The Wrong Man (10 page)

11

W
e
dropped
to
a
legal sixty-five miles per hour and drove for about ten minutes—Tommy’s brown rusty cruise ship and my muscle car fallen from glory scudding up the highway. We hit a town called Greens Landing, a beachfront community which existed in the netherland between quaint tourist trap and dismal slum, featuring failing antique shops and seafood restaurants hoping to hook tourists going between
Monterey
and
Del
Mar.

Tommy’s right turn signal began blinking through its grime and he slowed and veered over, lifting roadside dust, and I followed. We swung down a sidestreet with that sunny but miserably windy and sandblasted quality that beachtown streets sometimes have—as inviting as the surface of Mars. Tommy swung his car hard to the left, so the suspension rocked the frame almost to the ground, and I followed him into the back parking lot of a bar and seafood restaurant.

As he stood out of his car he dragged hard on a cigarette and then flicked it into the windswept lot. He threw his hood back, exposing his outdated blond hair and unshaven jaw and threw me a look and a “come on” jerk of the head, and passed into the back door. I recognized the place as I rose from my car. It was called
The Greens Landing Jazz Club and featured smalltime local bands every weekend. I had been there once with Tommy, two years ago when I was single and on the prowl, and I remembered being badly disappointed by the prospects presented. There had been only a motley gathering of aging local types and Norse Viking bikers, shouting, playing darts and pool, dancing with their fat “old ladies” to raunchy George Thorogood covers. There was a feeling of shady deals and of the possibility of getting beat with a chain in the back lot. The bar was Tommy’s second home.

The inside was dark as a moonless night, until your eyes adjusted, at which point it became only dark as a porno theater. The woman tending bar greeted Tommy like he was her brother, took his order for fish and chips and set us up with a pitcher of Busch and two glasses, which we took to a far corner booth. There was one other table occupied by a couple of workingman types, but they were all the way across the room.

“I ask her,” Tommy said, throwing a look toward the bar, “she’ll commit fuckin’ purgery in front of a grand fuckin’ jury for me.”

I raised my eyebrows, nodded.

“So we can say what we want. We got an alibi if we need it—or we got someone to say were were never here and never had this conversation.”

I looked at him. His cheeks were flushed. His hands moved perpetually, fluttering through his hair, bringing his beer to his lips. His ass kept shifting as if he was sitting on broken glass. This was what happened when you banned smoking in bars. “You know,” he said, “there’s only one way out of this.”

We looked at each other. I was blank. “What is it?” I finally said.

“You really don’t know?”

“Fuck! Just help me out here, Tommy. I’m fuckin’ scared.”

He fired a glance toward the bar, then leaned forward. “You gotta fuckin’ kill Owen Ferguson, Sam—”

“Come
on!”
I leaned back, turned my beer in my hands, took a nervous gulp, slopped some down my shirtfront.

“You fucked up, Sam. Get it through your head. Some scrap motherfucker offered me money to scare you up this morning. Fuckin’ idiots. My own cousin! They told me two hundred bucks I help ’em out. Owen’s put the word out, man. It’s business now. Probably a thousand bucks or something, so this dude comes to me figuring I could show him where you’re hiding out and he’d get to you first and clear eight hundred. Or maybe it’s more, I don’t know. And then you just show up for
work?
” He shook his head.

I tried not to show it but my heart had begun thundering. I wanted to pitch my head over the side of the booth and puke. This was
Hollywood
stuff. There was a
hit
out on me. I cleared my throat. “No shit,” was all I could get out.

“No shit, Sam. So you can either run for it, or you can do something about it.”

“You’ll help me?” My mouth reacted almost against my will. Committing me.

Tommy scoffed and said, “What do you think I’m
doing
, asshole?” and reached over the table and shoved my shoulder almost belligerently.

“What am I supposed to do? Just go and shoot him? Go the fuck to prison?” The pitch of my voice was climbing.

“No, dumb-ass!” And then a blank and charming smile opened up on his face and he leaned back and said, “There you are!” as the barmaid set the plastic basket of fish & chips in front of us. There was a little dish of tartar sauce in the side and the grease on the breaded food shined as if it was painted on with a brush.

“What’re you two so secretive about?” she said, not really caring.

“Big time deals,” Tommy said. “You know me.”

“Oh yeah, I’m sure,” she said. She was maybe forty with whatever good looks she’d once possessed blasted off her as if by a nuclear explosion, leaving her skin dry and brown, her black hair thinned and dead. “Lemme know if you need anything else,” she said, turning away.

“You know what I need!” Tommy called after her, and she laughed and actually swung her flat, fat backside as she walked back to the bar.

“Don’t tell me you hit
that
,
”
I said.

“No, Sammy, I still got pretty good vision—and sense of fuckin’ smell!” he said, leaning in again. But there was no doubt in my mind he had walked away from the woman buttoning his pants at least once.

“Now listen.” He was speaking around a mouthful of food, his jaws working, lips glistening. “There’s no telling Grandpa Art after this one, Sam.” He swallowed. “We do this shit, we get our stories straight and we never mention it again. No evidence, no nothing. We were never there.”
      
The beer in front of me had emptied somehow, leaked right through the bottom of the glass, and I filled it again from the pitcher. I was just nodding, trying to drag my consciousness to the place where it believed I could commit murder.

