Afterburn: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

  He finished the job, picked up the bucket, and on the stairs up from the basement heard a baby making cranky noises one floor above. “Oh, chickie-bee, I’m coming,” called a woman sleepily. He stopped on the stairs. Aunt Eva was seventy-something years old. A baby meant young people, a young guy living in the house. Some guy who might notice new furnace cement when he changed the air filters and become curious about what was in the chimney. The baby cried again. Get the rest of the money. Rick turned back down the stairs, moving loudly, slipped around to the back of the furnace, and pulled on the exhaust vent. Nothing—he’d done too good a job cementing it in place. He savagely clubbed it with his arm. He had to hit it twice to dislodge it. Naturally the sound went through the house like a drum. The vent sagged to the floor. He reached in, grabbed the brick, threw it behind him, pulled out the envelope, and slipped it into his other pocket.

  Now he could hear footsteps. He hurried back to the stairs and climbed them three at a time, but stopped at the open door to the first-floor hallway.

  “Yo, whoever’s down there, I got a shotgun!”

  The guy was probably hunched at the top of the stairs leading from the second floor to the front door—not twelve steps from where Rick stood in the basement doorway. If the guy came down the stairs from the second floor, he might get a clean shot into the back of Rick’s head as he opened the front door.

  Now footsteps descended the stairs.

  “Where’s Aunt Eva?” Rick yelled. “She’s my aunt!”

  “Who’s that?” came the man’s voice. “Come out of there.”

  “That Sal?” Rick yelled. “Don’t fucking shoot me, Sal!”

  The baby was crying upstairs. “Come out of there!”

  “Sal?”

  “Sal lives in New Jersey. Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m a member of the family.”

  “The fuck you are. You come out here.”

  He was still holding the tub of chimney cement. He flung it down the hallway to see what would happen. The shotgun exploded, tearing away the plaster, splintering the door frame, making the woman scream and the baby cry louder.

  The guy is jumpy, Rick thought. “What the fuck you doing?” he called, smelling the smoke from the gun.

  “Who is that? You come out here, you motherfucker.” Then he yelled up the stairs. “Beth, call the cops!”

  “It’s Rick!”

  “Rick? Who’s Rick?”

  “Rick Bocca, Aunt Eva’s nephew. Tell Beth it’s her cousin Rick Bocca.”

  “Beth,” called the voice, “guy says his name is Rick Bocca!”

  He could hear her make some kind of answer. Then he heard footsteps.

  “Rick?” came Beth’s voice. “Is that you?”

  “Beth, it’s me—tell your husband not to fucking shoot me!”

  “He’s not going to shoot you.”

  “Come out of there, you fucker!” came the man’s voice again.

  “I’ll—” she began.

  “No, no, don’t go get him, let him come out!”

  “You’re not going to shoot?”

  “Come out of there!”

  He put his hand out, waved. Nothing happened.

  “Come on, goddammit!”

  He stepped into the hallway. A small, hairless man in a T-shirt and stained underwear held a double-barreled shotgun. Beth stood behind him, in a short nightgown.

  “Ricky?” she cried, still scared. “Is that you?”

  “It’s me.”

  “You look so different. Beard and everything.”

  “It’s me, Beth.”

  “Why you down there?”

  “I just needed to get something, Beth, something I left.”

  “Why didn’t you call?” she cried, upset all over again. “I mean, this is crazy, you woke everybody up and scared us and—”

  “I thought Aunt Eva was still here.”

  “She’s in a nursing home, three months.”

  “Oh.” He still hadn’t taken a step.

  “This is Ronnie.”

  “Hi, Ronnie. You mind putting down the gun?”

  But Ronnie was a small man threatening a big one. A rare thrill, and one not to be concluded too quickly. “What did you need to get?” he said.

  “Just something I left, Ronnie. Personal.”

  “What?”

  It was ten steps to the door, and if he got near enough, maybe Ronnie wouldn’t take a second shot with his wife so close.

  “Look,” he began, taking one step, his hands up, “Aunt Eva said I could leave something down there, and she let me have a copy of the key. Here.” He held up the key.

  “We heard you was way out on Long Island, fishing.”

  “I was, Beth, but I needed something so I came back.” He looked into her eyes. “I was out there, and I—”

  “I fucking want to know what you were getting!” said Ronnie, waving the barrel at him.

  “Hey, Ronnie, wait a minute, I know you don’t like this, but you got to see it my way. I didn’t want to disturb Aunt Eva.”

  “What do you have down there?”

  It was greed he saw in Ronnie’s face now, and this gave him his answer. “You’re never going to believe this—”

  “Try me.”

  “Ronnie, for God’s sake, put down the gun,” said Beth.

  Ronnie pointed the gun at Rick. “No. I want to hear this. He came back for something, Beth, he came back and wanted something.”

  “Okay, Ronnie. You’re probably familiar with the furnace, the exhaust vent, right?” He could feel the line coming but didn’t know what it was yet. “I used to help Aunt Eva around the house, and one day, couple of years ago, I hid a big toolbox up the chimney, leaving enough room so that the smoke can still go up no problem.”

