Pieces of dirt and stone went flying as he gripped the handles and heard the buried industrial rut of blade hitting schist. Grrrrrgggg. He pulled the gas-powered engine closer, beginning to think that this was as deep as he could drill in this spot, that he was only trying to bore into solid stone.
He stopped for a moment to wipe his brow and swig lemon-lime POWERade. The sun was just beginning to seep through the brittle fried circuitry of trees, and the first real hint of winter’s saw-toothed bite was in the air. A part of him was still not quite wide awake, but he’d decided he had to get out here early today to finish the job and get some money coming in. He picked up the auger again and continued his digging, the vibrations going right up his arms and into his shoulders, tremoloing his spine and rib cage. Grrrg. He noticed the soil getting darker and wormier as he burrowed under the surface.
Would you like some ice tea?
That was how it began last spring. The chard in Sandi’s vegetable garden starting to pop up through the soil. New growth on the rose canes around the deck, the blackberry brambles putting out their leaves.
I’ll leave it in the refrigerator so it stays cold. Come in and help yourself anytime you feel like it. Just make sure you take your boots off.
For Chrissake, could she have been more explicit, short of asking, “Hey, Fallon, would you care to step in the house and lick my pussy?” She wanted it. It was obvious from the second she’d hired him. She was tired of that limp-dick husband of hers, who paid him in stock options from his crappy dot-com to put up the fence. She was wondering what it would be like to get a righteous drilling for once.
Grrg. Gritty fragments flew back in his eyes, and he cursed himself for forgetting his plastic goggles this morning.
Grrrwwwwwwwww. The grinding steel into soil slowly became the swoosh of the upstairs shower in his mind. For a few seconds, he was halfway up the stairs again, hesitating on the landing. Not wanting to cheat, knowing damn well that he was going to. A rigid digit has a mind of its own. Once again, he remembered looking down and having a melancholy moment, seeing her children’s galoshes in the front hall, their bright-yellow slickers hanging from hooks with the same black fireman’s stripe around the hems that Timmy had on his FDNY coat. You’d think that would slow a man down, wouldn’t you? The prospect of losing the things that were holding him together. But then he’d heard the shower cut off, the pipes giving a squeak of anticipation, and he knew it was too late.
Grrrrr, the blade purred underground as he remembered how eagerly he’d bounded the rest of the way up the steps to meet his ruin, almost stepping on a yellow Pokémon figure with its arms raised and its tail in a lightning zigzag.
The shadow of sadness broadened. She’d been in the bedroom at the end of the hall, drying herself before the wall mirror with one foot up on the bed, naked, dewy, and vulnerable, as if he’d just come upon her in a wooded clearing at dawn.
He’d stood in the doorway, watching her, the moment threatening to crack open and swallow him. At first, it was that same gnawing in the pit of his stomach that he’d felt at Angelo’s Candy Store and in the Castlemans’ bathroom. But then it became something else. She became young for him right before his eyes. Her body seemed to slim and ripen. The laws of gravity reversed, wrinkles smoothed, her belly flattened, her breasts lifted, presenting themselves in all their splendor to the slant of sunlight streaming through the window.
And for a few seconds, he became young as well, no longer a man who’d disappointed his wife and been passed over for the chief’s job. He was seventeen once more, seeing Lynn Stockdale stand naked for the first time before him. He remembered how he’d felt at that moment, that a door was opening, that another kind of light was shining on him.
Standing in Sandi’s doorway, he’d felt that readiness again, that hunger. And Sandi had lowered her hands, her modesty fading, her hip jutting out like the bend in a question mark.
When they fucked, her eyes opened wide as if she was in awe of him. It had been months since Limp Dick Jeff had touched her, she said. Mike was rescuing her. Same as he was rescuing Lynn. And all the others. He lived for that vulnerable awestruck look. He was always trying to get it back again. As he was giving it to Sandi from behind, he kept seeing Lynn’s face looking back over her shoulder. Somewhere, somehow, she must’ve known what she was missing.
