Revolver

by Duane Swierczynski

  She hears footsteps coming up the staircase so she crouches down, too.

  “He had a little too much.”

  Guy coming up the stairs—a friend of rapey business guy here—nods and smiles, heads into the john.

  Audrey feels around the guy’s ass for his wallet. Plucks it out. Takes the cash inside. “You even look at me again and I’ll annihilate you,” she whispers hot and heavy in his ear. Then she tucks the money in her pants.

  Now she can get on to some proper drinking at some other watering hole.

  Annihilate it all.

  A little after midnight, just as he’s locking up for the night, the man Audrey knows as Pizza Counter Guy spots a young woman passed out in the narrow alley next to the restaurant. Hooker? Maybe. If so, she’s new to this neighborhood.

  The alley is the width of a small closet. Extend your elbows and you’re bumping into brick even before you clear a few inches. So it’s probably more like she tilted a few inches in one direction, found the gentle embrace of a wall, then slid down it until her ass hit the ground, knees popped up, boots scraping across the cement until her toes bumped against the opposite wall. Maybe she thought it was a safe place.

  Pizza Counter Guy puts down the boxes he’s carrying and makes his way up the alley to her. He crouches down, feels her wrist for a pulse. Finds one. He can’t see her face because her long dark hair is fanned across most of it. Just as he brushes some of it aside to see if she’s bleeding or hurt, her eyes pop open like a horror movie vampire’s.

  “Don’t,” she says.

  He tells her to relax, everything will be okay. And it will, because now he recognizes her. This is the young woman who tore up his counter a few days ago. Repairs of which came out of his salary. (The owner was not happy about the slapdash way the panels were reattached to the former bar.)

  “My whole family’s cops. Don’t even think about it.”

  Pizza Counter Guy assures her he is not thinking about anything.

  “It’s me,” he says. “You know, from the pizza shop?”

  Audrey locks eyes with him. “Right. Pizza Counter Guy. Heh. Funny running into you here.”

  “Uh, I work here. I think you know that.”

  “Baby, I don’t know a god-damned thing.”

  Again Pizza Counter Guy admires the ornate tattoos, full sleeves, that cover both of her bare arms. Crows and thorns and roses and something that resembles the flesh of a serpent. Where is her coat? What is she doing out here alone? She exhales and he can smell the stink of booze. Ah, so that’s what she’s been doing.

  “Can you stand?” he asks her.

  “Baby, I can’t stand anything anymore.”

  So this is how it’s going to be.

  She rolls to one side in an attempt to rise, ping-ponging her way up the walls. Her whole body is shaking. He puts his hands up as if touching her aura, ready to catch her if she suddenly tumbles forward or backward. Slowly, though, she steadies herself. She looks at Pizza Counter Guy. Then she turns away and vomits on the wall. Not a girly kind of vomit, either.

  He digs inside his bag until he finds a pack of tissues, pulls one out, holds it out to her. She ignores it, staggers a few steps away, clears her throat, spits a few times, moans, curses. After a small eternity she turns and asks,

  “You don’t happen to have a car, do you?”

  “Yeah. Just lemme grab these pizzas, okay?”

  The pizzas are still waiting on the sidewalk—five white, green, and red boxes, stacked neatly, held together with bungee cords.

  “Wow, you really do take your work home with you,” Audrey says.

  As he tucks her into the passenger seat, Pizza Counter Guy explains that he made a deal with the owner of the shop. Instead of chucking the leftover food into the rusty green Dumpster out back, he boxes up whatever’s left and brings it to the clusters of homeless folks around town on his way home. Usually it’s a bunch of assorted slices, a little congealed with cheese and grease, but still okay. Sometimes rolls a few days old go in there, and sometimes he even sneaks in a bunch of fresh hoagies.

  “What are you going for, the Last Decent Man in Philadelphia Award?”

  Pizza Counter Guy shakes his head, closes his door, flips the ignition. “There are a lot of good people here. You just have to open your heart and your eyes a little.”

