by Norman Green
“How about a Coke?”
He looked up at me then, almost a full second before he looked away. I could see his father out of the corner of my eye, leaning in to hear. “You want to buy me a soda?”
“Yeah, Franklin, I do.”
He thought about it. “All right,” he said. “Ginger ale.”
“Coming right up.” I slapped him on the back as I stood up, thinking, This guy is freaking huge, then remembering. Franklin was a navy destroyer piloted by a little boy.
I walked through the door from the big room into the small room where the bar was, pausing to let my eyes adjust to the relative darkness of the place. The bar itself was an oval-shaped affair in the center of the room, stools around the perimeter, TV in one corner with the sound turned down. They were showing a Red Sox–Yankees game, and I never cared about the Yankees, so I ignored it. I leaned on the bar and nodded to Hobart, the guy who’d rented me the Subaru. He was sitting on the far side. He nodded back, then pointed down the bar with his chin. Thomas Hopkins was at the far end.
Hop was drunk. There were three guys clustered around his stool, watching the baseball game. Hop was in civvies, drinking shots and beers, and he had that slow-motion, unfocused, fog-brained look that guys get when they’re deep into a run. The bartender came over to take my order. He was an older guy with a gray brush cut and a navy tattoo on his forearm. Hop’s eyes followed every move the man made as he went to get my two Buds and the ginger ale. My guess was that Hop’s drinks were getting low and he didn’t want to run dry, not for a minute. I been there, that’s the place where there’s something rising up inside you and the only way to keep it down is to keep hitting it with something, alcohol or dope or sex or whatever it is that works for you. Hop’s eyes passed by my face once or twice but he didn’t seem to remember me. I paid the bartender, left him a couple of bucks, but as I turned to go, I saw recognition dawning on Hop’s features. I thought I saw alarm in the bartender’s eyes, but Hobart sat and watched, impassive. I glanced his way as I turned to go, and I thought maybe he was amused by the two of us, Hop and me, just a little bit.
Bookman stood up when he saw me coming. Franklin started to rise but Bookman leaned over and said something in his ear. Franklin nodded and sat back down. I handed Bookman his beer and put the ginger ale on the table in front of Franklin. “Thank you,” he rumbled, and when I didn’t reply, I heard him say, “You’re welcome,” softer, to himself. I stopped then, admiring Bookman for teaching his enormous kid that it made a difference how you talked to people. I patted Franklin on the back again, silently apologizing, I suppose, for my uncouth ways, and resolved to myself that I would be more careful from here on out, at least around him. Bookman caught my eye, jerked his head at the back door. He patted Franklin on the shoulder. I couldn’t hear him but I could read his lips.
“Stay here, I’ll be right back.”
Roscoe’s band was getting louder as the night wore on. The two of us stepped through a side door. I watched Bookman look back at his son before the door swung shut, leaving us in the relative gloom and quiet of the parking lot. He’d noticed me watching.
“I probably shouldn’t worry about him,” he said.
Must be like worrying Godzilla is going to hurt himself, I thought, but I didn’t say it. “That’s your job.”
“I guess it is.” He took me by the elbow, led me a few steps away from the building. “I made a few phone calls this aftahnoon,” he said. “That Russian’s name is Alexander Postrozny. His cahd says he’s from Jersey City, so I talked to a detective from theyah. Guy told me Postrozny is a scumbag. His word, not mine. Said Postrozny’s a hiyed gun, they suspect he’s tied to the Russian mob.” He stared at me. “You ready to tell me what this is all about?”
The side door to the VFW opened, then, and Bookman and I were briefly bathed in light until the door swung shut behind some kid and his fat girlfriend. She was shorter than him, and she was fat in a muscular way, sort of like a hippopotamus, I guess, like if she caught you, she could rip your liver out and eat it if she wanted to. “G’night, Sheriff,” they both said, and waved at the two of us. “G’night.” She had a huge butt that rolled back and forth when she walked. Bookman and I watched the two of them cross the parking lot and get into an ancient pickup truck and drive away. It has to be pheromones, or something like that. A man gets a sniff of the right one and something terrible happens to his brain.
