Way Past Legal

by Norman Green

  I saw them take a right turn and head west. I thought it might have been that same road where I’d first seen Franklin, but I wasn’t sure, and again, we were back to two cars, one following the other through the middle of nowhere. After about three miles we ran out of pavement. The Russians had to slow down, and so did I, but I was feeling less and less comfortable with the situation. These guys would have to be complete idiots not to have noticed me. I shut my lights off as I got to the top of a hill. The dirt road dropped away in front of me. I could see the road going down the hill, but I couldn’t see any taillights, so I stopped and waited. It occurred to me then that I was being much more cautious than was normal for me, and I wasn’t sure if I liked that, but then I realized that I had a hell of a lot more to lose now than I’d ever had before. I didn’t know what to make of it: I sat there feeling like a coward for a few minutes, even though there were two of them and one of me, and they were sure to be armed while all I had was a hunting knife and a can of bug spray. I saw their lights come back on—they had pulled over into the trees to see if someone really was on their tail. I sat there and watched their taillights wink out of sight, wondering what to do. There must be a difference between courage and stupidity, that’s what I told myself. Rosario was going to have to take it a while longer.

  Nicky was asleep, right in the middle of the bed, his arm stretched out over to my side, reaching out for someone who wasn’t there. I was afraid to move him—I didn’t want to wake him up. I wasn’t all that tired anyhow, in spite of the hour. I sat in an overstuffed old chair in the corner of the room and watched him. One thing about him, he went to bed without complaining and he slept like a dead man. Little bastard got up early, though. Just the opposite of his father. “Father,” Jesus, there’s a word for you.

  Coming from where I did, it’s tough for me to understand people who are so desperate to have kids when we don’t know what the fuck to do with the ones we already got. You see it in the paper all the time, and I don’t get it. Surrogate mothers, in-vitro fertilization, egg donors, sperm donors, fertility drugs that make women bear children like litters of baby mice, and all the time I’m growing up, I’m yelling, “Hey! What about me?” I guess it’s in the genes, nobody really wants to just raise some kid, what they want is to procreate. Yeah, I’m a real winner, kid, and I’m gonna give you my DNA so you can be a winner, too. Just like me.

  And yet, there he was, you know, this beautiful little person, this natural con artist, sleeping right in the middle of the bed in Eleanor Avery’s spare bedroom, and what was I supposed to do with him? He didn’t need to live out of a knapsack, sleep in motels and spare bedrooms. No matter how well intentioned I might be, no matter what a great kid I thought he was, if I wanted him to turn out better than me, I needed to start doing things different. Fuck me, it’s bad enough you got to be responsible for yourself, okay, I’m a crook, I’m this and I’m that, go right down the fucking list, I don’t really care, I’ll cop to it all, but now I’ve got this kid, and if I don’t find him a place where he can have his own room, and a bicycle, and a school to go to and all that shit, then it will be on me how he turns out. When he hits eighteen, he could be in college or he could be in prison, and I couldn’t get away from the premonition that the decisions I was making right then were going to make the difference between the two.

  Even Louis had done better than me. His son had grown up in a house, it was his bedroom that Nicky and I were sleeping in. Okay, maybe the guy wasn’t Bill Gates, but he was a regular person, a guy with a job, and whatever the possessions were that he had managed to scrape together, they were his, the cops would stand between him and whoever it was that wanted them, he didn’t need to worry about some bastard with a warrant, or two Russians from New Jersey, showing up in the middle of the night to take his shit and his family away from him.

  I wondered if it was Bookman who had sold me out. I couldn’t think of another way the bastards could have gotten so close so quickly. There was no way they could have traced me on their own. I hadn’t used a credit card, I had been paying cash for everything. Even though the money had quite recently belonged to them, or to whoever had hired them, they had stolen it from someone else first. Cash doesn’t tell stories, anyhow, it’s never clean or dirty, only the hands that hold it. I had gone on-line from Avery’s telephone, but I couldn’t think of a way they could have traced that, either. They would have to know, in advance, what sites I would be looking at, they would have to know my on-line identity, and nobody knew that name but me. I cover my tracks, man. There’s nobody any more paranoid than me. The only person I could think of who could put the pieces together was Bookman.

  And why would he do it? What kind of game was he playing? Even if the Russians were offering some kind of a reward, I couldn’t picture Bookman going for it. Cops go to cops, that’s what they’re used to. He didn’t seem like that kind of guy, anyway. I hated to admit it, but I kind of liked the guy, even if he was a cop.

  I put my feet up on the corner of the bed. Nicky stirred when I did that, mumbled something in his sleep. He liked this place, he liked Eleanor and Louis, and he loved that stupid horse. The kid had never had anything of his own, never in his life. I knew that was more my fault than anyone else’s, but I couldn’t change it. I couldn’t go back into the past and give him a different family, and to be honest, I don’t know if I would have done it if I could. He was mine, you know? Blame it on the DNA, he was part of me, and I was part of him, for better or worse.

