by Bob Sanchez
“Look at this,” Frosty said. He had a strongbox opened up on the bed; passports, cash, and a house deed were spread on the blanket. “I got it from the closet. There must be half a grand in here.”
From the front of the house came a rustle and a bump, and Ace caught his breath. “I think I hear something. Grab the cash and put everything else back where you found it.” Frosty did as he was told, feeling virtuous as he returned a couple of twenties.
A door opened and closed. Ace heard two guys as he motioned for Frosty to be quick.
“Where is it?” One guy’s voice rumbled like faraway thunder. He sounded like he was already sick of asking.
“Where is what? Unnnh!”
There was a loud thump that sounded like a body slamming against a wall. Ace’s guts clenched, and he suddenly thought those Depends weren’t such a bad idea.
“Last I was here, it was on the mantel.”
“I don’t know what—”
There was a sharp gasp, like all of the air had been squeezed out of some poor loser’s lungs. Thump, thump, thump. Ace and Frosty hadn’t bargained for this, and they backpedaled quietly down the hall. Wait, they couldn’t take those squeaky cellar steps. Ace motioned that they should hide in the bathroom. Frosty whimpered, and Ace slapped his arm.
“You don’t tell me, you’re dead.” That awful voice again, carrying from down the hallway. Ace’s throat went dry.
“I sent it to my son.”
“Where is he?”
Mack Durgin. Ace had figured by now Mack would be chasing widows in Florida. Instead he lived in AZ, wherever that was.
“Let’s get out of here,” Ace whispered.
“Guy’ll get killed. We can’t just leave him.” Frosty’s eyes welled up. Caring was one of his better qualities. Ace nervously edged down the hall toward the living room and saw that same guy kicking a man on the floor, though Ace could only see the victim’s legs. This was wicked bogus, interfering with a perfectly honest housebreaking and using violence besides. The guy was much too big for Ace, though. Cowardice had served him well this far in life; why not stick with what he knew?
He closed his eyes, hoping to wish the mess away. When he opened them, he realized how big the man was—very—and saw that one of his hands was bloody and the other gripped an old lady’s neck.
Now Ace had lots of principles, all negotiable. The one that popped into his mind at this point was less flexible than most: If you absolutely, positively must hit some dude who’s bigger than you, make sure his back is turned.
Ace tiptoed into the living room and grabbed a ceramic lamp.
Chapter 4
Same place, seconds earlier
Diet Cola was built like an ex pro linebacker who’d forgotten how to train but remembered how to eat. He kicked Carrick Durgin in the ribs, and the breath left Durgin’s chest like a popped balloon. “You got rid of the urn, you stupid whackjob?” Durgin’s eyes were rimmed with red. He moaned a soft prayer, and Diet sat on his face to smother him and put him down for good. A couple of months ago he did that to some fish in the can, and the sucker flat-lined in the E.R.
So the geezers FedExed the urn to their little boy in Arizona, did they? Well, Diet Cola had to go there and get the ticket. Meantime, though, he had to start repaying the entire Durgin family.
As Carrick struggled to breathe, Diet Cola wondered where the geezer’s wife was; maybe he’d finally get his twofer. There was a squeak in the floorboard, but Diet Cola knew damn well he was alone. He had made sure of that. He laughed as he bounced his ass a couple of times on the old man’s face. Now that was a squeaky floor!
He heard a cough, turned, saw—Whack! Diet went down, rolling off Carrick and onto the floor, grasping his face in a rage of purple pain. A noise like a cherry bomb exploded next to his ear and set off a half-dozen car alarms ricocheting across the inside of his skull. Between his fingers he saw a woman in a Sunday church dress, white hair and a string of pearls, face full of wrinkles, feet spread apart and her spindly right arm cocked back. There was the meanest-looking face that had ever worn lipstick, and the biddy had a bullwhip!
“You leave my husband alone, you wicked creature!”
That was a new one on Diet Cola, and he didn’t know how to react. If she’d called him a motherfucker, he would know to fly into a rage the way he’d always done in jail. Those twelve letters were like a warm, comfortable coat. But wicked creature?
“I’m killing you next, lady.” He stood up just as the leather was on its backswing.
Old Brodie Durgin apparently wasn’t in a talkative mood, but she didn’t look like she had enough muscles in her arm to do any real damage. The first shot was her best one for sure, so he reached out to ward off the second blow. The end of the whip exploded in the palm of his right hand. Pain tore like a lightning bolt up his arm. Unfortunately, that was the hand he used to forge signatures and jerk off with. Now he had a handful of his own blood, and he was pissed. He charged at the old witch before she could get her full weight behind another snap. He grabbed her throat with his good hand, and as he squeezed, the fear of God bulged out of her eyes. The lipstick, the nice flowery dress, the sweet perfume—here was a woman all dressed up for her own wake. She shook so hard he thought he heard her bones rattle, or maybe it was her dentures. “What do you think? Have you lived long enough—bitch?”