“Nicky’s mother is dead. I don’t have legal custody.” You start with the truth, or a small piece of it, and then you build your structure on that. “She was Russian American. Her father’s brother is in the Russian Mafia. The family wanted to take Nicky away from me, and there’s no way I could compete with that kind of money. So I took him.” It was a good lie, especially for something I came up with on the fly. I had to do it. Bookman wanted a story, but if he found out I had two million bucks that I took off some Russian scam artists, and that I was keeping it in a storeroom in Hackensack, I’d be lucky if I ever saw Nicky again. Maybe with a thick sheet of Plexiglas between the two of us.
“Postrozny gave me the name of a motel down in Machias as a local address,” Bookman said, “but when I called down theyah, they didn’t know who I was talking about. I can’t exactly put out an APB on the son of a hoah, he’s not wanted for anything. If you was smaht, you’d stay out of sight fah the next few days.”
“I’ll do my best. Thanks for the heads-up.” He looked at me then, and again I could feel myself being scrutinized, and I wondered what was really going on behind that bland expression. “How you making out with your reconstruction project?”
“What’s that?”
“Hopkins.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, I got his attention, I can tell you that. Might take a day or so, but he’ll come around, he’s too smart not too. Not always easy to grow up, you know. Generally involves a little discomfit.” I didn’t have anything to say to that.
We went back inside and sat down. Roscoe’s band filled the air with French Canadian voices that were by turn pleading, mournful, angry. I was surprised by the number of people who got up and stomped their way across the dance floor, swirling and shouting in time to the music. I felt like I was on a small island of relative peace, sitting next to Franklin and his father, surrounded by noise and furious activity.
I asked Franklin if he wanted another ginger ale. He lumbered to his feet. “I’ll get it,” he said. On his far side, Bookman’s eyes went wide in surprise.
“You sure?” I asked him.
“Yep,” he said, without looking at me. “My turn.” He gathered up the empties.
“Franklin, you got money?” his father asked him.
“Course I got money,” Franklin said, and he headed off toward the bar. Bookman stared at me across Franklin’s empty chair.
“I don’t know what you did to that kid,” he said. “Sometimes days will go by befoah I get that much out of him.”
I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know what I had done to him, either, but I felt good for having done it. “I don’t know,” I said to Bookman. “Maybe he was ready.”
Bookman shook his head. “Maybe,” he said. I was getting to like the guy, and I had to keep reminding myself that Bookman was a cop, a policeman who could ruin my life, take Nicky away from me, put me behind bars for the foreseeable future if he found out the truth.
Franklin came back, looking pleased with himself. He plopped the bottle down in front of me. “Budweiser,” he said.
“Thank you, Franklin.”
“You’re welcome,” he said.
The two of them got up and left soon after, and they took that island with them, that small patch of tranquillity. I finished the beer Franklin had bought me, got up, and walked through the back door of the place into the parking lot. From the outside, you couldn’t hear music, all you got was the thump of the bass and muffled shouting. It was a clear and cold night. I leaned against a pickup truck, watching a bunch of swallows feeding in t
he airspace over a field adjacent to the parking lot. Swallows flying always remind me of movies of World War II dogfights, Messerschmitts and Spitfires.
Behind me, the door burst open and Thomas Hopkins stepped out into the night. His three friends were behind him, and they looked somewhat more sober than he did. One of them had Hopkins by the elbow, but he tore himself loose. “There you are,” he slurred, “you son of a hoah. Goin’ round, stickin’ your nose where it don’ belong. Fix you.”
The guy who’d been trying to restrain him took another stab at it. “Not now, Hop, this ain’t the right—”
“Fuck away from me,” Hop snarled, turning on his friend and shoving him away. The guy held his hands up in surrender, looked over at me and shrugged.
“You want me to go call Bookman?”
“Nah. Hoppie’s too fucked up to do anything,” I said. “Ain’t that right, Hoppie?”
Hop shook his head unsteadily. “Bassard,” he said. “Take you drunk or sober.”
