Bone on Bone:

by Julia Keller

  “Then what?” she said. Her voice had gone flat again.

  “Dispatcher. They need somebody on the night shift for a few months.”

  “Well, it’s something.”

  He shook his head. “Come on. We both know what it is. It’s a shit job. Offered out of pity.”

  She nodded. “You’re probably right.” There was a rigorous honesty about her. It was one of the things—one of the many, many things—that had made him fall in love with her, all those years ago. He had waited too long to tell her, though.

  And by the time he did, just a few hours before he was shot in the spine, she had turned him down. After that, he had a few more important things to deal with than his unrequited love for Molly Drucker.

  Like: How to survive the rest of his life as half a person. Because that’s precisely how he regarded himself. He’d been severed. Sliced in half, body and soul.

  “Maybe you could do it for just a little while,” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  For a few seconds the only sound was the soft scrape of the cards against the couch fabric as Malik dished them out and plucked them back up again, one after another.

  Then Molly said, “So that’s it? That’s why you broke your promise and had the extra beers? Come on, Jake.”

  “It wasn’t a promise.”

  She nodded. He was right. It hadn’t been a promise, just an agreement.

  “Still,” she said. “Pretty lame.”

  Before Jake could react, Malik uttered a long screeching yodel, sweeping both rows of cards onto the floor and then dumping the rest of the deck on top of them. The yodel wasn’t distress, Jake knew; it was excitement. Malik dropped to his knees, wedging himself between the couch and the coffee table while he scooped up the cards.

  “Got to go check on the crockpot,” Molly said, standing up. Jake got it: She was using Malik’s outburst as a way of closing off the moment. As much as she helped her brother, her brother often helped her, too—in ways Malik himself would never be able to appreciate. “And then I have to get this guy home,” she added, “so I can go to work.” She leaned over and rubbed Malik’s head. He grinned up at her.

  “Hey,” Jake said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks,” he said. “For the stew, I mean.” He thought about adding And for everything else, too, but he knew how much she’d hate that.

  “No problem.”

  “And I’ve decided.”

  “Decided what?”

  “I’m going to take the dispatcher’s job. I’ll tell Harrison I can start right away.”

  He knew how much Molly wanted to hear that, but he also knew how hard she’d try to hide it. She wasn’t effusive.

  “Okay,” she said. She couldn’t fool him. He’d heard it—the little hitch in her voice, the slight catch. She was pleased. And that, in turn, pleased him.

  Chapter Eleven

  When Brett came home an hour and a half later, Ellie was still in the garage, sitting on the concrete floor, her back to the wall, her knees up, her arms looped around those knees. She had put the gun back in its original spot on the high shelf.

  And then she’d sunk to the floor, and stayed there.

  Tyler was still asleep back at the kitchen table. He’d probably be there all night. When he passed out, he could stay that way for hours.

  She heard the chipper little hum as the garage door opener was hailed by the remote in Brett’s vehicle, the edges of the door rolling up smoothly in the sleek aluminum grooves. But she didn’t lift her head. She heard the Escalade slide into its spot, right next to her Audi.

  She heard the garage door going down again. She heard the door of the Escalade open and close. She reacted to none of it.

  Brett was leaning over her. He couldn’t squat; his knees were too bad.

  “Sweetie?” he said. “Are you okay?”

  She looked up at him but she didn’t answer. He reached down and took her elbow, helping her up. He put his arms around her. She was crying but she did it gently. There were times in the past when she had sobbed into his chest but this was not one of those times.

  Finally he stepped back from her, still holding her upper arms. He needed to look at her.

  “Are you okay?” he repeated. It was a silly question, of course; they had not been okay, either of them, since Tyler had started his descent. But it was still the question one asked at such a time.

  “He’s back,” she said.

  At the moment, that was all she needed to say. It explained everything.

  Brett nodded. “I’m sorry I’m so late. Things got—well, the meeting was pretty intense.”

  “The meeting.”

  “Yeah.”