  You could pack hundreds of thousands of dollars in a toolbox.

  “Where’s the box?” Ronnie demanded.

  “Well, I didn’t get it out yet, see, it’s still—”

  “What’s in it?”

  Rick waited, listening to the baby’s angry fit upstairs. He needed the line. “Hey, Ronnie, that’s my money down there,” he cried. “All of it. Aunt Eva—”

  “Come here. Step back,” Ronnie said to Beth.

  “What?” she cried. “What are you going to do? Don’t hurt him!”

  “Get up the fucking stairs, bitch!”

  “Ronnie, wait a minute—”

  “You can fucking just walk out of here, right now,” Ronnie ordered Rick. Holding the gun with one hand, he opened the front door with the other. “Go. Get out.”

  “Wait, I can’t do that,” Rick said. “I need all of that cash, man, I’m in trouble—”

  “It’s his money,” Beth said.

  “Shut up!” Ronnie screamed. “Get up the stairs.” He motioned to Rick with the gun. “Get out. Get the fuck out of this house now.”

  Rick looked back toward the basement stairs.

  “I mean it! Get the fuck out now!”

  “You got to let me have some of it, at least,” he said.

  “I don’t have to let you have shit!”

  “Just let me have sixty or seventy thousand. You can have the rest.”

  “No!”

  “It’s my money!”

  “It’s in my house.”

  “The house actually belongs to me,” Beth cried.

  “Shut up, I said, shut up!”

  “Let him have forty thousand,” came Beth’s voice. “It’s his money, Ronnie.”

  Ronnie didn’t answer. Instead he advanced toward Rick, leveling the shotgun at his head in the narrow hallway.

  “Get down. Get down on your stomach.”

  Rick knelt down.

  “I said stomach.”

  He got on his stomach, face touching bits of plaster and paint. It would take Ronnie a good ten minutes to tear apart the chimney with a sledgehammer and crowbar, looking for money that wasn’t there. By then Rick would be on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in his truck, t
he money a fat pad in the glove compartment.

  “Crawl. Crawl to the door.”

  He wormed along Aunt Eva’s old patio-turf runner that Uncle Mike had trimmed with a box cutter thirty years ago, until he got to the door, knowing that Ronnie couldn’t see the cash in the front of his pants. He looked up at Beth, who was still cowering in the stairwell. She looked like hell, even taking into account that it was six-thirty in the morning.

  “Beth—”

  She shook her head, eyes fearful. “I can’t do anything, Ricky.”

  Ronnie came over and put the gun into Rick’s face. “You come back, I’m going to do this.”

  Ronnie lifted the gun and blasted the hallway again. The sound of the gun hit Rick in the head, and for a moment he felt deaf and sick, but then he realized Ronnie had emptied the second barrel. He jumped up and grabbed Ronnie by the throat. He drove him backward against the stairwell, knocking his head on the wall, with Beth screaming, and he took his other hand and slipped a thumb under Ronnie’s lip and pulled upward.

  “What?”

  Ronnie couldn’t talk.

  “What was that, Ronnie? Say it again, what?”

  Ronnie made some kind of noise when Rick pulled again.

  “You’re tearing his face!” cried Beth.

  He looked at her.

  “Please, Rick.”

  He let go. Ronnie collapsed to the floor holding his mouth.

  AN HOUR LATER he found a parking garage that was just right—in Chinatown, tucked into the south side of the Manhattan Bridge. Unless you were looking for it, you’d never find it, which was the idea. He could sleep in the truck or move around the cheap hotels nearby, and if he had to get out of the city fast, then all he had to do was pull out of the parking garage and keep turning right until he was on the bridge. He eased the truck in next to a phone-booth-sized bunker made out of construction block. The attendant, a black man with a Knicks baseball cap, sat in an old bucket seat, eating sweet pork and watching television. The man turned, eyes dull, face diseased by car exhaust. “How long?”

  “A week, maybe. Could be longer.”

  “Put you down two weeks.”

  Something was wrong with the man’s breathing, and it was hard to hear him. Rick cut the engine. “You want to stick it in back, I don’t care.”

  The man nodded contemplatively. “You want it in the back? Most people want it out front so we don’t have to move ten cars.”

  “I don’t care if you bury it back there.”

  The attendant leaned forward and turned the television off, and, as if the box had been sucking the life out of him, now his gray face brightened strangely. “You trying to hide this truck, my brother?”

  “It’s my truck.”

  A smile of brown teeth, pork wedged against the gums. “Question still pertains.”

  “Yes, the answer is yes.”

  “Repossession? We get that a lot.”

  “Nope. Wife’s attorney.”

  The attendant frowned. “Them fuckers gone want every dollar—yes sir, I see you got yourself a situation. You want me, I can stick it down in the basement. Way in the back.”

  “As a favor?”

  The man rubbed his chin theatrically. “See, I always thought a situation require a consideration.”

  “I need access.”

  “What you mean by access, my brother?”

  “I want to be able to get to it. Not move it, just get to it.”

  He shook his head. “We don’t do that. I’ll stick the truck in the basement for you, but I can’t have you coming and going ten times a day, chicks back there, parties, barbecue, whatnot.”

