Bad Reputation: The Complete Collection

by Matt Hader

  His mother, Sharon, would normally know how to handle issues like a “kid from a good home gone wrong.” She’d dealt with children in the same type of situation in her practice. But those patients weren’t her son. Unfortunately, she was emotionally handcuffed and ineffective.

  When Danny’s dad, Donald, was given the chance to relocate with his employer, the family moved as quickly east as they could, hoping the fresh start and Balmoral would be the tonic needed to snap Danny out of his juvenile delinquent funk.

  Except for the storytelling, the move had seemed to work. But, Danny was becoming restless again, dressing like a homeless person, and seeking out more and more dangerous activities, like pissing off a 210-pound, 17-year-old kid named Staley.

  Danny stepped back toward the front windows of the Irish pub and took another peek inside. The old dude was speaking again with the pretty lady in the fashionable pantsuit. They seemed to be hitting it off and that made Danny do something he’d not done in a while – sport a sincere smile.

  The idea came to him right there. He wanted to know how this guy John ticked, what he did every day, who he knew, where he lived. There was only one way to gather that information.

  Danny would have to follow John every chance he could get.

  Inside the Irish pub, Amy ordered the shepherd’s pie and a beer.

  As they waited for her meal to arrive, she gave the “nickel tour” of her life and everything she’d been up against to this point (Kentucky, Winston, the FBI and the dentist). She felt that she could open up to John, who seemed to be such an excellent listener.

  The Vikes in John’s blood system were wearing off. Except for the constant scratching of his limbs, he seemed engaged. A couple of times he tried, when she wasn’t looking, to shake his head from side to side to snap out of his drug-induced malaise. He wanted very badly, or so he thought, to get to know this beautiful woman.

  “No, that house was in Deer Park off of Long Grove Road and Buckeye. The one where I’m living now is in Lake Zurich near Routes 12 and 22 in back of the grocery store and the Italian beef place. Lori and Jerry have been so supportive, but I have to get out of their basement soon. The rents here are so high, though, don’t you think?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’ve owned my house outright since I inherited it.”

  “Oh, so both of your parents…?”

  “Yeah, it’s okay,” said John.

  The bartender stepped from the back with Amy’s dinner. Amy picked up her fork and dug a trough into the mashed potatoes on top releasing a pocket of steam.

  A sad thought came to him. “It’s my brother who I miss,” said John.

  “That’s horrible. So all your family members are gone?”

  John scratched at his arm and said, “No, not my brother.” Her confused expression edged him along, “He’s still around. We just don’t talk.”

  She waved a hand over the opening in her shepherd’s pie and nodded to his scratching.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He looked down and lied, “Dry skin, sorry.” And then he stopped scratching.

  “So I’m hoping the BMW dealership I was telling you about works out. That would be an exciting job, I think. Seeing people negotiating over big ticket purchases. I’d like that.”

  He had this beautiful woman sitting right next to him. It was what he wanted, a chance with her, but all he could think was, “Shit, it’s time to re-Vike.” He took a deep breath, willing a brief moment of sobriety into his brain, but his eyes rolled up into their sockets instead.

  Amy instantly knew that she made a mistake in conversing with John. He was starting to act like he’s drunk, yet he’s not drinking.

  “Shit…you’re a goddamned addict,” she whispered.

  She’d seen this type of thing back home and, more recently, at the dentist’s office. What the hell was wrong with the world that people thought they needed to run and hide in the delusional state that downers brought on? Well, probably a stupid question but still, there was a lot of this shit going on around here. And this was a fancy neighborhood, too.

  “I have to run,” she said as she got to her feet and collected her purse.

  John was lost in thought for just a second and that was the cementing moment she needed. She turned to walk away.

  “Huh? What? Where are you going?”

  She stopped, dug into her purse and pulled out a $20, tossed it on the bar and headed for the door.

  She said, “I don’t need any more shit in my life at the moment.”

  John, defeated, knew exactly what she meant. It was just a matter of time before someone noticed that he had a problem.

  “Shit…”

  CHAPTER 13

  The other massive homes with their manicured lawns and in-ground pools were situated all around the French provincial. But Amy’s old residence, sporting two-foot high grass, a broken, picture window in front and weeds growing through the cracks in the blacktop driveway, was the pimple on the ass of this wonderful street.

  In exasperation, he again checked the numbers on the return address portion of the crumpled and stained envelope. They matched the numbers on the house, just not the image he had in his mind. As he adjusted the backpack on his shoulder, a voice startled him.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  Dwayne turned and tried to act as cool and calm as he could.

  “Shit, the Deer Park police are stealthy assholes,” he thought. Dwayne didn’t hear the cop car’s engine or the officer approaching on foot. Or maybe he was just too caught up in the disappointment of learning that his sister, Amy, no longer lived in the house.

  “I’m good, man. Just trying to visit my sister. Amy Bowling. You know her?”

  The Deer Park cop, Officer Hynek, was an 18” necked, no-nonsense bull of a man. “Step over to my vehicle, sir. Let me have that,” he said as he pulled the backpack away from Dwayne.