“You sure you want to do this, Hop? Nothing good can come from it.” He didn’t say anything, just shuffled a couple of steps closer to me. I didn’t react, I just watched him, because he’d looked too drunk to walk on his own, but then he lurched at me, threw a left uppercut that was surprisingly quick. He didn’t miss me by much. I danced back out of the way. “All right, all right,” I said. “Hold up.” I shrugged off my leather jacket. Good thick leather, it’ll slide right off you. Hop tried the same thing with his woolen jacket but it bunched up around his elbows, trapping his arms behind him. “That was probably a mistake, Hoppie,” I said, and I took a step in his direction and threw a nice stiff left right onto his nose. It rocked his head back sharply, and he staggered back. Not having his arms for balance, he tripped and went down.
I hadn’t been sure about the other three, but what they did was start laughing. “Way to go, Noo Yok,” one of them said.
Hop was pissed, though. He rolled around on the ground until he had his knees under him, then he jumped back up to his feet and got his jacket back up over his arms. He rushed me, making incoherent noises in the back of his throat. He paid no attention to the blood that was running out of his nose and down his face. He seemed much more sober than he had just seconds ago, and he started throwing quick hard punches. The guy had hands like rocks, but I got my arms up in time, and his punches bounced off my elbows and shoulders. Hop’s friends started laughing harder, which only made things worse. Hop changed tactics then. He grabbed me by my shirt and started grappling for my head. I tucked my chin and cracked him on the nose with my forehead. I knew it had to hurt, but he showed no sign of it. Even drunk, the guy had a horrible strength, and he had me by the head and left arm. His friends were still laughing, probably at both of us now.
My right arm was free, though, and I was starting to get angry myself. I held him straight up with my left arm and hit him in the guts with four of the best right hands you ever saw. He let go of me and staggered back, holding on to his midsection. His eyes went wide and his legs got rubbery, then suddenly he pitched forward. I caught him by the back of his collar just in time to keep him from planting his face on the bumper of a parked car.
“Noo Yok’s got quick hands,” one of Hop’s friends said. Hop threw up convulsively right then, splattering the car he’d almost hit. The three of them howled.
“Hey,” I said, holding Hop away from me. “One of you stooges want to take over for me here? He’s your guy, not mine.”
One of them stepped forward. It was the guy who had tried to restrain Hop a half a minute earlier. “Thanks for catching him,” he said. “His face is bad enough as it is.”
“It was reflex. I had time to think about it, I might have let him kiss that car.”
“Ayuh,” the guy said. “We would’na let him hurt ya, if things had went the other way.”
For whatever reason, I believed the guy. “Well, thanks. You better get him looked at. I think his nose is broke.”
The guy grabbed Hop by the head and rolled it back, looked like Michael Jordan palming a basketball. “Oh, Christ,” he said. “Eric, bring your pickup around, we’ll throw Hop in the back and ride him over to Doc’s.” He looked back at me. “Hop’s gonna be some ugly in the mawnin.”
One of them jogged off to get his coat. “C’mon, Jimmy,” the guy holding Hopkins said. “Muckle on, ovah heah.” The third guy stepped forward and grabbed Hop’s other arm, and the two of them dragged him away.
I went back inside, looked at myself in the mirror in the men’s room. I was going to have some bruises on my shoulders and arms where Hop’s punches had landed, and there was some blood on my forehead, but it was Hop’s, and it washed right off. I was going to leave, but Roscoe’s band was taking a break, so I sat back down. Roscoe was making the rounds, shaking hands. He stopped at my table. “T’anks for coming, aye?” he said. “You like da music?”
“Too loud,” I told him. “Hurts my ears.”
Roscoe laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “Franklin, he tell me dat last time. We play loud, by God.”
“I was kidding, Roscoe. You guys are all right.”
“T’anks,” he said, nodding. “I hear you popped old Hoppie pretty damn good.”
“Damn. Word gets around fast.”
He shrugged. “He had it coming. Maybe you make a few friends tonight, aye?”
He leaned in, lowered his voice. “You be careful now, aye? Old Hop, he’s a backshooter from away back. Okay?”
“Thanks, Roscoe.” I watched him walk away.
I was thinking about leaving when two Russians came through the door. I’d never seen either one of them before, but I knew who they were right away because they had my old partner Rosario with them. His face was gray and sweaty, and if you looked close you could see how carefully he was walking. The crowd had gotten a little thinner—the saner portion had gone home during the break, and I began to wish that I had, too. The Russians were both big, beefy guys, thick necks, wide shoulders. One of them had a vertical scar on one side of his face, ran from one cheekbone up past his eye into his hairline. The other guy looked like he was the one in charge of the brain. He was still in decent shape, but you could see the ghost of Boris Yeltsin in his face, he had already started down that booze highway. The three of them made their way over to an empty table and sat down.