  She put a hand on his lapel. She looked into his eyes. When you’d been married as long as they had been married, there was no expectation of total honesty all the time; that was an impossible standard, she knew. People lied. They lied out of kindness, sometimes, or out of expediency, when the truth was too complex. Or maybe too hurtful. Lies weren’t always cruel, horrible, deceitful things. Some lies were just softeners. Shortcuts. Avoidances of controversy.

  Hence forgivable.

  “I made chicken,” she said, “if you’re still hungry. If you’ve already eaten, I can just save it for tomor—”

  The sudden noise was shattering. It blasted through the garage like a linked chain of mini-earthquakes. Several seconds went by—and another flurry of punches—before Ellie realized it was coming from the closed garage door. Someone was attacking it from the outside with a series of massive, heavy blows.

  “Get in the house,” Brett said. His voice was firm but not agitated, not panicky. He tried to turn her around, pushing her toward the open doorway that led back into the kitchen.

  “What’s happening?”

  “In the house now.”

  She didn’t go and he didn’t have the time to make her. Sweat, she saw, instantly swamped his brow. He fumbled for the cell in his pants pocket as the pounding accelerated. Dents were popping through the aluminum in rhythm with the blows.

  Pop, pop, pop. Three dents in the middle of the door.

  Pop, pop. Two more, off to the right.

  Pop. Another one, on the left.

  Pop, pop. Back in the middle again, a little higher this time.

  The white door instantly looked like a page of braille. Her best guess? A baseball bat.

  Brett’s shaky thumb kept slipping off the screen but finally he steadied it enough to press. “He’s here,” he muttered into his cell. The phone dropped with a clatter onto the concrete. Brett was in the corner now, grabbing for the shovel, pawing his way past the other garden implements to get at it: rake, hoe, broom.

  “How soon until the police get here?” Ellie said, raising her voice so that he could hear her over the tremendous noise, the BoomBoomBoomBoomBoom echoing through the garage.

  “That’s not who I called.”

  “Who did you—”

  “I said to get in the goddamned house!”

  Still no shock in his voice. Just irritation at not being obeyed. Again she ignored him, knowing it wouldn’t matter past the next three seconds because his attention was elsewhere.

  She watched as her husband advanced toward the right side of the garage door, the fabric of his blue suit bunched across his back, holding the shovel like a minuteman with a musket. He looked silly, but that wasn’t the kind of thing you were supposed to think at such a time—was it?—and so Ellie let the thought drop out of her head. She was frightened—of course she was frightened—but she was also curious. Their long ordeal with Tyler had left her immune to the more primitive forms of panic.

  With the heel of his hand Brett slapped the lighted square of the inside opener. The wounded door stuttered upward with a groan and rattle and a tinny shriek, inch by difficult inch, as if reluctant to rise and reveal its own tormentor.

  And there he was.

  * * *

  Hunched in their driveway in a sort o
f semi-crouch was a man with a shaved head and a matched set of lethal-looking hands. He clutched a baseball bat in the right one.

  In the splash of artificial illumination from the floodlight, Ellie could see his face. It was contorted in a snarl. He was dressed completely in black: black jacket, black jeans, black boots. For all of his menacing brio, though, his face looked soft to her, malleable, as if his youth kept peeking through the hard veneer.

  His vehicle—or what she assumed was the vehicle belonging to him, a low-slung, black sporty thing with a white racing stripe down the side—was parked at a crazy angle, half on their driveway, half on their lawn, its engine still spitting and growling.

  From across the street, an outside light went on at the Tudor-style house. The oversized front door with the gold sunburst inlay separated itself reluctantly from the ostentatious frame. Ed Coverdell, Ellie thought. Nosy bastard.

  “Everything okay over there, Brett?”

  “Just fine, Ed!” Brett yelled back. He waved. “Got it under control!”

  The door across the street closed again. With relief. The light snapped off.

  Truth was, Ellie knew, the neighbors were no longer surprised by anything that happened at the Topping house. Loud, crazy noises didn’t faze them. The Toppings were in a special category now, on account of Tyler. The category was: People Whose Lives Have Spun Totally Out of Control. They were, she knew, a joke. The neighborhood punch line.