She spit in his face, as though he couldn’t get any madder. He smiled, though, and wiped blood from his palm to her face. “Lick it,” he said. When she bit his hand instead, he smeared blood down the front of her dress, got himself a handful of an ancient knocker, and squeezed it hard.
Sudden pain shot through the back of his skull. First a bullwhip, now a hammer, maybe a brick. Jesus. Not fair! Holy shit, that hurts! Jesus Christ, Ma, make it stop! He let go of Brodie and fell to his knees. The world spun in front of his eyes just like when he’d knock off a fifth of Jim Beam. He wanted to turn and see who—or what—had hit him, but what if they did it again? His bladder let go in a warm, wet rush. He staggered forward, pushed on the door, and smacked into the door jamb because he forgot to turn sideways. Then he got the hell out of there.
He squeezed into his GTO—technically, it wasn’t his, but it’s what he was driving at the moment—and gunned it out of the neighborhood and into an empty school parking lot. Half blind with pain, it was a miracle he could even drive. There, he stripped to his waist and wrapped his t-shirt around his wounded hand, but his head throbbed most of all.
He headed toward home, hid the GTO in an old garage and re-closed the rusty padlock. Then he went upstairs to his rat-hole of a tenement, which was supposedly empty, its windows having been boarded up sometime during his stretch in the can. In the bathroom, he dumped a bunch of Tylenol right from the bottle to his mouth, then washed them down with a diet cola.
Diet Cola felt like somebody’d chipped through his skull with an ice pick. Who knew a simple robbery was so freaking hard? Who had hit him? And why, for chrissake? All he wanted was the ticket that was rightfully his. Now would the cops track him down and hit him with a pair of murder ones? Carrick Durgin was dead. Nobody got Diet Cola’s ass in their face and lived to tell about it. The woman, what was her name? Yeah, Brodie. He couldn’t remember clearly whether he’d finished her off or not, his head was such a mess. Maybe he had killed her. Yeah. He must have.
Anyway, could the ticket really be in Arizona? The whole year he’d thought about the winning lottery ticket he’d stashed inside the urn at the Durgins’ house. You’re dead, you’re dead, right? Nobody expects your ashes’ll ever move again, right? And nobody’s going to move you, right? All that’s supposed to happen is they feather dust around you on the freaking mantel.
He checked his wall calendar—wrong year, but that didn’t really matter. The drawing date on the ticket was August 1 of last year, and here he was on July 7 of this year, with only three weeks left to find the ticket and stake his claim.
Right now, he needed money damn
quick. He went over to the fridge and found most of a steak and cheese sub that was wrapped in white paper, everything warmish since there was no electricity in the dump. The food was left over from breakfast, and the shredded beef was coated with congealed grease. No wonder he was so famished. He’d been so excited about getting his ticket that he’d forgotten to finish his meal. So he washed it down with the rest of the six-pack and let out a single, massive belch.
A roach scurried across the floor. He stomped at it three times with his work boot and missed. That rattled the kitchen table enough that a glass slid off the edge. At the same time, the insect stopped and turned around and raised one of its tiny legs—flipping Diet Cola the bird was what it looked like. Then the glass crashed squarely on the roach, just like the sky on Chicken Little. He walked over to the shattered glass where the injured roach wriggled for mercy, and he closed his eyes and imagined himself holding that hundred-million-dollar ticket while he stomped Mack Durgin’s brain into pea soup. His heel ground the glass into the linoleum—die, you son of a bitch, die, Mack Durgin, you stupid roach. There, he felt a little better.
He sat down on his beaten-up couch, avoiding the coil that stuck through a cushion like a steel enema. The couch groaned under his weight; it was a piece of junk he’d picked up from the sidewalk on trash day. Crappy foreign workmanship, he figured. The roach scurried out from under the broken glass like an earthquake survivor but ran in the wrong direction, right up Diet Cola’s pant leg. This time he caught it between folds of his jeans and took it out between his thumb and forefinger on his good hand. “Gotcha, Durgin,” he said. “I’m gonna pick you clean.” One by one, he pulled off the roach’s legs and realized what he would do when he caught up with Mack Durgin and got the ticket. Picture this: Mack Durgin with his hands tied behind his back as I empty a jar of roaches into his mouth and duct tape it shut. Arizona was going to be fun.
No way was Diet Cola going on a plane, though, because those goddamn things were death traps when they crashed and shit like that. Plus he couldn’t bring a gun on board. Driving the GTO all the way to Arizona, out of the question—he’d be stopped before he got out of the state.
Taking a bus seemed like a good idea. Leave the driving to Gus. It was brilliant, in fact. Once it got dark, he’d hustle his ass into the Greyhound terminal in Boston. A few days traveling would give him time to plan his moves and heal his hand.