  Dwayne, having dealt with the screws in the Kentucky State Pen for the past 15 years or so, knew to comply in a peaceful manner.

  Dwayne said, “Nice neighborhood, huh?”

  Officer Hynek took the envelope from Dwayne’s hand and read it. He saw the Kentucky State Penitentiary address.

  “For your safety, sir, I’m going to ask you to put your hands behind your back.”

  “Sure. I feel safe already,” said Dwayne as the cop clicked the handcuffs on him.

  Officer Hynek grabbed Dwayne by the arm and walked him to the back door of the police car. “Just make yourself comfortable and we’ll sort this all out at the station, okay?”

  “Sounds good to me, officer. You wouldn’t happen to have any sandwiches there, would you? Sort of hungry. You know, you being all worried about my comfort and all.”

  Officer Hynek pushed Dwayne into the back seat and slammed the door closed. Dwayne looked at Amy’s former residence and was saddened to think what may have happened to her and the life she created for herself.

  But, he’d find out what happened.

  Now that he was a free man, he had a lot of time to figure things out.

  CHAPTER 14

  She knew something was wrong a week ago.

  It was a mother’s intuition. She watched as her talkative and intelligent son became nearly mute in their Park Ridge home. She had asked repeatedly what was bothering him, but backed off her questioning yesterday when he broke down in tears and holed up in his bedroom for the rest of the day.

  Now Rita, a beautiful and solidly built woman of Greek descent, Jason’s wife, and Tyler’s mom, could wait no longer. She had to know what was going on. She tried subtle, but subtle wasn’t going to cut it any longer.

  Rita was raised as the youngest child and only daughter in a family of five from the Sauganash neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago. Her father,
Alex, a humorless man, owned and operated a small trucking company based in Niles. Her mother lived in the quiet desperation of an immigrant woman wanting all that was America, but fearful of what her disapproving husband would think of her.

  Rita was treated like a princess by her mother, ignored by her father and played a sort of whipping horse to her older brothers. She grew to be a princess with a punch of her own, though. A trait her older brothers grew to appreciate.

  She rarely backed down from a fight, especially when it came to protecting her two sons. Other mothers and kids in her current neighborhood figured that out fairly quickly, especially 11 years earlier when two older neighbor boys tried to bully a six-year-old Tyler.

  Rita didn’t go after the boys, both just ten at the time. She went after the kids’ mothers, both at the same time. No punches were thrown, but the bullies’ mothers got the message and got their kids in line. And ever since that episode, the neighbors would rather stay on Rita’s good side.

  “Mommy, what’s wrong,” said little Christopher, her five- year-old son.

  Rita near tears herself said, “Nothing, peanut. Go and wash up. I’ll make you some lunch, okay?”

  As Christopher happily hopped away humming to himself, Rita bit her lip. She couldn’t wait any longer. She marched from the kitchen, up the stairs and walked right into Tyler’s room without knocking.

  Tyler, lying on the floor with his iPod earbuds in, sat bolt upright, “Mom?”

  But Tyler knew the look Rita was giving him. He knew she was going to figure this all out and get to the bottom of it all.

  She said, “It’s time, Ty. Spill it!” And he did.

  CHAPTER 15

  “This is the last one,” he said to himself as he popped 500 mg of Vicodin into his mouth and swallowed it down with a cold chug of bottled water. He knew to land someone like Amy that he was going to have to cease his drug-taking ways.

  “How the hell did the habit get so out of control?” he said out loud as he maneuvered the old Chevy wagon through the group of houses near Routes 12 and 22 in Lake Zurich.

  But he knew exactly how his addiction started.

  He was prescribed one pill a day at bedtime so he could sleep, but a few years down the road, the urge to take more was too much to ignore. He went in search of illegal sources to supplement the 30 pills he got from Walgreens on the 15th of every month.

  It wasn’t difficult to find someone willing to help him out, either. Nor was the introduction to the Twitter-based Vike vine. There was an odd camaraderie among Vicodin addicts, and they tended to look out for one another. Naturally, it cost money to have this type of friendship, but he never went without the little, white, football-shaped pills for very long.

  His intense back and hip pain wasn’t the first symptom that he experienced.

  It started innocuously enough when his left big toe became numb eight years prior. Soon, his left leg up to the knee was pretty much feeling free. But the numbness, oddly enough, was coupled with pain - shooting nerve pain - the worst kind of pain in John’s opinion.

  It all soon intensified, becoming a buzzing and gnawing pain that was, most times, too much to endure. The numbness and pain soon migrated over to his right big toe, leg, both of his hands and part of his face. The back and hip pain kicked in soon after.

  There were bouts of disorienting vertigo, especially when he was vaulted into bright sunshine from a darkened building or the intense, humid heat of a summer day. He sort of lost track of the when and where of it all, but he finally went to a neurologist who, after intense testing over the course of a few years’ time, confirmed what John had suspected was going on all along.

