Fire Lake

by Jonathan Valin

  I sat there for a few minutes, staring at the graffiti on the wall: naked women with huge breasts and ash marks, where cigarettes had been stubbed out, for vaginas; a dagger with the slogan “Born to lose” bannered above it; a motorcycle wheel pouring smoke; a skull. A couple of the other inmates walked past the cell and tried to bum cigarettes from me. I didn’t even have to ignore them. My mind, my whole being, was centered on one thing. It wasn’t long in coming.

  About five minutes after Lewis had booked me, I heard the jailer call out my name. I fitted the toilet-paper mouthpiece around my teeth, stepped out of the cell, and walked slowly up to the holding-tank bars. Just a little piece of me was hoping that it was Laurel and her photographer. The rest knew better. And the rest was right.

  I could see Jordan plainly as I rounded the cellblock. He smiled at me as I walked toward him, crooking a finger and making a come-hither gesture. The jailer opened the barred doors and I walked out. A desk sergeant came out of the jailer’s cage and cuffed my hands behind me, while Jordan looked on.

  “We’ve got some unfinished business, Harry,” Jordan said, giving me his graveyard stare.

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want him to see the mouthpiece I’d fashioned from the tissue.

  Jordan grabbed my arm and pulled me toward an elevator. I looked around to see if his partner was coming with us. But Lewis wasn’t there, and the desk sergeant had already returned to his cage. It was just Jordan and I. Just the way he wanted it.

  ******

  He took me down to the sub-basement. There were a couple of unused cells down there—dark, empty holes lit by hanging lamps and full of old, dusty office furniture. Jordan pushed me into a cell that was filled with ancient wooden chairs. He pulled one of the chairs from a pile and plunked it down in the middle of the room.

  “Sit down,” he said casually.

  I sat on the chair and watched Jordan as he took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. “You shouldn’t have sucker-punched me, Harry,” he said, turning to me with a pleasant smile on his mouth. There was a half-dollar-size bruise on his chin where I’d clipped him. The rest of his face was as dead as his eyes.

  Jordan stared at me for a long moment, then reached behind him and pulled a four-ounce leaded sap from his back pocket. He slapped it against his palm. It made a full, rich sound in his hand, as if he’d slapped a loaf of fresh dough.

  “I’m going to give you a good beating, Harry,” he said. “Then we’re going to talk about the crack. Okay?”

  He looked at me as if he expected me to agree with him.

  Jordan started toward me, waving the sap in his fist. As soon as he got close, I kicked at him. But Jordan was prepared for me this time. He juked to his right and brought the sap down hard against my upraised leg. It caught me on the left shin.

  The pain was excruciating. I doubled over on the chair; and he brought the sap down even harder—on my spine. I snapped upright, throwing myself backward with so much force that I cracked the back of the chair and went sprawling onto the floor—my legs still crooked over the broken chair seat.

  “Get up!” Jordan roared, yanking me to my feet by my shirtfront and throwing me against the bars of the cell.

  I kicked at him again, with my right leg, missing badly. He countered by driving the sap deep into my belly. I doubled over again and sank to my knees with a groan. My face turned red and sweat poured out of me. I could feel it running down my cheeks, down my arms, as if I’d been doused with water.

  Jordan stood over me for a moment, breathing hard.

  “Tell me how you’re connected, Harry,” he said. “Save yourself some pain.”

  I looked up at him from where I was kneeling. The pain in my gut was intense. But I could feel the indignity just as intensely. My face started to burn with shame. The toilet tissue had turned to mush in my mouth. I spit some of it out on the floor, started choking on some more of it, and then vomited up the rest.

  “You better kill me, fucker,” I said between heaves.

  For the first time, Jordan smiled at me with genuine amusement. It lit up his whole face, even his dead eyes. “I think I can manage that,” he said.

  He raised the sap over his head and slammed it across my right arm at the shoulder. I shrieked and Jordan barked with laughter. My right arm went numb, all the way to the fingertips.

  “Did that hurt?” he said, pressing the sap against the bruise.

  I shrieked again and writhed against the bars behind me.