I was slightly drunk when my cell rang. It was Lucinda, the three-hundred-pound manager of Vanguard Liquors. She said she had called the store and discovered Sully was working instead of me and she wanted to make sure I was all right and would be able to work my next shift. Sully had told her I was sick and she asked me what was wrong. I said I had a flu bug or something; I had thrown up and my head was throbbing. She said nothing about any gangsters trying to kill me and I realized the whole episode had gone unnoted by cops or citizens, as if erased from the record of time. The gangsters must have just got up and left, wondering, literally, what had hit them. Jean, the scratcher ticket lady, might talk about it in the future, but people would probably think she had hallucinated the whole thing. As far as anyone not involved knew, I had merely gotten sick and left work early. Lucinda told me to sleep as much as I could and drink plenty of liquids and call if I wouldn’t be there tomorrow. I promised I would, thanked her for understanding, and thumbed the END button.

I hung out with Tommy all day. We drank three pitchers of Busch in the Greens Landing Jazz Club but he never got drunk, and I guessed it was because he was tweaking. After a while we left to ditch my car. I followed him to a house in town and parked in the back, and then we went through a backyard like a city landfill and knocked on a door held to its frame by little more than habit. A tattered and cadaverous young man answered, shook hands with Tommy, and we hung out in his so-called home for an hour or two; he had a huge, high definition TV and we watched a show about ancient Rome on HBO while he and Tommy made a quick drug deal, then smoked crank in tin foil, then chattered at a machinegun pace and got excited whenever naked people appeared on the television screen.

As the sky beyond the smudged window turned red, Tommy said, “Hey, we gotta go. Can we leave my cousin’s car in the back there?” and the cadaver said, “Sure,” and continued looking at the TV, fanning the fingertips of his two hands together. It seemed Tommy might have asked if we could piss on the living room rug and the man would have said, “Sure,” and continued staring at the TV and fanning his fingertips together.

In Tommy’s mildew-stinking car, rolling up the street, he said, “Don’t big bad Owen hang out at that bar right by your work?”

“Yeah. We gonna go
there
and get him?”

He made a ridiculous voice and said, “Now you’re catchin’ on, country cousin!”

“I can’t walk in that fuckin’ place. Neither can you. He knows you and knows we’re cousins, right?”

“Calm down, Sammy. We’ll go there and stake the motherfucker out. You need to watch more TV. But first we gotta get rid of this piece of shit.”

So we nursed the great brown stinking cruise ship across Greens Landing and mercifully turned off the engine in front of yet another of Tommy’s friends’ homes.

“This is someone
you
know?” I said. This house had a fresh coat of paint on it and a landscaped little yard out front.

“She’s a CPA. She helps me out.”

“A certified public accountant?” I couldn’t keep my voice even. “Who the fuck are you kidding—”

 
“She helps me with tax shit. Shut the fuck up about it, Sam.”

“You haven’t filed fuckin’ taxes since
 
. . . You’ve never filed fuckin’ taxes in your life!”

“Hey. Sam. Fuck you.”

I apologized and got out of the car with him. We went up a couple of steps to a nice Craftsman porch and knocked.
 
The woman who answered said, “Well, hello,” in a familiar way and let us into a pleasant front room with shiny hardwood floors and decent furnishings. There was a new black computer on the table in the corner with a screensaver going that was supposed to make it look like a tropical fish-tank. I was introduced and Tommy actually told her, with a straight face, that I was an amateur boxer and had just got knocked around in an exhibition bout—which I won. I just nodded and said pleased to meet you. Her name was Candy; she had iron gray hair and mother earth breasts. She was about fifty-five, shapely but old-looking, and I was surprised when Tommy hugged her and squeezed her ass. The whole thing began to make sense as Tommy explained to her that he hadn’t been able to help missing the last meeting because his grandpa was sick. She rolled her eyes at him and he pretended not to notice. So that was it. As of Tommy’s most recent parole he was forced to go to AA meetings, and there he came into contact, occasionally, with a better class of people. This woman probably never ingested any controlled substances more dangerous than half a bottle of wine at bedtime. She probably went to these meetings out of sheer loneliness—which Tommy had smelled from across the meeting hall.

Tonight he told Candy that he was fixing that brown, 1970s heap for someone, but he couldn’t get parts until tomorrow so could he please borrow her car for a few hours. She immediately went for the keys, which were hanging by the door, and she chided him to not smoke in it and to bring it back before morning. Just knock and she’d get up, she said. There was no mistaking the meaning in the statement.

Tommy thanked her and I thanked her as we edged out the door, and then we were down the stairs, stepping to a perfectly clean and respectable little Ford Focus that we had no right to ride in. Tommy clicked the electronic lock as if he’d driven the car frequently and we climbed in. It smelled new and neat and Tommy said, “That’s better,” as we pulled away.

I began laughing in spite of myself and Tommy said, “Not a fucking word about it, Sam. Anyway, you don’t know it from how she looks in clothes, but she’s got a pretty solid body.”

I made chuffing noises, my hand clapped over my mouth.

“Fuck you, Sam!” Tommy said, his scowling face distorted and ugly, lit from below by the dashboard lights. “Wait and see what you’re getting when you’re my age.”