Misisipi

by Michael Reilly

  They sat beneath one of the ornate framed windows where the view on offer was the backside of the protective sheet outside. Scott watched the three squat candles flickering in the center of the table until the barman brought their drinks over in plastic cups.

  “Hope y’all don’t mind Go-Cups,” he said. “I don’t plan staying on for washing duty.”

  “What’s with the candles?” Scott pointed to the TV. “You have power.”

  “Could go any time so why wait?” the barman replied. “I heard it’s already out Gentilly-ways. Sides, I think it looks nicer this way. Makes it harder for her to find us, safe and snug here in the shadows. You like seafood?” he asked Stencek.

  “Sure.” Stencek removed a hundred from his wallet.

  The barman shook his head. “Call it lagniappe for the Lady.”

  Both men stared blankly at him.

  “A gift to honor our stormy guest,” the barman explained. “I might need all the karma I can grab. Drinks’s on the house, food too. Refrigerator’s probably gonna be out by morning so you’re doing me a favor.”

  Stencek lifted his Sprite to Scott. “Sorry about the cuffs but you shouldn’t have hit me.”

  Scott tipped his own cup to Stencek’s. “I’m sorry too… but you shoulda ducked.”

  The barman reappeared with a plate of golden-fried golf ball-sized bites, about two dozen in a heaped mound.

  “Red chili crabcakes. Fresh this lunchtime so I microwaved em for y’all just now. If you want hot sauce or Zatarains, I’ll fetch it for ya but then I’m gonna have to take that hun’red for you disrespectin the recipe.”

  Stencek laughed, “Never. I’ll even go on bended knee while I eat them, just you watch.”

  “Aw’right, Brother,” the barman smiled. “Go forth and sin no more. Til then, bon appétit.”

  Stencek pushed the plate in Scott’s direction. Scott shook his head.

  Stencek pulled the plate back. “Fair nuff.”

  While Stencek set about the crabcakes, Scott sipped his mojito and watched the television, where a wet and windwashed Jim Cantore informed his dry and unruffled Weather Channel anchors how Gulfport was faring. The view switched to a CG graphic of the hurricane, a digital overlay of swirling storm bands spinning lazily just off the coast.

  “It looks like a baby,” Scott said.

  “What?”

  “That satellite image of the storm. It looks like an ultrasound, like it has a heartbeat, you know… alive… not that I’d know.”

  Stencek picked up another crabcake. “It looks like a skyful of bad news and busted windows. Take it from a father of three, I know all about chaos theory.”

  “Boys or girls?”

  “Boys. All destined to be yahoos like their old man.” Stencek smiled.

  “Why aren’t you home now, reading Harry Potter and tucking them in? Instead you’re down here, chasing me, holding me prisoner, hounding me when all I want to do is find my wife. Why aren’t you with yours?”

  “She’s got them. I pay for the Hogwarts and the X-Boxes. That’s my role now.”

  “So, you used to a cop?” Scott asked.

  “I thought you were deaf back there.”

  “Not deaf enough. So, you divorced?”

  Stencek shook his head. “Just… distanced.”

  “Don’t tell me. The old one about how hard it is being married to a badge. Another cop widow and the eventual—”

  “Listen, you privileged little Hyannis piece of shit,” Stencek snapped. “Don’t toss around the term ‘cop widow’ until you’ve actually had to tell some woman—some good friend of yours—how she actually became one in front of your own eyes.”

  “You don’t know me! Don’t presume me, ok? Hyannisport? For God’s sake, I’m grew up on a farm in Ithaca.”

  “And you sure as hell don’t know me. So don’t make assumptions about what cop life is actually like.”

  Scott folded his arms and leaned back. “So enlighten me then. Three kids. A wife. Must have been something serious to wreck that kind of contentment.”

  “Fuck you, Scott.”

  “No seriously. If I’m stuck with you then you’re stuck with me. Answer the question.”

  Stencek smacked his lips in resignation. “Marriages just fail. Sometimes they just lose the glue and fall apart. Happens all the time.”

  “I don’t buy that. You don’t strike me as the quitting type.”

  “Well, if you want to sit here and be amused by tales of counseling and talk therapy, that’s ok with me.”

