The Complete Matt Jacob Series

by Klein, Zachary;

  My gun hand trembled. “I’m glad about Collins and the Never Agains, but someone has to pay for Dov and Kelly. Someone has to pay for the nightmare you’ve put people through.” My voice quivered and I blinked rapidly to clear my vision.

  “Whose nightmare are you talking about, Matthew, yours?” Deirdre asked sarcastically. “Go home to your friends, go back to being a private detective. It’s the right job for someone who sees the world split between good and evil, right and wrong.”

  I cocked the hammer of my gun, the tiny click booming like a thunderclap. “Move away from your chair, Deirdre.”

  She stood where she was. “We look at the same world through different lenses, Matthew. I didn’t use my gun on you because I had no reason. You aren’t going to use yours because it would place you on the wrong side of your dividing line. Two different pairs of eyes, two different sets of lenses, but the same conclusion. Says something about life, doesn’t it?”

  Deirdre scowled. “It’s time for you to leave, Matthew Jacob, time for you to go back to your safe, American world.”

  My teeth clenched and a newer wave of cold sweat bathed my body. I closed my eyes, exhaled, and shut down my one-man army. With shaking hands I stuffed my gun back into its holster, nodded silently, grimly, and shuffled out of the apartment.

  Deirdre’s laughter cascaded around my ears as I closed the door. I heard her laughter while I walked down her steps, crossed the porch, trudged back to my car. I heard her laughter while I hit the ignition and stomped the accelerator. When I continued to hear it a block or two away I swerved into the nearest parking spot and killed the engine. I was afraid it would never go away.

  I put my back up against the door, stretched my legs across the seat, and lit a cigarette. The laughter didn’t entirely disappear but my trembling was easing. I leaned against the window glass and watched a montage of faces and listened to snatches of conversations replay in my head. Yakov’s gawky body; Collins’s slick, hearty handshake; Cheryl’s casts; Blue spitting blood. Too many had been bruised, broken, or left dead on the altars of belief. Deirdre’s, Never Agains’, Blue’s, Collins’s, Yonah’s.

  Maybe my own. There was a finer line than I had imagined between victim and victimizer.

  I turned my head and stared at the lighted houses on the pleasant residential street. This one square mile had been a converging point for disparate fears, a battlefield for divergent ideologies. Blind to the suffering, inured to the cost, their invisible presence left lifeless bodies, shattered lives.

  I pushed the spent cigarette into the ashtray and lit another. I’d wanted to stop Deirdre from finding another neighborhood, town, city, country, to work her ugly magic, leave her trace.

  But I hadn’t uncocked the hammer with my left finger. Hadn’t been willing to keep her from her appointed rounds. It wasn’t fear or self-preservation that stopped me. I just wasn’t willing to be another walking ideology blinded by commitment to my own dubious vision of right and wrong. The gun was stuffed back into my holster because there weren’t enough bullets to stop Deirdre, to stop whoever followed her, and whoever came after that. There were never enough bullets. History swore to that.

  Simon had asked if I was tired of living without belief. His question had recalled the sixties when belief had been my food, when a vision of a new age had consumed my life. But right now, with Deirdre’s mocking laughter only an echo, I was relieved. I had no higher guide or guideline dictating where to go, what to do, who to be. Without any organized belief I had to find out for myself. And right now, I liked that. Deirdre wasn’t the last one standing.

  I swung my legs off the seat, stubbed the cigarette, and thought about home. Then I heard my stomach growl with hunger and saw my grin in the rearview mirror. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want the couch, the television, the stash, or the Wild Turkey.

  I started the car and pulled into the street, smile still in place. Right now I wanted more of Mrs. Hampton’s, Charlene’s, home-made ham.

  To Susan Goodman whose faith in me has withstood the test of time. Life without you would be no life at all.

  And a special dedication to my cousin Hank Ashen; his life was a reminder that refusing to risk is refusing to really live. I miss you.

  Finally I’d like to acknowledge Sherri Frank whose time, help, and support were instrumental in the writing of this book. Thank you.