He put the auger aside and slammed the post into the ground. A yellow pine four-by-four. He was charging the de Groots the full price for cedar, but that was almost two dollars extra a foot and he was entitled to peck at the margins a little, wasn’t he? A man had to live. He started shoveling loose pieces of rock and gravel to hold the post in the hole so he could measure it against the other posts he’d put in. He remembered how Sandi had rolled over on the pillow next to him that one time. How she’d looked up and said, You’ll watch over me, won’t you? Shit, it all should’ve ended right then. He used the yellow plumb line with the leveler’s bubble attached to make sure this post was even with the last one. But then she had to go and get herself pregnant and put everything on the line. His marriage, her marriage, the job, the kids. She was a crazy bitch, no doubt about it.
He saw that the new post was an inch or two higher than the last one. He got the short-handled sledgehammer off his tool belt to try pounding in the difference.
Swwwkkk. The thin pine sound echoed through the woods. He’d let himself get confused. Swwkkk. He had to try not to think about it anymore. Swwk. His problem was that he’d let things get mixed up in his mind: thinking Sandi could make him feel better about what happened with Lynn all those years ago, and then that Lynn could make him feel better about what happened with Sandi in the end. Swwk. It was only when they didn’t need to be rescued that his problems with women started. Swwk. The post started to lean, and he tried to hold it in place as he drove it in. Swwk. He smashed himself hard on the thumb, and for a few seconds everything went dim.
“Hey, man, you all right?”
Paco Ortiz was coming across the yard toward him with Mike’s customer, Dr. Richard de Groot, trailing in his blue bathrobe, a steaming Weather Channel coffee thermos in hand.
“What are you doing here?” Mike bit his lip, trying not to black out.
The thumb was just beginning to throb, only slowly waking up to the damage he’d done.
“Following up on a couple of calls we got at the station.” Paco glanced over at Dr. de Groot, waiting for him to walk back toward the house so they could begin this conversation in earnest. “Seems somebody’s been harassing Mrs. Schulman.”
“Is this about Home Depot again? Jesus, I already talked to Larry about this. What are we turning into, a police state? I can’t even go shopping anymore?”
The pain began to pulsate out in waves. He felt the thumbnail buckling from the amount of swelling underneath.
“If I were you, I’d keep my distance from that lady.” Paco half-smiled at Dr. de Groot, who’d gone back inside and was watching them through the kitchen window.
“Listen, I didn’t say anything out of line to her. I just ran into her in the middle of the aisle and made it clear that I wasn’t happy about what she’s putting me through. Next time I’ll go the other way. All right?”
“We got another call from her yesterday.” Paco’s newly shaved scalp furrowed as if some unseen hand was molding it.
“Yeah? And?”
“She said she got a message over the Internet. Some kind of half-assed threat.”
Mike took a quick look at his thumb and saw that the nail was, in fact, starting to turn the color of an eggplant.
“I don’t know a damn thing about it,” he said.
“I thought you’d say that.” Paco pressed his lips together, not in the least intimidated by Mike being five inches taller. “So here’s what I want to say to you, muchacho. Are you listening?”
“Yeah, I’m listening.” Mike seethed, gritting his teeth.
“I don’t know you, man.” The goatee circled Paco’s mouth like a noose. “I didn�
��t go to school with you. I never played football with you. I never dated your sister. When I look at you, I don’t think about whether you saved my life or whether your aunt knew my uncle. I just see what’s right in front of me.”
“What’s your point, Paco?”
The thumb was starting to throb so much that it felt as if it were drawing breath.
“My point is, is that there’s no credit line here. You start shit on my corner, I’m a do more than just write you a ticket. Comprende? I’m a come over your house, and this time we won’t worry about embarrassing you in front of the kids.”
“Now what am I supposed to do with that?” Mike squeezed the handle of the hammer, trying to restrain himself.
“You suppose to take that shit to the bank, compañero. Estar sobre sí. I got my eye on you.”