  It came to me then, what I needed to do. And it’s funny, you know, you hear this shit all of your life, and I don’t know about you but I would never listen. I already knew everything, why the hell would I pay attention to you? But those voices had been right. I needed to stop taking the easy way out, stop sneaking out the back window, stop running away. I always thought I was so fucking smart. I still do. So go on, genius, figure it out. Find a way to take care of the Russians, deal with Bookman somehow, clean up your goddam mess for once. I had never lived in a house before, never in my life. Well, the big house, but that didn’t count. I had never lived in a normal place, like Louis’s, with a yard full of green grass outside, and a cat, never mind the horse and the chickens and all the rest of it. Even when I had gotten to the point where I was about as successful as burglars get, I still never had anything real, I still lived in apartments, people upstairs, downstairs, and on both sides, and not even that much was mine, the apartments had always belonged to someone else. Maybe things could work out here, maybe we could stay. If I could manage to give Nicky something real, maybe he could grow up to be something real himself.

  5

  I woke up wondering if the Russians were the kind of guys who would go to church. Funny, the things your brain worries about. It was Sunday morning, my ears were still ringing from Roscoe’s music, and my back was stiff from sleeping in the chair. Nicky had gotten up before me, of course, but he’d stayed quiet. He was sitting over by the window, watching Avery’s horse. When I got up, he followed me into the bathroom, and the two of us washed up together. He did not seem to question the bond between us, somehow he accepted what I had such a hard time comprehending. You couldn’t write it off, either, couldn’t say that it was because he was young and didn’t know any better, you couldn’t say it was because I hadn’t hurt him yet, hadn’t let him down. I had already done all of those things, in spades, and yet he still trusted me. And even more than that, Nicky expected me to be the good guy. He had faith in the image of me that he held in his head, and I felt the weight of that faith and those expectations, and I was no longer comfortable being the unprincipled rat that I had once been. It was a new experience for me, being the subject of another person’s uncritical positive regard, knowing for sure there was another human being out there who worried if I was going to be okay. I suppose I’d never had occasion to think about it before, maybe I’m emotionally retarded, stunted from a lack of water, but in my mind I always associated the word “love” with gett
ing laid, you know, like in rock-and-roll lyrics. I’ll tell you, though, those few minutes first thing in the morning, holding Nicky up so that he could make faces at himself in the mirror while he brushed his teeth, the hug that he gave me for no particular reason when we were done, that was worth everything to me. It was what I stood to lose if the Russians won.

  Louis went to church that morning. He was already dressed to go when Nicky and I got downstairs. He was wearing a suit that had to be twenty-five years old, but it was clean, his shoes were polished, he was polished too, he was into it, man. He got that light in his eyes that religious people get, you know, and he asked me if Nicky and I wanted to tag along. Hell, no, I wanted to say, but I declined politely. Maybe next time. Eleanor, Louis told me, was having one of her pain spells, and was staying in bed. I promised Louis that Nicky and I would be quiet.

  Nicky and I had cereal for breakfast, and then I got him settled in front of Avery’s television. I plugged my laptop in and went on-line. I looked at MapQuest, trying to figure out where the Russians had been headed the night before. It looked to me like they had taken the back way toward Calais, as if they had wanted to stay off Route 1. They couldn’t be staying far away, so I did a search for motels within a fifty-mile radius. I was surprised how few there were and worried for a while that I wasn’t getting them all, but I searched a few different ways and kept coming up with most of the same names. I quit when I was happy with my list. It had about twenty names and phone numbers.

  My phone spiel was pretty straightforward. Do you have a Dubrovnic party registered there? Oh, are you sure? Mr. Dubrovnic and his cousin are up there on a fishing trip. . . . Maybe they registered under his cousin’s name. Oh, gee, you know, I don’t remember his cousin’s last name. Big guy, though, and Russian. Might have a third guy along. . . . Nobody like that? Sorry to bother you.

  I made a mental note to myself to leave some money with Louis for the phone bill. I was three quarters of the way down the list when I hit pay dirt, sort of. “Oh, yes,” the lady said, “I know who you mean. I’m afraid you missed them, though. They checked out this morning.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. It was not too hard to sound distressed. “Oh, this is terrible. I’ve got to get a message to Mr. Dubrovnic right away, his wife went into labor earlier than expected, and if I don’t get ahold of him, she’s going to kill him and me both. Did they give you any idea where they were headed?”

  She lowered her voice. “Well, they didn’t say anything to me, but I did overhear one of them on the phone in the office, making arrangements to rent a cabin somewhere out near Grand Lake Stream. I don’t know what good that will do you, though, they didn’t leave the phone number.”

  “Oh, my,” I said. “Well, I’ll have to figure out something. Thank you so much for all your help.”

  I was up getting another cup of coffee when Avery’s phone rang. It was Bookman, looking for me.

  “Louis go to church?” he asked me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Look,” he said. “Howevah those Russians sniffed you out, the leak is on yaw end, not mine. Now you listen to me carefully: I don’t want any dead Rooskies turning up in my jurisdiction. Do you understand me?”

  “Bookman, you got me all wrong.”

  “Yeah, I ’magine. By the way, what did you hit Hopkins with?”

  “My good right hand. Listen, the guy’s a nutcase, I got the right to defend myself.”