  Tonight’s little disturbing-the-peace drama was far from the worst thing that had ever happened at the Toppings’ house. Far, far from it. She knew what Ed Coverdell was telling his wife, Sherry, right now: It’s that junkie kid of theirs again. Gotta be. Whacked out on something. Tearing their house apart. Oughta lock him up. Lost cause.

  “Lookin’ for Tyler,” muttered the young man in the driveway.

  “Get out of here.” Brett panted hard, and then he closed his mouth to suck in air through his nose.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Tyler’s father.”

  “Okay, Tyler’s Father.” The man cackled at his own witticism. “He owes me four thousand dollars, okay? He gives me the money—I go away.”

  Of course, Ellie thought. Tyler was involved in some kind of drug business with this man. It had happened before—people showing up at all hours, drug people asking for Tyler, demanding that he show himself until finally he did, and they all left in the same rusty van—but tonight felt … different.

  The others hadn’t included any door-bashing. This man bristled with rage. He was holding the rage in check right now, but the hand with the bat was never still. It quivered like a tuning fork that never lost its connection with his deep, endless anger.

  “I said you need to leave,” Brett said.

  “Listen, old man. You step aside. Right now. Tell that lying sack of shit to come outside and pay me. Else I’ll rip down your whole fuckin’ house with my bare hands, you get me?”

  “Leave.”

  The man’s response was to cackle once more and peer at the baseball bat in his own hand. Up and down, handle to tip. Up and down. Then he looked back at Brett.

  “Your choice, old man.”

  “Hey.” Brett’s voice had changed. Ellie heard something different in it. A confidence. A certainty. It was hard and sure. “We don’t want you around here,” Brett went on. “We want you to leave. Now.”

  Another cackle. “Shut up. Go get Tyler.”

  “I did some research. I know who you are. Your name’s Deke Foley.” The man, Ellie saw, definitely reacted to Deke Foley. Her husband was still talking: “You think you’re a real tough guy, don’t you, Deke? You think you’re some kind of big-time gangster. Well, you’re not. You’re a loser. A bully. A small-town punk. So listen up. You stop this, okay? You leave my family alone.”

  Foley stared at him.

  “I’ve been watching you,” Brett continued, his voice getting stronger and more sure of itself the longer he talked. “You and Tyler both. I’ve been following Tyler when he goes out to meet you. I take notes, okay? Been doing it for months, ever since he started living here again. I write it all down—dates, times, places, license plate numbers. I know Tyler’s selling for you. I’ve even got pictures, okay? I’ve got an entire file on you, Foley. You and your associates. And there are some surprises in there. Some names that I don’t think you’d like other people to know about. So you leave us alone—or I turn that file over to the police.”

  Foley’s jaw flexed and shifted. Ellie could almost feel it in her own jaw: upper and lower rows of teeth grinding against each other. The pressure.

  “Did you hear me?” Brett said. He was panting even more heavily now. The sweat on his face was so copious that he looked as if he’d just stepped out of the shower. Fresh notches of sweat blossomed under the arms of his suitcoat. “Did you?”

  “Yeah,” Foley said. “I heard you.”

  While Brett was uttering his last two words, Foley had changed his grip on the baseball bat. Added his other hand. He looked like a batter stepping up to the plate. Ellie felt a wave of fear rippling through her guts.

  Foley was talking again. “You get that file and you give it to me. You got ten seconds.” He took a few practice swings.

  “Leave,” Brett said.

  “Nine.”

  “I told you to—”

  “Eight.”

  “You better—”

  “Seven. Six.”

  Another sound. It caught the attention of the man and Brett alike; they turned simultaneously and stared as a light-colored sedan barreled straight toward the house, swerving at the last minute so that it ended up sideways in the driveway. It had nearly clipped the end of Foley’s car. The man who emerged from it looked like a slimmer version of Brett: suit and tie, shiny shoes. He had a thin, middle-aged face and a goatee.

