The pay phone rang, breaking the staring match. Omer climbed the porch.
“We got problems, Mr. Phillips.” A steady hiss and racket punctuated the statement. Sounded like a body shop.
“Problems are my business.” The crow started to make excited, dice-in-a-cup sounds behind Omer’s back.
“There’s a contract out on this Smonig guy. Has been for ten years.”
Omer pulled the receiver away and looked at the handset like it had licked him. A contract on Smonig? “What do you want me to do?”
“For now, just listen. You remember anything about Georgi Ristocelli and a pal gettin’ gunned down in front of Neglio’s in Hartford? Five guys pulled the job. You and I are interested in the welfare of one of ’em, though he didn’t touch a trigger. Well, do you also remember how there was all kindsa witnesses that the cops have been looking for ever since?”
“Yes, I remember. It’s been on television, I think.”
“You bet it was, on that show Mug Shots. They reenacted the whole thing just recently, said how they was looking for those same witnesses. But just between you, me, an’ the wall, we happen to know they’ll never find those witnesses.”
“I see,” Omer said flatly. He didn’t want to seem too interested. Frankly, he wasn’t.
“No, you don’t see, Mr. Phillips. One of these witnesses was a young woman named Sandra Jones, who as it happens was this guy Smonig’s wife.”
“I see.”
“Sure, they made it look like an accident, like the steering went out on her car, but this guy Russell was thrown clear of the wreck and survived. Said he saw someone at the wreck with a gun who called him Evel Knievel. It was Smonig’s contention that somebody had messed with the steering box. Nobody bought it. Her family, his family was all burned up at him for makin’ the fuss, an’ sudden-like he’s gone. Which suited us fine. The contract was pretty much a ‘when or where’—no big deal, so it’s kinda forgot, what with inflation and all. And now, since the Palfutti family is history…
“The deal is this: we don’t think she ever told him about bein’ a witness or he woulda used that t’convince the cops she was whacked. Yeah. He couldn’t see too good after the wreck, but he might recognize our friend as the guy who showed up with the gun. If not now, maybe later. An’ he might start askin’ questions. I dunno. Anyhow, I guess our friend don’t recognize Smonig either.”
“I see.” Omer did, finally, see.
“A delicate matter, Mr. Phillips. We don’t want anything to upset our friend’s retirement, make him seek out the Witness Protection Program, maybe cut some more deals with the Feds that might be bad for us. Our sources say he’s got some kinda incriminatin’ evidence stashed, the kind that might find its way to the DA even if he was dead. Yeah, but likewise, we don’t want our friend to go into a more permanent retirement ’cause quite frankly we’re hoping to reactivate him at some point. You know, on a specialty basis, somethin’ like you, Mr. Phillips. Craftsmen is hard to come by. Lot of ’em in jail these days. Speaking of which, what happened to Fest?”
“Bifulco took care of it, just like old times, you might say. And it seems Smonig and Bifulco have decided to forget the whole thing.”
“Heh-heh.” There was only morbid satisfaction in the chuckles. “Just like ol’ times. Where are they now, what’s the picture?”
“They went fishing.”
Silence on the other end. A car started, an air compressor rattled to a stop.
“Look out for our friend, Mr. Phillips, look out for our friend. I guess one way to work it would be t’eliminate this guy Smonig, but that might get the cops on Sid’s case. I mean, he’s a convicted murderer, an’ livin’ right next door. Another way to look at it, if Smonig somehow, like, finds out Sid is the guy that did his wife, he may be very pissed with our boy Bifulco. It’s your call, Mr. Phillips, but for now maybe you better just try’n figure out exactly what Smonig knows while playin’ guardian angel for Sid. See Smonig don’t send Bifulco to sleep with the fishes.” The line went dead.
When Omer turned away from the phone, he found the crow perched on his gearshift knob, pecking at loose change in the car’s ashtray. The crow flapped madly, dropped a few feathers, and made for the sky, something silver gleaming in its beak.
Omer took off his crusher and played with the brim as he searched the sky for the thief.
“A delicate matter indeed.”
Hands on her hips, Val shook her head at Little Bob, who lay sprawled on the couch before a snow-filled TV screen. He knew better than to try to bed down with the missus when he came in late. That just got him a lecture, especially on a Sunday.
