Monahan and his solid record as a cop.
Half the reason the Michigan State Police had hired Harvey Monahan at the backwater post on the lakeshore was that he was unknown; he could poke around places more-familiar faces couldn’t. The low profile suited him. So did being in a hick town on this side of the big lake. In his new-found Michigan haven, Harvey had few friends other than Jake Vanderzee, a local charter boat captain and an equally happily embittered recluse, and that was fine. Harvey had bought a turn-of-the-(20th)century bungalow near Lake Michigan. He had a new boat (although it had taken a year of therapy to muscle himself back on deck), a yellow Labrador named Rabbit and a reasonable Internet/cable TV package. The Cubs and Wrigley Field were just a two-hour Sunday drive away. Beer was five minutes to the Quick Stop. Harvey Monahan had come half way back to being a happy man.
Now he was nearing euphoria. Harvey had been working on an unrelated case, trying to nail the local whacked-out white supremacist’s cell on a weapons charge, when he’d gotten the voicemail from Lavern Icabone, the cute-faced chubby chick that took his check for the water bill at city hall, about her husband’s father, who’d been missing since the 1960s. A couple of days later, Lavern Icabone’s husband’s buddy had showed up at the post, asking to talk to a detective about the same forty-year-old case. The local cops had budget-cut their detective staff, so it had been relatively easy for Harvey to convince the post commander, Nabors Jefferies, that crew-cutted-by-the-book-bastard, that he could handle both the white supremacists and the missing person’s deal.
He was glad he had. Over the last week or so, the dead-file case had uncoupled as easily as a bra off a hooker’s back; the answers, like a lot of cop work, coming by pure-as-snow dumb luck. Actually, you could work a lifetime in this business and never have it come so easy. When the white power creep, Plannenberg, had come to undercover Harvey, asking him to help follow this Elvis Icabone, Harvey’d wanted to raise his eyes to heaven and thank Sister Mary or whoever upstairs could still see through the cigar smoke of his life and bless him with such luck. Two cases, wound up together in a neat little bow—the guys back in the precinct would n
ever have believed this.
Truth be told, Harvey was suspicious. His inner-cop divining rod was twinging, jerking toward some bad water he thought had to be here. Nothing had ever been this simple. He tried to reassure himself that nothing was wrong; that because he was in a small town now the puzzle pieces were just easy to find. No one had ever looked very hard; that was obvious. Heck, the puzzle pieces were not just close together, they were as big as his ex-wife’s ass.
He had no body or weapon, which was a problem. Maybe. But at the very least, Harvey Monahan figured he had the outlines of a couple of solid circumstantial cases.
The brain surgeon, he thought, had offed the old man—when the surgeon was a kid, a twisted, half-stupid kid. Later, sometime, he’d probably killed the mother. Guilt and worry had driven him home to frame-up the brother. Harvey chuckled, picturing the looney old Iowa couple who’d raised the boy-killer. Clueless, they were, but the three hours he’d spent with them in Davenport had given him a good picture of this brain doctor part-son of theirs. How the mother fit into this or how she’d died Harvey Monahan wasn’t sure. Everybody he’d asked was damn short on details about her. No funeral? No grieving? He hadn’t had time to get up to Traverse City to badger the folks at the home where she’d supposedly died. He probably should track down the coroner up north and have the body exhumed. He hated the thought of what he’d find. Lord help us, Harvey Monahan thought, gazing at the muddy fields and woods alongside the road. What a sick world.
The young State Trooper accelerated the car along the shoulder, hit the turn signal and made one last check over his left shoulder for oncoming traffic, then edged the car onto the roadway. The sound of the rear door opening and the sudden change in air pressure flashed Monahan back to his days in the Army, to the sucking of a Huey’s rotors against his eardrums.
Harvey Monahan whirled. Jesse Tieter had popped the door, was pushing it, arms locked, shaggy hair ripping in the wind as he groped for the release button on his shoulder harness. Harvey’s eyes flicked to the green-horn Trooper, his baby-soft face bloodless, mouth unhinged, eyes gawking at the rear-view mirror. He hadn’t secured the door? Before Harvey could stop him, the fool braked the car. No. No. Not that. He was pulling over, a natural reaction, but the wrong one. And his revolver, the Trooper had managed to pull his revolver? There it was ugly, pointed awkwardly, crazily toward the ceiling as the car jiggled to a stop.
****
The jolt of his shoulder striking the road was lightning that cracked through him, yellow-white and blinding. Then nothing happened and everything did. Jesse was tumbling, tumbling, face skidding through gravel. There was mud, exhaust, heat, then the cool of the wet grass and the darkness inviting him, his mother’s face, and those eyes, blue and gray and pleading, no, please, no, buck up, come on, be a man, stay with it, please. Finally, he was on his feet, limping and stumbling, running in the opposite direction, first toward the woods then angling back up the road, remembering the Cordoba, his phone, freedom.
A car door opened. A voice was shouting. “Hold up, doc. Stop now. Stop, doc. Stop.”
“Detective, I have this.”
“No. No you don’t. Put. The gun. Down.”
Jesse waved wildly at a fly with a hand that seemed to float away from him. He stumbled and fell again. His shoulder screamed. Jesse rolled to his back, sat up, and the fly was on him, darting at his face, in his ear. He closed his eyes and everything wavered, nausea rising in his throat.
“Remain on the ground, sir. Stay in the car, detective.”
Bright, stainless needles of pain probed across his chest from his shoulder, sending sharp minions marching to his brain. Through the pain, Jesse tried to stand, wavering between now and then, here and there. He could hear the car’s door slam, the rush of feet in gravel. He could see the road’s shoulder, slewing away from him and, down the gun’s barrel, the fat black kid with the rock; Donnel, his dumb brother’s buddy, the tears running down those fat, expressive cheeks.