  He slapped me with the sap a few more times—little stinging snaps on my chest and thighs. He wasn’t using all his strength, like he had on my shin, my back, my shoulder, and my gut. But the blows still hurt. And after a half dozen or so of them, the pain began to accumulate.

  I started dreading the next slap, flinching before he hit me, as if I were being whipped. I knew he was setting me up for another big one. And I told myself to save my strength for what was ahead. But each time he flicked that piece of lead against me, I lost a little more willpower and cowered a little more openly against the bars.

  “Enough fooling around,” Jordan said, when he’d gotten me good and scared. “This time, we go for the head.” He dangled the sap in my face. “Give you a walleye and a drool for the rest of your life.” He lifted the sap above his head, and I felt something inside me just give out.

  “Don’t!” I screamed.

  “What was that?” Jordan said, pressing his face close to mine.

  “Don’t!” I said, begging him. “Please, Christ, don’t!”

  “That’s a little better,” he said, backing away with a satisfied look. He slapped the sap against the bars of the cell. They rang like a bell and I cringed. “You going to tell me about your connection now, Harry?”

  I nodded weakly.

  “I can’t hear you,” Jordan said.

  “Yes!” I shouted. Yes, yes.

  “All right,” Jordan said with satisfaction. He smiled at me, almost paternally. “No hard feelings, Harry. That’s the way it’s done. You remember, don’t you?”

  He lifted me up to my feet and brushed some of the dust from my jacket. I could barely stand on my ankle; my back hurt up and down the spine; my right arm was useless; and the pain in my gut was like a knife wound.

  “You think you can make it upstairs, tough guy?” Jordan said.

  I leaned against the bars, unable to speak, barely able to stand.

  “Just remember, Harry,” Jordan said, poking me gently with the sap. “If I don’t hear what I want to hear when we get up to the interrogation room, we’re coming right back down here. We haven’t even begun to party yet.”

  18

  JORDAN LEFT me in the holding tank while he arranged for an interrogation room and a stenographer. I barely made it into one of the little cells. I collapsed on the steel cot and lay there for what seemed like an hour, smelling the stink of my own fear and humiliation. I’d been unmanned before. In the war and afterward. It had happened. But even though I’d come close in the past, it had never actually happened at the hands of a cop, in the basement of a police station. The pain would go away. I knew that. I could live with the pain. What I couldn’t live with was the way the pain had made me behave.

  I wanted to kill Jordan for what he’d done to me. I wanted to kill him more than I’d ever wanted anything else in my life. And then I wanted to kill Lonnie. For the shame he’d brought down on my head, for the shit I’d had to eat to protect him. I’d had to grovel in front of an enemy. I’d almost been killed earlier that day by another enemy. And on both occasions, I was the wrong goddamn man! The injustice of it plagued me almost as much as the beating I’d taken.

  Jordan hadn’t been wrong. I was connected, all right—to an absurd, dangerous idea, to a fellowship out of the sixties that had been ambiguous to begin with and was now turning lethal. What killed me was that I’d brought part of it on myself. I hadn’t just been victimized by Lonnie. I’d been victimized by my own need for...what? For something
better than what I had now, I guessed, for what Karen and I had briefly shared. For that feeling of connection itself.

  I tried not to think about Karen. I just hoped she’d taken a plane back to St. Louis. There was nothing I could do for her from jail.

  ******

  I sat in the cell for a long time. It was an even longer time before it dawned on me that Jordan hadn’t come back. I’d been more than ready to talk in that deserted sub-basement. I’d been almost eager to betray Lonnie when I’d first been brought back up to the holding tank. But as the minutes went by, my resolve faded in and out. I started telling myself things—stupid things, like, “I’ll be goddamned if I let that son of a bitch break me down.” I’d say it, then I’d start feeling the pain in my ankle or in my back. And that would cool me off.

  I really didn’t know what I was actually going to do or say, right up until the moment when the jailer called my name again. Even though my shin was swollen like a balloon, I got to my feet and hobbled up to the bars. To my surprise, Laurel Gould was standing there, with Al Foster standing behind her. Jordan was nowhere to be seen.