  “Oh Christ. You’re religious, aren’t you?”

  “Well, yeah, I’m a deacon,” he says.

  “How divine.”

  Pizza Counter Guy insists on driving her home first, but Audrey says no way—people are waiting for their food.

  So PCG steers his ancient-yet-spotless Civic (well over 130K on the odometer) and takes off for the Parkway. He explains there’s an unofficial rule: police won’t bother you between the hours of 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. as long as you pick up your boxes or mattresses or whatever and move along before the tourists arrive.

  “Are you one of those people who walks around saving prostitutes, telling them about Jesus?”

  “I talk to anybody who looks like they need it,” Pizza Counter Guy says.

  “Captain Save-a-Ho, to the rescue!”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Tell me—when a hooker passes out, do you call it a Ho-Down?”

  “You weren’t looking too good back there yourself, Little Miss Thing.”

  Audrey considers this. “You thought I was a junkie, didn’t you?”

  He smiles. “Well, for a second there…I thought you were a hooker.”

  She laughs and it sounds like a bark.

  Audrey doesn’t know what it is about him—maybe his kind face and easy manners. Maybe it’s all that divinity schooling. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t even know his name. But after the purge of her guts, she begins a purge of her mind. They drive up the Parkway, then to the dark corners beneath I-95, then finally up to Mayfair, but along the way she ends up giving Pizza Counter Guy her life story.

  How she’s been living in Houston the past three years to get back on the straight and narrow but has only ended up fucking up her life even more.

  How she had an affair with an older married musician guy and ended up getting pregnant and thought she’d just get rid of it—boom, done, move on. But couldn’t bring herself to do it, couldn’t even tell her parents about it, not right away anyway, because they’d just want to swoop in and try to “fix” things and control everything, and she didn’t need that shit at that particular moment.

  She tells him how her only lifeline—in a weird M. Night Shyamalan twist—was the parents of her baby daddy, a retired black couple who took her in and helped take care of Bryant while she worked and attended classes. Who are watching Bryant right now, back in Houston, while she’s getting shit-faced and puking on the side of the building where her grandfather was shot and killed fifty years ago.

  “Wait—how does that work? With the guy’s wife and all, seeing that they’re her in-laws?”

  “Badly,” Audrey says.

  So no, married guy’s wife doesn’t know. Her own friggin’ in-laws and she has no idea. She thinks the Tennellsons are just kindly old people helping some chubby white girl in trouble with a biracial baby get back on her feet.

  “What’s really weird is when the baby daddy comes over and pays extra-special attention to Bryant, right in front of her, and he gets this weepy look in his eyes, because you see, I guess the wife’s tubes are tied, and they’re never gonna have kids.”

  “Oh, that’s not going to end well,” Pizza Counter Guy says.

  Even the homeless people tucking into the cold pizza look at her like, Boy, and I thought my life was fucked up.

  The Tennellsons aren’t even all that nice to her. They adore their secret grandson, of course, and as far as they’re concerned, the less Audrey’s around, the better. She feels less like a mother and more like the babysitter who squeezes in a little kid time between work (bartending at a seafood joint) and studying (CSI school). So when she told them she had to fly back to
Philly to attend her grandfather’s memorial service, they were overjoyed. Told her to take her time. Don’t hurry back now, you hear?

  The more she surrenders control to the Tennellsons, the more tenuous her connection with her son.

  But it’s a war she feels ill prepared to fight, with no one on her side. She rebels, they kick her out—and probably fight for custody.

  “You need to get out of that situation,” Deacon Pizza Counter Guy says.

  “What I need,” Audrey says, “is to finish this independent project, finish my degree, get a job, then get my own place, my own phone, my own utilities. Preferably in thirty days or less.”

  “What about your parents? I’ve got to think they’d want to help.”

  “Yeah, you would think, wouldn’t you? I’m used to doing it on my own. I’ve been on my own since I was a kid.”

  By 1 a.m. the food is gone and the Deacon drives her up to Mayfair.

