by Norman Green
The passenger door on the far side of the station wagon popped open and Nicky flew out, running for all he was worth. Rosario looked around wildly. Nicky disappeared into the weeds down at the water’s edge, and I was bearing down, getting closer. Rosario was not afraid of me, but he had to know that I could hold him up long enough for Bookman to chug down there and shoot his ass. He had one option left, and he took it: he humped Franklin’s inert form into the station wagon, walked calmly around to the driver’s side, got in, and took off. It took me another ten seconds to get there. I got to the street in time to see him hit the brakes once, just before he went out of sight. I stood there, leaning over, my hands on my knees.
“Shit!”
I could see it again, Nicky jumping out of the far side of the car, taking off into the underbrush. I was inordinately proud of him, even though that resourcefulness had nothing to do with me, it was just a product of the need to watch out for yourself from an early age. Still . . . “Nicky! Nicky, come on out! It’s okay, he’s gone now.” He didn’t, though, he stayed where he was. Behind me, Bookman came huffing down the hill. He tried to talk in between big gasps of air.
“Was . . . that . . . guy . . . Was that . . . him?”
He sounded like he was having a heart attack. “Yeah, that was him. Gimme your keys.”
“Huh?”
“Gimme your car keys. I’m gonna run back up to your house and bring the cruiser down here. See if you can get Nicky to come on out.”
He nodded, red-faced, fished his keys out of his pocket, and handed them over.
It had been a while since I had driven anything like Bookman’s cruiser. Crown Vics aren’t real popular anymore, especially in the city, where you’ve got to worry about parking them, but you’ve got to wonder why we gave up on those big American sedans. Detroit puts a lot of extra stuff into cop cars, too, big fat antisway bars, good strong engines, serious rubber. I hauled ass out of Bookman’s driveway and left a set of smoking black adolescent streaks on the road in front of his house. Detroit could do it if they wanted to, take a platform like the Crown Vic, spend the kind of serious attention on it that they’re gonna waste on whatever isn’t going to measure up to next year’s BMW 3-Series. Quit being copycats, man, quit trying to be something you ain’t and do what you know how to do. Give me a new Goat, man, put an active suspension under it, with quad discs and ABS brakes. . . .
When you need a distraction, anything will do. I didn’t want to think about Rosey and Franklin, and I didn’t want to think about what I had decided to do when I was running up that hill, because I felt lousy about it already. But your kids come first, isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work? Aren’t I supposed to take care of him, isn’t he my first priority? All I needed to do was get Nicky back, Franklin was not my problem. His father was the county sheriff, for Chrissake. Rosey probably wouldn’t hurt him anyhow, once he knew I was gone. He would realize that it would do him no good to hang on to Franklin and no harm to let him go. He would dump him and take off. I mean, he’d leave him somewhere where he’d be found, right? Franklin would be okay.
I came tearing down that road by the creek, stomped the emergency brake and laid a beautiful bootlegger’s turn on Bookman, pointed the car back in the direction Rosey had taken. I jumped out, left the door open.
Bookman was still catching his breath. “He wouldn’t come out,” he said. “Not for me. He’s down along the creek there someplace.” He got into the cruiser, slammed the door. “Manny,” he said. “This guy Rosario. Is he flying blind here? Did he do this on impulse, or does he have someplace to go?”
It made me sick to have to answer. “He’s too smart to just jump at it. He’s got something set up, he’s got someplace to hide, I’d bet on it.” Bookman looked at me for another half a second, then went tearing off down the road.
It took me fifteen or twenty minutes to find Nicky. I couldn’t blame him for not trusting me—the kid had been through a lot of shit since the day I picked him up outside the Bushwick Houses. He was hiding back in under a raspberry thicket. I couldn’t get to him, but when he saw me standing there, he came out, looking pale and shaken. He didn’t say much at first, but then the questions started.
“Who was that guy, Poppy?”
“He was a bad guy, Nicky, but he’s gone now.”
“Where’s Franklin?”
“Franklin is okay, Nicky. C’mon, we gotta go.”
“Did that guy hurt Franklin, Poppy?”