  Laurel looked as if she’d had a very long day. Always immaculately dressed in a business suit and white silk blouse, she was as raw and wrinkled as I’d ever seen her. Her pretty, careworn face turned purple with rage when she spotted me. I was a gruesome sight—hobbling on one leg, my back bent, my shoulder hunched, dried vomit all over my shirtfront. Laurel turned to Foster with a snarl and said, “You bastards!”

  “Easy, Laurel,” Al said. “Remember our agreement.”

  “That was before I’d seen what you did to him,” she shouted.

  “I didn’t do anything to him,” Al snapped. He gave me a concerned look. “Are you all right?”

  I laughed. “How do I look to you, Al? All right?”

  Foster’s long, solemn face went blank. He’d seen what Jordan had done, but he hadn’t seen it. He couldn’t afford to look too closely.

  “I need to talk to you, Harry,” he said. He gave the jailer a quick, angry look and said, “Let him out, for chrissake!”

  The jailer opened the door and I hobbled into the anteroom.

  Al looked down at the floor—to keep from looking at me. “All charges against you are being dropped,” he said. “In return, you’re going to agree not to press charges against Jordan.”

  “Who says that, Al?” I said through my teeth.

  “Your lawyer and I came to an agreement.”

  I glanced at Laurel. She sighed and nodded.

  “So we all forgive and forget, is that it?” I said to Al.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Where’s Jordan?” I said.

  Al shook his head. “Just let it alone, Harry.”

  “Sure, Al.” I brushed past him, took Laurel by the arm, and walked out of the station house.

  Outside it was fully night—cold, blue-black, filled with wintry stars. After several hours in the overheated jail, I felt the icy air like cold rain on my face. I shivered beneath my topcoat and wrenched my back.

  “He did all he could for you, Harry,” Laurel said, coming up beside me.

  “Foster?”

  She nodded. “There was really nothing I could have done without his help. Jordan had listed you as being transferred to the Justice Center. I didn’t know you were actually still here, until Al stepped in.” She smiled wearily. “I tried to find you, though. Believe me, I tried.”

  “I believe you, Laurel.”

  “You better go to the hospital, don’t you think?”

  I nodded. “I guess I should.”

  “I’ll take you,” she said. “My car is right across the street.”

  We walked over to her BMW. It was parked beneath a fluted black gaslight. There was a police cruiser parked in front of the BMW. I glanced into the cruiser as we passed it, half expecting to see Jordan inside. But the cruiser was deserted.

  Laurel gave me an anxious look. “Al was right, Harry,” she said nervously. “You’ve got to put this behind you. You’re never going to be able to touch Jordan, legally. And if you lose your temper...nobody’s going to be able to get you out a second time.”

  “Let me worry about that,” I said sharply.

  “You don’t know all of it,” she said. “Al really had to push to get you out at all. Jordan is trying to connect you to a murder in Miamiville.”

  I shivered again and winced. “How?” I said uneasily.

  “Apparently your name was found on the register at a motel where a murder was committed. Jordan is trying to make a case that the murder was done over drugs. I’m not supposed to know this, but apparently they found some crack on the scene. The same batch that they found in your apartment.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Al and I know you’re not involved in this. But Jordan isn’t convinced. As far as he’s concerned, you’re still the main suspect in the murder.” Laurel shook her head ruefully. “You shouldn’t have punched him, Harry.”

  “I should have killed him,” I said grimly.

  It took me a full minute to get into Laurel’s car. As I settled down gingerly on the seat, I said, “Do you mind making one stop before we go to the hospital?”

  She shrugged. “It’s your body.”

  “Let’s stop at the Clarion, then. I want to check on a friend.”

  She started the car up, drove onto Central and circled back to Plum. We followed Plum down to Fifth. Even though it was Saturday night, the streets were deserted. The cold had kept everyone inside.

  Laurel parked in front of the Clarion. I worked my way out of the car and into the lobby. Several couples in evening clothes stared after me with horror. I pulled my topcoat tightly over my grimy shirt and went up to the front desk.