  “So…if it’s not too personal…what were you doing out by the shop tonight?”

  After all that purging, however, Audrey can’t bring herself to tell Deacon Pizza here the truth. That her cop brother killed himself this afternoon. (She doesn’t want to accept it as real. Not yet.)

  And that all this drama in her life and screwed-up family began at that corner of Seventeenth and Fairmount, in a dive bar. And maybe she’s holding on to this foolish dream that if she can figure out what happened back then, she can try to understand what the fuck is happening to them now.

  Stan Sits and Freezes

  March 10, 1965

  Every night and every morning they sit in their big red machine and watch a house on Queen Street down in Southwark.

  Southwark is way out of their bailiwick. They could land in serious shit for being here. And they’ve been doing this for a week now. Wildey calls it “applying pressure.” Stan doesn’t care what he calls it—he doesn’t like being down here. Too many bad memories.

  Southwark is where Stan grew up, and he would rather be patrolling the Jungle than sitting here right now. A lot of Poles came to the Washington Avenue port just a few blocks away when they immigrated to this country. The ones with enough money hopped the trains to destinations north and west—some as far as Chicago and Milwaukee. Those with no money ended up stuck here, competing for space in dirty, overcrowded rowhomes and scrambling for work along the docks with everyone else.

  If you could find work that the Irish, the Italians, and the murzyns hadn’t picked up for themselves.

  Still, the Poles called this area Stanisławo, meaning “the neighborhood around St. Stanislaus Church,” which was the center of their social life. To the peasants back home, the word conjured paradise and a promise of better times.

  The reality was much different—unless you knew someone with money or connections.

  Stan has never been one of those people, even though he was named for this goddamned place. Stanisław. He would have liked to ask his father why.

  The place looks more or less the same, though cleaner. They’re tearing down the slums of Society Hill to the north and blasting through some of the old blocks along the riverfront to build I-95. Tons of construction work to be had now—if you know the right people.

  Same as always.

  Of course Stan can tell Wildey none of this. Because none of this matters to the business at hand. All Stan can do is protest on the grounds that this is very stupid for their careers.

  The first night Stan sat there in the cold machine, looking around, terrified to be recognized by someone.

  “We’re going to get recognized,” he said.

  To which Wildey replied,

  “That’s the idea, partner.”

  Wildey has followed up on their big bust from the previous month. Seems the black buyer—Bey-Bey—is still facing serious narcotics charges. But the white dealer has been let go, case dismissed, get out of jail free. How is that even possible?

  “Maybe he had a better lawyer,” Stan offered.

  “No, you’re not understanding me. He was let go. All traces of the arrest—gone. At least, the white half.”

  Now, the narco unit is small, Wildey explained. Only ten guys under one commander. But the city claims the problem is equally small. According to the US Department of Health, there are only 557 known addicts within city limits. (“Shit,” Wildey said. “I think I know five hundred and fifty-seven addicts personally.”) To dismiss these guys caught with that much dope makes no sense whatsoever.

  Soon as he found out, Wildey went to their lieutenant for answers. The loot had nothing to give them, except that it was narco business, implying that the white guys were undercover cops.

  “I know a little something about undercover narco work,” Wildey told Stan. “Usually, the job doesn’t involve bringing the shit. Undercover cops are the ones buying the shit, then making their arrests.”

  “You were narco?” Stan asked.

  “Lifetime ago.”

  “So what do we got?”

  What they had were two names—the two dealers they arrested at Twenty-Second and Diamond. Samuel “Bey-Bey” Baynes was the bulldog with the shotgun. Buzz-Cut turned out to be Sherman “Bud” Van Meter.

  “I know Bey-Bey’s deal,” Wildey said. “He doesn’t interest me. Van Meter, though, is of supreme interest.”

  “Maybe he’s undercover narco after all,” Stan says that first night on stakeout detail.

  “If he’s narco, he’ll give us the professional courtesy to tell us to fuck off. But I don’t think we’ll be seeing Bud.”