  “Relax, I heard all about it. Stupid bahstid looked like a raccoon with a white nose this mawning, two black eyes and a big bandage in the middle of his face. I put him on unpaid leave for taking aftah you. Hop has had this coming for a long time, and I think that when it’s all said and done, he’ll be the better for it. If he’s half the man I believe he is, he’ll learn from it, but if you go stirring him up, he won’t get the chance. I told him to stay away from you. I’m asking you to do the same.”

  I was beginning to get the impression that Bookman had a blind spot when it came to Hopkins. They say loyalty is a good quality in a person, but I didn’t have much experience with it. “Bookman, I got nothing to prove to Hoppie or anybody else.”

  “‘Hoppie’ is one of those red-flag words.” I could hear the disapproval in his voice. “Be helpful if you could go along with me on this.”

  “I am the soul of cooperation.” He snorted disgustedly. “Listen, Bookman, I need you to do something for me. I checked around this morning, those two Russians were in a motel up in Calais, but they checked out this morning. The clerk said they rented a cabin up near Grand Lake Stream. Is there some way you could help me out? I’d feel much more comfortable knowing where they are and what they’re doing.”

  He didn’t say anything at first, and I wasn’t sure if I’d pushed him too far or not. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said finally, and he hung up.

  I didn’t know what to think about Bookman. There were too many layers to the guy. He was too good at misdirection for you to take him at face value. He wore that chubby doofus exterior like a jacket, but his eyes belonged to a much different creature. He never told you enough, either, never said exactly what he was after. What had he done with me, that day in his office? He fed me a few scraps of information, and then he sat back and watched me jump to conclusions. I knew the first time I met him that he had to be smarter than he looked. Question was, how much smarter? I believed him, though, when he said that it wasn’t him who’d ratted me out to the Russians. He just didn’t seem to be that kind of guy.

  I started thinking about the Russians again. Obviously they knew I was up here, but they didn’t seem to know exactly what I looked like or what my name was. They couldn’t know where I was staying, either, or they’d be coming through Avery’s door already. They had Rosario, but he couldn’t give them a lot, he only knew me by the street name I used in Brooklyn. I had to assume they were pretty good, though, because they’d bagged Rosey and broken him, and that could not have been easy. It’s one of the bad things about being a crook: you make a big score, all of a sudden you’re a target, the headhunters start coming after you, including the ones you thought were your friends. Hey, what are you gonna do, call the cops? I started getting antsy, started watching through the windows and shit.

  “Hey, Nicky, you want to go for a walk?”

  We stopped at the Subaru first and slathered ourselves with bug spray. I strung my binoculars around my neck and we started up the hill behind Avery’s house. Two gulls flew overhead, one chasing the other. The pursuer was a great black-backed gull. They’re easy to spot because they’re bigger than the other gulls, plus, as you might guess, their backs and the tops of their wings are black. Usually. I mean, you might get one that’s all white, and you might get one with gray wings, but this one was basic black. The other one was probably a herring gull, white body, gray on the back and the wing tops, but I couldn’t be sure, because there are a dozen or so other kinds of gulls that can look almost exactly the same, ring-billed gulls, glaucous gulls, Iceland gulls, lesser black-backed gulls in a gray phase, forget about hybrids, and the immature gulls all look the same to me. Gulls are a pain in the ass. You have to go on small differences: either black or white on the wing tips, pale spots in the wing feathers when seen from below, small black bands on the tail, maybe a black ring on the beak, or a red spot, all while the son of a bitch is running for his life, wheeling and diving to evade the bigger one chasing him. The black ones will kill and eat the other gulls sometimes, grabbing them in midair and shaking them hard enough to break their necks.

  Nicky was getting used to my fixation with birds, and he stopped next to me. We watched the two gulls until they were out of sight. “Why is the big one chasing that other one?” he wanted to know.

  “The small one probably caught a fish, and the big one is trying to take it away from him.”

  “That’s not fair. Why doesn’t he go catch his own fish?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s no good at catching fish. Maybe the fish hide when the
y see him coming.”

  “He should go catch his own.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” He seemed satisfied with that answer, and we went on up the hill. It’s hard not to think of what animals do in terms of good and bad. It’s a mistake to do that, they say, animals just do what they do, there’s no morality involved. Nobody says why it doesn’t work the other way around, though. I knew what the Russians were gonna do if they caught me, and it had nothing to do with some abstract set of rules about the politics of coercion. It was just who they were, what they did. No less true, I suppose, when I got the money to begin with, or when the guys I stole it from got it before me. Everything depends on where you’re standing when the shit goes down.

  Nicky and I messed around up in Louis’s woodlot for an hour or so. We stayed away from the hole where the red oak had gone down, went farther up the hill into the woods. You could see where Louis had dropped a tree here and there, and there were piles of small branches lying around, making their slow way back down into the dirt. Louis didn’t cut his firewood the way I imagined most people did, start with the closest trees to his house and work his way back, chopping down everything thicker than a pencil. He took one here and another one there, left the better-looking ones standing. I could hear a woodpecker drilling for his lunch but I couldn’t spot him, he kept moving around. Kept his distance. Smart bird.