Yeltsin leaned over and said something to Rosey. Rosey nodded, and then he made a show of panning the crowd. His eyes passed mine without stopping. A few seconds later, he looked back at Yeltsin and shook his head. Yeltsin said something, he must have wanted Rosey to be sure, because Rosey did it again, looked at all the faces carefully, shook his head again. The Russian bent closer, looked into Rosey’s eyes, saying nothing. Rosey leaned back away from the guy. I could see he was afraid. He shook his head, No, the guy ain’t here. Yeltsin sat back, disgusted, looked around for the bar. He said something to Scarface, got up, and walked into the back room.
Rosey wiped his forehead with a shaking hand, dried it on his shirt. Scarface watched him for a minute before he turned away, showing his contempt by twisting in his chair so he wouldn’t have to look at him. Very slowly, Rosey leaned his elbows on the table in front of him, steepled his fingers, and glanced up at the ceiling like he was praying. Then he looked over his shoulder for Yeltsin again before glancing across the room at me.
I stared right at him.
He looked around for Yeltsin again, then pantomimed holding on to a steering wheel. I nodded to him. Yeah, I get it. He put his hands palm down on the table just as Scarface turned to check on him.
We’re all human. No matter how tough you think you are, you’ve got fears, you’ve got emotions, you’ve got nerve endings. Rosario was a bad motherfucker, but the Russians had reduced him to a sweaty, shaking husk of what he had been. I read somewhere that we’re all born with two fears, the fear of loud noises and the fear of falling, all the rest of them we pick up as we go along. I mentally added those two Russians to my list.
Two tables down, the people got up to leave. I waited until they passed by where I was sitting, then I got up and mixed in with them. One of the women in the party looked like she was still in her teens, she had long blond hair and she wore jeans that could not have been any tighter. Who would look at me when they could look at her? I got out the door just ahead of them.
I took a quick tour of the parking lot. There was a late-model sedan with a National Car Rental sticker on it, and I assumed that it had to be what the Russians were driving. There were a bunch of empty spots in the lot from the people who’d already gone home, so I moved the Subaru to a place where I could watch both the car and the doors of the VFW. They stayed about another half hour. I guessed that Yeltsin must have been juicing himself pretty hard during that time, because he looked unsteady when they came out, and Scarface looked pissed. Rosey walked slowly and carefully, as he had before. I didn’t want to think about what they had done to him.
It’s not all that hard to follow someone in an urban setting. There’s usually plenty of other cars around, nobody’s gonna notice one more. Here, though, it was just the two of us, my car and theirs. They pulled out of the lot, and I gave them about thirty seconds before I started in their wake. I thought about that, and I lagged back maybe three quarters of a mile. They seemed to be heading more or less due west. I tried running without my headlights for a while, but I don’t know how smart that was. When there aren’t many houses with lights on and there are no streetlights at all, it gets real hard to see the road. I had to slow down too much to keep from killing myself, so I turned the lights back on.
They turned south when they got to Route 1. I was about a half mile behind them, but I saw their brake lights, and the left-hand turn signal blinking. I had to wait when I got to the stop sign, and a southbound pickup truck got between me and the Russians. I thought that was a good thing at first, but the guy in the pickup drove too slow, and the Russians began gaining on me. I couldn’t get past the son of a bitch, either, because he would speed up every time the road straightened out, and the Subaru just didn’t have the horses to take him. I guess the driver thought I was questioning his manhood, I don’t know. We were headed toward Louis’s house, and I was beginning to learn that section of Route 1 pretty well, so I hung back until we got to one long curve, and then I stood on the gas all the way around it, caught up with the bastard, and passed him at the beginning of the next straightaway. I must have pissed him off, he stayed right on my ass until we hit the next curved section of road, but I had other things to worry about. Rosario hadn’t given me up. Maybe he really did think I could rescue him, or maybe he was worried what the Russians would do to him once they found me. But they had definitely squeezed him, and I couldn’t be sure how much more of that he could take.
