Fire Lake

by Jonathan Valin

  “I don’t like this game,” I said through my teeth.

  “Don’t be an asshole, Harry. Play along. I’ve got the bastard hooked.”

  I took a deep breath and nodded. But I was still gritting my teeth.

  Sonny came ambling up behind Karen. He pulled her back to him and ran his huge hands up the front of her blouse to her breasts, squeezing them tightly. Karen laughed, as if she were drunk. Glancing over her shoulder at me, Sonny said, “I hear you’re into threesomes.”

  “Is that what you heard?” I said coldly.

  Karen gave me a warning look. “Lighten up, Harry,” she said. “Sonny’s going to party with us.”

  Sonny gave me a long look. He had piggish eyes, and what I could see of his mouth through the curly black beard was red and wet. For a moment, I wondered whether he’d remember me—from Friday. But there wasn’t a hint of recognition on his stupid face. He was just staring hard at me because he liked to stare hard at strangers—because he was big enough to do it and to get away with it. I started to wonder why Jordan considered him a key witness. If Carter didn’t know me, and he didn’t seem to, then I had no idea whom or what he’d seen at that motel.

  Sonny kept staring at me coldly. “If you’re not man enough to handle this scene, maybe I’ll just take her off on my chopper.” He squeezed Karen’s breasts so hard, she winced. “This bitch is hot.”

  I forced my mouth into a smile. “I’m ready to party. Any time. Any place.”

  Sonny grinned and wiped his red, dripping mouth with the back of his hand. He said to Karen: “Let’s go back to my crib. Get naked. Do some bad things.” He turned her face to him roughly. “I got a video camera back there, baby, and a fourteen-inch dildo your ass will just love. We can make movies.”

  “I want to get high,” Karen said with a pout of her pouty lip.”

  “I told you,” Sonny said. “I can handle that too. I got a connection.”

  Karen got in the backseat and Sonny piled in behind her. The car shook when he got in, as if someone had dropped a boulder in the bed of a pickup truck.

  “Let’s go, boy,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Just a few blocks up the road. Miamiville Apartments.”

  “What about your chopper?”

  “It ain’t going anywhere. Let’s move.”

  I started the car up and pulled out onto Wooster Pike. It was only a couple of blocks to the apartment complex, like Sonny had said. Just the same, I didn’t dare look in the rearview mirror on the way.

  33

  CARTER’S PAD was on the third floor of one of those jerry-built apartment complexes that promise you wall-to-wall carpeting, equipped kitchens, balconies with a view, and air-conditioning—all for under two hundred dollars a month. What they are, are dry-walled rattraps, with Astroturf on the floor, a disposal bolted under the sink, a two-foot by four-foot balcony overlooking a highway, and an 8ooo-BTU air conditioner rattling in the wall.

  I followed Sonny from the parking lot to a concrete stairwell and then up to the third floor. He’d kept Karen with him, as if he’d taken possession of her for the night.

  When we got to the door of his apartment, he let her go for a moment. While he was fiddling with the locks, she gave me a sick look, as if to say, “What now?” It was clear that she was as tired of the game as I was. Plus she was getting frightened. It was party time, and Sonny wasn’t likely to waste much time on foreplay. He’d had foreplay in the backseat of the Pinto.

  Sonny unlocked the door, opened it, and grabbed for Karen’s arm.

  I pulled her over to me before he could get a grip. “Easy, Sonny,” I said with a smile. “Let’s take this slow.”

  He gave me a vicious look, “I don’t know if I want to party with you, boy. You’re too square.”

  He stared at Karen, cowering behind me. She was looking scared; she just couldn’t hide it anymore. And Sonny could see it. He wasn’t a smart man, but he was street smart. And Karen and I were beginning not to add up.

  “I don’t know if I want to party at all,” he said slowly.

  “I want to get high,” Karen squeaked, from behind my back.

  “We all want to get high, lady,” Sonny said.

  He stood in the doorway to his apartment—his hand on the knob—squinting at us for a long moment. “Uh-uh,” he finally said, looking directly at me, “you ain’t party material.”

  He turned his back to us and started to close the door.