I didn’t want to lie to him, but only because I wasn’t sure how much he’d seen. “Well, he knocked Franklin down, but I think he’s going to be okay. C’mon, Nicky, we got to go.” He seemed to calm down then, and the two of us clambered back up the stream bank onto the road. I made a tactical mistake, though, I led him back up the same way I had gone down, and forgot about Franklin’s fishing rods. When Nicky saw those rods lying in the grass he pitched a fit.
“Poppy!” he yelled, and he started crying. “Poppy! What happened to Franklin? Where’s Franklin, Poppy?”
Ah, Jesus. “I think he went with Rosey, Nicky. I think he went with that guy.”
“Is he gonna hurt him, Poppy?” He wouldn’t look at me, he just stared down at the fishing rods lying by the side of the road.
“Nah, he’ll be fine. C’mon, Nicky, we gotta go.”
He didn’t move. He looked up at me then, his face white. “Are you gonna go get him, Poppy? Are you gonna go get Franklin?” He was doubting me for the first time, I could hear it in his voice, he knew what the right thing was but he wasn’t sure I was going to do it. My free pass was over.
I knelt down to put my face at his level. It wasn’t his tears that got to me, not really, it was that doubt in his voice, it was that implied judgment. Maybe I wouldn’t have done it in the end, anyhow, I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t have taken my kid and my money and run off, leaving Bookman holding the bag.
I’d been ready, though. All I had to do was put Nicky in the van, pick up my stuff at Louis’s, and take off. Kneeling there, looking at my son’s face, I realized that he would remember it if I did, that for the rest of his life, this event was going to color his perception of me, no matter what else I did.
Yeah, but . . . I could hear the inner voice. Every extra minute I hung around this place lengthened the odds against me. Every second that ticked by gave Bookman another chance to reevaluate his judgment of who I was, and whether it might not be better, after all, for Nicky to go back into foster care. And I had it, you know, I had it all right there in my hand, I had Nicky, I had the money, all I had to do was take it and go. Nobody in the world was watching me, except for my son.
“I’ll go get him, Nicky, I promise.” Maybe it was the right decision, I didn’t know, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had scored big at Vegas, and instead of taking my winnings and leaving, I had just pushed it all back up there on black, my life with Nicky, the money, even my freedom, and I was waiting for that stone-faced croupier to spin the wheel one more time. By the time we got back to Bookman’s house, though, I was ashamed of what I’d been ready to do. Thanks for taking care of my kid, Mrs. B, and oh, by the way, this buddy of mine just abducted Franklin, but he’s an okay guy, really, I think everything will turn out all right, and pardon me, but I gotta run. . . .
I was surprised to find Louis at home. I’d been sure that he would be in Machias at the hospital, seeing to Eleanor. “Hi, Louis. How is she?”
He was nodding. “She’s going to be all right. They’re going to operate tomorrow, thanks to you.”
“Nothing to it, Louis. I’m really glad I could help. I just need to run upstairs and grab my stuff. Nicky, stay here, okay?”
It took me only a few minutes to pack up. I didn’t know what was going to happen with Franklin, but I wanted to be ready to haul ass as soon as he turned up. It’s an old trick: if you think you’re gonna have to take off in a hurry, you fill up your gas tank, and you back your car into your parking space instead of nosin
g it in. Nicky wasn’t sure of me yet, though, because he ratted me out to Louis while I was upstairs. Louis looked at me oddly when I came down carrying my bags.
“Manny, what is Nicky talking about? Did something happen to Franklin?”
“Yeah. There’s this guy, his name is Rosario, and he’s been after me for a while. He was trying to grab Nicky, but Nicky got away so he took Franklin instead.”
It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. I watched as Louis wrapped his mind around it. “All right,” he said after a minute. “So what do we do now?”
“We wait for Rosario to call us,” I told him. “He really doesn’t want to hurt Franklin, he just wants his money. He’ll get in touch.”
“Does he have my phone number?”
“No, but he’s got my cell number.” I felt for the cell phone, but I remembered I had left it in the van. “Let me go get my phone,” I said. I took my bags with me, dumped them in the van.
There were three messages in my voice mail. I listened to the first one on my way back into Louis’s kitchen. It was Bookman, he’d gotten a radio call about a high-speed chase somewhere west of where we were, he thought the time frame was about right, and he was on his way to find out if it was Rosario. The second message was from Rosey himself, and he sounded like he was ready to burst into flames.