  “What’s going on here?” Goatee said, in the kind of too-loud voice that reminded Ellie of the tone a first-time teacher uses to bring a class to order. He stood on the balls of his feet, arms curved out from his body, ready for action. “You need some help here, Brett?”

  “Depends,” Brett said. “If Foley is ready to leave, then we’re okay. If he’s not, then we’ve got a problem.”

  Okay, right, Ellie thought. Now she understood. Brett must have formed a partnership with some other dad who had the same problem, the same lost son or daughter.

  She remembered Brett’s complaints, the bleak and bitter asides, the soundtrack to every long drive they’d made in the past few months: The sheriff can’t handle it. Too much for her. Too much for anybody, maybe.

  And later: Only way to get anything done is to do it your own damned self.

  Just as she’d concocted her own secret plan to liberate them—Brett had his plan, too.

  She’d lost her nerve. But Brett hadn’t.

  Foley spat a rubbery wad of phlegm on the driveway. It sparkled on the concrete. His gaze shifted between the two men. Ellie felt as if she could almost see his thoughts as they slouched across his brain, gray lumps of caveman cognition: New guy changes the odds. Longer I stand here, better the chance some nosy friggin’ neighbor calls the cops. Time to go. Settle this later.

  Foley switched the bat back to one hand. “Ain’t over,” he muttered. “Both of you’s gonna be real sorry for this.” He took several backward steps down the driveway, shaking his head. Reaching his car, he spat one more time. Then he tossed the bat through the open door and flung himself in after it.

  He made sure to leave by way of the wide and beautifully groomed lawn, flattening a chunk of the shrubbery that lined the long curving walk.

  At the end of the street Foley’s taillights swooped flamboyantly as he executed a crazy-fast left turn. And then he was gone.

  Ellie’s eyes returned to the driveway. Neither her husband nor his friend had moved.

  And for a moment, the scene—two human figures caught in the spectral glare of the floodlight, the flesh on their faces bone-white—looked, she t
hought, like something out of a movie. Like a scene she had paused with her remote, while she went to the kitchen to refill the chip bowl.

  There was Brett and there was Goatee.

  Two men poised on a gray expanse, frozen in a tableau of frustration and false bravado. Something stirred in Ellie. It wasn’t pity—or it wasn’t only pity. It had elements of admiration in it, too. They’re trying, she thought. They’re doing what they can.

  They were good, decent, honorable men, going up against the unthinkable—thugs and money and all the ugliness in the world—with the only weapons they had, namely their courage and their absurd, touching gallantry. They were too old and too tired to be doing this.

  “Go on home, Pete,” Brett said wearily to Goatee, and now Ellie knew his name. “It’s late.”

  “You sure?” the man said. “What if he comes back?”

  “He won’t. Not tonight. I’d bet on it. And thanks for getting over here so quickly.”

  The man shrugged off the gratitude. “That’s the pact we made. And besides—you’d do the same for me.”

  “Yes,” Brett said. “I would.”

  * * *

  Brett clamped a hand on Tyler’s shoulder. He shook it roughly.

  Tyler didn’t raise his head. He had slept through the whole thing—the assault on the garage door, the confrontation in the driveway, the threats, the yelling. Drug sleep was not like regular sleep. Ellie had learned that. Their boy could sleep through anything.

  His face was thrust into the filthy nest formed by his crossed arms on the kitchen table. He groaned and smacked his lips and shifted his shoulders, trying to get out from under his father’s hand.

  “What the hell,” Tyler mumbled. “Leave me ’lone—lemme—”

  “Up,” Brett said. The word sounded like a dead weight that dropped with no echo. “Get up.”

  Ellie watched. She didn’t intervene. Brett glanced at her at one point, to see if she might be tempted to try and stop him; she had done just that in the past, when Brett had found Tyler passed out on the front porch, stinking of vomit, and tried to rouse him. Don’t hurt him, Brett. Don’t. Don’t. Please—don’t.