“GET OUT OF THE WAY. DON’T LET HIM TOUCH YOU.”
It was a huge rock, for a kid, but not for a Donnel-sized kid. Donnel swung the rock up, up through the blinding light of the sun, screaming “NOOOOOOOO.” The fox let go of Elvis’ hand. But then the fox clamped again. Elvis screamed. Donnel fell back on his butt.
Jesse got to his feet and floundered down the road. His brain was spinning. His shoulder throbbed. Someone was yelling. He could see the fat, comical boy-Donnel through the dust, bawling on his butt, the fox shaking Elvis’ hand and snarling. Jesse could hear Mom’s voice, teasing and taunting him.
“What do you think you’re doing with the gun?” she’d said, laughing. “What do you think you’re doing with that?”
Mom knew he couldn’t do it; he couldn’t kill anybody else. She was laughing and the footsteps were coming, there was this commotion behind him and now Donnel was sobbing harder because the fox wouldn’t let go and Jesse was running away. Then Jesse was going back, feeling his fingers on the double triggers as he tried to draw a bead; Elvis’ image lined up with the sight for an instant, the next it was gone, obliterated by dust and sun and fox.
He could see the Cordoba. His chest ached, sweat stung his eyes and the boy-Elvis was a blur. Come on, Jesse thought, stay with it. Stay with it, baby. Then, just when he was ready to give up, it came: a breath of a breeze for his lungs and head. Elvis’ back was there, in line with the sight, clear. The handle of the car was cold against his hand. Jesse held his breath, tightened his fingers and closed his eyes.
“PLEASE. NO.”
Show her. Show her what kind of man you are.
“No. Please no.” The voice echoed in his head and rolled into his chest, colliding with the ache and making it impossible to breathe. Jesse saw the eyes, the blue-gray eyes, of his father and his brother. Please no, the eyes said.
No! Someone shouted?
“NOO!”
BWAAM.
Chapter Seventeen
Whirrrrr.
The phone again.
Elvis was paralyzed with indecision. He was in the kitchen, on his way out of Jesse Tieter, M.D.’s house, away from Donnel. He had to get going. He absolutely had to. But. Yes. The phone. Could be Mom. Mom? Maybe. Maybe he had to pick her up. Bus station. Yes. He took three quick, clumsy steps and grabbed the cordless, then turned and rushed toward the door.
“Hello?” Elvis said as he turned the knob.
“It’s me.”
Elvis opened the door. From the phone, there was noise, like a crowd, and music. The caller was in a restaurant or a bar or someplace. “Hello?” He said it loudly.
“I said, ‘It’s me.’” The voice was familiar.
“Who’s me?” Elvis took a step.
“You know, the guy that took care of your friend. At the plant.”
The world tipped a little. Elvis’ knees turned to Jello. Jerry. Plannenberg.
“You there?” the voice said. Yes, it was. Had to be.
Jerry. Jesse. The faceless man. Oh.
“You best be there,” Jerry said. ‘Cuz, tell the truth, dude, you got me in some kind of mess here.”
The truth, a glimmering, quartz-encrusted shaft of it, sliced through his head. With a silent gasp, Elvis eased to one knee, his hand still on the doorknob. “What, what do you mean…” He took a breath, steadied his voice, “What do you mean m… mess?”
“Look man,” Jerry said. “I don’t know what the deal is, but someone tipped off the cops or something. They got me charged for this thing. Me.”
“Really?” Elvis slowly stood. “Really?”
“Yeah, really. Me.”
“H… how?” Elvis couldn’t pull it all together. Jerry. The ponytail and the Dr Pepper, and the cops and don’t leave town, and Donnel and Lavern and, and, and Monahan The Cop. Start at the very beginning, the cop had said. Which brought him to his mom. But no
w, Jerry was—the police had him? Elvis’ overtaxed brain judged that Jerry being involved with the Mr. Faceless thing was good, that maybe his luck was turning, but he couldn’t pull the puzzle pieces together; they were too far apart. “How?” he repeated.
“How what?”
“How?” How? That was the best he could do? The only word that would dribble out of his mouth? Elvis stopped. Be Jesse Tieter. Come on. Be a man. Buck up. He gulped a lungful of air and let it out. “How did they get… apprehend you?”
Jerry groaned. “I don’t know, man. Well. Yeah. Yeah I do. I mean I don’t know how it happened, but I got double-crossed. There was this cop, see, that was double-crossing me, only I didn’t know it; same guy I got to follow the dude turned out to be a cop. Can you believe this shit?”
Elvis couldn’t believe it. His mouth felt frozen.
“Now, don’t you start pulling the pussy quiet stuff on me.” Jerry’s voice was low and angry, speech slurred like he’d had a couple drinks, even though it was too early for drinks. But Elvis could feel panic too—Jerry Plannenberg was scared. “See, you’re in this, man. This is you. All you. They questioned me half the night. I got a jerk-off lawyer; he made ‘em let me go for now. But I wasn’t expecting to get into it like this. It was all gonna be nice and easy. Now it’s… you’re in this, man. You are most definitely in this.”
This thing was coming at Elvis from all directions. There were too many angles. Mom. He had to get her. Lavern. He wanted to find her. But. Maybe not. And Jerry. Jerry was. Jerry had. He’d done this? The police had him. But not. Not now. From inside the house, there was the dull clunking of heavy footsteps coming down the stairs from the second floor. Donnel. Not now. Too much. So much to think about. Hurry. Hurry up.