  Lovemaking had slammed my ass to sleep. A good sleep, deep enough that I hadn’t heard the ring of Boots’s cell phone, not so deep that I couldn’t feel her body crawl across my own. I lifted my hands to stroke her buttocks, grew confused when she twisted out of reach, then dimly understood when she grabbed the phone. Still, I turned to hide my disappointment. A disappointment that instantly disappeared when she poked me with the cell.

  “It’s Lou,” she said, worry flooding her hazel eyes and smooth face. “And he sounds serious.”

  I couldn’t ignore the belly-dread. Lou was my dead wife’s father, the money-half of our partnership in two attached six-flats we both called home. It was much too late for the call to be about the buildings.

  “Why didn’t he call my phone?”

  “He knows you keep it off—now take the damn thing!”

  “Lou? Are you all right?” I stared blankly as Boots swung out of bed and bent her lean, limber body to pull on a pair of thigh-high jeans while I tried to push the image of Mrs. S.’s funeral out of my head.

  “I’m fine,” Lou wheezed. “I hate to bother you this time of night, but I need a mitzvah.”

  I closed my eyes with relief and didn’t notice Boots trying to get my attention until she tugged my arm. “Is Lou okay?” she whispered. “He called me Boots, not Shoes.”

  I raised my eyebrows and shrugged.

  “Matty,” Lou continued anxiously, “Lauren’s son is on the other telephone line bleeding from knife wounds. She’ll keep him on the telephone until you pick him up and bring him to the hospital.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “I’ll explain, but please, first will you do what I asked?”

  I shook my head in bewilderment. “Okay.You know where he is?”

  “At a bar in The Plain. Jimmy’s on Washington, near Forest Hills Station. The boy says he’s standing in an old fashioned phone booth, one with a door.”

  I hadn’t thought any of those were left in our new digital age. “Lou, an ambulance makes more sense.”

  “Sense doesn’t matter here, the kid won’t deal with anyone in a uniform. You can understand that. And you’ll have to bring him to Beth Israel. He won’t go anywhere else.”

  “Why doesn’t his mother pick him up?”

  “We’re at Lauren’s house on the North Shore. It will take too long to get there.”

  “He’ll come with me?” I took one of the lit cigarettes Boots was holding and dragged deeply, my initial fear and Forest Hills’s cemetery receding into nervous apprehension.

  “Lauren promises by the time you get there she’ll have him ready and willing.” He paused then added proudly, “She’s not wrong about much, boychick, she won’t be wrong about this. Anyway, you look shaggy enough for him to trust.”

  His tone troubled me more than the words. “Lou, if the kid was stabbed someone has to call the cops.”

  There was a momentary pause. “Matty, he did this to himself.”

  After a long moment I quietly asked again, “Who are these people?”

  This time it was the words, not his tone, that got to me.

  “He called her his ‘squeeze,’” I said, wrestling into my pants. “What the fuck is he talking about?”

  Boots sat cross-legged on the bed, her back pressed against the modern metal headboard. By now she was wearing a beige tank top that left a strip of her flat, tan stomach exposed. “Squeeze means girlfriend. You’re not that out of touch.”

  “I know the definition, smart-ass. Only Lou’s never mentioned a girlfriend. I’ve never even heard of this lady.”

&n
bsp; “You keep calling her ‘this lady.’ She has a name, doesn’t she?”

  I stopped tying my sneaks and glanced up. “Lauren. Her name is Lauren. Where’s the dope?”

  Boots frowned, raising slight ridges on her forehead. “You’ve been pretty good, Matt. Why not wait until you get back?”

  “I don’t know if I’m coming back. I might have to take Lou home or something.”

  “You don’t have weed at your apartment?”

  I returned her smile with a quick, worried grin of my own. “Then light me another cigarette, okay?”