  “Then what are we sitting out here in the cold for?”

  “To see who else shows up.”

  That knowing smile of his, like he’s figured out the clue in a crossword puzzle long before anyone else. Drives Stan nuts.

  “Sometimes I don’t understand half the shit you say.”

  “Look, I’m kind of hoping he is narco,” Wildey said. “Because if he’s not, then Terrill Lee’s crazy-ass stories have the ring of truth to them. And that, my friend, means we’re living in a much scarier place.”

  Yeah, there goes Wildey on his crazy conspiracy flights. The whole world’s against him and his people. Well, guess what—the whole world’s against everybody. But Stan doesn’t say any of this, because it’ll just get Wildey excited all over again. Tonight, though, day seven of this, he’s tired and cranky and can’t resist.

  “Tell me again why we’re doing this?” Stan asks.

  “Because we’re good cops.”

  Stan has to admit, that rocks him on his heels a bit. Because we’re good cops. He’s long since stopped thinking about the job in terms of good and bad. There’s the job, you do it, and your goal is to come home alive.

  “Sometimes I wonder why you go looking for trouble. Don’t you want to come home to Junior every night?”

  “Sure,” Wildey says. “But don’t you want Jimmy growing up in a better city than this?”

  So they sit on Queen Street, day in, day out, with nobody approaching. Their red police car isn’t exactly inconspicuous. Then they start sneaking down from the Jungle to cruise the area at odd times, checking out 226 Queen Street—Van Meter’s given address—at random times. Still nothing.

  But now, tonight, the seventh night of this, someone does show up.

  And it’s not “Bud” Van Meter.

  They park themselves on Front Street, right next to the construction site that will someday be I-95. Stan remembers the houses along here. Tight, cramped little immigrant homes that were Polish in his day but Irish a generation before that and German and Swedish generations before that, before there was even a country here.

  From his angle on Front, though, they can keep an eye down Queen, see who’s coming and going.

  A sedan with bright lights crosses Front, moving the wrong way up the street. Soon they’re headlight to headlight.

  “Here we go,” Wildey says. “Good things come to those who wait.”

  “This looks like the opposite o
f a good thing,” Stan says, moving his hand to his revolver.

  “Uh-uh. If I’m right, you’re not gonna need that. Just follow my lead.”

  Two stocky men in suits come out of the car, walk up to their machine on either side. Their coats are parted and Stan can see their sidearms. They’re not exactly reaching for them. More letting them know that they’re keeping the option open.

  “You fellas lost?” the one on the right asks.

  Wildey sticks his head out of the passenger side. “Evening, Inspectors. No, we’re not lost. Just following up on a suspect.”

  The guys trade looks. How the hell can Wildey see that these guys are inspectors? The other one, more heavyset, is coming up on Stan’s side. He makes a show of checking out the numbers on the side of their machine.

  “You’re a long way from the Jungle.”

  “Yeah, well, sometimes the inhabitants, they do sneak out,” Wildey says.

  The one on Stan’s side says, “This one is Walczak.” Pronounces it right: wall-CHAK.

  “And we got Officer Wildey over here.” Another correct pronunciation.

  (Later, Wildey will say this was the moment he knew—that nobody gets their names right on the first try. Again, Stan doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.)

  “You go on back to the Jungle, boys. Leave Southwark to us.”

  Wildey nods as if he agrees. And then he slams open his passenger side door, nailing the guy in his knees. Guy drops to the ground before he has the chance to reach for his revolver. Wildey slams the door into him again, metal crushing his nose, spurting blood down the side of their machine.

  The other inspector is cursing and starting to draw his weapon. Stan knows his own speed. By the time he climbs out from behind the wheel, this guy could draw his weapon and open fire at them through the windshield. So there’s really only one option. Stan lunges out with his left arm, grabs up a fistful of the guy’s shirt and tie, and yanks him forward with all his strength. Guy’s forehead slams into the top of their machine, busting it open. He’s still struggling, though, so Stan gives it to him again, feels the fight go away, then drops him.