Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (17 page)

I slammed Elijah against the stone wall, hard enough to bounce his forehead off it, which kept him dazed long enough for me to produce from underneath my jacket the wrath of God, wrapped in soft leather and mounted on a coil of stiff spring. I whacked his knee with the blackjack, hard enough that it made a noise like shattering ceramic. Before he collapsed, I grabbed him by the lapels of his tailored suit jacket and clapped a hand against his mouth to keep him from screaming.

“Like I told you, I’ll let you walk out of here,” I said. “But you’re gonna walk real slow, and every step you take is going to hurt like a son of a bitch. You won’t be making any quick getaways on foot for a while, and you won’t be sneaking up on people, either.”

I pressed his right hand against the wall of the bathroom, splayed out his long pianist’s fingers, and then bounced the lead weight off it so hard that the blow left a spiderweb pattern of hairline cracks in the stone panel underneath.

“I hope you weren’t intending to break open any safes with that hand,” I said. “It won’t be much good for delicate tasks. At least, not anytime soon.”

Then I clubbed him in the gut as hard as I could; the lead weight hit him right above the navel, and the follow-through carried the blow up to his sternum. He vomited all over the floor. When I let go of him, Elijah collapsed into the puddle of his own sick and started writhing around, so I flailed at his legs with the blackjack and hit his back and his chest a couple of times for good measure.

Then I hung the club from my belt, stepped over the damp, stinking pile that had once been a proud, smug man, and washed my hands at the sink.

“I told you not to pull any jobs in my town, and you didn’t listen, and now look at what has happened to you,” I said. “Was this part of your plan?”

He sort of gurgled.

“It seems I’ve finally found a way to get you to stop talking,” I said. “You probably feel like you’re about to die, but you’re not. A truncheon is considered one of the more humane ways to subdue a perpetrator. The damage it does is mostly to soft tissue. It hurts, but it heals. Except for the hand. If I were you, I’d have the hand looked at.”

He grunted something unintelligible.

“I can’t understand what you’re saying, but I assume you’re thanking me for my restraint,” I said. “I certainly could have hurt you a lot worse. I didn’t, because I want you fit to travel. So, when you manage to pick yourself up off the floor, do the prudent thing and put some distance between yourself and Memphis. You may think this was a beating I just gave you, but really, it was a warning. Take heed, because I don’t warn anyone twice. The next time I see you, I am going to kill you.”

I shook my hands dry, lit a cigarette, and dropped the burning match on the floor next to Elijah. Then I stepped over him again and walked out of the bathroom and across the lobby. The echoes of my leather soles against the pink limestone floor sounded to me like cannon fire.

“You can’t smoke in here, sir,” said a guard who hadn’t noticed me dragging a man into the toilet, but immediately spotted my cigarette.

“Yes, I can,” I said. “Watch me.”

And since I was on my way out the revolving front door anyway, that’s what he did.

Outside, I saw no signs of the beefy henchmen. I pulled my handgun out of its shoulder holster and edged around the side of the building to check the alley by the loading door, but there was nobody there, either.

I had to give Elijah credit; he’d almost bluffed me. But almost only counts for horseshoes and hand grenades.

SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:

I’d developed a habit of watching a talk program about movies before my nap on Wednesday afternoons. It was less shouty than Fox News, and if I turned on the animal shows, I’d sit and watch them until dinnertime without falling asleep. The show occasionally featured actors and directors, but most of the guests were critics and academics. I hadn’t seen most of the movies they talked about; I hadn’t been to a theater in a couple of decades. Since these people weren’t natural TV talkers, they spoke softly and looked weird, and I appreciated these characteristics.

The host was my favorite person on television. He was an exceptionally florid man with a Silly Putty face, and he looked like he hadn’t bought any new clothes since he was thirty pounds lighter, so his head splooged up out of his too-tight shirt collar like toothpaste coming out of a tube. When he got excited, he wobbled back and forth, and I believed, if I watched the show long enough, I’d eventually get to see him tip over.

“So, we’ve seen a rise in the popularity of gritty sorts of characters and antiheroes,” he said. “Why do you think that is?”