“Answer the fuckin’ phone, Mo, answer the fuckin’ . . . Goddam you, Mohammed! Answer the fuckin’ telephone!” He got louder as he went. “Don’t you do this to me, Mo, you fuckin’ piece of fuckin’ shit, Mo, answer the muthafuckin’ phone!”
The third message was from Rosey, too. He sounded almost sheepish. “All right, all right, voice mail, I know you couldn’t hear me. But I’m gonna call you back tonight, you fuck, and you better fuckin’ pick up. You hear me?” He sounded like he was outdoors, and he was shouting just a bit to compensate for the ambient noise. “You better fuckin’ talk to me, Mohammed, I got this fuckin’ retard here, and he’s not looking so good. I don’t wanna kill him, Mo, but you fuckin’ know I’ll fuckin’ do it, so you better answer your phone tonight. I’m gonna call you, maybe. . . .” He paused, looking at his watch or something, I guessed. I could hear a low drone in the background, it almost sounded like he was riding on a bus, it was a steady hum of some kind of engine. Not a bus, though, because it didn’t sound like a diesel. Then, on top of that, another tone, lower and deeper, maybe two seconds in duration. “I’m gonna call back eight or nine tonight,” he said. “You better fuckin’ answer, Mo. I want my fuckin’ money.”
Louis was watching me. “Was it him?”
“Yeah. It was him, all right.” I erased the first two messages. “Do me a favor, Louis, listen to the background noise in this message, tell me what it sounds like to you.” I started the message running again, handed the phone to Louis.
“The boy don’t sound happy,” Louis said.
“Forget him, Louis, what’s the noise he’s yelling over?”
“Outboard motor,” Louis said. “What? He’s on a motorboat?”
“Outboard,” Louis said, nodding. “Oh, wait. That’s the foghorn up in Indian Road.”
He was losing me. “What?”
Louis handed the phone back to me. “Play it again, so I can be sure,” he said. I did it, watched him listening to the message again. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s an outboard motor. Indian Road is the channel over on the Canadian side, across from Eastport. Runs between Campobello and Deer Island, I think. That low honk, that’s the foghorn from up there. You can hear it when you take the ferry across to Deer Island.”
I couldn’t believe it. Fucking Rosario, he’d left the hospital with no money, wearing a bathrobe and a pair of paper slippers, for chrissake, and now he was on a boat? The guy spent his whole life in Brooklyn, what the hell could he know about boats? “All right. Louis, why don’t you call the sheriff’s department, see if they can relay a message to Bookman, because it sounds like he’s chasing the wrong guy. Maybe I should head up to Eastport. Maybe I can figure out what to do from there.”
“Maybe so,” he said. “The thing is, Manny, if this guy is hiding someplace up within earshot of that foghorn on the Canadian side of the bay, you could look for him for six months and still not find him.”
“Oh, shit, Louis.”
“Ayuh,” he said. “And heah’s the other thing. This fella didn’t have no boat of his own, he couldn’t have. And even if he did, how’s he know where to hide? I think someone must be helping him, Manny.”
I remembered the last thing I’d said to Bookman before he took off in his cruiser. “Yeah, you’re right, Louis. I think he set this up ahead of time. He found the place first, then he came looking for me and Nicky.”
“How could he’a done that?” Louis asked. “He hasn’t had much time.” He shook his head. “How did he know where to look for you in the first place?”
“I don’t know. For a while I thought it was Bookman, because he’s the only guy who knows anything about what I’m running from.” I looked over at Nicky, wondering how much of this, if any, he understood, and how careful I was going to have to be with what I said. “He had me pegged that day I went up to his office, but he decided to let me slide. He had enough information, I think, to call somebody down in New York and put this thing in motion, but I couldn’t believe that he would do it. The problem is, nobody else knew enough about me.”
Louis was shaking his head. “Nah. Wan’t him, that ain’t the way Bookman does things. He might throw you in his cah trunk and ride you around for a couple hours to make you a little more cooperative, but he’d never have some other guy put the dogs on you. Bookman don’t do business out the back door like that. But I’ll bet you he told Hopkins what he knew.”
“Hopkins! Why the hell would he tell Hopkins?”