  The ride across town was a smooth sail—no post 9/11 twenty-four, seven patrol cars, detours, or potholes..—Other than the cops, much like the past years. Boots and I met after Chana, my wife, and Rebecca, my daughter died; a period in my life when I could barely collect rent in the building Lou had bought just to keep me busy and out of trouble. Though depression wasn’t Boots’s vice, during those years she had her own form of protection—Hal. Old enough to be her father, vaguely married, always on time. Therapy and years had eased some of my gloom, and Boots had long since shed Hal. Now things were going so well that, for the first time in what seemed like forever, I’d been thinking our longtime, on again, off again relationship was gonna keep. Neither of us was direct, but lately conversations were sprinkled with veiled references and humorous quips about our stability.

  And I’d still managed to tamp down my drug use, though it cost me a small fortune for cigarettes. Who’d a thunk I’d been able to become somewhat straight—though very somewhat. From the jump I didn’t do intimate alliances all that well, and the closer they veered into “family,” the further I usually leaped in the opposite direction.

  No real surprise. The only fond memories from my own original family were stories about my grandfather’s rabid love affair with baseball. How he’d sit in the darkened front room smoking his pipe, head cocked toward his tubed radio inning after inning, game after game.

  Hell, I was even a little like him. I collected old-fashioned Bakelite radios and followed baseball. But I usually sat across from a television and filled my pipe with marijuana. Tobacco I bought pre-rolled.

  Lou was the nearest thing to family since the accident. We’d always liked each other, our relationship bound by mutual love for Chana, my second wife. But our friendship hadn’t blossomed until the death of his wife Martha, his move to the building from Chicago, and a serious boundary war which ended after Mrs. S.’s surprise death. She’d been Lou’s closest friend in town and though almost a year had passed, I thought he was still mourning. I guess I was wrong. So here I was, hard into the night, driving to some godforsaken gin mill to fetch a failed suicide—a failed suicide who was talking on the phone with his mother. My father-in-law’s secret squeeze.

  Lou said the bar was close to Forest Hill Station, but it wasn’t close enough. When the city moved the overhead El ten blocks north into a neatly coifed, middle class trench, it promised the working people, working people who now had to trudge an extra ten blocks, they would dismantle the useless metal girders that kept Washington Street in perpetual dusk. The Pols also promised an end-to-end refurbishing of the dilapidated buildings that lined much of the boulevard. They did remove the hulking overhead, but only partially kept the rest of their rehabilitation promise; the half that gentrified in the frenzied speculation that follows any large urban development project.

  I was cruising the city’s unkempt half looking for Jimmy’s among carwashes, warehouses, and the Transit Authority’s bus barn. It took two passes before I finally spotted the hole-in-the-wall tavern nestled on a small side street. Somehow, I didn’t think the bar attracted too many first-timers.

  My hunch was confirmed when I opened the door, caught a couple of quick looks from the human barstools, then was immediately ignored as soon as it became apparent I wasn’t a member of the tribe. I had wondered how the kid had gotten to a telephone booth without attracting attention. Now I knew; if you weren’t a regular you weren’t there.

  It took a couple of seconds to see through the smoke filled haze, a couple more to fight a sharp urge for a double Wild Turkey when the heartwarming smell of booze and tobacco hit my nose. Then I reminded myself there wasn’t a chance in hell the joint served my beast. No matter what the label promised. Whoever owned this dump was paying serious scratch to let the barstools light up wasn’t gonna serve the real deal.

  I don’t know what I expected when I pulled on the flimsy, folding telephone door, but it wasn’t the well-built long-hair wearing a blood soaked karate outfit and open-toe sandals. His age also threw me. I’d imagined Lou’s “kid” as a sixteen year old. This robed Schwarzenegger was in his late twenties..

  He looked at me with zonked-out eyes and tried to close the door with trembling fingers, but I kept my foot flush to the cheap slatted wood. The receiver dangled at the end of its coiled metal cord and I heard a woman’s firm, controlled, “Ian, Ian, are you still there? Stay with me, Ian!”

  I reached past the swaying Ian and grabbed the phone. “This is Matt Jacob. Your son is conscious, but he’s in pretty bad shape. There’s a lot of blood on his... his...”

  “Gi, the robe he wears,” the woman interrupted impatiently. “Could you see if the knife is in his stomach? He told me he threw it away, but I’m not sure he really knows what he’s saying.”