  The night clerk eyed me with distaste, as if I were a dog running loose in the lobby.

  “I want to know if someone checked out,” I said.

  “Who?” he said disdainfully, as if he could scarcely credit the idea that someone who looked like me could have a friend who stayed at his hotel.

  “Her name is Karen Jackowski.” I gave him Karen’s room number.

  He flipped through an index on his desk and said, “She checked out at five forty-five this afternoon.”

  He glared at me as if I were the reason why.

  Feeling relieved, I hobbled back out to the car. Karen had shown good sense, after all. I figured she wouldn’t have checked out unless she was leaving town. If she’d caught an evening flight, she was already back in St. Louis, with her kids. And that was where I wanted her to be—out of harm’s way. Because, like it or not, I knew I was still going to have to deal with Bo and his friends. They weren’t just going to forget about me or Lonnie or the cocaine. They’d keep coming back, until they got what they wanted or until Lonnie and I were dead. So would Jordan. He was like a pit bull. Once he got his teeth in, he’d never let go. I was going to have to run Lonnie down before Bo or the cops got to him. I was going to have to find out what had really happened to the cocaine. Then, somehow, I was going to have to make things right with Bo’s boss, even if I had to feed Lonnie to him in the bargain. Jordan was a different question. He’d have to be dealt with too. I didn’t know exactly how, although I knew what I wanted to do to him.

  One thing was certain, I was tired of being taken for someone else. And I was deadly tired of being a friend to Lonnie Jack.

  19

  LAUREL DROVE me to University Hospital on Goodman Street. She wanted to stay with me in the examination room, but it was a busy night at the hospital and I knew I was in for a long wait. I told her to go home.

  “Is there anything you want to tell me?” she said, giving me her lawyer’s clear-eyed look.

  I thought about it for a moment. “Not now.”

  “You’re sure?”

  I said that I was sure.

  She patted me on the shoulder and stood up. “I’ll call you tomorrow, in case you change your mind.”

  She walked
out of the examination room, leaving me alone.

  ******

  It took me over three hours to get X-rayed and examined. Either I’d been lucky or Jordan had been more skillful than I’d thought, because nothing was broken. The intern wrapped my ankle in an Ace bandage, drained the bruise on my shoulder, gave me a steroid shot for my backache, and a bottle of muscle relaxants and painkillers to get me through the night.

  I stared at the bottle of painkillers and asked, “Am I going to be mobile tomorrow?”

  The intern smiled. “It depends on what you mean by mobile. You’ll be able to move, but don’t count on doing any lifting, running, or fast walking. In fact, if it’s at all possible, you should stay in bed for a few days.”

  “It’s not possible,” I said.

  “Then keep taking those muscle relaxants and the codeine.”

  I thanked him, picked up my coat, and hobbled out of the examination room. The muscle relaxant made me feel as if I’d been working out—loose-limbed, buoyant. But the feeling was illusory. If I stepped the wrong way or made any sudden turns, a sharp pain shot up my leg and through my spine like a jolt of electric current. Even with the codeine, the pain was bad enough to make me catch my breath.

  I called a cab from the emergency room lobby and had it take me back to the Delores. I didn’t really want to go home, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go on a dismal December night. Besides, I didn’t feel like wandering around unarmed, and I’d left the Gold Cup in the bedroom when I’d changed clothes.

  The cabbie let me out in front of the Delores’s courtyard. After I paid the fare, I stood on the sidewalk for a long time, watching the cab’s red taillights disappearing down Reading Road, as if I were bidding adieu to a friend. There wasn’t another car on the street and just the faintest glow from the traffic lights on Reading, flashing in the bare branches of the maples like Christmas tree ornaments. It started to rain as I stood there on the sidewalk, a cold drizzle mixed with flakes of snow. When the rain started to come down harder, I turned away from the street and stared at the apartment house. It was so quiet in the courtyard that I could actually hear the rain falling, a shushing noise like silk rubbed against silk. All told, I don’t think I’d ever felt more lonely in my life.