Tapes were scattered about the VCR, camcorder open and empty nearby. Val sniffed derisively when she confronted the clutter. Why couldn’t they have a DVD player like most people? Over at the Show Time Videomat the selection of VHS tapes was getting smaller and smaller. Her sister in Pittsburgh said that they don’t even rent VHS format at all anymore where she lives. And then Bob had to buy that silly VHS camcorder at a tag sale.
White go-to-meeting gloves in hand, she singled out the rental boxes for Reverend Jim Chattanooga’s Jesus Jamboree and The Elvis Conspiracy. Then she initiated the search for the tapes. One was on the floor. Oh—and the other tape she’d left in the machine. She’d fallen asleep in front of the TV waiting for Bob, and had finally dragged herself off to the bedroom around three a.m., a lecture fermenting in her mind. Training the evil eye on her prone hubby, she stuffed the tape one way, then the other into the tape box. Darned if she could remember which way they were supposed to go in.
Besides, she was in a hurry. She wanted to drop the tapes off at the Videomat “Nite Deposit” before church.
At the screen door, she stabbed sleeping Bob with a last reproachful glare. Wouldn’t he feel guilty for having missed services.
“How much this tub set you back, Smonig?” Sid admired all Russ’s gadgets—the sonar, rod holders, can holders, aerated baitwell—as they motored upriver toward the Eddy. “Yeah, ’cause I can’t stay with that rowboat, gotta think about tradin’ up.”
“Ten or twelve thousand to replace it.”
Two kingfishers zigged across the river, chattering and laughing.
“Twelve, huh? I may have to make a little investment. So where we goin’?”
“Just above the Eddy there’s some rapids. Above the rapids is a stretch of water five feet deep bank to bank, water that really moves, and a field of small boulders. We anchor, fish, lift anchor, move up, drop anchor, fish, and so on. The larger bass hang right at the edge of the fastest, deepest water.” Russ throttled back the motor as they arched into the Eddy. Rapids came into view. A washing-machine effect was at work through the center of the rapids.
“Whoa.” Sid came to attention. “How’re you gonna get through all that? Looks pretty rough.”
“Up the right side. It’s a little tricky. I used to go ashore and pull the boat up in the shallows. One day I felt lucky and motored up. I got away with it.” In the distance, Russ noted a nice trout rising where Pink Creek trickled into the Eddy and saved the information for later.
“That feelin’ is great.” A grin broke up the side of Sid’s face. “Gettin’ away with somethin’ like that, I mean.”
“I guess you’d know a lot about that.”
“I guess I would.” Sid’s grin broke into a smile. “But make no mistake, Russ. The only thing I wanna get away with now is bass, walleye, trout, muskellunge, those watchamacallits—the rocket-fish.”
“Rocket-fish?”
“Yeah.” Sid snapped a finger at Russ. “Shad.”
“Shad. Well, you’ve come at a good time for them. Looked like the one you brought over the other night gave you quite a fight.”
“Very amusing, Smonig. So how come I never heard of these here shad before I came here?”
“Sid, let me ask you something. I mean, I saw you casting, and you seem to have done a lot of it. You have a lot of tackle, and of
the right kinds. You seem to know a lot about fish, but…is this the first time you’ve ever actually fished?”
“Smonig, to quote a certain deputy warden I once knew, the only fish in prison is on a bun with tartar sauce.”
The bow swung to the right and over a burst of current and waves. The motor complained, and the blade whined and growled as it popped free of the water.
“You don’t mean to tell me you learned to fish in prison?” He tilted back his fedora.
“I had a special program, got all the magazines, catalogs. The Warden, he’s an outdoorsman. Gave me some pointers.”
Scraping the bow briefly off a rock to the port side, Russ cut the boat through a swell that sent about ten gallons over the gunnels. But that was the end of the rapids. The boat moved into the slick headwater. They didn’t go far before Russ pushed a toggle and the anchor motor fed cable. Soon they were stuck fast to the bottom. He flicked another switch, and a bilge pump started returning the ten gallons to the Delaware.