He turned on his heel and walked away, leaving Mike resting the hammer on his shoulder, the nail pressing down on the bone. Yeah, I got my eye on you too, compañero.
Having seen the conversation ending, Dr. de Groot came out through the glass doors and passed Paco on the lawn.
“Heh, heh.” The doctor pulled back his lips as he ambled over, showing broad purplish gums. “A little off-duty consultation?”
“Yep. Crime never sleeps.” Mike blinked back the tears of nausea.
“You guys must be working around the clock these days. Awful about Sandi Lanier. She was in my wife’s book group, you know.”
“Yeah.” Mike dropped the hammer to his side. “I guess I did know that.”
The doctor was an orthopedic surgeon with Nutty Professor glasses and surprisingly crooked teeth. His wife, Dianne, was that flake who wore her hair like Pippi Longstocking, coordinated her outfits to match what the kids were wearing, and blasted Britney Spears and ’Nsync from her Blazer every time she went to the supermarket.
“Listen, Mike, we’ve been having some second thoughts about the fence.” Air passed loudly through the doctor’s septum.
“What?”
“We’ve been thinking we might want to put money toward upgrading our security system instead.”
Mike looked over at the fence post he’d left leaning like the Tower of Pisa. “Where’s all this coming from?”
“Look, Mike, I want to be honest with you. We have some concerns. I should’ve called before, but I didn’t know you were coming today.”
“Concerns?”
“Dianne already heard from somebody at the School Board that you were having a problem with the police department. Apparently there’s going to be some kind of disciplinary hearing?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
The hammer pulsed in time with Mike’s swelling thumb.
“Perhaps it would be better to put off finishing the job until everything gets cleared up.”
“Put it off? I’m not sure I understand, Dick.”
“Heh, heh.” Dr. de Groot made a wheezing sound as he eyed the hammer nervously. “Mike, you have to understand. It’s a difficult position we’re in. I’m at work all day, and my wife would be alone in the house while you’re working here. I’m sure you can appreciate how awkward that would be.”
“So she asked you to speak to me?”
“Mike, would you mind putting that hammer down while we’re talking?” The doctor pursed his lips. “It’s making me a little uncomfortable, and I’m sure that’s not what you want.”
Mike jammed the hammer back in his tool belt, accidentally jarring the thumbnail again.
“You know, we’re supposed to have something called the presumption of innocence in this country,” he said, grimacing and holding back a raging torrent of curses.
“I know.” The doctor nodded. “It’s terribly unfair.”
“So, what’re you gonna do about the fence?” Mike said, resisting the urge to suck the end of the thumb. “You gonna leave it half-done?”
He’d been in their kitchen and seen their magnificent granite countertops and Swedish energy-efficient dishwasher. These were not people who left things half-done.
“We might have somebody else come in and finish the job.”
Mike glared at him, and for a moment the pressure was so strong that he thought about taking the hammer and hitting the doctor so hard on the tip of the nose that blood shot from his eye sockets.
“I guess that’s your right,” he said.
“We weren’t going to ask for the money back. You’ve already done part of the work.”
“Yes, I have. And I’d hate to come back and pull it all out.”
“Heh, heh.” The doctor wheezed again, not sure if Mike was serious.
Mike had half a mind to do it right now. Just tear out all the fencing and leave gouges like teeth marks all over the property.
“Take your time cleaning everything up,” said the doctor, glancing down at the auger and the wheelbarrow that Mike had brought along today. “I’ll be here all morning.”
“Yeah, let me just finish the footings for the last four-by-four.”
Other contractors had told him not to use concrete to secure the posts because it could trap the water and make the wood rot faster, but did he really care at this point?
“By the way,” said the doctor, “what happened to your thumb?”
44
“JACK DAVIS?” BARRY, on the phone, stood by the window, watching scattered fires still spitting and a yellow crane slowly removing pieces of wreckage from Ground Zero.
“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” said a voice on the other end, so phlegmy and clubbable that Barry could almost hear the faux-wood paneling on the walls of the office from which it issued and see the law degree and Rotary Club awards in Lucite on the bookshelves.