  Before he could shut it completely, I braced my hands against the wall behind me, raised my right leg, and kicked Sonny in the small of the back—kicked him as hard as if I was trying to kick down the door itself. The kick hurt me as much as it did him, sending a fierce pain shooting up my spine. But it had its effect. Carter fell forward through the doorway with a thud, landing on his face—hands outstretched, arms outstretched, as if he were lost in the desert.

  In spite of the ache in my back, I followed him right through the doorway, pulling the Gold Cup from my coat pocket. After the way he’d pawed Karen, I wanted to hurt the son of a bitch. I wanted to castrate him.

  Luckily the only light in the room was coming from the hall, and it was illuminating the spot where he was kneeling. He couldn’t see me, but I could see him fine. He started to get to his knees, huffing and blowing like a walrus, and I cracked him on the temple with the gun barrel. The first shot just seemed to make him mad. He snarled and swung one of his huge arms out at me blindly. I wrapped both hands around the gun barrel and whipped the butt across his face like a baseball bat, breaking his nose. He spit out some blood, wobbled on his knees like a tenpin, then fell over on the carpet, in the middle of that square of light.

  I raised the gun a third time and Karen cried out, “No!”

  I turned toward her with a snarl of my own. “I’m going to kill the fucker,” I said.

  “That’s going to do us a lot of good, isn’t it?” she said.

  For a second I felt like hitting her. Karen could see it, too, and she took a step back toward the hall.

  “Harry?” she said in a frightened voice. “You’re scaring me.”

  “I hated that whole scene in the car,” I said fiercely. “I mean I hated it.”

  “You think I didn’t?” she said, staring at me with a shocked look on her face. “You’re the first man I’ve felt anything for in two years, you crazy bastard. Or do you think I was born to swing?”

  I felt my heart sink. “I couldn’t stand to see him touch you,” I said.

  “A lot of guys have touched me, Harry,” Karen said, giving me a softer look. “I thought you understood that.”

  “I guess I didn’t,” I said heavily.

  “Can you live with it?”

  I nodded.

  But she didn’t look convinced. “We’re pretty different, you and I. More different than I thought. I’m not the person you think I am, Harry. I’ve been around the block—more than once.”

  “It wasn’t you. It was him,” I said, staring at Carter’s bloated body. “I’m never going to let that happen to you again. I shouldn’t have gone along with it in the first place.”

  She shook her head. “My bodyguard, huh? You’re a square, you know that? And a chauvinist.”

  “So?” I said without apology.

  “So...I don’t know. Under the circumstances, I guess I can handle it, but with that attitude, I honestly don’t know how you ever survived the sixties.”

  Karen reached over and flipped on a wall switch. A lamp on a table by the door came on, lighting up the tiny living room. It was just what you would have expected from a guy like Sonny. A velvet hanging of a naked siren above a black plastic sofa. A pine end table littered with beer cans and brimming ashtrays. A couple of cardboard boxes full of oily motorcycle parts. A video camera set up by a dilapidated color TV. The room smelled equally of cigarettes, beer, and forty-weight.

  Carter groaned dully and moved his head. It would take him a while to come around, and I wanted t
o be prepared.

  “See if you can find something to tie him up with,” I said to Karen.

  The living room opened onto a tiny kitchen, just an alcove, really. Karen shut the front door and walked into the kitchen. She flipped on a light and went through several drawers.

  “There isn’t any rope in here,” she said.

  I glanced at the boxes of motorcycle parts and said, “We can use the chains.”

  I flipped Sonny over on his stomach and pulled an oily bike chain from the box. I managed to loop it around each of his arms, loop it through itself, then bring it back and loop it around each of his legs. The chain wouldn’t have held him if he had had all his strength. But with a busted nose and a concussion, he wasn’t going anywhere.

  While I was hog-tying Sonny, Karen searched his bedroom, looking for crack. I knew that she’d found something when she made a little whooping noise. She came striding into the living room with a tube filled with rocks in her hand. It looked like the same stuff that Bo had dropped in my living room. Presumably the same stuff that Lonnie had lost at the motel.