Russ produced a plastic compartmentalized tray full of squiggly-tailed rubber grubs, hooks, and attachments. “Take your pick of color, but with sun on the water I like the dark ones with sparkles.”
Sid picked one, and while he was tying it on, Russ made his first cast. He was retrieving the cast in sharp jerks when—bang!—his rod was bent and pumping. A golden brown fish roughly the dimensions of a large baking potato arched out of the water and bore under the boat.
Sid cast, his grub plopping upriver in the folds of current.
“Whoa!” Sid hauled back, rod bent, vibrating, pumping. “Whoa, I got a friggin’ fish!”
Sid looked briefly away from his battle. Russ was raising his rod again, the foot-long bass gasping. The jaws broke the surface. Russ’s thumb and forefinger clamped onto the lower lip. He lofted the red-eyed fish by its lower jaw, the fins slowly fanning the air.
Sid held his rod high as his fish raced upstream. The bass’s bronze sides flashed in the water. It bolted to sunlight and the surface, breaking free of the river. The fish pirouetted and spat Sid’s grub at the boat. Splash and flicker: the bass was gone.
“Aw, crap.” Sid stood motionless. “What was that? I had him. What was that?” He waved a hand toward where the fish went, arguing with it.
Russ unhooked his fish and placed it in the water. It thrashed from his grip, vanishing.
“That often happens when a fish jumps.”
“What’d I do wrong?”
“When you feel them shoot for the surface, reel up and put your rod tip down. That discourages them from jumping. It also helps to keep a taut line if they do jump. Once the line is slack, they can shake the hook loose. But by the same token, you don’t want to pull when they jump either.”
“Huh.” Sid smiled to himself. “So what you’re sayin’ is I gotta finesse the fish, that right?”
“Well, yeah, I guess you could say that.” Russ hadn’t thought of it until then, but Sid seemed to be full of finesse. “I’m sure you’ll finesse the next one.”
It was only as Trooper Price lay on the ground bleeding that he’d suddenly remembered: Martha hadn’t been wearing a bra. Hell, that’s why he’d gone ape over her to begin with.
To say the least, his relief had been mixed. He’d only dodged one bullet. The other was in his chest.
X-rays and a little probing had shown that after the slug had passed through Price’s citation folder, it entered his chest, cracked, and deflected off a rib. What remained of the hollow-point slug was tucked up under the next rib. He had been lucky. Very lucky.
He had a dime-sized hole two and a half inches below his nipple and a bruised area surrounding that. After plucking out the lead, the doctor stitched it up, slapped a Band-Aid on it, and gave him some antibiotics. He was sent home.
Price felt gypped.
If a cop gets shot in the chest and survives, he can usually expect a month off at the least. And who knows? Maybe he can get a sweet disability deal. A trooper Price knew slammed a cruiser door on his hand and suffered “permanent damage” to his trigger/pen finger. The digit in question had a fractured knuckle and had lost sixty percent of its mobility. So this guy gets an early retirement—way early—with eighty percent of his pay. Price had seen the guy recently, and his finger apparently had regained ninety-nine percent mobility. He was bowling with it. The ex-trooper was sitting pretty.
But Price didn’t slam a door on his finger, he got shot in the chest. And what happens? Nothing. His injury was termed a “flesh wound,” which meant he wasn’t eligible for any of the bennies.
Now it was Sunday afternoon, and Price was planted in front of the TV. He was off duty, so he’d put the small diamond stud earring in his right ear. It was a vestige of something cool he and the guys in high school all did, and made him feel virile. His wife, Debbie—after setting him up with a beer, the channel changer, and a kiss—had run off to her sister’s to gab. Even Debbie was acting like getting shot in the chest was no big deal.
So he sat there in his den, surrounded by all his high school football trophies, sipping beer, watching The Sons of Katie Elder, and wishing he’d gotten shot in the right index finger. That’s when he decided that maybe he should pop in a tape. He didn’t much feel in the mood for any of his Super Bowl tapes, much less any of the blooper tapes, much less North Dallas Forty or The Longest Yard.