  “No. I want you to tell me the truth. I’m trying to save my marriage. You’re stopping me from doing that. The least you owe me is knowing what’s stopping you from saving yours.”

  Stencek threw down his napkin. “Hell, why not? Even money says we’re all dead by dawn, if this thing’s as serious as they’re making out.”

  “Then I’ll take your secret to the grave.” Scott lowered his head invitingly.

  “Her mother died.”

  “Your wife’s?”

  “Yeah. I’d been detective for eight years. We had our own place in Riverdale. Her folks lived down in Woodlawn. Bout when our youngest started second grade, her mother got cancer and her old man didn’t take it too well. Bit of a drinker—Irish. Never liked me, his Polak cop son-in-law. Dunno which part of that scared him or sickened him the most. Probably all of it. Still, he didn’t dare touch the sauce the times they came by our place. It’s funny, the upside: the sicker she got, the less I saw of him, cause he needed to get more and more tanked up to deal with it all.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t see it as a benefit back then.”

  “Hey, every cloud and all. I shoulda appreciated it more at the time, because of what came next.”

  “How long was she sick?”

  “Teresa? Bout nine months. She died July 2000. Annie—that’s my missus—she and her sister did what they could but Teresa just… wasted away. She spent some time in Sloane Kettering, but in the end, they didn’t want her dying in a hospital bed. Me personally, I thought home was the worse place for her. The old man was poison to be around. Just being in the same air as him would make a horse sick, let alone a frail old woman dying of cancer. Annie wouldn’t hear of it though. She knew her father was a prick but she argued that Teresa would want to spend the little time she had left at home with him. Guess Annie wanted Teresa to have the chance of one last glimmer of—you know—whatever was the old magic she saw in the mean old fuck in the first place. Stupid really.”

  “Did she?”

  “Did she what?”

  “Your wife’s mother. Did she get the last glimmer she held out for?”

  “Fuck, no. On the night she died, he was out getting tanked up and turfed out of some bar at 4am. Stead of going home, he went round to an old girlfriend in the neighborhood who put him up on the couch. I’m sure he’d been hoping for more, the sick selfish fuck. The homecare nurse came round next morning and couldn’t get an answer from the door so she rang Annie. Annie dashed over. They found Teresa, alone. She’d passed sometime in the night. Natural causes. Was just her time.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, what you gonna do? Annie was pissed at him for not being there, seriously angry. I figured he was gonna get what-for now; to stew in that house all alone, in the bed he abandoned Teresa to. If ever a guilty conscience needed rich pickings… I thought, there’s the motherlode all-you-can-eat-buffet right there. Bon appétit. I was onboard for that.”

  “I assume it didn’t work out that way.”

  “Ain’t it a bitch? Teresa’s medical bills came to over 90 grand, on toppa the 30 grand he owed bookies and bars round town. Only asset he had was the house.”

  “So the sale of the house meant he needed somewhere else to live?”

  “No way is he coming to live with us! No fucking way! I told Annie that straight out,” Stencek snapped. His features twisted, as though living the confrontation for the first time while Scott watched.
“After what he done? Kinda man he is? Even if he never touches another drop for as long as he lives, I can’t stomach to have him in my home, around my kids.”

  Stencek took a breath, drained the last of the Sprite. “Plus I knew he’d just play the sympathy card with Annie; nice-as-pie around her, making me the bad guy in my own house. If the fights we had, Annie and me, about the issue were anything to go by, I knew he’d make our home toxic the second he stepped through the door.”

  “What was it, really, that you hated so much about him?”

  “He was weak. Not helpless, the other, worse kind. The kind that has the smarts to know to make up for that weakness by exploiting the kindness of others. That’s their strength, parasites like him. Exploiting the good in people to make up for what they don’t have in themselves.”

  “So what happened? He moved in?”

  “What could I do? Annie said that it would be good for the boys to have their Granddad around. It might give him something to focus on too. Responsibility. She wanted him to have a last shot at redemption, was just as deluded as Teresa on that score. Me, I tried to find an upside. I was even prepared to let him drink, hoping he’d drink himself to death in the shortest time. Hell, I’d even line up the bottles and keep it coming if that sped the process along.”