  I carefully opened the “gi” and peered at his bloody body. Knife marks scored his muscular abdomen as if he had used his belly for a game of tic-tac-toe. Although the scratches oozed, most of the wounds appeared superficial. Two gashes didn’t. They looked ugly and deep. I pulled my first-aid kit—a dishtowel from Boots’s apartment—out of my back pocket and pressed it against his belly. Then I tried to get him to hold the towel in place. Ian’s grip was ineffectual so I wedged part of my body into the booth, held his hand on the towel with one of my own, and grasped the receiver with the other.

  “The knife is out but a couple punctures look pretty serious. Shattuck Hospital is a lot closer than Beth Israel.”

  “No, please! Ian wants to go to B.I. He trusts their emergency room.”

  I looked at the bleeding Jesus and decided not to waste time arguing. “Beth Israel it is, lady.”

  “Thank you, Matthew. Ian can be volatile, and I’m afraid if you take him where he doesn’t want to go...”

  I looked at the swaying boy. It’s tough to raise a stink if you’re out on your feet, but I swallowed my caustic rejoinder. She was his mother. “Okay,” I replied defeated, “we’ll meet you at the hospital.”

  “Thank you. You’re as kind as Lou said.”

  I jammed the receiver back into its cradle. Right then I wasn’t feeling all that kind; I was worried the kid would die in my car.

  I draped Ian’s arm around my shoulders, placed mine around his muscular waist, and half dragged him through the dingy joint while its customers kept their eyes fixed on their boilermakers. They had their own empty lives to wash away, let the barkeep scour a stranger’s blood.

  I squeezed Ian’s big bleeding body into the small back seat and laid him down as gently as possible while his tears mixed with small moans. I felt relieved he was conscious and silently cursed his mother for not calling an ambulance.

  I jumped behind the wheel and glanced into the rearview mirror. My stomach lurched when I saw the entire side of my face slathered with blood. I didn’t wipe it off, just hoped no cop noticed me on the way to the hospital.

  I was familiar with city’s medical center emergency room so was surprised by the calm wooden paneling of Beth Israel’s. When the automatic doors swung open as I dragged him inside, a nurse with two orderlies pushing a gurney rushed forward as if they’d been waiting. I felt sticky, then anxious, when I noticed a security cop watching the scene from across the room. I walked to the desk and, before a beefy woman could grill me about insurance, asked where to wash.

  I spent a very long time inside an oversized john equipped with a handicap stall. I stripped to the
waist and scrubbed clean. Afterwards, I couldn’t deal with wearing my ruined sweatshirt and settled for my less bloodied tee. I almost felt worse about the shirt than the kid; I didn’t have too many comfortable, familiar companions and hated to throw one away.

  Which probably accounted for the scowl on my face when I strode out of the bathroom and saw Lou and a woman talking to the thick receptionist and the security guards. I automatically slowed at the sight and stared. Lou’s “squeeze” looked young, supple, and her skin sparkled like a diamond. As I tentatively crept forward I realized how artfully she dressed. About five foot six, Lauren wore no makeup, loose fitting jeans, a thin black blouse, and a baggy, bleached denim jacket. Her hair was covered with a black satin scarf tied gypsy style. She probably drove a Volvo. The closer I edged, the older she looked, though appeared considerably younger than my father-in-law. Whatever her age, this was one very attractive woman.

  “There you are, Matty.” Lou’s loud whisper echoed through the almost empty room. He sounded relieved as he lumbered toward me.

  “There was no trouble at the desk, was there? Lauren called ahead to pave the way,” he said, a tense smile crossing his face. “You see why it made more sense for you to pick him up than an ambulance, boychick?”

  I leaned down and kissed his cheek. “Not really.”

  “You won’t walk next to a hospital security guards. Imagine the kid’s reaction to a carload of uniforms.”

  It hadn’t been the guards who’d brought me up short. “This “kid” was no ”kid.”. Anyway, the deal only works if he doesn’t drop dead from blood loss.” Even as I spoke I caught myself staring over Lou’s shoulder watching Lauren finish her conversation at the desk.