Next to the VCR was a bag from the video store with the movies Debbie had picked up on her way home from shopping. One tape was some romantic comedy featuring that ugly French guy with greasy hair. Price loathed that stuff at any time. The other tape was The Elvis Conspiracy. Well, that’s what the box said, but what was inside didn’t look like a commercial tape. Probably a bootleg. It wasn’t even rewound.
Price fed the tape into the machine.
Val chewed out Little Bob but good when she found him still asleep at noon. Godless wastrel that he was, Bob knew there would be no peace until he atoned. Some arduous yard work, followed by a visit to his mother-in-law’s to clean the dog poop off her lawn, usually bought the Lord’s forgiveness.
So it was after cleaning the gutters, shutters, and car, after weed-whacking the fence line, after scraping the BBQ grill and heading over to Mother’s for tea and dog poo that Val took up her knitting and left Bob in peace late that Sunday afternoon. And as Val took a dim view of feasting on “God’s Day,” dinner was a cold sup of the individual’s choosing, eaten apart. Bob had the whole rest of the day to himself. And, as was his way, he fell upon his camcorder.
It wasn’t until he did so that he had a chance to really mull over the previous night’s doings, which he’d reflected on from time to time throughout his chores. His general reaction was more awe over a character like Sid Bifulco than concern over the manslaughter cover-up.
Mechanically, Bob fumbled with the clutter of tapes, putting them back in their respective boxes. He recalled how well the whole evening had come out on tape, including all that stuff by the headlights with all that radiator steam. Especially since at the time he hadn’t been aware the thing was taping. Those blank SUPER*PROCAM tapes he’d gotten at Wal-Mart held up well in low light. He’d watched the whole thing when he’d reached home the night before and had only fallen asleep sometime during Sid’s “getting away with murder” speech.
Holding the last empty SUPER*PROCAM tape box in one hand and the last boxless tape, The Elvis Conspiracy, in the other, Bob suddenly realized something was amiss.
It took another fifteen minutes or so for him to realize the possible ramifications.
“Just walk him around the boat! Like a dog on a short leash!” Net poised for action, Russ jockeyed behind Sid.
“If this thing’s a dog, it’s a Doberman, Smonig—whoa!” Rod doubling, Sid lurched forward to keep the line from breaking.
“He’s hiding under the boat. Just let him stay there a second. Keep the pressure on!”
“You said to let him sit there! So I’m lettin’ him sit there!”
“O.K., sorry, just making sure you don’t give any slack line.” Russ backed off and took a deep breath. “When he comes out take him for another walk around the boat, then we’ll see if we can bring him up for the net. Now, Sid, we don’t want to net him at the front of the boat. There’s not room for both of us there. And in back, there’s a chance we’ll foul the line in the propeller. Just pick a side, and you tell me when he’s ready, O.K.?”
“How the hell will I know when he’s ready? You think maybe I should ask the Doberman to roll over an’ play dead? Oh crap, here he goes—here he goes….” The tip of the rod made two deep dips. The line buzzed off the reel. Russ stepped forward.
“I think this is it—his last run to the deep water. Reel up. You’ll feel his head turn as he starts to come up.”
“Hey—here he comes!”
“It’s O.K.”
“Here he comes….”
“Steady now, steady…”
“Ooh, there he is! Nab him, Smonig!”
“Not yet. Wait till he turns on his side. He may have one bolt left—a short one—be ready.”
“Now, Smonig!”
“Wait—there he goes!”
“Whoa!”
More line buzzed off the reel. A tail splashed river water in their faces.
“O.K., Sid, bring him back, fast and headfirst and into the net.” Russ plunged the green mesh hoop into the river.
“He’s comin’!”
“Got him.” Russ heaved the net aboard and stumbled backward—the boat tipped—Sid took an abrupt step backward and the seat cut his calves out from under him.
Man overboard.
Man down rapids.
Before he even clambered aboard, Sid was posing the usual question.
“How big?” He was dog-paddling smack in the middle of Hellbender Eddy like he spent every afternoon splashing about in the river. Well, truth be told, he had.
“Big. Maybe twenty-five. Maybe more.” Russ held out a hand and Sid waved it off, draping one arm, then the other, then a leg over the gunnel. Sid went splat on the boat’s wet carpet.
Sleep with the Fishes Page 8