The guest was a critic from the Internet; a mousy-haired pinheaded woman with squinty eyes and a broad wet mouth that seemed like it was much too big for her scrunched-up little face.

“Antiheroes are nothing new. Many of the figures of the Classical and Norse mythological traditions had significant flaws that modern audiences would consider antiheroic. Milton published
Paradise Lost,
starring a sympathetic Satan, in 1667. And of course, Nabokov wrote
Lolita
from the perspective of the odious Humbert Humbert, and
The Godfather
cleaned up at the Academy Awards in 1972. These are all antecedents to the sort of characters you see on contemporary programs like
Breaking Bad
or
The Sopranos
.”

I liked watching her. When she was busy concentrating on whatever the hell it was she was saying, it seemed like she forgot to swallow, so as she talked at length, her mouth was slowly filling with saliva. This had potential to develop into something interesting.

“The traditional heroic figure represents the establishment,” she continued. “He’s the new marshal bringing the law to an unincorporated Western town, or the superhero foiling some villain’s plot for world domination, or the tough cop stamping out crime in his city. He stands for the perpetuation of the status quo and the continuity of the existing power structure, often against antagonists who are not unambiguously evil, but rather, harbor contrary values to those of the prevailing society, or who envision a different kind of social hierarchy.”

The host had grown progressively wobblier as she spoke, and he finally piped up to interject: “And you think heroes like that are out of fashion these days?”

This gave the Internet woman a chance to swallow, which disappointed me terribly. I was rooting for the dam to burst.

She said: “I think, in times like this, the status quo becomes less persuasive. In the early 1970s, the country was at the end of more than a decade of civil rights strife, the war in Vietnam was in full swing, and the presidency was mired in scandal. The audience, at that time, was prepared to embrace Vito Corleone, who responded to an ossified and exclusionary power structure and widespread anti-immigrant bigotry by building an empire outside the boundaries of the law.

“The same thing is happening again today. The status quo and the establishment seem less noble after eight years of the Bush administration and seven years of endless war and the Wall Street crash and the banking- and auto-industry bailouts, I think. We feel powerless against greater social forces, and so we’re prepared to root for a somebody like a put-upon science teacher who reinvents himself as a drug lord.”

“And what happens to our more traditional heroes in the meantime?” the host asked.

She sucked back the rolling wad of spit before it spilled over her bottom lip, and swallowed again. I cursed at the screen.

“They become dirtier. James Bond is the perpetrator of secret government assassinations. Batman is a white millionaire who goes out at night in a rubber sex-suit to beat up the urban underclass. That Western sheriff, bringing the law to some border town, is just taming the place so the railroad tycoons or the mining barons can take it from the frontiersmen and prospectors who staked it out first, and that supercop is starting to look like the boot of the elites on everyone else’s neck.”

I gave up on the program, and changed the channel. She wasn’t going to drool all over herself, and she wasn’t going to convince me to accept her moral equivalencies.

The film critics and professors on television often say that every bad guy thinks he’s the good guy. That’s maybe the case in comic books and dime-store novels, but the truth is that a good two-thirds of your violent criminals are too stupid to think at all.

They’re not really moral agents choosing to do wrong; they’re simply acting on impulses, motivated by their basest desires for drugs and sex. They’re unable to appreciate the consequences of their actions, either for themselves or for the people they hurt. They’re nothing but vicious animals. That’s not a racial thing, either; it’s true of the whites just as much as the colored.

Most of the rest are what psychologists might call sociopaths; the ones who are smart enough to know better, but broken enough not to care.

Really, it’s only a tiny minority among your criminal types who bother to try to rationalize or justify their behavior, or to ground their crimes in any sort of principle. You don’t meet many like Elijah over the course of a police career.

But equivocations like Elijah’s are always too shabby to stand up to scrutiny, and men like him are not really much different from other thieves and murderers; when you strip away the bullshit, all they’re doing is hurting other people for selfish reasons.

And I don’t know much about heroes and antiheroes, but if you haven’t been hurt by some thug or psycho or outlaw philosopher recently, it’s probably because somebody like me got to them before they got to you.