  She handed the tube to me.

  “Was there any more in there?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “That was all I could find.”

  I stared at the tube. There were about twenty rocks in it. A couple hundred dollars’ worth. Not enough to get anybody killed.

  “Maybe I better take a look,” I said, walking toward the bedroom. “You keep an eye on him.”

  I searched the bedroom for about ten minutes, turning over everything I could find. Twice. There wasn’t much to turn—a mattress and a box spring. A beaten oak dresser. A couple more boxes of bike parts in the closet. And a few pieces of clothing. When I couldn’t find anything in the bedroom, I tried the kitchen. And then the living room itself. All to no end. If Sonny had the crack, he didn’t have it in his apartment.

  I was just sorting through the last box of bike parts, when he came around.

  “Harry!” Karen called out.

  I got up and walked over to where Sonny was lying facedown on the rug, his arms and legs chained behind him. I knelt next to him, took out the pistol, and pressed the barrel against the back of his head.

  “You know what that is, Sonny?” I said to him.

  He nodded weakly.

  “Now you’re going to answer a few questions,” I said. “If you don’t answer them, I’m going to kill you. It’s that simple. No second tries. I’m just going to blow the back of your head off. You understand?”

  He nodded again. “Yeah,” he said groggily.

  “Where’s the rest of the crack?”

  “What?” He started to cough and hack. “I gotta get a doctor, man. You broke my nose. And my bridge. You broke my bridge, man.”

  “The crack,” I said again.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” he shouted. “What crack?”

  “The crack you took off that guy at the motel on Thursday night.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. I tapped his skull with the gun barrel and he flinched, rattling the chains.

  “I didn’t take him off,” he said in a frightened voice. “I swear to God I didn’t.”

  “I don’t believe you.” I cocked the piece, pulling back the slide and letting it snap forward noisily.

  “Christ, don’t kill me!” Sonny cried out. “I’m telling you I didn’t take him off. Jenkins did. All I done was beat him up. All I got out of it was a few rocks, man. That’s all. A few lousy rocks.” He started to cough again, then to sob hoarsely. “Please. You gotta believe me, man. Jenkins come over to me at the bar and said he wanted to take this guy off. I was supposed to rough him up a little while he and his buddy did the job. That’s all I did—rough him up.”

  “What buddy?” I said.

  “That guy, man,” Carter said. “That guy Claude hung around with. That’s how Jenkins knew about the crack. That guy told him, man. He told him it would be going down.”

  “A black guy?” I said, thinking of Norvelle.

  “No, man. A white dude. What the fucks his name? A mean fucker. Does a lot of coke.”

  I glanced at Karen. “Cal?” I said.

  Sonny nodded. “That’s it. That’s the one.”

  I stood up.

  “You ain’t going to shoot me, are you?” Carter said in a pleading voice. “I told you what I know, man.”

  “What about the night of the murder?” I said.

  “What about it?”

  “You told the cops you saw someone.”

  “Bullshit!” Sonny said. “I told the cops what I just told you. About how that guy got ripped off by Jenkins. I don’t know nothing about no murder.” He rattled the chains again. “Let me loose, man. I gotta call a doctor.”

  “Let’s go,” I said to Karen.

  “What about him?” She stared at Sonny with disgust.

  “He’ll work himself loose in an hour or so. Or one of the neighbors will hear him bellowing.”

  We started for the door.

  “Let me loose, man,” Carter called out.

  Karen and I walked out the door, locking it behind us. For a good way down the hall, we could still hear him hollering to be let loose.

  34

  IT WAS close to eleven when Karen drove us out of the Miamiville Apartments’ lot. I let her do the driving because my back was killing me. In fact, after the fight with Sonny, all my bruises had begun to ache. I barely made it out to the Pinto. As soon as we turned onto Wooster Pike, I swallowed two painkillers and a muscle relaxant, washing them down with the watery remains of a McDonald’s Coke. I told Karen to head straight for the Delores—for our rendezvous with LeRoi.