  Scott realized he was already half-way down his second mojito. “Did that happen? Did he start drinking again?”

  “Even more than ever. Not in the house though. I bit my tongue, endured it for… oh, a good four months. Eating away at me inside. Thinking, is this gonna go on for another 4—14—40 years? I shoulda been bigger than that. But I never liked him, he never liked me. And I sure as shit despised him as much as you could despise anyone, for the way he let that poor woman die alone, leading himself around by his liver and his dick, like all along he had it hardest of all.”

  Stencek’s satphone buzzed. He looked at the screen for what seemed to Scott an eternity. Finally he set it down.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “New Year’s Eve, 2000. New York got dumped on, a total white-out. Three feet and drifts, a real blizzard. I’m working outta the Two-Five in Harlem—Robbery-Homicide. I’m up there cause I did my early tec time at OCCB, knew the turf. I get called from a bar in Woodlawn, some gin joint on Two-Thirty-Fifth Street. It’s coming up to midnight. The old man is up there, totally tanked, almost horizontal on his stool. He’s been bugging everyone else, trying to pick a fight all night. Barman wants to toss him but he’s afraid he’ll be found frozen solid at the door next morning. He ain’t got cash for a cab; drank it all. Barman turns out his pockets, finds his driver’s license with our address, suggests calling Annie to come get him. ‘No! No!’ he pleads. ‘My son-in-law’s a cop. Call him. Don’t call my daughter, please. Don’t let her see me like this.’ All parta the fuckin game, right?

  “So the barman rings me at the precinct and fills me in; says he won’t keep him in the bar any longer’n he has to. Like fuck I was gonna drive out of the city to go and babysit his ass into a semi-sober state, just so’s he could save face with Annie. But I do nothing and the old fart has another grievance to stack up against his grudge-bearing son-in-law. Am I right?”

  Scott nodded.

  “I rang this guy I know, Trabcab—that’s his gang name, just like the bozo we met back on the square there. Trab is a small potatoes dealer outta Highbridge. I busted him way back when I was posted with TNT. He did five years in Green Haven for dime bag stuff. Next time I ran across him again on OCCB, Trab was carrying a piece. So we turned him, made him our eyes-on in the neighborhood for a case we was working against DDP, local Dominican low-life crew.”

  Scott shook his head. “You may as well be talking a foreign language to me right now.”

  “It’s the job. Just deal with it,” Stencek spat. “Anyways, I pretty much owned Trab’s ass so I told him to get said-ass over to the bar, get the old fuck, and take care of him.”

  “You sent a drug-dealer to pick up your father-in-law and drive him home?”

  “No, I said ‘take care of him.’ Jesus, you gonna let me tell the story or what? You asked what happened.”

  “Yeah, I did. Sorry.”

  Stencek took a large gulp from the last mojito.

  “Next thing, it’s an hour later, Trab’s been picked up by a joint DEA-Narc team in Hunts Point, seven miles in the wrong direction from where he’s supposed to be. He’s got five kilos of heroin in his trunk along with the old man’s shoes but no old man.”

  Scott’s jaw dropped. Stencek pointed at the expression on Scott’s face. “Yeah. Kinda how I looked when I got off the phone with Annie.”

  “What happened?”

  “Took me most of the night to piece it together. Turns out Trab wasn’t snitching the DDP solely for our benefit. He was actually using us to clear space for his new best buddies at their main rivals, the Trinitarios. I didn’t get that memo. Trab’d picked up the blow for them that morning from LaGuardia. But the DEA knew it was coming in and they tailed Trab the rest of the day. Only, Trab went home from LaGuardia and stayed home, on accounta the weather. He only moved his ass for me cause he didn’t want me sniffing out that he was playing both sides.

  “Anyway, something spooked him after he collected the old man. Maybe he made the DEA tail. Maybe he got a vibe. Maybe he got the call from the Trinitarios to drop the package down in the Bronx and he figured he had to ditch the old man fast. Maybe he just had a bad burrito for breakfast—who the fuck knows? All the DEA tail saw was Trab parking up on Bryant and dragging a body from the car, dumping it in an alley in the middle of a snow storm, and taking off. What are they supposed to do? Exactly! They moved in, pinched Trab at the scene, found the drugs in the trunk and the old man slumped behind a dumpster back in the alley, drunk as a lord. Five more minutes there and he would have froze to death. Lucky for him, huh?”