  “It wouldn’t be ten times a day. Just once.”

  The attendant picked up his food. “I suppose we was discussing the consideration.”

  “Hundred bucks a week, you keep the truck way in the back, let me go in and out.”

  The man stirred his fork around in the carton. “Now, hundred dollars a week is just fine for me, buddy, but I’s the day man. Six to six. There’s also the night man. Big dog like you coming in here at night’s going freak him out. He going think you going kill his ass. If you explain your deal with me, he ain’t going believe you, and if I explain it, he’s going want his cut.”

  “I’ll go one-fifty, seventy-five for each of you. But I get to sleep in the truck.”

  “You can go ahead and take a shit in there, far’s I’s concerned. Just keep the windows rolled up.”

  “What about the air down there?”

  “It’s bad.”

  “You better show me.”

  They walked into the car elevator and descended to the basement. The dark space stretched about half the size of a football field, and the status of the cars went up appreciably: Mercedes, three Lexuses with dealer stickers on them, Cadillacs like Tony Verducci drove, a cherry-red Hummer, a vintage T-bird.

  “You’ve got some nice cars down here.”

  “Yo, this ain’t parking down here, this is security.”

  They walked to the far corner.

  “Here.”

  “Air’s pretty bad down here.”

  “It’s for cars, not people.”

  He wondered how well he would sleep. “How do I get up and down? Take the elevator every time?”

  “Nah, there’s a stairway in the front, comes up right next to the booth. My name’s Horace, in case you ask.”

  Rick handed the man his spare key, then peeled off some bills. “Hope you have fun with that, Horace. I had to go through some trouble to get it.”

  The attendant pocketed the money. “Nah, you? You kidding!” He threw back his head and burst into rotten-toothed laughter. “Yeah, I expect you did go through some kind of trouble, I expect you did. You think I don’t know who you is? I seen everybody, man, I seen them all! Everybody comes down here sooner or later, every kind of people, the good people and the bad people, the rich people and the poor, yeah.” His breath was coming in wheezes. “Telling me about some kind of trouble? I know that, man, I know just who you is, my brother, you is trouble coming and trouble going!” His laughing became a raspy cough. “Can’t get no air down here!” he croaked. “Can’t breathe, my brother.” He hurried toward the elevator, his hack echoing through the cavernous space.

  THE NEXT THING Rick needed was a quiet pay phone, not on the street. He walked west on Canal through Chinatown, then north toward the art galleries, enjoying the morning sun, glad to be free of the truck. The city had a lot of money in it now. The galleries and shops and restaurants were busy, full of Europeans and girls in tight dresses who thought they were doing something new. He noticed that people were getting out of his way on the sidewalk, including the black guys. He’d forgotten about that. At the corner, a cop on foot patrol watched Rick pass by and lifted his brow as they made eye contact. Take it somewhere else, pal, take it out of my beat. I’ve got to change my look, Rick thought, I’m not fitting in here. I look like a Hell’s Angel or pro wrestler or somebody. He found a restaurant with a pay phone in the back, got a coffee cup full of quarters, and called information in Sarasota, Florida, for Christina’s mother, a woman he’d met exactly twice, the last time the day that Christina was arrested.

  “Mrs. Welles?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Rick Bocca, Mrs. Welles.”

  “You looking for Tina?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s not here, Rick. She’s in prison.”

  So, he thought, the mother doesn’t know. “Well, I was wondering how she’s been doing. She won’t answer my letters, you see.”

  “Last time we spoke was the winter. I’ve been traveling quite a bit. Just got back last night, and I’m leaving again soon.”

  “How’s Mr. Welles?”

  “He’s lying down—”

  “Tired?”

  “—and he’s smiling.”

  “Smiling?”

  “He’s lying down in the cemetery about eight miles from here, and he’s smiling be
cause he doesn’t have me hollering at him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rick said. “He was a pistol, I always thought.”

  “Yes, he was, sugar, that’s why I kept forgiving him.”

  “He go out easy, Mrs. Welles?”

  She inhaled. “No, afraid he didn’t. He missed Tina so much, you know, he used to have me come bring all her old high-school report cards and then he’d read them in his hospital bed. He missed her terribly, see. She got his mind, you know. My brain was no good, but Mr. Welles was quite something. I ever tell you why I married him?”

  He was listening to a lonely middle-aged woman. The decent thing was to humor her. “He was so good-looking?”

  He heard her take a drag on a cigarette. “No, it wasn’t that. It was the Mustang.”

  “I heard this once.”

  “Mr. Welles bet a fellow that he could take apart a Mustang convertible and put it back together in two days. Not the seat cushions and not the inside of the radio, but all the engine pieces and the brakes and the body and the door and everything.”

  “They got a lot of bedsheets, is the way Christina told me. And it had to be able to drive.”

  “Yes, they taped a couple of old pink sheets down on the floor of the garage so they wouldn’t lose any parts. He was allowed to have one friend put parts in little piles.”

  “He won the bet.”

  “He won more than that—he got me, too. I thought, Now, there’s a man who can do things. We dragged that car around with us for the next thirty years.”