“Hop’s his number one apprentice. He’s been trying to teach Hoppie how to act for a couple yeahs now. I can see Bookman telling Hop why he was doing things in a certain way, trying to make him see right. Problem is, you can’t change the way a boy was raised. I’ll bet my house, Hoppie was smart enough to figure out how to put your tail in a sling, and mad enough to go through with it.”
“Son of a bitch! Son of a—”
“Now you just wait.” Louis was holding up a finger. “Won’t do you no good to go chahging around like a deer in the rut. You just wait right there.” He walked off into his dining room, and I could hear him pick up the telephone. “Hello, Brenda,” he said, but after that he pitched his voice too low for me to hear what he was saying. A couple of minutes later, he hung up and came back into the kitchen. “Brenda says Hop ain’t working. She says he’s at home.”
“Great!” I turned to go.
“Hold on, now,” Louis said. “Hold on just one more minute.”
“What is it?”
“You’re not gonna be able to beat it out of him,” Louis said. “You’re gonna have to talk him into helping you. Catch more flies with honey than vinegar, anyhow.”
“Oh, great.”
“And anyway, I bet you don’t even know where Hop lives.”
“Where’s he live, then?”
He had to draw me a map. It was only about eight miles from Louis’s house up to Hop’s trailer, but the route was convoluted and the directions too complex for me to hold them in my head. I found the place, though. The trailer itself was okay, I guess. If a trailer was what he could afford, who was I to think less of him for it? The location was another thing altogether, though. Hop’s trailer was situated about ten feet off an unpaved road, across from a blueberry field, which was nothing but an expanse of low brush stretching far back to a distant tree line. Behind the trailer, the hillside had been gouged out by someone who had carted away the underlying sand, and behind the sand pit, the forest had been ripped away, leaving a stubble of small trees growing up through the huge piles of brush that rendered the place impassable. I was amazed at the poverty of spirit required of anyone who would choose to put his house in that particular s
pot, especially in such a sparsely populated region, where other, more attractive alternatives abounded.
I parked the van behind the pickup in the sand between the trailer and the road. I was looking up at Hop’s satellite dish and thinking about what Louis had said I had to do, when the door to the trailer opened up and Hop came out. He wasn’t in uniform, but he did have a gun in his hand, and he was pointing it at me. His black eyes were getting better, the swelling had gone down, but he still had a bandage on his nose and he had a lot of discoloration. It was starting to fade to yellow around the edges, but all in all, he still looked like creamed shit on a stick.
“You no-good son of a hoah,” he said. He sounded pissed off, but it was impossible to read anything in that ruin of a face. He looked up and down the road, but the gun never wavered. “I ought to blow yoah head off, right heah in my front yahd.” I could see his jaw muscles working. “Only reason I ain’t doin’ it is I got no time to hide the body.”
“Why be mad at me, Hop? If you hadn’t come after me that night at the VFW, I’da never touched you.”
Hop came down off the steps to his place and stood off to one side. “I don’t care about that,” he said. “But you had to go and swear out a complaint on me, didn’t you? None of this would have happened if you had just minded yoah own damn business. I nevah hurt Brenda, anyhow. Not really.” He glanced up and down the dirt road again, then waggled the gun at me. “Inside, you son of a hoah. Get inside.”
“Yeah, sure.” I didn’t move. “It was Bookman, anyway. He made me do that. He needed a stick to hit you with, so he kind of insisted. I’da never set foot in that police station otherwise.”
“Goddammit!” It must have dawned on him just then how Bookman had manipulated him. He wasn’t pointing the gun at me anymore, not exactly, but he looked like he badly wanted to shoot somebody, or at least smack him around with his pistol, and I was the only candidate. I didn’t stand a chance against him, not with my wounded shoulder. All he had to do was put the gun down and come after me and it would have been all over. He didn’t, though. He stood there shaking, and after a minute he deflated like a balloon with a hole in it, his shoulders sagged, and he pointed his gun at the ground. “Goddammit,” he said, but without any spirit. “Bookman told me . . . he said you hated a man that would hit a woman. . . .” He glanced up and down that dirt road one more time, but there was fear in his eyes this time, and defeat. “Ah, fuck it. I got no time for this,” he said, shaking his head. “I got to get outta here. What the hell do you want?”