  “The shoes?” Scott asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You said the DEA found the heroin and your father-in-law’s shoes in the car.”

  “Oh yeah. Trab took his fucking shoes. You believe that? The guy’s gonna freeze to death anyways. But to take his shoes as well?”

  “Did the DEA wonder how your father-in-law came to be in the middle of all that?”

  “Oh boy, did they ever. They discovered my call to Trab’s cell, and when they put the squeeze on him, Trab tried every which way to pin the score on me, tried to turn State’s on me to wriggle outta the 15 he was facing down. First he said I was trying to muscle in on the gig, then that I was the buyer, then the seller. Tried to claim I sent the old man to watch out for my end. They had a New York detective placing private calls to a known crim in possession of five kilos and a family member of said-tec in the car during the bust. It looked iffy but they had my call on tape; they knew Trab’s claims were bullshit. Any case they made from them woulda been tossed in the crapper the minute it hit a courtroom, but it still stank to high Heaven when you stirred it.”

  “You weren’t charged with anything?”

  “No. They dicked around for five months looking for a hook. Meantime, indictments were about to fall in the Sindone case, a high profile bad-cop investigation from years back. The department was braced for a major media shitstorm on that one, but they were singing the song about how the Sindone crap happened under the old guard and how indicting Sindone now proved the department had cleaned its act up and was finally taking out the trash, wiping the past clean. But the Mike Stencek show, this would be a new entry in the sleaze parade. If the press got wind, it woulda put the current chiefs and their supposed new broom under the microscope. I was the iceberg that could sink their PR Titanic.”

  “So you got fired instead?”

  “I walked, let us be crystal clear on that. No pension. No gold watch. On the day Sindone got his paper and all the cameras were pointed at the front steps, I hit the street out the back door. Degree in Criminal Justice, 14 years on the job. I’m 36 years old and I still have to go home to where tha
t fuck has his feet under my table. Only now, I’m down to his level, lower even. I don’t have his knack for leeching.”

  “What did you mean ‘take care of him’, to the gang guy? What was he supposed to do?”

  “Ah, it was dumb, truly retarded. I told Trab to dump him out middle of the Irish football field in Van Cortlandt Park and take off. Poetic eh? I was gonna head on up after that and get him, take him home. But, let him chill for an hour out there first—that mighta shifted his world view for the better. No one other than a low life woulda done it for me, no questions asked. That’s why I roped Trab in.”

  “He could have frozen to death, you know,” Scott suggested. “I remember that storm. There was a report that some hobo in Langone Park in Boston lit a fire to keep his hooch from freezing and ended up in a fireball when the whole bottle blew. They say the cops that found him after the thaw couldn’t decide if it was the burns or the freeze that killed him.”

  “Well, let’s say they found Popsicle-in-law the same way come Paddy’s Day. We could but speculate, right? Maybe the old man tried to walk back to Riverdale from the bar by himself. He just came undone in the storm, was just his time.”

  “Is that what you were actually planning?”

  Stencek let the question hang for a second. He shrugged. “It’s academic anyhows. When I went to the park, he weren’t there, that’s all I know. If I would have found him—I kid you not—I was primed to clean his clock thoroughly before I took him home, claim that any marks on him were on accounta that he kicked off in the bar before I got there, that I found him out on the street like that. I woulda got it out of my system and Annie would have left it at that.”

  “So much for the best-laid plans, eh? How did she take the truth?”

  “Good news and bad. Good news, she never, ever believed I was any way involved in the five Ks of junk. At best, she convinced herself that I was just fucking with the old man but she never came out and said it. I doubt she ever believed that I was gonna let his ass freeze to death, but she never forgave me for wanting to teach him a lesson or how it ended up. That was the bad news. Never said it. Just you caught it, the coldness, the tension in her face when he and me were in the same space anytime after. Six months after the big freeze melted, it felt like it had never left my home. A week after I walked off the job, I started this gig. Took the first assignment out-of-state that came my way. Haven’t been home since. That was four years ago.”