“This is Barry Schulman. I’d been expecting to hear from you.”
“Have you now?” The bonhomie thinned just slightly. “Well, I’ve been busy as a fox in the henhouse. What can I do you for?”
“I’m supposed to be your client. As is my wife.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do. The Michael Fallon disciplinary hearing in Riverside?”
Jack Davis made a quiet wup, wup, sound like an old computer trying to read a warped floppy disc.
“Of course,” he said finally. “Your statement to the chief is right here on my desk. And I think I must have your wife’s statement too. Somewhere.”
“I can certainly fax you another copy if that’s necessary,” Barry replied evenly, having already decided to exercise more patience than he did with Mrs. Crawford at Town Hall. “But really I was hoping to have a chance to speak to you before the hearing.”
“Glad you caught me in, then. I can be harder to get a hold of than a greased pig. You understand, naturally, it’s not my full-time job, being the town’s prosecuting attorney. I’m doing this as a favor to the mayor, old Tom Flynn, who’s a dear friend of the family.”
“What kind of law do you usually practice, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Oh, I putter around in insurance and real estate development a little. I’ve done some work for Olympia and York, Douglas Ellman, Northern Coastal, a few local outfits …”
The tinny bell went off in the back of Barry’s head. Northern Coastal, the golf course developers who gave the mayor’s son a job as a VP. As Buddhists and ward politicians alike understood: we are truly all part of one great whole.
“So have you ever prosecuted a case before?”
“Of course. I put in a few years at the Westchester DA’s office, back before the Civil War. Heh-heh-heh.”
Political appointee, Barry thought. In the DA’s office, something like ninety-seven of the one hundred assistants were Republicans. The man might not know how to work a case, but he could certainly work a room. Not that there was anything wrong with a little patronage now and then. As a famous Southern governor once said, “What would you expect me to do, give contracts to my enemies?”
“Well, sir,” Barry said, trying to keep it friendly, “I know you’ve been preoccupied
like everyone else, but I was trying to make sure you knew that both of us are available so you’d have a chance to talk to us and adequately prepare your case.”
“Damn kind of you, Mr. Schuler.”
“Yeah …” Momentarily disconcerted, Barry reached for the legal pad on his desk. “I also wanted to pass on some phone numbers to you for potential witnesses, in case you hadn’t had a chance to look them up.”
“Excuse me …”
There was some manner of kerfuffle on Jack Davis’s end of the line. A flap of papers, a side-of-the-mouth mutter at a secretary, a groan of a creaky drawer opening, and a door shutting noisily.
“You were saying?”
“I have the numbers of some potential witnesses who could do serious damage to Lieutenant Fallon’s credibility and help bolster my wife’s testimony.” Barry tapped his legal pad with a Cross pen.
“You do?”
“To begin with, I found a series of complaints from people who say the lieutenant beat them with a radio in his patrol car after they were handcuffed in Operation Ivory Snow a few years ago …”
“Old news.” Jack Davis cut him off. “Those charges were already dismissed by the Town Board. I’m sorry, Mr. Schiller, but I don’t see the relevance. Until that unfortunate incident with the Three Musketeers bar, that little campaign probably cut the crime rate in this town by three quarters and doubled the value of the house you’re living in.”
Unfortunate incident? Nice way to talk about an unarmed black kid getting shot in the back. Nobody’s a liberal when he’s talking about the price of his house. Barry flipped the page, deciding not to push it.
“And then there are these two young ladies who’ve filed papers with the Civilian Complaint Review Board saying the lieutenant harassed them. I thought at least one of them might be a credible enough witness so that the hearing wouldn’t just be our word against his …”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Schulman”—Jack Davis’s chair gave a squeak loud enough to be heard through the phone line—“but how exactly did you come into possession of these phone numbers?”
“Freedom of Information Act. Standard stuff. No burning of incense or bowing down before graven images, I assure you.”
The Last Good Day Page 31