But first, he needed fast money for bus fare. He flicked the dead roach into the kitchen sink and went outside to get some help.
On the narrow sidewalk was broken cement. A skateboarding boy looked at Diet Cola and crossed the street. There was a row of tenements with fancy new siding, like a gold-plated row of garbage cans. Diet Cola opened a front door and let himself in. The place smelled like cigarette smoke and cat litter, and an old woman (she was what, sixty by now?) looked at him without surprise. She had on the same baggy dress she wore the night the cops came for him.
“You’re out early,” she said, rolling a cigarette and licking the paper. “What happened to your hand?”
“My hand’s fine. What happened to your face?”
“I thought you were doing a year.”
“I’m out on good behavior. I need money, Ma.”
Her teeth were out, and her laugh was strangled in phlegm. “Good be— Good behavior! Hoo!” She waved arthritic fingers at the living room around them. Her eyes began to water. “Welcome to Fort Knox, Mister Goody Two-Shoes! Take all the gold you can carry!”
Fido the tabby cat lay on top of her purse on the kitchen table. He pulled on the purse handle, and Fido tumbled onto a radiator. There were thirteen dollars. Fort Knocked was more like it.
She opened a drawer and pulled out a butcher knife, which she waved a foot from his face. “You’re not my son no more, so keep your pinkies out of my purse.”
“Look,” he said reasonably, “I need a couple hundred bucks for a business opportunity.”
“I don’t have it. What exactly for, anyway?”
“Plane ticket to Atlanta,” he lied. No sense telling the truth, in case she ever thought to give him up to the cops.
“I’d pay for one way if I could. You’re back in my life way too soon.”
Diet’s face flushed. “I don’t need that much.”
“You’re a sorry excuse for a man, Dieter.” His real name was Dieter Kohl, and he hated that name as much as he hated his own mother. She walked over to the pantry and pulled out couple of large plastic bags filled with soda cans and bottles. “Here, I’ve been collecting these on the street. You can cash these in. Get off your lazy ass and pick up around the city, earn your own airfare.”
Diet Cola hauled off with a roundhouse left and clipped his mother on the jaw. Just a little love-tap, since she got right up off the floor and punched him in the gut.
“Get out, you fat bastard!” she said. Her eyes blazed, and she held up a pair of scrawny fists. Which was funny, because he could take her anytime.
He picked up the bags of cans and headed out to look for more.
On the other side of the city, the officer stood in the Durgins’ living room and took notes as he listened to Carrick and Brodie. No, Carrick said, he’d never seen the man before.
“He was a devil,” Brodie added. “It took two angels and a bullwhip to stop him.”
“He was about six feet tall and well over two hundred fifty pounds,” Carrick said. “He had shaggy blond hair with a ponytail, and he smelled like last week’s cabbage.”
After the officer left, Carrick and Brodie sat together on the couch and traded brave looks. They placed shaking hands on each other’s faces. “We have to call Mack,” Carrick said.
“No, darling,” Brodie said. “Let’s go see him.”
Chapter 5
Friday night was Elvis Night at the Bump ‘n’ Grind on the south side of Lowell. Elvis wannabes climbed the stage and exposed their appalling lack of talent to about fifty cover charge-paying, Bud-swilling customers. Calliope Vrattos slapped away a groper’s hand as she threaded her way through the tables with a tray of drinks. Apparently, some guys thought a leer was the highest compliment a man could pay a woman. She’d had enough of the touching, the noise and the smoke to last her a long, long time. Tonight was her last night, and she’d already given notice.
“What’s your name, darlin’?” The guy was bald. His sequined jacket was open, and a wig rested on the table next to a couple of empty beer glasses.
“Cal. It’s on the name tag.”
“Lordamercy, I looked right past that little plastic thing. You got the most splendid—”
“Stop it.”
“Nature’s such a wonderful thing, idn’t it? Hey, you gonna watch me up there?”
“I’ll be here.”
“The name’s Elvis Hornacre. And you know what I was thinkin’, maybe you and me could go someplace else for a couple pops later on.”
“Sorry. I’m married,” she lied.
“No, you ain’t. I checked. You’re prime, you’re fine, and you’re mine.”
“I’d rather have shingles than date you.” She turned and walked away.
“Great!” Elvis yelled. “See you after work, then.”
She served a few more customers as off-key contestants hammed it up on stage while customers whistled, cheered and booed. Hornacre, the bald Elvis, headed for the rest room, and she happened to be looking in that direction when he came back out.
Elvis Hornacre had his wig on, as well as a tuft of chest hair she hadn’t noticed earlier—how could she have missed it unless he’d just put it on? His jacket glittered, and he wore tight blue pants and blue plastic shoes. She blinked twice as she realized that his pants were unzipped and his sorry penis was hanging out.