  He had multiple sclerosis.

  He remembered the day the neurologist displayed the images of his brain and spine from his MRI. It looked as if someone had dipped a small brush into paint and splattered his brain and spinal column with little white dots. Multiple sclerosis translates to “many scars,” and John had them.

  His doctor had wanted to get John started on a regimen of injectable medications that could possibly help to slow down the progression of the disease, but John refused. He had done his homework and decided that the medications the doctor wanted him to take were hit-and-miss with their effectiveness. He would rather alleviate the pain and deal with the inevitable progression on his own terms.

  There was only one other person he knew, other than his doctor, that was aware of his diagnosis. But if others saw him stumbling or in pain, he’d make up a plausible excuse of a sore knee or something similar and go about his day. And really, he knew that no one would care if Sparky had an inflammatory disease or not.

  And so far, the MS hadn’t affected his robbery activities. Although his feet were now completely numb, he had conditioned himself to jog without injuring his ankles or feet. He could still pull off a quick burst of speed when needed, like at the French-named spa in Deer Park. But that burst would only last for about 50 yards until the lack of control would take over again.

  He also kept in shape by riding a recumbent bike that was set up in his basement and by watching his diet fairly closely (with the exception of the corned beef hash and eggs at Dink’s Diner). If need be, he was ready to take flight if things went to shit, maybe not at a full gallop, but at a brisk jog.

  He had actually absorbed what Amy was saying back at the Irish pub. Although it took a nap and a quick memory run-through right after waking up to remember it all.

  She had said that the house was located behind the grocery store and Italian beef place at Routes 12 and 22, but he was having no luck in locating it. Who was he kidding? It was a shot in the dark anyway. He didn’t know what kind of car she drove, and all the homes in the area looked nearly identical. Two stories tall, boxy, all painted either tan or slightly different shades of tan, with the two-car, attached garage on either the right or the left side of the property.

  “Hold on. She said her other house was off of Long Grove Road,” he said aloud as he pulled a U-turn and sped out of the neighborhood. “There are not as many homes over there...because they’re fricking huge.”

  CHAPTER 16

  When he placed his hand on her knee, she had instantly punched him in the jaw with a left jab, followed by an immediate right to the nose.

  As his portly 230 pounds tumbled to the floor, the startled customers and salespeople all looked their way, but Amy wasn’t embarrassed. She stood over him like Muhammad Ali ready to knock the son of a bitch out.

  “Is that what it takes to get a job here, Mr. James?” she said quite loudly as he tried to get to his feet. “I bet the customers would love to know how you treat perspective employees, huh?” she added in an even louder tone.

  Mr. James, a fat little shit, wiped blood from his left nostril and looked up at Amy with wild and frightened eyes. “You’ll need to leave,” he said.

  “No sir, I will not. Not until you apologize right here on the sales floor. Right here in front of all these people.”

  “Call the police!”

  “That’s a fantastic idea. I need to report a sexual assault,” she said.

  A couple who were right on the verge of purchasing a $75,000 BMW walked out of the dealership in a hurry; the salesman they were dealing with pulled at his own hair.

  “Please, just leave,” said Mr. James.

  But Amy didn’t move. She stood with her arms crossed over her chest – waiting.

  “Okay, all right. I’m sorry,” he said.

  “They can’t hear you.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m goddamned sorry! Okay?!”

  Amy gathered up her purse and headed for the door. She passed by a saleswoman who stood holding the door for her. The saleswoman and Amy locked eyes.

  “Thank you for doing that,” said the woman. “I’m right behind you,” she added.


  Amy nodded and exited the BMW dealership, walking back toward Balmoral’s main intersection.

  CHAPTER 17

  Sitting at the counter in the Athenian, he couldn’t help but notice the depressed mood of the owner, Jason. The short, stocky man had stationed himself in his office and was doing, well, nothing. The poor mope.

  He had completed some research on Jason and found out bits and pieces about his past in Greece. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Jason was some sort of mobster back in the old country. But he was clean as an American citizen. “People can change,” he thought, with a laugh. “Yeah, sure.”

  Enright was there trying to get a feel for what his prey, the Baby Face Robber, would know, see and hear as he pulled off his heists. And the pancakes here weren’t that bad, either.

  Of a secondary nature, if he could get a peek at his next quarry, Jason, that was all the better. By the looks of how brisk business was at this hour in the afternoon, Enright calculated an ask of $50,000 as a starting point to keep his son’s murderous activities quiet once the Baby Face Robber business was put to bed. This was a win-win excursion.

  He pushed his plate of half-eaten pancakes to the side and opened a 12 by 10-inch book of maps out on the counter. The page he studied was the portion of the Northwest Chicago suburbs where he sat at the moment.

  Little, hand-drawn X’s marked the spots of the known robberies. There were two robberies that the public wasn’t yet aware of, information he’d gotten from an old cop buddy in Buffalo Grove. Also the Lake Geneva robbery was believed, at this time, to be a copycat crime because it fell way outside the suburban Chicago pattern.