23

2009

My mind slid into semiconsciousness from out of a whirling phantasmagoria of nightmares. The first thing I became aware of was rhythmic beeping, with incomprehensible static noise behind it. The beeping filled me with deep instinctive panic, and it took me more than a moment to recognize the sound as belonging to hospital machines; to a cardiac monitor.

I tried to look around, but all I could see was darkness. I realized this was because my eyes were closed. I tried to open them, but could not summon the strength. I couldn’t move my arms, either, but I could feel the cool, oppressive weight of a bedsheet on my bare legs, so I figured my inability to move was a drug thing rather than a spinal thing.

Now the noise behind the beeping was congealing into voices, and I slowly began to understand the words.

“… sent her home to have a shower and some rest. She was here all night.”

“Don’t know how she’s put up with him for so long.”

“Can’t believe he was in another shoot-out. Does anyone know what it was about?”

“The policeman he was riding with is worse off, I hear.”

“You really didn’t need to fly in.”

“Why isn’t he awake yet?” I recognized my son’s voice. I was glad he was there. It seemed like I hadn’t talked to him in a long time. Why was that?

“They had him under sedation. They were worried about a brain bleed, but the MRI came back clean. Apparently, he was just in shock, and he broke his nose. They had to transfuse him, which knocked out his blood thinners, so they’re worried about clots. Otherwise, he should be okay.”

I was sedated. That was why my limbs felt so heavy; why it felt like wading through dense mud just to force my brain to think.

“Well, I wanted to be down here, regardless. I’m always expecting that phone call about him.”

“But you’re missing work at your new job.”

“I’m a summer associate at a New York law firm; they understand the concept of a family emergency, and I think they’ll be able to live without me for a day or two. The clients won’t even let them staff me on the real matters, so my assignments are mostly make-work, anyway. Today, I’m missing a three-hour lunch, a partner giving a group lecture about negotiation tactics, and an open-bar cocktail event.”

“But what happens if they don’t offer you a full-time job?”

“That’s a pretty fucking inappropriate question, Mom.”

Okay, this wasn’t my son; it was my grandson, William, who was now wearing thousand-dollar suits to his office in a Manhattan skyscraper, but still let everybody call him Tequila Schatz. I wanted to tell him to watch his goddamn language, but I couldn’t quite force my jaw to move. My tongue felt dry and sticky and heavy in my mouth.

“It just keeps me up at night thinking about you in that city, and the decisions you make,” my daughter-in-law said. “There always seems to be something important you’re not taking care of.”

“Look, I don’t really want to have this conversation right now.”

“You never want to have this conversation.”

Where was Brian? Oh, God.

When I’m awake, I can push my rage and fear and grief down into someplace where I don’t have to think about it, but when I dream, it comes back up on me like bad Mexican food.

Every time I wake up, I briefly linger between there and here, and then I push through the curtain, and the weight of everything I’ve lost comes crashing down on me, and I shatter. I thought maybe I wouldn’t have dreamed under sedation, with my brain and my heart slowed down and pickled in chemicals. But I must have. Coming out of it, with my mind spinning in druggy half-speed, the whole awful process took longer, like slowly peeling a sticky bandage off a crusty wound.

It’s no wonder so many folks stop remembering things as they get older, when memory serves no purpose except to make old pain fresh again. It’s no wonder people stop getting out of bed. What’s out there in the world, except for scrambled eggs and disappointment?

On the other hand, I really wanted some scrambled eggs; I hadn’t eaten for quite some time. I also wanted a cigarette.

I tried to figure out how long I’d been unconscious. There was an oxygen tube running to my nose, but I didn’t have a feeding tube down my throat, so I’d been out for hours, rather than days, which meant there might still be some slim hope of getting Elijah back before his kidnappers murdered him.

If William had gotten a standby ticket on the first plane out of New York, he could have been in my hospital room six hours after the accident. But it had probably been longer. Rose might not have called my daughter-in-law, Fran, right away, and Fran might not have immediately called William. He might not have been able to get a direct flight.