  If we’d had more time and I’d been in better shape physically, I might first have tried to check out what Sonny had told me. But checking out Carter’s story meant a confrontation with Cal—a violent one. And the way I felt physically, I just wasn’t up to taking Cal on. Besides, I figured that once I’d told LeRoi what Sonny had told us, taking on Cal would no longer be my problem. All I’d have to worry about was Jordan. And if Sonny Carter was Jordan’s only ammunition, a grand jury would never indict me. Without an eyewitness, all he had on me was circumstantial evidence.

  The highway was deserted between Miamiville and Fairfax, and for a while the only sound on the road was the tires singing in the snow. As we raced down Wooster Pike, I stared out the windshield at the snowflakes blowing toward us and thought of that Friday morning, three days before, when I’d driven that same stretch of road through the ice storm—not knowing what I was going to find, not really sure I wanted to know.

  Poor Lonnie. He’d really let himself get screwed this time. Desperate to make up for all those years lost to drugs and prison and schemes that had gone nowhere, he had been an easy mark for Cal and Claude Jenkins. For all I knew, Norvelle had been part of it too. Lonnie’s old friend from the sixties. Apparently, old friendship didn’t count for much in the eighties—not with that crew.

  After his visit to Sy Levy, Lonnie had probably gotten together with Norvelle at the Cross Lane house, on Wednesday afternoon—a couple of old dopers, sharing a pipe or a fit. A communal ritual, right out of the wild old days. Only it wasn’t the old days anymore. Norvelle must have introduced Lonnie to his roommate, Cal. And Cal, who knew a desperate man when he saw one, could have sized things up quickly and formulated his plan over a little base or smack. All Lonnie would have to do to score quick and big was act as a mule, a role he’d played dozens of times before. Just transport some crack to this motel that Cal knew about and make the trade with the bikers.

  I wasn’t sure how Lonnie had managed to talk LeRoi into fronting him the lady without a down payment. Perhaps he’d done business with LeRoi before, back in the sixties or seventies. Perhaps Norvelle had vouched for him. More likely, Lonnie had promised LeRoi a bigger cut of the pie if he fronted him the dope to sell to the bikers. Ghetto blacks and redneck bikers don’t mix—at least they don’
t in Cincinnati. So it wasn’t the sort of deal that LeRoi could have managed on his own; and, if Lonnie had made it seem big enough, LeRoi might have gone along with him for the vig.

  Once Cal had manipulated Lonnie into getting the crack and going to the motel, the rest had been child’s play: he’d paid Carter off to knock Lonnie cold; and while Lonnie was out, Cal and Jenkins took him off for the crack. When Lonnie woke up, he discovered the bad news—that he’d been robbed of the lady and of his one last chance to make it to Fire Lake.

  Neither Cal nor Jenkins had counted on Lonnie’s trying to kill himself after that. The suicide attempt had been the only wrinkle in their scam, because if Lonnie had succeeded in committing suicide, there would have been no patsy to take the fall with LeRoi. Cal and Jenkins needed Lonnie alive. That was why Jenkins had ministered to him in that little storeroom. That was why Claude had solicited my help—to get Lonnie away from the motel and out of his life. That was why I had ended up a fall guy too.

  “Sorry, Harry.” I wondered if Lonnie had known, when he’d written that, how sorry both he and I were going to be.

  ******

  Karen had just turned onto McMillan, when the painkillers kicked in. Worn down as I was, they hit me hard, and for a few minutes I felt as if I was just coming off an all-night drunk. I must have started singing to myself, because Karen glanced over at me with a smile and patted me on the leg.

  “You okay, there, tough guy?” she said affectionately.

  “Never better.” I started to laugh. “The most important meeting of my life, and I’m not going to be there.”

  “I’ll be there,” Karen said, reassuringly.

  “There could be trouble,” I said, almost gleefully.

  “Everywhere you go, there’s trouble,” Karen said. “I’m used to it. Besides, after what that creep Sonny told us, LeRoi should lay off.”

  I nodded. “He should. He certainly should.”

  “I’m going to get you some coffee,” Karen said, pulling into the White Castle on Reading. It was just eleven-thirty, and we were exactly one block from home. So I didn’t put up a fuss.